Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (35 page)

However, given that she wielded such influence only in private, it is hard to assess the extent of it. Certainly there are instances of her exercising authority independently of her husband. We find her intervening in matters of law, and petitioning him on behalf of her servants, London merchants, and others. When one of her Welsh tenants complained
of the heavy-handedness of Henry’s uncle, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, Chief Justice of North Wales, she did not refer the matter to the King but sent a sharp reproof to Pembroke herself, which apparently achieved the desired result.
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Another letter from Elizabeth, undated but written in 1492, is among the Paston letters, that great collection of fifteenth-century correspondence; in it, she rebukes John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, in regard to disputed ownership of a manor:

Beneath is written: “subscribed with the Queen’s hand.” The existence of this letter—and there were probably more like it that are lost—proves that Elizabeth did sometimes venture into the world of public affairs. Here we see her being firm, fair, and concerned to right a wrong, and her influence must have been known to be effective, or Simon Bryant would surely not have judged it worth appealing to her for help. Two months after the letter was written, John Daubeney sent Sir John Paston, Oxford’s councilor, “a copy of the letter that the Queen sent to my lord of Oxford from the manor of Cotton for Bryant.” He reported that the Archbishop of York wanted Oxford to help Paston keep possession of the manor, and was going to “inform the Queen of the matter, and because the Queen hath take[n to] her chamber,” he had sent a ring to the Lord Treasurer, anxious “that he should excuse my lord of Oxford to the Queen,” for he really had no choice in the matter.
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As Queen, Elizabeth traveled widely, often with the King, sometimes on her own, showing the gentler face of monarchy to the people, which doubtless enhanced her popularity. Like her father, she had the common touch; she was charming and accessible. Certainly she was generous, and the multiplicity of her many charities and kindnesses bears testimony to a warm and giving heart. Sadly, her privy purse expenses survive for only one year, 1502–03,
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but they are packed with evidence of her goodness, her open-handedness, and her kindnesses, as will be seen; and no doubt the purse expenses for the missing years would have further served to show why she was such a popular queen.

Elizabeth was seen as “a very noble woman,” as “the most distinguished
and the most noble lady in the whole of England,” and she was “much loved”
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by her husband’s subjects, high and low.
The Great Chronicle of London
states that she “demeaned her[self] so virtuously that she was named the Gracious Queen,” while Edward Hall, writing under her son, Henry VIII, was to recall: “For her great virtue this noble princess was commonly called the good Queen Elizabeth.”

Short of cash though she was, her charities were many. She supported orphans, took children under her wing and raised them, and liberated debtors from London prisons. She gave money, for example, to an anchoress living in St. Peter’s almshouses in St. Albans; in alms to two of her father’s former servants; to a friary clerk, so that he could bury pirates who had been hanged at Execution Dock on the Thames at Wapping; to Nicholas Grey, clerk of the works at Richmond, whose house had burned down; to the children of the College of Windsor; to the son of a madman, for his diet and a gown; to the man who had cured himself of syphilis—“the French pox”; to “little Anne Loveday,” a girl who wanted to be a nun at Elstow Abbey, so that she could have a dowry; to a child christened at Windsor; and alms to many beggars. She also obtained a letter of pardon “for the remission of sins” for the friars of the monastery housing St. Katherine’s shrine on Mount Sinai in the Holy Land.
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She was the generous patron of several religious establishments, including the austere Carthusian priory of the Charterhouse at Sheen, founded by Henry V in 1414, and lying half a mile north of Sheen Palace; and she gave alms, rewards, and cash for repairs to the buildings.
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Her privy purse expenses of 1502–03 reveal that she was the recipient of numerous gifts from many of her husband’s appreciative subjects. She handsomely rewarded them all, from the poor man who came with apples, to the Lord Mayor of London, who presented her with cherries. A substantial number of the gifts were of food: her son’s fool sent her some carp; Lord Stanley sent Malmsey wine; Edith Sandys, Lady Darcy, sent “a present of seal,” the meat of which was then a delicacy; Sir John Williams sent two bucks, Sir John Seymour two does; the prothonotary of Spain sent oranges—a costly delicacy only recently introduced into England—“from Spain to the Queen at Richmond”; Richard Smythe, yeoman of the wardrobe, sent a gift of a
fawn “from the park of Swallowfield,” Berkshire, where he was bailiff; the Abbess of Syon sent rabbits and quails; Richard FitzJames, Bishop of Rochester, sent grapes; Henry Deane, Archbishop of Canterbury, sent a “Llanthony cheese,” while Henry, prior of Llanthony, also sent regular gifts of cheeses and some baked lampreys.
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People of all ranks sent gifts for the Queen, and many commoners or poor folk came to the palace gates with humble offerings, such as butter, chickens, wardens (pears), pippins, puddings, apples, peascods, cakes, cherries in season, a conserve of cherries (several gifts of cherries are recorded, so they must have been known as among Elizabeth’s favorite foods), pomegranates, oranges, comfits (candied fruit), cheeses, several bucks, wild boar, tripes, chines of pork, a goshawk, pheasant cocks, capons, birds, a crane, Rhenish wine, roses, fine ironwork, and a cushion. None went away without a handsome reward, usually more than Elizabeth could afford. One man got 13s.4d. [£320] for bringing her a popinjay (parrot).
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Some of the gifts may have been expressions of thanks or appreciation, much as flowers are given to royalty today; some were perhaps given in anticipation of queenly favor to come, given Elizabeth’s reputation for open-handedness and the influence she was perceived to have with the King. But most are probably testimony to the love and goodwill borne by Henry’s subjects for a kind, gentle, and generous-hearted queen.

Ballads were sung about Elizabeth, such as the “White Rose Carol”:

Henry VII did not enjoy that kind of affection, so he was lucky to have such a queen to show to the world the popular face of monarchy.

Elizabeth was “intelligent above all others, and equally beautiful. She was a woman of such character that it would be hard to judge whether she displayed more of majesty and dignity in her life than wisdom and moderation.” This was written by Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s favored historian, so one might expect it to be flattering in the extreme, but Vergil was not afraid to offend or criticize his royal patron—Henry was decidedly put out when Vergil dismissed the Arthurian legends as myths. That Elizabeth had these qualities in good measure is borne out by the praise of other contemporaries as well. One chronicler called her “noble and virtuous,”
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and a Venetian report described her as “a very handsome woman of great ability, and in conduct very able,” beloved for her abundant “charity and humanity.”
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Erasmus described the Queen in one word: “brilliant.”

Later writers had little to say about her, though. “Besides her dutifulness to her husband, and fruitfulness in her children, little can be extracted of her personal character,” observed Thomas Fuller in the 1660s, and his words sum up a problem faced by her biographers today, because much about her has to be inferred from external evidence. That she was gentle, kind, and devout is patently clear, and she was demonstrably generous by nature. Alison Plowden describes her as fruitful, beautiful, submissive, a loving mother, a dutiful daughter,
chaste after marriage, pious, charitable, placid, kind, sweet-tempered, generous, and “naturally indolent.” In short, she had all the virtues of great ladies in medieval chivalric verse.

Certainly she was pious: her privy purse expenses show that she unfailingly made offerings on all the great feasts of the Church and on numerous saints’ days; she had a special devotion to the Virgin Mary and various other saints; she owned religious books that give insights into a conventional, late medieval piety, and “a chest of ivory with the Passion of Our Lord thereon.”
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In 1486 the Pope issued her and Henry with a special dispensation “to have a portable altar, on which they may have Mass celebrated when necessary before daybreak, and to have Mass and other divine offices celebrated in places”—even “under interdict, with doors closed, the excommunicate and interdicted being excluded, bells unrung, and in a low voice, in presence of themselves and their household, etc., provided that they are not the cause of such interdict, nor specially interdicted.” His Holiness also permitted “each of them and for Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the King’s mother, not to be bound to fast in Lent, and during that season to eat eggs, cheese, butter, and other milk-meats, whenever they shall think fit.”
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Elizabeth was hardly indolent. Rather, as Thomas Penn suggests in
Winter King
, she had a natural serenity. She could bestir herself when she needed to, as when she busily schemed in the months before Bosworth. That serenity made it easy for her to accept the decisions that were made for her, asserting herself with fervor only when important things were at stake, or with anger, as when she intervened to prevent an injustice. Richard III’s councilors feared that she had it in her to be vengeful, but those may well have been assumptions, for it is unlikely they knew her very well. Certainly there is no evidence to give credence to their fears. Elizabeth had neither her mother’s robust energy nor her strong will and steely determination, and maybe felt at a disadvantage beside that practical and capable paragon, Margaret Beaufort. It was fortunate that her serene nature—and no doubt her love for her husband—helped her to survive in a marriage in which she was kept in submission, and in a queenly role that was overshadowed by her mother-in-law. Her love for Henry would have made that easier too.

The appearance of placidity, even indolence, may stem from the
fact that all her life Elizabeth was overshadowed by dominant women: her grandmothers, her mother, and her mother-in-law—and it is sometimes said that there was friction between the latter two, although that can only be an assumption. In her early years Elizabeth had learned that it was her lot to be obedient and conformable, and this was to stand her in good stead in adult life. It is hard to imagine any of those domineering female relations being so mild and self-effacing as she undoubtedly was during her years as Queen. She was not domineering and grasping like her mother and mother-in-law, and it was probably because of her dutifulness and her willingness to accept a subordinate role that her marriage was successful, if not happy.