Blood Sisters (21 page)

All the same, it seems likely she had an abiding sense of grievance – not least about her brother’s failure ever fully to pay her dowry. And there was a hint of mysticism about her religious feeling, despite the crusading practicality with which she tackled the reform of religious orders in her domain. In an odd echo of the dream that Margaret Beaufort once claimed to have had, Margaret of Burgundy figured herself as visited in her chamber by the risen Jesus. The scene is described in a book written at her request soon after her marriage; she had it painted, too.
²¹
In the vaulted bedchamber, by her blue and scarlet bed, Margaret kneels fully dressed on a carpet, waiting to kiss the bleeding hand extended to her.

A ‘beatific and uncovered vision’, He was, naked under His crimson cloak, displaying His wounds, instructing her to make ready the bed of her heart in which she was to lie with Him ‘in purest chastity and pure charity’, ready to receive His instruction that she should look well upon the fires of hell and the glory of God. Christ had entered her bedchamber so quietly that even her greyhound did not wake; but she was so wholly convinced of His coming that she kissed the covers of her bed His body had touched until the colour was worn away. The same fanaticism could also surface in her secular affairs, skilled and competent though she might usually be.

Now, in 1480, Margaret returned to England to encourage her brother in his goodwill towards Burgundy, to turn him away from the French, and to negotiate a match between Edward’s daughter Anne and Mary of Burgundy’s little son. The magnificence of the visit can be summed up in the lavish clothes and other textiles that were ordered; two pieces of arras [tapestry] ‘of the story of Paris and Elyn [Helen]’ to help furnish a house for the visitor’s use; 47 yards of ‘green sarsenet’ garnished with green ribbon for curtains; and ‘great large feather beds’. A hundred servants were given new ‘jackets of woollen cloth of murrey [purple-red] and blue;’ the Yorkist colours. Edward Woodville, sailing across the Channel to escort Margaret back home, was given a yard of blue velvet and a yard of purple for a jacket; the twenty-four men who rowed her up the Thames in the king’s barge after she disembarked from the
Falcon
at Gravesend sported jackets trimmed with white roses; an embroiderer called Peter Lambard was paid a penny for each small rose. The horses Edward gave her were harnessed in green velvet, embellished with gold and silver, and the reins were of crimson velvet.

Few princesses returned to their native land unless, like Marguerite of Anjou, disgraced and desperate or, in their widowhood, returned as surplus to the requirements of their marital country. This was different; whatever her brother may have thought, as he contemplated arranging for her a fresh match in Scotland, Margaret was here to carry out the agenda of her adopted land. As she was rowed upstream and into London, past Greenwich, round the great loop of the river, the city itself began to come into view.

Streets where the shopkeepers sold everything from silks to strawberries; hot sheep’s feet to Paris thread; peascods and pie; where an Italian visitor two decades later would write that in the fifty-two goldsmith’s shops in one road alone there was such a magnificence of silver vessels that in Rome, Venice and Florence together you might not find its equivalent. The Tower, London Bridge with its tall rows of houses, Baynard’s Castle came into view, and further ahead, past another green burst of country, the spires and turrets of Westminster: this was her own old home city.

A house had been prepared for her near her mother’s residence of Baynard’s Castle, as well as an apartment in the palace at Greenwich, her home in the first few years of her brother’s reign. Edward gave a banquet at Greenwich in honour of her and their mother; Richard even came down from the battles with Scotland to see her. Margaret’s older sister Elizabeth visited, too. Perhaps their presence made the absence of Clarence the more poignant; perhaps, too, there was some awkwardness in the adjustment of positions and protocols now that the youngest daughter of the house of York had become the dowager duchess of a foreign power. But the reforging of relationships would be important in the next reigns.

The celebrations went well; the diplomacy was more edgy. If he yielded to Margaret’s persuasions, Edward stood to lose his French pension and that flattering match between the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth and the Dauphin. As far back as August 1478 Edward had been pushing for Elizabeth’s French marriage to go ahead, but at that time Louis was less than keen; a son and heir’s marriage was too important a tool of diplomacy to be squandered lightly. So it was surely no coincidence that Louis now chose this moment not only to send over a delegation with Edward’s annuity of 50,000 crowns but to offer an additional 15,000 a year for Elizabeth until she and the Dauphin were actually wed.

The match that Margaret was offering may have been all in the family, but the bargaining was nevertheless keen. Edward asked whether Burgundy would compensate him, if promising his daughter Anne cost him his French pension; he also proposed that Anne should come without a dowry. Margaret had to send home for Maximilian and Mary’s opinion, and the result was a compromise. Edward would allow English archers to reinforce the Burgundian troops, and would declare war on France if Louis did not restore Margaret’s lands by Easter the following year. Burgundy would pay his pension if the French withdrew it. Anne would bring a dowry, albeit only half the one hoped for, but Burgundy would pay her an annuity until the marriage could be finalised. Margaret, meanwhile, gave her four-year-old niece a wedding ring (‘in the style of a circlet with eight fine diamonds and a central rose of three hanging pearls’) and a chain on which – until her fingers grew – it could be hung.

But no sooner had Margaret confirmed the details than she received word that Maximilian had negotiated his own truce with the French, doubtless using the current English rapprochement as leverage. She feared that Maximilian’s duplicity would anger her brother – in fact he took it with the calm of one who would have done exactly the same thing. Back in Burgundy, she felt she would have to explain to Maximilian why she had not been able to agree better terms. One can only hope she did not take the double-dealing personally, but merely as evidence that a woman’s diplomatic work is never done.

The visit ended as it had begun, however, on a note of personal happiness. Edward accompanied Margaret as she rode out of London, on her way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St Thomas à Becket. Before sailing from Dover she spent a week at the Kent estate of Anthony Woodville, talking books and philosophy. Margaret had sent William Caxton, who had been her financial adviser in Bruges, to England a few years earlier, and in 1476 Anthony had become his patron, translating books for him to print. A stream of works emerged from Caxton’s press in the yard of Westminster Abbey: Chaucer, Malory’s stories of King Arthur, Boethius’
The Consolation of Philosophy, The Mirror of the World,
Higdon’s
Polychronicon, The Golden Legend, Aesop’s Fables, The Life of Our Lady.

After this agreeable intellectual interlude Edward’s ‘well-beloved sister’, as he wrote to Maximilian, went home. She would continue to look across the Channel, as one of Edward’s successors would discover all too painfully. But, for the moment, England seemed established in comparative tranquillity.

The turn of the decade had seen business as usual for King Edward and his family. Elizabeth Woodville was now well established as a wielder of influence and distributor of patronage; endowing, for example, a chapel dedicated to St Erasmus in Westminster Abbey. The powerful group of traders known as the Merchant Adventurers had cause to be grateful for the ‘very good effort’ she put into helping them negotiate a reduction in the subsidy demanded of them by the king. Intercession had been made by several nobles, their records noted, ‘but especially by the Queen’. It is a useful reminder that these women were consumers and negotiators; patrons as well as parents; readers and (on their own estates) rulers. Even the young Princess Elizabeth had long had her own lands. On 4 November 1467 the Calendar of the Patent Rolls records a ‘Grant for life to the King’s daughter the Princess Elizabeth of the manor of Great Lynford, county of Buckingham’.

Some time in 1477 Elizabeth Woodville had given birth to a third son, George, who died in infancy. Her sixth daughter, Katherine, was born in 1479 at Eltham, a favourite residence, and her last child, too, was born there in November 1480. This daughter was named after St Bridget, the former court lady turned religieuse who founded her own order – a path of life that would come to seem prophetic in the family. When Bridget was christened at Eltham Margaret Beaufort was asked to carry her in the formal procession – a mark of high esteem. The godmothers were the baby’s grandmother Cecily Neville, and her elder sister Elizabeth of York.

Today the Great Hall at Eltham built by Edward, with its hammerbeam roof and its discreet ‘archers’ gallery’, where a bodyguard with drawn bows would stand facing the crowd as king and queen dined, can still be seen. And though their walls are now only ruins, it is possible to trace the pattern of the surprisingly tiny rooms Elizabeth would have used when she visited her children here – for Eltham was always the first choice as a nursery palace, and would remain so when Elizabeth of York came to rear her own children. It was a fit setting for a happy family.

And such the king’s family had been throughout the 1470s; Crowland described the court as filled with ‘those most sweet and beautiful children’. A visitor to the court in 1482 described the young Richard, Duke of York as singing with his mother and one of his sisters, playing at sticks and with a two-handed sword. There had been sadnesses too, of course, as when in November 1481 Richard’s eight-year-old bride Anne Mowbray died, followed six months later by Elizabeth Woodville’s fourteen-year-old daughter Mary, recently betrothed to the king of Denmark. But by and large, even after the new decade dawned, glimpses of the family are cheerful ones. There was a visit to Oxford, where they were joined by the king’s sister Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk. A set of signatures in an early fourteenth-century manuscript of an Arthurian romance – ‘E Wydevyll’ on the back, and ‘Elysabeth, the kyngs dowther’ and ‘Cecyl the kynges dowther’ on the flyleaf – suggests that Queen Elizabeth’s daughters may have been reading the book she had once owned as a girl.

A stained-glass window in Canterbury Cathedral depicts the royal family diminished slightly in number, but still in all its glory. It can be dated to 1482 or later by the fact that Cecily is shown as the king’s second daughter: until her elder sister Mary died earlier that year she had been the third. The king and queen, each kneeling at a prayer desk, face each other in the two central panels, with their children, similarly posed, lined up in order and dwindling size behind them. The two surviving boys have each a panel and a desk to themselves; the five surviving girls have to cram themselves into a matching pair.

The boys, like their parents, are garbed in royal purple cloaks over robes of cloth of gold, collared in ermine. The girls wear matching purple gowns girdled in gold, with flashes of jewels and fur at neck and hem, and their long yellow hair hangs down their backs. All are crowned or coroneted, all have an open book on the prayer desk before them; this was a family who knelt only to God. The panels would once have flanked an image of the Crucifixion under a depiction of the seven holy joys of the Virgin Mary, before the window became the target of Cromwell’s wreckers in 1642.

After the great reburial ceremony at Fotheringhay, it seems that the first daughter, Elizabeth of York, had been considered old enough to join her mother on other ceremonial occasions. In the Garter procession that marked the feast of St George in April 1477, the records note, the queen came to mass ‘on horseback in a murrey gown of Garters. Item: the lady Elizabeth, the King’s eldest daughter, in a gown of the same livery.’

Her later tastes and abilities indicate something of Elizabeth of York’s education. Her Latin was not fluent – she would later request that her prospective daughter-in-law Katherine of Aragon be taught French before her arrival, since English ladies did not usually understand the other tongue – yet she did learn to write, not by any means a given even for ladies of the highest rank. But Elizabeth’s was an educated family: her father collected books, and her uncle Anthony’s literary interests seem to some degree to have been shared by the wider Woodville clan. Later Elizabeth would hunt and shoot, keep her own musicians, play at games of chance and sew expertly, all of which were expected of ladies. What was perhaps less common was the degree to which Edward’s daughters learned to fill their imaginations with the world of written thought and story.

Of course high-born children grew up with Bible stories and the lives of saints, as well as tales from the allegories and spectacles of pageantry. In
The Treasury of the City of Ladies
Christine de Pizan had urged that: ‘A young girl should also especially venerate Our Lady, St Catherine, and all virgins, and if she can read, eagerly read their biographies.’ But Elizabeth and her sisters would have had an unusual opportunity to get their information and story direct. Their uncle Anthony had translated the
Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers
and the
Moral Proverbs
of Christine de Pizan; their mother too was a patron of Caxton’s.
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Elizabeth would have got to know the Arthurian stories, with their wildly mixed messages about a woman’s love and a queen’s duty, their tales of Guinevere and the other heroines maying and feasting, shamed and repenting. (Such books were dangerous, declared a contemporary at the Castilian court, ‘causing weak-breasted women to fall into libidinous errors and commit sins they would not otherwise commit’.) Elizabeth and her sister Cecily also wrote their names on a French story of the world and the funeral rites of an emperor of the Turks: here are mosques and minarets, slaves and strange palaces.