Elizabeth Tudor, and Medieval Child Mortality

Princess Elizabeth Tudor, the 4th child and second daughter of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York,  was born on 2 July 1492.

She seemed healthy enough as a baby, but the little girl died while she was only a toddler in the royal nurseries at Eltham Palace on 14 September 1495. Her parents were, naturally, grief stricken by the loss of their daughter – the first of their children to die. They had her small body placed in the king’s chapel at Eltham, and was covered by a cloth of gold pall decorated with her coat of arms. The king paid for masses and requiems to be given for the toddler’s soul every day for the eleven days she remained in the chapel.

On 26 September the tiny princess was placed in a black hearse covered by black cloth and adorned with the red and white roses of Lancaster and York and the motto Jesus est amor meus. The hearse was drawn by six horses to Stangate, then ferried across the Thames to Westminster Abbey. There, the hearse waited in the choir overnight while more prayers were said and a vigil kept over Elizabeth Tudor’s body. The next day the funeral was held for the departed princess, and she was interred in the Chapel of St. Edward the Confessor. Her grieving parents paid for an effigy of gilded copper on a black marble tomb (long since disappeared) with the inscription in Latin which read:

Elizabeth, second child of Henry the Seventh King of England, France and Ireland and of the most serene lady Queen Elizabeth his consort, who was born on the second day of the month of July in the year of Our Lord 1492, and died on the 14th day of the month of September in the year of Our Lord 1495, upon whose soul may God have mercy. Amen

Few families were spared the loss of an infant or child in Medieval or early Renaissance Europe, and even a crown could not stop death from taking one of your beloved offspring. Almost half of all children died before the age of 10, most from childhood diseases we’ve largely eradicated from the modern population thanks to vaccines. Nor were families hardened to these losses; in spite of myths to the contrary people in the Middle Ages were as likely to be agonizingly distraught over the loss of a child as they are today. They merely had less hope they would be able to avoid that pain.

Moreover, children weren’t as plentiful in medieval families as popular culture often thinks they were. Most woman experienced an average of six or seven pregnancies over the course of their life spans, and a woman who bore a child almost every year was an exception not the rule. Every child was a valued potential worker or heir, and the death of a baby was never the reason for anything other than sorrow for even the poorest peasant families.

Even in the upper classes where wet-nurses ensured women would regain their fertility more quickly,  around 19% of first marriages among the nobility did not produce living children, and 29% had no male heirs. Multiple marriages among peers was no guarantee of fruitfulness either, since 48% of second marriages were childless, and 58% produced no male heir.

King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York would have eight children four of whom lived past the watershed first decade. Their eldest son, Arthur, would die in his early teens,  but three of their children – Margaret, Henry VIII, and Mary – would live to adulthood and reproduce. Of the three who lived, only one, Margaret, would have grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were able to survive as a royal dynasty — the Stuarts and Georgians and down into the current House of Windsor. Mary’s descendants would remain peers, but not royalty. Henry VIII, however, would make history in his futile attempt to secure a dynasty that would last beyond his own offspring.