Authors: Lisa Hilton
I Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, late wife to the most victorious Prince of blessed memory Edward the Fourth, being of whole mind, seeing the world so transitory and no creature certain when they shall depart from hence, having God Almighty fresh in mind … bequeath my soul into his hands … I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my said Lord at Windsor according to the will of my said Lord and mine, without pompous interring of costly expenses thereabout. Item, where I have no worldly goods to do the Queen’s Grace, my dearest daughter, a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children according to my heart and mind, I beseech Almighty God to bless her Grace with all her noble issue and wish as good heart and mind as is to me possible. I give her Grace my blessing and all the foresaid my children. Item, I will that such small stuff and goods that I have to be disposed truly in the account of my debts and for the health of my soul as far as they will extend. Item, if any of my blood will of my stuff or goods to me pertaining, I will that they have the preferment before any other.
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It is a heartbreakingly pathetic document for anyone to leave, let alone a woman who had been a reigning queen consort. Two years later, Elizabeth died at Bermondsey on 8 June. On the tenth, the twenty-seventh anniversary of her coronation, her body was transported by boat to Windsor, accompanied by her friends Dr Brent and Prior Ingilby, the executors of her will. Also in attendance were two ‘gentlewomen’, one of whom was Grace, the illegitimate daughter of Edward IV. Only one priest and a clerk waited to receive the cof fin. Two days later Dorset, princesses Anne, Katherine and Bridget and Edmund de la Pole arrived to hear a funeral service conducted by the bishop of Rochester. A clerk who witnessed the ceremony left a concerned account. ‘There was nothing done solemnly for her saving a low hearse such as they use for the common people with wooden candlesticks about it … never a new torch, but old torches, nor poor men in black gowns nor hoods but upon a dozen old men holding torches and torches ends.’
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The was not customary for the King to attend funerals, and the Queen was about to give birth, but neither were the senior magnates represented and the dean of Windsor, though
in attendance, took no part in the service. No one even bothered to ring the bells for the Dowager Queen. The sum of Elizabeth’s memorial was forty shillings paid out in alms by Dorset.
Even if the family were complying with Elizabeth’s request for a humble funeral, their negligence in arranging no Masses for her soul was extraordinary. By the late fourteenth century, the chantry tradition, which had been flourishing by the time of Eleanor of Castile’s death 200 years before, had reached its peak. An increased attention to the doctrine of Purgatory, in which the soul was believed to linger before attaining the purity required to enter Heaven, meant that intercessory prayers and Masses were vital to the safe passage of a loved one’s soul to Paradise. Fifteenth-century religious practice is characterised by this ‘obsessive anxiety’.
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Chantry foundations, essentially small chapels where funds could be willed to support intercessory Masses, were a form of private postmortem insurance for the wealthy. Elizabeth herself had founded a chantry for two priests at her chapel of St Erasmus, Westminster, in the 1470s to pray for the royal family. To leave no such provision was a serious risk; indeed, ‘to make a will without thought for intercessory prayer was near to heresy’.
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Elizabeth’s hope that her meagre possessions might serve ‘for the health of my soul as far as they shall extend’ gestures towards such provision, but given her evident poverty and the extravagant measures taken for most people of rank (47,000 Masses for Queen Eleanor in the first six months after her death, 10,000 for Cardinal Beaufort), it is literally rather damning that her family apparently made no efforts to augment her minimal arrangements.
Henry VII has always had a reputation as a grasping, miserly king, and his treatment of his wife’s family does nothing to dispel it. Elizabeth of York’s sisters, Bridget, Cecily, Anne and Katherine, were entitled by their Mortimer descent to a share of the Mortimer-Clare inheritance, but Henry quietly absorbed those lands into his own estates and did nothing to provide the princesses with dowries. This explains the relatively humble matches made by the daughters of Edward IV, for without dowries, diplomatic foreign matches were out of the question. Bridget gave up and became a nun at Dartmouth Priory, from where she corresponded with her sister for the rest of her life. Katherine married the heir of the Earl of Devon, William Lord Courtenay, and Cecily John, Viscount Welles, half-brother of Margaret Beaufort. For each of these marriages Elizabeth supplied her sisters with allowances of fifty pounds a year and £120-pound annuities for their husbands from her own privy purse. Katherine’s marriage was tainted with scandal — her husband was imprisoned for
conspiracy with the Earl of Suffolk — and Elizabeth arranged for the education of her children under Lady Margaret Cotton and provided them with clothes and necessities. When her elderly husband died, Cecily made a love match with a squire, Thomas Kyne of Lincolnshire, which outraged Henry, though he had only himself to blame, and Elizabeth and her mother-in-law stepped in to support the couple. Thomas and Cecily lived for some time at Margaret Beaufort’s great country house, Collyweston, near Stamford, but they and their two children were eventually obliged to retreat for economy’s sake to the Isle of Wight, where reportedly their circumstances were less than royal. When Cecily died in 1507, Margaret Beaufort paid for part of her funeral expenses at the abbey of Quarre, which was more than anyone had done for poor Elizabeth Woodville.
Elizabeth of York’s relationship with her ambitious, domineering mother-in-law has been described politely as ‘tinged with ambiguity’.
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Publicly, their relationship was cordial — they even went so far as to have identical outfits made up for the Christmas court of 1487 and their award of Garter robes the following year, with a celebratory song composed for the occasion, and rooms were kept for the Queen at Collyweston. Elizabeth’s first daughter, born in 1489, was named Margaret. The two women also worked together, as Eleanor of Castile and Eleanor of Provence had done, to protect Margaret from the perils of an early marriage when her betrothal to King James of Scotland was arranged in 1498. Margaret was just nine, and her grandmother particularly spoke from bitter experience when she expressed her fear that ‘the King of Scots would not wait, but injure her and endanger her health’. Yet it is hard to imagine that a woman as jealous of her son, ambitious and interfering as Margaret Beaufort could have been anything other than an insufferable mother-in-law. In 1498, the Spanish ambassador reported the dislike between the two women and the ‘subjection’ the Queen was obliged to tolerate. Elizabeth and Henry apparently had a warm, loving and faithful relationship, but there was no question who was the first woman in the King’s life. There was one interest in which the two women collaborated with apparent enthusiasm, and which, for Elizabeth, was a means of maintaining the traditions of her cultivated, literary-minded mother and her family: the development of printing.
The main figures in the Buckingham rebellion of 1483 had been Buckingham himself, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor, but their supporters were largely drawn from men who had served in Edward IV’s household. Among the 1,100 gentry and merchant figures who petitioned for Richard III’s pardon after the rebellion was the printer
William Caxton. It was Elizabeth’s uncle, Anthony, Earl Rivers, who had done more than anything to promote Caxton’s revolutionary printing innovations in England. Caxton’s patron in the Low Countries had been Margaret of Burgundy, Elizabeth’s aunt, and the first-ever printed book in English, the
Histories of Troy
shows Caxton presenting the text to Margaret in Bruges. The first book to be printed in England itself was Lord Rivers’s translation of a collection of maxims in French and Latin by Jean de Teonville, published as
Dictes and sayings of the Philosophers
, followed by his translation of Christine de Pisan in 1478 and a book known as the
Cordial in
1479.
Elizabeth Woodville was a keen literary patron, purchasing books from, among others, the chancellor of Cambridge University. Her copy
of The Romance of the San Graal
was passed down to her elder daughter, while Caxton’s
History of Jason
was dedicated and presented to Prince Edward in 1477 to help him learn to read. Caxton noted Elizabeth Woodville’s encouragement as ‘the supportacion of our most redobted liege lady’.
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The most intriguing connection with Caxton is his dedication to her of
The Knight of the Tower
while she was in sanctuary in 1484. In 1483, Margaret Beaufort had requested a copy of a French romance,
Blanchardin and Eglantine
, from Caxton, a text which remained with her throughout Richard III’s deposition and which she asked Caxton to translate and print in 1489. Since Caxton’s shop was located near Westminster sanctuary, it has been suggested that Lewis Caerleon, the physician used as a go-between by Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, may have smuggled the book to Elizabeth of York and her mother. The plot
of Blanchardin and Eglantine
closely mirrors the situation in which the imprisoned Princess found herself in 1483. With her betrothed husband in exile, Elizabeth, like Eglantine, had to remain steadfast in the face of her enemies while her beloved staked his life to fulfil his promise. In this, the transmission of books between royal women, which had always formed part of an informal network of patronage and power, becomes an instrument of female conspiracy in a gesture worthy of courtly romance. By later publicising the book, Margaret Beaufort was able to gloss over Elizabeth’s unfortunate carry-on with her uncle and augment her family’s prestige by guiding readers instead towards a romantic story which had parallels in fresh contemporary memory.
Elizabeth of York was also a customer of Caxton’s (though Margaret, typically, took credit for introducing him to the King), as well as of his successor, Wynkeyn de Worde.
Eneydos
was dedicated to Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Caxton’s final book,
The Fifteen Oes
, an appropriate selection
of prayers from St Bridget of Sweden, was made for Elizabeth and her daughter Margaret. There is thus a connection between Margaret of Scotland’s earliest vernacular commissions and Elizabeth of York’s patronage of the first English printer, placing the patronage of English royal women at the centre of a movement whose impact, during the Renaissance, was to be felt all over the world.
The baby whose birth had prevented Elizabeth from attending her mother’s funeral was named for her lost mother, but she died in infancy. Elizabeth was to lose two more children, Edmund in 1499 and her last child, Catherine, in 1503, but she gave Henry two healthy sons, Arthur in 1486, and Henry, Duke of York, in 1491, and two daughters, Margaret in 1489 and Mary in 1495. Henry may have been niggardly towards his sisters-in-law, but he was determined that the marriages of his children should consolidate the Tudor dynasty by connecting them to the greatest houses in Europe. Plans for Arthur’s marriage began when he was just a year old, and in 1489 the treaty of Medina del Campo provided for an alliance between England and the united Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile with the Prince’s marriage to Catalina (Catherine), the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. For Henry, this was not only a diplomatic coup, but an essential validation of his kingship. Catherine of Aragon, twice descended from John of Gaunt and the daughter of their Most Christian Majesties, was the most prestigious English royal bride since Catherine de Valois.
Arthur was the only one of Elizabeth’s children she would live to see married, and the arrangements for the wedding are a further indication of her marginalisation at the court so effectively dominated by Margaret Beaufort. After a decade of diplomatic stalling, Arthur was married in a proxy ceremony to the Spanish ambassador Dr de Puebla at Woodstock in 1499. Elizabeth wrote fulsomely to Isabella of Spain:
Although we before entertained singular love and regard to your Highness above all other queens in the world, as well for the consanguinity and necessary intercourse which mutually take place between us, as also for the eminent dignity and virtue by which your Majesty so shines and excels that your most celebrated name is noised abroad and diffused everywhere; yet much more has this love increased and accumulated by the accession of noble affinity which has recently been celebrated between the most illustrious Arthur, Prince of Wales, our eldest son and the most illustrious Princess the Lady Catherine.
But it was Margaret Beaufort who sent instructions to advise the Infanta on English customs and behaviour, and who made a list for the ‘convenience’ of Elizabeth’s household over the arrangements for the marriage. It was Margaret Beaufort who suggested that Catherine learn French as a means of communicating with her new family. Elizabeth of York already spoke French well, a reminder of the days of her early betrothal, after the treaty of Picquigny, when her father had teased her by calling her ‘Madame la Dauphine’, but it is often overlooked that she also spoke and wrote Spanish. Margaret Beaufort did not speak Spanish, and she was not prepared to be left out, so the Infanta and her mother-in-law would speak French. Margaret’s intention to control the new Princess of Wales is also reflected in the arrangements she made for Catherine’s household, in which several officials, the clerk of the signet, almoner and usher were shared with her own.
Before the marriage could take place, Henry was obliged to employ ruthless measures to convince the Spanish that he was able to maintain his rule over the kingdom. Lambert Simnel was not the only royal imposter. Since 1491, a young man named Perkin Warbeck, with the connivance of Margaret of Burgundy, the King of France and James of Scotland, had been presenting himself as Elizabeth’s vanished brother, Richard, Duke of York. As in the case of Simnel, it is impossible that any of the powerful movers of the plot actually believed in Warbeck, what mattered was keeping alive the image of Henry VII as a usurper and its attendant insecurities. Warbeck was received in Scotland by James IV after a brief appearance on the Kent coast, where he failed to attract any supporters, and in 1499 he was arrested in Hampshire. For a short period he was permitted to live in Elizabeth’s household, but Henry then committed him to the Tower. In a perfectly contrived piece of political theatre, Warbeck was then discovered to have been helping the Earl of Warwick, previously impersonated by Lambert Simnel, to escape. Warwick’s claim had always been an embarrassment to Henry, and now he created an excuse to execute both fake and true pretenders. Elizabeth was hardly unaware of the brutalities of realpolitik, but Warwick’s execution was a reminder that her husband could, if necessary, be as cruelly ambitious as her uncle.