Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (79 page)

The coffins in the vault below the tomb, as seen in 1869. Elizabeth’s is in the center, Henry VII’s to the right, and James I’s to the left. (
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Tomb effigies of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York by Pietro Torrigiano, 1512–19. “Here is Henry VII, the glory of all the kings who lived in his time. Joined to him his sweet wife was very pretty, chaste and fruitful.” (
Illustration credit i1.52
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Illustration credit i1.53
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The earliest images of Elizabeth date from when she was at most fourteen. She appears with her parents and siblings in the magnificent stained-glass “Royal Window” in the northwest transept of Canterbury Cathedral (above the site of St. Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170), executed probably by the King’s glazier, William Neve, after Katherine’s birth in 1479 and before November 1480, because the youngest sister, Bridget, who was born that month, does not appear. Elizabeth is shown kneeling behind her mother, at a prayer desk on which lies an open book. Between the King and Queen was a now-vanished Crucifixion, and above were once scenes showing the seven joys of the Virgin Mary. Behind Elizabeth—in a line, although not in order of age, according to the later inscriptions below—kneel her four identically dressed sisters, who, according to those inscriptions, are Cecily, Anne, Katherine, and Mary. Probably these are incorrect, and the princesses are actually depicted in their order of seniority: Elizabeth, Mary, Cecily, Anne, and Katherine. Like her sisters, Elizabeth wears a long purple
damask gown with a golden girdle and a neckline trimmed with ermine, with a rich collar of gold studded with diamonds in quatrefoils; her long fair hair is loose nearly to her waist beneath a heavy coronet.

The window was partly destroyed in 1642, during the Civil War, by a Puritan fanatic, leaving only the royal figures. It was badly restored in the eighteenth century, after which Elizabeth’s head was recorded as being too small; fortunately, later restoration has used the surviving glass in as authentic a setting as possible. The only original heads are those of the King and Queen, but that of the princess in the end panel—probably Katherine—survives in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, and from this we can see that the restored heads are all faithful copies of it. They are therefore unlikely to be true likenesses of the princesses.

It has been said that the naturalism in these stained-glass figures, and those at Little Malvern (see below), had not been seen in English art for a century, and that their rich design owes something to the influence of the Netherlandish painter Hugo van der Goes.
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Elizabeth is also depicted with her sisters Mary, Cecily, and Anne in the remaining fragments of a stained-glass window in St. Giles’s Church—the tower and choir of which are all that remain of Little Malvern Priory, Worcestershire, a Benedictine cell of Westminster Abbey. It is one of a set of five windows depicting the royal family, which were crafted by local glaziers Richard Twygge and Thomas Woodshaw, and donated between 1480 and 1482 by Bishop Alcock, tutor to Edward, Prince of Wales, the subject of another window. The other three windows depicted Edward IV; Richard, Duke of York—both now lost—and Elizabeth Wydeville, whose head is missing.

Aged between fourteen and sixteen, Elizabeth kneels in front of her sisters at a prayer desk bearing books, beneath a rich canopy of estate. She wears a rather old-fashioned heart-shaped headdress adorned with an elaborate jewel, and a crimson mantle over a rich blue gown with a deep V-neckline edged with bands of gold. Her sisters are differently and less splendidly attired, reflecting the fact that, as the future Queen of France, Elizabeth was of far greater importance.
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In the north transept of Great Malvern Priory, Worcestershire, another former daughter house of Westminster Abbey, can be seen the royal “Magnificat” window, given by one of the donors it portrays between May 1499 and April 1502, according to the inscriptions and the evidence of the glazing.
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It is inscribed: “Pray for the good estate of the noble and most excellent King, Henry VII, and of Elizabeth, Queen, and of the lord Prince Arthur, their son, and also of his most well-beloved consort.” At the bottom, below the lights depicting the joys of the Virgin (as in the Royal Window at Canterbury, which probably influenced that at Great Malvern), are the kneeling figures of the King (restored), Prince Arthur, and three knights of the body: Sir Reginald Bray, Sir John Savage (gone, apart from his tabard), and Sir Thomas Lovell (reconstructed from fragments). The figure of Elizabeth of York is mostly missing, lost in a hotchpotch of glass fragments. It has been suggested that the window was the King’s gift, prompted by Elizabeth, whose grandfather, Richard, Duke of York, had been active in the rebuilding of the priory in memory of his Beauchamp and Despenser relations; possibly she mooted the idea after Warwick’s execution in 1499, which left Henry VII undisputed lord of Malvern. However, it could have been donated by any or all of the people portrayed in the glass.
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The earliest known surviving portrait of Elizabeth of York is a half-length in the Royal Collection (RC 403447). In 1974, tree-ring analysis of RC 403447 suggested that the panel dates from 1485–1500 and is from the same tree used for a portrait of Prince Arthur in the Royal Collection,
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but further analysis in 2012 indicated 1480 as the earliest possible date of the panel, and the most likely date as the 1490s.
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Examination under a microscope revealed an underdrawing that had been sketched, rather than one with straight traced lines. This strongly suggests that the portrait was painted from life.
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Elizabeth wears a long-lappeted gable hood of black velvet or silk with frontlets embellished with precious stones and goldsmiths’ work. Her gown is of crimson velvet with a front-fastening bodice, its neckline edged with a
jewel-encrusted border and ermine; the long tight sleeves have ermine cuffs. Her beringed fingers hold a white rose. Her hair appears reddish-gold, parted in the center, with plaits wound up over her head, which can just be seen beneath the hood, and she has a widow’s peak, which is evident only in her early portraits. She wears a necklace of pearls and rubies. Another version of this picture hangs at Christ Church, Oxford.

A portrait of Elizabeth—which may well have been RC 403447—is listed in Henry VIII’s inventories of 1542 and 1547, and was almost certainly the one owned by his son, Edward VI.

Charles I had two portraits of Elizabeth. One was among “nine old heads” on display in Whitehall Palace: “King Henry the 7th his queen in a black and golden dressing, holding in her hand a little white rose, in a blue-painted, gilded frame.” The other was “among the twenty-three little heads, King Henry the 7ths Queen picture with a little white rose in her hand and a black-and-gold dressing, in a red and gilded frame,” which measured 14½ by 9 inches and hung beside a portrait of Henry VII.
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Presumably (comparing the descriptions), the former picture was larger. The “black-and-gold dressing” seen in both pictures was almost certainly Elizabeth’s gable hood. Conceivably, the smaller portrait owned by Charles I was the same as the one in Henry VIII’s inventory, and is to be identified with RC 403447, which measures 14¾ by 10½ inches.

In 1537, Henry VIII commissioned from his court painter, Hans Holbein, a great mural for the privy chamber in Whitehall Palace, which was lost when the palace burned down in 1698, and is known only from two small copies painted
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. 1667–69 by Remigius van Leemput.
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The “Great Picture,” as it was known, portrayed the full-length, life-sized figures of Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour, in the foreground, with Henry VII and Elizabeth of York standing behind on a raised carpeted platform. The figures are arranged around a large stone plinth bearing the date 1537 and a heroic inscription that makes no mention of Elizabeth or Jane Seymour, being concerned only with the achievements of the kings: “If you enjoy seeing the illustrious figures of heroes, look on these: no painting ever bore greater …” A preliminary, full-size drawing by Holbein
of the figures of the kings is in the National Portrait Gallery, but that of the queens is lost.

Probably Holbein took his likeness of Elizabeth from the portrait in Henry VIII’s collection,
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which was presumably offered as a good likeness of the King’s mother. The features are strikingly similar to those in RC 403447, which lends itself to the theory that the latter was indeed the painting owned by Henry VIII. However, the necklace is different, as is the fabric of the gown, which is of cloth-of-gold damask.

It is possible that Holbein—probably at Henry VIII’s request—chose to paint Elizabeth in a golden gown
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with different jewels, rather than in the attire she wears in the portrait. It is not known where he got the details of the gown or its skirt, which do not appear in any portrait (full-length portraits prior to the mural are rare) or on Elizabeth’s tomb effigy, but are accurate for the period. Possibly Holbein obtained descriptions of her dress from other sources. There would have been people at court who could remember her, not least the King himself. And possibly one of her surviving gowns was brought for him from the Royal Wardrobe at the Tower.

The only other portrait in which Elizabeth wears a gold damask gown is a seventeenth-century miniature painted by John Hoskins, now in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch.
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The miniature was one of several that Charles I commissioned of his forebears. In the seventeenth century Abraham van der Doort described it as a portrait of Elizabeth “in a black dressing adorn’d with gold and pearls in a golden habit with white ermine,” copied “after an ancient old colored piece.”
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By “piece” he evidently meant a panel—which was one of the meanings of the word in those days—and presumably a panel portrait; he is hardly likely to have referred to Holbein’s magnificent and famed mural in such terms, so we might speculate that Hoskins based his miniature on the larger of Charles I’s portraits of Elizabeth, which in turn was perhaps based on the mural. Several later images of Elizabeth (including numerous engravings from the eighteenth century on) derive from Holbein’s image.

In the reign of Charles II two portraits of Elizabeth—probably the same ones—were hanging at Whitehall:
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one measured 22 by 17 inches, the other, “Henry 7ths Queen with a white rose in her hand,”
14 by 10 inches. It seems both portraits survived the sale of Charles I’s goods, so the smaller picture may well have been RC 403447.

According to Oliver Millar, the larger picture in Charles II’s collection had apparently left the Royal Collection by 1714. Perhaps it perished when Whitehall Palace was burned down in 1698. In 1818 two paintings of Elizabeth were hanging at Kensington Palace. One was probably RC 403447, which presumably was the smaller portrait owned probably by Henry VII, Charles I, and Charles II. The other portrait recorded at Kensington was apparently part of a set of royal portraits bought by Queen Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II, from Lord Cornwallis in the eighteenth century; it was later at Buckingham Palace, and is now at St. James’s Palace. Very similar to the image in the National Portrait Gallery, it measures 22¾ by 17½ inches, and bears the inscription:
ELIZABETH REGINA MATAR HENRICI OCTAV
(Queen Elizabeth Mother of Henry the Eighth). Millar describes it as a later derivation of the standard portrait type, part of a long gallery set of portraits of kings and queens, popular in late Elizabethan and Jacobean times among the owners of great houses; but it dates from 1550–1600, so may be one of the earliest surviving copies.
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