There is very little, from the cupidity of Elizabeth Woodville to the culpability of Richard III, on which the historians of the middle and late fifteenth century agree. There is just one subject, however, on which they are unanimous: the inadequacy of their sources. J.R. Lander wrote that these were ‘notoriously intractable’ – and it is especially true when it comes to dealing with women, who fought in no battles and passed no laws. Charles Ross, biographer of Edward IV, lamented that ‘any discussion of motive and the interplay of personality in politics [were] matters generally beyond the range of the unsophisticated and often ill-informed and parochial writers of the time’.
The fifteenth century saw great change in the writing of history. The monastic Latin chronicle, with a couple of honourable exceptions, was in decline; and though the baton was being passed to secular chroniclers – city merchants and the like, writing in the vernacular and often anonymously – their records were erratic and often confusing. In an age which showed few signs of a sense of authorship or provenance, the chroniclers and antiquaries frequently repeated and adapted each other. The writing of humanist history in the Italian style only started in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century with Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More, as did the keeping of state papers. And though the records of state departments such as the Chancery, the Exchequer and the law courts have been the subject of extensive recent study they do not satisfy the biographer’s thirst for motive and feeling.
The records of royal life provide few personal letters of the kind found in the Paston papers. Perhaps the fact that aristocratic letters were usually dictated militated against the written expression of intimate feeling; not only that, but the times were dangerous and a friend could so easily become an enemy. There is, too, the fact that in the civil war most reports were written very definitely from one side or the other. As Lander put it, introducing his book on the Wars of the Roses: ‘Many of the letters and narratives quoted in this book purvey biased opinion, wild rumour, meretricious propaganda and the foulest of slander as well as historical truth.’ Not just what someone writing after the event thought had happened, but, even more invidiously, what they wanted others to think had happened. Brief introductions are given below to some of the most important contemporary writers, in an attempt to offer the reader some idea of their likely starting point. For a more extensive discussion see Keith Dockray’s introductions to his Source Books, or the chapter ‘Writing History’ in English Historical Documents, vol. v.
Any work of synthesis, such as this largely is, inevitably owes a great deal to existing individual studies. Six of the seven women here have already been the subject of biographies, from the great Victorian works of Cooper, Hookham and the like to the sometimes less considerable works of the mid-twentieth century. More recently Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood in The King’s Mother have produced a wealth of new detail on Margaret Beaufort, while Helen Maurer’s book on Margaret [sic] of Anjou has explored the whole question of queenship and power. Both Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York have benefited from new biographies by Arlene Okerlund; and Christine Weightman was able to bring a knowledge of continental sources to bear on her biography of Margaret of Burgundy (or ‘Margaret of York’). With these I would couple, as of prime importance, Joanna Laynesmith’s The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1503; while Lisa Hilton’s Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens, and Helen Castor’s She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth provide an invaluable context.
Michael Hicks has been brave enough to confront the sometimes daunting lack of information for a biography of Anne Neville; but there has, at the time of writing, been no published study of Cecily Neville, though Joanna Laynesmith (née Chamberlayne) has written several valuable articles, and Michael K. Jones used his book on the psychological background of Bosworth to explore his controversial but fascinating theories. It is possible that the uncertainty surrounding several crucial points is enough to prohibit a biography as such: therefore the source notes given here for Cecily are more extensive than for the other women in this book.
Prologue
1 Elizabeth of York’s funeral: The Antiquarian Repertory, vol. 4, pp. 655–663
2 matter as much as the battlefields: Leyser, Medieval Women p.167 cites Philippa Maddern in the Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988) on the important role of the Paston women in the ‘bloodless battles of land transactions, county rumour-mongering and client maintenance’.
Part I 1445–1460
1 fifteen-year-old: Earlier writers have Marguerite born in 1429 rather than 1430 but this perception was corrected in an article of 1988 by C.N.L. Brooke and V. Ortenberg, ‘The Birth of Marguerite of Anjou’, Historical Research, 61 (pp. 357–8).
2 Polydore Vergil: c.1470–1555, Italian Renaissance scholar who came to England in 1501–2 and a few years later was invited by Henry VII to write a history of England – the Anglica Historia, not completed until the reign of Henry VIII. When considering his views on, for example, events as controversial as those of Richard III’s reign it is disconcerting to realise he can have had no first-hand knowledge of them: the more so, since his writings have been among the most influential in blackening Richard’s name. None the less, although writing in a Tudor, which effectively meant a Lancastrian, age, Vergil set conscientiously about his task, collecting memories and canvassing opinions; and his work is widely seen as marking a turning point in the writing of English history. Keith Dockray, moreover, points out that where the civil wars are concerned so many of the surviving records were written from a Yorkist viewpoint that Vergil serves as a useful corrective in recreating the Lancastrian perspective.
3 took stock of her: One report goes that Henry had earlier instructed his ambassadors to have portraits taken of other potential brides ‘in their kirtles simple and their faces, like as you see their stature and their beauty and colour of skin and their countenances’. He had an aesthetic appreciation, unworldly though he may have been.
4 chivalry: A concept which, embodied in the courtly tournament and in popular literature, recurs time and again in the lives of the women of the late fifteenth century, serving simultaneously to elevate and to contain them. See Leyser, Medieval Women, p. 248: that it was once a standard practice to contrast the bloody epics of the early medieval period with the later, ‘heroine-centred’ romances ‘showing women in the courtly worlds of the later Middle Ages as the privileged and adored mistresses of all they surveyed. More recent criticism has come to make this view seem singularly naive; the romance heroine on her pedestal is, if anything, worse off than her epic predecessor who had at least some part to play in the thick of the fighting.…’ Many of Marguerite’s problems would come from the uncertainty of her position between these two worlds. See also Epilogue, note 2.
5 queenship: What did it mean to be a queen in the late fifteenth century? The models were contradictory. A book printed by Caxton in 1475, the Game and Playe of the Chesse, by the Dominican Jacobus de Cessolis, had been written almost two centuries earlier, but the publication of this new English edition suggests that its vision was still in currency. A queen, de Cessolis wrote, ought to be chaste and wise, ‘secret’ – i.e. discreet – ‘and not curious in nourishing of her children’. ‘A Queen ought to be well mannered and amongst all she ought to be timorous and shamefast [shamefaced].’ Good advice for any woman, no doubt – but not wholly adequate for a queen when the turmoils of the time might well force her to take a part in public affairs.
Christine de Pizan repeatedly writes of her ‘princess’ also as someone who may have the business of state thrust upon her. ‘The lady with great responsibilities in government has little time free from ruling. Lords often give over their rule to their ladies when they know them to be wise and good and when they themselves are obliged to be absent. Such women have enormous responsibility and authority to govern their lands and serve as council chief.’ It was in part expectations like these, which Marguerite would bring across the Channel with her, that would so trouble her new country – for all that de Pizan carefully presents her lady’s rule as being only that of her lord’s deputy. By the same token a tract written in France in the fourteenth century, and translated in the fifteenth, The III Consideracions Right Necesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince, urged a queen to ‘have good and due regard to such things as toucheth the profit and the honour of her lord and herself. And she should take in hand no great matters without license or “congie” [permission] of her lord’ … which did however imply that she could take on such matters if necessary. This was clearly a position of responsibility without power: the queen could function only through her influence on the king, and while this often served its purpose, allowing her acknowledged if informal influence, it could rebound on her if the situation changed. Marguerite’s biographer Helen Maurer makes a distinction between power, which women could wield either through influence or through armed force, and authority – the recognition of their right to exercise power – which they would be denied until the next century.
6 the ‘Wars of the Roses’: The beginning and end points of which are a matter for dispute. The preferred option now tends to be from 1455 to 1485 – the battle of Bosworth – or possibly 1487 and the battle of Stoke. None the less, some have seen this conflict as starting as early as 1399, with the seizure of Richard II’s throne by Henry IV; while others point out that 1471, with the death of Henry VI and his son, saw the end of any conflict between York and what could properly be called the house of Lancaster.
7 Crowland Abbey chronicles: ‘Crowland’ is a convenient way of referring to the important chronicles compiled at Crowland – or Croyland – Abbey in the Fens. The chronicle begun by one ‘Ingulph’, giving the history of the abbey from 655, was later taken over by a series of ‘continuators’; the identity of the second continuator who chronicled the years from 1459 to 1486 (which, he declares, was the time of writing) is a matter of debate. The most popular candidate is John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln (Richard III’s chancellor for much of his reign, but needing now to ingratiate himself with the new king Henry VII); or possibly a member of Russell’s staff. Other candidates, however, have been suggested: from a clerk in Chancery whose writings only later found their way to the abbey, to an unknown Crowland monk working from a secular source. It has often been pointed out that the second continuator, whoever he was, displays a certain animus against Richard III. But the more one reads the records for this period, the more does a certain amount of bias seem inevitable; and Crowland must rank as a very significant source.
8 through the male line: The question of inheritance through a female line would prove a recurrent issue in this century, despite the fact that it had long ago provided the basis for the Neville family’s power: after one Robert Fitz Meldred of Raby had married the daughter of Geoffrey de Neville, their son took the rich mother’s Neville name and founded this branch of the Neville family. See Young, Charles R., The Making of the Neville Family 1166–1400, Boydell Press, 1996.
9 jointly to choose a confessor: For what information exists on Cecily’s early married life, see Crawford, Yorkists, pp. 1, 3, 5.
10 Cecily’s expenditure: For Cecily as a ‘late medieval big spender’ see Jones, Bosworth 1485, p. 59.
11 debate … about Edward’s birth: These are the facts on which Michael K. Jones bases his argument that the suggestion Edward was not York’s son was in fact true. He points out (Bosworth, p. 67) that York was away from Rouen on campaign exactly nine months before Edward’s birth on 28 April 1442; has, indeed, found new documentation which shows the duke was away for longer than had been previously thought – from mid-July until after 20 August. But the baby would have had to be only a matter of weeks late or premature to put the argument in jeopardy, even disregarding the possibility of conjugal visits during a campaign fought only 50 miles away. See Crawford, Yorkists, pp. 173–8 for the facts that weigh against the theory. Jones also suggests that Cecily’s later piety was that of the reformed rake; but this theory, though fascinating, can only be speculative.
12 Edward took after his mother: Edward’s different appearance would later be held up as evidence of his illegitimacy. But the same grounds would also be used by Richard III to infer the bastardy of Edward’s brother Clarence, who himself had been the first to accuse Edward of bastardy; and Clarence was born some years and several siblings down the line, and in a different country.
13 no sign of querying his son’s paternity: and this as the all-important heir. As Horace Walpole put it (in Historic Doubts) in the eighteenth century – a time of notably lax aristocratic morality – ‘Ladies of the least disputable gallantry generally suffer their husbands to beget the heir’.
14 Mancini: Dominic Mancini was an Italian visiting England for the first half of 1483 and writing a report on English affairs for his patron Angelo Cato, one of the advisers of the French king Louis. These comprised Richard III’s takeover of the country, as well as a certain amount of background. He left England in July 1483, though he seems to have tried to update his information right up until the point when he handed in his report at the beginning of December. It is unclear how good his sources were – though one may possibly have been John Argentine, physician to the boy king Edward V – or even how much English he spoke. None the less, because he was writing in the year the events he described took place his testimony is invaluable. It is perhaps worth noting that, though his report is usually known as the ‘Usurpation’ of Richard III, its Latin title actually referred to the ‘Occupatio’, i.e. occupation or seizure of the throne, rather than to its ‘usurpatio’.
15 relayed by … Charles of Burgundy: When it reached Louis of France, so the report runs, he enjoyed it so much that he pretended deafness, so it might be repeated to him. But the sixteenth-century historian Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantome, reported in his Memoirs that Louis was a collector of ‘bawdy-tales of loose-living ladies … [He] had a very low opinion of women, and believed none to be chaste.’ A story concerning the notoriously pious Cecily, mother to Louis’ rival Edward, would surely have been a particularly effective passport to his favour. Pierre de Bourdeille, The Lives of Gallant Ladies, Pushkin Press, 1943, p. 325.
16 Jean de Waurin: Jean or Jehan de Waurin (c.1398–c.1474) was born a Frenchman but wound up at the court of Burgundy, where he was commissioned to write a history of England, ending in 1471. A single copy of his Recueil survived in the library of Louis de Gruuthuyse, q.v.
17 Marguerite, whose father: Although some said now that Marguerite was not even her father’s legitimate daughter, a rumour hinted at in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3, Act 2, Scene 2.
18 Shakespeare has Marguerite pleading: Henry VI Part 2, Act 3, Scene 2.
19 a high-spending queen: Myers and Clough in Crown, Household and Parliament in Fifteenth Century England: studies on ‘The Household of Queen Margaret of Anjou, 1452–3’; ‘Some Household Ordinances of Henry VI’; as well as on ‘The Household of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, 1466–7’.
20 Margaret [Beaufort] had been raised at her own family seat: Though another theory (see Hardyment, Malory, p. 244) suggests that she was at least partly raised in Alice Chaucer’s household at Ewelme.
21 Cecily … wrote to Marguerite: Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women, pp. 233–5. On the birth of her son Richard Cecily writes of an ‘encumberous labour, to me full painful and uneasy, God knoweth’.
22 Thomas More: More’s History of King Richard the Third brings into sharp focus many of the issues which bedevil the historical sources for the late fifteenth century. That focus is all the sharper not only for More’s own later reputation as a figure of probity, but for the extremely attractive (and quotable) nature of his writing – full of lengthy reported speeches and the kind of human drama not always found in other sources of the day.
The first question is whether More can be regarded as a contemporary, given that he – born in 1478 – is describing the events of 1483. (His mention of Richard’s birth, like his descriptions of Richard’s brother’s marriage, are all part of the back story to his main theme.) But this apart, the long impassioned speeches he gives to Elizabeth Woodville and her opponents over the surrendering of the younger of the Princes in the Tower could in any case not credibly have been relayed to him verbatim even by someone who was present. They give point to the observation that his History is as much a matter of literary creation as factual narrative – a conscious warning against the dangers of tyranny owing a good deal to classical models. (Unless – a suggestion mooted by R.S. Sylvester, editing the sixteen-volume Yale edition of More’s works – he was drawing on a now-lost piece of writing by someone, possibly John Morton, in whose household the youthful More spent some time.)
Morton (whose own experience would help account for More’s anti-Richard bias) has most often been suggested as More’s probable source of information: other theories, however, have been raised. Jones (Bosworth, pp. 63–4) postulates that ‘Jane’ Shore, whom More evidently knew, may have given him some information, though she would hardly have been privy to the speeches mentioned above; Weir (The Princes in the Tower, p. 170) points out that More was in close touch with a nun in the Minoresses’ convent of Aldgate, the inmates of which might have had important information to give him concerning the fate of the princes (the daughter of Sir Robert Brackenbury and two female relatives of Sir James Tyrell: see Part v, note 23 on p. 375 for Tyrell’s supposed confession). It is More’s testimony concerning the fate of the princes which has been more influential even than Vergil’s in blackening the reputation of Richard III: none the less, supporters of King Richard can choose between simply blaming him for calumny, and speculating that the reason he left his narrative unfinished, ending at the point of the murder, may have been that he had come to realise this version of events was a lie. Assuming, of course, that he did indeed abandon it at this point … The History of King Richard III was printed only two decades after his death, at which time it was described merely as having been found among More’s papers and was in his hand, so that even the authorship could – the crowning uncertainty – be seen as unclear.
23 honour or dishonour: Helen Cooper writes in her introduction to the OUP edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur: ‘Malory’s Arthurian world operates by the principles of a shame culture, where worth is measured in terms of reputation, “worship”, rather than by the principles of a guilt culture.’
24 several of the early Norman queens: The two Matildas – the Conqueror’s wife and daughter-in-law – exercised this kind of power, as did Eleanor of Aquitaine, while in 1253 Henry III had named his queen Eleanor of Provence regent during his absence.
25 process was completed: Maurer in Margaret of Anjou states on p. 78: ‘There has been a tendency among historians to acknowledge Margaret’s [sic] emergence as a political actor but then to shy away from looking at it too closely. A part of the problem lies in the traditional habit of regarding the Wars of the Roses from the perspective of its male protagonists.’ See also Maurer, pp. 81–2.
26 two sides of the same unnatural coin: This is the theory by which Richard, in Henry VI Part 3, 5.5 accused her of having usurped her husband’s breeches, i.e. his masculinity.
27 Anne Neville: Another aspect of Neville power was that it was northern. Anne Neville was, of course, great-niece as well, eventually, as daughter-in-law to Cecily.
28 perhaps physically: The famous thirteenth-century tract Holy Maidenhead paints a horrifying picture of maternity: ‘a swelling in your womb which bulges you out like a water-skin, discomfort in your bowels and stitches in your side … the dragging weight of your two breasts, and the streams of milk that run from them. … Worry about your labour pains keeps you awake at night. Then when it comes to it, that cruel distressing anguish, that incessant misery, that torment upon torment, that wailing outcry; while you are suffering from this, and from your fear of death, shame [is] added to that suffering. …’ (Leyser, Medieval Women, p. 123). The same tract paints an equally damning picture of a wife’s lot – the child screaming, ‘the cat at the flitch and the dog at the hide, her loaf burning on the hearth and her calf sucking, the pot boiling over into the fire – and her husband complaining.’ (Leyser, p. 146). But at least that is a position with which Margaret Beaufort would not have to cope. The tract may have been written specifically for an audience of enclosed religious women: later in life Margaret Beaufort would be recorded as fitting out a cell for at least one anchoress, at Stamford in Lincolnshire, and making her gifts of wine and apples.
29 Bernard André: Also known as Andreus, 1450–1522, French Augustinian friar who was appointed Poet Laureate in the first few years of Henry VII’s reign; became his official ‘historiographer’ (and inevitably apologist); and played a role in the education of his sons. Vita Henrici Septimi in Memorials of King Henry VII, ed. J. Gairdner, Rolls Series, London, 1858.
30 a new marriage had to be arranged for her: Or perhaps – since she did, after all, ride out to be present at the negotiations – her modern biographers are right to suggest she took a hand in arranging it herself. Earlier biographers of Margaret Beaufort preferred to stress her piety and resignation.
31 unmanly and cruelly was entreated: English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, p. 83.
32 ‘submitted her unto his grace’: Gregory’s Chronicle, p. 206.
33 relief of [Cecily] and her infants: Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry VI, 1452–61, p. 542.
34 the Countess of Salisbury was personally attainted: a comparatively novel procedure where a woman was concerned. From the parliamentary rolls of 1442: ‘Also pray the commons … that it may please you, by the advice and assent of the lords spiritual and temporal in this present parliament assembled, to declare that such ladies (duchesses, countesses, or baronesses) thus indicted … of any treason or felony … whether they are married or single, should be held to reply and set for judgement before such judges and peers of the realm as are other peers of the realm. …’
35 chair of blue velvet: Weightman, Margaret of York, p. 45; Paston Letters, iii, p. 233.
36 Hall and Holinshed: For The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York Hall (c.1498–1547) drew heavily on Vergil and on More; in fact, when More’s History was first printed, it was described as having appeared earlier in Hall but ‘very much corrupt … altered in words and whole sentences’. Raphael Holinshed (?–1580) first published the Chronicles containing his History of England in 1577; his work, more directly even than Hall’s, which in large parts it reproduces (a modern age would say plagiarises), is the major source for Shakespeare’s history plays. John Stow (1525–1605, mentioned subsequently in text), who contributed to a later edition of Holinshed’s work, was also an antiquary who transcribed a number of manuscripts.
37 pillaged the land: There is a theory that the whole saga of Marguerite’s indifference and her soldiers’ outrage originated as Yorkist propaganda. See Cron’s article ‘Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrian March on London 1461’.
38 the ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales … : That, at least, is the consensus view, though Cron’s article (see above) demonstrates how this is a good example of the way information has often to be pieced together from diverging sources. The Great Chronicle of London mentions Jacquetta and Lady Scales but not Anne; the Annales once attributed to the antiquary William Worcester and the Calendar of State Papers Milan mention Anne and Jacquetta but not Lady Scales: another source, the so-called English Chronicleedited by Davies, has Anne alone.
39 her eldest daughter Elizabeth: The name of Domina Isabella (the Latin ‘Elizabeth’) Grey occurs among the ladies attending Queen Marguerite at a point when (in so far as the records allow a guess at dates to be made) the young Elizabeth Woodville had probably recently been married to the Lancastrian John Grey. This reference may well describe another lady; none the less, Thomas More would mention Elizabeth’s service with Marguerite as a fact. The nineteenth-century writer Prévost d’Exiles relates a romantic story that Elizabeth had accompanied her husband on the campaign and was, before St Albans, persuaded by Marguerite to visit Warwick’s camp as the queen’s spy.
40 The Bishop of Elphin … sets the glad tidings later: Calendar of State Papers Venetian, p. 103; also Calendar of State Papers Milan, pp. 65–6.
Part II 1461–1471
1 the lands held by his father: See Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV 1461–67, p. 131 (1 June 1461), an extremely extensive list of properties (with their ‘advowsons, wards, marriages, escheats … warrens, chases, fairs, markets, fisheries, liberties, wrecks of sea’) granted to Cecily for life ‘in full recompense of her jointure’. A later grant describes her holding properties, which carried with them the right to hold a three-weekly court, ‘as fully as the king’s father had them’. See also Calendar of the Close Rolls Edward IV, vol. i, 1461–68, p. 73.
2 couple were estranged: When in 1461 Exeter was forced to flee abroad and was attainted, his wife was granted the bulk of his lands; and if this favour came at a price (in 1466 she was required to allow her heiress daughter to marry a son of Queen Elizabeth Woodville), no doubt she felt it was well worth paying.
3 another … issue would raise its head: see p. 155 below. The possibility of Edward’s having been already married is explored at length in Ashdown-Hill’s Eleanor: The Secret Queen; see also Crawford, Yorkists, pp. 178–9.
4 ‘to love together’: Against that, an unsanctioned love match in 1469 of Margery Paston with Richard Calle, the family’s bailiff, had, her mother claimed, ‘struck sore at our hearts’. The bishop hauled in to adjudicate, who by no means thought such a matter too light for him, assured Margery that if she persisted in claiming this marriage, none of her friends would receive her – ‘remember’, Margery’s mother Margaret urged her son, ‘that we have lost of her but a brothel, and set it less to heart …’. Love within an agreed marriage was of course another, wholly desirable, thing. A letter in the Stonor Papers, from a partner in the firm who had been betrothed to a teenaged Stonor daughter not yet deemed ready to complete the match: ‘when I remember your youth, and see well that you are no eater of your meat, which would help you greatly to grow, forsooth then you make me very heavy again. And therefore I pray you, my own sweet cousin, even as you love me, to be happy and eat your meat like a woman. And if you will do so for my love, look what you will desire of me, whatsoever it may be, and by my truth I promise by the help of our Lord to perform it to the best of my power.’ The messages here are potentially mixed, of course – but the young Katherine was sufficiently content with her lot to show a ‘responsible loving dealing’ towards her future partner.
5 The only Englishwoman to become queen consort since the Conquest: The closest comparisons would probably be with Matilda of Scotland, wife of Henry I, whose mother came from a Saxon royal house; and Joan of Kent, who made a controversial marriage with the Black Prince, son of Edward III. It could not, however, be held against Matilda that she was not of royal stock; while the Black Prince died before he became king, or Joan queen.
6 Cecily elaborated her title: Chamberlayne ‘A paper crown’; see also Crawford, Yorkists, pp. 175–6.
7 until de Brezé found her: Nor were her dramatic adventures over. When she and her son, with de Brezé, had ridden back into Scotland, they fell into the hands of an English spy called Cook who planned to take her to Edward IV. Cook’s confederates overpowered the men, dragged them all into a rowing boat and put out to sea where, as dawn broke, Marguerite was able surreptitiously to loosen de Brezé’s bonds so that he was able to overpower Cook and they got away.
8 A queen was allowed … to exercise influence: Men, of course, exercised influence as well, but they had more formalised rules also, which meant that the dangerous, mistrusted interaction of the political and the personal was one step further away.
9 Messengers … bringing instructions from Marguerite: Malory’s biographer Christina Hardyment postulates (Malory, p. 419 ff) that he may have been employed as a go-between.
10 Woking: In December 1468 the Staffords invited the king to visit Woking; perhaps it was to calm frayed nerves, and to signal continued good intentions, that he accepted. He hunted in the deer park and dined in the hunting lodge under a canopy of purple sarcenet, on a pewter dinner service brought down from London by a hostess who had purchased velvet and Holland cloth to dress for the occasion. The party ate pike, wildfowl, thirteen lampreys and seven hundred oysters, with ‘half a great conger for the king’s dinner’.
11 ‘Worcester’: The chronicler once mistakenly identified as the fifteenth-century antiquary William of Worcester, and now often known as ‘pseudo-Worcester’.
12 Clarence’s mother Cecily had now told him this was true: Jones, Bosworth, p. 73. Militating against the theory that Cecily here fell out with Edward is (as Joanna Laynesmith points out in the article cited in the next note) the fact that in a time of danger soon afterwards – a time when he had, however, been reconciled with Clarence – Edward took his family for safety to his mother’s house; and that Cecily was recorded as taking part in several family ceremonials in the years ahead. As several writers have also reflected, however, within the context of a family irritation is not the same thing as total alienation – now or in the fifteenth century.
13 Cecily and her daughters … working: Like so much concerning Cecily’s role in the Clarence saga this seems to be, as Jane Austen put it, ‘a truth universally acknowledged’ rather than one for which it is possible to produce actual proof. For discussion of that role, see Laynesmith, ‘The Kings’ Mother’; also Jones, Bosworth, Chapter 3 for his theory as to Cecily’s motives in travelling to Sandwich to see Clarence as he set off for Calais and marriage with Warwick’s daughter.
14 Marguerite held out for fifteen days: Shakespeare in Henry VI Part 3, Act 3, Scene 3 takes full dramatic licence to have Warwick change his allegiance, and Marguerite accept it, in half a dozen lines or the blink of an eye.
15 Commynes: Philippe de Commynes or Commines (1447–c.1511) made the opposite journey to that of Jean de Waurin. Born in Flanders, he wound up in the service of the French king Louis XI (at which court he may have met the exiled Henry Tudor). HisMémoires reflect the insider’s view of international relations that he gained in his career as a diplomat, while his analytical style has seen him dubbed ‘the first truly modern writer’.
16 his force met Warwick’s at Barnet: The reports of the battle serve as a good example of how news spread. The battle of Barnet started at dawn 12 miles outside London. Wild rumours were abroad early and by 10 a.m. the city was hearing tales of Edward’s victory, but these were disbelieved until, the Great Chronicle of London says, a rider raced through the streets displaying one of Edward’s own gauntlets, sent as token to his queen. A Norfolk man claimed to have seen the bodies of Warwick and Montague at St Paul’s that morning. Wanting to be the first to deliver the news back home, he took a boat after dinner, about twelve, but was captured at sea by merchants of the Hanseatic league and taken to Zeeland where his story was quickly taken to Margaret of Burgundy at Ghent. Margaret wrote a letter describing it to her mother-in-law and presumably also to her husband – who, however, was also getting erroneous news that Edward IV had been killed.
17 womanly behaviour … of the Queen: Agnes Strickland’s early Victorian Lives of the Queens of England claimed that Elizabeth’s ‘feminine helplessness’ had drawn forth a ‘tender regard’ for her throughout the realm, in contrast to the effect produced by the ‘indomitable spirit’ of Marguerite of Anjou. The comparison might be phrased differently today, but contemporaries clearly agreed.
Part III 1471–1483
1 Cecily … ‘sore moved’ Sir John to sell her the place: Castor, Blood and Roses, p. 119. She had, after all, grown up in far less commodious establishments: Raby was a palace-cum-fortress rebuilt almost a century earlier, with towers and apartments irregularly grouped round courtyards.
2 disguised as a kitchen maid: If that sounds too much like Cinderella in the fairy story, it should be remembered not only that Marguerite is supposed to have travelled disguised as a servant, but that in the turmoils of the 1440s Alice Chaucer had had to go to Norwich disguised ‘like a housewife of the country’.
3 the dispensation: Anne’s biographer Michael Hicks (Anne Neville, p. 143 ff) has written on what he believes to be the invalidity of the dispensation and therefore of the marriage; clearly not a subject of debate at the time, but casting an interesting light on Richard’s attitudes.
4 any other choices: And Hicks, for example (Anne Neville, p.111), though without citing actual evidence, portrays it as her own decision to marry Richard.
5 George Buck: Sir George Buck, 1560–1622, James I’s Master of the Revels, Richard III’s first determined apologist, and author of the History of King Richard the Third. Buck’s account plays a significant part in the history of the next reign (see below, pp. 225–7) at which time it will, however, become clear that information from this source must be treated warily.
6 Rous: John Rous, Rows or Roos (d. 1491), Warwickshire cleric and antiquary, the chronicler of Anne Neville’s family. His Rous Roll, a history of the earls of Warwick, warmly praised Anne’s husband, then on the throne as Richard III; later, however, hisHistory of the Kings of England vilified the dead king just as ardently. It was this work that first saw the portrait, seized upon by Shakespeare, of a Richard who spent two years in his mother’s womb, emerging complete with teeth and long hair.
7 a declaration of trust: Cecily, by contrast, spent the summer well away from the seat of power. A letter from Margaret Paston to her son John (Paston Letters vol. 5 p. 236) describes how ‘my Lady of Yorke and all her household is [sic] still here at St Bennet’s [an abbey near the Paston home of Mautby in Norfolk] and purposed to abide there still, till the king come from be yonder the sea, and longer if she like the air there’. The Paston Letters contain a number of references to Cecily; see, for example, vol. 3 pp. 110, 233, 366.
8 the reburial at Fotheringhay: Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, The Reburial of Richard Duke of York.
9 simply watched the ceremony: Sutton and Visser-Fuchs say Cecily was certainly conspicuous ‘for her absence, or for the failure of the texts to refer to her’. They speculate on the possibility that ‘Her status as the widow of a man who was being buried almost as a king may have created problems of precedence that were best resolved by her merely watching’; suggesting alternatively that she may have been absent from sickness ‘or choice’.
10 Elizabeth Stonor writes: Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women, pp. 75–7; Stonor Letters, pp. 269–71.
11 One letter perhaps written in 1474: Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women, pp. 133–4. For the possible significance of Syon in the family dynamics, and the shared piety here reflected as a bond between Richard and Cecily, see Jones, Bosworth, p. 78. Crawford, Yorkists, p. 66, however, sees Edward IV’s later decision to call one of his youngest daughters Bridget, ‘a name almost unknown in England’, as a reflection of Cecily’s devotion to St Bridget of Sweden and the Bridgettine abbey of Syon. See note 20.
12 Cecily’s second daughter Elizabeth … access of independence: The Paston letters suggest that John was perhaps dominated by his mother Alice; as possibly, at least in her younger years, was Elizabeth herself, who in any case would have been fairly well occupied with her childbearing. In 1468 the Pastons reported that Queen Elizabeth had been persuaded to write to ‘my lady of Norfolk and another letter unto my lady of Suffolk the elder’ – Alice. It is noteworthy that the Pastons first found it worth petitioning Elizabeth herself – to intercede in a land dispute – just after Alice’s death in 1475. But Elizabeth’s awareness of the need for status and finery continued to be at war with her and her husband’s comparatively low financial standing. Present when Edward made one of his few gestures to education, at Oxford in 1481, she could be found writing (in, most unusually for any fifteenth-century noblewoman, her own hand) to John Paston, asking if she might have the use of his rooms at Windsor. ‘For God’s sake, say me not nay.’
13 the ever-troublesome Scots: Edward had the option of other marital plans as a peaceable way of dealing with the Scots. A letter of 1477 to his ambassador in Scotland replies to the Scots king’s suggestion that Clarence and his sister Margaret should marry a sister and brother of his own – despite the fact that Edward pleaded both were still in their period of ‘doule’ or mourning, and that until they were out of it he would not be able to ‘feel their dispositions’. It is, however, again a moot point whether he would have wished thus to advance his dangerous brother.
14 daughter of the great Earl of Shrewsbury: Eleanor Butler was also, through her mother, niece by marriage to Warwick; and Shakespeare only echoes other sources in having Warwick cast up against Edward ‘th’abuse done to my niece’ Henry VI Part 3,3.3; speaking also of the difficulty of this king’s being ‘contented by one wife’ ibid 4.3.
15 Thomas More … Elizabeth Lucy: More also has Cecily, at the time of Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward and ‘under pretence of her duty towards God’, sending for Elizabeth Lucy and putting considerable, though ultimately unavailing, pressure on her to stake her prior claim. The idea of precontract was regularly encountered: the Mirror for Magistrates of 1559 would suggest that Humfrey, the old Duke of Gloucester, had attempted to prevent Marguerite of Anjou’s marriage on the grounds that Henry VI was precontracted to another lady.
16 as one author puts it: Jones, whose theory this is, writes in Bosworth, p. 35, of ‘a far more collective sense of identity held by medieval society … As custodians of an historical pedigree, a family would together determine where the interests of its lineage lay and act to defend it.’
17 good ladyship: Both letters in Crawford, Letters of the Queens of England, pp. 142–3; see also Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women, p. 238, for Cecily’s exercise of influence.
18 [Cecily] can be glimpsed: See, e.g., the Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV 1467–77, pp. 89, 151; also Edward IV and V and Richard III 1476–85, pp. 218, 459, 522. See also Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV and V and Richard III, p. 441, and Calendar of Papal Registers, vol. 13, part I, pp. 106, 260.
19 A few years later: English Historical Documents, vol. 4, 1327–1485, p. 837 (from A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, ed. J Nichols, 1790), a record believed to have been made some time around 1485, which leaves it open to interpretation whether the events which first pushed Cecily to a religious retirement (if that were indeed the sequence of events) were those of 1478, 1483 or 1485 itself. It is the dwindling traces of her presence at court which inclines me to the earlier date.
20 Cecily had chosen … the mixed life: See Armstrong, ‘The piety of Cicely Duchess of York’; see also Hughes, The Religious Life of Richard III, and Laynesmith, ‘The King’s Mother: Cecily Neville’.
21 she had it painted: This work and a number of others mentioned, including the Shrewsbury Book and the Beaufort Hours, were shown in a British Library exhibition in 2011–12. See catalogue by McKendrick, Lowden and Doyle, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination.
22 their mother too was a patron of Caxton’s: Gregory, Baldwin and Jones, The Women of the Cousins’ War, suggest (p. 135) she may be the noble lady who, in the interests of her daughters’ moral education, commissioned from Caxton a translation of the manual for young ladies, The Book of the Knight of the Tower.
23 her Victorian biographer Mary Ann Hookham: Hookham also quotes the local historian of the nineteenth century, J.F. Bodin: ‘Her blood, corrupted by so many sombre emotions, became like a poison, which infected all the parts that it should nourish; her skin dried up, until it crumbled away in dust; her stomach contracted, and her eyes, as hollow and sunken as if they had been driven into her head, lost all the fire, which had, for so long a time, served to interpret the lofty sentiments of her soul.’
Part IV 1483–1485
1 his wishes no longer paramount: This begs the question of whether deathbed codicils to Edward’s will (mentioned by both Crowland and Mancini but, if made, since lost) had in any case removed the powers formerly given to her.
2 even female: The hint of Richard’s double prescience – both as to Edward V’s fate and Elizabeth of York’s future importance – cannot necessarily this time be put down to hindsight since Mancini’s narrative ended, with his visit, in the summer of 1483.
3 confided to his wife: Anne’s role in events is one of the great imponderables. Shakespeare, in Richard III, Act 4, Scene 1, would have a scene of mutual lamentation when the three women – Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville and Cecily – get the first inkling of Richard’s plans. But there is no reason to assume this was the reality (it certainly failed to reflect the dissent between Elizabeth and her mother-in-law). Janis Lull, introducing the CUP edition of the play, notes on p. 9 that the triad has been compared to the lamentations of Helena, Andromache and Hecuba in Seneca’s Troades, and explores also the motif of the three Marys – Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome and Mary the mother of James – in the medieval Resurrection plays.
4 Margaret Beaufort’s ally: Morton had been one of the protectors involved in the negotiation of Margaret Beaufort’s marriage settlements, as well as mediator to Edward IV in her attempt to get her son home.
5 On 16 June a delegation was sent: Some sources, Mancini, Vergil and More among them, seem to suggest that the younger boy was surrendered before Hastings’ execution; however, the dispassionate evidence of a contemporary letter and an account book suggest the sequence of events followed here.
6 More’s pages need some decoding: See note 22, p. 354.
7 Another view: That of Jones in Bosworth: ‘The painful turmoil of 1469 was to be mirrored in 1483, as Richard succeeded where Clarence had failed. And as King Richard struggled to overcome the threats from those who opposed this new Yorkist settlement, it was Cecily to whom he appealed for daily blessing in his enterprise. Her role was crucial.’ See Chapter 4, ‘The Search for Redemption’. It is Jones who cites as evidence the Archbishop’s register: Registrum Thome Bourgchier, Cantanuariensis Archiepiscopi, AD 1454–1486, ed. F.R.H. Du Boulay, Canterbury and York Soc., LIV, 1957, pp. 52–3. Jones also states (p. 91) that several decades later, in 1535, a conversation between the Spanish ambassador Chapuys and Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell showed that Cecily had made a written confession. The actual statement from Chapuys (Calendar of State Papers Foreign and Domestic Henry VIII, vol viii, p. 281) is that he had told Cromwell that Henry, in seeking a divorce from Katherine of Aragon, was wrong to rely on the statutes of the realm, ‘which only depended on the prince’s wish, as might be seen by the Acts of King Richard, who … caused King Edward himself to be declared a bastard, and to prove it, called his own mother to bear witness, and caused it to be continually preached so’. From this Jones concludes that Cecily did indeed bear written evidence; that she did so before Shaa preached his sermon; and that she was in London to do it. But this may apportion more weight than Chapuys’ statement can really bear. Laynesmith in her article for the Ricardian of Autumn 2005, suggests as her own suspicion that Cecily ‘did not actively promote Richard’s accession, but equally did not oppose it either’. I would be inclined to agree. I am indebted to Dr David Wright for confirming my interpretation of the Latin Register.
8 The right of inheritance to the throne: Even a hundred years later, when Elizabeth I was dying, there was – to quote the succession historian Nenner (The Right to Be King, p. 13) – no agreement as to how the next ruler should be chosen, let alone as to who he or she should be. No one knew ‘whether the crown ought to pass automatically at the death of Elizabeth to the next in the hereditary line; whether the next in the hereditary line might be passed over because of a “legal” incapacity to rule; whether the next monarch ought to be determined in parliament; or whether the queen should be exhorted in the waning days of her life to nominate her own successor’.
9 the grant of [Cecily’s] manors and lands: Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV and V and Richard III, p. 459.
10 The list of accounts: Sutton and Hammond, The Coronation of Richard III.
11 Elizabeth Woodville … was so well pleased: A phrase from Crowland is often cited, which might seem to suggest that Elizabeth had taken a very active and early part in the plotting: ‘many things were going on in secret … especially on the part of those who had availed themselves of the privilege of sanctuary’. But a fuller quotation describes specifically the people ‘of the South and of the West’ of the kingdom, ‘especially those people who, because of fear, were scattered without franchises and sanctuaries’.
12 Margaret was on the point of sending … Christopher Urswick: In the end, another messenger would be sent to Brittany, with ‘a good great sum of money’ raised by Margaret in the city. This next messenger, interestingly, was one Hugh Conway, who had connections not only to Edward IV’s household but to the Stanleys.
13 an outside candidate for villain: If the Duke of Buckingham had had the boys killed, then (as Buckingham would surely have calculated) Richard might indeed have hesitated at least in the short term to publish the news of their deaths; though one must still ask why did he not do so later. Henry VII, when the time came, might well have kept a similar silence. If this were true the guilty man, after all, was nominally one of Henry’s supporters – one of his mother’s close allies.
14 historians from Vergil and More onwards: Unless, just possibly, More broke off his history at the crucial point because he could no longer subscribe to what he had become convinced was a lie.
15 Candidates include … Margaret Beaufort: See Maurer’s article, ‘Whodunit: The Suspects in the Case’ for an analysis of the evidence for the different candidates mooted (who in fact include even the boys’ mother Elizabeth Woodville). Margaret Beaufort is her personal favourite for the role.
16 by the vise [advice] of the Duke of Buckingham: This comforting theory may have been the one to which Margaret of Burgundy persuaded herself to subscribe. Of the chroniclers associated with Burgundy, Molinet blamed Richard but Commynes put at least part of the guilt on Buckingham. Margaret may, alternatively, have assumed that any rumours of murder were exaggerated.
17 evidence … is in short supply: There is, of course, the question of the bones found in the Tower – but medical examination of them made in the 1930s could not state with certainty that they were those of the princes, though the examiners came down on the side of probability.
18 Some time that month Elizabeth’s daughters left sanctuary: Vergil says that: ‘When the queen was thus qualified, king Richard received all his brothers’ daughters out of sanctuary into the court’; which might seem to show that they went to court immediately. But a precise timescale was not necessarily the priority of the contemporary chroniclers: Vergil also implies that all of this happened after the queen wrote to bring her son Dorset home, which other evidence shows to have happened a year later. Crowland writes that Elizabeth Woodville (‘after frequent entreaties as well as threats’) ‘sent all her daughters out of the sanctuary at Westminster before mentioned to King Richard’ – i.e. into his charge – implying, however, that this happened rather earlier than other evidence suggests.
19 quietly allowed to join her: Even a location for the family’s secret residence has been suggested by one of Richard’s modern supporters, Audrey Williamson: Gipping Hall in Suffolk, seat of the Tyrell family, whose own tradition suggests that royal children lived ‘by permission of the Uncle’. (Williamson, The Mystery of the Princes, pp. 122–4). More will be heard of Sir James Tyrell later. This would not only cast a new light on his relations to the princes, but explain why Henry Tudor might later feel the need to put a very different spin on them.
20 died from natural causes: This may be another case of arguing from effect to cause. Professor Wright, who in the 1930s examined two children’s skeletons found within the Tower, noted that the skeleton of the elder child bore the symptoms of what has been tentatively diagnosed as the progressive bone disease osteomyelitis. But it is not known for certain whether these skeletons were those of the princes; and though the elder prince was known to have been visited by his doctor that summer, any royal person might have a physician in precautionary attendance anyway.
21 Francis Bacon: 1561–1626. Best known as Elizabeth I’s counsellor and James I’s Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor, he turned wholly to writing after being indicted by parliament on charges of corruption. His History of Henry VII was published in 1622.
22 giving away … her family lands: albeit that some of them were to the Queens’ College that honours her as a patron. Some thirty years later the Great Chronicle would call her ‘a woman of gracious fame’; but of that too there is very little evidence.
23 of similar colour and shape: For consistency I have used the older translation of the complete Crowland Chronicle (Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations by Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers, trans. Riley, 1854). Here, however, the more recent translation of the work of the ‘second continuator’ (The Crowland Chronicle Continuations 1459–1486, ed. and trans. Pronay and Cox, 1986) differs in significance as well as wording. Their translation from the Latin (‘eisdem colore et forma’) is ‘who were alike in complexion and figure’, which clearly indicates the women rather than the garments. (Dress was an important signifier of rank.) Interpretation has hitherto varied – but the real point is that nothing in the original necessarily compels the popular assumption that Richard had given the garments: Buck indeed says that Anne herself instituted the swap.
24 damning in several ways: Shakespeare’s wooing (Richard III, Act 1, scene 2) by Richard of a Lady Anne still lamenting her first husband, whom Richard had killed, in a sense represents a dramatisation of our reaction to this different, but equally shocking, marriage. It might have been unwise for him to comment more directly on the behaviour of one who was grandmother to Elizabeth I.
25 letter was a total invention: Against that theory is the fact that Buck gave a specific source for the letter – in the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in a ‘rich and magnificent cabinet, among precious jewels and more monuments’ – and he would have been taking a huge risk that other scholars might have called his bluff. For the theory is the fact that Buck, a determined apologist for Richard, was not above ‘suppressing evidence and altering record’, as one modern historian, Alison Hanham, declared. N. Harris Nicolas in the nineteenth century put it even more directly: ‘the character of Buck as a faithless writer is well known’. The great Victorian James Gairdner, on the other hand, was disgustedly inclined to accept the letter, writing that ‘the horrible perversion and degradation of domestic life which it implies is only too characteristic of the age’ – so different, one can’t but add, from the home life of his own dear queen.
26 article for the Ricardian: Kincaid, ‘Buck and the Elizabeth of York Letter’. See also Visser-Fuchs, ‘Where Did Elizabeth of York Find Consolation?’ and of course Kincaid’s introduction to his edition of Buck’s History of King Richard the Third.
27 the marriage proposed for Elizabeth: Details of the Portuguese proposal, and Elizabeth of York’s role in it, from Ashdown-Hill, The Last Days of Richard III. Ashdown-Hill suggests (p. 32) that rumours about a foreign match for her and one for Richard were misunderstood (by contemporaries as well as by later historians) as concerning a match between her and Richard.
28 the Great Chronicle recorded: Although some internal evidence, confusingly, would suggest that this entry was intended to describe the spring of 1484.
29 the Ballad of Lady Bessy: The Ballad of Lady Bessy (or, The Most Pleasant Song of Ladye Bessiye) is believed probably to have been written by Stanley’s officer Humphrey Brereton – chiefly because it is hard otherwise to account for the large part Brereton himself plays in the narrative.
30 his mother Cecily Neville’s residence: Ashdown-Hill, The Last Days of Richard III, p. 53, cites R. Edwards, The Itinerary of King Richard III, 1983.
31 The Middle Ages … died: If, of course, they can be said ever to have existed in any definable form. The term is in many ways as spurious as ‘Wars of the Roses’ and is certainly capable of wildly elastic limits. While in England the battles of Hastings and of Bosworth provide convenient starting and ending points, the period is sometimes seen as beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire, while a school of French historians argued convincingly that for the mass of their population – the illiterate rural poor – they lasted until the industrial revolution.
Part V 1485–1509
1 starting place of the early modern age: Rubin in The Hollow Crown, p. 322: ‘Historians have claimed that a “new” monarchy arose with the coming of Henry VII, that a new age was inaugurated … But wise readers should be wary of the “new” … Most change, deep change, occurs more slowly, experimentally, cautiously, and through deliberation. It thus often goes unnoticed by those who live it and make it happen.’
2 said Francis Bacon: In his History of Henry VII. The question of whether a woman’s right of inheritance to the throne should automatically pass over her to her sons was of course still an issue in the mid-sixteenth century when Edward VI attempted to will his crown to ‘Lady Jane’s heirs male’, before being forced by the imminence of his own death to alter it to Jane Grey and her heirs male. See also Castor, She-Wolves, pp. 28–9.
3 silent uncertainty was everybody’s friend: Baldwin in Gregory et al., The Women of the Cousins’ War, p. 210: ‘It is impossible to believe’ that those women closest to them – women in positions of power – remained in complete ignorance of the boys’ fate. He concludes not only that ‘The implication is that they did know but chose to remain silent, something that would not have been necessary if both boys were dead and threatened no one’, but that ‘the most likely scenario’ is that the younger son at least may have been sent to a secure place.
4 Lincoln’s own attempt: Francis Bacon: ‘And as for the daughters of King Edward the Fourth, they thought King Richard had said enough for them [i.e. the people thought that Richard’s example showed they were not the inevitable heirs], and took them to be but as of the King’s party, because they were in his power and at his disposing.’
5 discontent with the King: Elizabeth Woodville’s biographer Baldwin suggests as one possibility that she envisaged a papal dispensation allowing Elizabeth of York, with Henry out of the way, to marry her cousin Warwick while she herself became the power behind a monarch believed to be of feeble personality. There is, as he says, no evidence. Another possibility is that Elizabeth knew one of her sons was alive and intended, should the rebellion succeed, to assert his prior claim in place of Warwick’s; though this might suggest that she had not been sure of her son’s fate earlier, when she allowed her daughter to marry herself and her valuable royal rights into the opposing dynasty.
6 fundamental role in the Lambert Simnel drama: Weightman, Margaret of York, p. 153.
7 John Leland: Best known for his Itinerary, describing his findings on journeys through England and Wales. Leland (?1503–1552) was also the antiquary whose De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea contains a number of the most important descriptions of key ceremonies in Henry VII’s reign. Narratives quoted from this source include Margaret Beaufort’s ordinances for the confinement of a queen and the christening of her child (vol. iv, pp. 179–84); the christening of Prince Arthur (pp. 204–15); Elizabeth of York’s coronation (pp. 216–33); the Twelfth Night celebrations of 1487 (pp. 234–7); Elizabeth’s taking to her chamber (p. 249); the proxy marriage of Princess Margaret and her journey to Scotland (pp. 258–300).
8 evidence that she was in some degree of disgrace: Theories that Elizabeth Woodville’s health had gone into some sort of major decline, necessitating her retirement, are contradicted by the fact that the negotiations for her to marry the king of Scots went on for years: see Baldwin in Gregory et al., The Women of the Cousins’ War, p. 215. But then again, if Elizabeth were seriously suspected of treason it is unlikely Henry would have contemplated giving her access to a foreign army.
9 placid, domestic sort of creature: Nicholas Harris Nicolas, editing her Privy Purse expenses in 1830: ‘The energy and talents of Henry the Seventh left no opportunity for his Queen to display any other qualities than those which peculiarly, and it may be said exclusively, belong to her sex. From the time of her marriage she is only to be heard of as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a sister, and an aunt; and in each of these relations, so far as materials exist by which it can be judged, her conduct reflects honour upon her memory.’
10 letters to Spain: There was also considerable mention in De Puebla’s correspondence of Elizabeth’s determination to arrange a marriage with an Englishwoman for De Puebla himself, and his efforts to avoid it. Perhaps one of the early lessons Elizabeth had learnt was that marriage as a means of bringing a party to your own side might be the most useful tool of diplomacy.
11 similarities in their handwriting: Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince, pp. 118–20.
12 Elizabeth of York and Margaret Beaufort as rivals: Laynesmith argues that between the two – both of whose royal blood had caused their fortunes to seesaw in the years past – ‘there probably existed more than cordial relations’, equivalent to those between Eleanor of Provence and Eleanor of Castile some 250 years earlier. Elizabeth’s biographer Okerlund suggests that Margaret Beaufort may have substituted for the absent Elizabeth Woodville – if Margaret really did have that sort of warm personality?
13 A letter from Henry VIII’s day: Ellis (ed.), Original letters illustrative of English history, series 1, vol. 2.
14 we have, moreover, opened the moneybox: Calendar of State Papers Venetian, p. 181, 9 May 1489.
15 Henry offered this daughter [Margaret]: The elder Margaret, Margaret Beaufort, had always promoted her half-blood family and the autumn of 1494 was also when she arranged for Richard Pole – the son of her half-sister, Edith St John – to marry Clarence’s daughter Margaret. This would prove to be setting up trouble: for the Tudor dynasty, but also for Margaret Pole who, as the increasingly paranoid eyes of an ageing Henry VIII focused on her family, would be beheaded in one of the Tower’s nastiest execution stories. At the time, however – since it may have seemed unrealistic to keep Margaret Pole for ever unmarried – it may have looked like the safe thing to do, another way of using the marriage tie to secure her within the family.
16 servants of Cecily Neville’s: Wroe, Perkin, pp. 178–9.
17 as her will declared: Wills from Doctors’ Commons.
18 another daughter, Mary, was born: Her date of birth is often given as 1495, which is how it is described in the Beaufort Hours – but Margaret Beaufort followed the then-current practice of beginning a new year on 23 March.
19 Warbeck/Richard declared himself king: Among his otherwise rather vague charges against Henry was that he had married ‘by compulsion certain of our sisters’ – Elizabeth’s younger sisters – to his own friends and kinsmen of unsuitably low degree.
20 Katherine Gordon … treatment: Wroe, Perkin, pp. 374–8.
21 Margaret of York’s illegitimate son: There is a possible alternative identification, as suggested by Wroe (Perkin, pp. 516–18). The childless Margaret took several children under her wing (and indeed even the fertile Elizabeth of York’s Privy Purse expenses show upkeep for children who had been ‘given’ to her). One of Margaret’s appeared to have attracted her special interest: Jehan le Sage, a boy of about five when she adopted him in 1478, which makes him around the same age as Richard, Duke of York. Carefully educated and luxuriously clad, he was reared in some seclusion until – at the end of 1485, just when Margaret must have been swallowing the bitter knowledge of the destruction of the house of York – he vanished from the records. It may be pure coincidence that the room in the country palace of Binche in which he lived was later known as ‘Richard’s room’. Wroe notes also (pp. 467–71) that the delegation sent to enquire into Perkin’s fate was headed by the Bishop of Cambrai; among those who believed Perkin to be Margaret’s own son, it was said (p. 209) that he had been fathered by the incumbent of the Cambrai see, whether this man or his predecessor.
22 jousted for her: Among the fighters – so John Younge, the Somerset Herald who wrote the description, noted, ‘Charles Brandon had right well jousted.’ A dozen or so years down the line Brandon would be the husband in Mary Tudor’s unsanctioned second marriage.
23 Tyrell … confessed to having … murdered: Such a declaration was never published, nor seen by any of those who mention it. Indeed, though both Vergil and the Great Chronicle (both postdating 1502) refer to Tyrell’s guilt or at least the possibility of it, mention of the confession, so dramatically utilised by Shakespeare, can be traced back only as far as Thomas More. But in early to mid-August 1483, so the tale runs, Richard had ordered Sir Robert Brackenbury, the man in charge of the Tower, to put the boys to death; but Brackenbury had refused. He did, however, agree to turn the keys over for one night to a less scrupulous man – Tyrell, who enlisted two ruffians called Miles Forrest and John Dighton to do the actual deed.
There are both indications and counter-indications as to the truth of the tale. Those for include the fact that Richard rewarded Brackenbury for deeds unspecified, reappointing him to his post for life in March 1484 ‘considering his good and loyal service to us before this time, and for certain other considerations especially moving us’; and that Tyrell too prospered under his rule. But in fact Tyrell was not in 1483 the needy man on the make Thomas More depicts – his name has indeed cropped up, as a successful court official, earlier in this tale. Some theories that have the younger prince, at least, released alive also have him hidden at the Tyrell family seat; while the fact that in late 1484 Richard sent Tyrell to Flanders ‘for divers matters greatly concerning the King’s weal’ could be taken to suggest that Tyrell had escorted the boy to safer hiding there.
Indeed, almost every piece of evidence can be taken two ways (even, indeed, the fact that Tyrell had once been in Cecily Neville’s wardship and Audrey Williamson points out, Mystery, p. 178, that a Miles Forrest was one of Cecily’s attendants). In June 1486 Henry VII issued Tyrell with a general pardon for anything he had done before that date; on 16 July he issued him with another one: almost as if, in the intervening month, Tyrell had, with Henry’s knowledge, committed some other heinous crime. (If Henry found the boys alive after Bosworth, it would seem odd that he should have kept them alive for almost a year and then murdered them. Perhaps Elizabeth of York’s pregnancy gave an urgent reason to remove any threat to his dynasty. It has even been suggested that Elizabeth Woodville found out what Henry had done, and that this was why she was despatched to her convent so abruptly.) After that time Tyrell continued to thrive under Henry’s rule, albeit that the posts Henry gave him kept him out of the country. When Tyrell was finally attainted in 1504 it was only for treason in connection with Suffolk, while Dighton (both Forrest and Brackenbury being already dead) was left at liberty. Bacon says that Henry ‘gave out’ word of Tyrell’s guilt, but there is no sign of his having actually published any confession – which seems incomprehensible. It must go down as yet another mystery – and one of those stories that do not reflect well on the Tudor dynasty.
24 velvet-clad effigy: The effigy (or part of it) is still there in the precinct museum – a bald head, long stripped of its wig and crown; a wooden arm and hand. It looks like a monstrous doll – the broken toy of some giant child. The body of straw-stuffed leather fell victim to a World War II incendiary bomb. The flames took no hold in the vaulted stone room, but the damage was done by water from the firemen’s hoses. The planks of pear wood around which the torso was built started to separate after their wartime saturation and in 1950 they were ‘discarded’, as the restorer noted regretfully. But photographs survive and show the ‘ragged regiment’ of the royal effigies in all their macabre glory. For more information see The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, ed. A. Harvey and R. Mortimer, Woodbridge, 1994.
25 John Fisher: John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (c.1469–1535). First holder of the Cambridge Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity, Vice-Chancellor of that university, Fisher (like Sir Thomas More) would be best remembered, and indeed canonised, for his refusal to accept Henry VIII as head of the Church of England: a refusal which sent him to the block. For the ‘Mornynge Remembraunce’ sermon preached a month after Margaret Beaufort’s death see The English Works of John Fisher, ed. J.E.B. Mayor, 1876.
26 Juana … ‘the Mad’: see Fox, Sister Queens.
27 Shakespeare never wrote a voice for Margaret Beaufort: He never wrote a Henry VII, of course, though the co-authored Henry VIII takes the story up to the christening of Elizabeth I.
Epilogue
1 legacy of works: In Cambridge today, her image is among the parade of academic notables who gaze down over the modern setting of the Graduate Society’s café, the only other woman there besides Rosalind Franklin, the ‘dark lady’ of DNA. Flick through theCambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English and there she is, ‘Beaufort, Lady Margaret, English translator of religious texts and literary patron’, sandwiched between Simone de Beauvoir and American satirist Ann Beattie.
2 move towards mere domesticity: see ‘Conclusion’ to Hilton, Queens Consort.