Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood7/2/2023 At a great council held in the city the Yorkist lords were indicted for treason. Just a year later, the hostility between rival Lancastrian and Yorkist groups had reached such a pitch that Margaret, her husband and son withdrew to Coventry (the Midlands were the queen’s power base, where she held most of her dower lands). There was no love lost between Margaret and Richard, and the brief appearance of amity was hollow. For form’s sake, both were willing to grit their teeth and go through with the charade. It is a powerful image: the determined and, by several accounts, attractive Frenchwoman walking alongside the stocky figure of the man who threatened the inheritance of her four-year-old son. This can seldom have been more so than on 25 March 1458, when Margaret of Anjou, the redoubtable queen of Henry VI, walked hand in hand in a Loveday procession through the streets of London with Richard, Duke of York, the monarch’s cousin and challenger to his throne. Such a poetic term, with its undertones of chivalry and Christian values, spoke of an optimism often belied by harsher reality. In fifteenth-century England there was a ceremony of formal reconciliation known as a ‘Loveday’.
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