Authors: Sarah Gristwood
In earlier reigns a measure of control in the north had been deputed by Edward IV to his brother Richard, and by Richard to his nephew John. But Henry VII was an only child, and in the absence of other near relations he turned, as so often before, to his mother. Her brief may have been different from the one given to military men, but there is no doubt that Margaret’s was the ultimate authority in deciding the fate of every litigant who came before her council, whether it were a question of money owed between individuals or alleged disrespectful remarks made about the Tudor dynasty. In the early sixteenth century, and again in the early seventeenth, debates at the Inns of Court in London cited Margaret when suggesting that a ‘
feme sole
’ could, through royal commission, be made a justice of the peace; the king’s attorney declared that he had seen ‘many arbitraments’ made by her.
With men like the old ‘Kingmaker’ Earl of Warwick and Lord Hastings gone, power in the Midlands had fallen largely into the hands of the Stanley family. But the Stanleys were proving themselves dubiously trustworthy, despite being his mother’s in-laws. Henry needed someone on whom he could place complete reliance. That may be one reason why in 1499 Margaret Beaufort took another step towards independence.
At the beginning of the year, with the permission of her husband Stanley, the Earl of Derby, she undertook a vow of chastity. To do so would not be an unusual choice for a widow: in these years an increasing number were choosing to become a vowess, which entailed undergoing a ceremony of cloaking and veiling before a bishop and taking a vow of chastity, but without going to live in a convent, taking vows of poverty and obedience, or renouncing the goods and concerns of the lay state. But for a woman with a living husband, Margaret’s action was highly unusual.
She was now basing her establishment at Collyweston rather than at Lathom or Knowsley, the houses she had shared with him. There was no actual breach in their relationship – rooms were reserved for him at Collyweston – but he was in no position to resist. Not only was this a recognition of a state of affairs that had probably long existed, it was also to some degree a matter of state, since Margaret’s new administrative role required that she should be associated only with those of certain loyalty.
Also from this year, instead of signing her letters ‘M Richmond’ Margaret took to signing them with the quasi-regal ‘Margaret R’ – the ‘R’, of course, capable of being interpreted either as Richmond or as Regina. It was as if she were now crowned queen dowager, as well as being independent of any husband – even the one who had given her her son. But a letter to Henry probably written at this time is signed, from Collyweston, ‘your faithful true bedewoman, and humble mother, Margaret R’. There was certainly no diminution in the ardently expressed devotion which breathes from the document itself – addressed to ‘My own sweet and most dear King and all my worldly joy’.
The bulk of the letter is concerned with ‘my matter which so long hath hanged’ – a decades-old attempt to extract from the French ducal house of Orléans a sum of ransom money the Beauforts believed was still owed to Margaret’s grandfather. But there was still time among the information and instruction to assure Margaret’s ‘dear heart’ that if she should finally receive the money, ‘there shall never be that or any good I have but it shall be yours … And Our Lord give you as long good life, health and joy, as your most noble heart can desire, with as hearty blessings as our Lord hath gven me the power to give you.’ Margaret’s increased independence had only heightened her attachment.
In May the proxy marriage between Arthur and Katherine of Aragon had taken place, but Katherine’s Spanish parents were still worried about any threat to the English throne from ‘doubtful royal blood’. Nor, all too visibly, were all the old York interests reconciled to the Tudor dynasty: in July Suffolk, the younger son of Edward IV’s sister Elizabeth and younger brother of the Earl of Lincoln who had died fighting for Lambert Simnel, decamped abroad. He was persuaded back – this time – and Bacon said that, though he went to Flanders, Margaret of Burgundy was ‘growing by often failing in her alchemy weary of her experiments’. But shortly afterwards another young man appeared claiming to be Clarence’s son the Earl of Warwick. Henry realised his only safety lay in ridding himself of any such claim.
On 23 November 1499 Perkin Warbeck was executed, as shortly afterwards was the real Warwick, Queen Elizabeth’s unfortunate cousin. Henry said the executions were necessary ‘because the Duchess Margaret of Burgundy and the King of the Romans [Maximilian] would not stop believing that Perkin was the true and legitimate son of King Edward, and Duke of York; and the duchess had given him so much authority and credit, that it had to be done’. The fact was, of course, that it had to be done to facilitate the Spanish marriage, which, it was hoped, would move the Tudor dynasty on into the next century.
To Margaret in Burgundy Henry’s words must have cut deep – as, of course, they were meant to do. At some point in that year she commissioned a painting, derived from Rogier van der Weyden’s painting of the Deposition. There are plenty of other portraits of Margaret from which to recognise her long-nosed face: she is the Mary Magdalene lamenting at the feet of the deposed Christ, her crimson velvet cloak and cloth of gold robe caught by a belt trimmed with daisies – marguerites – and ornamented by a white rose. Indeed, her whole posture seems designed to draw attention to the flower which had become Warbeck’s symbol in his royal identity.
yet like
A queen and daughter to a king inter me.
Henry VIII
, 4.2
As the new century dawned, a new generation would be coming to the fore. Among Henry and Elizabeth’s children Prince Arthur was now thirteen and Margaret ten, fast approaching the age of marriageability; while the increased geographical distance of Margaret Beaufort from the court may have come as a relief to her daughter-in-law. In May Elizabeth went with Henry to Calais for forty days. It was partly to escape the plague, especially bad that year, and partly a matter of diplomacy: a meeting had been planned with Philip of Burgundy. The king took ushers, chaplains, squires, a herald, clerks, grooms and pages as well as guards – and so did she.
A month later the royal couple met Philip outside the walls of Calais at St Peter’s church, decorated for the occasion with tapestries and with scented flowers strewn on the floor. Philip had recently married Katherine of Aragon’s elder sister Juana; a new tie between Burgundy and the new English dynasty to replace Duchess Margaret’s adherence to the old one. The Spanish envoy reported that: ‘The King and the Archduke had a very long conversation, in which the Queen afterwards joined. The interview was very solemn, and attended with great splendour.’
The royal couple landed back in Dover on 16 June, but their pleasure at returning home was short-lived. Three days later their baby son Edmund died at Hatfield, and the heartbreakingly tiny coffin had to be carried through the London streets to a royal burial in Westminster Abbey.
There is, for once, no record of Margaret Beaufort having joined the Calais party. The Spanish ambassador had commented on the speed with which the trip was arranged: so perhaps Margaret was simply at Collyweston, too far away to join the party and outside the plague zone. If there was any element of her being left behind to deal with domestic affairs in Henry’s absence she may have been determined not to be wholly left out, for early next year she was writing her own letter from Calais ‘this day of St Anne’s, that I did bring into this world my good and gracious prince, king and only beloved son’.
Once again, her letter was addressed to ‘My dearest and only desired joy in this world’, and signed as from Henry’s ‘humble servant, bedewoman, and mother’. The first part of the document concerned, again, what Henry had next to do in support of his mother’s long-standing Orléans claim, pursuance of which may have been what brought her across the Channel. ‘I wish, my dear heart, an [if] my fortune be to recover it [the money], I trust you shall well perceive I shall deal towards you as a kind, loving mother; and, if I should never have it, yet your kind dealing it is to me a thousand times more than all that good I can recover.’ It was as if the common pursuit of money (and the power – or security – that came with it) had evolved into a shared language between mother and son.
In the same letter Margaret asked her son to enter into a small subterfuge to help her maintain good relations with her husband Stanley. Stanley’s son, who held offices on her lands in Kendal, had been retaining Margaret’s tenants to himself; rather than claim her own rights directly but tactlessly, she suggested the king send her a letter ordering that all her tenants be retained only in the name of little Henry, Duke of York, which would be ‘a good excuse for me to my lord and husband’. Perhaps, now Margaret was officially independent of him, Stanley was feeling a little jealous of his rights.
In May 1501 the Portuguese ambassador was writing home: ‘the queen was supposed to be with child; but her apothecary told me that a Genoese physician affirmed that she was pregnant, yet it was not so; she has much embonpoint and large breasts.’
Elizabeth too had troubles with her extended family. In August 1501 her cousin Suffolk decamped again, this time permanently, and made his way inevitably into the Burgundian sphere of influence. Caught up in the fall-out were Elizabeth’s nephew Dorset (the son of her half-brother, now succeeded to his father’s dignities) and her brother-in-law Courtenay, who was arrested and sent to the Tower. The queen’s financial records show her taking on responsibility for her sister Katherine and her Courtenay children: payment for their ‘diets’ and servants (two women and a groom at 14
s
4
d
a week) for bringing them to London, for their rockers, for their doctor – and, when medicine failed, for the burying of one small boy.
Suffolk’s timing was particularly galling in that it all but coincided with Katherine of Aragon’s long-awaited arrival in the country. Elizabeth’s officers were involved at every stage of her grand arrival in London from Plymouth, where she had landed. The ceremony was to be extraordinary, but Henry the puppet master couldn’t wait for the curtain to go up on his play. He hastily took his son Arthur south to intercept the Spanish bride on her journey – against the protests of her scandalised staff, who declared she had gone to bed. On his return to Richmond the king immediately reported back: ‘he was met by the Queen’s Grace, whom he ascertained and made privy to the acts and demeanour between himself, the Prince, and the Princess, and how he liked her person and behaviour.’ Margaret Beaufort’s
Book of Hours
recorded the progress of Katherine’s journey, and her town house at Coldharbour was being fitted out with expensive fabrics and other luxuries to entertain the wedding party. New ovens, freshly glazed windows, new liveries and Beaufort badges for the servants, and a carpet of ‘imagery work’ for Margaret’s own chamber had been ordered. Her comfortable London house even boasted a conservatory, to provide fresh herbs in the winter.
On 10 November the king and queen left Richmond on their separate barges for Baynard’s Castle, to be at hand for the festivities. On 12 November Katherine entered London, with an escort of lords. The king and Prince Arthur watched from a haberdasher’s house; and, so another contemporary document,
The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne
, described it, ‘in another chamber stood the Queen’s Good Grace, my Lady the King’s Mother, My Lady Margaret, my Lady her sister [Mary], with many other ladies of the land, not in very open sight, like as the King’s Grace did in his manner and party’. What Elizabeth saw as she peeked out of the window was a blooming fifteen-year-old with ‘fair auburn’ hair, and ‘rich apparel on her body after the manner of her country’, and ‘a little hat fashioned like a cardinal’s hat of a pretty braid with a lace of gold’.
Next afternoon Katherine was taken to Baynard’s Castle, with a ‘right great assembly’, to meet Queen Elizabeth, who welcomed her ‘with pleasure and goodly communication’, dancing and ‘disportes’. On 14 November the king and queen – with the king’s mother – stood ‘in secret manner’ in St Paul’s to watch the wedding ceremony from behind a lattice. It was arranged that the bridal couple should process along a walkway six feet above the ground to the specially constructed stage where their marriage would be solemnised – so that everyone could see.
Elizabeth watched while her son Henry escorted the bride into the church and her sister Cecily carried Katherine’s train. The Duchess of Norfolk led those who prepared the bed. Later, what did or did not happen in it would become a source of great controversy: Arthur (so it was reported almost thirty years later) boasted the next morning that he had ‘been this night in the midst of Spain’ but Katherine declared that she had remained as ‘untouched and pure’ as when she came from her mother’s belly. But at the time no one seems to have doubted that everything had gone as it should.
The celebrations proceeded as custom dictated, with mass followed by tournaments and pageants, dancing and feasting. At one moment the ten-year-old Henry, ‘perceiving himself to be encumbered with his clothes’, cast off his gown and danced in his jacket ‘in so goodly and pleasant manner that it was to the King and Queen right great and singular pleasure’. At the Sunday banquet Elizabeth, with her sisters and of course her mother-in-law, sat at a table in the upper part of the Parliament Chamber, ‘the table of most reputation of all the tables in the Chamber’ – another reminder that this chivalric world was hers by virtue not only of her sex but of her family history. After more tournaments and more spectacles, on the following Friday an armada of barges transported the royal party and their attendants to Richmond.