Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (74 page)

After Queen Isabella’s death in 1504, which left her widower Ferdinand as a mere king of Aragon, Henry would neither permit his heir to marry Katherine of Aragon, nor would he return Katherine or her
dowry to Spain. He made young Henry secretly abjure his betrothal, and kept the princess in England in increasing penury for the rest of his reign.

Isabella’s passing reawakened Henry’s fears about the legitimacy of his title. According to Bacon, after the death of Elizabeth he had fretted that there would be some question over his continuing to reign, and he’d had cause, for one of his spies in Calais reported speculation there that Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a descendant of Edward III, was the rightful successor of Elizabeth, who some people still clearly regarded as the true Queen of England; Prince Henry was not even mentioned.
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Henry “conceived that the case of Ferdinand of Aragon after the death of Queen Isabella was his own case after the death of his own queen. For if both of the kings had their kingdoms in the right of their wives, they descended to the heirs and did not accrue to the husbands. And though his own case had both steel and parchment more than the other, that is to say a conquest in the field and an Act of Parliament, yet notwithstanding, that natural title of descent in blood did (in the imagination even of a wise man) breed a doubt that the other two were not safe nor sufficient. Wherefore he was wonderful diligent to inquire and observe what became of the King of Aragon in holding the kingdom of Castile,”
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which Ferdinand was soon successfully to wrest from his daughter Juana (who had succeeded her mother as Queen) on the grounds that she was mad. Henry’s concern shows he had always been aware that public opinion generally held that he was King in right of his wife. One pedigree roll showing the descent of Prince Arthur bypassed Henry and his immediate forebears completely, and showed Cadwaladr’s line stretching down through the Mortimers to Edward IV and Elizabeth, through whom, it was made clear, Arthur derived his claim to the throne.
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This may explain why the King kept Prince Henry, his surviving son and heir, under such close supervision that the boy ended up isolated—“locked away like a woman” and brought up more like a girl than a boy, as the Spanish ambassador Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida put it, adding, “He is so subjugated that he does not speak a word except in response to what the King asks him.” Henry’s bedchamber
could only be accessed through his father’s,
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and he was not allowed much freedom of movement, spending his formative years mainly with his tutors, “sober and discreet” old men, and the noble boys who had been selected as his companions. He grew up to be learned and pious, but lacking in experience of life. Probably the King had fears for the succession and the health of this one remaining son, in whom were now vested all the hopes of his dynasty, which would explain why the prince was never sent to Ludlow as Arthur had been.

Yet Henry VII also seemed reluctant to instruct his heir in the art of government or allow him to read state papers. It is possible that he had already assessed his son’s character and potential and come to fear him, or that factions might form around him. On one occasion the King got so angry with young Henry that it looked “as if he sought to kill him”; instead, he locked him up until his anger had cooled.
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This treatment may have proceeded from dread that those who were dissatisfied with his rule would rally around Elizabeth’s son and clamor for his succession. It was perhaps for this reason that Henry was “not greatly willing to cast any popular luster” on his children,
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although he had certainly given Arthur due prominence in happier days.

Henry VII died on April 21, 1509, at Richmond Palace, of tuberculosis. Despite his having brought peace and prosperity to England and enhanced her reputation in Europe, he was not mourned. He was succeeded by seventeen-year-old Henry VIII, who became famous—or notorious—for marrying six wives, breaking with the Church of Rome, and founding the Church of England in the process, with himself as its Supreme Head. He would die in 1547, and in the early seventeenth century there was still to be seen beside his vault in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, a funeral banner bearing the arms of his parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.
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Henry VIII was succeeded in turn by his three children, Edward VI (reigned 1547–53, on whose death Elizabeth of York’s male descendants became extinct), Mary I (reigned 1553–58), and Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603). Seventy years after Elizabeth of York’s right to succeed had been passed over virtually without comment, Henry VIII’s lack of surviving sons had made it possible for a woman to rule in her own right.

It is almost certain that Henry VIII named the future Queen Elizabeth I, his daughter by Anne Boleyn, after his mother, Elizabeth of York, not only because of his fond remembrance of her, but also to proclaim his daughter’s descent from the legitimist royal line. At Elizabeth’s coronation procession in 1559 the figures of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York appeared in a pageant in Gracechurch Street, London, “so set that one of them joined hands with th’other, with the ring of matrimony perceived on the finger,”
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and seated beneath a cloth of estate in their respective red and white roses symbolizing the union of Lancaster and York, of which the Virgin Queen was now the embodiment:

The feisty and formidable Elizabeth I was the very antithesis of the mild and self-effacing grandmother whose name she bore. The Virgin Queen did not look to the gentler Elizabeth as a role model; she preferred to emulate her magnificent sire, Henry VIII. Proving that a woman could rule as capably as any man, she enjoyed a long and successful reign, but never married. She was the last of the Tudors.

Elizabeth’s blood flowed on, however, through her daughter Margaret, the ancestress of the Stuart monarchs of Great Britain, and through them to the Hanoverians and the House of Windsor. Her namesake, Queen Elizabeth II, is her descendant in the sixteenth generation.

Of Elizabeth’s surviving sisters, Cecily, who had perhaps borne Thomas Kyme two children,
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died on August 24, 1507. Hall states that she was buried at Quarr Abbey, a Cistercian monastery on the Isle of
Wight; if so, her tomb and its location was lost at the Reformation. Yet there is evidence in the Beaufort account books that she died at the Old Palace at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, after lodging there for three weeks, and was interred at “the friars,” which may have been the friary at King’s Langley where her ancestor, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, was buried.
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Anne (Lady Thomas Howard) died between November 1511 and 1513, and was buried in Thetford Priory, Norfolk. Her remains were later removed to Framlingham Church.

After Elizabeth’s death, Henry VII sent Katherine and her children home to Tiverton in Devon, where she lived as a dependent of the Earl of Devon, her father-in-law. William Courtenay remained in prison until Henry VII’s death in 1509, after which he was freed by Henry VIII, but he did not long enjoy his liberty, for he died in 1511. Katherine then took a vow of perpetual chastity. She passed away in November 1527 at Tiverton Castle, and was buried in Tiverton parish church, where her son, Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, erected a tomb to her memory, now gone.

Both John Speed and John Weaver, writing in the seventeenth century, state that the nun, Bridget, died in 1517, but Thomas More, writing in 1513, states that Elizabeth’s
only
surviving sister, Katherine, was still living, which suggests that Bridget was then dead. She was buried in the priory church at Dartford, but her grave too was lost at the Dissolution.

More states that “representing the virtue of her whose name she bore, [Bridget] professed and observed a religious life in Dartford,” and Speed says she “spent her life in holy contemplation unto the day of her death”; but it has been suggested that she had a bastard daughter, Agnes of Eltham, who was born around 1498. It is possible that Agnes was an orphan whose wardship was administered by Dartford Priory, but until Elizabeth of York’s death in 1503 she was maintained by the crown, and when she married Adam Langstroth, a wealthy Yorkshire gentleman, in 1514, she had “a considerable dowry.”
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It is not inconceivable that the teenage Bridget, pushed into a convent at the age of seven, and perhaps not very bright anyway, had no vocation for the religious life and embarked on an affair that resulted in a child; and
that the Queen supported that child, as she had supported her sisters. It is equally possible that Agnes was simply one of the children Elizabeth took pleasure in patronizing. She died in 1530.

Margaret Beaufort, who was widowed in 1504, survived her son. She had played a mother’s part to Henry and Mary, the grandchildren who were left to her, after Elizabeth’s death and Margaret’s departure for Scotland,
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and in 1509 acted as unofficial regent for Henry VIII during his brief minority.
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She died in the Abbot’s House at Westminster Abbey on June 29, 1509, the day after her grandson reached eighteen. Her fine bronze tomb effigy by Torrigiano shows her in her customary widow’s wimple.

Elizabeth’s daughter Margaret married James IV on August 8, 1503, at Holyrood Abbey, Edinburgh, and was crowned Queen of Scots the same day. She bore six children, among them James V, father of Mary, Queen of Scots. James IV was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. The following year, Margaret took a second husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, to whom she bore a daughter, Margaret Douglas, later Countess of Lennox and mother of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, who married Mary, Queen of Scots, and fathered the future James VI of Scotland. In 1603, James succeeded Elizabeth I as the first sovereign of the House of Stuart to reign over a united Great Britain. Margaret Tudor died of palsy in the autumn of 1541 at Methven Castle, and was buried in the Carthusian Abbey of St. John in Perth.

Her younger sister Mary, the beauty of the family, judging by all reports, was married in 1514 to the ailing King Louis XII of France. Widowed in 1515, she caused a scandal by marrying, for love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. But when Henry VIII’s anger had cooled, and the errant couple agreed to pay a crippling fine, he received them back into favor. Mary bore four children, one of whom, Frances Brandon, became the mother of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, who was set up as a puppet queen for just nine days in 1553 and was beheaded on Mary I’s orders the following year. Mary Tudor died on June 25, 1533, at Westhorpe Hall, Suffolk, and was buried in the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Later, her remains were moved to St. Mary’s Church, where a white stone slab in the chancel marks her grave.

The future Henry VIII had not attended his mother’s funeral; none of her children had, but Henry’s tutor, chaplain, and servants walked in the procession and no doubt witnessed the obsequies and committal, and could have told him about the stark, mournful pageantry that surrounded that final act. The effect on an eleven-year-old who had been close to his mother was probably devastating.

That Henry was grief-stricken by his mother’s death is attested on good evidence. A richly illuminated manuscript, the “Vaux Passional” in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth,
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dating from the early sixteenth century, is believed to have been in Henry VII’s own library, and contains an illumination showing the presentation of a book to the King, who can be identified by his heraldic emblems. Behind the throne to one side is an empty black-draped bed, and kneeling beside it, his red-haired head buried in his arms, is a young boy in a green tunic. Almost certainly this image portrays the young Henry weeping for his mother. In front of the bed kneel two girls in black hoods who are probably his sisters, thirteen-year-old Margaret and seven-year-old Mary. The manuscript, which still has its original crimson-velvet binding, contains two French texts:
“La Passion de Nostre Seigneur,”
which invites the reader to reflect on the sufferings of Christ, and Georges Chastellain’s poem
“Le miroir de la mort,”
an aid to meditation on the futility of worldly pleasures in the face of death. All the other illuminations show scenes from the Bible or classical history.

The manuscript was later owned by Jane Vaux, the wife of Sir Richard Guildford. She had served Elizabeth of York and was later governess to Margaret and Mary; she died in 1538. It is possible that the Passional was a gift to her from Henry VII or Henry VIII. The manuscript descended through the Vaux and Fermor families, from whom it was probably acquired by Sir Kenelm Digby in the seventeenth century. His decendants had it in their library at Peniarth, Merioneth. It was bought for the National Library of Wales in 1921.
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