The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [225]
Louis persevered, and Fortescue added his own pleas, perceiving that this alliance was the only way of restoring Henry VI. The Milanese ambassador reported that ‘His Majesty has spent and still spends every day in long discussions with the Queen to induce her to make the alliance with Warwick and to let the Prince go with the Earl to the enterprise of England. Up to the present the Queen has shown herself very hard and difficult.’ Eventually, though, she allowed Louis to overrule her objections and consented to grant Warwick an audience, saying she would let him have her final decision after the interview. She would not agree in any case to the Prince accompanying Warwick, despite Louis’s arguments that his presence would inspire the people of England to rise in favour of Lancaster. She feared to expose her son to the risks that such an expedition must necessarily attract, though Louis was relentless in insisting that there was no question but that the boy should go. Again, Margaret said she would defer any decision on the matter until she had seen Warwick.
On 15 July, the court moved to Angers, where the Countess of Warwick and her daughter Anne were formally presented to Queen Margaret. It cannot have been a comfortable meeting, given Margaret’s hostility towards Warwick. Worse was to follow, for later that day Louis told her that the Earl was ready to agree to a marriage between Anne and Prince Edward. At this, Margaret exploded. ‘What!’ she cried. ‘Will he indeed give his daughter to my son, whom he has so often branded as the offspring of adultery or fraud?’ And she ‘would not in any wise consent thereunto’, alleging she would gain more advantages by marrying Edward to Edward IV’s heiress, Elizabeth of York – through such an alliance, the House of Lancaster would regain the throne on Edward’s death providing he had no son to succeed him. And she produced for Louis to see a letter she had received from England the previous week, offering the hand of the Princess Elizabeth for Prince Edward.
Louis reported all that Margaret had said to Warwick so that he could marshal his arguments, and on the evening of the 22nd the Earl was at last ushered by the King into the frigid presence of the Queen, and abased himself on his knees, ‘addressing her in the most moving words he could devise’, according to Chastellain, ‘begging forgiveness for all the wrongs he had done her, and humbly beseeching her to pardon and restore him to her favour’. The Harleian MSS account reports him conceding ‘that by his conduct King Henry and she were put out of the realm of England’, but excused this by saying he had believed they ‘had enterprised the destruction of him and his friends in body and in goods, which he had never deserved. He told her he had been the means of upsetting King Edward and unsettling his realm’ and promised that he would in future ‘be as much his foe as he had formerly been his friend and maker’. He now offered himself as a true friend and subject of King Henry.
The Queen, however, ‘scarcely vouchsafed him any answer, and kept him on his knees a full quarter of an hour’. Seeing that matters were not going as he had planned, King Louis stepped in and offered personally to guarantee the Earl’s fidelity. Margaret demanded that Warwick publicly withdraw his slanderous remarks concerning the paternity of her son, which he assured her he would do, not only in France, but also in England when he had conquered it for her. At length, after much persuasion, the Queen pardoned Warwick.
Louis