The Last Plantagenets (62 page)

Henry surprised the nation by riding to London from Bosworth in a covered chariot, a type of vehicle which has crept into the records in connection with the travels of great ladies. If an evidence of modesty, this was not wise, for the people of England wanted to see the man who had made himself their king. If due to a sense of the need for protection, it may have been sensible, for feelings still ran high. At any rate he had
a safe, if slow, journey but arrived in London before the princess, going into residence at first in the palace of the Bishop of London and transacting his affairs at the Tower. When Elizabeth and the cloudy-witted earl arrived, she was sent to Westminster where her mother was in residence. The unfortunate youth vanished into the closed and mysterious life of the grim Tower, to emerge therefrom only once in the balance of his sad life, when he was taken out and paraded on horseback through the streets of London to prove that Lambert Simnel, who claimed to be the real earl, was an impostor.

If Henry met the fair Elizabeth at this time, there is no report of it. Perhaps this would be due to the prevalence in London of the sweating sickness, which had been brought into England by his French mercenaries. Perhaps he was in the throes of ceaseless activities. One of his first acts was to organize a personal bodyguard. Then he had many vexed matters of business to transact with Parliament.

These were anxious moments for Elizabeth, who did not want to see another crown whisked out of the reach of her willing hands. She and her mother heard he was to be crowned on October 30 and their faces clouded with bewilderment and anxiety when there was no hint of a marriage. Their worry deepened when he had Elizabeth declared the Duchess of York and claimed the throne in his own right “to be, rest, and abide in his own person.” To make matters worse, there were rumors in London which came quickly and unerringly to their disturbed ears. Henry, it was said, was considering other possible matches. A princess of Brittany was mentioned and also Lady Katherine Herbert. Henry knew each of these ladies and had been favorably impressed.

The situation finally took a more favorable turn in the second week of December. Information reached the queen mother which sent her with much hurried rustling of her rich violet and fur-trimmed skirts along the drafty halls from her apartments in the palace to the handsome corner suite, hanging with tapestries and the costliest of furnishings, where the princess (the position of mother and daughter having been reversed) abided in considerable state. In happy whispers she told her daughter that Parliament in full meeting the next day would petition Henry to observe his promise and take her as his wife and consort. The queen mother knew how potent the voice of the House could be. Henry’s purse was as flat as his hat and he was desperately in need of the financial supplies which only Parliament could supply. Would he dare disregard such a demand from the members? The queen mother thought not.

The approaching Yuletide season, which had promised so little, assumed a brighter tinge for Elizabeth. The crown seemed within her
reach after all. She probably gave no thought to the brave gaiety at Christmas the year before when she had been happy enough and rather excited to dance in the gown which was identical with that of the queen—gentle Queen Anne who had died a few months after.

Henry may have carried in his mind certain reservations when he faced Parliament the following day, December 10. But he was shrewd to a degree and he understood one thing very clearly. The wishes of the House were conveyed to him in the form of a petition, but there was a latent suggestion of an exchange. “Fulfill your promise to unite the two great warring families by marrying Elizabeth of York and so ensure the peace of the realm,” was the implication, “and we will grant you the tunnage and poundage for life which you ask of us.” When they rose and faced him, he bowed his head.

“I am willing so to do,” he said.

Parliament was prorogued until January 27, and on January 18 in Westminster the new king took the heiress of York as his wife. The people celebrated the event with “dancing, songs and banquets throughout all London.”

As the king had already been crowned, it was neccessary for the queen to have a coronation separately. It seems to have been her first public appearance, and the streets were thick with cheering people. Elizabeth was dressed in a kirtle of white cloth of gold and a mantle edged with ermine and fastened with a cordon of lace and rich tassels of gold. Above the “caul of pipes” that she wore on her hair was the circlet of gold which attested to her new rank. It was to be expected that she would be beautiful in a truly resplendent way. Did she not unite in her person the two most resplendent of family lines, the Plantagenets and the Woodvilles?

It does not seem to have been in any sense a love match, but there is no proof of the assertion often made that Henry was cold to his wife and the direct opposite of a uxorious husband. Henry was cold to everyone. His was a withdrawn nature, secretive in all things. And his lovely young queen was a real Plantagenet in two respects. She was wildly extravagant and generous to a fault. To borrow a modern phrase, she made the money fly! Most of it was expended on others, particularly her younger sisters. Henry was continuously under the necessity of straightening out her finances and paying off her debts. And this irked him in every atom of his parsimonious self.

Henry did not confide in those about him. “His mother,” wrote Francis Bacon a century later, “he reverenced much but listened to little.” The queen, according to the same source, could do nothing with him. He never rushed into a decision but always thought things out in a silence which none dared invade. Being a believer in system, he kept a notebook with him and entered everything in it: what he had spent, what he had decided, who was to be punished and who rewarded, his private opinions of people and events. This was well known and all the officials of the state and all the nobles and servants at court walked in fear of what the well-thumbed book contained. One day, through some unusual lapse, he left the book carelessly about and someone saw that it fell into the hands of the pet household monkey. The result was that the pages were torn to pieces and scattered about the royal domain, which added less than nothing to the feeling of affection for the little pet.

Mention of the mischievous monkey suggests that the way he treated the animals in the royal menagerie was an indication of the strangeness of this man’s inner thoughts. One day four English mastiffs were pitted against a lion for the entertainment of the court. They fought so grandly that they got the better of the lion, who was in the king’s mind a symbol of royal authority. He had the four hanged as traitors! This, of course, was one of his methods of letting everyone know his feelings about any infringement of his rights, any doubt of his omnipotence.

This story must be authentic because it has been cited by a number of writers who incline to the fulsome in praise of him.

Elizabeth had been radiant in her health as well as in appearance, but she died early of the trouble which sent most women of the Middle Ages to their graves, excessive childbearing. She brought seven children into the world, two sons and five daughters. When she died in 1503, in her thirty-seventh year, she was survived by one son and two daughters. Her first-born, Prince Arthur, who married Catherine of Aragon, died in his youth, leaving the healthy, burly son Henry to succeed to the throne. The surviving daughters were Margaret, who married the King of Scotland and lived a tumultuous life, and pretty dark-eyed Mary, who married Charles XII of France in his last and senile year. Mary is one of the best remembered of English princesses.

Henry was properly grieved at the early demise of his fair consort, so it may have been that they were not seriously incompatible.

In the early months of his reign Henry passed through Parliament some unusual measures. First he demanded the repeal of
Titulus Regius
, stipulating that it was not to be read before the House and that all copies in existence were to be destroyed! This may have been due to a deep repugnance for the act and a desire to expunge it from the
memories of men. But everyone in England knew what it contained, and a monarch’s personal feelings should not be allowed to create a gap in national records. The repeal may have been an indication that he knew the princes were dead and that now they could safely be declared legitimate, as his wife was the third in line.

The next measure which provides a glimpse into the unusual workings of his mind was a bill of attainder against the dead Richard and all men who had fought for him at Bosworth. This would make it legal for him to confiscate their properties and scoop everything into his own empty pockets. The weak point in the scheme was that these men had fought for the crowned king of the realm and so were not guilty of treason. Henry saw a way around that difficulty. He dated his reign from the day before the battle!

It happened that some sharp parliamentary eye detected the error while the attainder was under discussion in the House. The date was corrected and the copy was sent to the king with the change made. Henry undoubtedly lapsed into one of his deep silences, his pale eyes blazing with inner fire as he realized that he could not now confiscate to his own use any of these fat and profitable acres and the honors that went with them.

This act was to prove one of Henry’s major mistakes in the matter of the charge of murder against Richard. For the second time the book was being thrown at the dead king. There was a long list of generalizations. He was charged with “unnatural, mischievous and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding of infant blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and men and in special our said sovereign lord—–” No specific misdeeds were enumerated and
no direct reference was made to the murder of the princes
. Now Henry’s claim to the throne was so extremely weak that he had to depend on proving the unfitness of the dead king. Why then this most inexplicable omission? The death of the princes was the trump of trumps, the thunderbolt of retribution, the voice in the clouds crying vengeance. Only because of it could Henry claim justification for overthrowing Richard and retrieving the crown from among the bramble bushes to set it upon his own brow.

Only two possible reasons can be found for the lack of use in evidence of this black deed. First, the princes may still have been alive. Second, Henry had been in possession of the Tower for months and
may have had reasons for not wanting an investigation
.

A complete silence fell over the fate of the two unfortunate youths and this continued for a long time. Was it any wonder that people began
to have doubts of Richard’s guilt and that some of them were led to believe in the impostures of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck?

There was one precedent for this curious silence, the fact that the truth about Richard II’s death was never allowed to come out. But there was a difference in the two cases. Henry IV, who succeeded Richard II, had been directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of his cousin and so had every reason to spread the pall of official silence over the grave of his predecessor. On the other hand the murder of the princes was charged against the dead Richard and there were good reasons for spreading the story over all of Christendom. Why then should the newly seated Henry refuse to fulfill his duty as monarch to bring out the facts and punish the guilty aides in the dark crime?

It would have been an easy matter to get at the truth. A double murder could not be committed in the Tower without some officials knowing of it, and without whispers spreading in the dark corridors which the guards patrolled. If the officers of the Tower had been questioned, the truth would soon have been arrived at.

Moreover it is not in the nature of criminals to keep still tongues. The hand of justice has always depended on the indiscretions of the guilty. One of the fine fellows who participated would have dropped a casual word somewhere, to a wife, to a walking mort (a woman of the streets), to a gossip in a tavern.

But Henry did nothing about it.

S
IR James Tyrell came of a family with strong Yorkist sympathies and he had been knighted after the victory at Tewkesbury. When Henry VII succeeded to the throne, however, the perhaps nimble-witted Tyrell managed to insinuate himself into his favor. He was given some properties and posts of importance. His most notable post was that of lieutenant of the castle of Guisnes in France and there he remained for the largest part of Henry’s reign, which may indicate a desire on the king’s part to keep him employed outside the kingdom. Tyrell had been born at Gipping in Suffolk and seems to have entertained a liking and respect for Edmund de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk. At least, when the latter fled from England he was received by Tyrell, and still later Tyrell was induced by a trick to surrender the castle to Suffolk. This was too much for the king to swallow and so Tyrell was made the victim of another trick which took him aboard a ship in Calais harbor. The captain upped sails at once and in the briefest possible time Tyrell found himself a prisoner in the Tower, charged with treason.

He was found guilty and was led out to Tower Hill. There he saw before him the most terrifying of sights—a black block so small that it seemed impossible for anyone to lay his neck upon it, and a masked executioner standing beside it and holding a curved ax on which the warm May sunshine glinted brightly.

At practically the same moment a priest named Dighton, who had been examined during the hearing, was released through the main gate and made off so promptly that he never again came into notice.

There was intense excitement in London when criers proclaimed the execution of Tyrell and declared him to have confessed the killing of the two princes under orders from Richard. As this was happening in the year of our Lord, 1502, there was nation-wide speculation on many points. How had the deed been committed? Why had the punishment of the murderer been delayed for nineteen years? The answers were to be found in the confession which Tyrell had made and in which his confederate Dighton had shared. But that most important paper, strange to relate, was never produced. Some historians say it was not preserved but others are convinced that it never existed, that Tyrell was convicted on the treason charge and made no confession at all.