Courtier: Alice Chaucer de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk, 1404-1475

Life during the time of the Wars of the Roses wasn't for sissies.  The women had to be as tough as the men and few met that description better than the matriarch of the de la Pole branch of the Plantagenet family, Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk. 

Alice, 1404-1475, was the granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer of Canterbury Tales fame, through his son Thomas.  The Chaucers were connected.  Geoffrey was a lawyer and bureaucrat active in the service of Edward III, Richard II, and Richard's rival Henry of Bolingbroke, later Henry IV.  The Chaucer family's connections made possible three good marriages for Alice.  When she was 11, she married Sir John Phillip, who died a year later of dysentery while in service in Normandy during the Hundred Years War.  He left his young widow with an estate of extensive property, including Donnington Castle.  Young Alice married next in 1421, Thomas Montacute, 4th Earl of Salisbury, and when he died in 1428 she had yet more property to her credit.  Finally, in 1430, she married William de la Pole, Earl and later Duke of Suffolk.  In 1442, she bore him a son, John. 

William was steward of the household and a leading counselor of Henry VI and Alice served as a lady in waiting to Margaret of Anjou.  For a time, she was a loyal Lancastrian.  However, in 1450, William was impeached by the House of Commons.  Henry exiled the Duke to save him from death, but his ship was tracked down.  He was captured, returned to England and executed.  Alice now had to scramble to protect her son's inheritance.  She loaned the king several thousand marks to spare her son's lands from attainder but in 1451, found herself facing a state trial on suspicion of support the opposing Yorkists.  She was acquitted, but later threw in her lot with Edward IV against Henry and her former mistress, Margaret of Anjou.  After Henry's death and when Margaret was captured, Alice was deemed trustworthy enough to serve as Margaret's guardian and effectively jailer.  She was also appointed castellan of Wallingford Castle in her own right.

Alice made several pious donations to religious institutions and charitable causes throughout her life.  She held property in over 22 counties and was patroness of the poet John Lydgate.  She was no doubt a devoted mother.  But she could also be ruthless.  She was not above taking her erstwhile friend Margaret Paston to court to seize several Paston manors on the basis of fraudulent deeds.  The two women had been friends, but were now bitter enemies.  Alice could be as avaricious and cunning as any man over her time.  She was also the last woman to be named a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter.  Alice died in 1475 wealthy enough to have an elaborate transi or double-decker tomb in her honor at St Mary's Church, Ewelme.  The top level of the tomb showed her in the prime of life as a noble woman, but below was a rotting corpse, symbolizing what she became after her death. 

Meanwhile her son, John, would marry Elizabeth, daughter of Richard of York and Cecilly Neville.  Elizabeth was the sister of Edward IV and Richard III.  Thus, after the deaths of these final Plantagenet kings, the de la Pole family would carry an important claim to the Yorkist side of the Plantagenet dynasty and give the Tudors no end of grief.