Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (50 page)

On November 30—the feast day of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, a most auspicious baptismal date for a child who would one day be Queen of Scots—the newborn princess was collected by Anne Fiennes, Marchioness of Berkeley, from Elizabeth’s chamber and carried into Westminster Hall, and thence to St. Stephen’s Chapel.
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The officers-at-arms led the procession, followed by the High Constable, the Earl Marshal, the Earl of Kent, carrying two basins, Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex, carrying an unlit taper, Viscount Welles with a gold salt cellar, “my Lady Anne, the Queen’s sister, [who] bare the chrisom with a marvelous rich cross-lace [cord],” and Lady Berkeley with the princess, escorted by the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury, and walking under a canopy borne by four knights. The baby’s train of crimson velvet furred with ermine was carried by her great-aunt, Katherine Wydeville, Duchess of Buckingham, and George Stanley, Lord Strange.

John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, was waiting to receive her in the church porch, which was “royally beseen” with a richly embroidered ceiling covering. He baptized her with the name Margaret, “after my lady the King’s mother,” in Canterbury Cathedral’s magnificent silver font, which had been brought to Westminster for the occasion and lined with cloth of Rennes. At that moment the Earl of Essex lit his taper, and 120 knights, gentlemen, and yeomen set their torches ablaze. Then Thomas Rotherham, “the Lord Archbishop of York, being in pontificals, confirmed” the child at the high altar, with Lady Berkeley acting as sponsor. Wine and spices were served to the godparents: Margaret Beaufort, who gave the princess a silver-gilt chest full of gold; George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury; the Duchess of Norfolk, who gave a rich cup; and Archbishop Morton, who gave two gilt flagons and a gold vessel for holy water. These gifts were borne before the child in the torchlit procession that carried her, with “noise of trumpets [and]
Christ’s blessing,” back to the palace to her parents. Having received their blessing also, she was carried off by her nurse and laid in an oak cradle lined with ermine and covered with a cloth-of-gold canopy.
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Margaret was probably given a separate, smaller nursery establishment from Arthur’s. It would also have been ruled by a lady governess, but it was Alice Davy, the nurse, who looked after the child in her infancy, ably assisted by two rockers, Anne Mayland and Margaret Troughton, and by Prince Arthur’s former rocker, Alison Bwimble, who later became the princess’s “day-wife,” essentially a dairy maid who brought milk, cream, and butter for the child.
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On the same day Margaret was christened, Arthur was brought to the Parliament Chamber and created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, titles borne by the heirs of English kings since 1301. During the ceremony Henry VII was lauded for restoring the pride of the Welsh, and as a British king capable of reestablishing order after the chaos of the Wars of the Roses. Afterward the little prince sat beneath the cloth of estate and presided over the feast held to celebrate the occasion.
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On December 4, 1489, King Ferdinand wrote triumphantly to Elizabeth to tell her that he had “conquered the town of Baca, in the kingdom of Granada, and has made great progress in the war against the Moors. As his victory must interest all the Christian world, he thinks it his duty to inform the Queen of England of it.” If he wrote to Henry too, the letter has not survived, but it is possible that he wrote separately to Elizabeth because he recognized her status as the rightful Queen of England.
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Happy as this news was, Elizabeth had more immediate concerns on her mind. A virulent measles epidemic was raging and had claimed the lives of several ladies of her court. Consequently she had to miss the christening celebrations, which lasted into December, and some of the Christmas solemnities too, because her churching, which of necessity took place in private, had to be delayed until December 27. Christmas was a subdued holiday, and on December 29, Henry moved the court to Greenwich to escape the contagion. “There were no disguisings and but very few plays acted on account of [the] prevalent sickness, but there was an abbot of misrule, who made much sport.”
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By Candlemas, February 2, the court was back at Westminster, where the King, the Queen, Margaret Beaufort, and all the Lords Spiritual and Temporal went by custom in procession to Westminster Hall, and thence to Mass; and in the evening watched a play in the White Hall.
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On February 19, 1490, Henry VII confirmed by letters patent the grant of Elizabeth Wydeville’s dower lands to her daughter.
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That year, the Queen Dowager’s pension was increased to £400 [£195,570], further evidence that she was not out of favor.

On February 26, near Kew, Prince Arthur boarded the King’s state barge, which would bear him to Westminster for his investiture as Prince of Wales. Between Mortlake and Chelsea, other barges containing lords, bishops, knights, the Lord Mayor of London, and the craft guilds waited to attend him; at Lambeth Stairs, the flotilla was joined by the Spanish ambassador’s barge. To the sound of trumpets, and amidst colorful pageantry, the prince alighted at the landing bridge at Westminster, and was carried to his father’s presence. Many new knights were dubbed that day in his honor.

On Saturday, February 27, the little boy was hoisted on a horse and led into Westminster Hall. Here, the King formally invested him as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, “as accustomed. Then, the King departing, the prince that day kept his state under a cloth of estate.” A banquet was served at which he “licensed” the knights to enjoy their meat, while minstrels played. The celebrations were brought to a close by Garter King of Arms, who gave thanks to God. It was a demanding ceremonial for such a young child, but Arthur bore himself commendably. In May the following year he would be made a Knight of the Garter.

In November 1490, Elizabeth was granted custody of the lordship and manor of Bretts, in West Ham, Essex. This may have been in response to her giving the King the glad news that she was expecting her third child, possibly conceived during a visit to Ewelme in Oxfordshire.
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On St. Peter’s Eve, June 28, 1491, at Greenwich Palace, in the midst of a rainy summer, she bore a second son, called Henry after his father, and perhaps after Henry VI, whom the King hoped to have canonized. The child was red-haired and sturdy, a true Plantagenet who much resembled
his grandfather, Edward IV. As Henry VIII, he was to become the most famous of Elizabeth’s children.

Wrapped in “a mantle of gold furred with ermine,” and escorted by two hundred men bearing torches, the new prince was baptized a few days later in the nearby church of the Observant Friars. The church was hung with rich Arras and cloth of gold for the occasion, and carpets were laid in the chancel. Richard Fox, Bishop of Exeter, one of the King’s chief ministers, officiated. The silver font in which this lusty infant was immersed was again borrowed from Canterbury Cathedral for the occasion, and “the bottom [was] well-padded with soft linen.” Money was paid “for sealing of a window where my Lord Henry was changed.” A nurse, Anne Oxenbridge,
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was appointed to look after him during his early years; clearly he grew fond of her, as much later, after he became King, he would reward her with a pension of £20 [£9,670]. In charge of his nursery was the King’s “dear and well-beloved Elizabeth Darcy, mistress to our dearest son the prince.” Agnes Butler and Emmeline Hobbes were among the “rockers to our said son.”
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When he was still quite young, Prince Henry’s household was established at Eltham Palace in Kent, to the east of London. Although Prince Arthur was brought up away from the court, Elizabeth’s younger children were largely reared in close proximity to their parents, at Eltham, or at Sheen (where she herself had spent part of her early childhood), Greenwich, or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Croydon, Surrey—all well away from the unhealthy air of London.

Eltham Palace stood on a high hill with commanding views over the City, in a bracing location. There had been a moated manor house on the site as early as the thirteenth century; much extended, it became a favored royal palace in the fourteenth century, boasting a bathroom, dancing chambers, and beautiful gardens. Edward IV, who loved Eltham, had built its soaring great hall in the 1470s, adorning it with pairs of cinque-foil windows, battlements (now gone), and what is today the third-largest hammer-beam roof in England, after those at Westminster Hall and Christ Church, Oxford; and here his badges of the white rose and the sun in splendor still survive. Edward also built the stone bridge across the moat, the front courtyard, new kitchens at
right angles to the hall, the service quarters of pantry and buttery at its screens’ end, and new royal lodgings beyond for himself and Elizabeth Wydeville. The latter contained a novel and unique series of five-sided bay windows, and a new innovation, a gallery, built for the purpose of recreation—the earliest one of its kind known in England. Surrounding the palace was a forested hunting park. After Westminster, Eltham was the largest of the royal palaces—and it would have held happy associations for Elizabeth.

Henry VII built a new brick range of royal apartments with bays and oriel windows on the west side of the Great Court—“a fair front over the moat”
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—and rebuilt the chapel. From 1490 on, he and Elizabeth of York often resided at Eltham, and in their day the great hall was used as a dining hall for the court. Here they dined on the dais, while the officers of the court kept their tables at right angles to theirs.

The future Henry VIII and his siblings spent a large part of their childhood on Eltham’s breezy heights,
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their mother being a frequent visitor—often from nearby Greenwich—rather than a constant presence in their lives.
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Margaret was weaned in 1491, probably around her second birthday, and her nurse, Alice Davy, dismissed. It is clear from Exchequer warrants that her household and Henry’s were amalgamated before the end of that year, although each had their own attendants.
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In time other infants would join them. The
Great Wardrobe Accounts
contain many payments for beautiful clothing for the royal children, who were clad in velvet, satin, and damask right from infancy, outward display being considered more important than practicality.
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Since 1489 there had been fresh and persistent rumors that at least one of the Princes in the Tower had survived. It is not known where they originated, or if Elizabeth heard these rumors, or what she made of them. It is unlikely that she knew for certain what had happened to her brothers, so it is possible that hope sometimes sprang in her heart that one or both of them was alive. Conceivably she had long speculated as to their fate, and maybe this new crop of rumors gave her pause for thought.

But in the autumn of 1491 news came from Ireland that one of the princes might be very much alive. A merchant of Brittany, Pregent
Meno, had sailed into Cork with a youth on board. When this fair, blond young man appeared magnificently garbed in silks, bearing himself with great dignity, the citizens of Cork are said to have concluded at once that he must be of royal blood, and the mayor, John Atwater, impressed by the youth’s knowledge of the court, declared that he must be the Earl of Warwick, escaped from the Tower. It is likely that this plot had been hatched in advance.

What happened next is unclear, but soon afterward it was announced that the handsome stranger was actually Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the vanished princes. York would have reached sixteen in August 1491, and the stranger was about that age. In a drawing in the Receuil d’Arras he bears a strong resemblance to Edward IV, which was commented on by contemporaries, although he was “not handsome,” as Edward was.
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Certainly the boy knew a lot about the Yorkist court. According to a thirdhand report, Maximilian of Austria was to assert that he was Margaret of Burgundy’s bastard son by Henri de Berghes, Bishop of Cambrai,
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but there is no evidence to substantiate this.

By 1487 the boy had been taken into the service of Edward IV’s godson, Sir Edward Brampton, a staunch Yorkist knighted by Richard III. Brampton had gone to Portugal to negotiate the marriage between Richard and the Infanta Joana, but he fled into exile in the Netherlands after Bosworth. It could have been in his household that his protégé learned so much about the Yorkist court, knowledge that would serve him well in the future. He might have been Edward IV’s bastard; Bacon hints that there was something scandalous behind the employment of the boy by Edward’s godson. Yet this lad, who claimed he was brought up at the English court until he was ten, had clearly not yet mastered the English language.

Vergil believed that this was a new imposture, the brainchild of Margaret of Burgundy, who hated Henry VII and had probably been waiting for an opportunity to unseat him since the failure of the Simnel conspiracy. According to Vergil, Margaret had apparently come across the boy by chance, or he might have been pushed into her path by Brampton. Impressed by his looks and sharp wits, and possibly struck by his resemblance to her brother, Edward IV, she was only too
happy to recognize him as her lost nephew, whom she had last seen when he was seven. Bacon claimed that she had been looking out for such a handsome, graceful youth “to make Plantagenets and dukes of York.” Vergil states that she kept him secretly in her household and that it was she who taught him all he needed to know, “so that afterward he should convince all by his performance that he sprang from the Yorkist line.” Vergil believed it was Margaret who had arranged for the lad to go to Ireland with a view to stirring up the Yorkist supporters there.

There is no evidence that Margaret ever met the pretender before 1492, when he fled to her court from France. Even so, it is likely that some conspiracy had been formed before he appeared in Ireland. Henry VII was convinced that it had its roots in Burgundy.
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Certainly Margaret of Burgundy would not have hesitated to do everything in her power to overthrow Henry and Elizabeth and replace them with any “male remnant” of the House of York who was remotely suitable.
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