Edward’s return to London and Henry VI’s convenient ‘death’ a day or so later brought what was undoubtedly the most dramatic and often fearful period of Elizabeth’s life to a conclusion. She had no genuinely powerful foreign relatives who would shelter her (another disadvantage of her being her husband’s subject), but her apparent stoicism in remaining in England throughout the troubles only added to her growing reputation. The Speaker of Parliament, William Alyngton, ‘declared before the King and his noble and sad [serious] council, the intent and desire of his commons, especially in the commendation of the womanly behaviour and the great constancy of the Queen, he being beyond the sea’. There were many who had thought her unsuited to be Edward’s wife seven years earlier, but no one, it seems, questioned her fitness now.
ELIZABETH THE QUEEN
Alyngton did not say in so many words what he meant by ‘womanly behaviour’, but he was almost certainly referring to the birth of the young prince, christened Edward after his father. Elizabeth may have disappointed her husband by giving him only daughters in the early years of their marriage, but she more than made up for it by producing two more sons (as well as four more daughters) in the course of the 1470s and 1480. Neither Margaret (b. 1472) nor George (b. 1477) was destined to live long, and Mary (b. 1467) died aged fourteen; but the seven children who survived their father seemed more than enough to secure the future of the dynasty. They included Henry VII’s future queen, Elizabeth of York (b. 1466), and Richard (b. 1473), who would become the younger of the ‘Princes in the Tower’.
King Edward had loved Elizabeth as his consort in the early years of their marriage, but after 1471 treated her increasingly as his partner in government. She became the effective head of her son Edward’s council when he was created Prince of Wales in June 1471 (the subcommittee managing his day-to-day affairs was charged to act ‘with the advice and express consent of the Queen’), a task she fulfilled until the child was given his own household at Ludlow in the Welsh Marches twenty months later. Even then she accompanied him to his new home (where he was to be supervised primarily by her brother Anthony), and became one of the three people entrusted with a key to his coffers. It is also significant that when the king embarked on his abortive invasion of France in 1475 he named her the principal executor of his will if he failed to return. She was to take the leading role in arranging their daughters’ marriages, and was given wide-ranging powers to dispose of his goods.
Elizabeth and her brother have been accused of persuading King Edward to allow them to turn Wales into a kind of family fiefdom, but there is no real evidence that this was the case. There were almost bound to be occasions when Anthony issued instructions under his own seal or associated his nephew with them as an afterthought (such actions merely reflected the actuality of the situation), and only a fool would have shunned the opportunity to employ or reward his own followers. The prince’s council was not ‘packed’ with Woodville nominees as some have suggested, and although Elizabeth and Anthony were in a majority among the key-holders there is no indication that they used the boy’s money for their own purposes. On the contrary, there were occasions when Anthony paid bills himself.
We have seen how anything that worked to the Woodvilles’ advantage was almost certain to be at the expense of others, and Thomas Grey, Elizabeth’s eldest son by her first marriage, faced similar criticisms when he was created Marquis of Dorset and given particular responsibilities in the West Country. Thomas seems to have fulfilled his new role adequately – at least there is no hint that the situation there deteriorated during his period of office – but his promotion would have been regarded as yet another example of Woodville aggrandisement in some quarters. The reality was that Anthony, the future king’s uncle, and Thomas, his half-brother, were almost bound to be given senior positions in the world that was a-making, but – again – none of this would have happened if Elizabeth had not become queen.
Thomas Grey’s claim to the Exeter estates had lapsed when his first wife had died childless within a year of their marriage, but in 1474 Lord Hastings allowed him to marry his stepdaughter Cecily Bonville, heiress to the West Country baronies of Bonville and Harrington. It is likely that Elizabeth had cajoled her husband to persuade Hastings, his great friend, to enter into this agreement with her, and this time there were to be no slip-ups. If Thomas died before the wedding his brother Richard was to marry Cecily to preserve the contract, and Elizabeth was to recoup the £2,500 she undertook to pay Hastings by collecting the revenues of the Bonville and Harrington properties until her daughter-in-law reached the age of sixteen. It is worth noting that ten years had passed since she had last agreed that Thomas should marry into the Hastings family (when, as a frightened widow, she had sought protection shortly before her own wedding to King Edward), and that this time the bride was not to be Hastings’s (landless, and then unborn) daughter but his wealthy stepdaughter. She was negotiating from a position of strength.
Elizabeth and the Woodvilles may well have seized every opportunity to promote their own interests, but their machinations hardly compare with those of the king and his two brothers, George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester. Richard married Anne Neville, Warwick’s younger daughter, in 1472, and immediately demanded half the inheritance that George had assumed would fall to him as the husband of her elder sister Isabel. Neither was willing to make concessions, and a further complication was that many of the lands the Kingmaker had held would only descend to Isabel and Anne in time, if ever. The Beauchamp-Despenser estates of the widowed Countess of Warwick would not pass to her daughters until she herself died, and Warwick had entailed (‘settled’) his northern Neville lands on George, his brother John’s son, the boy who had been betrothed to the king’s daughter. Edward finally settled the matter by barring George Neville’s claims and by declaring the Countess of Warwick to be legally dead – so that her daughters and their acquisitive husbands could inherit her properties without having to wait for her to die naturally! This was manifestly unjust, but there is every indication that the brothers would have resorted to armed conflict if the king had not found a solution that benefited them both.
Elizabeth’s next major role, after bearing her husband’s children, was to be at his side on great state occasions and participate in the ceremonies in an appropriate manner. Documents describing several of these royal gatherings have survived from the 1470s, and show her fulfilling her duty as impeccably as any woman born into the purple. When Louis de Gruthuyse, who had sheltered King Edward during his exile in Holland, was invited to England and created Earl of Winchester in September 1472, Elizabeth, we are told, ‘ordered a great banquet . . . with abundant welfare . . . in her own chamber’. No expense was spared to make the guest of honour feel welcome and comfortable, and the after-dinner entertainment included dancing by some of the greatest in the land. When all was finished, the king and queen escorted Louis to ‘three chambers of pleasance all hanged with white silk’, and to a bed ‘of as good down as could be thought . . . as for his bed sheet and pillows they were of the Queen’s own ordinance’. Elizabeth had as much reason to be grateful to him as her husband, and her thoughtful touches complemented the greater honour only Edward could bestow.
Elizabeth Woodville portrayed in her coronation robes as a member of the London Skinners’ Company’s Fraternity of Our Lady’s Assumption, probably c. 1472. The legend reads: ‘Oure moost goode and graciouse Quene Elizabeth, Soster unto this oure Fraternite of oure blissed Lady and Moder of Mercy Sanct Mary Virgyn the Moder of God’
In 1476 King Edward decided to rebury the remains of his father, Richard Duke of York, and brother Edmund with greater respect than they had received after their deaths at the battle of Wakefield sixteen years earlier. The bodies were exhumed from their original graves in Pontefract in Yorkshire and brought south to the Yorkist mausoleum at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, where elaborate tombs had been prepared for them. Richard Duke of Gloucester headed the cortège accompanied by
other peers, bishops and heralds, and ensured that his father and brother were appropriately honoured at each stage of the journey. A lifelike effigy of the duke with a white angel holding a crown behind – or over – his head to symbolise that he had been king as of right, was placed over his black-draped coffin, and the hearses were ceremonially guarded at each place they stopped for the night. When they arrived at Fotheringhay on 29 July they were met by Edward, who respectfully kissed his father’s image before it was received into the church by the assembled clergy. The appropriate obsequies were observed, after which Lord Hastings, on behalf of the king, and Lord Dacre of the South, acting for Elizabeth, laid seven and five pieces of cloth of gold over the body in the form of a cross.
Next day the numerous dignitaries attended a mass of requiem at which the duke’s regal status was again emphasised. Walter Lord Ferrers of Chartley rode a black-trapped warhorse displaying the royal arms of England to the choir entrance, after which Edward offered his mass-penny and bowed to the catafalque followed by Elizabeth and their two eldest daughters. The queen was dressed all in blue (the royal colour of mourning) ‘without a high headdress’, and, in the words of a contemporary, ‘made a great obeisance and reverence to the said body’. After the burial the royal party repaired to a ‘village’ of canvas pavilions where they fed a large number of people (our author claims 20,000), and gave alms to all who asked for them. The guests who partook of the royal munificence could not fail to be impressed by the king’s generosity and his ability to command.
The third great ceremonial occasion of the decade took place on 15 January 1478 when the king and queen’s second son Prince Richard was married to the Lady Anne Mowbray, the late Duke of Norfolk’s heir. The bride was conducted from the queen’s chamber at Westminster to St Stephen’s Chapel by the Earl of Lincoln (King Edward’s nephew), Anthony Earl Rivers, ‘and many ladies and gentlewomen’. Edward, Elizabeth, three of their daughters and the king’s mother awaited them, seated beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, and listened patiently while a papal bull was read permitting the young couple to marry even though they were related within the prohibited degrees. Afterwards, Richard of Gloucester ‘cast gold and silver among the common people’, and a great banquet was followed a week later by a tournament in which Anthony, Elizabeth’s two sons from her first marriage, and her youngest brother Sir Edward Woodville all participated. It confirmed the strength of the ruling dynasty, and emphasised the prominence of the Woodvilles in its midst.
Prince Richard was only four when he wed his five-year-old bride, and was left a widower less than four years later at the tender age of eight. The aim, of course, had been to secure the Norfolk estates for the royal family, and King Edward had already ensured that they would not revert to Anne Mowbray’s own relatives in the event of her death. In a move reminiscent of his deprivation of the Countess of Warwick he arranged for parliament to give his son a life interest in the inheritance which would then pass to any children he might have by another wife. The two co-heirs, John Lord Howard and William Viscount Berkeley, were bound to be disappointed, and although Howard did not protest openly (unlike Berkeley), he must have felt that his many years of service to the House of York had been poorly rewarded. It is hardly surprising that he supported Richard of Gloucester’s bid for the throne in 1483.
It would be easy to assume that now Elizabeth was queen she could spend without worrying about where the money came from, but King Edward was determined to restore the Crown’s solvency after the extravagances of Henry VI’s reign. The lands granted her on her accession yielded approximately £4,500 per annum, and she was almost certainly told that her expenses must not exceed this figure. Only one account survives – for 1466–7 – but her surplus of £200 for that year contrasts strikingly with Margaret of Anjou’s ‘loss’ of £24 (after spending over £7,500), in 1452–3. There were some extravagances – £14 10s. spent on sable furs and £54 on goldsmith’s wares, for example – but the overriding impression is that she managed with a smaller staff than her predecessor and reduced fees and household expenses whenever she could.
Some commentators have suggested that Elizabeth was not personally interested in everyday economics, and that her treasurer John Forster was responsible for the careful budgeting that characterised her accounts in 1466–7. Professor Myers thought that ‘there is no reason to suppose that she understood finance beyond the usefulness of money for gratifying her desires’, but it seems unlikely that senior servants like Dr Roger Radcliff, her chancellor, and John Dyve, her attorney-general, could have had their fees reduced unless the queen had been personally involved in the process. Medieval aristocrats were more inclined to exact the last penny than to be careless of their income and expenditure, and it would not be surprising if Elizabeth checked her accounts in the same way that we know her son-in-law Henry VII checked his. Forster may have been charged with balancing the books on a day-to-day basis, but is unlikely to have done as he wished.
Like other aristocratic ladies, Elizabeth had her own household which was quite separate from that of her husband and which was staffed by her own officers. Her chamberlain was himself a peer, her ladies-in-waiting were usually the wives or relatives of knights and noblemen, and her council included not only her senior employees but also greater men whose influence and advice she valued. Her estates, concentrated as they were in particular regions, meant that she was bound to be regarded as the local ‘good lady’ in these areas, and expert guidance in matters such as dispensing patronage (minor offices and cash annuities), maintaining values, and settling disputes would have been essential. She could – and did – delegate much of this work to others, but the ultimate responsibility was hers alone.
Intercession had long been a part of medieval queenship, and Elizabeth would have received a stream of petitions from both corporate bodies and individuals who thought that they would gain more by approaching her than by going directly to the king. Queens were traditionally kind-hearted and sympathetic towards their subjects, and were expected to use their influence with their husbands to win concessions or right wrongs that would not have been addressed in other circumstances. The requests she received from corporate bodies included one from the city of Coventry in 1474 and another from the Merchant Adventurers four years later. She and her son the Prince of Wales had been well received in Coventry in April (even though it was a former stronghold of Warwick the Kingmaker), and the citizens appealed to her when one Reginald Buckley, a servant of her husband, caused trouble there a few months later. She told them to imprison Buckley until Edward could deal with him, and assured them that, in the meantime, she would speak to the king personally. No more is heard of the matter, and she was presumably as good as her word.
The Merchant Adventurers found themselves in difficulty when the tonnage and poundage they owed to the Crown fell into arrears and they were ordered to pay £2,000. Attempts to persuade the Exchequer to rescind or defer part of the debt were unsuccessful, and they asked the Marquis of Dorset, Lord Hastings and Elizabeth, for help. Hastings advised them to direct their main suit to Elizabeth (although he would do what he could to assist also), and at a meeting of the company ‘court’, or assembly, held on 8 January 1479 they were informed that ‘it hath pleased the Queen’s good grace so to labour and pray for us unto the King’s grace that at the instance of her prayer, of the said £2,000 is released 500 marks [£333 6s. 8d.]’. A second 500 marks was cancelled three days later, and they were required to pay only two-thirds of the original sum.
It is not, perhaps, particularly surprising to find powerful interest groups approaching Elizabeth, but ordinary people also sought her assistance when more conventional means of obtaining redress failed. One such petitioner was the Norfolk gentleman Simon Bliaunt who complained to her that Sir John Paston was ignoring his better title to the manor of Hemnals in Cotton and was refusing to surrender it to him. The Earl of Oxford, who was dominant in that part of East Anglia, had promised to appoint arbitrators and to
reinstate Bliaunt if they failed to reach a decision by Easter 1467; but Oxford was on good terms with the Pastons and showed no inclination to expel his clients. Elizabeth could have taken the view that Bliaunt was a ‘nobody’ whose difficulties were beneath her attention, but far from ignoring the matter she wrote to the earl in no uncertain terms telling him she ‘marvelled’ that he had not honoured his undertaking. ‘Wherefore we desire and pray you that you will, at the contemplation of these our letters, show unto the said Simon all the favourable lordship that you goodly may, doing him to be restored and put into his lawful and peaceable possession of the same [manor], as far as reason, equity and good conscience shall require, that he may understand himself to fare the better for our sake, as our very trust is in you.’ Again, the end of the story is missing, but Oxford presumably obeyed!
Sir John Paston found himself on the wrong side of the argument on this occasion, but two years later had occasion to seek Elizabeth’s assistance on behalf of his own family. His late father had greatly improved their fortunes by persuading the wealthy but childless knight Sir John Fastolf to make a new deathbed will leaving him all his properties, but his gain had made enemies of a number of powerful figures (not least the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk), who had themselves expected to share in the inheritance. John’s only hope was to find someone as powerful as, or preferably more powerful than, his opponents who would intercede for him, and it was for this reason that ‘at the special request of the Queen’, he appointed John Yotton, one of her chaplains, to a sinecure at Caister Castle. Elizabeth was one of the few people in England who could stand up to the dukes, but even she did not presume to order them directly. Instead, she wrote to their wives, asking them to speak to their respective husbands and to let them know her mind in the matter. Such a move was unlikely to change attitudes, but it was a way of warning Norfolk and Suffolk that they could not simply do as they pleased.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 15