These Privy Purse expenses, from the spring of 1502 to that of 1503, form an extraordinary document. They in no sense give—despite the lists of wages and receipts—a complete picture of the queen’s finances. But they do provide a glimpse into daily life of the kind modern observers have not often been able to see—and, tangentially, an equally rare glimpse into an emotional reality.
Particularly interesting is the support the records show Elizabeth giving to fellow members of the house of York and those who had served her natal family. In December by Elizabeth’s “commandment,” three yards of cloth were given “to a woman that was norice [nurse] to the Prince brother to the Queen’s grace.” In the same month, twelve pence went to a man who said that Earl Rivers (Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Anthony) had lodged in his house just before his death. Alms, twice that year, were provided for an old servant of King Edward’s and upkeep for the queen’s sister Bridget in her convent. A messenger was paid for carrying a command from the queen in April 1502 that the Duchess of Norfolk should receive the wife of Edmund de la Pole, “late Earl of Suffolk”—Elizabeth’s traitorous cousin, who had rebelled against Elizabeth’s husband. There were payments, of course, for the maintenance of the Courtenay children, whose mother was the queen’s sister Katherine but whose father had been implicated in the Suffolk rebellions. A queen was supposed to be the caring face of her husband’s regime, and of course Elizabeth would care for her family; there is no need to suspect any insurgency was going on. But all the same, one wishes that comparable records had survived for other years, so that we could know whether this kind of support to old Yorkists had been her standard practice, or whether it was new in any way.
Through the lists of Privy Purse expenses, it is possible to disentangle a whole volume of stories and a web of women’s connections, too. The expenses end with a list of women’s fees: a pension to the queen’s sister Katherine, a sum to her sister Anne’s husband for her keep. Salaries to some half dozen more ranging downward from Elizabeth Stafford (£33 6s 8d) to Agnes Dean, the queen’s laundress (66s 8d) and the rockers of Katherine Courtenay’s children. (There were wages, too, for messengers and minstrels, attorneys and auditors, the clerk of the queen’s council and the man who surveyed her lands.) Besides payments recorded there to those who had been kind to her mother’s family, there are payments to some who would ease her daughters’ way. Dame Jane Guildford who had £23 6s and 8d in Elizabeth’s final wage bill would become one of Margaret Beaufort’s close attendants and then, a decade later, would escort Elizabeth’s daughter Mary to marry the old king of France; she would be the same “mother Guildford” for whose continued company and counsel Mary, feeling isolated and alone in a foreign court, would beg, hysterically.
Black clothing was paid for in June, after the death of Prince Arthur, and, in connection with the expected birth of another child, offerings were made on the eve of and the feast of the Blessed Virgin on December 7 and 8. December 13 brought a reward to a monk who brought “Our Lady girdle” to the queen, an item believed to protect a woman who wore it in childbirth. Elizabeth had ordered a “rich bed” with decorated red and white roses and with clouds, purchased linen, and interviewed childbed attendants. Then she took a boat to Richmond for Christmas; she played cards, listened to music, and paid a messenger who had brought a gift from her mother-in-law. That season, Henry’s pet astrologer, William Parron, had beautifully illustrated and bound up what must at the time have seemed a suitable and seasonal prophecy: that Henry would father many sons and Elizabeth live until she was eighty.*
It was not to be. Elizabeth spent a January week at Hampton Court, but on January 26 she went to the Tower. On February 2 she gave birth to a baby girl in what would seem to be a premature delivery. The Privy Purse expenses record a payment for “iii yards of flannel bought for my Lady Katherine,” the daughter who would not long survive her mother, and also the payment that gives the first urgent alarm: “Item to James Nattres for his costs going into Kent for Doctor Hallysworth physician to come to the Queen by the King’s commandment,” boat hire from the Tower to Gravesend and back (3s 4d), two watermen to wait there while the doctor was hastily fetched, and horse hire and guides “by night and day.” We have no record of whether the birth itself went smoothly, of how any fever first came upon her, of what remedies—if any—were attempted. But on February 11, 1503, she died. It was her thirty-seventh birthday.
Death in childbirth can never have been wholly unexpected in the fifteenth century. But this one seems to have struck all those around Elizabeth a devastating blow. Nonetheless, the practicalities had to be gone through. Sir Thomas Malory described what happened after the death of Queen Guenivere. “And then she was wrapped in cered cloth of Raines [waxed cloth from Rennes], from the top to the toe, in thirtyfold; and after she was put in a web of lead, and then in a coffin of marble.” Elizabeth’s body was placed only in a wooden chest for its progress through the London streets, but that does not mean that any expense was spared for the ceremony, or for the velvet-clad effigy that would be placed on Elizabeth’s coffin. “Item to Master Lawrence for carving of the head with Fedrik his mate, xiijs iiiid. Item to Wechon Kerver and Hans van Hooh for carving of the two hands, iiijs. . . . Item for vij small sheep skins for the body . . . ijs iiijd.”
Elizabeth was to have the grandest of resting places, albeit work on the building that was to house her tomb was begun only weeks before. At the beginning of the century, Henry VII had given the orders for a wonderful new Lady Chapel, a monument to his family that would, he hoped, ultimately house the body of Henry VI, canonized into a Lancastrian saint. The old chapel on the site had been pulled down, as had, claimed the sixteenth-century writer John Stow, an adjoining tavern called, ironically, the White Rose. The first stone had finally been laid on January 24, 1503. It would be another fifteen years before the tomb Elizabeth would share with her husband was finally completed, but meanwhile her body was placed in a temporary vault in the crossing of the abbey, in front of the high altar.
As always, there are stories to be deduced from the records of the burial ceremonies. Though the queen’s sisters Katherine and Anne took a prominent part in the funeral procession, Bridget the nun, the youngest, must still have been at her convent at Dartford, and Cecily, though next in age to Elizabeth herself, was absent either because of the offense her unsanctioned second marriage (to a man of lower rank called Thomas Kyme) had caused the king or perhaps because of the sheer distance of her residence. Instead, place in the procession after Katherine and Anne went to Lady Katherine Gordon, the widow of Perkin Warbeck, by virtue of her own connections to Scottish royalty.
King Henry’s retreat into his grief was a profound one. He was never likely to indulge in the swooning grief Malory imagines for Lancelot after Guenivere’s death: shunning food and drink, “evermore, day and night, he prayed, but sometime he slumbered a broken sleep; ever he was lying grovelling on the tomb of King Arthur and Queen Guenivere.” But he became seriously ill, so much so that Margaret Beaufort moved into Richmond to take charge of his sickbed, ordering medicines for him and a sustaining supply of sweet wine for herself. Thomas More’s Rueful Lamentation of the Death of Queen Elizabeth vividly imagined Elizabeth’s farewell to the world:
If worship might have kept me, I had not gone.
If wit might have me saved, I needed not fear.
If money might have helped, I lacked none.
But O good God what vaileth all this gear?
When death is come thy mighty messenger,
Obey we must, there is no remedy,
Me hath he summoned, and lo now hear I lie.
Besides having Elizabeth bid a respectful farewell to Margaret Beaufort, and a heartbreakingly affectionate one to her children, More’s poem also warned King Henry, in curiously modern terms, that “Erst were you father, and now must ye supply / The mother’s part also.” The bereaved king may not have found it an easy task. His son Henry still in adulthood remembered his moth
er’s death bitterly enough to recall that “hateful intelligence” as a standard for melancholy. In the wake of Elizabeth’s death, there must have been readjustments all around, in a diminished family party. But as the months passed, life went on.
In the summer of 1503, young Princess Margaret was sent north, as promised, to marry James of Scotland—he who had so recently harbored the pretender Perkin Warbeck. On June 27, she and her father, the king, traveled from Richmond to Collyweston, Margaret Beaufort’s house, where the gardens were enlarged and fitted out with new summerhouses to entertain the royal party. On July 8, the younger Margaret set out north, to be crowned in Edinburgh on August 3. She was not yet fourteen years old. Out of the six children she bore James, five would die in infancy; perhaps her mother and grandmother had been right to worry about her health.
The almost forty-page account of the young Margaret’s journey north, written by the same “Somerset Herald” who had described her proxy marriage ceremony to James eighteen months earlier, makes fascinating reading. Everything was splendidly done; Margaret was sent off “richly dressed, mounted upon a fair palfrey,” “very nobly accompanied, in fair order and array.” The procession of towns, of official receptions and leave-takings (Margaret always “richly dressed”), makes exhausting reading. Margaret must have been tougher than she was reputed to have been, for she survived it, even if she hadn’t “killed a buck with her bow” at Alnwick, as the chronicle claimed. But there is no doubt the ceremonial must have been impressive; this was of course a publicity exercise, not only for the new Scottish queen, but also for the father who was sending her off so lavishly equipped.
Minstrels were sent along to attract the populace and make sure no one missed Margaret’s entry into and departure from all the various towns, and a party of gentlemen was ordered “to make space, that more plainly the said Queen and her company might be better seen.” As she passed into Scotland, her servants had sometimes to force a way for the carriage through the crowds that thronged the route, but the “great quantity” of people flocking to see her had at least brought “plenty of drink” for those prepared to pay for it. It was truly a great public spectacle.
The description of Margaret’s initial meetings with her husband at Hadington Castle shows, with unusual clarity, the stages of two people getting to know each other under these trying circumstances. As James was brought to what was now Margaret’s Great Chamber, she met him at the door, and the two “made great reverences, the one to the other, his head being bare, and they kissed together.” The greeting to the rest of her party being done, they “went aside, and communed together by long space.” But one wonders how much a thirteen-year-old and an experienced womanizer of thirty can really have had to say to each other.
The next day, James found Margaret playing cards in her room, and she kissed him “of good will”; after she had danced with the Countess of Surrey, a lady of her retinue, and bread and wine had been brought to James, he served her before himself and played for her on the clavichord and the lute, “which pleased her very much.” Every day saw a visit, and on the next occasion, seeing the stool where she was seated for supper “was not for her ease,” he gave her his chair. Things were looking good, surely. The two did have some things in common—an interest in music as well as in hunting.
But this was an account written to glorify the couple, and although Margaret may have been lucky by comparison with her grandmother Margaret Beaufort, married at an even earlier age, a letter back to her father, Henry, in England nonetheless breathes homesickness. After expressing her formal thanks to all the ladies and gentlewomen who had accompanied her, and asking her father to take care of one Thomas, who had been her mother’s footman, Margaret describes the intimacy sprung up between the Earl of Surrey and her new husband, the king of Scots, and how her own chamberlain, committed to “my cause,” gets hardly a look in. “I pray God,” she writes plaintively, trying to make sense of the internal politics in the new world in which she found herself, “it may be for my poor heart’s ease in time to come.” A teenager trying to negotiate the politics of a foreign court, she wishes “I would I were with your Grace now, and many times more.” It was the common lot of princesses, but that cannot have made it easy.
Among the older generations of York women, the year 1503 ended on the same sad note with which it had begun. On November 23, Margaret of Burgundy died. But although her last few years saw her decline in health, hers is by no means a story of decay. Whatever personal grief she had felt for the loss of Perkin, she remained a central figure at the Burgundian court: the dowager whose presence was in demand for diplomatic functions, the devoted mother figure who would care for the children of the new duke and duchess whenever they were called away. Indeed, Duke Philip spoke of “how, after the death of our late lady mother, she behaved towards us as if she were our real mother.” She had become, almost, the Plantagenet who got away, safe from the precautionary violence that in decades to come the Tudors would continue to wreak on other remaining scions of the family.
Some unrecorded time between January 1503 and May 1504, Edward IV’s other sister Elizabeth also died—the mother of Lincoln and Suffolk, the last of Cecily Neville’s brood. The ground was being cleared. Of the women who had earlier occupied the stage, there was only one survivor. It was Margaret Beaufort, inevitably.
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*After the events of the next few weeks, Parron sensibly fled abroad.
25
“OUR NOBLE MOTHER”
Tell me, how fares our noble mother?
THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 5.3
It was an end, of course, but perhaps it was also a beginning, and a long-awaited one at that. Lady Margaret Beaufort had now—with Elizabeth of York dead, Princess Margaret gone north, and Princess Mary still a child—become England’s first lady. Perhaps she no longer felt she had to struggle so hard, now that there were no other contenders for that position.
But Margaret Beaufort would not have long to enjoy her new prominence. Before the end of the decade, John Fisher, the cleric with whom she developed an increasingly close relationship in the last years of her life, would be called on to preach a memorial sermon (the month-mind sermon, or Mornynge Remembraunce) for Lady Margaret, and in it he painted a picture that was at least partly hagiography. All England, he would say, “had cause of weeping” for her death: “The poor creatures that were wont to receive her alms, to whom she was always piteous and merciful. The students of both the universities to whom she was as a mother. All the learned men in England to whom she was a very patroness. . . . All the good priests and clerks to whom she was a true defenderess. All the noble men and women to whom she was a mirror and exemplar of honour. All the common people of this realm for whom she was in their causes a common mediatrix, and took right great displeasure for them.”
Fisher, perhaps inevitably under the circumstances, painted the portrait of a saint, and whatever Margaret Beaufort’s virtues, she was not that. Fisher’s assurance that she was never guilty of avarice or covetousness carries less conviction than his description of how her servants were kept in good order, suitors heard, and “if any factions . . . were made secretly amongst her head officers, she with great policy did bolt it out and likewise any strife or controversy.” The picture of Margaret ruling her household with a rod of iron and a measure of surveillance is not hard to conjure. More personal still, perhaps (even in an age when the specter of death was considered a good companion for the living), was Fisher’s description of how Margaret would not only comfort in sickness any of the dozen poor people she maintained, “ministering unto them with her own hands,” but “when it pleased god to call any one of them out of this wretched world she would be present to see them depart and to learn to die.”
Fisher also provided in the sermon a description of Margaret’s daily round of devotions, evocative of those recorded for Cecily Neville some years before. They began before dawn with the matins of our lady and the mati
ns of the day “not long after v [five] of the clock.” Four or five masses a day, she was “upon her knees” before the early dinner (at ten on “eating days” and eleven on fasting days); after dinner she “would go her stations” to three different altars and say her diriges and commendations and her Evensongs before supper. “And at night before she went to bed she failed not to resort unto her chapel, and there a large quarter of an hour to occupy her in devotions.” She seems to have followed this rigorous schedule assiduously, although so much kneeling was difficult for her, “and so painful that many times it caused in her back pain and disease.”
Fisher describes her habit of saying every day—when she was in health, at least—the crown of our lady “after the manner of Rome,” kneeling each of the sixty-three times she heard the word ave, and recounted her meditations from French devotional books “when she was weary of prayer.” He describes her “marvellous weeping” at confession, which at many seasons she made as often as every third day and how when she was “houselled,” or received the Eucharist, nearly a dozen times a year, “what floods of tears there issued forth from her eyes.”
It is the picture of what was for the time a perfect piety: wholly obedient to Rome and partaking of all the old rituals though perhaps not uninfluenced by the more individual, more interior style of religious practice beginning to make its way over from the Continent. Margaret participated in all the old popular practices and would surely have been horrified by any suggestion that the inevitably questioning nature of her own intelligent interest—her readiness to challenge church authorities over matters of property and patronage where necessary—could have sown the seeds of her grandson Henry VIII’s eventual break from the Roman Catholic Church and his creation of an independent Church of England. But it is hard not to see Fisher’s words also as the picture of a woman who had learned the hard way that life was not to be trusted, even if you might still rely on God’s mercy. And it is hard not to be touched when Fisher recalls how the “merciful and liberal” hands that gave comfort to the poor were so afflicted with (arthritic?) cramps as to make her cry out, “O blessed Jesu help me. O blessed lady succour me.”
Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Page 34
