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

  As the court moved on to Windsor for Easter that spring, and the royal trio wore their Garter robes to chapel on Saint George’s Day, the queen and the king’s mother were censed after the king (though only the king and queen kissed the pax). Elizabeth of York was in one sense the senior partner here, having ridden in her first Garter procession decades before. Here once again, her ceremonial presence was probably more important for Henry’s legitimacy than was usual for a queen, irritating though that may have been to Margaret. When they were accorded the Order of the Garter together, a song was composed to celebrate the two women’s togetherness: it was as if everyone needed to parade, and to reassure the protagonists about, this odd duality.

  Windsor, Westminster, Greenwich, Eltham, Sheen—despite his later reputation for miserliness, Henry made frequent and generous payments to dancers, entertainers of all kinds, and especially musicians. Music seems to have been an interest he and Elizabeth, who kept her own minstrels, shared. The pair traveled together perhaps more often than was usual, which could be variously ascribed to affection or possibly even to suspicion, if Henry felt he needed to keep an eye on Elizabeth—or on any Yorkists who might be drawn to her, anyway. But it was certainly an economy, since a second household functioning quite independently would inevitably cost more. The Great Wardrobe accounts show Henry not only making Elizabeth presents such as robes furred with miniver, but also supplying household essentials such as beds and hammers. The gifts of cash and communion cloths, gowns and gold wire may seem like evidence of intimacy and affection, but they could be seen another way. Despite the lands settled on her, Elizabeth’s finances were not run like those of preceding queens, and Henry often had to bail her out, undermining her independence, even though her signature on each page of her Privy Purse accounts shows that she had by no means chosen to abnegate responsibility for her own finances. Her lands and fee farms, yielding some nineteen hundred pounds in 1496, plus an annuity the king had extracted on her behalf from the town of Bristol of another hundred, still amounted to less than half the income Elizabeth Woodville had enjoyed in her day. Often in debt, borrowing money on the security of her plate, Elizabeth of York was dependent on an ongoing stream of other gifts and loans from the king.

  The only surviving records of Elizabeth’s Privy Purse expenses date from later in the reign. Nonetheless, many of the sums dispersed must have been duplicated every year. The records show monetary recognition of presents of food: pippins and puddings, peasecods and pomegranates, warden pears and chines of pork, wine and woodcocks, rabbits and quails and conserves of cherries, a wild boar and tripes. They also show small practical purchases a great household requires: baskets and bellows, bolts and barehides, two barrels of Rhenish wine and the perpetual “boathire,” for transporting people and property from one palace to another along the great watery highway that was the Thames. Her purchases for clothes included a gown of russet velvet and white fustian for socks. Further sums included upkeep for her horses and greyhounds, expenses to the keeper of her goshawk for meat for his bird and his spaniels (27s 8d), and three doublets of Bruges satin for her footmen at 20d apiece.

  In Lent, almond butter was brought to Elizabeth—the rich man’s substitute for dairy, at a time of year when fats were not allowed. In April and November, she gave money to nuns in the Minories, by the Tower, whose abbess had sent her rose water. There were many acts of charity. Elizabeth paid for the burying of a man who was hanged and gave money to another whose house had burned down. She paid support for one of the children who had been “given” to her, made contributions toward the enclosed life of an anchoress, and provided funding for one John Pertriche, son of “Mad Beale,” right down to payment for the man who cured him of the French pox.

  But the records also suggest that Elizabeth’s income did not fit her expenditures. A great many of the entries record only part payment from Elizabeth—to tailors, saddlers, goldsmiths—and some of the money was long due. Her gowns were being mended, and she bought shoes with cheap tin buckles; she was pledging plate and borrowing money. This may be the result of Henry’s habit of keeping her dramatically short of funds—or it may just reflect the casual relationship with cash of the aristocracy in any century.

  One story in the Venetian state papers does fit with the conventional picture of Henry’s miserliness. On May 9, 1489, the papal envoy wrote to the pope, “We have, moreover, opened the moneybox which the king was pleased to have at his court: we found in it 11 pounds 11s, which result made our heart sink within us, for there were present the King, the Queen, the mother of the King and the mother of the Queen, besides dukes, earls and marquises, and other lords and ambassadors, so that we expected to have far more.”

  The mention of Elizabeth Woodville as being present at the royal court in the spring of 1489 is particularly interesting. It is usually said that after her exile or retreat to Bermondsey, she visited court on literally only one or two specific occasions, one of them being the visit of a kinsman, the following November 1489, at the time of her daughter’s next confinement. But this extra, less well-known, record of her presence some six months earlier suggests that while she undoubtedly did live largely retired, her appearances might have been more frequent, if not always conspicuously noted.

  In the autumn of 1489, Elizabeth of York did indeed take to her chamber again.* She did so in state—“royally accompanied; that is to say, with my lady the Queen’s mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, and many other going before her.” The chamber itself was hanged with rich cloth of blue arras, decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis—no other, more exciting, images, which were “not convenient about women in such case.” But this time Elizabeth flouted protocol—the protocol her mother-in-law had enshrined—by receiving a great embassy from France after her retreat into her chambers. The party included a member of her mother’s Luxembourg family.

  This child, a daughter, was born just as her tiny son Arthur was being made knight and invested Prince of Wales. The baby was named for her godmother and grandmother Margaret Beaufort.

  Eighteen months later came another, even more significant, confinement for Elizabeth. Prince Henry, the future Henry VIII, was born on June 28, 1491. But the months immediately following brought the start of a new trouble, which would haunt the new dynasty for the rest of the decade.

  _______________

  *It is possible she had also given birth, the year before, to another son, Edward, who lived only a few hours. Other sources suggest the birth of such a child, but set the date considerably later.

  22

  “THE EDGE OF TRAITORS”

  Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,

  That would abate these bloody days again,

  And make poor England weep in streams of blood

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 5.3

  The autumn of 1491 saw the appearance of a pretender to the throne far more dangerous than Lambert Simnel. Simnel’s story had been shaky from the beginning, and even the royal personage he had tried to impersonate—Clarence’s young son Warwick—was not a figure to inspire much confidence in opponents to the new Tudor regime. Even with the rumored counseling of the queen’s mother, Elizabeth Woodville, Simnel had been easily dispatched. This new pretender, however, would be far harder to get rid of—and his challenge would shake the young dynasty to its very foundations.

  The pretender’s name was Perkin Warbeck, and his early life was shrouded in a mist of uncertainty. Ironically, that just left observers all the more free simply to appreciate the princely looks and bearing that, from the start, gave him an air of legitimacy. Bernard André and Polydore Vergil, with their Tudor-inspired hatred of Margaret of Burgundy, suggest that Warbeck may have had his birth in that country—possibly even physical birth, but certainly in his adult, royal identity (since they suspect Margaret might have been behind him even before his official arrival at the court of Burgundy in 1492, to launch a serious claim to the English throne). Bacon tellingly uses the imagery of witchcraft,
saying that “the magic and curious arts” of Lady Margaret “raised up the ghost” of the boy Duke of York to walk and vex King Henry.

  Warbeck’s origins may be a mystery, but his entrance onto the English political stage was swift and well publicized, and his claim was, ingeniously, impossible to disprove. It had once again been Ireland that, in 1491, had first seen the princely looking lad who was Perkin Warbeck hailed as Richard, Duke of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s younger son who had disappeared into the Tower during the reign of Richard III—a claim that, however improbable, cannot be conclusively disproved even today. As Perkin would later tell it, he was simply strutting the streets to display the handsome wares of his master, a silk merchant, when he began to be hailed as self-apparent royalty, and it is true that Ireland, chafing under the yoke of English governance, was always ready to foster dissent. But needless to say, Perkin’s opponents saw a less naive story.

  Warbeck quickly returned to the Continent after unveiling himself on England’s doorstep. By the summer of 1492 (when Elizabeth of York was already preparing to give birth to a fourth baby), Perkin was in France, treated as an English prince and used by King Charles VIII (just as Henry Tudor had been used before him) as a tool of diplomacy. Indeed, the tall, glowing young man—so like his supposed father, Edward IV—seems to have owed a lot of the credence he received to the fact he looked and behaved like a king, or at least a prince. The same, at the beginning of his reign, had been said of Henry.

  At this timely moment, in early June 1492, just before Whit Sunday, Elizabeth Woodville died, still at her convent in Bermondsey. The event cannot have been wholly unexpected; now in her midfifties, she had been predeceased by almost all of her many siblings. She had made her will on April 10: “Item. I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my lord at Windsor, without pompous interring or costly expenses done thereabout. Item. Whereas I have no worldly goods to do the queen’s grace a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children according to my heart and mind, I beseech God Almighty to bless her grace, with all her noble issue; and, with as good a heart and mind as may be.” She willed that “such small stuff and goods as I have” should be spent on repaying her debts and on prayers for the repose of her soul. It is hard not to remember, less than a decade before, the walls having to be broken down to get Elizabeth Woodville’s extensive goods into sanctuary.

  A surviving manuscript record shows that her burial was certainly as unostentatious as she had asked. “On Whit-Sunday, the queen-dowager’s corpse was conveyed by water to Windsor, and there privily, through the little park, conducted into the castle, without any ringing of bells or receiving of the dean . . . and so privily, about eleven of the clock, she was buried, without any solemn dirge done for her obit.” The only gentlewoman to accompany her body on its journey along the river was one Mistress Grace—“a bastard daughter of king Edward IV,” which might seem to show Elizabeth Woodville had enough generosity of spirit to make a friend of a girl she might well have resented.

  Elizabeth of York was not able to take any charge of her mother’s obsequies, having entered her fourth confinement. (She would call her new daughter Elizabeth, perhaps the only form of commemoration available to the grieving queen.) Her next eldest sister, Cecily, was also absent and so was represented at the funeral by her husband. The three remaining, unmarried, daughters of Elizabeth Woodville did arrive—Anne, Katherine, and even eleven-year-old Bridget from the Dartford convent, where she had already been placed.* With them came Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter-in-law the Marchioness of Dorset, Elizabeth’s niece, and others, as well as the gentlemen, led by Dorset himself.

  Finally, the dirge got under way, though instead of the twelve poor men neatly clad in black that custom would have dictated at the ceremony, there were only “a dozen divers old men, and they held old torches and torches’ ends.” Still, the queen dowager herself had said that she wanted it that way.

  The grave had spared Elizabeth Woodville the agonizing doubts that Warbeck’s mounting credit and credibility might have inspired. Any private conversations Elizabeth of York and her husband had about the pretender could never have been recorded, but a century or so later Bacon would have Perkin in his character of Richard declaring that on his delivery from the Tower, he resolved to wait for his uncle Richard III’s death “and then to put myself into my sister’s hands, who was next heir to the crown.” It is interesting that Bacon suggests the alleged Duke of York would have sought refuge with the wife to a king from a new dynasty, a hint, possibly, that Elizabeth’s feelings about this putative brother were a matter for speculation even in this near-contemporary day.

  At the beginning of October 1492, Henry launched an expedition against France, both to protect his former refuge of Brittany from possible annexation by the French and to punish France’s support for Perkin. Unsurprisingly, Margaret Beaufort made a major financial contribution to the campaign. As it turned out, though, Henry spent only a brief time across the Channel; like Edward years before, he was happy to be bought off by a sizable French pension. But before he left for France and a possible fight, while putting his affairs in order, he did acknowledge that Elizabeth of York’s finances were “insufficient to maintain the Queen’s dignity,” giving her reversion rights to her grandmother’s property whenever Cecily Neville would at last die.

  Elizabeth of York was left as her mother had been left when Edward IV too went to a French war, and again government was nominally vested in her six-year-old son. Arthur was at Westminster while Elizabeth seems to have been with her other children at Eltham, the site of what was becoming the royal nursery for all her younger children. Within easy reach of London, the palace was an old favorite of her father’s and near her own favorite residence of Greenwich. But her absence from Westminster at this moment shows that Elizabeth of York did not have even the limited powers that had been invested in Elizabeth Woodville long before. Nor did Margaret Beaufort, presumably; the times were changing and not, for half a century yet, in favor of a woman’s authority.

  But women still had other avenues of influence open to them, as was demonstrated in November 1492 when a new major player appeared in the Perkin Warbeck story. It was, predictably, Margaret of Burgundy, who some believed had been behind Perkin from the very start, but who now met him openly. The Low Countries had, despite Maximilian’s accord with Henry, never ceased to be a refuge for Henry’s enemies. Nor had Margaret ceased to have contact with Ireland and Scotland, those springboards for an English invasion. She had, indeed, been planning to take the battle to the Tudors—spreading the rumors a prince had survived—even before Perkin publicly appeared.

  Perkin was, it seems, exactly the sort of weapon that Margaret of Burgundy was looking for to avenge her brother Richard and their house of York. Vergil said that she had found the boy herself; he was a suitable candidate for instruction. Bacon wrote that she had long had spies out to look for “handsome and graceful youths to make Plantagenets.” The French king told the Scottish that Perkin had been “preserved many years secretly” by Margaret. In a letter to the pope, begging for recognition of her “nephew’s” claims, Margaret herself supported her petition with a garbled version of a story from the first book of Kings, in which the prince Joash is snatched from harm to be brought up secretly in the house of an aunt.

  Margaret, indeed, may have been convinced of Perkin’s legitimacy. Whatever those in other countries believed, Perkin had been welcomed in Burgundy as a prince and as Margaret’s close kin. Indeed, Vergil wrote that Margaret received him “as though he had been revived from the dead . . . so great was her pleasure that the happiness seemed to have disturbed the balance of her mind.” Margaret wrote to Queen Isabella in Spain that when Perkin appeared in Burgundy, she had at once recognized him as her nephew. She had been told of his existence when he was in Ireland but had then thought the tale “ravings and dreams,” until in France he had been identified by men she sent who would have recognized him “as easily as his mothe
r or his nurse.” When Margaret herself at last met him, she said, “I recognised him as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday or the day before. . . . He did not have just one or another sign of resemblance, but so many and so particular that hardly one person in ten, in a hundred or even in a thousand might be found who would have marks of the same kind.” However ardent they were, Margaret’s claims, of course, need to be taken with a hefty grain of salt; she had last seen the actual Duke of York in England when he was a child, some dozen years before.

  Margaret seems to have used no such caution in her embrace of Perkin. “I indeed for my part, when I gazed on this only male Remnant of our family—who had come through so many perils and misfortunes—was deeply moved,” she wrote to Isabella ecstatically, “and out of this natural affection, into which both necessity and the rights of blood were drawing me, I embraced him as my only nephew and my only son.” It was perhaps emotionally important that she would now, after Elizabeth Woodville’s death, have been the prince’s only mother. She intended—as the Latin is translated—to nourish and cherish him. The language was that one might use for a young child.