7

“Our Bridal Torch”

Henry VII made a triumphal entry into London on September 3. After giving thanks at St. Paul’s Cathedral for his victory and his crown, he retired to the nearby Bishop’s Palace and summoned his first Privy Council, declaring to them his intention of marrying Elizabeth of York. The matter was discussed at length, but first there were two obstacles to be overcome.¹ Parliament had to repeal the act Titulus Regius in order to declare Elizabeth legitimate and restore her royal status, for it was unthinkable that the King should found his dynasty by marrying a lady tainted with the stain of bastardy. Then a new dispensation for the marriage had to be obtained, for Henry and Elizabeth were related in the fourth degree of kinship.² The dispensation obtained by Henry in 1484 was deemed insufficient because it had been sought without Elizabeth’s consent.³

It is possible too that Henry VII wanted time to have a search made in the Tower for the bodies of the princes to assure himself that they really were dead before legitimizing their sister and marrying her. Probably Henry did have the Tower searched for any trace of them,⁴ but if he gave the order at this time—and it would be surprising if he hadn’t—then almost certainly nothing was found, and he was unable to confirm whether they were dead or alive. If their bodies had been discovered, he would surely have made political capital out of it. Proof that they were not may lie in a clause inserted when Titulus Regius was repealed, providing that nothing in the reversal should prejudice the act “establishing the crown to the King and the heirs of his body.”⁵ Even if Henry had gotten to London and found the princes alive, then had them murdered—an unlikely theory advanced by some revisionists—it would have been of no benefit to him because their removal was not sufficient in itself to guarantee his security: people had to know they were dead. But Henry never uttered a word on the matter, or accused Richard III of their murder. He could not, because, not having found any bodies, he had no means of knowing what had happened to the princes. That must have concerned him greatly, as uncertainty about their fate undermined the title of the woman he intended to make his wife, and it was to underscore many of the problems facing him in the years to come.

Legislation and dispensations took time, but there is evidence to suggest that Henry was in no hurry and that the delay suited him well, for it underlined the fact that he was King in his own right, and not by right of marriage to the Yorkist heiress. Never should anyone say that he owed his crown to his Queen (although many did). He would not be his wife’s “gentleman usher,” he said; and he was resolved to be crowned and have Parliament recognize his title before he married. Although marriage to Elizabeth was “the fairest” claim to the throne he had “and the most like to give contentment to the people, [who] were become affectionate to that line, it lay plain before his eyes that, if he relied upon that title, he could be but a king at courtesy, and have rather a matrimonial than a regal power, the right remaining in his queen, upon whose decease, either with issue or without, he was to give place and be removed. And though he should obtain by Parliament to be continued [as King], yet he knew there was a very great difference between a king that holdeth his crown by a civil act of estates and one that holdeth it originally by the law of nature.”⁶

Back in 1483, Buckingham and his allies had risen on Henry Tudor’s behalf on the understanding that he would marry Elizabeth of York and rule jointly with her, as King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella did in Spain. But now Henry was claiming the throne by right of conquest, as the true successor to the House of Lancaster. Wisely, he did not stress his Lancastrian descent, as there were about thirty other people who could have been considered to have a better claim, including Elizabeth, her sisters, her Yorkist cousins, and his own mother. Instead, he declared it was “the true judgment of God,” expressed in his victory at Bosworth, that gave him the crown by divine right.⁷

Henry was aware that his claim to the throne was weak and open to challenge. As Strickland wrote, not entirely fancifully, “much of the royal brain was occupied with ballads of the ‘Mort d’Arthur,’ with red dragons and green leeks, besides long rolls of Welsh pedigrees, in which Noah figured about midway.” Henry took care to emphasize his descent from the ancient kings of Britain, and in particular the legendary Arthur, and the Welsh prince Cadwaladr, King of Gwynedd, who had fought the Anglo-Saxon invaders in the seventh century. He claimed Cadwaladr as his hundredth progenitor, and had his red dragon emblazoned on his standard and later used as one of the supporters of the Tudor royal arms. It was said that, on his deathbed, Cadwaladr had foretold that a Welsh king would restore the ancient royal line of Britain, and that his descendants would rule the whole island. The message was clear: Henry Tudor was the true successor of these ancient rulers; it was those interlopers who had come since—the Saxon and Norman kings and the Plantagenets—who were the real usurpers. And lest his Welsh heritage make him appear alien to the English, Henry also took care to emphasize his devotion to St. George, the patron saint of England. As for his future bride, she was descended from the ancient princes of Wales by virtue of the marriage of her ancestor, Roger Mortimer, to Gladys Ddu, daughter of Prince Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, in 1230. Her father, Edward IV, had also boasted of his descent from Cadwaladr; thus she was, by descent, an eminently suitable wife for a Welsh-born king.

Craftily, Henry VII dated his reign from the day before Bosworth,⁸ effectively branding as traitors Richard III and all those who had fought for him, and provoking much comment, including this outraged response from Croyland: “O God, what security shall our kings have henceforth that in the day of battle they may not be deserted by their subjects?” Richard’s remaining adherents scattered, changed sides, or prudently disappeared. His heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was one of those who made his peace with the new King and obtained a pardon. Henry VII even gave him a prominent place on his council, although no doubt he kept an eye on him, given Lincoln’s prominence under Richard III, and the fact that he was now the hope of those who wanted to see a Yorkist king on the throne. Henry also issued a general pardon to those who had fought at Bosworth. Peers such as the earls of Northumberland and Surrey (Norfolk’s son), who were initially taken into custody, were later pardoned and released.

Possibly there were personal reasons why Henry was in no hurry to marry Elizabeth. By now he could have heard that she had urged Norfolk to further her marriage to Richard III. In Henry’s eyes that might have looked like betrayal, after he had publicly vowed to take her as his wife. Of course, Elizabeth could probably have reassured Henry as to why she had pressed for the marriage to Richard, and no doubt did, but history now had to be rewritten. Not for nothing would Henry’s official historian, Polydore Vergil, describe Richard’s plan to marry her as “the most wicked to be spoken of, and the foulest to be committed that ever was heard of.” Henry’s feelings may perhaps be gauged from the fact that, around 1488–89, his mother commissioned Caxton to print the romanceBlanchardin and Eglantine, doubtless because of its clear parallels with the story of her son and Elizabeth of York. Its publication may have been intended to quell any persistent rumors about Elizabeth’s eagerness to marry his enemy.

Many Yorkists had supported Henry precisely because he had sworn to marry Elizabeth; they were of the opinion that marriage to her would supply all that was lacking in his title to the throne. Most people in England believed that he could only claim the throne through marriage to the Yorkist heiress.⁹ Moreover, Henry needed this marriage in order to build support for his rule. He dared not leave the way open for anyone else to wed Elizabeth; unmarried, she would remain a threat to him, and the best way to neutralize it was to honor his word and marry her himself. Such a fortuitous union was seen by many as the best means of bringing peace between the two warring royal houses, and a lot of people, both high and low, were anxious to see it come to pass, to set the seal upon the King’s victory. Therefore his delay in marrying Elizabeth must have seemed like a betrayal to many, and certainly there was some murmuring that he had slighted her.

No one, however, could accuse Henry of being tardy while Elizabeth’s status remained unsettled and the dispensation needed to be obtained; nor could they have complained that he did not pay court to her. Buck states that he “came to the Tower to meet [her] there, to whom he was shortly to be married.” “The Song of Lady Bessy” exults: “Great solace it was to see, when the red rose of mickle [much] price and our Bessy were met.” But there is no other record of what happened when Henry and Elizabeth encountered each other for the first time, although it was likely a formal occasion with all the courtesies observed. When Elizabeth came face-to-face with the man who was to be her husband, it might have struck her, as it did a Spanish ambassador, that “there is nothing purely English in the English king’s face.”¹⁰ That was perhaps not surprising, as Henry was a quarter Welsh, a quarter French, and only half English.

Vergil described the King thus: “His body was slender but well-built and strong; his height above the average. His appearance was remarkably attractive; his eyes were small and blue.” That Henry was tall is borne out by his tomb effigy, which shows him to have been over six feet. Later Tudor chroniclers, Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, would extol his good looks. Hall, who took a hagiographic view of the Tudors, says he was “a man of body but lean and spare, albeit mighty and strong therewith, of personage and stature somewhat higher than the mean sort of men be, of a wonderful beauty and fair complexion, his eyes gray, his teeth single and hair thin.” Holinshed states he was “so formed and decorated with all the gifts and lineaments of Nature that he seemed more an angelical creature than a terrestrial personage. His countenance and aspect [were] cheerful and courageous, his hair yellow like the burnished gold, his eyes gray, shining and quick.” Both chroniclers were no doubt exaggerating, for certainly Henry’s portraits belie their admiring descriptions.

It may have been Henry’s manner, rather than his looks, that made an impression on Elizabeth. His expression was normally “cheerful, especially when speaking,”¹¹ and he had a “countenance merry and smiling, especially in his communications, [being] of wit quick and prompt, of a princely stomach and high courage.”¹² Holinshed recorded that Henry was “prompt and ready in answering,” but added, more realistically, that he was “of such sobriety that it could never be judged whether he were more dull than quick in speaking, such was his temperance.” One imagines, given his probable awareness that the young woman before him had schemed to marry his enemy, that it was this wary and cautious side of Henry that came across in his first meeting with Elizabeth. And of course she represented the rival House of York. Yet all the evidence suggests that she gave him no provocation in this regard, but exerted herself to be pleasant and conformable to his wishes, and so impressed him.

There were certainly other meetings after this. For the first two weeks after his arrival in London, the King was staying near Coldharbour at Baynard’s Castle, prior to removing to his mother’s palace at Woking, Surrey, and that would have facilitated the couple meeting in private, affording them the opportunity to get to know each other.¹³ After that, an understanding grew between them, and—on Elizabeth’s side at least—affection blossomed. In January, Lord Stanley would state that he had “heard the King and [the] lady often and at divers times treating and communing of, and about, a marriage to be contracted between them.” By the following January, according to the testimony of Lord Stanley, Elizabeth had come to feel “great and intimate love and cordial affection” for Henry, so the couple must have seen each other reasonably often.¹⁴ During the Michaelmas term of 1485, the King arranged for his Great Wardrobe to supply the princess with ten yards of crimson velvet and six yards of russet damask, priced at £20.4s. [£9,880], and sixty-four timbers (individual furs) of ermine costing £54.2s. [£26,450], supplied by Gerard Venmar and Hildebrand Vannonhaw (or Vain) furriers.¹⁵

Henry needed to consolidate his title and be formally acknowledged as King as soon as possible. A “device” for a joint coronation was drawn up, probably by one of the heralds of the College of Arms, laying out detailed arrangements for the King and “the noble princess, Dame [space left blank], his wife, Queen of England,” for royal approval. “Soon after the King is passed out of the Tower, the Queen shall follow upon [a] cushion of white damask cloth of gold, bare-headed, wearing a round circle of gold set with pearls and precious stones, [and] arrayed in a kirtle of white damask day cloth of gold furred with miniver, garnished with onlets [aiglettes, or fastenings] of gold … The cardinal [Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury] shall bless the Queen’s crown, then he shall set the same crown upon the Queen’s head, having then a coif put thereon by a great lady, for conservation of the unction [holy oil]. The Queen, thus crowned, shall be led by the Bishops of Exeter and Ely unto her seat of estate near to the King’s seat royal.”¹⁶

But Henry could not afford to defer his coronation until he was married, while a joint ceremony with Elizabeth might have sent out the message that they were equal sovereigns. There was to be no queen at his coronation, and the service was hastily amended to omit all references to one. Elizabeth was not even present at the solemnities in Westminster Abbey on October 30. Instead, the Lady Margaret Beaufort enjoyed a prominent place, visibly overwhelmed by the occasion: “in all that great triumph and glory, she wept marvelously.”¹⁷ Those who had lent Henry valuable support—Jasper Tudor, Bishop Morton, Lord Stanley, and John de Vere, Earl of Oxford—were given prominent roles at the ceremony; Morton would be consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury the following year, on the death of Cardinal Bourchier. Possibly the people were dismayed at Elizabeth’s absence. She was popular, the crown was seen as her right, and public opinion wanted her wed to the King without further delay. But before that could happen, there was other important business to be attended to.

“After the coronation had been solemnly performed, a Parliament was held at Westminster,” in which Henry VII was hailed as a second Joshua who had rescued his people from tyranny. “And the sovereignty was confirmed to our lord the King as being his due, not by one but by many titles; so that we are to believe he rules most rightfully over the English people, and that not so much by right of blood as of conquest and victory in warfare.”¹⁸

Parliament then proceeded to repeal Richard III’s act, Titulus Regius, effectively proclaiming Elizabeth and her siblings legitimate. This act, which had declared them bastards, was ordered suppressed. The judges deemed it too scandalous even to be read out, and urged that its recital in Parliament be avoided in order to preempt the perpetuation of its contents. It was also considered too subversive to be allowed to remain on record, for its “falseness and shamefulness” deserved only “utter oblivion”: the very Parliament roll on which it had been written was burnt by the public hangman, and orders were given that every copy be surrendered to the chancellor before Easter 1486, on pain of imprisonment or a heavy fine, so that “all things said and remembered in the said act may be forever out of remembrance and forgot.”¹⁹ Fortunately for posterity, the original draft of the act was found in the seventeenth century among the records stored in the Tower, and printed by John Speed in 1611; the text of it was also preserved in the Croyland Chronicle, most copies of which were also destroyed.

Thus it is unsurprising that Polydore Vergil, an intelligent man with a humanist approach to history, later declared that the “common report that in Shaa’s sermon King Edward’s children were called bastards” was “devoid of all truth.” Thanks to the suppression of Titulus Regius, the finer details of the precontract story—such as the identity of the lady to whom Edward IV had supposedly been contracted (More thought she was Elizabeth Lucy, one of the King’s mistresses)—were forgotten; but the scandal was not. As late as 1533 the Spanish ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, when urging his master, the Emperor Charles V, to invade England in defense of Katherine of Aragon, whom Henry VIII had divorced, suggested he might seize the throne: “People here say you have a better title than the present King, who only claims by his mother, who was declared by sentence of the Bishop of Bath a bastard, because Edward IV had espoused another wife before the mother of Elizabeth of York.”²⁰ There were several scions of the House of York then living who were in league with Chapuys and could have passed on that information. Eleanor Butler’s name was not to be published until 1646, after the text of Titulus Regius had been rediscovered.²¹

Just after Bosworth, Henry VII had sent a warrant for Bishop Stillington’s arrest to the civic council in York, near to where Stillington was then living. Possibly Henry had heard in France the same gossip that had informed Commines’s claim that it was Stillington who had married Edward IV to Eleanor Butler; or he received information from his supporters in England that Stillington had helped compromise Elizabeth’s legitimacy. Whether any of this was true or not, Stillington could prove a threat or liability, and Henry may have felt he deserved to be punished, or at least frightened into silence.

When the bishop was brought to York, he was found to be “sore crazed” and too ill to be sent south to London, so the city fathers imprisoned him at York—but not for long. A pardon for “horrible and heinous offenses imagined and done by him to the King” was issued by Henry VII in his first Parliament on the grounds of Stillington’s “great age, long infirmity, and feebleness.”²² After that, the King and the judges appointed to study Titulus Regius came to the conclusion that Stillington was either its author or had furnished the information about the precontract, but the King would not allow the bishop to be examined because he had been pardoned. Thus he blocked any discussion of the alleged precontract.

Henry VII’s discretion in regard to Titulus Regius and the naming of crimes and offenses can be better understood when one remembers that he publicly committed himself to marrying a princess whose legitimacy had been called into question. He knew there were many who believed he must marry Elizabeth to make good his own claim; therefore her legitimacy must be beyond dispute. He could not risk anyone challenging her title, or that of himself and their heirs. It may be that Henry was unable to disprove the allegations of a precontract between Edward IV and Eleanor Butler, probably because no evidence of one had ever been produced. It was essential therefore that all the evidence impugning Elizabeth’s legitimacy be eradicated. This appears to have been a subject about which Henry VII was especially sensitive.

Elizabeth was now the undisputed heiress of Edward IV. A political poem of 1487 acknowledged that:

His title is fallen to our sovereign lady,

Queen Elizabeth, his eldest daughter lineal;

To her is come all the whole monarchy,

For the fourth Edward had no issue male.

The crown therefore and sceptre imperial

Both she must have without division.

Pietro Carmeliano, an Italian poet who had transferred from Richard III’s service to Henry VII’s, recognized that, upon the murder of her brothers, Elizabeth—that “beautiful, marriageable virgin”—had become her father’s heiress.²³ Undoubtedly she had a better claim to the throne than Henry did, but there is no record of her resenting Henry relegating her to the role of Queen consort instead of Queen regnant. Although the Pope himself called her “the undoubted heir of that famous King of immortal memory, Edward IV”²⁴and Giovanni de’ Gigli, the papal collector in England, recognized that Edward’s “firstborn, should of right succeed her mighty sire,”²⁵ and there were those who thought that Henry and Elizabeth should reign as joint sovereigns, no one seriously considered that a woman—even the legitimate, rightful heiress of the House of York—could actually rule alone as Queen regnant. On the contrary, her crown was the inheritance she would bring to her husband. As one song would put it, “the Queen’s title, by fortune’s adventure, he hath.”²⁶ Traditionally women could transmit the crown—the royal houses of Plantagenet, York, and Tudor derived their claim through the female line—but not wield sovereign power. Even Margaret Beaufort, with all her astute capabilities, had never been regarded—or regarded herself—as a contender for the throne.

There was no Salic law in England barring women from the throne, as there was in France, so there was nothing to prevent a woman from ruling, but memories of female misrule were long. People remembered how, in the twelfth century, the haughty, overbearing Empress Matilda’s attempt to pursue her lawful claim to the throne had resulted in a civil war so bloody that it had been said that “God and His saints slept.” That experience had left the English with an enduring prejudice against female rulers.

The notion of a woman wielding dominion over men was seen as unnatural and against the laws of God and Nature. As Buckingham had bluntly put it, “It was not women’s place to govern the kingdom, but men’s.”²⁷ Women were regarded as weak, irrational creatures at the mercy of their reproductive cycle, their chief function being the bearing of children. They were seen as unfit to lead armies in battle and interfere in affairs of state. Once wed, they had no control over their own property. In law, they were regarded as infants. Their primary purpose was to be wives and mothers, subordinate to their menfolk, in whose interests their marriages were arranged. Thus, no one spoke out in favor of Elizabeth of York ascending the throne in her own right as England’s lawful queen, and in this respect, in Parliament, Henry VII “would not endure any mention of the Lady Elizabeth, no, not in the nature of a special entail” of the crown.²⁸ It would be left to the granddaughter who was named for her, Elizabeth I, to prove that a woman could rule successfully.

There were those who felt strongly that Henry VII should have become King only through marriage to Elizabeth. He would remain unpopular with several of his nobles “for the wrong he did his queen, that he did not rule in her right.”²⁹ Resentment festered in all ranks of society, and in time it would emerge as one of the chief causes of discontent on the part of his subjects, and provide a convenient pretext for his enemies to move against him.

In an act attainting Richard III as a traitor, Parliament made no direct mention of Elizabeth’s brothers, the Princes in the Tower, but referred to “homicides and murders, in shedding of infants’ blood” among the many crimes attributed to him³⁰—the kind of crimes of which traitors were often accused. Some modern historians have commented on the fact that the princes are not specifically named in the act. Given that repeal of Titulus Regius had legitimated Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, Henry VII might have been expected to publicize their murders in order to show that Elizabeth was the undoubted heir of York, and to stain Richard’s name more foully. The omission of their names has therefore been seen as proof that the princes still lived.

There is little evidence that the early Tudor monarchs actively pursued a policy of character assassination against Richard III.³¹ Henry VII had good reasons for wanting to avoid any mention of the heirs of Edward IV. One was that it was not in his interests to raise the specter of Elizabeth’s bastardy. The other was that, almost certainly, he had no hard evidence of the princes’ murder, and was relying on the assumption made in 1483 that Richard had gone ahead with his plan to destroy them. Had their bodies been found, Henry would surely have publicized the fact; it would have saved him a lot of trouble in the long run, because from the commencement of his reign there were “secret rumors and whisperings (which afterward gained strength and turned to great troubles) that the two young sons of King Edward IV, or one of them (which were said to be destroyed in the Tower) were not indeed murdered, but conveyed secretly away, and were yet living; which, if it had been true, had prevented the title of the Lady Elizabeth.”³² Henry’s failure to establish beyond doubt that the princes were dead probably accounts for his unwillingness to accuse Richard III openly of having them killed; there was then a legal presumption that, without a body, there could be no charge of murder.

In legitimizing Edward IV’s children, Henry VII could not but have been aware that he was acknowledging Edward V’s just title, so he must have been convinced that the princes were dead, for if they still lived, they posed a serious threat to his crown. Much has been made of two royal pardons granted by Henry to Sir James Tyrell in the summer of 1486, but there is no evidence that these relate to the murder of the princes. Very likely Henry himself did not know for certain what had happened to the boys, and it would have been highly damaging to the crown to publicize the fact that the brothers of the Yorkist heiress had effectively disappeared—hence the official silence on the matter.

What Elizabeth felt about the “secret rumors and whisperings” of the survival of her brothers is not recorded. Maybe she believed there was no truth in them; but if there was doubt in her mind, then soon the realization would have followed that she faced a massive conflict of interests in marrying the man who occupied the throne to which they had a better claim, and that his hold on it—not to mention her own position—might then prove precarious. If so, she might have reasoned that she had done well to survive the past two years with her legitimacy restored and a crown within her grasp, and that it was better to accept the status quo than to stir up controversy; and of course she was in no position to challenge Henry Tudor’s title. But it may be that her brothers were never far from her mind, and that the possibility of their survival was to haunt her for many years to come.

Now that Parliament had recognized Elizabeth Wydeville as Edward IV’s rightful queen, it restored her “estate, dignity, preeminence, and name” and repealed Richard III’s act confiscating her property.³³ This was not returned to her, but she was allowed her widow’s jointure of thirty manors plus rents, as well as the rights and privileges normally enjoyed by a queen dowager. Parliament restored to Margaret Beaufort all the estates confiscated in 1483, and granted her rights as a sole person, “not wife or covert of any husband,”³⁴ which gave her control over her huge fortune. Thereafter the King, grateful for all she had done to further his cause, “allotted her a share in most of his public and private resources.”³⁵ Her status at court as “my lady the King’s mother” was to remain unchallenged. It was such that, from 1499, after years of signing herself “M. Richmond,” she began using the royal style “Margaret R.” The R stood for Richmond, of course, but it sounded suitably regal, and the Lady Margaret was already enjoying commensurate influence; effectively, she acted as an unofficial queen dowager and wore her countess’s coronet whenever she appeared in public, whereas the King and Queen only appeared in their crowns on state occasions.

During this Parliament the King rewarded those who had served him loyally and helped him to win the crown. Lord Stanley was made Earl of Derby and given the offices of Constable of England and Chief Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster. Jasper Tudor, Henry’s uncle, was created Duke of Bedford. On November 7, Elizabeth was probably present at Jasper’s wedding to her aunt, Katherine Wydeville, widow of the Duke of Buckingham.

Henry Tudor had triumphed. But “although all things seemed to be brought to a good and perfect conclusion, yet the harp still needed tuning to set all things in harmony. This tuning was the marriage between the King and Elizabeth.”³⁶ There was no cause now for any further delay. Elizabeth had been legitimated, and a dispensation for her marriage to the King could be applied for. By November 4 a new coinage was being minted with a double rose symbolizing the union of Lancaster and York on the reverse—proof of Henry’s firm resolve to proceed to the marriage.³⁷ But he still appeared in no hurry to fulfill his vow to wed Elizabeth. He clearly did not want it to be thought that their union was a matter of political necessity.³⁸

Bernard André asserts that, as Christmas drew nearer with no sign of any marriage preparations, Elizabeth grew anxious, for she had heard reports that the King had considered marrying Anne, Duchess of Brittany, who could bring him a great duchy coveted by the French king; or, it was said, his personal choice was Katherine, the youngest daughter of his former guardian, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a girl he had known since childhood, and whom he had considered as a bride earlier that year.

There was no substance to these reports, but they “bred some doubt and suspicion in divers that [the King] was not sincere, or at least not fixed in going on the match England so much desired, which conceit also, though it were but talk and discourse, did much afflict the poor Lady Elizabeth herself.”³⁹ Bacon says she greatly desired this marriage, and to corroborate that we have Stanley’s evidence that her love for Henry had grown on acquaintance during the few weeks they had been seeing each other.⁴⁰

Elizabeth did not know it, but Maximilian of Austria had his sights on her as a bride. His late wife, Mary of Burgundy, had a claim to the throne of England through her grandmother, Isabella of Portugal, a descendant of John of Gaunt, which Charles the Bold had unsuccessfully asserted in 1471. Now Maximilian began entertaining the idea of marrying Elizabeth, which he felt would be sufficient to make good his claim.⁴¹ It is doubtful that Elizabeth would have been interested, with her hopes set on Henry, and certain that the King would not have permitted such a marriage.

In a Latin epithalamium commissioned by Henry as Elizabeth’s morning gift, to be given to her after their wedding night, Giovanni de’ Gigli tells how Elizabeth was longing to marry her king, and frustrated at being made to wait.⁴² Given Lord Stanley’s evidence that she had come to love Henry deeply and intimately,⁴³ this may be no fanciful portrayal, and it chimes with her earlier eagerness to marry Henry Tudor (or Richard III), and with André’s testimony to her anxiety. Possibly she regarded Henry as the chivalrous knight errant who had rescued her and her family from the slur of bastardy and the clutches of the man who had spurned her. Gigli imagines her agonizing:

Oh, my beloved! My hope, my only bliss!

Why then defer my joy? Fairest of kings,

Whence your delay to light our bridal torch?

Our noble House contains two persons now,

But one in mind, in equal love the same.

O, my illustrious spouse, give o’er delay,

Your sad Elizabeth entreats; and you

Will not deny Elizabeth’s request,

For we were plighted by a solemn pact,

Signed long ago by your own royal hand.

Gigli then presents a touching picture of Elizabeth whiling away the waiting time, longing for Henry to name the day:

How oft with needle, when denied the pen,

Has she on canvas traced the blessed name

Of Henry, or expressed it with her loom

In silken threads, or ’broidered it in gold.

And now she seeks the fanes [temples] and hallowed shrines

Of deities propitious to her suit,

Imploring them to shorten her suspense,

That she may in auspicious moment know

The holy name of bride.

This reads convincingly, for we know from her privy purse expenses how frequently Elizabeth made offerings at shrines, especially in times of stress.⁴⁴

Her fears were soon to be allayed. The rumbles of discontent about her delayed nuptials could be ignored no longer. Parliament wanted her for Queen consort and was keen to see the King honor his vow to wed her. Some members were of the opinion that his claim to rule by right of conquest rather than by right of blood “might have been more wisely passed over in silence than inserted in our statutes, the more especially because in that Parliament, a discussion took place with the King’s consent, relative to his marriage with the Lady Elizabeth, in whose person it appeared to all that every requisite might be supplied which was wanting to make good the title of the King himself.”⁴⁵

On December 10, as Henry VII sat enthroned in the Parliament chamber, Sir Thomas Lovell, Speaker of the Commons, announced that the King wished “to take for himself as wife and consort the noble Lady Elizabeth, daughter of King Edward IV, from which marriage, by the grace of God, it is hoped by many that there would arise offspring of the race of kings for the comfort of the whole realm.” The emphasis was not on Elizabeth’s title, but on her eminent suitability to be Queen and bear Henry heirs, for—as the speaker emphasized—the succession “is, remains, continues, and endures in the person of the lord King, and of the heirs legitimately issuing from his body.” All the Lords Spiritual and Temporal rose to their feet and, facing the throne with bowed heads, urged the King to proceed to this union of “two bloods of high renown”; to which he replied that “he was very willing to do so; it would give him pleasure to comply with their request.” And so “it was decreed by harmonious consent that one house would be made from two families that had once striven in mortal hatred.”⁴⁶

In a Latin oration made to the Pope after the marriage,⁴⁷ Henry VII’s envoy explained that “the King of England, to put an end to civil war, had, at the request of all the lords of the kingdom, consented to marry Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV,” on account of her beauty and virtue, “though he was free to have made a profitable foreign alliance.” This last was a bluff, part of Henry’s strategy to show the world that his crown was his by right, not in right of his wife, whose title he omitted to mention. Given the abysmal history of the warring royal houses over the past thirty years, marriage to the Yorkist heiress was probably the most profitable match he could have made, with peace being far more crucial to the future welfare of his kingdom than a fat foreign dowry—and it was surely what he had intended all along. It is highly unlikely that he had ever seriously contemplated marrying anyone else. He was aware that marriage with Elizabeth was a political necessity if he wanted to secure the loyalty of the Yorkists, and that, if he did not fulfill his vow to wed her, and thus publicly humiliated her, he risked alienating the many people who saw her as the true successor of the Plantagenets.

As Lord Stanley was soon to testify, the King was “moved and led to contract marriage with the lady for the sake of the peace and tranquillity of his realm, and by the entreaties and petitions of the lords and nobles, both spiritual and temporal, and of the whole commonalty of the same realm, who in Parliament assembled requested him to do so, and made prayers and great entreaties to him.” William de Berkeley, Earl of Nottingham, would add that “in conscience he believed that the King intends to contract marriage with the lady, if it can be done by the law of the Church, both on account of the singular love which he bears to her, and also on account of the special prayers and entreaties of the lords and nobles, both spiritual and temporal, and of the whole commonalty of his said realm of England.”⁴⁸

Thus Henry’s motives in marrying Elizabeth seem to have been largely political. But there was more to it than that, on both sides. Lord Stanley, under oath, was to tell the papal legate “that the aforesaid lady has not been captured nor compelled, but of great and intimate love and cordial affection desires to contract marriage with the said King, to the knowledge of this sworn [witness], as he says in virtue of his oath.”⁴⁹ Stanley knew Elizabeth well, so his testimony is good evidence that her heart was involved as well as her ambitions; this being so, it is easier to understand her future relations with Henry. Loving him, she was all the more prepared to mold herself to what he wanted her to be, especially now that her hopes of a crown were to be fulfilled. Sir Richard Edgecombe and Sir William Tyler were also emphatic that Elizabeth had not been “ravished,” or captured, as the word meant then. Nottingham’s testimony to “the singular love” Henry bore Elizabeth⁵⁰ is corroborated by André’s statement that, even before being petitioned by Parliament, the King “had come to know [Elizabeth’s] purity, faith, and goodness,” and “God [had] inclined his heart to love the girl.”

Having made a show of giving in to Parliament’s request, Henry, “like a prince of just faith and true of promise, detesting all intestine and cruel hostility, appointed a day to join in matrimony ye Lady Elizabeth, heir of the House of York, with his noble personage, heir to ye line of Lancaster: which thing not only rejoiced and comforted the hearts of the noble and gentle men of the realm, but also gained the favor and good minds of all the common people.” The latter were soon “much extolling and praising the King’s constant fidelity and his politic device, thinking surely that the day had now come that the seed of tumultuous factions and the fountain of cruel dissension should be stopped, evacuated, and clearly extinguished.”⁵¹

On December 10, after the date of the wedding had been set for January 18, the Lord Chancellor prorogued Parliament, announcing that, before it reassembled, “the marriage of the King and the Princess Elizabeth would take place.”⁵²

From that day, Elizabeth was treated as Queen of England. On December 11, the King ordered that preparations for the nuptials were to go ahead: a celebratory tournament was proclaimed, “then wedding torches, marriage bed, and other suitable decorations were made ready.”⁵³ Elizabeth was declared Duchess of York, as heiress to her father and her other illustrious forebears,⁵⁴ a move calculated to please the Yorkist faction.

According to Lord Stanley, Henry and Elizabeth had several discussions about being “joined together in the fourth and fourth degrees of kindred,” and he heard them say “they wished to make use of an apostolic dispensation in the matter of such impediment.”⁵⁵Pope Innocent VIII was now approached for a special dispensation. Giovanni de’ Gigli wrote to him, urging the marriage as the best means of establishing peace in England. Henry’s emissary to the Vatican was instructed to praise Elizabeth in a formal oration to his Holiness: “The beauty and chastity of this lady are indeed so great that neither Lucretia nor Diana herself were ever more beautiful or more chaste. So great is her virtue, and her character so fine, that she certainly seems to have been preserved by divine will from the time of her birth right up until today to be consort and Queen.”⁵⁶ No mention was made of Elizabeth’s claim to the throne;⁵⁷ again, Henry did not want to be seen to be King in right of his wife. Already he was finding that his bride’s royal lineage was proving an embarrassment as well as an advantage.

Henry did not need to wait for the Pope’s sanction to arrive. He and “the most illustrious Lady Elizabeth, eldest legitimate and natural daughter of the late Edward, sometime King of England,” drew up a joint petition to the papal legate, Giacomo Passarelli, Bishop of Imola, “setting forth that whereas the said King Henry has, by God’s providence, won his realm of England, and is in peaceful possession thereof, and has been asked by all the lords of his realm, both spiritual and temporal, and also by the general council of the said realm, called Parliament, to take the said lady Elizabeth to wife, he, wishing to accede to the just petitions of his subjects, desires to take the said lady to wife, but cannot do so without dispensation, inasmuch as they are related in the fourth and fourth degrees of kindred, wherefore petition is made on their behalf to the said legate to grant them dispensation by his apostolic authority to contract marriage and remain therein, notwithstanding the said impediment of kindred, and to decree the offspring to be born thereof legitimate.”⁵⁸

On January 14, at Westminster, the couple appointed proctors, who presented their petition to the legate in the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Two days later, after hearing testimony from the mandatory eight witnesses required by the Church, including Lord Stanley, and taking into account the people’s impatience to see the marriage concluded, Imola issued an ordinary dispensation allowing Henry and Elizabeth to marry (which was confirmed in a brief issued by the bishop on March 2 following). Given that this was just two days before the wedding, and that preparations for it were nearing completion, Henry must have been advised that the dispensation would be forthcoming, and that the Pope’s bull would be just a formality.⁵⁹ The marriage could go ahead. It was now five months since the King had emerged triumphant at Bosworth.

“At last, upon the eighteenth of January [1486] was solemnized the so long expected and so much desired marriage between the King and the Lady Elizabeth,”⁶⁰ and “great gladness filled the kingdom.” The wedding took place at Westminster with “great magnificence displayed to everyone’s satisfaction.”⁶¹ It is uncertain whether it was solemnized in the abbey or in St. Stephen’s Chapel. Surprisingly, no detailed account survives, which may be because the ceremony took place in the greater privacy of St. Stephen’s. The bridegroom was twenty-nine, the bride nearly twenty.

“The Pope had opportunely sent a legate to celebrate the nuptials,”⁶² but it was Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, who performed the ceremony “in the sight of the Church.”⁶³ As Bernard André colorfully put it, “his hand held the sweet posy wherein the white and red roses were first tied together.”

Among the wedding guests were Elizabeth’s aunts, Anne Wydeville, Lady Wingfield, and Margaret Wydeville, Lady Maltravers. Her grandmother, Cecily, Duchess of York, did not attend, but Henry VII evidently approved of her, as in 1486 he granted her an annuity and renewed her license to export wool.⁶⁴

Elizabeth went to her wedding in a gown of silk damask and crimson satin costing £11.5s.6d. [£5,500],⁶⁵ with a “kirtle of white cloth of gold damask and a mantle of the same suit, furred with ermine.” Giovanni de’ Gigli, in his Latin epithalamium, conjures a charming—probably imaginary—portrait of the princess on her wedding day, as his poem was almost certainly written beforehand. It suggests, however, the kind of jewels that Elizabeth might have worn:

Your hymeneal torches now unite

And keep them ever pure. O royal maid,

Put on your regal robes in loveliness.

A thousand fair attendants round you wait,

Of various ranks, with different offices,

To deck your beauteous form. Lo, this delights

To smooth with ivory comb your golden hair,

And that to curl or braid each shining tress

And wreath the sparkling jewels round your head,

Twining your locks with gems; this one shall clasp

The radiant necklace framed in fretted [symmetrically patterned] gold

About your snowy neck; while that unfolds

The robes that glow with gold and purple dye,

And fits the ornaments with patient skill

To your unrivalled limbs; and here shall shine

The costly treasures from the Orient sands:

The sapphire, azure gem that emulates

Heaven’s lofty arch, shall gleam, and softly there

The verdant emerald shed its greenest light,

And fiery carbuncle flash forth rosy rays

From the pure gold.⁶⁶

It was not customary then for a bride to be wholly attired in white—that was a tradition begun centuries later by Queen Victoria—but for her to wear the richest materials. It was her flowing hair, threaded with jewels, not the color of her clothes, that proclaimed her virginity.

Henry was gorgeously attired in cloth of gold. The clerk of the works of the King’s Wardrobe was paid £95.3s.6½d. [£46,500] for “divers stuffs bought for the day of the solemnization of the King’s marriage”; 23s.4d. [£770] was paid “for the Queen’s wedding ring,” which was of gold, weighing two-thirds of an ounce, and heavy compared with modern wedding rings; it had been purchased before the beginning of January.⁶⁷

According to the eleventh-century Sarum Rite, the pre-Reformation form of the marriage service then in use, Elizabeth vowed to take Henry for her wedded husband, “for fairer, for fouler, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to be blithe and bonair [amiable] and buxom [obedient, in the sense of obliging] in bed and at board” till death parted them.

André says “the most wished day of marriage was celebrated by them with all religious and glorious magnificence at court, and by their people, to show their gladness, with bonfires, dancing, songs, and banquets throughout all London, both men and women, rich and poor, beseeching God to bless the King and Queen and grant them a numerous progeny.” The “great triumphs and demonstrations, especially on the people’s part, of joy and gladness” were greater “than the days either of [Henry VII’s] entry [into London] or his coronation, which the King rather noted than liked.”⁶⁸

“Gifts flowed freely on all sides and were showered on everyone, while feasts, dances, and tournaments were celebrated with liberal generosity to make known and to magnify the joyful occasion and the bounty of gold, silver, rings, and jewels. Then everyone, men and women, prayed to God that the King and Queen might have a prosperous and happy issue.”⁶⁹

Giovanni de’ Gigli’s epithalamium had more of joy and relief in it than mere flattery:

Hail! Ever-honoured and auspicious day,

When in blest wedlock to a mighty king,

To Henry, bright Elizabeth is joined.

Fairest of Edward’s offspring, she alone

Pleased this illustrious spouse.

So here the most illustrious maid of York,

Deficient nor in virtue nor descent,

Most beautiful in form, whose matchless face

Adorned with most enchanting sweetness shines.

Her parents called her name Elizabeth,

And she, their firstborn, should of right succeed

Her mighty sire. Her title will be yours

If you unite this Princess to yourself

In wedlock’s holy bond.

But now the royal pair were one, and a child, Gigli predicted, would shortly gambol in the royal halls, and grow up a worthy son of the King, emulating the noble qualities of his parents and perpetuating their name in his illustrious descendants forever.⁷⁰

Inevitably, much was made of this union of the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster, which was seen as symbolizing the end of the conflict between the two royal houses. “By reason of which marriage, peace was thought to descend out of Heaven into England, considering that the lines of Lancaster and York were now brought into one knot and connexed together, of whose two bodies one heir might succeed, which after their time should peaceably rule and enjoy the whole monarchy and realm of England.” This was written by the chronicler, Edward Hall, from the perspective of the reign of Henry VIII, whom he greatly admired. Vergil attributed the marriage to “divine intervention, for plainly by it all things which nourished the most ruinous factions were utterly removed, the two houses of Lancaster and York were united and from the union the true and established royal line emerged which now reigns.” Hall even went so far as to compare this “godly matrimony” with the union of God and man in Christ.

Most English people believed that the royal wedding would bring an end to the civil wars and herald a new era of peace and stability; consequently it was very popular, and it won for Henry Tudor the loyalty of many who had supported the House of York. Victory had given Henry “the knee of submission,” wrote Bacon, but “marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart; so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him.”

The nuptial union of Lancaster and York was a continuing theme in Tudor propaganda. “Now may we sing, we two bloods all made in one,” Bessy rejoices in Brereton’s poem. Thomas Ashwell, an English composer skilled in polyphony, wrote an early form of the National Anthem, “God save King Henry, wheresoe’er he be,” in honor of the marriage.⁷¹ In 1509, at the coronation of Henry VIII, the court poet, Stephen Hawes, reputed (probably without foundation) to have been a bastard son of Richard III, lauded the King’s parentage:

Two titles in one thou didst unify

When the red rose took the white in marriage.⁷²

More than a century later the union was still being extolled, indeed, immortalized, by Shakespeare in Richard III:

We will unite the white rose and the red.

Smile Heaven upon this fair conjunction

That long hath frowned upon their enmity!—

What traitor hears me, and says not Amen?

England hath long been mad and scarred herself;

The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood,

The father rashly slaughtered his own son,

The son, compell’d, been butcher to the sire:

All this divided York and Lancaster,

Divided in their dire division.

O now let Richmond and Elizabeth,

The true successors of each royal House,

By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!

And let their heirs—God, if Thy will be so—

Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,

With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!

Now civic wounds are stopped, peace lives again

That she may long live, God say Amen!

And as late as 1603, the accession proclamation of James I would speak of this marriage that had “brought to an end the bloody and civil wars to the joy unspeakable of this kingdom.”⁷³

After the wedding, the King and his new Queen presided over a lavish nuptial feast, at which the guests dined on roasted peacocks, swans, larks, and quails, followed by sugared almonds and fruit tarts.

It is often claimed that a medal (now in the British Museum) was struck to commemorate the marriage, embellished with images of the happy couple holding hands; the man wears a garland of roses on his head, while the woman is shown crowned, with her wavy hair loose, as betokened a virgin bride and queen. She wears a round-necked gown beneath a mantle, and a heavy cross suspended from a pearl necklace. The reverse shows a wreath of roses enclosing a legend: “As the rising sun is the ornament of the day, so is a good wife the ornament of her house.” It is the roses that have led to the incorrect assumption that the medal was struck to mark the union of Henry and Elizabeth, but it has now been established that the medal is one of a series made in Prague in the late sixteenth century, and that it has nothing to do with them.⁷⁴

Similarly, a painting formerly at Sudeley Castle (once at Strawberry Hill), said to be by Jan Gossaert (or Mabuse), has long been said to portray the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and has often been engraved as such. Yet there is no evidence that Gossaert ever visited England, and his style is very different. The setting is an imaginary church, and the attire of the bride appears to date from the late sixteenth century, while the other figures wear late-fifteenth-century dress. A painting, perhaps contemporary, and said to be of the marriage, is in Lady Braye’s collection at Stanford Hall, Leicestershire. A modern romanticized painting of The Joining of the Houses of Lancaster and York, executed by J. R. Brown around 1901, hangs in Blackpool Town Hall.

At last Elizabeth’s ambitions had been crowned with the royal dignity that was rightfully hers. Her wedding night was spent in the King’s bedchamber, the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, a vast room built in the thirteenth century by Henry III, measuring eighty-six by twenty-six feet. Behind the massive four-poster bed was a mural dating from that time, showing the coronation of Edward the Confessor in faded red, blue, silver, and gold, and on the walls were huge paintings of Biblical battles. There was a great fireplace in the room, but even so the Painted Chamber must have been difficult to heat in January, and the palace was notoriously damp. Fortunately, the bed curtains would have afforded a degree of intimacy.

Now, it was Henry’s part to assay a second victory: as on the battlefield, so in the bedchamber, for as Ann Wroe points out, the language of love was very much the language of war, and a man was expected to come prepared with his “weapon” or “harness” and engage in a “raid,” or “sweet combat,” with his lady, each showing the other mercy in paying “the sweet due debt of nature.”⁷⁵ For all the years of intrigue and political maneuvering, the blood shed at Bosworth, the pageantry and symbolism of the wedding, and the advantages of this great alliance, what mattered now was what happened when these two young people, divested of their royal finery—for it was customary to sleep naked—got between the sheets together to do their duty to their people and to posterity, and, as Fuller put it, “the two Houses of York and Lancaster united first hopefully in their bed.” As time would soon prove, this was a most successful mating, not least because the Yorkist claimant to the throne, who could have been Henry Tudor’s greatest enemy, had now been rendered neutral in his embrace.

The white and red roses of York and Lancaster combined were from the first the chief symbol of this union, and of the new dynasty. Henry was actively to promote it. The following year, in York on progress, he ordered a pageant to be performed featuring “a royal rich red rose, unto which rose shall appear another rich white rose, unto whom all flowers shall give sovereignty, and there shall come from a cloud a crown covering the roses.”⁷⁶ Here is the origin of the Tudor badge, the rose and crown. The great rose window in the south transept of York Minster, with its intertwined red and white roses, commemorates the marriage of the founders of the Tudor dynasty. The King had the Tudor rose incorporated into the collar of the garter insignia, and it became customary to surround the royal arms with a garland of Tudor roses.

Popular songs were written about the new emblem, notably, “A Crown-Garland of Noble Roses gathered out of England’s loyal Garden: A Princely Song made of the Red Rose and White, royally united together by King Henry VII and Elizabeth Plantagenet,” which claimed that “the owners of these princely flowers in virtues do excel.”⁷⁷ And in 1550 the title page of the printed edition of Hall’s chronicle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, had the title enclosed between two rose trellises, with Henry VII and Elizabeth of York kneeling, hand in hand, at the top of each, with their son, Henry VIII, in majesty above them—the true inheritor of both strains of royal blood.⁷⁸