Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  The Yorkists also claimed that the prince of Wales had died in the carnage of the battlefield. But darker rumours had it that he had been taken prisoner and brought before Edward, who accused him of treason, pushed the boy away and struck him with a gauntlet. He was then murdered by Clarence and Richard. A day or two later, despite his solemn pardon, Edward ordered the beheading of most of the remaining Lancastrian leaders. Now only the life of the feeble Lancastrian king, Henry VI, stood between Edward and an unchallenged grasp of the throne.

  On 21 May Edward entered the City of London in triumph. That night, between the hours of eleven and midnight, Henry VI was murdered in the Tower of London, probably with a heavy blow to the back of the head. Only one man is named as being present in the Tower at the time: Edward’s youngest brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who already, at the age of only eighteen, was emerging as the most effective hatchet man of the Yorkist regime. As he struck the fatal blow, he is supposed to have said, ‘Now there is no heir male of King Edward the Third but we of the House of York!’ Now, surely, the Wars of the Roses were over.

  No one, a Yorkist chronicle also exulted, of ‘the stock of Lancaster remained among the living’ who could claim the throne. But one Lancastrian claimant, however remote, did remain: Henry Tudor. Fourteen years had passed since Margaret had had her son. Now the teenage Henry was in danger of his life. Not even the massive walls of Pembroke Castle could protect the boy against the vengeful power of Edward of York, and his mother urged him to flee. He took ship at Tenby, and crossed the Channel to Brittany. And there Henry had to endure a decade and a half of politically fraught exile before he would see either England or his mother again.

  II

  Having annihilated his Lancastrian enemies, Edward of York was now King Edward IV of England indeed. But the problem of nobles who were almost as rich and powerful as the king himself remained. And richest and most powerful of all was Edward’s middle brother George, duke of Clarence, the man Shakespeare described as ‘False, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence’.

  The phrase is memorable. But it is misleading. It suggests that the key to Clarence’s story lies in his character defects. It doesn’t. It lies instead in his position. For Clarence was what Queen Elizabeth I, who would occupy the same unenviable place herself, called ‘second person’. His title, duke of Clarence, was the one that was given in the Middle Ages to the king’s second son. As such, he was endowed with vast estates and many grand castles such as Tutbury and Warwick. Here he kept what he called his ‘court’ with a state that was indeed royal. He had stepped into the role of Warwick the kingmaker, whose eldest daughter he had married and whose lands and immense following he now controlled. Only the life of Edward himself, and in time Edward’s two sons, stood between Clarence and the throne itself. Some second persons were content to remain merely loyal lieutenants. Clarence was not one of them. He had a power over the king that was at once malicious and deeply harmful to the peace of England. Clarence’s knowledge, should he choose to reveal it, concerned the future of the House of York itself and all that the brothers had fought for. It related to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth.

  Edward’s hasty marriage was the cause of much of his woe. The secrecy, the haste and the sexual hold that Elizabeth seemed to have over the king made it a juicy and seedy controversy. For Edward’s enemies it was the gift that kept on giving. But, whatever could be said against it, the marriage had at least proved fruitful. By the mid-1470s, Elizabeth had presented Edward with five daughters and, crucially, two sons. Immortalized in stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral, they look like the perfect royal family. Edward had what every king desired: an heir and a spare and a collection of marriageable daughters.

  The elder son was called Edward; the younger, Richard. History would know them as the Princes in the Tower. But if their parents’ marriage proved to be invalid, the serene image of a happy royal family that would carry on the Yorkist line long into the future would be shattered. The boys would become bastards, and Clarence would be heir once more. So the ambitious second person revived an old rumour. It was said that the libidinous king had been married to another woman at the time he married Elizabeth, thus making the present union bigamous and therefore illegal.

  The rumour of a previous marriage may well have been true; certainly, bearing in mind Edward’s notorious way with women, it was plausible. That only made it the more dangerous, and by throwing his weight behind it Clarence had tested his brother’s patience too far. Clarence was arrested and put on trial before a specially convened parliament in January 1478. Edward had packed the parliament with his own supporters. He was himself both judge and prosecutor, and no one dared to speak on behalf of the accused but Clarence himself.

  The verdict of guilty was a foregone conclusion, and on 18 February 1476 Clarence was executed in the Tower, famously by drowning in a butt of malmsey. The middle brother of York was gone. But the problem he represented was not. The monarchy had been weakened by the Wars of the Roses. Much royal land had been given away to buy support from the nobles, some of whom, like Clarence, had threatened to become mightier than the king. Such overweening subjects were difficult to manage at the best of times. But when there were rival claims to the throne, they became a dangerous source of instability, as Clarence’s own career had shown.

  To guard against the possibility of future Clarences, Edward needed to strengthen his own position and that of the crown. To help him do it, he enlisted a surprising ally: a man who had spent thirty years working for the enemy. Sir John Fortescue had served as the Lancastrian Lord Chief Justice; had spent years in exile with the Lancastrian prince of Wales, and had been captured after the battle of Tewkesbury. But the king not only pardoned him; he placed him on his council.

  At first sight, it’s rather surprising that Edward decided to spare Fortescue. An enthusiastic hanging judge, Fortescue had planned the judicial murder of the young Edward and the whole Yorkist family. He had also written powerfully and learnedly against Edward’s claim to the throne. But Edward set these personal grievances aside. He had work for the old man to do. Fortescue, the leading intellectual of Lancastrian England, would play an important part in the construction of the new, reformed Yorkist monarchy of England.

  Fortescue could be called England’s first constitutional analyst, his key ideas shaped by the years he had spent in exile in Scotland and France. For his experience of how other countries were governed led him to reflect on his own, and to ask a series of fundamental questions. What was unique and valuable about the English system of government? What had gone wrong with it to breed the dreadful malaise of the Wars of the Roses? And how could the disease be cured without killing the very benefits that made England what it was?

  Fortescue set out his answers in a short but remarkable book. It is usually called The Governance of England, but its full title, as it appears in the early printed edition, is The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy. Or in Fortescue’s own lawyerly Latin terminology, between a ‘dominium regale’ and ‘dominium politicum et regale’.

  France, Fortescue says, is the supreme exemplar of absolute monarchy, dominium regale, and England of limited, or mixed, monarchy, dominium politicum et regale. And the key to the difference between the two lies in the rules governing taxation. In France, the king could tax the common people at will, a system Fortescue strongly disliked as it made the king rich, but kept the people poor. But in England the rule established since at least the thirteenth century was that the king could tax only with the agreement of Parliament. For the English had an inviolable right of private property, and in that lay their liberty.

  This certainly made the English rich, with a standard of living that was the envy of foreign visitors and the boast of patriotic Englishmen like Fortescue. But did the rules limiting taxation make the English king poor, and because he was poor, weak and incapable of military conquest and enforcing the rule of law against a fractious and turbulent nobility? Fortescue thought t
hat they did, and that this weakness was the explanation for the Wars of the Roses. For the administration of the laws which guaranteed the property rights and liberty of Englishmen worked only when the monarchy had the independence and authority to govern the powerful men of the kingdom. And that in turn depended on the relative balance of wealth and power between the king and his greatest subjects, the nobility. As it was, in the late fifteenth century the king was relatively poor, whereas a handful of the nobles were extremely rich, which made them in Fortescue’s vivid phrase ‘over-mighty’ and potentially ungovernable.

  One solution would have been for the king of England to follow the path of French absolutism and impose by force taxes that Parliament wouldn’t vote by consent. But such a challenge to traditional English freedom, or more accurately to the rights of property owners, would be dangerously revolutionary. The question, therefore, was how to achieve the apparently impossible, and reconcile monarchical authority with the liberty of the subject. Fortescue’s proposal was to strengthen the crown within the existing system of limited monarchy. The king, he said, should acquire land, and rule by virtue of being the richest man in the kingdom. For if the king had an independent source of income, Fortescue argued, the English people would enjoy their wealth and liberty without being imposed upon by the monarch, who would in turn uphold the law because he would ‘exceed in all lordship all the lords of his realm, and none of them would grow to be like him, which thing is most to be feared of all the world’. The execution of his brother allowed Edward to do just that, by keeping Clarence’s vast estates for himself.

  The royal revenues from land increased rapidly, which meant that Edward didn’t need to call a parliament again for the unusually long period of almost five years. But land, Fortescue also understood, was about power as well as cash. And Edward took advantage of his new-found freedom to redraw the political map. He carved England up into territories, each controlled by a trusted member of his own household or family. It was all very cosy, but it depended to a dangerous extent on the force of Edward’s own personality. It also loosened ties of loyalty, since it meant that those outside the charmed circle didn’t care very much one way or another about who the king happened to be.

  But as long as Edward remained alive and well, none of that mattered. Indeed, for the next five years the king grew rich; his Yorkist regime grew strong and it seemed that Lancastrian Henry Tudor, still sheltering in Brittany, would live out the rest of his life in exile. But at Easter 1483, disaster struck the House of York. Edward was taken ill with a fever after going fishing on the Thames. Within ten days he was dead. Only Richard, youngest of the brothers, remained of the generation of Yorkists that had defeated the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury. He was no more his brother’s heir than Clarence, but true to family form he too would make his own brutal bid for power.

  III

  After the unexpected death of King Edward IV, all eyes turned west, towards Ludlow in the Welsh marches, where Edward’s son, heir and namesake Prince Edward was being brought up. But at twelve, was the boy old enough to rule in his own name? Much of the Yorkist clique, particularly the queen’s family, who had become powerful after the secret marriage, staked their future on the premise that the child could reign in his own right. They had been responsible for his education and upbringing; they had much to gain in the new reign. But a faction emerged in favour of appointing the prince’s uncle Richard as ‘Protector’ or regent until the boy was old enough to exercise power himself.

  Queen Elizabeth, sensing danger, was determined to get her son crowned quickly, and the council agreed that the coronation should take place without delay. On 23 April, following the council’s decision, Edward left Ludlow for London, his coronation and his reign. His escort, as his council insisted, was limited to 2000 men. It was enough to put on a fine show as the young king took possession of his kingdom. But the great lords of the kingdom were able to muster as many men or more. And unbeknown to the boy or his mother, Richard was summoning his own troops. He too was heading south.

  Late on the night of 2 May, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, waiting in London for the arrival of her eldest son, received alarming news. Edward’s cavalcade had been intercepted by his uncle, Richard, who had taken possession of his young nephew. The duke professed loyalty to the late king’s son and heir, his own nephew after all. But Elizabeth, immediately suspicious of Richard’s motives, fled that night with her younger son into the safe sanctuary of the Abbey at Westminster. Richard entered London with his nephew a few days later. The council quickly ratified Richard’s role as ‘Protector’. Young Edward’s coronation was ‘postponed’ until late June, and he was placed in ‘lodgings’ in the Tower.

  What was Richard doing and why? Hitherto, he had had a reputation, in contrast to the flighty Clarence, for rock-solid loyalty to his brother Edward, who had rewarded him with the government of the whole of the north of England. There he had won golden opinions as a fine soldier and a fair judge, and the model of a king’s younger brother. Nevertheless, his portrait suggests a man not entirely at ease with himself or others. He is tight lipped, and he is fiddling nervously with the rings on his fingers; he also had the tic of biting hard on his lower lip and constantly pushing and pulling his dagger in and out of its sheath. Was he repressed, paranoid? A hypocrite with an iron grip on himself ? Or did he genuinely believe, in view of Edward’s tangled marital history, that he, Richard, was now rightful king of England?

  On 10 June Richard, an over-mighty subject indeed, summoned his troops to London. His bid for the crown had begun in earnest. A week later, Queen Elizabeth was compelled to give up her younger son Richard into his uncle’s charge. The young prince now joined his brother in the Tower.

  Their uncle Richard now had both boys, first and second in line to the throne, under lock and key. On 22 June a compliant Parliament decreed that King Edward’s marriage to Queen Elizabeth was invalid, and the princes bastards. Richard had succeeded where his brother Clarence had failed. He had robbed his nephews of their right to the crown and cleared his own path to the throne. He was crowned King Richard III at Westminster on 6 July, with the full blessing of Parliament.

  During those frantic weeks, the two princes had been seen less and less around the Tower. Now they seemed to have disappeared altogether. By the late summer of 1483 everybody, including the princes’ own mother, Elizabeth Woodville, took for granted that they were dead. They also took it as read that the responsibility for their deaths rested with Richard. For only Richard had the power, opportunity and above all the motive.

  To this day, their exact fate remains a mystery. Writing thirty years later, Thomas More claimed that the constable of the Tower was ordered to do them to death, but refused. Others, however, proved willing, and the two boys, More says, were smothered to death in their sleep with pillows, on the orders of their uncle.

  His elder brothers were dead, the princes gone. The crown was his. But apparently doing away with the rightful heirs to the throne was a step too far, and opposition to Richard was now growing. Richard had been popular and might in theory have been a suitable king. But his sudden and bloody means of gaining power were seen as bringing a curse on England and perverting the sacred rule of succession. Soon he would be fighting to the death for the crown he had taken by fraud and force.

  Opposition came to centre on a plot hatched between two powerful and aggrieved mothers: Queen Elizabeth Woodville, whose sons were lost, and Margaret Beaufort, whose son Henry Tudor was in exile. Their machinations would prove Richard’s undoing, and decide England’s fate.

  Some time in the late summer of 1483 Queen Elizabeth Woodville, still in sanctuary in the abbot’s lodgings at Westminster, received a visit from a singular Welshman, Dr Lewis Caerleon. Dr Caerleon was a scientific jack-of-all-trades – mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and physician – and, unlike many polymaths, he was a master of all of them. The sanctuary, of course, was heavily guarded by the king’s men, but Dr Caerleon was waved thro
ugh because he was the queen’s physician. He was also, not coincidentally, physician to Lady Margaret Beaufort, and in his doctor’s bag he carried, on Lady Margaret’s behalf, a remarkable proposal. The queen’s eldest daughter, also called Elizabeth, should marry Margaret’s son Henry. Thus the bloodlines would converge, and York, Woodville and Tudor would join together against the usurping Richard III. That Elizabeth accepted the proposal confirms that she was convinced that her sons were dead.

  That Margaret made it shows that she had realized that Richard’s murderous ambition had opened the way for her son to gain the throne of England. Margaret had been nursing her ambitions for her exiled son, Henry Tudor, for years. Now, thanks to Richard’s murderous path to the throne, she could put them into practice.

  His mother’s plot under way, the thirty-year-old Henry set sail from Brittany, where he had lived in exile for the fifteen years of impregnable Yorkist rule, to make his bid for England’s throne. On 7 August 1485, at Milford Haven, just a few miles from his birthplace at Pembroke, Henry Tudor’s army made landfall in the evening. His years of exile were at an end.

  As soon as he stepped ashore Henry knelt, overcome with emotion at his seemingly miraculous return, and began to recite the psalm ‘Judge me Lord and fight my cause’. Then he kissed the sand and, making the sign of the cross, called on his troops in a loud voice to follow him in the name of God and St George. It was a magnificent beginning for a would-be king of England.