TWENTY-ONE
Put in her tender heart th’aspiring flame
Of golden sovereignty; acquaint the princess
With the sweet silent hours of marriage joys.
Richard III, 4.4
This rebellion was over, though other ripples of armed discontent would plague Henry’s next years. But he heeded a complaint voiced by the rebels that Elizabeth of York was being treated too casually – that, extraordinarily, she had not yet been crowned. September was full of plans for the splendid ceremony, and in October the royal couple set out from Warwick to London. Even then, the entry into the city was Henry’s moment – the first time he had been there since his victory at Stoke – and the crafts guilds were out in number, lined up along the packed streets, according to a manuscript preserved by the early sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland,7 ‘hugely replenished with people’.
‘And so to behold the fair and goodly sight of his coming, the Queen’s Grace and my lady the King’s Mother, and many other great Estates, both lords and Ladies, richly beseen, went secretly in a House beside St Mary Spittle, without Bishops Gate; and when the sight was passed, they went from thence to Greenwich to their Beds.’ The ladies were withdrawing to Greenwich for the weeks before the coronation: Elizabeth was to be presented to London afresh, almost as though she were a newly arrived foreign princess.
On ‘the Friday before Saint Katherine’s Day’ the queen (accompanied once again by ‘my Lady the King’s mother’) set out from Greenwich in a flotilla of barges decorated with ‘Banners and streamers of silk’, as Leland put it. Especially fine among the accompanying vessels was the Bachelors’ Barge, from which a dragon spouted flames into the Thames. Landing on Tower Wharf, Elizabeth was greeted by the king; and while he created fourteen new Knights of the Bath, she prepared for the next day.
The following morning she dressed in the traditional kirtle of white ‘cloth of gold of damask’ with a mantle furred with ermine and tasselled with gold. The writer noticed the ‘fair yellow hair hanging down plain behind her back’ – that symbol of virginity, suggesting anointed queenship as new territory. Her sister Cecily carried her train as they formed up for the procession through the city. After the horse of state and the henchmen decked with white York roses came the ladies in horse-borne litters. The first carried Katherine Woodville (Elizabeth Woodville’s sister, the former Duchess of Buckingham, now Duchess of Bedford) and Cecily. The second conveyed the Duchess of Suffolk (still Elizabeth’s royal aunt – never mind that her son had been Lincoln, the recent rebel), the Duchess of Norfolk and the Countess of Oxford. Behind them came their various gentlewomen.
The night was spent at Westminster and on Sunday, coronation day, Elizabeth was dressed in purple velvet furred with ermine as she walked to the Abbey over a carpet of woollen cloth which the watching crowds would traditionally be allowed to take. But: ‘there was so huge a people inordinately pressing to cut the ray cloth that the Queen’s Grace went [‘gede’] upon, so that in the Presence certain persons were slain, and the order of the ladies following the Queen was broken and distroubled.’ Then came the ceremony itself: the anointing, the crowning, the placing of a rod and sceptre into her hands. Margaret Beaufort watched with her son, from an elevated stage concealed by lattice and draperies, as another woman was transformed into a quasi-divinity. Any queen might validate and contribute to her husband’s kingship, but Elizabeth’s contribution was far greater than the norm. It was something that must have struck her husband and her mother-in-law as both a potential threat and an opportunity.
Next came the banquet. After grace was said, ‘Dame Katherine Gray and Mistress Ditton went under the table, where they sat on either side [of] the Queen’s feet all the dinner time.’ She had the Duchess of Bedford and Cecily on her left, the Archbishop of Canterbury on her right, while the Countess of Oxford and the Countess of Rivers (Anthony Woodville’s widow) knelt on either side of her and held up a cloth as she ate. It was the parade of homage that Elizabeth Woodville had received and, remembering the royally born Jacquetta on her knees before her daughter, it is easy to guess why Margaret Beaufort was not there. Again, ‘the high and mighty princess his mother’ watched with her son from a window at the side.
The banquet was two courses only – perhaps they remembered that at the coronation of Richard and Anne no one had had time to eat three. But each contained a plethora of dishes: game birds and fatted rabbits, swan ‘in chawdron’ and peacock in its feathers, even a whole seal ‘richly served’. After alms were given and the queen was ‘cried’ around the hall – ‘De la tres haut, tres puissant, tres excellent Princesse, la tres noble reigne d’Engleterre, et de Fraunce, et Dame d’Irlande’ – it was almost over; bar the fruit and wafers, the ritual washing, the grace, the trumpets and the hippocras – spiced wine – and further spices. Elizabeth left ‘with God’s blessing and to the rejoicing of many a true English man’s heart’.
At mass next day Margaret Beaufort sat on the queen’s right, as she did when Elizabeth sat in state in the Parliament Chamber; the Duchess of Suffolk was still present. All the lessons of the Wars of the Roses were surely there: divide and conquer, bring into the fold, make the defeated (especially the placatory, conciliatory, figures of the women) part of the victory. The one person who does not appear to have been there was Elizabeth’s own mother, which seems the strongest evidence that she was in some degree of disgrace.8 But perhaps Elizabeth of York’s relations with her husband, her role as queen, would get easier as her own loving but (from all the past evidence) forceful mother moved out of the way.
Visiting the queen in July 1488, the Spanish ambassador De Puebla found her ‘with two and twenty companions of angelical appearance, and all we saw there seemed very magnificent, and in splendid style, as was suitable for the occasion’. The envoy of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile was in England to negotiate the marriage treaty between the infant Prince Arthur and their daughter Katherine. Some time later the ambassador saw Elizabeth and Henry walking in procession to mass and noticed that her ladies ‘went in good order’ and were much adorned. The Venetian envoy wrote that she was ‘a very handsome woman and in conduct very able’ – or, as the original Italian has it, ‘di gran governo’. Elizabeth knew how to be a queen of England; she had learnt it at her mother’s knee.
While the new queen’s motto was ‘humble and reverent’, that is not necessarily the entire story. Her mother had surely known the value of informal, closet influence, and maybe Elizabeth of York had picked up something from observing the different styles of queenship exercised by Elizabeth Woodville and Marguerite of Anjou and the varying degrees of warmth with which they were received. Perhaps, too, if she were influenced that way her own style would in turn affect her son Henry, and the expectations with which he would greet his own queens. There is some slight evidence to suggest that Elizabeth did exercise a behind-the-scenes influence on her husband: for instance, a letter from the Pope to Margaret Beaufort saying that Henry had promised to appoint Elizabeth’s candidate to the bishopric of Worcester. Another letter, one of only two intercessionary letters from Elizabeth that survive, was written in 1499 to recommend to Ferdinand of Aragon one ‘Henry Stuke, who wishes to go and fight against the Infidels … Though he is a very short man, he has the reputation of being a valiant soldier.’ A further letter concerns the nomination of a chaplain to a vacant living.
Another Spanish report tells of Elizabeth receiving two letters from Ferdinand and Isabella and two from their daughter Katherine: ‘The King had a dispute with the Queen because he wanted to have one of the said letters to carry continually about him, but the Queen did not like to part with hers … ,’ the ambassador relates. It has been taken as evidence of Elizabeth’s independence; and though in fact it may sound more like a thoroughly stage-managed display, it shows how highly missives from the Spanish court were valued – that too would make Elizabeth a conscious player in the diplomatic game.
Against that are reports – such as Bacon’s comment that she was ‘depressed’ in status, and the Spanish view that she was beloved ‘because she is powerless’ – suggesting that Elizabeth had been sidelined like Anne Neville before her. These writers infer that a canny husband had subsumed her rights and powers into his own, while diverting her into a life of ceremonies interspersed by as many as eight pregnancies. Bacon, indeed, even claimed that the king’s ‘aversion toward the house of York was so predominant in him as it found place not only in his wars and councils, but in his chamber and bed’. (Bacon did also say, more mildly, that though Henry was ‘nothing uxurious, nor scarce indulgent’ towards his queen, he was none the less ‘companionable and respective [considerate], and without jealousy’.) It seems curious, in the light of these comments, that Elizabeth of York is widely assumed to have been happy.
There are two distinct strands of information concerning Elizabeth’s personality and situation, and the two do not altogether match up. Writers have traditionally reconciled her apparent contentment, and her husband’s dominance, by por-traying her as a woman without ambition and almost without volition – ‘a placid, domestic sort of creature’,9 as one of them described her.
The problem with that judgement is that this ‘placid’ ruminant of a woman had been, only a few years earlier, the passionately pro-active girl of Richard’s reign, Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter. Unless, that is, the Buck letter is regarded as a complete forgery; theBallad of Lady Bessy is totally ignored; and the apparent fears of Richard III’s henchmen that she might revenge her family’s wrongs on them are set aside. Perhaps the truth is that the construct of successful monarchy the first Tudors set up leaves no room for evidence of dissent; and any dissents of Elizabeth’s were probably of the private, domestic kind. A happy marriage – and this one does seem to have been basically happy – has no story.
In August 1498 the Spanish ambassador delivered another set of letters from Spain to Elizabeth, ‘the most distinguished and the most noble lady in the whole of England’. She immediately sent for the Latin Secretary to write replies; he was, the man said, always obliged to write such letters to Spain10 three or four times, because the queen always found some defects in them.
It is possible that Elizabeth’s cultural influence has been underestimated; the chivalric influence at her husband’s and her son’s courts derived from her Burgundian family, and she shared a measure of literary interest with her mother. The renovations at Greenwich, displaying a Burgundian influence, were made following ‘a new platt [plan] … devised by the Queen’. From certain similarities in their handwriting,11 it may have been she who taught her second son and her daughters to write, and in spring 1488 Elizabeth’s influence could perhaps be seen when a Lady Mistress was chosen for Prince Arthur (at a hefty fee of more than £26 a year) – Elizabeth Darcy, who had presided over the nursery of Elizabeth’s brother Edward V.
Elizabeth owned or used several exquisitely illustrated Books of Hours, as well as giving them to favoured ladies. One is inscribed: ‘Madam I pray you remember me in your good prayers your mistress Elizabeth R.’ A copy of the devotional Scala Perfectionis, the ‘Scale of Perfection’, presented to her lady Mary Roos, was signed both by her (‘I pray you pray for me/Elizabeth ye queen’) and by Margaret Beaufort. Elizabeth shared with her mother-in-law an interest in religion that led them particularly to St Bridget of Sweden, whose work took pride of place in the collection of English and Latin prayers they commissioned together from Caxton.
Her relationship with Margaret Beaufort is one of the big questions about Elizabeth of York. The Spanish reports asserting that the queen is ‘beloved because she is powerless’ continued: ‘The King is much influenced by his mother and his followers in affairs or personal interest and in others. The Queen, as is generally the case, does not like it.’ It also spoke of Elizabeth’s ‘subjection’ to Margaret. There is a strong received impression that the two were antagonistic – or that antagonism was averted only by this supposed placidity on Elizabeth’s part – and perhaps it is true that there was bound to be an element of rivalry.
In 1493 Henry drew up household ordinances demonstrating the concern he shared with his mother for the dignity and order of the court. They stipulated that a bishop dining in Margaret’s house would be served ‘as he is served in the king’s presence’; that when Margaret went to church with the king and queen she too should have her cloth of estate. When the king took wine and spices after evensong it should be served with equal state to him, his mother and his sons – the queen presumably residing in her own household, separately. Indeed, it must not be forgotten that part of the anxious parade of state and intimacy accorded to Margaret rather than to Elizabeth was precisely because the queen had her own separate establishment, and status, already; whereas a place had to be created for the sort of ‘king’s mother’ Margaret was determined to be. Perhaps if Margaret had become a queen, a role which she clearly felt Fortune had denied her, she would not have felt the need to press for her rights quite so stridently.
Cecily Neville had likewise played an active part in the first years of Edward IV’s reign, but she, while possibly as determined a woman as Margaret, had herself been newly arrived at the independence of widowhood when her son became king. She had not spent years imagining her future role as Margaret must have done; had not played such an active part in bringing her son to the throne; while Elizabeth of York was not – and this may in part explain why Elizabeth Woodville was relegated to Bermondsey – surrounded, as her mother had been, by so very active a family.
Perhaps it is too simplistic a view to envisage Elizabeth of York and Margaret Beaufort as rivals.12 The Spanish envoy apart, the picture of their hostility depends largely on one particular story of Margaret Beaufort’s intervening to block a man who was trying to petition the queen, and his subsequent complaint that he had been set aside by ‘that strong whore’, the king’s mother. Margaret’s action could be seen as officious, or protective, or a little bit of both. Perhaps the Spanish envoy had expectations that were unrealistic in England: at home, Isabella of Castile could exercise power quite openly.
Elizabeth and Margaret may indeed have been able to turn to advantage the fact that between them they represented two very different faces of queenship or quasi-queenship. Certainly the two women worked together when necessary: to receive the licence to found a chantry, for instance, or to apply for the rights to the next presentation to a deanery. It is uncertain, even so, how large a part Elizabeth really had to play in these activities – the more so since both partnerships included Margaret’s old retainer Reginald Bray. In 1501, several of Margaret’s trusted connections were among Elizabeth’s officers – but, after all this time their relationships may just have grown entangled to a degree.
They probably collaborated more naturally on family matters, acting in concert, in the years ahead, to prepare for Katherine of Aragon’s smooth passage into English life, and to protect Elizabeth’s daughter Margaret from the perils of too early a marriage. But all the same, if Elizabeth of York’s life was spelt out in big ceremonies and childbirths, she had her mother-in-law at her side in too many of them.
For the first decade or so of their marriage, reports of the royal couple’s movements almost always show that Margaret was with them; and she was often with her son when the queen was absent. Margaret was, of course, a woman now past the pressures of childbearing and rearing, which left her free to act almost like a male counsellor. At the palace of Woodstock Margaret’s lodgings were linked to the king’s by a withdrawing chamber where the two could be together, for work or leisure. In the Tower, again, her rooms were next to the king’s bedchamber and the council chamber.
A letter from William Paston describes how the royal trio ‘lie at Northampton and will tarry there till Michaelmas’, as though they were one indissoluble entity. A letter of Margaret’s from 1497 stated that the king, the queen and all ‘our’ sweet children were in good health – though by this time Queen Elizabeth would perhaps be able to act more independently. As Henry VII found his feet, Francis Bacon would later claim, he reverenced but did not heed his mother. Nevertheless, to keep a balance between the two women closest to him must always have been a juggling act.
This test of diplomacy can be seen in operation immediately after Elizabeth’s coronation, at the end of 1487, when the court spent Christmas at Greenwich. On Twelfth Night the king and queen wore their crowns, though the closest thing Margaret Beaufort could be allowed was ‘a rich Coronal’. When the king wore his formal surcoat and the queen hers, Margaret dressed ‘in like Mantel and Surcoat as the Queen’.
Distinctions were, however, made. Margaret had to walk slightly behind and ‘aside the queen’s half train’. After mass, as the king and queen dined in state, the king’s marshal ended the formalities by making ‘Estate’ to the king and queen and ‘half Estate’ to the king’s mother – the same as to the Archbishop of Canterbury. A letter from Henry VIII’s day13 would concede that Katherine of Aragon, after the divorce, could keep the royal privilege of Maundy Thursday alms-giving; not as queen, but only ‘in the name of Princess Dowager, in like manner as my Lady the Kings graunt-dame did in the name of the Countess of Richemount and Derby’.
When the court moved on to Windsor for Easter 1488, and the royal trio wore their Garter robes to chapel on St George’s Day, the queen and the king’s mother were censed after the king; but only the king and queen kissed the Pax. Elizabeth of York was in one sense the senior partner here – she was the one who had ridden in her first Garter procession decades before. Here, once again, her ceremonial presence was probably more important for Henry’s legitimacy than was usual for a queen, irritating though that may have been to Margaret. When the two women were accorded the order of the Garter together, a song was composed to celebrate their togetherness: it was as if everyone needed to parade this odd duality, and to reassure the protagonists.
Despite his later reputation for miserliness Henry made frequent and generous payments to dancers, entertainers of all kinds, and especially musicians at his various palaces: Windsor, Westminster, Greenwich, Eltham, Sheen. It seems to have been an interest that he and Elizabeth, who kept her own minstrels, shared. The pair travelled together perhaps more often than was usual, which could be ascribed to affection, or to suspicion if Henry felt he needed to keep an eye on Elizabeth – or on any Yorkists who might be drawn to her, anyway. But it was certainly an economy, since a second household functioning quite independently would inevitably cost more. The Great Wardrobe accounts show him not only making her presents such as robes furred with miniver, but supplying household essentials such as beds and hammers.
Some regard the gifts of cash and communion cloths, gowns and gold wire as evidence of intimacy and affection; but they could be seen another way. Despite the lands settled on her, Elizabeth’s finances were not run like those of preceding queens and Henry often had to bale her out, undermining her independence, even though her signature on each page of her Privy Purse accounts shows that she had by no means chosen to abnegate this responsibility. Her lands and fee farms, yielding some £1900 in 1496, plus an annuity the king had extracted on her behalf from the town of Bristol of another £100, still amounted to less than half the income that Elizabeth Woodville had enjoyed in her day. Often in debt, borrowing money on the security of her plate, she was dependent on an ongoing stream of gifts and loans from the king.
The only surviving records of Elizabeth’s Privy Purse expenses date from later in the reign. Nonetheless, many of the sums disbursed must have been duplicated every year. The monetary recognition of the endless presents of food – pippins and puddings, peascods and pomegranates, warden pears and chines of pork. Wine and woodcocks, rabbits, quails and conserves of cherries, a wild boar and tripes. The small practical purchases a great household requires – baskets and bellows, bolts and barehides, two barrels of Rhenish wine and the perpetual ‘boathire’, for transporting people and property from one palace to another along the great watery highway that was the Thames. There were clothes for herself – a gown of russet velvet and white fustian for socks – and her servants: three doublets of Bruges satin for her footmen at 20d the piece, as well as money to the keeper of her goshawk for meat for his bird and his spaniels (27s 8d).
In Lent, almond butter was brought to her – the rich man’s substitute, at a time of year when dairy fats were not allowed. She made many acts of charity. Money to nuns in the Minories, by the Tower, whose abbess had sent her rosewater; the burying of a man who was hanged, and money given to another whose house had burnt down. Support for one of the children who had been ‘given’ to her, and contributions towards the enclosed life of an anchoress. Funding for one John Pertriche, son of ‘Mad Beale’, right down to payment for the man who cured him of the French pox.
One story in the Venetian state papers does fit with the conventional picture of Henry’s miserliness. On 9 May 1489 the papal envoy wrote to the Pope: ‘we have, moreover, opened the moneybox14 which the king was pleased to have at his court: we found in it£11 11s, which result made our heart sink within us, for there were present the King, the Queen, the mother of the King and the mother of the Queen, besides dukes, earls and marquesses, and other lords and ambassadors, so that we expected to have far more.’
The reference to Elizabeth Woodville is interesting. After her exile or retreat to Bermondsey she is supposed to have visited court on only one or two specific occasions, one of them being the visit of a kinsman the following November at the time of her daughter’s next confinement. But this extra, less well-known record of her presence some six months earlier suggests that, while she undoubtedly did live largely in retirement, her public appearances might have been more frequent, if not always conspicuously noted.
In autumn 1489 Elizabeth of York did indeed take to her chamber again. (It is possible she had also given birth, the year before, to another son, Edward, who lived only a few hours. Other sources suggest the birth of such a child but set the date considerably later.)
Allhallows-eve the Queen took to her chamber at Westminster royally accompanied; that is to say, with my lady the Queen’s mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, and many other going before her … the Queen’s chamberlain, Sir Richard Pole [the son of Margaret Beaufort’s half-sister], in very good words, desired in the Queen’s name all her people to pray that God would send her a good hour, and so she entered into her chamber which was hanged and ceiled with rich cloth of blue arras with fleur-de-lis of gold.
This time Elizabeth flouted the protocol her mother-in-law had enshrined by receiving a great embassy from France, which included a member of her mother’s Luxembourg family, after her retreat and ‘in her own Chamber. There was with her her Mother Queen Elizabeth, and my Lady the King’s Mother, but there entered no more than been afore rehearsed [some four dignitaries], saving my Lord the Queen’s Chamberlain, and the Garter Principal King of Arms’, said the chronicler reassuringly. Elizabeth’s daughter was born just as her tiny son Arthur was being made knight and invested as Prince of Wales. The baby was named for her godmother and grandmother Margaret Beaufort.
Eighteen months later came another, even more significant, confinement for Elizabeth. Prince Henry, the future Henry VIII, was born on 28 June 1491. But the months immediately following brought the start of a new trouble, which would haunt the new dynasty for the rest of the decade.