England’s Traitor Princess: Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy. Sister of Richard III

She was a Plantagenet royal who became a powerful European Duchess and ended up repeatedly betraying her own bloodline and trying to overthrow the Tudors. This is the life of one of the most overlooked and yet also the most dangerous women of the Wars of the Roses, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy. Margaret of York was born on the 3rd of May, 1446, the daughter of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and his wife, Cecily Neville. She was the sixth of their 12 children and among her siblings were the future Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third. At the time of her birth, Henry the Sixth was on the English throne, but he did not have the best blood claim on it based on his descent from Edward the Third. For Henry was a descendant of that king’s third son, John of Gaunt. Instead, that honor belonged to Margaret’s father, who was descended from Edward’s second son and his fourth too, actually, because the royals liked a little light incest. As King Henry’s grandfather, Henry the Fourth, had seized the throne back in 1399, however, the crown was no longer following strict male first primogeniture from Edward the Third and that was why Margaret’s dad wasn’t the king. Though within a year of her birth, he would become the heir apparent to the still childless monarch. His aspirations to take the crown, which he passed on to his sons, would shape most of Margaret’s life and her self-identity. Though never technically a princess because her father was never a king, she styled and referred to herself as such and nonetheless and more often than not called herself Margaret of England rather than Margaret of York.

Margaret was named after Henry the Sixth’s formidable queen, Margaret of Anjou, whom he had married in 1445, but we aren’t sure where the little York baby was born. Fotheringhay Castle and Waltham Abbey were both mentioned by contemporary chroniclers, though. And Margaret definitely spent a portion of her childhood at the castle, even if it’s not where she made her entrance into the world. We knew very little about this childhood on the whole, but she does not appear to have accompanied her parents to Ireland in 1449, where her younger brother George, later Duke of Clarence, was born at Dublin Castle during their father’s lieutenancy of the island. Instead, her biographer, Christine B. Whitman, whose book was my main secondary source for this video and is linked below for you, suggests that she may have remained at Fotheringhay, while her other surviving siblings, and some of them were already dead, were housed or boarded out elsewhere. From surviving documents, we can tell that she was clearly taught to read and write, and as an adult, she had a very strong interest in beautiful manuscripts and books, especially religious texts, which reflected her Catholic faith. She was also evidently proficient in French, though less so in its written form, and music, dancing, and embroidery seem like safe bets as well. But beyond that, I wouldn’t like to speculate on the extent of her education. What I can tell you about her youth, though, is that as she grew up, the Wars of the Roses began to have ever more serious effects on her life.

This conflict was a fight for the throne between the two branches of the Plantagenet family I’ve already mentioned. Those descended from Edward III’s second son, that’s Margaret’s family, the Yorks, who sometimes used a white rose as one of their badges, and those descended from his third son, the Lancastrians, who sometimes used a red rose. Funnily enough, Margaret was a Lancastrian on her mother’s side, but in this era, it was the father’s blood which usually counted much more. Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou remained childless until their only son, Prince Edward of Wales, was born in October 1453. By that point, however, the king had suffered a complete mental breakdown and was catatonic. He didn’t even know he’d become a father. In March 1454, the Duke of York was made the protector of the realm during the king’s illness, much to the queen’s chagrin. He and Margaret of Anjou really didn’t get along. But when Henry recovered his wits, the situation took a turn for the worse for York, and the first battle of the Wars of the Roses took place at St. Albans on the 22nd of May 1455. Over the next few years, there would be a series of such battles. Sometimes the Yorks won, sometimes the Lancastrians, and it was impossible to tell who would ultimately end up on top. I’m not going to go through them all here, as I want to keep the focus on little Margaret, but if you see my playlist on the Wars of the Roses, which includes videos about her mother Cecily and Margaret of Anjou, you can find a much more detailed account of the intricacies of these years there. I’ll leave it linked for you.

One battle I do want to pay some attention to is that at Ludford Bridge in 1459. For at that clash, Richard, Duke of York, lost and had to flee into exile in Ireland with his second son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland, while Margaret’s oldest brother, then known as Edward, Earl of March, went to Calais with their uncle and cousin, the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick. Duchess Cecily, Margaret, and the younger boys, however, were captured at Ludlow Castle. They were not badly treated by the king, but the lands of Margaret’s father, brothers, Uncle Salisbury, and Cousin Warwick were all attainted, and her mother, her younger siblings, and presumably she herself, too, were placed in the care of their maternal aunt, Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, and allotted an income of 1,000 marks per year from the York lands. By July 1461, though, Edward was back from France and saw to it that all four moved into the home of the recently deceased Sir John Falstaff in Southwark, London. It was there that they heard that Duke Richard had returned from Ireland. Leaving the children where they were, Cecily went to meet him while Edward kept an eye on his brothers and sister, visiting them in their temporary home.

Within a few months, the tables had turned. Henry VI was taken prisoner by York and the Duke tried to take the throne. The nobility and Parliament weren’t having it though and instead a compromise was reached. By the Act of Accord passed on the 31st of October that year, Henry VI would remain king, but after his death, the throne would go to York and his descendants, thereby completely cutting the young Prince of Wales out of his inheritance. Obviously, Queen Margaret and her son, both still at large, weren’t going to go along with this. The stage was set for all-out war and both sides started gearing up for the inevitable clash. Eight weeks later, the Duke of York and his second son, the teenage Earl of Rutland, were at Sandal Castle in the north of England. Having left the safety of its walls to engage with Lancastrian troops at what became known as the Battle of Wakefield, both were killed as were the Earl of Salisbury and other nobles on the 30th of December. York’s head was then mounted on the walls of the city of York with a paper crown on it to mock his pretensions to the throne. Margaret, her mother, and her younger brothers remained in London, most likely at Baynard’s Castle, and it was there that they received the horrific news. Cecily quickly sent her youngest two sons, George and Richard, to Utrecht for their safety. Fourteen-year-old Margaret though, only a girl after all, so no threat, stayed with her mother in London, which was still in Yorkist hands. Her oldest brother Edward, still only 18 and now the Duke of York, though he is not generally remembered by that title, defeated the Lancastrians at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross on the 2nd of February. This resulted in the execution of King Henry’s stepfather, Owen Tudor, by the way. But, soon after, his cousin, the Earl of Warwick, was defeated at the 2nd Battle of St. Albans on the 17th of February and lost custody of Henry VI, who was freed and returned to his wife and son. Warwick and Edward’s troops met up. The king and queen proved unable to take London, and when Edward got there at the start of March, he was proclaimed Edward IV in place of Henry VI, whose forces he defeated soon afterwards at the Battle of Towton on the 29th of March, forcing the Lancastrian royals to flee into exile. Margaret was now the sister of the King of England, or rather, of one of its kings. Initially housed at Greenwich, she spent the next seven years moving between different houses provided for her and her mother, or used by the royal court, whilst waiting for King Edward to organize a suitable marriage for her.

She was granted an annuity of 40 livres a year whilst under 18 years of age, rising to 400 marks once she had attained that age in 1464. She was in England to witness the fallout in 1465 from Edward’s impetuous marriage to the older, but beautiful, Lancastrian widow, Elizabeth Grey, née Woodville, which caused a serious breach with their cousin, Lord Warwick, who had been angling for a foreign marriage alliance for the king, and with Cecily, Duchess of York, who Weightman doesn’t think attended the new queen’s coronation, though Cecily’s own biographer, J. A. L. Smith, thinks she did, even if only on one day of the festivities. Margaret was definitely there, though, sitting next to her new sister-in-law at the banquet afterwards and taking part in the dancing. She would remain one of Elizabeth’s attendants until her own marriage. Margaret’s marriage had been rather neglected by her brother when we consider her age by 1465. She was then 21. There had been talk of wedding her to the King of Scotland in 1462, which came to nothing, or to a Spanish or Burgundian candidate in 1464, but again, these ideas went nowhere. In late 1465, a new suitor in the form of Don Pedro of Portugal, who had a claim on the throne of Aragon, appeared. And these negotiations went so far that Pedro sent Margaret an expensive betrothal ring in 1466. However, he then died that June, and that was the end of that. It was back to the drawing board. Luckily for Margaret, though, a much better suitor was on the horizon, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. An Anglo-Burgundian marriage suited Charles, who had been widowed in 1465 with only a daughter called Mary to his name, and who had only inherited his Duchy in 1467. It would prevent an Anglo-French alliance occurring in its place. Louis XI of France had offered several candidates for Margaret’s hand, too, but to no avail. And it also offered him another shot at producing a son. For King Edward, because let’s not pretend that Margaret had much of a say in this, it ensured that his sister would be one of Europe’s greatest duchesses and would provide a useful ally for his shaky dynasty, still undermined by the existence of Henry VI and his son, who could surely expect no help from Burgundy once Margaret was its duchess. It also meant he didn’t have to ally himself with England’s traditional enemy, the French. Both sides would also benefit economically with good trading links between the two realms. Though Weightman feels that the marriage terms offered by the French were actually better on the whole, and it was anti-French hostility which pushed Edward, and by extension Margaret, into the waiting arms of Duke Charles.

Negotiations for this marriage were protracted, and it seemed at times as though it would never occur. Englishman Sir John Paston even placed a bet in May 1467 that he’d pay 80 shillings for a horse if the marriage occurred in the next two years, but only 40 if it did not. He ended up paying the 80 shillings. Margaret’s betrothal to Charles was made public in October 1467, much to the anger of the French, who were livid that she had not been given to them. King Louis tried and failed to prevent the papal dispensation required from going through, and he spread rumors about Margaret’s honor, saying that she’d already had a child and tried to interfere with Edward’s money-raising ventures to raise the dowry. None of it worked, and the wedding occurred on the 3rd of July, 1468. Margaret’s dowry was to be 200,000 crowns paid by Edward in installments over two years. Her dower or jointure, as I’m mostly going to call it to avoid confusion with the word dowry, provided by her husband to support her if she was widowed, was to include the cities of Malines or Mechelen, Oudenaarde, and Dendermonde. She would also get between 22,000 and 26,000 livres per year for expenses during her marriage. The now 22-year-old Margaret left England on the 24th of June with a fleet of 16 ships to see her, her baggage, and her retinue safely across the channel and to Sluys, which I’m probably not saying correctly and which is now in the Netherlands, the following evening. She was given a grand welcome with all the townspeople in their doorways with lights to show her the way to the house of a local merchant, Guy de Brimeu, and Van den Winckele, where she was to stay for a week and be entertained by pageants each day. She made a good first impression, too, by wearing the Burgundian colors of red and black. The next day, she met her new mother-in-law, Isabella of Portugal, and her new 11-year-old stepdaughter, Mary of Burgundy, both of whom she got along with very well. The day after that, she met her soon-to-be husband, and the two were betrothed in Van den Winckele’s garden, after which Margaret was called the Duchess of Burgundy, though the final wedding ceremony hadn’t taken place yet. She remained at Sluys for another week, entertained with fireworks, music, and pageants, before moving on to Damme, where she continued to be richly entertained and given gifts by the citizens of those places she stayed. Finally, the actual wedding occurred in Damme in the house of a man called Witte or Wittes.

Margaret of Burgundy, as she now was, then had a grand entry into the city of Bruges, carried to the ducal palace in a litter draped in crimson cloth of gold, wearing a dress of white cloth of gold with white ermine fur trimming and a crimson cloak, and her hair loose. Topping it all off was her very own coronet. Remarkably, this incredible piece of jewelry still exists in the cathedral at Aachen, to which Margaret later donated it, and is one of the few pieces of treasure from the medieval English crown jewels to survive. Most of them were destroyed in the 17th century by the Cromwellians. It is only 12 cm in diameter and clearly meant to be worn over a hairdo or perhaps around one of the coned hennin headdresses so popular at this time, and which we see Margaret wearing in the best-known portrait of her. It is decorated with her name, Margaret of York, in enamel and with a diamond cross and a large white rose, the symbol of the House of York. This and the form of her name makes some suspect that it predates her wedding and might have been made at the time of her brother’s coronation. There are also lines of pearls around it, other precious stones, and in what might be a later addition to make it suitable for her wedding, the initials C and M in lovers’ knots. There’s always the chance, though, as Whiteman says, that Charles had it made for his bride. If so, though, it was generous of him not to add more Burgundian symbols to it. As for the looks of the woman underneath this coronet, the portrait of her in the Louvre Museum has been dated to roughly the year of her wedding and from it and descriptions written by those who saw her, we know that she was fair-haired and tall like her older brother whilst also pious and reserved in her character and someone who rarely smiled. She had an oval-shaped face, gray eyes and according to one observer possessed an air of intelligence and will. The wedding festivities which began with her entrance into the city lasted for nine days and the processions, pageants, tournaments, decorations, banquets and gifts to the new duchess were so spectacular that they were written about at length by chroniclers and historians for years afterwards and were apparently barely dampened by the rain which lashed down on top of them. That problem aside, things seem to have gotten off to a very good start for the Duchess of Burgundy.

There were problems to come though. No doubt the greatest disappointment in Margaret’s marriage was its lack of children. Despite trips to shrines to try to become pregnant, there was no royal baby to show for it while little Mary of Burgundy and the illegitimate half-siblings that her father produced showed that the issue was apparently with Margaret. Despite this disappointment, there is no evidence that it caused a breakdown in the marriage of the kind which would occur in the following century between Margaret’s great nephew Henry the VIII of England and his first wife Catherine of Aragon or his second Anne Boleyn. Charles though had a different temperament to Henry. He was clever, hard-working, severe, and impatient with his servants when they made errors, and a stickler for etiquette. Yet still, he was more patient and reasonable than Henry. Rather than dumping or killing Margaret, he simply didn’t spend much time with her after he’d given up on her conceiving. Not that he was a constant presence in her life even in the earlier days of their union. In fact, Wietman says that they were together for only a combined total of a year out of the first 7 years of their marriage, and then never met again after 1475.

And to be honest, when I read those stats, I actually thought Margaret might have conceived if her husband had just put a bit more effort into it. He was too busy with matters of state, however, putting down rebellions and negotiating treaties. So, what did the Duchess do with herself when her husband wasn’t in residence? Well, she got to know her new lands and people, for one thing. She toured around his Duchy, sometimes with her beloved stepdaughter, who was only 11 years her junior, seeing and being seen, hunting, visiting shrines, at some point she gave her coronet to Aachen, remember, and being entertained by the locals. Wietman lists 28 journeys made during the course of her 8 and 1/2 year marriage, which is no small feat when we consider the state of 15th-century roads and travel conditions. She gave generously to the church, something which would continue in her widowhood, and founded or supported many religious houses in the Low Countries. She also deputized for her husband on occasion, receiving ambassadors when he wasn’t for instance, and his frequent absences meant that she played an increasingly prominent role in the administration of the Duchy. Her mother-in-law, Isabella of Portugal, was not to be a long-term presence in her life, dying in December 1471. But Margaret built good relationships with her half-brothers-in-law, David, Bishop of Utrecht, and John, Bishop of Cambrai, and also had a chance to see her own family again on occasion, as we’ll see shortly.

She became close to, professionally speaking, only to Olivier de la Marche, an army man and diplomat who later became the master of her household. That household, as established in 1468, had about 140 people, around 90 of whom would have been in service at any given time. There were kitchen staff, stable staff, and of course bedchamber staff, comprising 12 maids of honor and three ladies of the bedchamber, all managed by Marie, Countess of Charney, Charles’s illegitimate half-sister. In 1472, there was a serious fire in her rooms in the Castle of Mail. She was unharmed, but the castle was badly damaged, and the situation was serious enough that her usually absentee husband rode over from Bruges to check on her. She estimated her financial losses to be in the region of 50 to 60,000 crowns, including the loss of jewelry, and tapestries, and expensive clothing. Back home in England, the ups and downs of the Plantagenet family and the Wars of the Roses continued. Margaret’s little brother, George, Duke of Clarence, greatly angered their older brother, Edward IV, by marrying Isabel Neville, daughter of their cousin, the Earl of Warwick, in 1469 without permission. Then he and Warwick basically usurped Edward, locking him up in Warwick Castle, among other places, and killing his father-in-law and brother-in-law. The anarchy did not reflect well on the English Duchess of Burgundy.

What good was a marriage alliance with England, after all, when the country was so unstable? Fortunately, the situation was smoothed out relatively quickly, at least for now, and Edward, Clarence, and Warwick appear to make up, with the king released and able to resume government. The next crisis was never far off, though. There was another rebellion in early 1470, which resulted in Clarence and Warwick leaving England for France, seizing some of Charles the Bold’s merchant ships along the way, much to the anger of Margaret’s husband, and making an alliance with Henry VI’s exiled wife, Margaret of Anjou, and her son. Her husband, by the way, was by this stage languishing in the Tower of London, having been recaptured by the Yorks in 1465. Nothing Margaret could do or say in her letters to George prevented the mess he now made. He and Warwick, whose younger daughter Anne was now married to the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, came back to England with a French force and were able to seize the throne on behalf of Henry VI, who was released from the Tower.

King Edward and his youngest brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, fled to mainland Europe, and Queen Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters went into sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, where she gave birth to her son named after his father and ultimately known to history as the elder of the princes in the Tower. More on them later. Where does Margaret fit into this family drama, though? Well, her brothers Edward and Richard had pitched up in The Hague by October 1470, pretty much penniless and now seemingly useless as allies. Weightman tells us that there were secret messages between the siblings, but no public contact, as Charles figured out which horse to back in the disaster that was English politics. The decision was made for him when Louis of France, who was on the side of the Lancastrians, remember, and had provided troops to help take the throne back for Henry VI, declared war on him. It was now in Charles’s best interests to get the English crown back on his brother-in-law Edward’s head, so that England would be Burgundy’s ally and not France’s. On the 2nd of January, 1471, the Duke and the exiled king met for the first time at Oostkamp, and Charles pledged 20,000 pounds towards helping Edward get his throne back.

Edward then went to Hesdin to see Margaret, where he and Richard remained for 3 weeks. More money was raised from loans made from bankers and merchants from across the Low Countries, and we know that Margaret moved to Lille on the 19th of January and was visited there early the following month by Richard of Gloucester as preparations continued for an all-out invasion of England. Meanwhile, back in their motherland, the Duke of Clarence was being persuaded by his mother and other sisters to back Edward once more. He was better off as the king’s brother than the Prince of Wales’ brother-in-law, after all. And Margaret was pushing him to defect back to their brother, too. It worked. By the time Edward landed back in England in March, Clarence had decided to return to the fold. What followed was swift by medieval standards and brutal by anyone’s. Edward retook London, freed his wife and children, reimprisoned Henry VI, and went to fight Warwick at the Battle of Barnet on the 14th of April. Warwick was killed. Margaret would later claim that her brother had wanted to spare their cousin, but the Earl had been slain by Yorkist soldiers before saving him. And this left Margaret of Anjou and her son as the last loose ends to tie up.

They had only arrived back in England on the very day of the battle, and King Edward caught up with them on the 4th of May at Tewkesbury, where the Lancastrian Prince of Wales was killed. Margaret of Anjou, who was no threat now, was captured alongside her daughter-in-law Anne Neville, who was later married to Richard Duke of Gloucester, and Henry VI died in the Tower of London on the 21st of May, having almost certainly been murdered on Edward’s orders. Though Margaret of Burgundy did her best to spread the unconvincing story that Henry had had nothing to fear from her brother, I do wonder if she was truly gullible enough to believe that. The Burgundians were delighted at how things had played out, and their Duchess was once again the sister of the English king, and threw a banquet at Ghent on the 16th of June to celebrate. She was soon granted a series of highly favorable trade licenses by Edward, perhaps as a thank you for her support, perhaps as Weightman says to make up for the fact that he never paid her full dowry. In June 1475, she met with all three of her brothers in Calais, still in English hands in this time period, when they arrived with an army to support her husband in an invasion of France.

Charles then joined them a month later. In the end, there was no armed conflict with the forces of King Louis though. Instead, diplomatic solutions were reached, but when Margaret said goodbye to her brother George and husband Charles at the end of July before setting out for Ghent, she could hardly have imagined that she would never see either of them again. Throughout 1476, Margaret was busy traveling through her husband’s lands, raising money and troops to send to him while he was campaigning in the likes of Lorraine and Savoy. Charles was at the siege of Nancy on the 5th of January 1477 when he and his troops were surprised by an attack by Swiss infantry under the control of René, Duke of Lorraine. The Burgundians were decimated and Charles was killed. It took two days to find his body in the mess. Having suffered a catastrophic head injury, he was only recognizable by his long fingernails and scars on his body, which his valet and doctor were able to recognize. It took a few days for the news to reach his wife and daughter and a few more before they could be certain that it was true, but by the 21st of January, a memorial service was being held for him in Ghent. Margaret was now a widow at the age of 31 and her unmarried 19-year-old stepdaughter Mary was now the Duchess of Burgundy in her own right. Both were in a terribly dangerous position.

Louis of France began invading Burgundian territory, claiming that with no male heir, those lands should default to him and the citizens of some territories rose up in revolt against some of the stricter measures Charles had imposed on them. The two women worked together to try to calm the storms, also attending the opening of the Assembly of the Estates, think of that like Parliament, on the 26th of January, and promising better government in exchange for allegiance of the various cities and provinces affected by rebellion. Mary also had to agree to rule with the advice of a council of men drawn from the Estates. England, which had by now made a peace deal with France, was of little help as Edward the Fourth didn’t think it worth his while to send an army to assist his sister and step-niece. Margaret tried to tempt him with the idea that the recently widowed Clarence could marry Duchess Mary, but it was to no avail. In any event, Mary was actually already engaged to Maximilian, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Third, and later King of the Romans and eventually Holy Roman Emperor himself. To stall Louis and his attacks, the Dowager Duchess and the new Duchess opened diplomatic negotiations with the French king, but he continued to attack Mary’s lands and to undermine her position by attacking her main advisers who were associated with some of her father’s least popular measures. This included Margaret. He accused the Dowager Duchess of planning to kidnap her stepdaughter and take her to England for a marriage to Clarence, and made public letters sent by the women without the permission of the Estates. Some of Mary’s advisers were summarily executed and Margaret was forced to leave Ghent, with Mary left behind essentially as a prisoner in her own castle. Once her stepmother was gone, there was a bloodbath made of many of the young Duchess’s officials, despite her pleas for mercy for them or even for fair trials.

Margaret went to Oudenaarde, which was one of the towns granted to her in her jointure, then from there moved to Mechelen in Brabant, which would become her primary residence for much of the rest of her life and where she built herself a grand ducal palace. She helped to support the match for Mary with the 18-year-old Maximilian on the word of a princess, as she put it. And in August 1477, much to King Louis’ annoyance and with Margaret in attendance, the wedding finally occurred in Ghent. Maximilian and his new stepmother-in-law would always get along well, with Margaret largely credited then and now with getting the marriage over the finish line in the face of strong opposition from the French king. She also had to arrange her jointure payments, which according to her marriage treaty were dependent on her entire dowry being paid by her brother, which it never had been. She should therefore have received a reduced jointure. But in fact, she was able to negotiate a very favorable settlement, which gave her all her mother-in-law’s former dower lands, among other things. In this, she was greatly helped by the fact that she had Mary’s full support, both because the young Duchess loved and respected her stepmother, and because she wanted to maintain friendly relations with Edward of England. She also obtained Maximilian’s backing when he arrived. Her brother was fairly useless to her now, failing to send the military support she asked him for, though he did make some complaints to Louis about how Burgundy, and by extension his sister, were being treated over the next few years. Still, it was Margaret who managed to protect her own financial situation, not Edward. And she was such an effective negotiator and politician in this matter, as well as in general, that Louis hated her guts, which is really quite a compliment. She was now an exceptionally rich lady, and still only in her 30s. There were few mentions of a second marriage, though, which Whitman attributes both to Margaret’s apparent inability to conceive, and also to the fact that few men could have rendered her better off than she now was. As for what was going on in England, there is no evidence that Margaret attempted to intervene on behalf of her brother Clarence when he was arrested in 1477 and ultimately executed by drowning in wine in the Tower of London in 1478. She was distracted anyway by her stepdaughter’s affairs.