Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (12 page)

It was perhaps in March 1477 that Queen Elizabeth gave birth to a
third son, George.
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Joan, Baroness Dacre, wife of the Queen’s chamberlain, was appointed his nurse.
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In 1478, George was designated Duke of Bedford, the title of which the hapless George Neville, Elizabeth’s former betrothed, had been deprived early that year, although there is no record of any formal creation.

In 1477 eleven-year-old Elizabeth, her mother the Queen, and her aunt, Elizabeth Plantagenet, Duchess of Suffolk, were all made Ladies of the Order of the Garter, and participated in the traditional three-day celebration. Elizabeth no doubt thrilled to see her father the King and his Knights Companions “all mounted on horseback in their habits of blue,” and on the “Grand Day,” St. George’s Day itself, she and her aunt rode with her mother and a company of ladies to the chapel to hear Mass, all wearing a “livery of murrey [mulberry red] embroidered with garters.”
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Stalls were not allocated to Ladies of the Garter, so the royal women watched the service from the rood loft. Afterward, Elizabeth was present at the annual garter feast in St. George’s Hall, Windsor, presided over by Edward IV, who was enthroned in solitary state at the high table. Entering with her mother and the other ladies as the second course was borne in, Elizabeth ascended with them to the gallery at the west end of the hall and observed the proceedings from there.
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The outward displays of unity by the Yorkist family masked divisions that would soon tear it asunder. Early in 1477, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, had been killed at the Battle of Nancy, leaving his duchy in the hands of his only legitimate child, Mary of Burgundy. The dukes of Burgundy were descended from Charles V of France, but they had constantly striven for independence from the French crown. Now Louis XI promptly declared the duchy extinct on the grounds that it properly belonged to France.

Charles the Bold’s widow, Margaret of York, now schemed to marry her stepdaughter Mary to her brother George, Duke of Clarence, whom she loved more than any other member of her family; and naturally Clarence leapt at the idea, for if he married Mary, he would gain a great European fiefdom. However, such a scheme would seriously have prejudiced England’s alliance with France, Burgundy’s enemy, and Elizabeth’s marriage plans. It would also have given the untrustworthy,
treacherous Clarence a rival power base on the Continent, with all the riches of Burgundy at his disposal as well as control over the North Sea coast; these resources could have enabled him to challenge his brother’s title to the English throne. Evidently this was what Edward IV feared, not least because a case—admittedly weak—could be made for Mary of Burgundy to claim the English throne, since she was descended from John of Gaunt. But the ambitious and headstrong Clarence was unlikely to bother with legal niceties.

Edward “threw all possible impediments in the way,”
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but fortunately for him, Clarence’s schemes were immediately thwarted when Louis XI invaded the duchy and seized Burgundy “proper” (roughly the area now known as Burgundy today), Flanders, Artois, and Picardy. Edward no more wanted Louis ruling Burgundy than he did Clarence, but he was anxious to maintain the alliance with France, so he reminded Louis of the treaty of amity between them, reiterating his desire for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Dauphin. But Louis failed to respond with enthusiasm; he was suspicious of Edward’s motives, and proposed that the Dauphin be wed to Mary of Burgundy instead, to which Edward retaliated by offering her Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, as a husband. This kind of diplomatic maneuvering was common, even after marriage alliances had been concluded. Nothing was set in stone, and treaties could be broken or ignored if a more advantageous alliance presented itself. Elizabeth’s future was by no means certain.

In August 1477, thanks to Margaret’s efforts, Mary of Burgundy was married to the husband her father had chosen for her, Maximilian of Austria, son of the Emperor Frederick III. When Maximilian began vigorously resisting French aggrandizement, Louis came to believe that Edward IV—who was striving to remain neutral—meant to marry Elizabeth into the Imperial House with a view to forging a new Anglo-Burgundian alliance against France, and responded by planning strategies to avert that threat.

Thwarted of Burgundy, Clarence had forsaken the court and become aggressive and provocative, showing scant respect for his brother or the law, and before long he and Edward had “each begun to look upon the other with no fraternal eyes.”
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On June 10, 1477, amid rumors
that Clarence was again plotting rebellion, Elizabeth learned that her uncle had been arrested on her father’s orders and imprisoned in the Tower of London. She was probably too young to understand how he threatened the King politically, but she may have been aware that her father hated and feared him, and she would certainly have heard talk or gossip of the scandals that preceded his arrest. The year before, Clarence’s wife, Isabella Neville, died in childbirth, but he had subsequently accused the Queen of poisoning her by means of a servant, Ankarette Twynho. Elizabeth Wydeville was beyond his reach, but he had the unfortunate—and innocent—servant hanged. Then, when one of his affinity was executed for using sorcery against King Edward and the Prince of Wales, Clarence provocatively defended the man before the council, disparaging the King’s justice. That was a step too far for Edward, who responded accordingly. Clarence was to languish in the Tower for seven months.

Elizabeth and her sisters Mary and Cecily were present at yet another splendid royal occasion when, on January 15, 1478, their brother Richard, Duke of York, aged four, was married to the late Duke of Norfolk’s daughter and heiress, Anne Mowbray, aged five. By this marriage King Edward secured for his son the rich Norfolk estates. The wedding took place in St. Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster. This narrow but beautiful Gothic chapel, built in the late thirteenth century in emulation of St. Louis IX’s La Sainte Chapelle in Paris, was two stories high, and the upper chapel, which was used by the royal family, had a vaulted ceiling of sky blue with numerous gold stars, which soared a hundred feet above the tiled floor. For this occasion, the chapel walls, adorned with murals of angels, kings, and religious scenes in vivid scarlet, green, and blue, had been hung with azure cloth embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lis.

The Queen escorted her son to the marble altar, where he waited beneath a cloth-of-gold canopy with the bride’s mother, Elizabeth Talbot, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Then Lord Rivers and the King’s nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, led in red-haired Anne Mowbray.
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Elizabeth sat with her parents, her brother Edward, her sisters Mary and Cecily, and her grandmother of York beneath another cloth-of-gold canopy while the papal dispensation permitting this marriage
of cousins was read out. Then the King gave away the bride and the marriage service commenced.

Afterward Gloucester showered gold and silver coins upon the crowds outside, then spices and wine were served to the wedding party. There were jousts and a lavish banquet in the vast Painted Chamber, at which the little bride was named “Princess of the Feast.” Apart from the incarcerated Clarence, the entire royal family was present, as well as foreign ambassadors, lords, ladies, knights, squires, and guards and servants in the mulberry and blue livery of the House of York. All but the latter took part in the dancing that lasted until the Kings of Arms entered and asked the bride if she would present the prizes that would be won at the jousts to be held the next day. Elizabeth was appointed to assist her, and a council of ladies was convened to decide what share in the ceremony each should take.

After the tournament on January 16, the Kings of Arms gave Elizabeth the prizes: gems set with the golden letters A, M, and E, standing for Anne, Mowbray, and Elizabeth; Clarencieux Herald presented her with the A, set with a diamond, saying: “Right high and excellent princess, here is the prize which you shall award to the best jouster of the jousts royal.” Norroy Herald gave her the E, set with a ruby, for the best runner in armor, and March Herald the M, set with an emerald, for the best swordsman.

Elizabeth handed the A to the little “Princess of the Feast,” who bestowed it upon Thomas Fiennes, who had won first prize. The others went to Sir William Truswell and William Say, to the delight of the noble company.
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Darker deeds were brewing. Less than a month after the wedding festivities, on February 8, 1478, Clarence was condemned in Parliament. The Act of Attainder passed against him stated that he had “falsely and traitorously intended and purposed firmly the extreme destruction and disinheriting of the King and his issue.” It accused him of spreading “the falsest and most unnatural-colored pretense that man might imagine.” He had “falsely and untruly noised, published, and said that the King our sovereign lord was a bastard and not begotten to reign upon us.”
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The King himself sat in judgment on his brother, but the Queen—in
the deaths of whose father and brother Clarence had been complicit—was thought to have brought pressure to bear, as she had “concluded that her offspring by the King would never come to the throne unless the Duke of Clarence were removed, and of this she easily persuaded the King.”
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This Parliament included an influential Wydeville presence—Earl Rivers was one of the four “triers”—which was “easily the most powerful faction.”
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Clarence’s attainder deprived him of his life, titles, and estates, and the rights of himself and his heirs to the succession. On the face of it, he was condemned for crimes for which he had already been pardoned and forgiven; but it is possible, of course, that he had recently reiterated his calumnies.

Although the Wydevilles were seen as being responsible for Clarence’s fall, Edward long had reason to believe that Clarence had designs on his throne; he had, after all, joined Warwick in rebellion and in spreading that tale of Edward’s bastardy, something the King could neither have forgiven or forgotten, and recently Clarence had questioned the validity of Edward’s marriage. Years later, when Elizabeth of York was Queen, the historian Polydore Vergil asked Edward IV’s surviving councilors about the reasons for Clarence’s execution, but they were not forthcoming. Possibly they were reluctant to repeat anything Clarence had said that cast doubt on Elizabeth’s legitimacy. Clarence’s recent scheme to marry the heiress of Burgundy had alone represented a major threat to the King, and he had publicly impugned Edward’s justice. All in all, he was a deadly troublemaker, and had proved himself a threat to the realm’s stability.

Because the Duchess Cecily had protested against her son being executed in public, Clarence was put to death privately on February 18, 1478, in the Tower of London. It was said that, allowed to choose how he would die, he opted to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey (Madeira) wine.
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He left behind a three-year-old son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, who was barred by his father’s attainder from ever inheriting the throne or any of Clarence’s lands and titles, and also a five-year-old daughter, Margaret, who would wear a tiny wooden wine butt on a bracelet all her life in commemoration of her father; it can be seen in her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The wardship and custody of Warwick were granted to Elizabeth Wydeville’s son,
Dorset,
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and Edward IV arranged for the boy to go to Sheen to be brought up with Elizabeth and the other royal children.
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It is likely that Margaret of Clarence was sent there too.

Elizabeth cannot have had a good opinion of her uncle. To her, raised under the influence of the Wydevilles, he was no doubt the bête noire of the family; like her mother, she probably saw him as a threat. He bore half the blame for the executions of her grandfather, Earl Rivers, and her uncle, John Wydeville, in 1469, and had accused her mother of compassing his wife’s death by sorcery. But the impact on a twelve-year-old of the judicial killing of her uncle by her father must have been considerable, and a brutal reminder of the dangers inherent in being of the blood royal in this turbulent period of history.

Mancini states that Gloucester was “overcome with grief” at his brother’s execution, and vowed to avenge it. Yet, while he would in time exact a fearful vengeance on Elizabeth Wydeville, there is evidence to suggest that he colluded in, and condoned, Clarence’s fate. Some of his retainers had sat in the Parliament that condemned the duke, and he himself appears to have supported Edward’s proceedings.
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He profited too, more than anyone else. Even before his brother’s death, he had requested Clarence’s share of the Warwick inheritance, and his son, Edward of Middleham, had received Clarence’s forfeited earldom of Salisbury, while he himself was appointed Great Chamberlain of England in place of Clarence and granted lands belonging to the latter. It is possible, though, that knowing that Clarence’s fate was a foregone conclusion, and that half the Warwick inheritance was at stake, he gave the King his tacit support, then moved quickly afterward to preempt any designs the Wydevilles may have had on that inheritance. That he was affected by his brother’s fall is suggested by a letter he sent much later to James FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond, in which he recalled how he had to keep his “inward” feelings hidden.
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Those inward feelings may very well have included hatred for the upstart Wydevilles, who had destroyed a prince of the blood. If Richard really felt such hatred and resentment for the Queen and her kin, it would make more sense of his actions in five years’ time.

Mancini states that “thenceforth Richard came very rarely to court. He kept himself within his own lands and set out to acquire the loyalty
of his people through favors and justice. The good reputation of his private life”—in contrast to his brother Edward’s—“and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers. By these arts, Richard acquired the favor of the people, and avoided the jealousy of the Queen, from whom he lived far separated.” Richard’s main political focus was the North, where he had his power base, and his responsibilities there tended to isolate him from the court anyway. He did spend most of the last years of Edward’s reign in the North, as Mancini states, and although he visited the court in London on state occasions, it is unlikely that Elizabeth and her siblings ever got to know this often absent uncle very well.