Tudor Queens of England (13 page)

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no longer a political battle to be fought, moreover she had the interests of fi ve daughters to protect as best she could. In return for surrendering all her claims Richard agreed to make a modest provision for her and to give her somewhere to live. On that understanding, she and her children quitted the sanctuary and the agreement was honoured on both sides. In the previous autumn Elizabeth had agreed to the betrothal of her eldest daughter to the Lancastrian pretender Henry of Richmond, but she now withdrew from that position and the younger Elizabeth, now 17, instead was welcomed at King Richard’s court. After the death of his wife Anne Neville in March 1485, there were rumours that he intended to marry her but they appear to have been unsubstantiated and Elizabeth was no party to them.

The events of August 1485 did not immediately rescue her from poverty and obscurity, but when the new king, Henry VII, decided to honour his threeyear-old pledge to marry her eldest daughter, her fortunes were revived. Having withdrawn her consent for this union as part of her understanding with Richard she was now constrained to renew it and the wedding duly took place in January 1486. Elizabeth was now again a member of the royal family. Her dower lands were restored on 5 March 1486 and when Arthur was born in September, she stood as godmother. In July, when a three-year truce was signed with the Scots, a multiple marriage package was discussed which would have matched the Queen Dowager (then about 50) with the 34-year-old (and widowed) King of Scots and two of her daughters with two of his sons, but nothing came of the negotiation. Henry may not have been very fond of his mother-in-law – hence his willingness to despatch her to Scotland – but the idea that he suspected her of involvement in the Lambert Simnel fi asco is a pure fabrication. Had Elizabeth really been convinced that Simnel was her missing son, she might have been sorely tempted but she had good reason to believe that he had died four years earlier, and there is no contemporary evidence to support the charge. What did happen, however, was that her endowment was transferred in February 1487 to her daughter and that then, or shortly after, she retired to Bermondsey Abbey. This arrangement seems to have been voluntary rather than punitive and when Henry made her a gift of 200 marks in March 1488, he described her as the ‘right dear and right well beloved Queen Elizabeth, late wife unto the noble prince of famous memory King Edward IV, and mother unto our dearest w

ife the Queen …’30

The king gave her an annuity of £400 in 1490, and several other presents over the next few years, as well as arranging honourable marriages for three of her four remaining daughters.

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The fourth and youngest, Bridget, took the veil. By the terms of his own hereditary claim to the throne (such as it was) Henry should have described Edward IV as a usurper, but he never did so, reserving that epithet

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for Richard III. This was straightforward pragmatism because if Edward had been a lawful king, and properly married to Elizabeth, then Edward V had also been a lawful king and his own wife was legitimate. This placed all the odium on Richard and made Henry the reconciler of the feud between York and Lancaster. Elizabeth lived in retirement at Bermondsey for about fi ve years, dying in April 1492. Her will survives but in truth she had little to leave but her blessing because she had been entirely supported by the King and Queen during the last few years of her life and seems to have surrendered her moveable possessions to the Abbey. She was 55 and had lived a normal span for her generation. Like Margaret, she has had a bad posthumous press, being represented as greedy, cold and unscrupulous and the contemporary evidence is not entirely supportive. However her political ambition is largely unproven. It was Edward who decided to promote her kindred and he was able to do that at little cost to himself. Nor did he turn them into a powerful faction in the process; they were not a very amiable bunch, but they were no threat to anyone. Her supposed political interventions – for instance against the Duke of Clarence – are uncorroborated and for the most part her infl uence was entirely domestic and was confi ned to patronage. How real a threat the Woodville/Grey connection was to Richard in 1483 is very hard to determine but when it came to the point, they did not put up much of a fi ght. Nor was Elizabeth in any real sense the leader of such a party. She had some infl uence in the council after Edward’s death and was certainly a symbolic fi gurehead but she did not have the spirit or intelligence to be a real leader – and in that she differed from Margaret. Elizabeth was the King’s lover, who also happened to be married to him, and the rest of her image is largely constructed on that basis.

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1. Catherine de Valois by Sylvester Harding; after Unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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2. The Marriage of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou by Barrett (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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3. Elizabeth Woodville Queen of Edward IV by Johann Gottlieb Facius; or by Georg Siegmund Facius; after Thomas Kerrich (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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4. Elizabeth of York by Unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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5. Catherine of Aragon by Unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)

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6. Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein the Younger

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4

The Queen as Helpmate: Elizabeth of York

With the marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York in January 1486, we come upon yet another different type of Queen. Like her mother, Elizabeth was home bred and reared but, unlike her, she was of royal blood. Indeed, given the absence of any Salic Law in England, she had a far better claim to the throne than her husband. Richard’s attempt to impugn her mother’s marriage had been effective in the summer of 1483, and remained orthodox as long as the King lived, but it was not emphasized when he came to terms with the older Elizabeth in March 1484. The younger Elizabeth returned to court, was friendly with the Queen and her illegitimacy was simply taken for granted. In a later age, Elizabeth and Henry might have reigned together, like Mary and William, but England was not yet ready for such an experiment. There had not been a ruling Queen since the Norman conquest and Henry, despite his dubious pedigree, had the advantages of being male and of unchallenged legitimacy.

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He also, more critically, had led the army that had defeated and killed the childless Richard at Bosworth. Richard, by moving against Edward V, had split the Yorkist party right down the middle but, although his opponents continued to regard Elizabeth as Edward’s legitimate daughter, in the circumstances of August 1485 nobody was pressing her claims as his heir. Nevertheless when she and Henry married both her supporters and the Lancastrian party came together to celebrate the union of the red rose and the white and the healing of the long and bloody feud that they represent
ed.2

Elizabeth was Edward’s fi rst-born child and, as we have seen, her baptism in February 1466 had been an occasion for a display of family solidarity. From then until the birth of Edward junior in 1470, she was her father’s heir and had immediately been deployed on the marriage market. This was in the interest of trying to heal his feud with the Nevilles following the fi asco of 1469. She was betrothed to George, the son of John Neville, Marquis Montague. However John blotted his copybook by betraying Edward in the summer of 1470 and then died fi ghting against him at Barnet in 1471. So the betrothal disappeared and was heard of no more. George, who must have been almost as young as his intended bride, was still a minor in 1480, and died unmarried in 1483. Apart from that, Elizabeth’s public role was minimal. When the King 72

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had his father’s remains transferred from Pontefract to Fotheringhay in 1466, she was present as a very small child. Her uncle, Richard of Gloucester, then 14, was the chief mourner on that occasion. At about the same time Edward settled on her for life the manor of Great Lynford in Buckinghamshire. The reason for this rather curious gesture is unclear, but it may have been some compensation for the fact that she had no title. If she had been a boy she would have been created Duke of Cornwall at birth and enjoyed the revenues of the Duchy. As it was, presumably the profi ts of Great Lynford went towards paying some of her nursery expenses but the point of such an allocation is elusive. During the crisis of 1470–1 Elizabeth was with her mother and her sister Mary in sanctuary but presumably spent most of her time with a faithful nurse or nurses because the Queen was busy giving birth to her fi rst-born son.

When Edward went off to France in 1475, he left behind his will, naming the Queen as Governor of the Realm and allocating 10,000 crowns for the marriage portion of his elder daughter. There does not seem to have been any bridegroom in prospect at that time so she was still an available asset to be deployed diplomatically and that is just what Edward did at Pecquingy a few months later. When this treaty was signed in August 1475 one of the clauses was for a marriage between Elizabeth and Louis’s young son, Charles, the Dauphin. The King of France was to provide a jointure of £60,000, and Mary was to cover as substitute in the event of anything untoward happening to the older child, who was then about 9. Apparently Elizabeth was known thereafter at the English court as Madame la Dauphine and was taught to speak and to write both French and Spanish in preparation for her future role. Contemporary reports relate that she was already a precocious reader and writer in English and she seems to have been generally a highly intelligent and teachable child, although there is no record of who was responsible for these accomplishments. Mary was to be taken out of her treaty commitment in 1481 by betrothal to the King of Denmark but died still well short of her majority, in the following year. In December 1482 Louis came to terms with Maximilian, the husband of Mary of Burgundy at Arras and effectively abandoned the Pecquingy agreement, which deprived Elizabeth of her expected dignity and her father of his peace of mind. The French action on this occasion was (allegedly) one of the causes for Edward’s premature demise in the following April.

We do not know how Elizabeth reacted to her father’s unexpected death. She was 17 and must have been well aware of the political tensions that this situation created. At fi rst the prognosis was good. All the talk was of her brother’s coronation and of his arrival from the Marches of Wales. Then, quite suddenly, there was panic. Her uncle Anthony had been arrested and Edward was coming

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under the escort of another uncle, Richard, whom the Princess can hardly have known. At the news, her mother took fright, and bundled her and her siblings back into the Westminster sanctuary, which must have carried uncomfortable memories from her early childhood. At fi rst this panic must have seemed rather unnecessary, as preparations for the coronation continued as though nothing had happened. Perhaps lulled into a sense of false security, or perhaps just not able to muster the willpower to resist, the Queen Dowager was persuaded to let her younger son join his brother

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Then there were rumours – Richard was plotting to take the Crown himself – and disaster struck. A preacher put up by the Protector denounced the Dowager’s marriage as false and all her children as bastards. The older Elizabeth may (or may not) have been in touch with Lord Hastings via his mistress, Jane Shore, in an attempt to check this headlong progress. Jane had been Edward’s last mistress and Elizabeth would almost certainly have known her. Within a few days, Hastings had paid for this alleged treason with his head, Richard was proclaimed king and rumours started arriving that Anthony and his brother had been executed in the north. On 6 July Richard was crowned and, shortly after, his two young nephews disappeared in the Tower. The distress of the women in sanctuary can only be imagined. Years later Bernard Andreas was to say of the young Elizabeth ‘the love she bore her brothers and sisters was unheard of and almost incredible’. Even allowing for poetic licence that is strong testimony. From later evidence she seems to have had a loving and gentle disposition, which may have made her unfi t for government, but was considered a great commendation in a consort. Unfortunately no contemporary commented upon how she endured the loss of her brothers, whose death was generally accepted long before she was allowed to emerge from the sanctuary.

Richard had no desire to make more enemies by storming Westminster so he sat down patiently to besiege it, using his household troops for the purpose. The intention was not to starve the occupants out but to intimidate them. The siege lasted for nine months before the Dowager fi nally came to terms and it must have been a very bleak autumn and winter for the girls, who were accustomed not only to their comforts but also to fl attering attentions. Now they were simply Edward’s illegitimate offspring. In March 1484, as we have seen, the Dowager surrendered. In return for giving up all her pretensions and eschewing political activity, she was provided with a modest competence and houses to live in, ‘honest places of good name and fame’, while Richard undertook to marry her daughters to

‘gentlemen born’ with a small portion of 200 marks each. Presumably these were the best terms Elizabeth could get. Soon after there was talk of marrying Elizabeth to William Stillington, the illegitimate son of Robert, Bishop of Bath and Wells. Presumably an Episcopal bastard was deemed to be gentleman enough for a 74

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royal one. However, neither the Dowager not her daughter would have anything to do with such a suggestion and the idea (if it was ever seriously proposed) was dropped. Meanwhile a much more momentous development had taken place at Rennes, although it is unlikely that it appeared that way at the time. By December 1483, Henry of Richmond, the Lancastrian pretender, had realized that Richard’s actions in the summer had seriously alienated many Yorkist supporters. Although he had not been able to take advantage of the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion in the autumn, it had benefi ted him in several ways. Most importantly the dissident Yorkists, convinced that Edward V and his brother were dead, were now looking to him to unseat the usurper. To strengthen that alliance it was suggested to Henry that he should undertake to marry Elizabeth, now the senior Yorkist claimant. This can hardly have been done without the permission of the Queen Dowager and the story is that her Welsh physician, a man named Lewis, carried her letters to Henry undertaking to support his claim in return for the marr