Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Unusually, it was to be a joint ceremony, the first double coronation for almost two centuries. Anne’s inclusion in the ritual could be taken as a gesture of genuine affection on Richard’s part, or simply as a suggestion that he needed to reinforce the commitment of the northerners loyal to Anne’s family. It could, by contrast, also be taken to mean that he did not want to give her a separate ceremony and the suggestion of authority that might bring.*

  Provision would in any case have had to be remarkably speedy—some of the preparations set in place for the boy Edward’s coronation could still be used, though there were certainly robes to be made for the new, differently proportioned participants. At the same time, however, there must have been a particular, contradictory, concern that in these most unusual circumstances, everything should be done by the book, literally: a special document, the Little Device, laying down the formalities, was drawn up in addition to the more generally applicable Liber Regalis. The list of accounts for, and goods provided by, the Great Wardrobe department is in itself an extraordinary document: page after page recording everything from the commission of silk fringe and buttons of Venice gold from two silk women, Alice Claver and Cecily Walcote, to the “slops” of Spanish leather, the banners, and the saddlery. The records show the provision of garments to Anne—“a robe of crimson velvet containing mantle with a train, a surcoat and a kirtle made of xlviii yards of crimson velvet,” furred with “cxxi timbers of wombs of miniver pure”—and also for the ladies of rank, Margaret Beaufort among them, who might be expected to attend the coronation. (Margaret would have appeared in two long gowns: one of crimson velvet “pufiled” [bordered] with white cloth of gold and another of blue velvet with crimson cloth of gold.) Anne herself is first sighted on July 3, when she and Richard exchanged formal gifts. He gave twenty-four yards of purple cloth of gold, with seven yards of purple velvet; she gave twenty yards of purple velvet decorated with garters and roses. The next day, they traveled to spend a night in the royal apartments at the Tower, as tradition dictated. Their proximity to those whose places they had taken (for the Princes were presumably still in the Tower at this time) may well have made this an uncomfortable stay for Richard and Anne, and some of the normal pomp and circumstance of the occasion was missing as well; the hurried and joint nature of the proceedings, and the shortness of the journey from Baynard’s Castle, meant that Anne did not receive the usual pageants that would not only honor her queenship and lay down her specific role, but also acknowledge her ancestry and her own identity.

  Richard, Mancini says, had summoned six thousand men from his estates and Buckingham’s and now stationed them “at suitable points” around London, in case of “any uproar.” The next day, they set out for the abbey, Anne wearing her hair loose under a jeweled circlet in the symbol of virginity that had become linked to the coronation ritual, however inappropriate it might be for the long-married Anne (and for Elizabeth Woodville before her). Seated on a canopied litter of white damask and white cloth of gold, fringed and garnished with ribbon and bells, her train followed Richard’s. She was dressed, too, in white cloth of gold, tasseled and furred (in July!) with ermine and miniver. Two of her gentlemen ushers and her chamberlain went in front; her henchmen, her horse of state, and three carriages bearing twelve noblewomen came behind.

  They reached Westminster Palace and took wine and spices in Westminster Hall. As they did so, and as they took supper in the Great Chamber of the palace, Elizabeth Woodville—demoted now from the dowager Queen Elizabeth to Dame Elizabeth Grey—cannot have been far away, still in sanctuary. But then, just as when the couple had stayed near the Princes at the Tower, it might have seemed like an admission of weakness to omit any part of the usual ceremony.

  On July 6, the Sunday of the coronation, the procession assembled at seven in the morning in Westminster Hall. Despite her royal surcoat and train of crimson velvet, it would have been shoeless that Anne followed the king into the abbey, flanked by two bishops and followed by two duchesses and her ladies, knights, and esquires. Prostrating herself on ground carefully carpeted and cushioned, she was anointed after her husband, ringed, crowned, and invested with a scepter and rod. Her ceremony, however, deliberately fell slightly short of his. The couple then celebrated mass, and at the climax of the mass they both drank from the same chalice in “a sign of unity” (says the Liber Regalis, which had laid down provision for this rare event) because in Christ they were one flesh by bond of marriage. Anne was now consecrated to her country’s service, and she must surely have felt as anyone would at such a moment: the dizzying, almost terrifying mix of grandeur, responsibility, and sheer fatigue.

  By Saint Edward’s shrine, king and queen were taken to separate closets and allowed to break their fast. The queen changed into a surcoat and long-trained mantle of purple velvet before she and Richard resumed their thrones and their regalia. They then proceeded back to Westminster Hall and to their chambers. The menu also survives for the banquet that afternoon in Westminster Hall: pheasant in train (with its tail feathers); roasted cygnet, egrets, and green geese; roe deer “reversed in purple” (literally turned inside out and the meat dyed); glazed kid; baked oranges; fresh sturgeon with fennel; and fritters flavored with rose and jasmine. In all as many as three thousand guests may have been fed, and the proceedings lasted so long that the third course could not be served. Everyone who was anyone, after all, was in town for the Parliament that had been summoned to greet not this king, but Edward V. Almost everyone, anyway.

  A number of prominent Yorkists were nowhere to be found at Richard’s coronation, while others played a tellingly active part. Not only was Cecily Neville not there, but neither—though her husband was especially prominent—was the Duke of Buckingham’s Woodville-born wife. Richard’s sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, however, walked behind the queen, leading Anne’s ladies. Archbishop Bourchier, who had promised Elizabeth Woodville her younger son’s safety, had officiated but, says Mancini, unwillingly—and apparently he abstained from the banquet. Margaret Beaufort, by contrast, carried the new queen’s crimson train.

  Before the coronation, Margaret’s husband, Stanley, had been in trouble with the new regime: Thomas More described him as having been attacked by the same men who arrested Hastings at the council meeting, and Vergil has him being placed under arrest. But Richard quickly changed tactics with the great landowner; when Richard had arrived at the Tower before his coronation, he had appointed Stanley steward of his household. Margaret’s own intentions at this point seem to have been merely to come to an accord with Richard and get her son home, on the terms agreed upon with Edward IV the year before. She had opened negotiations in June through Buckingham, and again the possibility of a marriage between Henry and one of Edward IV’s daughters had been mooted; this was, however, to be subject entirely to Richard, “without any thing to be taken or demanded for the same espousals but only the king’s favour.”

  Margaret and her husband appeared close to the new regime, but the events of the next few months would force the couple—or at least its female half—to reveal their true colors. On July 5, the day before the coronation ceremony, she and Stanley had met Richard and his chief justice at Westminster. It is possible that Margaret might even then have been two-faced in her approach (just as Richard was concurrently also conducting independent and less well-intentioned negotiations with Brittany to get Henry handed back to him). So much had changed in so short a time. A month before Richard and Anne’s coronation day, that of Edward V was still assumed a certainty; three months before it, Edward IV had still been alive, the future of his dynasty apparently ensured. All the same, Richard’s speedy takeover seemed to be accepted not only by Margaret Beaufort but also by Margaret of Burgundy (who probably saw this as a simple transfer of power without contemplating any fatal consequences). But in any case, the latter Margaret had her own fish to fry. By the terms of the Treaty of Arras of December 1482 (that same treaty that had so distressed Edward IV), the daughter o
f Margaret of Burgundy’s stepdaughter, Mary of Burgundy, was to marry the Dauphin in place of Elizabeth of York, and indeed the Burgundian infant had been handed over to the French on the same day, April 24, as the putative Edward V left Ludlow. Mary’s young son and heir, Philip, was in Ghent, where the authorities refused to give him up. As his father, Maximilian, struggled to regain control of the duchy and the motherless child, Margaret was preoccupied by the need first to aid him, and then to care for the little boy in a spirit of almost surrogate maternity. She does not seem to have upbraided her brother Richard for having deposed their nephews—instead, she appealed to him for aid.

  Richard, however, was more concerned with establishing himself in his own kingdom. Soon after the coronation, the new king and queen set out on progress, one of the regular royal tours designed to exhibit the monarch to his people. From Greenwich, on July 19 they traveled to Windsor, where Anne stayed while Richard went westward, the couple meeting again in Warwick as the second week of August dawned. Anne seems not to have taken part in the whole of Richard’s exhausting program. But on August 15, she joined him for the rest of the fortnight’s progress north to York, where they stayed for three weeks.

  The highlight of the York stay was to be the investiture of Richard and Anne’s son Edward as Prince of Wales. Young as he was —perhaps no more than seven—he would still be the figurehead representing his father’s rule in the North. Such ceremonies were all the more important for a regime still trying to demonstrate its legitimacy—and besides, York had always been true to Richard. Its citizens deserved to see their new, their own, king and queen, wearing their crowns and walking through the streets, holding the hands of their newly honored son.

  The young Edward had been left in the North when his mother came southward. But the same document that at such length records the silks and ostrich feathers, the bonnets and the furs, the reins and the cruppers for the coronation also records the delivery of blue cloth and crimson velvet to cover a saddle “for my Lord Prince against his noble creation”—that is, the boy’s investiture—as well as crimson or tawny satin to make doublets for the king’s henchmen on the same occasion, and murrey (mulberry) cloth and white sarcenet lining to make their gowns.

  Anne and Richard traveled with their son from Pontefract to York, where the city dignitaries met them outside the walls, to escort them past a series of pageants to the archbishop’s palace. It was September 8, the day of the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, when a celebratory mass, at which the cathedral’s relics were displayed, was followed by the knighting of the prince (along with Richard’s nephew Warwick and his own bastard son) and Edward’s investiture. If one consistent theme of this story is women’s anxiety to promote the interests of their children, or those they regarded as such, then whatever her feelings about her husband’s actions, Anne’s heart, like the candles at the banquets, must have flared with pride.

  The couple left York on September 21 to escort their son back to Pontefract, before moving on to Lincoln on October 11. At Lincoln, however, news of a fresh crisis of Richard’s reign would greet them. It was a problem that Richard might perhaps have expected, for it involved his young nephews, the “Princes in the Tower.”

  As Richard (and Anne) consolidated his rule, Elizabeth Woodville’s young sons had presumably remained in the Tower. Mancini wrote that “after Hastings was removed”—in the second half of June—all the attendants who had waited upon the young Edward were denied access to him. He and his brother were “withdrawn in the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at lengthy they ceased to appear altogether.”

  Mancini adds that young Edward’s doctor, a man called Argentine, “the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed,” reported that the twelve-year-old king, “like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.” Fabian’s report of the boys seen “shooting and playing in the gardens of the Tower by sundry times” might seem to run on into later summer or early autumn, but More provides a rather wintry embroidery for Mancini’s story, describing how after a time of captivity, the elder boy “never tied his points, nor ought wrought of himself”—a lassitude and disregard of his clothing that sounds very much like a state of depression. Continental chronicler Jean Molinet (who had replaced Georges Chastellain at the Burgundian court) gave a dramatic description of the younger boy urging his brother to learn how to dance, and the elder replying they should rather learn how to die, “because I believe I know well that we will not be in this world much longer.”

  Polydore Vergil—that unabashed Tudor apologist, writing well after the event—was very sure he knew just what had happened, from the first days of August on. He has Richard arriving at Gloucester on progress, and there “the heinous guilt of wicked conscience” so tormented him that he determined to be free of his anxieties once and for all. It was from there, Vergil says, that he sent word the Princes were to be killed while Richard himself proceeded on to York, presumably relieved of care. But the lieutenant of the Tower, Robert Brackenbury, refused to obey such wicked instructions, so Richard was forced to find another instrument.

  Vergil’s account, written in the sixteenth century, can no longer be distinguished from pieces of information or disinformation put out in the interim: it is likely he had been spoon-fed a party line on the all-important question of the Princes’ fate. But as Vergil points out, it is interesting that at York, Richard founded a college of a hundred priests, a huge gesture of expiation or reparation. Vergil says also that Richard purposely let it slip out that the boys were dead, “[so] that after the people understood no issue male of king Edward to be now left alive, they might with better mind and good will bear and sustain his government.” He describes, moreover, the reception of the news by “the unfortunate mother,” Elizabeth Woodville, to whom it was “the very stroke of death”:

  for as soon as she had intelligence how her sons were bereft this life, at the very first motion thereof, the outrageousness of the thing drove her into such passion as for fear forthwith she fell into a swoon, and lay lifeless a good while; after coming to her self, she weepeth, she cryeth out aloud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair, and, overcome in fine with dolour, prayeth also her own death, calling by name now and then among her most dear children, and condemning herself for a mad woman, for that (being deceived by false promises) she had delivered her younger son out of sanctuary, to be murdered of his enemy.

  Her only resource was to beg God for revenge.

  There is no need to take Vergil’s timing as sure, or even the agency he attributes to Richard in the disappearance of his nephews. Crowland suggests only that while Richard was on his progress, rumors began to spread, and he adds that in those same months, it was advised that “some of the [late] king’s daughters should leave Westminster in disguise and go in disguise to the parts beyond sea; in order that, if any fatal mishap should befall the said male children of the late king in the Tower, the kingdom might still, in consequence of the safety of the daughters, one day fall again into the hands of the rightful heirs.” Richard apparently responded to this by ordering a blockade around the Tower, under the command of one John Nesfield.

  All the same, there is a reason Richard’s attitudes toward the “Princes” might indeed have been hardening in late July: there had been a rescue attempt. In late July, a number of men were arrested because “they were purposed to have set on fire diverse parts of London, which fire, while men had been staunching, they would have stole out of the Tower, the prince Edward, & his brother the Duke of York.” The report comes from the antiquarian John Stow a century later—but the contemporary Thomas Basin confirms it.

  Interestingly, there seems to have been a connection between Margaret Beaufort’s Tudor relations and the plot to spring the two boys from the Tow
er. According to Stow, the men had planned also to “have sent writings to the earls of Richmond and Pembroke”—Henry and Jasper Tudor. In early August, Margaret Beaufort’s half brother John Welles led a rising, at her childhood home of Maxey. Her connection to the rebels is enough to suggest to many that Margaret Beaufort may have given her support to the ploy; the seventeenth-century antiquarian George Buck believed her negotiations with Richard had been a feint, on the part of the “cunning countess.” But it is a little hard to be sure just where Margaret’s advantage would have lain in freeing the Princes. It is easier, of course, to imagine Richard—when the news had reached him, in the West—deciding that the boys were not, as he had hoped, altogether neutralized by the declaration of bastardy or their incarceration in the Tower.

  If it was now that rumors of the boys’ deaths began to spread, then it may also have been now that Margaret recast her hopes for her son, Henry. And if it was now that Elizabeth Woodville—possibly influenced by Margaret’s agents?—became convinced her sons were dead, then it is no wonder she gave her consent to a joint conspiracy.

  There is ample reason to believe that, around this time, Margaret Beaufort was beginning to actively promote her son, Henry Tudor, as a contender for the throne—or, as Vergil put it, “she, being a wise woman, after the slaughter of king Edward’s children was known, began to hope well of her son’s fortune.” The go-between keeping the two ladies in touch was Margaret Beaufort’s physician, the Welshman Lewis Caerleon—“a grave man and of no small experience,” says Vergil, with whom “she was wont oftentimes to confer freely.”* Margaret, according to Vergil, suggested to Caerleon that a marriage might be arranged between Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, and her son, Henry. She “therefore prayed him to deal secretly with the queen” and broach the idea to her. Elizabeth Woodville, fortuitously, was also in the habit of consulting Caerleon, “because he was a very learned physician.” Vergil says that Caerleon, presumably on Margaret’s instruction, pretended this idea was “devised of his own head” when he mooted the notion to Elizabeth Woodville.