Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (32 page)

According to Lord Stanley, Henry and Elizabeth had several discussions about being “joined together in the fourth and fourth degrees of kindred,” and he heard them say “they wished to make use of an apostolic dispensation in the matter of such impediment.”
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Pope Innocent VIII was now approached for a special dispensation. Giovanni de’ Gigli wrote to him, urging the marriage as the best means of establishing peace in England. Henry’s emissary to the Vatican was instructed to
praise Elizabeth in a formal oration to his Holiness: “The beauty and chastity of this lady are indeed so great that neither Lucretia nor Diana herself were ever more beautiful or more chaste. So great is her virtue, and her character so fine, that she certainly seems to have been preserved by divine will from the time of her birth right up until today to be consort and Queen.”
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No mention was made of Elizabeth’s claim to the throne;
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again, Henry did not want to be seen to be King in right of his wife. Already he was finding that his bride’s royal lineage was proving an embarrassment as well as an advantage.

Henry did not need to wait for the Pope’s sanction to arrive. He and “the most illustrious Lady Elizabeth, eldest legitimate and natural daughter of the late Edward, sometime King of England,” drew up a joint petition to the papal legate, Giacomo Passarelli, Bishop of Imola, “setting forth that whereas the said King Henry has, by God’s providence, won his realm of England, and is in peaceful possession thereof, and has been asked by all the lords of his realm, both spiritual and temporal, and also by the general council of the said realm, called Parliament, to take the said lady Elizabeth to wife, he, wishing to accede to the just petitions of his subjects, desires to take the said lady to wife, but cannot do so without dispensation, inasmuch as they are related in the fourth and fourth degrees of kindred, wherefore petition is made on their behalf to the said legate to grant them dispensation by his apostolic authority to contract marriage and remain therein, notwithstanding the said impediment of kindred, and to decree the offspring to be born thereof legitimate.”
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On January 14, at Westminster, the couple appointed proctors, who presented their petition to the legate in the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Two days later, after hearing testimony from the mandatory eight witnesses required by the Church, including Lord Stanley, and taking into account the people’s impatience to see the marriage concluded, Imola issued an ordinary dispensation allowing Henry and Elizabeth to marry (which was confirmed in a brief issued by the bishop on March 2 following). Given that this was just two days before the wedding, and that preparations for it were nearing completion, Henry must have been advised that the dispensation would be forthcoming, and that the Pope’s bull would be just a formality.
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The marriage could go ahead. It was now five months since the King had emerged triumphant at Bosworth.

“At last, upon the eighteenth of January [1486] was solemnized the so long expected and so much desired marriage between the King and the Lady Elizabeth,”
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and “great gladness filled the kingdom.” The wedding took place at Westminster with “great magnificence displayed to everyone’s satisfaction.”
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It is uncertain whether it was solemnized in the abbey or in St. Stephen’s Chapel. Surprisingly, no detailed account survives, which may be because the ceremony took place in the greater privacy of St. Stephen’s. The bridegroom was twenty-nine, the bride nearly twenty.

“The Pope had opportunely sent a legate to celebrate the nuptials,”
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but it was Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury, who performed the ceremony “in the sight of the Church.”
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As Bernard André colorfully put it, “his hand held the sweet posy wherein the white and red roses were first tied together.”

Among the wedding guests were Elizabeth’s aunts, Anne Wydeville, Lady Wingfield, and Margaret Wydeville, Lady Maltravers. Her grandmother, Cecily, Duchess of York, did not attend, but Henry VII evidently approved of her, as in 1486 he granted her an annuity and renewed her license to export wool.
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Elizabeth went to her wedding in a gown of silk damask and crimson satin costing £11.5s.6d. [£5,500],
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with a “kirtle of white cloth of gold damask and a mantle of the same suit, furred with ermine.” Giovanni de’ Gigli, in his Latin epithalamium, conjures a charming—probably imaginary—portrait of the princess on her wedding day, as his poem was almost certainly written beforehand. It suggests, however, the kind of jewels that Elizabeth might have worn:

It was not customary then for a bride to be wholly attired in white—that was a tradition begun centuries later by Queen Victoria—but for her to wear the richest materials. It was her flowing hair, threaded with jewels, not the color of her clothes, that proclaimed her virginity.

Henry was gorgeously attired in cloth of gold. The clerk of the works of the King’s Wardrobe was paid £95.3s.6½d. [£46,500] for “divers stuffs bought for the day of the solemnization of the King’s marriage”; 23s.4d. [£770] was paid “for the Queen’s wedding ring,” which was of gold, weighing two-thirds of an ounce, and heavy compared with modern wedding rings; it had been purchased before the beginning of January.
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According to the eleventh-century Sarum Rite, the pre-Reformation form of the marriage service then in use, Elizabeth vowed to take Henry for her wedded husband, “for fairer, for fouler, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to be blithe and bonair [amiable] and buxom [obedient, in the sense of obliging] in bed and at board” till death parted them.

André says “the most wished day of marriage was celebrated by them with all religious and glorious magnificence at court, and by
their people, to show their gladness, with bonfires, dancing, songs, and banquets throughout all London, both men and women, rich and poor, beseeching God to bless the King and Queen and grant them a numerous progeny.” The “great triumphs and demonstrations, especially on the people’s part, of joy and gladness” were greater “than the days either of [Henry VII’s] entry [into London] or his coronation, which the King rather noted than liked.”
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“Gifts flowed freely on all sides and were showered on everyone, while feasts, dances, and tournaments were celebrated with liberal generosity to make known and to magnify the joyful occasion and the bounty of gold, silver, rings, and jewels. Then everyone, men and women, prayed to God that the King and Queen might have a prosperous and happy issue.”
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Giovanni de’ Gigli’s epithalamium had more of joy and relief in it than mere flattery:

But now the royal pair were one, and a child, Gigli predicted, would shortly gambol in the royal halls, and grow up a worthy son of the King, emulating the noble qualities of his parents and perpetuating their name in his illustrious descendants forever.
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Inevitably, much was made of this union of the white rose of York
and the red rose of Lancaster, which was seen as symbolizing the end of the conflict between the two royal houses. “By reason of which marriage, peace was thought to descend out of Heaven into England, considering that the lines of Lancaster and York were now brought into one knot and connexed together, of whose two bodies one heir might succeed, which after their time should peaceably rule and enjoy the whole monarchy and realm of England.” This was written by the chronicler, Edward Hall, from the perspective of the reign of Henry VIII, whom he greatly admired. Vergil attributed the marriage to “divine intervention, for plainly by it all things which nourished the most ruinous factions were utterly removed, the two houses of Lancaster and York were united and from the union the true and established royal line emerged which now reigns.” Hall even went so far as to compare this “godly matrimony” with the union of God and man in Christ.

Most English people believed that the royal wedding would bring an end to the civil wars and herald a new era of peace and stability; consequently it was very popular, and it won for Henry Tudor the loyalty of many who had supported the House of York. Victory had given Henry “the knee of submission,” wrote Bacon, but “marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart; so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him.”

The nuptial union of Lancaster and York was a continuing theme in Tudor propaganda. “Now may we sing, we two bloods all made in one,” Bessy rejoices in Brereton’s poem. Thomas Ashwell, an English composer skilled in polyphony, wrote an early form of the National Anthem, “God save King Henry, wheresoe’er he be,” in honor of the marriage.
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In 1509, at the coronation of Henry VIII, the court poet, Stephen Hawes, reputed (probably without foundation) to have been a bastard son of Richard III, lauded the King’s parentage:

More than a century later the union was still being extolled, indeed, immortalized, by Shakespeare in
Richard III
:

And as late as 1603, the accession proclamation of James I would speak of this marriage that had “brought to an end the bloody and civil wars to the joy unspeakable of this kingdom.”
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After the wedding, the King and his new Queen presided over a lavish nuptial feast, at which the guests dined on roasted peacocks, swans, larks, and quails, followed by sugared almonds and fruit tarts.

It is often claimed that a medal (now in the British Museum) was struck to commemorate the marriage, embellished with images of the happy couple holding hands; the man wears a garland of roses on his head, while the woman is shown crowned, with her wavy hair loose, as betokened a virgin bride and queen. She wears a round-necked gown beneath a mantle, and a heavy cross suspended from a pearl necklace. The reverse shows a wreath of roses enclosing a legend:
“As the rising sun is the ornament of the day, so is a good wife the ornament of her house.”
It is the roses that have led to the incorrect assumption that the
medal was struck to mark the union of Henry and Elizabeth, but it has now been established that the medal is one of a series made in Prague in the late sixteenth century, and that it has nothing to do with them.
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Similarly, a painting formerly at Sudeley Castle (once at Strawberry Hill), said to be by Jan Gossaert (or Mabuse), has long been said to portray the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and has often been engraved as such. Yet there is no evidence that Gossaert ever visited England, and his style is very different. The setting is an imaginary church, and the attire of the bride appears to date from the late sixteenth century, while the other figures wear late-fifteenth-century dress. A painting, perhaps contemporary, and said to be of the marriage, is in Lady Braye’s collection at Stanford Hall, Leicestershire. A modern romanticized painting of
The Joining of the Houses of Lancaster and York
, executed by J. R. Brown around 1901, hangs in Blackpool Town Hall.

At last Elizabeth’s ambitions had been crowned with the royal dignity that was rightfully hers. Her wedding night was spent in the King’s bedchamber, the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, a vast room built in the thirteenth century by Henry III, measuring eighty-six by twenty-six feet. Behind the massive four-poster bed was a mural dating from that time, showing the coronation of Edward the Confessor in faded red, blue, silver, and gold, and on the walls were huge paintings of Biblical battles. There was a great fireplace in the room, but even so the Painted Chamber must have been difficult to heat in January, and the palace was notoriously damp. Fortunately, the bed curtains would have afforded a degree of intimacy.