CHAPTER 19
‘A faithful love that did us both combine in marriage and peaceable concord’
Almost nine months to the day after her marriage to Henry Tudor, Elizabeth of York gave birth to a son at Winchester. Henry’s choice of name for this first Tudor prince made the clearest possible statement of his ambition for his newly established dynasty. The baby was called Arthur. After Bosworth, Elizabeth had been instructed to make her way to London to join her mother, escorted by Sir Roger Willoughby. Meanwhile, apartments were prepared for her in Margaret Beaufort’s house in Coldharbour Lane. Her betrothed husband had been in the capital since September, but it was not until 18 January that their marriage had taken place, after Thomas Lovell, the speaker of the Lords, had made a statement in the December Parliament requesting that Henry make good his promise. Why did Henry wait so long? Was he concerned about the stories of Elizabeth’s relationship with her uncle and if so, did he decide to stall until there was no possibility that she was carrying Richard’s child? Or was the King determined to separate his claim to the throne from his wife’s, which, after all, was far stronger than his own?
The delay in crowning Elizabeth of York indicates the strength of the latter argument. Henry could not be seen to be assuming the crown through his wife. He had not quite snatched it from the bloodied earth of Bosworth Field, but it was essential that it appear his by right of conquest, rather than claimed through the line of Edward IV. A double coronation could be too easily interpreted as a sign of joint sovereignty. There could be no doubt that Elizabeth and Henry’s marriage represented an alliance between two battling dynasties, as the papal bull read out in churches on Trinity Sunday 1486 made clear:
Understanding of the long and grievous variance, contentions and debates that have been in this Realm of England between the house of the Duchy of Lancaster on the one party and the house of the Duchy of York on the other party. Willing all such divisions following to be put apart by the council and consent of his college of Cardinals approves, confirms and establishes the matrimony and conjunction made between our sovereign lord King Henry the Seventh of the House of Lancaster of that one party and the noble Princess Elizabeth of the house of York of that other with all their issue born between the same.1
Henry, however, was keen to play down Elizabeth’s blood claim and accordingly the commemorative medals struck for their wedding referred to ‘a virtuous wife’ being ‘a sweet rose’ and an ‘ornament of her house’. Though clearly there were reminders here of her birth, the priority was to celebrate her virtue over her lineage.
Elizabeth was not crowned until November 1487, more than a year after the birth of her first child. By this time Henry had already had to deal with two plots against his rule, but 1487 produced the most serious challenge, the Lambert Simnel conspiracy. At the beginning of the year, it was rumoured that Elizabeth’s cousin, Clarence’s son the Earl of Warwick, who had been kept at the Tower since Henry’s accession, had escaped and was hiding in Ireland. With Lambert Simnel — a nobody who had been persuaded by a priest named Richard Simons to impersonate Warwick — being acknowledged as the Earl by Margaret of Burgundy, Edward I V’s sister, and John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln, Henry’s exhibition of the real Warwick in London in February did nothing to scotch the story. Neither Margaret nor Lincoln necessarily believed that Simnel was in fact the Earl: for them the plot was simply a means of striking against Henry. Margaret supplied 2,000 troops for Lincoln, who arrived in May 1487 in Dublin, where Simnel was crowned ‘Edward VI’ on the twenty-fourth. By June Simnel had landed on the Lancashire coast. Henry raised a large army and defeated Lincoln’s forces at Stoke on 16 June. The first Tudor king is usually remembered as a dour man, but his treatment of Simnel displayed a streak of humour. The pretender was put to work in the royal kitchens as a scullion, and eventually became quite popular, rising to become the master of the King’s hawks. Lincoln had died at Stoke, and though Margaret of Burgundy was to prove a threat for years to come, it was only after the suppression of this last military challenge to his rule that Henry felt secure enough to anoint his queen.
The pageantry of Elizabeth of York’s coronation was in keeping with the aim of minimising the significance of her personal claim. Henry had made a ceremonial entry into the city some days before, watched in secret by Elizabeth and his mother, so that when she made her formal arrival by barge from Greenwich (itself a departure from custom), he was able to welcome her to the city almost as though she were a foreign bride. Elizabeth was attended by her mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort, rather than any of her own family, and there was a notable absence of Yorkist badges and decorations. One feature did signal a connection with Edward IV: a model of a huge, red, fire-breathing dragon, the symbol of the last of the ancient British kings, Cadwaladr. Contemporary genealogies show that Edward IV had been interested in proving his descent through the Mortimers from Cadwaladr who, in legend, was visited by an angel who told him that only the true King of Britain would one day recover the realm. Henry VII co-opted even this idea, also claiming descent from Cadwaladr and decorating the horse of Elizabeth’s champion at her coronation banquet – Jasper Tudor, now promoted Duke of Bedford – with red dragons. In accordance with the practice of Catherine de Valois’s coronation, Henry was not present for Elizabeth’s crowning or her banquet, surveying both from behind a latticed screen draped with cloth of arras. In this concealment he was reinforcing her status by melding his public body with hers at the moment of translation, even though his choice of timing for her coronation struck a blow at queenly authority. In the fourteenth century, it had been considered essential to crown Philippa of Hainault before she gave birth to the heir to the throne. By delaying Elizabeth’s ceremony until a year after Arthur’s arrival, Henry undid nearly 500 years-worth of accumulated customary power. With the exception of Marguerite of France, whose husband already had an heir, and Anne Neville, whose queenship had not been foreseen, Elizabeth was the only English queen since 1066 to give birth to the King’s child without first being crowned. It was marriage to him, he emphasised, that legitimated his heir, and that alone.
The continuation of the papal declaration of 1486 had affirmed that it was Henry’s blood, and only Henry’s, that could transmit a claim: ‘If it please God that the said Elizabeth . . . should decease without issue between our sovereign lord and her of their bodies born than such issue as between him and her whom after God shall join him to shall be had and born heritors to the same crown and realm of England.’2
The aggrandisement of the Tudor line also extended to twitching at the details of the past. Henry had the headstone of Catherine de Valois’s tomb replaced with one that mentioned her second marriage, to Owen Tudor, a gesture which retroactively endorsed his own family claim to royal blood. Officially, then, the Yorkist entitlement had died with the princes in the Tower. But suspicion and paranoia was to haunt the succession of Elizabeth’s descendants for the duration of her husband’s dynasty.
A week after Henry VII’s coronation on 7 November 1485,an act of Parliament repealed the statute of invalidity against his mother-in-law’s marriage and restored the Queen Dowager to her full status. Elizabeth Woodville attended her daughter’s wedding, after which Henry confirmed her dower rights. The royal women then moved to Winchester for the spring while the King was on progress, and Elizabeth Woodville stood godmother at Prince Arthur’s christening at the cathedral, which was also attended by her daughters Anne and Cecily, Edward Woodville and the Marchioness of Dorset. For once the Woodvilles had no need to feel like parvenus, for the new King’s pedigree was more dubious than their own. Finally, after all her struggles, it seemed that Elizabeth Woodville was safe. Yet just a few months later, in February 1487, the royal council assembled to deprive Elizabeth of ‘all her possessions. This was done because she had made her peace with King Richard, had placed her daughters at his disposal and had, by leaving sanctuary, broken her promise to those . . . who had, at her own most urgent entreaty, forsaken their own English property and fled to Henry in Brittany.’3 On 20 February Parliament granted her a 400-mark annuity and she was registered as a boarder at Bermondsey Abbey. The Benedictine convent of Bermondsey was a sister house of the Cluniac foundation of 1082. Since the Cluniacs looked to William, first Duke of Aquitaine, as their tenth-century founder, Elizabeth, as the widow of one of the Duke’s descendants, was entitled to a special offer of free board and lodging.
Officially, Elizabeth Woodville had voluntarily surrendered her lands and decided to follow the tradition of widowed queens by retiring to the contemplative life. But if this was truly the case, why would the partisan Vergil put out a report that reflected so badly on Henry? Francis Bacon’s suggestion was that Elizabeth thought her daughter disparaged by the marriage to Henry, ‘not advanced, but depressed’, and that she had therefore collaborated in the Simnel plot. One of the more absurd conclusions of at least one of Elizabeth’s biographers is that ‘it seems certain that she was actively working for Henry’s overthrow’.4 In February 1487, when Henry showed the true Earl of Warwick in the streets of London, he was clearly concerned about rumours of an invasion, but why would Elizabeth have involved herself in such a conspiracy? She had worked for her daughter’s marriage, if not actually suggested it. Warwick was the son of her erstwhile enemy Clarence, the son, moreover, of Anne Neville’s sister, and Anne’s husband had murdered her sons. Elizabeth was far too seasoned in political intrigue to have believed in Simnel. There is strong evidence that Henry never seriously doubted her loyalty, either. Edward Woodville commanded 2,000 troops in Henry’s van at the battle of Stoke (this factor is evaded by the suggestion that Elizabeth was acting alone), but why would Henry have proposed a third marriage to Elizabeth, as he did as part of the three-year Scottish truce signed in 1486, if he believed her intention was to overthrow him, and thereby her own daughter?
If the question of treason is dismissed, we are left with the theory that Elizabeth had deliberately impoverished herself and withdrawn from court at the very point of her daughter’s triumph. Apologists for this explanation have claimed that Elizabeth’s dower lands were in the right of the reigning queen, which is not only inaccurate but implausible, given that Henry had handed over the lands himself, and that Elizabeth was ill, of which there is no record whatsoever. The fact that Henry officially remained on good terms with his mother-in-law, suggesting her as a bride for James III, referring to her affectionately in official documents as ‘our right dear and right well beloved Queen Elizabeth, mother of our dear wife the Queen’, inviting her to court and making occasional grants such as fifty marks in 1490 for Christmas, does not necessarily indicate that Elizabeth’s decision to live at Bermondsey was her own, merely that Henry knew any public appearance of disunity would be damaging to the royal family. He could keep Elizabeth at arm’s length by inviting her to attend court in the full knowledge that he had made her too embarrassingly poor to do so.
Elizabeth was not even permitted to attend the 1487 coronation. Jealousy of Margaret Beaufort would hardly have kept her away. Her presence would have been an all-too-visible reminder of the past, and of the fact that Elizabeth of York was far closer by right to the throne than her husband. Even Elizabeth Woodville’s champions have too easily accepted the theory that her retreat to Bermondsey was an elective choice to follow tradition of pious queenship, when all the evidence suggests that she, like Joanna of Navarre, was simply inconveniently rich. Henry wanted her dower and he shut her up in the convent to get it. Given what Elizabeth Woodville had endured, Henry’s treatment of her was appalling, and it does not reflect well on Elizabeth of York that she apparently acquiesced so passively in his plans.
The last five years of Elizabeth Woodville’s life were spent at Bermondsey. She did attend her daughter’s next lying-in at Westminsterin 1489, but aside from this her only notable excursion was in response to an invitation to meet the French ambassadors and her kinsman François of Luxembourg in November the same year. In April 1492, Elizabeth made her will:
I Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, late wife to the most victorious Prince of blessed memory Edward the Fourth, being of whole mind, seeing the world so transitory and no creature certain when they shall depart from hence, having God Almighty fresh in mind . . . bequeath my soul into his hands . . . I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my said Lord at Windsor according to the will of my said Lord and mine, without pompous interring of costly expenses thereabout. Item, 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 wish as good heart and mind as is to me possible. I give her Grace my blessing and all the foresaid my children. Item, I will that such small stuff and goods that I have to be disposed truly in the account of my debts and for the health of my soul as far as they will extend. Item, if any of my blood will of my stuff or goods to me pertaining, I will that they have the preferment before any other.5
It is a heartbreakingly pathetic document for anyone to leave, let alone a woman who had been a reigning queen consort. Two years later, Elizabeth died at Bermondsey on 8 June. On the tenth, the twenty-seventh anniversary of her coronation, her body was transported by boat to Windsor, accompanied by her friends Dr Brent and Prior Ingilby, the executors of her will. Also in attendance were two ‘gentlewomen’, one of whom was Grace, the illegitimate daughter of Edward IV. Only one priest and a clerk waited to receive the coffin. Two days later, Dorset, princesses Anne, Katherine and Bridget and Edmund de la Pole arrived to hear a funeral service conducted by the bishop of Rochester. A clerk who witnessed the ceremony left a concerned account. ‘There was nothing done solemnly for her saving a low hearse such as they use for the common people with wooden candlesticks about it . . . never a new torch, but old torches, nor poor men in black gowns nor hoods but upon a dozen old men holding torches and torches ends.’6 It was not customary for the King to attend funerals, and the Queen was about to give birth, but neither were the senior magnates represented and the dean of Windsor, though in attendance, took no part in the service. No one even bothered to ring the bells for the Dowager Queen. The sum of Elizabeth’s memorial was forty shillings paid out in alms by Dorset.
Even if the family were complying with Elizabeth’s request for a humble funeral, their negligence in arranging no Masses for her soul was extraordinary. By the late fourteenth century, the chantry tradition, which had been flourishing by the time of Eleanor of Castile’s death 200 years before, had reached its peak. An increased attention to the doctrine of Purgatory, in which the soul was believed to linger before attaining the purity required to enter Heaven, meant that intercessory prayers and Masses were vital to the safe passage of a loved one’s soul to Paradise. Fifteenth-century religious practice is characterised by this ‘obsessive anxiety’.7 Chantry foundations, essentially small chapels where funds could be willed to support intercessory Masses, were a form of private post-mortem insurance for the wealthy. Elizabeth herself had founded a chantry for two priests at her chapel of St Erasmus, Westminster, in the 1470s to pray for the royal family. To leave no such provision was a serious risk; indeed, ‘to make a will without thought for intercessory prayer was near to heresy’.8 Elizabeth’s hope that her meagre possessions might serve ‘for the health of my soul as far as they shall extend’ gestures towards such provision, but given her evident poverty and the extravagant measures taken for most people of rank (47,000 Masses for Queen Eleanor in the first six months after her death, 10,000 for Cardinal Beaufort), it is literally rather damning that her family apparently made no efforts to augment her minimal arrangements.
Henry VII has always had a reputation as a grasping, miserly king, and his treatment of his wife’s family does nothing to dispel it. Elizabeth of York’s sisters, Bridget, Cecily, Anne and Katherine, were entitled by their Mortimer descent to a share of the Mortimer-Clare inheritance, but Henry quietly absorbed those lands into his own estates and did nothing to provide the princesses with dowries. This explains the relatively humble matches made by the daughters of Edward IV, for without dowries, diplomatic foreign matches were out of the question. Bridget gave up and became a nun at Dartmouth Priory, from where she corresponded with her sister for the rest of her life. Katherine married the heir of the Earl of Devon, William Lord Courtenay, and Cecily John,Viscount Welles, half-brother of Margaret Beaufort. For each of these marriages Elizabeth supplied her sisters with allowances of fifty pounds a year and £ 120-pound annuities for their husbands from her own privy purse. Katherine’s marriage was tainted with scandal — her husband was imprisoned for conspiracy with the Earl of Suffolk — and Elizabeth arranged for the education of her children under Lady Margaret Cotton and provided them with clothes and necessities. When her elderly husband died, Cecily made a love match with a squire, Thomas Kyne of Lincolnshire, which outraged Henry, though he had only himself to blame, and Elizabeth and her mother-in-law stepped in to support the couple. Thomas and Cecily lived for some time at Margaret Beaufort’s great country house, Collyweston, near Stamford, but they and their two children were eventually obliged to retreat for economy’s sake to the Isle of Wight, where reportedly their circumstances were less than royal. When Cecily died in 1507, Margaret Beaufort paid for part her funeral expenses at the abbey of Quarre, which was more than anyone had done for poor Elizabeth Woodville.
Elizabeth of York’s relationship with her ambitious, domineering mother-in-law has been described politely as ‘tinged with ambiguity’.9 Publicly, their relationship was cordial — they even went so far as to have identical outfits made up for the Christmas court of 1487 and their award of Garter robes the following year, with a celebratory song composed for the occasion, and rooms were kept for the Queen at Collyweston. Elizabeth’s first daughter, born in 1489, was named Margaret. The two women also worked together, as Eleanor of Castile and Eleanor of Provence had done, to protect Margaret from the perils of an early marriage when her betrothal to King James of Scotland was arranged in 1498. Margaret was just nine, and her grandmother particularly spoke from bitter experience when she expressed her fear that ‘the King of Scots would not wait, but injure her and endanger her health’. Yet it is hard to imagine that a woman as jealous of her son, ambitious and interfering as Margaret Beaufort could have been anything other than an insufferable mother-in-law. In 1498, the Spanish ambassador reported the dislike between the two women and the ‘subjection’ the Queen was obliged to tolerate. Elizabeth and Henry apparently had a warm, loving and faithful relationship, but there was no question who was the first woman in the King’s life. There was one interest in which the two women collaborated with apparent enthusiasm, and which, for Elizabeth, was a means of maintaining the traditions of her cultivated, literary-minded mother and her family: the development of printing.
The main figures in the Buckingham rebellion of 1483 had been Buckingham himself, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor, but their supporters were largely drawn from men who had served in Edward IV’s household. Among the 1,100 gentry and merchant figures who petitioned for Richard III’s pardon after the rebellion was the printer William Caxton. It was Elizabeth’s uncle, Anthony, Earl Rivers, who had done more than anything to promote Caxton’s revolutionary printing innovations in England. Caxton’s patron in the Low Countries had been Margaret of Burgundy, Elizabeth’s aunt, and the first-ever printed book in English, the Histories of Troy shows Caxton presenting the text to Margaret in Bruges. The first book to be printed in England itself was Lord Rivers’s translation of a collection of maxims in French and Latin by Jean de Teonville, published as Dictes and sayings of the Philosophers, followed by his translation of Christine de Pisan in 1478 and a book known as the Cordial in 1479.
Elizabeth Woodville was a keen literary patron, purchasing books from, among others, the chancellor of Cambridge University. Her copy of The Romance of the San Graal was passed down to her elder daughter, while Caxton’s History of Jason was dedicated and presented to Prince Edward in 1477 to help him learn to read. Caxton noted Elizabeth Woodville’s encouragement as ‘the supportacion of our most redobted liege lady’.10 The most intriguing connection with Caxton is his dedication to her of The Knight of the Tower while she was in sanctuary in 1484. In 1483, Margaret Beaufort had requested a copy of a French romance, Blanchardin and Eglantine, from Caxton, a text which remained with her throughout Richard III’s deposition and which she asked Caxton to translate and print in 1489. Since Caxton’s shop was located near Westminster sanctuary, it has been suggested that Lewis Caerleon, the physician used as a go-between by Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, may have smuggled the book to Elizabeth of York and her mother. The plot of Blanchardin and Eglantine closely mirrors the situation in which the imprisoned Princess found herself in 1483. With her betrothed husband in exile, Elizabeth, like Eglantine, had to remain steadfast in the face of her enemies while her beloved staked his life to fulfil his promise. In this, the transmission of books between royal women, which had always formed part of an informal network of patronage and power, becomes an instrument of female conspiracy in a gesture worthy of courtly romance. By later publicising the book, Margaret Beaufort was able to gloss over Elizabeth’s unfortunate carry-on with her uncle and augment her family’s prestige by guiding readers instead towards a romantic story which had parallels in fresh contemporary memory.
Elizabeth of York was also a customer of Caxton’s (though Margaret, typically, took credit for introducing him to the King), as well as of his successor, Wynkeyn de Worde. Eneydos was dedicated to Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Caxton’s final book, The FifteenOes, an appropriate selection of prayers from St Bridget of Sweden, was made for Elizabeth and her daughter Margaret. There is thus a connection between Margaret of Scotland’s earliest vernacular commissions and Elizabeth of York’s patronage of the first English printer, placing the patronage of English royal women at the centre of a movement whose impact, during the Renaissance, was to be felt all over the world.
The baby whose birth had prevented Elizabeth from attending her mother’s funeral was named for her lost mother, but she died in infancy. Elizabeth was to lose two more children, Edmund in 1499 and her last child, Catherine, in 1503, but she gave Henry two healthy sons, Arthur in 1486, and Henry, Duke of York, in 1491, and two daughters, Margaret in 1489 and Mary in 1495. Henry may have been niggardly towards his sisters-in-law, but he was determined that the marriages of his children should consolidate the Tudor dynasty by connecting them to the greatest houses in Europe. Plans for Arthur’s marriage began when he was just a year old, and in 1489 the treaty of Medina del Campo provided for an alliance between England and the united Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile with the Prince’s marriage to Catalina (Catherine), the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. For Henry, this was not only a diplomatic coup, but an essential validation of his kingship. Catherine of Aragon, twice descended from John of Gaunt and the daughter of their Most Christian Majesties, was the most prestigious English royal bride since Catherine de Valois.
Arthur was the only one of Elizabeth’s children she would live to see married, and the arrangements for the wedding are a further indication of her marginalisation at the court so effectively dominated by Margaret Beaufort. After a decade of diplomatic stalling, Arthur was married in a proxy ceremony to the Spanish ambassador Dr de Puebla at Woodstock in 1499. Elizabeth wrote fulsomely to Isabella of Spain:
Although we before entertained singular love and regard to your Highness above all other queens in the world, as well for the consanguinity and necessary intercourse which mutually take place between us, as also for the eminent dignity and virtue by which your Majesty so shines and excels that your most celebrated name is noised abroad and diffused everywhere; yet much more has this love increased and accumulated by the accession of noble affinity which has recently been celebrated between the most illustrious Arthur, Prince of Wales, our eldest son and the most illustrious Princess the Lady Catherine.
But it was Margaret Beaufort who sent instructions to advise the Infanta on English customs and behaviour, and who made a list for the ‘convenience’ of Elizabeth’s household over the arrangements for the marriage. It was Margaret Beaufort who suggested that Catherine learn French as a means of communicating with her new family. Elizabeth of York already spoke French well, a reminder of the days of her early betrothal, after the treaty of Picquigny, when her father had teased her by calling her ‘Madame la Dauphine’, but it is often overlooked that she also spoke and wrote Spanish. Margaret Beaufort did not speak Spanish, and she was not prepared to be left out, so the Infanta and her mother-in-law would speak French. Margaret’s intention to control the new Princess of Wales is also reflected in the arrangements she made for Catherine’s household, in which several officials, the clerk of the signet, almoner and usher were shared with her own.
Before the marriage could take place, Henry was obliged to employ ruthless measures to convince the Spanish that he was able to maintain his rule over the kingdom. Lambert Simnel was not the only royal imposter. Since 1491, a young man named Perkin Warbeck, with the connivance of Margaret of Burgundy, the King of France and James of Scotland, had been presenting himself as Elizabeth’s vanished brother, Richard, Duke of York. As in the case of Simnel, it is impossible that any of the powerful movers of the plot actually believed in Warbeck; what mattered was keeping alive the image of Henry VII as a usurper and its attendant insecurities. Warbeck was received in Scotland by James IV after a brief appearance on the Kent coast, where he failed to attract any supporters, and in 1499 he was arrested in Hampshire. For a short period he was permitted to live in Elizabeth’s household, but Henry then committed him to the Tower. In a perfectly contrived piece of political theatre, Warbeck was then discovered to have been helping the Earl of Warwick, previously impersonated by Lambert Simnel, to escape. Warwick’s claim had always been an embarrassment to Henry, and now he created an excuse to execute both fake and true pretenders. Elizabeth was hardly unaware of the brutalities of realpolitik, but Warwick’s execution was a reminder that her husband could, if necessary, be as cruelly ambitious as her uncle.
Catherine of Aragon arrived in England in 1501, after a crossing that was dreadful, even by the standards of previous queens-in-waiting. She and Arthur were married on 14 November at St Paul’s, after a nod to the Yorkist origins of the groom’s mother in a progress down the Thames to the home of the indomitable Duchess of York, Cecily Neville. The wedding was followed by a week of pageants and tournaments, in which challengers hung their shields on a Tree of Chivalry, watched by the royal ladies from a specially erected stand in Westminster yard. Henry’s famous meanness made itself apparent in the pageants, which featured great emphasis on four model beasts, two lions, a hart and an elk, with two men inside each. These were not new: Henry had simply had them painted up from previous celebrations. Relentlessly, throughout the week, the beasts appeared.
For Christmas at Richmond, though, Henry was prepared to spare no expense. Elizabeth of York might be paying her tailor a regular twopence to turn her gowns, but Richmond Palace (on the site of Sheen, which Richard II had destroyed in memory of Anne of Bohemia) was to impress the world with the very latest in Tudor taste and convenience. Inspiration for Richmond had come from Elizabeth’s family. Edward IV’s stay at the Burgundian court as the guest of Lord Gruuthuyse had been extremely influential. Fifteenth-century Bruges was far from the tiny outpost of civilisation in a barbarous land that Matilda of Flanders had known: ‘The inhabitants are extraordinarily industrious, possibly on account of the barrenness of the soil, since very little corn is grown, and no wine, nor is there water fit for drinking, nor any fruit. On this account, the products of the whole world are brought here.’11
Burgundy was the capital of the Christian world for luxury, and Edward I V had come back to England intent upon replicating its magnificence. The reorganisation of the royal household in the 1470s was inspired by Olivier de la Marche, whom Edward had commissioned to write L’Etat de la Maison de Charles de Bourgogne (1473), a text upon which Margaret Beaufort drew for her own codification of etiquette for the Tudor court. As well as clothes, jewels and tapestries, Edward’s building projects demonstrated Burgundian influence. At Nottingham, the royal apartments were constructed on several storeys, attached by a staircase modelled on that of the Princehof in Bruges, and at Eltham Edward built a gallery and a raised garden with a view of the river. At Richmond, Henry VII included the ‘donjon’ design for the royal apartments, enclosed gardens and open-loggia galleries. A new chapel featured a private closet for Elizabeth to the left of the altar, with the King’s on the right.
In the Christmas celebrations floats shaped like ships, lanterns, castles and mountains carried costumed dancers and actors in direct imitation of Burgundian pageants. One wonders whether Elizabeth found her husband’s over-earnest imitation of the Burgundian dukes slightly embarrassing. She had been born royal, he had not. As an exile, Henry had little experience of dealing with, or impressing, his English magnates. Surrounding himself with churchmen and civil servants may have earned him the accolades of posterity for his modernity, but his eagerness to follow his mother’s strictures on court practice and his incessant money-grabbing was frankly rather middle-class. Edward had made his court ‘the house of very policy and flower of England’. Elizabeth would have remembered the celebrations for the marriage of her lost brother Richard to the five-year-old heiress to the duchy of Norfolk in 1478, one of the great pageants of her father’s reign, when St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster was hung in blue and gold, coins were thrown to the crowd from gold and silver basins and Princess Elizabeth had presented a gold ‘E’ set with rubies to the winner of the tournament. She knew a good deal more about regal display than her cautious husband and his fussy, exacting mother.
Whatever Elizabeth’s private feelings about her Henry, she was publicly never less than entirely loyal to him. Her political involvement was minimal, as he evidently wished it to be, and she confined herself to educating her children in the exceptional tradition from which she herself had benefited and making small gestures of reconciliation towards former Yorkists, such as payments to servants of her father and a man who had assisted her uncle Anthony in 1483. However, she was prepared on occasion to defy the Tudors, as when a tenant of the Duke of Bedford appealed to her in a property dispute and she wrote to Henry’s uncle using the sternest, most formal eloquence of her position. She practised small, rather touching economies — the gown-turning, wearing cheap shoes that cost under a pound and paying her ladies seven pounds per year less than they had received under Elizabeth Woodville. How much of Elizabeth’s modest, pious, maternal image was due to her own nature and how much to Henry’s fashioning is hard to judge, but her queenship was very different in style from her mother’s.
If Edward IV was England’s last medieval king, then Elizabeth Woodville was his ideal consort. Sifting the calumnies and fabrications which have dogged her reputation, she presents a picture of an intriguing, impetuous, tremendously courageous woman in contrast with whom her daughter is inevitably prosaic, very much a consort rather than a queen. Generalisations being a disease of conclusions, it perhaps does not do to compare Elizabeth of York too unfavourably with her mother, but perhaps it is not going too far to say that Elizabeth Woodville applied her energies to a tradition of queenship that stretched back to Emma of Normandy, while her daughter anticipated an era in which, for the first time in more than 500 years, queens were reduced to little more than decorative dynastic appendages. And yet Elizabeth of York was the grandmother of England’s first queen regnant, Mary Tudor, and of her unique namesake, Elizabeth I. It is fair to say that there remains work to be done on her influence on both these women. Like her husband, Elizabeth of York had been educated in a hard school. It is unsurprising that she chose to live quietly, and keep her own counsel.
After Arthur’s marriage in 1501, he and Catherine were sent, against Elizabeth’s wishes, to Ludlow to play at government. But by 2 April 1502, Arthur was dead. Riding through the night, a messenger from the marches arrived at Greenwich at midnight, and Henry immediately sent for Elizabeth to break the news to her. Bravely, she told him: ‘God has left us yet a fair prince and two fair princesses . . . and we are both young enough.’12 She then retreated to her chamber where she collapsed with grief, and Henry took his turn at comforting her. The Queen lived to receive her bewildered daughter-in-law, Catherine, back into her household and, just as she had promised, she conceived again. In January 1503 she travelled by barge from Hampton Court to the Tower for her final confinement. She died there, on 11 February, her thirty-eighth birthday, in the White Tower, shortly after giving birth to her last child, Catherine, who was not to survive. Henry ‘privily departed to a solitary place and would no man should resort unto him’.13
On 11 June 1509, Elizabeth’s second son, Henry VIII, married Catherine of Aragon.