Queens Consort (63 page)

When Warwick’s battered, miserable family arrived at Honfleur in May 1470, Louis sent an invitation to Marguerite to come to court. By June, the betrothal between Anne and Edward had been proposed. Marguerite had little choice but to favour the match, even though she risked Warwick’s treachery if he planned to worm his way back into Edward IV’s favour by delivering up the Lancastrian’s principal bargaining tool in the person of the Prince. She also had her dignity to think of. Warwick took care of that by grovelling on his knees for a full fifteen minutes at Angers Cathedral on 22 July, and on the twenty-fifth both parties swore themselves to the proposal over sacred fragments of the True Cross.

What Edward and Anne thought of their marriage is unknown, though both seem to have accepted it dutifully. Warwick was clearly prepared to forget that he had accused the Prince of being illegitimate when he was born, manipulating rumours of Marguerite’s adultery and Henry’s inability to recognise the baby to support his campaign to bring Edward to the throne. To be married to the daughter of the man who had deposed his father, forced his mother into humiliating exile and called him a bastard might have been a very bitter pill for a sixteen-year-old boy to swallow, but ‘the very little we perceive of Edward of Lancaster … is of a boy who had been brought up to think of himself as a prince and who was keen to
have his opponent’s heads off’.
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Edward, like Marguerite, was clearly prepared to accept whatever distasteful necessities fate presented in the quest for the restoration of his rights. Nor was Anne necessarily a demeaning bride. She was a great heiress, five of her ancestral lines gave her a share of royal blood, she also had connections with European dynasties and (inevitably) Charlemagne, and was described as ‘the most noble Lady and Princess of the royal blood of diverse realms lineally descending from princes, kings, emperors and many glorious saints’.
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Anne had been four years old when Edward IV was crowned. She had been born at Warwick in 1456, but had spent the first few years of her life in Calais, when her father was captain there. Unusually for medieval children of high rank, she and her sister Isabel had remained with their parents until their teens. There had been no queen’s household for them to enter until Edward’s marriage in 1464, and there is no evidence that Anne or Isabel waited on Elizabeth Woodville, though they were mentioned as being present, along with the King’s younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, at the consecration of Anne’s uncle, George Neville, as archbishop of York in 1465. Anne spoke French, and possibly Flemish — the former language may have eased her introduction to her formidable future mother-in-law — but little else is known of her education. What Anne was aware of were the vicissitudes of fortune so beloved of medieval moralists. She had seen her father as almost a ruler in his own right in Calais, then as the greatest man at Edward’s court, then as an exile, and according to the aggrieved Burgundians, a pirate. She had watched her sister, in theory one of the highest-ranking women in England, endure a miserable childbirth at sea, with her father reduced to begging for supplies. Now Anne was to displace her sister in Warwick’s putative succession, and Isabel’s was not a happy precedent. Though the Duke of Clarence was tactfully kept away from the betrothal proceedings, his newly bereaved Duchess was not. Anne saw her mighty father creeping on his knees to his former enemy, and yet he planned to make her Queen of England. It could only have been bewildering. The events of the following months were to prove even more dramatic.

At the same time as Anne’s betrothal was taking place, Queen Elizabeth, once again pregnant, moved into the safety of the Tower of London with Henry VI. King Edward had left for the north, to put down yet another rising, this time led by the Earl of Warwick’s brother-in-law, Lord Fitzhugh. The King’s fleet was patrolling the Channel, and Elizabeth’s removal to the Tower with her three daughters was one more indication that invasion was inevitable. Through the lucky chance of a huge storm
which scattered Edward’s fleet, Warwick and Clarence were able to land at Dartmouth in mid-September. When she heard the news, Elizabeth began preparing for a siege.

Like King Harold in 1066, Edward now had to swing his army round and head south to face Warwick who had mustered 30,000 men at Coventry. His own troops were gathering at Nottingham, and John Neville was rallying a northern contingent. Edward was dining with his brother Gloucester and brother-in-law Lord Rivers at Doncaster when he received word that Neville had betrayed him and marshalled the northern levy in favour of Henry VI. Edward was caught between two advancing hostile armies and there was no time to think of fighting. The King and his immediate entourage rode for the coast and on 2 October set sail in three borrowed ships. Somehow a message was carried to the Queen in the Tower, and on the night before Edward’s escape, Elizabeth, Jacquetta and the princesses were rowed up the Thames to Westminster, where they took sanctuary. The atmosphere in London was terrifying. With the King gone so suddenly, the authorities had no idea how to keep order. Debtors and criminals scuttled out of sanctuary and swarmed over the city. It was an opportunity for general anarchy, with prisons broken open and mobs of looters declaring they were supporters of Warwick. The Earl himself, accompanied by the Duke of Clarence, appeared on 6 October. Poor Henry VI, confused and shuffling, was fetched from prison and set once more upon his throne.

It is curious that at this juncture Marguerite did not rush over to Westminster to join her husband. Initially this was due to a delay in the marriage between Anne Neville and Prince Edward. The ceremony eventually took place at Amboise on 13 December, held up by bureaucratic tanglings and the last-minute discovery of a need for the dreaded papal dispensation (Anne and Edward shared a great-great-grandfather in John of Gaunt). In the meantime Anne, Isabel of Clarence and the Countess of Warwick remained with Marguerite, leaving for Paris after the wedding. Louis XI was finally prepared to open his purse now that Marguerite was useful to him once more, and provided over 6,000 livres for ‘the furnishing of their silver ware’ and their ‘pleasures’, but even a return to luxurious living could not have been much of a temptation to Marguerite to linger, given that what she had fought and schemed and yearned for had finally been achieved.

In March 1471, Marguerite’s party were once more at Harfleur, but were kept ashore for seventeen days more by adverse winds. This dithering was highly prejudicial to the Readeption, as the restoration of Henry
VI is known. Warwick had difficulty in creating any coherent sense of government, and without the presence of Marguerite and, more importantly, Prince Edward, there was no prospect of stability in England. Henry’s inadequacies were common knowledge, and returning Lancastrians were resentful at the ascent of one who had so recently been their enemy, when they, not he, had suffered for their King’s cause. So why did Marguerite wait? She may have been reckless in speech but, as she had shown in retreating from London in 1461, she had a tendency to hesitate at crucial moments. She had to delay until her son’s marriage had taken place to give herself some security, but she still had no guarantee that Warwick might not decide Clarence was a more malleable successor to Henry. Either way, he would still have a daughter on the throne.

Marguerite’s indecisiveness once again allowed events to get the better of her. In November, Queen Elizabeth had given birth to a son, Edward, in Westminster sanctuary. A greater contrast to the hushed ceremonial of her previous lyings-in could hardly be imagined. Henry VI had behaved considerately, providing a salary of ten pounds for Elizabeth, Lady Scrope to wait on her, and permitting a butcher named William Gould to send in a half of beef and two muttons every week for her household. There was even a fishmonger to provide for Fridays and fast days. But the sanctuary quarters in Westminster Close were disgustingly crowded and insanitary, with the many debtors, thieves and beggars sharing space with fifty monks and the hundred servants who waited on them, as well as shopkeepers and cookshops. The public latrine, situated to the west of the abbey, filled the whole area with its stink and there was little space for outdoor exercise. Anyone who has spent a rainy day indoors with small children might pity Elizabeth, who was confined here for six months with a newborn to nurse. For her labour, Elizabeth had been allowed the company of Marjory Cobbe, the midwife who had attended her at Cecily’s birth, and a physician, Dominic de Sergio. The Prince was christened in the abbey with Abbot Millyng and the prior of Westminster as godfathers and Lady Scrope as godmother. It was an inauspicious, indeed ominous beginning, but still a joyful one. The new baby was the heir to the house of York and now Elizabeth, like Marguerite, had a son to fight for.

If Warwick was disadvantaged by Marguerite’s hesitancy, Edward IV was saved by Louis XI’s impatience. On 3 December, the French King declared war on Burgundy. Until this point, Charles of Burgundy had refused to see his exiled brother-in-law, who was living under the protection of the governor of Holland, Lord Gruuthuyse. Charles’s main concern was that he should have an ally against Louis in the English, and
now that Edward had been deposed it was more sensible of him to seek an accommodation with the new government. However, as Warwick was pro-French, Louis’s aggressive stance now meant Charles had an interest in helping Edward, and the Duke had nothing to lose by acknowledging him openly. He provided Edward with 20,000 pounds to finance an invasion, and Edward and his brother Gloucester also had an interview with their sister, Duchess Margaret, who raised further money and ships from bankers and merchants and 6,000 florins from five Dutch towns. In March, Edward set sail with thirty-six ships, landing at Ravenspur on the fourteenth. Arriving at York, Edward, like Henry IV before him, declared that he had not come to claim the crown, but only the duchy that had belonged to his father. He swore an oath on the high altar at York Minster that he would never again make an attempt on the throne of England, then promptly set about raising an army. At this stage, though, he looked unlikely to succeed. He had brought about 2,000 troops from Burgundy, but Warwick had reputedly gathered 7,000 at Coventry. The crucial intervention came from the Duke of Clarence.

Clarence was not tremendously intelligent, but he finally realised that Warwick had used him and that he had little to gain by Henry’s restoration. In a dramatic scene on the Banbury road, the two brothers, each with their army behind them, came forward and embraced. Thus Clarence, and more importantly 4,000 men, were firmly engaged on Edward’s side. By 9 April, Edward was able to send a reassuring message to his supporters in London and Queen Elizabeth in sanctuary, and two days later he entered the city. After a quick pause at St Paul’s to thank God and St Edward and feel the crown once more on his head, Edward went to Westminster to retrieve his wife and daughters and see his son for the first time. The
Historie of the Arrivall
pictures Edward comforting Elizabeth, and praises her fortitude in ‘right great trouble, sorrow and heaviness, which she sustained with all manner of patience that belonged to any creature, and as constantly as has been seen at any time any of so high estate to endure’, and describes his joy as he was presented with the baby prince.
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Henry VI was once more stowed away in the Tower. He had been produced by Warwick’s brother George Neville to march in a propaganda procession in a last attempt to hold the city, but had made a poor showing in a scruffy blue velvet gown, and he was apparently quite relieved to see Edward again, shaking his hand and expressing gratitude to his ‘cousin of York’, whom he trusted to spare his life.

The next day was Good Friday, and Edward and Elizabeth, who had spent the night with Edward’s mother, the Duchess of York, heard Mass
together. Elizabeth, Jacquetta and the children then returned to the Tower while Edward prepared for the final showdown with Warwick. The King and the kingmaker met at Barnet on the morning of Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471. The battle began at dawn, and once again Edward fought at the centre of his men, his tall figure rearing out of the mist, ‘turning first one way and then another he so beat and bore down that nothing might stand in the sight of him’
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After three hours of close fighting, Warwick was dead and the field was Edward’s. A few hours later Marguerite, with her son Edward and his Neville bride, landed at Weymouth.

The news of Warwick’s death reached Marguerite the next day at Cerne Abbey in Dorset. There is something magnificent in her refusal to surrender, her clear belief that there was still a chance of victory. From Cerne she moved to Exeter, where the troops of Devon and Cornwall were called out for Henry VI. Marguerite was supported by the third Duke of Somerset to fight for the Lancastrian cause (Edmund, the younger brother of Henry, who had been executed after Hexham in 1464), and the earls of Wiltshire and Dorset, while Jasper Tudor was gathering a Lancastrian army in Wales. Now began a cat-and-mouse hunt that lasted almost three weeks, with Marguerite moving cautiously north via Wells, Bath and Bristol and Edward leaving London to the west then turning north, marching in parallel with the Lancastrians, as Marguerite sent out small parties of troops in different directions to confuse Edward’s spies. Conditions were hard for both armies, with hot sun and scant supplies of water for the heavily laden men and gasping horses. On 3 May as Edward’s troops approached faster and faster to the rear, the Lancastrians camped at Tewkesbury while Marguerite and Anne took shelter in the abbey house.

On Saturday 4 May, Edward’s trumpets blared out the attack and his guns and archers started to pound the Lancastrian defence. Somerset managed to lead a contingent round the side of the central Yorkist division and attack downhill. As usual, Edward had placed himself in the centre and now he and his soldiers shifted to face the oncoming Lancastrians, trying to force them, hand to hand, back up the slope. Meanwhile, the Yorkist vanguard, under the command of Richard of Gloucester, had been liberated by Somerset’s feint and now bore down on the Lancastrians. Edward had stationed 200 men-at-arms on his flank and they rushed forward so that Somerset’s men were boxed in, with no option but to try to flee. Few succeeded. The second Lancastrian division, led by the inexperienced Prince Edward, was coming up, and the King wheeled his troops again to face them head on. The Yorkists knew they were winning and the remaining Lancastrians had little spirit for the fight. Many of them
ran away, pursued enthusiastically by Edward’s troops, who had been given permission to chase, kill and rob them. Most disastrously of all for Marguerite, Prince Edward was killed.