Free Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood Page A

source, the Milanese ambassador in France, Prospero di Camulio, seems even to suggest that this time she was in the thick of the fray: ‘The earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and … pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.’ The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle ‘King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trusted better to her party than to his own… .’ One anecdotal report of a speech Marguerite once made to her men is as heroic in its way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury: ‘I have often broken [the English] battle line. I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen … I will either conquer or be conquered with you.’
    Marguerite had by now experienced far more warfare than most ladies of her time. She had known the tension beforehand, mounting to fever pitch; the fear that each step of your horse’s hoof could bring it down on the sharp point of a hidden caltrop, before men rushed out from ambush to claim you as their prey; and the roads afterwards, crammed with the bodies of horses and with bleeding, dying men who lacked even the strength to crawl away.
    When the engagement at St Albans was over King Henry, brought there by Warwick under guard, was found seated under an oak tree, and Marguerite was reunited with her husband. As the couple halted outside London the city officials requested that a carefully chosen delegation of ladies should act in the traditional way as go-betweens, interceding with Marguerite ‘for to be benevolent and owe goodwill to the city’. The ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales 38 who had been among those escorting Marguerite from France and who had remained in her household; the widowed Duchess of Buckingham, Cecily of York’s sister, whose husband had been killed the previous summer fighting in the Lancastrian cause; and Jacquetta, dowager Duchess of Bedford, another member of the party that had escorted Marguerite to England. Of the princely house of Luxembourg, and married in her youth to Henry VI’s uncle John, Jacquetta had been widowed in 1435 at the age of nineteen; ‘minding also to marry rather for pleasure than for honour, without counsel of her friends’ she had promptly taken as her second husband ‘a lusty knight, Sir Richard Woodville’. Jacquetta had remained close to the queen; and indeed her eldest daughter Elizabeth 39 may have been one of Marguerite’s ladies. Now not only was Jacquetta’s own husband with the queen’s force, but so too had been her daughter’s husband John Grey, father of her two young sons. Grey had recently died at the second battle of St Albans; and it was Elizabeth Woodville’s widowhood that would soon propel her into national history.
    A letter reported that the delegation had returned to London on 20 February with news that ‘the king and queen had no mind to pillage the chief city and chamber of their realm, and so they promised; but at the same time they did not mean that they would not punish the evildoers’. The message was sufficiently ambiguous that there was still panic in the streets, and the ladies were sent out again two days later to request the Lancastrian leaders to enter the city without the main body of their army. The queen conceded; ironically, her decision to send only a small symbolic force into London, and her subsequent withdrawal to Dunstable, would prove to be arguably the biggest mistake of her life. The wheel was about to turn yet again.
    The huge overturns of fortune did not come heralded in any way. In the weeks after the battle of Wakefield, Cecily Neville had been so afraid that she had sent her two younger sons, George and Richard, abroad to the safety of Burgundy. Yet almost as she did so her eldest son Edward and the Earl of Warwick, with their armies, were preparing to approach London from the west. On 27 February they were