Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  Bridget stayed with her mother through this harrowing time. After months of pressure, the queen broke down and turned over her younger son, Prince Richard, to men who promised he would be kept safe. The two princes disappeared from view shortly after; their fate is one of history’s saddest and most tantalizing mysteries.

  Richard III proclaimed the marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville invalid because of an obscure pre-contract to another English woman. All the children were now illegitimate. On March 1, 1484, Elizabeth Woodville finally emerged with her daughters from sanctuary and appeared to be amenable to the new king. But in reality she was deep in conspiracy with Lady Margaret Beaufort to marry her oldest daughter to Margaret’s son in exile, Henry Tudor.

  In 1485, Henry Tudor claimed the throne after winning the Battle of Bosworth. He revoked the illegitimacy of the children, including Bridget, now five years old. He married the oldest girl, Elizabeth of York, as he’d promised.

  But the status of the entire York family was uneasy in the infancy of the Tudor reign. In the court and country, grumblings turned to conspiracy. Pretenders emerged. Rebellions flared.

  Rather suddenly, Elizabeth Woodville retired from public life to a suite of rooms in Bermondsey Abbey, a Benedictine order in the London borough of Southwark. Some believe her son-in-law forced the duplicitous queen dowager into monastic life because he thought she was plotting against him, though there is no evidence of it.

  Said one biographer, “Nineteen years as queen had cost her three sons, a father, and two brothers sacrificed to the court’s bloody politics. Elizabeth Woodville now sought solace and peace in service to her God.”

  But what about Bridget? Did she go with her mother to the abbey—or find a place with her sister the queen or another sibling? No one knows. The next time Bridget appears in historical record is in 1490, when she, too, left the public arena for religious life. But the youngest child of Edward IV was sent to live not at Bermondsey but at Dartford Priory, a Dominican order in Kent. No one knows if this was because of her own piety, her mother’s wish to devote a child to God, or the sad fact that Bridget had become an inconvenience to her family.

  There were no ten-year-old nuns, not even in the late medieval age. Only adults could take vows. But abbeys accepted boarders, and this might have been what happened to Bridget.

  There is a theory to Bridget’s rustication. Perhaps an unhappy childhood had unbalanced her. Ponders a historian: “Bridget was excluded because she had mental incapacities and was hidden away to save the royal family any embarrassment.” However, a priory such as Dartford was far from a mental hospital. The sole Dominican convent in England was known for its library and its members’ intellectual achievements. To be considered, a woman must be able to read or be capable of learning.

  Another more probable explanation is that Bridget’s grandmother, Cecily of York, had a hand in choosing Dartford. The priory attracted women of aristocratic background, often connected to the House of York. Prioress Joan Scrope, who oversaw Dartford in the 1470s, was the granddaughter of Cecily’s sister, Margaret Neville. Cecily also bequeathed three beautiful devotional books to Bridget, including a tome of the life of Catherine Siena, a Dominican mystic. These seem unlikely gifts to a young woman with “mental incapacities.”

  Elizabeth Woodville died in her sleep on June 8, 1492. Her youngest child, twelve-year-old Bridget, attended the funeral, a simple one at the express wish of the queen. She was buried beside her beloved husband Edward at Windsor.

  The Tudor regime continued to gain strength. Bridget’s sister, the new queen, gave birth to four children who survived childhood.

  Elizabeth of York quietly did what she could to protect her sisters and promote their interests. She supported Bridget with funds from her own privy purse:

  On the 6th July, 1502, 3l. 6s.8d. were paid by her sister the Queen to the Abbess of Dartford, towards the charges of Lady Bridget there; and in September following, a person was paid for going from Windsor to Dartford to Lady Bridget, with a message from her Majesty.

  At some point Bridget took vows and became a sister of Dartford. One writer says: “Her whole adult life had been dedicated to God, within the walls of the nunnery, where her family had made little or no effort to see her.” However, this is something of a misunderstanding of life in an enclosed order.

  Visitors, family or otherwise, are rare; the sisters form a sealed-off community dedicated to prayer and intercession for the souls of the dead, with time set aside for study, embroidery, gardening, music, and the more menial tasks of the priory.

  Elizabeth of York died in childbirth in 1503; her husband died in 1509, to be succeeded by young Prince Henry. It is not known if Henry VIII ever met his Aunt Bridget. Certainly he gave no thought to sparing Dartford Priory in the break from Rome. It was demolished along with all of the other monasteries of England in the late 1530s.

  But Bridget did not live through the Dissolution; she did not suffer yet another wrenching change in her fate wrought by others. Sister Bridget of York died of unknown causes in 1517. She was only 37.

  A new theory has come to light. One source believes she gave birth to an illegitimate child, a girl named Agnes, in 1498. Pregnancies were obviously very unusual at a priory and the cause of great scandal, though they did happen. There are no confirmed births to any of the nuns of Dartford.

  Still, this girl supposedly became a ward of the priory, her expenses paid by the queen. She was called Agnes of Eltham, a reference to the palace where Bridget was born. According to Wikipedia: “Agnes later left the Priory and was married to Adam Langstroth, the head of a landed family in Yorkshire (the ancestral home of the Yorks and refuge of York loyalists in the early Tudor period) with ‘a considerable dowry.’”

  The leading book on the priory, Paul Lee’s Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Society: The Dominican Priory of Dartford, contains no mention of a child of Bridget. Instead, the book says: “Sister Agnes Roper, daughter of Henry VIII’s attorney general John Roper of Eltham…was a nun at Dartford from the 1520s until the time of Dissolution.” Were there two women named Agnes, or have historical records become muddled?

  I traveled to Dartford while researching my novel, The Crown, a historical thriller whose heroine, Sister Joanna Stafford, is a fictional nun of the priory. On a quiet afternoon I walked north of the town’s center and discovered the site of the ruined convent. All that remains is a large gatehouse built by Henry VIII from the rubble in 1540—now, ironically, used for wedding receptions—and a long, low wall that ran the perimeter of the Dominican sisters’ home. This wall kept Bridget of York in—and the world out.

  Did she find peace and fulfillment in her vocation? Perhaps Bridget created a family for herself, to replace the one she lost to death and political strife, the last violent cataclysms of the Wars of the Roses. Or did she rebel against the strict, chaste life of a Dominican sister and take a secret lover and give birth to her own baby?

  Six hundred years later, as I lingered by the crumbling medieval wall that now hugs a modern road, there is no way for me to know what happened to Bridget of York, what her life was like. But in that moment, I sensed a lingering sadness.

  The Worst Marriage of the 16th Century

  by Nancy Bilyeau

  On November 23, 1511, at the age of thirty-six, Anne of York, born a princess, died, possibly of consumption. She had outlived not only her parents, Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, but her two brothers, the tragic Princes of the Tower, her oldest sister, Queen Elizabeth of York, and, saddest of all, her own four children who died at birth or not long after.

  We don’t know how fervently the widower of Anne of York, Lord Thomas Howard, mourned her passing. It had been a prestigious match for Howard, not least because his father, the Earl of Surrey, fought on the wrong side of the Battle of Bosworth and the newly minted
Tudor monarch, Henry VII, consigned him to the Tower of London as punishment. But after Surrey, the son of the first Duke of Norfolk, was released a few years later, he dedicated himself to playing the new game in town. With success.

  Thomas and Anne’s union was definitely not the last time a Howard married (or attempted to marry) royalty—the 16th century is littered with the carnage of ambitious Howards. Time and again they struggled to climb that final rung of the dynastic ladder but slipped and fell. Decapitation sometimes followed or, if they were lucky, a stint in the Tower. In fact, through a century of Tudor rule, the Howards cycled in and out of the Tower of London more than any other clan.

  But to return to the premature passing of Anne of York, the most significant aspect of her death is how it cleared the way for a disastrous marriage, one that, if it weren’t for the truly over-the-top Henry VIII and his “ill conditioned wives,” would take a leading place on a hall of marital infamy.

  With apologies to Jane Austen, a childless man who stands to inherit a dukedom must be in want of a wife. Proud Thomas Howard would settle for nothing less than the best, and so he zeroed in on the children of the man who was at that time the sole duke in England: Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham. (Charles Brandon had not yet been elevated, nor had Howard’s own father.) Stafford was rich and had three daughters. The oldest, Elizabeth, was of marriageable age: fifteen. Howard was old enough to be her father. But her own father was not bothered by the age gap—Buckingham approved of the marriage.

  The young woman in question did not.

  For the rest of her life, the word that would be used most often to describe Elizabeth Stafford was “willful,” and she definitely wanted to exercise her own will in marriage. She had a husband in mind already: her father’s ward, Ralph Neville, her own age and the future earl of Westmoreland. She wrote in a sad letter, years later: “He and I had loved together two years, and I had married him before Christmas, if the widowed Thomas Howard, the earl of Surrey’s heir, had not made vigorous suit to my father.”

  Her wishes were ignored. Elizabeth married Howard on January 13, 1513.

  In the early years, it must have seemed to most observers that the marriage succeeded. Elizabeth gave birth to a son within the first year, Henry, the future poet and earl of Surrey; three healthy children followed. Elizabeth traveled with her husband, including two military campaigns to Ireland. She was a success at the court of Henry VIII, becoming a trusted lady in waiting to Katherine of Aragon.

  In the late 1520s, two things happened. First, Howard, by then the third Duke of Norfolk, the Lord Treasurer of England, and more than fifty years of age, humiliated his wife by trying to move his mistress, Bess Holland, into official apartments in one of their homes.

  And second, Elizabeth and Norfolk took opposite sides on the matter of the king’s divorce. Anne Boleyn was half-Howard, and Norfolk supported his niece’s tireless quest to be queen. But Elizabeth, devoted to Katherine, was outraged by the king’s affair with Anne Boleyn. She tried to smuggle foreign messages of support to the spurned queen in a basket of oranges. It was discovered, and Norfolk was embarrassed.

  Politics may have strained the marriage, but infidelity destroyed it. Most wives suffered in silence when their husbands took mistresses. Not Elizabeth. Outraged, she complained to everyone, loud and clear. Bess Holland, she said, was a “churl’s daughter.” She wrote: “But because I would not be content to suffer the harlots…therefore, he put me out of doors…. He locked me up in a chamber and took away all my jewels.”

  Elizabeth said that her husband ordered women who served in his household to bind her and sit on her “until I spat blood and he never punished them.” (Elizabeth also later claimed that her husband had assaulted her days after she gave birth to their daughter, but he furiously denied it.)

  She had no support. Her father, the Duke of Buckingham, had been executed for treason years ago; his son, Lord Stafford, would not agree to his sister’s return to the family home because of her “sensual and willful” nature. Stafford wrote to his brother-in-law Norfolk: “Her accustomed wild language does not lie in my power to stop.”

  For his part, Norfolk claimed his wife was unbearable, that she told “false and abominable lies and has obstinacy against me.” He desperately tried to get her to shut up. She wouldn’t. He offered her a divorce, which she refused (at that time divorces were difficult to obtain).

  At certain points, intermediaries went back and forth, suggesting reconciliation. But the couple’s mutual hatred ran too deep. They permanently separated in 1533. Elizabeth lived alone in a house in Hertfordshire her husband leased for her; their children did not visit, taking the side of the powerful duke, now the earl marshal of the kingdom. She wrote angry letters for years to Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, and even to the king himself, protesting her ill treatment. Elizabeth wrote Cromwell: “Though I be left poor, yet I am content with all, for I am out of danger from my enemies and of the ill life that I had with my husband since he loved Bess Holland first…she has been the cause of all my troubles.”

  Norfolk, freed of his hostile wife, had his ups and downs. He turned against Anne Boleyn after she married Henry VIII and was not damaged by her fall. He even presided over her trial. Four years later, when another niece, Catherine Howard, married the king of England, he did not fare as well. The family suffered from the scandal of Catherine’s adultery. They seemed to have righted themselves but the eldest son of Norfolk and Elizabeth, the earl of Surrey, was executed for treason shortly before Henry VIII died.

  The duke himself was imprisoned in the Tower and was thought to have been spared the axe only by the death of the king. During Norfolk’s long imprisonment through the following reign of Edward VI, the duke’s daughter, Mary, petitioned for his release. At one point the Privy Council said that Norfolk’s “daughter and wife may have recourse to him.” The duke naturally recoiled from the prospect of visits from his long-estranged duchess.

  When Mary took the throne, Thomas Howard, then an incredible eighty years of age, emerged from the Tower of London and plunged into organizing the queen’s coronation and wreaking revenge on his various enemies. He even led a command against the rebels in the Wyatt uprising. But in 1554, the old warrior and schemer died. There was no mention of his surviving spouse in his long will.

  Elizabeth seems to have found a place in the family again. She was, after all, on good terms with Queen Mary, the daughter of her friend, Katherine of Aragon. In June 1557, she served as godmother for her great-grandson, Philip Howard, named after Mary’s husband, Philip of Spain. (In 1595 this same Philip Howard would die of dysentery following a hunger strike in the Tower of London, accused of treason against his second-cousin Elizabeth I.)

  But four years later, it was Elizabeth’s turn, and she died in London at the age of sixty-four. Amazingly, she asked to be buried in a Howard chapel. This wish, finally, was not ignored. Elizabeth and Thomas Howard are not buried together but they are joined in a chapel effigy. Reunited at last.

  For Sale: Rich Orphans—The Tudor Court of Wards

  by Barbara Kyle

  In the late 1400s a young woman named Jonet Mychell was abducted. Her step-father, Richard Rous, wrote to the Chancellor of England asking for help.

  According to Rous, Jonet had been living with her uncle in London when some “evil disposed” people led by one Otis Trenwyth took her away so that “neither father nor mother, nor kin nor friend that she had could come to her, nor know where she was.” She was subsequently forced to marry against her will to “such a person that was to her great shame and heaviness.”

  To modern eyes, the crime of a man abducting a young woman is a sexual one. But Tudor eyes saw things differently.

  The main dispute in Jonet Mychell’s abduction was about wardship and marriage, and what those two things entailed, above all, was money. What concerned Tudor bureauc
rats was the abduction of young women who were heirs to property.

  Abduction of heiresses was not uncommon. Certainly it occurred frequently enough to necessitate a statute passed in 1487 under Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch: “An Act Against Taking Away of Women Against Their Will.” A stolen heiress meant lost revenues for the Crown.

  The revenue stream went back for centuries. The wardship of minor heirs of any tenant-in-chief was one of the king’s ancient feudal rights, a royal prerogative dating back to the feudal principle of seigneurial guardianship. It entitled the king to all the revenues of the deceased’s estate (excluding lands allocated to his widow as dower) until the heir reached the age of majority: twenty-one for a male, fourteen for a female. The king generally sold the wardships to the highest bidder or granted them gratis to favoured courtiers as a reward for services.

  In other words, all orphans, male and female, who were heirs to significant property became wards of the king, who then sold the wardships. Gentlemen bid for these sought-after prizes because control of a ward’s income-generating lands and their marriage was a significant source of revenue. The guardian pocketed the rents and revenues of the ward’s property until the young person came of age, at which time the guardian often married the ward to one of his own children.

  When Henry VIII, the second Tudor monarch, came to the throne, he fully exploited the royal right of wardships. Monarchy had to be a money-making business and wardships provided an excellent way to replenish the royal treasury.