Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Page 32

  It was even suggested at the time that Perkin was Margaret of Burgundy’s actual, illegitimate, son. In 1495 Maximilian had apparently said so, and Maximilian was close to Margaret. This may well have been just another example of a man using a woman’s reputation as an expendable tool of political expediency, and the suggestion has to be put in the context both of earlier slurs on her reputation and of the regularity with which such slurs were cast upon a woman who transgressed in any way. But the time of a pregnancy, later historians have suggested, would have been in 1473, when she had disappeared for two months to the palace of Ten-Noode, commonly used for recuperative purposes. If the allegations were true, Margaret, of course, could have simply declared the bastard to be her husband’s child—but that option would obviously have been unavailable if she and her husband were both aware that a lack of physical relations between them, in the right period of time, made this an impossibility. It must go down as another mystery.

  If Perkin Warbeck was truly a Plantagenet, there is, of course, a possibility that Elizabeth of York would pick up on their family connection—but Elizabeth, who must have seen him in person, though not necessarily at close quarters, appears never to have commented publicly (unless her kindness to Katherine Gordon can be interpreted as a tacit comment). Indeed, she seems to have continued to stand firmly by her husband. On October 11 at Woodstock, the family certainly put on a good, united, display for the visiting Venetian envoy, who found Elizabeth “at the end of the hall, dressed in cloth of gold,” with Margaret on one side of her and Prince Henry on the other.

  Margaret Beaufort, meanwhile, was still traveling incessantly with the king. In the summer of 1498, mother and son were together at London, Westminster, Sheen, and Windsor (where Margaret ordered brooches for her grandchildren), then on a tour of eastern counties. Her house was now a gathering place. Henry Parker, her carver as a teenager, remembered how, when serving her at New Year’s, he had twenty-five knights following behind him. “In her hall from nine of the clock till it was seven of the clock at night as fast as one table was up another was set, no poor man was denied at that said feast of Christmas if he were of any honesty.” It was an almost royal liberality. Her household had its lighter side. She employed a fool named Skyp, for whom high-heeled shoes had to be bought, and “Reginald the idiot.” She would give money to visiting dancers, and she would have a “house of boughs” built, one April, in which she could dine. Once she paid a man to go on pilgrimage for her—because she herself was too busy playing cards.

  In 1498 the ongoing negotiations for a marriage between Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon showed how far into the club of European royalty the Tudors had come. Elizabeth herself wrote to Queen Isabella, her “cousin and dearest relation,” wishing her “health and the most prosperous increase of her desires”; she described Catherine as “our common daughter.”

  Elizabeth’s own initiative apart, the details of the match between Arthur and Catherine of Aragon had also been a much-cited instance of she and her mother-in-law working together. In July 1498, the Spanish ambassador reported, “The Queen and the mother of the King wish that the Princess of Wales [Catherine] should always speak French with the Princess Margaret [the daughter of Mary of Burgundy, raised in France] who is now in Spain, in order to learn the language, and to be able to converse in it when she comes to England. This is necessary, because these ladies do not understand Latin, and much less, Spanish. They also wish that the Princess of Wales should accustom herself to drink wine. The water of England is not drinkable, and even if it were, the climate would not allow the drinking of it.” In the letter, Margaret and Elizabeth speak as if with one voice, commanding from a position of greater unity and cohesion than they perhaps had enjoyed in the earlier years of Elizabeth’s queenship.

  Not all the potential royal marriage arrangements, however, were going as planned. Also in 1498, the Spanish envoy de Ayala was reporting to Ferdinand and Isabella that a marriage between the Scottish king and Henry’s daughter had many “inconveniences.” The English king said that his wife, Elizabeth, and her mother-in-law joined forces to protect their daughter and granddaughter Margaret, who “has not yet completed the ninth year of her age, and is so delicate and weak [feminina] that she must be married much later than other young ladies. Thus it would be necessary to wait at least another nine years.” Besides his own doubts, Henry said, “The Queen and my mother are very much against this marriage. They say if the marriage were concluded, we should be obliged to send the Princess directly to Scotland, in which case they fear the King of Scots would not wait, but injure her, and endanger her health.” If her granddaughter and namesake took after Margaret Beaufort in stature, the elder lady was clearly determined the child should not share her fate. And as with the instructions concerning Catherine of Aragon, both Margaret and Elizabeth of York seemed to be reconciled, to a degree, by their common interests.

  The year 1498 also saw an attempt by Perkin Warbeck to escape. Vergil wrote that friends pushed him into it, and his wife, Katherine Gordon, may have urged it—but it is also possible that he had been lured into it by servants of King Henry, anxious now (since the threat represented by Perkin’s continued existence was concerning the parents of Catherine of Aragon and proving a hindrance to the Spanish match) to have an excuse to do away with him. Afterward, he was kept under much stricter conditions and indeed moved to the Tower—an ill portent for the debunked prince.

  Perkin’s incarceration in the Tower was shortly followed by the arrival of a trade delegation from Burgundy, headed by the Bishop of Cambrai and bearing (so said the Spanish ambassador) a formal apology to King Henry from Margaret, perhaps humbling herself in a last throw to get clemency for her protégé. The bishop asked if he might see the young man. When taxed with having deceived his benefactress, Perkin “swore to God that Duchess Madame Margaret knew as well as himself that he was not the son of King Edward.” The Spanish reported that Henry wanted to proceed against the duchess, but that Philip of Burgundy and his new wife (Juana, a sister of Catherine of Aragon) would not allow it. If Margaret was a mother of sorts to Perkin, she had played that part, too, to Philip, and now Burgundy’s ruler stood by her.

  At the end of February 1499, Elizabeth of York gave birth to another son at Greenwich. Margaret Beaufort was again the godmother, making generous presents to the midwife and nurses and a christening gift worth one hundred pounds. But maybe some frailty in the baby, Edmund (who would die some sixteen months later), was allied to some concern over the state of his mother’s health. The Spanish envoy wrote to his monarchs that “there had been much fear that the life of the Queen would be in danger, but the delivery, contrary to expectation, has been easy. The christening was very splendid, and the festivities such as though an heir to the Crown had been born.” It is possible that Henry and Elizabeth here decided—having, as it seemed, the heir and two spares—to settle for what family they had. After Edmund’s birth, Elizabeth’s pregnancies ceased—for the moment, at least.

  With their brood of robust children, Elizabeth and Henry had laid an auspicious foundation for the new Tudor dynasty. In 1499 the great Renaissance scholar Erasmus was taken by his friend Thomas More to visit the royal nursery at Eltham. He described what he found: nine-year-old Henry (“already with a certain royal demeanour”), flanked on his right by eleven-year-old Margaret, and “on the left Mary was playing, a child of four. Edmund was an infant in arms.” It sounds as solid a family group as, a generation before, the York family—although, as in the York family, the eldest son had been drawn apart, to live outside his mother’s direct care. Prince Arthur in distant Wales had his own household, with all the tutors necessary to train him to be a king.

  With the threats from pretenders receding, it did seem as though the Tudors were breaking through into a new era of stability. Perhaps now Margaret Beaufort felt she could safely turn her attention elsewhere, to the task of shoring up other, more immediately practicable, dimensions of the regime.
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  In 1499 to 1500, Margaret spent more than a hundred pounds on a new series of buildings against the gates of her principal residence, Collyweston, in Northamptonshire: a council house, a chamber where those coming in legal suits could receive attention without impinging on the domestic side of the household itself, and a prison. Margaret Beaufort’s house was becoming not only a palace—with a jewel house and a presence chamber, a library, and pleasure grounds—but an administrative center for the king’s authority in the Midlands and in the North.

  In earlier reigns, a measure of control in the North had been delegated by Edward IV to his brother Richard and by Richard to his nephew John. But Henry VII was an only child, and in the absence of other near relations, he turned, as so often before, to his mother. Her task may have been different from the one given to those men and soldiers, but no one can doubt that Margaret’s was the ultimate authority in deciding the fate of every litigant who came before her council, whether it was a question of money owed between individuals or alleged disrespectful remarks made about the Tudor dynasty. She made a powerful and lasting impression. In the early sixteenth century, and again in the early seventeenth, debates in the Inns of Court in London cited Margaret’s example as suggesting that a feme sole could, through royal commission, be made a justice of the peace; the king’s attorney declared that he had seen “many arbitraments” made by her.

  With men like the old “Kingmaker,” Earl of Warwick, and Lord Hastings gone, power in the Midlands had fallen largely into the hands of the Stanley family. But now the Stanleys were proving themselves dubiously trustworthy—with Sir William Stanley having thrown in his lot with the recent rebellion and been executed for his pains—despite being in-laws to the king’s mother and despite having made the decisive contribution at the battle that swept the Tudors into power.

  Henry needed someone on whom he could completely rely. That may be—partly—why in 1499 Margaret Beaufort was able to take another step toward independence. At the beginning of the year, with the permission of her husband, Stanley, the Earl of Derby, she undertook a vow of chastity (technically, stating it as a “purpose,” since to do such a thing in her husband’s lifetime was unheard of and might, surely, seem to counteract the other vows she had taken in matrimony). It would not have been an unusual choice for a widow; an increasing number, in these years, were choosing to become vowesses, undergoing a ceremony of cloaking and veiling before a bishop, taking a vow of chastity, but without going to live in a convent, taking vows of poverty and obedience, or renouncing the goods and concerns of the lay state. But for a woman with a living husband, Margaret’s action was unusual to a degree.

  She was now basing her establishment clearly in Collyweston rather than in Lathom or Knowsley, the houses she had shared with her husband. There is no evidence as to how Stanley felt about this, but although there was no actual breach—rooms were reserved for him at Collyweston—he also was in no position to resist. Not only was Margaret’s move a recognition of a state of affairs that had probably long existed, but it was also to some degree a matter of state, since Margaret’s new administrative role required that she should be associated only with those of certain loyalty.

  Also from this year, instead of signing her letters “M Richmond,” Margaret took to signing them with the quasi-regal “Margaret R”—the R, of course, capable of being interpreted either as Richmond or as Regina. A letter to Henry, which has tentatively been dated to January 14, 1499,* is indeed so signed, by “your faithful true bedewoman, and humble mother, Margaret R.” But even if Margaret at this point in her life did feel able to claim a higher title in her own right, there was certainly no diminution in the ardently expressed devotion that breathes from the document itself—addressed to “My own sweet and most dear King and all my worldly joy.” The bulk of the letter is concerned with “my matter which so long hath hanged”—a decades-old attempt to extract from the French ducal house of Orléans a sum of ransom money the Beauforts believed was still owed to Margaret’s grandfather. But there was still time among the necessary pieces of information and instruction to assure Margaret’s “dear heart” that if she should finally get any of the money, “there shall never be that or any good I have but it shall be yours. . . . And Our Lord give you as long good life, health and joy, as your most noble heart can desire, with as hearty blessings as our Lord hath given me the power to give you.”

  In May 1499, the proxy marriage between Arthur and Catherine of Aragon had taken place, but Catherine’s parents, still worried about any threat to the English throne from “doubtful royal blood,” were reluctant to send their daughter to that country. Nor, all too visibly, were all the old York interests reconciled to the Tudor dynasty: in July 1499, Suffolk—the younger son to Edward IV’s sister Elizabeth and younger brother to the Earl of Lincoln, who had died fighting for Lambert Simnel—decamped abroad. He was persuaded back, and just as well, maybe. Bacon would later say that although Suffolk went to Flanders, Margaret of Burgundy was growing weary of her attempts to replace Henry. Presumably, therefore, she gave him less than a wholehearted welcome. But shortly afterward, another young man appeared claiming to be Clarence’s son the Earl of Warwick. Henry realized his only safety lay in ridding himself, once and for all, of any such threat.

  On November 23, 1499, Perkin Warbeck was executed, as shortly afterward was the real Warwick, Queen Elizabeth’s cousin; his death was a political necessity not for anything he had actually done, but for what had been, and still might be, done in his name. Henry said the executions were necessary “because the Duchess Margaret of Burgundy and the King of the Romans [Maximilian] would not stop believing that Perkin was the true and legitimate son of King Edward, and Duke of York; and the duchess had given him so much authority and credit, that it had to be done.” The fact was, of course, that it had to be done to facilitate the Spanish marriage, which, it was hoped, would move the Tudor dynasty into the next century, but would not come off with either Perkin or the hapless Warwick—perhaps the most innocent victim of these disputes—still providing a rallying point for opposition to the Crown.

  To Margaret in Burgundy, Henry’s words must have cut deep—as, of course, they were meant to do. She had lost the young man whom she had once considered her nephew and son, and Henry claimed to have executed him because of her. What’s more, with Perkin had died Margaret’s hopes for reinstalling a Yorkist on the throne of England. For a woman who had spent so much of her life looking northward across the Channel, it would have been a devastating blow.

  At some point in that year of 1499, Margaret commissioned a painting, derived from Rogier van der Weyden’s painting of Christ’s body being lifted down from the cross. One figure bears Margaret’s long-nosed face—she is the Mary Magdalene lamenting at the feet of the deposed Christ, her crimson velvet cloak and cloth-of-gold robe caught by a belt trimmed with daisies—marguerites—and ornamented by a white rose. Indeed, her whole posture seems designed to draw attention to the flower, the white rose of York, which had become Perkin’s symbol in his royal—if perhaps assumed—identity.

  _______________

  *After the queen’s death—and the funeral at which she laid the fourth pall, right after the queen’s sisters—Henry was said to keep Katherine so close it was rumored they had now married. Remaining in England after Henry’s death, she made three more marriages with English gentlemen, retaining a particular friendship for the daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s sister Cecily.

  *Many letters of the period have the day and the month, but no year.

  24

  LIKE A QUEEN INTER ME

  yet like

  A queen and daughter to a king inter me.

  THE LIFE OF KING HENRY THE EIGHTH, 4.2

  As the new century dawned, a new generation of Tudor royalty was moving to the fore. Among Henry VII and Elizabeth of York’s children, Prince Arthur was now thirteen and even Margaret ten, fast approaching the age of marriageability. While Elizabeth’s childbearing seeme
d to have ceased, for the moment at least, the increased geographical distance of Margaret Beaufort from the court may also well have come as a relief to the queen.

  In May 1500, Elizabeth went with Henry to Calais (the only part of France the English still held) on a forty-day trip. It was partly to escape the plague (especially bad that year) and partly a matter of diplomacy; they were going to a meeting with Philip of Burgundy. They sailed on May 8 and arrived the same night. The king took ushers, chaplains, squires, herald, clerks, grooms, pages, as well as guards—and so did his queen.

  A month later, the royal couple met Philip at St. Peter’s Church outside Calais’s walls, especially decorated for the occasion with tapestries and scented flowers strewn on the floor. Philip’s recent marriage to Catherine of Aragon’s elder sister Juana had forged a new tie between Burgundy and the new English dynasty. The Spanish envoy reported that “the King and the Archduke had a very long conversation, in which the Queen afterwards joined. The interview was very solemn, and attended with great splendour.” The royal couple landed back in Dover on June 16, but any pleasure they felt at returning home would be short-lived. On June 19, their baby son, Edmund, died at Hatfield, and the heartbreakingly tiny coffin had to be carried through the London streets to a royal burial in Westminster Abbey.

  Margaret Beaufort, probably in one of her own residences, must only later have heard the news. There is, for once, no record of Margaret having joined the Calais party. The Spanish ambassador had commented on the speed with which the trip was arranged, so perhaps Margaret was simply at Collyweston, too far away to join the party, and in any case outside the plague zone. But if there was any element of her being left behind to “mind the shop,” as it were, she may nonetheless have been determined not to be wholly left out.