Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Elizabeth Woodville, Vergil reports, was “so well pleased with this device” that she sent Caerleon back to Margaret promising to recruit all Edward IV’s friends for a rebellion to topple Richard, if Henry would be sworn to take Elizabeth of York in marriage as soon as he had the realm (or else Cecily, the younger daughter, “if th’ other should die before he enjoyed the same”).

  Margaret sent out her man Reginald Bray to gather her friends for the coming fight; Elizabeth Woodville sent word to hers. Margaret was on the point of sending a protégé of Caerleon’s, a young priest called Christopher Urswick whom she had taken into her household, to her son, Henry, in Brittany, when she had news that halted her in her tracks. Hers was not the only conspiracy afoot.

  The Duke of Buckingham had played a leading part in placing Richard on the throne but had since become disaffected—a discontent purposefully fostered (when Buckingham left Richard at Gloucester that early August week and returned to his own home of Brecon Castle) by the man he had been asked to hold in custody there: Margaret’s old associate John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Richard had surely hoped that such an arrangement would keep his old foe Morton from causing him any trouble, but now the bishop made himself meddlesome in other ways, urging Buckingham that “if you love God, your lineage, or your native country,” he should himself take the crown.

  Buckingham was eagerly receptive to Morton’s scheme. He responded that only recently, he had indeed “suddenly remembered” his own lineage through the Beaufort line; on his way home to Brecon, however, he had happened to meet Margaret Beaufort on the road, which reminded him of her superior claim (superior if you ignore the legitimacy question). This picture conjured up of a chance meeting is likely to be disingenuous, but at some stage the various conspirators must have decided to pool their resources. In the seventeenth century, George Buck declared that Margaret was the brain behind the final plans, “for she was entered far into them, and none better plunged in them and deeply acquainted with them. And she was a politic and subtle lady.”

  So Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville were both deeply involved in the general outlines of the plot, but of the three main conspirators, it was inevitably Buckingham, the man, who took charge of the armed rebellion launched on October 18. Leading his men from Wales, he was to have joined up with the other forces Margaret and Elizabeth had been able to rally, but freak weather conditions made it impossible for his army to cross the swollen Severn. His men began to desert—and, probably contrary to his expectations, there was no sign of Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Stanley, coming to join the rebellion, as the conspirators must surely have hoped he would.

  Henry Tudor’s attempts to sail from Brittany with a fleet provided by the Breton duke had likewise repeatedly been thwarted by the weather, and by the time he saw the English coast, it was evident that his only option was to flee back across the Channel again. Buckingham was captured—betrayed by his servant for the reward—and summarily executed on November 2. Others (including Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset) fled abroad to join Henry. But as so often with stories from this era, that clear and simply told version is not the whole tale.

  IT IS OFTEN SAID that Elizabeth Woodville must have known the Princes were dead, or she would never have gone along with a plan to marry her daughter Elizabeth, with her valuable York blood, to the Lancastrian Henry Tudor. But her late husband had, at the end of his life, promoted the same plan of a marriage between Elizabeth and Henry: a way to bring Henry Tudor safely into the Yorkist fold. It is, moreover, possible that she first agreed to throw her weight behind the rebellion in the belief that her sons were still living and that the insurrection would have a chance of placing Edward V on the throne. The Crowland chronicle suggests that the rebels first contemplated arms in the Princes’ name and then, after “a rumour arose that King Edward’s sons, by some unknown manner of violent destruction, had met their fate,” turned to Henry Tudor in their need for “someone new at their head.”

  Margaret Beaufort’s position is more equivocal. If Margaret’s sole goal was to bring her son safely home, subject to some friendly sovereign, she might simply have continued negotiating with Richard—unless she mistrusted him and feared treachery. On the other hand, if she knew or believed the Princes were dead when she committed herself to the rebellion, her rationale would have been significantly clearer. The Princes’ deaths would have made Henry Tudor’s chances for assuming the throne much better—and would also have made Elizabeth of York more important, since she would now be the main inheritor of her father’s bloodline. If Henry could but marry Elizabeth, then many Yorkist supporters, dismayed by Richard’s seizure of the throne, might rally behind Henry, Lancastrian though he may be.

  Buckingham’s position is yet more puzzling. Most now dismiss the idea (Vergil’s) that he had quarreled with Richard over lands promised and not granted. It is theoretically possible that he was belatedly defending the rights of Princes he believed to be still living; no manifesto for the rebels survives, but it seems that some of the minor risings in the South and West were indeed popular ventures aimed at freeing the Princes. (Crowland reports that “in order to deliver them from this captivity, the people of the southern and western parts of the kingdom began to murmur greatly, and to form meetings and confederacies.”) But as word of the Princes’ deaths filtered out and the goal changed, Buckingham’s involvement becomes anomalous. He may possibly have been genuinely disinterested enough to wish, while avenging the Princes, to elevate Henry Tudor to the crown. But from everything that is known of him, this seems unlikely.

  Buckingham may well have been an opportunist, taking advantage of the Princes’ deaths to promote his own claim. If so, he probably hoped to dupe Margaret Beaufort into believing he supported her son’s claim—striking a deal with Margaret to get the Tudor and Woodville supporters as allies, while always planning himself to step into Henry Tudor’s place. But it is just as conceivable that he was himself the dupe—that Margaret (his aunt, through her marriage to Stafford) invited him to join a rebellion nominally in support of the Princes, while actually interested only in her own son.

  John Talbot, in his Garter robes, presents a copy of the beautifully illustrated Shrewsbury Book to Marguerite of Anjou, shown hand in hand with her new husband, Henry VI. Daisies—Marguerite’s personal emblem—decorate the lavish borders.

  The stained glass Royal Window in Canterbury Cathedral shows the figures of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, with their sons and daughters to either side, kneeling at prayer desks. The royal figures originally flanked an image of the Crucifixion, but the window was damaged by Puritan iconoclasts in 1642.

  Believed to have been painted by Rowland Lockey in the last years of the sixteenth century, this image of the aging Margaret Beaufort reflects her reputation for piety.

  Margaret’s emblems—the mythological beast called a Yale, the portcullis, and the red rose—adorn several Cambridge colleges of which she was patron.

  Cecily Neville’s father, the Earl of Westmorland, flanked by the many children of his second marriage, in a French illustration from the fifteenth century.

  Portraits of Elizabeth Woodville—mostly sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century copies of one original portrait type—show the high forehead and elaborate headdress that were a fashion of the day.

  Anne Neville, depicted here in the Rous Roll, is shown in her coronation robes with orb and scepter.

  Portraits of Richard III often show a more personable figure than his later reputation might suggest.

  This lovely miniature shows a vision in which the risen Christ appeared to Margaret of Burgundy in her bedroom, so silently that even her sleeping dog was not aroused.

  Like that of her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, this portrait of Elizabeth of York is a later version of a single earlier painted portrait type. She holds the white rose symbol of York in her hand.

  This depiction of the birth of Julius Caesar reflects not only the childbirth customs of the late fi
fteenth century but also the high quality of illumination found in Burgundian books and manuscripts at the time.

  This tapestry of a hunting scene also shows the courtly pastimes of fishing and falconry. From the marguerites woven into some of the ladies’ hats, it may have been a wedding present for Marguerite of Anjou.

  The funeral procession of Elizabeth of York. Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Lord Stanley, walks directly in front of the bier.

  The preparations for a tournament, in the Livre des Tournois written by Marguerite of Anjou’s father, René.

  Margaret of Burgundy’s crown may have been made for her wedding, or possibly as a votive offering. The white roses around the rim could suggest the Virgin Mary, as well as being a Yorkist emblem.

  A French collection of love songs, made with heart-shaped pages, c. 1475.

  This illustration for a volume of poems by Charles, Duke of Orléans reflects his twenty-five-year imprisonment in the Tower of London. Behind the Tower itself is a panorama of the city.

  Elizabeth of York has inscribed her name—“Elisabeth the quene”—on the lower margin of this page from a Book of Hours passed down through her family.

  Taken from the Troy Book of the mid-fifteenth century, the image of the Wheel of Fortune, with a crowned king poised at its apex, would prove all too prophetic for the years ahead.

  And there is another possibility—that Buckingham knew that a rebellion could safely be raised in the Princes’ names, without in the end placing an Edward V on the throne. Rightly or wrongly, he was to some contemporaries, and remains, a favorite outside candidate for villain of the story—the murderer of the Princes. Buckingham’s execution, perhaps, just makes him even more convenient a scapegoat.

  But just as the reasons for Buckingham’s involvement in the plot against Richard may never be truly understood, so too the fate of the Princes in the Tower may have been forever lost to history. The majority of historians from Vergil and More onward have believed that Richard III murdered his nephews. It has, moreover—thanks largely to Shakespeare—become the accepted view among many who care nothing for history. But in truth, it is impossible (barring new—and probably scientific—evidence) to be certain what happened to the boys and who is to blame. And until that conclusive evidence is discovered, it is wrong to declare Richard guilty.

  If Richard did not kill the boys, the question must be, why did he not simply produce them, when rumors of their murder began to spread? One conceivable answer is that he knew they had died—by someone else’s hand, or indeed by natural causes—and that he would be blamed for their deaths, even if he was not in fact guilty.

  Richard, of course, certainly had both motive and opportunity. So too did others—such as the adherents of the young Henry Tudor. Candidates suggested include Margaret Beaufort’s ally Bishop Morton; her husband, Lord Stanley; and Margaret Beaufort herself. It seems almost, sometimes, as though assumptions about her gender have insulated Lady Margaret from suspicion, but the early- seventeenth-century antiquarian George Buck claimed to have read “in an old manuscript book” that it “was held for certain that Dr Morton and a certain countess, [conspirin]g the deaths of the sons of King Edward and some others, resolved that these treacheries should be executed by poison and by sorcery.” Unfortunately—as shall soon be seen—allegations from Buck have to be treated with caution.

  Yet despite the unreliability of the historical record, Margaret Beaufort cannot be wholly discounted as a suspect. Henry Tudor and his family, after all, stood to gain tremendously from the deaths of the Princes. And although Henry himself was out of the country around the time the Princes were last sighted, it is hard to ignore the fact that he had a highly able and totally committed representative in England, in the person of his mother. And indeed, the Tudor party had even more motive than the principal suspect in the case. For Richard to rule, it was technically necessary only that the boys should be declared illegitimate, and this he had arranged soon after his brother’s death (albeit this hadn’t proved the end of the story). If, by contrast, Henry was to bolster his own genealogically weak claim with that of Elizabeth of York, he would have needed them actually to be dead. No other solution would have sufficed; if the whole family was declared illegitimate, then Elizabeth had no claim. And if they were legitimate, then her brothers’ claim would take precedence over hers for as long as they lived.

  What is more, while the assumption of Richard’s guilt depends on a posthumous reputation for savagery, it was the first two Tudor monarchs who would, one by one, eliminate all the rival Yorkist line with chilling efficiency. Of course, if we are to go by track record, then practically any ruler of the era could have done it. (Edward IV had had his own brother Clarence executed and had probably had both Henry VI and Henry’s son murdered.) Nor does savagery have to be a prerequisite for the crime, per se. The fact that the Princes were underage makes all the difference in modern minds, but their youth may not have been such a charged issue in the fifteenth century. Henry VII would proclaim, with curious vagueness, that Richard was guilty of the shedding of infants’ blood—but in fact childhood ended early in the medieval era, and if Edward V did die soon after his uncle’s accession, then he was nonetheless not much younger than Margaret Beaufort at the time of her pregnancy.

  Public opinion then, as now, was not indifferent to the boys’ fate. But death was only one possible reason for the Princes’ disappearance. The Silesian visitor Nicolaus von Popplau reported hearing the rumors in 1484 but added, “Many people say—and I agree with them—that they are still alive and kept in a very dark cellar.” Even Vergil reported rumors they had been sent to “some secret land.” It is worth noting that the usually reliable Crowland does not say Richard killed the boys, but mentions only the rumor.

  Rumors, of course, are no substitute for hard evidence, which remains in short supply. Many over the centuries have taken as conclusive the dubious confession to the murder supposedly made in 1502 by one Sir James Tyrell, in 1483 an officer in Richard’s household. Whatever its veracity, Tyrell’s testimony could not have been known to the women directly affected by the affair in 1483. If this leaves modern viewers in a state of uncertainty, then the consolation must be that we are probably only in the same state as these women. The Princes’ mother and sisters may not have known what to believe. They may have had to persuade themselves to believe whatever would prove necessary for them to be able to make their way through the difficult times ahead.

  _______________

  *Henry VII, though, under those circumstances, would delay his wife’s coronation.

  *A noted, and Cambridge-educated, astronomer and mathematician, he would still be in the records as employed by Elizabeth of York a decade later.

  17

  “LOOK TO YOUR WIFE”

  Stanley, look to your wife. If she convey

  Letters to Richmond, you shall answer it.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 4.2

  When, following the rebellion of October 1483, Richard III called a Parliament, Henry Tudor was inevitably among those attainted. He was, however, beyond reach of actual punishment, safe back in Brittany. His connections in England—Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, and Margaret’s husband, Stanley—were in a less comfortable position. Margaret may have been going behind her husband’s back, but it is also possible that he approved of her actions as a sort of insurance policy—part of his lifelong strategy of having a foot in both camps.

  Indeed, there is some evidence that Stanley secretly but actively continued to support Margaret’s ongoing efforts to win Henry the crown. Stanley escaped censure—just too powerful (and perhaps too close to being genuinely uncommitted) for punishment to be the best option, while any other remained. Margaret herself, however, was attainted at the end of 1483: “Forasmuch as Margaret Countess of Richmond, Mother to the king’s great Rebel and Traitor, Henry Earl of Richmond, hath of late conspired, ‘confedered,’ and committed high Treason against our sovereign lord the king Rich
ard the Third, in diverse and sundry wises,” the official charges declared. But in the end (as so often with women), the full lethal penalties were not enacted, not even the total alienation of Margaret’s goods.

  Her property was indeed to be taken away from her, but it would be given over to her husband for the term of his life. Richard (like Edward before him) hesitated altogether to alienate such a powerful and chancy magnate as Stanley. Margaret had chosen her latest husband well. She was, however, to be held in Lord Stanley’s charge, so strictly that she was to be deprived of “any servant or company,” effectively jailed under her husband’s jurisdiction—the instructions making it clear that this was less a punitive measure than a step intended to disable her from further action. According to Vergil, Stanley was ordered to “remove from his wife all her servants, and keep her so straight with himself that she should not be able from thenceforth to send any messages neither to her son, nor friends, nor practise anything at all against the king.” Margaret’s immediate future lay in the North, probably in Stanley’s residences of Lathom and Knowsley.