Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood Read Free Book Online Page A

council of nobles with York as ‘protector’ at their head. It was solution to which all the men involved – even Henry VI’s half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor – could agree.
    York was described also as ‘defensor’ of the realm – a military role that could only have been held by a man. While Somerset was disempowered – arrested in the queen’s apartment – Marguerite was sent to Windsor to be with her husband: a wife, not a force in the land. She seemed, however, to accept the decision, even when the council’s money-saving reforms reduced her household and thus her power base. It is hard, indeed, to know what else she could have done. Certainly she could not stress Henry’s incapacity: she had no authority to act other than through him. Although some lords refused to serve on York’s council on the grounds that they were ‘with the queen’, either physically or otherwise, the normal business of administration seemed – except only for the continued opposition of Somerset – to be going comparatively smoothly.
    Then, on Christmas Day 1454, Henry recovered his senses. On 28 December the queen brought her son to him and told him the baby’s name, and, in the words of the Paston letters, ‘he held up his hands and thanked God therefore’. Another account has it that he also, unhelpfully, said the child ‘must be the son of the Holy Spirit’, which could not but fan the flames of doubt about the boy’s paternity.
    The king’s recovery was hailed with relief by all; in reality, it only presented a new set of problems. York had been a capable governor, but the king’s recovery also resurrected Somerset, boiling with fury, while the weakened Henry would henceforth be more susceptible than ever to petticoat government. York could only ride back to his own estates for safety and with him, in spirit if not in person, came Cecily’s brother Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and Neville’s eldest son, the Earl of Warwick – the man who has gone down in history as ‘the Kingmaker’ and whose wife would two years later give birth to the most obscure female protagonist in this story, Anne.
    Up until the 1450s the Neville family had continued to support the Lancastrian government, to which they were linked by the connections of Joan Beaufort. Cecily, married to York, must have found herself isolated within her own family. This situation had now begun to change, largely because of the repercussions of a feud with another great northern family, the Percy earls of Northumberland. The two divisions of the Neville family were coming to be on opposite sides. Cecily, the former ‘Rose of Raby’, was now closest to the Nevilles of Middleham, Salisbury and Warwick, who were aligning themselves with her husband; while her half-nephew Ralph, who held the Raby land and the Westmorland title, remained Lancastrian. Whatever the cause, the change of allegiance in at least some of her kin must have been welcome to Cecily.
    In May 1455 the queen and Somerset held another great council charged with protecting the king ‘against his enemies’. It is from this month that many historians date the start of the ‘Cousins’ War’. The stand-off between the two parties quickly gave way to armed conflict as the king (supported by Somerset, though not by the queen, who had retreated to Greenwich with her baby) rode out of London at the head of a royal army and York likewise mustered his forces. The battle of St Albans was no major military engagement – an hour-long fracas through the market place and the town’s main street – but it was notable for two things. Contemporaries were shocked, not only that the victorious Yorkist soldiers had looted their way through an English town, but that the king had been slightly wounded by an arrow from one of his English subjects. A number of lords and gentlemen on the royal side were slain, among them the Duke of Somerset, cut down by an axe outside the Castle Inn. Once again