Authors: Sarah Gristwood
At the beginning of October 1492 Henry launched an expedition against France – to protect his former refuge of Brittany from possible annexation by the French, and to punish them for their support of Warbeck. Margaret Beaufort, unsurprisingly, made a major financial contribution. In the event Henry spent only a brief time across the Channel: like Edward years earlier, he was happy to be bought off by a sizeable French pension. Before he sailed from England he did acknowledge that Elizabeth of York’s finances were ‘insufficient to maintain the Queen’s dignity’, and gave her reversion rights to her grandmother’s property whenever Cecily Neville eventually died.
So Elizabeth was left as her mother had been left, and government was nominally vested in her six-year-old son. Arthur was at Westminster, while Elizabeth seems to have been with her other children at Eltham, the nursery for her younger children; handy for London, an old favourite of her father’s and near her own favourite residence of Greenwich. But her absence from Westminster at this moment shows that she did not have even the limited powers that had been invested in Elizabeth Woodville long before. Nor did Margaret Beaufort, presumably: the times were changing and not, for half a century yet, in favour of a woman’s authority.
In November a major new player appeared on stage in the Perkin Warbeck drama. It was, predictably, Margaret of Burgundy, who some believed had been behind Warbeck from the very start, but who now met him openly. Despite Maximilian’s accord with Henry, the Low Countries had never ceased to be a refuge for Henry’s enemies. Nor had Margaret ceased to have contact with Ireland and Scotland, those traditional springboards for an English invasion. She had, indeed, been planning – spreading the rumours that a prince survived, rallying support – even before Warbeck appeared in public. Vergil said that she had found the boy herself – a suitable candidate for instruction. Bacon wrote that she had long had spies out to look for ‘handsome and graceful youths to make Plantagenets’. The French king told his Scottish counterpart that Warbeck had been ‘preserved many years secretly’ by Margaret. In a letter to the Pope, begging for recognition of her ‘nephew’s’ claims, she gave a garbled version of the biblical story of Prince Joash in the second Book of Kings, snatched from harm to be brought up secretly in the house of an aunt. Certainly Warbeck was now welcomed in Burgundy as a prince, and as Margaret’s close kin. Indeed, Vergil wrote that she received him ‘as though he had been revived from the dead … so great was her pleasure that the happiness seemed to have disturbed the balance of her mind’.
Margaret wrote to Queen Isabella in Spain that when Warbeck/Richard appeared in Burgundy she immediately recognised him as her nephew. She had been told of his existence when he was in Ireland, but had at that time thought the tale ‘ravings and dreams’; then he had been identified in France by men she sent who would have known him ‘as easily as his mother or his nurse’. When Margaret herself at last met him, she said, ‘I recognised him as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday or the day before … . He did not have just one or another sign of resemblance, but so many and so particular that hardly one person in ten, in a hundred or even in a thousand might be found who would have marks of the same kind… .’ She had, however, last seen the actual Duke of York in England when he was a child, some dozen years earlier.
‘I indeed for my part, when I gazed on this only male Remnant of our family – who had come through so many perils and misfortunes – was deeply moved, and out of this natural affection, into which both necessity and the rights of blood were drawing me, I embraced him as my only nephew and my only son.’ It was perhaps emotionally important that she was now, after Elizabeth Woodville’s death, his only mother. She intended – as the Latin is translated – to nourish and cherish him. The language was that one might use for a young child.
Warbeck/Richard wrote to Isabella too – vaguely, of the ‘certain lord’ who had been told to kill him but ‘pitying my innocence’ had preserved him. He seemed however to have got his ‘own’ age slightly wrong, though his praise of his ‘dearest aunt’ rang true enough. Isabella was unimpressed, but concerned about the fresh potential for unrest in the country where her daughter Katherine of Aragon was to marry. She wrote, woman to woman, to Margaret suggesting she should not be taken in. But Isabella’s caution would not necessarily be followed by the other rulers of Europe: a prince or pretender could always prove an invaluable pawn of diplomacy.
The news that the Duke of York was alive, said Bacon, ‘came blazing and thundering over into England’, breeding murmurs of all sorts against the king, and ‘chiefly they fell upon the wrong that he did his Queen, and that he did not reign in her right, wherefore they said that God had now brought to light a masculine branch of the house of York that would not be at his courtesy, howsoever he did depress [suppress] his poor lady’.
In 1493 Henry was writing about ‘the great malice that the Lady Margaret of Burgundy beareth continually against us’, in sending first the ‘feigned boy’ Lambert Simnel and now another ‘feigned lad’. He was invoking a concept popular at the time: that of the she-wolf or, as Edward Hall would later imagine Margaret, the ‘dog reverting to her old vomit’. Hall memorably described Margaret as being ‘like one forgetting both God and charity’ in her malice against Henry, seeking ‘to suck his blood and compass his destruction’; not just a she-wolf like Marguerite of Anjou, but a vampire as well. Hall (and Bacon after him) followed Vergil, who claimed that Margaret, driven by ‘insatiable hatred and fiery wrath’, continually sought Henry’s destruction – ‘so ungovernable is a woman’s nature especially when she is under the influence of envy’, he glossed. Vergil was probably swayed by Henry VII’s own perception of events, and Henry may well have been influenced by Louis of France – he who had cast doubts on Margaret’s chastity even before her marriage, just as he had impugned the chastity of Cecily.
Margaret of Burgundy, Bacon sneered, had ‘the spirit of a man and the malice of a woman’. Being ‘childless and without any nearer care’, she could devote herself to her ‘mortal hatred’ of Henry and the house of Lancaster: a hatred, Bacon claimed, that she now extended even to Henry’s wife, her niece. Certainly Margaret did not seem to regard Elizabeth’s role of queen consort as elevating the family’s status in any way. Her letter to Isabella had spoken of how her family were ‘fallen from the royal summit’, suggesting the situation could be redeemed only by a ‘male remnant’. Or perhaps she thought that for one who had been, in Vergil’s words, ‘the means of the king’s ascent to the throne’, a mere consort’s role was inadequate.
By this time Henry had discovered an alternative identity for the supposed prince – Perkin Warbeck, a boatman’s son from Tournai. That summer of 1493 an embassy was sent to Burgundy, warning Philip (now old enough to hold at least theoretical rule when his father Maximilian succeeded to the grander title of Holy Roman Emperor) that he was giving house room to an impostor. One of the envoys (Warham, the future archbishop), joked unpleasantly to the childless Margaret that in Simnel and Warbeck she had produced ‘two great babes not as normal but fully grown and long in the womb’. While Philip, and probably Maximilian behind him, raised men for the pretender, Margaret provided money. Not that she entirely lost her head over the affair: her ‘nephew’ was to pay his ‘aunt’ the remaining part of her dowry as soon as he came into his own – her promised wool rights, the manor of Hunsdon and the town of Scarborough.
In October 1494, in England, Henry VII created his second son Henry Duke of York – the title the younger prince in the Tower had borne. Arthur, as Prince of Wales, had been sent the previous year to take up residence in Ludlow, just as Elizabeth of York’s eldest brother had done. Prince Henry’s new title was a riposte to Warbeck; perhaps, too, a sop to any disaffected Yorkists and a reminder that through his wife the king had annexed also the Yorkist claim. Celebratory tournaments were designed as a chivalric fantasy centring on the queen, just as earlier tournaments had focused on Elizabeth Woodville and her jousting family. Margaret Beaufort was with the king and queen as they left Woodstock for the ceremonies in the capital; she was still with them three weeks later as they processed away from Westminster.
The queen was prominent in her state, the jousters on the first day wearing her crest as well as the king’s livery; but subsequent challengers could be seen in Margaret Beaufort’s blue and white livery, and she was one of the ladies who advised on the prizes, which were presented by her namesake, the ‘high and excellent princess’, little Margaret. In January 1495 Henry offered this daughter
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in marriage to the king of Scotland – the son of Elizabeth Woodville’s erstwhile prospective bridegroom.
The queen’s sisters were being married off too; Anne to the grandson of one of Richard III’s leading adherents, who might thus be reconciled to Henry’s regime; and Katherine, by way of reward, into the notably Lancastrian Courtenay family. Connections of the various women were, after all, still involved in machinations against Henry. In February Sir William Stanley – Margaret Beaufort’s brother-in-law, the man whose intervention had made all the difference at Bosworth – was found to have had contact with Warbeck and executed. Later that year the royal couple visited William’s brother, Margaret’s husband, at Lathom, ‘to comfort [the king’s] mother, whom he did always tenderly love and revere’.
A servant of Edward’s sister Elizabeth had been among those indicted in these years; and several of those in trouble over the Warbeck affair were neighbours of, or had been servants of, Cecily Neville’s.
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Cecily left money in her will to a Master Richard Lessy who had been involved in the Perkin Warbeck affair, specifically to help him pay the fine levied for his trangression, and requested that the king might curtail the charge; several of the others to whom she left legacies had connections with Burgundy and with Duchess Margaret. It showed that Henry could never really feel secure about his wife’s Yorkist connections, however amicable their personal relations might be.
On 31 May 1495, at Berkhamsted, Cecily died, being, as her will declared,
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‘of whole mind and body, loving therefore be it to Jh’u [Jesu]’, surrendering her soul into God’s hands and the protection of the saints; and her body, subject to Henry VII’s permission, to be buried at Fotheringhay beside that of ‘my most entirely beloved Lord and husband, father unto my said lord and son [Edward IV]’. She left a series of bequests to the Fotheringhay college – everything from mass books to ecclesiastical vestments – and to the abbey at Syon ‘two of the best copes of crimson cloth’.
She asks, as was usual, that any debts should be paid; rather touchingly ‘thanking our Lord at the time of making of this my testament [that] to the knowledge of my conscience I am not much in debt’. But it is the personal bequests that are interesting: an acknowledgement to the king; legacies to officers of her household; to ‘my daughter of Suffolk’ her litter chair with all the ‘cushions, horses, and harnesses’ belonging to it; to her granddaughter Anne a barge with all its accoutrements and ‘the largest bed of bawdekyn [a silk fabric with metal threads, like a less costly cloth of gold], with counterpoint of the same’. Her grandson Prince Arthur, heir apparent to the Tudor dynasty, got her tapestry bed decorated with the Wheel of Fortune.
Cecily’s granddaughter and godchild Bridget was left the
Legenda Aurea
on vellum, and her books on Saints Katherine and Matilda. A psalter with a relic of St Christopher went to Elizabeth of York, a portuous or breviary ‘with clasps of gold covered with black cloth of gold’ to Margaret Beaufort. It was yet another exemplar of how religion forged links between women who might find there a new lease of life after their years of marriage and childbearing were over, and after they were freed from their husbands’ enmity.
Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say amen.
Richard III
, 5.5
In late June 1495, Perkin Warbeck’s fleet set sail across the Channel for a first invasion attempt. His men landed on the coast near Deal but, lacking support, were forced to set sail again for Ireland; in November he made for Scotland and the court of King James. The two young men took to each other and, as Warbeck settled into the Scottish court, the king even married him to the beautiful Katherine Gordon, his own ‘tender cousin’. Warbeck was awaiting more arms from Margaret in Burgundy, but financial support even from that quarter seemed to be drying up since the country’s new young ruler, Philip, had withdrawn his support. It was a salutary reminder that cooler issues of broader Burgundian policy and of pay ran alongside Margaret’s emotional enthusiasm. In the treaty which, in February 1496, restored the damaged trading relations between Burgundy and England, Margaret was bound over not to give aid to Henry’s enemies, and she appeared to comply.
That autumn Elizabeth of York’s daughter and namesake had died of ‘atrophy’, aged three – or ‘passed out of this transitory life’, as her monument in Westminster Abbey described it. On 18 March 1496 another daughter, Mary, was born.
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Amid fears of an invasion, Margaret Beaufort and her son now toured her Dorset estates, winding up at the improved and impressive castle of Corfe, traditionally a Beaufort property. Tensions were still running high. It was in that year that she sent a letter to the Earl of Ormond thanking him for a gift of gloves sent from Flanders – ‘right good’, she said, but too big for her hand. ‘I think the ladies in that parts be great ladies all, and according to their great estates they have great personages’ – a crack from the petite Margaret Beaufort about the solidly built Margaret of Burgundy. In September 1496 James of Scotland and his protégé Warbeck rode south with a 1400-strong army; but it was little more than a raiding party and they soon returned across the border.