18
The Queen was widely mourned. She had been “one of the most gracious and best-loved princesses in the world.” Ferdinand and Isabella wrote: “The tidings have, of a truth, caused us much grief.”1 In Scotland, out of respect for his mother-in-law, James IV ordered dirges to be performed at the abbeys of Newbottle, Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh, Kelso, and many other places.2 When Margaret Tudor arrived in Scotland later that year, James expressed his sympathy for the loss of her mother and brother, adding that he too had lost his own mother when he was young.3 In Ireland, the Annals of Ulster, in which English affairs rarely featured, recorded: “The wife of the King of the Saxons died, to wit, the daughter of King Edward, and Isabel [sic]4 was her name: a woman that was of the greatest charity and humanity from Italy to Ireland.” William Parron, who had predicted that Elizabeth would live to see eighty, fled the realm.
Thomas More, then a young London lawyer, was moved to write an elegy, “A Rueful Lamentation on the Death of Queen Elizabeth”:
Oh ye that put your trust and confidence
In worldly joy and frail prosperity,
That so live here as ye should never hence,
Remember death and look here on me.
Example I think there may no better be.
Yourself wot well that in this realm was I,
Your Queen but late, and lo, now here I lie.
Was I not born of old worthy lineage?
Was not my mother Queen, my father King?
Was I not a king’s fere [companion] in marriage?
Had I not plenty of every pleasant thing?
Merciful God, this is a strange reckoning:
Riches, honour, wealth, and ancestry
Hath me forsaken, and lo, now here I lie.
If worship [worth, honour, renown] might have kept me, I had not gone;
If wit [intelligence] might have me saved, I needed not fear;
If money might have holp, I lacked none;
But oh, good God, what vaileth all this gear?
When Death is come, Thy mighty messenger,
Obey we must; there is no remedy;
Me hath he summoned, and lo, now here I lie.
Yet was I late promised otherwise,
This year to life in wealth and delice.
Lo! Whereto cometh thy blandishing promise
Of false astrology and divinatrice,
Of God’s secrets, making thyself so wise?
How true is for this year thy prophecy?
The year yet lasteth, and lo, now here I lie.
O, brittle wealth, aye full of bitterness,
Thy single pleasure doubled is with pain.
Account my sorrow first, and my distress
In sundry wise, and reckon there again
The joy that I have had, and I dare sayn,
For all my honour, endured there have I
More woe than wealth, and lo, now here I lie.
Where are our castles now, where are our towers?
Goodly Richmond, soon art thou gone from me;
At Westminster, that costly work of yours,
Mine own dear lord, now shall I never see.
Almighty God vouchsafe to grant that these
For you and your children may well edify.
My palace builded is, and lo now here I lie.
Adieu, mine own spouse, my worthy lord!
The faithful love, that did us both combine
In marriage a peaceable concord,
Into your hands here I do clear resign,
To be bestowed on your children and mine;
Erst were ye father, now must ye supply
The mother’s part also, for here I lie.
Farewell my daughter, Lady Margaret,
God wot full oft it grieved hath my mind
That ye should go where we might seldom meet;
Now I am gone, and have left you behind.
O mortal folk, but we be very blind:
What we least fear full oft it is most nigh—
From you depart I first, for lo, now here I lie.
Farewell, Madam, my lord’s worthy mother;
Comfort your son, and be of good cheer,
Take all at worth, for it will be no other.
Farewell, my daughter Katherine, late the fere [companion]
Unto Prince Arthur, late my child so dear.
It booteth not for me to wail and cry;
Pray for my soul, for lo, now here I lie.
Adieu, Lord Henry, loving son, adieu!
Our Lord increase your honour and estate.
Adieu, my daughter Mary, bright of hue,
God make you virtuous, wise, and fortunate.
Adieu, sweetheart, my little daughter Kate!
Thou shalt, sweet babe, such is thy destiny,
Thy mother never know, for lo, now here I lie.
Lady Cecily, Lady Anne, and Lady Katherine,
Farewell, my well-beloved sisters three.
O Lady Bridget, other sister mine,
Lo, here the end of worldly vanity!
Now are you well who earthly folly flee
And heavenly things do praise and magnify.
Farewell, and pray for me, for lo, now here I lie.
Adieu my lords, adieu my ladies all,
Adieu my faithful servants every one,
Adieu my commons, whom I never shall
See in this world: wherefore to Thee alone,
Immortal God, verily Three in One,
I me commend; Thy infinity mercy
Show to Thy servant, for lo, now here I lie.5
More’s poem, which was to be one of several epitaphs hung up on wooden boards near the Queen’s burial place, reflects two popular contemporary themes: the fall of princes, and warnings from beyond the grave of mortality and the transience of life. Yet More’s differs from late medieval elegies, in that he shows Elizabeth not just as a sinner but as a Renaissance pattern of virtue.6
The elegy must have been written in the week after the Queen’s death, for More speaks of the infant Princess Katherine as if she was still living. Tragically, she “lived not long after”7 and “tarried but a small season after her mother” before being “called unto a far better kingdom.” She died in the Tower on February 18, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The site of her grave is unknown; probably, like her brother Edmund, she was interred in the Confessor’s Chapel in an unmarked grave.8
Another epitaph, which may have been hung near Elizabeth’s tomb, was also in verse form:
Here lieth the fresh flower of Plantagenet,
Here lieth the white rose in the red set …
God grant her now Heaven to increase
And our own King Harry long life and peace.9
Elizabeth was given a lavish funeral costing £2,832.7s.3d. [£1,381,000],10 far in excess of the £600 spent on Prince Arthur’s funeral, or on that of Edward IV even.11 Her grieving widower spared no expense. Such open-handedness on the part of a miserly king might well have reflected Henry’s feelings for his dead wife, but it was also a very public statement of her prime dynastic importance in the annals of English royalty.
On February 22, Mass was said early in the morning in St. Peter ad Vincula. At noon “the coffin was put in a carriage covered with black velvet, with a cross of white cloth of gold, very well fringed.” Then, with the two hundred poor men going before, followed by royal officers and clergy, it was borne in procession through London on a chariot “drawn with six horses trapped with black velvet.” All the City churches were shrouded in black for the occasion.12
On the coffin lay “an image or personage like a queen, clothed in the very robes of estate of the Queen, having her very rich crown on her head, her hair about her shoulders, her scepter in her right hand, and her fingers well garnished with gold rings and precious stones.”13 As at Elizabeth’s coronation, the virginal loose hair proclaimed her chastity. The effigy cost £2 [£970], and its clothing £5.2s.6d. [£2,500].14
From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century it was customary for funeral effigies of royal persons to be displayed at state funerals. Westminster Abbey possesses several such effigies, besides what is left of Elizabeth of York’s; the earliest recorded, which does not survive, was that of Edward I; Henry V’s effigy is also lost, as possibly are others. The oldest extant is that of Edward III (1377), and there are two others that predate Elizabeth’s: those of Anne of Bohemia, queen of Richard II (1394), and Katherine of Valois, queen of Henry V (1437); and of course there are several later examples.
In the seventeenth century the poet John Dryden recorded that these effigies lay in open presses, where “you may see them all a-row.” In the eighteenth century, around the time that the practice of making funeral effigies died out, John Dart recorded that they were “sadly mangled, some with their faces broke, others broken in sunder, and most of them stripped of their robes”—by Oliver Cromwell’s men, he supposed. They were a sorry sight—a “ragged regiment.” But the face of Elizabeth of York, he noted, was still perfect. Later still, it was described as having “a pleasant and slightly roguish, or boylike, air.”15
The upper part of her painted effigy of soft Baltic wood, with a jointed left arm (the right is missing) beautifully carved from pear wood, and some beautiful gold satin from the original bodice, survives today in the Norman Undercroft Museum in Westminster Abbey. The rest of the effigy is either lost or in too poor a condition to display, much of the body having disintegrated after being saturated with water when Westminster Abbey was bombed in the Second World War. That also left the head and bust blackened and damaged, the wood split, the nose missing and the remains of the bodice stiff with filth—it was described, prior to cleaning in 1961, as an “unpleasant-looking fabric of dirty gray with a shimmer of yellow.”16
The effigy was made by two Dutchmen, Laurence Wechon, “the carver,” and Hans van Hoof, and was five feet eleven inches tall, with a wooden head and bust, jointed wooden arms, and fir poles for legs. The body—from the bust to the feet—was formed of hoops, stuffed with hay, and covered in leather, which was secured with nails. Beneath the Queen’s own robes of estate, it was clad in clothes specially made for it: a crimson satin square-necked “garment” seamed and bordered with blue and black velvet, having a wider neckline than on bodices in the Queen’s portraits (as appears from the outline on the wooden bust), and dark cloth stockings to the knees; the latter were still in place in 1890, but have since disappeared. The wig was hired and does not survive. The ears have holes, thought to have been for earrings,17 but earrings were not commonly worn at this period, so perhaps they were for attaching the wig.
Almost certainly, the face, which so closely resembles Elizabeth’s portraits, is a death mask, like the head of Henry VII’s funeral effigy, which survives with it. Signs of the stroke that killed Edward III are evident in the face of his funeral effigy, so it is likely that the tradition of using death masks for such effigies dated from 1377 at the latest. The sunken aspect of the features of the effigy reflect the Queen as she looked in death. The accounts for Elizabeth’s effigy record payments to “two porters, for fetching of the coffin from the Princes’ Wardrobe,” to one John Scot “for watching in the Tower a night,” and to two more porters for bringing the effigy to the Tower, presumably so the face could be modeled from Elizabeth’s dead features.
At each corner of the funeral chariot “sat a gentlewoman usher kneeling on [beside] the coffin, which was in this manner conveyed from the Tower to Westminster. On the forehorses rode two chariot men; and on the four others, four henchmen in black gowns. On the horses were lozenges with the Queen’s escutcheon; by every horse walked a person in a mourning hood. At each corner of the chariot was a banner of Our Lady of the Assumption, of the Salutation, and of the Nativity,” and these banners “were all white in token that she died in childbed.” An early sixteenth-century drawing of the funeral procession made for Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms,18 shows the wheeled chariot bearing a large coffin with hooded mourners at each corner carrying their banners. On the hearse lies the effigy with loose hair and a crown and scepter.
The funeral route from the Tower to Westminster was the same as that followed at Elizabeth’s coronation fifteen years earlier; now, as then, nobles, royal officers, citizens, and clergy united together to pay their respects, and hundreds of painted escutcheons bearing the arms of the King and Queen were made, to be carried or displayed in the funeral procession. Following the chariot were “eight palfreys saddled with black velvet, bearing eight ladies of honor, who rode singly after the corpse in their slops and mantles, every horse led by a man afoot without a hood but in a demiblack gown, followed by many lords. The Lord Mayor and citizens, all in mourning, brought up the rear, and at every door in the City a person stood bearing a torch.” Among the ladies were the Queen’s four sisters, all wearing mourning attire with sweeping trains, even the nun Bridget. The principal mourner was Katherine, Countess of Devon, supported by Mary Say, Countess of Essex, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, and Elizabeth, Lady Herbert.
As the cortege passed each church along the route, “a solemn peal with all the bells was rung,” and each curate came forward to cense the corpse, “and thus was this gracious princess with the King’s Chapel and others singing all the way before her conveyed unto Charing Cross.” “At Fenchurch and Cheapside were set thirty-seven virgins all in white linen, having chaplets of white and green on their heads, and bearing lighted tapers”—each girl representing one year of the Queen’s life, with their chaplets the colors of the Tudor royal livery. They were dressed as virgins because a woman who had died in childbed was honored as a virgin. “In Chepe the Lady Mayoress ordained also thirty-seven other virgins, in their hairs [i.e., with their hair loose], holding likewise pretty tapers, in the honor of Our Lady, and that the good Queen was in her thirty-seventh year [sic].”
The somber pomp of the occasion impressed onlookers. “From Mark Lane to Temple Bar alone were five thousand torches” carried by bearers wearing white woolen gowns and hoods, “besides lights burning before all the parish churches, while processions of religious persons singing anthems and bearing crosses met the royal corpse from every fraternity [guild] in the City. And as for surplus of strangers, who had no torches, as Easterlings [Baltic traders], Frenchmen, Portugals, Venetians, Genoese, and Lukeners [natives of Lucca], even they rode in black. All the surplus of citizens of London that rode out in black stood along Fenchurch to the end of Cheap[side].” The London craft guilds had paid for the black mourning clothes worn by their members, and also for white robes worn by those who stood with lighted torches beneath the Eleanor Cross at Charing as the coffin passed.
At Temple Bar the cortege was met by a procession of noblemen headed by Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, who had played such an important role in Elizabeth’s life and was himself to die the following year. At Charing Cross the abbots of Westminster and Bermondsey, wearing black copes, met and censed the corpse, then preceded it to St. Margaret’s churchyard at Westminster, where it was received by eight bishops,19 the abbots of Reading, St. Albans, Winchcombe, and Stratford, and the priors of All Hallows Barking by the Tower and Christ Church, Canterbury. Here the peers “took their mantles” in readiness for the obsequies in the abbey.
The body was “censed and taken out of the chair,” along with the effigy and banners. With Derby leading the procession, it was carried under a canopy “with all due solemnity” on the shoulders of “certain lords” to the door of Westminster Abbey. Inside the church it was laid on a grand catafalque hung with banners and covered in “cloth of majesty” of black cloth of gold with a valance embroidered with the Queen’s motto, “Humble and reverent,” and garnished with her coat of arms, gold roses, portcullises, and fleurs-de-lis.20 The wooden effigy of Elizabeth was laid on top. “Then began the dirge.”
After the service, Dorset and Derby escorted Katherine Courtenay and all the lords and ladies across to the Queen’s great chamber in the Palace of Westminster, where Katherine presided over a supper at which fish was served. Meanwhile, in the abbey, knights, ladies, squires, and heralds kept watch over the body all night, their vigil illuminated by over 1,100 hearse candles, which were kept burning throughout the rest of the ceremonies.
Royal funerals at that period normally took place over two days, with the state obsequies on the first day and the interment on the second. At six o’clock the next morning, February 23, the Dean of Westminster went to summon the female mourners to Our Lady’s Mass at seven o’clock, and an hour later Katherine Courtenay and the Queen’s other sisters assembled in the “cathedral [sic] vast and dim.” The abbey had been hung with black cloth, and was lit by the candles around the hearse and 273 tapers bearing escutcheons, placed high up above the hangings.
The Mass of the Trinity was celebrated. Afterward the princesses and Lady Katherine Gordon, who took precedence immediately after them, were among the twenty ladies who presented thirty-seven palls of blue, red, and green cloth of gold, one for each year of Elizabeth’s life. The first pall was “laid along the corpse” by Elizabeth Say, Lady Mountjoy, who made an obeisance as she approached and kissed her pall; the rest followed suit. The Queen’s sisters, Katherine and Anne, each presented five palls.21
John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, officiated at the final requiem Mass, with Katherine of York, the chief mourner, making the only offering, in accordance with tradition. Then Richard FitzJames, Bishop of Rochester, preached the funeral sermon, taking as his text Job 19: Miseremini mei, miseremini mei, saltem vos amici mei, quia manus Domini tetigit me (Have pity, have pity on me, O ye my friends, for the hand of God hath touched me). “These words he spake in the name of England, on account of the great loss the country had sustained of that virtuous queen, her noble son, the Prince Arthur, and the recently deceased Archbishop of Canterbury [Henry Deane]”—three deaths that had left a nation bereft.
After the sermon the palls were removed from the coffin and the ladies left the abbey, “after whose departing the image with the crown and rich robes were had to a secret place by St. Edward’s shrine” and the men proceeded to the actual burial. Until the Lady Chapel was completed, Elizabeth was interred temporarily in a vault specially made for her in the crossing of the abbey—“the void space between the high altar and the choir,” where monarchs were customarily crowned. Here, “Her Grace was laid until the new chapel were fully edified and made.”22 William Warham, Bishop of London, hallowed the vault with appropriate rites and ceremony, then the clergy and the King’s chaplains approached the hearse and lifted the coffin, which was lowered into it, whereupon the Queen’s chamberlain and her gentlemen ushers, weeping, broke their staves of office and cast them into the grave, to symbolize the termination of their service. It is possible that, like other early royal funeral effigies, Elizabeth’s was laid on top of her temporary burial place. In his will of 1509, Henry VII left orders that her body be brought from there and interred beside him in the new Lady Chapel.23
To speed Elizabeth’s passage through Purgatory, Henry VII had not only paid for those 636 Masses to be said for her soul, but also for at least £240 [£116,660] in alms to be distributed by her almoner to the bedridden, the blind, lepers, and other unfortunates.24In 1504, Henry founded a chantry at Westminster for himself, Elizabeth, his parents and ancestors, and handsomely endowed it with a yearly income of £804.12s.8d. [£391,130].25 In 1506, Margaret Beaufort founded another chantry in the new Lady Chapel for the souls of herself, her parents, her husbands, her deceased daughter-in-law, the Queen, and Elizabeth’s deceased children.26
The King remained in seclusion at Richmond for six weeks after the funeral, prostrate with grief and so ill with quinsy—a complication of tonsillitis that can cause breathing difficulties—that it was said he was near death. He was unable to swallow and could barely open his mouth.27 His mother came to nurse him, bringing sweet wine and ordering physic for him. It seems that the loss of Elizabeth—and of Arthur the year before—impacted badly on Henry; as for the remaining six years of his life, his health steadily declined.28By 1504 he had become “a weak man and sickly, not likely to be no long-lived man.”29
He could not remain in solitude; life had to go on. The Emperor Maximilian, “hearing that Queen Elizabeth had died, sent a solemn embassy to visit and comfort the King,” whom he had heard was “sorrowful and sad at the death of so good a queen and wife.” On Palm Sunday, March 15, his wasted frame clad in blue velvet,30 Henry rode to St. Paul’s Cathedral “in great triumph” with the Imperial ambassador riding by his side. “And there the bishop made an excellent and comfortable oration to the King concerning the death of the Queen.”31 Henry also wore blue mourning for the ceremonies of Maundy Thursday on March 19.32
In April he paid off Elizabeth’s ladies, gentlewomen, and servants, and in May he settled her funeral expenses, and rewarded her dry nurse with £3.6s.8d. [£1,620].33
The sad news of the Queen’s death had reached Spain by April 11, when Queen Isabella wrote at once to her ambassador in England: “We are informed of the death of the Queen of England, our sister. We have spoken of the audience you are to seek, and the consolation you are to administer upon our part to the King of England, our brother. He is suffering from the loss of the Queen his wife, who is in glory.”34
Henry VII never did secure the canonization of Henry VI—Pope Julius II asked too high a price—so his plans for a shrine in the new Lady Chapel at Westminster were abandoned in favor of his own monument being built to the east of the altar. He had always envisaged a fine tomb for himself and his queen. In 1506 he considered a design by Guido Mazzoni, based on the effigy of Charles VIII at St. Denis. The following year he commissioned a black-and-white marble tomb chest with gilt effigies of himself and Elizabeth, which may have been designed by Mazzoni, although royal craftsmen were to execute the work; but these effigies were never made, because Henry VIII “disliked” the designs, according to a later note on the estimate.
It seems Henry VII did too. In his will of 1509 he left a lavish sum of money to be spent on his chapel and monument; the total eventual cost was at least £20,000 [£9.7 million], about £5,000 more than his son estimated. He also left minute instructions for a different tomb, still with a black-and-white marble chest; this was to have “our and our wife’s images” in gilt-bronze lying on it, side by side, “as good or better than any of the other kings and queens in the abbey.”35 The new chapel was consecrated the day after the King’s death in 1509, so that he could be buried there in the large vault that had been constructed at the east end. As he ordered, he was laid next to Elizabeth; her body had been exhumed and placed in the vault so it could rest beside his for eternity.
The vault measured 2.7 meters long, 1.5 meters wide, and 1.4 meters high. Both bodies were encased in anthropoid lead coffins marked by Maltese crosses, with only the King’s bearing a coffin plate. These were in turn chested in wooden outer coffins. Urns containing the entrails of the royal couple may have been buried with them. Bacon observed that Henry VII “dwelleth more richly dead in the monument of his tomb than he did alive at Richmond or any of his palaces.”
In October 1512, Henry VIII commissioned the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano to build a Renaissance-style tomb for his parents over the vault. Torrigiano, a fearless, volatile man who broke Michelangelo’s nose during a fight, had worked under Pinturicchio on the Borgia apartments in the Vatican. Before 1507 he had traveled to England in the company of some Florentine merchants. By 1511 he had come to the attention of the young King, who asked him to design a fine tomb and effigy for Margaret Beaufort in the south aisle of the new Lady Chapel. In producing this outstanding sepulchre, which is reckoned to be his masterpiece (and on which Elizabeth of York’s arms appear), Torrigiano proved himself superior to any sculptor then working in England, and so earned himself the honor of building a tomb for the founders of the Tudor dynasty. It was the first major Renaissance monument to be erected in England, and was designed as the centerpiece of the Lady Chapel, which would in time come colloquially to be known as “the Henry VII Chapel.” In 1516, Torrigiano was also contracted to build the principal altar in the chapel. He returned to Rome while these works were being executed, hoping to persuade Benvenuto Cellini to come to England to assist him, but Cellini refused on account of Torrigiano’s arrogance and pride, and because he did not want to live among “such beasts as the English.”36
Torrigiano’s innovative marble tomb, one of the greatest sepulchres in Westminster Abbey, is considered to be “the finest Renaissance tomb north of the Alps.”37 It is of white and black touchstone work with elaborately decorated gilt-bronze pilasters and Corinthian capitals at each corner. Tudor roses, portcullises, dragons, greyhounds, and crowns abound in the ornamentation of the monument. The tomb chest of Tournai marble is decorated with an exquisitely carved frieze, copper-gilt Italianate figures, and gilt-bronze medallions with reliefs of the Virgin Mary and the King’s patron saints; cherubs sit at the head and feet of the tomb, supporting the royal arms. The monument is surrounded by a massive intricate bronze grille by one Thomas the Dutchman, dating from 1505 and bearing royal badges and emblems. Originally it was adorned with thirty-two figures of saints, of which only six survive, and enclosed a chantry chapel with its own altar, long vanished, although the step on which it stood remains, along with the bar that once supported a canopy over the altar.
In 1512, Henry VIII commissioned Humphrey Walker and Nicholas Ewen, coppersmiths, to cast gilt-bronze effigies of his parents under the direction of Torrigiano. They took six years to complete, and rest on a white marble plinth. The tomb cost the King £1,500 [£569,400]; it was finished on January 5, 1519. It appears that the sculptors used the death masks from the funeral effigies of the King and Queen as models for their tomb effigies. The quality of their workmanship is superb, and the naturalism of the heads, hands, and figures marks a departure from the stiff formalism of medieval effigies, and set a new standard for royal tomb sculpture. Elizabeth is portrayed with a slender figure, when in reality she was buxom and plump in her latter years; she and Henry lie side by side with their hands joined in prayer. They wear plain attire without any trappings of royalty, for their crowns—the only regalia ever to adorn the effigies—were lost or stolen after 1677, when they appear in an engraving of the tomb by John Dart in Francis Sandford’s A Genealogical History of the Kings and Queens of England. It is this very simplicity that invests them with a realism at once majestic and pious, and in true Renaissance tradition shows the King to be a scholar, humanist, and great prince. The serene figure of Elizabeth wears traditional ceremonial robes—a square-necked surcoat with a low-slung girdle over a gown with cuffs and a chemise inset, a mantle secured by tasseled cords, and her customary long gable hood, beneath which (unlike in portraits) her wavy hair is loose in token of her purity and her queenship. It bears a good resemblance to her portraits and her funeral effigy. Her head rests on two cushions and her feet on a lion.38
Henry VII’s will made lavish and precise provision for perpetual daily Masses to be said at the tomb altar for his soul and that of his late wife. Four candles, each eleven feet high, were to be kept burning around the monument, and on feast days and solemn ceremonials of the Church, thirty candles were to enclose it, each taller than a man. The candles were to be replaced when they had burned down to a height of three feet. Each year, on the anniversaries of the deaths of Henry and Elizabeth, no fewer than a hundred candles were to be lit in the chantry. Fines were to be imposed if the monks defaulted on these obligations.39 Thus did the King hope to ensure the safe passage of his soul and Elizabeth’s through Purgatory to eternal bliss. Alas, the dissolution of Westminster Abbey in 1540 put an end to these sacred rites.
The tomb survived with much of its splendor intact. Elizabeth, wrote Fuller, “lieth buried with her husband in the chapel of his erection, and hath an equal share with him in the use and honor of that, his most magnificent monument.” Writing in the reign of her granddaughter, Elizabeth I, John Stow also found much to admire in this “sumptuous sepulchre and chapel,” with its breathtaking Perpendicular fan-vaulted roof, Tudor emblems, and brilliant stained-glass windows that flooded the interior with light. It was, opined Bacon, the stateliest and daintiest chapel in Europe.
A white marble tablet inset in the bronze frieze to the right hand of the Queen’s effigy bears the Latin inscription placed there on the order of Henry VIII:
Hic jacet regina Hellisabect,
Edwardi IIII quondam regis filia,
Edwardi V regis nominate soros,
Henrici VII olim regis conjux,
Atque Henrici VIII mater inclyta.
Obit autem suum diem turri Londiniarum,
Die Febrii 11, Anno Dom. 1502 [sic],
37 annorum etate functa.
This translates as: “Here rests Queen Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, sometime king; sister of Edward V, who bore the name of king; formerly wedded to King Henry VII; and also the illustrious mother of Henry VIII; who closed her life in the palace of the Tower of London on February 11, in the year of Our Lord 1502 [sic], having completed her thirty-seventh year.” This recital of the Queen’s royal connections was intended to proclaim the noble ancestry and connections of the Tudor dynasty, as was a further inscription around the tomb, also placed there by her son: “Here is situated Henry VII, the glory of all the kings who lived in his time by reason of his intellect, his riches, and the fame of his exploits, to which were added the gifts of bountiful nature, a distinguished brow, an august face, an heroic stature. Joined to him his sweet wife was very pretty, chaste, and fruitful. They were parents happy in their offspring, to whom, land of England, you owe Henry VIII.”
Impeccably connected, beautiful, ceremonious, fruitful, devout, compassionate, generous, and kind, Elizabeth fulfilled every expectation of her contemporaries. Her goodness shines forth in the sources, and it is not surprising that she was greatly loved. She had overcome severe tragedies and setbacks, and emerged triumphant. We have seen how it is possible to reconcile her much debated actions before her marriage with the gentle queen who emerges after it. Certainly the sources show that, as Queen, she played a greater political role than that with which most historians have credited her, and that she was active within her traditional areas of influence. It is also clear that, far from being in subjection to Henry VII and Margaret Beaufort, she enjoyed a generally happy relationship with both of them—and with Henry at least up until the last year of her life.
Elizabeth is often unfairly overshadowed by her successors, the wives of Henry VIII, but she was more successful as Queen than any of them. For this, and for her integrity, her sweet good nature, and her many kindnesses, her memory deserves to be celebrated.