The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [76]
There were other officers in the Queen’s household – the Clerk of the Closet, the Private Secretary, the Clerk of the Signet and the Clerk of the Jewels, while two Knights of the Board (table) earned forty marks per annum each. Margaret had five female attendants; one was Dame Elizabeth Grey, daughter of Sir Richard Wydville and wife of Sir John Grey; none could have then predicted that Elizabeth would one day be Queen of England. Another attendant was Elizabeth, wife of the powerful James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire, one of the foremost members of the court faction and a great admirer of the Queen.
In the lower ranks of the Queen’s servants were ten ‘little damsels’, two chamberwomen, grooms, pages of the robes, pages of the beds, pages of the bakery, scullions, kitchen staff who worked in the buttery and pantry, the Queen’s gardener – who was paid 100s. (£5.00) per annum – twenty-seven esquires whose salary bill was £143.4s.4d. (£143.22) annually, and twenty-seven valets at £93.15s.6d. (£93.77½) a year. The Queen paid £7 a day to the treasurer of the King’s household for the maintenance of her own household, although she often found to her dismay that some of the money due to her as part of her dower, the income settled on her by the King through Parliament, was paid late. She therefore had to stretch such resources as she had to the limit.
Margaret’s influence made the court once again the hub of fashionable society. In the year of her marriage Henry VI ordered that the Queen’s apartments at Eltham Palace be rebuilt with a new hall, scullery and range of lodgings for the Queen to use prior to her coronation. In other royal palaces his wife’s apartments had to be renovated as they had not been used for more than a decade. In these refurbished apartments Margaret entertained royally and encouraged a livelier atmosphere at court. She hunted frequently, ordering that the game in her forests be preserved exclusively for her use, and that bloodhounds be especially trained for her.
Margaret’s chief mentor after her marriage was Suffolk, though rumour soon had it that they were lovers, and Gloucester later accused Cardinal Beaufort of turning a blind eye to the fact and even encouraging such wickedness. But no contemporary chronicler, however hostile, ever hinted that there was anything improper in the relationship.
When Suffolk met Margaret he was forty-eight and she fifteen. He was a suave, experienced man of the world with cultivated charm, while she was a young, untried girl about to leave her family and the land of her birth for a strange husband and a new life. Suffolk was kindly and avuncular, and made no secret of his admiration; she was flattered and susceptible to his warmth. His party had arranged her marriage and therefore she supported it.
Suffolk even saluted Margaret in romantic verse:
How ye lover is set to serve ye flower …
Mine heart is set and all mine whole intent
To serve this flower in my most humble wise
As faithfully as can be thought or meant
Without feigning or sloth in my service.
For wit thee well, it is a paradise
To see this flower when it begin to spread
With colours fresh enewed, white and red.
This poem is a typical example of the kind of courtly doggerel that was then fashionable, it being socially acceptable for knights and lords to write in such terms of a lady whose rank precluded any closer relationship. Nevertheless, the enemies of Margaret and Suffolk made political capital out of their friendship and spread scurrilous rumours about it.
Suffolk used Margaret’s confidence and loyalty to his own and his party’s advantage, and in return protected her from criticism, keeping her in ignorance of public opinion and dissident voices in Council and Parliament. Together they made a formidable political team, for the court faction headed by Beaufort and Suffolk controlled both King and government; Suffolk even manipulated his adherents so as to ensure that important decisions were taken