The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (31 page)

At Arthur’s christening, held at Winchester on 24 September, the Woodvilles were prominent.
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The dowager queen, Elizabeth Woodville, served as the infant’s godmother; she presented her grandson with a ‘rich cup of gold’. The prince, wearing a mantel of crimson cloth of gold furred with ermine, was carried by Elizabeth of York’s sister Cecily, who was assisted by the Marquis of Dorset and by the Earl of Lincoln, whose heart, as it will soon appear, may not have been entirely in his task. The Marchioness of Dorset bore the infant’s train, and Edward Woodville and three other men carried the canopy over the baby.

The christening would in fact be Elizabeth Woodville’s last major ceremonial appearance. On 10 July 1486, she had agreed with the Abbot of Westminster to lease a mansion within the abbey called ‘Cheyne gate’.
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Was she looking for seclusion, as suggested by Arlene Okerlund, or was she simply interested in obtaining a residence convenient to the court when it was at Westminster? Whatever her reasons, it is not clear whether she actually stayed there and, if so, how long she remained there, for sometime later, she moved to Bermondsey Abbey, a Cluniac monastery on the banks of the Thames.

Elizabeth’s removal coincided with, and has often been linked to, a conspiracy against Henry VII which had been building since the previous autumn. The conspiracy, which arose in Ireland, took the unlikely form of recruiting a boy, Lambert Simnel, to impersonate Edward, Earl of Warwick, the young son of the Duke of Clarence. In fact, the unfortunate Warwick was shut up fast in the Tower of London, to which the cautious Henry VII had moved him shortly after winning his crown at Bosworth.

On 1 May 1487, Henry VII, for what is described in classically vague bureaucratic terms as ‘divers considerations’, transferred Elizabeth Woodville’s real properties to her daughter, the queen.
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According to Polydore Vergil, the decision to ‘deprive’ the dowager queen of her possessions was taken in the midst of a council meeting called at Sheen to discuss the rebellion. Yet the reason Vergil gives has nothing to do with the nascent rebellion, but with her 1484 agreement with Richard III to leave sanctuary.
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The Tudor historian Hall follows Vergil in ascribing Elizabeth’s loss of her properties to her long-ago deal with Richard, adding, ‘By this folly and inconstancy of the queen, she incurred the hatred and displeasure of many men, and for that cause lived after in the Abbey of Bermondsey beside Southwark’.
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As Elizabeth’s rapprochement with Richard III was old news in 1487, this hardly seems a plausible explanation.

It was not until the seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon wrote his history of Henry VII’s reign, that Elizabeth was explicitly linked to the Lambert Simnel conspiracy:

    That which is most probable [is] that it was the Queen Dowager from whom this action had the principal source and motion. For certain it is, she was a busy negotiating woman […] and was at this time extremely discontent with the King, thinking her daughter (as the King handled the matter) not advanced but depressed: and none could hold the book so well to prompt and instruct this stage-play, as she could. Nevertheless it was not her meaning, nor no more was it the meaning of any of the better and sager sort that favoured this enterprise and knew the secret, that this disguised idol should possess the crown; but at his peril to make way to the overthrow of the King; and that done, they had their several hopes and ways. That which doth chiefly fortify this
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is, that as soon as the matter brake forth in any strength, it was one of the King’s first acts to cloister the Queen Dowager in the nunnery of Bermondsey …
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Bacon’s admitted conjecture, arrived at more than a century after the events in question, has for some taken on the aura of historical fact. Yet, as others have pointed out, it defies credibility that Elizabeth would support supplanting her daughter’s husband (and their heir, her new grandson) in favour of the Earl of Warwick, the son of the man who had aided in the death of her father and her brother, John. An alternative explanation is that Elizabeth believed that Simnel was not Warwick, but the vanished Edward V, her son.
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While such a belief certainly would give Elizabeth a motive, the argument is undermined by the failure of any contemporary or near-contemporary source to mention such a claimed identity for the pretender. Moreover, as the rebellion attracted close associates of Richard III such as Francis, Viscount Lovell, it is difficult to imagine any of them fighting to restore Edward V to the throne when they themselves had helped remove him from it in the first place.

It is possible, however, that Henry VII’s seizure of Elizabeth’s properties was linked to his suspicions of her son, Dorset. According to Vergil, the king, preparing to meet the rebels in battle, arrived at Bury St Edmunds, where, believing Dorset to be privy to the conspiracy, he arrested him and sent him to the Tower.
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Bacon amplified the story:

    And being come to St Edmund’s-bury, he understood that Thomas Marquis Dorset […] was hasting towards him to purge himself of some accusations which had been made against him. But the king, though he kept an ear for him, yet was the time so doubtful, that he sent the Earl of Oxford to meet him and forthwith to carry him to the Tower; with a fair message nevertheless that he should bear that disgrace with patience, for that the King meant not his hurt, but only to preserve him from doing hurt either to the King’s service or to himself; and that the King should always be able (when he had clared himself) to make him reparation.
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Unlike his mother, Dorset did stand to gain from putting Warwick upon the throne: Dorset had been Warwick’s guardian during Edward IV’s reign and had probably hoped to marry him to one of his many daughters. That old tie, combined with Dorset’s defection from him during exile, might have been enough to awaken the suspicions of the jittery king, who after all had good reason to know how easily a ruler could be pushed off his throne. That Dorset was indeed under a cloud at this time is confirmed by the king’s failure to summon him to Parliament that autumn.
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Nonetheless, whatever reservations the king had against Dorset’s loyalty, they did not extend to the whole of the Woodville family: as we shall see, Edward Woodville not only fought for the king against the rebels but held high command in the king’s army. Furthermore, if Henry did suspect Elizabeth of plotting, Bermondsey, an abbey conveniently located on the Thames, seems an odd place to stow her; there were more secure and more remote locations to which she might have been sent.

It is quite possible that Elizabeth’s removal to Bermondsey was prompted chiefly by financial concerns on the part of the king. The order transferring Elizabeth’s estates is sandwiched in among a number of routine matters of royal business, suggesting that the order had likewise been an administrative matter rather than a security measure. Due to chance and political upheavals, it had been a century since a married king had faced the situation of maintaining a queen dowager while assuring his own queen of her proper landed endowment. Henry solved this problem by transferring Elizabeth Woodville’s lands to her daughter; in recompense, Elizabeth received an annuity of 400 marks, raised on 19 February 1490 to £400.
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While a different king might have treated Elizabeth Woodville more generously, the events of the past few years had left England on shaky financial ground, and Elizabeth could at least console herself that her daughter was receiving a suitable endowment. Moreover, Henry may have thought that Elizabeth would soon have no need of an endowment in England, because on 28 November 1487, he and the Scottish king, James III, agreed that the latter would marry Elizabeth. The negotiations had been carried on pursuant to the three-year truce that the English and the Scots had formed the previous July. James’s death in June 1488, however, kept Elizabeth from becoming the Queen of Scots.
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The Lambert Simnel conspiracy had gained fresh blood when John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, Edward IV’s nephew by his sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, fled the country for Burgundy. There he began raising an army to support the pretended Earl of Warwick.
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Hitherto, Lincoln had given no sign of disloyalty, even dutifully playing his role at Prince Arthur’s christening and attending a council meeting in February 1487. As his own claim to the throne was quite strong, he may have been planning to replace Henry VII with himself rather than either the real or the feigned Warwick. His aunt Margaret, the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, and her step-son-in-law Maximilian of Austria, the Regent of Burgundy, supplied him with an army of 2,000 mercenaries, led by Martin Schwarz. In May 1487, Lincoln and his forces arrived in Dublin.

Henry VII was well prepared for them. Having been apprised of a possible invasion in March, he had left on a progress through East Anglia, apparently in the expectation of a landing on the east coast. On 22 April, however, he moved abruptly to Coventry, probably after receiving news of possible trouble on the west coast as well. On 13 May at Kenilworth, learning that the rebels had landed in Ireland, he wrote to Elizabeth of York’s chamberlain, the Earl of Ormond, asking that the earl bring ‘our dearest wife and […] our dearest mother’ to him there – an indication, perhaps, of the affection he had for both women.

On 24 May at Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin, the pretender’s supporters, who included Lincoln, Richard III’s old ally Francis, Viscount Lovell, and Garrett Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, had crowned the boy as ‘Edward VI’. With the new king in tow, the group soon sailed from Dublin and landed on 4 June at the Cumbrian coast.

At Kenilworth, Henry VII had appointed his commanders: Jasper, Duke of Bedford, the mainguard, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the vanguard, and George, Lord Strange, the rearguard. The vanguard was divided into two wings, the right of which was commanded by Edward Woodville.

Edward’s first duty was to ride to York and stall the invaders by harassing them. According to Molinet, the only chronicler to record Edward’s actions, he had 2,000 horsemen; Christopher Wilkins, however, estimates that he had only 500, given Molinet’s fondness for large numbers.
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For three days outside Doncaster, Edward and his men made life thoroughly miserable for ‘King Edward’s’ army, although Molinet, a Burgundian chronicler, shines his best light on the pretender’s forces: ‘[Edward] was so closely pursued from encampment to encampment and driven back for three days on end that he was forced to fall back in great haste through the forest of Nottingham’.
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As Christopher Wilkins points out, however, the purpose of Edward’s mission was to impede the advance of the invaders which he achieved by cutting their miles travelled per day by half.
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Mission accomplished, Edward rejoined the main army south of Nottingham. On 16 June, the two armies met at Stoke Field. King Henry had about 12,000 men, the rebels only 8,000 to 9,000.

The battle was over in about an hour. The Irish in the rebel army were ill-equipped, and there were no timely defections to save the day for the invaders. The Earl of Lincoln was killed in battle, as was the mercenary leader Martin Schwarz. Francis, Viscount Lovell, disappeared; whether he was killed in battle or fled abroad remains a mystery to this day, although there is a grisly legend that a skeleton found in a bricked-up room in one of his manors was his remains.
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The young pretender, Lambert Simnel, was captured and set to work turning a spit in the royal kitchens; eventually, he rose to the position of royal falconer and according to Vergil was still alive in 1534.
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The real Warwick was far less fortunate. The rebellion, and the arrival of a new pretender, Perkin Warbeck, on the scene a few years later, put paid to any chances he had had of being freed from the Tower. Warwick spent the rest of his life in captivity and was executed in 1499 for plotting with Perkin Warbeck; he may well have been entrapped in entering into communications with the pretender.

Having beaten back the first major challenge to his kingship, Henry could now turn his thoughts to a happier matter: the coronation of his queen, which took place on 25 November 1487.
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There were two notable Woodville absences: the dowager queen and her son, Dorset. Custom might have prevented Elizabeth Woodville, a crowned queen herself, from taking part in the ceremony, but she is not listed as being present even at the feast afterward, unlike the king’s mother, who observed the ceremony from a private spot and dined with the queen. Was she prevented from coming, or did she choose not to come? Some very awkward guests were present at the coronation, these being the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, whose son the Earl of Lincoln had died at Stoke fighting against Henry, and Margaret Pole, the sister of the imprisoned Warwick. Given their presence, it seems unlikely that Elizabeth Woodville would have been kept away. Perhaps the imprisonment of her son, Dorset, had soured her relations with the king. Dorset himself may have still been in the Tower, according to Bacon, who informs us that he was released after the coronation, ‘to show that it was now fair weather again, and that the imprisonment of Thomas Marquis Dorset was rather upon suspicion of the time than of the man’.
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