13

“Unbounded Love”

Elizabeth was family orientated to a high degree. She gave “unbounded love”¹ and support to her children, her sisters, and other relations, and always interested herself in their affairs. She kept her sisters with her at court before they wed, and sometimes after, and they were usually included in the royal celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun.

Cecily of York, who had played such a prominent role at the coronation, was the first of the Queen’s sisters to marry. Henry VII was aware that while Edward IV’s daughters might be assets to him in terms of making advantageous marriages, they were also a threat by virtue of their Yorkist lineage. In 1486, determined to neutralize their dynastic claims by marrying them to his loyal supporters, Henry had Cecily’s marriage to Richard III’s adherent Ralph Scrope dissolved, and between November 25 and December 31, 1487, Cecily was married to Margaret Beaufort’s half brother, John, Viscount Welles. Margaret, who was always a good friend to Cecily,² probably had a hand in brokering the marriage.

Welles had been in high favor with Edward IV and was one of those who watched over his body after his death.³ An opponent of Richard III, he had joined Henry Tudor in Brittany after Buckingham’s rebellion. He was a favorite of the King, and had been rewarded with his title in 1485. He was probably about thirty-seven, and his bride eighteen. The King and Queen attended their wedding.⁴

Cecily was described as being “not so fortunate as fair.”⁵ She got on well with the Lady Margaret, whom she took to visiting at Collyweston, and Margaret would later protect her from the consequences of an ill-advised second marriage, and pay toward her funeral expenses.⁶ Sadly, Cecily’s two daughters by Welles were to die young. After she married, her next sister, Anne of York, now twelve, became the Queen’s chief lady-in-waiting, and was constantly in attendance on her.

In the months following her coronation, Elizabeth received various financial and material gifts. On December 21, Henry granted her “the next presentation to the deanery of the College of St. Stephen in the Palace of Westminster.”⁷ Five days later “our dearest wife the Queen” received a grant—backdated to February 20—of some of Elizabeth Wydeville’s lordships and manors that appear to have been overlooked earlier, namely “Waltham Magna, Baddow, Mashbury, Dunmow, [Great] Leighs, and Farnham, all in Essex,” with the offices of feodary⁸ and bailiff⁹ in each. With that, the transfer of land from queen to queen was complete.¹⁰

On March 6, 1488, a charter was given “to the King’s very dear consort, that she may have and take for her life all the goods and chattels of all her men and tenants being either fugitives or felons, or persons condemned and convicted of felony”; she also received “liberties and immunities in all her castles, lordships, etc.” This charter was granted “at the suit of the Queen herself.”¹¹ At Easter, 100 marks [£15,500] were paid to her “for the maintenance of her state.” She also received a tun of wine “by way of reward.” On May 8 a royal writ was issued to the mayor and burgesses of Bristol “requiring them to render to Elizabeth, the Queen consort, the arrears, and also the half-yearly payments [of rents], as they become due.” Another writ was sent “to the men of the town of Bedford in respect of an annuity of £20 [£10,000] out of the farm [rents] of the town, granted to the Queen from February 20 last past.”¹²

The Christmas of 1487 was kept “full honorably” at Greenwich. The King presided over the customary feast in the great hall of the palace, while the Queen dined with her mother—clearly Elizabeth Wydeville was still welcome at court—and the Lady Margaret in her chamber. Cecily, “the noble princess, sister of the Queen, our sovereign lady,” and her new husband, Viscount Welles, joined the festivities. The court stayed at Greenwich for a week after Christmas, and on New Year’s Day largesse was cried in the great hall, where Henry and Elizabeth distributed gifts to members of their households, with the Welleses following suit; and there was a banquet and “a goodly disguising” in the evening.

When the King and Queen wore their crowns in public on Twelfth Day, January 5, Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort appeared in identical mantles and surcoats of estate, Margaret wearing “a rich coronal” on her head. “And when the High Mass was done, the King went to his chamber and from thence to the hall, and there kept his estate, crowned with a rich crown of gold set with pearl and precious stones, and under [a] marvelous rich cloth of estate. The Queen, also crowned under a cloth of estate, hanging somewhat lower than the King’s, on his left hand, and my lady the King’s mother on her left hand, with all four estates were served covered.” During the feast, the Earl of Ormond, Elizabeth’s chamberlain, kneeling, held her crown, while the Earl of Oxford held the King’s.¹³

In March 1488 negotiations were opened for the marriage of Prince Arthur to the Spanish Infanta, Katherine of Aragon. Katherine had been born on December 16, 1485. Her parents, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, had not only united Spain by their marriage, but were now winning a centuries-long war to recapture the kingdom from the occupying Moors. For this, the Pope would award them the title “their Most Catholic Majesties,” and they were already renowned and respected throughout Christendom. An alliance with Spain would undoubtedly bolster Henry VII’s standing both at home and in Europe, for by agreeing to marry their daughter to his son, Ferdinand and Isabella were endorsing his right to the crown.

That spring, Rodrigo de Puebla, at the time the new Spanish ambassador, was sent to England, his first task being to inspect the two-year-old Prince Arthur. He was much taken with the young prince, reporting: “We find in him so many excellent qualities as no one would believe.” He was a child “of remarkable beauty and grace” and “taller than his age would warrant.” Puebla also extolled Elizabeth’s beauty and magnificence in his dispatches.¹⁴

But the ambassador had reservations about the match. “Bearing in mind what happens every day to the kings of England, it is surprising that Ferdinand and Isabella should dare to give their daughter at all,” he observed, referring to the dynastic crises and rebellions of the past few years. Nevertheless, on April 13 his sovereigns authorized him to conclude a treaty of marriage between the Infanta and Prince Arthur, and thereafter negotiations proceeded.¹⁵

At Easter 1488, Henry and Elizabeth were at Windsor, staying in the old state apartments built by Edward III, which were now much outdated. Between 1497 and 1500, Henry VII was to extend them westward from the existing range toward the gatehouse, building for Elizabeth “a new and elegant work of squared stones,” a three-storied building that would be known as King Henry’s Tower, which was constructed under the direction of Robert Janyns, who had designed St. George’s Chapel. The tower was surmounted by pairs of turreted oriel windows on the north and south facades, and its purpose was to provide extra accommodation for the Queen. Every provision was made by the King for her comfort and convenience.

Her apartments were established here and in the adjoining inner gatehouse, where her old bedchamber had been on the first floor; it had an anteroom that had served as a pallet chamber, where her female attendants slept. A gallery extended from her dining chamber (once Margaret of Anjou’s bedchamber) in her old apartments to the pallet chamber outside her new bedchamber in the tower. A privy staircase led up from this pallet chamber to what was probably her jewel house, and the southern half of the gallery served as Elizabeth’s closet. In the northwest corner of her new bedchamber was a deep oriel with tall windows on three sides, used as an “arraying chamber,” where Elizabeth was dressed each day.¹⁶

When a German, Paul Hentzner, visited Windsor in 1598, late in the reign of Elizabeth I, the beds of the Queen’s parents, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and her grandparents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, were still there, “each eleven feet square, covered with quilts shining with gold and silver.”¹⁷ Probably Elizabeth’s was made for her new bedchamber. The sheets in Henry VII’s household ordinances were clearly large enough to have fit the great beds mentioned by Hentzner.

Elizabeth had a prominent part to play in the customary religious observances at Easter. She distributed her own Maundy money and clothing to poor women, and on Easter Day her religious observances paralleled the King’s.¹⁸

April 1488 witnessed the first garter ceremonies to take place at Windsor in Henry VII’s reign. For Elizabeth, the sight of Henry riding with his Knights Companions to the still unfinished St. George’s Chapel on the Sunday after St. George’s Day must have brought back poignant memories of her father. She was there in company with Margaret Beaufort, who had just been made a Lady of the Garter—the last woman to be given that honor until 1901. Both were wearing “gowns of the garter of the same as the King and the lords wear.” These were gifts from Henry, from his Great Wardrobe, and of “sanguine [red or rust color] cloth in grain, furred with the wombs of miniver pure, gartered [banded] with letters of gold.” In providing his mother with identical clothes to those of his Queen, Henry proclaimed her importance. The significance of that would not have been lost on spectators. The poet Skelton praised Henry VII for his “knightly order, clothed in robes with garter, the Queen’s Grace, and thy mother in the same.”¹⁹

That day Elizabeth and Margaret rode in procession through the precincts of Windsor Castle in a rich chariot covered in cloth of gold and drawn by six horses harnessed with gold. Their route took them from the royal lodgings through the narrow vaulted passageway of the Inner Gatehouse, then past the Round Tower down to the Inner Ward—the same path followed by garter processions today. After them followed another Lady of the Garter, Anne of York, wearing a crimson velvet robe of the order, Margaret Pole, Elizabeth’s aunt, Lady Rivers, and eighteen other ladies similarly attired, all mounted on white palfreys bedecked with cloth-of-gold saddles and caparisons embroidered with the white roses of York in the Queen’s honor. On arrival at the castle, the royal party attended Mass in St. George’s Chapel. At this special service, Elizabeth was the only one beside the King permitted to kiss the Gospel and the pax.

Then the King, the Queen, and “my lady the King’s mother” walked in procession around the cloister and attended a great feast in St. George’s Hall, with the ambassadors of Burgundy, Austria, Scotland, and Brittany being present. The next day Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort went with the King and the Garter Knights in procession to Mass and to Evensong, although they did not attend the feast held in the evening.²⁰

The court was still at Windsor for the Whitsunday festival of 1488, which fell on May 20, and again Elizabeth’s sister Anne was with her. A papal envoy had reported that, on May 9, “the mother of the Queen” had been present with the royal couple, the King’s mother, and many nobles and ambassadors, again proving that Elizabeth Wydeville was not persona non grata at court.²¹ Her appearances there the previous Christmas and on this occasion suggest that she may have visited at other times when her presence was not recorded.

Much of the summer of 1488 was passed at Woodstock Palace near Oxford,²² a large, stone-built house decorated with heraldic emblems. It had been a favored royal residence since the twelfth century, and Henry VII spent a lot of money upgrading it, enticed by the excellent hunting to be had nearby.

In July, Rodrigo de Puebla, who had been busy debating the Infanta’s dowry and jointure with the Privy Council, “went at an unexpected hour to the Queen, whom we found with two and thirty companions of angelical appearance, and all we saw there seemed very magnificent, and in splendid style, as was suitable for the occasion.” He added: “The King requests that from time to time Latin letters should be written to him from Spain, since he writes Latin letters to Spain. Neither the King, nor the Queen, are able to understand Spanish letters.”²³ It was important, of course, that Elizabeth was able to read the diplomatic correspondence concerning the marriage negotiations, because it was her role as a queen and a mother—and within her proper sphere of influence—to ensure that her children made good marriages.

It was probably in connection with these negotiations that Elizabeth wrote rather forcefully to the powerful and influential Lorenzo de’ Medici, “il Magnifico,” of Florence. On August 6, 1488, Lorenzo informed Pope Innocent VIII that one “Robert the Englishman, the bearer of the present letter, is going to His Holiness to obtain a brief to the King of England, for the purpose which His Holiness will learn from the Florentine ambassador and from Robert.” Lorenzo beseeched “His Holiness to give Robert audience and grant his request, as the Queen has written very warmly on this matter.”²⁴

Henry and Elizabeth spent All Hallows at Windsor and the rest of the autumn of 1488 at Westminster. When they went down the Thames by barge to the bishop’s Palace at St. Paul’s to receive the papal chamberlain, there was “so great a mist upon the Thames that there was no man could tell in what place the King was.” In the cathedral, Elizabeth watched as Archbishop Morton ceremonially girded Henry with a sword blessed by the Pope, and afterward there was a lavish feast. The court removed to Sheen for Christmas, the Queen being attended by many great ladies, including her sisters, Lady Rivers, Margaret Beaufort, and Margaret Pole.²⁵ This was the last occasion when Margaret Pole was recorded at Henry VII’s court.²⁶ She was becoming increasingly occupied with a series of pregnancies and the demands of a young family.

In March 1489 the marriage between Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon was finally agreed upon with the conclusion of the Treaty of Medina del Campo, which provided for the Infanta to bring to England a dowry of 200,000 crowns [£20 million]. This treaty, ratified by the King on September 23, 1490,²⁷ was arguably Henry VII’s greatest achievement in foreign policy, as it established the Tudor dynasty in the top rank of European monarchies—although it was to be many years before the marriage took place, and at times during those years it would seem as if it might not take place at all.

Henry and Elizabeth were at Hertford Castle at Easter 1489, which fell on March 31.²⁸ They were back at Windsor for the feast of St. George and the annual garter ceremonies. At this time Elizabeth was given “cloth of black velvet, russet cloth,” squirrel fur, and shoes.²⁹ Shortly afterward Henry received news that the Earl of Northumberland had been murdered while enforcing the collection of the King’s taxes, and rode north to York to preside over the trials of the culprits.

By the time he returned to Windsor, Elizabeth knew she was to have another child. It was nearly three years since Arthur’s birth, and in an era in which infant mortality was high, she must have felt pressure to bear more children to ensure the succession. If she’d had miscarriages in the interim period, they are not recorded. Maybe, having been so ill after her first confinement, she delayed having another child for the sake of her health, or had simply not managed to conceive.

The King was delighted to learn of his wife’s pregnancy. He lavished gifts upon her against her coming confinement: bolts of black velvet, russet cloth, canaber (soft linen) cloth and white blanket, squirrel fur, cord, thread, tappet (tapestry) hooks, crochettes (pieces of crochet), iron hammers, a carpet, feather beds filled with down, and sheets of Holland cloth.³⁰

The high ceremonial observed on October 31 suggests that the King was confidently expecting Elizabeth to present him with a second son. She was then eight months pregnant. “On All-Hallows Eve, the Queen took to her chamber at Westminster, royally accompanied with ladies and gentlemen, that is to say, with my lady the King’s mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, and many other going before her, and besides [the] greater part of the nobles of the realm assembled at Westminster at the Parliament. She was led by the Earl of Oxford and the Earl of Derby. The reverend father in God, the Bishop of Exeter, said Mass in his pontificals” in St. Stephen’s Chapel. “The earls of Shrewsbury and of Kent held the towels when the Queen received the Host, and the corners of the towels were golden, and the torches were holden by knights; and after Agnus Dei was sung, and the bishop ceased, the Queen was led as before. When she was come unto her great chamber, she tarried in the anteroom before it and stood under her cloth of estate. Then was ordained a void of spices and sweet wines. That done, my lord the Queen’s chamberlain, in very good words, desired in the Queen’s name all her people there present to pray that God would send her a good hour.”

Elizabeth now “departed to her inner chamber, which was hanged and ceiled with rich cloth of blue Arras with fleurs-de-lis of gold. In that chamber was a rich bed and pallet, the which pallet had a marvelous rich canopy of gold with a velvet pall garnished with bright red roses, embroidered with two rich panes of ermine covered with Rennes of lawn. Also there was an altar well furnished with relics, and a cupboard of nine stages, well and richly garnished.” It had been decreed that the tapestries in the birthing chamber were not to portray human figures, which were considered “not convenient about women in such case,” but pleasant subjects, so that the Queen and the newborn infant might not be “affrighted by figures which gloomily stare.”

At the door to her chamber the Queen “recommended herself to the good praises of the lords; and my lord her chamberlain drew the traverse,” the curtain that separated the bedchamber from the great chamber. “From then forth no manner of officer came within the chamber but ladies and gentlewomen, after the old custom.”³¹

Elizabeth Wydeville came to court to support her daughter during her confinement, and a few days after the Queen had taken to her chamber an exception was made to the strict protocol prohibiting men from admittance to it. In the interests of good diplomatic relations, Elizabeth and her mother privately received the new French ambassador, their cousin, Francis, Sieur de Luxembourg, Viscount of Geneva, who had asked to see the Queen. Two other men were allowed to be present—Elizabeth’s chamberlain and Garter King-at-Arms—as well as Margaret Beaufort, who was also in attendance on the Queen at this time. Elizabeth Wydeville deputized with Margaret Beaufort for her at another reception for the ambassadors.

On November 29, 1489, three-year-old Prince Arthur was brought to Westminster and dubbed a Knight of the Bath. While the ceremony of knighthood was in progress, Elizabeth went into labor. “At that same season were all those of the King’s Chapel reading a psalter for the good speed of the Queen, who then travailed; and upon nine of the clock of the same night, she was delivered of a princess.”³² The midwife in attendance was “our well beloved Alice Massey,” who had been paid £10 [£5,000] for her services on November 27,³³ and probably assisted at Arthur’s birth. She was to attend the Queen at all her later confinements, being paid the same sum for each.

On November 30—the feast day of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, a most auspicious baptismal date for a child who would one day be Queen of Scots—the newborn princess was collected by Anne Fiennes, Marchioness of Berkeley, from Elizabeth’s chamber and carried into Westminster Hall, and thence to St. Stephen’s Chapel.³⁴ The officers-at-arms led the procession, followed by the High Constable, the Earl Marshal, the Earl of Kent, carrying two basins, Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex, carrying an unlit taper, Viscount Welles with a gold salt cellar, “my Lady Anne, the Queen’s sister, [who] bare the chrisom with a marvelous rich cross-lace [cord],” and Lady Berkeley with the princess, escorted by the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury, and walking under a canopy borne by four knights. The baby’s train of crimson velvet furred with ermine was carried by her great-aunt, Katherine Wydeville, Duchess of Buckingham, and George Stanley, Lord Strange.

John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, was waiting to receive her in the church porch, which was “royally beseen” with a richly embroidered ceiling covering. He baptized her with the name Margaret, “after my lady the King’s mother,” in Canterbury Cathedral’s magnificent silver font, which had been brought to Westminster for the occasion and lined with cloth of Rennes. At that moment the Earl of Essex lit his taper, and 120 knights, gentlemen, and yeomen set their torches ablaze. Then Thomas Rotherham, “the Lord Archbishop of York, being in pontificals, confirmed” the child at the high altar, with Lady Berkeley acting as sponsor. Wine and spices were served to the godparents: Margaret Beaufort, who gave the princess a silver-gilt chest full of gold; George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury; the Duchess of Norfolk, who gave a rich cup; and Archbishop Morton, who gave two gilt flagons and a gold vessel for holy water. These gifts were borne before the child in the torchlit procession that carried her, with “noise of trumpets [and] Christ’s blessing,” back to the palace to her parents. Having received their blessing also, she was carried off by her nurse and laid in an oak cradle lined with ermine and covered with a cloth-of-gold canopy.³⁵

Margaret was probably given a separate, smaller nursery establishment from Arthur’s. It would also have been ruled by a lady governess, but it was Alice Davy, the nurse, who looked after the child in her infancy, ably assisted by two rockers, Anne Mayland and Margaret Troughton, and by Prince Arthur’s former rocker, Alison Bwimble, who later became the princess’s “day-wife,” essentially a dairy maid who brought milk, cream, and butter for the child.³⁶

On the same day Margaret was christened, Arthur was brought to the Parliament Chamber and created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, titles borne by the heirs of English kings since 1301. During the ceremony Henry VII was lauded for restoring the pride of the Welsh, and as a British king capable of reestablishing order after the chaos of the Wars of the Roses. Afterward the little prince sat beneath the cloth of estate and presided over the feast held to celebrate the occasion.³⁷

On December 4, 1489, King Ferdinand wrote triumphantly to Elizabeth to tell her that he had “conquered the town of Baca, in the kingdom of Granada, and has made great progress in the war against the Moors. As his victory must interest all the Christian world, he thinks it his duty to inform the Queen of England of it.” If he wrote to Henry too, the letter has not survived, but it is possible that he wrote separately to Elizabeth because he recognized her status as the rightful Queen of England.³⁸

Happy as this news was, Elizabeth had more immediate concerns on her mind. A virulent measles epidemic was raging and had claimed the lives of several ladies of her court. Consequently she had to miss the christening celebrations, which lasted into December, and some of the Christmas solemnities too, because her churching, which of necessity took place in private, had to be delayed until December 27. Christmas was a subdued holiday, and on December 29, Henry moved the court to Greenwich to escape the contagion. “There were no disguisings and but very few plays acted on account of [the] prevalent sickness, but there was an abbot of misrule, who made much sport.”³⁹

By Candlemas, February 2, the court was back at Westminster, where the King, the Queen, Margaret Beaufort, and all the Lords Spiritual and Temporal went by custom in procession to Westminster Hall, and thence to Mass; and in the evening watched a play in the White Hall.⁴⁰ On February 19, 1490, Henry VII confirmed by letters patent the grant of Elizabeth Wydeville’s dower lands to her daughter.⁴¹ That year, the Queen Dowager’s pension was increased to £400 [£195,570], further evidence that she was not out of favor.

On February 26, near Kew, Prince Arthur boarded the King’s state barge, which would bear him to Westminster for his investiture as Prince of Wales. Between Mortlake and Chelsea, other barges containing lords, bishops, knights, the Lord Mayor of London, and the craft guilds waited to attend him; at Lambeth Stairs, the flotilla was joined by the Spanish ambassador’s barge. To the sound of trumpets, and amidst colorful pageantry, the prince alighted at the landing bridge at Westminster, and was carried to his father’s presence. Many new knights were dubbed that day in his honor.

On Saturday, February 27, the little boy was hoisted on a horse and led into Westminster Hall. Here, the King formally invested him as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, “as accustomed. Then, the King departing, the prince that day kept his state under a cloth of estate.” A banquet was served at which he “licensed” the knights to enjoy their meat, while minstrels played. The celebrations were brought to a close by Garter King of Arms, who gave thanks to God. It was a demanding ceremonial for such a young child, but Arthur bore himself commendably. In May the following year he would be made a Knight of the Garter.

In November 1490, Elizabeth was granted custody of the lordship and manor of Bretts, in West Ham, Essex. This may have been in response to her giving the King the glad news that she was expecting her third child, possibly conceived during a visit to Ewelme in Oxfordshire.⁴² On St. Peter’s Eve, June 28, 1491, at Greenwich Palace, in the midst of a rainy summer, she bore a second son, called Henry after his father, and perhaps after Henry VI, whom the King hoped to have canonized. The child was red-haired and sturdy, a true Plantagenet who much resembled his grandfather, Edward IV. As Henry VIII, he was to become the most famous of Elizabeth’s children.

Wrapped in “a mantle of gold furred with ermine,” and escorted by two hundred men bearing torches, the new prince was baptized a few days later in the nearby church of the Observant Friars. The church was hung with rich Arras and cloth of gold for the occasion, and carpets were laid in the chancel. Richard Fox, Bishop of Exeter, one of the King’s chief ministers, officiated. The silver font in which this lusty infant was immersed was again borrowed from Canterbury Cathedral for the occasion, and “the bottom [was] well-padded with soft linen.” Money was paid “for sealing of a window where my Lord Henry was changed.” A nurse, Anne Oxenbridge,⁴³ was appointed to look after him during his early years; clearly he grew fond of her, as much later, after he became King, he would reward her with a pension of £20 [£9,670]. In charge of his nursery was the King’s “dear and well-beloved Elizabeth Darcy, mistress to our dearest son the prince.” Agnes Butler and Emmeline Hobbes were among the “rockers to our said son.”⁴⁴

When he was still quite young, Prince Henry’s household was established at Eltham Palace in Kent, to the east of London. Although Prince Arthur was brought up away from the court, Elizabeth’s younger children were largely reared in close proximity to their parents, at Eltham, or at Sheen (where she herself had spent part of her early childhood), Greenwich, or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Croydon, Surrey—all well away from the unhealthy air of London.

Eltham Palace stood on a high hill with commanding views over the City, in a bracing location. There had been a moated manor house on the site as early as the thirteenth century; much extended, it became a favored royal palace in the fourteenth century, boasting a bathroom, dancing chambers, and beautiful gardens. Edward IV, who loved Eltham, had built its soaring great hall in the 1470s, adorning it with pairs of cinque-foil windows, battlements (now gone), and what is today the third-largest hammer-beam roof in England, after those at Westminster Hall and Christ Church, Oxford; and here his badges of the white rose and the sun in splendor still survive. Edward also built the stone bridge across the moat, the front courtyard, new kitchens at right angles to the hall, the service quarters of pantry and buttery at its screens’ end, and new royal lodgings beyond for himself and Elizabeth Wydeville. The latter contained a novel and unique series of five-sided bay windows, and a new innovation, a gallery, built for the purpose of recreation—the earliest one of its kind known in England. Surrounding the palace was a forested hunting park. After Westminster, Eltham was the largest of the royal palaces—and it would have held happy associations for Elizabeth.

Henry VII built a new brick range of royal apartments with bays and oriel windows on the west side of the Great Court—“a fair front over the moat”⁴⁵—and rebuilt the chapel. From 1490 on, he and Elizabeth of York often resided at Eltham, and in their day the great hall was used as a dining hall for the court. Here they dined on the dais, while the officers of the court kept their tables at right angles to theirs.

The future Henry VIII and his siblings spent a large part of their childhood on Eltham’s breezy heights,⁴⁶ their mother being a frequent visitor—often from nearby Greenwich—rather than a constant presence in their lives.⁴⁷ Margaret was weaned in 1491, probably around her second birthday, and her nurse, Alice Davy, dismissed. It is clear from Exchequer warrants that her household and Henry’s were amalgamated before the end of that year, although each had their own attendants.⁴⁸ In time other infants would join them. The Great Wardrobe Accounts contain many payments for beautiful clothing for the royal children, who were clad in velvet, satin, and damask right from infancy, outward display being considered more important than practicality.⁴⁹

Since 1489 there had been fresh and persistent rumors that at least one of the Princes in the Tower had survived. It is not known where they originated, or if Elizabeth heard these rumors, or what she made of them. It is unlikely that she knew for certain what had happened to her brothers, so it is possible that hope sometimes sprang in her heart that one or both of them was alive. Conceivably she had long speculated as to their fate, and maybe this new crop of rumors gave her pause for thought.

But in the autumn of 1491 news came from Ireland that one of the princes might be very much alive. A merchant of Brittany, Pregent Meno, had sailed into Cork with a youth on board. When this fair, blond young man appeared magnificently garbed in silks, bearing himself with great dignity, the citizens of Cork are said to have concluded at once that he must be of royal blood, and the mayor, John Atwater, impressed by the youth’s knowledge of the court, declared that he must be the Earl of Warwick, escaped from the Tower. It is likely that this plot had been hatched in advance.

What happened next is unclear, but soon afterward it was announced that the handsome stranger was actually Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the vanished princes. York would have reached sixteen in August 1491, and the stranger was about that age. In a drawing in the Receuil d’Arras he bears a strong resemblance to Edward IV, which was commented on by contemporaries, although he was “not handsome,” as Edward was.⁵⁰ Certainly the boy knew a lot about the Yorkist court. According to a thirdhand report, Maximilian of Austria was to assert that he was Margaret of Burgundy’s bastard son by Henri de Berghes, Bishop of Cambrai,⁵¹ but there is no evidence to substantiate this.

By 1487 the boy had been taken into the service of Edward IV’s godson, Sir Edward Brampton, a staunch Yorkist knighted by Richard III. Brampton had gone to Portugal to negotiate the marriage between Richard and the Infanta Joana, but he fled into exile in the Netherlands after Bosworth. It could have been in his household that his protégé learned so much about the Yorkist court, knowledge that would serve him well in the future. He might have been Edward IV’s bastard; Bacon hints that there was something scandalous behind the employment of the boy by Edward’s godson. Yet this lad, who claimed he was brought up at the English court until he was ten, had clearly not yet mastered the English language.

Vergil believed that this was a new imposture, the brainchild of Margaret of Burgundy, who hated Henry VII and had probably been waiting for an opportunity to unseat him since the failure of the Simnel conspiracy. According to Vergil, Margaret had apparently come across the boy by chance, or he might have been pushed into her path by Brampton. Impressed by his looks and sharp wits, and possibly struck by his resemblance to her brother, Edward IV, she was only too happy to recognize him as her lost nephew, whom she had last seen when he was seven. Bacon claimed that she had been looking out for such a handsome, graceful youth “to make Plantagenets and dukes of York.” Vergil states that she kept him secretly in her household and that it was she who taught him all he needed to know, “so that afterward he should convince all by his performance that he sprang from the Yorkist line.” Vergil believed it was Margaret who had arranged for the lad to go to Ireland with a view to stirring up the Yorkist supporters there.

There is no evidence that Margaret ever met the pretender before 1492, when he fled to her court from France. Even so, it is likely that some conspiracy had been formed before he appeared in Ireland. Henry VII was convinced that it had its roots in Burgundy.⁵²Certainly Margaret of Burgundy would not have hesitated to do everything in her power to overthrow Henry and Elizabeth and replace them with any “male remnant” of the House of York who was remotely suitable.⁵³

The news of York’s apparent survival “came blazing and thundering into England,” arousing much excitement and speculation.⁵⁴ One wonders what Elizabeth felt on hearing it. Her Victorian biographers suspected that “her mental sufferings were acute”⁵⁵ during the years and crises that followed, and that the emergence of this new pretender and his subsequent career filled her mind “with gloomy forebodings.”⁵⁶ It seems many wanted to believe that one of the princes had survived. “The King began again to be haunted by sprites, by the magic and curious arts of the Lady Margaret [of Burgundy], who raised up the ghost of Richard, Duke of York, to walk and vex the King. This was a finer counterfeit stone than Lambert Simnel.” The youth who claimed to be York was so “crafty and bewitching” that he could “move pity and induce belief, as was like a kind of fascination and enchantment to those that saw or heard him.”⁵⁷

Is it possible that he was the prince he claimed to be? His own account of how he was spared death after his brother had been killed lacks credibility, and there were inconsistencies in his confession, made much later when he was a captive, which cast doubt on its veracity. Further, against the weight of evidence that the princes were dead by October 1483, it would be hard to argue for the survival of one of them. But some were apparently convinced that he was York. He was to “number kings among his friends,”⁵⁸convincing the monarchs of France, Denmark, and Scotland, the Duke of Saxony, Maximilian the Archduke of Austria and his son, Philip; all claimed to be satisfied with the evidence of birthmarks, although each at some stage may have been glad of an opportunity to discountenance Henry VII.

The pretender was also a magnet for the dissident Irish lords. “My masters of Ireland, you will crown apes at length!” Henry VII was to observe scathingly.⁵⁹ But it was no jesting matter: the King might dismiss him as “this lad who calls himself Plantagenet,”⁶⁰but that lad was to be a constant thorn in Henry’s side for the next eight years, and at first the King may have feared that he really was Richard of York. The pretender could not have plagued him thus if he had discovered what became of the Princes in the Tower. Had he been in possession of that information, he would surely have used it to counter the pretender’s claims, as he had paraded Warwick in London to counteract Simnel’s.

The question of the youth’s true identity must at this stage have tormented Elizabeth, whose heart no doubt leapt at the news that her brother might be alive. Yet her hopes must have been tempered with dread and cruelly torn loyalties, for Richard of York had a better claim to the throne than she or Henry. Even if this pretender was her brother, he must be her husband’s enemy, and therefore hers, a deadly threat to Henry’s security and the safety of her children; and she herself would be placed in a most unenviable position.

Despite the sensation he had created in Cork, the pretender had little success in winning over many of the Irish to his cause, so in 1492 he went to France. Charles VIII’s relations with Henry VII were dismal at that time, so predictably he warmly received the pretender as “Richard IV.” Assigned royal apartments and a guard of honor, the young man “thought himself in Heaven.”⁶¹

His advent had already subverted the loyalty of some of Henry’s subjects, “in some upon discontent, in some upon ambition, in some upon levity and desire of change, and in some few upon conscience and belief, but in most upon simplicity, and in divers out of dependence upon some of the better sort, who did in secret favor and nourish these bruits. And it was not long ere these rumors of novelty had begotten others of scandal and murmur against the King and his government, taxing him for a great taxer of his people. Chiefly they fell upon the wrong that he did his Queen, and that he did not reign in her right, wherefore they said that God had now brought to light a masculine branch of the House of York that would not be at his courtesy, however he did depress his poor lady.”⁶²Unwittingly, Elizabeth had become a focus for discontent among her husband’s subjects, and the existence of the pretender only fueled the fire.

On June 8, 1492, Elizabeth Wydeville died at Bermondsey Abbey. She must have been unwell since at least April 10, when she had made her will. Elizabeth could not be with her at the end, for “at this same season,” in the ninth month of her pregnancy, she had already taken to her chamber at Sheen,⁶³ knowing that her mother was very ill; but her sisters and her half brother, the Marquess of Dorset, were present, with Grace, a bastard daughter of Edward IV. “The said Queen desired on her deathbed that, as soon as she should be deceased, she should in all goodly haste, without any worldly pomp, by water be conveyed to Windsor, and there to be buried in the same vault that her husband was buried in, according to the will of my said lord and mine.”⁶⁴

In her will, witnessed by Abbot John of Bermondsey, and Benedict Cun, “doctor of physic,” the Queen Dowager lamented: “Where I have no worldly goods to do the Queen’s Grace, my dearest daughter, a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children, according to my heart and mind, I beseech Almighty God to bless Her Grace, with all her noble issue, and with as good heart and mind as is to me possible, I give Her Grace my blessing, and all the aforesaid my children … And I beseech my said dearest daughter, the Queen’s Grace, and my son, Thomas, Marquess Dorset, to put their good wills and help for the performance of this my testament,” and to ensure that her last requests were carried out. They were few.

Elizabeth Wydeville’s wishes in regard to her interment were respected. Her body was “wrapped in [fifty yards of] wax canvas” and, on the evening of Whitsunday (June 10), conveyed by barge from London to Windsor, with only the executors—the late Queen’s chaplain, the prior of the Charterhouse at Sheen, a Mr. Haute, a clerk, Dr. Brent, and “Mistress Grace” in attendance. The coffin was borne “privily through the little park and conveyed into the castle without ringing of any bells or receiving of the dean and canons, but only by the prior of the Charterhouse of Sheen and her chaplain. And so, privily, about eleven of the clock in the night, she was buried” in Edward IV’s tomb in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, “without any solemn dirge or Mass done for her.”⁶⁵

On the Tuesday following, Elizabeth’s younger sisters, Anne, Katherine, and Bridget, arrived by barge at Windsor for the Requiem Mass, Bridget having come from Dartford Priory. With them were several relatives, including Lord Dorset and John, Viscount Welles, husband of Cecily of York, who was not present, possibly because she was ill or pregnant, so Anne was chief mourner, deputizing for Queen Elizabeth. They attended the ceremonies in St. George’s Chapel that evening and the next, and “the officers of arms, there being present, went before the Lady Anne, which offered the Mass penny instead of the Queen, wherefore she had the carpet and the cushion laid, as would have happened had Elizabeth been present.” There were murmurs that the obsequies were conducted cheaply and shabbily, because only the Poor Knights of St. George, garter officers, and other servants were present, but they had been performed as Elizabeth Wydeville had directed.⁶⁶

The death of her mother must have been a grievous blow to Elizabeth, coming as it did as she was about to give birth. An observer wrote that because the Queen was confined to her chamber, “I cannot tell what dolent [sad apparel] she goeth in, but I suppose she went in blue likewise as Queen Margaret, the wife of King Henry VI, went in when her mother the Queen of Sicily died.”⁶⁷ Henry VII’s ordinances followed earlier precedents in laying down the colors to be used for royal mourning; blue was still to be worn,⁶⁸although Elizabeth was also to don the traditional black after the death of one of her children.⁶⁹

On July 2 she bore a second daughter, who was baptized Elizabeth in honor of her late grandmother as well as her mother.⁷⁰ According to the epitaph on her tomb, this child was exceptionally beautiful. She was brought up in the nursery household at Eltham Palace with her brother Henry and sister Margaret, in the care of her nurse, Cecilia Burbage, who was paid a salary of 100s. [£2,500]. Her rockers each received 66s.8d. [£1,630]. That the royal siblings were brought up together is attested by warrants dated September 1493 for payment to servants attending upon “our right dearly well-beloved children, the Lord Henry and the Ladies Margaret and Elizabeth.”⁷¹ The Wardrobe Accounts of the Lord Treasurer for the period 1491–95 contain orders for robes for “Margaret and Elizabeth,” the King’s daughters.⁷²

Henry VII’s alliances with Ferdinand and Isabella and Maximilian had led to hostilities with Charles VIII. Early in October 1492 he departed for France, leaving Prince Arthur at Westminster to act as nominal regent in his absence. He arrived at Calais on October 6, then joined his allies in besieging Boulogne. Elizabeth, left behind at Eltham in charge of her younger children, felt her husband’s absence keenly, and wrote him many letters with “tender, frequent, and loving lines,” begging him so persuasively to return that they were among the “potent reasons” why he raised the siege, concluded a peace treaty with Charles VIII on November 3 at Étaples, and returned to England soon after November 17.⁷³ This reveals how close the royal couple had become in nearly seven years of marriage—so close that they hated being apart.

The peace treaty put an end to Charles VIII’s support of the pretender, but rather than surrender him to Henry VII, Charles merely banished him from France. Late that year the youth sought refuge at the court of Margaret of Burgundy. At first she showed herself dubious about his claims, but then said she had been persuaded, after questioning him, that he was indeed her nephew, “raised from the dead,” and publicly congratulated him on his preservation.⁷⁴ He was taken under the protection of the Archduke Philip, and was again treated like a king. Given a palatial house in Antwerp, he held court there seated under the royal arms of England, which enraged some English visitors. When he went abroad in the streets, he was escorted by a guard of thirty archers wearing his white rose badge. Philip’s father, Maximilian, received him in Vienna as the rightful King of England.

Naturally, everyone wanted to know how “York” had escaped from the Tower as a child. He told them he had narrowly avoided murder by a ruse, “for that those who were employed in that barbarous fact, having destroyed the elder brother, were stricken with remorse and compassion toward the younger.” He had been delivered to “a gentleman who had received orders to destroy him, but who, taking pity on his innocence, had preserved his life and made him swear on the sacraments not to disclose for a certain number of years his birth and lineage.”⁷⁵ It was an unlikely tale, since the assassins would surely have known that their remit was to do away with the Yorkist heirs who posed a threat to the King; it did not make sense—and indeed was perilous—for them to kill one and spare the other, however plaintively he pleaded for his life, for with his older brother dead, York would have been, in the eyes of many, the true King of England.

The pretender would never be drawn on the details of Edward V’s murder or his own supposed escape from the Tower, saying only “it is fit it should pass in silence, or at least in a more secret relation, for that it may concern some alive and the memory of some that are dead.”⁷⁶ That way he forestalled all discussion of the anomalies in his story. But the Duchess Margaret “took pleasure in hearing him repeat the tale,” and following her example, the Flemings “professed they believed the youth had escaped the hand of King Richard by divine intervention, and had been brought safely to his aunt.”⁷⁷

“The rumor of so miraculous an occurrence rapidly spread into England, where the story was not merely believed by the common people, but where there were many important men who considered the matter as genuine.”⁷⁸ By now, one imagines, Elizabeth must have been desperate to get a look at or at least obtain more knowledge of this youth who insisted he was her brother. Frustratingly, we don’t know what she made of the story of his escape.

Queens had little control over the lives of their eldest sons. Arthur was growing into a promising boy, “blessed with such great charm, grace, and goodness that he served as an example of unprecedented happiness to people oftimes,” as André glowingly recorded. But when Arthur was six, Elizabeth had to bid him farewell, for by February 1493 he had been sent to live at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh Marches so that he could learn how to govern his principality of Wales. It was to be a practical apprenticeship for kingship. The precedent had been established by Edward IV, who had sent the future Edward V to be educated at Ludlow. Following in his uncle’s footsteps, Arthur was nominally to preside over the Council of the Marches and Wales, which administered the principality. Thereafter Elizabeth would see him only intermittently.

His council was headed by his great-uncle, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, and included his uncle, Dorset, Sir William Stanley, Thomas FitzAlan, now Earl of Arundel, Gerald FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare, who had been forgiven for helping to crown Lambert Simnel, and John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester, who served as President of the Council of the Marches, as he had for the future Edward V; his appointment may have been made at the Queen’s behest.

Early in 1493, Sir Richard Pole was appointed chamberlain of the prince’s household.⁷⁹ The other members of the Council of the Marches included Anthony Willoughby; Robert Ratcliffe, later Earl of Sussex; Maurice St. John of Bletsoe, a favored nephew of Margaret Beaufort who had entered royal service as a member of Henry VII’s elite bodyguard; and Gruffydd ap Rhys, who was the son of an influential Welsh lord and became close friends with Arthur. An interesting appointment, probably also made by the Queen, was that of Dr. John Argentine, former physician to Edward V, who was now to serve as Prince Arthur’s doctor. Dr. Argentine had been one of the last people to see the Princes in the Tower alive.⁸⁰ After Richard III was crowned, he had fled abroad. Probably he had been able to tell Elizabeth much about her vanished brothers, and possibly this appointment and the many other benefices and marks of royal favor he received under Henry VII were rewards for his loyalty to and care for them both.

Arthur’s governor and comptroller was Sir Henry Vernon. In 1501 the prince stayed at Vernon’s house, Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, where a room adorned with his coat of arms was once called “the Prince’s Chamber.”

Arthur had commenced his formal education around 1490–91. His first tutor was his chaplain, John Rede, headmaster of Winchester College, who gave him a “deep acquaintance with knowledge, without great labor on either side.”⁸¹ When he was ten, Arthur twice stayed in the President’s Lodgings at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was served pike, tench, red wine, claret, and sack (sweet fortified wine), presented with gloves (as were all distinguished guests), and amused by a marmoset; he came across as “rather in the grave than in the gay aspect of youth.”⁸²

Henry VII was the first English king to encourage at his court the Renaissance culture of humanism, the study of ancient classical learning, and he was at the forefront of ideas in appointing humanist scholars to teach his sons. Around 1499, Rede was succeeded by the blind friar, Bernard André, who had been assisting Rede since 1496. Under André, Arthur studied classical and Renaissance literature, history, and philosophy, reading numerous works by authors such as Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, and Erasmus. By 1501, according to André, Arthur “had either committed to memory, or read with his own eyes and leafed with his own fingers” the best Latin and Greek authors. André was joined after 1499 by Dr. Thomas Linacre, another humanist scholar, who had been in Italy and was a pioneer of the New Learning of the Renaissance as well as the King’s physician. To him was entrusted “the task of making the mind and body of Prince Arthur grow in wholesome vigor,” and he dedicated his translation of a Greek text, The Sphere, to the prince. Arthur was also instructed in music, horsemanship, and the arts of warfare. Giles Dewes, who served Henry VII and Henry VIII as clerk of their libraries, was “schoolmaster for the French tongue to Prince Arthur.”⁸³ Dewes also specialized in grammar and alchemy and was an accomplished lute player.

Thanks to his careful education, Arthur turned out to be studious, reserved, and thoughtful, “learned beyond his years, and beyond the custom of princes.”⁸⁴ Of the royal children, only he, the heir to the throne, was brought up so far away from his family. The younger ones were reared in households nearer the court, and consequently enjoyed a closer relationship with their parents, especially their mother, who customarily spent more time with them. Elizabeth’s influence over her oldest son’s upbringing would be far less than she exerted over the lives of her other children.

By July 1493, Henry VII’s intelligence had informed him that the young man whom he called “the feigned lad” was Peter, commonly known as Perkin, Warbeck, the son of a boatman of Tournai, and not of royal blood at all,⁸⁵ whereupon he made a formal protest to Philip and Maximilian against harboring such a dangerous rebel. When this failed, relations between England and Flanders, usually harmonious, quickly deteriorated, resulting in a temporary trade embargo by England.

Did Henry really believe this intelligence, or did it surface all too conveniently? His later conduct, as will be seen, suggests there remained at least a grain of doubt. And if the King was uncertain, then Elizabeth must have been too. Maybe she and her sisters were entertaining a faint hope that their brother was indeed still alive.

But Warbeck’s story had already spread, which was bad news for Henry VII. “Conspiracies began to multiply. Desperadoes seeking refuge in sanctuaries broke forth to flock to Peter in Flanders. Many among the nobility turned to conspiracy. Some were actuated by mere foolhardiness; others, believing Peter to be Edward’s son Richard, supported the claim of the Yorkist party. Others were moved partly by resentment and greed.”⁸⁶ One Edwards, the Queen’s own yeoman, defected to the pretender. Elizabeth was unenviably in the middle. The very silence of the chroniclers on her role in all this strongly suggests that she did what was expected of her.

The Christmas season of 1493–94 saw lavish and unprecedented celebrations at Westminster. Henry and Elizabeth presided “with great solemnity,” and at 11:00 P.M. on Twelfth Night, after divine service and accompanied by the Queen’s ladies and the Spanish ambassadors, they went in procession “through both the halls” to Westminster Hall, which had been hung with tapestries for the occasion. Here they and their guests, including the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, were entertained by an interlude (a short play) performed by the King’s players; “but ere they had finished came in riding one of the King’s Chapel,” the court composer and dramatist William Cornish, “appareled after the figure of St. George; and after followed a fair virgin attired like unto a king’s daughter and leading by a silken lace a terrible and huge red dragon, the which, in sundry places of the hall as he passed, spit fire at his mouth. And when Cornish was come before the King, he uttered a certain speech made in ballade royal,⁸⁷ after finishing thereof he began this anthem of St. George, ‘O Georgi deo Care’ [‘O George, beloved of God’], whereunto the King’s Chapel, which stood fast by, answered ‘salvatorem deprecare, ut gubernet Angliam’ [‘Intercede with the Savior, that He may govern England’], and so sang out the whole anthem with lusty courage. In pastime whereof the said Cornish avoided with the dragon, and the virgin was led unto the Queen’s standing,” to be taken under Elizabeth’s protection.

Then there appeared “twelve gentlemen leading by kerchiefs of pleasance twelve ladies, all goodly disguised, having before them a small tabret [tabor] and a subtle fiddle, the which gentlemen leaped and danced all the length of the hall as they came, and the ladies slid after them,” looking as if “they stood upon a frame running.” When they came before the King, they danced for an hour, and “it was wonderful to behold the exceeding leaps.”

The King and Queen then entertained their guests at a private banquet, seating themselves at the King’s direction at “a table of stone garnished with napery, lights, and other necessaries.” Then the disguised gentlemen came in “bearing every each of them a dish, and after them as many knights and esquires as made the full number of sixty, the which sixty dishes were all served to the King’s mess, and as many served unto the Queen.” All the dishes were “confections of sundry fruits and conserves, and so soon as the King and the Queen and the other estates were served, then was brought unto the mayor’s stage twenty-four dishes of the same manner service, with sundry wines and ale in most plenteous wise. And finally, as all worldly pleasure hath an end, the board was reverently withdrawn, and the King and Queen with the other estates, with a great sort of lights [were] conveyed into the palace.” The Lord Mayor and aldermen of London did not get home until daybreak.⁸⁸

In April 1492, Henry VII had appointed ten-month-old Prince Henry Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, not only to honor him, but also to provide an income for his maintenance. The following year, to boost that income, Henry had been made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Warden of the Scottish Marches. Now, in October 1494, in order to discountenance the pretender and proclaim him a fraud, the King created his three-year-old son Duke of York. Edward IV had given his second son that title; and henceforth, until the eighteenth century (and again today), the second sons of monarchs would customarily bear it. It is tempting to imagine that Henry created this precedent at Elizabeth’s request, in memory of her father’s house and perhaps of her brother Richard, Duke of York, but it is more likely that he did so to demonstrate that young Duke Richard was dead and the title was now firmly vested in the Tudor dynasty.

On October 27, the eve of the feast day of Saints Simon and Jude, “the King, the Queen, and my lady the King’s mother came from Sheen to Westminster to dinner.” That same day, “about three in the afternoon, Lord Henry came through the City. He sat on a courser and rode to Westminster to the King with a goodly company,”⁸⁹ escorted by the Lord Mayor, the aldermen, “and all the crafts in their liveries.”⁹⁰ The King welcomed his son and “kissed him, and from thence went into the Queen’s closet.” There is a sketch of the child Henry at the age of two or three in the Bibliothèque de Méjanes, which shows him as a solid, placid infant with chubby cheeks and alert eyes.⁹¹

Three days later the little prince waited upon his father with a towel while the King dined, then, having been signed with a cross by Henry and given Elizabeth’s blessing, he and twenty-two other candidates received the customary ceremonial bath before keeping vigil in St. Stephen’s Chapel throughout the night—a long ordeal for so young a child. The next day he was dubbed a Knight of the Bath. The ceremony of ennoblement took place the following day, when he was formally created Duke of York in the presence of the whole court, both houses of Parliament, and the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London. “My lord Shrewsbury bare my Lord Harry, Duke of York, in his arms, and ten bishops with miters on their heads going before the King that day about Westminster Hall, with many others of great estate.” In the prince’s honor, the King created new Knights of the Bath. Elizabeth was not present at the ennobling, but afterward she and Henry, crowned and robed in ermine, went with their son, who was wearing a miniature suit of armor, in procession to Westminster Abbey to attend a Mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury.⁹² The following day was All Souls’ Day, when, by tradition, the King kept a “day of estate” at court and he and Elizabeth again wore their royal robes and crowns.

The celebrations in honor of the young duke went on for at least two weeks. There were three days of “jousts royal in the King’s Palace of Westminster,” where a special stand had been built for the royal party; “it was the most triumphant place that ever I saw,” wrote an observer. The people had flocked “to see the King’s Grace and the Queen so richly appareled, his house and stage covered with cloth of Arras blue, enramplished with fleurs-de-lis of gold, and within hanged with rich cloth of Arras and two cloths of estate, one for the King, another for the Queen, and rich cushions of cloth of gold, accompanied with the great estates of this realm, as the Duke of York, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Buckingham, and many other,” and with them “the fairest young princess,” “the Lady Margaret, the King’s oldest daughter.” On the first day the challengers wore the King’s livery of green and white, the Tudor colors, but all sported a badge with the Queen’s livery of blue and mulberry on their helmets. Other jousts were fought by lesser combatants, but were “honorable and comfortable to the King and Queen and many other great people there to watch, and a great pleasure to the common people.” On the second day the contestants wore Margaret Beaufort’s blue-and-white livery, and “by the advice of the King [and] the Queen, my lady the King’s mother gave the prize.”⁹³

On November 11, Henry and Elizabeth, sitting under their canopies of estate, presided over another tournament, which was followed by a comic display between mock knights. Two days later there were more jousts before “the King’s Highness, for whose pleasure, the Queen’s, and all the ladies,” the contestants took part, “especially for the pleasure of their redoubted lady and fairest young princess,” five-year-old Princess Margaret, who, prompted by her parents, presented the prizes. These were handed to her by three of her mother’s ladies: Elizabeth Stafford, Anne Percy, and Anne Neville, who, clad in white damask gowns with crimson velvet sleeves and gold circlets on their heads, had led three knights into the ring. By popular demand, more jousts were held on November 12, and on the following day “the King [and] the Queen entered the field to their house.”⁹⁴

In 1619, Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian scholar and church reformer, stated that Prince Henry, “not being born the King’s eldest son, had been destined by his father to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and therefore in his youth was made to study”; this assertion was repeated by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Henry VIII’s seventeenth-century biographer, who opined that a career in the Church was a “cheap and glorious way” of advancing a younger son, and that the information came from a “credible author”; yet there is no contemporary evidence to support it, and the fact that Henry was given a secular dukedom contradicts it.

That year the King held “his royal feast of Christmas” at Greenwich, where he entertained the Lord Mayor of London; “which disports being ended in the morning, the King, the Queen, the ambassadors … being sat at a table of stone, sixty knights and esquires served sixty dishes to the King’s mess, and as many to the Queen’s … And finally, the King and Queen were conveyed with great lights into the palace.”⁹⁵

On January 7, 1495, the court moved to the Tower, where Elizabeth was a silent witness to the grim events that followed. Two years earlier a knight, Robert Clifford, had been secretly communicating with Sir William Stanley; then Clifford had gone to the court of Burgundy and espoused the cause of Perkin Warbeck. Mysteriously, in December 1494, he was granted a free pardon, upon which he returned to England. On January 6, “forewarned of his coming,” the King went ahead to the Tower and had Clifford brought there so he could question him himself. During that interview Clifford—who was probably a royal spy or a double agent—incriminated Sir William Stanley and others who enjoyed his confidence, apparently asserting that Stanley had said he would not fight against Warbeck if he was the true son of Edward IV.⁹⁶ Bacon asserts that resentment of Henry’s rule, his taxes, and his treatment of Elizabeth were at the root of Stanley’s disaffection.

At first, according to Vergil, the King could not be persuaded to believe Clifford; he owed his crown to Stanley’s intervention at Bosworth, and since then Stanley had held a position of great trust as chamberlain of the royal household, an office that brought him in daily contact with the King; and he had grown very rich in Henry’s service. Elizabeth knew him well. He was also Margaret Beaufort’s brother-in-law, so these allegations came close to home. In the end Clifford convinced Henry that Stanley was plotting treason, and left the Tower with a gift of £500 [£243,000].

Henry did not wish to alienate Thomas Stanley, but “in the end severity won and mercy was put behind.”⁹⁷ Sir William and his contacts were arrested, arraigned and condemned for aiding the cause of the pretender Warbeck and plotting the death and destruction of the King and the overthrow of his kingdom. Stanley was accused of passing on privileged information to the pretender, thus abusing the trust placed in him by the King. The allegiance he owed Henry VII may have been compromised by his resentment at not being awarded a peerage, and by Henry’s curbs on the power of the nobility, but he must have known that he stood to lose more than most if Henry were overthrown; possibly he hoped for more from Warbeck. The twelve days of executions that followed, culminating with Stanley’s beheading before dawn on February 16 on Tower Hill, caused a sensation.

Warbeck’s cause was now “as stone without lime” in England, and he knew it. In return for continuing financial support from Maximilian and Philip, he resorted to pledging them part of his kingdom if he died childless—and, of course, was in possession of it; and he promised to give away all Henry VII’s personal effects, even down to the toys of his children. Then he set about raising mercenaries to “try his adventures in some exploit upon England, hoping still upon the affections of the common people toward the House of York.”⁹⁸

With Warbeck at large on the Continent and Sir William Stanley proved guilty of treason, Henry VII was aware that his enemies might scheme to use Elizabeth’s unmarried sisters against him. Wishing to avert that threat, he arranged marriages advantageous to himself for Anne and Katherine. On February 4, 1495, at Greenwich, Anne was married to Lord Thomas Howard, son of the Earl of Surrey, who had affirmed to the King that they had been betrothed since 1484.⁹⁹ The royal family attended the wedding and Henry VII gave the bride away, himself presenting the offering at the nuptial Mass.¹⁰⁰ The marriage marked the return to favor of the Howards: Thomas’s father, the Earl of Surrey, had fought for Richard III at Bosworth and spent three years in prison in the Tower for it, but his refusal to seize an opportunity of escaping had marked him to Henry VII as an honorable, upright man, and secured his pardon and release, and the restoration of his estates and the earldom of Surrey. Since then Howard had proved his loyalty and worth to the new dynasty, paving the way for the marriage of his son to the Queen’s sister, which would bind the Howards to the royal house by kinship as well as loyalty.

On February 12, Elizabeth met with Surrey to finalize Anne’s marriage settlement—which shows that she had been involved in arranging the match. The King had not advanced the marriage portion of 10,000 marks [£1.5 million] willed to Anne by Edward IV, so Elizabeth undertook in this indenture to provide the couple with an annuity of £120 [£58,300], to which the King had agreed to contribute £26 [£12,600, considerably less than Anne’s father had willed] annually from the crown lands; in addition, Elizabeth promised to pay allowances of 20s. [£500] a week for the upkeep of the couple’s estate, food, and drink; £51.11s.8d. [£25,000] for the wages of two female attendants, a maid, a gentleman, a yeoman, and three grooms; and £15.11s.8d. [£7,600] a year to maintain seven horses. In addition, “the said Queen’s Grace, at her costs and charges, shall find unto the Lady Anne all her sufficient and convenient apparel for her body, at all times” until the couple came into their inheritance on Surrey’s death.

In return, the cash-strapped Surrey settled on the couple, as jointure, four manors that would revert on Thomas Howard’s death to Anne’s half brother, Dorset, her royal nephew, Henry, Duke of York, and others of the Queen’s choosing. The indenture was signed in Elizabeth’s own hand.¹⁰¹ At her request and Surrey’s, the settlement was approved by the King in Parliament in 1496, the act being passed “at the special desire” of the Queen, since it was “her very will and mind” that the settlement be paid in full.¹⁰² This is another instance of Elizabeth exercising her authority within the conventional bounds permitted to queens.

After her marriage, Anne did not frequent the court: her name is not recorded there again. Tragically, her four children—Muriel, Katherine, Henry, and Thomas—were all to die in infancy. They were buried in the Howard aisle in St. Mary’s Church at Lambeth.¹⁰³

Later in 1495 (certainly by October), Elizabeth’s other unwed sister, sixteen-year-old Katherine, was married to Lord William Courtenay. The Courtenays, who were descended from Edward I, had long supported the House of Lancaster. William’s father, Edward Courtenay, had been one of Henry Tudor’s adherents during Buckingham’s rebellion; after being attainted he had defected to him in Brittany and fought for him at Bosworth, for which he had been rewarded with the earldom of Devon. His son William made a worthy and honorable match for a princess: Vergil praised his courage and his manly bearing, and Hall called him “a man of great nobility, estimation, and virtue.”¹⁰⁴

Elizabeth almost certainly helped to arrange this marriage too, negotiating with the Earl of Devon a similar settlement to what she had negotiated for her sister Anne and Thomas Howard; no indenture survives, but the Queen appointed the same men to hold the lands in question.¹⁰⁵ After the wedding, Katherine resided mainly at the castles of Tiverton, Colcombe, and Powderham in Devon, or at her husband’s London residence in Warwick Lane, Newgate. She bore Courtenay two sons and a daughter.

On March 27, 1495, to supplement her dower, Henry gave Elizabeth the castle, manor, lordship, and town of Fotheringhay,¹⁰⁶ the chief seat of her Yorkist forebears, a gift that must have been very welcome to her. Strangely, given that so many members of her family were represented, her arms were missing from the lost heraldic glass in Fotheringhay Church and College, as described by William Dugdale in the seventeenth century.¹⁰⁷

In April the King named Elizabeth Chief Lady of the Order of the Garter. Prince Henry, not quite four, was made a Knight of the Garter on May 17, wearing a crimson velvet gown and cap for his investiture.¹⁰⁸

Death carried off Elizabeth’s grandmother, the eighty-year-old Cecily, Duchess of York, on May 31, 1495, at Berkhamsted Castle. Cecily, clothed in the black Benedictine habit she had worn for many years now, was buried with her husband, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, in the collegiate church at Fotheringhay, the ancestral mausoleum of the House of York. In her will, she bequeathed to Elizabeth a psalter with a relic of St. Christopher;¹⁰⁹ Margaret Beaufort was left an exquisite breviary, which suggests that the two matriarchs had got on well.

On Cecily’s death, her revenues reverted by inheritance to her granddaughter the Queen, bringing Elizabeth a further £1,399.6s.8d. [£680,200] a year, which considerably boosted her income and helped to clear the debts she had amassed. She also inherited Baynard’s Castle, which fittingly made her the owner of the two great seats of the House of York. Baynard’s Castle was a place she had known well from childhood, for it had been the London residence of Cecily Neville from 1461, and in 1461 and 1483, respectively, Edward IV and Richard III were offered the crown of England in its great hall. A castle had stood on the site since Norman times, when, along with the Tower of London and Mountfichet’s Tower, Baynard’s Castle had been one of three fortresses guarding the City.

The house Elizabeth inherited was the third to be built on or near the site. It was “situated right pleasantly on Thames side, and full well garnished and arranged, and encompassed outside strongly with water,”¹¹⁰ its wall rising sheer from the river. It consisted of four wings built in a trapezoid shape around a double courtyard with lovely gardens, from which rose a hexagonal tower. It became Elizabeth’s favorite London residence and she spent liberally on its gardens. In 1500–01, Henry VII “repaired or rather new builded this house, not embattled, or so strongly fortified castlelike, but far more beautiful and commodious for the entertainment of any prince or great estate.”¹¹¹ His additions included five projecting towers between the two existing great octagonal corner towers on the riverfront. The principal chambers, which may have been located in these towers, were freshly decorated, with new glass in the windows, expensive ironwork, and tapestries.¹¹²

On July 1, 1495, Henry and Elizabeth departed on a progress northward, visiting Chipping Norton, Evesham, Tewkesbury, and Worcester before arriving at Bewdley, the residence of Prince Arthur, on July 10. They were with their son at Ludlow two days later;¹¹³he had traveled ahead to receive them. Entertainments had been laid on, and the prince watched a play in the “dry quarry,” an amphitheatre on the site of the modern swimming pool. Henry and Elizabeth then left for Shrewsbury.

This progress came at a fraught time, as an invasion by Perkin Warbeck was expected daily. Sir William Stanley’s execution had cost Henry much popularity in the northwest, where the Stanleys had a great affinity. In Lancashire they were important landowners and commanded more respect than the monarch, and in this period they were steadily increasing their extensive land holdings in the county. It was not the most convenient time to be away, but the King felt it necessary that he should be seen in those parts with his popular Queen in order to regain the love of his subjects.

The royal couple rode northward to Combermere Abbey, Shropshire, where they stayed in the lavish Abbot’s Lodgings. From there they traveled via Holt to Chester, and thence to Hawarden in Wales, where Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, awaited them. On July 27 he accompanied the King and Queen to Vale Royal Abbey, then escorted them north to Lathom House,¹¹⁴ his palatial mansion at Ormskirk, Lancashire. To ease the royal journey, Derby had a fine stone bridge built at Warrington, which lasted until the nineteenth century.

Lathom had been in the possession of the Stanleys since 1390. It was set in a deer park bounded by the River Tawd, Eller Brook, and Douglas Brook, and overlooked the town of Burscough and the marshlands of Martin Mere and Hoscar Mossit. The estate, part of the parish of Ormskirk, was mentioned in the Domesday Book. Lathom House, begun by Derby in 1485, was a palatial mansion boasting eighteen towers and a moat eight yards wide; it is said that this splendid house, which was unique in the northwest, was Henry VII’s inspiration for Richmond Palace. Derby was now busily converting Lathom into the chief administrative center of the region, but it was still a peaceful retreat, far from the turmoil of the court.

In the early seventeenth century Samuel Rutter, Bishop of Sodor and Man, described Lathom before its destruction: “Lathom House was encompassed with a strong wall of two yards thick; upon the walls were nine towers, flanking each other. Without the wall was a moat eight yards wide; upon the back of the moat was a strong row of palisades; beside these there was a high strong tower, called the Eagle Tower, in the midst of the house surrounding all the rest; and the gateway was also two high and strong buildings, with a strong tower on each side of it. There is something so particular and romantic in the general situation of this house, as if Nature herself had formed it for a stronghold or place of security.”¹¹⁵ The names of seven of the towers were the Eagle Tower, the Tower of Madness, the Tower at the Kitchen Bridge, the little tower next it, the next tower to that in the corner, the Chapel Tower, and the Private Tower.¹¹⁶

Henry and Elizabeth stayed at Lathom for four days as guests of Derby and Margaret Beaufort. During their visit Henry rewarded “the women that sang before the King and Queen.”¹¹⁷ A tale persisted in the Stanley family that the King, after being shown over the house, was taken up to the leads by Derby to see the fine view of the countryside roundabout. The earl’s fool accompanied them, and seeing the King standing near the unguarded edge of the leads, he muttered to Derby, “Tom, remember Will.” He was referring, of course, to Sir William Stanley. Henry heard his words and, perceiving what was meant, hastened back downstairs to Elizabeth and terminated his visit immediately, leaving the fool wishing that his master had had the courage to avenge the death of his brother.¹¹⁸But there is no historical evidence to back up the story.

Late in July, while Henry and Elizabeth were at Lathom, Warbeck and fourteen ships carrying his mercenary force of what Vergil called “human dregs” finally anchored off Deal. The pretender sent his soldiers ashore to reconnoiter prior to invading, but the men of Kent were already on the alert and summoned the King’s forces, who cut them to pieces,¹¹⁹ prompting Warbeck’s fleet to scurry away to the west. By the end of July, Warbeck was in Ireland. His attempt to attack Waterford was fiercely repelled by the able Sir Edward Poynings, the King’s Deputy. Driven off, Warbeck sailed toward Cork, disappeared for a time, then made his way north to Scotland.

On August 3, Henry and Elizabeth moved south to Derby’s hunting lodge at Knowsley, east of Liverpool, where Derby had built for them a set of detached royal lodgings. He had perhaps also commissioned a new four-poster bed—the “Paradise Bed”—which was very similar in size, design, and ornamentation to another bed that he had had made for himself, either for Lathom or Knowsley. Both were probably built by the same craftsmen; the standard of carving is exceptionally high and reveals Burgundian influence. It is not known whether the Paradise Bed was installed at Lathom or Knowsley, or whether it was built some years before this visit, but it may have been specially made for the new royal apartments at Knowsley.

The royal bed has a triptych of panels set into the headboard; the central panel portrays the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the side panels display the royal arms of France and England respectively, which are repeated on the footboard. The lion and the dragon, supporters of the Tudor arms, appear in the central panel. Tudor roses appear on the head posts and on shields supported by the heraldic lions surmounting the posts. The center crest bears the royal arms of England and France quartered. The cross of St. George—a saint much invoked by Henry VII—dominates the side crest of the bed, which is formed by a carved knotted cord that may symbolize the King’s devotion to the Observant Friars. These symbols are all to be seen in the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. The faces of Adam and Eve bear some resemblance to those of Henry and Elizabeth—especially as carved in the Sudbury Hutch (see Appendix I)—and maybe Derby wanted a parallel drawn between the progenitors of humanity and the founders of the Tudor dynasty.¹²⁰

If the Paradise Bed was at Knowsley, then Henry and Elizabeth slept in it for just one night. The next day they were in Manchester, then a market town, and on September 6 proceeded southward, lodging at Macclesfield, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Stafford, and Lichfield, before diverting northeast to Burton-on-Trent and Derby, then south via Loughborough to Collyweston, Margaret Beaufort’s house. They continued south to Rockingham, and then to Northampton, Banbury, and Woodstock, where they stayed for ten days. By now Elizabeth knew she was to have another child, so possibly she needed to rest. On October 20 she and Henry were at Ewelme, the Oxfordshire seat of her cousin, Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, then they moved on to Bisham Priory, Berkshire, the burial place of many of her Neville ancestors. From there they went to Windsor Castle, and then to Sheen, arriving on October 31.¹²¹ They were to have four days in which to relax after their travels before calamity struck.