Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood Read Free Book Online

been guilty of adultery with the Duke of Somerset. If it were indeed the news of Marguerite’s pregnancy that had triggered the king’s collapse, the question is whether he was horrified by the first indisputable evidence of his own sexuality or, conversely, by awareness that the child could not be his and that his wife must have been unfaithful.
    By the traditions of courtly love, adultery could be a forgivable, even laudable, route to emotional fulfilment. Guinevere was guilty of adultery with Lancelot while her husband Arthur, soon to fall into his own magic sleep below the lake, stood by; but because Guinevere was Lancelot’s true lover, she was able to be redeemed. In the world of practical politics, however, it was a different story. When chroniclers such as Robert Fabian wrote that ‘false wedlock and false heirs fostered’ were the ‘first cause’ of the ills in the body politic, they were making an equation between private morality and public wellbeing which would have seemed reasonable to any contemporary.
    The whispers of unfaithfulness would rise to a crescendo of public debate towards the end of the decade, when Marguerite’s Yorkist enemies found it convenient both to discredit the Lancastrian heir and to cast a slur on Marguerite herself in the field in which women were above all judged: her chastity. As Catherine de’ Medici would later warn Elizabeth I, her sexuality was always the way in which a powerful woman could be most successfully attacked. Christine de Pizan similarly suggested that a queen had less freedom of sexual action than a lower-ranking woman, for ‘the greater a lady is, the more is her honour or dishonour 23 celebrated through the country’. But the birth of Prince Edward transformed Marguerite, the first of several women in this story for whom their sons would be the ones to play. She would now not be prepared to sit back and allow others to rule – as her husband all too patently could not – the country.
    In January 1454 it was reported that the queen, ‘being a manly woman, using to rule and not be ruled’, had drawn up a bill of five articles ‘whereof the first is that she desires to have the whole rule of the land’, so a Paston correspondent wrote. There was no very recent precedent in England for a woman’s rule, or indeed a formal regency. Though several of the early Norman queens 24 had acted as regent, memories of the last woman to hold the reins of power, Isabella of France a century before, were not reassuring. Marguerite’s mother-in-law Katherine de Valois had taken no part in government during Henry VI’s minority.
    But across the Channel there was precedent aplenty. Maybe it helped that the French had regularised their position by ‘discovering’ an ancient tradition that a woman could not inherit. The Salic law, while it debarred a woman from the throne itself, conversely enabled her to get near the throne without seriously imperilling the status quo. Marguerite’s family tradition was of women taking control when necessary; but there was severe disapproval for a woman who crossed the indefinable boundary and seemed to seek rule openly. Perhaps Marguerite’s very bid, influenced by the experience of her continental family, would have repercussions when, almost thirty years later, the governors of England came to consider a Woodville queen’s position during another prospective regency.
    Discussions as to how the country should be ruled dragged on for weeks, in parliament and in the council chamber, which suggests that Marguerite’s claim was not instantly dismissed. At the end of February, both she and York were scheduled to make grand public arrivals in London. The mayor and aldermen agreed to turn out in scarlet to give the queen a formal welcome on Wednesday – and to do the same for the Duke of York on Friday. In the end, however, in the last days of March it was decided that the country would be governed during the king’s incapacity by a