Authors: Lisa Hilton
There is an oddly elegiac quality to Polydore Vergil’s account of Richard’s death. Bosworth is taken as one of those convenient, and contested, points of English history, the moment at which the medieval age ended and a new era began. To contemporaries, this would have been less than obvious. Bosworth was just one more skirmish in a conflict which had seen the reigning dynasty overturned four times since the start of the century, and historians have been arguing ever since about the accuracy and relevance of slotting this battle too neatly into a periodic categorisation. Yet there is an inevitably appealing neatness about Bosworth, a resonance of Hastings, of two men on a battlefield staking their lives for their claims to the crown, a beginning and an end. ‘King Richard alone was killed fighting manfully in the press of his enemies … his courage was high and fierce and failed him not even at the death which, when his men forsook him, he preferred to take by the sword, rather than by foul flight, to prolong his life.’
Richard’s son Edward, the short-lived Prince of Wales, had been educated in the belief that his supreme duties were to his God and his king. His father had defied both. Peter Idley had warned of the dangers of trusting to fortune:
Shining as glass, that soon is broken …
Beware of that maid, for she is unstable,
Flee from her fast, and trust her never …
She is flattering and false and double of deed
And faileth a man ever at his most need.
CHAPTER 19
ELIZABETH OF YORK
‘A faithful love that did us both combine in marriage and peaceable concord’
A
lmost 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.
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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 IV’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.’
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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.’
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On 20 February Parliament granted her 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’.
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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 Westminster in 1489,
but aside from this her only notable excursion was in response to an invitation to meet the French ambassadors and her kinsman Francois of Luxembourg in November the same year. In April 1492, Elizabeth made her will: