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

by Dan Jones

  The duke of Clarence was in the Tower of London and had been there for more than six months. Around 10 June, he had been summoned to an audience with the king, the mayor and the aldermen of London. Edward had upbraided him in person before commanding that he be thrown in jail. It was no secret that the king and his wayward middle brother looked on one another ‘with no very fraternal eyes’. Nevertheless, there was something sensational about a king summarily imprisoning his closest adult relative and preparing to put him on trial before the lords in parliament.

  Clarence’s behaviour had been problematic for some time. His feud with Gloucester over the division of the Warwick and Neville estates between 1472 and 1474 had almost resulted in armed confrontation and had certainly not helped Edward to stabilise the realm following his return to the throne. The deal that Edward imposed in 1474 to bring this quarrel to an end had settled on both men handsome portions of the lands they craved, but it had left Clarence highly dissatisfied.17 He did ‘more and more to estrange himself from the king’s presence’, sulking in silence through council meetings and refusing to eat or drink in the king’s company. His rage was that of a middle child overtaken by a prodigious younger brother. Gloucester was emerging as the king’s hand in the north and his most trusted magnate, whereas Clarence was humiliated: Edward had taken away his favourite manor and ducal seat at Tutbury in Staffordshire, and also refused to allow him to exercise his military duties as lieutenant of Ireland.

  Personal matters had also served to inflame the brotherly resentment. When Gloucester married Anne Neville in 1472, she immediately conceived and in the course of time bore him a son, Edward of Middleham. Clarence’s marital experience was markedly less happy. In December 1476, his wife Isabel died at the age of twenty-five. She left two children, Margaret and Edward, who would survive to adulthood, but her death made a terrible mark on her husband. It is probable that Isabel died from the after-effects of childbirth, but this was not the way it seemed to Clarence. Perhaps because he was driven mad by grief, perhaps simply because he was constitutionally vindictive, short-sighted and unwise, he determined to take revenge for his wife’s death. At two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday 12 April 1477 a mob of eighty ‘riotous and misgoverned persons’ loyal to the duke descended on the manor of Cayford in Somerset and seized a woman by the name of Ankarette Twynho, who had once been a personal servant of Duchess Isabel. Effectively abducted, Twynho was whisked across the country at great speed, from Cayford to Bath, from Bath to Cirencester and from Cirencester to Warwick, where she arrived as dark was falling on Monday 14 April and was locked in a cell. At six o’clock the following morning the wretched woman was dragged to the Guildhall in Warwick, where Clarence sat in personal judgement as she was accused of having killed Isabel by giving her ‘a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison’. It was plainly a ludicrous charge (not least because the crime had supposedly taken place on 10 October 1477, more than two months before the duchess had actually died) but Clarence ensured that within three hours of reaching the Guildhall, Ankarette Twynho had been presented to the court, indicted for murder, tried, found guilty, dragged through the streets of Warwick and hanged. There was no semblance of justice: indeed, several of the jurors who were browbeaten into delivering a guilty verdict apparently approached Twynho with ‘great remorse in their conscience, knowing they had given an untrue verdict’ and ‘piteously asked forgiveness’ before the unlucky lady was put to death.18

  This would have been a serious indiscretion in its own right – to subvert the judicial process and kill innocent people was no way for a duke of the royal blood to behave. But it would most likely have been forgiven, were it not for Clarence’s subsequent intervention in another, far more serious criminal case.

  This second case involved three men – a fellow and a chaplain of Merton College, Oxford by the names of Master John Stacey and Thomas Blake and a brutish, violent midlands landowner called Thomas Burdet, who were arrested and charged with predicting the king’s death by sorcery. During the mid-fifteenth century the phenomena of witchcraft, alchemy, astrology and sorcery were taken very seriously – they had after all been instrumental thirty years previously in bringing down Humphrey duke of Gloucester through his wife Eleanor Cobham. The men were charged before a court composed of some of England’s most senior noblemen with having attempted to predict the death dates of Edward IV and his eldest son, so that ‘the King, by knowledge of the same, would be saddened … so that his life would be thereby shortened’. All three were found guilty. On 19 May 1477 Burdet and Stacey were drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn and hanged, pleading their innocence as they stood on the scaffold. Blake was pardoned, and that would have been the end of it – if Clarence had not decided to intervene, for, intriguingly, Burdet had been one of his servants. Two days after the hangings, Clarence marched into a council meeting, read out declarations of innocence on behalf of the dead men and promptly marched out again. Even if Burdet’s association with Clarence had not cast suspicion on the duke, his headstrong defence of a convicted traitor most certainly did.

  These, then, were the events that had convinced Edward IV in the summer of 1477 that Clarence was too dangerous to be left alone. The first sign of royal displeasure came in the king’s explicit refusal to allow Clarence to marry again. Edward IV ‘threw all possible impediments in the way’ of potential matches with either Mary of Burgundy (the only heir of Charles the Bold following the Burgundian duke’s death in 1477) or Margaret Stewart, sister of James III of Scotland.19 Ill-feeling between Edward and Clarence began to burn from this point: stoked, according to one chronicler, by ‘flatterers running to and fro, from the one side to the other, and carrying backwards and forwards the words which had fallen from the two brothers, even if they had happened to be spoken in the most secret closet’.20

  When the January 1478 parliament assembled before the king in the Painted Chamber, it was clear to everyone in it that the duke’s time was up. The autumn preceding parliament’s meeting had been passed by those around the king – principally his Woodville relatives – in building a case against Clarence which extended far beyond the affronts to justice, judicial process and political common sense committed in the aftermath of his wife’s death. All of the duke’s past misdemeanours had been bundled together in a package of damnable crimes that could be deployed to destroy him. Parliament, when it was called, was packed with retainers, servants and associates of the king and queen. Over the next months, as proceedings took place in Westminster Abbey, it witnessed an extraordinary, ruthless piece of political drama in which Edward IV, unsupported by any other legal counsel, delivered a personal case against his brother. ‘Not a single person uttered a word against the duke, except the king,’ wrote one chronicler, who also noted that Clarence was refused the right of attorney in his defence: ‘Not one individual made answer to the king except the duke.’ Witnesses were called, but they struck observers as royal stooges. It was plain from the beginning that Clarence was doomed. Outside Westminster, the king had scheduled a series of lavish parties and pageants to celebrate the marriage of his four-year-old second son Richard duke of York to the six-year-old Anne Mowbray, sole heiress to the duke of Norfolk. The large royal family, dominated by Woodvilles and their noble spouses, feasted and made merry, while inside a tense parliament chamber, Clarence was systematically destroyed by his own brother.

  Eventually and inevitably, early in February 1478 proceedings were wound up and Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham – the king’s brother-in-law through his marriage to Catherine Woodville – stood in parliament and delivered a verdict. Clarence was convicted of treason, having been adjudged guilty on a bewildering array of charges, which were enumerated in a bill of attainder later passed against him. He was held to have engaged in a ‘conspiracy against [the king], the queen, their son and heir and a great part of the nobility of the land’. Ignoring the fact that Edward had ‘always loved and generously rewarded’ him, he had ‘grievously offended the king in t
he past, procuring his exile from the realm and labouring parliament to exclude him and his heirs from the crown. All of which the king forgave, but the duke continued to conspire against him, intending his destruction by both internal and external forces.’ Then came the list of specific crimes.

  [The duke] sought to turn [Edward’s] subjects against him by saying that Thomas Burdet was falsely put to death and that the king resorted to necromancy. He also said that the king was a bastard, not fit to reign, and made men take oaths of allegiance to him without excepting their loyalty to the king. He accused the king of taking his livelihood from him, and intending his destruction. He secured an exemplification under the great seal of an agreement made between him and Queen Margaret promising him the crown if Henry VI’s line failed. He planned to send his son and heir abroad to win support, bringing a false child to Warwick castle in his place. He planned to raise war against the king within England and made men promise to be ready at an hour’s notice. The duke has thus shown himself incorrigible and to pardon him would threaten the common weal, which the king is bound to maintain.21

  The bill of attainder noted that the duke was convicted of high treason. It was signed by Edward’s own hand.

  The king dithered for a few days about whether to carry out the sentence that his brother’s supposed crimes demanded. But eventually the parliamentary commons complained about the delay, and on 18 February George duke of Clarence was put to death in the Tower of London. The exact method of death has never been established, but a long tradition holds that he was plunged head first into a barrel of malmsey wine and drowned.22 His bones were later buried at Tewkesbury Abbey. It was an unfortunate end for a man who in life had been a feckless nuisance and an ingrate. He died the victim of his own rashness. Edward rued his brother’s death and made many expensive provisions to tie up his finances and estate, but his reign was the more secure for Clarence’s removal. By 1479 almost every threat to the rule of the house of York – both external and internal – had been erased. There was only one man left who posed even the vaguest challenge to the dynastic security of the English crown. Far away across the sea, Henry Tudor still survived, a dim beacon for the Lancastrian cause. But in 1478 he could hardly have seemed less dangerous to Edward IV, the king who had amply demonstrated what St Paul had once told the Romans: ‘They that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.’23

  17 : The Only Imp Now Left

  Jasper and Henry Tudor had washed up on the shores of western Brittany, in the little fishing port of Le Conquet, in the middle of September 1471. Their crossing was rough and troubled by storms, but the wind was kind in blowing their barque ashore in the territory of Duke Francis II of Brittany. Francis was a clever politician and a courteous host. When Jasper and Henry found their way to his court he treated them ‘very handsomely for prisoners’, which was what they now were.1 The Tudors would remain at the duke’s mercy for more than a decade.

  As Edward rebuilt England, across the sea Jasper and Henry lived the lives of honourable fugitives. Francis’s ducal seat was the Château de l’Hermine at Vannes: a grand, well-fortified palace equipped with fine stables, tennis courts and its own mint. Having submitted to Francis’s authority, the Tudors were treated with ‘honour, courtesy, and favour’ and entertained as though ‘they had been [the duke’s] brothers’. The duke promised that they should be free to ‘pass as their pleasure to and fro without danger’. But manifestly that was not the case. In October 1472 the Tudors were moved from Vannes into the possession of Jean du Quelennec, the admiral of Brittany, who kept them at his château of Suscinio, a small but stunning moated hideaway on a peninsula between the ocean and the bay of Morbihan. Later, when it was feared that Suscinio was too vulnerable to a kidnapping raid from the sea, they were moved to Nantes. Here the men would become political pawns in the diplomatic intrigues that took place between Duke Francis, Louis XI of France and Edward IV.

  Although Edward was busy in the 1470s with the pacification both of his kingdom and his brother, he never wholly forgot that the only remaining Lancastrian of any note was tantalisingly beyond his reach. Henry was, in the words of the Italian historian Polydore Vergil, ‘the only imp now left of Henry VI’s blood’, and the English king determined on numerous occasions to solicit his return from Brittany with ‘gift, promise and prayer’.2

  He had a rival for Henry’s custody in Louis of France. The French king suspected, quite rightly, that possession of the Tudors would be a very useful stick with which to prod his English rival. Louis attempted to extract Jasper and Henry from Brittany in 1474, sending an ambassador, Guillaume Compaing, to argue that since Jasper was a pensioner of France (and cousin of Louis himself ) he and his nephew ought to be released into French custody. Francis refused, seeing in turn that possession of the Tudors was a stick with which he could prod France, but he agreed to move Jasper and Henry from Nantes. Early in 1474 Jasper was taken to the Château Josselin, twenty-five miles from Vannes, while Henry was placed in the newly constructed, maximum-security Château Largöet, under the watch of the marshal of Brittany, Jean de Rieux. He was imprisoned once again in luxury on the sixth floor of seven within the massive octagonal Tour d’Elven.3 Not for the first time in his life, the seventeen-year-old Henry Tudor was comfortable, but he was not going anywhere.

  In June 1475 Edward IV invaded France with a large army, funded by English taxation on a scale that had not been seen since the time of Henry V. He declared himself, in time-honoured fashion, to be the king of France and duke of Normandy and Gascony, evoking the claims of all his Plantagenet predecessors since Henry II and Richard the Lionheart. Using a fleet of five hundred borrowed Dutch boats, he landed in Calais with as many as fifteen hundred men-at-arms, fifteen thousand archers and ‘besides a great number of foot-soldiers’. Even if we allow for exaggerations in the estimates, the English army was still thought by a close associate of the French king to be ‘the most numerous, the best disciplined, the best mounted and the best armed that any king of that nation invaded France withal’.4 Nevertheless, Edward found little support from either Burgundy or Brittany for his endeavour. After some minor and fruitless skirmishing the expedition was over by 29 August, when Louis XI and Edward met on the bridge over the river Somme in the town of Picquiny to thrash out the terms of a deal. Edward wrung from Louis a seven-year truce and a lavish pension. In comparison to the great campaigns of the Hundred Years War, which Edward was hoping to emulate, the 1475 invasion was a largely insignificant jaunt about the countryside, notable for little more than the fact that the king had managed, as he was wont, to collect a huge amount of tax without fighting the campaigns it was intended to fund. But the treaty of Picquiny also made the Tudors’ position a great deal more precarious, for under its terms Louis promised not to attack Brittany. Expecting that Duke Francis might be rather grateful, Edward renewed his attempts to wheedle Henry Tudor away from Brittany and bring him to justice in England, on the understanding that he would not be ill-treated. This time, he was very nearly successful. After a year, weary of being nagged, Francis agreed to repatriate his charge.

  In November 1476 English ships bobbed in the waters off the Breton coast, ready to receive the prodigal Tudor. But when he was brought to the port of St Malo, Henry, ‘knowing that he was carried to his death, through agony of mind fell by the way into a fever’.5 Whether feigned, real or psychosomatic, this illness was enough to save him. He took sanctuary in one of St Malo’s churches in order to recover his health, and during the delay Duke Francis had a change of heart. He sent messengers summoning Henry back to the Château d’Hermine. Jasper joined him there from Josselin. The Tudors had narrowly escaped Edward’s attempts to recapture them. The king realised he would have to choose a different tactic if he wished to wipe out for good the last remaining threat to his throne.

  *

  Back in England, Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, had trodden a more conciliatory course through the politics of the Yorkist restoration. Smal
l of stature, shrewd and tough, Margaret was a very impressive woman. She was highly literate, a canny businesswoman and, above all, always mindful of her duty to protect what she could of her son’s inheritance and future. Despite the trauma she had suffered while giving birth to Henry in Pembroke Castle during the plague-swept winter of 1457 when she was only thirteen years old, she had gone on to marry twice since the death of her first husband, Edmund Tudor. In 1461 she married Henry Stafford, the second son of Humphrey Stafford, late duke of Buckingham. This had meant separation from her son when he was only four years old, although she had visited the boy at Raglan Castle during his youth. Henry VI’s readeption had permitted a brief reunion, and Margaret had taken the young Henry Tudor on a barge ride up the Thames to visit the king at Westminster. (Polydore Vergil recorded that the simple-minded old monarch had looked at the child and said, ‘This, truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion,’ a cryptic statement to which Margaret would later assign great meaning.6) When Edward IV swept back into power, circumstance once again separated mother from son. Margaret’s first cousin Edmund duke of Somerset had been dragged out of sanctuary and beheaded following the battle of Tewkesbury, while her cousin John marquess of Dorset was killed during the fighting. Jasper and Henry had fled to the continent. Margaret had last seen Henry on 11 November 1470, but in all that time she had never stopped chasing means by which she could secure her own inheritance, consisting of a considerable body of land and income in the south of England and the midlands, and pass on what she could to her exiled only child.