Authors: Sarah Gristwood
It was probably November 1484 when Henry began sending letters to England, trying to garner support. Their style suggested he was already king: ‘Being given to understand your good devoir and entreaty to advance me to the furtherance of my rightful claim, due and lineal inheritance of that crown, and for the just depriving of that homicide and unnatural tyrant, which now unjustly bears dominion over you …’ The letters were signed ‘H.R.’ – Henricus Rex.
In retaliation, on 7 December Richard issued a proclamation against Henry which poured scorn on his rival’s pretensions to a royal estate ‘whereunto he hath no manner interest, right, or colour’, and warning of ‘the most cruel murders, slaughters, robberies and disinheritances that were ever seen in any Christian Realm’. It must have felt like an insult also to Margaret Beaufort in isolation in the north. Richard was trying to chip away at her alliances and accessories: her useful tool Reginald Bray had been given a pardon at the beginning of the year: now pardons were extended also to Morton and, the following spring, to Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Richard.
On the other hand, Henry’s band in exile had for some time now included a number of Stanley affiliates. And when, towards the end of 1484, they were joined by the dedicated and militarily experienced Lancastrian Earl of Oxford, who for some years had been a high-profile prisoner of the Yorkist regime, Molinet claimed that the advice of Lord Stanley had been key to his custodian’s decision to let him escape. There must, indeed, have been a perverse, edgy reassurance for the Lancastrians in the very importance Richard had come to attach to the Tudor threat. Step by step, Henry was gaining ground. He now instructed Bishop Morton to seek the papal dispensation necessary for him to marry Elizabeth of York. The kingdom still held quiet under Richard’s rule, but it was becoming increasingly clear that something had to break.
The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom,
And Anne my wife hath bid this world good night.
Richard III
, 4.3
On 6 January 1485, the English court celebrated the festival of Epiphany with particular splendour. There would have been seasonal rituals such as the burning of an oak log to draw heat back into the earth, together with the licensed revelry of the fools and the more malicious clowning of whichever young courtier had been appointed Lord of Misrule for the day. The king made a point of appearing ‘with his crown’. But it is easy to surmise that Richard was not naturally lively that day.
Crowland wrote that ‘while [Richard] was keeping this festival with remarkable splendour in the great hall … news was brought to him on that very day, from his spies beyond sea, that, notwithstanding the potency and splendour of his royal state, his adversaries would, without question, invade the kingdom during the following summer’. The king’s reaction to certain news at last was to declare that ‘there was nothing that could befall him more desirable, in as much as he imagined that it would put an end to all his doubts and troubles’. But among the other courtiers, the news must have sent a ripple of unease through the party mood.
Perhaps the women of the royal household were trying to keep things merry. Not that Richard’s queen, Anne Neville, can have found it any easier than he. Anne had been in poor health for months, and in the hothouse atmosphere of a palace she could hardly fail to have known that courtiers and diplomats were speculating on what would happen if, as looked increasingly likely, she were to die. She had the company of her elder nieces, who were spending Christmas at court. Buck says that Elizabeth Woodville sent her four younger daughters along to ‘colour’ the appearance of the eldest, Elizabeth of York: ‘[And t]he queen regnant entertained also the young ladies with all her courtesies and gracious caresses, and especially the Lady Elizabeth, whom she used with so much family[arity] and kindness as if she had been her own sister.’ They were, after all, hardly a decade apart in age. ‘But the queen had small joy and little pleasure in the festi[val and] pompous time, because she was sick and was much in languor and [sorrow] for the death of the prince, her dear and only son, and the which grieved her sorely.’
Indeed, Elizabeth’s company must have represented a very mixed pleasure for Anne. At the festivities (where, as the Crowland chronicler disapprovingly relates, ‘far too much attention was given to dancing and gaiety’) ‘vain exchanges of clothing’ took place between Anne and Elizabeth, ‘being of similar colour and shape;
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a thing that caused the people to murmur and the nobles and prelates greatly to wonder thereat’.
All the same, Crowland seems to suggest some point was being made. Despite that official declaration of bastardy, many still regarded Edward IV’s children as the natural inheritors of the throne. It was already being whispered that, if anything were to happen to Anne, a marriage between Richard and Elizabeth would square the circle of inheritance nicely. She was his niece, to be sure, but was there anything a papal dispensation could not legitimise? (And if there were any question over the papal dispensation that had allowed Anne and Richard’s marriage to go ahead, that could provide grounds for an annulment.) It ‘was said by many that the king was bent, either on the anticipated death of the queen taking place, or else, by means of a divorce, for which he supposed he had quite sufficient grounds, on contracting a marriage with the said Elizabeth’. Vergil described it as a plan ‘the most wicked to be spoken of, and the foulest to be committed that ever was heard of’.
At that Epiphany party, it is unlikely that anyone spoke openly of the possibility of such an alliance between Richard and his niece – but rumours were already flying. The marriage would be a severe blow to Henry Tudor. And Richard might have had other incentives, as Anne must miserably have realised. Elizabeth was a buxom eighteen; later in her life the Portuguese ambassador noticed her ‘large breasts’, while a Venetian diplomat called her ‘very handsome’.
‘In the course of a few days after this’, Crowland wrote, ‘the queen fell extremely sick, and her illness was supposed to have increased still more and more, because the king entirely shunned her bed, declaring that it was by the advice of his physicians that he did so. Why enlarge?’ the chronicler asks, maddeningly. But perhaps he trusted his readers to understand the coded message of ‘declaring that …’. It may be that Anne’s illness was infectious – or that Richard wished further to distance himself from her.
Elizabeth’s own supposed feelings were related by the seventeenth-century antiquary George Buck. In 1619, in his
History of King Richard the Third
, he set down a précis of a letter in which, he said, Elizabeth expressed her passionate longing to marry her uncle. She was, said Buck, writing towards the end of February to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, an influential magnate and once her father’s friend:
First she thanked him for his many courtesies and friendly offices, and then she prayed him as before to be a mediator for her in the cause of the marriage to the king, who, as she writes, was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and in thoughts, in body, and in all. And then she intimated that the better half of February was past, and that she feared the queen would never die. And all these be her own words, written with her own hand, and this is the sum of her letter, whereof I have seen the autograph or original draft under her own hand.
Not only surprising, but damning in several ways:
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the callousness of the fear that Anne would never die, the possible sexual implications of that ‘his … in body, and in all’. But there have long been doubts over Buck. Some have suggested that he could simply (especially when blinded by his prejudices) have misinterpreted a letter that he did indeed see; others that it was not written by Elizabeth, or not written at this juncture and in relation to this match. Indeed, a far less controversial marriage was proposed for Elizabeth very soon afterwards, and the words could be made to fit. At the most extreme, it has even been claimed that the letter was a total invention.
25
Buck himself may be the victim of an inadvertent injustice here. Several decades after he wrote his manuscript, his great-nephew (confusingly, also called George Buck) published a version of it. Buck’s modern editor, Arthur Kincaid, has discovered that this branch of the family had a track record of forgery. The surviving manuscript versions of Buck’s original show revisions not only by Buck himself but by his great-nephew: even more importantly, the earliest of them has been very considerably damaged by fire. In an article for the
Ricardian
journal Kincaid transcribed precisely what was (and was not) left:
26
< st she thanked him for his many Curtesies and friendly>
as before in the cause of<
>d then she prayed him ^ to bee a mediator for her to the K<
>ge
whoe (as she wrote) was her onely ioye and her maker in<
in
Worlde, and that she was [in] his, harte, in thoughts in<
and \ in / all, and then she intimated that the better halfe of Ffe<
was paste, and that she feared the Queene would neu<
In other words, the choice of the words ‘body’ and ‘never die’ were inserted by the younger George Buck in the gaps left on the paper, with the goal of producing a sensational and saleable text rather than one of historical accuracy. The gaps mean that the cause in which the recipient was to intercede with the king is unclear – the writer’s marriage to the king, or her marriage to someone else? Kincaid’s own conclusion was that ‘Elizabeth in her letter was referring to a hoped-for marriage – though not necessarily with the king’.
It does not seem wholly impossible that Elizabeth of York should have wanted to marry Richard. There was enough uncertainty in the air for her to be open to conviction that he was not responsible for her brothers’ deaths. Power is an aphrodisiac and this was the destiny for which she had been reared – a chance to come back from the wilderness. There may be a clue in the inscription she wrote on a copy of Boethius’
The Consolation of Philosophy
– ‘
Loyalte mellye
’ or ‘Loyalty binds me.’ It was Richard’s favourite motto. She also wrote, on a copy of the French prose
Tristan, ‘sans re[mo]vyr
’, ‘without changing’ above her signature, ‘elyzabeth’.
fn9
She wrote on the page with the mark that showed it was Richard’s property – but is that enough to show the unchanging loyalty she was expressing was loyalty to Richard? Not really.
Polydore Vergil sees it differently, of course. ‘Richard had kept [Elizabeth] unharmed with a view to marriage. To such a marriage the girl had a singular aversion. Weighed down for this reason by her great grief she would repeatedly exclaim, saying, “I will not thus be married, but, unhappy creature that I am, will rather suffer all the torments which St Catherine is said to have endured for the love of Christ than be united with a man who is the enemy of my family.”’ But Vergil would say that – a quarter of a century later, when he was writing, it was a Tudor age. The words ‘the enemy of my family’ might have applied to Henry as easily as to Richard; and Richard kept Elizabeth’s sisters ‘unharmed’ too, even those who were nearing maturity. What is more, if he wished to keep her away from Henry Tudor all he had to do was marry her to somebody else – not necessarily to himself.
Whatever the truth about Richard’s plans, there were certainly rumours of the possible marriage, if not necessarily of Elizabeth’s complicity. Across the Channel Henry heard them and feared loss of Yorkist support if the two York factions could thus be reunited. Vergil wrote that the stories ‘pinched Henry by the very stomach’, so much so that he began to seek an alternative match. He may have thought first of Elizabeth’s sister Cecily but, hearing tales that Richard had married her off, turned instead to a daughter of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the loyally Yorkist supporter of Edward IV who had cared for him when he was a child. But the message he sent proposing the match, says Vergil, never reached its destination; and in any case he must soon have heard that a marriage between Richard and his niece was no longer a possibility … . Unless, of course, the rumours of the marriage – rumours so discreditable to Richard – had all along been spread by Henry Tudor’s own party.
Anne almost certainly heard the rumours. Over the next few weeks her condition worsened; and the suggestion is that Richard hoped it would do so – even helped the process along. The king, said Hall, ‘complained to divers noble men of the realm, of the unfortunate sterility and barreness of his wife’; he did so especially to the Archbishop of York upon whom he relied to spread the word to Anne, ‘trusting the sequel hereof to take his effect, that she hearing this grudge of her husband, and taking therefore an inward thought, would not long live in this world’. Vergil even says that Anne, hearing the rumours, went to her husband ‘very pensive and sad, and with many tears demanded of him what cause there was why he should determine her death. Hereunto the king, lest that he might seem hard hearted if he should show unto his wife no sign of love, kissing her, made answer lovingly, and comforting her, bade her be of good cheer.’