Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  First 100 Torches born by Knights followed by Esquires and other honest Persons.

  The Lord Maltravers [Matraners], Bearing the Basin, having a Towel about his neck.

  The earl of Northumberland bearing a Taper not lit.

  The earl of Lincoln, the Salt.

  The Canopy born by 4 Knights and a Baron.

  My Lady Maltravers [Queen Elizabeth’s sister] did bear a rich Chrysom pinned over her left breast.

  The Countess of Richmond did bear the Princess.

  The godmothers were the baby’s grandmother Cecily Neville and elder sister Elizabeth of York.

  The visitor to Eltham today can see the Great Hall built by Elizabeth Woodville’s husband, Edward. Though their walls are only ruins today, it is possible to trace also the pattern of the surprisingly tiny rooms Elizabeth would have used when she visited her children here—for Eltham was always in favor as a nursery palace (even when it came time for Elizabeth of York to rear her own children). It was a fit setting for a happy family.

  And such the king’s family had been, through the 1470s. Crowland—with pleasure and perhaps relief in the queen’s fecundity?—described the court as filled with “those most sweet and beautiful children.” A visitor to the court in 1482 described the young Richard, Duke of York, as singing with his mother and one of his sisters and playing the game called sticks and with a two-handed sword. There had been sadnesses, of course, as when in November 1481 Richard’s eight-year-old bride, Anne Mowbray, died, followed six months later by Elizabeth Woodville’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Mary, buried in royal state that reflected her family’s now established status, as well, perhaps, as her own recent betrothal to the king of Denmark. But by and large, even after the new decade dawned, the glimpses history affords of the family are cheerful ones: a visit to Oxford, where they were joined by the king’s sister Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk; a set of signatures in a book, an early-fourteenth-century manuscript of an Arthurian romance, “E Wydevyll” on the back and “Elysabeth, the kyngs dowther” and “Cecyl the kynges dowther” on the flyleaf, suggesting as one possibility that Queen Elizabeth’s daughters were reading the book she had once owned as a girl.

  A stained-glass window in Canterbury Cathedral still survives, a symphony of singing, stinging color showing the royal family diminished slightly in number, but still in all its glory. It can be dated to 1482 or later by the fact that Cecily is shown as the king’s second daughter: until her elder sister Mary died earlier in 1482, she had been the third. The king and queen, each kneeling at a prayer desk, face each other in the two central panels, with their children, similarly posed, lined up in order and dwindling in size behind them. The two surviving boys, like their parents, wear a royal purple cloak over a robe of cloth of gold, collared in ermine; the girls wear matching purple dresses girdled in gold, with flashes of jewels and fur at neck and hem and long yellow hair hanging down their backs. All crowned or coroneted, all with an open book on the prie-dieux before them, it was a family who knelt only to God. The panels would once have flanked an image of the Crucifixion, under a depiction of the seven holy joys of the Virgin Mary, before that window became the target of Cromwell’s wreckers in 1642. The window shows Elizabeth of York kneeling directly behind her mother. She was growing up fast. After the great reburial ceremony at Fotheringhay, it seems Elizabeth of York had been considered old enough to join her mother on other ceremonial occasions: in the Garter procession that marked the feast of Saint George in April 1477, the Garter records note that the queen came to mass “on horseback in a murrey gown of Garters. Item: the lady Elizabeth, the King’s eldest daughter, in a gown of the same livery.”

  From her later tastes and abilities, something can be intuited about the education of the younger Elizabeth, Elizabeth of York. Her Latin was not fluent—she would later request that her prospective daughter-in-law Catherine of Aragon would be taught French before her arrival, since English ladies did not usually understand the other tongue—but she learned to write, something that was not by any means a given even for ladies of the highest rank. But Elizabeth’s was an educated family: her father collected books, and her uncle Anthony’s literary interests seem to some degree to have been shared by the wide Woodville family.

  Later in life, Elizabeth of York would hunt and shoot, would keep her own musicians, play at games of chance, sew expertly. Those last were expected of ladies; what was perhaps less usual was the degree to which Edward’s daughters learned to fill their imaginations with the world of written thought and story.

  Of course, children had always grown up with story, from the biblical world and the lives of saints, as well as from the allegories and spectacles of pageantry. Christine de Pizan had in The Treasure of the City of Ladies urged that “a young girl should also especially venerate Our Lady, St Catherine, and all virgins, and if she can read, eagerly read their biographies.” But Elizabeth and her sisters would have had an unusual opportunity to get their information and stories directly, thanks both to the advent of printing, which was making books more available, and to their family’s literary interests. Their uncle had translated the Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers and the Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pizan; their mother too was a patron of Caxton’s. Elizabeth would have gotten to know the Arthurian stories, with their wildly mixed messages about a woman’s love and a queen’s duty, their tales of Guenivere and the other Arthurian heroines maying and feasting, shamed and repenting. (Such books were dangerous, declared a contemporary at the Castilian court, “causing weak-breasted women to fall into libidinous errors and commit sins they would not otherwise commit.”) Elizabeth and her sister Cecily also wrote their names on a French story of the world and the funeral rites of an emperor of the Turks. They would have read therein about mosques and minarets, slaves and strange palaces. And they may have found a like-minded woman during the course of their reading: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, after all, was described in various of the many narrations of her life as having “held her household in her palace with full Christian governance”—but she had also a tower built for her by her father to allow uninterrupted study under “the best masters and highest of cunning that might be found in that end of the world.”

  But underneath the pleasures of daily life, it became apparent as the 1480s wore on that Elizabeth of York’s future was less secure than it had seemed. Perhaps this early experience of uncertainty, indeed, would influence her sometimes controversial actions in the years ahead, for King Edward’s diplomatic affairs—those affairs in which the royal children were such useful pawns—were going less than smoothly.

  When Edward arranged what seemed to be yet another good alliance for his children, betrothing his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, to Anne, the young heiress of Brittany, Louis of France struck back by encouraging the Scots to attack northern England. This war compelled Edward, in 1481, to excuse himself to the pope for not joining a crusade against the Turks, on the grounds that “the acts of our treacherous neighbours” kept him fully occupied during “this tempestuous period.” But things were about to get more tempestuous: in March 1482, Mary of Burgundy died after a riding accident, an event that gave her Flemish subjects the chance to decide they preferred peaceful relations with the French to Mary’s husband, the Archduke Maximilian, and his English treaty.

  On her deathbed, Mary begged her stepmother, Margaret, to protect her two surviving children, and she must at first have hoped that Mary’s widower, Maximilian, would be able to keep the children in a country he proposed to rule himself. But in the course of the year, political necessity dictated otherwise. Although the little boy, Philip, remained largely in Margaret’s care, after Christmas news reached England that Mary’s three-year-old daughter was to be sent into France, another princess sent off to cement a peace treaty. The little girl was to be married to the French Dauphin, who—as had so often been threatened before—would jilt Elizabeth of York as a consequence. At seventeen, comparatively late for a royal gir
l to be unmarried, Elizabeth in England would certainly have been old enough to feel both the slight and the pangs of uncertainty about her future.

  Edward’s marital plans for his daughters were not going well. In October 1482, just months before receiving the bad news about Elizabeth’s engagement, he had also to call off Cecily’s arranged marriage with the ever-hostile Scots. The betrothal between Anne and the Burgundian heir, Philip, too, would founder on Edward’s parsimony over Anne’s dowry, which allowed Philip’s father, Maximilian, when the chance arose, to abandon it for a better match elsewhere.

  In this difficult diplomatic climate, Edward suggested for his eldest daughter a match that would once have seemed most unlikely—a match with Henry Tudor, still living in exile in Brittany. An agreement had already been drawn up to return Henry home, “to be in the grace and favour of the king’s highness,” and to enjoy a portion of the lands recently left to him by the death of his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort’s mother. Now Edward mooted also the possibility of a marriage that would attach Henry to the Yorkist family.

  The Tudor chronicler Holinshed says that a marriage between Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York had been suggested several years before, even while Margaret Beaufort had been participating in the great Fotheringhay ceremony. If so, at that point Edward’s offer may not have been sincere—just a lure to get Henry back to England—and when the ruler of Brittany was persuaded to hand Henry over, he may well, as Vergil would later have it, have been handing “the sheep to the wolf,” since Edward’s intentions toward Henry may not have been benign. Henry had been entrusted to the English envoys, but when he reached St. Malo to board a ship for England, he feigned illness, slipped into a church, and claimed sanctuary, from whence he was able to slip back to a remorseful Duke Francis in Brittany; he had been warned, says the Tudor poet Bernard André, by his mother, Margaret, who had scented a deception.

  But now times had changed. With the new alliance between France and Burgundy, and with the danger that England might once again be at war with the French, King Edward may have found the thought of Henry Tudor—a potential English claimant—as a loose cannon at the French court too dangerous to contemplate. Marrying him into the royal family would be a way to neutralize the threat and bring him into the fold. To Margaret Beaufort, in any event, this new plan may well have seemed a reasonable advancement for her son. Her acquiescence may have represented an acceptance of the status quo and an admission that Henry’s Lancastrian claim had no immediate prospect of bearing fruit. But as had happened so many times before, events were about to overthrow all plans.

  The marriage arrangements were the calm before another storm, one that no one could have foreseen. Edward’s way of life had long been intemperate enough to affect his health. Mancini wrote that “in food and drink he was most immoderate: it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more.” He had now “grown fat in the loins, whereas previously he had been not only tall but rather lean and very active.” What is more, the legendarily beautiful and loving Elizabeth Woodville had always to deal with her husband’s flagrant infidelity, a fault, More said, that “not greatly grieved his people,” though it may in private have grieved his wife.

  Mancini wrote, “He pursued with no discrimination the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly: however he took none by force. He overcame all by money and promises and having conquered them, he dismissed them. Although he had many promoters and companions of his vices, the most important and especial were three of the afore-mentioned relatives of the queen, her two sons and one of her brothers.” If true, the abetment of Edward’s stepsons and brother-in-law may throw an interesting light on Elizabeth Woodville’s attitude, suggesting that actual infidelity as such, and any distress that might cause Elizabeth, took second place to the urgent necessity of keeping it in the family, so to speak, ensuring that no rivals had the chance of promoting their candidate into the king’s bed and gaining influence that way. The question of Edward’s relations with women, licensed or unlicensed, would become political dynamite. But Edward’s mistresses were important in another, more immediate, sense as well: they reflected the king’s rampant self-indulgence, which was taking a serious toll on his health.

  On the outside, at least, Edward appeared to be carrying on as usual as the year drew to an end. Christmas 1482 had been kept in great state at Westminster, with Edward, as Crowland reported, “frequently appearing clad in a great variety of most costly garments, of quite a different cut to those which had been usually seen hitherto in our kingdom. The sleeves of the robe were very full and hanging, greatly resembling a monk’s frock, and so lined within with most costly furs, and rolled over the shoulders, as to give that prince a new and distinguished air to beholders.” The king “kept his estates all the whole feast in his Great Chamber and the Queen in her Chamber where were daily more than two thousand persons served.” It was a time of great opulence and merriment, with the affairs of the royal court holding no sign of the troubles to come.

  It looked—and was meant to—as if the royal family was here to stay, in prosperity and stability. On Candelmas 1483, the king and queen went in procession from St. Stephen’s to Westminster Hall. Business went on, with a grant to the king’s mother, Cecily, among the many financial matters listed in the records for the first month of the year.

  But in the spring of 1483, Edward IV fell sick. Mancini said that he had been out fishing in a small boat and allowed the damp cold to strike his vitals; Commynes (with a certain credibility from other foreign reports) says that it was apoplexy following a surfeit. Some even put it down to chagrin at the failure of his attempts to marry his children advantageously. The English reports as to cause are all sixteenth century and inevitably include the suspicion of poison, but Hall says that since the French campaign of 1475, Edward had suffered from an ague “which turned to an incurable quarten,” a type of fever.

  On April 9, at the age of just forty, Edward IV died. Poet John Skelton summed up the shock many must have felt, at the unexpected collapse of so towering a figure, but the words he puts into Edward’s mouth also speak eloquently of the distress that must have been felt in his immediate family:

  Where is now my conquest and victory?

  Where is my riches and my royal array?

  Where be my coursers and my horses high?

  Where is my mirth, my solace, and my play?

  As vanity, to naught all is wandered away.

  O lady Bess, long for me may ye call!

  For now we are parted until doomsday;

  But love ye that Lord that is sovereign of all.

  If Edward IV had lived longer, the events that followed his death would surely have unfolded differently. The young Prince Edward, his heir, might not have been perceived as being so dangerously under Woodville influence. There would not have been the same shock to a country only a decade away from the last throes of civil war and still in recovery from the long-term effects of the minority rule of Henry VI.

  The question of Edward’s male heir was of course first in most people’s minds, but Edward’s death had bereaved more than just his little son. Mancini noted that Edward IV left two sons. “He also left daughters, but they do not concern us.” In the Latin, the last part sounds even more chillingly dismissive—he left daughters, sed de iis nihil ad nos—but it was to prove a poor prophecy.

  Less than a year before Edward’s death, the woman who had done most to challenge the patriarchal assumptions of these years had also left the scene. Marguerite of Anjou had died in France at the Château de Dampierre near Saumur on August 25, 1482. She had, according to her Victorian biographer Mary Ann Hookham, been visited there by Henry Tudor, whom she urged to continue his struggle against the house of York—an ironic gesture, given that a marriage was about to be arranged between Henry and the daughter of the Yorkist king.

  Marguerite died so poor, as her will recorded, that King Louis took her hunting dogs as the o
nly things she had left of value. The document reflects how far she had fallen. The “few goods” that God and King Louis had allowed her were, she wrote, to be used to pay for her burial: “And should my few goods be insufficient to do this, as I believe they are, I implore the king meet and pay the outstanding debts as the sole heir of the wealth which I inherited through my father and mother and my other relatives and ancestors.” These last lines reflect Marguerite’s resentment of her poverty and her old pride in her lineage—a pride never quite extinguished, even by all she had undergone.

  Marguerite’s political life had long been over, but she had been one of the most forceful women in a century not short of them. Shakespeare has her at the beginning of Richard III returned from exile like a vengeful ghost to curse Elizabeth Woodville:

  Long mayst thou live to wail thy children’s death

  And see another, as I see thee now,

  Decked in thy rights, as thou art stalled in mine.

  Long die thy happy days before thy death,

  And after many lengthened hours of grief,

  Die neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen.