“The Queen’s book”

The Winchester Project includes a new transcription of the queen’s book,[95] the account of Elizabeth of York’s receiver, Richard Decons or Dycons, for the last year of the queen’s life.[96]  The original manuscript has been badly damaged by the damp conditions of its storage in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey.  Repair and rebinding carried out in the early nineteenth century has further obscured the text, although it has secured the preservation of the manuscript.  Like the three Chamber Books retrieved from the same historic record repository, it has been paginated in ink, probably at the same time; and the original cover has been removed.[97] 

The volume was edited in full transcript by Nicholas Harris Nicolas and published by the antiquarian bookseller William Pickering in 1830.[98]  The edition included a brief biography of the queen, as well as some indication of the contents of the book.  The introduction made reference to entries in the king’s Chamber Books – but only to entries as published by Samuel Bentley from Craven Ord’s extracts from the Chamber Books.[99]  The discursive index-cum-glossary still has some value to the modern reader, although it needs to be used with care.  Nicolas’s edition was reprinted in 1972 as a limited edition facsimile.[100]  Nicolas included, to the best of his abilities, a transcript of the very badly damaged nine folios at the commencement of the book.  These are all of receipts, primarily from the revenues of the queen’s lands.[101] Working no doubt in poor light, and without the aid of electricity or an ultra-violet lamp, Nicolas (or the transcribing clerk) struggled, and Nicolas banished his very imperfect transcript of the receipts to follow, rather than precede, the payments.[102]  Water damage and paper loss means that it has still not proved possible to recover the entire text. The modern transcript, however, runs in proper order, and includes material that Nicolas could not decipher.  Hitherto unnoticed, the Winchester edition also includes the auditor’s marginalia to the much larger payments section of the book.[103]  These marginalia would have enabled the auditor to draw up a summary account, listing expenditure by type, including almsgiving and mass offerings, casual rewards, piece-rate wages paid to the master and rowers of the queen’s barge, money paid, probably as loans, to the queen’s own purse, and wardrobe expenses.  For the latter, and for jewellery and plate, it is likely that a separate account would have been drawn up.[104] Although this has not survived, Decons’s account is rich in detail.  It is notable that there is little expenditure on food and drink, other than as almsgiving and as rewards in kind to the king’s harbingers and others. The queen’s diet and related expenses seem to have been met by the king’s cofferer, even when she was apart from the king.  Various miscellaneous expenses were subdivided by type.[105] They included items purchased for a queen who had already borne several children, was now of an advanced age for bearing more, and whose final pregnancy seems to have been difficult.  It would ultimately result in her death within days of childbirth and, in consequence, the dispersal of her household: some of whom can then be traced, through the Chamber Books, in the household and service of the first two Tudor kings. Amongst other matters, the account includes reference to the refurbishment of Baynards Castle, the Thames-side house formerly in the possession of Cicely, duchess of York, Elizabeth’s grandmother, and to carpenter’s work to provide archival storage within the queen’s council chamber in the palace of Westminster.  Notably, the account includes references to Elizabeth’s financial support and generosity towards her siblings, the daughters of Edward IV, and there are small reminders that the history of her own lineage and heritage was being kept alive, both in private and in public spaces. Wages and fees both within and outside the household are entered towards the end of the book.[106]

There are two points on which the document usefully supplements the Chamber Books.  The first concerns the queen’s chronic indebtedness.  Loans to the queen, and the arrangements made to repay them, are scattered through both Decons’s account and through the king’s books.  Harris Nicolas made reference to several of the latter, although he knew of the entries only at second or third hand through Ord’s extracts and their partial publication in Samuel Bentley’s Excerpta Historica: although there must be a suspicion that Nicolas was himself the editor of this portion of the text.[107] The second point briefly privileges the queen’s book as a source when set against the king’s Book of Receipts. At the end of the first week of August 1502 Henry VII and his queen commenced a summer progress through Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire, returning to the hunting lodge of Langley, in the forest of Wychwood, Oxfordshire, around 16 September.[108] John Heron joined the court, although his lodgings may have been at Woodstock, about eight miles away.  For the six weeks of the king’s progress, the Chamber Books retrospectively record only the weekly totals from the riding books of Thomas Trollop, Heron’s servant, and, separately, the weekly totals of payments made by Heron, probably at Westminster, as well as just five itemised payments, one significant, authorised on 16 or 17 September.[109] Richard Decons, too, was present at the court and may, indeed, have travelled in the queen’s entourage. The great Michaelmas audit of the two accounts, the king’s and the queen’s, commenced almost immediately. They were separate processes involving separate accountants and auditors.  Elizabeth is likely to have overseen the audit of her receiver’s account, since she signs each page of the payments section of the ledger – to 20 September 1502.  She did not sign the books again.[110] On 18 September she authorised payment of an apothecary’s bill.[111] In the week ending 23 September the king sent to Burford for a surgeon.[112]  Elizabeth was well enough to move with the court in early October, and to take part in the Christmas festivities, celebrated that year at Richmond.  The queen’s premature death, however, may be one reason why some entries towards the back of the book appear to be in a somewhat randomised order.  Final audit was necessary, but posthumous, taken in the absence of the lord; and, as the king’s Books and of the books of declared accounts show, the queen’s lands passed once more, as was customary, into the control of the king.[113]

There is a third point.  The evidence is circumstantial, and it seems to have gone unnoticed.  Richard Decons recorded, without date, the receipt of £500 from the queen by the hands of Sir Thomas Lovell, on a ‘pledge’ of plate – that is, precious metal tableware was handed over by way of guarantee of a loan.[114]  The king’s books, in the week following St George’s day (23 April) 1502, recorded a loan of £500 to the Queen – and, slipped in among the register of debts, and by an entry recording the loan, there remains a signed memorandum in the queen’s hand agreeing the terms of repayment.[115] While Lovell was certainly a senior councillor and a knight of the Garter, and could simply have been a trustworthy messenger, was he also, as other evidence might suggest, still officially the treasurer of the Chamber and acting in that capacity?

Harris Nicolas’s edition made the text available to scholars at an early date.  Yet it has been far less used than the much inferior and third-hand [King’s] Chamber Book extracts, derived from Craven Ord’s transcripts, published by Samuel Bentley as ‘Privy Purse Accounts’.  Mary Everett Green, a record scholar of considerable ability, made good use of Harris Nicolas’s volume in her study of English princesses; Agnes Strickland, writing on the English queens, cited it but briefly and used it without understanding.[116]  The edition is a surprising omission from Stanley Chrimes’s biography of Henry VII, although he was too good a scholar not to have been aware of it; nor is it mentioned in the Baynards Castle chapter of the History of the King’s Works.[117] The accounts as a whole contain much that would feed the Victorian preoccupation with manners and customs: but for this there were other, perhaps easier to use, or more fashionable, sources, including the wardrobe account printed in the same volume. It was an opportunity lost.[118]

It is also an opportunity gained.  The twenty-first century has seen an explosion of interest in the Tudors, driven in part by the media.  That has spilled over into an interest in Tudor women, and is further augmented and shaped by the coming of age of gendered history as a main-stream academic discipline. It has found outlets and expression both in popular literature, and in more substantial works.  Studies of Elizabeth of York, often portrayed as a ‘grey’ and shadowy figure, have multiplied, both as stand-alone books and as chapters in themed works.  Purpose built royal residences had a king’s side and a queen’s side: but they interconnected.  The digital editions of the Chamber Books and the “Queen’s Book”, constrained though they are by the loss or survival of original texts, potentially performs the same tasks for the sources.[119]