The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (30 page)

On 1 August 1485, Henry Tudor at last left Harfleur with around 4,000 men, most of them French but some of them Scots in French employ, funded by a grant from Charles VIII of 40,000 livres and loans obtained by Henry himself. Ironically, Philippe de Crèvecoeur, whose piratical fleet Edward Woodville had been fighting back in the spring of 1483, supplied about 1,500 of the men. Among Henry Tudor’s ‘chief men’ was Edward Woodville, singled out by Crowland for praise as ‘a most valiant knight’. Dorset, whose attempted defection had not been forgotten, remained in France as human collateral for Henry’s borrowed funds.
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On 22 August 1485, Richard III’s forces, totalling around 8,000 to 10,000 men, and Henry Tudor’s forces, totalling about 5,000 after picking up new recruits during the march from Henry’s landing point in Wales, faced each other, probably on the plain southwest of Ambion Hill. The forces of Lord Stanley – Margaret Beaufort’s husband – and his brother Sir William stood nearby, committed to neither side.
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While Edward Woodville and his fellow rebels no doubt hoped that God would judge the rightness of their cause by granting them a victory, Edward could not have been a little daunted as he assessed the odds. If Henry Tudor lost the day and he managed to escape, he faced life in permanent exile, perhaps hiring himself out as a mercenary like many of the Frenchmen and Scots who stood beside him. If he fell alive into Richard III’s hands, he could expect a summary execution by beheading after the battle. If Richard were minded to give his subjects an especially strong warning of the costs of rebellion, Edward might even be facing the traitor’s death of hanging, drawing, beheading, and quartering.

Instead, a few hours later, a horse trotted away from the battlefield. It bore the naked and battered body of Richard III.
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For William Catesby, the reign of Henry VII got off to a particularly bad start: his own execution. Catesby was the only major figure from Richard III’s reign to be put to death in the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth: two others, a now obscure yeoman of the crown named William Bracher and his son, were hanged immediately after the battle. Why these three men in particular suffered is unknown; perhaps Catesby at least, as Peter Hammond suggests, had made enemies on the king’s side.
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On 25 August 1483, probably the date of his execution in Leicester, Catesby was allowed to make his will, which included this bequest: ‘that my lady of Buckingham have [£100] to help her children and that she will see my lord’s debts paid and his will executed’.
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Catesby, among others, had been granted lands by Richard III in order to settle the debts of the executed Duke of Buckingham;
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evidently he had been dilatory in this task and was now trying to set things right for the duchess, who under Richard III had been living on what for her was a small annuity.

But Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham, would soon be in no need of the unfortunate Catesby’s well-intended bequest. On 28 October 1485, Henry VII had created his uncle, Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford.
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Having been restored to the lands associated with the earldom of Pembroke, Bedford was now in want only of a duchess. Katherine, who once her jointure and dower were restored would be a rich young widow, suited the purpose nicely. Some time before 7 November 1485, when the pair are mentioned as married in an Act of Parliament, the two were wed. On 7 November, the new Duchess of Bedford and Buckingham was granted the 1,000 marks jointure which Buckingham had left her in his will, as well as her dower lands. She brought her husband thirty-five lordships and manors. The couple were probably virtual strangers at the time of their marriage, unless Jasper had met Katherine during his brief stay in England in 1470. Since the young Duke of Buckingham had visited Margaret Beaufort on 28 October 1670, while Jasper and her son were visiting, it is possible that Buckingham brought his wife along with him.
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Katherine, of course, was not the only Woodville to benefit from the change of regime. On 16 September 1485, Edward Woodville was granted the castle and lordship of Carisbrooke and was made keeper of the castle and town of Porchester. He was now the Captain of the Isle of Wight.
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In the parliament that opened on 7 November, Richard Woodville was recognised as his brother Anthony’s heir; he now became the third Earl Rivers. Edward and Richard’s nephew, Dorset, who had proven fickle to Henry Tudor’s cause, did not come out of Parliament so well. While his attainder was reversed, he was not summoned to Parliament, and he was restored only to the lands he had acquired by inheritance or marriage, thereby losing the grants and wardships he had acquired under Edward IV. Elizabeth Woodville was restored to her ‘state, dignity, pre-eminence and name’ and was granted certain lands, though the delicate question of her landed endowment as queen was not settled. Most important, perhaps, from her point of view and her daughters’, the 1484 Act of Parliament declaring her marriage to Edward IV invalid and her children by Edward IV illegitimate was repealed and, indeed, ordered destroyed. Parliament also reversed the attainder of the Lancastrian royal family, the ill-fated Henry VI, his tenacious queen, Margaret of Anjou, and their son, though none, of course, were alive to appreciate their vindication. The rhyming William Collingbourne also earned a posthumous pardon.
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Henry VII had been crowned on 30 October. On 10 December, the Commons, through their speaker, Thomas Lovell, requested:

    the same royal highness should take to himself that illustrious lady Elizabeth, daughter of King Edward IV, as his wife and consort; whereby, by God’s grace, many hope to see the propagation of offspring from the stock of kings, to comfort the whole realm. And thereupon the lords spiritual and temporal being in the same parliament, rising from their seats and standing before the king sitting on the royal throne, bowing their heads, voiced the same request; to which the same king answered by his own mouth that he was content to proceed according to their desire and request.
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This was likely not, as has been suggested by some, an indication that Henry VII, having achieved the throne, had to be pushed by Parliament into fulfilling his vow to marry Elizabeth of York; rather, as Arlene Okerlund and others have pointed out, the request was probably simply a formality designed to emphasise Parliament’s approval of the match. The five-month interval between Henry’s victory on 22 August 1485 and his marriage on 18 January 1486 was hardly an unseemly delay, given the need for Henry to get settled in as king, repeal the act slandering the legitimacy of his prospective bride, and obtain a papal dispensation to replace the one issued in 1484, which evidently was considered inadequate.
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Elizabeth had spent the months leading up to the marriage in her future mother-in-law’s Thames-side residence of Coldharbour, where Margaret Beaufort ordered furnishings and repairs for the rooms she was to occupy.
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Little is known of the wedding ceremony, other than that it was conducted by Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had made the tragic mistake of asking Elizabeth Woodville to hand over her youngest son to Richard III’s custody.
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The septuagenarian archbishop had crowned Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville, Richard III and his queen, and Henry VII; the wedding was the last great ceremony over which he presided before his death in May 1486.
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Presumably the ceremony was followed by the ‘great jousting’ which had been promised when the wedding plans were announced.
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Edward Woodville did not linger long at the new king’s court or at his castles of Porchester and Carisbrooke. Early in 1486, possibly in fulfilment of a vow made during his exile, he departed for Spain to fight the infidels – ironically, an ambition that Richard III himself had cherished.
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By 1 March, he was at Seville, accompanied by 300 men. From there, he rode to Cordoba, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were assembling an army to fight the Moors. On 14 May, they arrived outside of the city of Loja, which the Spanish rulers aimed to capture from the Moors.

Edward – called ‘Lord Scales’ in the contemporary accounts of the campaign – made a considerable impression on his companions. The Italian Peter Martyr described him as ‘young, wealthy, and high-born’ and as ‘attended by a beautiful train of household troops, three hundred in number, armed after the fashion of their land with long-bow and battle-axe’.
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He and other eyewitnesses give us a rare description of a member of the Woodville family in battle. Fernando del Pulgar wrote that ‘the Englishman, the Conde de Escalas with the bowmen and foot soldiers he brought ventured into dangerous situations and places’.
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Andrez Bernaldez, chaplain to the Archbishop of Seville, wrote, as translated by W.H. Prescott:

    Having asked leave to fight after the manner of his country […] he dismounted from his good steed, and, putting himself at the head of his followers, armed like himself en blanco, with their swords at their thighs, and battle-axes in their hands, he dealt such terrible blows around him as filled even the hardy mountaineers of the north with astonishment.
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The Castilians followed Edward’s charge as the Moors fled. Edward and his men fought their way through the suburbs to the city walls. As he was mounting a scaling ladder, he was struck with a stone, knocking out two front teeth and sending him sprawling senseless on the ground. The surgeons saved his life, but not his teeth. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella later offered their sympathies, Edward quipped of his missing teeth, ‘Our Lord, who reared this fabric, has only opened a window in order to discern the more readily what passes within’.
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The Moors surrendered Loja on 28 May, after which the Spaniards moved to Illora, which also fell. There, on 11 June, Queen Isabella herself, along with her daughter the Infanta, arrived to celebrate the victories. Edward, minus two teeth but resplendent in a French surcoat of black brocade and a ‘white French hat with extravagant plumes’, greeted the queen and the Infanta and, having made his reverence to the king, showed off his horsemanship, to the delight of the royal family.
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From Illora, the Spanish went on to capture Moclin, then Montefrio, before the council of war determined to return to Cordoba. From there, Edward, his crusading vow fulfilled, set off for England. He did not return empty-handed. Queen Isabella presented him with twelve Andalusan horses, two beds with rich hangings (medieval beds being valuable items), linen, and pavilions. Later, Ferdinand would praise him as the ‘remarkable Count of Scales’.
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Edward stopped in Portugal on his way home; earlier, he had written a letter of apology to King John for not calling on him when passing through Lisbon previously; he had received a gracious royal reply.
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Now he made good his omission and paid his respects. There, the king’s secretary reported, he was ‘very well received’ and enjoyed a round of feasts, bullfights, cane-fights, plays, and pageants. At one point, he even engaged in some matchmaking: At a meal where the king honoured his guest by refusing to take his water while seated, Edward proposed that one of Edward IV’s daughters marry the Duke of Beja – continuing, evidently, the negotiations that had been broken off by the death of Richard III the previous year. In the end, however, nothing came of the proposal.
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When Edward returned to England, the court was anxiously awaiting the birth of the king’s and queen’s first child, who arrived on 20 September 1486.
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Born eight months after the wedding, the infant, named Arthur, may have been slightly premature – or his parents, having received Parliament’s blessing for their marriage, may have anticipated the formal ceremony by a few weeks. Given the ease with which a valid marriage could be contracted, it would not have shocked morality if the couple had exchanged private vows and then consummated their marriage. On the other hand, since the christening was postponed to await the arrival of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, an intended godfather, who was on his estates instead of being lodged nearby in anticipation of an imminent birth, it may indeed be that Arthur’s arrival caught everyone by surprise.
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