TWENTY-TWO
Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again.
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Richard III, 5.5
The autumn of 1491 saw the appearance of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne far more dangerous than Lambert Simnel. Bernard André and Polydore Vergil, with their Tudor-inspired hatred of Margaret of Burgundy, suggest that Warbeck may have had his birth in that country – certainly birth in his adult, royal identity. Bacon tellingly uses the imagery of witchcraft, saying that ‘the magic and curious arts’ of the Lady Margaret ‘raised up the ghost’ of the boy Duke of York to walk and vex King Henry. But it was once again Ireland that first saw a pretender hailed as Richard, Duke of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s younger son – a claim that, however improbable, cannot be conclusively disproved even today.
By the summer of 1492, when Elizabeth of York was preparing to give birth to another baby, Perkin Warbeck was in France, treated as an English prince and used (just as Henry Tudor had been used before him) as a tool of diplomacy. Indeed, the tall, glowing young man – so like his supposed father Edward IV – seems to have owed a lot of his credibility to the fact that he looked and behaved like a king or at least a prince. The same, at the beginning of his reign, had been said of Henry.
At this timely moment, in early June, Elizabeth Woodville died at her convent in Bermondsey. The event cannot have been wholly unexpected; now in her mid-fifties, she had been predeceased by almost all of her many siblings. On 10 April she had made her will:
Item. I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my lord at Windsor, without pompous interring or costly expenses done thereabout. Item. Whereas I have no worldly goods to do the queen’s grace a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children according to my heart and mind, I beseech God Almighty to bless her grace, with all her noble issue; and, with as good a heart and mind as may be, I give her grace my blessing, and all the aforesaid my children.
She willed that ‘such small stuff and goods as I have be disposed truly in the contentation of my debts, and for the health of my soul, as far as they will extend …’. Less than a decade earlier, walls had to be broken down to get her extensive goods into sanctuary.
A surviving manuscript record shows that her burial was certainly as unostentatious as she had requested. ‘On Whit-Sunday, the queen-dowager’s corpse was conveyed by water to Windsor, and there privily, through the little park, conducted into the castle, without any ringing of bells or receiving of the dean … and so privily, about eleven of the clock, she was buried, without any solemn dirge done for her obit.’ The only gentlewoman to accompany her was one Mistress Grace, described as ‘a bastard daughter of king Edward IV’; which suggests Elizabeth Woodville had enough generosity of spirit to make a friend of a girl she might well have resented.
‘On the Monday’, so the account records disapprovingly, ‘nothing was done solemnly for her’ except the provision of a hearse ‘such as they use for the common people’, with wooden candlesticks and tapers ‘of no great weight’. Elizabeth of York was not able to take charge of her mother’s funeral, having entered her confinement (she would call her new daughter Elizabeth). On the Tuesday (the next daughter, Cecily, also being absent and represented by her husband) the three remaining unmarried daughters of Elizabeth Woodville arrived – Anne, Katherine and even eleven-year-old Bridget from a Dartford convent where she had been placed. With them came Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter-in-law the Marchioness of Dorset and her niece; also the gentlemen, led by Dorset himself. Finally the dirge got under way.
‘But neither at the dirge were twelve poor men clad in black, but a dozen divers old men, and they held old torches and torches’ ends.’ Still, the queen dowager herself had said that she wanted it that way. The grave had spared Elizabeth Woodville the agonising doubts that Warbeck’s mounting credit and credibility might have inspired. We shall never know what conversations Elizabeth of York and her husband had about the pretender, but a century or so later Bacon would have Warbeck in his character of Richard, declaring that on his delivery from the Tower he resolved to wait for his uncle’s death ‘and then to put myself into my sister’s hands, who was next heir to the crown’. It is an interesting hint that Elizabeth of York’s reaction to this putative brother was a matter for speculation even in this near-contemporary day.
At the beginning of October 1492 Henry launched an expedition against France – to protect his former refuge of Brittany from possible annexation by the French, and to punish them for their support of Warbeck. Margaret Beaufort, unsurprisingly, made a major financial contribution. In the event Henry spent only a brief time across the Channel: like Edward years earlier, he was happy to be bought off by a sizeable French pension. Before he sailed from England he did acknowledge that Elizabeth of York’s finances were ‘insufficient to maintain the Queen’s dignity’, and gave her reversion rights to her grandmother’s property whenever Cecily Neville eventually died.
So Elizabeth was left as her mother had been left, and government was nominally vested in her six-year-old son. Arthur was at Westminster, while Elizabeth seems to have been with her other children at Eltham, the nursery for her younger children; handy for London, an old favourite of her father’s and near her own favourite residence of Greenwich. But her absence from Westminster at this moment shows that she did not have even the limited powers that had been invested in Elizabeth Woodville long before. Nor did Margaret Beaufort, presumably: the times were changing and not, for half a century yet, in favour of a woman’s authority.
In November a major new player appeared on stage in the Perkin Warbeck drama. It was, predictably, Margaret of Burgundy, who some believed had been behind Warbeck from the very start, but who now met him openly. Despite Maximilian’s accord with Henry, the Low Countries had never ceased to be a refuge for Henry’s enemies. Nor had Margaret ceased to have contact with Ireland and Scotland, those traditional springboards for an English invasion. She had, indeed, been planning – spreading the rumours that a prince survived, rallying support – even before Warbeck appeared in public. Vergil said that she had found the boy herself – a suitable candidate for instruction. Bacon wrote that she had long had spies out to look for ‘handsome and graceful youths to make Plantagenets’. The French king told his Scottish counterpart that Warbeck had been ‘preserved many years secretly’ by Margaret. In a letter to the Pope, begging for recognition of her ‘nephew’s’ claims, she gave a garbled version of the biblical story of Prince Joash in the second Book of Kings, snatched from harm to be brought up secretly in the house of an aunt. Certainly Warbeck was now welcomed in Burgundy as a prince, and as Margaret’s close kin. Indeed, Vergil wrote that she received him ‘as though he had been revived from the dead … so great was her pleasure that the happiness seemed to have disturbed the balance of her mind’.
Margaret wrote to Queen Isabella in Spain that when Warbeck/Richard appeared in Burgundy she immediately recognised him as her nephew. She had been told of his existence when he was in Ireland, but had at that time thought the tale ‘ravings and dreams’; then he had been identified in France by men she sent who would have known him ‘as easily as his mother or his nurse’. When Margaret herself at last met him, she said, ‘I recognised him as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday or the day before.… He did not have just one or another sign of resemblance, but so many and so particular that hardly one person in ten, in a hundred or even in a thousand might be found who would have marks of the same kind. …’ She had, however, last seen the actual Duke of York in England when he was a child, some dozen years earlier.
‘I indeed for my part, when I gazed on this only male Remnant of our family – who had come through so many perils and misfortunes – was deeply moved, and out of this natural affection, into which both necessity and the rights of blood were drawing me, I embraced him as my only nephew and my only son.’ It was perhaps emotionally important that she was now, after Elizabeth Woodville’s death, his only mother. She intended – as the Latin is translated – to nourish and cherish him. The language was that one might use for a young child.
Warbeck/Richard wrote to Isabella too – vaguely, of the ‘certain lord’ who had been told to kill him but ‘pitying my innocence’ had preserved him. He seemed however to have got his ‘own’ age slightly wrong, though his praise of his ‘dearest aunt’ rang true enough. Isabella was unimpressed, but concerned about the fresh potential for unrest in the country where her daughter Katherine of Aragon was to marry. She wrote, woman to woman, to Margaret suggesting she should not be taken in. But Isabella’s caution would not necessarily be followed by the other rulers of Europe: a prince or pretender could always prove an invaluable pawn of diplomacy.
The news that the Duke of York was alive, said Bacon, ‘came blazing and thundering over into England’, breeding murmurs of all sorts against the king, and ‘chiefly they fell upon the wrong that he did his Queen, and that he did not reign in her right, wherefore they said that God had now brought to light a masculine branch of the house of York that would not be at his courtesy, howsoever he did depress [suppress] his poor lady’.
In 1493 Henry was writing about ‘the great malice that the Lady Margaret of Burgundy beareth continually against us’, in sending first the ‘feigned boy’ Lambert Simnel and now another ‘feigned lad’. He was invoking a concept popular at the time: that of the she-wolf or, as Edward Hall would later imagine Margaret, the ‘dog reverting to her old vomit’. Hall memorably described Margaret as being ‘like one forgetting both God and charity’ in her malice against Henry, seeking ‘to suck his blood and compass his destruction’; not just a she-wolf like Marguerite of Anjou, but a vampire as well. Hall (and Bacon after him) followed Vergil, who claimed that Margaret, driven by ‘insatiable hatred and fiery wrath’, continually sought Henry’s destruction – ‘so ungovernable is a woman’s nature especially when she is under the influence of envy’, he glossed. Vergil was probably swayed by Henry VII’s own perception of events, and Henry may well have been influenced by Louis of France – he who had cast doubts on Margaret’s chastity even before her marriage, just as he had impugned the chastity of Cecily.
Margaret of Burgundy, Bacon sneered, had ‘the spirit of a man and the malice of a woman’. Being ‘childless and without any nearer care’, she could devote herself to her ‘mortal hatred’ of Henry and the house of Lancaster: a hatred, Bacon claimed, that she now extended even to Henry’s wife, her niece. Certainly Margaret did not seem to regard Elizabeth’s role of queen consort as elevating the family’s status in any way. Her letter to Isabella had spoken of how her family were ‘fallen from the royal summit’, suggesting the situation could be redeemed only by a ‘male remnant’. Or perhaps she thought that for one who had been, in Vergil’s words, ‘the means of the king’s ascent to the throne’, a mere consort’s role was inadequate.
By this time Henry had discovered an alternative identity for the supposed prince – Perkin Warbeck, a boatman’s son from Tournai. That summer of 1493 an embassy was sent to Burgundy, warning Philip (now old enough to hold at least theoretical rule when his father Maximilian succeeded to the grander title of Holy Roman Emperor) that he was giving house room to an impostor. One of the envoys (Warham, the future archbishop), joked unpleasantly to the childless Margaret that in Simnel and Warbeck she had produced ‘two great babes not as normal but fully grown and long in the womb’. While Philip, and probably Maximilian behind him, raised men for the pretender, Margaret provided money. Not that she entirely lost her head over the affair: her ‘nephew’ was to pay his ‘aunt’ the remaining part of her dowry as soon as he came into his own – her promised wool rights, the manor of Hunsdon and the town of Scarborough.
In October 1494, in England, Henry VII created his second son Henry Duke of York – the title the younger prince in the Tower had borne. Arthur, as Prince of Wales, had been sent the previous year to take up residence in Ludlow, just as Elizabeth of York’s eldest brother had done. Prince Henry’s new title was a riposte to Warbeck; perhaps, too, a sop to any disaffected Yorkists and a reminder that through his wife the king had annexed also the Yorkist claim. Celebratory tournaments were designed as a chivalric fantasy centring on the queen, just as earlier tournaments had focused on Elizabeth Woodville and her jousting family. Margaret Beaufort was with the king and queen as they left Woodstock for the ceremonies in the capital; she was still with them three weeks later as they processed away from Westminster.
The queen was prominent in her state, the jousters on the first day wearing her crest as well as the king’s livery; but subsequent challengers could be seen in Margaret Beaufort’s blue and white livery, and she was one of the ladies who advised on the prizes, which were presented by her namesake, the ‘high and excellent princess’, little Margaret. In January 1495 Henry offered this daughter15 in marriage to the king of Scotland – the son of Elizabeth Woodville’s erstwhile prospective bridegroom.
The queen’s sisters were being married off too; Anne to the grandson of one of Richard III’s leading adherents, who might thus be reconciled to Henry’s regime; and Katherine, by way of reward, into the notably Lancastrian Courtenay family. Connections of the various women were, after all, still involved in machinations against Henry. In February Sir William Stanley – Margaret Beaufort’s brother-in-law, the man whose intervention had made all the difference at Bosworth – was found to have had contact with Warbeck and executed. Later that year the royal couple visited William’s brother, Margaret’s husband, at Lathom, ‘to comfort [the king’s] mother, whom he did always tenderly love and revere’.
A servant of Edward’s sister Elizabeth had been among those indicted in these years; and several of those in trouble over the Warbeck affair were neighbours of, or had been servants of, Cecily Neville’s.16 Cecily left money in her will to a Master Richard Lessy who had been involved in the Perkin Warbeck affair, specifically to help him pay the fine levied for his trangression, and requested that the king might curtail the charge; several of the others to whom she left legacies had connections with Burgundy and with Duchess Margaret. It showed that Henry could never really feel secure about his wife’s Yorkist connections, however amicable their personal relations might be.
On 31 May 1495, at Berkhamsted, Cecily died, being, as her will declared,17 ‘of whole mind and body, loving therefore be it to Jh’u [Jesu]’, surrendering her soul into God’s hands and the protection of the saints; and her body, subject to Henry VII’s permission, to be buried at Fotheringhay beside that of ‘my most entirely beloved Lord and husband, father unto my said lord and son [Edward IV]’. She left a series of bequests to the Fotheringhay college – everything from mass books to ecclesiastical vestments – and to the abbey at Syon ‘two of the best copes of crimson cloth’.
She asks, as was usual, that any debts should be paid; rather touchingly ‘thanking our Lord at the time of making of this my testament [that] to the knowledge of my conscience I am not much in debt’. But it is the personal bequests that are interesting: an acknowledgement to the king; legacies to officers of her household; to ‘my daughter of Suffolk’ her litter chair with all the ‘cushions, horses, and harnesses’ belonging to it; to her granddaughter Anne a barge with all its accoutrements and ‘the largest bed of bawdekyn [a silk fabric with metal threads, like a less costly cloth of gold], with counterpoint of the same’. Her great-grandson Prince Arthur, heir apparent to the Tudor dynasty, got her tapestry bed decorated with the Wheel of Fortune.
Cecily’s granddaughter and godchild Bridget was left the Legenda Aurea on vellum, and her books on Saints Katherine and Matilda. A psalter with a relic of St Christopher went to Elizabeth of York, a portuous or breviary ‘with clasps of gold covered with black cloth of gold’ to Margaret Beaufort. It was yet another exemplar of how religion forged links between women who might find there a new lease of life after their years of marriage and childbearing were over, and after they were freed from their husbands’ enmity.