Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (58 page)

In July 1498, Londoño and the sub-prior of Santa Cruz reported an instance of the King, Queen, and Margaret Beaufort sharing a similar sense of humor. They had heard of it from “a Spaniard, brought up and married in England,” who was “porter to the Queen of England. He said that some time ago the King was living at a palace about a quarter of a league distant from the town in which Puebla was staying. Puebla went every day, with all his servants, to dine at the palace, and continued his unasked-for visits during the space of four or five months. The Queen and the mother of the Queen sometimes asked him whether his masters in Castile did not provide him with food. On another occasion, when the King was staying at another palace, there was a report that Dr. de Puebla was coming. The King asked his courtiers, ‘For what purpose is he coming?’ They answered, ‘To eat!’ The King laughed at the answer.”
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This is a revealing insight into a private joke shared by Elizabeth, her mother-in-law, and her husband, which suggests that “subjection” was quite the wrong word to describe her relations with Lady Margaret.

There was a good reason to account for Elizabeth being out of sorts or looking strained or irritable during the ambassadors’ visit: she was two months pregnant, and possibly suffering with it. The King paid out money to her physician, Lewis Caerleon, probably for consultations and treatment connected with her condition.
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In the summer of 1498, during a visit to London, the Bishop of Cambrai (once alleged to be Warbeck’s real father) visited Henry VII and asked to see Perkin, who was duly produced for his inspection. Puebla
observed that he was “so much changed that I, and all other persons here, believe his life will be very short. He must pay for what he has done.” Puebla, doubtless acting on the orders of King Ferdinand, did not cease urging King Henry to rid himself of this embarrassment, hinting that Ferdinand was having second thoughts about marrying his daughter to a prince whose future throne might not be secure.
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On September 11, Bishop Fox was empowered to negotiate the marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV. Henry was resolved upon cementing the peace between England and Scotland, and liked the prospect of his grandson sitting on the Scots throne. James too was eager for the marriage, and there was talk of an early wedding, but Henry revealed to Pedro de Ayala that his wife and his mother had worked in concert again, this time to protect Margaret from the perils of marrying too young. “I have already told you more than once that a marriage between him and my daughter has many inconveniences,” he said. “She has not yet completed the ninth year of her age, and is so delicate and female [i.e., weak] that she must be married much later than other young ladies. Thus it would be necessary to wait at least another nine years. Beside my own doubts, the Queen and my mother are very much against this marriage. They say if [it] were concluded, we should be obliged to send the princess directly to Scotland, in which case they fear the King of Scots would not wait, but injure her and endanger her health.”
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Margaret Beaufort probably spoke from bitter experience, for her husband had not waited, and the likelihood is that giving birth at thirteen scarred her so badly, mentally as well as physically, that she had never borne another child. She and Elizabeth may also have heard reports of the Scots King’s womanizing and been concerned for Margaret. Bowing to this pressure from his womenfolk, Henry compromised and made James agree not to demand his bride before September 1503, when she would be nearly fourteen.
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Early in 1499 a young Cambridge student, Ralph Wilford, the son of a London cordwainer, suddenly declared that he was the real Warwick. Like Lambert Simnel, he had been encouraged in his deception by an errant cleric, in this case a friar. He was speedily apprehended and
“confessed that he was sundry times stirred in his sleep that he should name himself to be the Duke of Clarence’s son, and he should in process obtain such power that he should be King.” By now Henry VII’s patience was exhausted, and after personally interrogating the imposter, he did not hesitate to deal swiftly with him: on February 12, Wilford was hanged.
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Even so, the damage had been done, for the King was much disturbed by the appearance of yet another pretender, and—as he had probably feared—the Spanish sovereigns were dismayed when they heard of it.

Elizabeth was then in the last stages of pregnancy. The
Great Wardrobe Accounts
for January 1499 record payments for linen cloth for bearing sheets, “headkerchiefs, biggins [bonnets for the baby], and breast kerchiefs,” kersey for twelve couches (beds), and fustian “for a bed for the nursery,” all purchased for the Queen. On January 20 the King sent for the silver font from Canterbury Cathedral, paying the prior £2 [£970] for the favor.

Around the time she took to her chamber, Elizabeth had to deal with more bad news. On February 9, 1499, her brother-in-law, John, Viscount Welles, the husband of her sister Cecily, died of pleurisy at his London home. In his will he had passed over his other heirs and directed that all his property should go to Cecily for the term of her life, and that his body should be interred wherever she—with the consent of the King and Queen and the King’s mother—should deem appropriate. After his death Cecily sent to the King at Greenwich to discover his pleasure in the matter. He commanded that Welles be buried with great solemnity in the old Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey. Cecily apparently returned to the Queen’s household, where, given Elizabeth’s love and care for her sisters, she was assured of a sympathetic welcome.
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By February 19, Anne Crown, mistress of the nursery (probably identified with Anne Crowmer), was installed and awaiting the arrival of her charge. Under her was Anne Skern, who had nursed Princess Mary, and “five gentlewomen of the nursery.”
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Elizabeth bore her third son, her sixth child, on Thursday, February 21, 1499, at Greenwich.
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He was baptized there in the church of the Observant Friars on February 24. The Great Wardrobe provided
linen for the silver font from Canterbury, cords for hanging the canopy that would be borne over the infant, red worsted, gilt nails, and other items
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against the christening, which was “very splendid, and the festivities such as though an heir to the crown had been born.”
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The baby was named Edmund, after Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond.

Margaret Beaufort was Edmund’s godmother at the font, and gave him the generous gift of £100 [£48,600], as well as handsomely rewarding the midwife and the nurses.
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Clearly she was relieved to see both mother and child safely delivered, for “there had been much fear that the life of the Queen would be in danger, but the delivery, contrary to expectations, had been easy.”
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A payment of 6s.8d. [£160] made by the King on the day after the birth to “Wulf the Physician at two times”
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may reflect the precautions put in place should something go wrong. We do not know why there were fears for the Queen’s life, unless the shock of her brother-in-law’s death and her sister’s bereavement had affected her badly, but the ministrations of her doctors the previous year suggest she had had a difficult pregnancy.

Prince Edmund was styled Duke of Somerset,
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a title proudly borne by his Beaufort ancestors, although he was probably never formally ennobled since no enrollment of any patent can be traced.

Polydore Vergil recorded that “by his wife Elizabeth, [Henry VII] was the father of eight children, four boys and as many girls”; and John Foxe, writing in the reign of Elizabeth I, stated that “Henry VII had by Elizabeth four men children and of women children as many, of whom only three survived.” John Stow, the Elizabethan antiquarian, states that there was a fourth and youngest son called Edward. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Carte also asserted, in his history of England, that there was a fourth son who died in infancy, while in the nineteenth century, Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, recorded a fourth son, Edward, who died very young and was buried in Westminster Abbey. However, the royal genealogist Francis Sandford, writing in the seventeenth century, says that Edmund was the third and youngest son.

Modern biographers
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have put forward all kinds of theories about
a fourth son. One names him George,
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but most call him Edward. His birth date has variously been given as 1487–88
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and 1495–96,
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suggesting some confusion with Princess Mary, 1497
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or 1500–01.

There is no contemporary evidence to support any of these theories. Nor is there any record of Elizabeth having more than seven pregnancies. All are documented in one way or another, so it is unlikely that a prince called Edward ever existed. The most telling evidence in favor of the Queen having borne only three sons is to be found in two works of art. The St. George altarpiece at Windsor, which depicts Henry and Elizabeth and their children adoring St. George, and dates from 1505–09, shows four daughters and only three sons. An illumination in the “Ordinances of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception,” dating from 1503, also shows three sons and four daughters. Given that all the known children who died young are included in each of these groups, which were painted after Elizabeth’s death, we might expect to see a fourth son—if there had been one—in both pictures.

There also exists in the British Library the “Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England,” dating from 1511, which has tiny circular images of Henry and Elizabeth with seven children, labeled Arthur, Edmund, Henry, Katherine, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth. Margaret and Katherine are shown as boys—the other girls wear gable hoods.
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The likelihood is that Vergil got it wrong and there were only three sons of the marriage. Claims by modern historians
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that there were other children who died unnamed in infancy are not substantiated by any contemporary evidence.

In May 1499, with the portly Puebla standing in for the Infanta, Prince Arthur was married by proxy in a ceremony in the chapel at Tickenhill Palace, his house near Bewdley, Worcestershire. This was “a fair manor place west of the town, standing in a goodly park well wooded” on a hill in the Severn Valley. Originally built in the fourteenth century, it had been enlarged by Edward IV for his son, the Prince of Wales, when the Council of the Marches was established, and Henry VII converted it into a palace for Prince Arthur.
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It was intimated by the King and Queen to the Spanish ambassador
that the ladies Katherine brought with her to England should be “of gentle birth”—for “the English attach great importance to good connections”—and “beautiful, or, at the least, by no means ugly.”
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From 1499 to 1501, Arthur and Katherine were encouraged to write frequently to each other. They corresponded in Latin in a formal style, no doubt supervised by their elders. Although the young couple had not yet met, they expressed the proper sentiments required by convention. One letter sent by Arthur on October 5, 1499, from Ludlow Castle is typical of how a royal courtship was conducted:

The expressions in the letter are those of an adult, and it seems unlikely that a thirteen-year-old boy would have written them; probably his words were dictated by his tutors.

In September, while the King and Queen were away on a progress in Hampshire,
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the celebrated scholar Erasmus, then a guest of fellow
humanist William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, was taken to meet their younger children at Eltham. Years later he recalled: “Thomas More paid me a visit, and took me for recreation on a walk to a neighboring country palace, where the royal infants were abiding, Prince Arthur excepted, who had completed his education. The princely children were assembled in the hall and were surrounded by their household, to whom Mountjoy’s servants added themselves. In the middle of the circle stood Prince Henry, then only nine [
sic
] years old, and already having something of royalty in his demeanor, in which there was a certain dignity combined with a singular courtesy.” A painted terracotta bust by Guido Mazzoni in the Royal Collection, of a chubby-cheeked, mischievous-looking, laughing boy is thought to portray young Henry around this time (
ca
.1498–1500), and may have been commissioned by Henry VII himself.

On Prince Henry’s right hand “stood the Princess Margaret, a child of eleven [
sic
] years, afterward Queen of Scotland. On the other side was the Princess Mary, a little one of four [
sic
] years of age, engaged in her sports, whilst Edmund, an infant, was held in his nurse’s arms.”
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