The curse of the Red Dragon

The curse of the Red Dragon is a dynastic malediction attributed to Elizabeth of York and her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, against the person responsible for the princes taken from the Tower of London. Its promised repayment reaches across generations: the perpetrator’s son is to die young, and then his grandson. In Margaret Pole’s account, the curse does not remain a single fearful confession. It returns as an explanation for Tudor deaths and succession crises, and as a political language through which Yorkist grievance and Tudor vulnerability are repeatedly understood.

Origin and Terms

Elizabeth reveals the curse privately to Margaret Pole, drawing her aside and admitting that she had joined her mother in speaking it. Her confession makes the curse more than an inherited story: Elizabeth accepts personal responsibility for having spoken the words herself, although she had been young. The two women had addressed a river and the goddess they associated with the founding of their family, asking for the death of the alleged murderer’s son before he reached manhood, and then for the death of his grandson. Those deaths, they said, would serve as payment for the loss of their own son.

The threat depends on a specific family sequence rather than a general promise of revenge. If the killer is responsible for the princes’ removal, his son and grandson become the intended targets. Margaret reasons that the suspected killer is Henry VII, whose mother, Margaret Beaufort, also comes under suspicion in her account. Elizabeth fears the implication for her own household: Henry VII is her husband, and the next generation includes her son Prince Arthur. The curse therefore turns the family ties that join York and Tudor into its instrument and its danger.

The story does not establish the curse as a supernatural fact. It presents a remembered declaration, the fear it creates, and later events interpreted through that fear. Margaret is initially horrified by Elizabeth’s confession, and Elizabeth’s own distress shows that the curse is also a burden of guilt: she fears not only that it may strike the Tudor line, but that she may have invoked harm against her child.

A Dynastic Fear Made Political

The curse gains force in a court where Plantagenet kinship is already politically precarious. Margaret’s family includes a wide network of cousins and kinsmen; she describes the Plantagenets as numerous and interwoven, in contrast to the small Tudor household of Henry VII and his heirs, Arthur and Harry. Edmund de la Pole, a Plantagenet duke who has served Henry VII loyally, appears as a particularly vivid sign of the supposed coexistence of York and Tudor. News that he may have been arrested makes Margaret’s fear of the family’s political exposure immediate, even though this account does not confirm the arrest.

The same kinship network can look different depending on who is watching. Marriage among relatives preserves wealth, land, and influence within the family, but Margaret recognizes that an unfriendly observer could interpret those bonds as evidence of faction or conspiracy. In that atmosphere, the curse gives inherited grievance a form that can be carried forward, while the state’s suspicion of Plantagenet connections gives the grievance a continuing political context. The curse is thus both a threat against a royal succession and a sign of how dangerous it is for the Yorkist family to remember its losses aloud.

Deaths Read Through the Curse

When Prince Arthur falls ill, Margaret connects his condition to the malediction and to her own promise to keep him safe. She sees his suffering as the feared consequence of the curse, and as punishment directed at the family responsible for the deaths of the Yorkist boys. The interpretation sharpens the tragedy for Margaret: Arthur is not merely the heir whose death would destabilize the dynasty, but Elizabeth’s beloved son and the very child she had feared the curse might reach.

A later death in the royal nursery renews the association between the curse and the failure of Tudor succession. Margaret is summoned to a lifeless newborn boy after the nurse discovers that he has stopped breathing. The child’s death is described through the image of the curse resting over him, ending a line already shadowed by the princes of York. The passage does not name the infant, so the significance lies in the scene’s dynastic pattern rather than an identification: a birth expected to strengthen the royal future instead becomes another occasion for fear that the family line is being cut short.

The prospect of another child also gives the curse a public, political dimension. When Katherine of Aragon goes into premature labor, those around her hope that a son might silence claims that she is weak, infertile, or cursed, and secure her standing against the king’s other possible interests. The stillborn child is a girl, and the household’s hopes collapse. The scene does not prove the curse, but shows how readily questions of fertility and personal loss become questions about royal authority and succession.

Return, Resistance, and Royal Grief

During her years at Syon Abbey, Margaret’s prayers change. She moves from asking for help and release to wishing for Henry VII’s death, the damnation of his mother, and the restoration of the House of York. In the silence of confinement she comes to hope that the curse spoken by Elizabeth of York and Elizabeth Woodville will hold through the end of the Tudor line. When the old king dies in April 1509, an abbey porteress announces that the curse has passed over them and that the new king’s accession has brought their deliverance. The announcement gives the curse a new, provisional meaning: Henry VII’s death appears to Margaret’s companions as an answer to years of fear, though the succession itself ensures that the Tudor dynasty continues.

Later, Margaret’s sons propose action to defend Katherine of Aragon and the princess against Henry VIII’s plans. They imagine sending Geoffrey to carry reports to Reginald Pole, communicate with the Pope, and convey a letter for Katherine to the King of Spain. Their hope is that papal opposition might force Henry VIII to restore his wife. Montague frames the family’s collective intervention through the White Rose of York and the Plantagenet claim to rule. Margaret’s decision to support the effort is rooted in loyalty to Katherine and the princess, but also in her sense of family duty and her concern that Henry VIII is damaging his inheritance by placing Henry FitzRoy before the princess. In this political crisis, the curse is not merely a prediction: it accompanies a renewed Yorkist challenge to Tudor decisions about legitimacy and succession.

Henry VIII himself eventually speaks of a curse as an explanation for losing people he loves and for his misery. After the death of Henry FitzRoy, he asks why God would take his son if no curse were involved. Margaret does not confirm his interpretation. The contrast is striking: she has long feared a curse directed against the Tudor line, while Henry experiences loss as proof that he, too, is its victim. His adoption of the title Majesty accompanies a growing assertion of royal authority; yet the scene places that claim beside a king overwhelmed by grief, dependent on attendants to help him to bed. The curse’s lasting force lies in this collision between political power and vulnerable family bodies. It cannot be verified as the cause of the deaths, but it gives the characters a recurring way to read bereavement, failed succession, and the unresolved history between York and Tudor.