Tudor Queens of England (14 page)

iage.4
Towards the end of December, therefore, in Rennes Cathedral, Henry of Richmond solemnly swore that, when the opportunity presented itself, he would marry Elizabeth of York. The Princess herself was probably aware that this action had been taken, but her reaction is not known. It must have seemed a good deal less realistic than her erstwhile marriage to the Dauphin and when she came to terms with Richard, the Dowager had perforce to drop the whole idea. Romantic stories allege that the Princess kept up a clandestine correspondence with Henry despite her mother’s withdrawal and even sent him a ring of betrothal but no evidence substantiates them. For about a year after her emergence from sanctuary, the young Elizabeth was at court, probably as some kind of attendant upon the Queen, Anne Neville, with whom she is said to have been friendly. It seems likely that Richard, who had not lost his suspicious nature, wanted to keep her where he could see her. When Anne died in March 1485 there were rumours that Richard would marry her himself. These rumours were so persistent that the King issued a formal denial – and indeed a bastard niece would hardly have been a suitable br
ide.5 I
nstead, Elizabeth was packed off to Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, where she remained throughout the summer.

The circumstances of Henry’s landing and of his advance to Bosworth, are well known. He won his decisive victory on 22 August less by the strength of his own forces (which numbered barely 5,000) than by the dubious tactics of Lord Stanley and the Earl of Northumberland. The latter, having ostensibly brought his power to support Richard, did absolutely nothing. The former joined Henry just as the battle was turning in his favour. The victory in itself would probably have settled nothing if Richard had survived, but in fact he died on the fi eld of battle and his crown was symbolically transferred to Henry on the spot. Richard’s failure to rally

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committed support is something of a mystery and there was much talk at the time of divine judgement. Henry acted as king from the moment of his victory and even dated his reign from the day before the battle. Before he left Leicester for London, he sent Sir Robert Willoughby to Sheriff Hutton to secure the persons of Edward, Earl of Warwick, the 10-year-old son of the Duke of Clarence, and of Elizabeth, each of whom presented a potential threat to his claim. Warwick was immediately consigned to the Tower but Elizabeth was temporarily returned to the custody of her mother and accommodation was provided for them at Westminster. In September he appointed a new Chancellor and a new Lord Privy Seal, while Lord Dynham, the Treasurer, continued in his post. On 15 September he also summoned a parliament, which duly convened on 7 November. This assembly dutifully endorsed the King’s title (thereby annulling his previous attainder), annulled the attainders of those who had been supporting him since 1483 and replaced them with some of his recent enemies. It also petitioned him to honour his two-year-old pledge to marry Elizabeth ‘Daughter of King Edward IV’

.6 N
othing was said about her being Edward’s heir, but as Giovanni de Giglis reported to the Pope, everyone considered this to be for the advantage of

the kingdom.7
Edward had been Duke of York as well as king, and that title had descended to his younger son. If Richard was dead, as was generally assumed, it was at the King’s discretion whether to recognize Elizabeth as Duchess in her own right, and it is possible that he did so in November or December, although no instrument confi rms that. If it did happen, then she would have enjoyed the revenues of that Duchy for about a month before her wedding. Henry responded positively to the parliamentary petition, and even offered excuses for his delay: there had been plague in the capital, it was necessary to gather money, and so on. The ceremony eventually took place on 18 January 1486, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Bourchier, offi ciating. In fact the couple were suffi ciently near in kin to need a papal dispensation but so well disposed was Pope Innocent VIII that his Legate was able to give that verbally early in January in order not to hold up the ceremony.
8
It is probable, indeed, that Elizabeth was already pregnant, given the fact that Arthur was born just eight months later, and the Legate may have had good cause to suspect that. Innocent certainly seem to have seen this wedding as the ideal way to end the feud which had so disrupted England, because when the written dispensation fi nally arrived in March, it addressed the King as ‘Henry of Lancaster’ and the Queen as ‘Elizabeth of York’, referring specifi cally to the healing of the dynastic breach. The people of London seem to have felt the same because we are told that they greeted the occasion with ‘bonfi res, dancing, songs and banquets’ in the streets. It should be noted, however, that when Parliament recognized Henry’s 76

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title in November, it made no reference to Elizabeth and the King never allowed the slightest suggestion that his wife reinforced his position. The wedding was not immediately followed by a coronation. This was probably because Henry had more urgent things to attend to, although it might be because she was soon realised to be pregnant. It is also possible that the King had no desire to emphasize his consort’s royal credentials at this stage, having, to his mind, done that quite suffi ciently in the wedding. Instead, the King took off on what was likely to be a diffi cult and even dangerous progress to the north, to the heartlands of Richard’s support, while the Queen retreated to Winchester, where she, her mother and her sisters appear to have been the guests of the Queen Mother, Margaret Beaufort. The role of this formidable matriarch has been carefully studied and she seems to have performed many of the functions that might otherwise have fallen to the consort. She was extremely well endowed fi nancially, had a large affi nity of dependents, dispensed much patronage and seems to have lived virtually independently from her third husband, the Earl of Derby. Relations with the Queen Dowager may well have been diffi cult (the two women were much of an age) and it may well have been that tension rather than any political suspicion that caused the older Elizabeth to retreat to Bermondsey in 1487. Margaret seems to have assumed a propriatorial interest in the young Elizabeth, which her mother may well have resented, although the Queen herself seems to have been completely relaxed about it, as she was about most things. Arthur was born on 19 September 1486 at Winchester and Elizabeth, who seems to have had a diffi cult labour, went down with a fever immediately afterwards. This was not apparently thought to be life threatening but it did mean that she had to be carried to her churching. Her mother stood as godmother at the christening but we know little else about the ceremony apart from the fact that it was nearly wrecked by the late arrival of the Earl of Oxford, one of the godfathers. Like her mother, Elizabeth was destined to become a baby factory. In a married life of seventeen years she bore her husband at least six children who are recorded, and several others who are not recorded and may have been still births – including the daughter whom she died giving birth to. Her fertility equalled that of her mother, but she was less fortunate with survivals. When the Queen Dowager died in 1492, fi ve of her seven daughters were still alive and of her three sons only one had died a natural death. When the Queen died in 1503

she left two daughters and one son and, although it was Henry’s survival that saved the dynasty, his mother had in other respects been unfortunate. Henry’s critics later claimed that the King’s relationship with his wife was lacking in warmth or affection but her frequent pregnancies and the devastating effect that her death had on him point to a quite different conclusion. He is rumoured to

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have been enamoured of Katherine Herbert, a daughter of the Earl of Pembroke, with whom he was brought up for some years, but that was before his betrothal to Elizabeth. The Princess was warned about Katherine in the autumn of 1485

but seems not to have taken her rivalry seriously – and in that she was fully justifi ed. Unlike his father in law, Henry was a man of great continence and although he obviously made full use of his wife he seems never to have strayed after other women, a characteristic in which he resembled his pious namesake and predecessor.

Financial provision for the Queen is something of a mystery because the evidence is not entirely consistent. Apart from the problem over the Duchy of York there are suggestions that she was deemed to have inherited the lands of the Earldom of March because she appears to have been holding property belonging to that patrimony in Herefordshire in September 1486, long before she had received any formal grant. Parliament also authorized her to ‘sue in her own name … all manner of rents etc. due to her …’, which would have been pointless if she had not been holding property. Later, in 1494, certain lands of the earldom in Ireland were described as being ‘in the king’s hands in the right of Elizabeth the Queen Consort’, which points in the same dir

ection.9 H
owever, it was not until 26 November 1487, following her coronation, that any formal grant was made directly to her – a long list of lands and other properties being conferred for life. These seem to have been the same as those that had been granted to her mother in March 1486, and confi rm other references to the transfer of that patrimony
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n March 1488 she was granted certain royalties and other rents and both these grants were confi rmed on 1 February 1492, about three months before her mother died, when she was also granted the reversion of some of her grandmother’s property
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onsequently, unlike any of her predecessors, and because the grants were made in this piecemeal fashion, it is not possible to say what Elizabeth’s properties as consort were actually worth In 1495 she was granted the castle and lordship of Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire but in the same year was noted to be so deeply in debt that she was forced to pawn

£500 worth of plate, and to borrow £2,000 from her husband to satisfy her creditors. The suggestion is that this was rather due to excessive generosity than to inadequate income. It is probably safe to conclude that Henry would have wanted to make suitable provision for his Queen, and that would have meant committing between £4,000 and £5,000 of annual revenue but it is impossible to say just how that endowment was put together.

During the summer of 1487 Henry was much preoccupied with the rebellion that came to an end at Stoke on 16 June. After that he had to try to stabilize the situation in Ireland, where there had been much support for Lambert Simnel’s 78

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imposture; it was not until November that he got around to crowning his Queen. When it came, it was worth the wait. Elizabeth set out by barge from Greenwich on 24 June and the King welcomed her at the Tower, where they spent the night. The following day she processed on her own through the City to Westminster, her train being borne by her sister Cecily. The earls of Oxford, Derby and Nottingham acted as Stewards for the occasion and the ceremony was performed by the new Archbishop, John Morton. Henry watched the proceedings from ‘a closed lattice box between the altar and the pulpit’ and, as was customary, the Queen presided at the following banquet. Her mother, apparently, was not present although whether this was by the King’s orders or not is unclear. However her stepbrother the Marquis of Dorset, who had been under arrest for his suspected part in the Simnel rising, was specially released to attend.

Thereafter the Queen can only be occasionally observed going about her business. She was in a way a model consort, never overstepping the traditional limitations, so comments upon her activities are comparatively rare. Her accounts show her both giving and receiving gifts, not only from the humble, who brought her cherries and apples, but also from the powerful and well connected. Her goodwill was obviously worth cultivating.

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Her household provided a refuge for several of Richard’s former servants; Edward Chaderton, his Treasurer of the Chamber, for example became her Chancellor. There was nothing particularly surprising about that as both Margaret Beaufort and the King himself had strong Yorkist contingents in their households but they were rather less welcoming to those with close connections to the previous regime. Although there are a number of contemporary testimonies to her intelligence and, as we have seen, she had several languages, she was not to any great extent a patron of scholars and even Bernard Andrée did not credit her with such a function. When she appears as a patron of letters it is usually in association with Margaret Beaufort, who is much better known for that sort of patronage. They both, for example, sponsored Caxton’s edition of the
Fifteen Oes
in 1491, and jointly gave a copy of Wykyn de Worde’s edition of Walter Hilton’s
Scala Perfectionis
to her Lady Margery Roos in 1494. The two ladies were also associated occasionally in pious benefactions and were, along with the King and the royal children, the subjects of the prayers of many endowed chantries. They were together created Ladies of the Garter in 1488, and when Elizabeth became Chief Lady in 1495 no jealousy seems to have resulted. Margaret was 53 in that year and Elizabeth 29, but despite this difference relations seem to have remained entirely harmonious. In this, as in so many other matters, Elizabeth seems to have remained true to her motto,

‘humble and reverent’. After a chequered childhood and a turbulent adolescence, her married life was singularly peaceful. Insofar as she features as an independent

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