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to congratulate Marguerite – nor even to lament the infirmity of her own ‘wretched body’. She was indeed recovering from the birth of her son Richard, of which Thomas More 22 wrote that it was a breech birth and the mother could not be delivered ‘uncut’. But it was her husband’s fall from favour that caused her to be ‘replete with such immeasurable sorrow and heaviness as I doubt not will of the continuance thereof diminish and abridge my days, as it does my worldly joy and comfort’. She would have sued to Marguerite earlier had not ‘the disease and infirmity that since my said being in your highness presence hath grown and groweth’ caused her ‘sloth and discontinuance’. In this long, elaborate and convoluted letter Cecily renewed the plea she had made at Hitchin: that her husband the Duke of York should no longer be ‘estranged from the grace and benevolent favour of that most Christian, most gracious and most merciful prince, the king our sovereign lord’.
    It is not known whether York had asked Cecily to intercede, or whether she did so on her own initiative. The lists of gifts made by Marguerite each year show presents being made to Cecily and her servants; this can be interpreted as a less politically coded conduit to the husband, or as an expression of female alliance. Either way, Cecily’s letter may have had some effect. When a great council was summoned that autumn York did, belatedly, receive an invitation to attend; one of the signatories on the document was Marguerite’s confessor.
    The council was summoned by Margaret Beaufort’s uncle, Somerset, on 24 October. Recently, several important things had happened. On 19 October the French king’s forces had entered Bordeaux, leaving England only Calais as a foothold in France and ending the Hundred Years War with France’s resounding victory. On the 13th Queen Marguerite had given birth to a healthy baby boy, named Edward after Edward the Confessor, whose feast day it was. But while proclamations of the joyous news were read around the country, at court the joy was muted. For the man to whom the news should have been most welcome of all, the baby’s father, Henry VI, had been for some weeks in a catatonic stupor.
    It had been the middle of August when the king, after complaining one evening of feeling unusually sleepy, had woken the next morning with lolling head, unable to move or to communicate with anybody. Over the days and weeks ahead, as his physicians and priests tried the full panoply of fifteenth-century remedies – bleedings, purgings and cautery on the one hand, exorcism on the other – he seemed not entirely to lose consciousness but to be utterly incapable. Modern medicine has tentatively diagnosed his condition as catatonic schizophrenia, or a depressive stupor, triggered by the news from France or just possibly by the fact of Marguerite’s pregnancy. Every effort was made at first to conceal the king’s condition, not only from the country at large but specifically from York.
    It was in this climate that, as custom dictated, Marguerite had withdrawn into her apartments at Westminster to await her child’s birth; it was an all-female world which not even her priest was allowed to enter. Never can withdrawal from the wider world have seemed less timely. After the birth – and the churching or ceremony of religious purification some forty days later at which Marguerite, wearing a robe trimmed with more than five hundred sables, was attended by the duchesses not only of Suffolk and Somerset but also of York – she had to accept the fact that Henry in his catatonic state could make no sign of acknowledging the baby as his. This represented both a personal slight and a practical problem if the name of the little prince were to be invoked as nominal authority for a council to rule during his father’s incapacity.
    There would, perhaps inevitably, be rumours about the baby’s paternity – whispers that Marguerite had