Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  The exact circumstances of the story, as described by Thomas More, have served to build the legend of Richard’s villainy. Richard arrived smiling at a council meeting, praising the strawberries from the Bishop of Ely’s garden. This was Bishop Morton, already an ally of Margaret Beaufort’s and later one of her closest friends. But soon after Richard left the room, he returned with a frowning face and a ritual parade of accusation on his lips—accusation directed first at the absent Elizabeth Woodville.

  More’s account has Richard pulling up his sleeve to show a withered arm, telling the lords to see what “that sorceress” (Queen Elizabeth) and “others of her counsel, [such] as Shore’s wife with her affinity,” had done to him by their “sorcery and witchcraft.” “Jane” Shore, once Edward IV’s “merriest harlot,” was now the lover of Lord Hastings, and More shows his skepticism about that part of the story in particular. Would Elizabeth really have joined forces, he asks, with her husband’s mistress? But Richard’s fury was not directed only at the absent women. Hastings and Morton were both arrested, on a vague and unsubstantiated charge of having plotted to destroy Richard, and Hastings, hitherto Richard’s ally, was (so the dramatic tale goes) unceremoniously beheaded the same day.

  This looks like the first indisputable evidence that Richard, whether or not he had always done so, now sought the crown itself. It is hard to see why else he would have wished to dispatch Hastings, a mutual enemy of the Woodvilles. But although Hastings had supported Richard so far, doubtless believing the country would be better governed in Edward V’s minority by Edward IV’s loyal and able brother than by the queen and her family, he would surely have balked at what was now to follow.

  After this, events moved swiftly. At the next meeting of the council, Richard insisted that his namesake, Elizabeth Woodville’s second son, had to be brought out of sanctuary—nominally to attend his brother’s coronation. On June 16, the council sent a delegation to visit Elizabeth in sanctuary, and More details at length their arguments. Some were technical: that an innocent child such as Richard could have no reason to claim—could have no reason to be given—sanctuary, which was for those who had done wrong or those who had reason to hide, that it was as reasonable for the council to fear to leave the prince in the queen’s hands as it was for her to fear to hand him over, since he might be spirited away. Some were political: that Elizabeth’s evident refusal to trust the council was causing division in the realm and would cause distrust outside it. One, at least, was directly gendered: that her refusal sprang from what the senior cleric present charitably called “womanish fear” but the Duke of Buckingham called “womanish frowardness.” Other of the delegation’s arguments for handing over Richard were designed to appeal directly to a mother’s heart. Elizabeth was, the delegation said in a shrewd blow, like Medea avenging herself at the expense of her own children by thus keeping them shut up. They said that sanctuary was no place for a child, full as it was of “a rabble of thieves, murderers, and malicious heinous traitors” (not to mention “men’s wives [who] run thither with their husbands’ plate, and say they dare not abide with their husbands for beating”). They said that young Edward V needed his brother’s company and that a life without play was unsuited to “their both ages and estates.” The saga of argument and counterargument runs on for pages, and Elizabeth could only have been worn down by the barrage.

  But More has her answering fluently and bravely. If the young King Edward needed company, why should not he, as well as Richard, be placed in her care (he more so since the younger boy had been ill, and needed his mother’s attention)? (It was, of course, the last thing to which the councilors were likely to agree.) If not, then why not find other peers’ sons for Edward to play with, rather than his still ailing brother? She said that the law made her as Richard’s mother his guardian (“as my learned counsel shows me”).

  The widowed Elizabeth mustered point after point to keep her younger son by her side. “You may not take hence my horse from me; and may you take my child from me?” she asked. It was another telling point. She also defended her decision to take her children into sanctuary, adding that the imprisonment of her brother and younger Grey son hardly led to confidence, that protection for herself or her other children could not be ensured in a time of “greedy” men, and that, yes, her son did have the right to claim sanctuary: Richard had a nerve, had come up with “a goodly glose”—a clever misinterpretation—to claim that “a place that may defend a thief may not save an innocent.”

  But the real point of the discussions, of course, was an unspoken one: the fear that if Elizabeth refused to hand over her boy, then he would simply be snatched away. Sanctuary was a moral rather than a physical concept; this was the middle of Westminster, with the Protector himself waiting in another part of the palace only a few hundred yards away. Indeed, Mancini says that “with the consent of the council [Richard] surrounded the sanctuary with troops,” a sign that he may have been preparing for just such a maneuver.

  As More tells it, the question of taking the boy by force was a matter of some dissent among the peers themselves, some of the lords spiritually holding back, but the majority agreeing to do whatever was necessary to get ahold of the boy. In the end, it was Thomas Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and a relative of the York brothers through their father’s sister), who broke the deadlock, telling Elizabeth that if she sent the boy now, he himself would guarantee the prince’s safety, but that if she refused, he would have nothing more to do with a woman who seemed to think that “all others save herself lacked either wit or truth.” The threat found its mark. “The Queen with these words stood a good while in a great study,” More said.

  More’s pages have, up to a point, to be decoded, for he surely, at the very least, polished Elizabeth’s words in his account of what happened next. “And at the last she took the young duke by the hand,” More explains, “and said to the lords, ‘my Lord,’ quod she, ‘and all my lords, I am neither so unwise [as] to mistrust your wits, nor so suspicious to mistrust your troths [promises].’” It may have been More’s hindsight that makes her add, “We have also had experience that the desire of a kingdom knows no kindred. The brother has been the brother’s bane. And may the nephews be sure of their uncle?” But whenever these prescient words were first strung together, they are considerations of which everyone must, in any case, have been aware at the time; the Cousins’ War had, by now, turned many a brother against their own blood. More has her giving the lords a warning, saying that she begged them just one thing: “that as far as you think that I fear too much, be you well ware [careful] that you fear not as far too little.”

  And then Elizabeth said good-bye to her youngest son. More describes how “she said to the child, ‘Farewell my own sweet son, God send you good keeping. Let me kiss you once yet before you go, for God knows when we shall kiss together again.’ And therewith she kissed him, and blessed him, turned her back and wept and went her way, leaving the child weeping as fast.” When the lords brought the little boy through the palace to his uncle, waiting in Star Chamber, Richard received him kindly, welcoming him “with all my very heart.” The Stonor Letters report confidently that the child had gone with the archbishop to the Tower, where he was known to be “merry.”

  With both of his nephews—the two immediate heirs to the throne—tucked away in the Tower under his watchful eye, Richard’s hands were now free. Immediately, the coronation and Parliament were both deferred until November. When Elizabeth heard the news, she must (with good reason) have feared the worst—that whatever he said, Richard had no intention of crowning her son, in November or at any other time.

  On June 21, Simon Stallworthe, he who had previously urged Sir William Stonor to come to London, was writing that “I hold you happy that you are out of the press, for with us is much trouble and every man doubts other.” The Archbishop of York and Morton, the Bishop of Ely, were in the Tower, but he hoped “they shall come out nevertheless”; Mistress Shore was in pr
ison, and “what shall happen her I know not”; twenty thousand of Richard’s and Buckingham’s men were expected in the city, “to what intent I know not but to keep the peace.” Crowland too wrote of armed men “in frightening and unheard of numbers.” The same chronicle also wrote that the detention of Edward V’s servants and relatives had been causing widespread concern, “besides the fact that the Protector did not, with a sufficient degree of considerateness, take measure for the preservation of the dignity and safety of the Queen.”

  But the dignity of Elizabeth Woodville was about to suffer a far worse insult. On Sunday, June 22, the popular London preacher Dr. Ralph Shaa delivered a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross—“Bastard Slips Shall Never Take Deep Root”—that directly attacked the immediate family of the dead king. Many were eager to give a précis of the theme of that and other sermons Richard’s agents surely caused to be preached around the City that day.

  The most serious—because more plausible—of the various allegations made that Sunday raised the same specter that Clarence had invoked during his rebellion: the accusation that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid, because he was already contracted to another lady, Eleanor Butler. The debate still runs today as to whether there might be any truth in the suggestion and whether invalidity in the parents’ marriage would necessarily have debarred Edward V from the throne.

  After the sermons had first mooted the idea, Richard’s supporters took care to ram the point home. On Tuesday, June 24, the Duke of Buckingham addressed a Guildhall convocation with a secular version of the story: the tale of a precontract, with the old slurs that Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was in any case “not well made” since her blood “was full unmeetly to be match with his” and a general deprecation of Edward’s sexual appetite. There was, More represents him as saying, no woman who caught Edward’s eye “but without fear of God, or respect of his honour, murmur or grudge of the world, he would importunately pursue his appetite,” so that “more suit was in his days to Shore’s wife, a vile and abominable strumpet than to all the Lords in England.” Commynes declares it was Bishop Stillington—the same official who had perhaps married Edward IV to Eleanor Butler as well—who told Richard the truth about his brother’s marriage; it has been suggested, by those who believe the allegation, that he now displayed some proof.

  But there was another allegation in the air, one on which, More said, Buckingham touched only lightly in his speech before the Guildhall convocation, since Richard had asked him to avoid it, because “nature requireth a filial reverence to the Duchess his mother.” The allegation, of course, was that other specter Clarence had once raised: that Edward (and indeed, it was now hinted, also Clarence himself) was the bastard fruit of Cecily’s adultery.

  Not everyone, however, had treated this scandalous notion with such delicacy. More has Shaa having declared that neither Edward IV nor Clarence was “reckoned very surely” as the Duke of York’s child, as both more closely resembled other men. Vergil has Shaa having declared simply that their bastardy “was manifest enough, and that by apparent argument.”

  Of course, there are doubts over just who did say what. Both More and Vergil were writing some years later, and it has been suggested that the whole notion of Richard’s having raised the issue—the persistent myth of, as Vergil puts it, the “madness” of his “wicked mind”—was simply a Tudor slur. The Tudors, of course, did need to find alternative grounds for Richard’s complaint, since the allegation about Edward’s own marriage touched Elizabeth of York too nearly. But Mancini does say that “corrupted preachers” declared Edward “was conceived in adultery,” in no way resembling his supposed father—and Mancini was writing within months of the event.

  As far as the question of the adultery itself is concerned, there is no real evidence available from Cecily’s time at Rouen on which to judge the veracity of her supposed affair with the archer, Blaybourne, who was rumored to be Edward’s true father. More than a decade after Edward IV’s death, writing on the edge of eternity, Cecily in her will would declare herself “wife unto the right noble prince Richard late Duke of York, father unto the most Christian prince my Lord and son King Edward the iiiith.” She did not so boast of Richard, but then to do so in Henry VII’s reign would have lacked tact. But it may also be significant that she made no bequests to Clarence’s children as she did to her other grandchildren, a fact that militates against the idea that she had herself originated the claim he had made. Vergil states that Cecily, “being falsely accused of adultery, complained afterwards in sundry places to right many noble men, whereof some yet live, of that great injury which her son Richard had done her.”

  Another theory, however, says she was entirely supportive of Richard’s takeover, if not actually the orchestrator of it, even going so far as to let her name be trampled in the dirt in order for his design to succeed. There is, however, little firm evidence for this. Richard did base himself at Baynard’s Castle—his mother’s house in London—for some of this time, but it has not been conclusively proven that Cecily was actually there. The Archbishop of Canterbury recorded that the first, early-May, meeting at which it was agreed to take possession of Edward’s seals was held at the “solite” (accustomed, wonted) residence of the great duchess; indeed, it is a fair deduction that, in the irregular state of affairs, the archbishop drew some comfort from the connection of the plan with so respected a lady. But the London house was not Cecily’s only regular residence, and if she was in the house at the time, then the archbishop’s phraseology is oddly oblique. The list of those present at the meeting—senior clerics and officials, all male—does not mention her name. Mancini says that the lords gathered “at the house of Richard’s mother, whither he had purposefully betaken himself, that these events might not take place in the Tower, where the young King was confined.” But it is possible that in using Baynard’s Castle, Richard hoped to echo the pattern of the offer of the crown to Edward IV (which had also taken place at Baynard’s Castle), or indeed to invoke the idea of Cecily’s support.

  THERE REMAINS, OF COURSE, the matter of Cecily’s grandsons, the Princes in the Tower. It is conceivable that Cecily’s animosity toward Elizabeth Woodville extended to the queen’s sons, but if Cecily was truly involved in a plot against her daughter-in-law, she might also have convinced herself that the boys were not in any great danger. Arguably, the simple substitution of an adult for an underage male—a step designed to ensure the family of York maintained the power it had only recently attained—might not have seemed so outrageous at the time. The right of inheritance to the throne was not necessarily as clearly defined in the fifteenth century as it might seem to later generations; witness, indeed, the relative flexibility in the manner of choice that had allowed one ruler to depose another with comparative impunity in the decades preceding this one. In such a climate, to replace a juvenile member of the family by a more viable candidate from the same house might seem a simple matter of practicality, at a time when the welfare of the family was seen as dependent not on the safety and welfare of the individual, but on the progress of the entity as a whole.

  Moreover, if Cecily did indeed collaborate with Richard to any degree, she may have seen her function as that of a brake—a mediating, emollient influence, intercessionary even—since part of the role of a medieval lady was to stop her men from going far too far: witness the way in which the intercessionary function was always urged on queens. Cecily must have given a measure of acquiescence, since she did not cut off contact with Richard (the next spring, the grant of her manors and lands, and of Berkhampsted, was confirmed), but possibly she gave his campaign no more than tacit support. If she was indeed by now living largely retired from the world, she may have taken refuge in her solitude and distance. And if she was absent or anything less than totally committed to Richard’s plan, then Vergil’s report that she “complained afterwards” about the slur on her virtue has a certain ring of probability. It would surely have been easie
r for Shaa to preach that sermon if Cecily and Cecily’s servants weren’t in London to hear it. By the time report of it spread, it could be softened or explained slightly.

  There is no doubt, at least, about where Cecily was not on one significant occasion in these few weeks. When her son Richard was crowned king, Cecily would be absent. That is far from conclusive, of course; the widow of a deceased monarch did not normally attend the coronation of his successor, and some such prohibition may have inhibited Cecily.* Margaret Beaufort, similarly, would be recorded as observing, rather than playing an active part in, her son’s coronation ceremony. But Cecily is not mentioned at any point during the extensive records of Richard’s lengthy festivities.

  Whatever Cecily’s role, on June 25 in northern England, Anthony Woodville was executed, as was Elizabeth Woodville’s son Richard Grey. On the same day, Buckingham, with a deputation of London officials, went to Baynard’s Castle to beg Richard to assume the throne.

  _______________

  *When the rule was finally broken by Queen Mary in 1937, her attendance at the coronation of George VI was taken as evidence of her strong views on his brother’s abdication.

  16

  “INNOCENT BLOOD”

  Rest thy unrest of England’s lawful earth,

  Unlawfully made drunk with innocent blood

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 4.4

  On June 26, 1483, Richard proceeded to Westminster Hall to take the royal seat in the Court of the King’s Bench. It was from this day that he dated his accession. On July 6, he was crowned—and Anne Neville, with whatever different expectation she may (or may not) have had, arrived in London and was crowned as his queen.