Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Read online

  The officiating archbishop, Thomas Bourchier, was the man who had persuaded Elizabeth Woodville to send her younger son out of sanctuary; she, presumably, must have been relieved to see the final confirmation of a marriage she had long planned. The usual long list of presents and celebrations has not survived, but the records do show Henry ordering a huge quantity of ermines that would make his new wife’s Easter gown. He also ordered a third papal dispensation, one dispensing with any impediment caused by the couple’s relation through marriage, rather than through consanguinity; over the succeeding months, the pope was obliging enough also to threaten excommunication for anyone who challenged the right of Henry’s heirs to succeed, and to issue a papal bull confirming the legitimacy of the union.

  Not that the people seemed to have any doubts that this was truly a marriage made in heaven. The Tudor poet Bernard André wrote that “the people constructed bonfires far and wide to show their gladness and the City of London was filled with dancing, singing and entertainment.” Bacon wrote that whereas Bosworth had given Henry the bended knee of his subjects, this marriage gave him their hearts.

  The couple may not have waited for the marriage ceremony to begin living together—a common-enough practice in the fifteenth century. That third dispensation at the beginning of March may even have been because they knew Elizabeth was pregnant, and court poets hastened to link Henry’s victory at Bosworth with this speedy proof of virility. Bernard André’s version has to be the most oleaginous: “Then a new happiness took over the happiest kingdom, great enjoyment filled the queen, the church experienced perfect joy, while huge excitement gripped the court and an incredible pleasure arose over the whole country.”

  Not everyone, however, had taken Bosworth as the final verdict on the future. Easter saw rebellion in Yorkshire, and for the first full year of his reign Henry was off around the country, putting out fires and displaying himself in the guise of majesty. Meanwhile, the women—Elizabeth of York, her sister, her mother, and her mother-in-law—summered at Winchester, in St. Swithin’s Priory within the cathedral precincts. Elizabeth Woodville, besides being restored to her rank as queen dowager, had been awarded a grant for life of six manors in Essex and an annual income of £102. There were, however, problems inherent in the situation, not least the fact that there was bound to be a certain amount of jostling for place between the two senior in-laws, the queen dowager and Margaret Beaufort. The former had lived through a lot but, in her late forties, wasn’t necessarily ready to give up all hope of power; the latter, in her early forties, had only just arrived, and would surely be reluctant to see the real authority she wielded in her son’s kingdom cast in the shade by the ceremonial status of a woman who technically outranked her.

  But it is possible Elizabeth Woodville had tired of court. On July 10, she had arranged with the Abbot of Westminster to take out a forty-year lease on “a mansion within the said Abbey called Cheyne gate,” an odd choice for a residence, because it might well have brought back bad memories of her time in sanctuary. But it was a practical location, and though her worldly image might sometimes have masked it, Elizabeth Woodville’s behavior as queen had always been that of a conventionally devout woman. Then again, her negotiations for a London home may also have been her response to other plans first mooted for Elizabeth just a few days earlier that July. Henry had proposed that his new mother-in-law should marry the Scots king, as part of a peace treaty (a proposal that would never come to fruition).

  On September 20, 1486 (“afore one o’clock after midnight,” noted Margaret Beaufort in her Book of Hours), to widespread rejoicing, Elizabeth of York gave birth to a prince in whose veins ran the blood of both dynasties. Either the baby was a whole month early, or the date is evidence that the couple had indeed slept together before the actual marriage ceremony.

  No account survives of this birth as such, but Margaret Beaufort laid down the rules for the royal confinement and for the subsequent christening. Her ordinances decreed that Winchester Cathedral should be carpeted and hung with arras, that soft linen should be folded inside the font, which was placed on a stage in the middle of the church to give the crowds a better view. Margaret and her son were both good at publicity. But Elizabeth’s own maternal relations were well to the fore: her sister Cecily carrying the baby to the font with their sister-in-law the Marchioness of Dorset bearing the train, with Dorset himself as well as the Earl of Lincoln, the queen’s cousin, beside her. The queen’s sister Anne carried the robe, while the queen dowager—Elizabeth Woodville, the godmother—carried the little prince onto the high altar and gave the baby a covered cup of gold.

  But, of course, it was Margaret whose ordinances also laid down orders for the baby’s rearing—decreeing that the wet nurse should be observed by a doctor at every meal to see that the child was getting “seasonable meat and drink” and describing the leather (and presumably dribble-proof) cushion on which she should lean and the two great basins of pewter needed for the nursery laundry. The ordinances encompass both practicality and grandeur—the pommels on the cradle, the counterpane furred with ermine, and the “head sheets” of cloth of gold—and they go on forever. Court ceremony was important, and a new dynasty had to show it could do these things magnificently—but all the same, there is something a little frightening in the thoroughness with which Margaret laid down every detail. The years of her misfortunes had obviously bred in her an urgent need for control, but one wonders if through her daughter-in-law’s accouchement she were not also reaching after the kind of experience she herself had been denied when she gave birth to Henry all those years before. It’s almost as if Elizabeth was her surrogate, not the only such case in this story.

  Elizabeth of York was ill with an ague just after the birth; she did suffer from childbed fevers and would cling to those who had seen her through one birth to help her through another, like her midwife, Alice Massy. She would in any case have had to stay at Winchester until she was churched, and the court stayed with her until All Hallows, today’s Halloween. The precisely ordered ceremonials for the churching show Margaret once again stage-managing the scenario—a duchess or countess to assist the queen out of bed, two more to receive her at her chamber door. For Elizabeth of York, her relationship with Henry’s mother—like that of Cecily Neville and her daughter-in-law Elizabeth Woodville—was an issue never to go away.

  The choice of Winchester for the new prince’s birth and the decision to name him Arthur were a conscious attempt to link the new Tudors with the ancient Arthurian tale. This was, as anyone who read Caxton’s newly printed edition of the Morte d’Arthur knew, the city that still held the Round Table. But there may have been a more serious reason for staying on in Winchester, away from any troubles that might shake the capital. Troubles were brewing, as the court made its way back to Greenwich for the winter season.

  The problem, not unpredictably, had to do with those of the Plantagenet heirs who were still unaccounted for. Francis Bacon, a century later, wrote that from the very start of Henry’s reign, there were “secret rumours and whisperings (which afterwards gathered strength and turned to great troubles) that the two young sons of King Edward the Fourth or one of them (which were said to be destroyed in the Tower), were not indeed murdered, but conveyed secretly away, and were yet living.” And the young Princes were not the only objects of such rumors. Earlier that year, in the summer of 1486, stories had begun to spread that Clarence’s son Warwick had escaped from the Tower and was in the Channel Islands. The subject of these stories was later identified as Lambert Simnel. As a matter of fact, Simnel seemed at first to be claiming that he was Richard, Duke of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s younger son, but by the time he reached Ireland by the turn of the year, he had changed his story.

  What can Elizabeth Woodville have felt? To pretend this boy was her nephew Warwick was absurd, and Elizabeth must have known it. Henry soon brought the real Warwick briefly out of the Tower and sent him through the London streets in a public display.
But when Simnel’s supporters claimed he was Richard, the pressure on Elizabeth Woodville must have been intense (even assuming she could be sure that he was not). The people rallying around the pretender would need only a word from Elizabeth to endorse his claim. And the events of the next few months might suggest that, in the eyes of the authorities at least, there was a real possibility that Elizabeth would give that word.

  On February 2, 1487, Henry met with his council, and, as Polydore Vergil reported after the fact, “among other matters, Elizabeth the widow of King Edward was deprived by the decree of the same council of all her possessions.” This, unconvincingly, was supposedly punishment for the fact that she had, three years before, left sanctuary and made a deal with Richard III. Nevertheless, Parliament on February 20 did indeed endorse the alienation of Elizabeth’s property. This step has often been seen as evidence that the dowager queen was being punished for having supported the pretender Simnel, with all that might imply about her beliefs as to her son’s fate. Or, less drastically, it could have been a precautionary measure.

  It may have been that the decision to take away Elizabeth’s lands and the rise of Lambert Simnel bore no relation to each other. It was a time of reorganization all around: this indeed was the season of the “great grant” of lands that benefited Margaret Beaufort. A separate establishment had been set up for Prince Arthur at Farnham in Surrey, and Elizabeth of York visited in January, to check on her son. Furthermore, the lands lately belonging to Elizabeth Woodville were, after all, simply being transferred to her daughter, the new “lady queen,” whose position would traditionally be kept up by income from these properties. In return, the older lady got an annuity of four hundred marks. This, however, might well be called paltry; indeed, it was less than the income Richard had promised her. What is even more curious is the fact that it was precisely now, around the middle of February, that Elizabeth Woodville took up more or less permanent residence in Bermondsey Abbey, the great convent on the Thames already equipped with accommodation for royalty. (Katherine of Valois, Henry V’s widow, had been forced to retreat there after it was discovered she had married Owen Tudor.)

  There is not necessarily anything strange about Elizabeth Woodville’s decision to retreat to an abbey—many widows did choose a religious retirement in this era—though this does revise the standard image of Elizabeth as a wholly worldly creature. If her first choice had fallen on the more central residence of that house in Westminster Abbey, then Bermondsey was still a convenient residence—even a thrifty one, since the association of an ancestor of hers with the place meant that she could board for free. But the timing is suggestive—the more so since the lease of Cheyneygate shows she had only recently made quite different plans. It does look as though Elizabeth Woodville was at the least being urged to take up a temporary retirement—if not because of anything she had done, then because of what she might do. Francis Bacon wrote that the queen’s mother was so deeply suspect, “it was almost thought dangerous to visit her, or see her.”

  A real threat to the young Tudor dynasty was brewing, however, and—on its surface, at least—it had nothing to do with Elizabeth Woodville. Soon after Henry VII had paraded the real Warwick through London, John Earl of Lincoln (son to Edward IV’s sister Elizabeth and trusted lieutenant and potential heir to Richard III) made a dramatic flight from England. He had been received with favor into the new Tudor court and had been prominent at the christening of Prince Arthur. But now he fled and turned up in the Low Countries. By Easter, it was clear that an invasion force was getting under way.

  In April Lincoln took an army from the Low Countries to Ireland, where Simnel was given an impromptu coronation ceremony and declared King Edward VI. But the involvement of Lincoln is curious: when his aunt Margaret of Burgundy had occasion to write about the expedition, it was his name she invoked, not Simnel’s. It seems possible Simnel was just a stalking horse for Lincoln’s own attempt to take over the country.

  In May Henry, at Kenilworth Castle in the safety of the Midlands, heard that Simnel had landed with an army and sent word that his wife and mother, still at Greenwich, should come to him there. But when Henry set out to confront the rebels, Elizabeth hotfooted it south to Farnham, where her baby was being reared, with a plan made for them to move, if necessary, on to a house of Benedictine nuns at Romsey in Hampshire—not far from the coast—in case the worst happened and they had to flee. For the young queen, it must have been a terrifying reminder of traumas past.

  On June 16, at the battle of Stoke, perhaps the last familial battle of the Wars of the Roses, Lincoln was killed. The boy Simnel—in what may have been natural clemency on Henry’s part, but was more certainly intended to emphasize the absurdity of his pretensions—was put to work in the royal kitchen. Lincoln’s parents, the Suffolks, whatever their personal loss, suffered no further penalties.

  The battle of Stoke had ended the threat of Lambert Simnel, and perhaps of the Earl of Lincoln too, but, as Henry would surely have been aware, the real question was which if any Yorkist women had been a key player in the affair. Simnel’s immediate sponsor, Polydore Vergil said, was an Oxford priest called Richard Simons. But there had to have been some greater personage waiting in the wings, someone better able to coach an impostor in the things he should know about the person whose identity he would assume. Bacon believed that Lambert Simnel had been schooled, and by a Yorkist lady. “So that it cannot be, but that some great person, that knew particularly and familiarly Edward Plantagenet [Warwick], had a hand in the business.” He was inclined to allot some of the blame to Elizabeth Woodville, “a busy negotiating woman” who was at this time “extremely discontent with the King, thinking her daughter, as the King handled the matter, not advanced but depressed [that is, lowered in status, suppressed].” No one, he said, in a metaphor tellingly drawn from the theater, “could hold the book so well to prompt and instruct this stage-play as she could.”

  But whatever Elizabeth Woodville’s involvement, there was another Yorkist woman who certainly did support, and possibly coach, Lambert Simnel: Margaret of Burgundy, whom Bacon described as “the sovereign patroness and protectress of the enterprise.” When her only remaining brother, Richard, had been killed at Bosworth, Margaret was fully occupied with Burgundian affairs. Perhaps she might have let well enough alone if Henry had taken care to conciliate either Burgundy or its dowager duchess. He was, after all, a novice king and one, moreover, reared in the traditions of France and Brittany, often Burgundy’s enemies.

  Henry had, in 1486, been careful to renew (in at least some, diminished, form) the rights Cecily Neville had been accorded by her sons—but Cecily Neville was there in his country, and therefore someone whom he would do well to appease to some degree. But the trading privileges Edward had granted his sister Margaret of Burgundy, and which her brother Richard seems to have continued, now lapsed—and it is probable that Margaret’s actions in the years ahead were governed by enlightened self-interest as well as by emotion.

  Margaret may also have played a more fundamental role in the Lambert Simnel drama than even Bacon suspected. As early as the summer of 1486, a donation was made in Burgundy for the feast of Saint Rombout’s Day, on behalf of “the son of Clarence from England”; in the same year, the city of Malines gave Margaret money for her “reyse” (venture) to England. If it was Margaret who in fact fulfilled the coach’s role Bacon ascribed to Elizabeth Woodville, then she may not have been acting solely on her own behalf, but in the interests of her adopted land. Her efforts, moreover, seem to have worked, if perhaps not in quite the way Margaret intended. After the recent rebellion, Henry began to be more conciliatory toward Burgundy.

  Elizabeth Woodville, by contrast, had lost through the rebellion—assuming there was some connection between it and the reduction in her income. Henry’s records, over the next few years, do show regular, almost yearly, payments to his “right dear” mother-in-law: fifty marks for Christmas here, and there the gift of a ton of wine. But it
was not the kind of wholesale funding that would allow her to play any kind of political role in her son-in-law’s kingdom. Her public career was over. She would, indeed, thenceforth be recorded as making only occasional appearances in public and would otherwise live a reduced life in the convent at Bermondsey.

  21

  “GOLDEN SOVEREIGNTY”

  Put in her tender heart th’aspiring flame

  Of golden sovereignty; acquaint the princess

  With the sweet silent hours of marriage joys.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 4.4

  The first rebellion of the Tudor reign was over, though other ripples of armed discontent would plague Henry’s next years. But he heeded a complaint voiced among the rebels that Elizabeth of York was being treated too casually—that, extraordinarily, she had not yet been crowned, an affront to Yorkist sympathies. September was full of plans for the splendid ceremony. In October the royal couple set out from Warwick to London. His plans for Elizabeth notwithstanding, the entry into the city was Henry’s moment—the first time he had been there since the Stoke victory—and the craft guilds were out in number, lined up along the packed streets, “hugely replenished with people.” An anonymous manuscript preserved in the collection of the sixteenth-century antiquarian John Leland describes how Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort secretly watched the grand event from the window of a house near the City walls.