Elizabeth of York and her mother’s curse against the Tudors

Elizabeth of York and her mother’s curse against the Tudors is a private act of vengeance that becomes a lasting language for dynastic fear. Elizabeth confesses that she and her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, called for the deaths of the man responsible for her brothers’ fate, then his son and grandson. The curse turns grief over the princes into a threat against the Tudor succession; later deaths make its terms seem to echo through the family, without establishing that supernatural force caused them.

Origin and Confession

The curse enters the narrative through Elizabeth’s confidential disclosure to Margaret Pole. She draws Margaret aside and says that a curse existed against whoever removed her brothers from the Tower or put them to death. Margaret understands Elizabeth’s guilt as soon as she sees her face: this was not only her mother’s act. Elizabeth admits that she had spoken the curse with her while still a girl.

The setting emphasizes secrecy rather than public ritual. Elizabeth takes Margaret through an arched doorway into the stable gardens, where they are alone beneath a leafless tree. There, Elizabeth describes directing the curse toward a river and the goddess associated with her family. Its requested payment is specific: the alleged murderer’s son should die while still a boy, before manhood and inheritance, and his grandson should die as well. Their deaths would, in Elizabeth’s account, confirm that the curse had answered the loss of her brother.

The confession makes Elizabeth both the bereaved daughter and a participant in the threat. Her admission that she was young does not undo her responsibility; it deepens her fear, because the curse’s target may include people she loves. Margaret responds by identifying the danger to Elizabeth’s husband and their son, Prince Arthur. Elizabeth fears that Arthur, as the murderer’s grandson, may be the very child she has condemned. The curse is therefore not simply directed outward: its logic threatens to consume Elizabeth’s own family.

Dynastic Fear and Contested Heirs

The curse is rooted in uncertainty about what happened to Elizabeth’s brothers in the Tower and who was responsible. In the private conversation, Margaret and Elizabeth also fear Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor’s mother. The possibility that the Tudor family rose through the destruction of Elizabeth’s brothers gives the curse a political target, but the scene presents suspicion and fear, not proof of who killed them.

The terms of the curse make succession itself the measure of revenge. A son is to be taken before he becomes a man or inherits; then the grandson is to be taken too. Margaret’s fearful response extends this pattern to the possibility that the Tudor line might end without boys, leaving only daughters. In the book’s account, private bereavement thus becomes an imagined judgment on the ruling dynasty: the deaths of particular children would carry meaning beyond the family and threaten the continuity of the crown.

That anxiety also resonates with later disputes about marriage and legitimacy. Margaret is challenged over whether Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon consummated their marriage, and is pressed to affirm that they were put together regularly and that the marriage was bedded. Henry VII’s claim to marry Katherine would require papal dispensation if Arthur’s marriage had been consummated; the question becomes entangled with the security of his house. These later arguments do not establish that the curse caused the dispute, but they show how the narrative repeatedly makes the fate and status of heirs a matter of political survival.

The Curse’s Return in Margaret’s Life

Years later, the curse persists for Margaret not as a solved mystery but as a hope she comes to entertain. During her years at Syon Abbey, she lives as a widow with severe financial insecurity and little prospect of support. Her prayers change over time: after praying first for help and then release, she begins praying for Henry VII’s death, for the damnation of his mother, and for the return of the House of York. In the enforced quiet of religious life, grief and political resentment harden into rebellion. Margaret hopes that the curse Elizabeth and her mother laid upon the Tudors will prove true and destroy their line.

The news of Henry VII’s death arrives at the abbey in April 1509. An old porteress bursts into Margaret’s cell to announce that the king is dead and that the new king has come to the throne. She interprets the death as deliverance and declares that the curse of the Red Dragon has passed over them. Margaret, who had been dreaming of her uncle Richard’s court and Elizabeth dancing there, initially refuses to hear the news. The scene makes the curse a shared political expression of relief, but the succession does not end: Henry VIII’s accession replaces one Tudor king with another.

Heirs, Loss, and Retrospective Meaning

The next generation’s losses give the curse fresh force. After Katherine of Aragon gives birth, Margaret is called to the nursery and finds the baby blue and lifeless in his ornate crib. The child has stopped breathing without warning. Margaret’s narration associates the death with the old curse and with the end of the line that killed the princes of York. This is the death of Henry, Duke of Cornwall, and the passage presents its unexplained suddenness through Margaret’s interpretation; it does not establish a supernatural cause.

The fear of a male heir continues in later pregnancies. When Katherine goes into labor weeks early, those around her privately hope that a son would silence those who call her weak, infertile, or cursed and would secure her position at court. The child is stillborn, and the narrator carries the news through the palace to the king. The episode extends the book’s pattern of turning pregnancy and infant loss into dynastic crisis, though it does not identify this stillbirth as the fulfillment of Elizabeth’s curse.

Much later, Henry VIII himself asks whether a curse has been laid upon him after the death of his son Henry FitzRoy. Grieving, he connects the losses of people he loved with divine punishment and wonders why his son has been taken. Margaret does not answer him with the history of Elizabeth’s confession. In the same sequence, Henry’s claim to rule the Church and his adoption of the imperial title Majesty place his personal grief beside an expanding assertion of royal authority. The contrast is sharp: the king seeks an explanation for his private losses, while the political order around him insists on his supremacy.

Across these episodes, the curse works as a narrative pattern through which characters interpret the precariousness of children, heirs, and dynasties. It begins in Elizabeth’s remorseful confession, becomes part of Margaret’s growing Yorkist resentment, and returns whenever royal succession is unsettled by death or threatened by the absence of a son. The book preserves the difference between belief and proof: characters fear, hope, or speak of a curse, while the deaths themselves remain events whose political meaning is made by those who survive them.