prince of Wales. This time, though, Parron had overreached himself. Elizabeth, he forecast, would live to the age of eighty.4
Late in January, the royal household moved downriver, to the Tower. Elizabeth was carefully ferried in her barge, reclining heavily on cushions and carpets, burning braziers filled with sweet herbs to mask the smells of the freezing Thames, her twenty-two oarsmen rowing with particular care. At the Tower, the rituals of childbirth began with a ceremonial mass in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, followed by a ‘void’ of spiced wine and sweetmeats. Then, surrounded by her ladies and gentlewomen, her mother-in-law Lady Margaret Beaufort at their head, Elizabeth went into confinement.
Following ordinances drawn up by Lady Margaret, the chamber in which Elizabeth would give birth had been meticulously well appointed. Above the heavily carpeted floor, the ceiling, walls, ‘windows and all’ were swathed in blue arras peppered with gold fleurs-de-lys, signifying kingship and that paradigm of motherhood, the Virgin Mary. One window only was left uncovered to admit light. The room had a cupboard gleaming with plate, two cradles standing in readiness and a ‘rich altar’ encrusted with relics of the saints. Below their velvet, gold and ermine canopies of estate worked with embroidered red-and-white roses stood the bed on which the queen was to give birth, and at its foot a pallet, half-throne, half day-bed, with furnishings of velvet and cloth-of-gold and counterpanes of ermine-fringed scarlet. In this opulent, womblike environment, in which the events crucial to the dynasty and the country would unfold, the queen’s status was exalted, almost sacred. The furnishings, too, were designed with tranquillity in mind, the simple patterns of the fleurs-de-lys preferred to more elaborately designed arras with ‘images’, so as not to overstimulate ‘women in such case’. And while Alice Massy, Elizabeth’s favoured midwife, was in attendance, there were as usual no physicians. The presence of men in this all-female environment was forbidden – besides which doctors, it was thought, only served to cause anxiety to women in labour.5
On 2 February, the household celebrated Candlemas. Of all the great feasts of estate, Candlemas was one of the most distinctive. Forty days after Christmas, its candles emphasized the light brought into the world by the new-born child. In the depth of winter they symbolized, too, rebirth and renewal, bringing a sense that the first faint signs of spring could not be too far away. On that day, barely a fortnight into a confinement intended to last a month, Elizabeth was convulsed by sudden and violent contractions.6
The traumatic and premature labour was badly handled, and Elizabeth became feverish. Soon, she had a raging temperature and was slipping in and out of consciousness. Waiting with mounting anxiety outside his wife’s apartments, Henry frenziedly sought medical advice. Messengers rode through the night into Kent and the west country to summon specialists. Nothing worked. On 11 February, her thirty-seventh birthday, Elizabeth died. Her sickly baby daughter, hastily christened Catherine, followed soon after.7
Nobody, those around Henry reported, had ever ‘seen or heard’ the king in such a state. Anguish ruptured the poised regality in which he had sublimated all his anxieties. Years before, in exile, rumours of Elizabeth’s betrothal to Richard III had ‘pinched him to the very stomach’; now, her death provoked in him a visceral response.
As his wife’s newly coffined body lay in the chapel of St John the Evangelist, bathed in the light of innumerable candles, and attended by her mourning gentlewomen and the ‘great estates’ of court, the king left the funeral ceremonies in the hands of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey and Sir Richard Guildford. Commanding six hundred masses to be sung in London’s churches, Henry, surrounded by a clutch of his close servants in mourning black, ‘privily departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrows and would no man should resort to him’. His barge slid away from the Tower and up the wintry Thames to Richmond. There, he disappeared, up flights of stairs, through the succession of public chambers and galleries into the building’s heart, his privy chamber, where he collapsed.8
On Wednesday 22 February Queen Elizabeth’s funeral procession snaked through London’s crowded, silent streets, from the Tower to her place of burial at Westminster Abbey. Bells tolled and priests stood in church doorways with swaying censers, the pungent smell of incense drifting over the cortege as it passed. With a vanguard of horsebacked lords, among them London’s mayor and Garter king-of-arms John Writhe, the hearse was drawn by eight warhorses caparisoned in black velvet. On it rested a painted, intricately modelled effigy of the late queen, clothed in her crown and robes of estate, bejewelled hands clutching her sceptre. The hearse was accompanied by two hundred poor men, their presence believed to be a powerful act of intercession with Christ, bearing lighted tapers. Following them came the queen’s gentlewomen, eight ladies of honour riding black palfreys, the rest in two carriages, each drawn by a team of six horses. Chaplains, squires, knights and aldermen rode alongside, black gowns draped behind, their mourning hoods pulled down obscuring their faces. The orders of friars patronized by Elizabeth, the Carmelites in their white habits and the Augustinians in black, joined the king’s chapel choir in the singing of ‘solemn anthems’. Then followed representatives of London’s guilds and the city’s foreign mercantile and banking communities: Spanish, French, Dutch and Germans, Venetians, Florentines, Lucchese and Genoese.
On that dark February day, the overwhelming impression made on the London chronicler was one of light. From the manor of Blanch Appleton on the city’s eastern edge to Temple Bar in the west, the city was illuminated. Over 4,000 flaming torches lit the streets through which the procession passed, while the main streets of Cornhill and Cheapside, ‘garnished thoroughly with new torches’, were lined with white-clad men holding burning brands. At Fenchurch Street and the top of Cheapside stood groups of thirty-seven virgins, one for each year of the late queen’s life, dressed in white, holding lighted tapers.9
Though founded on pragmatism, Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage had nevertheless blossomed throughout the uncertainty and upheaval of the previous eighteen years. This was a marriage of ‘faithful love’, of mutual attraction, affection and respect, from which the king seems to have drawn great strength – indeed, it was the kind of marriage that their second son, Prince Henry, would spend his whole life trying to find. With Elizabeth’s burial, the lights went out all over Henry VII’s court. The reign was plunged into crisis. Henry, shattered, would never be the same again. For his young, vulnerable son, so recently saddled with the burden of impending kingship, it was a traumatic loss.
Beautiful, serene and able, through all the crises of the reign Elizabeth had been the embodiment of reconciliation. A focus for the loyalties of many who had accepted Henry’s rule, she had produced six children, the stuff of a new dynasty, and had been a charismatic counterpart to her increasingly suspicious, controlling husband. In life, nobody had a bad word to say about her and, as the outpouring of grief on her death testified, she was genuinely loved. Her serenity was sometimes mistaken for passivity, as by the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala, who reported acidly that she was ‘beloved because she was powerless’. But Elizabeth’s true quality lay in an apparently artless graciousness, which was thrown into relief by the close proximity of the king’s sharp-elbowed mother.
Deeply pious and a stickler for protocol, Lady Margaret Beaufort ran her own household with a rod of iron. If she was a bit of a nag – even her saintly confessor, John Fisher, remarked on how she tended to repeat the same moralizing stories ‘many a time’ – the appearance of her slight form, clad in black gown, mantle and wimple was faintly intimidating. She had, Fisher noted, a particular gift for ‘bolting out faction’, for sniffing out suspect loyalties among her household servants.10
Royal mothers tended to busy themselves with the affairs of their sons and daughters-in-law – but at a distance. Lady Margaret Beaufort, however, was very much more hands-on. Adopting the airs and graces of a queen, she was constantly at Elizabeth’s shoulder – literally so, walking a mere half-pace behind her in public ceremonials. In some royal houses, her apartments were next to the king’s own; at Henry’s Oxfordshire manor of Woodstock, they shared an interconnecting ‘drawing chamber’, to which they could retreat to discuss politics or play cards. The upheavals of the 1490s only served to increase her influence. In 1499, after separating from her husband Thomas Stanley, earl of Derby – whose family remained under a cloud following their involvement in the Warbeck conspiracy – she altered her signature to ‘Margaret R’: possibly an abbreviation of ‘Richmond’, it also looked like the queen’s ‘Elizabeth Regina’. At court, on progress, or through her servants who, like the powerful Sir Reynold Bray, had become members of the king’s household, Margaret was constantly watching, observing, organizing. It felt to one Spanish envoy as though she kept Elizabeth ‘in subjection’. Others agreed. One irritated petitioner, trying to gain access to the queen, suggested that Margaret was, more or less, her gatekeeper: he would, he said, have spoken more with Elizabeth ‘had it not been for that strong whore, the king’s mother’.11
If Elizabeth resented Lady Margaret’s intrusion on her territory, she kept her thoughts to herself. It was, after all, only natural that the reign’s self-styled matriarch should have taken the younger woman under her wing. There was, too, much to suggest that as Elizabeth settled into her role as queen, this became a relationship of equals. If
