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was inclined to grant it. But Humfrey, who would be a powerful opponent of this policy, would have to be got out of the way. In February 1447 – under, it was said, the aegis of Marguerite, Suffolk and the Beaufort faction – Gloucester was summoned to a parliament at Bury St Edmunds, only to find himself arrested by the queen’s steward and accused of having spread the canard that Suffolk was Marguerite’s lover. He was allowed to retire to his lodgings while the king debated his fate but there, twelve days later, he died. The cause of his death has never been established and, though it may well have been natural, inevitably rumours of murder crept in – rumours, even, that Duke Humfrey, like Edward II before him, had been killed by being ‘thrust into the bowel with an hot burning spit’.
    Gloucester had been King Henry’s nearest male relative and therefore, despite his age, heir. His death promoted York to that prominent, tantalising position. The following month Cardinal Beaufort died too. The way was opening up for younger men – and women. Marguerite did not miss her opportunity and over the next few years could be seen extending her influence through her new English homeland, often in a specifically female way.
    A letter from Margery Paston, of the Norfolk family whose communications tell us much about the events of these times, tells of how when the queen was at Norwich she sent for one Elizabeth Clere, ‘and when she came into the Queen’s presence, the Queen made right much of her, and desired her to have a husband’. Marguerite the matchmaker was also active for one Thomas Burneby, ‘sewer for our mouth [food taster]’, telling the object of his attention that Burneby loved her ‘for the womanly and virtuous governance that ye be renowned of’. To the father of another reluctant bride, sought by a yeoman of the crown, she wrote that, since his daughter was in his ‘rule and governance’, he should give his ‘good consent, benevolence and friendship to induce and excite your daughter to accept my said lord’s servant and ours, to her husband’. Other letters of hers request that her shoemaker might be spared jury service ‘at such times as we shall have need of his craft, and send for him’; that the game in a park where she intended to hunt ‘be spared, kept and cherished for the same intent, without suffering any other person there to hunt’. For a queen to exercise patronage and protection – to be a ‘good lady’ to her dependants – was wholly acceptable. But Marguerite was still failing in her more pressing royal duty.
    In contrast to that of the prolific Yorks, the royal marriage, despite the queen’s visits to Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, was bedevilled by the lack of children. A prayer roll of Marguerite’s, unusually dedicated to the Virgin Mary rather than to the Saviour, shows her kneeling hopefully at the Virgin’s feet, probably praying for a pregnancy. One writer had expressed, on Marguerite’s arrival in England, the Psalmist’s hope that ‘Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house’; and the perceived link between a fertile monarchy and a fertile land only added to the weight of responsibility. As early as 1448 a farm labourer was arrested for declaring that ‘Our Queen was none able to be Queen of England … for because that she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land.’
    The problem was probably with Henry, whose sexual drive was not high. The young man who famously left the room when one of his courtiers brought bare-bosomed dancing girls to entertain him may also have been swayed by a spiritual counsellor who preached the virtues of celibacy. But it was usually the woman who was blamed in such circumstances, and so it was now. A child would have aligned the queen more clearly with English interests, and perhaps removed from her the pressure of making herself felt in other, less acceptable,