Blood Sisters (29 page)

The reassurance did her little good. On 16 March, during a great eclipse of the sun, Anne died. Since her illness was lingering and possibly infectious, the best modern guess is tuberculosis. But there would be other suspicions, and her death would be linked to that of the princes. Vergil wrote that she died ‘whether she was despatched by sorrowfulness or poison’; Rous that ‘Lady Anne, his queen, he poisoned.’ Commynes wrote that ‘some say he had her killed’, and Hall said: ‘Some think she went her own pace to the grave, while others suspect a grain was given her to quicken her in her journey to her long home.’

Anne was buried on the ninth day after her death – the 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation. She was interred, says Crowland, ‘at Westminster, with no less honours than befitted the interment of a queen’. The absence of a tomb – which conveys, now, an impression of lack of care or lack of ceremony – was almost certainly the result of Richard’s reign having ended before he had had time to commission one. Some six weeks later, after the news had spread across Europe, the Doge of Venice assured Richard that ‘your consort led so religious and catholic a life and was so adorned with goodness, prudence, and excellent morality, as to leave a name immortal’. But it is difficult not to feel that Anne’s life had been a hard one, even by the harsh standards of the fifteenth century.

On 20 March, only four days after Anne’s death, Sir Edward Brampton was sent to Portugal to negotiate a marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king’s sister, the Infanta Joana. The Infanta was not only determinedly religious and averse to marriage, but thirty-three and, for those times, old for child-bearing. It is likely therefore that her appeal was her descent from John of Gaunt – a descent that made her the senior representative of the legitimate Lancastrian line.

The Portuguese council urged Joana that it was her duty to agree, ‘for the concord in the same kingdom of England that will follow from her marriage and union with the king’s party, greatly serving God and bringing honour to herself by uniting as one the party of Lancaster, and York’. It was conscious that, if she refused, Richard might look instead to the next most senior marriageable representative of the Lancastrian line, the Spanish Infanta Isabel, another great-great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt.

The idea must have maddened Margaret Beaufort if she heard of it – it neatly cut out her (and her son’s) Lancastrian claim. Both Joana and Isabel were descended from John of Gaunt’s earlier, uncontroversial marriages to foreign princesses, while the Beaufort line came from his liaison with Katherine Swynford, only later regularised by marriage. But Sir Edward was to negotiate a double marriage – an alliance also between a daughter of Edward IV (presumably Elizabeth) and the king’s cousin, the Duke of Beja. This, it is suggested, may have been the marriage Elizabeth was discussing in the Buck letter. The speed with which the embassy set out shows that in a pragmatic age the matter must surely have been under discussion before Anne’s death. Since the marriage proposed for Elizabeth
²⁷
was dependent on the one proposed for Richard, this would explain, if not excuse, any fear that Queen Anne would never die.

The prospect of a foreign royal marriage for Elizabeth of York may, like the pardons granted to various Woodvilles, have been part of the general sweetening that persuaded Elizabeth Woodville to write summoning her son Dorset home. That spring he tried to escape from the exiled Tudor ‘court’; he was making for Flanders and the coast when Henry’s representatives, with French connivance, caught up with him and persuaded him to return. Perhaps Elizabeth Woodville had been rattled by Henry’s declaring himself king before he had married her daughter. Or, of course, she may have been coerced – though it has been taken as yet more evidence of her gullible venality. Shakespeare has Elizabeth, asked by Richard how he should woo her daughter, sarcastically advising him to send her a token ‘by the man that slew her brothers’. She counters each promise he makes for the future with some wrong from the past. But in the course of some 150 lines she also changes her mind – ‘Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!’, as Richard apostrophises her.

But whoever else may have been complicit, it was Richard who attracted most opprobrium for the reputed plan of marriage with his niece. The king’s closest advisers, Ratclyff and Catesby, felt obliged to warn him of the unpopularity of such a union. In Crowland’s words: ‘For by these persons the king was told to his face that if he did not abandon his intended purpose, and that, too, before the mayor and commons of the City of London … all the people of the north, in whom he placed the greatest reliance, would rise in rebellion against him and impute to him the death of the queen, the daughter and one of the heirs of the Earl of Warwick, through whom he had first gained his present high position’ – in order that he might, says the chronicler disapprovingly, ‘to the extreme abhorrence of the Almighty, gratify an incestuous passion for his said niece’.

Besides this, certain of Richard’s advisers wheeled in a dozen or so doctors of divinity ‘who asserted that the Pope could grant no dispensation in the case of such a degree of consanguinity’. ‘It was supposed by many, that these men, together with others like them, threw so many impediments in the way, for fear lest, if the said Elizabeth should attain the rank of queen, it might at some time be in her power to avenge upon them the death of her uncle, Earl Anthony, and her brother Richard [Grey].’ It sounds as if the girl later generations assume to be placid and gentle was believed by those closer to her to be her mother’s daughter.

Only a fortnight after Anne’s death, just before Easter, in the great hall of the Hospital of St John, Richard was forced to take the extraordinary step of making a public repudiation of any desire to wed his niece. He spoke, says Crowland, ‘in a loud and distinct voice; more, however, as many supposed, to suit the wishes of those who advised him to that effect, than in conformity with his own’.

The records of the Mercers’ Company describe how, ‘to the very great displeasure of the king’, the ‘long saying and much simple communication among the people by evil disposed persons’ seemed to show ‘that the queen as by consent and will of the king was poisoned for and th’intent that he might then marry and have to wife Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of his brother …’. In the presence of many of his lords, and of the city hierarchy, he ‘said it never came into his thought or mind to marry in such manner wise nor [was he] willing or glad of the death of his queen but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be …’.

But the
Great Chronicle
recorded
²⁸
‘much whispering among the people that the king had poisoned the Queen his wife, and intended with a license purchased [a dispensation] to have married the elder daughter of King Edward. Which rumours and sayings with other things before done caused him to fall in great hatred of his subjects… .’ The stage, as Margaret Beaufort must have realised, was set for her son Henry.

NINETEEN

In Bosworth Field

Here pitch our tent, even here in Bosworth field.

Richard III
, 5.1

Henry Tudor in France now had every hope of support from the teenage Charles VIII – or rather from his sister and regent Anne of Beaujeu. As the spring of 1485 grew warmer, Margaret Beaufort’s servant Reginald Bray was collecting money to fund mercenaries and sending messages across the Channel. Even her cautious husband Stanley, the ultimate political weathercock, was beginning to rate her son’s chances more highly now that Richard had become so unpopular. If this were down to Margaret’s influence it would soon prove to be the most important thing she could possibly have done, for all that she was in theory debarred from political activity.

Throughout the spring Richard continued to hear rumours of an impending rebellion. Perhaps he heard, too, that in France Henry Tudor was being misdescribed as a younger son of Henry VI, suggesting that the French were seriously promoting him as a royal heir.

Elizabeth of York may have been sent straight to Sheriff Hutton after the scandal of the spring; but one source has her for a few weeks at least in Lord Stanley’s London house, where her furious resentment against her uncle swung her to the opposite political side. The long early sixteenth-century verse narrative the
Ballad of Lady Bessy
,
²⁹
which chronicles the events that led up to the battle at Bosworth, survives in several different versions. On one thing, however, they all agree: Elizabeth of York played an extraordinarily active role in this story.

The
Ballad
describes how as the spring began to ripen, she waylaid Lord Stanley in the palace corridors and asked him to send a message to his stepson Henry Tudor, promising to marry him and thus greatly strengthen his cause:

For and he were King, I should be Queen;

I do him love, & never him see

She tears her hair in fury when Stanley refuses to commit, sinking into a swoon and lamenting that she will never be queen. But her determination has a more practical aspect too: the ballad has her raising money, rallying supporters and detailing the Stanley military strength with considerable precision. Lady Bessy volunteers to write letters to Stanley’s adherents, which she boasts she can do as well as the scrivener who taught her. Presented as a ‘lady bright’, as spirited and beautiful as she is able, Bessy successfully brokers a contact with Henry, and he responds with his own verse:

Commend me to Bessy, that Countess cheer [or, ‘clere’], –

& yet I did never her see, –

I trust in god she shall be my Queen,

For her I will travel the sea.

Did Elizabeth in truth hate Richard – and if she did, was it for trying to seduce her, or for repudiating her? It depends on what we think were or had been her feelings for her uncle. But it is certain she must have awaited events with more than uncommon tension: once more, you might say, she had been cheated of a royal match. Maybe she feared losing another, if she had heard Henry was now pursuing a Herbert heiress – or, as Francis Bacon would suggest, that he contemplated marriage to the heiress of Brittany. We cannot be sure, at this juncture, what were the relations between Margaret Beaufort, still held under house arrest, and the Woodville clan.

After having had to make that embarrassing declaration repudiating his marital intentions Richard had left London first for Windsor and then, on 17 May, to spend a few days at his mother Cecily Neville’s residence at Berkhamsted,
³⁰
possibly to update her on his European marriage plans or to explain the other marriage stories as best he might.

But war was now coming. As spring edged towards summer Richard must have heard that Charles in France was openly raising money for Henry. In the second week of June the king set out for Nottingham Castle, a military power base strategically placed in the heart of England. From there he began to raise his army and to prepare for the invasion that everyone knew would soon be on the way.

In late June Richard’s proclamation against Henry was reissued, with two important changes. The first omitted the name of the Marquess of Dorset, Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest son, from the list of rebels and traitors: Richard was trying to placate her and her family. The second laid out Henry Tudor’s – Margaret Beaufort’s – bloodline, ‘descended of bastard blood, both of father’s side, and of mother’s side … [John of Gaunt’s and Katherine Swynford’s children being] in double avoutry [adultery] gotten’.

That week Thomas Stanley requested leave to withdraw from court and return to his estates ‘in order to rest and refresh himself’. His estates in Lancashire were the site of Margaret Beaufort’s enforced residency. Richard agreed, on condition that Stanley left his son behind, as a guarantor of the magnate’s continued loyalty, and the same day sent for the Great Seal, a sure sign he expected urgent business of great importance.

On 1 August Henry Tudor set sail from France. The French had wobbled in their support, granting money as a loan only. Henry was forced to pawn his household possessions and leave behind as security two Yorkist lords, including Dorset. Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, however, would ride with Henry’s army. With him were a hired band of expert French pikemen, and the two supporters – the Earl of Oxford, a powerful nobleman and experienced commander, and Henry’s equally battle-hardened uncle Jasper Tudor – whose presence compensated for his own lack of military knowledge. Henry landed six days later at Milford Haven in Wales, where he fell to his knees and kissed the soil of a country he had not seen for fourteen years. He is said to have recited the psalm ‘Judge me, O Lord, and defend my cause’.

Then the fortnight-long march eastwards began along, as Crowland described it, ‘rugged and indirect tracks’. It would have taken several days for galloping messengers to bring Richard the news, but on the 11th the summons to his supporters went out: ‘orders of the greatest severity’ threatening reprisals on all who refused. Crowland declares that on hearing of Henry’s landing Richard ‘rejoiced, or at least seemed to rejoice, writing to his adherents in every quarter that now the long wished-for day had arrived, for him to triumph with ease over so contemptible a faction’.

All through Wales Henry was rallying his supporters, with more flocking to his cause. But in England he was a virtual stranger. Vergil reports that along the way he wrote to his mother. It was Margaret Beaufort on whom, directly or indirectly, he had had to rely to raise support in the country.