31

A MARRIAGE OF FIRE AND MILK

Every time a new Targaryen is born, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.

—SIR BARRISTAN SELMY

The world got colder. From 1430 there was an intensification of the worsening weather in Europe as the continent entered deeper into the Little Ice Age; although no one knew it, a period of reduced solar activity called the Spörer Minimum was taking place and volcanic eruptions lowered the temperature even further.1 A reduction in the growing season led to three successive crop failures in Europe, the years 1437-9 being the worst harvests in a century, aggravated by two rainy summers; the suffering was compounded by another bout of the plague hitting the continent.

The war in France was now going badly for the English, and the nature of conflict was changing. Weaponry developed at a rapid pace—Gonnes, or canons, are mentioned in an account of the 1333 siege of Berwick and were also used at Calais in 1346, but they were now vastly more lethal. Continual warfare, as with 1914-45, was helping to spur huge advances in technology.

The new French king, Charles VII, was weak in body and highly neurotic, and yet from 1438 the French had managed to impose order on their army.² Charles had them properly equipped, paid, and organized into twenty companies, a fifteen thousand-strong professional army, and from 1445 Charles also established an elite royal bodyguard of one hundred Scotsmen, Europe’s first since the Praetorian guard of ancient Rome. (Although it’s also argued that Philippe Auguste, so worried Lionheart would have him assassinated, had created the first bodyguard or gendarmes—men at arms.)

For the English there followed a series of disasters. In 1435 the alliance with Burgundy fell apart as the two factions in France finally agreed to a peace treaty; in September that year Bedford died in Rouen, leaving behind a vast collection of books, tapestries, and treasures of various sorts, and with it England’s hopes of ever retaining France. The French took Paris in the spring of 1436.

The war also continued to hemorrage money out of the English treasury, which groaned under the cost, with crown debts doubling in fifteen years so that, by 1450, they were over eleven times the country’s annual revenue. And all of this was happening under the rule of a listless, mentally unstable king.

All mental illness is to some extent hereditary, and schizophrenia is no different, with up to 79 percent of the diseases’s risk factors being genetic, the rest being a product of childhood environment.3 Even to have one grandparent with the disease raises the chance of developing it five-fold, and whatever illness Charles VI suffered from, it was most likely inherited by his grandson Henry VI of England. Indeed, Henry’s mother Catherine of Valois also exhibited similar symptoms before her untimely death at thirty-five.⁴

The sort of madness exhibited by an Aerys or a Nero has a certain glamor—violent, spectacular, and dramatic. The reality for Henry, as with many sufferers of mental illness, was a gradual withdrawal from the world, lethargy, and internal terror. His insanity was quite the opposite of the Mad King of fiction, and yet for the kingdom it was just as disastrous; as the world around him grew ever more violent, this gentle and pathetic man remained in childish innocence until the encircling political turmoil reached his own chamber.

Henry was born with an almost impossible burden, king of two warring realms before he could even walk or talk, one of them won by a charismatic, conquering father he could not possibly match. His childhood was the business of state, and yet he remained a boy all his life.

Henry VI, observers noted, had a weak chin and protruding lower lip and arms without muscle. He would, at times, agree to every proposal placed before him, tractable and obedient to everyone else’s desires; at others, he was obstinate and would not take sound advice. He hated conflict of any sort, and with no initiative and no desire to make war, the king was helpless as his father’s hard-won French territories were reclaimed.

Every king since the Norman Conquest had seen battle, but poor Henry was disgusted by the sight of a decayed corpse and objected to the impaling of executed prisoners as cruel. He also had a fear of nudity, and according to his teacher and biographer John Blackman, one Christmas “a certain great lord brought before him a dance or show of young ladies with bared bosoms” and the king “very angrily averted his eyes, turned his back on them and went out to his chamber.”5 Even the Pope commented that he was “more timorous than a woman.”⁶

He was in many ways a saintly figure, so that when one intruder tried to behead him with a dagger, inflicting a wound so serious he thought he had succeeded, the king simply forgave him. And yet as Henry grew up it became clear there was something wrong with him that went beyond mere gentleness. Schizophrenia usually manifests between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and⁷ a portrait of the young king “shows the staring, vacant expression characteristic of the disease,’ while he ticked many other diagnostic boxes, among them inability to feel joy, great sensitivity to disagreement, strange emotional responses and inability to consider consequences of decisions.”⁸ Later, after a particularly shocking military setback, he slipped into a catatonic state, “taken and smitten with a frenzy and his wit and reason withdrawn,” after which “he retreated into his world of mysticism and visions, probably happier than he had been for years.”⁹

As the crown collapsed around the mad king, the realm’s barons became more divided, their hatreds and struggles over prized inheritances unrestrained by royal power. The weak monarch bought them off with land and titles, turning lords into earls and earls into dukes, and so only raising their monstrous sense of self-importance. The great lords and their “affinities,” mostly veterans with experience of killing, menaced rivals in land disputes, simmering violence escalating as more men returned home from defeat in France. At heart the conflict was about blood, brothers against cousins and families locked in marriage alliances joined in mutual destruction of rivals. They fought for themselves, their brothers, and their children, or to settle scores; but most of all to avenge fathers.

The period between 1440–1480 was known as the Great Slump. There was a decline in the supply of gold and silver and a fall in food production caused by the ever-colder weather. Land was also much reduced in value after the Black Death, and aristocrats found themselves competing against a gentry class of merchants, lawyers, and smaller landowners. The large number of offspring produced by Edward III—twenty-four grandchildren and at least sixty-nine great-grandchildren—also meant too many nobles with too few positions to fit their dignity.¹⁰

As in Westeros, the Realm was ruled by a King’s Council, which included members of the monarch’s own family, and was often (if not usually) beset by bitter rivalries. Although the monarch resided in Westminster, much of the time this story was based around the Tower of London, the city’s fortress, palace, and prison.

Henry’s youth was dominated by the bitter conflict between his uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and his great-uncle Henry Beaufort, a hatred which only grew more bitter as the war turned against England. John of Gaunt had had four bastards by his mistress Katherine Swynford, but after Gaunt and Katherine married, Parliament and the Pope had declared the children legitimate, and they became the House of Beaufort. Henry IV had insisted on a clause stating that they were barred from the succession, and neither could any of their heirs claim the throne through their Beaufort line.

The eldest, John Beaufort, was given the title of Earl of Somerset and the middle son Henry rose to become Bishop of Winchester. Henry IV had made his half-brother Lord Chancellor back in 1403, but Henry Beaufort repaid the favor by siding with the king’s son, the future Henry V, against him. Beaufort was now very wealthy and had financed the crown with loans for a war he supported. As he once said, in the duplicitious language of politicians down the years: “Let us make war so that we may have peace, for peace is the purpose of war.”11 He also had at least one illegitimate daughter, despite his office.

The conflict between Beaufort and his nephew had escalated back in 1425 when Humphrey had led a foolhardy military adventure in Hainault in pursuit of his wife Jacqueline’s claim there; these disputed lands were now occupied by Jacqueline’s first husband John of Brabant, who was supported by the Duke of Burgundy, an ally of England. The war, which went badly, endangered England’s alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, Brabant’s ally, and led to anti-Flemish rioting in London. Beaufort was forced to bring order to the capital with an army in late 1425.

Beaufort used his position to further the interests of his family and, in 1442, he convinced the council and Parliament to authorize his nephew John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, to lead an expedition to Maine, in order to join up English territory in Normandy and Gascony. It was a complete disaster, and also angered the young lieutenant of France, Richard of York, who felt that his authority was undermined. Soon after his return Somerset died, possibly at his own hand, and Cardinal Beaufort now effectively retired.

King Henry had promised John Beaufort that, were he to die, then his widow should have the right to decide whom their infant daughter Margaret Beaufort should marry. However, he broke his word almost immediately and gave her wardship to his close friend William de le Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who betrothed her to his two-year-old son John. But then Henry was easily swayed by his inner circle: Suffolk; two senior clergymen, Adam Moleyn and William Ayscough; and James Fiennes, a soldier and sheriff who he appointed Lord High Treasurer (i.e. Master of Coin). Within a few months, in one brutal year of Henry’s reign, all four men would be hacked to death by uncontrollable mobs.

SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

Gloucester had meanwhile become another victim of witchcraft, or at least men’s belief in it. Back in 1428 the arrogant duke had cast aside his wife Jacqueline of Hainault, having failed to acquire her land, and had the marriage annulled so that he could marry Eleanor Cobham, one of her ladies in waiting. The marriage had not been blessed with children and Cobham was known to have consulted what in southern England were then called “cunning women”—one Margery Jourdemayne, known as “the Witch of Eye Next Westminster.”

She was not the only one; certainly Beaufort’s nephew Edmund, who succeded as Duke of Somerset after his brother’s suicide, had consulted Jourdemayne on his future, and had been told he would be killed in a castle, although if he only fought in the open he could avoid this grizzly fate, which Beaufort determined to do.

However, in 1441 Cobham was discovered to have been consulting with Jourdemayne over another matter, the prediction of the king’s death, an incredibly serious crime. The Witch of Eye Next Westminster had even supposedly devised a wax image of the king so ‘that by their devilish incantations and sorcery they intended to bring out of life, little and little, the King’s person, as they little and little consumed that image.”12

In July Cobham was tried as a witch and in November forced to walk the streets of London while carrying a candle for three days, as if she were a common prostitute, this being the common method of public shaming for harlots. She was forcibly divorced and made to live in various isolated castles on the Isle of Man and then the island of Anglesey. She was lucky; her co-conspirators were all executed. Jourdemayne was burned to death in Smithfield.

Humphrey of Gloucester had, in his combat with his uncle, failed to notice the rise of William de la Pole, who helped to ingratiate himself with King Henry and slowly sucked power away from the council which had ruled in his childhood and toward Henry’s court. He became a deadly enemy of Humphrey.

While Katherine Swynford had got her hands into Gaunt and founded the Beaufort dynasty, her sister Philippa de Roet had married Geoffrey Chaucer, one of a handful of poets who emerged in the late fourteenth century when the English language had reasserted itself after three centuries of Anglo-Norman domination. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are considered the most famous works in Middle English, the heavily French-influenced language that evolved from Anglo-Saxon (or Old English).

His son Thomas Chaucer had been one of Humphrey’s many enemies, while Thomas’s daughter Alice had become the second wife of the very wealthy Earl of Salisbury, which gave her large swathes of land in wealthy Berkshire and Oxfordshire. After the Earl’s death she married de la Pole. They had a sort of pre-nuptial agreement, Alice being so much richer than her new husband; yet, quite unusually, it did become a love match.

William de la Pole, nicknamed Jackanapes, had been a leading commander in the war and Lord High Admiral from 1447. His grandfather Michael had been Richard II’s close friend, but his father, also Michael, had sided with Henry IV and inherited the title of Earl of Suffolk; he married well and Jackanapes’s mother Katherine de Stafford was related to the Mortimer and Beauchamp families.

Born in 1396, Suffolk had been injured at the siege of Harfleur in 1415 where his father had died of dysentery; later that same year his elder brother Michael had been killed at Agincourt, and Suffolk spent many long gruelling years fighting in France. In 1429, he had led the English retreat along the Loire, chased by six thousand French soldiers, Joan of Arc, and the Duke of Alençon before being captured, taken to Orléans, imprisoned, and ransomed for twenty-thousand pounds, a crippling amount at least seven times his annual income. He finally returned to England in 1431, where he became an ally of Cardinal Beaufort.

In 1432, Suffolk had been appointed to the royal council and later he was raised from Earl to Duke. Hard-working and diligent, he served on embassies and fought in Normandy, alongside a young Richard of York, and from 1433 became steward of the royal household, which gave him intimate access to the king. He was also the largest landowner in East Anglia and in this region his aggressive behavior toward neighboring estates had won him many enemies.

And so, with a vacuum in the leadership and the war going badly, Suffolk had taken the initiative by finding Henry a French princess who would bring peace to his realms and stability to his dynasty. He left for France in 1444.

The king of England, whatever his personal weaknesses, was a great catch and among the women considered as a match was Isabelle, Lady of the Four-Valleys, daughter of the Count of Armagnac, but her father was scared off by the king of France. Isabelle thereafter started a relationship with her brother Jean V, Count of Armagnac, and they had three children together, the only prominent case of full incest at the time (as far as historians know). Offending both popes and kings with this and various other reasons, Jean was eventually exiled and his marriage dissolved, the children declared bastards. Eventually allowed back, he wed again—to a woman who wasn’t his sister—but died while his wife was eight months pregnant and she was forced to drink a poison that caused her to give birth to a still-born baby.

Instead attention turned to a fourteen-year-old girl with impeccable lineage, Margaret of Anjou.

TEARS AREN’T A WOMAN’S ONLY WEAPON.

The War of the Roses was dominated by two figures, a man and woman who would inspire two of the main characters in Westeros, Margaret of Anjou and Richard of York.

While the kingdom may have had a weakling on the throne, offended by nudity and dressed in a hair shirt, the queen who would share his bed was anything but. Formidable, beautiful, cunning, and ruthless, Margaret of Anjou was feared by her enemy Edward of York more “than all the princes of the House of Lancaster combined,” according to one chronicler.13 A correspondent of John Paston wrote: “The Quene is a grete and stronge labourid woman, for she spareth noo peyne to sue hire thinges to an intent and conclusion to hir power.”¹⁴ Arrogant and haughty, she kept a great household, with five female attendants and ten “little damsels.”

Christine de Pizan wrote that “it is the duty of every princess and high-born lady . . . to excel in goodness, wisdom, manners, temperament and conduct, so that she can serve as an example on which other ladies and all other women can model their behaviour.” The wise queen must also learn to cope with the failings of the men around her; their drunkenness, their vanity, lechery, and violence. De Pizan advised ladies with husbands who “conduct themselves abominably” to “bear all this and to dissemble” for responding harshly will gain them nothing.15 She also insisted that a high-born woman requires knowledge of law, accounting, warfare, and various other important matters for the kingdom, adding: “The lady who lives on her estates must be wise and must have the courage of a man . . . She must know the laws of warfare so that she can command her men and defend her lands if they are attacked.” Inevitably it was a task too much for Margaret, despite her best efforts.

Margaret’s curse was to be stuck with a weak husband and to be a strong woman at a time when such people were called “viragos,” an insulting term for masculine women. Like Cersei, Margaret wanted to take a man’s role in government and to be respected for being better suited to it.

Born in Lorraine in north-eastern France, Margaret was the eldest of ten children to Isabella, Duchess of Lorraine, and “Good King” Rene. She was of solid blue blood, descended from King Jean II, as well as being the niece of Marie, the Queen of France. Margaret’s father was in theory the Duke of Lorraine through his wife, as well as King of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem as well as Duke of Anjou, Count of Provence, Duke of Bar, Count of Piedmont and king of Hungary. None of these titles amounted to anything in reality, and Rene endured a lifetime of military defeats during ill-thought-out adventures trying to claim them.

Many noble women led their estates and acted as regents for young sons because their men were away, or incompetent. Margaret’s family was no different, and she learned at the feet of her grandmother Yolande de Aragon. Yolande had married Duke Louis of Anjou, from a branch of the French royal family who had controlled Sicily for many years, but after her husband’s premature death she ruled in his place. Later when her son was away fighting for his various titles, she took his place at home too. The formidable Yolande played a prominent role in defeating the English in Maine and Anjou, alongside Joan of Arc, and became something of a surrogate mother to Dauphin Charles. Yolande also organized a network of mistresses for high-ranking men within the royal court and came to play a leading political role as a result. Margaret had lived with her grandmother for four years and it was here that she learned the art of ruling.

She endured much suffering. When Margaret’s father was captured by the Burgundians, after yet another failed expedition, he was only released in exchange for two of his sons sent as hostages; one of them, sixteen-year-old Louis, then died in captivity from pneumonia.

Margaret was dark-haired and described as “handsome” rather than classically beautiful, although Chastellain, a Flemish chronicler of the time, said she was “a very fair lady, altogether well worth the looking at.”16 It was Suffolk who arranged the marriage and it was Suffolk who stood in for the king when he took the fourteen-year-old’s hands at Tours cathedral in the prescence of King Charles in 1444.

Several months later she was brought over to England in a storm, setting foot in Hampshire, and after time spent at the many royal palaces along the Thames, the king took her to London where her new subjects declared her the savior of the two kingdoms. And yet Margaret and Henry’s union was described as “marriage of fire and milk.”¹⁷ Like her predecessor Isabella condemned as a “she-wolf of France,” she was tasked with an insurmountable burden in bringing order to a realm disintegrating under an unfit king. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga lamented that Margaret was “married at 16 to an imbecile bigot”¹⁸ and while in later centuries Henry VI was regarded as a saint he was undoubatbly “pious, ineffectual and periodically deranged.”¹⁹ Even if he was not a bad man, the country could not tolerate a mad king.

The marriage was cursed, at any rate, being part of a peace treaty in which the English agreed to hand over Maine in 1448, viewed as a humiliation. Though it had been Henry’s initiative, Suffolk was blamed.

Humphrey, now a fringe figure, had not even been invited to the 1445 peace negotiations, but such was the unpopularity of the treaty that when it became public knowledge his subsequent reputation as a martyr and hero was born even before his death. For then, in February 1447, Suffolk had arranged for his enemy to be arrested on trumped-up charges of treason, only for Humphrey to be found only five days later, dead, most likely from a stroke. Cardinal Beaufort expired just two months later.

Humphrey’s career had ended in failure, and all the achievements of his brother Henry V would crumble to dust. His great legacy was his library, which on his death he donated to the university of Oxford—becoming “Humfrey’s Library,” the oldest reading room at the Bodleian Library.