The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family

by Higginbotham, Susan

  While the Woodville sisters were being married off, plans were underway for Elizabeth’s coronation, which took place on 26 May 1465. The ceremonies began on Friday 24 May, when London’s mayor, aldermen, and guild members went to meet the queen at Shooters Hill. From there they conducted her to the Tower, as was traditional. At London Bridge, Elizabeth was greeted by a man dressed as St Paul, most likely a reference to Elizabeth’s St Pol ancestry, and by another person dressed as St Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Mary Cleopas, the half-sister of the Virgin Mary, also stood upon the bridge along with her four sons.65

  As was customary, the king had summoned a number of boys and men to be made Knights of the Bath, a ceremony which most likely took place on Saturday, following ritual baths and a night vigil on Friday. Among the new knights were Richard and John Woodville, two of Elizabeth’s brothers, and William Haute, Lord Rivers’s nephew by his sister Joan. The Woodville grooms were also well represented: the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Maltravers, and Anthony, Lord Grey of Ruthin. That Saturday afternoon, Elizabeth rode from the Tower to Westminster, passing through Cheapside and preceded by the newly made knights. Most likely, as did queens before and after her, she wore white cloth of gold and sat in a litter draped with the same material, her hair worn down.

  On the following day, Sunday, the king’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence, rode into Westminster Hall on horseback, his horse trapped from head to hoof with a richly embroidered cloth garnished with gold spangles. Behind him rode the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Norfolk (John Woodville’s step-grandson), both on coursers trapped in cloth of gold extending to the ground. The three noblemen rode about the hall, keeping the spectators from pressing against the queen as she entered the hall.

  Preceded by the Abbot of Westminster and walking under a canopy carried by the four barons of the Cinque Ports, the queen wore a purple mantle and a coronal upon her head. She carried the sceptre of St Edward in her right hand and the sceptre of the realm in her left. The elder Duchess of Buckingham bore the queen’s train, while the Bishop of Durham walked at the queen’s right hand and the Bishop of Salisbury on her left. Following the queen were the queen’s mother and two of Edward’s sisters, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, and the unmarried Lady Margaret.

  Covering the path from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey was a carpet of ray cloth, upon which the queen walked barefoot (or perhaps in her stockinged feet). Before her walked the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops and abbots. Clarence, Arundel, and Norfolk, now on foot, had also joined the procession, along with the 9-year-old Duke of Buckingham, carried upon a squire’s shoulders. The king’s sisters and Jacquetta still followed the queen, along with Buckingham’s little duchess, who like her husband rode upon someone’s shoulders. These ladies and the rest of the thirteen duchesses and countesses wore robes of red velvet and ermine, while fourteen baronesses were clad in scarlet and miniver. Seven ladies of lesser rank followed in scarlet.

  Having passed into the monastery and through its north door, Elizabeth knelt at the high altar, then prostrated herself while the archbishop prayed. Rising, she was anointed and crowned, then led to the throne.

  After the royal procession left the abbey in the same order in which it had entered, the queen was led to her chamber, where she was dressed in a purple surcoat and brought into Westminster Hall to dine, with John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (married to Edward’s sister Elizabeth) standing on her right hand while she washed and the Earl of Essex holding the royal sceptres. John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, served the queen her water, while the Duke of Clarence held the basin. The Countesses of Shrewsbury and Kent knelt beside the queen, holding up a veil before her whenever she ate. Each time the queen took a bite, she herself removed her crown, putting it back when she was finished. The Archbishop of Canterbury sat at the queen’s right hand, the Duchess of Suffolk and the Lady Margaret on her left.

  To cap off the ceremonies, on 27 May, a tournament was held at Westminster. Elizabeth’s brother, Anthony, must have surely appeared there, but the honours went to Lord Stanley, who was awarded a ruby ring.

  Conspicuously absent from the coronation ceremonies was King Edward himself. This was not a snub but custom; Henry VI had been absent from Margaret of Anjou’s coronation, as Henry VII would be from Elizabeth of York’s and Henry VIII from Anne Boleyn’s. (Richard III was crowned with his queen, as was Henry VIII with Catherine of Aragon; both had married their brides before their own coronations.) It is possible that Edward IV was able to watch the ceremonies unobserved, as would Henry VII when his own queen was crowned.66 An equally conspicuous absence was that of the king’s mother, Cecily, Duchess of York. This may well have been a snub, but the duchess also missed her son Richard’s coronation in 1483. The Earl of Warwick was on an embassy to Burgundy. Jacques de Luxembourg, Jacquetta’s brother, came to the coronation as the representative of the Duke of Burgundy, which served the doubly pleasant purposes of allowing a kinsman of Elizabeth to see his niece crowned and of lending the event an international cachet.

  Lord Rivers is not specifically named as taking place in the ceremonies; probably his rank was not sufficiently high or his role so prominent to merit comment. It is clear, though, that he was a proud father. Later he purchased a romance, Alexander, which, he wrote in its inscription, had been bought on the fifth anniversary of the coronation of Edward IV ‘et le second de la coronacion de la tres vertueuze royne Elizabeth’.67

  The Black Legend

  of the Woodvilles

  Soon after her crowning, Elizabeth Woodville would have noticed another change in her life: she was pregnant. The child, another Elizabeth, was born on 11 February 1466 at Westminster Palace. The birth of the king’s first legitimate child served to lure even the baby’s paternal grandmother, Cecily, Duchess of York, to court, where she and the Duchess of Bedford (smiling hard, one imagines) served as the child’s godmothers at the christening at Westminster Abbey. The Earl of Warwick (also smiling hard, one imagines) did duty as the child’s godfather. The elder Duchess of Buckingham served as the child’s godmother at the confirmation.1 Over the next few years, Elizabeth gave birth to two more daughters: Mary, born at Windsor shortly before her baptism there on 12 August 1467, and Cecily, born at Westminster on 20 March 1469.2 The birth of Cecily, the queen’s third daughter, prompted a Milanese ambassador to write that the queen ‘gave birth to a very handsome daughter, which rejoiced the king and all the nobles exceedingly, though they would have preferred a son’.3

  It is not for her fecundity in the 1460s, however, that Elizabeth is remembered. Three events that occurred during this period – a churching, an execution, and a trial – have marred her reputation, so much so that they deserve a chapter to themselves.

  Following childbirth, a medieval mother was expected to remain in her chamber for about a month, after which a purification/thanksgiving service known as a ‘churching’ would mark her return to public life. For a medieval queen, a churching was a particularly grand event. An observer from Nuremburg, Gabriel Tetzel, travelling in the suite of Leo of Rozmital, a Bohemian nobleman, happened to be on hand in 1466 to witness Elizabeth’s. He reported:

  The Queen left her child-bed and went to church in stately order, accompanied by many priests bearing relics and by many scholars singing and carrying lights. There followed a great company of ladies and maidens from the country and from London, who had been summoned. Then came a great company of trumpeters, pipers and players of stringed instruments. The king’s choir followed, forty-two of them, who sang excellently. Then came twenty-four heralds and pursuivants, followed by sixty counts and knights. At last came the Queen escorted by two dukes. Above her was a canopy. Behind her were her mother and maidens and ladies to the number of sixty. Then the Queen heard the singing of an Office, and, having left the church, she returned to her palace in procession as before. Then all who had joined the procession remained to eat. They sat down, women and men, ecclesiastical and lay, each according
to rank, and filled four great rooms.4

  Rozmital and Tetzel went into a separate hall with England’s noblest lords ‘at the table where the King and his court are accustomed to dine’. There an unnamed earl, quite possibly Warwick, sat in the king’s place and was shown all of the honour customarily shown to the king. The breathless Tetzel reported, ‘Everything was supplied for the Earl, as representing the King, and for my lord [Rozmital] in such costly measure that it is unbelievable that it could be provided’.

  Having finished dining, the earl conducted Rozmital and his attendants ‘to an unbelievably costly apartment where the Queen was preparing to eat’. There, Tetzel, watching from an alcove so that his lord ‘could observe the great splendour’, noted:

  The Queen sat alone at table on a costly golden chair. The Queen’s mother and the King’s sister had to stand some distance away. When the Queen spoke with her mother or the King’s sister, they knelt down before her until she had drunk water. Not until the first dish was set before the Queen could the Queen’s mother and the King’s sister be seated. The ladies and maidens and all who served the Queen at table were all of noble birth and had to kneel so long as the Queen was eating. The meal lasted for three hours. The food which was served to the Queen, the Queen’s mother, the King’s sister and the others was most costly. Much might be written of it. Everyone was silent and not a word was spoken. My lord and his attendants stood the whole time in the alcove and looked on.

  After the banquet they commenced to dance. The Queen remained seated in her chair. Her mother knelt before her, but at times the Queen bade her rise. The King’s sister danced a stately dance with two dukes, and this, and the courtly reverence they paid to the Queen, was such as I have never seen elsewhere, nor have I ever seen such exceedingly beautiful maidens. Among them were eight duchesses and thirty countesses and the others were all daughters of influential men.

  For the Woodvilles’ modern detractors, this grand, silent meal, where even the queen’s mother and the king’s sister were obliged to kneel, epitomises the queen’s vanity and the social climber’s insecurity. Tetzel’s editor, even while acknowledging that silence at meals at the time was not unusual, commented that Elizabeth’s ‘head must have been turned by her sudden elevation in rank’.5 This, however, was no ordinary family dinner but a grand occasion for the royal family, marking Elizabeth’s safe delivery of the king’s first legitimate child. Notably, nothing in Tetzel’s account suggests that he found Elizabeth’s conduct repellent; he seems to have been merely a fascinated observer, just as he was when he witnessed the unnamed earl dining in royal state. Certainly nothing indicates that the queen was always surrounded by such solemn pomp; to the contrary, Louis de Bruges (Lodewijk van Gruuthuse), visiting the court a few years later, recorded his own account of his visit to the queen’s chamber and of the ‘pleasant sight’ of the queen and her ladies playing games and dancing.6

  If the queen’s churching has fuelled unfair comments about the queen’s hauteur and social insecurity, the next episode had led to far more serious allegations against the queen – murder. This story rises from the execution of Thomas Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond, at Drogheda in February 1468 under the direction of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who was Edward IV’s deputy governor in Ireland. For reasons which remain murky,7 Desmond, along with his brother-in-law the Earl of Kildare (who was also named Thomas Fitzgerald) and an Edward Plunkett, had been attainted of treason in the Irish Parliament at Drogheda. Desmond and Kildare, who had attended Parliament, were arrested there, and Desmond was executed several days later. Desmond’s brother, Garret of Desmond, gathered together an army. With the help of Sir Roland FitzEustace, who had been accused of urging Desmond to crown himself King of Ireland, Kildare escaped from prison in Dublin and joined Garret’s forces. This combined strength forced the hand of Worcester, who was obliged to accept Kildare and FitzEustace back into his favour.8

  None of this would seem on the surface to have anything to do with Elizabeth Woodville, and indeed, no contemporary – not even Elizabeth’s enemies – accused Elizabeth Woodville of having a hand in Desmond’s death. In the public outcry in Ireland that greeted the execution of the earl, Elizabeth was never mentioned. Rather, the story of the earl’s execution, and Elizabeth’s supposed role in it, did not make an appearance until the sixteenth century. The first source for the story is this memorandum allegedly presented to Henry VIII’s privy council by James FitzJohn Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, Thomas’s grandson:

  So it is that this Earl’s grandfather was brought up in the King’s house, and being well learned in all manner of sciences and an eloquent poet, as the author affirmeth, was in singular favour with his Highness, so far forth that his grace took much pleasure and delight in his talk. And upon a day being in chase a hunting, his Majesty questioned with him, and amongst other things said, ‘Sir cousin O’Desmound, for as much as I have you in secret trust, above others, and that ye are a man who doth both see and hear many things, as well in my court as elsewhere abroad, which shall not perchance be brought to mine ears, I pray you tell me what do you hear spoken by me?’ To the which he answered his Highness and said, ‘If it like your Grace, nothing but honour and much nobility.’ The King, nevertheless, not satisfied with that answer, demanded of him again, three or four several times, what he had heard; and willed him frankly to declare the truth, not hiding one jot thereof from his knowledge; whereunto the said Earl made answer as he did before. At the last his Majesty, wading still in that communication as most desirous to grope the full, required him, for that he took him to be not only a man of a singular wit, but of a long experience and judgment withal, and none within this realm in whom he had more affiance, to declare his own opinion, and what he himself thought of him. To the which the said Earl lowly made answer and said, ‘If it shall please your Grace to pardon me and not to be offended with that I shall say, I assure you I find no fault in any manner of thing, saving only that your Grace hath too much abased your princely estate in marrying a lady of so mean a house and parentile; which, though it be perchance agreeable to your lusts, yet not so much to the security of your realm and subjects.’ Whereunto his Majesty immediately condescended, and said that he had spoken most true and discreetly.

  Not long after, the said Earl having licence to depart into his country and remaining in Ireland, it chanced that the said King and the Queen his wife, upon some occasion fell at words, insomuch that his Grace braste out and said: ‘Well I perceive now that true it is that my cousin, the Earl of Desmond, told me at such a time when we two communed secretly together;’ which saying his Majesty, then in his melancholy, declared unto her; whereupon her Grace being not a little moved, and conceiving upon those words a grudge in her heart against the said Earl, found such mean as letters were devised under the King’s privy seal, and directed to the Lord Justice or governor of the realm of Ireland, commanding him in all haste to send for the said Earl, dissembling some earnest matter of consultation with him touching the state of the same realm, and at his coming to object such matter, and to lay such things to his charge, as should cause him to lose his head.

  According to which commandment the said Lord Justice addressed forth his messenger to the said Earl of Desmond, and by his letters signifying the King’s pleasure willed him with all diligence to make his repair unto him and others of the King’s Council; who, immediately setting all other business apart, came to them to the town of Droughedda, accompanied like a nobleman with eighteen score horsemen, well appointed after a civil English sort, being distant from his own country above 200 miles. Where without long delay or sufficient matter brought against him, after the order of his Majesty’s laws, the said Lord Justice (the rest of the Council being nothing privy to the conclusion) caused him to be beheaded, signifying to the common people for a cloak, that most heinous treasons were justified against him in England, and so justly condemned to die. Upon which murder and fact committed, the King’s Majesty being advertised thereof,
and declaring himself to be utterly ignorant of the said Earl’s death, sent with all possible speed into Ireland for the said Lord Justice; whom, after he had well examined and known the considerations and circumstances of his beheading, he caused to be put to a very cruel and shameful death, according to his desert, and for satisfaction and pacifying the said Earl’s posterity, who by this execrable deed were wonderfully mated, and in manner brought to rebel against the sovereign lord and King.9

  There are a couple of reasons that this memorandum should be treated with caution. First, although Annette Carson and John Ashdown-Hill used the petition to bolster their argument that Elizabeth was indeed behind Desmond’s execution, they point out that the editor of the Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, in which the memorandum appears, gives no source for it. They themselves were unable to find the original document.10 Is it possible, then, that the document is not what it purports to be; was a fabrication foisted upon an unsuspecting editor?

  Second, Desmond was in England in 1464, though not on a pleasure visit: he and William Sherwood, Bishop of Meath, had quarrelled, resulting in the killing of nine of the bishop’s followers, and both men went to England to put their cases before the king. Art Cosgrove notes that the period that Desmond spent in England cannot be precisely dated, but he was granted an annuity by the king, who was at Woodstock, on 25 August 1464.11 Edward IV did not announce his marriage to Elizabeth until the end of September 1464. While it is possible that Desmond was still in England in September to be sounded by the king about public opinion of him, there is no proof of this. Nor is there any evidence, other than the allegation in this story, that Edward and Desmond were close friends. Edward had a boon companion, William, Lord Hastings, who would have been a far likelier candidate to canvas public opinion if this was what the king wanted. No doubt the king’s mother would have also been happy to pass along any negative feedback about her son’s unconventional marriage.