by Thomas Penn
Eager to show they had a card to play, Ferdinand and Isabella offered to exert pressure on Maximilian to give up the earl of Suffolk. The Spanish monarchs had a strong presence at the court of the emperor’s son, Archduke Philip of Burgundy, who had married their daughter, Catherine’s sister Juana of Castile. The coterie of Castilian diplomats at the Burgundian court, they reasoned, might be able to pull some strings. It was a lame offer, and Henry knew it.45
Henry temporized. Here, at least, he was in a strong position to negotiate – and he was unwilling to rush into anything. By the autumn, the tone of Ferdinand and Isabella’s letters were subdued, far from the bullishness of earlier in the year. They told their ambassadors not to mention anything to Henry about France, in case it put him off the idea of a betrothal, adding plaintively that, were the betrothal to take place it ‘might chance’ that Henry’s friendship ‘might prove an advantage to us’. Once the paperwork was in place, they reasoned, they could continue lobbying Henry about military intervention.46
As 1502 wore on, changes were afoot at Eltham, as Prince Henry’s little household began to transform itself into an establishment fit for an heir. And Queen Elizabeth’s consoling words to Henry had been proved right. She was pregnant again.
Now Must You Supply the Mother’s Part Also
On Christmas Day 1502, Henry made his customary procession, crowned and in a gown of purple velvet lined with sable, through Richmond’s public chambers and galleries to the Chapel Royal, surrounded by a thicket of lords temporal and spiritual dressed in their robes of estate, his way lined with halberd-bearing guards pushing back anybody ‘so hardy’ as to approach. There, before the high altar, as the choir’s voices soared upwards to the blue, star-flecked ceiling, Henry knelt and made his offering of a ‘noble in gold’, 6s 8d. After him, his eleven-year-old son stepped forward to make his offering of five shillings, not as the duke of York, but, for the first time, as ‘my lord prince’. At the centre of things, too, was the reassuring sight of Elizabeth. Cheeks flushed, heavily pregnant, she heard the children of the Chapel Royal sing William Cornish’s new setting of a carol, and on Boxing Day, she settled down to endless games of cards, gambling away a hundred shillings.1
As usual that Christmas, the solemn liturgies and crown-wearing processions were interwoven with the feasts, the endless processions of extravagantly dressed and spiced dishes borne out of the royal kitchens, the distribution of largesse to heralds and winter clothing to the household servants, and the entertainments: a succession of tumblers, singers, carollers and minstrels, interludes and plays. Weaving through the festivities on his hobby horse pranced the mocking master of ceremonies, the lord of misrule. Pursued by his band of gaudily dressed, painted fools, he supervised the programme of revels and ‘rarest pastimes to delight the beholders’, with its satirical upending of the established order – kitchen servants strutting around with the airs, graces and clothing of great men; household officers acting as menials – all to be done, of course, ‘without quarrel or offence’.2 Behind this temporary upside-down world lurked a sense of the fragility of things, that the lurching wheel of fortune which raised people up could as quickly overturn them. Riches, honour, wealth, and life, could disappear in an instant.
On New Year’s Day, servants queued to present the king and queen with gifts from their masters: large sums of money from Henry’s close counsellors and, from others, fine foods and exotic fruits – pomegranates, branches of oranges, figs – and a snarling leopard, with which Henry was clearly delighted, rewarding the giver liberally with £13 6s 8d.3 Among the gifts was a small Latin manuscript entitled ‘The Book of the Excellent Fortunes of Henry duke of York and his Parents’. The composer of this fulsome horoscope was William Parron, the Italian astrologer who had carved out for himself a role at court as a semi-official peddler of prognostications, which he combined with a sideline in cheap printed almanacks. The fashionable classical allusions which Parron sprinkled over his predictions may have given them a certain superficial authority, but he made sure to tell Henry what he wanted to hear: his most notorious moment to date had been his advocacy of the judicial murder of Edward earl of Warwick back in autumn 1499. Now, in the wake of Arthur’s death, Parron’s horoscope for 1503 predicted the glowing futures of Henry, Elizabeth and Prince Henry, who received his own personalized copy, dedicated to him in his new role as prince of Wales. This time, though, Parron had overreached himself. Elizabeth, he forecast, would live to the age of eighty.4
Late in January, the royal household moved downriver, to the Tower. Elizabeth was carefully ferried in her barge, reclining heavily on cushions and carpets, burning braziers filled with sweet herbs to mask the smells of the freezing Thames, her twenty-two oarsmen rowing with particular care. At the Tower, the rituals of childbirth began with a ceremonial mass in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, followed by a ‘void’ of spiced wine and sweetmeats. Then, surrounded by her ladies and gentlewomen, her mother-in-law Lady Margaret Beaufort at their head, Elizabeth went into confinement.
Following ordinances drawn up by Lady Margaret, the chamber in which Elizabeth would give birth had been meticulously well appointed. Above the heavily carpeted floor, the ceiling, walls, ‘windows and all’ were swathed in blue arras peppered with gold fleurs-de-lys, signifying kingship and that paradigm of motherhood, the Virgin Mary. One window only was left uncovered to admit light. The room had a cupboard gleaming with plate, two cradles standing in readiness and a ‘rich altar’ encrusted with relics of the saints. Below their velvet, gold and ermine canopies of estate worked with embroidered red-and-white roses stood the bed on which the queen was to give birth, and at its foot a pallet, half-throne, half day-bed, with furnishings of velvet and cloth-of-gold and counterpanes of ermine-fringed scarlet. In this opulent, womblike environment, in which the events crucial to the dynasty and the country would unfold, the queen’s status was exalted, almost sacred. The furnishings, too, were designed with tranquillity in mind, the simple patterns of the fleurs-de-lys preferred to more elaborately designed arras with ‘images’, so as not to overstimulate ‘women in such case’. And while Alice Massy, Elizabeth’s favoured midwife, was in attendance, there were as usual no physicians. The presence of men in this all-female environment was forbidden – besides which doctors, it was thought, only served to cause anxiety to women in labour.5
On 2 February, the household celebrated Candlemas. Of all the great feasts of estate, Candlemas was one of the most distinctive. Forty days after Christmas, its candles emphasized the light brought into the world by the new-born child. In the depth of winter they symbolized, too, rebirth and renewal, bringing a sense that the first faint signs of spring could not be too far away. On that day, barely a fortnight into a confinement intended to last a month, Elizabeth was convulsed by sudden and violent contractions.6
The traumatic and premature labour was badly handled, and Elizabeth became feverish. Soon, she had a raging temperature and was slipping in and out of consciousness. Waiting with mounting anxiety outside his wife’s apartments, Henry frenziedly sought medical advice. Messengers rode through the night into Kent and the west country to summon specialists. Nothing worked. On 11 February, her thirty-seventh birthday, Elizabeth died. Her sickly baby daughter, hastily christened Catherine, followed soon after.7
Nobody, those around Henry reported, had ever ‘seen or heard’ the king in such a state. Anguish ruptured the poised regality in which he had sublimated all his anxieties. Years before, in exile, rumours of Elizabeth’s betrothal to Richard III had ‘pinched him to the very stomach’; now, her death provoked in him a visceral response.
As his wife’s newly coffined body lay in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, bathed in the light of innumerable candles, and attended by her mourning gentlewomen and the ‘great estates’ of court, the king left the funeral ceremonies in the hands of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey and Sir Richard Guildford. Commanding six hundred masses to be sung in London’
s churches, Henry, surrounded by a clutch of his close servants in mourning black, ‘privily departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrows and would no man should resort to him’. His barge slid away from the Tower and up the wintry Thames to Richmond. There, he disappeared, up flights of stairs, through the succession of public chambers and galleries into the building’s heart, his privy chamber, where he collapsed.8
On Wednesday 22 February Queen Elizabeth’s funeral procession snaked through London’s crowded, silent streets, from the Tower to her place of burial at Westminster Abbey. Bells tolled and priests stood in church doorways with swaying censers, the pungent smell of incense drifting over the cortège as it passed. With a vanguard of horsebacked lords, among them London’s mayor and Garter king-of-arms John Writhe, the hearse was drawn by eight warhorses caparisoned in black velvet. On it rested a painted, intricately modelled effigy of the late queen, clothed in her crown and robes of estate, bejewelled hands clutching her sceptre. The hearse was accompanied by two hundred poor men, their presence believed to be a powerful act of intercession with Christ, bearing lighted tapers. Following them came the queen’s gentlewomen, eight ladies of honour riding black palfreys, the rest in two carriages, each drawn by a team of six horses. Chaplains, squires, knights and aldermen rode alongside, black gowns draped behind, their mourning hoods pulled down obscuring their faces. The orders of friars patronized by Elizabeth, the Carmelites in their white habits and the Augustinians in black, joined the king’s chapel choir in the singing of ‘solemn anthems’. Then followed representatives of London’s guilds and the city’s foreign mercantile and banking communities: Spanish, French, Dutch and Germans, Venetians, Florentines, Lucchese and Genoese.
On that dark February day, the overwhelming impression made on the London chronicler was one of light. From the manor of Blanch Appleton on the city’s eastern edge to Temple Bar in the west, the city was illuminated. Over 4,000 flaming torches lit the streets through which the procession passed, while the main streets of Cornhill and Cheapside, ‘garnished thoroughly with new torches’, were lined with white-clad men holding burning brands. At Fenchurch Street and the top of Cheapside stood groups of thirty-seven virgins, one for each year of the late queen’s life, dressed in white, holding lighted tapers.9
Though founded on pragmatism, Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage had nevertheless blossomed throughout the uncertainty and upheaval of the previous eighteen years. This was a marriage of ‘faithful love’, of mutual attraction, affection and respect, from which the king seems to have drawn great strength – indeed, it was the kind of marriage that their second son, Prince Henry, would spend his whole life trying to find. With Elizabeth’s burial, the lights went out all over Henry VII’s court. The reign was plunged into crisis. Henry, shattered, would never be the same again. For his young, vulnerable son, so recently saddled with the burden of impending kingship, it was a traumatic loss.
Beautiful, serene and able, through all the crises of the reign Elizabeth had been the embodiment of reconciliation. A focus for the loyalties of many who had accepted Henry’s rule, she had produced six children, the stuff of a new dynasty, and had been a charismatic counterpart to her increasingly suspicious, controlling husband. In life, nobody had a bad word to say about her and, as the outpouring of grief on her death testified, she was genuinely loved. Her serenity was sometimes mistaken for passivity, as by the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala, who reported acidly that she was ‘beloved because she was powerless’. But Elizabeth’s true quality lay in an apparently artless graciousness, which was thrown into relief by the close proximity of the king’s sharp-elbowed mother.
Deeply pious and a stickler for protocol, Lady Margaret Beaufort ran her own household with a rod of iron. If she was a bit of a nag – even her saintly confessor, John Fisher, remarked on how she tended to repeat the same moralizing stories ‘many a time’ – the appearance of her slight form, clad in black gown, mantle and wimple was faintly intimidating. She had, Fisher noted, a particular gift for ‘bolting out faction’, for sniffing out suspect loyalties among her household servants.10
Royal mothers tended to busy themselves with the affairs of their sons and daughters-in-law – but at a distance. Lady Margaret Beaufort, however, was very much more hands-on. Adopting the airs and graces of a queen, she was constantly at Elizabeth’s shoulder – literally so, walking a mere half-pace behind her in public ceremonials. In some royal houses, her apartments were next to the king’s own; at Henry’s Oxfordshire manor of Woodstock, they shared an interconnecting ‘drawing chamber’, to which they could retreat to discuss politics or play cards. The upheavals of the 1490s only served to increase her influence. In 1499, after separating from her husband Thomas Stanley, earl of Derby – whose family remained under a cloud following their involvement in the Warbeck conspiracy – she altered her signature to ‘Margaret R’: possibly an abbreviation of ‘Richmond’, it also looked like the queen’s ‘Elizabeth Regina’. At court, on progress, or through her servants who, like the powerful Sir Reynold Bray, had become members of the king’s household, Margaret was constantly watching, observing, organizing. It felt to one Spanish envoy as though she kept Elizabeth ‘in subjection’. Others agreed. One irritated petitioner, trying to gain access to the queen, suggested that Margaret was, more or less, her gatekeeper: he would, he said, have spoken more with Elizabeth ‘had it not been for that strong whore, the king’s mother’.11
If Elizabeth resented Lady Margaret’s intrusion on her territory, she kept her thoughts to herself. It was, after all, only natural that the reign’s self-styled matriarch should have taken the younger woman under her wing. There was, too, much to suggest that as Elizabeth settled into her role as queen, this became a relationship of equals. If Lady Margaret paraded her spirituality across the full spectrum of visible acts of piety – punctiliously observed daily rituals, devotion to cults of saints and any number of good works, from the giving of alms to the endowment of chantries – so too did Elizabeth. Early in the reign, Lady Margaret had commissioned the printer William Caxton to publish the romance Blanchardin and Eglantine, apparently in honour of the love-story that was Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage; later, Margaret and Elizabeth together commissioned from Caxton The Fifteen Oes, a highly popular prayer sequence whose fifteen prayers, each beginning ‘O blessed Jesu’ – hence the title – underscored their devotion to the fashionable cult of the Name of Jesus.
Henry, too, spoke of them in the same breath. When in 1498 he wrote to the Scottish king James IV to postpone the wedding between James and his daughter Margaret, then nine years old, he cited intensive lobbying by ‘the Queen and my mother’. When, in the run-up to Prince Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, Lady Margaret drew up a list of the queen’s attendants, there were spaces for names to be included – after discussion with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was a discreet, persuasive lobbyist on her own account. London’s key politicians and merchants cultivated her assiduously; so too did foreign diplomats. They did so not because she was ‘powerless’, but quite the opposite. Beneath the emollience was a steeliness, glimpsed in the brisk letters she wrote intervening in legal affairs, and in petitioning her husband for favours on behalf of her servants. When Pope Alexander VI requested that his representative in England be given the vacant bishopric of Worcester, Henry wrote back apologetically, explaining that his queen had already bagged the post for her confessor. Elizabeth could, it seemed, put her foot down. During the preparations for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, the Spanish ambassador de Puebla handed over letters in duplicate to the queen from Catherine of Aragon and from her parents. Henry wanted copies of each ‘to carry continually about him’. Elizabeth refused. One set, she said, was for Prince Arthur, and she ‘did not like to part with hers’; the resulting marital tiff was played out in front of Lady Margaret and the watching de Puebla.12
Elizabeth combined a strong sense of family loyalty – including a love for her siblings which was, according to Henr
y VII’s chronicler Bernard André, ‘ferme incredibilis’, truly extraordinary – with a strong awareness of the new political dispensation that she represented.13 In early 1495, in the face of Warbeck’s continued threat and the recent upheavals within the royal household, she had brokered and funded high-profile marriages for her younger sisters, Anne and Katherine, in the process binding two noble families further into the regime: Anne’s husband was the oldest son of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey; Katherine, meanwhile, married Lord William Courtenay, son of the earl of Devon. As her extended family became entangled in the various crises of the reign, Elizabeth’s quietly emollient role continued to dovetail with Henry’s policies. After the flight of her cousin the earl of Suffolk in August 1501, she arranged accommodation for his unfortunate wife Margaret who, having been under surveillance for two years as a result of her husband’s intriguing, had her lands and revenues annexed by the crown – the proceeds flowed into Elizabeth’s own coffers. When in spring the following year Elizabeth’s brother-in-law William Courtenay was tainted by association with Suffolk and incarcerated in the Tower, she sent him a care package of clothes: shirts, a gown and a ‘night bonnet’. The Courtenay children, meanwhile, were securely looked after at the queen’s Essex house of Havering-at-Bower.14
Elizabeth’s household staff mirrored that of her husband. Among her gentlewomen were the wives of Henry’s counsellors and intimate servants, who were themselves regularly around, bringing messages and gifts from the king: in January 1503, the privy chamber servants Piers Barbour and James Braybroke were first on the queen’s list of New Year’s rewards. She also employed them on her own account. On one occasion she instructed the head of the privy chamber, Hugh Denys, to tip a foreigner who had brought her a pair of clavichords, the first set of keyboards known in England; on another, the urbane Richard Weston, travelling abroad on the king’s business, picked up a set of expensive, ornamented devotional girdles – fashionable pregnancy wear – on the queen’s orders.15 Entertainers and musicians, too, made their way between the two households: one man regularly in demand with both Elizabeth and Lady Margaret was Henry Glasebury, marshal of the king’s minstrels and a composer of entertaining doggerel verse. And her household had an engaged, enquiring openness about it – the kind of easiness that had attracted the king’s mother’s hawklike attention – which took its tone from Elizabeth herself.