Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (75 page)

Thomas More, in his elegy of 1503, refers to Henry as Elizabeth’s “loving son.” This, and the portrayal of him in the illumination, suggests that his closeness to his mother was well known. There is also his own testimony to his grief at her loss: four years afterward, in January 1507, in a letter to Erasmus about the untimely demise of the Archduke
Philip, he wrote: “Never since the death of my dearest mother hath there come to me more hateful intelligence. And to speak truth, I was the scanter well-disposed toward your letter than its singular grace demanded, because it seemed to tear open the wound to which time had brought insensibility. But indeed those things which are decreed by Heaven are so to be accepted by mortal men.”
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These heartfelt words show that Henry had grieved deeply for Elizabeth and been close to her, and that at fifteen he was already familiar with the raw pain of loss when he learned of Philip’s passing. The news of his mother’s death must have come as a terrible shock. Already, in his short life, he had seen two brothers and a sister die young, and soon another sister would die too. The impact of these events on the young Henry should not be underestimated, and his misery can only have been compounded by the total withdrawal of his father, followed by the illness that threatened to deprive the boy of his other parent. It may well have been these terrible events that gave Henry VIII his lifelong fear of illness.

Elizabeth’s influence on him is hard to gauge. Given Henry’s checkered matrimonial career—six wives, two beheaded, three divorced, and only one son to show for it—post-Freudian historians have sometimes taken a psychological view, speculating that he was so traumatized by losing a mother he idolized that he developed an Oedipus complex, which drew him irresistibly into incestuous relationships while being outraged by them; yet it has since been questioned whether such a condition as an Oedipus complex even exists.

It is tempting to speculate that, had Elizabeth lived, Henry’s marital career would not have been so colorful. It is possible that his six marriages represented attempts to re-create the marital harmony of his parents, and mirror their example. The way he comforted Katherine of Aragon after the death of their son echoes the way his parents had consoled each other after Arthur died. Henry’s eagerness to marry Katherine, six years his senior, may have stemmed partly from the fact that she had been beloved by his mother; possibly she appeared as a mother-substitute figure to him. Certainly the qualities he admired in his wives—fidelity, dignity, piety, virtue, fruitfulness, intelligence, and docility—were those his mother had in full measure. And, as Marie
Louise Bruce has pointed out, he would have been too young to perceive any flaws in Elizabeth’s character. For him, she probably remained the epitome of all that was desirable in a queen—with disastrous consequences for his own wives, who would suffer by comparison with such impossible perfection.

Henry inherited Elizabeth’s books and manuscripts, as well as his father’s, and would appoint the antiquarian John Leland, whom he made keeper of the King’s books around 1530, to put them all in order in the new library at Whitehall Palace.
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No doubt the King prized the cross his mother had given him—one “set with a table diamond and three good pearls”—which had cost her £13.6s.8d. [£6,500].
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He evidently cherished her memory. When he became King, he appointed to his service, and Queen Katherine’s, several men and women who served or had been related to his mother, possibly for her sake, and rewarded many who had served her well (see
Appendix II
).
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The death of his third wife, Jane Seymour, in 1537 in childbed, twelve days after the birth of Henry’s long-awaited son and heir, probably revived sad memories of his mother’s passing, and his advisers consulted Garter Herald as to the ceremonial that had been observed at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral so that it could be replicated at Jane’s; a banner bearing the arms of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York was carried in the procession.
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By the end of Henry VIII’s reign it was generally accepted that Henry VII had owed his crown to Elizabeth of York. In 1533 the Imperial ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, observed that Henry VIII had “received the principal title to his realm through the female line.”
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In 1541, Henry’s kinsman, Sir Anthony St. Leger, was reported to him for saying that the King’s father had no just title to the crown till he married Edward IV’s daughter. When questioned, St. Leger insisted he had been misquoted and actually said that Henry VII’s title was not perfect until he married Elizabeth of York, because some of his advisers had urged him to claim the throne by right of conquest, “but now, thanked be the Lord, all titles be in the King our master.” Henry VIII was satisfied with this line of reasoning.
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When, in 1674, workmen were dismantling the forebuilding to the White Tower, during demolition of the old royal palace, they
discovered—ten feet under the rubble infill of a spiral staircase, just as Sir Thomas More had described—a wooden chest containing the skeletons of two children. It was recorded that scraps of rag and velvet adhered to the bones. The velvet was evidence that these were children of high status, and it was assumed they were the Princes in the Tower. On the orders of Charles II they were reburied as such in an urn in Westminster Abbey, just a few feet from where Elizabeth of York, the princes’ sister, lay at rest. The bones were examined in 1933, and the results, while not conclusive, were compatible with those of Elizabeth’s lost brothers, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. In 1965 dental tests on the remains of Anne Mowbray proved a familial link between her and the skeletons in the urn.
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However, in 1789, workmen restoring the tomb of Edward IV in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, accidentally broke into the vault containing the coffins of the King and Elizabeth Wydeville, and discovered a small vault next to it, which held the bodies of two children. It was assumed that they were those of Princess Mary and George, Duke of Bedford, and their names were added to the inscription on the restored tomb. But in 1810, when Wolsey’s tomb house was excavated to construct a burial vault for George III and his family, the coffin of George, clearly labeled
“Serenissimus princeps Georgius filius tercius Christianissimi principis Edvardi iiij,”
was found, and next to it one that was almost certainly Mary’s, as the contemporary account of her funeral states she was buried beside her brother.
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In 1813 both were moved into their parents’ vault. Unfortunately, on neither of the occasions when Edward IV’s vault was opened were the coffins of the two unidentified children opened, examined, or even described.

It has been suggested that they could have been the Princes in the Tower, perhaps secretly laid to rest with their parents by a guilty Richard III, but until further investigations are made—and the sovereign’s permission would be required for that—there is too little evidence to say whose remains they are.
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It is likely that the bones are those of royal children, but no other royal children are recorded as having been buried, with graves unaccounted for, in St. George’s Chapel prior to 1789.

A clue to the mystery may lie in Westminster Abbey. A history in
the abbey’s library records that when the sarcophagus of Elizabeth’s infant sister Margaret was opened, it was empty. At the Reformation the sarcophagus was moved from the steps of St. Edward the Confessor’s shrine to the side of his chapel, so it is possible the body was removed at that time to Windsor. As to who the other child may be, that remains a mystery.

The full splendor of the incomparable and richly adorned chapel in which lay the remains of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York did not long outlive them. It was despoiled and stripped of some of its fittings during the Reformation that spanned the reigns of their son, Henry VIII, and grandchildren, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, and more depredations took place later under Oliver Cromwell. The upper part of the fine screen around the tomb, most of the images of saints that adorned it, much of the wondrous glass of the chapel and the original altars, placed there with such veneration, were all destroyed, and the last of the glass was lost during the Second World War Blitz.

In 1625 the vault below Henry VII’s tomb was opened for the burial of James I. At that time the large wooden outer coffins encasing the lead coffins of Henry and Elizabeth were removed to make space for the vault’s new incumbent, leaving the bodies wrapped only in lead. They had originally been placed on either side of the vault, but were moved to one side to accommodate James I’s coffin, and the head shell from Elizabeth of York’s coffin was temporarily laid upon Henry VII’s. It is possible that the visceral urns were removed and later placed in the nearby vault of General George Monck.

On February 11, 1869, the vault was again opened, on the instructions of Dean Stanley, who examined its contents. A drawing was made by Sir George Scharf, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, of the lead coffins lying in a row: James I’s to the left, and the smaller ones of Elizabeth of York (center), marked by a Maltese cross, and Henry VII (right).
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Those of the two kings were identified by inscriptions.
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The tomb has not been disturbed since, and Elizabeth sleeps on in peace.

Elizabeth of York, “the most virtuous princess and gracious Queen.” (
Illustration credit i1.1
)

Edward IV and Elizabeth Wydeville with their children: the future Edward V kneels in front of his brother on the left, and Elizabeth of York heads her sisters, Mary, Cecily, Anne, and Katherine, on the right. “In those days you would have seen a royal court worthy of a most mighty kingdom, filled with riches, and, surpassing all else, those beautiful and most delightful children.” (
Illustration credit i1.2
)

Edward IV, Elizabeth’s father. “The commons love and adore him as if he were their God.” (
Illustration credit i1.3
)

Elizabeth Wydeville, Elizabeth’s mother. “Now take heed what love may do.” (
Illustration credit i1.4
)

Elizabeth and her sisters, Mary, Cecily, and Anne. “She manifested toward her brothers and sisters an unbounded love.” (
Illustration credit i1.5
)

One of the restored rooms at Cheyneygates, the former house of the Abbot of Westminster, where Elizabeth lived in sanctuary with her mother and siblings for eighteen months in total, “in right great trouble, sorrow and heaviness.” (
Illustration credit i1.6
)

Thomas, Lord Stanley, later Earl of Derby—Elizabeth’s “Father Stanley”—who intrigued with her against Richard III. (
Illustration credit i1.7
)

Richard III, the uncle who had Elizabeth declared a bastard. She called him “her only joy and maker in this world.” (
Illustration credit i1.8
)

Fotheringhay Church, where Elizabeth witnessed the solemn reburial of her grandfather, Richard, Duke of York, in 1476. (
Illustration credit i1.9
)

Sheriff Hutton Castle, Yorkshire, where Elizabeth was effectively held prisoner by Richard III in 1485. (
Illustration credit i1.10
)

Elizabeth’s husband, Henry VII, as a young man. “He was governed by none,” yet there is evidence that he came to respect Elizabeth’s judgment and confided in her. (
Illustration credit i1.11
)

Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, Elizabeth’s mother-in-law. “Everyone that knew her loved her,” and the two women got on well together. (
Illustration credit i1.12
)