Enthroned for a second time on October 3, 1470, Henry had been propped up on the throne by Warwick, who set the crown upon his head and made a great show of reverence before him, but the sovereign seemed more confused than pleased about it. No wonder, when his nemesis bowed before him! Observers noted that Henry sat on the throne as limp as a sack of vegetables. The Great Chronicle of London stated, “He was a mere shadow and pretence.” The real ruler of England was Warwick, functioning as Henry’s lieutenant. The restored king’s mind had been unstable before his imprisonment, but incarceration had surely dulled it further. However, despite the medieval chroniclers’ assertion that “what was done in his name was done without his will and knowledge,” most modern historians believe that Henry was not deranged, and fully lucid.
In the royal records this period was referred to as “the 49th year of the reign of Henry VI and the first of his readeption to royal power,” otherwise known as the Readeption. The math ignored the fact that for the previous decade, Edward IV had been on the throne.
The Readeption Parliament confirmed Edward of Lancaster’s right to be king, reinstating Henry’s son in the line of succession. But he wed Anne Neville without the necessary papal dispensation, because it took too long to arrive. Permission was procured instead from another authority, the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, and the teens were married on December 13, 1470, in a lavish ceremony officiated by the Grand Vicar of Bayeux. Yet Margaret forbade her son to consummate his nuptials. Should Warwick’s star plummet (and no one but the members of the Commons liked him), his daughter would hardly be an appropriate match for the Prince of Wales.
Shortly after the wedding, Henry VI authorized a two-thousand-pound expenditure from his exchequer for Warwick to collect Margaret and the newlyweds in France and escort them back to England, reuniting them with the king. But Warwick spent the money elsewhere and went only as far as Dover to await the queen’s arrival. Unfortunately, no one told Margaret about the change in plans, and when Warwick never arrived in Rouen, she had to rethink her strategy to reach England. Three times she endeavored to embark from Normandy, but met with punishing storms.
Edward IV was also on the Continent, in self-imposed exile since Henry VI’s readeption. By now he had raised enough support to plan an invasion and retake the throne. The fate of England rested on who landed first: Margaret of Anjou or Edward IV.
Margaret delayed her departure after learning of Edward IV’s possible invasion; she feared that her ships would be caught in the cross fire. Finally, on March 24, 1471, with great trepidation she sailed from Harfleur with the Prince and Princess of Wales, a handful of trusted advisers, and three thousand French chevaliers and squires. Many of the Lancastrian lords had left London in order to greet Margaret upon her arrival in the West Country—so they were not in the capital to prevent Edward IV and his forces from marching right through the city gates.
On April 9, the Tower was taken for Edward, giving him clear access to the capital. Two days later, he entered London in triumph, welcomed by the citizens with open arms. He went to St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the Archbishop of Canterbury gave thanks for his restoration to the throne, declaring Henry VI deposed.
At the bishop’s palace, the forty-nine-year-old Henry embraced Edward, humbly declaring, “My cousin of York, you are very welcome. I know that in your hands my life will not be in danger.” After ordering Henry transferred to the Tower, later that day in Westminster Abbey, Edward IV was recrowned king of England. There was no more hope for the Lancastrians. Warwick was killed at the Battle of Barnet on April 13, cementing the victory for Edward IV and the Yorkists. By that evening, Henry VI was once more considered a prisoner of the state.
Although Margaret reportedly fainted at the news of Warwick’s death, she swiftly rallied her strength and her forces, never losing sight of her purpose. It was imperative to save the kingdom for her son! Margaret and Edward of Lancaster sent out summonses to their supporters, rallying them, in the chronicler Hall’s words, “to the banner of the red rose.”
By the end of April, the stage was set for a genuine battle royal between the forces of Margaret of Anjou and those of Edward IV. But on May 4, Edward of Lancaster was felled in his first taste of warfare at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Historians’ accounts differ, depending on the chroniclers’ allegiances. The Croyland Chronicle of 1486, written when the first Tudor, Henry VI’s half brother’s son, Henry VII, was on the throne, stated that Edward of Lancaster died “either on the field or after the battle, by the avenging hands of certain persons.”
Sixteenth-century Tudor historians Vergil and Edward Hall claim that the prince was taken alive during the battle, and that after the fighting was over he was hauled before Edward IV, who received him graciously and asked why the youth had taken up arms against him. The prince hotly replied, “I came to recover my father’s heritage. My father has been miserably oppressed and the crown usurped.” While the story may be apocryphal, the angry quote wouldn’t be out of character for the younger Edward.
As the story continues, Edward IV became irate at such disrespect and slapped Edward of Lancaster across the mouth with his gauntlet. The king’s two brothers, the dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, along with their pal Sir William Hastings, then turned the prince into a human pincushion with their swords.
However he died, Edward of Lancaster’s corpse was interred in the church of the monastery of the black monks at Tewkesbury. The epitaph for the only child of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, dead at the age of seventeen, read:
Here lies Edward, Prince of Wales,
Cruelly slain while a youth.
Anno Domini 1471.
Alas, the savagery of men,
Thou art the sole light of thy mother,
the last hope of thy race.
During the battle, Margaret had gone into hiding with Anne Neville, but the pair were discovered at Little Malvern Priory in Worcestershire and taken into custody on May 7, 1471, by Sir William Stanley, who informed the deposed queen of her son’s death. Hysterical, Margaret had to be dragged from the abbey. She and Anne were brought before Edward IV on May 11. Margaret hurled so many invectives at the usurping king that he considered executing her. But the code of chivalry did not permit knights to abuse damsels in such legitimate distress. After Edward assured her that he would deal leniently with her and treat her with respect, Margaret politely replied that she would place herself “at his commandment.”
On May 14, Edward IV departed for London with Margaret of Anjou in his entourage. He entered the city a week later at the head of a triumphant procession. Like a conquering Caesar he paraded his spoils of war: his vanquished. Ahead of the king, perched atop a litter, rode Margaret of Anjou. She was taunted and pelted with refuse by the jeering crowd.
Henry VI remained imprisoned in the Tower. And perhaps he might have languished there, but a Lancastrian uprising fomented by the Earl of Warwick’s cousin, Thomas, Bastard of Fauconberg, sealed Henry’s death warrant. As long as Henry lived, someone somewhere would be tempted to incite rebellion in his name and attempt to resuscitate the House of Lancaster’s claim to the throne. Civil war would rage indefinitely. The crown would perpetually have to raise revenues to muster troops and defend itself.
The Warkworth Chronicle, a late medieval account of events, stated, “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.” These accounts were written some years later, during the reign of Henry VII. In 1485 at Bosworth Field, the last major battle of the Cousins’ War, Henry, then Earl of Richmond, slew Richard III (the former Duke of Gloucester), who in 1483 had usurped the throne he was supposed to be keeping warm for Edward’s young son.
Naturally, it was in the interests of Tudor chroniclers to further blacken the name of the man whose
crown Henry VII placed upon his own head, declaring himself the new king of England. Nevertheless, it was also entirely in character for Richard to play the consigliere for Edward IV and to do his older brother’s violent bidding, even though no one has, beyond a shadow of a doubt, placed Gloucester’s hands on the weapon(s) that eliminated Henry VI.
Tradition has it that Henry was praying in a niche within his chamber in the Wakefield Tower when he was murdered on the night of May 21, 1471. But the court’s official story was that Henry had died of grief upon hearing of his son’s death and the capture of his wife. However, no one believed it. The Milanese ambassador thought that the king was directly involved, remarking that Edward IV “caused King Henry to be secretly assassinated in the Tower. He has, in short, chosen to crush the seed.” Philippe de Commynes was convinced that the Duke of Gloucester (who’d also probably stabbed Edward of Lancaster) “killed poor Henry with his own hand, or else caused him to be killed in his presence.”
And Vergil, a Tudor chronicler, averred that it was generally believed that “Gloucester killed him with a sword.”
A sword thrust from Richard, Duke of Gloucester, or from anyone else, may have been harder to prove, but poor Henry VI did not go gently into the good night. When his bones were exhumed in 1910, his skull was found to be “much broken,” the result of a severe blow, if not many, to the head.
Shortly after the king’s demise, Henry’s corpse was carried through the streets of London to St. Paul’s, where it lay in state overnight, “opyn vysagid, that he mygth be knowyn,” according to the Great Chronicle of London. The contemporary accounts report, as Shakespeare would later dramatize, that the dead king’s body bled afresh onto the pavement, to the shock of onlookers. According to the Great Chronicle it was proof positive of Gloucester’s guilt in Henry’s judicial murder.
Margaret of Anjou’s whereabouts on the night her husband was brutally killed are unknown, and her reaction to the news of his death is unrecorded, although it’s a safe bet that she was both hysterical and vitriolic. Her requests to gain custody of his corpse were denied.
Henry VI’s funeral was held at the monastery of the Black Friars. His body was then taken by barge up the Thames to Chertsey Abbey, where it was modestly interred in the Lady Chapel. Although Henry had been a weak ruler, he was renowned as a pious man, and this reputation was magnified to the nth degree after his death. Lancastrian propaganda all but canonized him as soon as he died (the corpse’s bleeding-afresh phenomenon surely contributed to the myth), and word quickly spread that Henry had died a martyr. Soon people were making pilgrimages to Chertsey, where it was claimed 155 miracles took place at the late king’s tomb. His former subjects venerated him as a saint—his incompetent administration of the realm all but forgotten.
In 1484, Richard III ordered Henry’s body to be reinterred at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. It was discovered that the corpse appeared uncorrupted and smelled just as sweet after thirteen years. To true believers, it was further proof of divine intervention. Richard even ordered Henry’s royal effects to be displayed near the tomb as relics.
The room within the Tower where Henry was murdered was turned into a shrine as his cult spread, although it was dismantled in the 1530s by Henry VIII’s commissioners. Nevertheless, every year on the night of May 21, the governors of Eton College, which Henry founded, place a bouquet of lilies (for France, perhaps) and red roses (for Lancaster) at the spot where Henry was supposedly felled.
Soon after her husband’s death, Edward IV ordered Margaret of Anjou to be transferred from the Tower to Windsor Castle, where she remained under house arrest until July 8, 1471. After that, she was moved to Wallingford Castle, near the home of her good friend Alice Chaucer, dowager Duchess of Suffolk. Edward IV appointed Alice to be Margaret’s guardian—considered a kindness on his part, as things could have gone much worse for the former queen and she could have met with a violent end.
After Alice died in 1475, Margaret was ransomed by the king of France, Louis XI, and returned to her homeland. On January 29, 1476, she was compelled to sign a formal renunciation, releasing all rights that her marriage in England had given her. Margaret’s father supported her until his death in 1480. After the demise of René of Anjou, Margaret subsisted on a meager royal pension in exchange for relinquishing to the crown all claims to her Angevin territorial inheritances and her mother’s properties in Lorraine. It was more than adequate compensation, Louis XI insisted, for the substantial expenses he had incurred on Margaret’s behalf since 1462.
On August 25, 1482, at the age of fifty-two, Margaret of Anjou died in tremendous poverty after suffering from a short, unspecified illness, and was entombed beside her parents at Angers Cathedral. Her remains were desecrated—removed and scattered—when the cathedral was ransacked during the French Revolution.
It is spectacularly ironic that Margaret of Anjou bears such a ghastly reputation for acting in what was deemed an “unwomanly” manner when everything she did would, by the same lights, be considered the most natural behavior for any woman: Even at her own peril, she always wanted what was best for her husband and their only son. Her union with Henry, though a mismatch of temperaments, was in many ways doomed to failure because medieval England was prejudiced against a French-born queen, especially a dowerless one whose marriage terms included the return of two provinces the English had shed much blood to conquer. As a couple, Henry and Margaret endured perpetual ignominy: eight years of a childless marriage, his recurring bouts of “madness,” and the countless rumors questioning the paternity of their only child, which, by default, falsely tarred Margaret as an adulteress. Their subjects certainly saw the marriage as an inglorious one: In their opinion England’s malleable sovereign, a pious pacifist, had wed a pushy foreign wife who tried to control the government in his stead.
And yet, what their critics fail to recognize is that Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou were devoted spouses during an immensely tumultuous age. Throughout their thirty-six-year marriage, no one was a fiercer advocate for Henry than his wife. For decades, their traditional roles were reversed: Henry was the damsel in distress, while Margaret acted as his knight in shining armor, more actual than metaphorical.
Henry was a weak king who twice lost his crown and died ingloriously—but not without his “right entierly Welbeloved Wyf” putting up the fight of her life to prevent his downfall.
MARGARET TUDOR
AND
JAMES IV OF SCOTLAND
MARRIED: 1503–1513
AND
ARCHIBALD DOUGLAS, 6TH EARL OF ANGUS
MARRIED: 1514–1527
AND
HENRY STEWART, 1ST LORD METHVEN
MARRIED: 1528–1541
Scandal seemed to follow Henry VIII’s elder sister wherever she went. While her first marriage was a glorious union on paper, in practice it was tarnished by her husband’s flagrant infidelity. Margaret subsequently married beneath her—twice. But wedding for love was considered inglorious for a queen, who was supposed to make grand international alliances that would further her kingdom’s interests. Margaret’s choices instead angered her subjects, not to mention her brother.
Named for her paternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, Margaret Tudor was the second child of Henry VII, the first Tudor king. Henry, Earl of Richmond, had gained the throne by defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Legend has it that the murdered king’s crown was plucked from the branches of a thornbush and placed on the earl’s victorious head. From that moment on, Henry Tudor, who traced his lineage to the Lancastrian line of kings, would need to hold on to this crown, obtained so tenuously, by any means necessary. That meant securing as many allies as possible. The best way to cement such alliances was through marriage.
He began with his own—to the niece of Richard III, the beautiful blond Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Richard’s predecessor, Edward IV. Their wedding uni
ted the long-feuding houses of York and Lancaster—those cousins who scrabbled for decades in what we now call the Wars of the Roses.
The eldest daughter of Henry and Elizabeth, Margaret Tudor was raised as a proper Renaissance princess, learning to dance, speak Latin, play the lute and clavichord, and prove her mettle at the archery butts. Negotiations for her own royal marriage began in 1496, when she was only six years old. The designated groom was her father’s closest neighbor and ofttimes enemy, King James IV of Scotland. But negotiations were forestalled by the threat of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the English throne who claimed to be the nephew of Richard III. Warbeck was backed by the Scots, who believed his contention.
In any event, Margaret’s proposed match with James was not met with full approval in England. Some of Henry’s council objected to it on the grounds that Scotland was not only a poor and, in their view, backward country, but that a union between their king and Henry’s daughter would place the Stewarts, James’s family line, in direct succession for the English throne. The far-thinking Henry VII cannily countered, “Supposing, which God forbid, that all my male progeny should become extinct and the kingdom devolve by law to Margaret’s heirs, will England be damaged thereby, or rather benefited? For since the less becomes subservient to the greater, the accession will be that of Scotland to England, not of England to Scotland.”
Additionally, a papal dispensation was necessary for Margaret to wed James, because they stood within the prohibited degree of kinship. They both descended from a common ancestor, their great-great-grandfather John Beaufort—the oldest son of John of Gaunt and his third wife, Katherine Swynford.
James IV had been crowned king of Scotland on June 24, 1488, just two weeks after the death of his father, following the Battle of Sauchieburn, near Stirling. During the fighting, a skirmish between King James III’s adherents and a group of rebels that included his own son James and the 5th Earl of Angus, the king was thrown from his horse and dragged, bruised and bleeding, into the mill of Bannockburn by the miller and his wife. The injured king demanded to see a priest, whereupon the miller’s wife ran into the street and called for a cleric to attend the king. A passerby responded, but turned out to be no man of the cloth. When the wounded James III asked this “priest” to shrive him, and to give him the sacrament, the stranger hastily agreed to oblige—which he did by drawing a sword and driving it through the king’s body several times.
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 6