by Jones, Nigel
Henry was soon joined at the Tower – though not in the same rooms – by Queen Elizabeth. For the second time in a few months, the two monarchs changed places. Now it was the queen’s turn to move back into the sumptuous apartments of the royal palace, along with her two daughters, baby son, and Edward’s aged mother Cecily, the Dowager Duchess of York. The king had sent his family within the Tower’s secure walls for their own safety should things go amiss on the battlefield, while he dragged Henry along with his army to be the helpless witness of yet another battle. For the restored king had pressing business: a final settling of accounts with the Earl of Warwick
The decisive battle between the two old comrades-in-arms took place at Barnet, north of London, on Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471. The engagement was fought in thick fog, which created a climate of fear and confusion. When Lord Oxford’s livery of the star and rays was mistaken for the sun-in-splendour symbol of King Edward, cries of ‘Treason!’ swept through the Lancastrian ranks, and the morale of Warwick’s army collapsed. The earl and his brother Montagu were killed fleeing the battle, the Duke of Exeter sustained severe wounds, and only Oxford succeeded in getting away. Once again, victory had gone to Edward IV, but he was not yet secure: on the day that Barnet was fought, Queen Margaret and Prince Edward landed at Weymouth.
Buffeted by storms, Margaret had been at sea for an incredible twenty days before her fleet finally limped into port. King Edward now faced the same nightmare that had defeated King Harold in 1066. Having dealt with one enemy at the cost of many casualties, he had to gird himself to face a full-scale cross-Channel invasion of his realm. Edward had barely time to draw breath after Barnet – sending King Henry back to the Tower, dismissing his victorious army, and displaying the naked bodies of his slain enemies, Warwick and Montagu, in their coffins – before he was forced to raise new troops to meet Margaret’s threat.
Edward hastily scraped together a small army at Windsor Castle before moving west to confront Margaret. He had to intercept the queen before she crossed the River Severn and reached the Lancastrian heartlands of Wales. The rival armies converged at Tewkesbury, on the Severn. The battle that settled the fate of the House of Lancaster was short but bloody. It ended with a total Yorkist victory, murderous dissent among the Lancastrian commanders – old Lord Wenlock had his brains dashed out by the Duke of Somerset’s mace – and a massacre of the surviving Lancastrian leadership, many being dragged from sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey to their deaths.
According to rival chroniclers Prince Edward was killed either fleeing from the battlefield, crying vainly to his false brother-in-law Clarence for help, or soon afterwards when he was caught and brought before the king. Edward IV reportedly asked him what he was doing in England, and when the spirited young man replied that he had come to reclaim his inheritance from those who had usurped his father’s throne, the king flew into a Plantagenet rage and struck the youth in the face with his steel gauntlet. The blow was the signal for the king’s brothers, Richard and Clarence, along with Lord Hastings, to gather round the prince and hack him to death. A similar fate awaited Edmund, Duke of Somerset – the third Beaufort holding that title to die violently in the Lancastrian cause. He was beheaded in Tewkesbury marketplace in front of the vengeful king, along with his brother Sir John Beaufort; the Earl of Devon, and a dozen other Lancastrian knights. This time, Edward was utterly determined to wipe out the rival dynasty once and for all.
Queen Margaret was picked up a few days after the battle and brought before the king. Distraught at the death of her only son, she raged at Edward, before collapsing into passive resignation. All trace of the tigress who had been the terror of the Yorkists for more than fifteen blood-drenched years had gone. Mute with despair, she was placed in a carriage which lurched its way towards London – and to the Tower where her husband was held. But she would never see him again. On 21 May, the same night that Margaret arrived in the fortress, poor, helpless Henry VI, most pathetic of English kings, ended his unhappy earthly existence.
While the fate of the kingdom was decided at Tewkesbury, the Tower had been the centre of military action in its own right. As part of the Lancastrian plan, the Earl of Warwick’s nephew, Thomas Neville, a gifted sailor who commanded Warwick’s Calais fleet, invaded England. Neville, an illegitimate son of the late Lord Fauconberg, a Yorkist hero of Northampton and Towton, was known as ‘the Bastard of Fauconberg’. As a diversion designed to keep Edward in London, the Bastard used the ships and men of the Calais garrison to attack Kent. The diversion was initially successful. With Edward away chasing Margaret to Tewkesbury, what had been anticipated as an in-depth raid turned into a full-scale invasion.
Fauconberg landed unopposed at Sandwich in early May, picking up support from Kentish men always eager to plunder London’s riches. The Mayor of Canterbury, Nicholas Faunt, for example, joined him with 200 men. On 4 May, the day Tewkesbury was fought, the Bastard was at Sittingbourne, and on the 12th he appeared at Southwark, styling himself ‘Captain and leader of our liege lord Henry’s people in Kent’ and demanding that King Henry be freed from the Tower and handed over to him. However, emboldened by the news that the Lancastrian cause had been smashed at Tewkesbury, London’s lord mayor, John Stokton, refused to admit him.
Reinforced by his fleet, which had sailed round from Sandwich and up the Thames, Fauconberg ferried his men across the river to the north bank and set fire to the alehouses at St Katherine’s in the Tower’s shadow. When this failed to intimidate the garrison, which was commanded by Lord Anthony Rivers, the queen’s brother, Fauconberg decided that harsher persuasion was needed. He opened up with his guns from Southwark, directing a cannonade across the river at the Tower’s walls. The terrified inhabitants of the fortress enduring the bombardment included Queen Elizabeth and her children, as well as King Henry. Frightening though the crash and roar of Fauconberg’s guns were, he was unable to assault the Tower directly. Even the river banks were largely impervious to the cannon fire as Lord Dudley, the constable of the Tower, had filled huge wine casks with sand and gravel and placed them as bulwarks at vulnerable points to absorb the shot.
Fauconberg, aware that King Edward was fast approaching with his victorious army, knew that time was not on his side. He decided to launch an all-out assault to break into the city. Under the cover of the guns, in a two-pronged attack on 14 May his men rushed London Bridge from the south bank while crossing to the north bank in their boats and attempting to break through Aldgate from the east. The Londoners just managed to drop the gate’s portcullis in time, trapping some of the attackers inside the gateway. These unfortunates were swiftly slaughtered. But the fighting raged on until Lord Rivers made a decisive intervention from the Tower at the head of the garrison. Leaving the fortress by an unguarded postern gate, he made a sortie and drove Fauconberg’s force as far as Stratford, five miles to the east. As they fled, Fauconberg’s men took with them fifty oxen destined to feed the queen’s household that they had rustled from their pasture outside the Tower.
On 18 May Fauconberg abandoned his army camped on Blackheath – that traditional gathering ground for Kentish rebels – and, accompanied by the core of his sailors from Calais, rode hard for the coast. At Sandwich, the Calais men reboarded their ships and departed – without their leader. Fauconberg had decided to submit to King Edward. The Bastard still had a powerful bargaining chip – the fifty ships of the Calais fleet that he controlled.
Negotiations began, and on 26 May at Sandwich, Fauconberg handed over his ships to the king’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in exchange for his life. He later accompanied Richard north after Gloucester became the royal lieutenant in that restive region. In September, both Fauconberg and his brother William Neville were accused of treason and executed. The king, with grim gallows humour, had the Bastard’s head spiked on London Bridge looking south towards the scene of his rebellion.
Fauconberg’s rebellion was the last straw that sealed the fate of Henry in the Tower. Edward ha
d probably decided to kill his helpless rival after the death of the fallen monarch’s only son at Tewkesbury anyway, but any last qualms of pity were snuffed out by the chaos that Fauconberg had unleashed in London. Given that the purpose of his attack had been to free Henry from the Tower, it followed that so long as Henry lived he would be the focus for future rebellions. But who could be trusted to carry out such a sacrilegious deed as the murder of an anointed king? The answer stood at Edward’s right hand.
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had been the hero-worshipping loyal sibling ever since his small frame had been strong enough to heft a broadsword. In stark contrast to his other brother, Clarence, Richard had stood by Edward through thick and thin: when he was expelled from his kingdom, in exile, and during his perilous return. Richard had commanded – with competence and courage – wings of his brother’s armies at Barnet and Tewkesbury. He was the king’s man. Edward’s choice was shrewd. Richard was the one person he could trust to carry out his orders without question. He had spotted a streak of ruthlessness in his young brother which echoed – perhaps even surpassed – his own casual cruelty. Blood really was thicker than water.
Summoning Richard, Edward gave him his secret command. He would ride ahead of the main army to London with an advance guard of 1,500 men, secure the Tower, and kill Henry. The murder was to be performed quickly and quietly at dead of night. Richard obeyed. He arrived in a city barely recovered from the pitched battle fought with Fauconberg’s men, and roughly took control of the Tower from his sister-in-law Queen Elizabeth and her brother, Lord Rivers. It was Richard’s first run-in with the Woodville family which would one day end in murder within these same Tower walls.
On the morning of 21 May, King Edward finally arrived back in his capital after his triumph at Tewkesbury. Like a Roman emperor dragging his captives behind his chariot, he had Queen Margaret, his lifelong enemy and the killer of his father and brother, jolting along in an open cart exposed to the jeers and missiles of the crowds. Her destination was the Tower, but room had to be made for her by getting rid of the current royal prisoner: the husband she had not seen for almost a decade. It was a tragic irony that the royal couple, now within the same fortress, had never been so close since Margaret had sailed from Bamburgh Castle in July 1463, but were now to be parted for ever.
Tuesday 21 May was the feast of the Ascension, and the ever-pious Henry was marking the event with a lone all-night vigil in his private oratory – a tiny chapel set into a niche in the eastern wall in the octagonal Wakefield Tower. As he knelt in prayer, the cold flagstones were hard on his bony, fifty-year-old knees. But he had always accepted pain and discomfort as the lot of a truly Christian king (he wore a hair shirt, alive with lice, next to his flesh). Absorbed in prayer, did he hear the creak of the door as his killer, or killers, entered the chamber? Did the candle flicker and gutter in the sudden draft? Did he look around in terror as the murderer stole up to him, or was he struck down from behind with his eyes still closed, fervently worshipping the God he was about to meet?
The chroniclers are broadly agreed on what happened to Henry. According to John Warkworth, a Lancastrian sympathiser, writing soon after the event, ‘And in the same night that King Edward came to London, King Henry, being in ward in prison in the Tower of London, was put to death between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the Duke of Gloucester.’ The Burgundian diplomat Philippe de Commines, close to the Yorkists, also accuses Richard of the dreadful deed, charging that Gloucester ‘killed poor King Henry with his own hand, or else caused him to be killed in his presence’. John Morton, Bishop of Ely, a loyal servant to both Henry VI and Edward IV in their turn, and later a bitter enemy to Richard, who would also cause him to suffer in the Tower, wrote, ‘He [Richard] slew with his own hand King Henry VI as men constantly say.’ Polydore Vergil, a court historian under Henry VIII, says it was ‘generally believed that Gloucester killed him with a sword’. The London chronicler Robert Fabyan suggests that the murder weapon was a dagger, and a knife reputed to have struck the fatal blow became a revered relic of the martyrdom.
But whichever hand or hands wielded the weapon and whatever weapon was used – and from early twentieth-century forensic examination it seems that Henry’s skull was smashed in addition to, or rather instead of, him being stabbed – we know that Gloucester was in charge of the Tower that night. We also know from Richard’s later career that he was more than capable of such lethal violence. It is clear, however, that the order for Henry’s killing came from the very top. As a loyal sibling, Gloucester would never have carried out such a fateful crime as regicide without King Edward’s direct sanction. It seems certain that having disposed of young Prince Edward, the king took the decision in the vivid phrase of a Milanese diplomat to ‘crush the seed’ of Lancaster once and for all.
Naturally, the Yorkist regime tried to cover up the crime by putting out an official story that the cause of Henry’s convenient demise had been ‘ire, indignation … pure displeasure and melancholy’ upon being brought the news that his Lancastrian cause was ‘utterly despaired of’ after Tewkesbury, the death of his son, and the capture of his wife. The dead king’s own body silently gave the lie to this fiction when it was displayed the next day at St Paul’s. The King’s coffin was open and, says Warkworth, blood welled from the wound at the back of his head and dripped on to the pavement when the Duke of Gloucester came to view it – which the superstitious saw as a sure sign of Richard’s guilt. When the body was moved to Blackfriars by the Thames for the funeral service before being rowed upriver in a barge to the Benedictine Chertsey Abbey for burial, ‘it bled fresh and new’ again.
The death of the saintly king caused consternation among his subjects, who had nearly all been raised in the half-century when he had been nominally on the throne. His posthumous bleeding was seen as a miracle, and, according to the Great Chronicle, ‘the common fame went that the Duke of Gloucester was not all guiltless’ of Henry’s death. The Croyland Chronicle hinted strongly at the same conclusion:
I shall pass over the discovery of the lifeless body of King Henry in the Tower of London. May God have mercy upon him, and grant sufficient time for repentence to him, whoever he may be, who dared to lay sacrilegious hands on the Lord’s Anointed! Let the doer merit the title of tyrant, and the victim be called a glorious martyr.
The king’s tomb at Chertsey became a centre of pilgrimage equalling in popularity that of the earlier murdered martyr, Thomas Becket. In 1484, hearing of the miracles reportedly wrought there, after he had become king by dint of more murders, Richard III had his victim’s body transferred from Chertsey to the more regal setting of St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. In November 1910 it was exhumed and examined. The bones of the skull were found to be ‘much broken’, with brown blood-matted hair still adhering to the fragments – leaving no room for doubt that Henry had met a violent death.
Margaret of Anjou, immured in the Tower, only learned of her husband’s death some days later. It was said that her piteous wailing could be heard by people in the streets beyond the moat. The queen was so shell-shocked by the succession of disasters that had befallen her – above all the loss of her only son – that the death of her long-lost husband seemed just another blow in an endless parade of fortune’s buffets. She did, however, in a pathetic display of her old fierce spirit, make a strong if unavailing effort to gain custody of her husband’s body. Unsuccessful, she lapsed back into a state of deep depression from which nothing could rouse her.
Observing her condition, and realising that she no longer posed a threat, after a few weeks’ custody, King Edward decided to release her from the Tower. A second royal death in the fortress would be awkward to explain. Margaret was moved to Windsor Castle, and then, at the end of the year, to Wallingford where she was placed in the care of her old friend the Duchess of Suffolk. She remained in the duchess’s household, isolated from the world that had used her so cruelly, until Edward took advantage of a peace trea
ty with France to ship her back to her native land in 1475. Here, haunted by her memories, Margaret lived out a twilight existence ‘far from the bloody fields of Tewkesbury’ as an impoverished pensioner of King Louis XV until her death in August 1482.
The Queen’s Lancastrian followers were less lucky. Nicholas Faunt, the mayor of Canterbury who had unwisely joined Fauconberg’s insurrection, was brought to the Tower and executed. And Edward’s brother-in-law, Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, the former constable of the Tower, was brought from the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey where he had been recovering from the near-mortal wounds he had sustained at Barnet. Exeter was placed in strict custody in the Tower while his wife, the king’s sister Anne, obtained an annulment of their marriage to wed her lover.
Edward’s 1475 expedition to France when he disposed of Margaret, also provided a chance to get rid of this other inconvenient survivor from the Lancastrian past. The king brought Exeter over with him to France, but the duke did not complete the return journey. His boat set out from Calais, but on arrival at Dover the duke was missing. ‘How he drowned,’ remarks Robert Fabyan tactfully, ‘the certainty is not known.’ Another source is less discreet. Giovanni Pannicharola, Milanese ambassador in Burgundy, was told by Burgundy’s Duke Charles the Bold, Edward’s brother-in-law, that the king had given direct orders for the duke to be hurled overboard. One more of Edward’s old scores was settled.