The Hollow Crown by Dan Jones

Author:Dan Jones [Dan Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571288090
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Sand crunched underfoot on London Bridge as Elizabeth Woodville crossed the river Thames and entered England’s capital to be crowned a queen. During the previous winter the bridge had been cleaned and cleared of its foul vapours, and forty-five loads of sand were dumped along its length to assure the grip below the feet of the many lords, ladies and dignitaries who were to cross it in the weekend of celebrations that followed.22 It was Friday 24 May 1465, and the kingdom was about to welcome not only a new queen but also a whole new generation of nobles, all learning their places in a world still being rebuilt.

As ever when celebrating a moment of great royal dignity, London put on a spectacular show. The centre of the bridge was awash with colour, in the form of a massive stage, draped in cloth and paper in gold and green, black and white, red and purple, which provided the setting for actors and actresses dressed as blonde-headed angels, their wings made from hundreds of dazzling peacock feathers. Another actor dressed as St Elizabeth read a greeting while the high-pitched voices of boys rang out from the windows of St Thomas’s chapel, singing songs of praise to the incoming queen. The whole of London, as was customary, thronged with crowds and pageants, and Elizabeth, like so many queens before her, took her stately progress through the cramped but well-scrubbed streets, absorbing the proud scenes that unfolded before her.

Two days later, on Whit Sunday, 26 May 1465, she was crowned in Westminster Abbey, having been met in the hall of the adjacent palace by the youthful figures of Clarence and John Mowbray, fourth duke of Norfolk and marshal of England (who had inherited the duchy on the death of his father in November 1461). Clarence was fifteen and a half and Mowbray only twenty – both on the cusp of manhood but gilded with the highest rank and title. They met the new queen in the saddle: riding about the crowded Westminster Hall on great thick-backed horses draped in gold-embroidered cloth. They greeted her, and the party then processed from the palace to the abbey. Beside the new queen walked the king’s sister Elizabeth, duchess of Suffolk, then twenty-one, and the queen’s sister Margaret, eleven years old and betrothed to the earl of Arundel’s heir. These young ladies were accompanied by forty other dignified women, ranging from duchesses to knights’ wives, all of them dressed in scarlet, with miniver and ermine marking out the highest-ranking from the lowest. Bobbing above the crowd were the queen’s youngest sister, Catherine, aged about seven, and her ten-year-old betrothed, Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, who was the grandson and heir of the old duke killed at the battle of Northampton. This tiny couple was afforded the best view in the house: carried on the shoulders of squires above the throng of glorious nobility below.

Once this glittering party was in the abbey, it witnessed a long and lavish crowning.

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