Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors

by Skidmore, Chris

  There was little chance that Thomas would gain access to the impregnable fortress; instead he decided to encircle the castle, digging trenches and ditches around it so that ‘there was no possible means of escape’. With all communications, including supplies and rations, from outside now prevented, Thomas intended to starve Jasper and Henry out of hiding.

  Relief only came eight days later in the form of Morgan ap Thomas’s younger brother David, who arrived at Pembroke with a force of 2,000 men, described as a ‘ragged regiment, with hooks, prongs and glaives, and other rustic weapons’, and began to attack his brother’s siege. He was soon able to free Jasper and Henry, conveying them to Tenby. Jasper knew that the heavily fortified harbour would be able to hold out from any siege: the earl had himself ordered its walls to be strengthened in 1457. Six feet thick, with a continuous platform running around the top, the moat was also widened to thirty feet. But with William Herbert, the other Earl of Pembroke, and Lord Ferrers having been dispatched to crush any resistance in Wales and moving closer towards the region, to hold out for too long would be hopeless. Jasper understood that his and his nephew’s safety could only be secured in flight.

  A ‘barque’ was hastily prepared, provided by the prominent merchant Thomas White, mayor of the town several times between 1457 and 1472 and who had worked with Jasper on the town’s reconstruction, and his son John. On 2 June Jasper, together with Henry and ‘certain other his friends and servants’, set sail for France, presumably to seek refuge at the court of Louis XI. However, storms blew the ship off course, and after apparently landing briefly at Jersey, they landed at the small port of Le Conquet, on the westernmost point of the peninsula, in northwest Finistère near Brest. Instead of disembarking in France, as Jasper had hoped, they found themselves in the territory of the duchy of Brittany, ruled by Duke Francis II. Initially, Jasper must have cursed what had seemed an ill wind that had blown them away from their planned destination; later, it would prove a remarkable stroke of fortune.

  Jasper had hoped to seek the protection of his cousin the French king Louis XI, who had previously sheltered the earl at his court and had awarded him a pension. Arriving in Brittany as he had done, this was now out of the question. Instead, he would need to seek asylum at the court of Duke Francis. As soon as they landed, news reached Francis of the Tudors’ arrival. Sending a ‘good and safe guard’ to meet the new arrivals to his shore, Jasper and Henry were accompanied to the ducal palace, the Château de l’Hermine at the walled hilltop city of Vannes, where Duke Francis II was residing. There Jasper ‘submitted himself and his nephew to his protection’. The duke knew that both would be valued pawns in any future diplomatic games between France and England; he received his new guests ‘willingly, and with such honour, courtesy, and favour’. Treating them as if ‘they had been his brothers’, he pledged to Jasper that he would protect him and his nephew ‘from injury, and pass as their pleasure to and fro without danger’. The chronicler Philippe de Commynes was present at the duke’s court when Henry and Jasper arrived at Vannes. ‘The duke,’ he observed, ‘treated them very gently as prisoners.’

  By late September, news of Jasper and Henry’s escape was common knowledge. Sir John Paston wrote to his brother that ‘it is said that the Earl of Pembroke is taken on to Brittany; and men say that the King shall have delivery of him hastily, and some say that the King of France will see him safe, and shall set him at liberty again’. When Edward IV heard the news of Jasper and Henry’s escape and safe landing in Brittany, discovering that they had been ‘courteously received and entertained’ by Francis, he was furious: ‘which matter indeed he took very greviously, as though his mind gave him that some evil would come thereby’. He sent secret messengers to Francis, promising great reward if he would hand over the earls.

  The tactic backfired: Francis had already been ‘very merry’ when he discovered news of Henry’s arrival, knowing that ‘by having him in his grasp he could always command King Edward’ since if the French king had obtained possession of the boy, ‘he would have easily crowned him King of England’. Edward’s expressed interest in obtaining Henry and Jasper, seemingly at any cost, only increased the value of his captives; ‘the earls were so rich a prey’ he was determined not to release them, and instead kept them more closely guarded than before. He could not return them to England, he told Edward’s messengers, ‘by reason of his promise and fidelity’; instead he would ‘for his cause keep them so sure as there should be no occasion for him to suspect that they should ever procure his harm in any manner’. When the ambassadors returned to the English court with Francis’s message, Edward was determined to ensure the duke stuck to his word, writing further to Francis, calling on his ‘honour, good fame, and constancy’ to keep Jasper and Henry under arrest, promising at the same time money, aid and ‘huge gifts’ if he would do so. Understanding the advantage that possession of the Tudors had brought him, Francis knew that he would need to prevent their escape. He ordered that Jasper’s personal servants be removed, and that his own men were placed around the two earls, ‘to wait upon and guard them’.

  For Margaret Beaufort, news that her son had arrived safely in Brittany must have come as a blessed relief from the concerns that encircled her. On 4 October 1471 her husband Henry Stafford died; he had suffered from bouts of illness, possibly resulting from the injuries he had received at Barnet. He certainly never recovered from the outcome of the battle. She began the required period of a year’s mourning, but already she was contemplating her next marriage; in choosing Thomas, Lord Stanley as her third husband, she had decided to forgo her former Lancastrian loyalties to bind her fortunes closely to those now in the ascendant at court.

  Thomas Stanley had become one of the wealthiest noblemen in the kingdom, with large estates stretching across Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales. For Stanley, marriage to Margaret brought with it the prospect of further augmenting his lands, providing him with a life interest in her estates; in return Margaret would be granted an annual income from Stanley’s own lands. For Margaret, Stanley’s power lay not merely in his wealth; his connections at court as steward of the king’s household would provide Margaret with the opportunity to be restored to Edward’s favour. In particular, the Stanley family had strong links with the Woodvilles; Thomas Stanley’s son and heir George had first married the queen’s elder sister Jacquetta, and had later been married to Joan, the daughter of George, Lord Strange. It was these connections that allowed Margaret to establish a presence at court; whatever reservations she may have had about the upstart queen, she remained silent, ingratiating herself, even attending upon the queen and her daughters on the occasion of the reburial of her nemesis, Richard, Duke of York, at Fotheringhay, in 1476.

  Still Margaret’s true loyalty lay undoubtedly with her son’s welfare. Throughout Edward’s reign, she would continue to hope for her son’s eventual return from exile and into the king’s favour. It was almost as if Henry was at the heart of every decision she was to make. Ten days before her marriage, on 2 June 1472, Margaret placed her paternal estates in Devon and Somerset in trust, with the provisions that the trustees of her estate were to create a separate estate of lands for Henry Tudor’s inheritance. Ten years later, after Margaret’s mother the Duchess of Somerset had died, Margaret would make further provisions for Henry. In a document drawn up in Edward IV’s own presence in June 1482, her husband Thomas, Lord Stanley promised that he would not interfere with Margaret’s Beaufort estates, and that lands to the value of 600 marks a year would be granted to Henry, ‘called Earl of Richmond’, upon certain conditions. Henry was to return from exile, and ‘to be in the grace and favour of the king’s highness’. The document was sealed by the king himself. Stanley later recalled that it was during Edward’s reign that Margaret and others had discussed the possibility of Henry even marrying Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York, relating how the discussion had included the bishops of Ely and Worcester and a Papal representative as well as the king.
The clearest evidence that, at some stage, Edward himself intended Henry Tudor to be restored to favour can be found in Margaret’s own archives where, on the back of a copy of a patent of creation of Edmund Tudor as Earl of Richmond, is written in a faint, almost illegible hand the draft text of a pardon for ‘Henry Earl of Richmond alias lord Richmond alias the said Henry son and heir of the late Earl of Richmond to be the said Richmond or also by the name’.

  The date of the pardon, surviving as only a draft, is unknown, but that it reflects not merely Margaret’s hopes, but Edward’s genuine desire for Henry Tudor to return to England should not be in doubt. Edward seems to have been determined to reconcile former supporters of Henry VI to his kingship. Between 1472 and 1475, thirty attainders were reversed, and former Lancastrians were offered positions under the new regime. It was clear to many that no hope remained for the Lancastrian cause; many understood that the most pragmatic course was to accept God’s judgement in battle, that Edward IV was indeed their rightful king. John Morton, the son of a Dorset squire, who had risen through the Lancastrian ranks as a successful lawyer and had taken part in the Parliament of Devils, made his peace with the new regime and by 1472 had been made Master of the Rolls, personally enjoying Edward’s ‘secret trust and special favour’. Morton later admitted that ‘if the world would have gone as I would have wished, King Henry’s son had had the Crown and not King Edward’. Yet now things were different: ‘after that God had ordered him to lose it, and King Edward to reign’, Morton accepted, ‘I was never so mad that I would with a dead man strive against the quick’.

  For men like Morton, the Lancastrian dynasty was over: Henry VI was dead, his son killed on the battlefield at Tewkesbury. Even Margaret Beaufort recognised that her son Henry would be best placed to one day return to court, to ingratiate himself with the Yorkist dynasty through marriage, as she herself had done. Yet there remained a few ‘so mad’ that they would refuse to admit that their cause was finished.

  John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, had been determined to crush the Yorkist cause. His father and his eldest brother had been executed by the Yorkists; it is hardly surprising that he was described as ‘being disposed in extreme malice against the king’. Henry VI’s restoration to the throne, the achievement of which Oxford himself played no small part, had seen the earl return from penniless exile in France to becoming one of the most powerful noblemen at court, bearing the sword of state during the procession at St Paul’s in October 1470 in which the Lancastrian king was formally recrowned. Oxford’s influence at court was such that he had ‘the rule of them and theirs’, one contemporary wrote. Six months later, upon Edward’s return and as he drew up his soldiers in preparation for battle at Barnet, Oxford knew that the Lancastrians had the advantage, both in terms of the number of men and artillery ranged against the Yorkist pretender. The battle had started to plan, with Oxford’s men defeating the Lancastrian wing; only returning to the battle in the thick blinding fog did Oxford find that Warwick’s troops had set themselves upon him. He was not to know of their fatal mistake, confusing the badges of his men with their Yorkist opponents. Instead, the earl had fled the confusion of the battle with the sound of the cries of ‘Treason!’ ringing around him.

  Several days later, Oxford wrote to his wife, ‘in great heaviness at the making of this letter; but thanked be God, I am escaped myself, and suddenly departed from my men’. Being among ‘strange people’ he had no money to even pay his messenger. Asking for all ‘the ready money you can make, and as many men as can come well horsed’, he requested that his own horse be sent ‘with my steel saddles’ to be covered with leather. ‘You shall be of good cheer, and take no thought,’ he ended his letter, ‘for I shall bring my purpose about now by the Grace of God, whom you have in keeping.’ This cryptic letter was the last the countess would hear from her husband for some time. The outcome of Tewkesbury and Henry VI’s death put paid to any hope that Oxford might bring his ‘purpose’ about; not knowing where her husband was, the countess decided that in spite of her husband’s optimism, the best course of action was to flee to the sanctuary of St Martin’s church in London. Several years later, one chronicler wrote, she was reduced to such poverty that she had nothing to live upon, ‘but as the people of their charities would give to her, or what she might get with her needle or other such cunning as she exercised’.

  Still Oxford was determined to fight on. Over the next few years he was sighted in Scotland, Dieppe, making attacks on Calais, determined to become a sore thorn in Edward’s side. On 28 May 1473 he arrived on the shore at St Osyth’s, Essex, not far from his own ancestral estates. Oxford’s hope of raising a hundred gentlemen in Norfolk and Suffolk who had agreed to give their assistance was dashed by the Earl of Essex and Oxford ‘tarried not long’; shortly afterwards he was apparently sighted on the Isle of Thanet, ‘hovering, some say with great company, and some say with few’. Oxford had hoped for French support for his endeavours, but with no chance of ever establishing a rival to Edward IV, and with France and Burgundy having come to a peaceful alliance, already the Duke of Burgundy had warned the French king ‘not to keep the Earl of Oxford in his kingdom any longer’ as part of their continued truce. Initially supportive of Oxford’s enterprises, Louis began to change his mind. ‘He fears art and fraud in the earl’, one ambassador reported.

  After spending the summer at sea in piracy, capturing passing ships and obtaining ‘great good and riches’, on the last day of September 1473 Oxford took the remarkable decision to seize the small garrison at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. He had fewer than eighty men with him, but the fortress and the position of St Michael’s Mount made it next to impossible to attack. It seems that Oxford was further assisted by the support of the nearby Cornish gentry, including Henry Bodrugan who, despite being tasked by Edward with recovering the garrison, pocketed the money he had been given for the commission for himself, and despite occasional outbreaks of fighting, including one occasion when Oxford was shot and wounded ‘in the very face’ by an arrow, was mostly content to meet with the earl each day under truce, supplying him with enough victuals and supplies to last until the following summer. When Edward realised what was going on, he transferred control of the siege to Sir John Fortescue; in addition to stepping up the ferocity of the attack upon Oxford’s stronghold, he supplied Fortescue with 300 men, cannon and artillery from the Tower and four ships from the royal fleet carrying over 600 men that were able to cut off any chance of escape by sea. The siege began in earnest in late December, but Oxford’s resistance ensured that it was not for another month, when tempted by the promise of pardon for his life if not his goods, that Oxford finally surrendered on 15 February.

  Oxford would spend the next nine years imprisoned in Hammes Castle in the Calais pale. His stay was a comfortable one: at first fifty marks was set aside for his ‘costs and sustenation’, later increased to fifty Flemish pounds. A year after his surrender, Oxford and his two brothers were attainted, with all their lands and goods being declared forfeit to the king. One chronicler lamented the earl’s downfall, stating how ‘all was done by their own folly’. As the years drew on, in isolation Oxford struggled to come to terms with his own ruin, seeing no chance of restoration to his title and lands. In 1478 he took the drastic step of attempting to end his own life: John Paston was repeating well-known gossip when he wrote that Oxford was rumoured to have ‘leapt the walls and went to the dyke to the chin’, adding, ‘to what intent I cannot tell; some say, to steal away, and some think he would have drowned himself, and so it is deemed’.

  Despite Duke Francis’s assurances that both Jasper and Henry Tudor would be guarded so that they would be unable to challenge his crown, Edward continued to press for both men to be returned to England. He also sought to ingratiate himself with Francis, in the hope that his support for Brittany against France might sway the Duke into handing over both the Tudors. In April 1472 he had sent his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, together with a troo
p of soldiers, to join the duke’s service. Having assisted the duke in repelling a French invasion on 11 September, Rivers negotiated a treaty with Francis at Châteaugiron, signalling both sides’ desire for a joint Anglo-Breton invasion of France. In November, Breton envoys led by Guillaume Guillemet arrived in England to negotiate for further military aid. It seemed as if an agreement might be reached that, in return for military assistance, the Tudors might be handed over to Edward, but still Francis insisted that in light of his earlier promise to protect Jasper and Henry, he could not break his word. Francis’s resort to chivalric honour was nothing more than an excuse; he was hardly prepared to give up his greatest bargaining tools quite yet, at least until he had gained everything he could from Edward in return. He would, however, restrict Jasper and Henry’s movements further, something which Edward welcomed, writing to the duke pledging more money and aid to Brittany.

  As a consequence, around October 1472 both Jasper and Henry were taken to Suscinio, one of the duke’s country residences close to Sarzeau on the gulf of Morbihan, near St Gildas abbey. Set in a vast hunting chase on the Rhys Peninsula, enclosing the Gulf of Morbihan in southern Brittany, the castle itself was built in the thirteenth century to be used by the Dukes of Brittany as their summer residence. With several large rounded towers formed around a courtyard, it was both secluded and ‘well sumptuous’. The keeper of the chateau was Jean de Quelennec, the admiral of Brittany since 1432, who had earned a reputation as both ‘wise and judicious’, and who gave his full support to protecting the Tudors, especially after rumours began to circulate that English envoys had been ordered to kill Henry if they were unable to secure his extradition.