Tudor Queens of England

by David Loades

  fl orins (£20,000) and fi t out three or four ships for him. Edward deployed his money to good effect, and on 11 March was able to leave Flushing with 36 ships and about 1,200 men, including several gunners.

  16 He had also re-established contact with his brother and was reasonably confi dent that Clarence would support him once he had shown his hand. Meanwhile Warwick was expecting him, but having considerable diffi culty in making defensive preparations. For a variety of reasons, his support was very limited and as he tried to mobilize 54

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  against Edward that became abundantly clear. On 14 March the returning exile landed at Ravenspur on the Humber, in what should theoretically have been hostile territory. However the Earl of Northumberland, who was strong in the region, held his hand, and Edward was able to bluff his way into York. As other equivocators like Lord Montague continued to hold back, Edward moved south, and his support continued to grow. Most critically he was joined at Leicester by 3,000 men under Lord Hastings. On 2 April Clarence fi nally declared himself and, bypassing Warwick, who was then at Coventry, the King headed for London The capital was divided, but Edward’s supporters proved the stronger, and the Common Council resolved that ‘as Edward late King of England was hastening towards the city with a powerful army, and as the inhabitants were not suffi ciently versed in the use of arms to withstand so large a force, no attempt should be made to resist him …’

  Despite the equivocal use of ‘late’ in describing the King, this declaration was suffi cient, and on 11 April 1471 Edward entered the city, securing in the process the person of his rival and several of the latter’s more prominent supporters. He was also reunited with the wife, whom he had not seen for over a year, and introduced to his 6-month-old son. Elizabeth promptly moved out of the sanctuary, which had been her home for about eight months, and returned to the Tower. Although his supporters were now fl ocking to him, and his grip on London was secure, the Earl of Warwick remained unfought, and Margaret of Anjou still lurked in the wings. There was much to do. On 13 March Edward moved out of the city towards St Albans aware that Warwick was advancing. The following day, which was Easter Sunday, the two armies met at Barnet, and the Lancastrians were routed, both the Earl of Warwick and Lord Montague being killed on the fi

  eld.17 It was as decisive a victory as could well have been wished for and Edward had the bodies of his enemies displayed in St.Pauls. Two days later the news reached him that Margaret had landed at Weymouth and that the old Lancastrians were rallying to her. Instead of being able to enjoy his victory, he had now to pick up this fresh challenge. As Margaret and her son moved north from Exeter to Bristol, apparently well supported, and headed for the Severn to cross into Wales, Edward set off in hot pursuit, and after a number of false sightings fi nally caught up with her at Tewkesbury on 4 May. There he won an equally decisive victory, capturing Margaret and killing the Prince of Wales on the fi eld.

  It must have appeared at fi rst that his victory was now total and secure but while he was occupied at Tewkesbury, fresh Lancastrian risings took place both in the north and in Kent. Thomas Neville, an illegitimate son of the Earl of Kent, known as the Bastard Faulconberg, had raised the county and was attacking London. The Queen, it was reported, was besieged in the Tower of London. In fact

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  it did not quite come to that. Although the Bastard was supported by a number of armed ships, the Londoners feared a sack and resisted resolutely, until on 14

  May Earl Rivers who was in command of the Tower, led a sortie which drove the attackers back. Reports that Edward himself was on his way with his victorious army fi nally demoralised the Kentishmen and they fl ed, the bastard himself escaping to Calais. On the same day, as he awaited reinforcements at Coventry, the news reached Edward that the northern rebellion had petered out. Partly because they had learned of the disaster at Tewkesbury and partly because the Earl of Northumberland remained loyal, it now appeared to the local leaders that they had neither a cause nor a captain and they laid down their arms and began to sue for par

  don.18 After this, there was only some tidying up to be done, like securing the submission of Calais, which was achieved during July. As Henry VI had died on the night of Edward’s return to London from Coventry, his son had died at Tewkesbury, and Margaret was safely imprisoned, the Lancastrian challenge remained only in the obscure and fugitive fi gure of Henry of Richmond. For the next 12 years, England enjoyed an interval of peace. In 1472 Louis of Bruges visited England at the King’s invitation and was created Earl of Wiltshire as a gesture of gratitude for his help and support. In the journal of his visit, which was kept by a secretary, we get a number of glimpses of life at the English court. Elizabeth, as might be expected, features regularly in his account, but never doing anything of political signifi cance. She attends lavish banquets, introduces the visitors to her children and is on one occasion surprised playing at marbles and ninepins with her ladies. Her second son, Richard, was born in August 1473, and she is noted to have offered with the King at the shrine of St. Edward at Westminster. Her mother, Jacquetta, died in 1472, causing her considerable distress, and she accompanied Edward on his visits to Oxford. There was, however, rather more to Elizabeth than this domestic routine might indicate. Her revenues were further, although not dramatically, augmented, and it was noted in 1475 that her infl uence in East Anglia was so great that she was

  ‘regarded as one of the main instruments of roy

  al policy’19 in that area. In that year also, while the King was pursuing his brief and abortive war with France, which was ended at Picquingy on 29 August, Elizabeth was named as Governor of the Realm in his absence. She was probably a compromise candidate for this particular job, because Edward was not anxious to exalt any of his already powerful nobles to such a position. Nevertheless her appointment indicates a level of political involvement that would not be expected from the record of her activities. There was much resentment among the English military at the tame outcome of this confrontation but neither Elizabeth nor the King himself had to cope with any signifi cant disturbances. 56

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  Meanwhile, the Queen went on bearing children. By the time that Edward returned from the wilderness she had produced three daughters and one son, all of them alive and well. In 1472 she bore another daughter, Margaret, who lived only a short while, and in 1473 (as we have seen) a second son, Richard. There then followed Anne (1475), George (1477), Catherine (1479) and Bridget (1480), of whom only George died young. It could be argued that Edward had found the ideal way to keep his wife out of political mischief and her fecundity made up for at least some of the qualities in which she may have been lacking. Meanwhile her frequent pregnancies gave her husband the opportunity to play the fi eld, which he did apparently with enthusiasm and success. We do not know how many bastards Edward sired because he did not usually acknowledge them and only two appear in the records – Arthur, subsequently Viscount Lisle, and Grace, who was placed in Elizabeth’s household, and was to be with her when she died. Grace may have been an unusually amiable child, or she may have been intended as a reminder to Elizabeth not to presume upon her connubial attractions. If Elizabeth ever resented these wanderings she was wise enough to say nothing and she certainly could not complain that her husband was neglecting her for other women.

  The one political incident in which she is alleged to have been involved in these years was the second and fatal fall from grace of the King’s brother the Duke of Clarence. Clarence was a surly, abrasive person, and although his return to allegiance in 1471 had been of great importance, Edward never really trusted him. His wife, Isobel, died on 22 December 1476, and there was soon talk of his re-marriage to his niece, Mary of Burgundy. Duke Charles was killed at Nancy in January 1477 and his widow Margaret was Clarence’s sister. Margaret was desperate to preserve the integrity of the Burgundian inheritance, now
in the hands of a mere girl, and saw a marriage within her own family as a means to enlist English support. Edward would not entertain the suggestion, for the good reason that if his brother ever disposed of the great power of Burgundy, he might well be tempted to try his luck again at home. For rather similar, if less potent reasons, he would also not countenance a union between Clarence and Margaret, the sister of the King of Scots, which was also suggested. The Duke sulked, publicly and offensively. He also, apparently, became tangentially involved in necromancy when some members of his household joined with a group that was trying to use the black arts to discover when Edward would die. This was the treasonable offence of ‘compassing and imagining’ the King’s death. The group were convicted by a special commission on 19 May 1477, and two of them were put to death.

  20 If, as seems likely, this was intended as a warning to Clarence, he paid no heed. Even before the verdict was delivered he

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  had accused one of Duchess Isobel’s former servants of having poisoned her. He had the unfortunate Ankarette Twynho seized and taken to Warwick by force, where she was convicted by an intimidated jury and hanged on 13 April.

  21 The Duke had simply taken the law into his own hands in manifest contempt of his brother’s authority and for that reason was arrested towards the end of June and committed to the Tower. Elizabeth had no particular reason to sympathize with Ankarette Twynho but she did have good reason to fear and dislike Clarence. Not only did she not forget his pretensions in 1470, which had been made more threatening by the birth of his son in 1475, she also blamed him for the deaths of her father and uncle. Warwick, who shared that responsibility, was out of reach, but the Duke was now suddenly vulnerable to revenge. There is no direct evidence and the story may simply be a part of that ‘black legend’ that subsequently gathered around the Queen and her kindred but it is quite likely that Elizabeth urged her husband to deal with his troublesome brother once and for all. Something must account for his unprecedented behaviour because he appeared in person in the House of Lords in January 1478, and accused Clarence of Treason. Evidence of criminal misconduct was plentiful and genuine but that of treason was not. However, the King’s word could not be gainsaid in his own Court and the Duke was duly convicted. There then followed a delay of ten days. This was common and was often allowed to the condemned to give them time to make their peace with God but, in this case, because of the peculiar circumstances, it was thought that Edward was struggling with his conscience – and that may well have been the case. The eventual outcome was as unprecedented as the trial because Clarence was neither pardoned nor publicly executed, but privately murdered – allegedly by being drowned in a butt of malmsey wine.

  22 This detail is probably a picturesque fabrication, but of the private nature of his execution there can be no doubt. Later historians blamed both the Queen and the Duke of Gloucester for this bizarre outcome and, whereas Richard can certainly be exonerated, similar certainty cannot be deployed in support of Elizabeth. Even her worst enemies did not claim that she was directly responsible and the King himself must take the blame but in the private and unrecorded world of pillow talk the suspicion remains. Elizabeth’s piety appears to have been entirely conventional. She offered dutifully at various shrines and made pious donations of a modest nature. She is alleged to have had a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary as mediatrix but the evidence for any such enthusiasm is slight. She was chief Lady of the Garter but that refl ected her status as queen rather than any particular devotion to chivalry. The only exception to this relative anonymity was her generosity to Queens’ College in Cambridge but she never showed very much interest in the work of the 58

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  college and was not a particular patron of scholars. Edward took a lively interest in the work of the new printing press established by William Caxton in 1576 but his main expenditure was not on books but on buildings. He virtually refounded the Order of the Garter and built the sumptuous chapel at Windsor as a setting for its ceremonial – but it was on the refurbishment of his own residences that he spent most of his money and time. His patronage of religion has been described as ‘rather sparse’ but did embrace the Carthusian monastery at Sheen, founded by Henry V, of which both Edward and his queen were generous supporters. In 1480 he was visited by his sister, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy and, on her prompting, introduced the rigorous order of reformed, or Observant, Franciscans. Although he was also well known for the lavish equipment of his chapels this was probably his most signifi cant contribution to the religious life of his kingdom. In literature both their tastes seem to have run to chronicles and French romances. Of humanist scholarship in the sense that that was understood in Italy, his Court appears to have been entirely innocent.

  During the last six or seven years of his life, Edward’s main diplomatic concern was the advantageous marriage of his own children and, although Elizabeth’s hand in these negotiations must be assumed, it is often hard to trace. Her eldest son by her fi rst marriage had already been provided for. As we have seen, he had been betrothed at fi rst to Anne, daughter of the Duke of Exeter and, when Anne died young, married to Cecily the daughter and heir of Lord Bonville. He had been created Earl of Huntingdon in 1471, and Marquis of Dorset in 1475. By 1480

  at the age of 25, he could consider himself well established in life. The diplomatic activity of 1475–81 was about Edward’s own children. In 1476 the 6-year-old Edward was proposed as a match for the Infanta Isabella of Castile, then for a daughter of the Emperor Frederick III, and then for a daughter of the former Duke of Milan, but in every case ‘… the chief diffi culty which they speak of will be owing to the great quantity of money which the king of England will want’

  ,23 by way of dowry. In other words Edward was being greedy, and overpricing his son. More realistically, in 1481, an agreement was almost concluded with Duke Francis II of Brittany for a marriage with his daughter and heir Anne but this was abandoned at the last minute possibly because of the King’s fears of the inevitable reaction from the King of France if the heir to one of his major fi efs were to wed the future King of England. Meanwhile Elizabeth (who was not, of course, the heir) had been betrothed to the Dauphin, and Cecily to the future James IV of Scotland, at the time boy of about 5. Of the older girls, only Mary was uncommitted and she may have been in poor health because she was to die in 1482 at the age of 15. Anne, Catherine and Bridget were too young and too far down the pecking order to have been considered in this context. Richard,

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  although almost equally young, was conscripted because John Mowbray the fourth Duke of Norfolk had died in January 1476 leaving an infant daughter as his only heir. With an eye on securing the great Mowbray inheritance, Edward immediately hallmarked her for the young Duke of York and they were actually married at Westminster in Januar

  y 1478.24 In the event, she died in November 1481, long before the pair could have co-habited, but the King’s objective had been secured because her inheritance lay vested in Duke Richard for the duration of his life, a situation confi rmed by statute in January 1483.This was the sole extent of the King’s success with all these negotiations, however, and when he died in April 1483 none of his surviving seven children was actually married. The whole job had, it appeared, been left for Elizabeth to do all over again. The King’s unexpected death left the Queen in no-mans land. Edward was a few days short of his 42nd birthday and had been ill for about a month. The cause of his death appears to have been overindulgence in wine, food and sex. In Shakespeare’s words he had ‘overmuch consumed his royal person’ and either his liver, or his heart, or both, collapsed under the strain. Contemporary accounts show him as suitably penitent for his lifestyle when it was too late for amendment and concerned to reconcile the feuds that raged among the courtiers around him, particularly that between Lord Hastings and the Marquis of
Dorset.25 The story that he was exercised by a rivalry between Elizabeth and the Duke of Gloucester appears to be a later interpolation. The issue that he did not satisfactorily resolve, however, was who should hold the regency for his 12-year-old heir or what kind of offi ce that should be. The last guidance in writing was a will drawn up at the time of his going to France in 1475. As we have seen, he had then left Elizabeth as Governor in his absence, so it was natural that she should have been named as Regent in the event of his demise. Apart from her family her power base at that time consisted of a de facto control over the council of the Prince of Wales, a position to which young Edward had been elevated within a year of his birth. For about three months the Queen appears to have presided at Council meetings, although her input into the discussions is not known. The King may have been dissatisfi ed with the results of this experiment because in the last week or so of his life he named his surviving brother, Richard of Gloucester, as Regent. There was no time to commit this formally to writing, but it was well enough known, and the Queen did not challenge it. Just as Edward appears to have transferred his sexual attentions to a new mistress – Jane Shore – in the last year of his life, so at the end he transferred his political trust to his brother. Elizabeth was left with her dower lands but with no political role. However, the situation was not as straightforward as it appeared. Because Edward had not defi ned the regency that he conferred on his brother, it was 60