The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  Richard was undoubtedly angry with Elizabeth, but was obliged to recognise that his embarrassing public stand-off with his sister-in-law was not enhancing his reputation either at home or abroad. He seems to have adopted a carrot-and-stick approach, using ‘frequent entreaties as well as threats’ until, finally, Elizabeth agreed to leave the sanctuary around Easter 1484. The agreement drawn up between them stated that ‘Dame Elizabeth Grey’, as she was now called, would receive 700 marks (£466 13s. 4d.) annually for her maintenance, that Richard would treat her daughters as his own kinswomen, marrying them to ‘gentlemen born’ with appropriate dowries, and that he would not imprison or believe any ill report of them without first hearing their side of the story. It was guaranteed by an oath sworn on holy relics before an assembly of notables, in the words of one historian ‘by the most solemn and public promise that Richard could contrive’.

  The document did not mention the two princes, but it is unclear what conclusions should, or should not, be drawn from this. It is possible to argue that Elizabeth would never have negotiated with a man who had the blood of her sons fresh on his hands (what mother could have done so?), but that, alternatively, she had little choice. The sanctuary must have become increasingly cramped and uncomfortable during the nine months the six royal ladies had occupied it, and it is likely that their ‘hosts’, the Church authorities, were anxious to resolve the matter before it soured their own relationship with the new monarch. Elizabeth would also have known that Richard was some fifteen years her junior, and the fact that there would probably not be another king in her lifetime meant that she had no option but to deal with him. His execution of her brother and the younger son of her first marriage had not prevented her from coming to terms with him, and if she could overlook their deaths could she not overlook the princes’ murders too?

  But it is not quite that simple. Elizabeth may have ‘done what she had to do’ to improve the lot of her five daughters, but some little time after this she wrote to the elder son of her first marriage, Thomas Grey Marquis of Dorset, urging him to make his peace with Richard also. Dorset had found refuge at Henry Tudor’s little court-in-exile in Brittany after the failure of Buckingham’s rebellion, and it says much for his mother’s persuasiveness that he now tried to abandon Henry only to be pursued and forced to return. It is possible that Richard compelled Elizabeth to write to him, but Dorset, who knew only too well what had happened to his brother Richard and uncle Anthony, would surely have suspected trickery. Whatever Elizabeth told him, it was enough to convince him that there had been a sea-change in her relationship with Richard, and that the Woodvilles were back in business. She never said why she had modified her opinion, but a logical explanation would be that she had discovered that one of her royal sons was still living or that Richard had persuaded her that he was not responsible for their fate.

  There is, however, another possible explanation. We do not know precisely when the Marquis of Dorset tried to return to England, but contemporary writers imply that it was not long before rumours began to circulate that Richard intended to marry Elizabeth’s daughter, his niece Elizabeth of York, when his sickly wife Queen Anne died. Richard thought that this would frustrate Henry Tudor’s plan to marry her while compelling disaffected Yorkists to tolerate him for the girl’s sake; but Sir Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby, two members of his ‘kitchen cabinet’, told him bluntly – ‘to his face’ as Croyland has it – that such a union was incestuous and would never be accepted. They argued that many northerners had supported Richard out of loyalty to Anne, Warwick the Kingmaker’s daughter, and that he would lose their backing if he married a Woodville. This was true to a point, although their real concern was that the younger Elizabeth would seek to punish them for their part in the deaths of her uncle Anthony and half-brother Richard Grey if she became queen.

  Elizabeth of York. Bronze effigy by Torrigiani, Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey

  We might suppose that Princess Elizabeth would have recoiled at the prospect of being forced to marry an uncle who had indisputably ordered the execution of members of her mother’s family, but remarkably, she embraced the plan with enthusiasm. Sir George Buck, Richard’s earliest apologist, saw, ‘in the cabinet of the Earl of Arundel’, a letter she had written to Arundel’s ancestor, the Duke of Norfolk, towards the end of February 1485 asking Norfolk to do all he could to hasten the matter. The letter has disappeared and Buck did not provide a full transcript, but in his words she ‘prayed him [Norfolk] as before to be a mediator for her in the cause of her marriage to the king, who, as she wrote, was her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was his in heart and in thoughts, in body, and in all’. It is unlikely that she would have expressed these sentiments without her mother’s approval and encouragement, but again, we should not assume that Elizabeth Woodville had genuinely forgiven Richard. She could have taken the view that it was the surviving members of her family who mattered, and that here was an opportunity they might never have again.

  The moment never arrived, however. Queen Anne duly expired on 16 March, but two weeks later Ratcliffe and Catesby compelled the beleaguered king to stand up in the great hall of the Knights of Rhodes at Clerkenwell and declare publicly that he had no intention of marrying the younger Elizabeth. Richard went so far as to deny that he had even considered the possibility, although the Croyland writer was in no doubt that ‘there were some persons, however, present who very well knew the contrary’. In the event Richard was destined to remain King of England for only five more months, and, long before this, it was known that Henry Tudor was planning an invasion from his new base in France. Henry, prudently, left Elizabeth’s son Dorset behind when he sailed for England in early August, and on the 22nd defeated and killed Richard on Bosworth Field. Elizabeth cannot have mourned Richard any more than she had his brother George, and Henry’s promise to marry her daughter meant that she would become queen mother after all.

  So what did happen to the two ‘Princes in the Tower’? It is often alleged that their disappearance was a mystery to everyone, but someone had to remove them from the Tower (dead or alive), and someone had to give the order. It is impossible to believe that Richard III and Henry VII (Henry Tudor) did not know – or care – what had become of them, or that close family members (including Elizabeth Woodville, princess – soon to be queen – Elizabeth and Henry’s mother Margaret Beaufort) remained in complete ignorance. The implication is that they did know but chose to remain silent, something that would not have been necessary if both boys were dead and threatened no one. Edward V was being visited by his doctor in the summer and autumn of 1483 and could have succumbed to his malady; but there is no suggestion that Prince Richard was ill, and no evidence that King Richard or King Henry had him killed. The most likely scenario is that he was sent to a safe and secure place, his whereabouts and true identity known only to a handful of people, in order to ensure that, as far as possible, he posed no threat to the reigning monarch. Such a secret plan would have required Elizabeth Woodville’s agreement, and could explain the apparent thaw in her relationship with King Richard in 1484 and 1485.

  The boy had to ‘disappear’ then, but where did he go and was that the last the world heard of him? One possibility is that he was taken to Colchester Abbey after the battle of Bosworth and apprenticed to the abbey’s master bricklayer, eventually re-emerging as ‘Richard Plantagenet of Eastwell’ after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. Alternatively, he may have been smuggled or sent abroad, reappearing as the young man known as Perkin Warbeck in Ireland in 1491. Warbeck is a plausible contender in that he actually resembled Edward IV, his ‘father’, and never, so far as is known, made an obvious blunder. But he always declined to explain where he had spent his ‘missing’ years (his claim that he wanted to protect those who had shielded him may have been genuine or may have been designed to avoid the one question everyone was bound to ask him), and he was finally hanged as a common criminal in 1499. Elizabeth Woodville,
who died in 1492, would scarcely have heard of him, and there is no evidence that anyone sought the opinion of her daughter Elizabeth, his ‘sister’. The younger Elizabeth would have seen him, if only from a distance, when he was first captured, and could surely have identified him if they had been allowed to converse privately. Henry may have been too afraid that she would recognise him to permit such a meeting, or alternatively, was so convinced that he was an impostor that there was no need.

  The new reign began well enough for Elizabeth Woodville. King Henry married her daughter on 18 January 1486, and treated her with all the respect due to the queen’s mother. The act of parliament that had invalidated her marriage to King Edward and bastardised their children was repealed, and on 5 March she was given an income consisting of annuities and a life interest in a raft of properties in southern England. She had lost many members of her family, but could look forward to a comfortable retirement and a peaceful old age.

  King Henry had won a decisive victory at Bosworth, but was bound to face challenges from individuals who would have hoped to succeed Richard III if he had remained childless and from others who had been wholly committed to him. An insurrection mounted by Francis Viscount Lovell, the late king’s chamberlain, in April 1486 was suppressed without difficulty, but later in the year Henry learned of a new and altogether more serious plot being hatched in Ireland. Polydore Vergil blamed an Oxford priest, one Richard Simons, who, he said, had trained a personable youth named Lambert Simnel to impersonate the Yorkist claimant Edward Earl of Warwick, the son of the executed George Duke of Clarence, who was then a prisoner in the Tower of London. Simons had taken his protégé to Ireland, where Richard Duke of York, Edward IV’s and Richard III’s father, had been a highly respected royal lieutenant in the 1450s, and where, according to Vergil, he convened an assembly of the Irish nobility and convinced them that Simnel was the real Warwick, who had somehow escaped from custody. The Irish lords responded enthusiastically, and began to plan an invasion of England that would restore the boy to his ‘right’.

  None of this is very plausible, however. Simons was an ordinary cleric who had probably never seen the real Earl of Warwick and had no direct knowledge of how he (or any other prince for that matter) conducted himself. He would have been ignorant of the small, personal details of the boy’s life that could have come only from another member of the family, and would have needed help to produce an acceptable substitute. The same would have been true when the unlikely pair reached Ireland and began to publicise their ‘mission’. Few would have taken them seriously, still less danced to their tune in the manner described by Vergil, unless some word of their coming had preceded them, and the vast probability is that they were part of a wider conspiracy organised by senior Yorkists in England. The Irish nobles had been well primed.

  Vergil did not identify the leading conspirators, but the royal council, meeting at Sheen Palace in February 1487, took three crucial decisions. First, it was decided to offer pardon to all rebels who would throw themselves on the king’s mercy; secondly, to allow the real Earl of Warwick to attend mass at St Paul’s Cathedral and to speak with those who knew him (so that none could doubt that the boy in Ireland was an impostor); and thirdly, to deprive Elizabeth Woodville of all her properties and send her to Bermondsey Abbey. The first two decisions were direct responses to the Simnel conspiracy (as we may now call it), and it must be supposed that the same is true of the last, the one penalising Elizabeth, but that Henry did not care to acknowledge that his own mother-in-law had been conspiring against him. Vergil admits that Elizabeth was being punished, but says that it was because she had broken faith with Henry when she made her peace with Richard III three years earlier. He sidesteps the fact that Henry had been aware of this for his entire reign but had hitherto treated her kindly, and does not indicate why, if the reason was genuine, he chose this particular moment to accuse her. Lord Bacon’s remark, that Elizabeth was so tainted with treason that ‘it was almost thought dangerous to visit her, or see her’, is almost certainly nearer the truth.

  There had been no obvious, open quarrel between Elizabeth and Henry, so why would she have turned against him? Bacon was writing just over a century later, but there is no reason to doubt his assertion that she had been angered by Henry’s treatment of her daughter and increasingly resented the overbearing attitude of his mother, Margaret Beaufort. Henry had been anxious to dispel any suggestion that his claim to the throne had only been accepted because he had married Edward IV’s eldest daughter, and although the younger Elizabeth had given him a son she had still not been crowned. Henry always turned to his mother when he needed advice, and as Margaret assumed ever greater authority so Elizabeth Woodville thought her daughter ‘not advanced but depressed’.

  But would Elizabeth have sought to depose her daughter and her daughter’s husband in order to make Edward of Warwick, the son of her old enemy George of Clarence, king? Some modern writers believe that she had no quarrel with King Henry, and surrendered her properties to her daughter Elizabeth and retired to Bermondsey as part of an amicable ‘family settlement’ that just happened to coincide with the Simnel rebellion. They suggest that she may have been ill or perhaps wished to spend her last years in religious contemplation; and maintain that Henry would not have referred to her in endearing terms in official documents or proposed her as a wife for James III, the King of Scots, if he thought her guilty of treason. What does the evidence really say?

  Henry did indeed continue to behave as though everything was ‘normal’, even referring to Elizabeth as ‘our right dear and right well beloved queen Elizabeth, mother unto our most dear wife the queen’ when he gave her fifty marks in 1490. But any hint that he was on bad terms with his mother-in-law would have called the stability of his dynasty into question, and his actions speak louder than his words. Elizabeth Woodville was conspicuous by her absence when her daughter was finally crowned in November 1487 (Henry and his mother watched events from behind a lattice), and although Henry had little choice but to let her kinsman Francois de Luxembourg see her when he visited England in November 1489, they were not allowed to meet privately. Margaret Beaufort was present to hear all that was said.

  Admittedly, Henry would not have proposed marrying Elizabeth to James III in November 1487, five months after the Simnel rebellion, if he thought her guilty of treason, but how serious was he? The idea of a union between the Scottish King and the English queen-dowager can be traced to the ‘Three Years’ Truce’ which the two countries signed in July 1486 (long before there was any trouble in Ireland), and it is likely that Henry continued the negotiations even if he had no intention of bringing them to fruition. The Scots would not cause trouble in northern England if they thought their king was about to marry into the English royal family, and Henry, who had troubles aplenty, would have seen it as a good way of keeping the border quiet. King James was murdered in June 1488 after the battle of Sauchieburn, so the subterfuge did not have to be maintained for long.

  Elizabeth was no longer young by 1487, but the Scots would not have thought her a suitable bride for their king if she had serious health problems and few if any medieval aristocrats would have surrendered their lands willingly. On the contrary, they seized every opportunity to add to their acres by whatever means were available to them because wealth invariably enhanced status. Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, was pious even by contemporary standards, but her commitment to her religion never prevented her from acquiring money. She used it to found chantry chapels and university colleges, and still left the then vast sum of £14,724 when she died in 1509. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was restricted to an annuity of £400 (less than the settlement she had received from Richard III), and even this was not always paid promptly. King Henry would surely not have given her the properties in the first place if he had always intended them for Elizabeth of York.

  Clearly, Elizabeth would not have wanted to depose her daughter (however much she wanted to remove Henry and his overb
earing mother), but this is to assume that Elizabeth of York would have ceased to be queen when Henry was killed or at least toppled. She would never have contemplated making George of Clarence king, but Edward, his son, was young, possibly simple-minded, and malleable. There was, as yet, no precedent for a queen-regnant, but a papal dispensation would have allowed the younger Elizabeth to marry Edward, her first cousin, after Henry had been dealt with, and made Elizabeth Woodville the real power behind the throne. The claims of any children the young couple might have would conflict with those of their half-brother, the infant Prince Arthur, but recent events had shown how easily inconvenient royal children could be sidelined. Firm evidence that any of these thoughts actually formed in Elizabeth’s mind is inevitably lacking, but she would, arguably, have been prepared to countenance such a scheme if it allowed her to regain the upper hand.

  The other possibility is that Elizabeth knew by early 1487 that one of her sons was alive and in hiding, and that she intended to ‘produce’ him if the Irish rebellion succeeded. The conspirators would have considered the possibility of allowing the real prince to lead it in person, but concluded, regretfully, that his safety outweighed any additional support he might bring to their party. All Yorkists would have regarded a son of Edward IV as the rightful heir to the throne, and Warwick’s claim would have been instantly superseded if one of the two missing ‘princes’ had emerged from the shadows. The Tudor writer Edward Hall says that the conspirators originally considered using Simnel as a stalking-horse for Prince Richard, but then apparently changed their minds.