Queens Consort (62 page)

The Queen’s visit to Norwich provides a touching glimpse of the excitement generated among ordinary people by the glamour of royalty. The mayor of the town declared that ‘because this should be her first coming hither … she will desire to be received and attended as worshipfully as ever was Queen afore her’.
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A committee was organised to repair the church tower and Robert Horgoner was sent out to supervise the Queen’s route into Norwich, while John Sadler instructed her servants to enter by the Westwick Gate. Parnell’s company were hired for twelve days to provide pageants on a stage decorated with red and green worsted.
Elizabeth was met by the mayor and corporation as well as two wooden giants stuffed with hay, and heard a speech of salutation performed by Mr Gilbert Spirling. Other entertainments included the angel Gabriel and sixteen virgins in hooded cloaks. The ‘great chair’ of St Luke’s Guild was brought from the cathedral to the abbey of the Friars Preachers for the Queen to sit on, and Mr Farckes’s choir of boys sang. In typically English fashion, the whole event was rather spoiled by heavy summer rain.

While Elizabeth was at Norwich and Edward at Nottingham, Isabel Neville was married to the Duke of Clarence at Calais by Warwick’s brother the archbishop of York, attended by her younger sister Anne Neville. The wedding celebrations lasted five days, but the Earl himself left almost immediately to raise an army in Kent. Maintaining the pose of a loyal subject, Warwick released a letter in which he denounced the Woodvilles as the ‘evil counsellors’ so of ten invoked by potential traitors:

The deceivable covetous rule and guiding of certain seditious persons, that is to say the Lord Rivers, the Duchess of Bedford his wife, Sir William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, Humphrey Stafford Earl of Devonshire, the Lords Scales and Audley; Sir John Woodville and his brothers … and others of their mischievous rule, opinion and assent, which have caused our said Sovereign Lord and his said realm to fall into great poverty of misery, disturbing the ministrations of the laws, only intending to their own promotion and enriching.

As the Yorkists had done during the crisis of 1450, Warwick emphasised the interdependence of the King and his great magnates, focusing on the ultimate criterion of medieval hierarchy: blood.

First, where the said Kings estranged the great lords of their blood from their secret counsel, and not advised by them; and taking about them others not of their blood and inclining only to their counsel, rule and advice, the which persons take not respect nor consideration to the weal of the said princes, nor to the commonweal of this land, but only to their singular lucre and enriching of themselves … by which the said princes were so impoverished that they had not sufficient of livelihood or of goods, whereby they might keep and maintain their honourable estates and ordinary charges within this realm.

Pro-Woodville writers have chosen to oppose Warwick’s obsession with ‘blood’ with the more ‘meritocratic’ tendencies of the Woodville
family, figuring Warwick as the harrumphing reactionary and the Woodvilles as proto-modern, achieving distinction by service rather than birth. This simplistic opposition overlooks the fact that we know nothing of how much or how little the Woodvilles, or indeed Warwick himself, truly believed in the ineffable qualities of breeding. Nor had the Woodvilles proved averse to allying themselves with some of the most prestigious families of the nobility. Warwick was not alone in considering them a pack of parvenus and upstarts, but equally, he and the Woodvilles were playing the same game, and when it appeared that they might best him, it was logical that he should employ a conventional form of outrage against them, whether or not he himself cared for the principle. ‘Blood’ was a concept to which fifteenth-century society paid a great deal of attention but, as became evident in the reign of Edward IV’s son-in-law, Henry Tudor, it was a flexible commodity, a very little of which could be made to go a very long way.

By 20 July, Warwick and his troops had left Canterbury for London. Edward remained at Nottingham, awaiting support from the Earl of Pembroke, but Pembroke’s army was attacked and defeated by a pro-Warwick force of northerners at Edgecote, and on Warwick’s orders their commander and his brother were executed. Queen Elizabeth was still at Norwich when she heard the appalling, incredible news that the King himself had been taken prisoner and was being held at Warwick Castle. Edward had barely advanced out of Nottingham when he received word of the Edgecote defeat, and had submitted himself to George Neville’s keeping on 29 July. Following a short spell at Warwick he was taken to the Nevilles’ northern power base of Middleham. After a two-week wait at Norwich, Elizabeth had to endure even more terrifying tidings. Her father, Earl Rivers, and her brother John had been beheaded at Coventry, again on Warwick’s orders. Elizabeth was in an extremely vulnerable position. She could not have known what Warwick’s intentions were, but she knew that if the ‘kingmaker’ were to depose her husband as he had done Henry VI, the next in line to the throne was Warwick’s new son-in-law, Clarence and, after the treatment of her father and brother, that her family could expect no mercy from either. Nevertheless, she set off for London.

Perhaps Warwick’s intentions were not entirely clear even to the Earl himself. He had claimed to be fighting for the reformation of the government, not the deposition of the King, yet he had acted entirely illegally in the executions of the Pembrokes, Earl Rivers and John Woodville, who served the man he still acknowledged as his master. Warwick’s supporters
had no wish to dethrone Edward, and Warwick himself did not intend the restoration of Henry VI, who was by this time languishing in the Tower. It was rumoured that he had been thinking of having Edward declared illegitimate and was conspiring to replace him with Clarence, but now that he was on the way to creating his puppet king he appeared at a loss to know what to do next. In this light, Edward’s seemingly inexplicable passivity might be seen as a stroke of political genius. Had he attempted to flee and raise another army, the whole grisly process of battling towards the crown would have started up again. As it was, he played the role of the polite prisoner until his captors were embarrassed into releasing him. By 10 September, Edward was back in London, and everybody acted as though nothing much had happened.

Outwardly, all was peace and concord. Edward even went so far as to betrothe his three-year-old daughter Elizabeth to Warwick’s nephew, creating him Duke of Bedford to mark the occasion. The Queen and her family suppressed their outrage at Warwick’s unjustifiable savagery, and for some months Edward and Warwick held councils together, but both the King and the Earl were planning their next moves. In March, Edward travelled north to put down a rebellion in Lincolnshire, while Warwick was supposedly mustering troops in the Midlands to come to assist him. When Edward confronted the Lincolnshire men, their war cry ‘For Clarence! For Warwick!’ told him all he needed to know about the Earl’s latest conspiracy. The King continued northwards, and while Clarence and Warwick maintained appearances of loyalty in their letters, they refused to join the King as promised. On 24 March Edward issued a proclamation against them, announcing that if they came within four days to York they could be reconciled with him, but if they failed to do so they were to be considered traitors. Needless to say, they did not appear. The rebel list later compiled in Salisbury shows that at this point support for the rebels was weak — only four lords, fewer than twenty knights and twenty esquires were arraigned — and Warwick realised that it was time to flee. Edward’s army was now pursuing him to the west country, but Warwick, his wife, Clarence, Isabel and the second Warwick daughter, Anne, succeeded in taking ship at Dartmouth. The Earl attempted to supplement his fleet with a raid on Portsmouth, but was repelled by a force led by Anthony Woodville, now Earl Rivers.

Warwick headed for his old stamping ground of Calais, but found the guns of the garrison, which had appealed to Edward’s brother-in-law the Duke of Burgundy for support, turned against him. Nineteen-year-old Isabel was heavily pregnant, and went into labour on board ship, but
though Warwick was able to obtain some wine for her, the birth was difficult and her baby died. The Earl now put to sea again, encountering and taking a large Burgundian convoy, and on 1 May he arrived in Normandy. Officially, Louis IX was unable to offer him any help. He did extend an offer of hospitality to the Countess and her daughters, but the family chose to stay together at Vulognes, near Barfleur, where Warwick came to the conclusion that his only remaining hope lay with his old enemy, Marguerite of Anjou.

After the battle of Towton, Marguerite had stayed in Scotland until 1462. She received some support from Mary of Guelders, acting as regent for her son James III, who was the same age as Prince Edward, and it was Mary who paid for Marguerite’s passage to France. Marguerite’s uncle Charles VII had died the previous July, and she now persuaded her cousin, the new French King Louis XI to supply her with money and troops in return for the promise of Calais. Louis lost interest after the Duke of Burgundy refused French forces access to the port across his lands, and in the end Marguerite had returned to Scotland with just 800 men. She was able to advance as far as Bamburgh which, along with the other important Marcher castles of Alnwick and Dunstanburgh, had reverted to the Lancastrians, but when she heard the news that both Edward and Warwick were heading north, she retreated, suffering the misery of a shipwreck on the way. Marguerite herself arrived safely at Berwick, but many of her little force were marooned on Holy Island, where they had nothing to do but wait for the Yorkist army. Still, she soldiered on.

Over the winter of 1462—3, the three castles changed hands again, first to York and then back to Lancaster, so by March it seemed plausible that Henry VI’s supporters could attempt a more ambitious attack. Marguerite had worked hard to retain the support of the Scottish regency council, this time wildly promising them seven English counties if they should succeed, and in July 1463 the young James III led an attack on the castle of Norham, accompanied by his mother, King Henry and Marguerite. The expedition ended hopelessly, with the invaders fleeing Norham for their lives and Warwick harrying the undefended Scottish marches. The Scots had now had enough, and in August Marguerite embarked once more for France with Prince Edward.

Everyone felt very sorry for her, and did all they could to avoid her. France had supported Henry VI in the conflict, but it now seemed clear to Louis XI that there was nothing to be gained from maintaining such an alliance any longer. He was keen to come to an accommodation with
the Duke of Burgundy, who had supported the Yorkists, concerning lands in the Somme, and both rulers were ready to make terms with Edward, the new English King. Marguerite pleaded in person with the Duke, but came away with no more than a sum of money and a few courteous commonplaces. Neither Burgundy nor France were overly concerned about a dethroned queen or her dispossessed son.

What remained of Marguerite’s hopes was signed away at Hesdin in October 1463. In exchange for the cession of the Somme towns by Burgundy, the King of France renounced all help to the Lancastrians, along with the traditional French protection of Scotland. Edward IV had been funding a conspiracy by the ‘Black Douglases’, whom James II of Scotland had stripped of their power, to foment civil war, and the Scottish regency council, isolated and abandoned by the French, was prepared to come to terms with England if Edward ended his assistance to the rebels. The Lancastrians were still pushing hard in the north, and there was a brief resurgence of optimism when the Duke of Somerset, who had been pardoned by Edward, turned his coat again and joined Henry VI, who was now imprisoned at Bamburgh. Despite an attack led by Somerset, Scottish envoys reached York in April 1464, and once an agreement was reached with Edward, Scotland would no longer offer a refuge. Somerset brought Henry to By well Castle, close to where the royal army, commanded by Warwick’s brother John Neville, was camped, but any hope that his presence would garner enough support to overwhelm the Yorkists was disappointed by a swift, sudden defeat at Hexham on 15 May. Somerset was executed immediately, but by the time soldiers arrived at Bywell, Henry had vanished, leaving behind his coroneted helmet. It had never been much use to him. For a year, the former King of England wandered the north country until he was finally taken the following July at Ribblesdale and shut up in the Tower of London, but not before Warwick and Edward had paraded him with tasteless cruelty through the city streets, denounced as a usurper.

Marguerite now had little choice but to return to the protection of her own family. René of Anjou eventually provided her with the castle of Koeur near Verdun and a pension of 2,000 livres. By 1470, Marguerite and Prince Edward had been in France for seven years. Time did not reconcile her to her position. Henry lived, her son was the rightful heir to the throne and there were still many loyal to her cause. (Perhaps it is permissible to imagine Marguerite heaving a sigh of relief every time Elizabeth Woodville was delivered of a girl). But the Lancastrians were poor. They had no means to attempt another invasion, and meanwhile
politics was moving on. Harlech, the last castle in Lancastrian hands, fell in 1468, Edward was establishing his family and a new court party and cementing his European alliances. If it was difficult to imagine that the situation would ever change, certainly no one could have foreseen what actually happened.

The Lancastrian cause was revived by the most wonderful and improbable of marriages: that between Edward, Prince of Wales and Anne Neville, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the kingmaker.

Marguerite and Warwick had little cause for mutual trust, but perhaps they had one thing in common: their shared hatred of Elizabeth Woodville. Certainly, they were both determined to depose Edward IV, and to achieve this they had to depend not only on one another but on King Louis of France. Louis was careful to portray himself as a reluctant mediator, rather than the instigator of this extraordinary alliance, but he was nevertheless instrumental in bringing it about. He was determined to bolster his power against Charles of Burgundy, who still retained control of the disputed Somme territories, and he was prepared to gamble on Charles’s reaction to his support for Warwick in the confidence that the marriage could bring about the restoration of a Lancastrian king and a subsequent pact against Burgundy.