Elizabeth

by Arlene Okerlund

  The Wydeville family connections to Burgundy made them natural ambassadors, and the King began to reward Elizabeth’s siblings with small favours. In August 1467, Sir William Bourchier and his wife Anne (the Queen’s sister) received £100 yearly from the royal manor lands.3 In July, Elizabeth’s brother Lionel, a clerk, was granted ‘all issues of the archdeaconry of Norwich’4, and in November Anthony was granted for life the custody of the King’s castle and town of Porchester and governance of the town of Portsmouth.5

  As the Wydevilles thrived, Warwick nursed his anger in the north. Not only had the Earl failed in his efforts to promote France over Burgundy, but he was now displaced as the pre-eminent English ambassador. The Croyland Chronicle, whose author was a member of the King’s Council and in a position to know, attributes the cause of the increasing alienation between Edward IV and Warwick to the Burgundian alliance:

  This, in my opinion, was really the cause of the dissensions between the King and the Earl, and not the one which has been previously mentioned – the marriage of the King with Queen Elizabeth. For this marriage of the King and Queen (although after some murmuring on the part of the Earl, who had previously used his best endeavours to bring about an alliance between the King and the Queen of Scotland, widow of the King of that country, lately deceased), had long before this been solemnly sanctioned and approved of at Reading, by the Earl himself, and all the prelates and great lords of the kingdom.

  Indeed, it is the fact, that the Earl continued to show favour to all the Queen’s kindred, until he found that her relatives and connections, contrary to his wishes, were using their utmost endeavours to promote the other marriage, which, in conformity with the King’s wishes, eventually took place between Charles and the Lady Margaret, and were favouring other designs to which he was strongly opposed.6

  Not until a reconciliation was negotiated by Warwick’s brother, the Archbishop of York, and the Queen’s father, Earl Rivers, did Warwick return to the court in January 1468. He was sufficiently mollified to lead Margaret of York’s procession when she departed for her new home in Burgundy on 18 June 1468. The procession out of London was grand. First stopping at St Paul’s Cathedral to make an offering, Margaret mounted her horse with the Earl of Warwick riding before her and other earls, barons, duchesses, ladies and gentlewomen following. The Mayor of London and the aldermen met her and presented her with a ‘pair of rich basins, and in the said basins a £100 of gold’.7 The first evening she lodged at the abbey of Stratford where the King and Queen were also staying. Then Margaret and her large entourage departed for the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury, before boarding their ships.

  Once embarked, the Wydevilles dominated the English contingent accompanying Margaret. Anthony, Lord Scales and Sir John Wydeville sailed aboard Margaret’s ship.8 In Bruges, Margaret’s chief presenter was Anthony, whose continental manners learned at his mother’s knee smoothly bridged any divide between the two cultures. Both Wydeville knights participated in the wedding tournament, and after nine days of feasting and fighting, Sir John Wydeville was declared the Prince of the Tournay. Lord d’Argueil, brother of the Prince of Orange, was named Prince of the Joust as the wedding celebrations concluded in diplomatic, as well as marital, harmony.9

  Problems were developing in England, however. Edward had difficulty in raising Margaret’s first dowry payment of 50,000 crowns and ultimately had to secure a bond from merchants and prominent citizens. The honour of contributing to the elaborate royal marriage somewhat cooled national enthusiasm for the enterprise. At one point, the marriage bond was placed at risk by the arrest of Sir Thomas Cook, a principal guarantor, for treason. As long as Margaret of York was in the country, she protected Sir Thomas for helping to secure her marriage bond, but after Margaret arrived in Burgundy, Cook was rearrested.

  Until this charge of treason, Sir Thomas, a former Lord Mayor and current alderman, had received great favours from Edward, including his creation as Knight of the Bath at the Queen’s coronation. Details of his case are incomplete and the witnesses not always objective, but the Queen and her family have been long and loudly vilified for their part in his prosecution. The most detailed account of the incident appears in The Great Chronicle of London whose author identifies himself as Sir Thomas’s apprentice at ‘about the age of 17 or 18 years and thereabouts’ when the trouble began. The author’s close relationship to the accused provides details otherwise unrecorded, but it also assures his partisanship toward Sir Thomas.

  The story began when John Hawkins, a servant of Lord Wenlock, approached Sir Thomas Cook to request a loan of 1,000 marks. When Sir Thomas asked for whom and what the money would be used, Hawkins disclosed that it was intended for Queen Margaret of Anjou. That exiled Lancastrian Queen! Well aware of the treasonous waters in which he was treading, Sir Thomas denied the loan, even though Hawkins reminded him of Queen Margaret’s earlier favours in appointing Cook as her ‘wardrober’ and making him a ‘customer of Hampton to his great advantage’. Hawkins dropped his request to £100, but Sir Thomas sent him away empty-handed.

  Hawkins continued his Lancastrian subversions and was arrested two or three years later, taken to the Tower, and tortured for information about other traitors. Among the King’s counsellors who questioned Hawkins were Earl Rivers (Treasurer and Constable of England) and Sir John Fogg (Treasurer of the King’s Household and husband of the Queen’s cousin Alice Haute). When Hawkins implicated Sir Thomas Cook, the alderman was immediately arrested and sent to the Tower. The jury that tried Sir Thomas in July 1468 included Clarence, Warwick, Rivers, Sir John Fogg and other members of the council. The Great Chronicle did not commend the process:

  The Mayor being a replete and lumpish man sat for Chief Judge and slept, wherefore the Duke [Clarence] sitting upon his Right hand seeing his misdemeanour said openly in his derision, ‘Sirs, speak softly for the Mayor is on sleep.’10

  Sir Thomas was acquitted of treason by this jury, but as Charles Ross points out, such juries always resisted convicting one of their own: ‘The legal records themselves show that, whilst the London juries of presentment were willing to indict known Lancastrian agents, such as Hawkins, whose evidence under torture involved Cook, they would not accept charges of treason against prominent and respectable London citizens.’11 Cook was acquitted but not freed, and another jury was appointed.

  Sent to prison at the King’s Bench in Southwark, Cook successfully petitioned to be released into the custody of Sir Robert Brandon, whom he paid ‘for his board and bedding’. His wife joined him at Sir Robert’s lodgings, since their own house had been confiscated by the crown. When the house was restored to the wife, she found it heavily damaged:

  [The wife] with her friends got again the possession of her own place, the which she found in an ill pickle, for such servants of the Lord Rivers and of Sir John Fogg as were assigned to keep it made such havoc of such wine as was left. In the cellars that what they might not drink and give away, they let run in the cellar, and sundry pipes that they had broached to chose the best, they suffered to stand open vented and lost thereby the wine of sundry vessels which were so pallid that they came to no good. So that by these means eight of nine tuns of Gascony wine lying in one cellar were lost, and over that much stuff of household, as well bedding and other, was bribed and lost.12

  Worse havoc occurred at Sir Thomas’s estates in Essex where his deer, rabbits and fish were destroyed ‘without reason’, and the house spoiled ‘without pity, so that brass, pewter, bedding, and all that they might carry was riffled clean, for the which might never after one penny be gotten in recompensement’.

  Efforts to free Sir Thomas continued into 1469, by which time the writer of The Great Chronicle specifically blames the Wydevilles for his former master’s troubles. He mentions the displeasure of the Duchess of Bedford ‘which ever was extremely against the said Sir Thomas, and all was because she might not have [a] certain arras at her pleasure and price belonging unto the said Sir Thomas’.13 Jacquetta m
ay indeed have admired the arras, which was ‘wrought in most richest wise with gold of the whole story of the Siege of Jerusalem, which I heard the foreman of my Master’s say that it cost in barter when my said master bought it £400’. But to blame the Duchess of Bedford and an arras for the troubles of Sir Thomas seems a bit far-fetched.

  Sir Thomas was ultimately freed when his offence was reduced from treason to misprision (concealment of treasonable activity). The value of his losses while jailed was deducted from his fine of £8,000, and he ‘came again to his own dwelling place, and builded and purchased as he did before’.

  Queen Elizabeth entered the story when she tried to collect her share of Cook’s fine through a provision allowed ‘by a statute made of old time’ known as ‘Queen’s Gold’, a 10% assessment added to fines paid to the King. This traditional assessment dates at least to the twelfth century, when Eleanor of Aquitaine obtained most of her income from Queen’s Gold. In recent years, however, it had become harder and harder to collect. Queen Margaret of Anjou had little success: her account books for 1452–3 record fifty-nine assessments of Queen’s Gold, several of which were unpaid after eight years and forty-three still uncollected. Elizabeth improved on Margaret’s record by collecting ten of eleven claims in 1466–7.14 Four queens later, Anne Boleyn was still collecting aurum reginae in 1534.15

  Elizabeth’s pursuit of the ‘Queen’s gold’ in the Thomas Cook case has become primary evidence of her ‘greedy and grasping’ character. What has been overlooked, however, is the fact that the Queen forgave the fine. According to The Great Chronicle, Sir Thomas sued for dismissal of the assessment, and ‘by the favour of one master page, then solicitor unto the Queen, had his end, how well there was no open speech of it after’. Although Fabyan’s Chronicle claims that the fine was paid, the greater detail of The Great Chronicle makes it a more reliable source, especially in light of the partisanship of its author. His concluding statement about the Queen forgiving Cook’s fine resonates ironically even today: ‘there was no open speech of it after’.16

  Even worse, too many historians have ignored the context of the times in which the Cook episode occurred. In 1468, treason was afoot and advancing in England. Queen Margaret was inciting incursions across the always insecure Scottish border, and Lancastrian supporters were fomenting rebellion within. Warkworth’s Chronicle lists the annual threats in succinct order: in the fifth year of Edward’s reign, the rebellion of the Earl of Oxford and his son Lord Aubrey (both executed); in the sixth year, Lord Hungerford’s treason; in the seventh, Thomas Cook, John Plummer and Humphrey Howard’s arrests. Warwick’s rebellion and Margaret’s invasion would soon prove the dangers imminent and real.

  Further, if Sir Thomas was not guilty of treason, he was certainly guilty of not reporting Hawkins’s efforts on behalf of Queen Margaret, a treasonable act. Indeed, Sir Thomas’ s Lancastrian leanings were more substantial than he admitted during his trial of 1468. When Henry VI was restored to his throne in 1470, Sir Thomas prominently appeared among his supporters. During the November Parliament that disinherited Edward IV and proclaimed him ‘usurper of the Crown’, Cook requested restitution of his property:

  Sir Thomas Cook then being one of the knights of the shire for London… made him more busy than was for his advantage, for he being an excellent and well-spoken man and a profoundly reasoned, showed in the open Parliament of the great wrongs and losses that he had sustained for the fidelity that he bare unto King Henry and Queen Margaret, and required restitution of 22,000 marks that he had lost by force of the foresaid wrongs.17

  Other London officials were more circumspect during the Lancastrian readeption. The Mayor, for instance, feigned illness rather than minister his office. But ‘the said Sir Thomas casting no perils executed the uttermost of his power to the hurt and indemnity of such as he knew bore any favour unto King Edward’. His former apprentice reports the consequences: ‘He repented full sore after’.18

  King Edward’s advisors rightly pursued, therefore, Cook’s involvement in Lancastrian plots. Lord Rivers, as Treasurer and Constable of England, and Sir John Fogg, as Treasurer of the King’s Household, appropriately investigated the factions endangering the King – actions that, of course, provoked anger and resistance from the accused and their advocates.

  In its partisanship, The Great Chronicle not only supports Cook, but clearly and explicitly favours Warwick. In reporting that ‘many murmurous tales ran in the City atween the Earl of Warwick and the Queen’s blood’, the writer reveals why Warwick was the popular choice of so many people:

  …by reason of the exceeding household which he daily kept in all countries where-ever he sojourned or lay, and when he came to London he held such a house that six Oxen were eaten at a Breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, for who that had any acquaintance in that house, he should have had as much sodyn [boiled meat] and roast as he might carry upon a long dagger… 19

  The well-fed commoners happily believed the slanderous tales about the Queen and her relatives disseminated by Warwick’s propaganda: bribery too frequently buys loyalty. But tales told by partisans should not be permitted to distort historical truth.

  Such tales typify the methods that have demeaned the Wydeville reputations. Another infamous example, concocted several generations later, blamed Elizabeth Wydeville for the execution, on 14 February 1468, of Thomas Fitz Gerald, 7th Earl of Desmond. During the reign of Henry VIII, the grandson of Desmond petitioned the Privy Council for restoration of the manor of Dungarvan, by presenting a memoir that accused Queen Elizabeth of causing his grandfather’s death. The Desmond affair offers several sorry insights into how unfounded claims create historical reputation.

  The Earl of Desmond, Deputy Governor of Ireland, was a somewhat hapless administrator whose defeat in an expedition against County Offaly jeopardised English control of the Pale. Edward IV replaced Desmond with the Earl of Worcester, a notoriously mean-spirited and violent administrator, who convened the Irish Parliament at Drogheda to attaint and subsequently execute Desmond. More than seventy years later, Desmond’s grandson claimed that the Earl’s execution occurred because Queen Elizabeth was angry with Desmond for urging Edward IV to annul his marriage and to find a more appropriate foreign bride. In revenge, the Queen stole the King’s signet ring, sealed an execution order for Desmond, and sent it off to Ireland.

  Although this story first appeared in a grandson’s memoir written two generations after the events in 1464, it was included by David MacGibbon in his 1938 biography of Elizabeth:

  A striking example of Elizabeth’s influence over Edward is to be found in her treatment of Thomas FitzGerald, 7th Earl of Desmond, who, in 1463 had been appointed Deputy Governor of Ireland. Desmond is said to have told the King that he ought to divorce Elizabeth and marry some foreign princess whose connexions would help stabilise his throne. When in May 1467 the Earl of Worcester was made Deputy Governor in Desmond’s place, it was commonly reported that Worcester’s new office had been obtained for him by the Queen, who intended through him to avenge herself on Desmond… In everything he did in Ireland Worcester appears to have been acting for Elizabeth, who is said to have secretly procured a privy-seal warrant for Desmond’s arrest and execution.20

  Passive verbs lacking attribution turn rumour into fact. While MacGibbon’s footnotes cite Desmond’s grandson as the source of this slander, along with a note that ‘G.H. Orpen disputes the authenticity of this episode in The English Historical Review’, the footnote cannot undo the damage done by the text. Neither does MacGibbon fairly represent Orpen’s clear exoneration of Elizabeth:

  The story will not bear examination… Earl Thomas [Desmond] had many enemies in the anglicized regions about Dublin, who resented his Irish methods, had repeatedly accused him of illegalities (Statute Roll 3 Edw. IV, p. 96; Annals of Duald MacFirbis, p. 253), and feared his great influence with the ‘Irish enemy’. Moreover, his recent rule had been disastrous. Irish writers inform us that in 1466 the earl was
taken prisoner by O’Conor Faly, that the country from Naas to Tara was repeatedly plundered by the Irish, and that the earl had purchased peace from O’Brien by a concession of lands and an annuity. The attainder is grounded on treasons committed by the earl ‘as well in alliance, fosterage, and alterage with the Irish enemies of the king, as in giving them horses and harness and arms and supporting them against the king’s faithful subjects’.21

  Thomas, Earl Desmond, hardly needed Elizabeth Wydeville to cause his demise, but his grandson needed someone to blame. And Elizabeth Wydeville, long dead, could not defend herself. In 1974 Charles Ross, Edward’s biographer, dismissed the accusation as a ‘Tudor fabrication’, and Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs have soundly refuted it in their account of Elizabeth as a ‘most benevolent Queen’. Yet the legend lives on in the false reputation of Elizabeth as a ‘cold and calculating woman’.

  Instead, while the Cook and Desmond affairs were ongoing, Queen Elizabeth was pursuing her many charitable and educational interests. In 1468 she visited the Queen’s College at Cambridge, the institution she had rescued after Margaret’s defeat. During that visit, she would have seen the Old Court of red brick buildings very much as it appears today. Completed in 1448–9, this medieval college was the first where students could live, study, eat, sleep and worship within its walls. Elizabeth would have entered the College through the east gatehouse, where the figures of St Bernard and St Margaret still decorate the bosses. Directly ahead were the dining hall and kitchens. To the left, students lived in residence halls, and to the right they worshiped and studied in the chapel and library. President Doket would have welcomed her to his lodgings in the corner between the library and dining hall.

  By the time of this visit, Elizabeth had been Queen four years and Margaret had been deposed for seven years. In continuing patronage to the College begun by her benefactor and her mother’s close friend, Elizabeth must surely have reflected on the hand that fortune deals the ‘sex feminine’ – and humanity in general.