Authors: Lisa Hilton
Catherine of Aragon arrived in England in 1501, after a crossing that was dreadful, even by the standards of previous queens-in-waiting. She and Arthur were married on 14 November at St Paul’s, after a nod to the Yorkist origins of the groom’s mother in a progress down the Thames to the home of the indomitable Duchess of York, Cecily Neville. The
wedding was followed by a week of pageants and tournaments, in which challengers hung their shields on a Tree of Chivalry, watched by the royal ladies from a specially erected stand in Westminster yard. Henry’s famous meanness made itself apparent in the pageants, which featured great emphasis on four model beasts, two lions, a hart and an elk, with two men inside each. These were not new: Henry had simply had them painted up from previous celebrations. Relentlessly, throughout the week, the beasts appeared.
For Christmas at Richmond, though, Henry was prepared to spare no expense. Elizabeth of York might be paying her tailor a regular twopence to turn her gowns, but Richmond Palace (on the site of Sheen, which Richard II had destroyed in memory of Anne of Bohemia) was to impress the world with the very latest in Tudor taste and convenience. Inspiration for Richmond had come from Elizabeth’s family. Edward IV’s stay at the Burgundian court as the guest of Lord Gruuthuyse had been extremely influential. Fifteenth-century Bruges was far from the tiny outpost of civilisation in a barbarous land that Matilda of Flanders had known: ‘The inhabitants are extraordinarily industrious, possibly on account of the barrenness of the soil, since very little corn is grown, and no wine, nor is there water fit for drinking, nor any fruit. On this account, the products of the whole world are brought here.’
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Burgundy was the capital of the Christian world for luxury, and Edward IV had come back to England intent upon replicating its magnificence. The reorganisation of the royal household in the 1470s was inspired by Olivier de la Marche, whom Edward had commissioned to write
L’Etat de la Maison de Charles de Bourgogne
(1473), a text upon which Margaret Beaufort drew for her own codification of etiquette for the Tudor court. As well as clothes, jewels and tapestries, Edward’s building projects demonstrated Burgundian influence. At Nottingham, the royal apartments were constructed on several storeys, attached by a staircase modelled on that of the Princehof in Bruges, and at Eltham Edward built a gallery and a raised garden with a view of the river. At Richmond, Henry VII included the ‘donjon’ design for the royal apartments, enclosed gardens and open-loggia galleries. A new chapel featured a private closet for Elizabeth to the left of the altar, with the King’s on the right.
In the Christmas celebrations floats shaped like ships, lanterns, castles and mountains carried costumed dancers and actors in direct imitation of Burgundian pageants. One wonders whether Elizabeth found her husband’s over-earnest imitation of the Burgundian dukes slightly embarrassing. She had been born royal, he had not. As an exile, Henry had
little experience of dealing with, or impressing, his English magnates. Surrounding himself with churchmen and civil servants may have earned him the accolades of posterity for his modernity, but his eagerness to follow his mother’s strictures on court practice and his incessant money-grabbing was frankly rather middle-class. Edward had made his court ‘the house of very policy and flower of England’. Elizabeth would have remembered the celebrations for the marriage of her lost brother Richard to the five-year-old heiress to the duchy of Norfolk in 1478, one of the great pageants of her father’s reign, when St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster was hung in blue and gold, coins were thrown to the crowd from gold and silver basins and Princess Elizabeth had presented a gold ‘E’ set with rubies to the winner of the tournament. She knew a good deal more about regal display than her cautious husband and his fussy, exacting mother.
Whatever Elizabeth’s private feelings about her Henry, she was publicly never less than entirely loyal to him. Her political involvement was minimal, as he evidently wished it to be, and she confined herself to educating her children in the exceptional tradition from which she herself had benefited and making small gestures of reconciliation towards former Yorkists, such as payments to servants of her father and a man who had assisted her uncle Anthony in 1483. However, she was prepared on occasion to defy the Tudors, as when a tenant of the Duke of Bedford appealed to her in a property dispute and she wrote to Henry’s uncle using the sternest, most formal eloquence of her position. She practised small, rather touching economies — the gown-turning, wearing cheap shoes that cost under a pound and paying her ladies seven pounds per year less than they had received under Elizabeth Woodville. How much of Elizabeth’s modest, pious, maternal image was due to her own nature and how much to Henry’s fashioning is hard to judge, but her queenship was very different in style from her mother’s.
If Edward IV was England’s last medieval king, then Elizabeth Woodville was his ideal consort. Sifting the calumnies and fabrications which have dogged her reputation, she presents a picture of an intriguing, impetuous, tremendously courageous woman in contrast with whom her daughter is inevitably prosaic, very much a consort rather than a queen. Generalisations being a disease of conclusions, it perhaps does not do to compare Elizabeth of York too unfavourably with her mother, but perhaps it is not going too far to say that Elizabeth Woodville applied her energies to a tradition of queenship that stretched back to Emma of Normandy, while her daughter anticipated an era in which, for the first time in more
than 500 years, queens were reduced to little more than decorative dynastic appendages. And yet Elizabeth of York was the grandmother of England’s first queen regnant, Mary Tudor, and of her unique namesake, Elizabeth I. It is fair to say that there remains work to be done on her influence on both these women. Like her husband, Elizabeth of York had been educated in a hard school. It is unsurprising that she chose to live quietly, and keep her own counsel.
After Arthur’s marriage in 1501, he and Catherine were sent, against Elizabeth’s wishes, to Ludlow to play at government. But by 2 April 1502, Arthur was dead. Riding through the night, a messenger from the marches arrived at Greenwich at midnight, and Henry immediately sent for Elizabeth to break the news to her. Bravely, she told him: ‘God has left us yet a fair prince and two fair princesses … and we are both young enough.’
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She then retreated to her chamber where she collapsed with grief, and Henry took his turn at comforting her. The Queen lived to receive her bewildered daughter-in-law, Catherine, back into her household and, just as she had promised, she conceived again. In January 1503 she travelled by barge from Hampton Court to the Tower for her final confinement. She died there, on 11 February, her thirty-eighth birthday, in the White Tower, shortly after giving birth to her last child, Catherine, who was not to survive. Henry ‘privily departed to a solitary place and would no man should resort unto him’.
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On 11 June 1509, Elizabeth’s second son, Henry VIII, married Catherine of Aragon.
CONCLUSION
T
he first text of Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
was printed by William Caxton a month before Bosworth field. If Bosworth may be taken, simply, as the date for the passing of the medieval age in England, then
Morte d’Arthur
, the chronicle of the rise and fall of Camelot, is that age’s fitting elegy. Romance does battle with treacherous, grasping reality, and reality wins. Sir Lancelot, the greatest knight who has ever lived, dies grovelling in shame, starved and shrunken, on the tomb of his lord, while the only four knights remaining of Arthur’s great brotherhood are dispatched to the Holy Land to die in battle with the Turks. Other kings will come, but as one Malory critic bluntly puts it, ‘We are not interested.’
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And the source of this desolation and decay? The catalyst for the fall of Camelot? A queen.
‘And so … in a May morning, they took their horses with the Queen and rode a-Maying in woods or meadows as it pleased them.’ Finely mounted in her green silks, Guinevere appears to us as vividly as a jewellike figure in a book of hours, the perfect embodiment of queenly grace and courtesy. Yet the consequences of her adulterous affair with Lancelot bring about knightly failure and political collapse. What does Guinevere’s portrait tell us about perceptions of queenship at the end of the fifteenth century? One way of answering this question is to compare Malory’s image of queenship with that of a writer from the very beginning of the period, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Beowulf’ poet. His protagonist is a lone warrior with the strength of thirty men who defeats two monsters and is ultimately defeated by a third. While initially it may appear that the two texts are divided by a whole culture, as well as seven centuries, both stories consciously invoke a lost past, myths or romances which were familiar to contemporary audiences, both investigate and criticise that past’s sense of ‘heroic’ values and both seek to make such questioning applicable to their
contemporary audiences. ‘Beowulf’, too, is elegiac, in that it celebrates the passing of the pagan warriors and their monster foes whose time is over. Yet ‘Beowulf’ proposes an alternative, optimistic form of a new heroism, one that is characterised by the ‘feminine’ values of its queenly characters. In a sense, it anticipates the chivalric tradition that Guinevere’s adultery dismantles.
But how does the analysis of these texts help us to an overview of English queenship from the period of the Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century? Surely ‘Beowulf’ and
Morte d’Arthur
are fantasies, escapist entertainments that served as distractions from ordinary life in the way that Hollywood films might do today? Yes and no. There is no reason to believe that Saxon or medieval audiences were any less sophisticated in their relationship with such entertainments than modern cinemagoers. They knew perfectly well that knights and dragons were not ‘real’, even if their world had more of magic and miracles in it than ours. Their fears, hopes and comforts were dramatised for them in storytelling and reading just as they are for us, and the creators of those stories were alive to the inferences and resonances that would be drawn from them. Malory, for instance, who had been in Warwick’s company in the north in the 1460s, has the wizard Merlin foresee the early death of King Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, and the consequent dangers to young princes represented by the ambitions of great lords — as topical a reference as one could wish for. Similarly, although the exploits of Beowulf take place in an ostensibly pagan world, the poet adjusts the inclinations of his characters to the expectations of his audience, rendering them ‘natural’ Christians. What makes these texts relevant, when read against each other, to English queenship, is how both centralise queens as instruments of the ideal, for better for worse, and this in turn suggests a distinct shift in values with regard to the always anomalous status of feminine power within a patriarchal culture between the eighth and fifteenth centuries.
Though there are more female characters in ‘Beowulf’ than in any other Old English poem, it can hardly be said to be ‘about’ women. The exploits of Beowulf and his thanes explore an almost exclusively masculine world. Yet of all the female characters, the five referred to by name are all queens, who observe rather than participate in the enthusiastically bloodthirsty violence of Beowulf s adventures. Nevertheless, by their presence, their gestures and their position as victims of the heroic ethos, they are in a powerful position to offer both a comment on that ethos and an alternative to it. Essentially, they challenge the values of Beowulf s world, both as emblems of their human cost and as transmitters of a
Christianised world view which posits a new ideal of the heroic, in which battles are not fought against giants but against sin: ‘The “Beowulf” poet mobilises feminine voices to prescribe a new model of heroism premised on turning the violent energies of heroic self-assertion inward.’
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this argued in the poem? At first, the roles of the queens appear to be conventional. The women are presented as participating in traditional heroic life in three ways, as the gracious hostesses in their lords’ halls, as the bestowers of treasure and as the peace-weavers. After Beowulf has slain the man-eating monster Grendel, Queen Wealtheow appears at the celebratory feast, elegant in her golden collar, reminding her husband to speak ‘words of gratitude’ and declaring that ‘Here, each warrior is true to the others/gentle of mind, loyal to his lord? The thanes are as one, the people all alert/the warriors have drunk well/They will do as I ask.’ She presents Beowulf with a collar, bracelets and rings, treasures which diplomatically evoke ancestral memories for Beowulf s people, the Geats.
But Wealtheow’s poise is counterpointed by the examples of two other women. Before she appears, the warriors hear the story of Queen Hildeburh, whose political marriage collapses in the tensions between her marital and natal kin. She is pictured singing ‘doleful dirges’ over the corpse of her son, and is stripped of her treasure and returned to her own people. Hildeburh has failed as a peace-weaver, and the poet predicts the same fate for Wealtheow’s daughter, Freawaru, whose marriage will fail to effect concord between the Danes and their enemies the Heathobards. Although women have a crucial role in the maintenance of the social order, the price of adherence to the old-fashioned ethos of heroism is simply too high. Beowulf himself refuses to marry, as for him incessant warfare is incompatible with domesticity, but this has severe spiritual and practical consequences. When Beowulf divests himself of his weapons in order to fight hand-to-hand with Grendel, it seems initially that his gesture is heroic, but in a sense he is reducing himself to the level of a monster —‘life within a cultural group ruled by the logic of the sword’s edge is ultimately dehumanising’.
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Beowulf s lack fa wife reflects his insistence on the ‘old’ heroic model, but he is left without sons, and with no woman to pass the mead cup in his hall he is unable to establish the necessary affective bonds between lord and thane. In his final encounter with the dragon, his men desert him and he is killed. His death is all the more poignant because he has no children, his heroic virility to all intents and purposes fails him at the last and, just as he had no queen to love him, there is no woman to mourn him.