TWENTY-FOUR
yet like
A queen and daughter to a king inter me.
Henry VIII, 4.2
As the new century dawned, a new generation would be coming to the fore. Among Henry and Elizabeth’s children Prince Arthur was now thirteen and Margaret ten, fast approaching the age of marriageability; while the increased geographical distance of Margaret Beaufort from the court may have come as a relief to her daughter-in-law. In May Elizabeth went with Henry to Calais for forty days. It was partly to escape the plague, especially bad that year, and partly a matter of diplomacy: a meeting had been planned with Philip of Burgundy. The king took ushers, chaplains, squires, a herald, clerks, grooms and pages as well as guards – and so did she.
A month later the royal couple met Philip outside the walls of Calais at St Peter’s church, decorated for the occasion with tapestries and with scented flowers strewn on the floor. Philip had recently married Katherine of Aragon’s elder sister Juana; a new tie between Burgundy and the new English dynasty to replace Duchess Margaret’s adherence to the old one. The Spanish envoy reported that: ‘The King and the Archduke had a very long conversation, in which the Queen afterwards joined. The interview was very solemn, and attended with great splendour.’
The royal couple landed back in Dover on 16 June, but their pleasure at returning home was short-lived. Three days later their baby son Edmund died at Hatfield, and the heartbreakingly tiny coffin had to be carried through the London streets to a royal burial in Westminster Abbey.
There is, for once, no record of Margaret Beaufort having joined the Calais party. The Spanish ambassador had commented on the speed with which the trip was arranged: so perhaps Margaret was simply at Collyweston, too far away to join the party and outside the plague zone. If there was any element of her being left behind to deal with domestic affairs in Henry’s absence she may have been determined not to be wholly left out, for early next year she was writing her own letter from Calais ‘this day of St Anne’s, that I did bring into this world my good and gracious prince, king and only beloved son’.
Once again, her letter was addressed to ‘My dearest and only desired joy in this world’, and signed as from Henry’s ‘humble servant, bedewoman, and mother’. The first part of the document concerned, again, what Henry had next to do in support of his mother’s long-standing Orléans claim, pursuance of which may have been what brought her across the Channel. ‘I wish, my dear heart, an [if] my fortune be to recover it [the money], I trust you shall well perceive I shall deal towards you as a kind, loving mother; and, if I should never have it, yet your kind dealing it is to me a thousand times more than all that good I can recover.’ It was as if the common pursuit of money (and the power – or security – that came with it) had evolved into a shared language between mother and son.
In the same letter Margaret asked her son to enter into a small subterfuge to help her maintain good relations with her husband Stanley. Stanley’s son, who held offices on her lands in Kendal, had been retaining Margaret’s tenants to himself; rather than claim her own rights directly but tactlessly, she suggested the king send her a letter ordering that all her tenants be retained only in the name of little Henry, Duke of York, which would be ‘a good excuse for me to my lord and husband’. Perhaps, now Margaret was officially independent of him, Stanley was feeling a little jealous of his rights.
In May 1501 the Portuguese ambassador was writing home: ‘the queen was supposed to be with child; but her apothecary told me that a Genoese physician affirmed that she was pregnant, yet it was not so; she has much embonpoint and large breasts.’
Elizabeth too had troubles with her extended family. In August 1501 her cousin Suffolk decamped again, this time permanently, and made his way inevitably into the Burgundian sphere of influence. Caught up in the fall-out were Elizabeth’s nephew Dorset (the son of her half-brother, now succeeded to his father’s dignities) and her brother-in-law Courtenay, who was arrested and sent to the Tower. The queen’s financial records show her taking on responsibility for her sister Katherine and her Courtenay children: payment for their ‘diets’ and servants (two women and a groom at 14s 4d a week) for bringing them to London, for their rockers, for their doctor – and, when medicine failed, for the burying of one small boy.
Suffolk’s timing was particularly galling in that it all but coincided with Katherine of Aragon’s long-awaited arrival in the country. Elizabeth’s officers were involved at every stage of her grand arrival in London from Plymouth, where she had landed. The ceremony was to be extraordinary, but Henry the puppet master couldn’t wait for the curtain to go up on his play. He hastily took his son Arthur south to intercept the Spanish bride on her journey – against the protests of her scandalised staff, who declared she had gone to bed. On his return to Richmond the king immediately reported back: ‘he was met by the Queen’s Grace, whom he ascertained and made privy to the acts and demeanour between himself, the Prince, and the Princess, and how he liked her person and behaviour.’ Margaret Beaufort’s Book of Hours recorded the progress of Katherine’s journey, and her town house at Coldharbour was being fitted out with expensive fabrics and other luxuries to entertain the wedding party. New ovens, freshly glazed windows, new liveries and Beaufort badges for the servants, and a carpet of ‘imagery work’ for Margaret’s own chamber had been ordered. Her comfortable London house even boasted a conservatory, to provide fresh herbs in the winter.
On 10 November the king and queen left Richmond on their separate barges for Baynard’s Castle, to be at hand for the festivities. On 12 November Katherine entered London, with an escort of lords. The king and Prince Arthur watched from a haberdasher’s house; and, so another contemporary document, The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne, described it, ‘in another chamber stood the Queen’s Good Grace, my Lady the King’s Mother, My Lady Margaret, my Lady her sister [Mary], with many other ladies of the land, not in very open sight, like as the King’s Grace did in his manner and party’. What Elizabeth saw as she peeked out of the window was a blooming fifteen-year-old with ‘fair auburn’ hair, and ‘rich apparel on her body after the manner of her country’, and ‘a little hat fashioned like a cardinal’s hat of a pretty braid with a lace of gold’.
Next afternoon Katherine was taken to Baynard’s Castle, with a ‘right great assembly’, to meet Queen Elizabeth, who welcomed her ‘with pleasure and goodly communication’, dancing and ‘disportes’. On 14 November the king and queen – with the king’s mother – stood ‘in secret manner’ in St Paul’s to watch the wedding ceremony from behind a lattice. It was arranged that the bridal couple should process along a walkway six feet above the ground to the specially constructed stage where their marriage would be solemnised – so that everyone could see.
Elizabeth watched while her son Henry escorted the bride into the church and her sister Cecily carried Katherine’s train. The Duchess of Norfolk led those who prepared the bed. Later, what did or did not happen in it would become a source of great controversy: Arthur (so it was reported almost thirty years later) boasted the next morning that he had ‘been this night in the midst of Spain’ but Katherine declared that she had remained as ‘untouched and pure’ as when she came from her mother’s belly. But at the time no one seems to have doubted that everything had gone as it should.
The celebrations proceeded as custom dictated, with mass followed by tournaments and pageants, dancing and feasting. At one moment the ten-year-old Henry, ‘perceiving himself to be encumbered with his clothes’, cast off his gown and danced in his jacket ‘in so goodly and pleasant manner that it was to the King and Queen right great and singular pleasure’. At the Sunday banquet Elizabeth, with her sisters and of course her mother-in-law, sat at a table in the upper part of the Parliament Chamber, ‘the table of most reputation of all the tables in the Chamber’ – another reminder that this chivalric world was hers by virtue not only of her sex but of her family history. After more tournaments and more spectacles, on the following Friday an armada of barges transported the royal party and their attendants to Richmond.
The new Tudor palace of Richmond had been built on the site of the palace of Sheen, destroyed by fire in 1497. Its richly decorated rooms, the royal apartments glowing with gold leaf offering both luxury and a new measure of privacy, looked out on to gardens of topiary and statues of heraldic beasts, ‘the which gardens were apparelled pleasantly for his Highness and certain Lords there ready set, some with chess, and some with tables, byles [sic], dice and cards. The place of butts was ready for archers; and there were bowling alleys and other pleasant and goodly disports for every person as they would choose and desire.’ It was an ideal place in which to continue the festivities. The wedding party watched as, on a specially rigged platform, a Spaniard showed off ‘many wondrous and delicious points of tumbling, dancing and other sleights’. After evensong and supper, the hall was decked out with carpets and cloth of gold cushions, and a great display of plate. A richly decorated portable stage in the shape of a tower was dragged in by sea horses: it was occupied by ladies in disguise and a choir of children. Coneys and white doves were set free to run or fly about the hall, to everyone’s ‘great laughter and disport’. After ‘courtly rounds and pleasant dances’ came the void of ‘goodly spices and wine’, served by a host of nobles.
That account, preserved by Leland, was written to praise, but it does paint an impressive picture. It is miles away from the days when a fleeing Marguerite of Anjou, another foreign princess brought over to become England’s queen, had been reduced to living off a single herring. That was the point, presumably.
The new couple set out for Arthur’s seat at Ludlow just before Christmas and only a few weeks later, in January 1502, Richmond saw the celebration of Princess Margaret’s marriage to the king of Scotland. After mass in the new palace chapel, the queen’s great chamber was the site of the proxy wedding. Once again there is no mention of Margaret Beaufort being present, though the party did include little Princess Mary.
King, queen and princess were asked whether they knew of any impediment to the match. Margaret, according to the account of the Somerset Herald, ‘wittingly and of deliberate mind having twelve years complete in age’ affirmed that she contracted the match; and ‘incontinently’, after the ceremony was concluded, ‘the Queen took her daughter the Queen of Scots by the Hand, and dined both at one Mess covered [using covered dishes]’. Two queens together: it is a pity Elizabeth Woodville could not be there. Jousts and a supper banquet followed. Next morning the new queen of Scots came into her mother’s great chamber and ‘by the voice of’ the officer of arms gave thanks to all the noblemen who had jousted for her,22 and distributed praise and prizes ‘by the advice of the ladies of the court’. Margaret was left in her mother’s charge, but it was agreed she would be sent north by the beginning of September 1503.
But three months after the wedding came tragedy. On 2 April 1502 Prince Arthur died at Ludlow after a short illness. The letter arrived at Greenwich so late in the night that the council did not immediately inform the king but summoned his confessor, who broke the news early next day.
When his Grace understood that sorrowful heavy tidings, he sent out for the Queen, saying, that he and his Queen would take the painful sorrows together. After that she was come and saw the king her Lord, and that natural and painful sorrow, as I have heard say, she with full great and constant comfortable words besought his Grace, that he would first after God, remember the weal of his own noble person, the comfort of his realm, and of her. She then said that my Lady his Mother had never no more children but him only, and, that God by his Grace had ever preserved him, and brought him where that he was. Over that, how God had left him yet a fair Prince, two fair Princesses, and that God is where he was and we are both young enough [to have more children] …
After that she was departed and come to her own Chamber, natural and motherly remembrance of that great loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart, that those that were about her were fain to send for the king to comfort her. Then his Grace of true gentle and faithful love, in good heart came and relieved her, and showed her how wise counsel she had given him before; and he for his part would thank God for his son, and would she should do in like wise.
It was positive evidence of Henry and Elizabeth’s relationship.
Katherine of Aragon, the youthful widow, was left in painful uncertainty about her fate; she herself was said to be ‘suffering’ – in other words, ill. It was Elizabeth who sent ‘a litter of black velvet with black cloth’ to bring her back to the capital by slow stages (there was, after all, the possibility of a pregnancy). By late May she had reached Croydon, and Elizabeth was careful to remain in reassuring contact for all that she herself was planning to journey in the other direction.
That summer Elizabeth went on a progress into Wales, although she must surely have known that, at thirty-six, she was once again pregnant. She and the king had now lost two of their three sons in less than two years, and even if she had decided that the time for childbearing was past it may now have appeared worth the risk. The timing of her journey does seem odd, given that she had no particular history of long solitary trips, but perhaps all the arrangements were in place before she knew of her condition. An event that occurred in late spring may possibly have played a part in Elizabeth’s desire to spend some time away from court. On 6 May one Sir James Tyrell was executed in connection with the Suffolk conspiracies, and his death paved the way for subsequent declarations that he had in his last days confessed to having, at Richard III’s instigation, murdered the Princes in the Tower.23 If such a confession were indeed made, and if Elizabeth believed it, it may have stirred up painful memories. If she had any cause to doubt it – as many have done – it could have operated on her yet more powerfully.
Before Elizabeth even set out from Woodstock she was unwell, but she still managed to depart in early August. Choosing this moment to visit the part of her husband’s realm where her son the Prince of Wales had died a few months earlier might, to modern minds, seem linked to her grief for him. But whether sixteenth-century parents, in an age of rearing at one remove for the high-born and frequent child mortality for all, had the kind of relationship with their children that is commonplace today is uncertain. In any case Elizabeth visited not Ludlow but Raglan, home of the Herbert family. William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, had raised Henry Tudor as a boy; but now his son was married to the queen’s cousin Anne, daughter of the Duke of Buckingham and of the queen’s aunt Katherine Woodville, Anne’s sister Elizabeth Stafford being one of the queen’s chief ladies.
At Raglan Castle Elizabeth may have found some escape from recent strains, including the myriad minor complications of the actual journey as recorded in her Privy Purse expenses: repairs for her litter; local guides; twenty pairs of shoes for her footmen – it was a long way to walk. There were grooms and ostlers to be organised, and arrangements to be made for food and drink along the way. The expenses mention a cart and ‘load of stuff’ which had to travel overland on the journey home, rather than crossing the Severn. The effort it took to carry a queen and her retinue was staggering: not just the provisioning of what was effectively a small army on the march, not just the hasty upgrading of the houses where she was to sleep, but arrangements for the jewels and robes which maintained the queen’s majesty.
These Privy Purse expenses, from 1502–3, provide a rare glimpse into daily life and emotional reality. In December by Elizabeth’s ‘commandment’ three yards of cloth were given ‘to a woman that was norice [nurse] to the Prince brother to the Queen’s grace’. In the same month 12 pence were given to a man who said Earl Rivers (Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Anthony) had lodged in his house just before his death. Alms were bestowed twice that year on an old servant of King Edward’s; and there were entries for upkeep of the queen’s sister Bridget in her convent. The records detail payment to a messenger carrying a command from the queen in April 1502 that the Duchess of Norfolk should receive the wife of Edmund de la Pole ‘late Earl of Suffolk’ – Elizabeth’s traitorous cousin, who had rebelled against Elizabeth’s husband. There were payments, of course, for the maintenance of the Courtenay children, whose mother was the queen’s sister Katherine but whose father had been implicated in the Suffolk rebellions. A queen was supposed to be the caring face of her husband’s regime and of course Elizabeth would care for her family; there was no suspicion of any insurgency. But all the same, one wishes that comparable records had survived for other years, so that we could know whether this kind of support to old Yorkists had been her standard practice, or whether it was new in any way.
A great many of the entries record only part payment from Elizabeth – to tailors, saddlers, goldsmiths – and some of the money was long due. Her gowns were being mended and she bought shoes with cheap tin buckles; she was pledging plate and borrowing money. Henry may have been keeping her short of funds – or perhaps such details reflect the casual relationship with cash of the aristocracy in any century.
The Privy Purse expenses end with a list of payments to women: a pension to the queen’s sister Katherine, a sum to her sister Anne’s husband for her keep. There were salaries to some half-dozen more ranging from Elizabeth Stafford (£33 6s 8d) to Agnes Dean, the queen’s laundress (66s 8d) and the rockers of Katherine Courtenay’s children. The lists reveal a web of female connections. Besides payments to those who had been kind to her mother’s family, there are payments to some who would ease her daughters’ way. The Dame Jane Guildford who received £23 6s 8d in Elizabeth’s final wage bill would become one of Margaret Beaufort’s close attendants and then, a decade later, would escort Elizabeth’s daughter Mary to marry the old king of France; this was the same ‘mother Guildford’ for whose continued company and counsel Mary would beg hysterically.
Black clothing was paid for in June 1502 after the death of Prince Arthur, and in connection with her expected child, offerings were made at the time of the Feast of the Blessed Virgin on 7 and 8 December; the 13th lists a reward to a monk who brought to the queen ‘Our Lady girdle’, traditionally worn by women in childbirth. She had ordered a ‘rich bed’ decorated with red and white roses and with clouds, had purchased linen and interviewed childbed attendants. Then she took boat to Richmond for Christmas; there she played cards, listened to music and paid a messenger who had brought a gift from her mother-in-law. That season, Henry’s pet astrologer William Parron had beautifully illustrated and bound what must at the time have seemed a suitable and seasonal prophecy: that Henry would father many sons and Elizabeth live until she was eighty. It was not to be.
Elizabeth spent one January week at Hampton Court, but on the 26th she went to the Tower. On 2 February she gave birth to a baby girl in what would seem a premature delivery. The Privy Purse expenses record the payment that gives the first urgent alarm: ‘Item to James Nattres for his costs going into Kent for Doctor Hallysworth physician to come to the Queen by the King’s commandment.’ There were entries for boat hire from the Tower to Gravesend and back: for two watermen to wait there while the doctor was hastily fetched; and for horse hire and guides ‘by night and day’. There is no record of whether the birth itself went smoothly, of how any fever first came upon her, of any attempted remedies. But on 11 February 1503 she died. It was her thirty-seventh birthday.
Elizabeth’s body, once sealed in lead by the king’s plumber, was placed in a wooden chest for its progress through the London streets to Westminster. No expense was spared for the ceremony, or for the velvet-clad effigy24 which would be placed on her coffin. ‘Item to Master Lawrence for carving of the head with Fedrik his mate, xiijs iiiid. Item to Wechon Kerver and Hans van Hooh for carving of the two hands, iiijs … Item for vij small sheep skins for the body … ijs iiijd.’
And Elizabeth was to have the grandest of resting places, even though work on the building which was to house her tomb had begun only weeks before. At the beginning of the century Henry VII had commissioned a wonderful new Lady Chapel; a monument to his family designed, he hoped, ultimately to house the body of Henry VI, canonised into a Lancastrian saint. The old chapel on the site had been pulled down and also, John Stow wrote, an adjoining tavern called, ironically, the White Rose. The first stone had been laid on 24 January 1503. It would be another fifteen years before the tomb that Elizabeth would share with her husband was finally completed; in the meantime her body was placed in a temporary vault in the crossing of the Abbey, in front of the high altar.
As always, there are stories to be deduced from the records of the burial ceremonies. Though the queen’s sisters Katherine and Anne took a prominent part in the funeral procession Bridget, the youngest, must still have been at her convent at Dartford; and Cecily, though next in age to Elizabeth, was absent either for the offence her second marriage had caused the king or perhaps because of the sheer distance of her residence. Instead, place in the procession after Katherine and Anne went to Lady Katherine Gordon, the widow of Perkin Warbeck, by virtue of her own connections to Scottish royalty.
King Henry’s retreat into grief was profound and he became seriously ill. Margaret Beaufort moved into Richmond to take care of her son, ordering medicines for him and a sustaining supply of sweet wine for herself. Thomas More’s A Rueful Lamentation of the Death of Queen Elizabeth vividly imagined Elizabeth’s farewell to the world.
If worship might have kept me, I had not gone.
If wit might have me saved, I needed not fear.
If money might have helped, I lacked none.
But O good God what vaileth all this gear?
When death is come thy mighty messenger,
Obey we must, there is no remedy,
Me hath he summoned, and lo now here I lie.
Besides having Elizabeth bid a respectful farewell to Margaret Beaufort, and a heartbreakingly affectionate one to her children, More’s poem also warned King Henry, in curiously modern terms, that: ‘Erst were you father, and now must ye supply/The mother’s part also.’ He may not have found it easy. Even in adulthood his son Henry VIII, who evinced little sign of warm feeling towards his father, remembered his mother’s death bitterly enough to recall that ‘hateful intelligence’ as a standard for melancholy. In the wake of Elizabeth’s death there must have been adjustments all round in a diminished family. But as the months passed, life went on.
In summer 1503 the thirteen-year-old Princess Margaret was sent north, as promised, to finalise her marriage to James of Scotland. On 27 June she and her father travelled from Richmond to Margaret Beaufort’s Collyweston, whose gardens had been extended and fitted out with new summerhouses to entertain the royal party. On 8 July she set out again, to be crowned in Edinburgh on 3 August, not yet 14 years old. (Out of the six children she would bear James, five would die in infancy; perhaps her mother and grandmother had been right to worry about her health.)
The long account of the journey north, written by that same Somerset Herald who had described Margaret’s proxy marriage ceremony eighteen months earlier, makes fascinating reading. There is a melancholy, elegiac tone about a document avowedly written ‘to comfort the hearts of age for to hear it, and to give courage to the young to do thereafter in such case to come’.
Everything was splendidly done; Margaret was sent off ‘richly dressed, mounted upon a fair palfrey’. The list of towns, of official receptions and leave-takings (the bride always ‘richly dressed’) is exhausting. Margaret must have been tougher than reputed in order to have survived it, even if she had not ‘killed a buck with her bow’ at Alnwick. But there is no doubt the ceremonial must have been impressive: this was, of course, a publicity exercise.
Minstrels were sent along to make sure no one missed Margaret’s entry into and departure from the various towns, and a party of gentlemen was ordered ‘to make space, that more plainly the said Queen and her company might be better seen’. As she passed into Scotland her servants sometimes had to force a way for the carriage; but the ‘great quantity’ of people flocking to see her had at least brought ‘plenty of drink’ for those prepared to pay for it.
The description of Margaret’s initial meetings with her husband at Hadington Castle shows, with unusual clarity, the stages of two people getting to know each other under these trying circumstances. As James was brought to her great chamber she met him at the door, and the two ‘made great reverences, the one to the other, his head being bare, and they kissed together’. The greeting to the rest of her party being done, they ‘went aside, and communed together by long space’ – though it is doubtful how much a thirteen-year-old girl and an experienced womaniser of thirty can really have had to say to each other.
Next day James found Margaret playing cards in her room; she kissed him ‘of good will’ and he played for her on the clavichord and the lute ‘which pleased her very much’. The next day again, seeing that the stool where she was seated for supper ‘was not for her ease’, he gave her his chair. Things were looking good, surely. The two did appear to have some things in common – an interest in music as well as in hunting – and there were still several days to go before their marriage was completed. But, this was an account written to glorify, and although Margaret may have been lucky by comparison with, for example, her grandmother Margaret Beaufort, married at an even earlier age, a letter back to her father Henry in England none the less breathes homesickness.
After formal thanks to all the ladies and gentlewomen who had accompanied her, she asks her father to give credence to the bearer of the letter to whom she had showed more of her mind than she could write, and asks him to take care of one Thomas, who had been her mother’s footman. Describing the intimacy that had sprung up between the Earl of Surrey and her new husband, and how her own chamberlain, committed to ‘my cause’, could hardly get a look in, she can only write that ‘I pray God it may be for my poor heart’s ease in time to come.’ An inexperienced young girl trying to negotiate the politics of a foreign court, she added: ‘I would I were with your Grace now, and many times more.’ It was the common lot of princesses, but that cannot have made it any easier.
Among the previous generation of York women, 1503 ended on the same sad note with which it had begun. On 23 November Margaret of Burgundy died. Whatever personal grief she had felt for the loss of Perkin Warbeck she had remained a central figure at the Burgundian court: the dowager whose presence was in demand for diplomatic functions; the devoted mother figure who would care for the children of the new duke and duchess whenever they were called away. Indeed, Duke Philip spoke of ‘how, after the death of our late lady mother, she behaved towards us as if she were our real mother …’. She had become, almost, the Plantagenet who got away: safe from the precautionary violence that in decades to come the Tudors would continue to wreak on other remaining scions of the family.
At some unrecorded time between January 1503 and May 1504 Edward IV’s other sister Elizabeth also died – the mother of Lincoln and Suffolk, the last of Cecily Neville’s brood. The ground was being cleared. Of the women who had figured earlier in this story, there was only one survivor. It was, inevitably, Margaret Beaufort.