Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Vergil describes how Richard’s body was stripped naked and slung dangling across a horse to be taken back to Leicester to be buried without ceremony;* Crowland states that many insults were offered to the corpse. If Richard’s mother, Cecily, heard of the indignities, she, and Richard’s sisters, must have been hideously reminded of other deaths, other ignominies: when Richard, Duke of York’s, body, for instance, was mockingly decked with a paper crown.

  Richard III had been not only the last English king but the first since the Norman Conquest to die in the red heat of battle. The fighting had lasted just two hours, but Vergil says that a thousand men had been killed, nine-tenths of them, it is estimated, on Richard’s side. John Rous tells that Richard’s last words were “treason—treason.” Well they might be: it was a Stanley who placed the crown on Henry’s head after the battle, once it had been stripped from Richard. But the legends of Bosworth add one other telling detail—that the crown had been found on a thornbush by Reginald Bray, steward to Margaret Beaufort. The origins of the story can be traced back only to an eighteenth-century antiquarian, but, given the part Margaret Beaufort had played in bringing her son to this point, it has a poetic authenticity.

  _______________

  *His grave was lost for centuries, but an excavation in late summer 2012 under a Leicester car park revealed a skeleton that may well be Richard’s. At the time of writing, tests are underway to see whether the bones display the same mitochondrial DNA, carried only through the female line, which can be traced from Cecily Neville through her oldest daughter Anne to descendants still living today.

  PART V

  1485–1509

  20

  “TRUE SUCCEEDERS”

  O now let Richmond and Elizabeth,

  The true succeeders of each royal house,

  By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 5.5

  The battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 has often been regarded as the starting place of the early modern age, but that is the result of hindsight. In the wake of the slaughter, there would have been no indication that anything substantial had changed for the average man or woman in England. As Henry Tudor assumed the throne, any adult would remember not only Richard III’s overthrow of the expected order, and Edward IV’s coup, but also Henry VI’s brief resumption of the throne. There was not necessarily any reason to think Henry VII’s dynasty would be any more durable. And while Henry had been welcomed by many in England, there were many others who were invested in the Yorkist power structure and had much to lose over a seeming twist of fate. Bosworth could so easily have gone the other way.

  Henry did have one important advantage. There had been a comprehensive clearing of the decks (and the Tudors would make sure it became ever more comprehensive in the years ahead). Any previous Lancastrian comeback had been shadowed by the knowledge that the sons of York were waiting, prolific and power hungry. But now, of Cecily Neville’s six adult children, four—her three sons and one of her daughters—were dead. The surviving daughters would not make life easy for Henry in the years ahead; Margaret of Burgundy would, as shall be seen, still repeatedly attempt to intervene in English affairs, and the descendants of Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk, would later be an issue as well. But for the moment, they were in no position to prevent Henry from seizing power in the land.

  The next generation of Yorkists—at least those males who might have stood between Henry and the throne—had been all but obliterated, as well. Even if there were some questions as to whether one or both “Princes in the Tower” had survived, they themselves—like their cousin Warwick, Clarence’s ten-year-old son and the only unquestionably legitimate surviving member of the Plantagenet male line—would have been simply still too young to have mounted a credible challenge themselves, and with Buckingham and the senior Woodvilles dead, it is hard to see who would have done it for them. What is more, it would take time for any opposition to rally after the shock of defeat.

  Time is one thing that Henry’s opponents would not have. Henry, mindful that one Plantagenet heir still lurked nearby, immediately moved to have Warwick brought south from Sheriff Hutton and given into Margaret Beaufort’s charge, or custody. If there was one person who could be trusted to keep a close eye on this potential threat to Henry, it was his mother.

  Everything had changed for Margaret Beaufort, certainly. Her world had effectively been turned upside down; the man whom she had opposed—openly and otherwise—for so long was vanquished, and her son was on the cusp of power. Henry sent her from Bosworth the Book of Hours that had been with Richard in his tent—an appropriate tribute, for someone of Margaret’s piety. But the book, already an old one when Richard began using it, had been transformed into something more personal by the addition, on blank pages, of prayers for Richard’s use and mentioning his name—one prayer, particularly. A prayer seeking comfort in sadness by emphasizing the goodness of God, but more specifically seeking protection against enemies. Deleting Richard’s name from what was now her book, she added the jingle on the endpapers: “For the honour of God and St Edmunde / Pray for Margaret Richmonde.” For a woman of her temperament—so prone, as her confessor would later recount, to see disaster lurking behind the greatest triumph—even so wonderful a turn of Fortune’s Wheel as she had just experienced could not have come altogether easily. Margaret would have set out south when she heard the news of Henry’s victory, to be reunited with the son she had not actually seen since he was in his teens.

  Henry Tudor reached London by September 7 and spent two weeks at Baynard’s Castle—Cecily Neville’s former home. (She herself was presumably still at Berkhampsted, where her son Richard had visited her only a matter of weeks before.) The task facing him was immense: to take hasty control of a country that had not only had every opportunity, in recent years, of learning to regard kings as interchangeable, but he himself hardly knew, since even his early boyhood had been spent not in England, but in Wales. He had had few direct opportunities of learning systems and making allies. But he did have advice.

  From London Henry went with Margaret to her palace of Woking for a two-week stay. We may surmise that as mother and son grew to know each other again and shared memories—it was at Woking that they had last been together, all those years before—it was also time for an extended briefing. Henry across the Channel would have been kept informed of events in the realm he needed now to rule, but he was too distant in exile to understand the competing identities and agendas. Each new recruit to his band of exiles might have brought information, but each had his own ax to grind, and the others closest to him, such as his uncle Jasper, had been away as long as he. As they walked in the late-summer orchards, surely Henry drew information from the one person he could trust completely and who knew the fault lines of England as well as anyone, and perhaps this process gave Margaret Beaufort a role in her son’s reign that would not easily be forgotten.

  It seems never to have occurred to Margaret Beaufort to make a bid for the crown herself. She—and her future daughter-in-law, Elizabeth of York—were in a different position to the other women in this story: they had, by blood at least, their own claims to the throne. But even her son was reluctant to stake his claim first on her blood right, preferring instead a three-pronged justification of marriage (the long-planned marriage to Elizabeth of York), birth (his descent from John of Gaunt, son of Edward III), and right of battle. “The first of these was the fairest, and most like to give contentment to the people,” for whom, said Francis Bacon, Edward IV’s reign had suggested the Yorkists were the natural rulers.

  But Henry, says Bacon, was all too aware that if he seemed to rely upon his wife’s title to the throne, he could never be anything more than “a King at courtesy,” with the real power residing in Elizabeth. And then, what is more, if Elizabeth were to predecease him, he would have “to give place and be removed.” Bacon was writing in the early seventeenth century, and by then the country had known two re
igning queens: the entire right of Elizabeth of York may not in fact have seemed quite so clear at the time. But Henry was persuaded, Bacon said, “to rest upon the title of Lancaster as the main”—to stake his claim chiefly on his mother’s bloodline—and, flaunting his God-given military victory, took care from the beginning that his prospective bride should not have too much importance.

  WHAT COMPENSATION could be given to Margaret would be. One of Henry’s first actions was to see that his mother was declared a feme sole: a woman able to act independently of a husband, as queens were allowed to do, and able to own property. An Act of Parliament ordained that she “may from henceforth [for the] term of her life sue all manner of actions . . . plea and be impleaded for . . . in as good, large and beneficial manner, as any other sole person not wife nor covert of any husband.” She could take and receive “states, leases, releases, confirmations, presentations, bargains, sales, gifts, deeds, wills and writings.” It made Margaret an independent financial entity and potentially a real power in the land. This was unprecedented for an aristocratic woman (queens were often allowed this privilege, and it had occasionally been used in lower ranks, to allow a woman to operate a business). Over the next couple of years, elaborate arrangements would be set up to apportion the revenues of land Margaret had inherited or would now be given between her and her husband. Stanley was treated with separate generosity—created Earl of Derby and honored as the new king’s stepfather—but Margaret’s power and property were not to be at his disposal, as would be normal in the fifteenth century.

  That property would be substantial. While mother and son were still at Woking, orders had gone out for repairs and improvements to the fine house of Coldharbour on the Thames (the same Margaret of Burgundy had used during her stay) for “my Lady the King’s Mother.” In what was to be her London home, Margaret’s arms were set into the windows, to be displayed to anyone passing on the water. Over the next few weeks, the king’s “most dearest mother,” as even the official documents described her, saw the return of her own estates, now that the attainder against her was reversed. She was also given power to appoint officers in certain areas, as well as effective use of the estates of the heirs of the executed Duke of Buckingham, whose son became her ward. From the “great grant” of March 22, 1487, came the “Exeter lands” in Devonshire, South Wales, Derbyshire, and Northamptonshire, as well as the Richmond estates in Lincolnshire and Kendal.

  Tangible benefits were given also to those close to Margaret: her trusted servants Reginald Bray (who would become Henry’s great officer) and Christopher Urswick (another whom Bacon described as a man the king “much trusted and employed”); her Stanley connections, led by the new king’s stepfather; and Jasper Tudor, who became Duke of Bedford. Her half brother John Welles would be allowed to marry Edward IV’s second surviving daughter, Cecily, while Jasper Tudor would marry Buckingham’s widow, Katherine, the former Woodville girl. It was of course a favor to the men concerned—but it is also an example of how marriage could be used to bring potentially dissident bloodlines into the fold. Margaret’s old associate John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, soon became her son’s Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor soon after that.

  At the end of October 1485, Henry was crowned, under the book of rules laid down for Richard III. Powdered ermine and black furs were ordered, as were crimson velvet and crimson cloth of gold. Margaret’s confessor, John Fisher, later recalled that “when the king her son was crowned in all that great triumph and glory, she wept marvellously.”

  On November 7, Parliament reenacted the 1397 statute legitimating the Beauforts, making no mention of the 1407 document barring them from the throne. The Parliamentary Rolls that incorporated Titulus Regius were ordered to be burned—“cancelled, destroyed, and . . . taken and avoided out of the roll and records of the said Parliament of the said late king, and burned, and utterly destroyed,” because “from their falseness and shamefulness, they were only deserving of utter oblivion.” Not only were the attainders against Henry VI and Marguerite of Anjou (and Jasper Tudor) reversed, but Elizabeth Woodville was restored to her “estate, dignity, pre-eminence and name.”

  On December 10, Parliament, surely at his instigation, begged Henry to “unify two bloods” by marrying Elizabeth of York, who had by now probably been brought south from Richard’s castle of Sheriff Hutton. Care, however, was taken all around to stress that Henry’s rule was valid, as Crowland put it, “not only by right of blood but of victory in battle and of conquest”; the Speaker declared that it was because the hereditary succession of the crowns of England and France “is, remains, continues, and endures in the person of the same Lord King, & in the heirs legitimately issuing from his body” that he wished to take Elizabeth for a wife, for the “continuation of offspring by a race of kings.”

  Still, the bride-to-be was to find herself in a strange position—at once needed and repudiated. Crowland added that Henry’s marriage to Edward IV’s eldest daughter merely filled in the gaps, or “whatever appeared to be missing in the king’s title elsewhere,” but Bacon wrote that he “would not endure any mention of the Lady Elizabeth” in any of the documents asserting his kingship. There was, however, no question but that the marriage would go ahead, and on December 11, Henry gave order that preparations for the wedding should begin.

  The marriage plan was founded on the assumption that it was in Elizabeth of York that the best Plantagenet claims to the throne were now embodied; that Elizabeth’s rights, in other words, were not superseded by those of any living brother. When Henry took control of London, he would have taken control also of the Tower, which begs the question of what—or who—he found or failed to find there. Was the fate of the Princes still a question, or did the denizens of this new Tudor age think of it as a certainty? The answer cannot be known because (insofar as any records can reveal) no one said, but that silence is itself suggestive. If Henry Tudor and his adherents knew that Richard had definitely, demonstrably, had his nephews killed, it is inconceivable that they would not have declared it, and made capital out of the fact, as soon as they had proof of the deed.

  If, however, Henry believed the boys dead at Richard’s hands, but had no way to prove it, his silence makes perfect sense; to have declared them simply missing would have been to invite pretenders. By the same token, the Princes’ mother and sisters must surely have known something, or at least felt as if they did, since now would have been the moment for a hullabaloo of inquiry, and they seem to have made none. It is very possible Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters believed, like Henry, that the boys were killed, and presumably by Richard, but that they too had no proof. That dearth of evidence might allow future doubt to creep in, but for the moment at least, it could have been enough to stop them from speaking out. A measure of silent uncertainty was, it seems, everybody’s friend.

  The two young Princes cannot have been far from Elizabeth of York’s mind when she arrived in London to meet her future husband. One of the new king’s first acts, said Vergil, had been to send a messenger to Sheriff Hutton, summoning Elizabeth. She had progressed southward, “attended by noble ladies,” to stay with her mother and later with Henry’s. The betrothed couple met for what was almost certainly the first time. Elizabeth, happily, would have seen not the pinch-faced miser of later imagery but a man still in his twenties, already with something of his mother’s hooded eyes, perhaps, but tall and slim, with blue eyes set in a cheerful face and a general appearance Polydore Vergil could describe even some years down the line as “remarkably attractive.”

  Henry would have seen an even more agreeable picture. Elizabeth of York does seem really to have had the blonde (“yellow”) hair conventionally ascribed to queens: from later descriptions of plumpness, we can guess that she was already buxom—certainly a comely nineteen-year-old, whether or not she was a true beauty like her mother. (Vergil did describe her as “intelligent above all others, and equally beautiful”—but that can probably be put down to tact.) And if,
when Henry looked at her, he saw the girl who had caused so much trouble with rumors of attachment to her uncle—if she saw the man who had long been an enemy to her family—such compromises were far from rare in the marriage of royalty. The two had, after all, one thing in common: a shared experience of uncertainty, of the swift turns that Fortune’s Wheel could bring. It is likely they were both well-enough pleased, and more than that, maybe. Probably Elizabeth of York, like Margaret Beaufort, had never envisaged ruling in her own right. To be queen consort was the destiny for which she had been raised to aspire—and she had achieved it without the need to leave her own country.

  Henry applied for a second papal dispensation to allow two relatives to marry. One had been issued in March 1484, to cover a marriage between “Henry Richmond, layman of the York diocese, and Elizabeth Plantagenet, woman of the London diocese,” but perhaps that might not now cover Henry’s changed status. Margaret’s husband, Stanley, had to swear that his wife had discussed all necessary questions of lineage before any arrangement was made between the pair. The second dispensation was issued on January 16, but the couple clearly assumed it would arrive, since by that time the wedding ring was purchased and the wedding only two days away.

  On January 18, 1486, came the wedding itself, almost exactly a year after Elizabeth’s name had first been coupled with that of another king of England. Not much is known in comparison with other ceremonies; it is not even certain that the records describing it as taking place at Westminster meant the abbey rather than a subsidiary church, though Bacon wrote that “it was celebrated with greater triumph and demonstrations (especially on the people’s part) of joy and gladness than the days either of his entry or coronation, which the King rather noted than liked.” On the one hand, the great outpouring of enthusiasm for the marriage was a sign of support for the regime; on the other, the very effusiveness may have suggested to Henry that Elizabeth with her York blood might eclipse him in the public eye.