Elizabeth of York

 Elizabeth of York

Today is the anniversary of both the birth (1466) and the death (1503) of Elizabeth of York, she being the wife of Henry Tudor / Henry VII {yes, she died on her birthday}. She may be viewed as the wellhead of the legitimacy of the line of British (I’m now not going to get into the chain of distinctions between England and Great Britian and the United Kingdon; for now it is all Britian) crown.

Elizabeth’s mother was Elizabeth Woodville, wife of King Edward IV.  He would die in 1483 during the Cousins’ War (a/k/a The War of the Roses), succeeded by his brother Richard III (he being Elizabeth of York’s uncle).  Richard would lose his life and with it his crown at the final battle of the Cousins’ War, that being Bosworth Field (1485).

Henry Tudor is now king by right of conquest; his “claim” to the throne was in the very best light quite weak and his elevation was as much dependent upon the fact that there were after the predations of the Cousins’ War so few with a legitimate claim to the throne.  Years later in1521 Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, would be charged with treason by Henry VIII in part because he kept running his mouth about how he was a descendent of Edward III and had a legitimate claim to the throne – but I digress. So Henry and his no doubt overbearing mother Margaret Beaufort needed to find a way to buttress the claim of legitimacy.

The so called “Princes of the Tower,” Edward (later treated as Edward V in order to undercut the legitimacy of the claim of Richard III) and Richard, were children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville; in turn they were the brothers of Elizabeth of York.  Had they lived they would have undercut Henry VII’s claim to the throne. Elizabeth, on the other hand, could legitimize it. So a marriage was “arranged.” Based on the surviving accounts (history is not the study of what happened but rather the study of the surviving records) the marriage was at first not happy, but in time it came to be.  Henry VII and Elizabeth of York had four children that survived to adulthood: Arthur, Henry, Mary, and Margaret.

Arthur, the eldest son, married Catherine of Aragon and died not long-after, possibly of tuberculosis (m. Nov. 14, 1501; d. April 2, 1502).  Henry, who would go on to be Henry VIII, would marry Catherine and then (famously) five other women:  Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr.  Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr would outlive Henry.  Henry’s children Mary (libelously passed down to us as Bloody Mary thanks to Foxes Book of Martyrs), Edward (who ruled as Edward VI till he perished, again likely of tuberculosis), and Elizabeth who would rule as Elizabeth 1 in the Age of Gloriana. None of Henry VIII’s children in turn had children, so we have a dynastic dead end.

But back to the children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.  Mary would first be married to the (aged) King of France Louis XII; he died within three months of the wedding (m. Oct. 9, 1514; d Jan. 1, 1515).  She would in turn secretly marry Charles Brandon, Henry VIII’s best friend.  That did not go over well but was eventually forgiven.  She would die in 1533 and was the maternal grandmother of Lady Jane Grey (via her daughter Frances who married Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk) whose time on the throne was measured at nine days. The executioner’s axe terminated that line.

Which leaves Margaret.  She was in 1503 married off to the King of Scotland, James IV, and was the grandmother of Scotland’s James VI (Margaret & James IV è James V & Mary of Guise è Mary, Queen of Scots & Henry Stuart è James I/VI) who upon the death of Elizabeth in 1603 became as to England James I, the first of the Stuarts.  Jumping ahead, the line or succession to the throne of Britain is tied to descent from Sophia of Hanover, and Sophia was the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, and Elizabeth Stuart was the daughter of James VI/I.  He in turn was the spouse of Margaret Tudor, daughter of Elizabeth of York.  So (i)  Elizabeth of York to Margaret Tudor to (ii) Elizabeth Stuart to (ii) Sophia of Hanover to (iv) the current line of the British throne, all tied together back by descent from Edward IV and his daughter Elizabeth of York.