Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Perkin also wrote to Isabella, with a vague description of how a “certain lord” had been told to kill him but, “pitying my innocence,” had preserved him. He seemed, however, to have gotten his own age slightly wrong, though his praise of his “dearest aunt” rang true enough.

  Isabella was unimpressed and concerned about the fresh potential for unrest in the country where her daughter Catherine of Aragon was to marry. She wrote, woman to woman, to Margaret, suggesting she should not be taken in. But Isabella’s caution would not necessarily be followed by the other rulers of Europe: a prince or pretender could always prove an invaluable pawn of diplomacy.

  The news that the Duke of York was alive “came blazing and thundering over into England,” said Bacon, breeding murmurs of all sorts against the king, suggesting that by rights he should be ruling only through Elizabeth, and so “God had now brought to light a masculine branch of the house of York,” who could not be overlooked as easily as Elizabeth, his “poor lady.”

  In 1493 Henry was writing about “the great malice that the Lady Margaret of Burgundy beareth continually against us,” in sending first the “feigned boy” Lambert Simnel and now another “feigned lad.” He was invoking a conception popular at the time: that of the she-wolf or, as Edward Hall would later imagine Margaret, the “dog reverting to her old vomit.” Hall memorably described Margaret as being “like one forgetting both God and charity” in her malice against Henry, seeking “to suck his blood and compass his destruction,” not just a she-wolf like Marguerite of Anjou, but a vampire as well.

  Hall (and Bacon after him) followed Vergil in this, claiming Margaret, driven by “insatiable hatred and fiery wrath,” continually sought Henry’s destruction—“so ungovernable is a woman’s nature especially when she is under the influence of envy,” he glossed. Vergil was probably swayed by Henry VII’s own perception of events, and Henry may well have been influenced by Louis of France: he who had cast doubts on Margaret’s chastity even before her marriage, just as he had impugned the chastity of Cecily.

  Margaret of Burgundy, Bacon sneered, had “the spirit of a man and the malice of a woman.”* Being “childless and without any nearer care,” he said, she could devote herself to her “mortal hatred” of Henry and the house of Lancaster—a hatred, Bacon claimed, she now extended even to Henry’s wife, her own niece. Certainly, Margaret did not seem to regard Elizabeth’s role as queen consort as elevating the family’s status in any way. Her letter to Isabella had spoken of how her family had “fallen from the royal summit,” suggesting the situation could be redeemed only by a “male remnant.” Or perhaps she thought that for one who had been, in Vergil’s words, “the means of the king’s ascent to the throne,” a mere consort’s role was inadequate.

  Margaret’s hopes, however, were already on shaky ground. By 1493 Henry had discovered an alternative identity for the supposed prince: Perkin Warbeck from the French border city of Tournai, a boatman’s son. That summer an embassy was sent to Burgundy, warning Philip (now old enough to hold at least theoretical rule when his father, Maximilian, succeeded to the grander title of Holy Roman Emperor) that he was giving houseroom to an impostor. One of the envoys (Warham, a future archbishop) joked unpleasantly to the childless Margaret that in Simnel and Warbeck, she had produced “two great babes not as normal but fully grown and long in the womb.” Henry’s efforts were unsuccessful: while Philip, and probably Maximilian behind him, raised men for the pretender, Margaret provided money. She had not lost her head over the affair entirely. Her “nephew” was to pay his “aunt” the remaining part of her dowry as soon as he won the English throne: her promised wool rights, the manor of Hunsdon, and the town of Scarborough.

  In October 1494, in England, Henry VII created his second son, Henry, Duke of York—the title the younger Prince in the Tower had borne and the one Warbeck had since claimed for himself. (Arthur, as Prince of Wales, had the year before been sent to take up residence in Ludlow, just as Elizabeth of York’s eldest brother had done.) Prince Henry’s new title was a riposte to Perkin, and also perhaps a sop to any disaffected Yorkists—a reminder that through his wife, the king had annexed also the Yorkist claim. The celebratory tournaments for the younger Henry’s investiture were set up as a chivalric fantasy centering on the queen, just as earlier tournaments had centered on Elizabeth Woodville and her jousting family: “The Queen’s grace and the ladies, remembering themselves that ancient custom of the [the king’s] noble realm of England . . . besought the King’s grace to license and to permit them at the said feast to hold and to keep a ‘justes royall’ [a royal joust].” Margaret Beaufort was with the king and queen as they left Woodstock to move toward the capital for the ceremonies; she was still with them three weeks later as they processed away from Westminster.

  The queen was prominent in her state, the jousters on the first day wearing her crest as well as the king’s livery. But subsequent challengers could also be seen in Margaret Beaufort’s blue and white livery, and she was one of the ladies who advised on the prizes, which were presented by her namesake, the “high and excellent princess,” little Margaret.

  Other changes around this time were also designed, in part, to tighten the security of the regime. In January 1495, Henry offered his daughter Margaret in marriage to the king of Scotland—the son of Elizabeth Woodville’s erstwhile prospective bridegroom. Henry was busy securing his flanks.

  The queen’s sisters were also being married off: Anne to the grandson of one of Richard III’s leading adherents who might thus be reconciled to Henry’s regime and Katherine, by way of reward, into the notably Lancastrian Courtenay family. Connections of the various women, after all, were still involved in machinations against Henry. In February 1495, Sir William Stanley—Margaret Beaufort’s brother-in-law, the man whose intervention had made all the difference at Bosworth—was found to have had contact with Warbeck and was executed.

  But the royal women’s troubling connections did not end there. A servant of Edward’s sister Elizabeth had also been among those indicted in these years, and several of those in trouble over the Warbeck affair had been neighbors or servants of Cecily Neville’s. But any question of active involvement on Cecily’s part would soon be over. Her long life was drawing to a close.

  On May 31, 1495, at Berkhampsted, Cecily died, being, as her will declared, “of whole mind and body, loving therefore be it to Jh’u [Jesus],” surrendering her soul into God’s hands and the protection of the saints. Her body, subject to Henry VII’s permission, was to be buried at Fotheringhay beside that of “my most entirely beloved Lord and husband, father unto my said lord and son [Edward IV].” She left a series of bequests to the Fotheringhay college—everything from mass books to ecclesiastical vestments—and to the abbey at Syon “two of the best copes of crimson cloth.”

  In her will, Cecily asks, as was usual, that any debts should be paid, rather touchingly “thanking our Lord at the time of making of this my testament [that] to the knowledge of my conscience I am not much in debt.” But it is the personal bequests that are the interesting ones. An acknowledgment to the king, legacies to officers of her household, to “my daughter of Suffolk” her chair of litter with all the “cushions, horses, and harnesses” belonging to it, and to her granddaughter Anne a barge with all its accoutrements and “the largest bed of bawdekyn [a silk fabric with metal threads, like a less costly cloth of gold], with counterpoint of the same.” (Her great-grandson Prince Arthur, heir apparent to the Tudor dynasty, got a bed of arras with the Wheel of Fortune—an unsettling, if salutary, reminder that nothing in royal life was ever fixed.)

  Cecily’s granddaughter and godchild Bridget was left the Legenda Aurea on vellum and Cecily’s books on Saint Katherine and Matilda. A Psalter with a relic of Saint Christopher went to Elizabeth of York, a breviary “with clasps of gold covered with black cloth of gold” to Margaret Beaufort. It was yet another exemplar of how religion forged links between women who, perhaps, might find in God a new, a separ
ate, lease on life after their years of marriage and childbearing were over and after they were freed from their husbands’ enmity.

  But even as the royal family mourned the passing of the matron of the house of York, there were troubling reminders that the old divisions still lingered. When Cecily died, her will left money to Master Richard Lessy, who had been involved in the plotting against Henry, specifically to help him pay the fine, with the request the king might curtail the charge. Several of the others to whom she left legacies had connections with Burgundy and with Duchess Margaret. It would have been just one more reminder that Henry could never really feel secure about his wife’s Yorkist connections, however amicable their personal relations might be.

  _______________

  *Bridget seems to have been placed in the Dartford convent, famed for strict observance of Dominican rule, before she was ten, and it may have been that she was cloistered so early because she suffered some sort of physical weakness or frailty.

  *Impossible not to think of Marguerite of Anjou—but perhaps also of Cecil’s famous dictum that Elizabeth I was “more than a man, and in truth sometimes less than a woman.”

  23

  “CIVIL WOUNDS”

  Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again.

  That she may long live here, God says amen.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 5.5

  In late June 1495, nearly a month after Cecily Neville died, Perkin Warbeck’s fleet set sail across the Channel for a first invasion attempt. His men landed on the coast near Deal on the southeastern coast of England, but, for lack of support, were forced to set sail again for Ireland, and in November made for Scotland and the court of the young King James.

  James and Warbeck took to each other, and, as Perkin settled into the Scottish court, the king even married him to the beautiful Katherine Gordon, his own “tender cousin.” Perkin was awaiting more arms from Margaret in Burgundy, but financial support even from that quarter seemed to be drying up, since Burgundy’s new young ruler, Philip, now withdrew his support. It is a salutary reminder that cooler issues of broader Burgundian policy and of pay ran alongside Margaret’s emotional enthusiasm. In the treaty that, in February 1496, restored the damaged trading relation between Burgundy and England, Margaret was bound over not to give aid to Henry’s enemies, and she at least seemed to comply.

  It was a time of mixed emotions back in England. In that autumn of 1495, Elizabeth of York’s daughter and namesake had died of “atrophy,” aged three—or “passed out of this transitory life,” as her monument in Westminster Abbey described it. The next spring, on March 18, 1496, another daughter, Mary, was born.

  In 1496, amid fears of an invasion, Margaret Beaufort and Henry toured her Dorset estates, winding up at the improved and impressive castle of Corfe, traditionally a Beaufort property. Tensions were still running high. It was that year Margaret Beaufort sent a letter to the Earl of Ormond thanking him for a gift of gloves sent from Flanders—“right good,” she said, but too big for her hand. “I think the ladies in that parts be great ladies all, and according to their great estates they have great personages”—a crack from the petite Margaret Beaufort about the solidly built Margaret of Burgundy.

  An invasion of sorts came later that year, when in September 1496 James of Scotland and his protégé, Perkin, rode south with an army fourteen hundred strong. It was little more than a raiding party, however, and they soon returned across the border. Henry surely wanted to focus on this continuing threat from the North—he had instituted new forms of taxation to fund a campaign against Scotland—but his attention was soon to be split between Warbeck and a new, unexpected danger.

  In the early summer of 1497, news came of trouble at the opposite corner of the kingdom. The Cornishmen were in rebellion against Henry’s new tax and calling for the dismissal of the king’s money raisers, Morton and Bray—Margaret Beaufort’s former men. The news caught the royal party at Sheen, but now the queen, with her son Henry, moved to London and Margaret Beaufort’s house of Coldharbour. A week later, as news came that the Cornish rebels were as close as Farnham, Elizabeth of York—like her mother before her, and with her own memories—took to the Tower for refuge. The main battle was at Blackheath, only a mile or two from the royal nursery palace of Eltham—but, on June 17, it was Henry who won the victory.

  At the end of the summer, however, Perkin (urged on by James) was back, not this time attacking across the northern border, but leaving Scotland by sea. His wife set sail with him—shades of Anne and Isabel Neville—which may show that Scotland too was finally tiring of its puppet princeling and that this was to be a last throw of the dice. The couple landed in Cornwall, the site of the recent May rebellions, where, sending the ladies to Saint Michael’s Mount for safety, Perkin declared himself king. As Henry marched west, Elizabeth (with her young son Henry) went on pilgrimage to Walsingham, getting out of the way of danger without looking too panicky.

  But Perkin seems to have been the one who was really unnerved—unnerved by the first fighting, along with the news that Henry was on the way. Fleeing into sanctuary, he was persuaded to surrender and confessed to being a fraud. The confession was widely circulated in Europe; Margaret in Burgundy must have heard it. Coincidentally or otherwise, that summer she was taken ill. Vergil wrote that news of the capture “made her weep many tears for her prince.”

  Perkin wrote to his real mother, Katherine Warbeque, telling her the story of how he had left home for Antwerp and there been taken into the service of Sir Edward Brampton—the man sent to negotiate a marriage for Richard III in Portugal—who had taken him to that country. From Portugal a new employer, Pregent Meno, had taken him to Ireland, where he was first taken for a Plantagenet. It was a curious story, made more curious by the fact that both Brampton and Meno had come into King Henry’s service, and by the fact that many still doubted a boatman’s son could so convincingly play the prince—and, perhaps, by the treatment the pseudoroyal couple received once they surrendered to Henry.

  Perkin’s wife, Katherine Gordon, is an interesting figure—interesting in the light her treatment casts upon Henry VII, and perhaps on Elizabeth too. Katherine—like Elizabeth Woodville before her—had to be “much talked to” before she would relinquish the privileges of sanctuary. But from the start, it was obvious that her treatment would be kindly. This may be the single most striking example of the way in which women were often regarded as exempt from the penalties levied on their menfolk—but it may also be a sign of something more personal, a reputation that had gone before her for beauty. Henry’s letter’s spoke of her as being “in dole”—that is, mourning, and literal mourning, rather than just grief for her husband’s capture—and this may have been for a lost or stillborn child. When Katherine was finally able to travel, Henry sent black clothes in which she could do so: satin dress, riding cloak—everything down to hose and shoes. Vergil said that when Henry saw her, he was much taken, or, as Hall put it, he “began then a little to fantasy her person.” His concern took an overtly paternal form, providing sober matrons to accompany her “because she was but a young woman,” as well as everything practical from money to (so the wardrobe accounts record) “night kerchers”—sanitary wear.

  Henry, too, took care to extricate Katherine from her relationship with Perkin. When Henry (so his pet writer, blind Bernard André, wrote in a private volume for the king’s own pleasure) arranged a meeting with her husband, Katherine “with a modest and graceful look and singularly beautiful, was brought into the king’s presence in an untouched state.” Henry, as André tells it, made a long speech to this quasi maiden—apparently considered, since the man she thought she married never existed, to have attained the state of honorary virginity almost as a queen did before her coronation—telling her life ahead would have “many possibilities.” As Perkin was forced to repeat his confession to her, Katherine burst into a torrent of lamentation and recrimination, “soaked through with a fountain of tears.” Only one man
now could be her savior—Henry himself, naturally.

  On one level, it was natural that Katherine should be taken into the queen’s household, the obvious place for one of her own, undisputed, noble birth. Perhaps something was being implied about Perkin’s pretensions—that there had never been any smidgen of truth in them and that there was thus no danger in putting Katherine into a position where she could give Elizabeth dangerous information, or conspire with her Yorkist connections in any way. But it is probably also true that Henry could now feel sure his wife was too committed to the future of her own offspring to be moved by any older loyalty. Certainly, Elizabeth (just returned from that pilgrimage to Walsingham) seems to have accepted Katherine as one of her ladies, with the high place her Scottish rank entailed. If Elizabeth had any other reason for warmth toward the girl who had thought to be her sister-in-law, then she concealed it. And if, conversely, she had any suspicion of her husband’s feelings for Katherine, then it would seem she was prepared, as her mother had done, to turn a blind eye.*

  It was, of course, one thing to treat the noble Katherine with kid gloves, but, extraordinarily, Perkin too was brought to court and treated with a surprising leniency. The Venetian ambassador reported only that he and Katherine were forbidden to sleep together, suggesting that otherwise he was handled courteously.

  It has often been suggested over the years that “Perkin Warbeck” did indeed have Plantagenet blood in his veins—not perhaps as the legitimate Duke of York, but as a Plantagenet bastard. True, Edward IV (and his brother Richard) had acknowledged other illegitimate children, but their decisions to do so must to some degree have depended on the mothers’ position—as well, of course, as on the fathers’ knowledge of the pregnancies. What is more, whereas it would have been relatively acceptable for the king to admit to a liaison, for a royal woman to have borne a bastard child would have been a very different story.