Authors: Sarah Gristwood
fn6
Elizabeth of York would own Fotheringhay eventually, and her death would mark an end to its warm association with the royal family. Elizabeth of York’s granddaughter Elizabeth I would have another of her descendants beheaded there, and now the name of Fotheringhay will for ever be associated with that of the Scots queen Mary.
fn7
Elizabeth had, he said, no need to fear since there was ‘no man here that will be at war with women’ … and as for the rights of sanctuary: ‘What if a man’s wife will take sanctuary because she list to run away from her husband? I would ween if she can allege no other cause, he may lawfully, without any displeasure to St Peter, take her out of St Peter’s church by the arm.’
fn8
When the rule was finally broken by Queen Mary in 1937, her attendance at the coronation of George VI was taken as evidence of her strong views on his brother’s Abdication.
fn9
In Malory, Tristan is an Arthurian knight fatally in love with a lady, whose mother’s brother he has unfortunately killed.
fn10
Cannonballs have been found more than a mile from what was originally believed to be the site.
fn11
It is disputed whether the boy was born in 1474 or 1475.
fn12
Also in 21 February 1507, several years after her marriage, Margaret in Scotland gave birth to a son, so it is possible her husband James, unlike Edmund Tudor long ago, had delayed consummating the marriage until she was mature. She was none the less dangerously ill after the birth, but her husband went seven days on foot to a famous shrine to pray for her recovery. This child, like several others, died young; but Margaret’s one surviving son would go on to become King James V, father to Mary Queen of Scots. Margaret’s husband, however, died at Flodden in 1513, fighting against an English army. After his death she was appointed regent for her baby son, albeit that some argued this was against Scottish tradition. But after making a controversial second marriage to the Earl of Angus she was demoted to a lesser title, albeit one with resonance in her family – that of ‘My Lady the King’s mother’.
fn13
Mary’s marriage to Charles would not in the end proceed. She would instead be married by her brother Henry VIII to the ageing French king Louis XII, and dance him into his grave.
There is very little, from the cupidity of Elizabeth Woodville to the culpability of Richard III, on which the historians of the middle and late fifteenth century agree. There is just one subject, however, on which they are unanimous: the inadequacy of their sources. J.R. Lander wrote that these were ‘notoriously intractable’ – and it is especially true when it comes to dealing with women, who fought in no battles and passed no laws. Charles Ross, biographer of Edward IV, lamented that ‘any discussion of motive and the interplay of personality in politics [were] matters generally beyond the range of the unsophisticated and often ill-informed and parochial writers of the time’.
The fifteenth century saw great change in the writing of history. The monastic Latin chronicle, with a couple of honourable exceptions, was in decline; and though the baton was being passed to secular chroniclers – city merchants and the like, writing in the vernacular and often anonymously – their records were erratic and often confusing. In an age which showed few signs of a sense of authorship or provenance, the chroniclers and antiquaries frequently repeated and adapted each other. The writing of humanist history in the Italian style only started in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century with Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More, as did the keeping of state papers. And though the records of state departments such as the Chancery, the Exchequer and the law courts have been the subject of extensive recent study they do not satisfy the biographer’s thirst for motive and feeling.
The records of royal life provide few personal letters of the kind found in the Paston papers. Perhaps the fact that aristocratic letters were usually dictated militated against the written expression of intimate feeling; not only that, but the times were dangerous and a friend could so easily become an enemy. There is, too, the fact that in the civil war most reports were written very definitely from one side or the other. As Lander put it, introducing his book on the Wars of the Roses: ‘Many of the letters and narratives quoted in this book purvey biased opinion, wild rumour, meretricious propaganda and the foulest of slander as well as historical truth.’ Not just what someone writing after the event thought had happened, but, even more invidiously, what they wanted others to think had happened. Brief introductions are given below to some of the most important contemporary writers, in an attempt to offer the reader some idea of their likely starting point. For a more extensive discussion see Keith Dockray’s introductions to his
Source Books
, or the chapter ‘Writing History’ in
English Historical Documents
, vol. v.
Any work of synthesis, such as this largely is, inevitably owes a great deal to existing individual studies. Six of the seven women here have already been the subject of biographies, from the great Victorian works of Cooper, Hookham and the like to the sometimes less considerable works of the mid-twentieth century. More recently Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood in
The King’s Mother
have produced a wealth of new detail on Margaret Beaufort, while Helen Maurer’s book on Margaret [
sic
] of Anjou has explored the whole question of queenship and power. Both Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York have benefited from new biographies by Arlene Okerlund; and Christine Weightman was able to bring a knowledge of continental sources to bear on her biography of Margaret of Burgundy (or ‘Margaret of York’). With these I would couple, as of prime importance, Joanna Laynesmith’s
The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1503
; while Lisa Hilton’s
Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens
, and Helen Castor’s
She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth
provide an invaluable context.
Michael Hicks has been brave enough to confront the sometimes daunting lack of information for a biography of Anne Neville; but there has, at the time of writing, been no published study of Cecily Neville, though Joanna Laynesmith (née Chamberlayne) has written several valuable articles, and Michael K. Jones used his book on the psychological background of Bosworth to explore his controversial but fascinating theories. It is possible that the uncertainty surrounding several crucial points is enough to prohibit a biography as such: therefore the source notes given here for Cecily are more extensive than for the other women in this book.
Prologue
1
Elizabeth of York’s funeral:
The Antiquarian Repertory
, vol. 4, pp. 655–663
2
matter as much as the battlefields:
Leyser,
Medieval Women
p.167 cites Philippa Maddern in the
Journal of Medieval History 14
(1988) on the important role of the Paston women in the ‘bloodless battles of land transactions, county rumour-mongering and client maintenance’.
Part I 1445–1460
1
fifteen-year-old:
Earlier writers have Marguerite born in 1429 rather than 1430 but this perception was corrected in an article of 1988 by C.N.L. Brooke and V. Ortenberg, ‘The Birth of Marguerite of Anjou’,
Historical Research, 61
(pp. 357–8).
2
Polydore Vergil:
c
.1470–1555, Italian Renaissance scholar who came to England in 1501–2 and a few years later was invited by Henry VII to write a history of England – the
Anglica Historia
, not completed until the reign of Henry VIII. When considering his views on, for example, events as controversial as those of Richard III’s reign it is disconcerting to realise he can have had no first-hand knowledge of them: the more so, since his writings have been among the most influential in blackening Richard’s name. None the less, although writing in a Tudor, which effectively meant a Lancastrian, age, Vergil set conscientiously about his task, collecting memories and canvassing opinions; and his work is widely seen as marking a turning point in the writing of English history. Keith Dockray, moreover, points out that where the civil wars are concerned so many of the surviving records were written from a Yorkist viewpoint that Vergil serves as a useful corrective in recreating the Lancastrian perspective.
3
took stock of her:
One report goes that Henry had earlier instructed his ambassadors to have portraits taken of other potential brides ‘in their kirtles simple and their faces, like as you see their stature and their beauty and colour of skin and their countenances’. He had an aesthetic appreciation, unworldly though he may have been.
4
chivalry:
A concept which, embodied in the courtly tournament and in popular literature, recurs time and again in the lives of the women of the late fifteenth century, serving simultaneously to elevate and to contain them. See Leyser,
Medieval Women
, p. 248: that it was once a standard practice to contrast the bloody epics of the early medieval period with the later, ‘heroine-centred’ romances ‘showing women in the courtly worlds of the later Middle Ages as the privileged and adored mistresses of all they surveyed. More recent criticism has come to make this view seem singularly naive; the romance heroine on her pedestal is, if anything, worse off than her epic predecessor who had at least some part to play in the thick of the fighting … .’ Many of Marguerite’s problems would come from the uncertainty of her position between these two worlds. See also Epilogue, note 2.
5
queenship:
What did it mean to be a queen in the late fifteenth century? The models were contradictory. A book printed by Caxton in 1475, the
Game and Playe of the Chesse
, by the Dominican Jacobus de Cessolis, had been written almost two centuries earlier, but the publication of this new English edition suggests that its vision was still in currency. A queen, de Cessolis wrote, ought to be chaste and wise, ‘secret’ – i.e. discreet – ‘and not curious in nourishing of her children’. ‘A Queen ought to be well mannered and amongst all she ought to be timorous and shamefast [shamefaced].’ Good advice for any woman, no doubt – but not wholly adequate for a queen when the turmoils of the time might well force her to take a part in public affairs.
Christine de Pizan repeatedly writes of her ‘princess’ also as someone who may have the business of state thrust upon her. ‘The lady with great responsibilities in government has little time free from ruling. Lords often give over their rule to their ladies when they know them to be wise and good and when they themselves are obliged to be absent. Such women have enormous responsibility and authority to govern their lands and serve as council chief.’ It was in part expectations like these, which Marguerite would bring across the Channel with her, that would so trouble her new country – for all that de Pizan carefully presents her lady’s rule as being only that of her lord’s deputy. By the same token a tract written in France in the fourteenth century, and translated in the fifteenth,
The III Consideracions Right Necesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince
, urged a queen to ‘have good and due regard to such things as toucheth the profit and the honour of her lord and herself. And she should take in hand no great matters without license or “congie” [permission] of her lord’ … which did however imply that she could take on such matters if necessary. This was clearly a position of responsibility without power: the queen could function only through her influence on the king, and while this often served its purpose, allowing her acknowledged if informal influence, it could rebound on her if the situation changed. Marguerite’s biographer Helen Maurer makes a distinction between power, which women could wield either through influence or through armed force, and authority – the recognition of their right to exercise power – which they would be denied until the next century.
6
the ‘Wars of the Roses’:
The beginning and end points of which are a matter for dispute. The preferred option now tends to be from 1455 to 1485 – the battle of Bosworth – or possibly 1487 and the battle of Stoke. None the less, some have seen this conflict as starting as early as 1399, with the seizure of Richard II’s throne by Henry IV; while others point out that 1471, with the death of Henry VI and his son, saw the end of any conflict between York and what could properly be called the house of Lancaster.
7
Crowland Abbey chronicles:
‘Crowland’ is a convenient way of referring to the important chronicles compiled at Crowland – or Croyland – Abbey in the Fens. The chronicle begun by one ‘Ingulph’, giving the history of the abbey from 655, was later taken over by a series of ‘continuators’; the identity of the second continuator who chronicled the years from 1459 to 1486 (which, he declares, was the time of writing) is a matter of debate. The most popular candidate is John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln (Richard III’s chancellor for much of his reign, but needing now to ingratiate himself with the new king Henry VII); or possibly a member of Russell’s staff. Other candidates, however, have been suggested: from a clerk in Chancery whose writings only later found their way to the abbey, to an unknown Crowland monk working from a secular source. It has often been pointed out that the second continuator, whoever he was, displays a certain animus against Richard III. But the more one reads the records for this period, the more does a certain amount of bias seem inevitable; and Crowland must rank as a very significant source.