Blood Sisters (36 page)

Henry had instituted new forms of taxation to fund a campaign against Scotland when, in the early summer of 1497, news came of trouble at the opposite end of his kingdom. The Cornishmen were in rebellion against the tax and calling for the dismissal of Henry’s money-raisers Morton and Bray – Margaret Beaufort’s former men. The news caught the royal party at Sheen; the queen and her son Henry moved to London and Margaret Beaufort’s house of Coldharbour. A week later, as news came of the rebels’ approach as close as Farnham, Elizabeth of York – like her mother before her, and with her own memories – took to the Tower for refuge. The main battle was as close as Blackheath, only a mile or two from the royal nursery palace of Eltham – but fortunately, on 17 June it was Henry who emerged the victor.

At the end of the summer, however, Warbeck, urged on by James, was back, this time leaving Scotland by sea. His wife set sail with him – shades of Anne and Isabel Neville – which may indicate that Scotland was finally tiring of its puppet princeling; that this was to be a last throw of the dice. They landed in Cornwall, the site of the recent May rebellions, where, sending the ladies to St Michael’s Mount for safety, Warbeck/Richard declared himself king.
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As Henry marched west Elizabeth and her young son went east, on pilgrimage to Walsingham. It got them out of the way of danger, without looking too panicky. But Warbeck seems to have been the one who was really unnerved – by the first fighting, along with the news that Henry was on the way. Fleeing into sanctuary, he was persuaded to surrender and confessed to being a fraud. The confession was widely circulated in Europe: Margaret in Burgundy must have heard it. Coincidentally or otherwise, that summer she was taken ill. Vergil wrote that news of the capture ‘made her weep many tears for her prince’.

Warbeck wrote to his real mother, Katherine Warbeque, telling her the story of how he had left home for Antwerp and there been taken into the service of Sir Edward Brampton – the man sent to negotiate a marriage for Richard III in Portugal – who had taken him to that country. From here a new employer, Pregent Meno, had taken him to Ireland where he was first taken for a Plantagenet. It was a curious story, made more curious by the fact that both Brampton and Meno had come into King Henry’s service; by the doubt expressed by many that a boatman’s son could so convincingly play the prince; and, perhaps, by the handling the pseudo-royal couple received.

Warbeck’s wife Katherine Gordon is interesting for the light her treatment
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casts upon Henry VII, and perhaps on Elizabeth too. Katherine – like Elizabeth Woodville before her – had to be ‘much talked to’ before she would relinquish the privileges of sanctuary. But from the start it was obvious that she would be dealt with kindly. It may have been just the single most striking example of the way in which women were often regarded as exempt from the penalties levied on their menfolk, or something more personal – a reputation for beauty that had gone before her. Henry’s letters spoke of her as being ‘in dole’ – mourning; and literal mourning, rather than just grief for her husband’s capture. This may have been for a lost or stillborn child. When she was able to travel Henry sent black clothes in which she could do so: satin dress, riding cloak – everything down to hose and shoes. Vergil said that when Henry saw her he was much taken or, as Hall put it, ‘began then a little to fantasy her person’. His concern took an overtly paternal form, providing all the practical necessities of life as well as sober matrons to accompany her ‘because she was but a young woman’.

When Henry (so his pet writer, blind Bernard André, wrote in a private volume for the king’s own pleasure) arranged a meeting with her husband, Katherine, ‘with a modest and graceful look and singularly beautiful, was brought into the king’s presence in an untouched state’. Henry, as André tells it, made a long speech to this quasi-maiden – apparently considered, since the man she thought she had married never existed, to have attained the state of honorary virginity almost as a queen did before her coronation – telling her that life ahead would have ‘many possibilities’. As Warbeck was forced to repeat his confession to her Katherine burst out into a torrent of lamentation and recrimination, ‘soaked through with a fountain of tears’. Only one man could now be her saviour – Henry himself, naturally.

It was natural that Katherine should be taken into the queen’s household, the obvious place for one of her undisputed noble birth. Perhaps, too, there was an implication that there had never been a grain of truth in Warbeck’s pretensions, so there was no danger in putting Katherine into a position where she could give Elizabeth dangerous information or conspire with her Yorkist connections in any way. It is probably also true that Henry could now feel sure his wife was too committed to the future of her own offspring to be moved by any older loyalty. Certainly Elizabeth seems to have accepted Katherine as one of her ladies, with the high place appropriate to her rank. If Elizabeth had any other reason for warmth towards the girl who had thought to be her sister-in-law, she concealed it. And if, conversely, she had any suspicion of her husband’s feelings for Katherine, it would seem she was prepared, as her mother had done, to turn a blind eye. (After the queen’s death – and the funeral at which she laid the fourth pall, right after the queen’s sisters – Henry was said to have kept Katherine so close it was rumoured they had married. In fact, remaining in England after Henry’s death, she made three more marriages with English gentlemen, retaining a particular friendship for the daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s sister Cecily.)

The noble Katherine was one thing. But, extraordinarily, even Warbeck was brought to court and treated with surprising leniency. The Venetian ambassador reported only that he and Katherine were forbidden to sleep together, implying that otherwise he was handled courteously.

It has often been suggested over the years that Perkin Warbeck did indeed have Plantagenet blood in his veins – not as the legitimate Duke of York, but as a Plantagenet bastard. True, Edward IV and his brother Richard had acknowledged other illegitimate children; but the decision to do so must to some degree have depended on the mother’s position. And the bastard child of a royal woman might be a different story.

It was thought even at the time that Warbeck might possibly be Margaret of Burgundy’s illegitimate son.
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In 1495 Maximilian had apparently said so, and Maximilian was close to her. This may well have been just another example of a man using a woman’s reputation as an expendable tool of political expediency – the idea has to be seen in the context both of earlier slurs on her reputation and of the regularity with which such slurs were cast upon a woman who transgressed in any way. But the time of a pregnancy would have been in 1473 when she had disappeared for two months to the palace of Ten-Noode, commonly used for recuperation.

Elizabeth of York, who must now have seen Warbeck, though not necessarily at close quarters, appears never to have made any public comment (unless her kindness to Katherine Gordon were a comment of sorts). On 11 October at Woodstock the family certainly put on a good, united display for the visiting Venetian envoy, who found Elizabeth ‘at the end of the hall, dressed in cloth of gold’, with her mother-in-law on one side of her and Prince Henry on the other.

Margaret Beaufort was still travelling incessantly with her son. In the summer of 1498 she and the king were together at London, Westminster, Sheen and Windsor (where Margaret ordered brooches for her grandchildren), then on a tour of eastern counties. Her house was now a gathering place. Her carver Henry Parker remembered how, when serving her at New Year, he had twenty-five knights following him; how the men at her table included her husband and her half-brother Lord Welles as well as the Bishop of Lincoln, while Cecily Welles (Elizabeth of York’s sister) shared her own cloth of state. ‘In her hall from nine of the clock till it was seven of the clock at night as fast as one table was up another was set, no poor man was denied at that said feast of Christmas if he were of any honesty.’ It was an almost royal liberality. Margaret seems to have had a genuine liking for Cecily, the young woman who was at once her niece-in-law and (through marriage to Lord Welles) her sister-in-law, arranging permission for her to worship with Margaret’s own household.

When Lord Welles died, Margaret took care of her; and when she made an unsanctioned second marriage with a man of much lower rank, interceded with the angry king to ensure that Cecily was allowed to keep a good portion of her estates. Both Cecily’s daughters died in or before 1499, and maybe Margaret found it easier to relate to those who shared her awareness of sorrow.

Her household had its lighter side, too – she employed a fool named Skyp, for whom high-heeled shoes had to be bought, and ‘Reginald the idiot’; gave money to visiting dancers, and turned the house over one Christmas to an ‘abbot of misrule’. One April she had a ‘house of boughs’ built in which to dine. And once she paid a man to go on pilgrimage for her – because she herself was too busy playing cards.

In 1498 the ongoing negotiations for a marriage between Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon showed how far into the club of European royalty the Tudors had come. Elizabeth herself wrote to Queen Isabella. To her ‘cousin and dearest relation’ she ‘wished health and the most prosperous increase of her desires’; Katherine she described as ‘our common daughter’. ‘Hence it is’, the letter concluded, ‘that, amongst our other cares and cogitations, first and foremost we wish and desire from our heart that we may often and speedily hear of the health and safety of your serenity, and of the health and safety of the aforesaid most illustrious Lady Katherine, who we think of and esteem as our own daughter, than which nothing can be more grateful and acceptable to us.’ This arrangement had been another instance of Elizabeth and her mother-in-law working together:

The Queen and the mother of the King wish that the Princess of Wales [Katherine] should always speak French with the Princess Margaret [the daughter of Mary of Burgundy, raised in France] who is now in Spain, in order to learn the language, and to be able to converse in it when she comes to England. This is necessary, because these ladies do not understand Latin, and much less, Spanish. They also wish that the Princess of Wales should accustom herself to drink wine. The water of England is not drinkable, and even if it were, the climate would not allow the drinking of it.

That year the Spanish envoy de Ayala was reporting to Ferdinand and Isabella that a marriage between the Scottish king and Henry’s daughter had many ‘inconveniences’. The English king said that his wife and mother-in-law joined forces to protect their daughter and granddaughter Margaret, who ‘has not yet completed the ninth year of her age, and is so delicate and weak [
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] that she must be married much later than other young ladies. Thus it would be necessary to wait at least another nine years.’ Besides his own doubts, Henry said, ‘the Queen and my mother are very much against this marriage. They say if the marriage were concluded, we should be obliged to send the Princess directly to Scotland, in which case they fear the King of Scots would not wait, but injure her, and endanger her health.’ If her granddaughter and namesake took after Margaret Beaufort in stature, the elder lady was clearly determined she should not share her fate.

The year 1498 also saw an attempt by Perkin Warbeck to escape. Vergil wrote that friends pushed him into it and his wife may have urged it – but it is also possible that he had been lured into it by servants of King Henry, now anxious (since Warbeck’s presence was proving a hindrance to the Spanish match) to find an excuse to do away with him. Afterwards he was kept in much stricter conditions, and indeed moved to the Tower. This move was shortly followed by the arrival of a trade delegation from Burgundy headed by the Bishop of Cambrai and bearing, so said the Spanish ambassador, a formal apology to King Henry from Margaret, perhaps humbling herself in a last attempt to get clemency for her protégé. The bishop asked if he might see the young man. When taxed with having deceived his benefactress, Warbeck ‘swore to God that Duchess Madame Margaret knew as well as himself that he was not the son of King Edward’. The Spaniard reported that Henry wanted to proceed against the duchess, but that Philip of Burgundy and his new wife would not allow it. If Margaret were a mother of sorts to Warbeck she had played that part, too, to Philip; and now Burgundy’s ruler stood by her.

At the end of February 1499, Elizabeth of York gave birth to another son at Greenwich. Margaret Beaufort was again the godmother, making generous presents to the midwife and nurses, and a christening gift worth
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100. But maybe some frailty in the baby Edmund – who died sixteen months later – was linked to concern over his mother’s health. The Spanish envoy wrote to his monarchs that ‘There had been much fear that the life of the Queen would be in danger, but the delivery, contrary to expectation, has been easy. The christening was very splendid, and the festivities such as though an heir to the Crown had been born.’

In 1499 the great Renaissance scholar Erasmus was taken by his friend Thomas More to visit the royal nursery at Eltham, and described what he found: nine-year-old Henry (‘already with a certain royal demeanour’), flanked on his right by eleven-year-old Margaret, and ‘on the left Mary was playing, a child of four. Edmund was an infant in arms.’ It sounds as solid a family group as, a generation before, the York family; although, as in the York family, the eldest son had been taken to live outside his mother’s direct care and be trained in kingship. With the threats from pretenders receding, the Tudors seemed to be breaking through into a new era of stability. Perhaps now Margaret Beaufort felt she could safely turn her attention elsewhere.

At the turn of the century Margaret spent lavishly on a new series of buildings against the gates of her principal residence, Collyweston in Northamptonshire: a council chamber, a building where those who came to deal with legal matters could receive attention without impinging on the domestic side of the household, and a prison. Margaret Beaufort’s house was now not only a palace – with jewel house and presence chamber, library and pleasure grounds – but an administrative centre for the king’s authority in the Midlands and further north.