Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (21 page)

While he may have offended his sister-in-law by calling her “Dame Elizabeth Grey,” Richard had at least very publicly guaranteed the future safety and welfare of her daughters. His promises—and his oath made on the Gospels—reflect widespread concerns that he had done away with her sons, for whose safety, as opposed to that of her daughters, there are no reassurances in the document.
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This strongly suggests that they were dead, while the specific mention of the Tower, and Richard’s willingness to give such a public guarantee, amounts to a tacit admittance that she had good cause for concern.

Clearly Elizabeth Wydeville had feared—especially in the wake of the sanctuary plot—that a pretext might be sought to find her daughters guilty of treason and worthy of punishment. But for Elizabeth of York, the King’s promises can only have emphasized the shame of her bastardy. He was contemplating marrying her to some gentleman, when, if her brothers really were dead, she was the rightful Queen of
England, and might yet be queen consort, if Henry Tudor realized his ambitions. And the dowry Richard was offering was paltry compared with the 10,000 marks [£1.5 million] willed her by Edward IV, and a cruel reminder of her reduced status.

In the circumstances, though, this was a pragmatic way of securing the girls’ futures, and Elizabeth Wydeville, “being strongly solicited to do so,” agreed to release them. On March 1, 1484, the same day her brother-in-law made his public declaration, she “sent her daughters from the sanctuary at Westminster to King Richard.”
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The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall castigated Elizabeth Wydeville for surrendering her daughters to her enemy: “Putting in oblivion the murder of her innocent children, the infamy and dishonor spoken by the King her husband, the living in adultery laid to her charge, the bastardizing of her daughters, forgetting also the faithful prayers and open oath made to the Countess of Richmond, mother of the Earl Henry, blinded by avaricious affection and seduced by flattering words, [she] delivered into King Richard’s hands her five daughters as lambs once again committed to the custody of the ravenous wolf.”

Yet what choice did she really have? There were pressing practical realities to be taken into account. Richard III was thirty-one, and might be in power for a very long time. She could not stay in sanctuary forever, especially in the face of the King’s guarantees; her continuing presence there might compromise the abbot’s standing with his monarch, and she had already been dependent on his kindness and charity for nearly a year. Furthermore, the abbey was still under siege on her account. If she refused to let her daughters leave, then Richard might well take them away, as he had young York, and on the same pretext. Her capitulation does not necessarily mean that she did not believe the King had murdered the princes. He had already judicially murdered another of her sons, on the flimsiest of pretexts, yet still she came to terms with him, doubtless hoping she had done the best she could for her remaining children.

Vergil states that “King Richard received all his brother’s daughters out of sanctuary into the court.” Hall follows Vergil, saying that the King caused them “to be conveyed into his palace [of Westminster] with
solemn receiving; as though, with his new, familiar, loving entertainment they should forget, and in their minds obliterate, the old committed injury and late perpetrated tyranny.” Buck also says that Elizabeth Wydeville sent the girls “to the court,” where they were “very honorably entertained and with all princely kindness.” Even so, it may have been a bitter experience for Elizabeth and her sisters to return to the palace where, just a year before, they were honored as royal princesses. Possibly resentment against their uncle, and anxiety about their mother, warred with pleasure and relief at being out of sanctuary and able to enjoy worldly pleasures and freedoms again. They were, after all, only young.

It is likely that they were received into the Queen’s household; as unmarried girls of royal birth, it was the only suitable place for them in a court dominated by men. But it seems that as soon as Elizabeth Wydeville left sanctuary, sometime after her daughters, they joined her. It is clear she did not return to court, as Croyland records that “the Lady Elizabeth was, with her four younger sisters, sent by her mother to attend the Queen at court” the following Christmas, so obviously they were not lodging there then. If she sent them to court, they must have been living with her.

All that is known of Elizabeth Wydeville’s whereabouts after she left sanctuary is that she was residing at Sheen in August 1485. The late Audrey Williamson wrote about an eighteenth-century tradition in which the Queen Dowager and her sons had once lived at Gipping Hall near Stowmarket, Suffolk, by permission of “the uncle,” presumably Richard III. Gipping Hall, which was demolished in the 1850s, was the seat of Sir James Tyrell, the man who as noted earlier probably arranged the murder of the princes, and it was rebuilt by him in 1474. From this late tradition, for which no earlier corroborating evidence exists, Williamson inferred that the boys had not been murdered at all, but sent here in secrecy with their mother by the King. If so, their sisters were with them.

There are obvious problems with this theory, not least the discovery, in 1674 in the Tower of London, of the bones of two children approximately the age of the princes at the time of their disappearance in 1483. But if they had survived, and were taken to Gipping Hall,
someone would surely have gotten to know about it. Late medieval royal and noble households were teeming places peopled with servants and officials, and privacy would not become a priority until the reign of Henry VIII. It is likely that several of those who served the Queen could have recognized her sons. Thus it would have been virtually impossible to keep the existence of the princes a secret, especially in the face of rumors of their deaths.

It is inconceivable that Richard, knowing that Elizabeth Wydeville had not hesitated to plot his overthrow, would have entrusted the princes to her care anyway, let alone in a house less than twenty miles from the coast, whence their escape to the Continent could easily have been arranged, even if that house did belong to one of his trusted retainers. The River Gipping flowed nearby, and was navigable all the way down to Ipswich and then, as the River Orwell, to the sea. Many disaffected Yorkists were just across the Channel with Henry Tudor; had it come to their knowledge that the sons of Edward IV still lived, and were at liberty on the Continent, they would surely have switched their allegiance instantly.

Some traditions may have a basis in fact, but even if this one originated with Elizabeth Wydeville retiring to Gipping Hall with her daughters, rather than her sons, it was still near the coast, and the chief objective of the sanctuary plot the previous year had been to spirit the Yorkist heiresses abroad. And it is highly unlikely that, in the wake of his undertaking to Elizabeth Wydeville, Richard would have entrusted her and her daughters to the custody of the man who’d had her sons killed.

Elizabeth Wydeville had been deprived of her property by Parliament, which had assigned her a life annuity of 700 marks [£117,750], which Richard had confirmed in his public undertaking. Both he and Parliament had stipulated that it was to be paid, not to her, but to John Nesfield, Squire of the Body to the King, “for the finding, exhibition, and attendance of Dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England.”
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Nesfield was to continue as the former Queen’s “attendant,” or rather, custodian.
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Historian David Baldwin has offered the compelling theory that she was sent to live in his charge, possibly at Heytesbury, a Wiltshire manor near Devizes, which he had been
granted on April 5 by Richard III after helping to suppress Buckingham’s rebellion the previous year.
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The manor had been confiscated from the Hungerfords after they supported the Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses and were attainted.

At Heytesbury, Elizabeth would have resided at East Court, a medieval manor house dating from the fourteenth century, the erstwhile seat of the Hungerfords. It was rebuilt in the sixteenth century and may have occupied the site of Heytesbury House, home of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, which still stands and probably incorporates some fragments of the medieval building.
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Nesfield held other properties in the north riding of Yorkshire, where his forebears had been landowners since the fourteenth century: the manors of Amotherby, near Malton, and Broughton. Both had a “capital messuage”—the chief residence of a lord of the manor, with outbuildings, possibly a courtyard, and a garden—in the thirteenth century,
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but there is no other record of them, and by 1484 they may not have been suitable residences for the former Queen and her daughters. It is more likely, therefore, that Elizabeth and her daughters went to stay at Heytesbury. Many years later Elizabeth would make a point of visiting this small village, which suggests she had some link to it.
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Maybe it was Nesfield who made certain that Elizabeth Wydeville kept her word and sent messages to Dorset in Brittany, urging him to abandon Henry Tudor and put an end to any idea of a marriage between Henry and her daughter Elizabeth. Her decision struck a blow to the hopes of the pretender, and provoked consternation and censure among his supporters, but it had been both wise and necessary—and she really had no choice in the matter. In January, Parliament had attainted Henry Tudor as a traitor, which meant that if he ever returned to England, he would be arrested and summarily executed. Elizabeth Wydeville must have realized that anyone supporting the mooted marriage between Henry Tudor and her daughter could be deemed guilty of misprision of treason.

We next hear of Nesfield in the summer of 1484, when he was captured while in naval combat with French and Scottish ships off Scarborough, and had to be ransomed by Richard III.
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David Baldwin
suggests that, because of his absence, Elizabeth Wydeville was placed in the custody of someone else and moved elsewhere, but it is also possible that Nesfield left someone trustworthy to keep an eye on her in his absence.
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Elizabeth’s cousin, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, had recently been appointed King’s Lieutenant in the North. The son of Richard’s sister Elizabeth and John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Lincoln’s loyalty had never been in doubt, and he now presided over the Council of the North, set up by Edward IV in 1472 to govern the region in the King’s name. In July 1484, Richard drew up ordinances for a new royal household—the King’s Household of the North—which was to be based at Sandal Castle, Yorkshire, Lincoln’s official headquarters. In September, Lincoln was also entrusted with responsibility for another royal household, at Sheriff Hutton Castle, fifty miles away, where the King was establishing a nursery for children of the House of York, notably Clarence’s son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, now aged nine, and his own bastard son, John of Gloucester, who was probably about the same age as Warwick. Richard had high hopes for this boy, whose “quickness of mind, agility of body, and inclination to all good customs” he warmly praised.
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Henry Lovell, Lord Morley, aged eighteen, Lincoln’s brother-in-law, also lived in the household. Some historians
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have conjectured that Elizabeth’s brothers were among the children at Sheriff Hutton, having been secretly conveyed there from the Tower, but apart from a reference to “the Lord Bastard” in the household ordinances,
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which probably refers to John of Gloucester, there is no evidence for this.

The ordinances laid down for the regulation of the establishment at Sheriff Hutton provided for “my lord of Lincoln and my Lord Morley to be at one breakfast, [and] the children together at one breakfast. My lord and the children” received the most generous allowances of food and drink. No other boys were to be allowed in the household apart from those sanctioned by Lincoln and the Council of the North,
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from which we might infer that at least one daughter of the House of York was living there, probably Warwick’s sister Margaret, aged eleven.
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It is unlikely that Richard III’s bastard daughter, Katherine Plantagenet,
was present,
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as she was now married to William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon.

It has been suggested by some historians
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that Elizabeth and her sisters were sent to reside at Sheriff Hutton in 1484; certainly Elizabeth was staying there in the summer of 1485. But because she and her sisters were sent by their mother to court at Christmas 1484, and there is no record of Elizabeth Wydeville living at Sheriff Hutton, it is more likely that they were living with her, probably at Heytesbury. Moreover, there is no record of her younger daughters ever being at Sheriff Hutton, and Elizabeth, now eighteen, was too old to be one of the children described in the ordinances.
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In 1484, according to Commines, the King offered Elizabeth Bishop Stillington’s bastard son, William, in marriage, which would have seemed a mighty insult, especially if she had come to regard Stillington as the archenemy of her family and the architect of its ruin. But the young man was shipwrecked off the coast of France, taken prisoner in Paris and “by mistake” starved to death.
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No English source mentions this proposed marriage, and it would have contravened the terms of the King’s undertaking to Elizabeth Wydeville, so the tale was probably an invention or garbled gossip.

Anne of York’s betrothal to Philip of Burgundy had been broken off after her father’s death. In 1484, Richard arranged for her to be affianced to Lord Thomas Howard, the eldest grandson of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk,
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a good match in the circumstances. But Cecily had to endure the humiliation of her cousin, Anne de la Pole, being betrothed by King Richard to Prince James of Scots, her own former fiancé. Hall, the Tudor chronicler, observed: “Here may well be noted the disordered affection which this kind [king] showed to his blood; for he, not remembering the tyranny that he had executed against his brother’s sons, the wrong and manifest injury he had done to his brother’s daughters, both in taking from them their dignity, possessions, and living, thought it would greatly redound to his honor and fame if he promoted his sister’s child to the dignity of a queen, rather than to prefer his brother’s daughter, whom he had disinherited.”