Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (42 page)

The court left Winchester in the third week of October, arriving on the October 26 at Farnham, where Prince Arthur’s household was now established, with 1,000 marks [£140,300] allocated for its upkeep.
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“The town of Farnham, where the King’s firstborn son, Arthur, is now being nursed,”
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had been in the hands of the bishops of Winchester since the ninth century; the castle dated from 1138 and overlooked the town from its high hill. The prince’s household was probably established in the adjacent bishop’s palace, an equally ancient building with many later improvements. Peter Courtenay, the bishop-elect, was probably in residence in the palace at this time. The constable of Farnham was Thomas FitzAlan, Lord Maltravers (soon to be Earl of Arundel), who was married to Elizabeth’s aunt, Margaret Wydeville.

It was no doubt felt that the cleaner air of Farnham would do the premature infant some good, and it was certainly not thought necessary that his mother should be with him. Elizabeth had discharged her chief responsibility, that of appointing trustworthy attendants to care for him, and now she had duties to perform. She was back with Henry at Greenwich by November 1, when the King held a great court to celebrate the feast of All Hallows, clad magnificently in cloth of gold, “a very good sight, and right joyous and comfortable to behold.” On November 18, no doubt grateful for the heir who had arrived so promptly, the King sent £100 [£48,900] to the Queen “by the hands of the Lord Treasurer.”
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This disruption to the bonding process may have affected the relationship between mother and son. A substantial body of modern research has shown that mothers show limited maternal responsiveness toward premature babies when there has been a prolonged period of separation after birth.
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We cannot say that was the case with Elizabeth and Arthur—not enough is known, although there is evidence that she would have much more to do with her subsequent children—but it is a possibility. There is no evidence to suggest that Arthur experienced the learning difficulties that can affect premature children, but new research, based on a study of a million births,
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shows that prematurity can have consequences right into adulthood, and that such children have an increased risk of dying in late childhood compared with babies delivered at full term; in late childhood, boys in particular have a sevenfold increased risk of dying. That may not impact greatly on today’s low mortality rates, but it would have had serious implications five hundred years ago. And while there is little evidence to support the theory that Arthur was always delicate, it is likely that he had a lifetime risk of poor health because he was premature, and there might have been concerns about his frailty before he reached his fourteenth birthday.

Arthur’s nursery was to remain at Farnham for at least six months, and perhaps the first two years of his life, after which it was apparently relocated to, or near, Ashford, in Kent.
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N
ow that Elizabeth was the mother of a prince, plans were once again set in hand for her crowning. Late in 1486, Sir Robert Cotton was paid £40 [£19,500] “for divers necessaries furnished by him toward the coronation of the lady Queen.”
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Elizabeth’s Wydeville relatives were now held in high favor by the King. On November 19, Thomas Grey was confirmed as Marquess of Dorset and granted an annuity; Elizabeth’s uncle, Sir Richard Wydeville, received a similar reward in January, and his brother Edward was made a Knight of the Garter.
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The court remained at Greenwich for Christmas, a time for religious observance, festivity, and ceremony. Although Elizabeth Wydeville seems to have accompanied Elizabeth back to London from Winchester, she is not recorded at this Christmas court, although Margaret Beaufort was present with her husband, Derby.

On Christmas Day the King customarily went in procession to Mass, wearing his crown and his royal robes. Gifts were exchanged formally on New Year’s Day in the King’s bedchamber, but Elizabeth did not give hers to her husband in person. Instead, she sent a messenger
with it. When the King came to his “foot-sheet” (the bench at the end of his bed, over which the bedding would have been draped), the usher of his chamber door would say to him, “Sire, here is a New Year’s gift coming from the Queen.” The King would reply, “Sir, let it come in.” Then his usher admitted the Queen’s messenger with the gift, and was rewarded with the customary 10 marks [£1,600] by Henry; one can see why posts in royal service were much sought after. “The Queen, in like manner, sat at her foot-sheet” with her chamberlain and usher in attendance, “and received the King’s New Year gift within the gate of her bed railing. When this formal exchange of presents had taken place between the King and his consort, they received, seated in the same manner, the New Year’s gifts of their nobles.” It is clear from Elizabeth’s privy purse expenses that she gave rewards to those lords and servants who brought her New Year’s gifts, and that those payments were carefully graded according to rank, but they were “not as good as those of the King.”
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On New Year’s Day the King and Queen always wore their crowns and their royal robes furred with ermine, and went in procession to chapel. Afterward they presided over a great feast. Normally, after such a feast, they and their special guests would retire to a private chamber or banqueting house for what was known as “the void” (as it took place when the table was voided), or banquet—the informal serving of sweet or spiced wine known as hippocras, spices, sugared fruits, marchpane, or other comfits. But on Twelfth Night, the culmination of the Yuletide celebrations, they took the void in the hall. Then the Lord Steward and the Treasurer of the Household would enter with their staves of office, bearing gold wassail cups containing a kind of mulled fruit punch that was drunk to toast the festive season. The steward would cry, “Wassail! Wassail! Wassail!” and the choristers of the King’s Chapel, waiting at the side of the hall, would “answer with a good song.”
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That Christmas season was perhaps overshadowed by a rumor that had surfaced in November, asserting that more would be heard of the Earl of Warwick before long. There had been other rumors too, that he had escaped, or been murdered in the Tower,
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like his cousins the
princes; but he was still there and very much alive. These rumors presaged the first serious threat to Henry VII’s security.

Again, Elizabeth’s coronation had to be deferred, for in January the King received news that a pretender to his throne, one Lambert Simnel, had appeared in Ireland, claiming to be the Earl of Warwick and to have escaped from his prison in the Tower.

Then, as now, the identity of this pretender was something of a mystery; much of the contemporary evidence about him derives from English government sources, so there may have been some spin at play. His very name may have been made up: John Leland
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gave it as Lambert, but elsewhere it appears as John,
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while the surname, Simnel, is extremely rare. This suggests that the King and his ministers were much in the dark about the facts behind the conspiracy. Later it emerged that Lambert Simnel, who was about the same age as Warwick, was the bastard son of an organ maker at the University of Oxford.
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He was said to have been coached in his role by an ambitious priest, Richard Symonds, who apparently had a dream that he would be tutor to a king, although it is more likely that he was acting on behalf of more powerful Yorkist interests.

Because the real Warwick was largely unknown, many were taken in by Simnel: the boy was well-spoken, handsome, and gracious, and he spoke accurately and convincingly of his past, as if he really were Warwick, and scathingly of the “Welsh milksop” who had seized his crown.

It is highly likely that the driving force behind the Simnel plot was the Earl of Lincoln, the hope of those who wanted a Yorkist king on the throne; and that it was he who secretly had Simnel groomed as a pretender to mask his own intention of seizing the crown. Once designated to succeed Richard III, Lincoln had seen his ambitions overthrown by the victory of Henry VII, and although he offered Henry his allegiance and was outwardly reconciled to the new régime, he had never enjoyed the same income and honors that had been his under King Richard. Probably his loyalty had always been in question, for apparently he had never come to terms with the loss of his hopes of a crown.

It is perhaps significant that the Simnel conspiracy originated in Oxford, not far from Lincoln’s house at Ewelme—and that Simnel soon afterward surfaced in Ireland, of which Lincoln had been Lord Lieutenant under Richard III. His appearance heralded the first serious crisis of Henry VII’s reign.

That January, Elizabeth visited Arthur at Farnham, and on February 1, in response to a petition by the townsfolk, the King granted license to Lord Maltravers “to found a perpetual chantry” at Farnham “for the good estate of the King, Elizabeth, Queen of England, Prince Arthur, and the King’s mother.” On May 29, Henry would also grant Bishop Peter’s nephew, Sir William Courtenay, license to found a perpetual chantry in the parish church of St. Clement at Powderham in Devon, “to pray for the King, Queen Elizabeth, Arthur, Prince of Wales, the said William Courtenay, and Cecily his wife.” In February 1487 license was granted to Thomas, Abbot of Shrewsbury, “to celebrate Mass at the altar of St. Winifred for the good estate of the King [and] Elizabeth the Queen,” and a grant was made to Henry, prior of St. Mary’s at Llanthony in Wales, so he could perform a similar service.
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It was common for royal and noble persons to make such provision for the health of their souls and those dear to them: thus did they lay up treasure in Heaven.

On July 10, 1486, Elizabeth Wydeville had taken a forty-year lease on Cheyneygates, the abbot’s house at Westminster Abbey; after her previous sojourns there, while in sanctuary, it may have represented a refuge from a court where (in view of what was about to befall her) she might have felt increasingly unwelcome—and it was conveniently situated for worship at the abbey and for visiting the Palace of Westminster. But she was not to enjoy it for long.

That same month, in negotiating a truce with Scotland, Henry VII had suggested that Elizabeth Wydeville might marry the widowed James III of Scotland, even though she was nearing fifty—to James’s thirty-four—and highly unlikely to bear him children. Henry would have been relieved of the burden of providing for the Queen Dowager if she married abroad, but the plan was complicated by the fact that
two of her daughters had been proposed as brides for the Scots king’s eldest son, James, and his second son, Alexander Stewart, Earl of Ross, and there ensued some discussion about proposing one of her younger girls, Anne or Bridget, for the King instead. Negotiations dragged on until, abruptly, they were halted by James III’s assassination in June 1488.
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By then Elizabeth Wydeville was out of the running. Early in February 1487, at Sheen, she was deprived “by the decree of the council of all her possessions.”
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The King took all her property into his hands, and on February 20, Parliament allocated her a pension of 400 marks [£133.3s.6d., now worth £65,100], which was to be paid in installments to “our right dear and right well beloved Queen Elizabeth, late wife unto the noble prince of famous memory, King Edward, and mother unto our dearest wife the Queen.”
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This was 300 marks fewer than Richard III had assigned Elizabeth Wydeville in 1484.
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According to Vergil, the reason given for the confiscation of the Queen Dowager’s property was that in 1484 she had imperiled Henry’s cause because, according to Hall, she “made her peace with King Richard, had voluntarily submitted herself and her daughters to the hands of King Richard, whereat there was much wondering, and had, by leaving sanctuary, broken her promise to those (mainly of the nobility) who had, at her own most urgent entreaty, forsaken their own English property and fled to Henry in Brittany, the latter having pledged himself to marry her elder daughter, Elizabeth. She was accordingly deprived of the income from her estates, so that she should offer an example to others to keep faith.” Hall adds: “Through her double dealings it was likely to have followed that the marriage could not take place, nor might the noblemen who, at her request, took King Henry’s part return without danger to their lives.” Undoubtedly that was a savage blow to Henry Tudor’s ambitions at the time. Yet it had been all of three years ago, and none of it was news to him: why wait until now to punish her for it? Far from appearing to harbor resentment, he had restored her to royal status and treated her honorably and well, giving her prominence above his own mother as the godmother of his firstborn son. It is also unlikely that he would have contemplated
marrying her to the Scots king if he feared she had it in her to intrigue against him, for the Scots were notoriously unreliable allies. It sounds therefore as if this pretext was contrived.