The New Murrey and Blue blog

I have written before about Elizabeth Woodville having possibly died of one plague or another, see https://murreyandblue.org/2019/09/26/did-elizabeth-wydville-die-of-the-plague/. I came upon the theory back in September 2019, and the article that prompted my post was by Lydia Starbuck of Royal Central (https://royalcentral.co.uk/author/lstarbuck/).  

A curious letter of 1511 (from Andrea Badoer, the Venetian ambassador to London, see more about him at the end of this post) had been “recently discovered” by Dr  Euan Roger. I don’t actually know when. (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/our-research-and-academic-collaboration/our-research-and-people/staff-profiles/dr-euan-c-roger/).

Now Lydia Starbuck of Royal Central has put this letter and its contents in the news again, see here https://royalcentral.co.uk/features/the-modern-mystery-surrounding-the-death-of-one-of-historys-most-controversial-queens-205395/. It seems to me to be exactly the same article as the one of 2019. Even so, I feel prompted to consider the theory again.

But first I must confess that I intend a to put forward an idea of my own about Elizabeth’s demise. It’s just a notion that has occurred to me—if I were younger I’d write the novel but haven’t finished the one I’m working on now!—but it just might have happened.

Now for some scene-setting. There is something puzzling about the wording of the 1511 letter. In the Royal Central article it is quoted as follows: “….the Queen-Widow, mother of King Edward has died of the plague [and] the king is disturbed….” This must refer to Elizabeth Woodville, (https://richardiii.org.uk/topic/49550/elizabeth-woodville-anxious-mother-or-calculating-shrew), who was indeed a widow and the mother of Edward V (one of the boys in the Tower), but the use of “has” rather implies that in 1511 her death was regarded as recent. She died in 1492….so is nineteen years ago really to be thought of as recent?

And to write in the present tense about the king being disturbed can only be a reference to her grandson Henry VIII, not her equally unpleasant son-in-law Henry VII, (see https://richardiii.net/faqs/richard-and-his-world/aftermath/opposition-to-henry-tudor-after-bosworth/) who had died in 1509. Now, why would Henry VIII be disturbed about the death of his Woodville grandmother nineteen years earlier, during his father’s reign?  It was over and done with, and nothing to do with him. Or was it?

In 1464 (it’s thought on May Day), at around the age of twenty-seven, the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville had secretly married the dashing, impetuous young Edward IV, who was twenty-two at the time. It’s not known when they first met.

She was a commoner, a widow with two sons, and was from a Lancastrian background, so it was a marriage that shocked England and Europe because Edward had been expected to consolidate his Yorkist reign by making an important foreign match. While he was king Elizabeth had been his unpopular queen. Yet a queen she was not, nor ever had been, as became clear in 1483 when Edward died suddenly at the age of forty.

His marriage to Elizabeth was revealed to have been fraudulent and their children therefore illegitimate. (See https://richardiii.net/richard-iii-his-world/his-family/edward-iv/.) So instead of her elder son succeeding his father as Edward V, it was Edward IV’s only remaining brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was invited by Parliament to ascend the throne as Richard III. As Edward left no legitimate offpring, his brother was indeed his heir. No question. The justness of Richard’s right was set out in a legal document/act called Titulus Regius (https://richardiii.net/research/ricardian-resources/titulus-regius/), which was entered into the law of the land.

After reigning for a mere two years, during which he’d done all he could to better the lot of his subjects, Richard was killed by treachery at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. (See https://richardiii.net/richard-iii-his-world/the-war-of-the-roses/the-battles/the-battle-of-bosworth/.)

His successor was the so-called Lancastrian usurper Henry VII, who had no true Lancastrian blood at all, not being descended from Blanche, who was Duchess of Lancaster in her own right. See https://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/plantagenet_84.html. Instead Henry was descended from her husband, John of Gaunt. Gaunt was only Duke of Lancaster jure uxoris, because the title was Blanche’s. So, to be a true bloodright Lancastrian, one had to be legitimately descended from Blanche, not John of Gaunt.

By royal and papal decree Gaunt was later able to marry Katherine de Roët/Swynford, the mistress he’d taken after Blanche’s death, and thus he achieved the legitimisation of their five Beaufort children. On Gaunt’s death, the Beauforts were barred from the throne by their half-brother, Henry IV (https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/henry-iv/), who really was a son of Blanche of Lancaster. See https://murreyandblue.org/2014/06/15/the-tudorbeaufort-claim-to-the-throne/ and https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/john-gaunt-duke-lancaster-who-facts-family-children-legacy/.

By the end of the 15th century the Beauforts were thoroughly integrated in the English nobility, and Henry VII managed to overturn Henry IV’s attempt to prevent his half-siblings from gaining the throne. Henry’s mother was Lady Margaret Beaufort (https://beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/a-letter-from-margaret-beaufort/), so Henry VII was half Beaufort. Perhaps even more of than half, see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Beaufort,_2nd_Duke_of_Somerset.

Henry VII would soon drop the pretence of being a Lancastrian, and put himself forward as the first of the House of Tudor. Immediately after Bosworth he set about reversing Titulus Regius. He had to do this as he needed to eradicate Richard’s “falsehood” that Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville were never truly married. This was vital, because Henry had promised to marry their eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, and thus unite the previously warring Houses of York and Lancaster. A king couldn’t knowingly take a bastard to wife.

His vow of marriage had been a calculated clarion call to lure to his banner the wavering Yorkists who still clung to Edward IV’s line. So, at the outset of his reign, he didn’t dare renege on his word. To do so would be catastrophic because it would surely provoke Yorkists and others into turning on him. The wars would return.

Apart from having to marry Elizabeth of York, Henry needed his own right to the throne to be indisputable in all ways. He claimed it through conquest, but Bosworth had been fought dishonestly by his side. Richard hadn’t been defeated in the normal heat of battle, he’d been murdered in a pre-planned plot by traitors who turned on him at a pivotal point. Even so, he was such a warrior that he fought to within inches of Henry, who definitely wasn’t a warrior!

There was another problem for Henry if he made Elizabeth of York trueborn again. He couldn’t just single her out, he had to do the same for all her siblings and that meant her brothers, who’d disappeared in 1483, immediately leapfrogged to better claims to the throne than Henry himself! His position would be untenable if they were still alive somewhere—as recent 21st-century research indicates, see https://richardiii.net/the-princes-in-the-tower-the-new-evidence/. Richard III is always accused of their murder, but it’s more likely he sent them to safety, probably his sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. But that’s another story.

For Henry a Yorkist uprising could be easily triggered and if it were the removal of the unpopular Tudor vulture from his ill-gotten perch would be at the top of their agenda! He wasn’t loved by any means, because he was harsh, money-grubbing and was generally damaging the fabric of English life. “Merrie England” wasn’t very merrie under the first Tudor! Or the second, third and fourth either. Only Elizabeth I was worth any salt at all, but even she couldn’t make up for the four disasters that preceded her.

To be certain of ridding himself of Titulus Regius in Parliament and elsewhere, Henry also ordered that all physical copies and other evidence were destroyed as well. He wanted to obliterate any suggestion that Richard had a right to the throne. He never knew that one telltale copy survived, which is how we today know its contents. (https://richardiii.net/research/articles/richard-and-the-historians/)

In 1464 the impulsive, sexually primed, 22-year-old Edward IV had deliberately tricked Elizabeth Woodville into a clandestine faked marriage. His reason, presumably, was simply that it was the only way to get her into his bed. If he was actually in love with her, as might also be the case, he still fooled her because he knew he was already secretly betrothed to Lady Eleanor Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. (See https://richardiii.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/16-Lady-Eleanor-Talbot-New-Evidence-New-Answers-New-Questions.pdf.) This being so, any further “marriage” he entered into during Eleanor’s lifetime would be null and void.

In those days a betrothal was as binding as an actual marriage, and in 1464 Eleanor was still alive. She died four years later, in 1468, but Edward IV took no steps to rectify the situation. Why? Probably because the Church would refuse to even consider it as he and Elizabeth had been blatantly living in sin.

But the matter of Gaunt’s eventual marriage to Katherine de Roët/Swynford and the legitimising of their Beaufort children was a resounding precedent. Papal palms could be crossed with silver, so there was at least a chance that all the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville could have been rendered trueborn. Yet Edward still did nothing. Why?

Perhaps his inaction was simply that he chickened out, unable to face the odium/ridicule such steps would have aroused. He was in too deep, and although he was a great warrior and strong king, that didn’t make him as formidable when facing the consequences of his youthful misdemeanours. So he stayed shtum to the very end, hoping to get away with it. He knew all along that his children were born on the wrong side of the proverbial blanket, and his brother Richard was his rightful heir!

Edward IV used Richard cruelly, as the latter would have realised only too well when the truth finally emerged in 1483. Its consequences hounded Richard throughout his short reign, and none of it was his doing or fault! It was all down to Edward IV.

Titulus Regius wasn’t the only document of Richard III’s reign that Henry VII destroyed. Numerous others disappeared too, too many for it to be accidental. Richard III’s will, for instance. He must have composed one before Bosworth, yet it’s conspicuous by its complete absence. I know it wouldn’t have been acted upon, but did Henry simply chuck it on a bonfire? The Tudors abolished the truth and rewrote history as it pleased them. They created a vile caricature of Richard III, and set about expunging the memory of the real man, along with his right to the throne.

Setting about making his reign secure inevitably brought Henry VII to the problem of his mother-in-law. Henry neither liked nor trusted Elizabeth Woodville, nor she him. He’d validated her union with Edward IV, but she hadn’t been returned to the position she warranted. She was the Queen Mother, but was locked away in Bermondsey. He needed her to be out of the way, where he could keep tabs on everything she did. She knew many secrets that could do great damage to his reign, and was still dabbling now and then in Yorkist intrigue. There were always Yorkist rumblings and she could never be a Tudorite, no matter how she tried. After all, Edward IV had been the first Yorkist king, and Henry would realise she believed Edward’s now legitimised elder son should be on the throne, Not Henry Tudor.

To be fair to Elizabeth perhaps the illegality of her marriage had been as much a shock to her in 1483 as it had to everyone else. She may have found out before then, but I’m sure she didn’t know at the time of the marriage in 1464. So let’s consider her circumstances when Henry cut her off from everything he could and had her incarcerated at Bermondsey Abbey for the last five years of her life. (See https://murreyandblue.org/2017/06/08/bermondsey-abbey-and-elizabeth-wydeville/.)

His actions may have been of his own volition, but I think it very likely that his conniving, spiteful mother, Margaret Beaufort—who pompously and incorrectly called herself “Regina”—probably had more than a single finger in it. Elizabeth was probably silenced by threats to her life if she put a foot wrong again. So from savouring the luxury, respect and privilege of being queen, she’d fallen very low indeed in the pecking order.

Now this is where I really go into the fictional theory of my own.

What if something happened to make Elizabeth decide to defy Henry and his mother and spill the true beans about everything leading up to and following Richard III’s reign? She’d been party to so many secrets, many of them that Henry would prefer never saw the light of day.

What might that something be? What could prompt her to such a momentous decision? After all, her daughter was Henry VII’s queen, and their children were her grandchildren. Would she deliberately bring about the fall of the relatively new House of Tudor of which her immediate descendants were now a vital part?

Well, let’s think about it. Henry had seized her property, excluded her from court and banished her to Bermondsey Abbey, where she lived very modestly indeed. She wasn’t part of the lives of her Tudor grandchildren, and what if her daughter always sided with Henry, and didn’t do as much as she might to alleviate her mother’s straitened situation?

Might Elizbeth Woodville simply choose to call time on the shabby treatment doled out to her and set about teaching Henry, her daughter and his mother a lesson they’d never forget?

My more tentative guesswork is that perhaps she was in poor health anyway, knew she was dying slowly and wanted to go out quickly, with a great flourish. She would make a grand gesture by trumpeting everything she knew, and Henry would be forced to silence her immediately. Thus he would unwittingly spare her the pain of her lingering illness? Conjecture, I know, but what an excellent way to get her own back and at the same time avoid the awful, drawn-out death she knew was coming.

So how might she go about it? Well, I imagine she, or a trusted scribe, would put pen to paper and record everything that pointed to her innocence throughout and was also detrimental to Henry and his mother. It was no more than they deserved! Getting her own back on Margaret for lying, manipulating, misleading and making a fool of her would be very satisfying.

Such a dangerous (admittedly speculative) document would have to be hidden somewhere completely secure. But what if she then made the signal error of blurting her intentions to Henry, although without mentioning the document? Perhaps she so exulted in her own cleverness she simply couldn’t hold her tongue? She needed to see the horror on his face when she told him she was about to tell the world the truth about everything!

But by doing this she also foiled her own plan….and brought about the very death by murder she’d already anticipated. If she realised her own foolishness, it was too late. Henry disposed of her, and blamed the plague for her demise. The document’s existence died with her. I’m not saying this is what happened, it’s only a possibility that holds up (in my opinion).

The years pass, Henry VII dies in 1509, followed two months later by his mother. Elizabeth of York had died in 1503. Now Henry’s surviving son becomes Henry VIII. What if the hypothetical document comes to light suddenly and falls into the hands of an appalled Henry VIII. Oh yes, he’d be “disturbed”, make no mistake of it. Like his father, he’d want the destruction of something so dangerous that the House of York was bound to rise against the Tudors. It was what his father had dreaded to the point of paranoia, because claimants had beset his reign. Henry VIII was prepared to execute anyone and everyone, especially if they had Yorkist blood. If there were still blue-blooded Yorkists in the realm, young, old, male or female, there wouldn’t be for much longer!

The deadly document before him now was in his grandmother’s hand (or at least written by a scribe but signed and sealed by her) and he wouldn’t know if it was the only copy. Had she seen to it that others were made? There’d been many copies of Titulus Regius and his father had destroyed them all. (Or thought he had, but as far as Henry VIII was concerned, no copies of Titulus Regius still existed either.

Henry VIII had to make sure his grandmother’s account suffered the same fate as Richard III’s title. Thorough searches would be made of every place to which Elizabeth Woodville had gone during his father’s reign. And these frantic searches would inevitably give rise to whispers, which reached the Venetian ambassador to London. He then mentioned them in his letter of 1511.

So what if, like the surviving copy of Titulus Regius, Elizabeth Woodville’s revelations also eluded the Tudors’ best efforts? What if we today were to find it and learn the whole truth at last? See https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/forever-out-of-memory-and-forgotten/.

We’re always sighing that if only there was an old, old tower, with an old, old spiral staircase leading up to an old, old room at the top, where an old, old trunk contained vital papers pertaining to Richard III. But Elizabeth Woodville’s knowledge was fascinating too.

I admit that her “memoirs” are hypothetical, but as I’ve said elsewhere of other matters, it’s fiction that’s possible. (See https://murreyandblue.org/2024/03/06/a-circumstantial-but-viable-clue-to-the-eventual-death-of-edward-ii/ and https://murreyandblue.org/2024/10/06/does-the-harrington-stanley-feud-harbour-a-secret-about-richard-of-gloucester/.

To return to the letter of 1511. The Venetian ambassador in question would appear to have been Andrea Badoer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Biagio_Badoer), who held the London post from 9 February 1508–9 to 18 April 1515. “….Original commission in the miscellaneous Journals of the Council of Ten, Giustinian’s Despatches, and Sanuto’s Diaries, passim.…” From https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/venice/vol1/cxxii-cxxix

I have also found more about Badoer’s letter, here https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/venice/vol2/pp46-49#fnn2. See below:

Aug. 19. Sanuto Diaries, v. xii. p. 305.	116. Contents of Letters from the Ambassador Badoer, dated London, 26th July. Good letters. The King had said to Badoer, “Ambassador! thou wilt soon hear some good news from Rome; and by this time the Signory must know all.”
	The King had sent 1,000 archers and other troops to assist the Lady Margaret against the Duke of Guelders, who receives subsidy from France.
	The Queen-Widow, mother of the late King Edward, had died of plague, (fn. 2) and the King was troubled. The King had also inquired of the ambassador if he had heard nothing from the Signory. He replied in the negative, and the King thought it strange. Complaints of Badoer that the Signory sends him no advices, and fails to provide him with money for his maintenance.
	[Italian.]

fn. 2 “Item come la Raina Vedova, fò madre dil Re Edoardo, erra morta da peste, et il Re era fastidiato.”

This says “had died” rather than “has died”, as stated in the Lydia Starbuck article, but it’s still odd to refer her death nineteen years after the event.

Nor do I know enough Italian, 16th-century or modern, to be sure that fastidiato means “troubled” (as in the State Papers extract above) or “disturbed” (as in the Lydia Starbuck article). Are both words more or less the same? Or might fastidiato also mean “annoyed” or “irritated”? All these words are close in meaning, but have subtle differences. I can only be sure that in 1511 Henry VIII was certainly put on his toes about something regarding his maternal grandmother’s death in 1492.

Nineteen years is a long time to suddenly become jumpy, and surely he wouldn’t fear she’d come back to infect him with the plague! She wouldn’t have been stricken with it when she wrote the document, which must have taken some time to write/dictate. The plague didn’t come on slowly, it struck swiftly and fatally.

So was something else of the utmost danger coming back to threaten the House of Tudor? Was the shadow of retribution falling across Henry VIII?

Unfortunately for us, retribution didn’t come. Henry VIII destroyed my theoretical document, and no further copies have come to light. Yet.

After all, Titulus Regius came back. And my theory just might be what really happened. At the end of her life it wouldn’t hurt her to tell the truth about Richard III. A copy of such a fascinating document might still be lurking somewhere, awaiting discovery….