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disruption to trade – but the costs of maintaining the royal court were also now conspicuously far greater than the revenues available, especially under the influence of a high-spending queen; 19 while there was widespread suspicion that her favourites were being allowed to feather their nests too freely. On her arrival in England parliament had voted Marguerite the income usually bestowed on queens – 10,000 marks, or some £ 6700; but the parlous state of her husband’s finances meant that those sums due her from the Exchequer were often not forthcoming. The surviving accounts show her making determined efforts to claim her dues, but they also show formidable expenditure – not just the £ 73 she gave to a Venetian merchant for luxury cloth, or the £ 25 to equip a Christmas ‘disguising’ at the Greenwich ‘pleasaunce’ (Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’s former residence which Marguerite had now adopted as her own), but sums of money clearly used to reward, in cash or in kind, her allies.
    The parliament of May 1451 heard a petition for York to be named heir presumptive to the childless Henry VI, and his and Cecily’s sons after him. Everything known about her would suggest that Cecily stood right alongside her husband, whose supporters were by the beginning of 1452 claiming that the king ‘was fitter for a cloister than a throne, and had in a manner deposed himself by leaving the affairs of his kingdom in the hands of a woman who merely used his name to conceal her usurpation, since, according to the laws of England, a queen consort hath no power but title only’.
    The charge is to some degree substantiated by the number of grants made ‘by the advice of the council of the Queen’ as revealed in accounts of the Queen’s Wardrobe department for 1452–3; and while some have queried whether the enmity between Marguerite and York was as instinctive and as early as has popularly been supposed, there is no doubt that by this point real conflict was on the way. By February 1452 both sides were raising troops. On 2 March the two armies drew up, three miles apart, near Blackheath.
    Neither party, however, was yet quite ready to fight. A royal delegation of two bishops and two earls was sent to command York, in the king’s name, to return to his allegiance. Prominent among York’s demands was that Somerset be arrested and York himself acknowledged as the king’s heir. Back in the royal camp, so one account goes, the bishops saw to it that the queen was kept occupied while they spoke to the king, who was persuaded to agree to all the demands. But the next morning there was a dramatic scene when Marguerite intercepted the guards who were leading Somerset away and instead took him to the king’s tent so that York, arriving a few minutes later to make his peace with his monarch, found himself also confronting a furious queen. Somerset was clearly in as much favour as ever; York felt he had been fooled. He had no option, however, but to make a humiliating public pledge of his loyalty before being allowed to withdraw to his estates in Ludlow. Armed conflict had been averted for the moment, but the divisions in the English nobility were deeper than ever. The resentful York and his adherents remained a threat for a king and a court party anxious to strengthen their position in any possible way; and one of the ways most favoured by the age was marriage. In February 1453 Margaret Beaufort’s mother was commanded to bring her nine-year-old daughter – Somerset’s niece – to court.
    During the first years of Marguerite’s queenship Margaret had been raised at her own family seat of Bletsoe, 20 as well as at Maxey in the Fens. Her mother had remarried, and there is evidence from her later life both that Margaret developed an enduring closeness to her five St John half-siblings and that she shared several of her mother’s traits: piety, a love of learning, and a desire for money and property. On 23 April 1453, she and her