PART FIVE
TWENTY
O now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together.
Richard III, 5.5
The battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 is often regarded as the starting place of the early modern age,1 but that is the result of hindsight. As Henry Tudor assumed the throne, any adult alive then would have remembered not only Richard III’s overthrow of the expected order, and Edward IV’s coup, but Henry VI’s brief resumption of the throne. There was not necessarily any reason to think Henry VII’s dynasty would be more durable.
Henry did have one important advantage. There had been a comprehensive clearing of the decks (and the Tudors would make sure it became ever more comprehensive in the years ahead). Any previous Lancastrian comeback had been shadowed by the knowledge that the sons of York were waiting, prolific and power-hungry. But now, of Cecily Neville’s six adult children her three sons and one of her daughters were dead. Margaret of Burgundy would still repeatedly attempt to intervene in English affairs; and the descendants of Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, would later cause problems. But for the moment, even if one or both ‘Princes in the Tower’ had survived, they, like their cousin Warwick, would have been still too young to have themselves mounted a credible challenge for the throne; and with Buckingham and the senior Woodvilles dead, it is hard to see who would have done it for them. What is more, it would take time for any opposition to rally after the shock of defeat: Bosworth could so easily have gone the other way.
Time is what they would not be given. Henry immediately moved to have Clarence’s ten-year-old sonfn11 brought south and placed in the custody of Margaret Beaufort, for whom everything had now changed. Henry sent her from Bosworth the Book of Hoursthat had been with Richard in his tent – an appropriate tribute for one of Margaret’s piety. But the book, already old when Richard began using it, had been transformed into something more personal by the addition, on blank pages, of prayers for Richard’s use and mentioning his name. One prayer seeks comfort in sadness by emphasising the goodness of God; another more specifically seeks protection against enemies. Deleting Richard’s name, Margaret added on the end-pages the jingle: ‘For the honour of God and St Edmunde/Pray for Margaret Richmonde.’ For a woman of her temperament – so prone, as her confessor would later recount, to see disaster lurking behind the greatest triumph – even so wonderful a turn of Fortune’s wheel as she had just experienced could not have come altogether easily.
When she heard the news of Henry’s victory Margaret would have set out south to be reunited with the son she had not seen since he was in his teens. Henry reached London by 7 September and spent two weeks at Baynard’s Castle, Cecily Neville’s former home. The task facing the new king was immense; to take hasty control of a country which had not only had every opportunity, in recent years, of learning to regard kings as interchangeable, but one which he himself hardly knew. Even his early boyhood had been spent not in England, but in Wales, and he had had few direct opportunities of learning systems and making allies. But he did have recourse to advice.
From London Margaret and her son went for two weeks to her palace of Woking, where they could get to know each other again and Henry could receive an extended briefing. Across the Channel he would have been kept informed of events in the realm, but he was too distant to understand the competing identities and agendas. Each new recruit to his band of exiles might have brought information, but each had his own axe to grind, and his uncle Jasper had been away as long as he. As mother and son walked in the late summer orchards Henry would have been able to draw information from the one person he could trust completely; and perhaps this process gave Margaret Beaufort a role in her son’s reign that would not easily be put aside.
It seems never to have occurred to Margaret to make a bid for the crown herself. She and her future daughter-in-law, Elizabeth of York, were in a different position from the other women in this story: they had their own claims to the throne. But even her son was reluctant to stake his claim principally on her blood right: he did so on the combination of marriage to Elizabeth, birth and right of battle. ‘The first of these was the fairest, and most like to give contentment to the people’, for whom, said Francis Bacon,2 Edward IV’s reign had made convincing ‘the clearness of the title of the White Rose or house of York’.
‘But then it lay plain before his eyes, that if he relied upon that title, he could be but a King at courtesy, and have rather a matrimonial than a regal power; the right remaining in his Queen, upon whose decease, either with issue, or without issue, he was to give place and be removed.’ Bacon was writing in the early seventeenth century, and by then the country had known two reigning queens; at the time, the right of Elizabeth of York may not have seemed so clear. But Henry was persuaded, Bacon said, ‘to rest upon the title of Lancaster as the main’, and took care from the first that his prospective bride should not be given too much importance – he plastered everything with the red rose now adopted as counterpoint to the white, and with Margaret Beaufort’s portcullis badge; and vaunted his God-given military victory.
But one of Henry’s first actions was to see that his mother was declared a ‘feme sole’, a woman able to act independently of a husband and to own property. An Act of Parliament ordained that she ‘may from henceforth [for the] term of her life sue all manner of actions … plea and be impleaded for … in as good, large and beneficial manner, as any other sole person not wife nor covert of any husband’. She could ‘as well make, as take and receive, all manner of feoffments, states, leases, releases, confirmations, presentations, bargains, sales, gifts, deeds, wills and writings’. It made Margaret an independent financial entity, and potentially a real power in the land. This was unprecedented for an aristocratic woman – queens were usually allowed this privilege, and it had occasionally been used in the lower ranks of society to allow a woman to operate a business. Her husband Stanley was treated with separate generosity – created Earl of Derby, and honoured as the new king’s ‘beaupère’. Over the next couple of years, elaborate arrangements would be set up to apportion Margaret’s land revenues between the two of them – but her power and property were not to be at his disposal, as would be normal in the fifteenth century.
That property would be substantial. While mother and son were still at Woking, orders had gone out for repairs and improvements to the fine house of Coldharbour on the Thames for ‘my lady the King’s mother’. Margaret’s arms were set into the windows, to be displayed to anyone passing on the water. Over the next few weeks the king’s ‘most dearest mother’ saw the return of her own estates, now that the attainder against her was reversed; she was given power to appoint officers in the lordship of Ware, as well as effective use of the estates of the heirs of the executed Duke of Buckingham, whose son became her ward. From the ‘great grant’ of 22 March 1487 came the ‘Exeter lands’ in Devon, south Wales, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire, as well as the Richmond estates in Lincolnshire and Kendal.
Tangible benefits were given also to those close to Margaret: her trusted servants Reginald Bray, who would become Henry’s great officer, and Christopher Urswick (another whom Bacon described as a man the king ‘much trusted and employed’); her Stanley connections led by the new king’s ‘right entirely beloved father’; and Jasper Tudor, who became Duke of Bedford. Her half-brother John Welles would be allowed to marry Edward IV’s second surviving daughter, Cecily, while Jasper Tudor would marry Buckingham’s widow, the former Woodville girl. It was of course a favour to the men concerned – but it is also an example of how marriage could be used to bring potentially dissident bloodlines into the fold. Margaret’s old associate John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, soon became her son’s Archbishop of Canterbury – and later Lord Chancellor.
At the end of October 1485 Henry was crowned, under the book of rule laid down for Richard III. Powdered ermine and black furs were ordered, as well as crimson velvet and crimson cloth of gold. Margaret’s confessor John Fisher later recalled that ‘when the king her son was crowned in all that great triumph and glory, she wept marvellously’.
On 7 November parliament re-enacted the 1397 statute legitimating the Beauforts, without the 1407 clause barring them from the throne. The parliamentary rolls which incorporated Titulus Regius were ordered to be ‘cancelled, destroyed, and … taken and avoided out of the roll and records of the said Parliament of the said late king, and burned, and utterly destroyed’, because ‘from their falseness and shamefulness, they were only deserving of utter oblivion’. Not only were the attainders against Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou and Jasper Tudor reversed, but Elizabeth Woodville was restored to her ‘estate, dignity, pre-eminence and name’.
On 10 December parliament, surely at his instigation, begged Henry to ‘unify two bloods’ by marrying Elizabeth of York. Care, however, was taken all round to stress that Henry’s rule was valid (as Crowland put it) ‘not only by right of blood but of victory in battle and of conquest’. The Speaker declared that it was because the hereditary succession of the crowns of England and France ‘is, remains, continues, and endures in the person of the same Lord King, & in the heirs legitimately issuing from his body’ that he wished to take Elizabeth as his wife, for the ‘continuation of offspring by a race of kings’.
Crowland added that marriage to Edward IV’s eldest daughter merely filled in ‘whatever appeared to be missing in the king’s title elsewhere’; but Bacon wrote that he ‘would not endure any mention of the Lady Elizabeth, no not [not even] in the nature of special entail’. There was, however, no question but that the marriage would go ahead, and on the 11th Henry gave order that preparations should begin.
The marriage plan was founded on the assumption that it was in Elizabeth of York that the best Plantagenet claims to the throne were now embodied; that Elizabeth’s rights, in other words, were not superseded by those of any living brother. When Henry took control of London, he would have taken control also of the Tower; which begs the question of what – or whom – he found or failed to find there. The records are silent, which is itself suggestive.
If Henry Tudor and his adherents knew that Richard had definitely, demonstrably, had his nephews killed, it is inconceivable that he would not have declared it and made capital of the fact. If, however, he believed the boys to be dead at Richard’s hands, but had no way to prove it, his silence makes perfect sense since to have declared them simply missing would have been to invite pretenders. By the same token the princes’ mother and sisters must surely have felt they knew something; now would have been the moment for a hullabaloo of inquiry, and they seem to have made none. It is very possible Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters believed, like Henry, that the boys had been killed, and presumably by Richard, but that they too had no proof. That dearth of evidence might allow future doubt to creep in, but for the moment at least it could have been enough to stop them speaking out. A measure of silent uncertainty was everybody’s friend.3
One of the new king’s first acts, said Vergil, had been to send a messenger to Sheriff Hutton to summon Elizabeth of York. She progressed southwards ‘attended by noble ladies’ to stay with her mother, and later with Henry’s. They met for what was probably the first time, and Elizabeth would have seen not the pinch-faced miser of later imagery but a man still in his twenties; already with something of his mother’s hooded eyes, perhaps, but tall and slim, with blue eyes set in a cheerful face and a general appearance that Vergil could describe even some years later as ‘remarkably attractive’.
Henry would have been greeted with an even more agreeable picture. Elizabeth of York really does seem to have had the blonde (‘yellow’) hair conventionally ascribed to queens. Later descriptions of plumpness infer that she was already buxom – certainly a comely nineteen-year-old, whether or not she were a true beauty like her mother. Vergil described her as ‘intelligent above all others, and equally beautiful’ – but that can probably be put down to tact.
If, when Henry looked at her, he saw the girl who had caused so much trouble with rumours of attachment to her uncle – and if she saw the man who had long been an enemy to her family – such deals were far from rare in the marriage arrangements of royalty. The two had, after all, a shared experience of uncertainty, of the swift turns that Fortune’s wheel could bring. It is likely they were both well enough pleased – and more than that. It is probable that, like Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth had never envisaged ruling in her own right. To be a queen consort was the destiny for which she had been raised to aspire – and she had achieved it without the need to leave her own country.
Henry now applied for a second papal dispensation to allow two relatives to marry. One had already been issued, in March 1484, to cover a marriage between ‘Henry Richmond, layman of the York diocese, and Elizabeth Plantagenet, woman of the London diocese’; but that might not be held to fit Henry’s changed status. Margaret’s husband Stanley had to swear that his wife had discussed all necessary questions of lineage before any arrangement was made between the pair. The second dispensation was issued on 16 January 1486, by which time the ring had been purchased and the wedding was only two days away. It would take place almost exactly a year after Elizabeth’s name had first been coupled with that of another king of England.
Not much is known about the actual ceremonies, though Bacon wrote that ‘it was celebrated with greater triumph and demonstrations (especially on the people’s part) of joy and gladness than the days either of his entry or coronation, which the King rather noted than liked’.
According to the Tudor poet Bernard André: ‘The people constructed bonfires far and wide to show their gladness and the City of London was filled with dancing, singing and entertainment.’ Bacon summed it up by remarking that while Bosworth had given Henry the bended knee of his subjects, this marriage gave him their hearts.
Henry now ordered a third papal dispensation: one setting aside 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.
The couple may not have waited for the marriage ceremony before they began to live together – common enough in the fifteenth century. That third dispensation may have been requested because they knew Elizabeth was pregnant; 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 rode around the country putting down local unrest and displaying himself in the guise of majesty. The women – Elizabeth of York, her sister, her mother, and her mother-in-law – summered at Winchester, in St Swithin’s Priory within the Close. 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, not least the jostling for place between the queen dowager and Margaret Beaufort. The former had lived through a lot but, only in her late forties, was not necessarily ready to give up; 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 that Elizabeth Woodville had tired of court. On 10 July 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’. Despite possibly bringing back bad memories of her time in sanctuary, it was a practical location; though her worldly image might sometimes have masked it, her behaviour as queen had always been that of a conventionally devout woman. Then again, her negotiations for a London home may have been her response to plans first mooted for her a few days earlier – Henry’s proposal that she should marry the Scots king as part of a peace treaty.
On 20 September 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 cohabited before the actual marriage ceremony.
It was inevitable that Margaret would have strong views on the christening. The ordinances she set down decreed that Winchester Cathedral should be carpeted and hung with tapestries, 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. She and her son were both good at publicity. But Elizabeth’s own maternal relations were well to the fore: her sister Cecily carried the baby to the font, with their sister-in-law the Marchioness of Dorset bearing the train. Dorset himself as well as the Earl of Lincoln, the queen’s cousin, stood beside her. The queen’s sister Anne carried the robe, while Elizabeth Woodville as godmother carried the little prince on to the high altar and gave him a covered cup of gold.
Margaret’s ordinances also covered the rearing of her grandson, 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 go on for ever. Court ceremony was important, and a new dynasty had to show it could do these things magnificently. All the same, there is something a little frightening in the thoroughness with which Margaret laid down every detail. The years of her misfortune had obviously bred in her an urgent need for control. Perhaps, too, she was reaching after the kind of experience she herself had been denied when she gave birth to Henry all those years before. It is almost as if Elizabeth were her surrogate – and not the only such case in this story.
Elizabeth was ill just after the child was born; she typically suffered fevers after giving birth, and would cling to those who had seen her through one birth, like her midwife Alice Massy, to help her through the next. She would in any case have had to stay at Winchester until she was churched. The precisely ordered ceremonials for that event 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 that would never 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 had read Caxton’s newly printed edition of the Morte d’Arthurknew, the city that still held the Round Table. But there may have been a more serious reason for staying in a place of safety. As the court made its way back to Greenwich for the winter season, troubles were brewing.
A century later, Francis Bacon 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’. 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 boy later identified as Lambert 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.
Henry soon brought the real Warwick briefly out of the Tower, and sent him through the London streets in a public display. But when people had claimed Simnel was Richard, the pressure on Elizabeth Woodville must have been intense. The pretender’s supporters would need only a word from her to endorse his claim. The events of the next few months might suggest that, in the eyes of the authorities at least, the possibility of Elizabeth giving that word was a genuine one.
On 2 February Henry met with his council and, as 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 as punishment for the fact that, three years before, she had left sanctuary and made a deal with Richard III. Later that month parliament endorsed the alienation of Elizabeth’s property. It has often been taken as evidence that the dowager queen was being held to task 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 financial negotiations and the rebellion bore no relation to each other. This was a time of reorganisation all round: it was, indeed, the season of the ‘great grant’ which benefited Margaret Beaufort. A separate establishment had been set up for Prince Arthur at Farnham in Surrey; Elizabeth of York visited in January, to check on her son. And 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 400 marks. This, however – being less than the income Richard had allowed her – might well be called paltry. What is even more curious is the fact that it was precisely now 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 was nothing strange about the decision itself, if Elizabeth is acknowledged as not the totally worldly creature she has often been thought; many widows chose a religious retirement. And if her first choice had been the more central residence in Westminster Abbey’s precincts, Bermondsey was still a convenient place – even a thrifty one, since the association with it of an ancestor of hers meant that she could board without payment. But the timing is suggestive – the more so since the lease of Cheyneygates shows she had only recently made quite different plans. It does look as though she were 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 she was so deeply suspect ‘it was almost thought dangerous to visit her, or see her’.
Soon after Henry had paraded the real Warwick through London, John, Earl of Lincoln made a dramatic flight from England. Lincoln was the son of Edward IV’s sister Elizabeth, and Crowland says that she herself was ‘longing’ for Henry’s overthrow. Lincoln had been received with favour at the new Tudor court and had been prominent at the christening of Prince Arthur. But now he disappeared, to turn up in the Low Countries. By Easter, it was clear that an invasion force was being assembled.
In April Lincoln took an army to Ireland, where Simnel was given an impromptu coronation ceremony and declared King Edward VI. But the involvement of this other royal line is curious: it was Lincoln, not Simnel who was later mentioned in his aunt Margaret’s correspondence about the expedition. It seems possible that Simnel was just a stalking horse for Lincoln’s own attempt to take over the country.4
In May Henry, at Kenilworth Castle in the safety of the Midlands, heard that Simnel had landed with an army. He immediately sent to the Earl of Ormond, chamberlain of the queen who was still at Greenwich: ‘we pray you that, giving your due attendance upon our said dearest wife and lady mother, ye come with them unto us …’. Then, when Henry set out to confront the rebels, Elizabeth travelled quickly to Farnham and her baby; plans were made for them to move on, if necessary, 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 16 June 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 emphasise the absurdity of his pretensions – was put to work in the royal kitchens. Lincoln’s parents the Suffolks, whatever their personal loss, suffered no further penalties.
There remains the question of what, if any, role other Yorkist women might have played in the affair. Simnel’s immediate sponsor, 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. 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:
That which is the most probable, out of precedent and subsequent acts, is, that it was the Queen Dowager, from whom this action had the principal source and motion. For certain it is, she was a busy negotiating woman, and … was at this time extremely discontent with the King,5 thinking her daughter, as the King handled the matter, not advanced but depressed [lowered in status]: and none could hold the book so well to prompt and instruct this stage-play as she could.
But 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 was killed at Bosworth, Margaret was fully occupied with Burgundian affairs: her stepdaughter’s son Philip, now returned to her care, and the Great Council which, in September 1485, had been summoned to consider the future of Burgundy. Perhaps she might have left matters alone if Henry had taken care to conciliate either Burgundy or its dowager duchess, but he failed to do so. 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 at least some of the rights Cecily Neville had been accorded by her sons. But the trading privileges that Edward had granted his sister Margaret of Burgundy, and which her brother Richard seems to have continued, now lapsed. It is probable, therefore, that enlightened self-interest jostled emotion to govern Margaret’s actions in the years ahead.
She may also have played a more fundamental role in the Lambert Simnel drama.6 As early as the summer of 1486 a donation was made in Burgundy, for the feast of St Rombout’s Day, on behalf of ‘the son of Clarence from England’; while in the same year the city of Malines gave Margaret money for her ‘reyse’ – venture – to England. If it was Margaret who fulfilled the coach’s role that Bacon ascribed to Elizabeth Woodville, she may not have been acting solely on her own behalf but also in the interests of her adopted land. After the recent rebellion Henry began to be more conciliatory towards Burgundy; the more so since he needed Burgundian aid to keep France out of his old host country, Brittany, now ruled after the death of Duke Francis by a young duchess, Anne.
Elizabeth Woodville, by contrast, had lost by the rebellion. Henry’s records over the next few years do show regular, almost yearly, payments to his ‘right dear’ mother-in-law: 50 marks for Christmas here, the gift of a tun of wine there. But it was not the kind of wholesale funding that would allow her to play any kind of political role. Her public career was over. She would, indeed, from this point be recorded as only making occasional appearances in public while she lived a reduced life in the convent at Bermondsey.