14th September 2016
Today in 1435 Jacquetta of Luxembourg was widowed when her first husband John Duke of Bedford died. She was only about nineteen – she was probably born 600 years ago this year. She remarried a knight, Richard Woodville, in secret without her nephew the king's permission – a scandalous love match in a time when a noble lady's hand was a valuable commodity. Together she and her new husband were the parents of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, the grandparents of Elizabeth of York and Edward V, and the ancestors of every English monarch from Henry VIII onwards.
From The Lady of the Rivers, my novel of Jacquetta:
His servants come in, they make him comfortable in his bed, and then I kiss his forehead and leave him for the night. As it happens, that is the last time I see him, for he dies in his sleep that night, and so that was the last he saw of me: not a loving wife but a statue gilded by the setting sun.
They call me at about seven in the morning and I go to his room and see him, almost as I left him. He seems peacefully asleep, only the slow low tolling of the single bell in the tower of Rouen cathedral tells the household and the city that the great Lord John is dead. Then the women come to wash and lay out his body, and the master of the household starts to make the plans for his lying-in at the cathedral, the joiner orders wood and starts to make his coffin, and only Richard Woodville thinks to draw me aside, stunned and silent as I am, from all the bustle and work, and takes me back to my own rooms.
Images: Detail from the Duke of Bedford before St George, the 'Bedford Hours', British Library Add MS 18850 f.256v; the cover of The Lady of the Rivers