Blood Sisters (27 page)

It was, says Crowland also, in February that ‘nearly all the lords of the realm, both spiritual and temporal, together with the higher knights and esquires of the king’s household … met together at the special command of the king’ in certain lower rooms near the passage which leads to the queen’s apartments; and here, ‘each subscribed his name to a kind of new oath … of adherence to Edward, the king’s only son, as their supreme lord, in case anything should happen to his father’ – never mind that this was yet another heir who had still not reached his teens.

With the turn of the year, in other words, the pressure was being piled on Elizabeth Woodville. Stripped of the dower rights she would have enjoyed as former queen, she would be without income if she and her daughters stayed in sanctuary.

On 1 March, in the presence of lords spiritual and temporal and the mayor and aldermen of London, Richard swore

upon these holy Evangels of God [relics of the Evangelists] by me personally touched, that if the daughters of dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England, that is to wit Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Katherine and Bridget, will come unto me out of the Sanctuary of Westminster, and be guided, ruled and demeaned after me, then I shall see that they be in surety of their lives, and also not suffer any manner hurt by any manner person … to be done by way of ravishment or defiling contrary their wills, nor them or any of them imprison within the Tower of London or other prison.

The mention of the Tower may imply that, as Richard was well aware, Elizabeth was still suspicious of him. Instead, he would ‘put them in honest places of good name and fame, and them honestly and courteously shall see to be found and entreated, and to have all things requisite and necessary for their exhibition and findings as my kinswomen; and that I shall marry such of them as now be marriageable to gentlemen born’. The prospect of a mere ‘gentleman’ was not exciting for the former princesses, but expectations had sunk and it was better than no marriage at all.

The declaration was firstly about the daughters, not about Elizabeth Woodville herself. But it went on: ‘I shall yearly from henceforth content and pay, or cause to be contented or paid, for the exhibition and finding of the said dame Elizabeth Grey during her natural life, at four terms of the year, that is to wit at Pasche [Easter], Midsummer, Michaelmas, and Christmas, to John Nesfield, one of the squires for my body, for his finding to attend upon her, the sum of seven hundred marks of lawful money of England.’

Elizabeth relented. Vergil wrote of how Richard ‘often’ sent messengers to her in sanctuary, ‘promising mountains’. ‘The messengers being grave men, though at the first by reducing to memory the slaughter of her sons they somewhat wounded the queen’s mind, and that her grief seemed scarce able to be comforted, yet they assayed her by so many means, and so many fair promises, that without much ado they began to mollify her (for so mutable is that sex), in so much that the woman heard them willingly, and finally said she would yield herself unto the king.’

Some time that month Elizabeth’s daughters left sanctuary.
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It is not known where they went, or in what company. The younger ones at least may have been moved to the country for some time – they may even have been among the unnamed royal children at Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire about whose maintenance instructions were given in July. Psychologically speaking, it would surely have been better if they had all gone to the country rather than face those at court who had known them in their glory. But it is also possible that the girls went straight to court, and it is this picture – of their blithely enjoying the gaieties provided by the man who may have killed their brothers – that has done much to damage the reputation of the women of Edward IV’s family.

Even if Elizabeth Woodville believed her sons to be dead by Richard’s hand, she may have felt for a variety of reasons that she had no option but to leave sanctuary and come to some sort of terms with him. She may have been afraid that, by this late point in the Middle Ages, the laws of sanctuary might not be respected; she had no means of financial support there; and her clerical hosts must have been growing desperate for her to leave. She may have been enough of a pragmatist to accept that her boys were gone, and her responsibility now was to make the best deal for her girls – though, if she believed Richard had killed her sons, then surely she was sending those daughters into the lion’s den. She may have been such a venal woman she could not resist the chance of better living conditions, even if the donor were her sons’ murderer. But there are several other more intriguing possibilities.

It seems possible (given her earlier plots, and her imminent conversion to Henry’s cause) that her compliance was only on the surface, and that she was secretly working against Richard. Even more interestingly, when Elizabeth herself left sanctuary in 1484, possibly rather later than her daughters, she may have had reason to know that Richard was
not
guilty of her sons’ deaths.

For the rest of Richard’s reign, Elizabeth Woodville simply disappears. One suggestion which has been made would explain this completely: either or both princes left the Tower alive, and when Elizabeth emerged from sanctuary it was because she had been promised that her sons, or at least the younger of them, would be quietly allowed to join her.
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The elder boy is supposed to have been ill in the summer of 1483, and it is possible he had died from natural causes.
²⁰
None of the later pretenders to Henry VII’s throne claimed to be the elder prince, suggesting that he, unlike his brother, was known by then to be dead. They were, in any case, no longer princes but officially royal bastards – of whom there were several already. But the boys’ ultimate fate remains a mystery.

The possibility cannot wholly be ruled out that the younger boy at least may – with or without Richard’s connivance – eventually have been sent abroad (just as Cecily sent her sons abroad in time of danger), and/or given a new identity. Francis Bacon,
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writing a century later, has Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who claimed to be Elizabeth Woodville’s younger son, saying that he would not reveal details of his escape from the Tower. ‘Let it suffice to think I had a mother living, a Queen, and one that expected daily such a commandment from the tyrant for the murdering of her children.’ The clear implication is that Elizabeth Woodville smuggled her younger son away; and though the words of a pretender must lack credibility, it shows the idea was in currency.

If this were done with Richard’s connivance, the intention might have been to get the boy out of the way of Henry, to whom he could have figured as either a tool or a threat. If so, it would not only explain Elizabeth Woodville’s sudden accord with Richard, but help to clear up one minor mystery: why Elizabeth was lying so low during these months that her whereabouts are uncertain, from the time she left Westminster Abbey right up to the time she starts appearing in documents, after Richard’s death, as one of the new king’s beneficiaries.

The real mystery about the Princes in the Tower concerns the behaviour of their family’s women. That the princes’ mother and sisters could, within months of their deaths, come to terms with their murderer has been put down to fear and pragmatism in a brutal age. Of course if Richard gave assurances of his innocence the women might have been eager to be convinced: they had, after all, few options other than compliance. But if Elizabeth Woodville believed her boys had not been murdered – or not murdered by Richard – it would explain everything even more simply.

For a few weeks the kingdom seemed to settle down. Richard in many ways was proving himself an admirable ruler: his parliament had enacted a considerable amount of socially beneficial law making, for example, the legal system more accessible to the poor. But once again unforeseen events were to change the situation completely, and once again it was the fate of a son which determined that of a dynasty.

On 9 April 1484 young Edward of Middleham, the only child of Richard and Anne, died after what Crowland calls ‘an illness of but short duration’. It took some days for the news to reach the court but then, says Crowland, ‘you might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief’. Anne’s state must have been truly pitiable. Looking at the extremely limited records of her short life as queen, it is striking just how isolated she seems. In-fighting over her parents’ estates had left her alienated from those powerful relations who survived; while Richard had taken to himself the interests of those northerners once regarded as her family’s allies and was giving away some of her family lands
²²
to bolster his network of support. The death of Richard and Anne’s son may have struck a fatal blow to their relationship. Vergil suggests that it was now Richard began to complain of Anne: she had given him an heir, but that heir was gone and there was no spare. Judging by her mother and sister, low fertility seems to have run in Anne’s family.

Richard, as the Crowland chronicler points out, had at least the concerns of the kingdom to distract him. The death of his only heir made the political situation more dangerous: the succession was again in doubt. There was of course Warwick, Clarence’s son, who had been brought to London and, for a time at least, placed in Anne’s charge. Clarence’s attainder theoretically removed all rights of inheritance from his son; attainders, however, could be reversed or ignored. But if that were done Warwick, as the son of Richard’s elder brother, would have a stronger claim to the throne than Richard himself.

Warwick, however, passed into manhood apparently placidly, in a kind of genteel captivity; Vergil later spoke of his simplicity, and there is a received impression, so widespread it may suggest a grain of truth, that there was something wrong with him. It cannot have been an obvious disability – but while his name served for pretenders, no one ever seems to have considered placing Warwick himself on the throne.

Warwick apart, it has even been suggested that Richard planned eventually to rehabilitate the princes as his heirs. Another good candidate for heir apparent was his sister’s son John, Earl of Lincoln – a grown man able enough for Richard to entrust him with the task of controlling the north. But certainly Henry Tudor gained in importance by Anne’s son’s death; and so, naturally, did Elizabeth of York.

That summer Richard was in the north, once Anne’s own family turf. In addition to the usual business of kingship, there was other trouble there. In the summer of 1484 Richard wrote a letter to his mother Cecily: ‘Madam I recommend me to you as heartily as is to me possible, Beseeching you in my most humble and effectuous wise of your daily blessing to my Singular comfort & defence in my need. And madam I heartily beseech you that I may often hear from you to my Comfort.’

He offers, through the mouth of his servant, ‘such News as been here’; recommends a man of his own to be her officer for her Wiltshire lands, trusting he should do her good service, ‘And I pray god send you the accomplishment of your most noble desires.’ All allowances made for the style of the times, surely this letter from Cecily’s ‘most humble Son’ shows a real degree of warmth? – or, alternatively, an eagerness to placate.

In the summer of 1484, an unflattering ditty was posted up around London: ‘The cat, the rat, and Lovell our dog, rulen all England, under an hog’ – Catesby, Ratclyff, Lord Lovell and Richard himself, whose emblem was a white boar. Things were going sour. The rebellion of the past autumn and its suppression had in some ways lanced a boil, but it had also made clear that Henry Tudor was a significant threat, especially if he could be coupled with Elizabeth of York; and it had shown Margaret Beaufort in her true colours as a continuing source of danger. Richard, so Vergil says, ‘yet more doubting than trusting in his own cause’ was so ‘vexed, wrested, and tormented in mind’ with fear of Henry’s threat that he had ‘a miserable life’. That is why he decided to ‘pull up by the roots’ the source of his trouble and sent messages to the Breton court.

Duke Francis was at that time suffering from some kind of mental illness. This left negotiations in the hands of his treasurer, who was less honourable and more amenable. By June Richard had been able to announce a treaty of cooperation with Brittany: Margaret must have feared that its terms included handing back Henry. In September those fears were realised: her son would be exchanged for England’s backing in Brittany’s quarrels.

That month, however, the deal was thwarted. Vergil describes how John Morton in his Flanders exile sent word to Henry ‘by Christopher Urswycke, who was come to him out of England about the same time …’ This emissary, like Morton, had been a member of Margaret Beaufort’s household. There was an urgent message to France to confirm that the exiles would be welcome there; a dramatic escape; and a chivalrous finale when Duke Francis, recovering his health and sanity, paid the expenses for Henry’s fellow exiles, under Edward Woodville, to join him in France.

Fresh impetus had now been given to any attempt to promote Henry’s claim. The French were bound to seize on him as a pawn both in their ongoing negotiations with Richard, and in their own power struggles which had followed the death of King Louis in the summer of 1483 and the accession of the thirteen-year-old Charles VIII. The tussle for control of the young king resulted in victory for Charles’s elder sister Anne of Beaujeu – which meant, ironically, that yet another woman would play a significant part in English political affairs. From the time Charles was informed on 11 October that Henry had crossed his border, the Tudor claimant was treated with a sympathy that gave him every hope the French would fund another invasion attempt.