The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (29 page)

Thus encouraged, Henry began to write letters to his potential subjects in England. One undated letter, in which Henry describes Richard as ‘that homicide and unnatural tyrant’, likely belongs to this period.
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On 6 December, Richard in turn issued a letter to the Mayor of Windsor, and presumably to other officials around the country as well, complaining that ‘rebels and traitors, now confedered with our ancient enemies of France’ were tending writings […] to provoke and stir discord between us and our lords’.
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The next day, 7 December, Richard followed up with a royal proclamation:

    Forasmuch as the king our sovereign lord hath certain knowledge that Piers, Bishop of Exeter, Thomas Grey, late Marquis Dorset, Jasper late Earl of Pembroke, John late Earl of Oxford and Sir Edward Woodville with others divers his rebels and traitors, disabled and attainted by the authority of the High Court of Parliament, of whom many be known for open murderers and adulterers and extortioners, contrary to the pleasure of God and against all truth honour and nature hath forsaken their natural country taking them first to be under the obeisance of the Duke of Brittany and to him promised certain things which by him and his council were thought things to be greatly unnatural and abominable for them to grant observe keep and perform. And therefore the same utterly refused they seeing that the said duke and his council would not aid and succor them nor follow their ways privily departed out of his countries into France, there taking them to be under the obeisance of the king’s ancient enemy Charles calling himself king of France and too abuse and blind the commons of this said realm the said rebels and traitors have chosen to be their captain one Henry late calling himself Earl of Richmond which of his ambitious and insatiable covetousness stirred and excited by the confederacy of the king’s said rebels and traitors encroaches upon him the name and title of royal estate of this realm of England, whereunto he hath no manner interest right or colour as every man well knoweth.
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Richard went on to accuse Henry Tudor and his confederates of agreeing to give up the English claim to France and, more generically, of ‘coming to do the most cruel murders slaughters robberies and disherisons that ever were seen in any Christian realm’. He hastened to assure his subjects, however, that ‘our said sovereign lord as a well willed diligent and courageous prince will put his most royal person to all labor and pain necessary’ to subdue the threat.

One Woodville was not around to hear the proclamation: Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury. Since Lionel’s entrance into sanctuary at Beaulieu Abbey the previous autumn, Richard had been attempting to prise him out. On 15 December 1483, he had sent a letter to the abbot demanding that he produce documents supporting his right to offer a sanctuary (although Richard’s own mother-in-law had taken sanctuary there herself following the Earl of Warwick’s death at Barnet in 1471). He followed up this inquiry with a demand on 13 February 1484 that his two chaplains be allowed to bring Lionel into his presence; J.A.F. Thomson has suggested that Richard meant to allow Lionel to answer the charges against him that had been brought in Parliament in connection with the 1483 rebellion. Nonetheless, Lionel remained in sanctuary. By 1 December 1484, however, he was dead, as indicated by a letter where Richard III authorised the election of a successor. His cause of death is unrecorded. A seventeenth-century manuscript stated that he was buried at Beaulieu, while another source claims that a damaged tomb at Salisbury Cathedral is his.
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Five of Jacquetta’s sons had reached adulthood; now only two, Richard and Edward, remained.

At Westminster, Richard III put his worries aside and celebrated Christmas in high style, attracting the censure of the Crowland Chronicler: ‘during this Christmas feast too much attention was paid to singing and dancing and to vain exchanges of clothing between Queen Anne and Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the dead king, who were alike in complexion and figure’.
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But more than mere gown-swapping was going on, according to Crowland: ‘it was said by many that the king was applying his mind in every way to contracting a marriage with Elizabeth either after the death of the queen, or by means of a divorce for which he believed he had sufficient grounds’. A few days after the Christmas festivities, Richard’s queen fell seriously ill. On 16 March 1485, she died.

Was Richard, whose queen fell seriously ill after Christmas, thinking of marrying his niece? Crowland goes on to tell us that although Richard later publicly denied wishing to wed Elizabeth of York, he had had to be dissuaded from the plan by Sir Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby, who feared that such a match would lead to accusations by the northerners that Richard had caused the death of Queen Anne in order to marry his nubile niece. Crowland adds that Catesby and Ratcliffe also feared that as queen, Elizabeth might use her influence to avenge the death of Earl Rivers and Richard Grey upon those who had advised Richard to carry out the executions. To persuade Richard against such a match, his councillors brought in over a dozen theologians who claimed that the Pope could not issue a dispensation for such a match. The story seems a very specific and detailed one to have been fabricated by Crowland solely to malign Richard.

That there were rumours that Richard had poisoned his queen so that he could marry Elizabeth of York was confirmed by Richard himself. The Mercers’ Company Records contain his denial, made on 30 March:

    the king sent for and had before him at St John’s as yesterday the mayor and aldermen whereas he in the great hall there in the presence of many of his lords and of much other people showed his grief and displeasure aforesaid and said it never came in his thought or mind to marry in such manner wise nor willing or glad at the death of his queen but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be.
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A further, but very uncertain, piece of evidence exists in the form of a letter that was supposedly written by Elizabeth to John Howard, Duke of Norfolk. The letter, which exists only in paraphrase, was supposedly seen by Sir George Buck, a seventeenth-century apologist for Richard III, in a cabinet belonging to Norfolk’s descendant Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey. Buck may well have seen such a letter – as Arundel was living, it would have ill behoved Buck to fabricate its existence – but Buck’s
History of King Richard the Third
, in which the paraphrased letter appears, has a tangled and nightmarish editorial history, which includes revisions by the author, revisions by other parties, and fire damage. Out of this muddle, Arthur Kincaid reconstructed the paraphrased letter, supplying gaps in the text (indicated by Kincaid’s brackets below) with emendations in later versions of Buck’s work:

    First she thanked him for his many courtesies and friendly [offices, an]d then she prayed him as before to be a mediator for her in the cause of [the marriage] to the k[i]ng, who, as she wrote, was her only joy and maker in [this] world, and that she was his in heart and in thoughts, in [body,] and in all. And then she intimated that the better half of Fe[bruary] was past, and that she feared the queen would nev[er die.]
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As one can see (especially when the material in brackets is removed), the paraphrased letter lends itself to multiple interpretations. Is Elizabeth referring to her marriage at all? If so, is she referring to a marriage between herself and the not-yet-widowed king, or to a marriage she hopes the king to arrange for her? If the word ‘die’ is correct, is Elizabeth callously hoping Queen Anne will die to make way for the king to take her as his wife, or is she hoping that the queen will soon be released from her suffering? Do her references to the king being her ‘only joy and maker’ in this world, and to her being his ‘in heart and in thoughts’ reveal a lovesick teenager, or are they merely the florid conventions of medieval letter writing? Assuming the actual letter is close in substance to the paraphrased version as it appears here, all that one can say for certain is that it appears that as of February 1485, Elizabeth was eager for something to happen.

In contrast to the rumours that Richard had designs on his niece, we have some evidence that after Anne’s death, he entered into negotiations for the hand of Joanna, the sister of John II of Portugal. Barrie Williams points out that on 22 March 1485, six days after Anne’s death, Sir Edward Brampton set off on an embassy to Portugal – although as Doreen Court notes in a follow-up article, it is by no means certain that Brampton’s original brief was to propose a marriage between Richard and Joanna, or even that the proposal originated with the English government. In any case, at some point, one side or the other suggested that Richard III marry Joanna and that Elizabeth of York marry Manuel, Duke of Beja, who was John II’s cousin. Joanna, who at 33 was eight months Richard’s senior, had spent much of her adulthood in a convent and appeared to prefer the cloistered life to that of a royal wife. In August, the story goes, having been given an ultimatum by her brother’s government, she entered into prayer and meditation, during which she had a vision which told her that Richard was dead. The next morning, she duly told her brother that if Richard were alive, she would marry him; if he was dead, her brother was not to urge her again to marry. Richard, in fact, had just been killed in battle.
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Richard’s desire to marry his niece and the Portuguese negotiations may not be mutually incompatible. Although marriage to a niece Richard himself had declared illegitimate had its obvious disadvantages, it was not without its appeal. Assuming that Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, were dead, and everyone at this point had been behaving as if they were, placing their eldest sister on the throne as his queen was the one form of amends Richard could make to Edward IV’s disgruntled supporters. If the match were fertile – and Elizabeth’s mother and grandmother had been quite fecund – there was the likelihood that a grandson of Edward IV would sit on the throne. Such a marriage would also put paid to Henry Tudor’s plans to marry Elizabeth of York himself. Certainly Henry, as Vergil reported, was ‘pinched […] by the very stomach’ when the rumour of Richard’s plan to marry his niece made its way abroad.
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If Richard were planning marriage to Elizabeth of York, it would also explain an odd episode that happened around this time: Dorset’s attempted defection from Henry’s cause. According to Vergil, Elizabeth Woodville had advised Dorset, then staying in Paris, ‘to forsake earl Henry, and with all speed convenient to return into England, where he should be sure to be called of the king unto high promotion’. Dorset, ‘partly despairing for that cause of Earl Henry’s success, partly suborned by King Richard’s fair promises’, absconded under cover of darkness to Flanders, to the dismay of his fellow exiles, to whose plans he was privy. They launched a search for him, and Humphrey Cheyney tracked him to Compiègne and persuaded him to return to the fold.
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Promises of pardon and restoration might have been enough to persuade Elizabeth Woodville to urge her only remaining son to return to England, of course, but if she knew that Richard was proposing to marry her eldest daughter, it would have been an even stronger incentive for Elizabeth to send for Dorset.

If Richard had indeed been contemplating marrying his niece, but was talked out of the idea by his advisors, it is likely that it was only at this point that he turned his attention to negotiations for a foreign bride. The warrant authorising Brampton’s 22 March journey to Portugal does not specify the purpose of his mission. It is entirely possible, then, that Brampton went to Portugal initially not to negotiate a marriage but to enter into a treaty, and that the marriage later entered the picture – as it inevitably would have when the Portuguese realised that the king was now an eligible widower. Certainly the Portuguese seem to have been quite eager for the marriage, as they feared that Richard would otherwise make an alliance with Spain.
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With Richard having made his public denial of his plans to marry Elizabeth of York, the girl was sent, for propriety’s sake, to Richard’s castle of Sheriff Hutton, which had decidedly gloomy associations with the imprisonment of her uncle Anthony Woodville. There she had the company of Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of the executed Duke of Clarence, and probably his sister, Margaret, as well. Ten miles from the city of York, Sheriff Hutton was a grand castle, but moving from the royal court to Yorkshire must have been a jar for young Elizabeth.
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In the meantime, on 30 March, Richard III had brought yet another Woodville in from the cold by issuing a pardon to Richard Woodville, who on 12 January had bound himself for 1,000 marks to bear himself well and faithfully’.
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His activities and whereabouts during the rest of Richard III’s reign are unknown, although he would have been in straitened circumstances, as there is no indication that he had any of his lands restored to him.

While Elizabeth of York waited at Sheriff Hutton to see what the future might bring her, the invasion plans of the exiles in France were progressing, leading Richard III to establish himself in June at Nottingham. On 22 June he sent out commissions of array, requiring the commissioners to have knights, squires, and gentlemen ready to meet a call to arms at one hour’s notice. On 23 June, the king issued another proclamation against Henry Tudor, with the now familiar language denouncing his associates as ‘open murderers, adulterers, and extortioners’. This time, however, Dorset was omitted from the named ‘rebels and traitors’, suggesting that Richard still had hopes of his defection. The June proclamation also contains a genealogical discourse impugning the legitimacy of Henry’s grandfather, Owen Tudor, though not, interestingly enough, that of Henry’s own father Edward Tudor, son of Owen Tudor and Katherine of Valois.
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