by Ed West
As for the Queen, following Towton she had escaped to exile in Scotland, where some colorful stories attached themselves to Margaret and her son Edward traveling along the road north over the mountainous, remote border country. One tells of them being separated from their group when a gang of cut-throats attacked and, when preparing to kill them, learned of their identity and instead swore to take them to safety. Another tale about Margaret’s dramatic escape is described by Burgundian chronicler Jehan de Waurin:
She and her son were caught, captured by thieves and murderers who wanted to kill them, but a great argument broke out over whom was to have her rings and jewels. While it pleased God that these murderers should be quarrelling with each other, taking her son in her arms she hid in the forest. Finally, overcome by hardship and exhaustion, she had no choice but to entrust her child to another brigand whom she encountered in the woods, saying ‘Save your king’s son.’ Through this man she and her son escaped out of the hands of those robbers and murderers and got away.13
Whether these stories carry any truth, Margaret eventually arrived in Scotland, destitute and defeated and yet determined to carry on the fight. For some time afterward, the defeated King Henry remained loose in the far north, while Lancastrian rebels still held onto three Percy castles on the East March—Alnwick, Dunstanburgh, and Bamburgh—and for four years maintained the struggle in the border lands. Young Edward, after taking Bamburgh, had given the castles back to the Percys, a bold move and yet one in which he had no choice, for as contemporary John Hardyng had put it, the Percys “have the hearts of the people of the North and always have had.” Instead the Percys handed the castles over to Queen Margaret, and then in November 1463 Somerset defected and made his way to the exiled King Henry at Bamburgh. “The king loved him well, but the duke thought treason under fair cheer and words,” it was recorded, and yet in fairness to Somerset he was at heart a Lancastrian and always would be.
The Percys were finally defeated in 1464, and the late earl’s brother Ralph was put in charge of his nephew and agreed to hand over Dunstanburgh to Edward IV. He wanted his nephew’s lands returned and to be treated well, and he also had a family of his own, a wife, three boys, and a girl. Ralph Percy was pardoned soon after and given Dunstanburgh and Banburgh in return—yet once again the Percys handed over their castles to the Lancastrians.
It was a very frigid winter—”fervent colde” a chronicler said. Still the winters were getting colder, but it would be the last for the rebel lords. Finally, in April and May 1465, the rebellion was crushed when John Neville twice defeated Lancastrian armies, killing Ralph Percy at Hedgeley Moor and a much larger Lancastrian army led by Somerset at Hexham a month later. The last Lancastrian castle to hold out, Bamburgh, was besieged and when its defenders refused to surrender Warwick ordered the guns to fire—the ancient stronghold of the old kings of the north became a ruin, the first fortress in England heavily damaged by modern artillery. The medieval world of castles was coming to an end, and a terrifying new age of fierce weapons capable of devastation on a new scale was fast approaching.
Henry Beaufort had been captured at Hexham and the following month finally executed, and with the axes’s blow the House of Beaufort was crushed. The House of Percy, too, lay ruined and defeated and with them the Lancastrian cause was finished, the mad king finally captured in 1465 and Margaret an exile in a foreign land. All three houses, of Lancaster, Percy, and Beaufort, had risen in the previous century, reaching the pinnacle of power in the realm, and all three now faced destruction, while the son of their arch-nemesis sat on the throne at Westminster. Such was fate, and the gulf between victory and defeat, when you play the game of thrones.
And yet there were ominious signs on the horizon for the House of York, for Fortune’s wheel was always turning, and just as it raised some so might it bring about their downfall. Edward had headed north during this final rebellion to help his kinsmen, the Nevilles, destroy their mutual enemies, bringing with him destructive artillery capable of reducing a castle to rubble in minutes—but along the way he had done something hugely foolish and destructive to his network of alliances. He had married for love. As a chronicler of the time warned on hearing this news: “now take heed what love may do.”14 There would be trouble ahead.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book developed from a far smaller ebook in 2014 called The Realm. For all the help with both the original Kindle Single and the book, I’d like to thank Laura Rosenheim, Louise Greenberg, Jerrod MacFarlane, Caroline Russomanno, and Sean Goodwin.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Kendall, Paul Murray Richard the Third.
2. This is disputed, and the low estimate puts it at around 9,000, which would still make it the bloodiest battle on British soil. And indeed, the weather is hotly contested; besides which a British ‘blizzard’ might not impress many people from the Upper Midwest
3. Bryson, Bill Mother Tongue.
4. Pinker, Steven Better Angels of Our Nature.
5. http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Influence_of_the_Wars_of_the_Roses.
6. http://uk.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-was-supposed-to-be-a-trilogy-2015-2.
7. Dan Jones, Sunday Times magazine, July 9, 2017.
8. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n07/john-lanchester/when-did-you-get-hooked.
9. Lowder, James (ed) Beyond the Wall.
10. Obviously we know he’s not really his bastard, but I don’t want to spoil it.
11. Kendall, Paul Murray Richard the Third.
12. Season 1, Episode 7.
CHAPTER 1
1. The exact date of the barbican is unclear; whether it dated from the early 14th century or as late as the late 15th century.
2. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
3. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
4. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
5. Ibid.
6. Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones.
7. Saul, Nigel For Honour and Glory.
8. Told by Walter of Guisborough, a 14th century canon, although many historians are skeptical of the story.
9. From the episode ‘You Win or You Die.’
10. Bartlett, Robert England Under the Normans and Angevins.
11. Rose Alexander The Kings in the North.
12. Larrington, Carolyne Winter is Coming.
13. Geoffrey of Monmouth History of the Kings of Britain.
14. The contemporary Gesta Stephani.
15. The 15th century Crowland Chronicles.
16. Chronicles of Froissart.
17. Ibid.
18. Martin made the comparison himself https://winteriscoming.net/2017/07/15/game-of-thrones-as-myth-the-roots-of-the-white-walkers-the-others/.
19. Polydore Vergil’s English History.
20. Tombs, Robert The English and Their History.
21. Saul, Nigel For Honour and Glory.
22. A World of Ice and Fire.
23. Court records from 1368.
24. Quoted in Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
25. Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
26. Andrew Boorde, an Elizabethan poet.
27. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-homicide-and-cities-surprises-the-experts.html.
28. Tuchman Barbara A Distant Mirror.
29. Frankopan, Peter Silk Roads.
30. Bartlett, Robert The Norman and Angevin Kings.
31. Ibid.
32. Bergreen, Laurence Marco Polo.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
CHAPTER 2
1. Chronicles of Froissart.
2. Tuchman, Barbara A Distant Mirror.
3. Weir, Alison Isabella, She-Wolf of France, Queen of England.
4. This is all described in detail in Maurice Druon’s novel The Royal Succession.
5. According to one theory, so-called because so many Jews were burned there during various persecutions.
6. Kelly, John The Great Mortality.
7. Horne, Alistair The Seven Ages of Paris.
8. No one called it ‘Gothic’ at the time, this was a much later term.
9. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/19/westeros-europe_n_7565694.html.
10. As Martin said: ‘King’s Landing, that’s the capital, is not quite so tropical—in the books it’s more like medieval Paris or London and the north is more like Scotland.’
11. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/westeros-europe_n_7565694.
12. The famous Robert Browning poem, “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” helps to portray the sheer vastness of the country. Havi
ng driven across the country several times, I feel their pain.
http://de.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/2pyu1l/agricultural_land_use_in_france_oc_1266x1297/?utm_content=bufferb1a6f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer.
13. Duby, Georges France in the Middle Ages.
14. Larrington Carolyne Winter is Coming.
15. Jager, Eric The Last Duel.
16. Alternatively it’s from louver, blockhouse, or l’ouevre work.
17. Manchester, William A World Lit Only by Fire.
18. Manchester, William A World Lit Only by Fire.
19. Horne, Alistair Seven Ages of Paris.
20. Duby, Georges France in the Middle Ages.
21. It may have been one of the other knights, as the witnesses couldn’t be sure because of the sound of the fire and screaming. In fact this story dates to many centuries later so may be completely made up.
22. This is only first recorded many centuries later.
23. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26824993.
CHAPTER 3
1. Sunday Times magazine.
2. http://freepages.misc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~byzantium/Mdv.html.
3. From an 18th description of the corpses buried at Westminster Abbey.
4. Seward, Desmond Demon’s Brood.
5. This is at least the most popular theory.
6. The royal arms of England are ‘gules, three lions passant guardants or,’ in the language of heraldry, which translates as ‘on a red field, three golden lions, facing outwards, with right foreleg raised.’
7. http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast78.htm.
8. The Bestiary, translated by Richard Barber.
9. Morris, Marc A Great and Terrible King.
10. http://history-behind-game-of-thrones.com/medieval-scotland/longshanks.
11. Carpenter, David Magna Carta.
12. From the chronicles of the contemporary monk Matthew Paris.
13. Morris, Marc A Great and Terrible King.
14. Gillingham, John Conquest, Catastrophe and Recovery.
15. The contemporary Flores Historiarum, the Flowers of History.
16. Rose, Alexander The Kings in the North.
17. http://historyofengland.typepad.com/documents_in_english_hist/2012/10/the-song-of-lewes-1264.html.