Blood Sisters (48 page)

17
evidence … is in short supply:
There is, of course, the question of the bones found in the Tower – but medical examination of them made in the 1930s could not state with certainty that they were those of the princes, though the examiners came down on the side of probability.

18
Some time that month Elizabeth’s daughters left sanctuary:
Vergil says that: ‘When the queen was thus qualified, king Richard received all his brothers’ daughters out of sanctuary into the court’; which might seem to show that they went to court immediately. But a precise timescale was not necessarily the priority of the contemporary chroniclers: Vergil also implies that all of this happened after the queen wrote to bring her son Dorset home, which other evidence shows to have happened a year later. Crowland writes that Elizabeth Woodville (‘after frequent entreaties as well as threats’) ‘sent all her daughters out of the sanctuary at Westminster before mentioned to King Richard’ – i.e. into his charge – implying, however, that this happened rather earlier than other evidence suggests.

19
quietly allowed to join her:
Even a location for the family’s secret residence has been suggested by one of Richard’s modern supporters, Audrey Williamson: Gipping Hall in Suffolk, seat of the Tyrell family, whose own tradition suggests that royal children lived ‘by permission of the Uncle’. (Williamson,
The Mystery of the Princes
, pp. 122–4). More will be heard of Sir James Tyrell later. This would not only cast a new light on his relations to the princes, but explain why Henry Tudor might later feel the need to put a very different spin on them.

20
died from natural causes:
This may be another case of arguing from effect to cause. Professor Wright, who in the 1930s examined two children’s skeletons found within the Tower, noted that the skeleton of the elder child bore the symptoms of what has been tentatively diagnosed as the progressive bone disease osteomyelitis. But it is not known for certain whether these skeletons were those of the princes; and though the elder prince was known to have been visited by his doctor that summer, any royal person might have a physician in precautionary attendance anyway.

21
Francis Bacon:
1561–1626. Best known as Elizabeth I’s counsellor and James I’s Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor, he turned wholly to writing after being indicted by parliament on charges of corruption. His
History of Henry VII
was published in 1622.

22
giving away … her family lands:
albeit that some of them were to the Queens’ College that honours her as a patron. Some thirty years later the
Great Chronicle
would call her ‘a woman of gracious fame’; but of that too there is very little evidence.

23
of similar colour and shape:
For consistency I have used the older translation of the complete
Crowland Chronicle
(
Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations by Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers
, trans. Riley, 1854). Here, however, the more recent translation of the work of the ‘second continuator’ (
The Crowland Chronicle Continuations 1459–1486
, ed. and trans. Pronay and Cox, 1986) differs in significance as well as wording. Their translation from the Latin (‘
eisdem colore et forma
’) is ‘who were alike in complexion and figure’, which clearly indicates the women rather than the garments. (Dress was an important signifier of rank.) Interpretation has hitherto varied – but the real point is that nothing in the original necessarily compels the popular assumption that Richard had given the garments: Buck indeed says that Anne herself instituted the swap.

24
damning in several ways:
Shakespeare’s wooing (
Richard III
, Act 1, scene 2) by Richard of a Lady Anne still lamenting her first husband, whom Richard had killed, in a sense represents a dramatisation of our reaction to this different, but equally shocking, marriage. It might have been unwise for him to comment more directly on the behaviour of one who was grandmother to Elizabeth I.

25
letter was a total invention:
Against that theory is the fact that Buck gave a specific source for the letter – in the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in a ‘rich and magnificent cabinet, among precious jewels and more monuments’ – and he would have been taking a huge risk that other scholars might have called his bluff. For the theory is the fact that Buck, a determined apologist for Richard, was not above ‘suppressing evidence and altering record’, as one modern historian, Alison Hanham, declared. N. Harris Nicolas in the nineteenth century put it even more directly: ‘the character of Buck as a faithless writer is well known’. The great Victorian James Gairdner, on the other hand, was disgustedly inclined to accept the letter, writing that ‘the horrible perversion and degradation of domestic life which it implies is only too characteristic of the age’ – so different, one can’t but add, from the home life of his own dear queen.

26
article for the
Ricardian
:
Kincaid, ‘Buck and the Elizabeth of York Letter’. See also Visser-Fuchs, ‘Elizabeth of York’s Letter’,
Ricardian
Bulletin, Winter 2004 and ‘Where Did Elizabeth of York Find Consolation?’ and of course Kincaid’s introduction to his edition of Buck’s
History of King Richard the Third
.

27
the marriage proposed for Elizabeth:
Details of the Portuguese proposal, and Elizabeth of York’s role in it, from Ashdown-Hill,
The Last Days of Richard III
. Ashdown-Hill suggests (p. 32) that rumours about a foreign match for her and one for Richard were misunderstood (by contemporaries as well as by later historians) as concerning a match between her and Richard.

28
the Great Chronicle recorded:
Although some internal evidence, confusingly, would suggest that this entry was intended to describe the spring of 1484.

29
the Ballad of Lady Bessy:
The
Ballad of Lady Bessy
(or,
The Most Pleasant Song of Ladye Bessiye
) is believed probably to have been written by Stanley’s officer Humphrey Brereton – chiefly because it is hard otherwise to account for the large part Brereton himself plays in the narrative.

30
his mother Cecily Neville’s residence:
Ashdown-Hill,
The Last Days of Richard III
, p. 53, cites R. Edwards,
The Itinerary of King Richard III
, 1983.

31
The Middle Ages … died:
If, of course, they can be said ever to have existed in any definable form. The term is in many ways as spurious as ‘Wars of the Roses’ and is certainly capable of wildly elastic limits. While in England the battles of Hastings and of Bosworth provide convenient starting and ending points, the period is sometimes seen as beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire, while a school of French historians argued convincingly that for the mass of their population – the illiterate rural poor – they lasted until the industrial revolution.

Part V 1485–1509

1
starting place of the early modern age:
Rubin in
The Hollow Crown
, p. 322: ‘Historians have claimed that a “new” monarchy arose with the coming of Henry VII, that a new age was inaugurated … But wise readers should be wary of the “new” … Most change, deep change, occurs more slowly, experimentally, cautiously, and through deliberation. It thus often goes unnoticed by those who live it and make it happen.’

2
said Francis Bacon:
In his
History
of Henry VII. The question of whether a woman’s right of inheritance to the throne should automatically pass over her to her sons was of course still an issue in the mid-sixteenth century when Edward VI attempted to will his crown to ‘Lady Jane’s heirs male’, before being forced by the imminence of his own death to alter it to Jane Grey and her heirs male. See also Castor,
She-Wolves
, pp. 28–9.

3
silent uncertainty was everybody’s friend:
Baldwin in Gregory et al.,
The Women of the Cousins’ War
, p. 210: ‘It is impossible to believe’ that those women closest to them – women in positions of power – remained in complete ignorance of the boys’ fate. He concludes not only that ‘The implication is that they did know but chose to remain silent, something that would not have been necessary if both boys were dead and threatened no one’, but that ‘the most likely scenario’ is that the younger son at least may have been sent to a secure place.

4
Lincoln’s own attempt:
Francis Bacon: ‘And as for the daughters of King Edward the Fourth, they thought King Richard had said enough for them [i.e. the people thought that Richard’s example showed they were not the inevitable heirs], and took them to be but as of the King’s party, because they were in his power and at his disposing.’

5
discontent with the King:
Elizabeth Woodville’s biographer Baldwin suggests as one possibility that she envisaged a papal dispensation allowing Elizabeth of York, with Henry out of the way, to marry her cousin Warwick while she herself became the power behind a monarch believed to be of feeble personality. There is, as he says, no evidence. Another possibility is that Elizabeth knew one of her sons was alive and intended, should the rebellion succeed, to assert his prior claim in place of Warwick’s; though this might suggest that she had not been sure of her son’s fate earlier, when she allowed her daughter to marry herself and her valuable royal rights into the opposing dynasty.

6
fundamental role in the Lambert Simnel drama:
Weightman,
Margaret of York
, p. 153.

7
John Leland:
Best known for his
Itinerary
, describing his findings on journeys through England and Wales. Leland (?1503–1552) was also the antiquary whose
De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea
contains a number of the most important descriptions of key ceremonies in Henry VII’s reign. Narratives quoted from this source include Margaret Beaufort’s ordinances for the confinement of a queen and the christening of her child (vol. iv, pp. 179–84); the christening of Prince Arthur (pp. 204–15); Elizabeth of York’s coronation (pp. 216–33); the Twelfth Night celebrations of 1487 (pp. 234–7); Elizabeth’s taking to her chamber (p. 249); the proxy marriage of Princess Margaret and her journey to Scotland (pp. 258–300).

8
evidence that she was in some degree of disgrace:
Theories that Elizabeth Woodville’s health had gone into some sort of major decline, necessitating her retirement, are contradicted by the fact that the negotiations for her to marry the king of Scots went on for years: see Baldwin in Gregory et al.,
The Women of the Cousins’ War
, p. 215. But then again, if Elizabeth were seriously suspected of treason it is unlikely Henry would have contemplated giving her access to a foreign army.

9
placid, domestic sort of creature:
Nicholas Harris Nicolas, editing her Privy Purse expenses in 1830: ‘The energy and talents of Henry the Seventh left no opportunity for his Queen to display any other qualities than those which peculiarly, and it may be said exclusively, belong to her sex. From the time of her marriage she is only to be heard of as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a sister, and an aunt; and in each of these relations, so far as materials exist by which it can be judged, her conduct reflects honour upon her memory.’

10
letters to Spain:
There was also considerable mention in De Puebla’s correspondence of Elizabeth’s determination to arrange a marriage with an Englishwoman for De Puebla himself, and his efforts to avoid it. Perhaps one of the early lessons Elizabeth had learnt was that marriage as a means of bringing a party to your own side might be the most useful tool of diplomacy.

11
similarities in their handwriting:
Starkey,
Henry: Virtuous Prince
, pp. 118–20.

12
Elizabeth of York and Margaret Beaufort as rivals:
Laynesmith argues that between the two – both of whose royal blood had caused their fortunes to seesaw in the years past – ‘there probably existed more than cordial relations’, equivalent to those between Eleanor of Provence and Eleanor of Castile some 250 years earlier. Elizabeth’s biographer Okerlund suggests that Margaret Beaufort may have substituted for the absent Elizabeth Woodville – if Margaret really did have that sort of warm personality?

13
A letter from Henry VIII’s day:
Ellis (ed.),
Original letters illustrative of English history
, series 1, vol. 2.

14
we have, moreover, opened the moneybox:
Calendar of State Papers Venetian
, p. 181, 9 May 1489.

15
Henry offered this daughter [Margaret]:
The elder Margaret, Margaret Beaufort, had always promoted her half-blood family and the autumn of 1494 was also when she arranged for Richard Pole – the son of her half-sister, Edith St John – to marry Clarence’s daughter Margaret. This would prove to be setting up trouble: for the Tudor dynasty, but also for Margaret Pole who, as the increasingly paranoid eyes of an ageing Henry VIII focused on her family, would be beheaded in one of the Tower’s nastiest execution stories. At the time, however – since it may have seemed unrealistic to keep Margaret Pole for ever unmarried – it may have looked like the safe thing to do, another way of using the marriage tie to secure her within the family.