The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors

by Dan Jones

  It did not take long for the news of Henry’s ‘secret assassination’ to circulate: by mid-June it was common knowledge at the French court that Edward IV, in order to bring the wars finally to an end, had applied himself to the extermination of his enemies. ‘He has, in short,’ wrote one ambassador, ‘chosen to crush the seed.’46 Edward’s decade as king had finally taught him the value of ruthlessness. Within the space of eleven weeks and against the most desperate odds he had invaded England, raised an army, rescued his son and heir from sanctuary, fought two ‘right-great, cruel and mortal’ battles, put down a rebellion, killed or captured virtually every one of his enemies, slain his rival king and successor and won back his crown.47 There had not been as successful and fortunate an English general since the days of Henry V. Edward was, as one writer put it, ‘a most renowned conqueror and a mighty monarch; whose praises resounded far and wide throughout the land’.48 He had not just staked his claim in blood: he had now earned it in bloodshed. He reigned with unarguable and well-deserved majesty: a great and glorious king.

  IV

  The Rise of the Tudors

  1471–1525

  But who will insane lust for power spare …?

  DOMINIC MANCINI

  16 : To Execute Wrath

  The fourteen-year-old boy travelled through south Wales alongside his forty-year-old uncle and a band of loyal retainers, making their way towards unstable country, thick with woods and pocked with the turrets of glowering castles. They were heading for the estuary of the river Severn, hoping to make contact with Queen Margaret and Prince Edward, and to reinforce the Lancastrian army aiming to destroy the Yorkist pretender who called himself Edward IV. The boy and the man both knew that if they could join forces with the queen, then they stood an excellent chance of victory. Ten years of exile, insurgency and plot would finally be rewarded with a return to rule. Reaching the river valley was the most important mission of their lives.

  Both were well acquainted with the perils that they faced. The man was a veteran of England’s wars: a skilled soldier with a fondness and talent for insurgent fighting. The boy had also seen his share of violence. His father had died a prisoner before he was even born. Then he had been brought up from the age of four as a captive – albeit a generously treated and well-schooled captive – in the heavily armed Yorkist castle at Raglan. He had been under the wardship of William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, who had bought him for £1,000, provided him with brilliant tutors and groomed him for marriage into the Herbert family. When he was twelve years old Herbert had taken him to the battle of Edgecote, to see and hear for the first time the ghastliness of men being hacked down in their hundreds. Herbert had perished there, at Edgecote: beheaded after the battle was through. The boy knew, therefore, the thin line that lay between living and dying, triumph and catastrophe. ‘This world’, as the old poem had it, ‘is variable.’1

  And so it proved. They had just passed Chepstow when the dreadful news arrived. The slaughter at Tewkesbury had spared no one: the queen was captured, the prince was dead, and so too were many of their allies, from Somerset and Lord Wenlock to the scores of loyal retainers who had risen up to fight for the Lancastrian right to rule. Tewkesbury was a disaster that exceeded even the horror of Towton. Edward and his brothers were triumphant. The boy and the man now knew that soon they would be targets. To march further was futile. The only rational plan now was to flee, as fast as they possibly could. Henry Tudor and his uncle Jasper halted their march and bolted for safety.

  Since Chepstow was the nearest town, it was there that the Tudors went first, taking with them a part of the armed force that Jasper had raised during the earlier months of 1471. Chepstow was a relatively secure fortress town, protected by city walls and the natural defences of the river Wye, and overlooked by a large turreted castle built on the densely forested hills that rose above the town. Here the Tudors paused. Jasper tried to make sense of the fact that Edward IV had ‘utterly overthrown’ his half-brother the king, and debated with his friends ‘what course was best to take’.2 He did not need long to deliberate. In a bid to exterminate whatever was left of the house of Lancaster, Edward IV sent out Sir Roger Vaughan – a veteran of Mortimer’s Cross, where Jasper’s father Owen Tudor had been captured and executed – with a licence to kill. Vaughan was described as a ‘very valiant man’; fortunately for the Tudors he was not so skilled in the art of survival as Jasper. Having received advance warning that Vaughan was on his way, the elder Tudor set up an ambush in Chepstow. Vaughan was captured when he entered the town, and Jasper avenged his father’s death by having the gentleman beheaded. But there was scarcely time to take satisfaction. More royal agents were closing in, and the Tudors retreated in all haste to Pembroke on the west coast of Wales, where they were ‘besieged, and kept in with ditch and trench [so] that [they] might not escape’.

  In happier times during the 1450s, when Jasper had himself been earl of Pembroke and the premier nobleman in south Wales, this great coastal town had been the seat of his power. It was where Henry Tudor had first seen the world, when he was born to thirteen-year-old Margaret Beaufort on 28 January 1457. It was a place that had traditionally been very close to Tudor hearts. Now, though, it was a prison. Their tormentor was the late Sir Roger Vaughan’s son-in-law, Morgan Thomas. The Thomas family had a long tradition of supporting the Lancastrian cause, but Jasper’s decision to kill Vaughan had pushed his son to the other side. For more than a week he kept Jasper and Henry pinned down, cut off from supplies and finding it desperately difficult to communicate with their supporters.

  Fortunately, not all of the Thomas family had lost their faith. Morgan Thomas had been camped in front of Pembroke for more than a week when he was attacked by his brother David, who brought a force of two thousand men before the town walls and distracted the besiegers just long enough for Jasper and Henry to slip out of the gates and flee again, this time four miles across the south-western peninsula to ‘a town by the sea side’ called Tenby. This little port town was just as well protected as Pembroke – indeed, Jasper had once helped to reinforce its defences. It was strong enough, at any rate, to keep Edward IV’s forces at bay for a couple of months while the Tudors hired a barque (a small sailing boat with three masts) and corresponded with the French court, asking for assistance and in return promising to ‘keep up the war and disturbance’ for as long as they could. But eventually their position became untenable. In mid-September 1471 the Tudors faced the inevitable and made arrangements to leave Wales for the continent. Taking with them a skeleton crew of friends and servants, they piled into Jasper’s hired barque, cast out from the shore and trusted their lives to the sea. The Channel stretching out before them churned with storms.3

  *

  When the Tudors sailed for France, they left Edward IV finally and indisputably master of his kingdom. He was still a young man – the battle of Tewkesbury took place only a few days after his twenty-ninth birthday – and he set about rebuilding his realm with his usual energetic bonhomie. A growing brood of young children by his wife Elizabeth suggested a healthy future for Edward’s royal line. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was six; her sisters Mary and Cecily were three and two. Their brother, Edward, had been born in sanctuary in November 1470 and was still a tiny baby, but he was heir to the crown all the same. On 11 June 1471 the seven-month-old was created prince of Wales and earl of Chester in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey, followed by investiture somewhat later as duke of Cornwall. Less than a month later, on 3 July, a great council met at Westminster, where forty-seven archbishops, bishops, dukes, earls, barons and knights all swore on the gospels that they would acknowledge Prince Edward as ‘true and undoubted heir to our … sovereign lord, as to the crowns and realms of England and of France and the lordship of Ireland’.4 Edward and Elizabeth would produce six more children during the next nine years: Margaret, born in April 1472; Richard duke of York in August 1473; Anne in November 1475; George duke of Bedford, who was born in March 1477 but di
ed at the age of two; and finally Catherine in August 1479 and Bridget in November 1480. All but George would survive their earliest years, creating a large and youthful family around the king.

  One of Edward’s first actions of his second reign was to set out a long list of protocols and ordinances for his household and those of his children. His fondness for the glittering and ritualised court of his brother-in-law Charles duke of Burgundy had only been increased by the months he had spent exiled in the Low Countries at a court which John Paston thought was second only to King Arthur’s.5 A long instruction manual for the organisation of an English king’s domestic and ceremonial life, called the Black Book, was produced by 1472.6 In it was set out every tiny detail of propriety and protocol in the royal presence, the deference due to visitors of every rank, and the rations due to servants and officials, no matter how lowly. The Black Book contained everything from the number of loaves, ale-flagons, candles and faggots of firewood that should be given to a baron residing at the royal court, to the precise means by which the king’s tablecloth should be folded and presented when he sat to dine in the company of his subjects. It described a court whose splendour would match that of any English court before it and which would impress any foreign visitor with its command of fashion and princely worship. This was more than simply a Burgundian copycat court: it was a royal establishment that was singularly, dazzlingly English, harking back to the glorious days of the king’s mighty fourteenth-century ancestor Edward III.7 Its style and grandiloquence was matched in the building works that began in Edward IV’s second reign, not least in his reconstruction of the chapel of the college of St George at Windsor, the spiritual home of the Order of the Garter, which became a soaring masterpiece of gothic architecture, furnished with elaborately carved choir stalls, decorated with brilliant statues and stained-glass windows and stocked with ornate vestments for the use of the clergy of the college. Edward spent £6,572 in five years on works to improve Windsor, at the same time undertaking extensive reconstruction of the fortresses and palaces at Calais, Nottingham, Westminster, Greenwich, Eltham and the York family seat in the midlands, Fotheringhay.

  Besides erecting fine buildings and marshalling the royal household, there was a kingdom to run. The deaths of Warwick, Montague and several other rebels left swathes of land to be reassigned in south-west England, the west midlands and the north. Edward also voluntarily reclaimed lands and offices that had previously been alienated from the Crown by passing an act of resumption in parliament in 1473. This was a tool that he had used before in 1461, 1463 and 1467 – and one which had the double benefit of fortifying royal finances while allowing the scope for cheap patronage by granting exemptions. Edward approached the problem of redistributing land, titles, offices and authority like a political jigsaw puzzle: fitting together sensitive areas of the country under the leadership of men whom he thought he could trust, most of whom came from the family circle. Lands in Devon, Cornwall and the south-west fell to the king’s stepson, Thomas Grey, who became marquess of Dorset by 1475. The late Lord Herbert’s son and namesake William Herbert became earl of Pembroke and was initially trusted to oversee Wales before the role was taken over by a council under the authority of the young Edward, who had been awarded the traditional heir’s titles of prince of Wales and earl of Chester.8 The prince’s council operated from the old Yorkist seat of Ludlow, on the borders, and its power in Wales was operated by the queen and her brother, Earl Rivers.

  Warwick’s huge estates, which, had he died naturally, would have gone to his brother Montague and his two daughters, were largely split between the king’s brothers.9 In the midlands, the unreliable Clarence was entrusted with land and a limited degree of autonomy and power, but his authority was eventually overtaken by that of Edward’s great friend, servant, military captain and companion, William, Lord Hastings. Edward kept a measure of direct control on the midlands, later marrying his second son, Richard duke of York, to the daughter of the duke of Norfolk, who had interests in the region. A patchwork quilt of delegated royal authority was being stitched together, connecting the king’s children, brothers and extended family in a way that had not been attempted since the heyday of Edward III.10 At the centre of it all the king remained sharp, interested and focused on the business of government. He was capable in an argument of demonstrating intimate knowledge of politics to a remarkably local level. He appointed men connected to his household to serve as local justices of the peace and sheriffs, to sit on the itinerant judicial commissions known as ‘oyer and terminer’ (‘to hear and to judge’) and to do the work of the royal council in the regions.11 The fingers of direct royal power spread deeper than at any time in living memory into the shires of England. One chronicler observed that the dominance of royal officials controlling the governance of ‘castles, forests, manors and parks’ was such that ‘no person, however shrewd he might be’ could commit any offence without being ‘immediately charged with the same to his face’. Gradually, the machinery necessary for keeping law and order in the realm was being rebuilt.

  Edward’s reconstruction of England and of English royal power relied heavily on the use of tough and trusted lieutenants, and few were more trusted after 1471 than his youngest brother, Richard duke of Gloucester. He was awarded the Neville estates in northern England, a perpetually troubled and dangerous area of the country, bordering the unpredictable enemy kingdom of Scotland. It required a leader of unimpeachable loyalty, military skill, courage and cunning, characteristics he had displayed over the course of the recent crises. To bolster his position, in 1472 Gloucester was married to Warwick’s younger daughter, Anne Neville. (His brother Clarence had, of course, married Anne’s elder sister, Isabel, during his rebellion in 1469.) Gloucester was also awarded huge tracts of land from the duchy of Lancaster, the honour of Richmond (which had once belonged to Henry Tudor’s father Edmund) and effective seniority over Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland. He held land in Wales and East Anglia, as well as serving as constable and admiral of England.

  Still only twenty-two years old in 1472, Richard of Gloucester was beginning to suffer noticeably from scoliosis, a curvature of the spine which caused him to walk with his right shoulder raised and his back hunched, and may have given him pain and shortness of breath.12 In later years a German visitor to England, Nicolas von Poppelau, would remark that although Richard was tall (he stood five foot eight inches, not as tall as his brother Edward, but large by the standard of the day), he was lean, with delicate arms and legs. Whatever Richard’s physical shortcomings, they did not diminish his standing either in his brother’s eyes or anyone else’s: during the 1470s he was roundly acclaimed as the most senior military man in England under the king, an effective prince in the north and Edward IV’s foremost and most trusted lieutenant. He had, said von Poppelau, ‘a great heart’.13

  The same could not be said of George duke of Clarence. He was chief among those who benefited from Edward IV’s preference for conciliation and mercy, and had been treated with extraordinary generosity, considering his pivotal role in the crisis that had forced his brother from the throne in the first place. Clarence had extensive territories in the midlands and was, with Gloucester, among the first to profit from the death of the earl of Warwick. But the partition of the Warwick estates caused a good amount of friction between Clarence and Gloucester from 1472 until 1474 – friction that translated on the ground into disorder throughout the midlands and a growing headache for the king. Edward had indulged his feckless younger brother for many years, tolerating the most appalling and disloyal behaviour, but eventually he came to realise that Clarence was never likely to redeem himself and become the dependable and astute kinsman on whom so much of his royal policy was founded. The duke’s final fall from grace would be spectacular, even by the standards of this ruthless, pitiless age.

  *

  On Friday 16 January 1478 the great men of England assembled in the Painted Chamber at the palace of Westminster for the opening of p
arliament. The large room was decorated in every available space with faded murals of biblical and historical scenes arranged in six large horizontal strips, rising to the very top of the thirty-foot walls: the stories depicted included those of King David, the Maccabees and the destruction of the Temple. Elsewhere were huge seven-foot figures representing the Virtues standing victorious over Sins, angels bearing crowns swooping above the windows and a sublime rendering of St Edward the Confessor on his coronation day.14 Amid all this splendour, sitting on his royal throne was King Edward IV. Before him were the representatives of his subjects and ready to address them was the chancellor of England, Thomas Rotherham, bishop of Lincoln.

  The bishop took as his theme two texts: the first from the Old Testament and the second from the New. The first was the famous Psalm 23: Dominus regit me et nihil mihi deerit – ‘The Lord rules me, I shall want for nothing.’15 The Lord, explained Rotherham, was the protector of his people. He was the essence of their salvation and it was, in turn, their absolute duty to obey their master. This brought the bishop on to his second text, the letter of St Paul to the Romans, in which he warned his correspondents that ‘the king does not carry the sword without cause’.16 This ominous passage explains that those who resist righteous power will be damned, and that in bearing the sword, a godly king is appointed as ‘an avenger to execute wrath on evildoers’. The bishop concluded his remarks by returning, pointedly, to the psalm, and reminding his audience that ‘if the Lord will rule them they will lack nothing but he will put them to graze in pasture’. It was obvious to everyone assembled in the Painted Chamber on that winter morning precisely what Thomas Rotherham had in mind.