Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
‘Also then were rung the bells of London every one, and after that throughout the Realm with solemn dirges and Masses of Requiems and every Religious place, colleges, and Churches.’ The loss of his queen was ‘as heavy and dolorous to the King’s Highness as hath been seen or heard of’. It was the end of the partnership which had given birth to the Tudor dynasty.
Elizabeth had been at the Tower when she ‘travailed of child suddenly’ and was there delivered on Candlemas Day of a baby daughter who may have come prematurely. The records of her own Privy Purse expenses show boatmen, guides, horses sent suddenly to summon a doctor from the country; linen purchased to swaddle a new baby who would outlive her mother only by days. ‘And upon the 11th day of the said month being Saturday in the morning, died the most gracious and virtuous princess the Queen, where within the parish church of the foresaid Tower her corpse lay 11 days after.’
Mourning garments were hastily ordered for her ladies, and while these were being prepared they put on their ‘most sad and simplest’ clothes. Elizabeth’s body would, immediately after death, have been disembowelled; prepared with spices, balm and rosewater; tight wrapped in waxed cloth. ‘60 ells of Holland cloth … likewise gums, balms, spices, sweet wine, and wax, with which being cered, the king’s plumber closed her in lead’, before the body was placed in a wooden chest, covered in black and white velvet with a cross of white damask. On the Sunday night the body was ready for removal to the chapel. The queen’s sister Lady Katherine Courtenay acted as chief mourner at the requiem mass, a ritual repeated daily as long as the body lay in the Tower.
It was Wednesday 22 February when the coffin was placed on a bier covered in black velvet and drawn by six horses, themselves decked in black. The cushions of black velvet and blue cloth of gold must have helped secure the coffin in place, and helped the gentleman ushers who knelt, braced against the horses’ motion, at either end of the moving construction. Above the coffin was an effigy of the queen, clothed in ‘the very Robes of Estate’, with her hair about her shoulders and her sceptre in her right hand. The funeral effigy of a royal personage symbolised the dual nature of a king or queen; the immortal office and the mortal body.
The banners at the corners of the bier were painted on a white background, to show this was the funeral of a woman who died in childbed, while behind the bier came the ladies of honour, each mounted on a palfrey; the chariots bearing other senior ladies; a throng of servants and citizens of London. In front of the bier went the choirs, and the English and foreign male dignitaries. Companies of foreign merchants – French, Spanish, Venetian – bearing their country’s arms stood among the crafts guilds and fellowships of London who held thousands of torches along the way. Bells rang, choirs sang, and incense scented the cold air from each parish church as the body passed by. From the Tower to Temple Bar; to Charing Cross and then on to Westminster; the same route that had been taken for Elizabeth’s coronation.
In the churchyard of St Margaret’s, where the peers ‘took their mantles’, the body was once again censed and then borne into the Abbey shoulder high. There it rested while, after the service, the Dirige, conducted by the abbot and nine bishops, Lady Katherine, escorted by her nephew the Marquess of Dorset and by the Earl of Derby, led the lords and the ladies to a supper of fish in the Queen’s Great Chamber. Watched that night by her ladies and men of all ranks, lit by hundreds more heavy tapers, Elizabeth’s corpse waited for the next day. Body and soul could not be left unprotected through the dark night hours: each one of those tapers might serve to drive a demon away.
The long list of services offered for the dead woman reflects the importance of the church rites in the daily life of the fifteenth century. Lauds were said at six the next morning, followed by Our Lady’s Mass at seven; the Mass of the Trinity; and then the Requiem Mass. As the ceremony came towards its close the mourners, in order of precedence, laid lengths of rich fabric across the effigy. The blue and green, the bright strands of metal in the weave, must have stood out against the funereal scene. After the sermon the ladies left, for men to do the real physical work of burial. The queen’s chamberlain and ushers broke their staves of office and cast them into the grave with ritual tears, in token that their service to Elizabeth of York was ended. Perhaps the emotion was real – Elizabeth had been a gentle mistress, and loyal to those who served her and family.
Following the funeral alms were given to ‘bed-rid folks, lazars, blind folks’; to churches, to hospitals, to charitable foundations. And, with more than 9000 yards of black cloth coming out of the Great Wardrobe, King Henry had handed out ‘the greatest livery of black gowns that ever was seen in our day’. Her funeral had cost some £3000; twice that of her father, and five times that of her eldest son. Henry must indeed have loved Elizabeth, even though in the political sphere his concern had been to avoid any suggestion that it was from her bloodline that he derived his legitimacy.
The funeral had been – as was customary for a female corpse – a predominantly female ceremony; partly because the one mourned was a woman; partly because concern for the dead was always firstly a female duty. But Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was absent. Instead, she occupied herself in laying down a set of ordinances for royal mourning to be used for future deaths – costume and comportment, prescribed precisely, ‘apparel for princesses and great estates’, moving down the scale in their order. A queen was to wear a surcoat with a train before and behind; the king’s mother (though Margaret was technically only a countess) was ‘to wear in every thing like to the queen’. It was often said that Margaret’s concern for rank and dominance came between her and Elizabeth; if so, they were not the only mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in this story to have had problems.
Elizabeth Woodville – the beautiful widow who had captured the heart of King Edward IV – had been bitterly resented by Edward’s mother Cecily Neville. Cecily had been the matriarch of the Yorkist clan, mother also to Richard III; just as Margaret Beaufort was a leader of the Lancastrians – another mother of kings who could never quite forget that Fortune had snatched her own queen’s crown away. Cecily’s daughter Margaret, too, was living in Burgundy, but as the sister of two Yorkist monarchs she never lost her urge to take a hand in the affairs of England.
Poor Anne Neville, Richard III’s wife, had been too shadowy a figure to have quarrelled with her mother-in-law. But the final woman in this story had quarrelled with half the world – Marguerite of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife, the Lancastrian queen under whose determined rule the ‘Wars of the Roses’, the Cousins’ War, had first got under way.
The events that caused the Cousins’ War, and finally brought into being the Tudor dynasty, were above all a family saga – ‘a drama in a princely house’. And the circle of women behind the conflicts and resolutions of the late fifteenth century were locked into a web of loyalty and betrayal as intimate and emotional as that of any other domestic drama, albeit that in this a kingdom was at stake.
The business of their lives was power; their sons and husbands the currency; the stark events of these times worthy of Greek tragedy. Cecily Neville had to come to terms with the fact that her son Edward IV had ordered the execution of his brother George, Duke of Clarence, and the suspicion that her other son Richard III had murdered his nephews. Elizabeth Woodville is supposed to have sent her daughters to make merry at Richard III’s court while knowing that he had murdered her sons, those same Princes in the Tower. Elizabeth of York, as the decisive battle of Bosworth unfolded, could only await the results of what would prove a fight to the death between the man some say she had incestuously loved – her uncle Richard III – and the man she would in the end marry, Henry VII.
The second half of the fifteenth century is alive with female energy, yet the lives of the last Plantagenet women remain relatively unexplored. The events of this turbulent age are usually described in terms of men, under a patriarchal assumption as easy as that which saw Margaret Beaufort give up her own blood right to the throne in favour of her son Henry; or passed the heiress Anne Neville from one royal family to the other as though she were as insentient an object as any other piece of property.
Of the seven women who form the backbone of this book, the majority have already been the subject of at least one biographical study. The aim of this work, however, is to interweave these women’s individual stories, to trace the connections between them – connections which