Authors: Lisa Hilton
Until recently, it has been accepted that Prince Edward died in the field while attempting to escape to the town, as confirmed by the
Arrivall, The Tewkesbury Abbey Chronicle
and
The Warkworth Chronicle
. Another story of his death exists in
Hall’s Chronicle
which, since it was written under the Tudors, was dismissed for some time as propaganda. In this version, Prince Edward was captured and brought face to face with Edward IV before being executed by Gloucester and Clarence some days after the battle. However, an illustrated version of the
Arrivall
from 1471 suggests that Hall’s version may indeed be correct. Clarence had been in the field with Edward, but where was Isabel? The Countess of Warwick had taken refuge at Beaulieu Abbey, but there is no mention of Isabel having joined her. Did this mean that Anne Neville had to wait with her sister while her brother-in-law murdered her husband?
The aftermath of Tewkesbury brought very different consequences for the once, present and future queens of England. Both Anne and Marguerite were formally pardoned at Tewkesbury as Edward passed through on 7 May, having sought refuge in a convent on the Worcester road. Anne was given into the custody of the Duke of Clarence. Marguerite was treated more severely. When Edward made his triumphal entry into London, she was exhibited as a penitent captive in the rear of his train, then sent straight to the Tower. She was not permitted to see her husband. Henry VI died that night. The highly partisan account in the
Arrivall
has him expiring of ‘ire and indignation’, unlikely indeed for such a passive character, and the consensus is that he was murdered, though how or by whom is a matter for speculation. However, ‘no matter who carried it out, the responsibility of the deed was Edward’s’.
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Edward’s decision was harsh and treacherous, but the upheavals of the last years had taught him that the violence could not end as long as Henry or his heirs were living. (Anne Neville, it must be assumed, was not considered to be pregnant with Henry’s grandchild.) To confirm the refoundation of his dynasty, Edward created his baby son Prince of Wales that July, in the presence of two archbishops, eight bishops and as many magnates as could be assembled, all swearing their allegiance to a Yorkist future.
Marguerite remained in prison for the next four years. Agnes Strickland speaks with determined optimism of the amelioration of her ‘rigorous’ confinement brought about by the ‘compassionate influence’ of Elizabeth Woodville, but as with so many of Strickland’s accounts, this is agreeable
fantasising. There is no record that Queen Elizabeth visited or saw Marguerite during her imprisonment, nor do her expenses show any personal favours. Marguerite had worked for years to destroy Elizabeth’s husband and family, and though she was no longer a political risk, Elizabeth, understandably, left no documented trace of compassion towards her. Strickland’s embroidering has been accepted by at least one of Elizabeth’s biographers, who has suggested that she was motivated by ‘a grateful remembrance of the benefits she had received from her royal mistress’,
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but the evidence of Elizabeth having served Marguerite is very flimsy, and her true feelings seem more apparent in the fact that in 1475 she had Marguerite’s arms removed from Queens’ College, Cambridge, and replaced with her own and those of England.
After a period in the Tower, Marguerite was moved to Windsor, then Wallingford and eventually to Ewelm in Oxfordshire, the seat of Lady Suffolk, who received a weekly sum of eight marks for the maintenance of the royal prisoner. Now that Henry was dead, the King of France had no purpose for Marguerite, while her father, Réne, seemed content to let her linger in captivity. It was a cruel reminder that despite all her struggles and suffering, she remained merely a woman, only as valuable as her alliances, and they were no more. Finally, in 1475, when Louis XI and Edward met at Picquigny to ratify an Anglo-French truce (one of the provisions of which was a second betrothal for Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, this time to the Dauphin), Louis agreed to ransom Marguerite. She had to renounce all claims to her jointure and any English inheritance, and Louis handed over 50,000 crowns for her freedom. In January 1476 she landed at Dieppe and travelled to Rouen, where she was received by the King’s representative, Jean d’Haguet, the receiver general of Normandy. The motivation behind Louis’s magnanimity soon became apparent: he invaded Anjou the next year. Since Marguerite’s brother John of Calabria had died in 1470, she was rightfully an heiress, but on 29 January 1476 she was obliged to sign away her rights in Lorraine, Barrois, Anjou and Provence, describing herself in the document as ‘I Marguerite, formerly married in the Kingdom of England’.
Marguerite’s father gave her the use of a castle and a small pension, but in 1480, he died.
Bourdigne’s Chronicle
mourned: ‘No prince ever loved his subjects as he loved his, nor was in like manner better loved and well-wished than he was by them,’ but Réne’s ‘love’ does not seem to have extended to his widowed, bereaved and dispossessed daughter. He had ceded his own inheritance to his nephew Charles of Maine, who had sold it on to King Louis, so now that he was gone, there was no one to pay
Marguerite’s pension. She was forced to beg, writing plaintively to one of Louis’s ministers that ‘it may please him to take my poor case in the matter of what can and should belong to me, into his hands to do with it according to his good will and pleasure and still keep me in his good grace and love’.
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Louis obliged her by insisting she confirmed the 1476 donation and then permitting her to go to law with her living sibling, Yolande, for the resignation of her rights to the Barrois. By this time, Marguerite was living in penury and, having manipulated her for his own territorial gain, Louis simply abandoned her. She was compelled to leave her castle of Reculée as she could no longer maintain her household, and it was only the charity of Francois Vignolles, Lord of Morains and one of her father’s former vassals, that protected her. He provided her with a home in his castle of Dampierre, about three miles from Saumur on the River Loire. The final indignity came when Charles of Maine died and Marguerite was pressured to sign a will in Louis’s favour. It included a request that he provide funds for her funeral and burial with her parents at St Maurice d’Angers. Marguerite had her wish and was interred with her father who, despite his careless treatment, she seems to have loved to the end.
Marguerite died aged fifty-two in August 1482. The last decade of her life had been one long fall from grace. There were some who still considered her a champion of the Lancastrian cause, and she had received a party of exiled Lancastrian lords in 1479, but the year of her death saw Edward IV’s dynasty apparently firmly established on the throne. At her coronation she had been hailed as a bringer of peace and plenty; she died an isolated exile, an impoverished symbol of war. King Louis demanded her hunting dogs be given to him as, pathetically, they were the only thing of value that she owned. No record exists of her funeral. It is possible that no one troubled to write one.
The decade after Edward IV’s ultimate recovery of his kingdom had been peaceful and productive, both for the country as a whole and for Elizabeth Woodville. She gave Edward three more daughters, Anne, Katherine and Bridget, and a second son, Richard, Duke of York. Two other children, Margaret and George, died as infants. Her public activities reflected both pious and scholarly interests whose pattern had been disturbed by the upheavals of the Lancastrian insurrection. In 1466, she had received a grant from the city of London for a tract of land adjacent to Tower Hill, on which to build a chapel or college, and though no more is heard of this project, by 1479 Elizabeth had founded a chapel to St Erasmus at Westminster Abbey. She made grants to Holy Trinity, Syon Abbey to the
Carthusians at Sheen and went on pilgrimage to Canterbury with her husband and eldest daughter. The Pope saw fit to make particular mention of her devotion to the Virgin and St Elizabeth, and granted exceptional indulgences to worshippers who recited the Hail Mary three times a day at the encouragement of the Queen. Elizabeth adopted Marguerite of Anjou’s foundation of Queens’ College, Cambridge and, along with her brother Lord Rivers, was a benefactress of Henry VI’s college at Eton.
Two accounts of Elizabeth’s participation in public rituals give a sense of her conduct and, again, of how the way her background influenced perceptions of that conduct. One is the description of her churching banquet after the birth of her first child as queen. It was held in ‘an unbelievably costly apartment’, where she sat on a golden chair. Jacquetta and Edward’s sister Margaret stood apart and knelt when she spoke to them. They were not permitted a seat until the first dish had been placed on the table, while the other sixty ladies at the women-only event remained on their knees in silence until the Queen had dined. Elizabeth’s silence and the formal protocol of the event have been attributed to her ‘haughtiness’ and ‘arrogance’ (characteristics that may well have been seen as appropriate had she been a royal princess), but this strange, soundless ballet was part of a sacred ritual, and in no way expressed her own preferences.
A warmer image is provided by Elizabeth’s role as hostess to Lord Gruuthuyse in 1472. Gruuthuyse had been Edward’s host during his Flemish exile, a sojourn that provided the King with an opportunity to experience the magnificence of the Burgundian court lifestyle and which was to be highly influential on his own tastes and cultural ambitions. Edward was keen to reward Gruuthuyse, and invited him to England, where he created him Earl of Winchester at Windsor. After supper, Edward conducted his guest to Elizabeth’s rooms, where she was playing at bowls with her ladies, a sight Gruuthuyse found charming. Following the bowls there was dancing and next day Elizabeth had a banquet prepared in her apartments. She had created three ‘chambers of pleasance’ hung with silks and floral tapestries, which featured a tented bath and a fine down bed for Gruuthuyse, complete with a cloth-of-gold and ermine counterpane, gold canopy, white curtains and sheets and pillows ‘of the queen’s own ordinance’. Elizabeth’s gilt-and-ivory beauty would have been set off to full advantage by such a backdrop, and here she appears as the perfect picture of graciousness and condescension, regal and courteous, yet simple enough to concern herself with cushions. Nothing in either of these accounts suggests that she was anything less than fully capable of fulfilling her royal role in public.
Privately, Elizabeth’s situation was less satisfactory, as she was learning that even great beauty is not enough to hold a philandering man. Her sexual relationship with the King certainly continued until 1480, since she gave birth to Bridget, her last child, in November that year. But Thomas More noted that Edward was ‘greatly given to fleshly wantonness’, and few women could resist the attentions of a handsome king. Dominic Mancini, an Italian cleric in the service of one of Louis XI’s ministers, added that Edward generously passed on his mistresses to his friends when he tired of them. The King had a bastard son, Arthur, by his lover Elizabeth Lucy, and two daughters, the tactlessly named Elizabeth and Grace (with whom Elizabeth Woodville obviously had some sort of relationship, as Grace attended her funeral). Anti-Woodville writers have made a vice even of Elizabeth’s dignified silence in the face of her husband’s many infidelities, citing it as evidence of her ‘cold’ and ‘designing’ character.
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A similar twisting occurs in the case of Edward’s best-known mistress Jane Shore, a source of misconceptions about Elizabeth’s relationship with the chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, which would affect the interpretation of her role in the events surrounding her son’s thwarted succession. Many commentators have accepted that Elizabeth hated Hastings, with whom she had a long history of disputes dating back to the 1460s, though there is some evidence that they collaborated with one another in the 1470s. The reason for this ‘hatred’ was supposedly the pleasure Hastings shared with Edward in ‘wanton company’, a tendency which, according to Mancini, spilled over into a quarrel with Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset. Dorset planned to take over from his stepfather in Jane Shore’s affections, but Mistress Shore wasted no time in throwing herself on the protection of the chamberlain. Thomas More bulks out Mancini’s gossip with a political motivation for the ill will between Hastings and the Woodvilles with the suggestion that Edward preferred Hastings for the governorship of Calais over the Queen’s candidate, her brother Lord Rivers, in 1482. The enmity between Hastings and the Queen’s family has been seen as a crucial stalling point in Edward V’s accession, though Elizabeth’s personal responsibility for it is ‘the most uncertain factor of all’.
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Malicious rumour also placed Elizabeth Woodville at the centre of another controversy of the 1470s: the execution of the Duke of Clarence. Isabel Neville died in January 1477, yet the King was reluctant to allow his untrustworthy brother to marry again. Matches were proposed with Mary, the heiress to the Duke of Burgundy, and Margaret, the King of Scotland’s sister, but the former would have prejudiced Edward’s concord
with Louis of France and the latter given Clarence a power base disturbingly proximate to England. A truculent Clarence began to display his contempt for Edward’s authority and in May 1477 expressly defied the King with his support of one Thomas Burdet, who was hanged for treason, sorcery and the spread of sedition that month. There were whispers of another rebellion plot, which the Duke compounded by claiming that he and his heirs had the true right to Henry VI’s crown and encouraging some of his men to swear fealty to him. Clarence was becoming dangerous, and by June Edward felt he had no choice but to arrest him. The Queen was reported to be using her influence to destroy the Duke, for fear that her son would never reign while his uncle was alive, but the decision to execute Clarence in February 1478 was Edward’s and Edward’s alone. Elizabeth may never have forgiven Clarence for conspiring with Warwick, so it is possible that she did perceive him as a threat and welcomed his demise, but her purported responsibility in the matter proves nothing more than the readiness of her critics to attribute her husband’s unpleasant political actions to the powers of persuasion of his wife, a trope with which English queens had had to contend since Eleanor of Provence’s day.