The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  Everything now turned on the success or failure of the rebellion, and Elizabeth could do nothing but sit quietly in Bermondsey and await the outcome. In April Henry clapped the Marquis of Dorset, the elder son of her first marriage, into the Tower ‘to preserve him from doing hurt either to the King’s service or to himself’, as Bacon has it, and then moved into the Midlands, to Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, to await developments. The conspirators, reinforced by nearly 2,000 Continental mercenaries supplied by Margaret of Burgundy, Edward IV’s and Richard III’s sister, ‘crowned’ Simnel ‘Edward VI’ in Dublin on 24 May 1487, and their combined army, led by the Earl of Lincoln, the Yorkist kings’ nephew, sailed for northern England eleven days later. They hoped that former supporters of Warwick the Kingmaker (the young Earl of Warwick’s grandfather) would rally to them, but were doomed to disappointment. Perhaps, as one writer suggests, Englishmen had had enough of ‘adventures in shining armour’, and were apprehensive of a ‘king’ who needed foreigners to restore him to his own.

  The Earl of Lincoln decided that his best chance was to march southwards as rapidly as possible in the hope of forcing a battle before all Henry’s forces could reach him, but he was again thwarted. The king had allowed his soldiers to return home over the winter, but he was ever vigilant and, in the words of one commentator ‘in his [Lincoln’s] bosom, and knew every hour what the Earl did’. The rebels spread rumours that Henry had already been defeated in the hope that some of his friends would be dissuaded from joining him, and one contingent led by Lord Welles apparently panicked and fell back on London. Yorkists who were in sanctuary in the city emerged to assault known Tudor sympathisers, and Elizabeth must have heard and drawn comfort from the commotion. Everything might yet be well.

  The Earl of Lincoln deployed his 8,000-strong army on some high ground to the south-west of the village of East Stoke in Nottinghamshire on 15 June 1487, and waited for the king’s forces to advance towards him the following day. He tried to maximise his numbers by concentrating them in a single contingent or ‘battle’ which he hurled down the slope at Henry’s vanguard; but probably half his soldiers were Irishmen whose rustic weapons and lack of body armour made them easy targets for the royal spearmen and archers. The Yorkists ‘fought hardily and stuck to it valiantly’, but as the morning lengthened the king was able to reinforce his forward division, and his soldiers’ professionalism and superior equipment eventually told in their favour. Lincoln and most of his fellow commanders perished in the final, furious onslaught, leaving the priest Simons and the boy Simnel to face Henry’s anger. The former disappeared into an ecclesiastical prison, while the latter became a scullion in the royal kitchen.

  We will never know the precise role that Elizabeth played in the rebellion, but she may well have provided money, assisted with Simnel’s ‘education’, and perhaps encouraged the Irish lords to use him as a substitute until the real Earl of Warwick – or one of her sons – could be liberated. No one recorded the moment when news of the disaster was brought to her, but it is possible to imagine the abbot, the trace of a smile playing about his lips, informing her of it in the days after the battle. Henry had wanted to capture the Earl of Lincoln alive so that he could ‘learn from him more concerning the conspiracy’ (Vergil), and could, arguably, have obtained at least some of this information from Elizabeth; but there is nothing to suggest that he asked her or that she subsequently co-operated with him. Perhaps, by this time, they knew each other all too well.

  THE LAST PHASE

  The Simnel conspiracy was Elizabeth’s last throw of the political dice, and the remaining five years of her life were spent in virtual seclusion behind the abbey’s walls. She was permitted to return to public life on rare occasions – the reception of her Luxembourg kinsman, for instance – but her absence from her daughter’s coronation implies that such concessions were kept to a minimum. Her last years were further saddened by the deaths of her remaining two brothers and three of her four remaining sisters. Sir Edward Woodville was killed aiding the Duke of Brittany at the battle of St Aubin du Cormier on 28 July 1488; Richard, the third and last Lord Rivers, died in March 1491; and Anne Countess of Kent, Margaret Countess of Arundel, and Joan Lady Grey of Ruthin all passed away within the same period. She may not have been close to some of them – Sir Edward had fought for King Henry at Stoke, for example – but they were all members of her immediate family. Their funerals would have brought many of the great and the good together, but the probability is that Elizabeth was not allowed to travel around the country or communicate with whom she would.

  We have already noted that Elizabeth’s smaller allowance was not always paid on time, and this would also have made her last years more difficult. King Henry was something of a miser, but he would have had reason to ensure that she never had more money than she or those managing her affairs needed. A servant might carry a secret message for old loyalty’s sake, but strangers could not be bribed, or rebellion contemplated, without funds. Elizabeth’s situation is confirmed by her will, which she drew up on 10 April 1492, apparently because she was by then ill and did not expect to live for much longer. It is a pathetic document, quite unlike the will of a queen or a member of the aristocracy:

  In God’s name, Amen. The 10th day of April, the year of our Lord God 1492. I Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, late wife to the most victorious Prince of blessed memory Edward the Fourth, being of whole mind, seeing the world so transitory and no creature certain when they shall depart from hence, having Almighty God fresh in mind, in whom is all mercy and grace, bequeath my soul into his hands, beseeching him, of the same mercy, to accept it graciously, and our blessed Lady Queen of comfort [the Virgin Mary], and all the holy company of heaven, to be good means for me. Item, I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my Lord [King Edward] at Windsor, according to the will of my said Lord and mine, without pompous ceremony or costly expenses done thereabout. Item, where I have no worldly goods to do the Queen’s Grace, my dearest daughter [Elizabeth], a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children, according to my heart and mind, I beseech Almighty God to bless her Grace, with all her noble issue, and with as good heart and mind as is to me possible, I give her Grace my blessing, and all the foresaid my children. Item, I will that such small stuff and goods that I have to be disposed truly in the contentation [satisfaction] of my debts, and for the health of my soul, as far as they will extend. Item, if any of my blood [relations] will of my said stuff or goods to me pertaining, I will that they have the preferment before any other. And of this my present testament I make and ordain mine executors, that is to say, John Ingilby, Prior of the Charterhouse of Sheen, William Sutton and Thomas Brente, doctors. And I beseech my said dearest daughter, the Queen’s grace, and my son Thomas, Marquis Dorset, to put their good wills and help for the performance of this my testament. In witness whereof, to this my present testament I have set my seal, these witnesses, John, abbot of the monastery of Saint Saviour of Bermondsey, and Benedictus Cun, Doctor of Physic. Given the day and year abovesaid.

  The will confirms both Elizabeth’s deep personal piety – God is mentioned or appealed to on a number of occasions – and the state of abject poverty in which she found herself. Medieval testators routinely paid for the saying of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the masses they believed would speed their souls to paradise, but Elizabeth could only ask that what little remained after her debts had been settled should be used for this purpose. She had nothing to leave to her daughter the queen, or any of her other children, and this was clearly a source of regret rather than something she had wished or intended. King Henry, her son-in-law, is nowhere mentioned, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their relationship remained poor

  Elizabeth Woodville’s signature, from a receipt for the annuity she received from Henry VII, 1491

  It was not unusual for contemporaries to request a ‘simple’ funeral in the sure knowledge that their families would bury them with app
ropriate ceremony; but Elizabeth would have known that a deceased’s estate bore the cost of this and that queenly obsequies were beyond her means. King Henry could have relented sufficiently to make a dignified ending possible, but the evidence is that everything was done ‘on the cheap’. When Elizabeth died on Friday 8 June 1492 her body was placed in a wooden coffin, and taken by boat from Bermondsey to St George’s Chapel, Windsor, two days later. It was received there by a single priest and a clerk (‘prevely’ – privately or secretly – at eleven at night), and interred almost immediately, without, apparently, the dean and canons being present. Her very existence had been an embarrassment, and there was to be no spectacle now that she was dead.

  Her son the Marquis of Dorset, his half-sisters Anne, Katherine and Bridget, and some other family members reached Windsor on the following Tuesday and Wednesday, and that night the Bishop of Rochester conducted the service of Dirige, the Office of the Dead. Elizabeth’s two eldest daughters did not attend – Elizabeth of York was heavily pregnant while Cecily was represented by her husband Lord Welles, the king’s uncle – and the others present were almost all relatives of Edward IV or the Woodvilles. One of the heralds was shocked by the meanness of the arrangements, remarking that ‘there was nothing done solemnly for her saving a low hearse such as they use for the common people with four wooden candlesticks about it’. There was, he adds, ‘never a new torch, but old torches, nor poor man in black gown or hood, but upon [approximately] a dozen divers old men holding old torches and torch ends’. Dorset paid the ‘dole’ (the customary distribution of money to the needy) and gave forty shillings to the heralds, presumably out of his own pocket. It was all a far cry from the funeral of King Henry’s mother seventeen years later, which cost an enormous – but affordable – £1,021!

  What, then, can be said of this woman whose modest expectations had been transformed when she married King Edward but who had paid a high price for her new-found status? No other English queen had been deposed, and lost so many of her close family in bloody revolutions, and had her marriage declared invalid and her children bastardised, and, finally, suffered the indignity of being officially forgotten. Her Lancastrian rival Margaret of Anjou had also been deposed, exiled, lost her son and husband, and been compelled to resist those who wanted to supersede them; but throughout her troubles Margaret had a consolation always denied to Elizabeth – she was a French princess who could, in the last resort, expect her powerful kinsman King Louis to intercede for her. It is no coincidence that Henry VIII executed two of his English wives (and considered beheading a third); but that his two foreign-born queens – who had both in their own ways incurred his displeasure – both died in their beds. Elizabeth could flee into sanctuary, but she was still at the mercy of powerful enemies. Warwick the Kingmaker and Richard of Gloucester refrained from using violence against her in 1470 and in 1483, but on both occasions her safety hung in the balance. Ultimately, she had no one to help her but herself.

  The real Elizabeth may not be too far removed from the plucky, pitiful queen Shakespeare depicted in Richard III and Henry VI, Part 3, but twentieth-century writers have not treated her kindly. Cora Scofield, whose admired biography of Edward IV was published in 1923, wrote that ‘even wise heads have been known to be turned by a sudden elevation in rank, and Elizabeth Woodville’s head, which was not wise, had evidently been badly turned. Worse still, love seemed to have turned her husband’s head as well. For, not content with the folly of having married this “widow of England”, there was no end to the favours Edward was ready to shower on her undeserving family’. To David MacGibbon, her 1938 biographer, she was ‘a person of a cool calculating decision of character, without any deep affection, but of steady dislikes and revengeful disposition’, while Paul Murray Kendall described her as the ‘impelling spirit’, the ‘greediest and most wilful’ of the Woodvilles, in his 1955 life of Richard III. Charles Ross, writing about the same king a quarter of a century later, remarked that ‘her rather cold beauty was not offset by any warmth or generosity of temperament. She was to prove a woman of designing character, grasping and ambitious for her family’s interests, quick to take offence and reluctant to forgive’.

  But was she really like this? People were indeed surprised that Edward IV married for love rather than for money and influence, but his choice was not entirely without merit nor were Elizabeth’s siblings undeserving of the favours they received from him. It is difficult to reconcile Miss Scofield’s allegation that her head had been ‘turned’ with the ‘cold’ and ‘calculating’ traits observed by MacGibbon, nor does the latter’s claim that she lacked ‘deep affection’ sit well with Professor Ross’s ‘grasping and ambitious for her family’s interests’. All these writers, it is fair to say, take the view that Elizabeth and the Woodvilles were a ‘bad lot’ and interpret their actions accordingly, but if we approach the subject without preconceptions it is possible to see most of them in a quite different light.

  The two men most responsible for blackening Elizabeth’s character were Warwick the Kingmaker and Richard of Gloucester; but their opinions should not blind us to the fact that other contemporaries took a very different view of her. The Croyland writer noted how she ‘most beneficiently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance’ when trouble flared in the council in the aftermath of Edward IV’s death, and Speaker Alyngton had no reason to commend her ‘great constancy’ during the dramatic events of 1469–71 unless he genuinely admired her for it. A Londoner who wrote a poem celebrating Edward’s recovery of his kingdom expressed similar sentiments:

  O Queen Elizabeth, O blessed creature,

  O Glorious God, what pain had she?

  What languor and anguish did she endure?

  When her lord and sovereign was in adversity,

  To hear of her weeping it was great pity,

  When she remembered the King she was woe

  Thus in every thing the will of God is do [done]

  It could be argued that men who sought Edward IV’s favour were unlikely to criticise Elizabeth, but they would have been inviting ridicule if they had written and said such things when everyone else thought the opposite. The same is true of the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, who described her as ‘a woman more of formal countenance than of excellent beauty, but yet of such beauty and favour that with her sober demeanour, lovely looking, and feminine, smiling (neither too wanton nor too humble) besides her tongue so eloquent, and her wit so pregnant’. Hall never knew Elizabeth and would perhaps not have spoken ill of Henry VIII’s grandmother; but he had access to sources of information now lost to us, and there is something about his characterisation that rings true.

  Elizabeth Woodville was not perfect – perhaps no one is – but she seems to have fulfilled her difficult and demanding role admirably. Her critics never questioned her competence or alleged that she had failed in her duty (as they surely would if she had presented them with an opportunity), and her devotion to her husband never faltered. Like every mother, she was ambitious for her family, but she cannot be accused of neglecting her brothers’ and sisters’ interests or of not doing her utmost to secure the throne for her son Edward. She never doubted Richard of Gloucester’s true intentions – unlike her brother Anthony and Lord Hastings, who both walked blindly into the traps Richard had prepared for them – and would have been regarded as an astute politician if she had lived in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. It was her misfortune to be born into a male-dominated society that allowed women no public, political role.

  This, then, was Elizabeth Woodville, a woman who experienced greater vicissitudes of fortune than anyone of her generation and who was probably more sinned against than sinning. We can question her motives but not her ability, her judgement but not her loyalty. All in all, there is much to admire in the personality of the ‘White Queen’.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  The quotations from contemporary sources have been taken from the following:

  Ross
, C. Edward IV, 1974; Lander, J.R. Government and Community, 1980; The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley, 1938, reprinted Gloucester, 1983; The Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England and the Finall Recoverye of his Kingdomes from Henry VI A.D. M.CCCC.LXXI., ed. J. Bruce, Camden Society, 1838; British Library Add. MSS. 6113, f. 100b. Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Edward IV 1467–77, 1900; ‘The Record of Bluemantle Pursuivant’, in C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford, 1913; Sutton, A.F., and Visser-Fuchs, L., with Hammond, P.W. The Reburial of Richard, Duke of York 21–30 July 1476, Richard III Society, 1996; Myers, A.R. ‘The Household of Queen Elizabeth Woodville 1466–7’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, l (1967–8); Acts of Court of the Mercers Company, ed. L. Lyell and F.D. Watney, 1936; The Paston Letters 1422–1509, ed. J. Gairdner, 6 vols, 1904; More’s ‘History of King Richard III’, ed. J.R. Lumby, Cambridge, 1883; Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard III, trans. C.A.J. Armstrong, 2nd edition, Gloucester, 1984; The Memoirs of Philip de Commines, ed. A.R. Scoble, 2 vols, 1855–6; The Travels of Leo of Rozmital, ed. & trans. M. Letts, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1957; The Stonor Letters and Papers, ed. C.L. Kingsford, 2 vols, 1919–20; Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, trans. H.T. Riley, 1854; Twigg, J. A History of Queens’ College, Cambridge 1448–1986, Woodbridge, 1987; Sutton, A.F., and Visser-Fuchs, L. ‘A “Most Benevolent Queen”: Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s Reputation, her Piety, and her Books’, The Ricardian, x (1995); Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, ed. H. Ellis, Camden Society, 1844; Hammond, P.W., and Sutton, A.F. Richard III: The Road to Bosworth Field, 1985; Nicolas, N.H. Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, Wardrobe Accounts of Edward IV, 1830, reprinted 1972; Laynesmith, J. ‘The Kings’ Mother’, History Today (March, 2006); Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Existing in the Archives and Collections of Milan, I, 1385–1618, ed. A.B. Hinds, 1913; Kendall, P.M. Richard III, 1955; Ross, C. Richard III, 1981; Buck, Sir George The History of King Richard the Third, ed. A.N. Kincaid, Gloucester, 1979; British Library Harleian Manuscript 433, ed. R. Horrox and P.W. Hammond, 4 vols, 1979–83; Bacon, Francis The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. R. Lockyer, 1971; Materials for a History of the Reign of Henry VII, ed. W. Campbell, 2 vols, 1873–7; Trevelyan, G.M. A Shortened History of England, Harmondsworth, 1959; Hall(e), Edward The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York, 1550, reprinted Menston, 1970; Testamenta Vetusta, ed. N.H. Nicolas, 2 vols, 1826; Sutton, A.F., and Visser-Fuchs, L., with Griffiths, R.A. The Royal Burials of the House of York at Windsor, 2005; Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. T. Wright, 2 vols, 1859–61.