Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (13 page)

Mancini’s testimony—which may have owed something to hindsight, although he used as sources people who would surely have known the truth—is often taken to mean that Richard deliberately avoided the Queen after Clarence’s fall. But it is clear that avoiding her jealousy was the consequence of his good reputation, while Mancini merely observes that she lived a long ways away, implying that this was to his advantage. Maybe Richard did fear her influence, having seen what it could do, while her behavior later on might suggest that she had his measure and distrusted and feared him. However, working relations between Richard and her brother, Earl Rivers, remained amicable after 1478
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—although the catastrophic events of 1483 were to show that Richard saw Rivers too as a threat.

Edward IV “inwardly repented, very often” of having Clarence executed,
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and reproached his nobles for not suing for mercy.
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But ultimately he himself had to bear the responsibility for it; and the young Elizabeth had to come to terms with the knowledge that not even ties of blood were a guarantee against disaster.

It was a superstitious age. Apart from the other reasons for Clarence’s fall, Edward had apparently been swayed by a prophecy that G should follow E as King of England.
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If true, it seems not to have occurred to him that his other brother was Gloucester—or that executing one of his blood had set a dangerous precedent for slaughter within his own house.
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That month of February 1478, Elizabeth turned twelve, the age at which she was to go to France and be married. Her dowry was already
settled, and it had been agreed that King Louis should meet the expenses of her conveyance into his realm. Soon afterward, Mary, Duchess of Burgundy, appealed to Edward IV for aid against Louis XI, but Edward ignored her pleas, for he would allow nothing to compromise Elizabeth’s prospects of marriage with the Dauphin.

On August 11 the King sent Dr. Thomas Langton to France, to press Louis XI to conclude the espousal without further delay, and to ask him to endow Elizabeth with her jointure immediately, in advance of the wedding. Louis—by no means as committed to the match as Edward—stalled. In December his ambassador told the King that he must not expect immediate payment of her jointure, insisting that his proposal was contrary to reason and French custom: Elizabeth could have her jointure only when the marriage took place, but the Dauphin, at eight, was too young to be wed at present, and it was usual for a jointure to be paid only after the consummation of a marriage. Edward’s councilors expressed great indignation and urged him to break the treaty, but he refused, being determined to force Louis to keep to its terms. But the writing was on the wall: France was then relying on England not to intervene on Maximilian’s behalf in Burgundy, and if Louis could treat his ally so dismissively when he needed him, clearly he was not committed to the marriage.

There was grief in March 1479 when Elizabeth’s two-year-old brother George died at Windsor Castle and was buried in St. George’s Chapel. After his death, his nurse, Joan, Lady Dacre, became lady mistress to Princess Mary.
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The loss of her youngest son must have been hard for the Queen, who was pregnant again; on August 14, 1479, she gave birth to a healthy sixth daughter, Katherine, at Eltham Palace. It was here that the infant princess was christened. Joanna Colson was appointed her nurse.
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Arguments about Elizabeth’s jointure grumbled on through the spring and summer of 1479. Edward’s envoys warned the French that if there was any further prevarication, England would ally itself with Maximilian. In August the Burgundians won a victory over the French, and Maximilian and Mary declared that they would not betroth their heir, Philip, to anyone except Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth. In the face of this, late that year Louis instructed his envoys to offer 10,000
crowns [£1,261,500] as a maintenance grant for Elizabeth, but Edward, who had been greedily anticipating the £60,000 [£30 million] agreed to at Picquigny, angrily turned down the offer because it was contrary to the terms of the treaty.

By now there were doubts in England as to Louis’s sincerity. In January 1480 the Milanese ambassador at the French court shrewdly observed that Edward was not deceived by the French king’s procrastination, and concluded that Elizabeth’s marriage to the Dauphin depended on Maximilian’s ability to repel the French. He reported that the English envoys had been told “to press in and out of season for the conclusion of the marriage. The King here stands in fear of the King of England, on the supposition that if he will not pay him any heed while the Flemings still flourish, England will not be able to get his desire when this king has accomplished his purpose”—the conquest of Burgundy—“and so diamond cuts diamond.”
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While Edward continued to put pressure on Louis, French envoys were instructed to divert him by discussing only superficial details, such as the timing and manner of Elizabeth’s journey to France; if she did not come, they said, King Louis would pay 20,000 crowns [£2,520,000] for her maintenance while she remained in England. But Edward insisted that he would accept only the £60,000 agreed as her jointure. In May 1480, John, Lord Howard (later Duke of Norfolk), and Dr. Langton were sent to France to remind Louis of the terms of the marriage contract, but they made little progress. In the wake of this, Edward began seriously considering an alliance with Burgundy against France.

Unknown to Edward IV, Louis, fearing that England would unite with the Habsburgs against him, had begun making overtures to the Scots, England’s enemy, for the marriage of James III’s daughter Margaret to the Dauphin. Early in 1480, Edward learned of this and threatened James with war, thwarting Louis’s schemes. At times like these it may well have seemed to Elizabeth that her marriage would never take place.

In February 1480 she reached her fourteenth birthday. She was growing up to be “very handsome.”
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According to Giovanni de’ Gigli, prebendary of St. Paul’s, writing in 1486, she was “the illustrious maid
of York, the fairest of Edward’s offspring, deficient nor in virtue nor descent, most beautiful in form, whose matchless face adorned with most enchanting sweetness shines.”
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It was almost obligatory for queens to be praised for their looks, but that Elizabeth grew up to be beautiful is borne out by her surviving portraits and her tomb effigy—which reveal a strong resemblance to her mother, especially about the large eyes, a straight nose, and what must have been a rosebud mouth in youth; while the inscription on her tomb, placed there by her son, Henry VIII, describes her as “very pretty.” If her tomb effigy is an accurate representation, she grew up to be a graceful woman of five feet six inches.

In the fifteenth century it was seen as highly desirable for queens to have blond hair, for the Virgin Mary was increasingly being idealistically portrayed thus in art.
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Elizabeth conformed to this ideal: she had a fair complexion and long “golden” or “fair yellow hair,”
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although it looks reddish-gold in her portraits, and may have been the same color as her daughter Mary’s, a lock of which (taken from Mary’s coffin) is preserved in Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St. Edmunds.

In April 1480, Elizabeth’s sisters Mary and Cecily were made Ladies of the Garter, and robes were provided for all three princesses for the annual festival.
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That year, Cecily, Duchess of York, now sixty-five, enrolled herself as a Benedictine oblate and retired to her castle at Berkhamsted to pursue a life of religious devotion. As an oblate, she wore sober secular robes and embraced the spirit of the Benedictine vows in her life in the world, dedicating herself to the service of God. Daily, she observed the canonical hours, prayed, and read the Scriptures, leaving only a little time for enjoying wine and recreation with her ladies. Elizabeth, at an impressionable age, was probably influenced by her grandmother’s piety, and would herself grow up to be sincerely devout.

On November 10, 1480, Elizabeth Wydeville gave birth to her tenth and last child at Eltham Palace. It was another girl, who was called Bridget, an unusual choice of name that had no royal precedent but was perhaps chosen by Cecily, Duchess of York, who cherished a special devotion to St. Bridget of Sweden, foundress of the Bridgetine order, in which the duchess took a particular interest.
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Again Cecily’s
influence can be detected, for Elizabeth herself would grow up with a deep reverence for St. Bridget, a fourteenth-century visionary who was celebrated for her piety and charity.

Choosing the name of a saint who left the royal court of Sweden to found a monastic order suggests that the King and Queen decided from the first that they would devote this daughter to God. It was not unusual for wealthy medieval parents to do that, as a gesture of thanksgiving, or to lay up treasure for themselves in Heaven. Their daughter would have no choice in the matter.

On the morning after the birth, St. Martin’s Day, Elizabeth stood godmother to her new sister at her christening in the Great Chapel at Eltham. A hundred “knights, esquires, and other honest persons” entered the chapel first, carrying unlit torches, then came Thomas FitzAlan, Lord Maltravers, bearing a basin and towel, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, with an unlit taper, and John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, bearing the salt. There followed other peers, among them the young Duke of York, Lord Hastings; Thomas, Lord Stanley; and Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre, the Queen’s chamberlain. Then came the Queen’s sister, Margaret Wydeville, Lady Maltravers, wearing “a rich white cloth pinned over her left side” and carrying the chrisom. Margaret Beaufort, the other godmother—no doubt chosen because in 1472 she had married Lord Stanley, a close associate of the Wydevilles—carried the Princess Bridget beneath a canopy borne by three knights and a baron. Elizabeth followed with Dorset and the Duchess of York. William Wayneflete, the octogenarian Bishop of Winchester, was the godfather, and Edward Story, Bishop of Chichester, officiated. “My lady the King’s mother and my Lady Elizabeth were godmothers at the font,” and a squire held the basins for them. At the moment of baptism, the knights and esquires lit their torches and the heralds donned their tabards. The baby was taken up to the altar to be confirmed, and then into an anteroom where the godparents presented their “great gifts,” whereupon she was borne back in procession to the Queen’s chamber to be blessed.
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Young York’s wife, Anne Mowbray, was not present. Possibly she was unwell, for sometime between January 16 and November 19, 1481, she died at the palace of Placentia at Greenwich, aged only eight. She
was given a lavish funeral and buried in the chapel of St. Erasmus in Westminster Abbey.

In June 1480, Margaret of Burgundy had visited England with a view to enlisting Edward IV’s support against France and arranging a marriage between Maximilian’s son Philip and Anne of York. Aware of her intentions, Louis sent envoys to England with Edward’s pension and the offer of an extra 15,000 crowns [£1,892,210] a year for Elizabeth’s maintenance until her marriage. That placed Edward in an ideal situation for bargaining with Burgundy, and that August he signed a treaty with Maximilian, by the terms of which five-year-old Anne was betrothed to Philip of Habsburg and it was agreed that the marriage would take place when she was twelve.
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Before entering into this alliance, Edward had told Margaret of Burgundy that Louis was prepared to concede to all his demands in regard to Elizabeth’s marriage to the Dauphin. But now Louis, facing the prospect of Edward joining forces with Maximilian against him, began to strengthen his defenses for war. He also stopped paying the pension guaranteed to Edward by the Treaty of Picquigny. Plans for a peace conference broke down, and Maximilian continued to press for English aid against France. The Anglo-French alliance now looked decidedly precarious.

In 1481, Edward IV reached an agreement with Francis of Brittany that Prince Edward should marry the duke’s only child, four-year-old Anne, the heiress of Brittany, when she reached the age of twelve. Fourteen-year-old Princess Mary was betrothed to the future King Frederick I of Denmark, and James III of Scots began pressing Edward IV to send Princess Cecily to Scotland to be betrothed to his son.
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Among the husbands proposed for Katherine of York were the Infante Juan, Prince of the Asturias and heir to the Spanish throne,
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and James Butler, Earl of Ormond. Through the unions of his daughters, Edward envisioned English influence extending through France, Scotland, Denmark, Burgundy, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, and beyond. It seemed that soon Elizabeth and her siblings would all be living in far-off kingdoms, rarely or never to see one another again.

But the Scots now began infringing the peace with England, putting the marriage treaty at risk. Hearing that his ally, King Louis, was
once more weighing Elizabeth’s betrothal to the Dauphin in the balance, James III led a raid over the border into England. Edward raised a great army in retaliation, but Maximilian was urging him to come to his aid in Burgundy against Louis. Edward prevaricated, while the ailing Louis waited to see what he would do.

Still wanting to maintain his lucrative friendship with France, Edward assured Louis in March 1481 that troops he had sent to Burgundy were not to be used against the French, and that he would continue to uphold the Treaty of Picquigny, on condition that Louis resumed payment of his pension and sent an embassy to arrange Elizabeth’s marriage to the Dauphin. If Louis agreed to this, Edward promised not to send his new army against France, but to Scotland, as he had originally intended. Louis was quick to acquiesce, and in August sent an envoy with Edward’s pension.

At last Edward decided to move against the Scots. In the autumn of 1481, at Nottingham—much to King Louis’s relief—he again confirmed the Anglo-French treaty, but on condition that Elizabeth’s marriage to the Dauphin would not be delayed further. Immediately, Louis abandoned all thoughts of a Scottish marriage for his son.