EIGHTEEN
The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom,
And Anne my wife hath bid this world good night.
Richard III, 4.3
On 6 January 1485, the English court celebrated the festival of Epiphany with particular splendour. There would have been seasonal rituals such as the burning of an oak log to draw heat back into the earth, together with the licensed revelry of the fools and the more malicious clowning of whichever young courtier had been appointed Lord of Misrule for the day. The king made a point of appearing ‘with his crown’. But it is easy to surmise that Richard was not naturally lively that day.
Crowland wrote that ‘while [Richard] was keeping this festival with remarkable splendour in the great hall … news was brought to him on that very day, from his spies beyond sea, that, notwithstanding the potency and splendour of his royal state, his adversaries would, without question, invade the kingdom during the following summer’. The king’s reaction to certain news at last was to declare that ‘there was nothing that could befall him more desirable, in as much as he imagined that it would put an end to all his doubts and troubles’. But among the other courtiers, the news must have sent a ripple of unease through the party mood.
Perhaps the women of the royal household were trying to keep things merry. Not that Richard’s queen, Anne Neville, can have found it any easier than he. Anne had been in poor health for months, and in the hothouse atmosphere of a palace she could hardly fail to have known that courtiers and diplomats were speculating on what would happen if, as looked increasingly likely, she were to die. She had the company of her elder nieces, who were spending Christmas at court. Buck says that Elizabeth Woodville sent her four younger daughters along to ‘colour’ the appearance of the eldest, Elizabeth of York: ‘[And t]he queen regnant entertained also the young ladies with all her courtesies and gracious caresses, and especially the Lady Elizabeth, whom she used with so much family[arity] and kindness as if she had been her own sister.’ They were, after all, hardly a decade apart in age. ‘But the queen had small joy and little pleasure in the festi[val and] pompous time, because she was sick and was much in languor and [sorrow] for the death of the prince, her dear and only son, and the which grieved her sorely.’
Indeed, Elizabeth’s company must have represented a very mixed pleasure for Anne. At the festivities (where, as the Crowland chronicler disapprovingly relates, ‘far too much attention was given to dancing and gaiety’) ‘vain exchanges of clothing’ took place between Anne and Elizabeth, ‘being of similar colour and shape;23 a thing that caused the people to murmur and the nobles and prelates greatly to wonder thereat’.
All the same, Crowland seems to suggest some point was being made. Despite that official declaration of bastardy, many still regarded Edward IV’s children as the natural inheritors of the throne. It was already being whispered that, if anything were to happen to Anne, a marriage between Richard and Elizabeth would square the circle of inheritance nicely. She was his niece, to be sure, but was there anything a papal dispensation could not legitimise? (And if there were any question over the papal dispensation that had allowed Anne and Richard’s marriage to go ahead, that could provide grounds for an annulment.) It ‘was said by many that the king was bent, either on the anticipated death of the queen taking place, or else, by means of a divorce, for which he supposed he had quite sufficient grounds, on contracting a marriage with the said Elizabeth’. Vergil described it as a plan ‘the most wicked to be spoken of, and the foulest to be committed that ever was heard of’.
At that Epiphany party, it is unlikely that anyone spoke openly of the possibility of such an alliance between Richard and his niece – but rumours were already flying. The marriage would be a severe blow to Henry Tudor. And Richard might have had other incentives, as Anne must miserably have realised. Elizabeth was a buxom eighteen; later in her life the Portuguese ambassador noticed her ‘large breasts’, while a Venetian diplomat called her ‘very handsome’.
‘In the course of a few days after this’, Crowland wrote, ‘the queen fell extremely sick, and her illness was supposed to have increased still more and more, because the king entirely shunned her bed, declaring that it was by the advice of his physicians that he did so. Why enlarge?’ the chronicler asks, maddeningly. But perhaps he trusted his readers to understand the coded message of ‘declaring that …’. It may be that Anne’s illness was infectious – or that Richard wished further to distance himself from her.
Elizabeth’s own supposed feelings were related by the seventeenth-century antiquary George Buck. In 1619, in his History of King Richard the Third, he set down a précis of a letter in which, he said, Elizabeth expressed her passionate longing to marry her uncle. She was, said Buck, writing towards the end of February to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, an influential magnate and once her father’s friend:
First she thanked him for his many courtesies and friendly offices, and then she prayed him as before to be a mediator for her in the cause of the marriage to the king, who, as she writes, was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and in thoughts, in body, and in all. And then she intimated that the better half of February was past, and that she feared the queen would never die. And all these be her own words, written with her own hand, and this is the sum of her letter, whereof I have seen the autograph or original draft under her own hand.
Not only surprising, but damning in several ways:24 the callousness of the fear that Anne would never die, the possible sexual implications of that ‘his … in body, and in all’. But there have long been doubts over Buck. Some have suggested that he could simply (especially when blinded by his prejudices) have misinterpreted a letter that he did indeed see; others that it was not written by Elizabeth, or not written at this juncture and in relation to this match. Indeed, a far less controversial marriage was proposed for Elizabeth very soon afterwards, and the words could be made to fit. At the most extreme, it has even been claimed that the letter was a total invention.25
Buck himself may be the victim of an inadvertent injustice here. Several decades after he wrote his manuscript, his great-nephew (confusingly, also called George Buck) published a version of it. Buck’s modern editor, Arthur Kincaid, has discovered that this branch of the family had a track record of forgery. The surviving manuscript versions of Buck’s original show revisions not only by Buck himself but by his great-nephew: even more importantly, the earliest of them has been very considerably damaged by fire. In an article for the Ricardian journal Kincaid transcribed precisely what was (and was not) left:26
< st she thanked him for his many Curtesies and friendly>
as before in the cause of<
>d then she prayed him ^ to bee a mediator for her to the K<
>ge
whoe (as she wrote) was her onely ioye and her maker in<
in
Worlde, and that she was [in] his, harte, in thoughts in<
and \ in / all, and then she intimated that the better halfe of Ffe<
was paste, and that she feared the Queene would neu<
In other words, the choice of the words ‘body’ and ‘never die’ were inserted by the younger George Buck in the gaps left on the paper, with the goal of producing a sensational and saleable text rather than one of historical accuracy. The gaps mean that the cause in which the recipient was to intercede with the king is unclear – the writer’s marriage to the king, or her marriage to someone else? Kincaid’s own conclusion was that ‘Elizabeth in her letter was referring to a hoped-for marriage – though not necessarily with the king’.
It does not seem wholly impossible that Elizabeth of York should have wanted to marry Richard. There was enough uncertainty in the air for her to be open to conviction that he was not responsible for her brothers’ deaths. Power is an aphrodisiac and this was the destiny for which she had been reared – a chance to come back from the wilderness. There may be a clue in the inscription she wrote on a copy of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy – ‘Loyalte mellye’ or ‘Loyalty binds me.’ It was Richard’s favourite motto. She also wrote, on a copy of the French prose Tristan, ‘sans re[mo]vyr’, ‘without changing’ above her signature, ‘elyzabeth’.fn9 She wrote on the page with the mark that showed it was Richard’s property – but is that enough to show the unchanging loyalty she was expressing was loyalty to Richard? Not really.
Polydore Vergil sees it differently, of course. ‘Richard had kept [Elizabeth] unharmed with a view to marriage. To such a marriage the girl had a singular aversion. Weighed down for this reason by her great grief she would repeatedly exclaim, saying, “I will not thus be married, but, unhappy creature that I am, will rather suffer all the torments which St Catherine is said to have endured for the love of Christ than be united with a man who is the enemy of my family.”’ But Vergil would say that – a quarter of a century later, when he was writing, it was a Tudor age. The words ‘the enemy of my family’ might have applied to Henry as easily as to Richard; and Richard kept Elizabeth’s sisters ‘unharmed’ too, even those who were nearing maturity. What is more, if he wished to keep her away from Henry Tudor all he had to do was marry her to somebody else – not necessarily to himself.
Whatever the truth about Richard’s plans, there were certainly rumours of the possible marriage, if not necessarily of Elizabeth’s complicity. Across the Channel Henry heard them and feared loss of Yorkist support if the two York factions could thus be reunited. Vergil wrote that the stories ‘pinched Henry by the very stomach’, so much so that he began to seek an alternative match. He may have thought first of Elizabeth’s sister Cecily but, hearing tales that Richard had married her off, turned instead to a daughter of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the loyally Yorkist supporter of Edward IV who had cared for him when he was a child. But the message he sent proposing the match, says Vergil, never reached its destination; and in any case he must soon have heard that a marriage between Richard and his niece was no longer a possibility.… Unless, of course, the rumours of the marriage – rumours so discreditable to Richard – had all along been spread by Henry Tudor’s own party.
Anne almost certainly heard the rumours. Over the next few weeks her condition worsened; and the suggestion is that Richard hoped it would do so – even helped the process along. The king, said Hall, ‘complained to divers noble men of the realm, of the unfortunate sterility and barreness of his wife’; he did so especially to the Archbishop of York upon whom he relied to spread the word to Anne, ‘trusting the sequel hereof to take his effect, that she hearing this grudge of her husband, and taking therefore an inward thought, would not long live in this world’. Vergil even says that Anne, hearing the rumours, went to her husband ‘very pensive and sad, and with many tears demanded of him what cause there was why he should determine her death. Hereunto the king, lest that he might seem hard hearted if he should show unto his wife no sign of love, kissing her, made answer lovingly, and comforting her, bade her be of good cheer.’
The reassurance did her little good. On 16 March, during a great eclipse of the sun, Anne died. Since her illness was lingering and possibly infectious, the best modern guess is tuberculosis. But there would be other suspicions, and her death would be linked to that of the princes. Vergil wrote that she died ‘whether she was despatched by sorrowfulness or poison’; Rous that ‘Lady Anne, his queen, he poisoned.’ Commynes wrote that ‘some say he had her killed’, and Hall said: ‘Some think she went her own pace to the grave, while others suspect a grain was given her to quicken her in her journey to her long home.’
Anne was buried on the ninth day after her death – the 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation. She was interred, says Crowland, ‘at Westminster, with no less honours than befitted the interment of a queen’. The absence of a tomb – which conveys, now, an impression of lack of care or lack of ceremony – was almost certainly the result of Richard’s reign having ended before he had had time to commission one. Some six weeks later, after the news had spread across Europe, the Doge of Venice assured Richard that ‘your consort led so religious and catholic a life and was so adorned with goodness, prudence, and excellent morality, as to leave a name immortal’. But it is difficult not to feel that Anne’s life had been a hard one, even by the harsh standards of the fifteenth century.
On 20 March, only four days after Anne’s death, Sir Edward Brampton was sent to Portugal to negotiate a marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king’s sister, the Infanta Joana. The Infanta was not only determinedly religious and averse to marriage, but thirty-three and, for those times, old for child-bearing. It is likely therefore that her appeal was her descent from John of Gaunt – a descent that made her the senior representative of the legitimate Lancastrian line.
The Portuguese council urged Joana that it was her duty to agree, ‘for the concord in the same kingdom of England that will follow from her marriage and union with the king’s party, greatly serving God and bringing honour to herself by uniting as one the party of Lancaster, and York’. It was conscious that, if she refused, Richard might look instead to the next most senior marriageable representative of the Lancastrian line, the Spanish Infanta Isabel, another great-great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt.
The idea must have maddened Margaret Beaufort if she heard of it – it neatly cut out her (and her son’s) Lancastrian claim. Both Joana and Isabel were descended from John of Gaunt’s earlier, uncontroversial marriages to foreign princesses, while the Beaufort line came from his liaison with Katherine Swynford, only later regularised by marriage. But Sir Edward was to negotiate a double marriage – an alliance also between a daughter of Edward IV (presumably Elizabeth) and the king’s cousin, the Duke of Beja. This, it is suggested, may have been the marriage Elizabeth was discussing in the Buck letter. The speed with which the embassy set out shows that in a pragmatic age the matter must surely have been under discussion before Anne’s death. Since the marriage proposed for Elizabeth27 was dependent on the one proposed for Richard, this would explain, if not excuse, any fear that Queen Anne would never die.
The prospect of a foreign royal marriage for Elizabeth of York may, like the pardons granted to various Woodvilles, have been part of the general sweetening that persuaded Elizabeth Woodville to write summoning her son Dorset home. That spring he tried to escape from the exiled Tudor ‘court’; he was making for Flanders and the coast when Henry’s representatives, with French connivance, caught up with him and persuaded him to return. Perhaps Elizabeth Woodville had been rattled by Henry’s declaring himself king before he had married her daughter. Or, of course, she may have been coerced – though it has been taken as yet more evidence of her gullible venality. Shakespeare has Elizabeth, asked by Richard how he should woo her daughter, sarcastically advising him to send her a token ‘by the man that slew her brothers’. She counters each promise he makes for the future with some wrong from the past. But in the course of some 150 lines she also changes her mind – ‘Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!’, as Richard apostrophises her.
But whoever else may have been complicit, it was Richard who attracted most opprobrium for the reputed plan of marriage with his niece. The king’s closest advisers, Ratclyff and Catesby, felt obliged to warn him of the unpopularity of such a union. In Crowland’s words: ‘For by these persons the king was told to his face that if he did not abandon his intended purpose, and that, too, before the mayor and commons of the City of London … all the people of the north, in whom he placed the greatest reliance, would rise in rebellion against him and impute to him the death of the queen, the daughter and one of the heirs of the Earl of Warwick, through whom he had first gained his present high position’ – in order that he might, says the chronicler disapprovingly, ‘to the extreme abhorrence of the Almighty, gratify an incestuous passion for his said niece’.
Besides this, certain of Richard’s advisers wheeled in a dozen or so doctors of divinity ‘who asserted that the Pope could grant no dispensation in the case of such a degree of consanguinity’. ‘It was supposed by many, that these men, together with others like them, threw so many impediments in the way, for fear lest, if the said Elizabeth should attain the rank of queen, it might at some time be in her power to avenge upon them the death of her uncle, Earl Anthony, and her brother Richard [Grey].’ It sounds as if the girl later generations assume to be placid and gentle was believed by those closer to her to be her mother’s daughter.
Only a fortnight after Anne’s death, just before Easter, in the great hall of the Hospital of St John, Richard was forced to take the extraordinary step of making a public repudiation of any desire to wed his niece. He spoke, says Crowland, ‘in a loud and distinct voice; more, however, as many supposed, to suit the wishes of those who advised him to that effect, than in conformity with his own’.
The records of the Mercers’ Company describe how, ‘to the very great displeasure of the king’, the ‘long saying and much simple communication among the people by evil disposed persons’ seemed to show ‘that the queen as by consent and will of the king was poisoned for and th’intent that he might then marry and have to wife Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of his brother …’. In the presence of many of his lords, and of the city hierarchy, he ‘said it never came into his thought or mind to marry in such manner wise nor [was he] willing or glad of the death of his queen but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be …’.
But the Great Chronicle recorded28 ‘much whispering among the people that the king had poisoned the Queen his wife, and intended with a license purchased [a dispensation] to have married the elder daughter of King Edward. Which rumours and sayings with other things before done caused him to fall in great hatred of his subjects. …’ The stage, as Margaret Beaufort must have realised, was set for her son Henry.