Thwarted Queen (52 page)

The songs were also chosen to be representative of the period. Blaybourne’s chanson
Plus Bele que Flor
(More Lovely Than A Flower), and Cecylee’s songs
I Cannot Help It If I Rarely Sing
and
This Lovely Star Of The Sea
come from the Montpellier Codex of the 13th century. It is quite possible that people continued to sing these songs well into the 15th century, making changes as they went along.

You may wonder why I chose to believe the tale of Cecylee’s affair with an archer on the Rouen garrison. After all, Anne Easter Smith, who has written her own novel about Cecylee, dismisses it out of hand. I believed it both because it had a ring of truth to it, and because it explains so many things. It explains, for example, why Cecylee helped to nullify Edward IV’s will shortly after his death, and why Richard III repeatedly sought his mother’s counsel and seemed to have had a much closer relationship with her than Edward IV ever did. It also explains Richard of York’s actions, why he had a sumptuous christening ceremony for his second surviving son Rutland, but not for Edward. And why he chose to exile himself to Ireland with Rutland, but not Edward. During that moment of crisis in 1459 when everything seemed lost, it is interesting that Edward sat it out in Calais with his mother’s relatives, rather than being by Richard of York’s side.

Of course, Cecylee’s lover Blaybourne presented his own set of problems. Scarcely anything is known about him, except that he was an archer on the Rouen garrison during the summer of 1441 when Cecylee’s husband Richard was away campaigning against the French in Pontoise. I was forced to make up everything about his life and circumstances and I tried to draw a character who was plausible for the fifteenth century, making him someone who would have gotten his opportunities in life from his education in a monastery.

To give a cultural read on the risks that Cecylee was taking, I included two stories about jealous husbands and the ways in which they punished their wives. Black Fulk, more commonly known in Anjou as
Foulques Nerra
, was Count of Anjou from 987, when he was around fifteen years old, until his death in 1040. He had a violent temperament, so the story that he burned his first wife Helizabeth in the market square at Angers after discovering her in bed with a lover, may well be true.

When twenty-one-year-old Parisina (or Laura) Malatesta was discovered in bed with her twenty-year-old stepson Ugo d’Este, her husband (and his father) Niccolo III d’Este ordered their executions. They were beheaded on May 21, 1425, when Cecylee had just turned ten.

Beginning with
Book Three: The Gilded Cage
, the novel becomes much more factually-based as Cecylee emerges from the shadows. I followed the opinions of historians Alison Weir and Michael K. Jones in trying to reconstruct this period, especially Alison Weir’s
The Wars of the Roses
and
The Princes in the Tower
, and Michael K. Jones’
Bosworth 1485: The Psychology of Battle
.

It is true that Cecylee’s six-year-old daughter was married off in 1446. I do not know if this was Richard’s way of punishing his wife for taking a lover, but Nan was forced to marry someone who was notorious for his cruelty. If you are one of those readers wondering why a six-year-old bride would be more useful than an older girl - given that she would not be able to bear children for several years - you have to remember that these girls were used as pawns in huge land transfers. The reason for marrying a young child now rather than later was because the family she was marrying into was impatient to acquire the wealth of the land that she brought as a dowry.

Obviously, there must have been a huge problem of child abuse, for these young girls were taken from their families, and sent off to live with their in-laws at the time of marriage. Legally, the husband became the child-bride’s liege lord, which meant that he had total control over her. The child-bride was thrust upon the mercy of her husband and in-laws, in a situation that is not unlike the one that occurs in India today. This practice was not uncommon six hundred years ago. In
Thwarted Queen
there are at least two other examples; Cecylee’s sister Alainor, who was forced into a marriage when she was five years old. When her 18-year-old bridegroom died, she was married to the Earl of Northumberland’s heir when she was seven. The other example is Richard’s sister Isabel who was married when she was about four years old to Sir Thomas Grey. That marriage was annulled for reasons that are not clear; but it is possible that Isabel was badly treated. By contrast, if the young girl was betrothed, she continued to be under the jurisdiction of her parents and lived with her family of origin until the marriage took place.

It is not known what happened to the little princes in the Tower (the sons and heirs of Edward IV). In trying to reconstruct what happened I have followed the ideas of Alison Weir in her
The Princes in the Tower
. However, not all historians agree that Richard III murdered his nephews, so I have given an alternative explanation at the end of the novel, in which I suggest that the younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, was smuggled out of the country and lived in Burgundy. If you are wondering why everyone is so certain that the elder brother, Edward V died in the Tower, it is because there are records showing that the poor young man was suffering from a severe ear infection in the summer of 1483. Without modern medicine, it is almost certain that his condition would have killed him within the year.

A couple of incidents in
Thwarted Queen
are based on the testimony of people alive at the time. Cecylee’s tirade against Edward IV – in which she publicly announces he is illegitimate – is based on what Dominic Mancini, an Italian diplomat of the time, wrote. I have followed the historian Michael K. Jones’ opinion that Cecylee was exiled to Berkhamsted Castle in March of 1469, and thus Cecylee’s explosion occurred shortly beforehand. Echoes of this can be seen in Shakespeare’s
Richard III
, except that in the play Cecylee’s tirade is directed against Richard III. Shakespeare’s play can be treated as propaganda on behalf of the Tudors. He did everything he could to blacken the character of Richard III, and so one can almost treat the play as a mirror-image of what actually occurred.

The other incident is Edward’s marriage to Lady Eleanor Butler. This is based upon the testimony of Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells. It is not known when the marriage actually took place, but I have set it in April 1462, because it gave a plausible time-frame for Lady Eleanor to have had a child before Edward met Elisabeth Woodville, whom he married two years later in May 1464. As in the novel, these facts did not come to light until after Edward’s death. People at the time had difficulty believing this story because it was so obviously in Richard of Gloucester’s interests to claim that Edward’s marriage to Elisabeth Woodville was bigamous. However, the story had the ring of plausibility for me, because Edward was a notorious womanizer who may have been attracted to older widows. (Both Elisabeth Woodville and Eleanor Talbot were Lancastrian widows. Elisabeth Woodville was five years older than Edward, and Eleanor Butler would have been about seven years older.)

As far as I know, there is no evidence that Cecylee ever referred to her daughter-in-law as
The Serpent
, though it is true that she was dismayed by Edward’s marriage and the two ladies seemed not to have liked each other. I picked that particular nickname because I felt it conveyed volumes about how Cecylee felt about Edward’s Queen. Élisabeth’s name for Cecylee,
good mother
, is meant to sound disrespectful. It is meant to sound like
Goodwife
, which although it was a polite form of address for women, only applied to those of the lowest social classes. By calling Cecylee
good mother
, rather than
Madam
, Élisabeth conveyed her animosity towards her mother-in-law. The encounters between Cecylee and Queen Élisabeth are fictional, but are based on fact, such as the Queen’s rapacious relatives wiping the aristocratic marriage market clean and Cecylee’s resulting problems in trying to find suitable marriage partners for her children. Cecylee did style herself
Queen By Right
and she did move into the Queen’s apartments, forcing her son Edward to build a separate wing for his new wife. The speech in which she tells Edward off about his marriage is based upon Sir Thomas More’s account as reported by Michael K. Jones.

Writing about the past forces historical novelists to confront the fraught issue of dates of birth. It is often difficult to pin an age on a person, especially minor female characters, because dates of birth were not systematically recorded. The reader should therefore take the ages of most of the characters as approximations.

Documents from the time provided a fascinating glimpse of Cecylee’s life in her later years.
Orders and Rules of the Princess Cecill
and
The Rules of the House
show a strong-minded yet kind woman running a tight ship at Berkhamsted Castle. I hope you enjoyed the quotations from these sources. In her will of 1495, Cecylee makes reference to two nearby convents:

“Also I geve to the house of Assherugge a chesibule and 2 tunicles of crymsyn damaske embrawdered with thre albes. Also I geve to the house of Saint Margaretes twoo auter clothes with a crucifix and a vestiment of grene vellet...”

I haven’t been able to trace a convent of Saint Margaret, but there was a convent at Ashridge, about four miles from Berkhamsted castle, and so I chose to place Cecylee’s friends from her later years there. (In the fifteenth century, most people didn’t think twice about walking four miles).

Such documents also give us clues to how things were pronounced. In Cecylee’s will of 1495, for example, she refers to Fotheringhay as “Fodringhey”, so I used that pronunciation in the scene where Richard talks about his favorite residence to Queen Marguerite d’Anjou.

Lastly, readers may wonder how I came to choose the name
Cecylee
. Not wanting to get caught up in the Cecily/Cicely controversy, I thought it would be interesting to see how Cecylee herself spelt her name. Her will is in the public domain, and it seems that she signed it
Cecylee
. However, her handwriting is extremely difficult to read – it looks like the signature of someone who does not write much – so it is possible that she actually spelled her name
Cecylle
. In the fifteenth century spelling varied widely and great ladies like Cecylee usually dictated their letters and papers to scribes who came from different regions of the country and spelled things differently. According to the Richard III society, Cecylee in her lifetime was addressed as
Cecill, Cecille, Cecyll
but the most usual form of the name was
Cecylee
. And so I went with that version of the name, knowing that it would be easy for English-speaking readers to figure out how to pronounce it. (It is pronounced in the exact same way as the more modern spelling of the name,
Cecily.
) If I had been writing for French readers, I probably would have called her
Cecylle
, because that is closer to the French version of the name
Cécile
.

It was an honor as well as great fun to have Cecylee materialize from the fifteenth century and talk to me about her life. I hope you enjoyed reading this novel as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Cynthia Sally Haggard

Washington D. C.., 2011.

Connect with me online at my blog:
http://spunstories.com/

Below is a selection of sources I used in researching
Thwarted Queen
.

Books

Amt, Emilie (1992).
Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook
.

Ankarloo, Bengt and Stuart Clark (2002).
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume 3: The Middle Ages
.

Anonymous 4.
Love’s Illusion: Music from the Montpellier Codex, 13th century
.

Baldwin, David (2004).
Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower
.

Cartidge, Neil (2001).
The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation
. University of Exeter Press.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (1382/2004).
The Parliament of Birds.
Hesperus Press.

Chantilly, Musée Condé, Jean Longnon, Raymond Cazelles (1489/1989).
The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry.

Cobb, John Wolstenholme (1883/2008). History & Antiquities of Berkhamsted.

Gies, Frances (1991).
Life in a Medieval Village

Gies, Frances (1998).
A Medieval Family: The Pastons of Fifteenth-Century England
.

Hardy, Robert (1992).
Longbow: A Social and Military History
.

Houston, Mary G. (1996).
Medieval Costume in England and France: The 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.

Jones, Michael K. (2003).
Bosworth 1485: The Psychology of a Battle
(Revealing History Series).

Landsberg, Sylvia (2003).
The Medieval Garden
.

Parlett, David (1991).
A History of Card Games
.

Ross, Charles (1998).
Edward IV
(The English Monarchs Series).

Smith, A. H. (1978).
Three Northumbrian Poems
. (Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies). Exeter University Press.

Weir, Alison (1995).
The Princes in the Tower.

Weir, Alison (1996).
The Wars of the Roses
.

Weir, Alison (2009).
Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster.

Whiteman, Robin and Rob Talbot Brother (1996).
Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden: An Illustrated Companion to Medieval Plants and Their Uses
.

Characters