Blood Sisters (34 page)

They probably collaborated more naturally on family matters, acting in concert, in the years ahead, to prepare for Katherine of Aragon’s smooth passage into English life, and to protect Elizabeth’s daughter Margaret from the perils of too early a marriage. But all the same, if Elizabeth of York’s life was spelt out in big ceremonies and childbirths, she had her mother-in-law at her side in too many of them.

For the first decade or so of their marriage, reports of the royal couple’s movements almost always show that Margaret was with them; and she was often with her son when the queen was absent. Margaret was, of course, a woman now past the pressures of childbearing and rearing, which left her free to act almost like a male counsellor. At the palace of Woodstock Margaret’s lodgings were linked to the king’s by a withdrawing chamber where the two could be together, for work or leisure. In the Tower, again, her rooms were next to the king’s bedchamber and the council chamber.

A letter from William Paston describes how the royal trio ‘lie at Northampton and will tarry there till Michaelmas’, as though they were one indissoluble entity. A letter of Margaret’s from 1497 stated that the king, the queen and all ‘our’ sweet children were in good health – though by this time Queen Elizabeth would perhaps be able to act more independently. As Henry VII found his feet, Francis Bacon would later claim, he reverenced but did not heed his mother. Nevertheless, to keep a balance between the two women closest to him must always have been a juggling act.

This test of diplomacy can be seen in operation immediately after Elizabeth’s coronation, at the end of 1487, when the court spent Christmas at Greenwich. On Twelfth Night the king and queen wore their crowns, though the closest thing Margaret Beaufort could be allowed was ‘a rich Coronal’. When the king wore his formal surcoat and the queen hers, Margaret dressed ‘in like Mantel and Surcoat as the Queen’.

Distinctions were, however, made. Margaret had to walk slightly behind and ‘aside the queen’s half train’. After mass, as the king and queen dined in state, the king’s marshal ended the formalities by making ‘Estate’ to the king and queen and ‘half Estate’ to the king’s mother – the same as to the Archbishop of Canterbury. A letter from Henry VIII’s day
¹³
would concede that Katherine of Aragon, after the divorce, could keep the royal privilege of Maundy Thursday alms-giving; not as queen, but only ‘in the name of Princess Dowager, in like manner as my Lady the Kings graunt-dame did in the name of the Countess of Richemount and Derby’.

When the court moved on to Windsor for Easter 1488, and the royal trio wore their Garter robes to chapel on St George’s Day, the queen and the king’s mother were censed after the king; but only the king and queen kissed the Pax. Elizabeth of York was in one sense the senior partner here – she was the one who had ridden in her first Garter procession decades before. Here, once again, her ceremonial presence was probably more important for Henry’s legitimacy than was usual for a queen, irritating though that may have been to Margaret. When the two women were accorded the order of the Garter together, a song was composed to celebrate their togetherness: it was as if everyone needed to parade this odd duality, and to reassure the protagonists.

Despite his later reputation for miserliness Henry made frequent and generous payments to dancers, entertainers of all kinds, and especially musicians at his various palaces: Windsor, Westminster, Greenwich, Eltham, Sheen. It seems to have been an interest that he and Elizabeth, who kept her own minstrels, shared. The pair travelled together perhaps more often than was usual, which could be ascribed to affection, or to suspicion if Henry felt he needed to keep an eye on Elizabeth – or on any Yorkists who might be drawn to her, anyway. But it was certainly an economy, since a second household functioning quite independently would inevitably cost more. The Great Wardrobe accounts show him not only making her presents such as robes furred with miniver, but supplying household essentials such as beds and hammers.

Some regard the gifts of cash and communion cloths, gowns and gold wire as evidence of intimacy and affection; but they could be seen another way. Despite the lands settled on her, Elizabeth’s finances were not run like those of preceding queens and Henry often had to bale her out, undermining her independence, even though her signature on each page of her Privy Purse accounts shows that she had by no means chosen to abnegate this responsibility. Her lands and fee farms, yielding some
£
1900 in 1496, plus an annuity the king had extracted on her behalf from the town of Bristol of another
£
100, still amounted to less than half the income that Elizabeth Woodville had enjoyed in her day. Often in debt, borrowing money on the security of her plate, she was dependent on an ongoing stream of gifts and loans from the king.

The only surviving records of Elizabeth’s Privy Purse expenses date from later in the reign. Nonetheless, many of the sums disbursed must have been duplicated every year. The monetary recognition of the endless presents of food – pippins and puddings, peascods and pomegranates, warden pears and chines of pork. Wine and woodcocks, rabbits, quails and conserves of cherries, a wild boar and tripes. The small practical purchases a great household requires – baskets and bellows, bolts and barehides, two barrels of Rhenish wine and the perpetual ‘boathire’, for transporting people and property from one palace to another along the great watery highway that was the Thames. There were clothes for herself – a gown of russet velvet and white fustian for socks – and her servants: three doublets of Bruges satin for her footmen at 20
d
the piece, as well as money to the keeper of her goshawk for meat for his bird and his spaniels (27
s
8
d
).

In Lent, almond butter was brought to her – the rich man’s substitute, at a time of year when dairy fats were not allowed. She made many acts of charity. Money to nuns in the Minories, by the Tower, whose abbess had sent her rosewater; the burying of a man who was hanged, and money given to another whose house had burnt down. Support for one of the children who had been ‘given’ to her, and contributions towards the enclosed life of an anchoress. Funding for one John Pertriche, son of ‘Mad Beale’, right down to payment for the man who cured him of the French pox.

One story in the Venetian state papers does fit with the conventional picture of Henry’s miserliness. On 9 May 1489 the papal envoy wrote to the Pope: ‘we have, moreover, opened the moneybox
¹⁴
which the king was pleased to have at his court: we found in it
£
11 11
s
, which result made our heart sink within us, for there were present the King, the Queen, the mother of the King and the mother of the Queen, besides dukes, earls and marquesses, and other lords and ambassadors, so that we expected to have far more.’

The reference to Elizabeth Woodville is interesting. After her exile or retreat to Bermondsey she is supposed to have visited court on only one or two specific occasions, one of them being the visit of a kinsman the following November at the time of her daughter’s next confinement. But this extra, less well-known record of her presence some six months earlier suggests that, while she undoubtedly did live largely in retirement, her public appearances might have been more frequent, if not always conspicuously noted.

In autumn 1489 Elizabeth of York did indeed take to her chamber again. (It is possible she had also given birth, the year before, to another son, Edward, who lived only a few hours. Other sources suggest the birth of such a child but set the date considerably later.)

Allhallows-eve the Queen took to her chamber at Westminster royally accompanied; that is to say, with my lady the Queen’s mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, and many other going before her … the Queen’s chamberlain, Sir Richard Pole [the son of Margaret Beaufort’s half-sister], in very good words, desired in the Queen’s name all her people to pray that God would send her a good hour, and so she entered into her chamber which was hanged and ceiled with rich cloth of blue arras with fleur-de-lis of gold.

This time Elizabeth flouted the protocol her mother-in-law had enshrined by receiving a great embassy from France, which included a member of her mother’s Luxembourg family, after her retreat and ‘in her own Chamber. There was with her her Mother Queen Elizabeth, and my Lady the King’s Mother, but there entered no more than been afore rehearsed [some four dignitaries], saving my Lord the Queen’s Chamberlain, and the Garter Principal King of Arms’, said the chronicler reassuringly. Elizabeth’s daughter was born just as her tiny son Arthur was being made knight and invested as Prince of Wales. The baby was named for her godmother and grandmother Margaret Beaufort.

Eighteen months later came another, even more significant, confinement for Elizabeth. Prince Henry, the future Henry VIII, was born on 28 June 1491. But the months immediately following brought the start of a new trouble, which would haunt the new dynasty for the rest of the decade.

TWENTY
-
TWO

The Edge of Traitors

Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,

That would reduce these bloody days again.

And make poor England weep in streams of blood!

Richard III
, 5.5

The autumn of 1491 saw the appearance of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne far more dangerous than Lambert Simnel. Bernard André and Polydore Vergil, with their Tudor-inspired hatred of Margaret of Burgundy, suggest that Warbeck may have had his birth in that country – certainly birth in his adult, royal identity. Bacon tellingly uses the imagery of witchcraft, saying that ‘the magic and curious arts’ of the Lady Margaret ‘raised up the ghost’ of the boy Duke of York to walk and vex King Henry. But it was once again Ireland that first saw a pretender hailed as Richard, Duke of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s younger son – a claim that, however improbable, cannot be conclusively disproved even today.

By the summer of 1492, when Elizabeth of York was preparing to give birth to another baby, Perkin Warbeck was in France, treated as an English prince and used (just as Henry Tudor had been used before him) as a tool of diplomacy. Indeed, the tall, glowing young man – so like his supposed father Edward IV – seems to have owed a lot of his credibility to the fact that he looked and behaved like a king or at least a prince. The same, at the beginning of his reign, had been said of Henry.

At this timely moment, in early June, Elizabeth Woodville died at her convent in Bermondsey. The event cannot have been wholly unexpected; now in her mid-fifties, she had been predeceased by almost all of her many siblings. On 10 April she had made her will:

Item. I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my lord at Windsor, without pompous interring or costly expenses done thereabout. Item. Whereas I have no worldly goods to do the queen’s grace a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children according to my heart and mind, I beseech God Almighty to bless her grace, with all her noble issue; and, with as good a heart and mind as may be, I give her grace my blessing, and all the aforesaid my children.

She willed that ‘such small stuff and goods as I have be disposed truly in the contentation of my debts, and for the health of my soul, as far as they will extend …’. Less than a decade earlier, walls had to be broken down to get her extensive goods into sanctuary.

A surviving manuscript record shows that her burial was certainly as unostentatious as she had requested. ‘On Whit-Sunday, the queen-dowager’s corpse was conveyed by water to Windsor, and there privily, through the little park, conducted into the castle, without any ringing of bells or receiving of the dean … and so privily, about eleven of the clock, she was buried, without any solemn dirge done for her obit.’ The only gentlewoman to accompany her was one Mistress Grace, described as ‘a bastard daughter of king Edward IV’; which suggests Elizabeth Woodville had enough generosity of spirit to make a friend of a girl she might well have resented.

‘On the Monday’, so the account records disapprovingly, ‘nothing was done solemnly for her’ except the provision of a hearse ‘such as they use for the common people’, with wooden candlesticks and tapers ‘of no great weight’. Elizabeth of York was not able to take charge of her mother’s funeral, having entered her confinement (she would call her new daughter Elizabeth). On the Tuesday (the next daughter, Cecily, also being absent and represented by her husband) the three remaining unmarried daughters of Elizabeth Woodville arrived – Anne, Katherine and even eleven-year-old Bridget from a Dartford convent where she had been placed. With them came Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter-in-law the Marchioness of Dorset and her niece; also the gentlemen, led by Dorset himself. Finally the dirge got under way.

‘But neither at the dirge were twelve poor men clad in black, but a dozen divers old men, and they held old torches and torches’ ends.’ Still, the queen dowager herself had said that she wanted it that way. The grave had spared Elizabeth Woodville the agonising doubts that Warbeck’s mounting credit and credibility might have inspired. We shall never know what conversations Elizabeth of York and her husband had about the pretender, but a century or so later Bacon would have Warbeck in his character of Richard, declaring that on his delivery from the Tower he resolved to wait for his uncle’s death ‘and then to put myself into my sister’s hands, who was next heir to the crown’. It is an interesting hint that Elizabeth of York’s reaction to this putative brother was a matter for speculation even in this near-contemporary day.