Blood Sisters (31 page)

From London Margaret and her son went for two weeks to her palace of Woking, where they could get to know each other again and Henry could receive an extended briefing. Across the Channel he would have been kept informed of events in the realm, but he was too distant to understand the competing identities and agendas. Each new recruit to his band of exiles might have brought information, but each had his own axe to grind, and his uncle Jasper had been away as long as he. As mother and son walked in the late summer orchards Henry would have been able to draw information from the one person he could trust completely; and perhaps this process gave Margaret Beaufort a role in her son’s reign that would not easily be put aside.

It seems never to have occurred to Margaret to make a bid for the crown herself. She and her future daughter-in-law, Elizabeth of York, were in a different position from the other women in this story: they had their own claims to the throne. But even her son was reluctant to stake his claim principally on her blood right: he did so on the combination of marriage to Elizabeth, birth and right of battle. ‘The first of these was the fairest, and most like to give contentment to the people’, for whom, said Francis Bacon,
²
Edward IV’s reign had made convincing ‘the clearness of the title of the White Rose or house of York’.

‘But then it lay plain before his eyes, that if he relied upon that title, he could be but a King at courtesy, and have rather a matrimonial than a regal power; the right remaining in his Queen, upon whose decease, either with issue, or without issue, he was to give place and be removed.’ Bacon was writing in the early seventeenth century, and by then the country had known two reigning queens; at the time, the right of Elizabeth of York may not have seemed so clear. But Henry was persuaded, Bacon said, ‘to rest upon the title of Lancaster as the main’, and took care from the first that his prospective bride should not be given too much importance – he plastered everything with the red rose now adopted as counterpoint to the white, and with Margaret Beaufort’s portcullis badge; and vaunted his God-given military victory.

But one of Henry’s first actions was to see that his mother was declared a ‘
feme sole
’, a woman able to act independently of a husband and to own property. An Act of Parliament ordained that she ‘may from henceforth [for the] term of her life sue all manner of actions … plea and be impleaded for … in as good, large and beneficial manner, as any other sole person not wife nor covert of any husband’. She could ‘as well make, as take and receive, all manner of feoffments, states, leases, releases, confirmations, presentations, bargains, sales, gifts, deeds, wills and writings’. It made Margaret an independent financial entity, and potentially a real power in the land. This was unprecedented for an aristocratic woman – queens were usually allowed this privilege, and it had occasionally been used in the lower ranks of society to allow a woman to operate a business. Her husband Stanley was treated with separate generosity – created Earl of Derby, and honoured as the new king’s ‘
beaupère
’. Over the next couple of years, elaborate arrangements would be set up to apportion Margaret’s land revenues between the two of them – but her power and property were not to be at his disposal, as would be normal in the fifteenth century.

That property would be substantial. While mother and son were still at Woking, orders had gone out for repairs and improvements to the fine house of Coldharbour on the Thames for ‘my lady the King’s mother’. Margaret’s arms were set into the windows, to be displayed to anyone passing on the water. Over the next few weeks the king’s ‘most dearest mother’ saw the return of her own estates, now that the attainder against her was reversed; she was given power to appoint officers in the lordship of Ware, as well as effective use of the estates of the heirs of the executed Duke of Buckingham, whose son became her ward. From the ‘great grant’ of 22 March 1487 came the ‘Exeter lands’ in Devon, south Wales, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire, as well as the Richmond estates in Lincolnshire and Kendal.

Tangible benefits were given also to those close to Margaret: her trusted servants Reginald Bray, who would become Henry’s great officer, and Christopher Urswick (another whom Bacon described as a man the king ‘much trusted and employed’); her Stanley connections led by the new king’s ‘right entirely beloved father’; and Jasper Tudor, who became Duke of Bedford. Her half-brother John Welles would be allowed to marry Edward IV’s second surviving daughter, Cecily, while Jasper Tudor would marry Buckingham’s widow, the former Woodville girl. It was of course a favour to the men concerned – but it is also an example of how marriage could be used to bring potentially dissident bloodlines into the fold. Margaret’s old associate John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, soon became her son’s Archbishop of Canterbury – and later Lord Chancellor.

At the end of October 1485 Henry was crowned, under the book of rule laid down for Richard III. Powdered ermine and black furs were ordered, as well as crimson velvet and crimson cloth of gold. Margaret’s confessor John Fisher later recalled that ‘when the king her son was crowned in all that great triumph and glory, she wept marvellously’.

On 7 November parliament re-enacted the 1397 statute legitimating the Beauforts, without the 1407 clause barring them from the throne. The parliamentary rolls which incorporated Titulus Regius were ordered to be ‘cancelled, destroyed, and … taken and avoided out of the roll and records of the said Parliament of the said late king, and burned, and utterly destroyed’, because ‘from their falseness and shamefulness, they were only deserving of utter oblivion’. Not only were the attainders against Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou and Jasper Tudor reversed, but Elizabeth Woodville was restored to her ‘estate, dignity, pre-eminence and name’.

On 10 December parliament, surely at his instigation, begged Henry to ‘unify two bloods’ by marrying Elizabeth of York. Care, however, was taken all round to stress that Henry’s rule was valid (as Crowland put it) ‘not only by right of blood but of victory in battle and of conquest’. The Speaker declared that it was because the hereditary succession of the crowns of England and France ‘is, remains, continues, and endures in the person of the same Lord King, & in the heirs legitimately issuing from his body’ that he wished to take Elizabeth as his wife, for the ‘continuation of offspring by a race of kings’.

Crowland added that marriage to Edward IV’s eldest daughter merely filled in ‘whatever appeared to be missing in the king’s title elsewhere’; but Bacon wrote that he ‘would not endure any mention of the Lady Elizabeth, no not [not even] in the nature of special entail’. There was, however, no question but that the marriage would go ahead, and on the 11th Henry gave order that preparations should begin.

The marriage plan was founded on the assumption that it was in Elizabeth of York that the best Plantagenet claims to the throne were now embodied; that Elizabeth’s rights, in other words, were not superseded by those of any living brother. When Henry took control of London, he would have taken control also of the Tower; which begs the question of what – or whom – he found or failed to find there. The records are silent, which is itself suggestive.

If Henry Tudor and his adherents knew that Richard had definitely, demonstrably, had his nephews killed, it is inconceivable that he would not have declared it and made capital of the fact. If, however, he believed the boys to be dead at Richard’s hands, but had no way to prove it, his silence makes perfect sense since to have declared them simply missing would have been to invite pretenders. By the same token the princes’ mother and sisters must surely have felt they knew something; now would have been the moment for a hullabaloo of inquiry, and they seem to have made none. It is very possible Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters believed, like Henry, that the boys had been killed, and presumably by Richard, but that they too had no proof. That dearth of evidence might allow future doubt to creep in, but for the moment at least it could have been enough to stop them speaking out. A measure of silent uncertainty was everybody’s friend.
³

One of the new king’s first acts, said Vergil, had been to send a messenger to Sheriff Hutton to summon Elizabeth of York. She progressed southwards ‘attended by noble ladies’ to stay with her mother, and later with Henry’s. They met for what was probably the first time, and Elizabeth would have seen not the pinch-faced miser of later imagery but a man still in his twenties; already with something of his mother’s hooded eyes, perhaps, but tall and slim, with blue eyes set in a cheerful face and a general appearance that Vergil could describe even some years later as ‘remarkably attractive’.

Henry would have been greeted with an even more agreeable picture. Elizabeth of York really does seem to have had the blonde (‘yellow’) hair conventionally ascribed to queens. Later descriptions of plumpness infer that she was already buxom – certainly a comely nineteen-year-old, whether or not she were a true beauty like her mother. Vergil described her as ‘intelligent above all others, and equally beautiful’ – but that can probably be put down to tact.

If, when Henry looked at her, he saw the girl who had caused so much trouble with rumours of attachment to her uncle – and if she saw the man who had long been an enemy to her family – such deals were far from rare in the marriage arrangements of royalty. The two had, after all, a shared experience of uncertainty, of the swift turns that Fortune’s wheel could bring. It is likely they were both well enough pleased – and more than that. It is probable that, like Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth had never envisaged ruling in her own right. To be a queen consort was the destiny for which she had been raised to aspire – and she had achieved it without the need to leave her own country.

Henry now applied for a second papal dispensation to allow two relatives to marry. One had already been issued, in March 1484, to cover a marriage between ‘Henry Richmond, layman of the York diocese, and Elizabeth Plantagenet, woman of the London diocese’; but that might not be held to fit Henry’s changed status. Margaret’s husband Stanley had to swear that his wife had discussed all necessary questions of lineage before any arrangement was made between the pair. The second dispensation was issued on 16 January 1486, by which time the ring had been purchased and the wedding was only two days away. It would take place almost exactly a year after Elizabeth’s name had first been coupled with that of another king of England.

Not much is known about the actual ceremonies, though Bacon wrote that ‘it was celebrated with greater triumph and demonstrations (especially on the people’s part) of joy and gladness than the days either of his entry or coronation, which the King rather noted than liked’.

According to the Tudor poet Bernard André: ‘The people constructed bonfires far and wide to show their gladness and the City of London was filled with dancing, singing and entertainment.’ Bacon summed it up by remarking that while Bosworth had given Henry the bended knee of his subjects, this marriage gave him their hearts.

Henry now ordered a third papal dispensation: one setting aside any impediment caused by the couple’s relation through marriage rather than through consanguinity. Over the succeeding months the Pope was obliging enough also to threaten excommunication for anyone who challenged the right of Henry’s heirs to succeed, and to issue a Papal Bull confirming the legitimacy of the union.

The couple may not have waited for the marriage ceremony before they began to live together – common enough in the fifteenth century. That third dispensation may have been requested because they knew Elizabeth was pregnant; court poets hastened to link Henry’s victory at Bosworth with this speedy proof of virility. Bernard André’s version has to be the most oleaginous: ‘Then a new happiness took over the happiest kingdom, great enjoyment filled the queen, the church experienced perfect joy, while huge excitement gripped the court and an incredible pleasure arose over the whole country.’

Not everyone, however, had taken Bosworth as the final verdict on the future. Easter saw rebellion in Yorkshire; and for the first full year of his reign Henry rode around the country putting down local unrest and displaying himself in the guise of majesty. The women – Elizabeth of York, her sister, her mother, and her mother-in-law – summered at Winchester, in St Swithin’s Priory within the Close. Elizabeth Woodville, besides being restored to her rank as queen dowager, had been awarded a grant for life of six manors in Essex and an annual income of
£
102. There were, however, problems, not least the jostling for place between the queen dowager and Margaret Beaufort. The former had lived through a lot but, only in her late forties, was not necessarily ready to give up; the latter, in her early forties, had only just arrived, and would surely be reluctant to see the real authority she wielded in her son’s kingdom cast in the shade by the ceremonial status of a woman who technically outranked her.

But it is possible that Elizabeth Woodville had tired of court. On 10 July she had arranged with the abbot of Westminster to take out a forty-year lease on ‘a mansion within the said Abbey called Cheyne gate’. Despite possibly bringing back bad memories of her time in sanctuary, it was a practical location; though her worldly image might sometimes have masked it, her behaviour as queen had always been that of a conventionally devout woman. Then again, her negotiations for a London home may have been her response to plans first mooted for her a few days earlier – Henry’s proposal that she should marry the Scots king as part of a peace treaty.

On 20 September 1486 (‘afore one o’clock after midnight’, noted Margaret Beaufort in her
Book of Hours
), to widespread rejoicing, Elizabeth of York gave birth to a prince in whose veins ran the blood of both dynasties. Either the baby was a whole month early or the date is evidence that the couple had indeed cohabited before the actual marriage ceremony.