Elizabeth’s ability to intervene successfully in these matters owed a great deal to her personal relationship with her husband. She could only seek favours on behalf of others if she was on good terms with him, and this cannot always have been easy. King Edward was notorious for his voracious sexual appetite, and had affairs both before and during his marriage. Thomas More remarked that ‘he was of youth greatly given to fleshly wantonness, from which health of body, in great prosperity and fortune, without a special grace hardly refraineth’, while Dominic Mancini’s comment that ‘he had been most insolent to numerous women after he had seduced them, for, as soon as he grew weary of dalliance, he gave up the ladies much against their will to the other courtiers’, implies that he changed little as he grew older. The King of France, Louis XI, once invited him to Paris, and told him jocularly that ‘if he would come and divert himself with the ladies, he would assign him the Cardinal of Bourbon for his confessor, who he knew would willingly absolve him . . . for he knew the cardinal was a jolly companion’!
Elizabeth must have been aware of these liaisons, but she did not allow them to sour her relationship with her husband. Words there may have been, but she continued to bear him children throughout their life together – Bridget, her last daughter, was born in November 1480 when she was forty-three – and there is no evidence that his trust in her ever diminished. No self-respecting medieval king would admit to changing his attitude or his policies because his wife asked him to, but there are hints that Edward could be far less forgiving on occasions when they were apart and Elizabeth was unable to influence him. He was justifiably angry that a number of nobles and knights – including some he had thought were his friends – fought against him at the battle of Tewkesbury, but to have a dozen of them dragged from the sanctuary of the nearby abbey and beheaded after the merest formality of a trial was as shocking as it was unprecedented. We cannot be sure that he would have behaved differently if Elizabeth had been present and able to calm him; but there is a striking contrast between this and his considered and sometimes markedly affable demeanour on other occasions. It would be fascinating to know how much real power Elizabeth, and other medieval queens, actually wielded behind the scenes.
There is one other aspect of Elizabeth’s queenship we have not so far dealt with, namely her obligation to give small sums of money to deserving subjects who found themselves in financial difficulties. All direct evidence that would have allowed us to see her at work in this capacity has long since perished, but it can be glimpsed in a single surviving privy-purse account recording gifts made by her daughter Queen Elizabeth of York. The younger Elizabeth was approached by various individuals who were in some way acquainted with her or who lived near to Richmond Palace, where she was then residing, and who often brought her small presents in anticipation of her willingness to help them. Two poor women who brought gifts of apples and butter to the queen were given twenty and eight pence respectively, and twenty pence was given to ‘a poor man in [an] almshouse sometime being a servant of King Edward IV’. Both William Pastone, a page of the queen’s beds, and Leonard Twycross, who served the apothecary John Grice, were helped to buy their wedding clothes, while Nicholas Grey, clerk of the works at Richmond Palace, was compensated with sixty shillings when his house caught fire. A friar was given eight shillings ‘for the burying of the men that were hanged at Wapping Milne’, a girl about to enter a convent was provided with a dowry, and Christopher Plummer was reimbursed twenty-three shillings for ‘money by him given in alms for the Queen at divers times in her journeys’. Elizabeth of York would have been regarded as a good and gracious lady by those she assisted, just as her mother would have been blessed by those who approached her and went away happy. In such ways were reputations made.
ELIZABETH THE WOMAN
We have seen something of how Elizabeth responded to the demands and responsibilities of queenship, but can we tell what she was like as a person? Modern historians have alleged that she indulged in feuds, behaved meanly towards those who displeased her, and was careless of others’ welfare, but much of their evidence is open to interpretation. One charge that can be dismissed quite easily is that she plotted the execution of the Irish Earl of Desmond who had dared to suggest to King Edward that it was still not too late for him to reject her and marry a well-connected foreigner. This appears to be no more than a ‘family tradition’ first mentioned by the earl’s grandson in Henry VIII’s reign, and although Desmond was beheaded there were sound political reasons for his downfall. Allegations that Elizabeth persuaded her husband to appoint the Earl of Worcester (who had agreed to avenge her) as his deputy in Ireland and purloined the royal signet ring to validate a ‘feigned’ letter ordering Desmond’s execution are almost certainly tales concocted years later. The Desmonds may have preferred to peddle the story that their ancestor had fallen victim to a spiteful woman rather than admit that he had conspired against the Crown.
Another criticism of Elizabeth is that her new royal status had ‘gone to her head’ and made her insufferably haughty. No one said this in so many words however, and the idea seems to be based mainly on the observations of some visiting Bohemians who were invited to see her ‘churched’ (formally received back into society following her period of ritual impurity) after the birth of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, in 1466. One of them, Gabriel Tetzel, described the banquet that followed the service in great detail, noting that
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 and 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.
It would be easy to suppose that Elizabeth thoroughly enjoyed making these ladies who had once far outranked her kneel in the rushes, but such a view takes no account of the strict rules governing English court protocol. The great respect shown her was as traditional as the silence that so impressed Tetzel, and would probably not have attracted comment if she had been a high-born princess. Elizabeth did not personally insist on any of these things, nor could she dispense with or modify them. She was an English queen, and did as English queens did.
A more substantial charge is that Elizabeth and other members of her family were at odds with Sir Thomas Cook, a former Mayor of London, supposedly because he had refused to sell her mother Jacquetta a particular tapestry ‘at her pleasure and price’. Cook’s troubles began in 1467 or 1468 when he was approached by a Lancastrian agent named John Hawkins who asked him to lend the exiled Queen Margaret some money. He declined, but at the same time decided not to report the incident to the authorities; and was accused of ‘misprison of treason’ (i.e. being aware that a crime was being committed but failing to reveal it), after Hawkins was arrested and forced to reveal the names of his contacts. The chronicler Robert Fabyan reported that some members of the queen’s family ransacked Cook’s London house in the hope of finding evidence against him, while others took possession of his country estate in Essex. Fabyan, who was apprenticed to Cook, may not have been an entirely disinterested observer, but there is no reason to doubt that the Woodvilles’ men ‘made such havoc of such wine as was left that what they might not drink and give away they let run in the cellar’ in London, or ‘destroyed his deer in his park and spoiled his house without pity’ in Essex.
Fabyan was in no doubt that these attacks had been instigated by Elizabeth’s parents, Earl Rivers and Jacquetta, but the queen herself became implicated when she demanded £800, an extra 10 per cent added to Cook’s huge fine of £8,000, und
er the ancient right of ‘Queen’s Gold’. This was usually levied only on voluntary fines, those paid for a licence or pardon, for example, so Cook’s representatives approached her solicitor and, as a result, he ‘had his end, how well there was none open speech of it after’. The precise meaning of this is uncertain, but it appears that some – or perhaps all – of the claim was rescinded, and that he was far from ruined. According to Fabyan, he ‘builded and purchased as he did before’.
It seems possible that Elizabeth had been told, perhaps by family members who disliked Cook, that here was an opportunity to obtain a substantial sum to which she was properly entitled, but that her attitude changed when the ‘mistake’ was pointed out to her. Later writers who took the view that no Woodville ever did anything good found it easy to misconstrue the situation however, and the same is true of her decision to place a daughter of Sir William Stonor in the household of her sister-in-law Elizabeth Duchess of Suffolk, at some time between 1470 and 1473. The girl was unhappy there and asked her parents if she could return home; but her mother, who had been reluctant to sanction the arrangement in the first place, told her in no uncertain terms that she could do so only with the queen’s permission. Her best course of action was to ask the duchess to release her ‘so that my husband or I may have writing from the Queen with her own hand, or else he nor I neither dare nor will take upon us to receive you, seeing the Queen’s displeasure afore’.
It would be easy to suppose that Elizabeth was not particularly interested in the girl’s welfare, but her own view would have been that she had given someone from a less exalted background an unrivalled opportunity to mix and mingle with the best in society. Children ‘placed’ in other households were often homesick, but it was all part of the process of gaining self-confidence and learning what others expected of them. We do not know how, or if, this particular difficulty was resolved, but some years later (it could have been as long as a decade), Sir William again found himself in correspondence with Elizabeth and again potentially on the wrong side of the argument. The reason this time was that Elizabeth had heard that he had been hunting deer in her ‘forest and chase’ of Barnwood and Eggshill (Glos.), and was sceptical of his claim that he was acting under a commission ‘to take the view and rule of our game’ granted him by her husband. Her terse, no-nonsense letter required him to ‘show unto us or our council your said commission, if any such ye have, and in the mean season [time] spare of [desist from] hunting within our said forest or chase as ye will answer at your peril’ (my italics). She was not a lady to be trifled with!
Elizabeth would have had little direct contact with men like Cook and Stonor, and their differences were probably isolated incidents; but her sometimes difficult relationship with William Lord Hastings, her husband’s close friend and chamberlain, was an altogether different matter. She may have never quite forgiven Hastings for the hard bargain he struck when she sought his help before her royal marriage, and undoubtedly held him responsible for her husband’s licentious behaviour. No one who was ‘secretly familiar with the King in wanton company’, to quote Thomas More, could seriously expect the queen to look kindly upon him, and the fact that Hastings was twelve years older than her husband made it easier to blame him for leading Edward astray. Hastings himself seems to have been likeable enough – ‘a good knight and a gentle . . . very faithful . . . a loving man and passing well beloved’, according to More – but Elizabeth probably treated him coolly and wished that her husband favoured him less than he did.
The situation was not helped by the friction that also existed between Hastings and Elizabeth’s brother Anthony Earl Rivers, and between Hastings and the elder son of her first marriage, Thomas Grey Marquis of Dorset. Hastings replaced Anthony as Captain of Calais soon after King Edward’s restoration in 1471, and although Anthony was subsequently honoured – by being given prime responsibility for Prince Edward, for example – the loss of Calais still rankled. Rumours began to circulate that the doggedly loyal Hastings was planning to betray the stronghold to the French, and – according to More – ‘was far fallen into the king’s indignation and stood in great fear of himself’. King Edward would never have thought this of his trusted friend in other circumstances, and it is tempting to conclude that Elizabeth was working against him behind the scenes. The storm passed and Hastings kept his position; but his relations with the Woodvilles would not have been improved.
Hastings and Anthony were very different personalities, the former affable and libidinous, the latter serious and noted for his asceticism and literary interests as well as for his ability as a jouster. They had probably never been friends, but neither had Hastings and the Marquis of Dorset, who both found the hedonistic Yorkist court to their liking. Dominic Mancini says they quarrelled over ‘the mistresses whom they had abducted or attempted to entice from one another’, and it is likely that both resented the other’s influence with King Edward. By the 1470s Hastings was in his forties while Dorset was more than twenty years younger; and it would not be surprising if Hastings feared that his more energetic, perhaps more attractive, rival would soon replace him in the royal affections. Elizabeth would have wanted to diminish Hastings’s hold over her husband by any means possible, and may have seen Edward’s fondness for her son as a new opportunity after the allegation that Hastings intended to betray Calais failed.
Historical evidence cannot always be taken at face value, however, and it is possible to argue that Elizabeth and Hastings were really on good terms for much of this period. Hastings not only agreed to allow Dorset to marry his stepdaughter, Cecily Bonville, in 1474, but nominated both the Marquis and his younger brother Richard for membership of the Order of the Garter two years later. Elizabeth, for her part, gave Hastings’s sister, Elizabeth Donne, and his sister-in-law Anne, his brother Ralph’s wife, places among her ladies; but were these merely gestures designed to hide their true feelings and foster the illusion that the Yorkist court was united? It is hard to dismiss the ‘deadly feud’ mentioned by Mancini as being no more than hearsay, and the Croyland writer surely spoke from personal knowledge when he remarked that ‘there had long existed extreme ill-will between the said Lord Hastings and them’.
So what do these relationships and incidents tell us about Elizabeth as a person? She has been much criticised for promoting her family’s interests, and there were undoubtedly some people whom she liked more than others; but how many of us would reject an opportunity that would benefit those closest to us, and how many find some working relationships ‘difficult’? Elizabeth was probably no better – or worse – than most human beings, and her actions must be viewed in the context of her own era. The fifteenth century was a hard and sometimes unprincipled world in which life was cheap and kindness seldom a priority. A man (or woman) who lacked the ability or strength of character to keep what he had would soon lose it, and appeals to law were useless unless he happened to be wealthier or enjoyed greater influence than his opponent. The Woodvilles’ treatment of Sir Thomas Cook – perhaps the most outrageous incident described above – does not seem to have shocked contemporaries, who probably thought he had been adequately compensated when he was allowed to deduct the cost of the damage done to his properties from his fine! Elizabeth herself behaved no less imperiously towards the Stonors, but she was the queen and no one questioned her right to act as she did.
Some insight into a person’s character can also be gained from their interests, and we have a little knowledge of how Elizabeth chose to pass her leisure hours and of her concern for both learning and matters of religion. When Louis de Gruthuyse visited England in 1472, King Edward took him to Elizabeth’s private chamber, ‘where she sat playing with her ladies at the morteaulx [a game resembling bowls]’, while others played ‘closheys [closh, or ninepins] and divers other games’ or danced. She may have shown him her books, a collection which came to include a devotional Hours of the Guardian Angel (most people of wealth possessed and used such volumes), and three others which she
either owned or which had been presented to her children and were essentially for entertainment. They included stories of the Trojan War, the legend of Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, and a collection of Arthurian romances, all of which passed for history at the time. It is unclear if she read them herself, read them to her offspring, or had them read to her, but she had clearly inherited her mother’s love of literature and wanted her own children to do the same.
Elizabeth’s interest in learning first became evident when, at the beginning of her reign, she intervened to save both Queens’ College, Cambridge, and Eton College from dereliction. The Queen’s College of St Margaret and St Bernard that Margaret of Anjou had founded in 1448 had fallen on hard times after the Yorkist triumph, but in 1465 King Edward gave the members a licence to hold property to the value of £200 annually. He informed them that they now had a new patron in Elizabeth, and when statutes regulating the institution were issued ten years later, she was described as vera fundatrix (true foundress), and her arms replaced Margaret’s on the college seal. The president and twelve fellows were enjoined to study theology rather than law, a decision that may not be unconnected with the fact that many worldly popes had been canon lawyers rather than theologians. Elizabeth was said to be ‘specially solicitous concerning those matters whereby the safety of souls and the public good are promoted, and poor scholars, desirous of advancing themselves in the knowledge of letters, are assisted in their need’.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 16
