Elizabeth
Page 13
As the decade of the 1460s drew towards its end, the Queen and her family were serving their King and country in ways that benefited its commerce and its educational and religious institutions. The presence and power of the Wydevilles was undeniable. At one point, Edward’s fool, whose wit made him a favourite of the King, appeared in court one hot, dry summer day wearing long boots and carrying a walking staff. When the King inquired why he was dressed so inappropriately for the season, the fool replied, ‘Upon my faith, Sir, I have passed through many counties of your realm, and in places that I have passed, the Rivers been so high that I could hardly scape through them.’ The King laughed at the joke about ‘Lord Rivers and his blood’.22
Those displaced by Lord Rivers and his family were not, however, amused. The Yorkist nobles who saw their former Lancastrian enemies reap rewards became increasingly resentful, angry and vindictive. Warwick, the King’s cousin who flaunted his ‘blood royal’, took particular umbrage at this family so recently converted to the Yorkist cause. In plotting his return to power, the Earl sought to discredit the Wydevilles. His propaganda spread to the continent when Luchino Dallaghiexia described the Queen as ‘a widow of this island of quite low birth’ in a letter to the Duke of Milan.23 The Italian correspondent deplores Elizabeth’s influence with details he could have obtained only from an informant:
Since her coronation she has always exerted herself to aggrandise her relations, to wit, her father, mother, brothers and sisters. She had five brothers and as many sisters, and had brought things to such a pass that they had the entire government of this realm, to such an extent that the rest of the lords about the government were one, the Earl of Warwick, who has always been great and deservedly so.24
His endorsement of Warwick perhaps identifies the source of Dallaghiexia’s information. At the least, he had been talking to those displaced by the Queen’s family.
Warwick strengthened his position by soliciting support from the King’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence, who similarly resented his own loss of prestige and power. Within months, the two joined forces and attacked Edward IV, the Yorkist King whose throne Warwick had helped win. Instead of York fighting Lancaster, the battles turned inward. The Yorkist brothers and cousins took up swords against each other. The family feud turned into another bloody war.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
War Within the Family
Earl Warwick was irrevocably alienated from Edward IV by the treaty with Burgundy and the growing influence of the Wydevilles. He blamed the Queen and her family for Edward’s foreign policies and for the personal estrangement developing between himself and his cousin the King. No matter that Warwick was the one harbouring – and nurturing – his resentments and that Edward himself felt no animosity towards his cousin. Indeed, the King apparently remained oblivious to Warwick’s growing hatred. The personal passions and political aspirations of Warwick would, however, dominate the next several years of Elizabeth’s life. She would have to live with Warwick’s ambition and murderous rampages against her family every day for the next four years.
Older than the King by fourteen years, Warwick had always believed he was better able to rule England than the handsome boy addicted to self-indulgent pleasure and games. At the age of forty, Warwick realised that time for achieving his dream was growing short. The Earl, who was so proud of his ‘blood royal’, traced his lineage to John of Gaunt, who had sired four children by Katherine Swynford while still married to Constance of Castile, children subsequently legitimised by Richard II. Although Henry IV specifically excluded Beaufort descendants from succession to the throne, they retained all other royal privileges and the sons occupied important positions in the court of Henry V. Gaunt’s daughter Joan Beaufort married Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmoreland, and their nine children built enormous fiefdoms through shrewd marriages and skilful politics.
Since Ralph Neville’s son from his first marriage inherited the title and rights of Westmoreland, the eldest son from his Beaufort marriage made his way in the world by marrying Alice, daughter and heir of the Earl of Salisbury, and inheriting his father-in-law’s title. Their eldest son, also named Richard, similarly married well to Anne Beauchamp, heiress of the Earl of Warwick, from whom he inherited his title. The youngest Neville daughter, Cecily, married Richard, Duke of York and grew into the formidable Duchess of York who tried to stop her son from marrying Elizabeth Wydeville. Warwick and Edward IV were first cousins, with Edward claiming the throne as a descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, an older brother of John of Gaunt.
Without question, Warwick’s power, money and political skills had helped his young cousin gain his footing as the leader of the Yorkist faction. After the death of the Duke of York at Wakefield on 30 December 1460, Warwick sent reassuring letters to Burgundy and France to control damage done to the Yorkist cause. His leadership was not flawless, however, and he almost lost everything at the second battle of St Albans. Warwick’s personality was that of the classic bully, and now that he was not getting his way, he openly defied the King.
Warwick began by suborning the King’s brother George, Duke of Clarence. As Steward of England, Clarence had led the procession at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and had ridden beside the King when George Neville was removed as Chancellor. But by 1469, Clarence, too, had become disaffected. Personally miffed by the glory heaped on Anthony Wydeville, and generally discontented with his diminished influence at court, he aligned himself with Warwick, who returned to Calais to build a powerful military base as captain of that crucial port.
Edward did not comprehend the depth of Warwick’s hatred and hostility. In June 1469, the King began a progress through East Anglia on pilgrimage to Bury St Edmunds and the shrine at Walsingham. Elizabeth, who had given birth to their third child, Cecily, on 20 March, did not accompany him, but met him at Fotheringhay Castle in late June or early July. On 7 July, Edward left Fotheringhay for the north where Lancastrian rebels were causing disturbances. Elizabeth prepared to fulfil a promise Edward had made to the town of Norwich where he had told its citizens that he would return for another visit, this time with the Queen. With Edward in the north, Elizabeth planned to visit alone with her small children.
John Aubrey, Mayor of Norwich, wrote to Sir Henry Spelman, the City’s Recorder in London, on 6 July 1469, to inquire about receiving and entertaining the Queen during ‘her first coming hither’. The Sheriff of Norfolk had told Mayor Aubrey that ‘she will desire to be received and attended as worshipfully as ever was Queen afore her’. Those words have often been quoted as proof of Elizabeth’s demanding arrogance, even though they emanated from the sheriff who was cautioning an admittedly naive fellow administrator to be appropriately ceremonious in receiving royalty. The Mayor, clearly pleased to be hosting the Queen, wanted her visit to reflect credit on the city of Norwich and asked Sir Henry to return home for the occasion: ‘and I trust in God, that either in rewards, or else in thankings, both of the King’s coming, and in this, ye shall be pleased as worthy is’.1
The Mayor, who well knew that entertaining a Queen was no trivial affair, wanted his city to do it right. Pageants had to be written and performed, stages erected, decorations purchased and musicians engaged. Reports of the visit indicate that the people warmly welcomed their Queen, who was a good sport not only in carrying out her husband’s wishes, but in ignoring the unpleasant weather.
The Mayor took great pains in his preparations. He sent a man named Lyntok to Windsor to gather information about the Queen’s plans. Finding that she was not at Windsor, Lyntok made subsequent trips to Bury St Edmunds and to ‘divers parts of Norfolk’ to learn of the Queen’s progress. Robert Horgoner rode out to find the road the Queen would take, and John Sadler followed to tell the Queen’s servants to enter the city by ‘Westwyk Gates’.2 Parnell and his servants from Ipswich were hired for twelve days as consultants to prepare the pageants and ceremonies. A freemason was paid 6d to repair the crest of the conduit on the north side of St Andrew’
s churchyard.
When the Queen entered Norwich on 18 July through Westwick Gate, the ‘Corporate Body’ received her. A stage had been built, covered with red and green worsted, and decorated with figures of angels, scutcheons and royal banners. Two giant figures of wood and leather, stuffed with hay and crested with gold and silver leaf, were placed on stage. The angel Gabriel (played by a friar) greeted the Queen, along with two patriarchs, twelve apostles, and sixteen virgins in mantles with hoods. ‘Gilbert Spirling exhibited a pageant of the Salutation of Mary and Elizabeth, which required a speech from him in explanation.’ Clerks sang accompanied by organs.
The Queen next visited the house of the Friars Preachers, where a second pageant on another newly built stage greeted her. The Friars Minor had lent their ‘Tapser work’ to cover this stage, along with vestments for the pageant. The great chair of St Luke’s Guild had been moved from the cathedral for the Queen’s comfort while listening to the singing of Mr Fakke’s choir of boys. Unfortunately, heavy rains cut short the ceremonies, forcing the Queen and her small daughters to their lodgings at the Friars Preachers. The dignitaries and performers rushed to the Guildhall, where they changed to dry clothes. Workers scrambled to move stage coverings and ornaments to a house near Westwick Gates, but much damage had already been done. The bills for using the articles included extra allowances for damage.
This inauspicious beginning to the Queen’s visit was followed by devastating news. While the Queen was at Norwich and the King at Nottingham, Clarence and Warwick strengthened their alliance through Clarence’s marriage to Warwick’s daughter, Isabel. Both men had much to gain from the union. Warwick moved his family a step closer to the throne of England, since Clarence was the next male in the Yorkist line as long as Edward had no sons. In addition, Clarence had his eye on the enormous fortune of land and money Isabel would inherit from her father.
Several problems had delayed the marriage. As first cousins once removed, Clarence and Isabel required a papal dispensation to marry. Edward IV had earlier forbidden the marriage, knowing the political danger it would constitute to his own children, and had directed the Pope not to approve it. But Warwick had his own means of influencing the Pope, who granted a dispensation on 14 March 1469. In July 1469, while Edward IV was in the north, Clarence crossed to Calais and married Isabel, the ceremony conducted by George Neville, Archbishop of York, brother of Earl Warwick and uncle of the bride.
The day after the wedding, Warwick, with the support of Louis XI of France, returned to England with Clarence. They gathered forces in Kent and marched north, where they captured Edward IV on 29 July 1469, while he was making his way back to London.3 First imprisoned in Warwick Castle, Edward IV was soon moved north to Middleham in Yorkshire, the ancestral home of the Nevilles. Warwick’s men captured the Queen’s father, Earl Rivers, and her brother, Sir John Wydeville, near Chepstow in the Welsh Marches. Rivers and Sir John were taken to Coventry where, on 12 August 1469, they were beheaded without a trial.4 The horrifying news that her beloved father and brother had been murdered reached Elizabeth while she was still residing in Norwich.
Elizabeth had been married to Edward IV just five years. She had given birth to three daughters: Elizabeth in 1466, Mary in 1467, and Cecily in 1469. Warwick’s hatred for her family took its revenge through murder. The widows left by this outrage were Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, and Katherine Neville, Duchess of Norfolk and aunt to both Warwick and Edward IV. Worse would come.
A document dated 12 July 1469 fulminates with hatred for the Queen’s family. Issued in the names of ‘The Duke of Clarence, the Archbishop of York, and the Earl of Warwick’, it cites
…the deceivable, covetous rule and guiding of certain seditious persons: that is to say, the Lord Rivers; the Duchess of Bedford, his wife; Sir William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; Humphrey Stafford, Earl of Devonshire; the Lords Scales and Audeley; Sir John Wydeville, and his brothers; Sir John Fogg, and other of their mischievous rule, opinion, and assent, which have caused our said sovereign Lord and his said realm to fall in great poverty of misery, disturbing the ministration of the laws, only intending to their own promotion and enriching.5
Here lies the source of the slander that has created the myth of the ‘grasping, greedy’ Wydevilles. In a political document crafted by rebels – Clarence, Warwick and the Archbishop of York – the Wydevilles were accused of motives that have become enshrined in the historical record. Blaming the Wydevilles of ‘intending… their own promotion and enriching’, the screed goes on to claim that they had no concern for the commonweal of the land, ‘but only to their singular lucre and enriching of themselves and their blood’.6
The document is obsessed with the concept of blood heritage and compares the reign of Edward IV to the historical precedents of Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI:
First, where the said Kings estranged the great lords of their blood from their secret Counsel, and not advised by them; and taking about them others not of their blood, and inclining only to their counsel, rule, and advice, the which persons take not respect nor consideration to the weal of the said princes, nor to the commonweal of this land, but only to their singular lucre and enriching of themselves and their blood, as well in their great possessions as in goods; by the which the said princes were so impoverished that they had not sufficient of livelihood nor of goods, whereby they might keep and maintain their honourable estate and ordinary charges within this realm.7
Warwick’s claim that he was impoverished to the point that he ‘had not sufficient of livelihood nor of goods’ to maintain his estate would be laughable if its consequences were less deadly. To that blatant lie he adds the accusations that the Wydevilles caused England’s excessive taxes, change of the coinage, diversion of money from ‘our holy father’ (the Pope), and the general lawlessness of ‘great murders, robberies, rapes, oppressions, and extortions.’ He then returns to his recurring obsession with blood relationships:
Also the said seditious persons have caused our said sovereign lord to estrange the true lords of his blood from his secret Counsel… The said seditious persons above named… by their subtle and malicious means have caused our said sovereign lord to estrange his good grace from the Counsels of the noble and true lords of his blood…8
Resonating with resentment at Edward’s preference for his wife’s family over his own, the document clearly reveals the authors’ intent and technique. The rebels intended to annihilate the Wydevilles – those whose veins carried merely the blood of an English nobleman and a European duchess. Their technique exploited slander and unproved accusations, lies they would repeat until frequency conferred validity. Their logic began with false premises and their rhetoric rationalised murder. The executions of Rivers and Sir John Wydeville marked merely the beginning of Warwick’s schemes.
In August, Queen Elizabeth left Norwich and returned alone to London, where she kept ‘scant state’ with her three small daughters.9 The next attack focused on her mother, Jacquetta, who was accused of witchcraft. Earlier allegations that Jacquetta had used charms to bewitch Edward IV into marrying Elizabeth had been forgotten. Now, in 1469, the Duchess of Bedford was officially charged by Thomas Wake, Esquire, with practising witchcraft and sorcery. The evidence provided by Wake was ‘an image of lead made like a man of arms of the length of a man’s finger broken in the middle and made fast with a wire’.10 Her accuser tried to suborn John Daunger, parish clerk of Stoke Brewerne in Northampton, into claiming that two other images made by Jacquetta were intended to destroy the King and the Queen (her beloved daughter!).
Charges of sorcery were not trivial and had been used against royal women with great effect in the past. When the men of the family were too powerful to attack head-on, their more vulnerable women became victims. In 1419, Joan of Navarre, Queen Dowager of Henry IV, was accused of Witchcraft and briefly imprisoned. More infamously – and malevolently – Eleanor Cobham, wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had been charged in 1441 with using witchcraf
t to shorten the life of Henry VI.
Jacquetta and Eleanor Cobham were sisters-in-law while Jacquetta was married to the Duke of Bedford. Eleanor was arrested in the same year that Sir Richard Wydeville defended England’s honour at Smithfield against the challenge of Pedro de Vasquez of Spain, and the two events dominated London news for the year.11 The Duchess of Bedford must have followed Eleanor’s trial closely, not only as a former in-law but as a member of Henry VI’s court. Convicted of sorcery, the Duchess of Gloucester was sentenced to the public penance of walking barefoot through the streets of London on three designated market days when the maximum number of shoppers, tradesmen, citizens and visitors would witness her humiliation.
Whether Jacquetta and her four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Wydeville, watched the three astonishing parades is unknown, but they could not have avoided hearing the sensational accounts. On each day of her penance, Eleanor was brought by barge from Westminster to a London landing where she was met by the Mayor, the sheriffs, and the craftsmen of London. On Monday 13 November 1441, she landed at Temple Bar, where two knights led her, dressed in black and carrying a two-pound lighted candle, as she walked barefoot along Fleet Street to St Paul’s Cathedral, where she offered her taper at the high altar. On Wednesday 15 November, she landed at the Swan on Thames Street and walked barefoot through Bridge Street, Grace Church Street, East Cheap, and on to Christ Church at Aldgate. On Friday 17 November, she walked from Queen Hithe along Broad Street to Cheapside and St Michael’s Church at Cornhill. Eleanor was then imprisoned until her death sixteen years later. First sent to Chester, she later was moved to Kenilworth and the Isle of Man. Eleanor Cobham died at Beaumaris Castle in North Wales on 7 July 1452, still in captivity.12