Blood Sisters (32 page)

It was inevitable that Margaret would have strong views on the christening. The ordinances she set down decreed that Winchester Cathedral should be carpeted and hung with tapestries, that soft linen should be folded inside the font, which was placed on a stage in the middle of the church to give the crowds a better view. She and her son were both good at publicity. But Elizabeth’s own maternal relations were well to the fore: her sister Cecily carried the baby to the font, with their sister-in-law the Marchioness of Dorset bearing the train. Dorset himself as well as the Earl of Lincoln, the queen’s cousin, stood beside her. The queen’s sister Anne carried the robe, while Elizabeth Woodville as godmother carried the little prince on to the high altar and gave him a covered cup of gold.

Margaret’s ordinances also covered the rearing of her grandson, decreeing that the wet nurse should be observed by a doctor at every meal to see that the child was getting ‘seasonable meat and drink’, and describing the leather (and presumably dribble-proof) cushion on which she should lean, and the two great basins of pewter needed for the nursery laundry. The ordinances encompass both practicality and grandeur – the pommels on the cradle, the counterpane furred with ermine and the ‘head sheets’ of cloth of gold – and go on for ever. Court ceremony was important, and a new dynasty had to show it could do these things magnificently. All the same, there is something a little frightening in the thoroughness with which Margaret laid down every detail. The years of her misfortune had obviously bred in her an urgent need for control. Perhaps, too, she was reaching after the kind of experience she herself had been denied when she gave birth to Henry all those years before. It is almost as if Elizabeth were her surrogate – and not the only such case in this story.

Elizabeth was ill just after the child was born; she typically suffered fevers after giving birth, and would cling to those who had seen her through one birth, like her midwife Alice Massy, to help her through the next. She would in any case have had to stay at Winchester until she was churched. The precisely ordered ceremonials for that event show Margaret once again stage-managing the scenario – a duchess or countess to assist the queen out of bed, two more to receive her at her chamber door. For Elizabeth of York her relationship with Henry’s mother – like that of Cecily Neville and her daughter-in-law Elizabeth Woodville – was an issue that would never go away.

The choice of Winchester for the new prince’s birth and the decision to name him Arthur were a conscious attempt to link the new Tudors with the ancient Arthurian tale. This was, as anyone who had read Caxton’s newly printed edition of the
Morte d’Arthur
knew, the city that still held the Round Table. But there may have been a more serious reason for staying in a place of safety. As the court made its way back to Greenwich for the winter season, troubles were brewing.

A century later, Francis Bacon wrote that from the very start of Henry’s reign there were ‘secret rumours and whisperings (which afterwards gathered strength and turned to great troubles) that the two young sons of King Edward the Fourth or one of them (which were said to be destroyed in the Tower), were not indeed murdered, but conveyed secretly away, and were yet living’. In the summer of 1486 stories had begun to spread that Clarence’s son Warwick had escaped from the Tower and was in the Channel Islands. The boy later identified as Lambert Simnel seemed at first to be claiming that he was Richard, Duke of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s younger son; but by the time he reached Ireland by the turn of the year he had changed his story.

Henry soon brought the real Warwick briefly out of the Tower, and sent him through the London streets in a public display. But when people had claimed Simnel was Richard, the pressure on Elizabeth Woodville must have been intense. The pretender’s supporters would need only a word from her to endorse his claim. The events of the next few months might suggest that, in the eyes of the authorities at least, the possibility of Elizabeth giving that word was a genuine one.

On 2 February Henry met with his council and, as Vergil reported after the fact: ‘Among other matters, Elizabeth the widow of King Edward was deprived by the decree of the same council of all her possessions.’ This, unconvincingly, was supposedly as punishment for the fact that, three years before, she had left sanctuary and made a deal with Richard III. Later that month parliament endorsed the alienation of Elizabeth’s property. It has often been taken as evidence that the dowager queen was being held to task for having supported the pretender Simnel, with all that might imply about her beliefs as to her son’s fate. Or, less drastically, it could have been a precautionary measure.

It may have been that the financial negotiations and the rebellion bore no relation to each other. This was a time of reorganisation all round: it was, indeed, the season of the ‘great grant’ which benefited Margaret Beaufort. A separate establishment had been set up for Prince Arthur at Farnham in Surrey; Elizabeth of York visited in January, to check on her son. And the lands lately belonging to Elizabeth Woodville were, after all, simply being transferred to her daughter, the new ‘lady queen’, whose position would traditionally be kept up by income from these properties. In return the older lady got an annuity of 400 marks. This, however – being less than the income Richard had allowed her – might well be called paltry. What is even more curious is the fact that it was precisely now that Elizabeth Woodville took up more or less permanent residence in Bermondsey Abbey, the great convent on the Thames already equipped with accommodation for royalty. (Katherine of Valois, Henry V’s widow, had been forced to retreat there after it was discovered she had married Owen Tudor.)

There was nothing strange about the decision itself, if Elizabeth is acknowledged as not the totally worldly creature she has often been thought; many widows chose a religious retirement. And if her first choice had been the more central residence in Westminster Abbey’s precincts, Bermondsey was still a convenient place – even a thrifty one, since the association with it of an ancestor of hers meant that she could board without payment. But the timing is suggestive – the more so since the lease of Cheyneygates shows she had only recently made quite different plans. It does look as though she were at the least being urged to take up a temporary retirement – if not because of anything she had done, then because of what she might do. Francis Bacon wrote that she was so deeply suspect ‘it was almost thought dangerous to visit her, or see her’.

Soon after Henry had paraded the real Warwick through London, John, Earl of Lincoln made a dramatic flight from England. Lincoln was the son of Edward IV’s sister Elizabeth, and Crowland says that she herself was ‘longing’ for Henry’s overthrow. Lincoln had been received with favour at the new Tudor court and had been prominent at the christening of Prince Arthur. But now he disappeared, to turn up in the Low Countries. By Easter, it was clear that an invasion force was being assembled.

In April Lincoln took an army to Ireland, where Simnel was given an impromptu coronation ceremony and declared King Edward VI. But the involvement of this other royal line is curious: it was Lincoln, not Simnel who was later mentioned in his aunt Margaret’s correspondence about the expedition. It seems possible that Simnel was just a stalking horse for Lincoln’s own attempt to take over the country.
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In May Henry, at Kenilworth Castle in the safety of the Midlands, heard that Simnel had landed with an army. He immediately sent to the Earl of Ormond, chamberlain of the queen who was still at Greenwich: ‘we pray you that, giving your due attendance upon our said dearest wife and lady mother, ye come with them unto us …’. Then, when Henry set out to confront the rebels, Elizabeth travelled quickly to Farnham and her baby; plans were made for them to move on, if necessary, to a house of Benedictine nuns at Romsey in Hampshire – not far from the coast, in case the worst happened and they had to flee. For the young queen it must have been a terrifying reminder of traumas past.

On 16 June at the battle of Stoke, perhaps the last familial battle of the Wars of the Roses, Lincoln was killed. The boy Simnel – in what may have been natural clemency on Henry’s part, but was more certainly intended to emphasise the absurdity of his pretensions – was put to work in the royal kitchens. Lincoln’s parents the Suffolks, whatever their personal loss, suffered no further penalties.

There remains the question of what, if any, role other Yorkist women might have played in the affair. Simnel’s immediate sponsor, Vergil said, was an Oxford priest called Richard Simons. But there had to have been some greater personage waiting in the wings; someone better able to coach an impostor in the things he should know. Bacon believed that Lambert Simnel had been schooled, and by a Yorkist lady. ‘So that it cannot be, but that some great person, that knew particularly and familiarly Edward Plantagenet [Warwick], had a hand in the business’. He was inclined to allot some of the blame to Elizabeth Woodville:

That which is the most probable, out of precedent and subsequent acts, is, that it was the Queen Dowager, from whom this action had the principal source and motion. For certain it is, she was a busy negotiating woman, and … was at this time extremely discontent with the King,
⁵
thinking her daughter, as the King handled the matter, not advanced but depressed [lowered in status]: and none could hold the book so well to prompt and instruct this stage-play as she could.

But there was another Yorkist woman who certainly did support, and possibly coach, Lambert Simnel – Margaret of Burgundy, whom Bacon described as ‘the sovereign patroness and protectress of the enterprise’. When her only remaining brother Richard was killed at Bosworth, Margaret was fully occupied with Burgundian affairs: her stepdaughter’s son Philip, now returned to her care, and the Great Council which, in September 1485, had been summoned to consider the future of Burgundy. Perhaps she might have left matters alone if Henry had taken care to conciliate either Burgundy or its dowager duchess, but he failed to do so. He was, after all, a novice king and one, moreover, reared in the traditions of France and Brittany, often Burgundy’s enemies.

Henry had, in 1486, been careful to renew at least some of the rights Cecily Neville had been accorded by her sons. But the trading privileges that Edward had granted his sister Margaret of Burgundy, and which her brother Richard seems to have continued, now lapsed. It is probable, therefore, that enlightened self-interest jostled emotion to govern Margaret’s actions in the years ahead.

She may also have played a more fundamental role in the Lambert Simnel drama.
⁶
As early as the summer of 1486 a donation was made in Burgundy, for the feast of St Rombout’s Day, on behalf of ‘the son of Clarence from England’; while in the same year the city of Malines gave Margaret money for her ‘reyse’ – venture – to England. If it was Margaret who fulfilled the coach’s role that Bacon ascribed to Elizabeth Woodville, she may not have been acting solely on her own behalf but also in the interests of her adopted land. After the recent rebellion Henry began to be more conciliatory towards Burgundy; the more so since he needed Burgundian aid to keep France out of his old host country, Brittany, now ruled after the death of Duke Francis by a young duchess, Anne.

Elizabeth Woodville, by contrast, had lost by the rebellion. Henry’s records over the next few years do show regular, almost yearly, payments to his ‘right dear’ mother-in-law: 50 marks for Christmas here, the gift of a tun of wine there. But it was not the kind of wholesale funding that would allow her to play any kind of political role. Her public career was over. She would, indeed, from this point be recorded as only making occasional appearances in public while she lived a reduced life in the convent at Bermondsey.

TWENTY
-
ONE

Golden Sovereignty

Put in her tender heart th’aspiring flame

Of golden sovereignty; acquaint the princess

With the sweet silent hours of marriage joys.

Richard III
, 4.4

This rebellion was over, though other ripples of armed discontent would plague Henry’s next years. But he heeded a complaint voiced by the rebels that Elizabeth of York was being treated too casually – that, extraordinarily, she had not yet been crowned. September was full of plans for the splendid ceremony, and in October the royal couple set out from Warwick to London. Even then, the entry into the city was Henry’s moment – the first time he had been there since his victory at Stoke – and the crafts guilds were out in number, lined up along the packed streets, according to a manuscript preserved by the early sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland,
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‘hugely replenished with people’.

‘And so to behold the fair and goodly sight of his coming, the Queen’s Grace and my lady the King’s Mother, and many other great Estates, both lords and Ladies, richly beseen, went secretly in a House beside St Mary Spittle, without Bishops Gate; and when the sight was passed, they went from thence to Greenwich to their Beds.’ The ladies were withdrawing to Greenwich for the weeks before the coronation: Elizabeth was to be presented to London afresh, almost as though she were a newly arrived foreign princess.