Elizabeth

by Arlene Okerlund

  And on the morn one of the canons, called Master Vaughan, sang Our Lady Mass, at which the Lord Marquess offered a piece of gold. At that Mass offered no man saving himself and in likewise at the Mass of the Trinity, which was sung by the Dean, and kneeled at the hearse head because the ladies came not to the Mass of Requiem. And the lords before rehearsed sat above in the choir into the offering time, when that the foresaid lords and also the officers of arms there being present went before my Lady Anne, which offered the Mass penny instead of the Queen, wherefore she had the carpet and the cushion laid. And the Viscount Welles took her offering, which was a very penny indeed of silver, and Dame Katherine Gray bore the said Lady [Anne’s] train. In time she was turned to her place again, then every one of the Kings’ daughters bore own trains and offered a piece of gold. After the ladies had offered in likewise, the Lord Marquess offered a piece of gold, then the other foresaid lords offered their pleasures; then offered the Dean and the Choir and the poor knights; then Garter King of Armes, with him all his company. Then offered all other esquires present and yeomen and the servants that would offer, but there was none offering to the corpse during the Mass. There was given certain money in alms. After Mass the Lord Marquess rewarded… their costs 40s.

  I pray to God to have mercy on her soul. At this same season, the Queen her daughter took her chamber, wherefore I cannot tell what dolent abbey… she goeth in. But I suppose she went in blue in likewise as Queen Margaret, the wife of King Henry the VI, went in when her mother the Queen of Sicily died.43

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Legacy

  Elizabeth Wydeville died without knowing with certainty the fate of the two princes, perhaps the saddest aspect of her life. While the death of Prince Richard was officially recognised during her lifetime, there was always the possibility that the boys had been spirited to a safe haven in Europe. A declaration of Richard’s death appears six years after his disappearance, in a petition of the Duchess of Norfolk on 27 November 1489, aimed at regaining property he had inherited through Anne Mowbray. A single, stark sentence in the Calendar of Patent Rolls states simply: ‘The said Richard Duke of York died.’1 Still, the impossible hope that at least one of the boys survived must have tantalised Elizabeth throughout her remaining days on earth.

  Whether Elizabeth was aware of the Perkin Warbeck rebellion that began just before she died, we do not know. That rebellion – again sponsored by Margaret of Burgundy – featured a nineteen-year-old male coached to impersonate the younger of the boys. In March 1492, the pretender visited the French court, which received him as Richard, Duke of York. Elizabeth died three months later, and we can only wonder if this news from France reached her at Bermondsey. If so, her heart once again must have leaped with hope before it broke. This pretender provoked considerable attention, as he travelled through the courts of Portugal, France, Flanders and Scotland, all of which welcomed him as the Duke of York. By July 1493, Henry VII had identified the man as Perkin Warbeck, ‘another feigned lad… born at Tournay in Picardy’, but that was a year after Elizabeth’s death. Warbeck was not captured until 5 October 1497, after his skirmishes through Cornwall and Devon caused quite a stir in England. Imprisoned in the Tower, Warbeck tried to collaborate with Clarence’s son, the Duke of Warwick, in planning an escape. The escape plot gave Henry VII a reason to execute both men. Perkin Warbeck was hanged on 23 November, and Edward, Earl of Warwick beheaded on 26 November 1499. The male line of the Plantagenets was thereby rendered extinct.

  Five centuries later, questions still persist about the fate of the young princes. The motive for killing them was strong in all the men seeking power: uncle Richard III, uncle Henry Buckingham, and brother-in-law Henry VII, none of whom could claim the throne without eliminating the boys. Instead of providing protection, consanguinity compelled death by those whose ambitions took precedence over family ties. The intrafamilial conflicts and the passions that drove these men created a legacy that subsequent generations have tried to comprehend through five centuries of historical study and literary introspection.

  Elizabeth Wydeville, after a lifetime of watching ambition ravage her family and kill so many of the persons she loved, must have found her reclusive residence at Bermondsey convent to be a welcome and comforting retreat from the reality of worldly affairs. In her private meditations there, perhaps she reread the books translated by her brother Anthony, and reflected on their contemptus mundi insights. She could not possibly have imagined that the events of her lifetime would stimulate so much interest in others trying to understand human motivations and actions.

  In retrospect, we can place the Wydeville family at the centre of the cultural revolution about to overtake England. Living at the cusp of the medieval world turning towards the Renaissance, they helped usher in the intellectual, cultural and sociological changes that define the modern era. Jacquetta of Luxembourg’s marriage to Sir Richard Wydeville and Edward IV’s decision to marry Elizabeth helped revolutionise the concept of marriage, by placing emotional wellbeing above financial gain, political expediency and social rank. The institution of marriage began to change from a business liaison into a personal engagement. They were not the first to follow their hearts, but they were in the vanguard of a movement that allowed love to become a factor in marriage.

  Elizabeth Wydeville’s family in general challenged medieval traditions. Their rise through the ranks of English nobility – achieved through merit and service, rather than through birthright and inheritance – set the pattern that would become commonplace in later centuries. In the generation of Elizabeth’s grandfather, Thomas Wydeville, fee-holder and country gentleman, served as justice of the peace and sheriff, while his younger brother, Richard, entered military service and became a trusted lieutenant to the Duke of Bedford. In the next generation, the son of Richard Wydeville, Esquire, was knighted by Henry VI and earned renown through his prowess as a chevalier. Sir Richard Wydeville married Jacquetta, the daughter of European nobility and the widow of a duke, and earned his baronage through military service as Seneschal of Aquitaine and Lieutenant of Calais. Among the cultured and literate children of Lord Rivers and the Duchess of Bedford, Elizabeth became Queen Consort to Edward IV and Anthony translated the first book published in England by Caxton.

  As the Queen’s talented Wydeville family displaced established nobility, their upward mobility provoked resentment and antagonism. That deadliest of sins – envy – slandered their achievements, mocked their erudition, and murdered when it could. But the sociological revolution they heralded was profound and irreversible. They helped to inaugurate the Renaissance, where men of intelligence and dedication gradually replaced the old nobility who relied on birthright and heritage to secure position and wealth. Under the Tudors, men of talent and ambition seized the day and dominated court circles. The world has never looked back.

  The medieval Wydevilles, however, paid the ultimate price for their precedency. The entrenched nobility whom they threatened – Warwick, Clarence, Richard et al. – responded in the only way they knew how. Ironically, the slander and murder perpetrated by those of the ‘blood royal’ ultimately proved self-destructive. Not only were their own families and fortunes annihilated, but the vacuum of leadership they created opened paths for more new men to ascend, a stunning example of the law of unintended consequences at work. Birth and rank would no longer remain unchallenged by ability and dedication.

  The children of Elizabeth Wydeville experienced both success and failure in their disparate lives. In her lifetime, she gave birth to twelve children – two by Sir John Grey and ten by Edward IV. One son, Sir Richard Grey, was murdered on orders of Richard III. Two sons, Edward V and Prince Richard, disappeared while in the custody of Richard III, their Protector. Of the remaining children, two – Margaret and George – died as infants. Another daughter, Mary, died at the age of fifteen. Her surviving daughters lived lives of mixed blessings. Cecily, Anne and Katharine certainly never enjoyed the splendid royal marriages
planned by their father.

  The marriage of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, however, determined much of modern history. The Great Chronicle refers to this Queen with warmth and pleasure:

  Elizabeth the first child of King Edward… was married unto that noble Prince Henry the Seventh, and demeaned her so virtuously that she was named the Gracious Queen.2

  ‘The Gracious Queen’ reminds us of the lifestyle of the Wydevilles, and the home in which Elizabeth of York grew up. Like her mother, Elizabeth of York fulfilled her role as consort faithfully and gave birth to eight children in her thirty-seven years of life. Arthur, Margaret, Henry and Mary survived infancy and changed the world.

  Arthur, the eldest, born on 20 September 1486, exhibited the spirit and good looks of his maternal grandparents, Edward IV and Elizabeth Wydeville. Destined to become King, he was betrothed to Catherine of Aragon in 1489, a liaison that must have pleased Elizabeth Wydeville, given her brother Edward’s reports of Spanish culture and wealth. The marriage of Arthur and Catherine took place on 14 November 1501, following which the couple spent the winter together at Ludlow. Suddenly becoming ill – perhaps with the sweating sickness – Arthur died there on 2 April 1502. The progress of the English Reformation would hinge on whether Arthur, aged fifteen, and Catherine, aged sixteen, had consummated their marriage during their five months at Ludlow Castle.

  Margaret, the eldest daughter, married James IV, King of Scotland, and became the grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots, and great-grandmother of James VI of Scotland/James I of England.

  Henry was betrothed to his brother’s widow in June 1503, after a papal dispensation based on the claim that Arthur’s marriage with Catherine had never been consummated. The marriage itself was delayed by politics while Henry VII supported the Hapsburgs against Ferdinand of Spain, but when Henry VII died, his son immediately married Catherine, on 11 June 1509. Twenty years later, Henry VIII claimed that his marriage was invalid because he was incestuously cohabiting with his brother’s wife. Henry VIII proved God’s displeasure by citing his failure to produce a male heir. Refused an annulment by the Pope, who depended on Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, for military and financial support, Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. That act institutionalised the English Reformation and permitted Henry’s serial marriages – his second, to Anne Boleyn, producing the great monarch Elizabeth I, who carried the name of her great-grandmother Elizabeth Wydeville.

  Mary, youngest daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, married Louis XII of France in October 1514, but was left a widow by December. She subsequently married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Their granddaughter, Lady Jane Grey, was declared Queen for nine days between the death of Edward VI and the accession of Mary Tudor.

  Elizabeth Wydeville’s younger daughters fared less well. The beautiful Cecily, once betrothed to the heir of James III of Scotland, married considerably beneath that rank to John, Viscount Wells, sometime before Christmas 1487. Whether Queen Dowager Elizabeth attended the wedding is unknown. Viscount Wells, twenty years older than Cecily and half-brother of Margaret Beaufort, possessed none of the status or wealth of the Beaufort family. Cecily, second daughter of Edward IV and next heiress after Elizabeth of York, had lived under the supervision of Margaret Beaufort from September 1485 on and was perhaps encouraged by the Countess to marry the Viscount.3

  Cecily did not attend her mother’s funeral, where she was represented by Viscount Wells. Both of her children and her husband died before Cecily was thirty years old. Margaret Beaufort helped the widow retain property rights to some of her husband’s estates when he died in 1499, and gave Cecily a special dispensation to worship regularly in the household of the Countess.4 Cecily may have returned to her sister’s court, for she carried the bride’s train at the wedding of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in 1501. She angered Henry VII, however, when she remarried without his permission and denied the King the opportunity of selecting a husband of his choosing. Cecily apparently married the second time for love; her new husband, a squire, is recorded in history merely as ‘Thomas Kyme of Lincolnshire’.

  For a while, Margaret Beaufort allowed the disgraced couple to stay at her palace at Collyweston, four miles south of Stamford, 5 but ultimately this most beautiful of Elizabeth’s daughters retreated to the Isle of Wight, where she lived in obscurity and relative poverty, gave birth to two children never recognised by her royal relatives, and died in 1507 at the age of thirty-eight. Margaret Beaufort paid some of the funeral expenses.6 Cecily was buried at the Abbey of Quarre on the Isle of Wight, but any memorial that might have existed was annihilated when her nephew Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries of England.

  Princess Anne, once betrothed to Philip, son of Maximilian of Austria, was aged seventeen at her mother’s death. She married Thomas, Lord Howard, son of the Earl of Surrey, in 1495. Three of their children died in infancy, and a fourth, Thomas, at the age of twelve. Anne died sometime after 22 November 1511, at the age of thirty-seven or thirty-eight. When Henry VIII destroyed her burial site at the priory at Thetford, her effigy was transferred to the church at Framlingham.

  Princess Katherine, whom her father hoped would marry the Infant of Spain, was aged thirteen at her mother’s death. She married Lord William Courtenay, heir to the Earl of Devon, sometime before October 1495. Her early years of marriage were spent on her husband’s rich Devonshire estates, from which they participated in splendid events at court, including the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon and the betrothal of Princess Margaret to James IV of Scotland. When Lord Courtenay fell under suspicion of treason, was attainted, and sent to the Tower, Katherine and her three children were forced to depend on the beneficence of her sister, the Queen.

  Katherine lived in obscurity until the death of Henry VII, when her husband was released from prison. Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon selected Katherine to act as sole godmother to their firstborn son, Henry Tudor, in January 1511, but the child’s death just six weeks later ended early hopes of a Tudor dynasty. When Lord Courtenay died, Katherine took a vow of chastity and returned to her Devonshire estates, where she died in 1527 at the age of forty-nine. Her family, too, experienced more tragedy than triumph. Her daughter, Lady Margaret Courtenay, died during her mother’s lifetime, and both of her sons were executed as Papist traitors by Henry VIII. Her grandson died childless in Padua, Italy, after banishment by Queen Mary Tudor.

  Elizabeth’s youngest daughter, Bridget, entered England’s only community of Dominican nuns, at Dartford in Kent, at the age of ten, leading to speculation that she may have suffered from a mental or physical disability. Bridget left the convent only once, at the age of twelve, to attend her mother’s funeral, accompanied by the Marchioness of Dorset. Dartford Priory, founded by Edward III in 1346, was one of the largest and wealthiest in medieval England and provided quiet, reclusive quarters for this princess. Queen Elizabeth sent money to this convent, as did Bridget’s eldest sister, Elizabeth of York, when she became Queen Consort.7 When Bridget’s grandmother, Cecily Neville, died in 1495, she willed three books to the fifteen-year-old girl: the Legenda Aurea, in vellum, a book of the life of St Catherine of Siena, and a ‘Book of Saint Matilde’.8 Bridget took the veil, but never achieved higher status than an ordinary nun.9 She died sometime between 1513 and 1517, the date obscured by Henry VIII’s destruction of the priory church where she was buried.

  Elizabeth Wydeville’s eldest son by her first marriage thrived under Henry VII, once he was cleared of suspicion concerning the Lambert Simnel rebellion. On 4 June 1492, just four days before his mother’s death, Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, was pardoned ‘of all offences committed before May 1 last’.10 As male head of the family, he rendered the offering at his mother’s funeral Mass and paid the costs of the service. Under Henry VII, Dorset commanded troops in support of Emperor Maximilian against the French, and fought in the battle of Blackheath in 1497. He became an early patron of Wolsey and sent three of his
sons to study under Wolsey at Magdalene College, Oxford.

  Dorset’s second marriage to Cicely, heiress of William Bonville, Lord Harington, produced seven sons and eight daughters. He extended the family fortunes and began building a magnificent manor house at Bradgate Park, on the ancestral lands of the Greys of Groby. This project was completed by his son Thomas, 2nd Marquis of Dorset, after his father’s death on 20 September 1501. Dorset’s grandson, Henry Grey, married Frances Brandon, daughter of Mary Tudor and granddaughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York (Dorset’s half-sister). That union produced Lady Jane Grey, who made her Bradgate birthplace famous.

  Lady Jane Grey thus inherited Elizabeth Wydeville’s blood through both sides of her family. When her father and father-in-law tried to usurp the throne from Queen Mary I, Lady Jane Grey became another unfortunate child sacrificed to the ambition of powerful men seeking yet more power. Declared Queen of England for nine sad days, she lost her life in the new wars of the Tudor cousins.

  Elizabeth Wydeville’s blood flowed in the veins of every Tudor and Stuart monarch from Henry VIII’s ascension to the throne in 1509 until Queen Anne’s death in 1714. The Hanoverians, too, inherited her blood via Sophia, daughter of Frederick, Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth, a sixth-generation descendant of her namesake Elizabeth Wydeville.

  Despite this legacy, Elizabeth Wydeville has not fared well in history. In part, her reputation suffered because no one survived to tell her story. Only a bell at Grafton – ‘Tenor… to the Bells then there’ – rang from its lonely perch as ‘a Remembrance of the last of the blood’.11 Henry VII was intent on creating his own Tudor legacy, to which his Queen Consort’s heritage was irrelevant. Thus the Wydevilles took with them to their graves their courtly reputations and their contributions to education, philosophy and religion. The stories preserved by Mancini, More and other contemporary chroniclers focused on the fate of the two princes, the accession of Richard III, and the ascendant Tudors. With no one to refute slanders against the family name, the lies of the Wydevilles’ worst enemies – Warwick, Clarence, and Richard III – turned into ‘facts’, propaganda into ‘history’. Elizabeth Wydeville’s life of charitable, pious acts and her never-flagging devotion to family, King and country were forgotten, an omission that has skewed the perception of the era. The time is long overdue to retrieve Elizabeth Wydeville from obscurity and to correct the misinformation that has slandered her reputation.