Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses by Gristwood Sarah

Author:Gristwood, Sarah [Gristwood, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-09-12T23:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

Letters to Richmond

Stanley, look to your wife. If she convey

Letters to Richmond, you shall answer it.

Richard III, 4.2

When, following the October rebellion, Richard III called a parliament, Henry Tudor was inevitably among those attainted but was beyond reach of punishment, back in Brittany. His connections in England, however, were in less safe a position.

Margaret Beaufort was attainted at the end of 1483: ‘Forasmuch as Margaret Countess of Richmond, Mother to the king’s great Rebel and Traitor, Henry Earl of Richmond, hath of late conspired, “confedered”, and committed high Treason against our sovereign lord the king Richard the Third, in diverse and sundry wises.’ But in the end, as so often with women, the full lethal penalties were not enacted. ‘Yet nevertheless, our said Sovereign lord, of his grace especial, remembering the good and faithful service that Thomas lord Stanley hath done … and for his sake, remitteth and will forbear the great punishment of attainder of the said countess, that she or any other so doing hath deserved.’

Her goods were to be taken away from her, but given over to her husband for the term of his life. Richard, like Edward before him, hesitated altogether to alienate such a powerful and chancy magnate as Stanley. Margaret had chosen her latest husband well. She was, however, to be held in Stanley’s charge and deprived of ‘any servant or company’. The instructions made it clear that this was less a punitive measure, more a means of preventing her from taking further action: Vergil reports that ‘she should not be able from thenceforth to send any messages neither to her son, nor friends, nor practise anything at all against the king’. Her immediate future lay in the north, probably (since it was there that Stanley later asked leave to retire) in his residences of Lathom and Knowsley.

Henry Parker, a member of Margaret’s household towards the end of her life, wrote that ‘neither prosperity made her proud, nor adversity overthrew her constant mind, for albeit that in king Richard’s days, she was often in jeopardy of her life, yet she bare patiently all trouble in such wise, that it is wonder to think it’. That is later hagiography: at the time even she must have been in a tumult of regret and fear. But the very fact of an uprising in her son’s name must have underlined his present closeness to the throne, and she continued to exert herself on his behalf. There is some evidence, too, that Stanley secretly but actively continued to support her in this.

On Christmas Day 1483, in Rennes Cathedral in Brittany, Henry Tudor made a public declaration of his intention to marry Princess Elizabeth, now nearing her eighteenth birthday. He was aiming to catch the disaffected elements from the now-divided Yorkist party, and his existing supporters swore homage to him as if he were already king. Elizabeth of York, however, was still with her mother, increasingly isolated in sanctuary where Buckingham’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville’s sister, had now joined the family of women.

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