Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (38 page)

As Queen, according to Thomas More, Elizabeth enjoyed “plenty of every pleasant thing.”
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Rodrigo de Puebla, ambassador from the court of Queen Isabella of Spain, observed: “There is no country in the world where queens live with greater pomp than in England, where they have as many court officers as the King.”
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But that high estate had to be maintained. On marriage, every English
queen consort received a dower for the financial support of herself and her household. This took the form of a substantial settlement of lands, manors, and other crown property, making her one of the major landowners in the realm.
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Elizabeth was co-heiress with her sisters to lands of the noble families of Mortimer, March, and Clare, which had been inherited by the House of York. These lands, in which Cecily Neville held a share as dower, were not part of the crown estate, and should have been divided between the Yorkist princesses and then passed to their husbands on marriage; but Henry VII appropriated their shares as well as what was his in right of his wife, quietly incorporated them into the crown lands, and dowered Elizabeth from them.
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She was in possession of lands of the earldom of March in Herefordshire by September 1486;
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some of the rest went toward the support of Elizabeth Wydeville and Cecily, Duchess of York; but for Elizabeth’s sisters there would be nothing, not even dowries.

Elizabeth had to wait for the rest of her settlement, for it was not finally assigned to her until November 1487; until then her financial needs were mainly met by the King’s household, further—and perhaps deliberately—limiting her sphere of influence and her capacity for patronage. From time to time she received grants from the King, such as the annuity of £100 [£48,900] bestowed on February 3, 1486, at Sheen Palace.
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When she finally was assigned her dower, for life, no set amount appears formally to have been settled on her. To the Mortimer and Clare estates were added her mother’s lands, worth about £1,890 [£924,000], and annuities from fixed rents from the towns of Bristol (amounting to £102.15s.6d., now £50,250) and Bedford. In addition, like her predecessors, she had income from wardships, fines, and tax exemptions granted her by the King, and in 1487, Parliament enacted that she could sell and grant leases in her own name, without the King’s consent, in consideration of the great expense of her chamber. On February 1, 1492, Henry settled upon her the reversion of the dower lands of her grandmother, Duchess Cecily, which she should have inherited anyway as part of the Mortimer and Clare inheritance.
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Henry had not only to maintain his wife, but also her mother—effectively, he was supporting two queens, which placed an unusual
strain on his finances, as a new queen was usually assigned the dower of her predecessor; as we have seen, Henry had granted other lands to Elizabeth Wydeville. He also gave grants to his own mother, and was responsible for the maintenance of Elizabeth’s dowerless sisters, although he expected her to support them out of the income allocated her. It did not help that revenues from the dukedom of York were tied up in her grandmother’s generous dower. To boost Elizabeth’s income, the King, “in consideration of the great expenses and charges that his most dear wife, Elizabeth, Queen of England, must of necessity bear in her chamber,” obtained the consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament that she should “be able to sue in her own name, without the King, by writs &c., all manner of forms [contracts], rents, and debts due to her; and sue in her own name in all manner of actions, and plead, and be impleaded, in any of the King’s courts.”
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Queens, unlike other married women, enjoyed the unique privilege of granting and acquiring lands as
femmes sole
, and they could also sue, and be sued, independently of the King.
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However, Henry VII, like Edward IV, was not above alienating lands he claimed to hold “in right of Elizabeth, the Queen consort,” as in 1494 when he gave away some Irish estates of Elizabeth’s earldom of March to her chamberlain, Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond.
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In 1489, Elizabeth was granted the use of some of the property of her aunt, Isabella Neville, Duchess of Clarence, during the minority of Isabella’s son, the Earl of Warwick. In 1495 she inherited Mortimer and Clare property worth £1,400 [£684,500] from her grandmother, Cecily Neville, which she had been granted in reversion in 1492.

Elizabeth had her own auditors. Each year, they and her receiver-general would tour her estates, inspect her stewards’ accounts, compile valuations of her properties, arbitrate in disputes, and advise their mistress on various issues.
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There could be a shortfall between what was due to her in rents and what was actually received.
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There is evidence to show that Elizabeth and her council were obliged to extract as much income as they could from her manors, but that this was resented by her tenants. For example, in 1487 they established a collector of rents at the royal manor of Havering in the hope of ensuring that all monies due to the Queen would be raised, but the local people made
life difficult for every occupant of the post until, in 1497, the then incumbent, Thomas Elrington, was assaulted after ordering the bailiff to seize the goods of the Queen’s tenant, local justice of the peace Sir Philip Coke, who might have been knighted for valor in the recent Cornish uprising but had rent outstanding. Coke, whose wife was probably the sister or aunt of Margaret Belknap, one of Elizabeth’s gentlewomen, was accused of an act injurious to the honor of the Queen and as a dangerous example to her other tenants. Her council fined him £5, whereupon Elrington demanded twelve years’ back rent. Coke reacted violently, and was fined a further £5; he never again held office, but in a sense his was the victory, because Elrington was relieved of his post to avoid further violence, and was never replaced.
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The Queen had the right to make a new appointment every time a post on one of her estates fell vacant: it was another way in which she could show favor to those who had served her well. Sir Gilbert Talbot, who had been associated with Elizabeth in “The Song of Lady Bessy” and was now one of Henry VII’s privy councilors, was appointed steward of her lands in Feckenham, Worcestershire. A letter from Elizabeth survives in which she acknowledges the good and faithful service he had rendered to her.
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In November 1502, Talbot sent her a wild boar as a gift.
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Margaret of Anjou had received a dower of 10,000 marks [at least £1.5 million], which was later increased. Elizabeth Wydeville’s dower was at least £4,500 [£2.1 million]. Elizabeth of York’s dower lands were ultimately worth only £3,360 [£1.6 million] in 1506, less than two-thirds of her mother’s income.
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Although she had brought him a great inheritance (the lands of the Mortimers and the Clares), Henry kept her short of money, which meant that financially she would always be heavily dependent on him for loans and gifts of cash, several of which are recorded.
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She was obliged to borrow small sums from her sisters and even her servants.
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Though she appeared outwardly wealthy,
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Elizabeth struggled to make ends meet, and her extant privy purse expenses show that often she could settle her debts only in part, leaving much still owed, in several cases over an extended period. One London silk merchant, Henry Bryan, had to submit his account for
£107 [£52,000] several times, and in the end was obliged to settle for payment in installments.
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By 1495, Elizabeth was deeply in debt, and had been driven to pawning her plate to Sir Thomas Lovell for £500 [£250,000], and borrowing money from her chamberlain and her ladies. In February 1497 the King ordered £2,000 [£972,200] to be delivered to her “to repay her debts,” but it was only another loan. When he loaned her money, he expected her to pledge her plate as security, and to redeem it on the due date, and took care to see that she did.
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She was not extravagant in her personal expenditure. She ran her household economically, better than her mother had run hers. She paid her ladies lower salaries than previous queens, the highest being £33.6s.8d. [£16,200]. As well as her dower, she received money from the Exchequer for her chamber expenses, and this she spent on items such as clothes for herself and for her household, horses, repairs to her barge and litters, repeated “boat hire,” household items (such as sheets, baskets, bellows, carving knives, bolts, locks, an axe, brushes, wheels, wax, faggots, and barehides), jewels, a small pair of enameled knives for the Queen’s own use, meat for her goshawks and spaniels, offerings in church, barrels of Rhenish wine, bread, ale, butter, eggs, and milk, and payments to her physicians and apothecaries. There were a few luxury items too, including chair coverings of crimson and blue cloth of gold and crimson velvet with linings of blue satin; and, for the Queen’s litters, twenty-seven cushions of blue cloth of gold, backed with various shades of satin, damask, and velvet. Elizabeth herself checked and signed every page of the book in which details of her income and her privy purse expenses were listed, ensuring that her officers were acting within their means. The most costly items she ever bought for herself—apart from clothing—were the clavichords and popinjay for which she paid a poor man 13s.4d. [£320].
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The small sums of pocket money she apportioned to herself were given by her accountant, Richard Deacons, into the hands of her ladies (usually Lady Anne Percy, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, or Elizabeth Lee), who would put them in her privy purse. It was rare for Elizabeth to receive more than 10s. [£250] or 20s. [£500] at a time, and sometimes
she got as little as 4s.4d. [£110]. She was, however, abundantly generous, which may have been the cause of some of her financial difficulties.
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The King gave her only a very small allowance for the charities to which she was expected to dispense, so she had to make stringent economies in order to give to the poor. Much of her available funds were spent on gifts—numerous, but not lavish—and donations to religious establishments. That left less for alms, and it has been noted that she outlaid only £9.11s.5d. [£4,650] on those in her last year. Her gambling debts at Christmas 1502 were about half that amount.
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She also had to support her unmarried sisters, paying them annuities of £50 [£24,450] each out of her privy purse. When they married, they received no dowries from the King, so she paid their husbands annuities of £120 [£58,350] for their maintenance. In addition, she sent her sisters gifts of cash: in 1502, for example, she gave Anne £6.13s.4d. [£3,250] for pocket money.
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Often, Elizabeth would go without to do all this. She might have lived in great state and luxury, but the Queen of England had to juggle her financial resources as carefully as any peasant’s wife.

E
arly in January 1486, before her wedding, it had been confidently expected that the new Queen would immediately be crowned, and it must have been on the King’s orders that a royal official, Piers Curteys, drew up a memorandum listing expenditure for items to be delivered “against the Queen’s coronation”: spurs for the henchmen who were to ride in the procession; “tawing” (treating) of ermines; “canopy staves and ye timber work of two chairs of estate”; hire of a cart “to carry in ye Rennes”—a fine linen cloth woven in Brittany, to be dyed scarlet and used as a carpet—“unto Westminster, and six porters’ wages for to help to lay the same Rennes from Westminster Hall unto the abbey”; ermines, miniver, and “powderings for furring of divers of ye Queen’s robes” (small spots added to distinguish royal ermine from that worn by the nobility); worsted, “white bogy [lambskin] for furring of ye henchmen’s gowns,” and “scarlet,” a fine, expensive wool cloth.
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In the event, though, there was no coronation for Elizabeth—not for nearly two years. It is often said that Henry expected her to bear him a son before he outlaid any serious expenditure on her crowning,
or that he did not want people to think that the ceremony was an endorsement of her title; but the likeliest explanation for it being deferred is that, by Lent, it was known that Elizabeth was expecting a child.

Loyal subjects had “prayed to Almighty God that the King and Queen would be favored with offspring, and that eventually a child might be conceived and a new prince be born, so that they might heap further joys upon present delights.” They had not had long to wait. “Our Lord Jesus Christ heard their prayers and permitted the joyous Queen to become pregnant with the desired offspring.”
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The speed with which Elizabeth conceived—on her wedding night, perhaps—must have seemed to Henry, and no doubt to many of his people, to be the greatest manifestation of divine approval of his marriage. “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.”
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