Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood Read Free Book Online Page B

Marguerite had lost her great ally (and Margaret Beaufort her uncle, and the head of her family).
    York’s and the Nevilles’ was the victory. But the battle of St Albans was significant in yet another way. There may have been no clear-cut turning-point in Marguerite of Anjou’s progress towards political activism, but this was surely the moment when the process was completed. 25
    With a few exceptions, the battlefield was not part of a lady’s experience in the fifteenth century. Some thirty years before, legend had it, Margaret’s grandmother Yolande had donned silver armour and led her troops against the English at the battle of Baugé. But though the century of Joan of Arc may have given lip service to the idea of the woman warrior, even Isabella of Castile, Katherine of Aragon’s mother, who was often pictured leading her own troops into battle, in fact confined herself to strategy and the supply of arms, planning and provisioning. Certainly most of the ladies whose husbands or sons were involved in wars would not have heard about events for days or even weeks afterwards. News travelled only at a horse’s pace; and in an age before mass media (before, even, the dissemination of official printed reports) they may never have known as much about the progress of each battle as is known today. The history of the ‘Wars of the Roses’ has usually been told in terms of the men who alone could take part in its physical conflicts. But the lives of the women behind them could be affected no less profoundly.
    As the Yorkists took over the reins of government, there was no overt breach of loyalty – everything was done in the king’s name. Past wrongs were blamed on the dead Somerset and his allies. But Marguerite at least was mistrustful and unhappy, again leaving the court to take refuge in the Tower with her baby. The fact that Henry resumed his role as king almost as York’s puppet must have frightened as well as angered her. That autumn the king fell ill again, though this time only for three months, and from November 1455 to February 1456 York resumed his protectorship of the country.
    But as York set about a policy of financial retrenchment, the queen was working to try and make the king’s rule more than nominal. ‘The queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spares no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power’, wrote one observer, John Bocking, a connection of the Paston family. Early in 1456, as the king’s recovery put an end to York’s protectorship, Marguerite herself left London, taking her baby son to the traditional Lancastrian stronghold of Tutbury. She had decided to take action, rallying support and persuading the king to remove the court from London to the Midlands, where her own estates lay. In September of that year her chancellor was entrusted by the king with the Privy Seal, which gave her access to the whole administration of the country.
    Marguerite portrayed herself always as the king’s subordinate and adjunct, which was what was needed in the short term but in the long term both acted to the detriment of her authority and left her vulnerable to charges of exceeding her brief. It was as Marguerite managed to accrue more power to herself that the rumours really began to circulate about her sexual morality – as if the two things were two sides of the same unnatural coin. 26 It was increasingly said that the prince was not the king’s son but perhaps Somerset’s – or not even hers, but a changeling. In February 1456 one John Helton, ‘an apprentice at court’, was hanged, drawn and quartered ‘for producing bills asserting that Prince Edward was not the queen’s son’.
    The pageants that welcomed Marguerite into the city of Coventry on 14 September that year reflected the confusion about her role. In most of them she was represented as traditionally female – wife and mother – and praised particularly for her ‘virtuous life’. (Considering