Elizabeth

by Arlene Okerlund

  Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs suggest that ‘perhaps all the erasing was part of an ill-informed Protestant cleaning-up’, a practice commonly followed, especially in deleting the names of Popes from books.24 But Protestants would hardly have taken umbrage at the secular names of ‘Wydeville’, ‘Rivers’ and ‘Scales’, especially in a text of unassailable moral teachings. The care taken to erase Anthony’s surname and titles argues for a more specific focus on this particular man. Did someone hate Earl Rivers so much that he attempted to obliterate him from history?

  The erasures become poignantly ironic in light of a marginal note in late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century handwriting25 to the left of the dedicatory inscription:

  This Erle was the most

  lernyd valyant and

  honorable knight of

  the world for his tyme

  yet all was exersid wth

  adverse accydentes in

  his lyfe. At length cam

  to atcheeve the honor

  of an undesarvid death.26

  The last flyleaf contains another erasure of what once was a signature, perhaps an owner of the manuscript. M.R. James speculates: ‘I have wondered whether it was not that of Richard III’.27 Sutton and Visser-Fuchs reject that possibility, however, based on an examination of the flyleaf signature under ultraviolet light.

  Ownership of this manuscript cannot be traced, even during Edward’s lifetime. And while the events following Edward’s death encourage intriguing speculations about Richard III excising the name of the man he executed, no proof exists to assign ownership or responsibility for the erasures. The enigma only deepens the mysteries surrounding the Wydeville reputation. Someone certainly wished to erase all evidence of the moralistic Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers from this earth.

  Anthony’s devotion to issues philosophical and moral resulted in a second book, The Morale Proverbes of Christyne, printed by Caxton at Westminster, ‘in February the cold season’ 1478.28 Just eight pages long, this moral tome translates the proverbs of Christine du Castel (de Pizan) into rhymed couplets which, again, guide readers to an exemplary life:

  A prince’s court without a governour

  Being prudent can not last in honour.

  * * *

  Great diligence with a good remembrance

  Doth a man oft to high honour advance.

  * * *

  He that seeketh often others to blame

  Giveth right cause to have of him the same.

  * * *

  Worldly richess for to win wrongfully

  Doth in danger bring the soul and body

  The irregular rhythms and contrived rhymes fall far short of poetic success. As with The Dictes, these rhymed aphorisms, didactic to a fault, are best read in small doses – and with an added tolerance for poetic dissonance. A moralist, yes. A poet, Anthony was not.

  During this period, James III of Scotland proposed a marriage between his sister Margaret and Earl Rivers, aimed at strengthening the ties between the two countries. A marriage treaty was drawn up in December 1478, and a safe-conduct pass was sent to Margaret on 22 August 1479. The Scots Parliament approved a dowry of 20,000 marks, and Edward himself planned to attend the wedding, scheduled for October 1479 at Nottingham. The marriage was postponed, however, when the Scots began to send raiding parties into northern England, and Edward prepared to invade Scotland. Open warfare ultimately led to the cancellation of two proposed marriages: Anthony, Lord Rivers to Margaret of Scotland, and Cecily, the King’s nine-year-old daughter, to James III’s son.

  In the midst of marriage proposals and war preparations, Anthony continued translating and in 1479 published the Cordiale siue de quatuor nouissimis, a consideration of the ‘four last things’ whose remembrance will keep man from falling into sin.29 Another 149 pages teach about the possibility of salvation. In his prologue, Anthony thanks God for the mercy and grace that enables man to survive his present transitory life, which is afflicted with frailty, inconstancy, feebleness and ‘insufficiency of self to resist the fraudulent malice and temptation of our ancient enemy the fiend’. Reason must be man’s ‘lantern’, and ‘remembrance’ the guiding force to man’s salvation.

  The four sections of the Cordiale discuss in sequence ‘the holy remembrance of death’, ‘the last and final day of Judgment’, Hell and its painful places, and ‘the blissful Joys of heaven’. Each section is subdivided into three parts. The remembrance of bodily death, for instance, should cause man to ‘be meek and humble himself’, ‘despise all vain worldly things’, and ‘do penance and to accept it with glad heart’. Reflections on the Day of Judgment explain that accusation is a ‘thing to be dread’, Judgement Day is ‘terrible and not without cause for there must be given a due reckoning and account of every thing’, and ‘the extreme sentence causeth doubts to be had of the Judgement’.

  The section on Hell discusses the diverse and many names of Hell in Holy Scripture, ‘the great and sundry paines’ that afflict those who descend into Hell, and ‘the diverse conditions of grievance in the pains of Hell. The last section, describing the Joys of Heaven, celebrates the beauty, clearness and light of the ‘Royalme of Heaven’, ‘the manifold goodness that be abundant therein’, and ‘the perpetual and infinite Joy and gladness therein’.

  Caxton’s three-page epilogue once more commends the translator:

  This book is thus translated out of French into our maternal tongue by the noble and virtuous lord Anthoine Earl Rivers, Lord Scales & of the Isle of Wight, Defender and director of the causes apostolic for our holy father the Pope in this Realm of England. Uncle & governor to my lorde prince of Wales.30

  Caxton recalls ‘the time of the great tribulation and adversity of my said lord’, who has since gone on pilgrimages to St James in Galicia, St Bartholomew in Rome, St Andrew in Amalfi, St Matthew in Naples and St Nicolas in Bari. Caxton also commends Anthony, not only for his service to the King and Prince of Wales, but for using his time to translate this text rather than for leisure.

  Caxton also mentions Anthony’s ‘diverse ballads against the seven deadly sins’, poems which have been lost to posterity. In commending his translator and patron, Caxton describes a character which ‘conceiveth well the mutability and the unstableness of this present life and… desireth with a great zeal and spiritual love our ghostly help and perpetual salvation. And that we shall abhore and utterly forsake the abominable and damnable sins’, including ‘pride, perjury, terrible swearing, theft, murder, and many others’.31

  Anthony may also have assisted Caxton in the printing of Le Morte D’Arthur. Lotte Hellinga’s meticulous tracing of the manuscript – from its likely owner Richard Followell, who lived in Litchborough in Northamptonshire, just ten miles from the Grafton home of the Wydevilles, to the printing press of Caxton – presents a convincing case for Earl Rivers as the ‘instigator of the printing of this book’.32 Because the printed text was completed on 31 July 1485, during the reign of Richard III, who had already executed Anthony, Caxton could not name his patron and merely credits ‘a certain gentleman’ who delivered the manuscript to him.33

  Even as Anthony immersed himself in religious and philosophical contemplation, he continued supervising his worldly affairs. Papers surviving in the files of his lawyer and business agent, Andrew Dymmock, reveal a man with sharp business acumen and a clear mind, who personally supervised the affairs of his estates. He wrote with authority and knowledge as he issued instructions for paying bills, discussed wheat prices, and arranged the London sale of sheep brought from Wales. A political realist, he discussed means of electing his preferred candidates to the Parliament of January 1483, and he requested a copy of his recently renewed patent to govern the prince’s household.

  When fortune turned against him in 1483, Anthony resorted to poetry to record his philosophical acceptance of life’s end. In a short ballad composed in prison at Pontefract Castle while awaiting execution at Gloucester’s order, Anthony’s resignation to hi
s fate is clear.

  Me thinks truly

  Bounden am I

  And that greatly

  To be content;

  Seeing plainly

  That fortune doth awry

  All contrary

  From mine intent.

  While the final stanza welcomes Fortune, he laments:

  But I neer went

  Thus to be shent [killed]

  But so it meant.

  Such is her wont.34

  In this case the jarring rhythms and failed rhymes reflect the reality of the axe about to descend on his neck.

  Anthony Wydeville’s published work and his lifelong deeds eloquently refute the modern reputation of the Wydevilles as unprincipled, conniving schemers devoted to personal aggrandisement. As head of the royal in-laws, Anthony’s contemptus mundi musings bespeak a profound and sincere rejection of things worldly. Pious and contemplative devotion, recognition of worldly sin and a desire for redemption define this devout man. Yet his modern critics remain unpersuaded – and somewhat bemused – by perceived contradictions in Anthony’s behaviour. M.A. Hicks, who condemns the ‘grasping’ Anthony for retaining his first wife’s inheritance and pursuing reversion rights to other estates, muses:

  Strangely Anthony waited eight years from the death of his first wife until his second marriage to Mary Lewis, a teenager with modest estates in Essex. Stranger yet, after painfully accumulating estates, Anthony planned to divide them between his brothers, neither of whom was married. The three brothers’ apparent unconcern about the future prosperity of their family, or even its continuance, contrasts with their personal greed. One wonders what was the point.35

  Perhaps sharing – in the tradition inspired by Anthony’s philosophy and religion – was the point. In any case, Anthony cannot logically be condemned as ‘grasping’, then criticised for marrying modestly and for giving away his estates.

  Sharing their property fairly and equally was a tradition followed by other Wydevilles. In 1485, Sir Edward Wydeville designated an inheritance priority for his annuity that was absurdly complicated, considering its paltry value of £50. Sir Edward designated his first heir to be his brother, Sir Richard Wydeville. If Richard died without heirs, the annuity was divided among their sisters Anne, Margaret and Joan, and their niece Elizabeth (daughter of deceased sister Mary). If those four beneficiaries died without heirs, the annuity went to two other sisters, Queen Dowager Elizabeth and Katharine, Duchess of Buckingham.36 Sir Edward’s intent seems clear. Beyond the male prerogative of inheritance, the money was split equally among the family members who needed it most. Only if they lacked heirs did it go to the Queen Dowager and Duchess of Buckingham, who enjoyed resources of their own.

  Among the five Wydeville brothers, Anthony, John and Lionel benefited from their connection to Edward IV. Anthony earned his rewards through service. John was murdered for his audacity in marrying the Duchess of Norfolk. Lionel became Chancellor of Oxford University and Bishop of Salisbury, venerated positions to be sure, but ones that produced no notable wealth. Neither Richard nor Edward Wydeville has ever been charged with untoward seeking of wealth, and beyond an occasional tournament honour, they remain footnotes in Edward IV’s annals. Given that record, where is the evidence of ‘greed’ and ‘grasping’ for which the Wydevilles have been castigated by modern critics?

  When such accusations are traced to their source, the propaganda of Warwick, Clarence and, later, Gloucester always rears its ugly head. Once Warwick and Clarence were out of the picture, the King’s youngest brother took up their cause in asserting dominance of the blood royal. The hatred and envy that incited Warwick and Clarence to execute the first Earl Rivers now simmered – and was fast approaching boiling point – in the soul of Richard, Duke of Gloucester. The first act Gloucester would commit when beginning his coup against Edward V would be the seizure and imprisonment of Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, Lord Scales. Gloucester held his prisoner for fifty-six days before he dared to order Anthony’s execution on 25 June 1483. Twelve days later, Gloucester was crowned King Richard III. His purification of the ‘blood royal’ from the contaminating influences of the elegant, cultured and pious Wydevilles would last just two years.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Queen’s Happy Years, 1475–1482

  While the rivalry between Anthony, Earl Rivers and Richard, Duke of Gloucester was growing, Queen Elizabeth was enjoying seven happy years of family prosperity. She shared with Anthony his love of books and his deep piety. Both had been influenced by their mother, Jacquetta, who had grown up surrounded by the bibliophiles of the Burgundian courts. Jacquetta’s first husband, the Duke of Bedford, had purchased the French royal library in June 1425, after he became Regent of France, and Richard Griffith postulates that many of the 800 volumes in that collection were inherited by Jacquetta at Bedford’s death and passed on to Anthony.1 Only one surviving manuscript originally from the French royal family reveals Wydeville ownership, however, and it was not listed in the inventory of books purchased by Bedford. That illuminated manuscript of Oeuores poètiques de Christine de Pison displays a handwritten ‘Jaquete’ and the motto and autograph of Anthony on its flyleaf.2

  Elizabeth, too, treasured books. The final entry in her 1466–67 household accounts lists £10 spent for a book, title unknown, purchased from ‘Willelmi Wulflete’, Chancellor of Cambridge University.3 Autographs in the illuminated manuscript of the Romance of the Saint Graal – ‘E Wydevyll’, ‘Elysabeth, the kyngys dowther’, ‘Cecyl the kyngys dowther’, ‘Jane Grey’, ‘Thys boke is myne dame Alyanor Haute’ – trace the family’s love of books through successive generations.4 A late-fifteenth-century inscription on the back folio of a copy of Caxton’s first printed book, Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, associates that volume with Elizabeth:

  This boke is mine quene elizabet late wiffe unto the

  moste noble king edwarde the forthe off whose

  bothe soolis y be seche almyghty Gode Take

  Take to his onfinyght mercy above. Amen.

  Per me Thoma

  Shukburghe iuniorem5

  Thomas Shukburghe, from a family whose members were in Elizabeth’s service, may have obtained the book and recorded its previous ownership by the Queen.6

  A religious text, Hours of the Guardian Angel, almost certainly belonged to Elizabeth, whose name is spelled out with an acrostic ‘ELISABETH’, each letter of which introduces the first nine lines of a dedicatory poem to a ‘Lady sovereyne princes’.7 The presentation miniature depicts a woman kneeling before a crowned princess who has ‘red-gold hair beneath a pearl-decorated, open crown’ and is dressed in a crimson surcoat trimmed in ermine. Analysis by Sutton and Visser-Fuchs of the clothing depicted on both donor and Queen convincingly establishes Elizabeth as the ‘Sovereign Princess’. The gift of this volume would have pleased the Queen, whose piety was an essential, deeply felt and constant part of her nature.

  Caxton also mentions Elizabeth in a book he gave to Edward, Prince of Wales, containing the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, printed around 1477. Caxton states that the gift was made with the King’s ‘licence and congye [permission] and by the supportacion of our most redobted liege lady, most excellent princesse the Quene’. Caxton’s ‘Prologue’ hopes that the young prince will ‘begin to learn [to] read English, not for any beauty or good endyting [composition] of our English tongue that is therein, but for the novelty of the histories which as I suppose have not been had before the translation hereof’.8 The Queen, who became a patron of Caxton along with her brother Anthony, clearly believed the printing of books to be essential for knowledge and education. They were right. It changed the world.

  How much influence Elizabeth had in encouraging the King’s bibliographic interests is less certain. During his exile in Flanders, Edward IV became interested in the libraries of Lord Gruuthuyse and of his sister, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. After his restoration, Edward began to buy books and manuscripts that ultimately became the
core of the royal library of England. That the Queen promoted such purchases to the King, who was immersed in the demands of governing the realm, is probable, but not provable.

  With the number of royal children increasing, education became increasingly important to the Queen. Elizabeth gave birth to ten children between 1466 and 1480, with four born after the King’s return from his foray into France. There were moments of sadness, when Margaret died in 1472 and George in 1477, both within months of their births, but the other children provided great joy for their mother, who took care to educate them in both letters and in courtly traditions. In 1476, Master John Giles, grammar teacher of the princes Edward and Richard, was rewarded with a lifetime grant of £20 yearly.9

  The protocol of royal responsibility and ritual was an essential part of the children’s education. Two daughters, presumably ten-year-old Elizabeth and eight-year-old Mary, experienced firsthand the public ritual of royal life when attending the 1476 reburial of their grandfather, the Duke of York. When the Queen celebrated Mass at the Garter ceremony on St George’s Day, arriving on horseback and dressed in a murrey gown of the Order of the Garters, Princess Elizabeth accompanied her ‘in a gown of the same livery’.10

  A more interesting lesson in political and religious protocol occurred during the wedding of Prince Richard to Anne Mowbray, when the seven-year-old Prince Edward and his sisters Elizabeth, Mary and Cecily witnessed the diplomatic and religious manoeuvres necessary to subvert canon law prohibiting the marriage of close relatives. The wedding procession with the four-year-old groom and the five-year-old bride was stopped at the door of the Chapel by one Doctor Cooke, who pronounced that

  …the high and mighty Prince Richard Duke of York ought not to be wedded to that high and excellent Princess, for that they were within degrees of marriage; the one at the fourth, the other at the third; for which cause he defended [forbid] the espousals, without that there were a special license from the Pope, and dispensation from the Pope for the said nearness of blood.11