So, too, the signature device associated with Elizabeth in several portraits has significant religious connotations. The pattern surrounding her figure in the stained glass of Canterbury Cathedral has been identified by Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs as a gillyflower, otherwise called a pink or carnation.26 A similar pattern appears in the background of a painting of Elizabeth in the Book of the Fraternity of Our Lady’s Assumption of the Skinner’s Company of London, and again in the border of an illuminated manuscript of the poetry of Charles d’Orléans, probably commissioned for Edward IV. The gillyflower symbolised the Virgin Mary, and its choice as a device points to Elizabeth’s devotion to the purity, love, motherhood and ideals of the Holy Mother. Her special feelings for the Virgin are confirmed by an indulgence for the general populace issued by the Pope at Queen Elizabeth’s request, which states ‘that she has a singular devotion for the feast of the Visitation [of] St Mary the Virgin to St Elizabeth’.27
Retirement to Bermondsey Abbey, therefore, may have exactly fulfilled Elizabeth’s emotional and psychological needs after fifty years of few triumphs and many tragedies. A bucolic retreat with extensive gardens, Bermondsey convent had long harboured royal guests seeking shelter from the outside world. As early as Domesday Book, the site was a royal manor, and the monastery had developed with the support of kings. Past royal visitors had included King Stephen and his Queen, Maud, Henry II (who spent Christmas 1154 there), and Edward III. By 1399 it had become a rich, prestigious and powerful abbey, sequestered from its Clunaic mother house at La Charité-sur-Loire. More recently, the Abbey had provided a resting site for the body of Joan of Navarre, widow of Henry IV, on the way to her burial at Canterbury. Katharine of Valois, widow of Henry V, entered Bermondsey convent in 1436, a forced retreat after the Duke of Gloucester discovered her marriage to Owen Tudor. The current abbot, John de Marlow, had officiated as a Deacon at the funeral of Edward IV and would witness Elizabeth’s will two months before her death. Abbot Marlow lived long enough to attend the body of her daughter Elizabeth of York at her funeral in 1503.28
In 1487, the enormous convent, which lay about half a mile from the river bank, was dominated by the majestic Romanesque Abbey of St Saviour, with its extensive cloisters, chapter-house, monastic offices, royal lodgings, visitor quarters and infirmary. Its Benedictine monks were noted for their artistic and intellectual pursuits. The parish church of St Mary Magdalene, serving the tenants and servants, lay within the precinct boundary. Modern excavations have revealed a sophisticated system of stone-lined drains, which provided fresh water to a small washroom and latrines.
Queen Dowager Elizabeth moved into the state apartments once used by the earls of Gloucester, an ironic association given the havoc wreaked on her family by the most recent Gloucester. Even at Bermondsey, however, the outside world threatened to intrude. England’s continuing skirmishes with Scotland had concluded with the Three Years Truce of 3 July 1486, wherein Henry VII had proposed to marry Elizabeth to James III, a widower fifteen years her junior. James III’s eldest son would marry whichever of Elizabeth’s daughters he chose, while his second son would marry daughter Katharine.29 These rather bizarre negotiations ended with the death of James III on 11 June 1488, while he was fighting a civil war with his son. Henry VII’s proposal, however, provides further evidence that he did not suspect the Queen Dowager of treason, or he would never have aligned her with the King of the always-troublesome Scots. How Elizabeth felt about being used as a bargaining chip in the proposed treaty remains enshrouded within her soul.
Painful reality intruded yet again into Elizabeth’s secluded retreat when one of her two remaining brothers, Sir Edward Wydeville, was killed at the battle of St Aubin du Dormier, on 27 July 1488. Sir Edward, whom Vergil describes as ‘an impetuous man, trained to arms and incapable of languishing in idleness’, 30 had set to sea in command of the English Navy after the death of Edward IV. When Gloucester ordered the ships back to England, Sir Edward joined the forces of Richmond and landed at Milford Haven. The King rewarded him on 16 September 1485 with a grant of the castle and town of Porchester and governance of Portsmouth, along with the Isle of Wight and its castle of Carisbrooke, property earlier held by Anthony Wydeville.31 On 13 March 1487, Sir Edward was granted the manors of Swanston, Thorley, Welowe and Brexton, to be held during the minority of Warwick.32 Such favour disproves yet again any claims that the King was at odds with the Wydevilles.
Indeed, Henry VII may have owed Sir Edward particular gratitude for his conquests as an adventurer-knight. During Henry’s reign, Edward’s restless spirit had carried him into hazardous enterprises, with farreaching personal and national consequences. A contemporary Spanish account tells of ‘an English lord, a relative of the English Queen, who called himself Lord Scales’ arriving in Spain in May 1486 with 300 soldiers, to join Ferdinand and Isabella’s battles against the Moors. The real Lord Scales, Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, was dead, of course, and this impostor has been identified by Roger B. Merriman as none other than Sir Edward Wydeville.33 Sir Edward had no right whatsoever to call himself ‘Lord Scales’, but since Anthony during his lifetime had resigned his grant to the Isle of Wight to his younger brother (a grant reaffirmed by Henry VII), he may have felt free to expropriate his brother’s title as well, especially since the Spanish would hardly detect the identity theft.
In an eyewitness account of a battle near Granada in May 1486, Andrez Bernaldez, chaplain of the Archbishop of Seville, describes Lord Scales fighting ‘after the manner of his country;… dismounting from his horse, and armed with sword and battle-axe, he charged forward at the Moorish host… slashing and hacking with brave and manly hearts, killing and dismounting right and left’.34 Such valour resulted in Sir Edward being struck by a stone, which knocked him unconscious and broke his teeth. The surgeons saved his life, after which Sir Edward paid homage to Queen Isabella, who sympathised with his misfortune. With dashing charm, the English knight dismissed his lost teeth with a witty reply: ‘Christ, who reared this whole fabric has merely opened a window, in order more easily to discern what goes on within.’ Pleased with his service and wit, the Queen rewarded him with ‘twelve Andalusian horses of the finest breed, two couches with richly wrought hangings and coverings of cloth of gold, a quantity of fine linen, and sumptuous pavilions for Woodville and all his suite’.35
Sir Edward returned to England just in time to assist his own King against the rebels at Stoke. But his restless spirit remained unquelled and, in May 1488, Sir Edward requested Henry VII’s permission to raise a force to assist the Duke of Brittany against the French. Henry, however, desired peace with France and ‘straightly prohibited him to attempt any such strategy or enterprise’.36 Whereupon Sir Edward sailed to the Isle of Wight, commandeered 400 men, and sailed to Brittany anyway. His arrival caused great consternation to the French and a flurry of ambassadorial activity between England and France. Within a month, Henry changed his mind and decided to augment the army in Brittany. The French attacked before the English reinforcements arrived, however, and slaughtered 6,000 Bretons and most of the English, including Sir Edward Wydeville.
Merriman surmises that Sir Edward’s adventures in Spain and Brittany were connected. On 10 March 1488, Henry sent a proposal to Ferdinand and Isabella to marry his eldest son, Arthur, to their youngest daughter, Catherine of Aragon. Formal discussion of the marriage agreement began in London on 7 July, two months after Sir Edward had sailed for Brittany. Merriman suggests that Sir Edward anticipated that Spain would demand English support of Brittany as part of the marriage settlement, not merely to assure Brittany’s independence but to force France to cede the provinces of Cerdagne and Rousillon to Spain. Unfortunately, the failure of English reinforcements to reach Brittany in time cost that country its independence.
Sir Edward’s adventures, however, had elevated England’s worth in the eyes of Spain, the most powerful country in Europe. And his reports to Henry VII of the power and riches of Spain may have encourag
ed the King to contemplate a marriage of the two royal families. Merriman concludes that Edward Wydeville’s contributions were
…of incalculable importance for Europe and for Christendom;… the first of a chain of events that paved the way for the English Reformation, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the transference of the sovereignty of the seas from Spain to England, and for the conflicts of these two great powers in the New World.37
For Queen Dowager Elizabeth, however, the death of the reckless, adventurous Sir Edward meant that only one brother, Sir Richard Wydeville, remained from the once large, happy family of her childhood. Fortunately, her daughter the Queen Consort soon became pregnant with her second child, and on All Hallows Eve 1489, Queen Elizabeth of York ‘took to her chamber at Westminster’, accompanied by ‘my lady the Queen’s mother’. The Queen Dowager, who was at her daughter’s side during her confinement, would have recognised the elaborate rituals:
[Queen Elizabeth] was led by the Earl of Oxford and the Earl of Derby. The reverend father in God, the Bishop of Exeter, said mass in his pontificals, and the Earl of Salisbury held the towels when the Queen received the Host, and the corners of the towels were golden… When she arrived at her great chamber she tarried in the anteroom before it, and stood under her cloth of estate; then was ordained a voide of refreshments. That done, the Queen’s chamberlain, Sir Richard Pole, in very good words, desired in the Queen’s name all her people to pray that God would send her a good hour, and so she entered into her chamber which was hanged and ceiled with blue cloth of arras.38
When the Queen Dowager’s cousin, François de Luxembourg, arrived at the head of a group of French ambassadors visiting England, Elizabeth graciously took him to visit the current Queen of England in her private chambers, where she was awaiting the birth. Elizabeth Wydeville’s second royal grandchild, Margaret, was born on 29 November 1489.
Elizabeth Wydeville was nearing the end of her lifetime of glory and grieving – as was her generation of the Wydeville family. Her last living brother, Sir Richard Wydeville, died on 6 March 1491. The third Earl Rivers never achieved either greatness or notoriety. He had been attainted by Richard III along with all the Wydevilles, an action reversed by Henry VII in 1485. Henry commissioned him to investigate treasons, felonies and conspiracies in the county of Hereford in 1486, and paid him a reward of £33 6s 8d on 8 June 1486 ‘for his counsel’.39 Sir Richard also inventoried archers in the county of Northampton, for the expedition to Brittany in 1488.40 Beyond his service as commissioner of the peace in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire, his most prominent position seems to be a 1487 appointment to try petitions presented to Parliament.
Richard Wydeville, third Earl Rivers, died without descendants. His will, of 20 February 1491, indicates that only his sisters Elizabeth and Katharine survived in his generation. He bequeathed his land to his nephew Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, and named as his other heirs his sister Katharine and the children of his sisters Anne, Margaret, Mary and Jacquetta. None of Elizabeth’s brothers left legitimate sons, and in a touching effort to preserve the family’s presence at Grafton, Sir Richard’s will directed that ‘there might be as much underwood sold, in the Woods at Grafton as would buy a Bell, to be a Tenor at Grafton, to the Bells then there, for a remembrance of the last of the blood’.41 With his death, the Wydeville name became extinct.
Queen Dowager Elizabeth would live to see the birth of a second grandson, Henry, on 28 June 1491. This grandson would assure that Wydeville blood flowed on to produce the greatest monarchs in English history. This grandson, Henry VIII, and her great-granddaughter Elizabeth I (the first Queen Regnant to use that Christian name) may have been Tudors, but their vigour, intelligence, flamboyance and feistiness owed much to Elizabeth Wydeville.
Whether the Queen Dowager learned of yet another rebellion in 1492, led by someone claiming to be her son Richard, Duke of York, we shall never know. If rumours of a surviving prince reached her at Bermondsey convent, her heart must once more have been broken by a mother’s love for a favourite child. In a curious reversal of the Lambert Simnel rebellion, this impostor, ultimately identified as Perkin Warbeck, first declared himself as Clarence’s son, Warwick, then switched his identity to that of the younger of the two princes, Richard, Duke of York. Fortunately, Elizabeth would never have to live through the rebellion, which ended with Warbeck’s death in 1499.
Queen Dowager Elizabeth, née Wydeville, died in Bermondsey Abbey on 8 June 1492. She was fifty-five years old. Anticipating her death, she had written her will two months earlier:
In Dei nomine, Amen. The 10th day of April, the year of our Lord God 1492. I, Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, late wife to the most victorious Prince of blessed memory Edward the Fourth, being of whole mind, seeing the world so transitory, and no creature certain when they shall depart from hence, having Almighty God fresh in mind, in whom is all mercy and grace, bequeath my soul into his hands, beseeching him, of the same mercy, to accept it graciously, and our blessed Lady Queen of comfort, and all the holy company of heaven, to be good means for me. Item, I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my Lord at Windsor, according to the will of my said Lord and mine, without pompous entering or costly expenses done thereabout. Item, where I have no worldly goods to do the Queen’s Grace, my dearest daughter, a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children, according to my heart and mind, I beseech Almighty God to bless her Grace, with all her noble issue, and with as good heart and mind as is to me possible, I give her Grace my blessing, and all the foresaid my children. Item, I will that such small stuff and goods that I have be disposed truly in the contentacion of my debts and for the health of my soul, as far as they will extend. Item, if any of my blood will any of my said stuff or goodes to me pertaining, I will that they have the preferment before any other. And of this my present testament I make and ordain my Executors, that is to say, John Ingilby, Prior of the Charterhouse of Shene, William Sutton and Thomas Brente, Doctors. And I beseech my said dearest daughter, the Queen’s grace, and my son Thomas, Marquess Dorsett, to put their good wills and help for the performance of this my testament. In witness whereof, to this my present testament I have set my seal, these witnesses, John Abbot of the monastery of Saint Saviour of Bermondsey, and Benedictus Cun, Doctor of Physic. Given the day and year abovesaid.42
Her eldest daughter, Queen Elizabeth, was awaiting the birth of her fourth child and unable to attend her mother’s funeral.
The funeral procession to Windsor Castle, where Elizabeth Wydeville was buried in St George’s Chapel beside her beloved husband, Edward IV, could not have contrasted more starkly with the elaborate processions of her queenly days. The scanty attendance and truncated funeral rites paled beside the elaborate ceremonies at the reburial of Richard, Duke of York – and even the funeral rites for her daughter Mary in 1482. The shabby hearse, the few mourners, the inferior tapers and the slight attention paid by church authorities discomforted the scribe who recorded the events:
On the 8th day of June the year of our Lord 1492 at Bermondsey in Southwark deceased the right noble princess Queen Elizabeth, some time wife of King Edward the IVth and mother to Queen Elizabeth, wife to King Henry the VIIth, which was the Friday before Whitsunday as that year fell.
And the said Queen desired in her death bed that as soon as she should be deceased, she should in all goodly haste without any worldly pomp by water conveyed to Windsor and there to be buried in the same vault that her husband the King was buried in. On Whitsunday she was according to her desire by water conveyed to Windsor and there privily through the little park conveyed into the castle, without ringing of any bells or receiving of the dean or canons in their habits or accompanied as who says, but with the prior of the Charterhouse of Sheen; Doctor Brent, her chaplain; and one of her executors, Edmund Haute; Mistress Grace, a bastard daughter of King Edward; and upon another gentlewoman. And as it told to me, one priest of the college and a clerk received her in the castle. And so privily
, about eleven of the clock in the night. She was buried, without any solemn dirge or the morn any solemn Mass done for her obit.
On the morn thither came the Lord Audley, Bishop of Rochester, to do the service, and the substance of the officers of arms of this realm, but that day there was nothing done solemnly for her, saving a low hearse, such as they use for the common people, with four wooden candlesticks about it, and a cloth of black cloth of gold over it, with four candlesticks of silver and gilt, every one having a taper of no great weight, and two scutcheons of her arms crowned pinned on that cloth.
On the Tuesday thither came by water four of King Edward’s daughters and heirs, that is to say the Lady Anne, the Lady Katherine, and the Lady Bridget accompanied with the Lady Marquess of Dorset, the Duke of Buckingham’s daughter… niece of the foresaid Queen. Also the daughter of the Marquess of Dorset, the Lady Herbert, also niece to the said Queen, the Lady Egermont, Dame Katherine Gray, Dame Guilford… Also that same Tuesday thither came the lords that follow: the Lord Thomas, Marquess of Dorset, son to the foresaid Queen; the Lord Edmund of Suffolk; the Earl of Essex; the Viscount Welles [son-in-law]; Sir Charles of Somerset, Sir Roger Cotton, Master Chatterton.
And that night began the dirge, the foresaid Bishop of Rochester and vicars of the college were rectors of the choir, and no canons. The Bishop of Rochester read the last lesson at the dirges of the canons the other two. But the Dean of that College read none, though he was present at that service. Not at dirge nor at noon… was there never a new torch, but old torches; nor poor man in black gown nor hoods… but… a dozen divers old men holding old torches and torches’ ends.
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