THE HEAVILY PREGNANT ELIZABETH OF YORK WAS PROCESSED TO her Great Chamber at St Swithin’s Priory, Winchester.1 She stepped up a low platform and sat on a chair under the canopy of rich fabric known as a cloth of estate. A line of courtiers honoured her one by one with formal offerings of wine and spices before she retired in a further procession, with her ladies, to an inner chamber for her confinement. She expected to spend three or four weeks there before she delivered her child, but her labour came early. Margaret Beaufort noted the time in her Book of Hours as ‘afore one o’clock after midnight’ on 20 September 1486 – only eight months after the marriage.2 Happily the baby was a healthy boy. Henry VII named him Arthur after the legendary hero on whose tomb the prophecy had been written ‘Here lies Arthur, king once, and king to be.’3
Margaret Beaufort drew up detailed instructions, based on Lancastrian precedent, for future royal confinements and christenings. Henceforth, Elizabeth of York would deliver her children in a room hung with tapestry decorated with gold fleurs-de-lys, and on a bed with a canopy of crimson satin embroidered with crowns of gold, just as the Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou had done.4 It cannot have been easy for Elizabeth to have her mother-in-law involved, as Margaret was, in even the most intimate areas of her life. Margaret’s writ included the running of the nursery, and the private rooms of her son and daughter-in-law. She had ordered, for example, that a physician supervise the nurse breastfeeding Elizabeth’s baby, and a yeoman test the king’s mattress daily, ‘leap upon the bed and roll him up and down’.5 She was, furthermore, always there, her tiny frame an almost inescapable presence. At Woodstock Palace near Oxford, Margaret’s rooms were linked to those of the king by a withdrawing chamber, and in the Tower they were next to the king’s chamber. Whenever Elizabeth attended important ceremonial occasions Margaret would be at her side, dressed ‘in like mantel and surcoat as the queen, with a rich crownall on her head’, or identical ‘robes of blood-red cloth furred in white squirrel belly’.6 This was a public advertisement that they held equal rank.
Although Margaret was known officially only as ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, she was a queen in all but name and continued to maintain enormous influence over Henry. ‘I shall be glad to please you as your heart desire it’, he once wrote to her, ‘I know well that I am as much bounden so to do, as any creature living, for the great, and singular motherly love and affection that it has pleased you, at all times, to bear me.’ He could hardly forget that she had risked her life plotting on his behalf in 1483 and 1485 and it was in this spirit that Henry granted Margaret the rights of a ‘femme sole’. Usually a woman’s land and legal status went to her husband on her marriage, and only as a widow did she become head of a household as a ‘femme sole’. Margaret, although married, could own her property and transact business as a widow could, so that she was subject to no one but the king. Henry also continued to value her judgement. Those who served in her household often went on to serve Henry, and she played an important diplomatic role too, entertaining dignitaries at her London palace, Coldharbour.
Margaret’s household was second only to the king’s in size and largesse. A servant recalled how at Christmas her hall would feed visiting gentlemen from nine in the morning until seven at night, and no poor were turned away, ‘if he were of any honesty, but that he might come to the Buttery or the cellar and drink at his leisure’. ‘Few kings [were] better’ served than Margaret, and the servant remembered that one Christmas, when he was acting as her carver, he had twenty-five knights follow him in ceremonial procession to her table. There she was sat under a cloth of estate alongside her guest, Cecily of York, the most beautiful of Edward IV’s daughters, and a regular visitor.7
Cecily’s marriage to one of Richard III’s allies had been dissolved after Bosworth, and Margaret arranged in 1487/88 for the eighteen-year-old to be married instead to her half-brother Richard Welles. Margaret remained devoted to her non-royal relations, but she extended this warmth to Cecily and Elizabeth of York. Cecily grew very fond of her despite being married off to a man twenty years her senior, and she continued to worship in Margaret’s households even after she was widowed in 1499. Later, in 1502, when Cecily angered the king by remarrying a lowly esquire, Margaret defended her, and gave the couple shelter until the king had forgiven them.8 It is in the context of a loving, but sometimes domineering matriarch, that we have to understand Margaret Beaufort’s intriguing relationship with her daughter-in-law.
Margaret kept rooms ever ready for Elizabeth of York to visit, and worried over her daughter-in-law’s health and well-being. Following Elizabeth’s recovery from one spell of sickness, Margaret thanked God that ‘the queen and all our sweet children be in good health’.9 Elizabeth of York surely found her mother-in-law irritating at times, but a Spanish claim that Elizabeth was ‘kept in subjection by the mother of the king’, and resented this deeply, is inspired, at least in part, by a long literary tradition of conflict between mother and daughter-in-law. Elizabeth of York had the wisdom to learn to accept Margaret for her warmth, as well as her loyalty, and over the years the two women collaborated on charitable projects, as well as in matters concerning the children. When Henry and Elizabeth had their second child on 28 November 1489 – a girl this time – she was named Margaret after ‘my lady the king’s mother’.10
The devoted new grandmother prepared every detail of the princess’ christening and gave her a silver and gilt chest filled with gold.11 In time Margaret Tudor would prove as crucial to the future of the dynasty as Margaret Beaufort was to its founding, but for the time being the political focus remained on her brother, Arthur, as King Henry’s heir. The three-year-old had been created Prince of Wales by 1489 and the royal wardrobe sent regular deliveries for Arthur’s servants and himself. They included white velvets and damasks, ermine and black lambskin.
Eighteen months after the birth of Margaret Tudor, a brother was born at Greenwich Palace on 28 June 1491 – the future Henry VIII. It was a testament to Elizabeth of York’s fertility that in July 1492 a second daughter was born, named Elizabeth. This was the only time Henry allowed one of his children to be given a name with a stronger association to the queen’s family than his own; an acknowledgement of his wife’s grief following the recent death of her mother. Sadly, baby Elizabeth died aged three. A further daughter, born in 1496 and named Mary, proved more fortunate, and was an outstandingly pretty child. Two more children would die as infants, Edmund, born in 1499, and Katherine in 1503.
As Henry embarked on fathering this family of the union rose, he continued to work to heal the old divisions amongst the elite. His councillors included veteran Lancastrians like Jasper Tudor, but also old servants of Edward IV like Sir William Stanley, now Chamberlain of the Household. Even former Ricardians were allowed to work their way gradually back into favour. Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose father, the Duke (‘Jack’) of Norfolk, was killed at Bosworth, became treasurer. Henry, however, remained an enigma for most Englishmen. The Great Chronicle of London, compiled in 1512, could still only venture that the king was ‘a gentleman being in the parts of Brittany named Henry and son unto the Earl of Richmond’, who was ‘induced to claim the crown as right’ following the death of the princes in the Tower.12
Instead of explaining his past in historical terms Henry promoted the providential nature of his reign – that it was the consequence of God’s intervention on earth. The story was told of St Nicholas appearing to his nine-year-old mother, advising her to marry Edmund Tudor, and Henry VI foretelling Henry’s reign became all the more significant with the growth of Henry VI’s cult. Richard III had hoped to expiate his brother’s crime in killing the king and gain control of the cult by moving Henry VI’s body from Chertsey Abbey to the royal St George’s Chapel at Windsor. With Henry’s encouragement the tomb had since become a place of pilgrimage to rival the internationally famous shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. He was now campaigning to have his half-uncle beatified.13 It was Bosworth, however, that had confirmed the providential nature of Henry’s reign, and he wrote proudly of ‘the crown which it has pleased God to give us with the victory over our enemy at our first field’.14 The problem for Henry was that if he lost a future battle, his claims to have been chosen by God would be fatally undermined. All that his enemies needed was a new narrative, and their own ‘fair unknown’ to rally round.
Henry’s anxiety about the continued Yorkist threat was evident in his treatment of Elizabeth Woodville. The dowager queen had been a prominent figure at Arthur’s christening, yet five months later, in February 1487, her dower lands were passed to Elizabeth of York and she retired to the convent where she would die in 1492. Historians have suggested that she was mourning the loss of her sons, or that Margaret Beaufort saw her as a rival and wanted her out of the way. But Polydore Vergil believed that Henry wanted her out of sight, and that her retirement was linked to the appearance in Ireland, in February 1487, of a boy claiming he was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, and the rightful King of England.15 Although Henry had the real Plantagenet brought out of the Tower and paraded through the streets of London, not everyone was certain which boy was the genuine article.16 Henry rightly feared the pretender could, therefore, be used as a Yorkist rallying figure to overthrow him. Elizabeth Woodville’s presence at court was extremely unhelpful to Henry in this regard: however loyal she might be to her little grandson Arthur, he was a Tudor and she was a reminder of the former glories of the House of York.17
It was not long before the shadowy figures behind this conspiracy of the pretender emerged. The first was Edward IV’s nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln: the eldest of three brothers who would trouble the Tudor dynasty well into the reign of Henry VIII. Richard III was believed to have named Lincoln as his heir, and his aunt, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, had raised an army of Swiss and German mercenaries to place at his disposal. Madame la Grande, as the duchess was known in Burgundy, was the widow of Charles the Bold of Burgundy to whom she had been married in 1468.18 The duchy which now gives its name to a mere province of France was, at the time of her marriage, then a great power, stretching across not only what remains under that name, but also most of north-west France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Charles the Bold had provided his brother-in-law, Edward IV, with part of the army with which he had overthrown the re-established Henry VI in 1471. There was no reason to suppose that this ‘renewed’ Lancastrian dynasty, the Tudors, could not be similarly overthrown.
In April 1487 Lincoln sailed with his army from Burgundy to Ireland to join the pretender. His grandfather had been Lord Lieutenant of the country and he had no shortage of friends awaiting him there. Henry, by contrast, angered the most powerful figure in Ireland, Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, by refusing to confirm his role as deputy Lord Lieutenant. As soon as Lincoln landed in Ireland he was welcomed with open arms by Kildare. He promptly recognised the pretender as the ‘real’ Edward Plantagenet and on 24 May the boy was crowned in Dublin as ‘Edward VI’, with a gold circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary. The following month, with Kildare’s backing, Lincoln launched the first, and last, Irish invasion of England with ‘Edward VI’ at its head.
According to Tudor accounts the pretender’s real name was Lambert Simnel, the son of an artisan in Oxford who had been groomed for his role by a local priest.19 Lincoln, who had property near Oxford, is assumed to have paid for the necessary education. In public, however, he and the other commanders had to treat the child as their ‘king’. Disembarking at Furness in Lancashire, the rebels moved rapidly eastwards, crossing the Pennines into Wensleydale, gathering recruits under the banner of Edward VI, before pressing south. They included a core of Yorkists, their new English recruits, 4,000 Irishmen and the 1,500 German mercenaries, known as Landsknecht, who had been provided by Margaret of Burgundy. These latter were a fearsome sight. Their brightly coloured clothes were taken from fallen opponents, and since they didn’t always fit properly, they slashed and tied them; while their hats were similarly decorated with bright and gaudy feathers. It inspired fashionable dress at many of the courts of Europe – minus the bloodstains of the fallen enemies that befouled the mercenaries’ costumes and added to the terror of the spectacle of their advance.
The scale of Lincoln’s army was similar to Henry’s invasion force in 1485, and the fragility of the Tudor king’s grip on the throne was evident in London where rumours of a rebel victory saw people take to the streets on behalf of ‘Edward VI’. Henry was well prepared for the confrontation, however. He had prayed at the famous English shrine to the Virgin at Walsingham, and as he awaited news of the rebel advance in the Midlands, he had twice the rebel numbers at his command. They included ‘a great host of the Earl of Derby’s folks’ – his stepfather Thomas Stanley’s men. When the news came Henry bid farewell to ‘our dearest wife and . . . our dearest mother’ and headed north from Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire with Jasper Tudor to face the rebels.
The armies met on a hillside near the village of East Stoke in Nottinghamshire. ‘Both sides fought with the bitterest energy,’ Polydore Vergil records, ‘the Germans, so practised in warfare, were in the forefront of the battle and yielded little to the English . . . but the Irish, though they fought most spiritedly, were nevertheless (in the tradition of their country) unprotected by body armour and [they] suffered heavy casualties, their slaughter striking no little terror into the other combatants.’ As the Irish fell in their hundreds Lincoln was killed, and ‘the lad’ Simnel, whom the ‘rebels called King Edward’, was captured.20
Margaret Beaufort greeted news of her son’s victory with a celebratory note in her Book of Hours. A prayer, copied in, also fervently beseeched ‘Almighty God’ for his favour in sustaining ‘our King Henry to govern the realm and increase in glory’.21 Henry, she knew, still faced the major problem of how to re-engage Yorkist loyalties. He began work on this immediately with a northern progress through the Yorkist heartlands and the announcement of his wife’s imminent coronation. It took place that November and was preceded by the first river pageant ever to take place on the eve of a queen’s coronation.22 It proved a splendid occasion. Crowds cheered the tall and lovely Elizabeth of York as she was rowed in a great barge decorated with tapestries followed by other barges filled with the nobility. Yet even here violence lurked close to the surface. The procession to Westminster Abbey, where she was crowned that Sunday, degenerated into a bloody farce as the crowds fought furiously over the ray cloth laid for her to walk on from Westminster Hall. There was a tradition that once a coronation procession had passed, people could keep whatever they grabbed of the cloth, but the free-for-all got so frenzied that ‘in the [queen’s] presence certain persons were slain’.23
The banquet that night proved more decorous with Margaret Beaufort and the king watching the festivities through a latticed window. Twenty-three dishes were served for the first course and twenty-nine for the second, from pheasant and perch to a ‘castle of jelly wisely made’. The ten-year-old Lambert Simnel was soon to be found working in the royal kitchens turning the spit for occasions such as this. Henry believed humiliation would be more effective than death in erasing the aura of kingship in Simnel who, whatever his orgins, had been anointed with Holy Chrism – and it worked. Simnel was eventually promoted to trainer of the king’s hawks, surviving well into the next century.24 Yet the successful conclusion to the conspiracy, and Elizabeth of York’s magnificent coronation, had done little to make Henry more secure.
There is a story that Lincoln and the other rebel commanders at East Stoke had been buried with green willow staves plunged into their hearts, to prevent them rising up once more to trouble the living.25 There were no stakes, however, for the vanished brothers of Elizabeth of York. Not only were their bodies lost, but the fate of their souls had also seemingly been abandoned. Research for this book has uncovered no references to public prayers or Masses being said for the dead princes.26 Henry may not have wanted chantries – which were endowments that paid for Masses for the souls of loved ones – since the churches where they were established could have become a centre for the kind of cult that he wanted to avoid. But their absence would have struck people as very strange.
Praying for the dead was a crucial part of medieval religion. In December 1485, when Henry issued a special charter refounding his favourite religious order, the ascetic Observant Friars at Greenwich, he noted that offering Masses for the dead was ‘the greatest work of piety and mercy, for through it souls would be purged’.27 It was unthinkable not to help the souls of your loved ones pass from purgatory to heaven with prayers and Masses. On the other hand, it was akin to a curse to say a requiem for a living person – you were effectively praying for their death. The obvious question posed by the lack of prayers for the princes was, were they still alive? And, as Vergil recalled, only four years later there appeared as if ‘raised from the dead one of the sons of King Edward . . . a youth by the name of Richard’.28 It was to have a devastating effect on Henry as a man, and as a king.