Authors: Sarah Gristwood
But underneath these pleasures of daily life it became apparent as the 1480s moved on that Elizabeth of York’s future was less secure than it had seemed; and perhaps her early experience of uncertainty influenced her sometimes controversial actions in the time ahead. For in these years King Edward’s diplomatic affairs – in which the royal children were such useful pawns – were going less than smoothly.
When the Prince of Wales was betrothed to Anne of Brittany, Louis of France struck back by encouraging the Scots to attack northern England. This was what compelled Edward, in 1481, to excuse himself to the Pope for not joining a crusade against the Turks, on the grounds that ‘the acts of our treacherous neighbours’ kept him fully occupied during ‘this tempestuous period’. But things were about to get worse: in March 1482 Mary of Burgundy died after a riding accident, an event that gave her subjects the opportunity to decide that they preferred peaceful relations with the French to Mary’s husband and his English treaty.
On her deathbed Mary begged her stepmother Margaret to protect her two surviving children, which at first looked like a case of helping Mary’s widower Maximilian keep them in a country he proposed to rule himself. This, however, would soon prove impossible: although the little boy Philip remained largely in Margaret’s care, after Christmas that year news reached England that Mary’s three-year-old daughter was to be sent to France to be married to the Dauphin, who – as had so often been threatened before – would thus be reneging on his betrothal to Elizabeth of York. At seventeen, comparatively late for a royal girl to remain unmarried, Elizabeth would have been old enough to feel both the slight and the uncertainty.
Edward’s marital plans for his daughters had not been going well. In October 1482 he had had to call off Cecily’s arranged marriage with the Scottish prince. The betrothal between Anne and the Burgundian heir Philip, too, would founder on Edward’s parsimony over Anne’s dowry, which allowed Philip’s father Maximilian to abandon it for a better match elsewhere. In this difficult diplomatic climate, Edward suggested for his eldest daughter a match that would once have seemed most unlikely – marriage to Henry Tudor, still living in exile in Brittany.
An agreement had already been drawn up to return Henry Tudor home, ‘to be in the grace and favour of the king’s highness’, and to enjoy a portion of the lands recently left by the death of his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort’s mother. And Edward mooted also the possibility of a marriage that would attach Henry to the Yorkist family.
Holinshed says that such a marriage had been suggested several years before. At that point the offer was probably only tactical; and when the ruler of Brittany was persuaded to hand over his principal pawn he may well (as Vergil would later have it) have been handing ‘the sheep to the wolf’. Henry had been entrusted to the English envoys but – warned, says the Tudor poet Bernard André, by his mother, who had scented a deception – when he reached St Malo to board ship for England he feigned illness, slipped into a church and claimed sanctuary, from where he was able to slip back to a remorseful Duke Francis in Brittany.
But now times had changed. With the new alliance between France and Burgundy, with the danger that England might once again be at war with the French, King Edward may have found the thought of Henry Tudor – a potential English claimant – as a loose cannon at the French court too dangerous to contemplate. To Margaret Beaufort this new plan may well have seemed a reasonable advancement for her son. Her acquiescence may have represented an acceptance of the status quo – that Henry’s Lancastrian claim had no immediate prospect of bearing fruit. But, as had happened so many times before, events were about to overthrow all plans.
Edward’s way of life had long been intemperate enough to affect his health. Mancini wrote that: ‘In food and drink he was most immoderate: it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more.’ He had now ‘grown fat in the loins, whereas previously he had been not only tall but rather lean and very active’. What is more, the legendarily beautiful and loving Elizabeth Woodville always had to suffer her husband’s flagrant infidelity: ‘He pursued with no discrimination the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly: however he took none by force. He overcame all by money and promises and having conquered them, he dismissed them.’ Quarrels over mistresses, Mancini added, would create a major rift between Elizabeth’s eldest son Dorset and the king’s great friend Lord Hastings, an admirer of the king’s favourite mistress Jane Shore. The whole question of Edward’s relations with women, licensed or unlicensed, would become political dynamite. But his mistresses were important in another sense as well: the toll the king’s self-indulgence was taking on his health.
At Candlemas in early February 1483 the king and queen went in procession from St Stephen’s Chapel to Westminster Hall. It looked – and was meant to – as if the royal family were here to stay, in prosperity and stability. But that spring Edward fell sick. Mancini said that he had been out fishing in a small boat and allowed the damp cold to strike his vitals; Commynes believed that it was apoplexy following a surfeit. Some even put it down to chagrin at the failure of his diplomacy. The English accounts are all sixteenth-century and inevitably include the suspicion of poison, but Hall says that since the French campaign of 1475 Edward had suffered from a fever ‘which turned to an incurable quarten’. Whatever the cause, on 9 April he died, at the age of just forty. John Skelton wrote:
Where is now my conquest and victory?
Where is my riches and my royal array?
Where be my coursers and my horses high?
Where is my mirth, my solace, and my play?
As vanity, to naught all is wandered away.
O lady Bess, long for me may ye call!
For now we are parted until doomsday;
But love ye that Lord that is sovereign of all.
If Edward IV had lived longer, the events that followed his death would surely have unfolded differently. The young Prince Edward, his heir, might not have been perceived as so dangerously under Woodville influence. There would not have been the same shock to a country only ten years away from the last throes of civil war and still in recovery from the long-term effects of the minority rule of Henry VI. Mancini noted that Edward IV left two sons, adding: ‘He also left daughters, but they do not concern us.’ It was to prove a poor prophecy. Women’s choices and women’s alliances would play a pivotal part in the years ahead.
The woman who had done most to challenge the patriarchal assumptions of these years had however, now departed. On 25 August 1482, at the Château de Dampierre near Saumur, Marguerite of Anjou had died. She had, according to her Victorian biographer Mary Ann Hookham,
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been visited there by Henry Tudor, whom she urged to continue his struggle against the house of York. Marguerite died poor, as her will recorded. The ‘few goods’ which God and King Louis had allowed her were to be used to pay for her burial: ‘And should my few goods be insufficient to do this, as I believe they are [King Louis took her hunting dogs as the only goods of value], I implore the king meet and pay the outstanding debts as the sole heir of the wealth which I inherited through my father and mother and my other relatives and ancestors … .’ Resentment of her poverty and pride in her lineage are evident here. Her political life had long been over, but she had been one of the most forceful women in a century not short of them.
At the beginning of
Richard III
, Shakespeare has Marguerite returned from exile like a vengeful ghost to curse Elizabeth Woodville:
Long mayst thou live to wail thy children’s death
And see another, as I see thee now,
Decked in thy rights, as thou art stalled in mine.
Long die thy happy days before thy death,
And after many lengthened hours of grief,
Die neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen.
Perhaps Marguerite’s ghost lived on – in the mind of Richard of Gloucester, for example, eyeing the accession of a twelve-year-old to the throne with all the paranoia of one born into the era of Marguerite’s battles to rule the country for her infant son at the time of Henry VI’s insanity.
For my daughters, Richard,
They shall be praying nuns, not weeping queens
Richard III
, 4.4
The marriage of Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV had been one of the great royal love stories, combining physical passion with warm domesticity; it rewrote the rules of royal romance, with all the implications that would have in the next century. There can be little doubt that under normal circumstances Elizabeth would have allowed herself to mourn most sincerely. But the circumstances were far from normal: she was a queen fighting for position, given her son’s minority. Edward IV’s death left a twelve-year-old boy as king – a difficult situation in any but the most stable country. The problem of competing factions within English court circles could only have been resolved by the accession of a strong and adult ruler.
Christine de Pizan took special pains to advise the princess in a war-torn land, widowed while her son was still a minor, that she should ‘employ all her prudence and her wisdom to reconcile the antagonistic factions’. Richard of Gloucester was riding high: the parliament of January 1483 had acknowledged and rewarded his efforts against the Scots. Perhaps it had been in response to his high profile that in the same month Anthony, Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, seemed to be trying to recruit the Woodville interest. In February and March he had been making sure that his appointment as Prince Edward’s governor was renewed, and requesting confirmation of his right as such to raise troops in Wales. Ever since, the question of who took the aggressive initiative – or who was merely getting their retaliation in first – has been argued endlessly.
The events which followed the death of Edward IV are still controversial. The main protagonists brought with them the memory of experiences that would make anyone wary. Elizabeth’s were of the downturn in fortune that had followed the death of her first, Grey, husband; and of the moment when her second husband’s crown had been snatched back from him in 1470. Richard, Duke of Gloucester must have remembered that the last two dukes of Gloucester, Henry VI’s uncle Humfrey and Richard II’s uncle Thomas Woodstock, both holders of the reins during a royal minority, had both died imprisoned. Moreover, he would have recalled all too clearly the time of Henry VI’s insanity, when Marguerite of Anjou attempted to take over in her infant son’s name. With Elizabeth Woodville manoeuvring in London, it must have seemed a most alarming precedent.
Richard, as the only royal uncle of the new boy king Edward V, had recent custom on his side. It was his uncles who had governed for the infant Henry VI. What is more, Richard was aligned with the ‘king’s men’ led by Lord Hastings, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Suffolk and the Earl of Lincoln (the latter two being respectively brother-in-law and nephew of Edward IV through his sister Elizabeth). Buckingham had reputedly never forgiven Elizabeth Woodville for marrying him, as a child, to another Woodville sister whom he considered beneath him; and he may have felt that the Woodvilles had deprived him of the influence in Wales that his landholdings on the Welsh border should have allowed him to enjoy. Hastings and the queen had a different quarrel, says More: she was not only resentful of ‘the great favour the King bare him [but] also for that she thought him secretly familiar with the King in wanton company’.
More describes a deathbed scene, with Hastings, like the queen and her eldest Grey son, among the leading players. He gives Edward a moving speech: ‘in these last words that ever I look to speak with you: I exhort you and require you all, for the love that you have ever born to me, for the love that I have ever born to you, for the love that our lord beareth to us all, for this time forward, all griefs forgotten, each of you love other.’ (‘If you among your selves in a child’s reign fall at debate, many a good man shall perish and haply he, too, and you, too, ere this land find peace again’, More has him add prophetically.) They all agreed – but whether they would keep their agreement once Edward had died was another story.
The council met immediately, and Elizabeth Woodville met with them. There was, however, no question of her having an actual regency; nor of her having even the measure of influence she had been given when her husband went to France in 1475, or the generous measure of control handed to her when her son’s council as Prince of Wales had been set up. Her husband was dead, his wishes no longer paramount.
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Perhaps there was never any question of a regency as such. What Henry VI’s senior uncle had held in the king’s infancy was a protectorate, which allowed the incumbent to ‘protect’ prince and state but without assuming regal powers. Some said that Edward IV had wanted his brother Richard to occupy such a position. But Richard was not in London to make any claim: he must have felt that events had overtaken him, just as Elizabeth must have felt herself cast adrift by the sudden loss of the man from whom all her influence had derived. But for the Woodvilles in general this looked like an opportunity to grasp even greater power. It was, after all, they in whose company and under whose guidance the new young king had been brought up.