FOURTEEN
I swear, ’tis better to be lowly born,
And range with humble livers in content,
Than to be perked up in a glist’ring grief,
And wear a golden sorrow.
Henry VIII, 2.3
The saga of Clarence’s death had demonstrated the divisions in the ruling York family, and at the same time had drawn attention to the important and at times divisive role played in English affairs by Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy.
The life she had been leading in her widowhood was, on a day-to-day level, a good one, despite the turmoils that had followed Duke Charles’s death in 1477. Burgundy was replete with the profits of trade: Margaret’s new home would be rich in tapestries, a single example of which could cost a wealthy landowner a whole year’s income, and in books. In tapestries and other depictions Margaret is seen at falconry and the hunt; one, entitled The Bear Hunt, shows her riding side-saddle on a horse led by a groom.
As her stepdaughter Mary’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian bore fruit, Margaret stood godmother to her children. Her dower lands included a prosperous and well-maintained collection of villages and towns. She chose to make her main residence at Malines in Brabant, purchasing a number of adjoining houses which she extended and rebuilt in red brick decorated with white stripes, with a balcony on which she could display herself to the people. She commissioned gardens designed to be seen from her palace windows, as well as a tennis court, a shooting gallery and hot baths. She had a chair of state, in the vast council chamber, upholstered in fine black velvet; and a study hung with violet taffeta, its beautiful books and manuscripts protected by a wrought-iron grille. She had her volumes on chess, her knives with handles of ebony and ivory, her knight of honour and her doctors, her dogs, her horses and her maker of preserves.
All the same, it seems likely she had an abiding sense of grievance – not least about her brother’s failure ever fully to pay her dowry. And there was a hint of mysticism about her religious feeling, despite the crusading practicality with which she tackled the reform of religious orders in her domain. In an odd echo of the dream that Margaret Beaufort once claimed to have had, Margaret of Burgundy figured herself as visited in her chamber by the risen Jesus. The scene is described in a book written at her request soon after her marriage; she had it painted, too.21 In the vaulted bedchamber, by her blue and scarlet bed, Margaret kneels fully dressed on a carpet, waiting to kiss the bleeding hand extended to her.
A ‘beatific and uncovered vision’, He was, naked under His crimson cloak, displaying His wounds, instructing her to make ready the bed of her heart in which she was to lie with Him ‘in purest chastity and pure charity’, ready to receive His instruction that she should look well upon the fires of hell and the glory of God. Christ had entered her bedchamber so quietly that even her greyhound did not wake; but she was so wholly convinced of His coming that she kissed the covers of her bed His body had touched until the colour was worn away. The same fanaticism could also surface in her secular affairs, skilled and competent though she might usually be.
Now, in 1480, Margaret returned to England to encourage her brother in his goodwill towards Burgundy, to turn him away from the French, and to negotiate a match between Edward’s daughter Anne and Mary of Burgundy’s little son. The magnificence of the visit can be summed up in the lavish clothes and other textiles that were ordered; two pieces of arras [tapestry] ‘of the story of Paris and Elyn [Helen]’ to help furnish a house for the visitor’s use; 47 yards of ‘green sarsenet’ garnished with green ribbon for curtains; and ‘great large feather beds’. A hundred servants were given new ‘jackets of woollen cloth of murrey [purple-red] and blue;’ the Yorkist colours. Edward Woodville, sailing across the Channel to escort Margaret back home, was given a yard of blue velvet and a yard of purple for a jacket; the twenty-four men who rowed her up the Thames in the king’s barge after she disembarked from the Falcon at Gravesend sported jackets trimmed with white roses; an embroiderer called Peter Lambard was paid a penny for each small rose. The horses Edward gave her were harnessed in green velvet, embellished with gold and silver, and the reins were of crimson velvet.
Few princesses returned to their native land unless, like Marguerite of Anjou, disgraced and desperate or, in their widowhood, returned as surplus to the requirements of their marital country. This was different; whatever her brother may have thought, as he contemplated arranging for her a fresh match in Scotland, Margaret was here to carry out the agenda of her adopted land. As she was rowed upstream and into London, past Greenwich, round the great loop of the river, the city itself began to come into view.
Streets where the shopkeepers sold everything from silks to strawberries; hot sheep’s feet to Paris thread; peascods and pie; where an Italian visitor two decades later would write that in the fifty-two goldsmith’s shops in one road alone there was such a magnificence of silver vessels that in Rome, Venice and Florence together you might not find its equivalent. The Tower, London Bridge with its tall rows of houses, Baynard’s Castle came into view, and further ahead, past another green burst of country, the spires and turrets of Westminster: this was her own old home city.
A house had been prepared for her near her mother’s residence of Baynard’s Castle, as well as an apartment in the palace at Greenwich, her home in the first few years of her brother’s reign. Edward gave a banquet at Greenwich in honour of her and their mother; Richard even came down from the battles with Scotland to see her. Margaret’s older sister Elizabeth visited, too. Perhaps their presence made the absence of Clarence the more poignant; perhaps, too, there was some awkwardness in the adjustment of positions and protocols now that the youngest daughter of the house of York had become the dowager duchess of a foreign power. But the reforging of relationships would be important in the next reigns.
The celebrations went well; the diplomacy was more edgy. If he yielded to Margaret’s persuasions, Edward stood to lose his French pension and that flattering match between the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth and the Dauphin. As far back as August 1478 Edward had been pushing for Elizabeth’s French marriage to go ahead, but at that time Louis was less than keen; a son and heir’s marriage was too important a tool of diplomacy to be squandered lightly. So it was surely no coincidence that Louis now chose this moment not only to send over a delegation with Edward’s annuity of 50,000 crowns but to offer an additional 15,000 a year for Elizabeth until she and the Dauphin were actually wed.
The match that Margaret was offering may have been all in the family, but the bargaining was nevertheless keen. Edward asked whether Burgundy would compensate him, if promising his daughter Anne cost him his French pension; he also proposed that Anne should come without a dowry. Margaret had to send home for Maximilian and Mary’s opinion, and the result was a compromise. Edward would allow English archers to reinforce the Burgundian troops, and would declare war on France if Louis did not restore Margaret’s lands by Easter the following year. Burgundy would pay his pension if the French withdrew it. Anne would bring a dowry, albeit only half the one hoped for, but Burgundy would pay her an annuity until the marriage could be finalised. Margaret, meanwhile, gave her four-year-old niece a wedding ring (‘in the style of a circlet with eight fine diamonds and a central rose of three hanging pearls’) and a chain on which – until her fingers grew – it could be hung.
But no sooner had Margaret confirmed the details than she received word that Maximilian had negotiated his own truce with the French, doubtless using the current English rapprochement as leverage. She feared that Maximilian’s duplicity would anger her brother – in fact he took it with the calm of one who would have done exactly the same thing. Back in Burgundy, she felt she would have to explain to Maximilian why she had not been able to agree better terms. One can only hope she did not take the double-dealing personally, but merely as evidence that a woman’s diplomatic work is never done.
The visit ended as it had begun, however, on a note of personal happiness. Edward accompanied Margaret as she rode out of London, on her way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St Thomas à Becket. Before sailing from Dover she spent a week at the Kent estate of Anthony Woodville, talking books and philosophy. Margaret had sent William Caxton, who had been her financial adviser in Bruges, to England a few years earlier, and in 1476 Anthony had become his patron, translating books for him to print. A stream of works emerged from Caxton’s press in the yard of Westminster Abbey: Chaucer, Malory’s stories of King Arthur, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, The Mirror of the World, Higdon’s Polychronicon, The Golden Legend, Aesop’s Fables, The Life of Our Lady.
After this agreeable intellectual interlude Edward’s ‘well-beloved sister’, as he wrote to Maximilian, went home. She would continue to look across the Channel, as one of Edward’s successors would discover all too painfully. But, for the moment, England seemed established in comparative tranquillity.
The turn of the decade had seen business as usual for King Edward and his family. Elizabeth Woodville was now well established as a wielder of influence and distributor of patronage; endowing, for example, a chapel dedicated to St Erasmus in Westminster Abbey. The powerful group of traders known as the Merchant Adventurers had cause to be grateful for the ‘very good effort’ she put into helping them negotiate a reduction in the subsidy demanded of them by the king. Intercession had been made by several nobles, their records noted, ‘but especially by the Queen’. It is a useful reminder that these women were consumers and negotiators; patrons as well as parents; readers and (on their own estates) rulers. Even the young Princess Elizabeth had long had her own lands. On 4 November 1467 the Calendar of the Patent Rolls records a ‘Grant for life to the King’s daughter the Princess Elizabeth of the manor of Great Lynford, county of Buckingham’.
Some time in 1477 Elizabeth Woodville had given birth to a third son, George, who died in infancy. Her sixth daughter, Katherine, was born in 1479 at Eltham, a favourite residence, and her last child, too, was born there in November 1480. This daughter was named after St Bridget, the former court lady turned religieuse who founded her own order – a path of life that would come to seem prophetic in the family. When Bridget was christened at Eltham Margaret Beaufort was asked to carry her in the formal procession – a mark of high esteem. The godmothers were the baby’s grandmother Cecily Neville, and her elder sister Elizabeth of York.
Today the Great Hall at Eltham built by Edward, with its hammerbeam roof and its discreet ‘archers’ gallery’, where a bodyguard with drawn bows would stand facing the crowd as king and queen dined, can still be seen. And though their walls are now only ruins, it is possible to trace the pattern of the surprisingly tiny rooms Elizabeth would have used when she visited her children here – for Eltham was always the first choice as a nursery palace, and would remain so when Elizabeth of York came to rear her own children. It was a fit setting for a happy family.
And such the king’s family had been throughout the 1470s; Crowland described the court as filled with ‘those most sweet and beautiful children’. A visitor to the court in 1482 described the young Richard, Duke of York as singing with his mother and one of his sisters, playing at sticks and with a two-handed sword. There had been sadnesses too, of course, as when in November 1481 Richard’s eight-year-old bride Anne Mowbray died, followed six months later by Elizabeth Woodville’s fourteen-year-old daughter Mary, recently betrothed to the king of Denmark. But by and large, even after the new decade dawned, glimpses of the family are cheerful ones. There was a visit to Oxford, where they were joined by the king’s sister Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk. A set of signatures in an early fourteenth-century manuscript of an Arthurian romance – ‘E Wydevyll’ on the back, and ‘Elysabeth, the kyngs dowther’ and ‘Cecyl the kynges dowther’ on the flyleaf – suggests that Queen Elizabeth’s daughters may have been reading the book she had once owned as a girl.
A stained-glass window in Canterbury Cathedral depicts the royal family diminished slightly in number, but still in all its glory. It can be dated to 1482 or later by the fact that Cecily is shown as the king’s second daughter: until her elder sister Mary died earlier that year she had been the third. The king and queen, each kneeling at a prayer desk, face each other in the two central panels, with their children, similarly posed, lined up in order and dwindling size behind them. The two surviving boys have each a panel and a desk to themselves; the five surviving girls have to cram themselves into a matching pair.
The boys, like their parents, are garbed in royal purple cloaks over robes of cloth of gold, collared in ermine. The girls wear matching purple gowns girdled in gold, with flashes of jewels and fur at neck and hem, and their long yellow hair hangs down their backs. All are crowned or coroneted, all have an open book on the prayer desk before them; this was a family who knelt only to God. The panels would once have flanked an image of the Crucifixion under a depiction of the seven holy joys of the Virgin Mary, before the window became the target of Cromwell’s wreckers in 1642.
After the great reburial ceremony at Fotheringhay, it seems that the first daughter, Elizabeth of York, had been considered old enough to join her mother on other ceremonial occasions. In the Garter procession that marked the feast of St George in April 1477, the records note, the queen came to mass ‘on horseback in a murrey gown of Garters. Item: the lady Elizabeth, the King’s eldest daughter, in a gown of the same livery.’
Her later tastes and abilities indicate something of Elizabeth of York’s education. Her Latin was not fluent – she would later request that her prospective daughter-in-law Katherine of Aragon be taught French before her arrival, since English ladies did not usually understand the other tongue – yet she did learn to write, not by any means a given even for ladies of the highest rank. But Elizabeth’s was an educated family: her father collected books, and her uncle Anthony’s literary interests seem to some degree to have been shared by the wider Woodville clan. Later Elizabeth would hunt and shoot, keep her own musicians, play at games of chance and sew expertly, all of which were expected of ladies. What was perhaps less common was the degree to which Edward’s daughters learned to fill their imaginations with the world of written thought and story.
Of course high-born children grew up with Bible stories and the lives of saints, as well as tales from the allegories and spectacles of pageantry. In The Treasury of the City of Ladies Christine de Pizan had urged that: ‘A young girl should also especially venerate Our Lady, St Catherine, and all virgins, and if she can read, eagerly read their biographies.’ But Elizabeth and her sisters would have had an unusual opportunity to get their information and story direct. Their uncle Anthony had translated the Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers and the Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pizan; their mother too was a patron of Caxton’s.22 Elizabeth would have got to know the Arthurian stories, with their wildly mixed messages about a woman’s love and a queen’s duty, their tales of Guinevere and the other heroines maying and feasting, shamed and repenting. (Such books were dangerous, declared a contemporary at the Castilian court, ‘causing weak-breasted women to fall into libidinous errors and commit sins they would not otherwise commit’.) Elizabeth and her sister Cecily also wrote their names on a French story of the world and the funeral rites of an emperor of the Turks: here are mosques and minarets, slaves and strange palaces.
But underneath these pleasures of daily life it became apparent as the 1480s moved on that Elizabeth of York’s future was less secure than it had seemed; and perhaps her early experience of uncertainty influenced her sometimes controversial actions in the time ahead. For in these years King Edward’s diplomatic affairs – in which the royal children were such useful pawns – were going less than smoothly.
When the Prince of Wales was betrothed to Anne of Brittany, Louis of France struck back by encouraging the Scots to attack northern England. This was what compelled Edward, in 1481, to excuse himself to the Pope for not joining a crusade against the Turks, on the grounds that ‘the acts of our treacherous neighbours’ kept him fully occupied during ‘this tempestuous period’. But things were about to get worse: in March 1482 Mary of Burgundy died after a riding accident, an event that gave her subjects the opportunity to decide that they preferred peaceful relations with the French to Mary’s husband and his English treaty.
On her deathbed Mary begged her stepmother Margaret to protect her two surviving children, which at first looked like a case of helping Mary’s widower Maximilian keep them in a country he proposed to rule himself. This, however, would soon prove impossible: although the little boy Philip remained largely in Margaret’s care, after Christmas that year news reached England that Mary’s three-year-old daughter was to be sent to France to be married to the Dauphin, who – as had so often been threatened before – would thus be reneging on his betrothal to Elizabeth of York. At seventeen, comparatively late for a royal girl to remain unmarried, Elizabeth would have been old enough to feel both the slight and the uncertainty.
Edward’s marital plans for his daughters had not been going well. In October 1482 he had had to call off Cecily’s arranged marriage with the Scottish prince. The betrothal between Anne and the Burgundian heir Philip, too, would founder on Edward’s parsimony over Anne’s dowry, which allowed Philip’s father Maximilian to abandon it for a better match elsewhere. In this difficult diplomatic climate, Edward suggested for his eldest daughter a match that would once have seemed most unlikely – marriage to Henry Tudor, still living in exile in Brittany.
An agreement had already been drawn up to return Henry Tudor home, ‘to be in the grace and favour of the king’s highness’, and to enjoy a portion of the lands recently left by the death of his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort’s mother. And Edward mooted also the possibility of a marriage that would attach Henry to the Yorkist family.
Holinshed says that such a marriage had been suggested several years before. At that point the offer was probably only tactical; and when the ruler of Brittany was persuaded to hand over his principal pawn he may well (as Vergil would later have it) have been handing ‘the sheep to the wolf’. Henry had been entrusted to the English envoys but – warned, says the Tudor poet Bernard André, by his mother, who had scented a deception – when he reached St Malo to board ship for England he feigned illness, slipped into a church and claimed sanctuary, from where he was able to slip back to a remorseful Duke Francis in Brittany.
But now times had changed. With the new alliance between France and Burgundy, with the danger that England might once again be at war with the French, King Edward may have found the thought of Henry Tudor – a potential English claimant – as a loose cannon at the French court too dangerous to contemplate. To Margaret Beaufort this new plan may well have seemed a reasonable advancement for her son. Her acquiescence may have represented an acceptance of the status quo – that Henry’s Lancastrian claim had no immediate prospect of bearing fruit. But, as had happened so many times before, events were about to overthrow all plans.
Edward’s way of life had long been intemperate enough to affect his health. Mancini wrote that: ‘In food and drink he was most immoderate: it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more.’ He had now ‘grown fat in the loins, whereas previously he had been not only tall but rather lean and very active’. What is more, the legendarily beautiful and loving Elizabeth Woodville always had to suffer her husband’s flagrant infidelity: ‘He pursued with no discrimination the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly: however he took none by force. He overcame all by money and promises and having conquered them, he dismissed them.’ Quarrels over mistresses, Mancini added, would create a major rift between Elizabeth’s eldest son Dorset and the king’s great friend Lord Hastings, an admirer of the king’s favourite mistress Jane Shore. The whole question of Edward’s relations with women, licensed or unlicensed, would become political dynamite. But his mistresses were important in another sense as well: the toll the king’s self-indulgence was taking on his health.
At Candlemas in early February 1483 the king and queen went in procession from St Stephen’s Chapel to Westminster Hall. It looked – and was meant to – as if the royal family were here to stay, in prosperity and stability. But that spring Edward fell sick. Mancini said that he had been out fishing in a small boat and allowed the damp cold to strike his vitals; Commynes believed that it was apoplexy following a surfeit. Some even put it down to chagrin at the failure of his diplomacy. The English accounts are all sixteenth-century and inevitably include the suspicion of poison, but Hall says that since the French campaign of 1475 Edward had suffered from a fever ‘which turned to an incurable quarten’. Whatever the cause, on 9 April he died, at the age of just forty. John Skelton wrote:
Where is now my conquest and victory?
Where is my riches and my royal array?
Where be my coursers and my horses high?
Where is my mirth, my solace, and my play?
As vanity, to naught all is wandered away.
O lady Bess, long for me may ye call!
For now we are parted until doomsday;
But love ye that Lord that is sovereign of all.
If Edward IV had lived longer, the events that followed his death would surely have unfolded differently. The young Prince Edward, his heir, might not have been perceived as so dangerously under Woodville influence. There would not have been the same shock to a country only ten years away from the last throes of civil war and still in recovery from the long-term effects of the minority rule of Henry VI. Mancini noted that Edward IV left two sons, adding: ‘He also left daughters, but they do not concern us.’ It was to prove a poor prophecy. Women’s choices and women’s alliances would play a pivotal part in the years ahead.
The woman who had done most to challenge the patriarchal assumptions of these years had however, now departed. On 25 August 1482, at the Château de Dampierre near Saumur, Marguerite of Anjou had died. She had, according to her Victorian biographer Mary Ann Hookham,23 been visited there by Henry Tudor, whom she urged to continue his struggle against the house of York. Marguerite died poor, as her will recorded. The ‘few goods’ which God and King Louis had allowed her were to be used to pay for her burial: ‘And should my few goods be insufficient to do this, as I believe they are [King Louis took her hunting dogs as the only goods of value], I implore the king meet and pay the outstanding debts as the sole heir of the wealth which I inherited through my father and mother and my other relatives and ancestors.…’ Resentment of her poverty and pride in her lineage are evident here. Her political life had long been over, but she had been one of the most forceful women in a century not short of them.
At the beginning of Richard III, Shakespeare has Marguerite returned from exile like a vengeful ghost to curse Elizabeth Woodville:
Long mayst thou live to wail thy children’s death
And see another, as I see thee now,
Decked in thy rights, as thou art stalled in mine.
Long die thy happy days before thy death,
And after many lengthened hours of grief,
Die neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen.
Perhaps Marguerite’s ghost lived on – in the mind of Richard of Gloucester, for example, eyeing the accession of a twelve-year-old to the throne with all the paranoia of one born into the era of Marguerite’s battles to rule the country for her infant son at the time of Henry VI’s insanity.