Tudors Versus Stewarts

by Linda Porter

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  CIRCUMSTANCES HAD made Elizabeth adaptable, if not always patient. She knew that power was dearly bought and easily lost. The spectacle of the court she had witnessed as both princess and bastard, her privileged existence punctuated by the uncertainty of sanctuary in the far less sumptuous surroundings of Westminster Abbey, not once, but twice, had brought home to her the unpredictability of life. Her uncle seized the throne in 1483, declaring that the marriage of her parents was invalid because of her father’s pre-contract with another lady. At a stroke, Elizabeth and her siblings found that they were illegitimate, their place in the succession vanished, their status unclear, replaced by an uncertain, dangerous future. Although the former princess returned to court at Christmas the following year and even wore fine clothing that matched that of Richard’s queen, a sign of favour, she knew that Henry Tudor had vowed to make her his wife. To counter this, Richard III undertook to find an honourable marriage for his niece, to a ‘gentleman born’, but this was a far cry from the promise of becoming queen of France that had been Elizabeth’s in 1475. A husband was duly supplied for her younger sister, Cecily, but no match was forthcoming for Elizabeth. Her increasing frustration about her situation may explain a letter she wrote to the duke of Norfolk early in 1485. A précis of this document, itself surviving only in fragmentary form, has been the subject of considerable speculation about whether Elizabeth would have been willing – indeed, eager – to marry her uncle himself.11

  Anne Neville, Richard’s wife, became seriously ill in the first months of 1485 and died in March, leaving the king a childless widower. We know that Elizabeth’s name as a possible replacement was considered because the king was compelled to make a public disavowal of such an intention: ‘in the presence of the Mayor and citizens of London and in a clear, loud voice [King Richard] carried out fully the advice to make a denial … as many people believed, more by the will of his counsellors than by his own.’ Later, Polydore Virgil would state that Elizabeth had ‘a singular aversion’ to such a marriage and this became, of course, the official Tudor explanation of what might otherwise have lingered as a stain on Elizabeth’s character. All that can be said with certainty is that the surviving fragment indicates that she wanted Norfolk to be a mediator on her part to the king, for a cause that is unknown. Her appeal may well have been to speed up the process of finding a husband, rather than an attempt to push her own candidature as Richard’s wife. She was a young woman in limbo, whose concerns are entirely understandable. And the fate of her two younger brothers remained a mystery, a sadness that hung over her but could not be spoken of publicly. Nevertheless, the prevailing image of Elizabeth of York as a sweet and tractable lady of no real character is given the lie by this episode, whatever its actual truth. She could speak up for herself and was not without ambition. The day that she became Henry Tudor’s wife and queen of England was no small triumph for the eldest child of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville.

  We cannot be certain where Elizabeth was living at the time of Bosworth. After the battle, Henry sent for her to come to London, where she was placed in the household of his mother.12 Here, Henry met his intended bride for the first time. Although it was perfectly normal in those days for royal matches to take place without either party knowing the other at all, the age of chivalry was not entirely dead and the notion that Henry wanted time to pay court to Elizabeth, though dismissed by some historians, is not mere whimsy but fits in with what we know of their subsequent relationship. Both Henry and Elizabeth had known anxiety and heartache and the success of their union would be key to the survival of the new dynasty. No doubt there were wider political considerations, the desire not to appear dependent on his wife’s claim to the throne being paramount among these, but Henry also wanted to establish his personal life on a sound footing. Bacon’s assertion that the king was cold towards his wife and always mistrusted her Yorkist ancestry has no foundation. Though he loved his mother deeply, he scarcely knew her, either, after so many years of separation, and the placing of Elizabeth in her care enabled him to spend time with both of them.

  Margaret Beaufort had been provided with a fine house in London called Coldharbour, overlooking the Thames. It required a number of hasty renovations before the king’s mother could move in, probably shortly before the coronation in October. A suite of rooms was specially prepared for Elizabeth and accommodation was also provided for two young boys with their own claims to the throne – Edward, earl of Warwick (son of Edward IV’s wayward brother, the duke of Clarence) and another Edward, the duke of Buckingham, descended from Edward III. The two children became Margaret’s wards, though in some respects she was closer to being their jailer.

  For Elizabeth, the return to London was no doubt welcome, for at last she could meet the man who would become her husband. Although the dictates of politics had brought them together, they made an attractive couple, Henry with his European air, his charm and conversational skills and Elizabeth with her family’s acclaimed good looks. At a time when it was customary for poets to fête all royal ladies with elaborate references to their beauty, Elizabeth’s physical endowments do seem to have been genuine. She was tall and fair, slender in those days, before frequent childbearing coarsened her figure and features. Like Henry, she spoke French but her Latin was limited – de Puebla, the Spanish ambassador to Henry’s court in the 1490s, would later say that neither the queen nor her mother-in-law could converse in Latin, a defect not uncommon in wellborn ladies of the time who had perhaps learnt the rudiments of Latin grammar and could follow certain religious rituals and books in the language but were not confident enough to speak or write it.

  His future wife’s lack of proficiency in the Latin tongue would probably not much have bothered Henry Tudor. Everything about Elizabeth showed that she had been raised as a royal consort. Well possessed of the courtly skills, she was a fine dancer and loved music and singing, playing the clavichord herself and keeping her own minstrels when she became queen. Other indoor interests, typical of high-born women of her time, were sewing, embroidery and gambling; playing at cards was a major pastime in the lives of both the English and Scottish aristocracy. In her outdoor pursuits, Elizabeth was also a typical noblewoman of the period, competent on horseback, enjoying archery, watching jousts and hunting. As a girl, she and her sister Cecily had read historical romances for pleasure, their horizons no doubt widened by studying the testament of Sultan Nichemedy, emperor of the Turks. So it was a well-rounded, gracious but far from naïve young woman that Henry VII found at his mother’s pleasant riverside retreat in the autumn of 1485. They must both have believed that they could put the past behind them and embrace their future with mutual affection and hope.

  No descriptions of the marriage ceremony survive and, even if they had, contemporary commentators seldom wrote about bridal gowns in detail, as is the custom today. We have no idea what Elizabeth wore for her wedding day, though indirect evidence from the accounts suggests that an impressive gold wedding ring was provided. As to popular reaction, Henry’s personal historian, the Frenchman Bernard André, claimed that there was much rejoicing. This seems plausible – after all, the occasion was one of happiness and optimism – but coming in the dead of winter, the opportunity for extensive carousing in the streets to toast the royal couple was probably restricted. As soon as the spring came, Henry left his new wife to make a vitally important tour of the northern part of his kingdom. No plans were made to crown the queen at this stage but any that might have been considered tentatively would have to wait, and not just for the king’s return. When he departed London in March, travelling through East Anglia and the Midlands to York and then eventually down into the south-west, Henry had given his wife a set of splendid furs for the very early Easter. By then Elizabeth was already pregnant, though it is unlikely that the king knew this before he left.

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  IT WAS TO PROVE a dramatic trip. Henry needed to establish his authority in the north, and especially in Yo
rk, where ties to Richard III and resentment at the manner of his death remained strong. The loyalty of the northern lords and the gentry in their service was England’s chief bulwark against the Scots. The king had already shown that he was not vengeful but that did not mean he had the unswerving devotion of all Yorkist supporters. Despite effusive greetings from the civic authorities on his official entry to York, with crowds shouting, ‘King Henry! King Henry! God preserve that sweet and well-favoured face’, an attempt was made to assassinate the king on 23 April, St George’s Day, and Henry’s life was only saved by the personal intervention of the earl of Northumberland.

  The king put a brave face on this turn of events, which came shortly after he had learned of what was to be the first revolt against his rule. Three known Yorkist dissidents, Viscount Lovell, Sir Humphrey Stafford and his younger brother, Thomas, escaped from hiding in Colchester and attempted, unsuccessfully, to coordinate risings in the Midlands and North Yorkshire in the spring and summer of 1486. Their ostensible aim was to overthrow Henry and put the young earl of Warwick on the throne. Using a combination of clemency and financial restriction, which meant that men of suspect loyalty had to provide substantial sums to the Crown in return for their freedom, the king dealt with these first challenges to his rule effectively. Yet there did not appear to be widespread opposition to his rule among the English population as a whole. And on 19 September, Henry’s hold on power was strengthened when Queen Elizabeth gave birth to a son. The arrival of an heir, Prince Arthur, born in Winchester, was a great boost to Henry Tudor. Both the city of his son’s birth and the child’s name had been carefully chosen for their associations with Camelot and a distant but glorious age when another Arthur had united the country. Henry’s consistent message had been that he would do the same. Elizabeth Woodville, Henry’s mother-in-law, was godmother to the child and took part in his christening ceremony, a further public demonstration of reconciliation with the Yorkists. But inside and outside his realm forces continued to gather that would stop him if they could. Less than a year later, England was invaded, the earl of Warwick’s claim was reignited and Henry VII was fighting a full-scale battle again.

  The Lambert Simnel conspiracy, as it has come to be known, was almost certainly never intended to put a lowly born boy from Oxford on the throne. Though little is known about Simnel himself, nor precisely how he came to have been spirited from Oxford to Ireland by a disaffected priest, he had undoubtedly been trained to pass as a nobleman even before the choice was made to claim that he was Edward, the young earl of Warwick. He also had powerful backers – the indefatigable Lord Lovell, who had evaded capture in 1486, John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln (who almost certainly would, if successful, have put forward his own claim) and, across the North Sea, the dowager duchess Margaret of Burgundy, sister of Richard III. Even Elizabeth Woodville was suspected of disloyalty and her lands were summarily given to her daughter while she retired to a convent.

  Accepted as genuine by the Irish peers, Simnel was actually ‘crowned’ as Edward VI in the cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Dublin, on 24 May (Whitsunday) 1487. This farce was an early indication, and warning to Henry VII, if any was needed, of the lengths to which his opponents would go. Despite having paraded the real earl of Warwick in London months earlier, the king could not avoid military confrontation. Less than two weeks after the impostor’s coronation, a force of two thousand German and Swiss professional soldiers, accompanied by a number of diehard Yorkists and a larger but much less well-armed group of some four thousand Irishmen, landed at Furness in north-west England.

  This was a serious invasion – indeed, the whole Lambert Simnel conspiracy was more serious than historians have sometimes thought. Henry’s opponents hoped to gather support in Yorkshire and then to advance rapidly south before the king could gather sufficient forces to contest them. But they had miscalculated on both counts. The king went north to meet them, via Leicester and Nottingham (where he managed to get lost), and by 15 June he had been joined by the forces of the men who had fought with him at Bosworth: the earls of Oxford, Derby and Devon and his ever-reliable uncle, Jasper. The king had twelve thousand men, the opposing forces only nine thousand, and when they met upstream from Newark, on the river Trent near the village of Stoke, on the morning of 16 June, a short but bloody battle followed. The earl of Lincoln was killed and young Simnel captured. He was allowed to live at Henry VII’s court, as kitchen boy and then falconer. But Lovell, a troublemaker who excelled at escaping, got away again. He found his way to Scotland, where both James III and James IV gave him refuge. Thereafter, he disappears from history. It was, however, brought home to Henry VII that his northern neighbour could still give sanctuary to his enemies. The very real threat that this posed became all too apparent in the 1490s, when James IV decided that the time had come to rule for himself.

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  IT HAD BEEN a long and sometimes bumpy apprenticeship, especially in the early years of the reign. There were no splendid festivities but James IV was crowned at Scone on 24 June with considerable pomp. Both the place and the date were significant. It was the anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn and the first coronation of a Scottish monarch at Scone, with its sacred and ancient associations, since James I more than sixty years earlier. Resplendent in a series of blue, black and crimson satin doublets, the young king had ridden to his coronation on a horse decked in velvet, supported by eight henchmen in black satin and velvet. Ahead of him went a man carrying St Fillan’s bell, which was supposed to cure the mentally afflicted. This may be revealing of the emotional turmoil of a boy who could not rid himself of the notion that he was being crowned while his murdered father remained unburied. The ceremony was conducted by the bishops of Glasgow and Dunkeld. Archbishop Scheves of St Andrews, the senior Scottish cleric (and loyal supporter of James III), was not present.

  It is likely that James IV was crowned by Robert Blacader, bishop of Glasgow, and Scheves’s great rival. Once the crown was on the king’s head, the lords came forward to swear homage, touching the crown itself and promising to support the king. His own coronation oath followed, in which he promised to be ‘a loving father to the people … loyal and true to God and the Holy Church and to the three estates of my realm’ and to govern according to the law and customs of the kingdom, making no changes without the consent of the estates. The clergy and the lords then responded with promises of loyalty and good counsel and thus the ceremony drew to its close.13 James did not stay long at Scone. Following the interment of his father, probably on 28 June, the young king returned to Stirling, where Masses were said for Margaret of Denmark. These duties to his parents done, James IV could then begin the task of becoming acquainted with his country, its landscapes, people, culture and international relationships, as well as with its structure of government. Over time, he acquired a mastery of all these aspects. In short, he would learn how to rule.

  His realm was smaller, colder, wetter and poorer than England. Around 800,000 people lived in Scotland in 1488, less than 5 per cent of whom inhabited towns. Edinburgh, the capital, with a population of 12,000, was by far the largest city, though only a quarter the size of London. Aberdeen and Glasgow were much smaller, with populations estimated at about 4,000 and 2,500 respectively. The geography of this overwhelmingly rural society was described by Pitscottie as very much a divide between the more fertile, prosperous south and the untamed north: ‘The Scots which inhabit in the southern part be well nurtured and live in good civility, and the most civil use the English speech … the other part northern, are full of mountains, and very rude and homely kind of people doth inhabit, which is called the Redshanks, or wild Scots. They be clothed with one mantle, with a shirt fashioned after the Irish manner, going bare-legged to the knee.’ He went on to describe the area around Stirling (which would have been well known already to James IV) where white bulls, ‘long-maned, like lions’, had flourished in the Caledonian forest but were now almost extinct, and moved on to a description of the in
habitants of the island of Orkney, recently joined to the kingdom of Scotland, where they used ‘the Goth’s speech’. Despite the climate, and the fact that they ate only fish, the islanders were ‘lusty of body and mind, living very long’. The Scots, he concluded, were very wise, ‘as their learning declareth’, brave yet cantankerous. But the poor were very poor, and lazy, too.14

  Andrea Trevisan, the Venetian commentator, obtained his descriptions of Scotland and its people from the Spanish ambassador to the court of James IV, Don Pedro de Ayala. The Spaniard was a great admirer of James and found much that was positive to say about the country, apart from the fact that it was very rainy. The Scottish people were very courteous and the nobility, residing on great, forested estates teeming with game, lived well: ‘They have excellent houses, built for the most part in the Italian manner, of hewn stone or brick, with magnificent rooms, halls, doors, galleries, chimneys and windows.’ Unlike the English, the Scots ‘are extremely partial to foreigners, and very hospitable, and they all consider that there is no higher duty in the world than to love and defend their crown.’15

  The accounts of both Pitscottie and Ayala are revealing, but not necessarily the whole story. Their emphasis on regionalism is interesting – localism was a vital element of civic and ecclesiastical life, but the functioning of Scottish government and society operated at local, regional and national level, with kinship and clan loyalty not solely confined to the Highlands, but regarded with equal fervour in the Lowlands and the Borders. At the apex of society was the king, commanding the kind of instinctive loyalty from lords, burgesses and peasants that went with an intensely personal, highly visible style of kingship. In late medieval Scotland, ordinary men and women stood a real chance of seeing their monarch in person at some point in their lifetimes. It was no wonder that James III did not command much popularity, since he seldom ventured outside Edinburgh. The motives of those who had put his son on the throne were far from altruistic and they were eager to reinforce their own legitimacy by parading the king, but, in so doing, they helped ensure that James IV did not repeat his father’s mistakes. The boy’s upbringing in Stirling, with only occasional visits to the capital, meant that he had much to learn about his country. In the first few months of his reign, James was constantly on the move, learning new skills and developing interests that would remain with him for the rest of his life. In early August, only six weeks after he was crowned king, he was at Leith, Edinburgh’s port, watching the ships and learning about naval warfare; his enthusiasm for all things naval probably dates from this visit. A few days later he was at Linlithgow, taking a break from his new duties by watching plays, listening to music and hunting. By 8 August he was back in Stirling and then, less than two weeks later, he was off again, presiding over his first justice circuit court at Lanark. These justice ayres, as the circuit courts were known, were a key feature of the Scottish legal system, bringing the rule of law to the farthest corners of the land. They provided a good grounding for the king in legal matters and an opportunity to be out among his subjects. Early on, they allowed the affable and inquisitive side of James’s nature to develop. Travelling was a new experience for him but it came to characterize his reign. Far more than his English counterpart, James IV was always on the move, leading his troops, visiting his castles for rest and enjoyment, dispensing justice, departing on pilgrimage and sailing on the ships he loved.