Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  A bust of Henry VII based on his death mask can be seen in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. We have no contemporary portrait of Owen Tudor. Did he look anything like his grandson? Would Katherine have fallen in love with this man?

  Who knows?

  Bloody Deeds at Tewkesbury

  by Anne O’Brien

  In May of 1471, the little town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire—today a peaceful place of half-timbered buildings, a magnificent Abbey, and lovely surroundings that make it a lure for visitors—witnessed a terrible battle.

  It was a momentous victory for the Yorkists under King Edward IV and his brother Richard of Gloucester, played out over the water-meadows of Tewkesbury where the rivers Avon and Severn meet. The Lancastrian Army was attempting to cross the River Severn when King Edward ordered an attack. It was a devastating and final defeat for the Lancastrians with wholesale carnage on what is still known today as “Bloody Meadow.”

  The Lancastrians went into full scale retreat, many drowning when attempting to cross the river, many cut down as they ran. Lancastrian soldiers who sought refuge in the Abbey were hunted down and mercilessly hacked to death within the building itself. The Lancastrian leaders were dragged from the Abbey and summarily executed in the market place. It was a truly bloody event with over 2000 Lancastrians killed, the church and churchyard so polluted that King Edward had to arrange for its re-consecration by the Bishop of Worcester.

  In the Abbey today a wooden door bears witness to the bloodbath: it is completely covered with plates of armour stripped from the dead and dying, perforated by gunshot and arrow holes.

  One of those to meet his death at Tewkesbury was Prince Edward of Lancaster, son and heir of King Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou. But how did he die, and where exactly? There is considerable debate about it.

  The Duke of Clarence, brother to Edward and Richard, recorded that the Prince “had been slain in plain battle.” Many contemporary writers also noted that he “died in the field.” The Arrivall, the official Yorkist account, recorded—as might be expected—that the Prince was “taken fleeing to the townwards and slain in the field.” There would appear to be no doubt that the Lancastrian Prince died in the fighting and there was no direct culpability on the part of King Edward and his brothers.

  But was this so? The historian Croyland in 1486 after the death of King Edward and Richard III is more ambiguous, recording that the Prince died “either on the field, or after the battle by the avenging hands of certain persons.”

  Tudor historians were also keen to implicate Richard of Gloucester. According to them, the Prince was taken during the rout and brought before King Edward when the battle was over. The King struck the Prince with his gauntlet in retaliation for an insolent remark, after which Clarence, Gloucester, and Hastings cut the Lancastrian heir down with their swords.

  This might, of course, simply be a Tudor attempt to bloody Yorkist hands, but an illustrated French version of the Arrivall, perhaps dating to the actual year of the battle, shows a scene very like the one where the Prince was forced to face King Edward and was ultimately slain.

  So perhaps there was more to Prince Edward’s death than contemporary reports made clear. Certainly the Prince as a future Lancastrian King was too dangerous to be allowed to live. King Edward and the leading Yorkists might have seen it in their best interests not to leave the Prince’s death to chance. Wherever Prince Edward was killed it was the death of the hopes of Lancaster to retrieve the Crown of England.

  Legend says that the brutal confrontation and murder took place in the chancel of Tewkesbury Abbey. Today, the brass that marks the official place of the Prince’s death in the chancel is a Victorian addition and thus cannot be used as proof of the site of the deed. It bears the words:

  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.

  Whatever the truth of it, the Abbey is a place of wonderful atmosphere, and since ultimate proof is lacking, I make no excuse for choosing the Abbey as the scene of Prince Edward’s death in Virgin Widow. It seemed very fitting that Prince Edward should, at the end, be forced to face the King he had tried to overthrow.

  A Short—but Heartfelt—Valentine from the Fifteenth Century

  by Anne O’Brien

  In the fifteenth century, England was torn apart by the Wars of the Roses. Between 1455 and 1485, four kings lost their crowns, more than forty nobles lost their lives, and thousands of those who fought on both sides met a violent death.

  Meanwhile, in Norfolk, the members of the Paston family were writing letters. They were a family who rose rapidly up the social scale from Clement, being a good plain husbandman in 1378, to John III the King’s trusty and well-beloved knight, invited by Henry VII to the marriage of his heir Arthur to Catherine of Aragon.

  So what did this ordinary yet remarkable family write about? The conflict, of course, particularly their dispute with the Duke of Norfolk over the ownership of Caister Castle which ended in a full-blown siege. But they also wrote about politics, business, shopping, and love, chattering endlessly over the decades, one member of the family to another.

  And one of these letters is believed to be the oldest Valentine.

  For this we have to thank John Paston III and Margery Brews.

  In 1476 John III was thirty-three years old and unmarried and was desperate enough for a wife to ask his brother to keep an eye out for “an old thrifty alewife” for him. Not the stuff of romance.

  But early in 1477 he met Margery Brews, a girl probably in her late teens, daughter of a Norfolk knight. She was not an heiress, but the family was well thought of, and John fell passionately in love with her. And she with him.

  The marriage seemed doomed to failure because of bitter disputes over the size of Margery’s dowry—she had three sisters for whom her father must also provide—but their love held true. During their prolonged betrothal, Margery wrote to John, addressing him as her “right well-beloved Valentine.” She pleaded with him not to leave her because of the dowry difficulties.

  If you love me, as I trust verily you do, you will not leave me therefore. My heart bids me ever more to love you, truly over all earthly thing.

  Then Margery added her initials in the shape of a heart.

  They wed eventually and it seems lived happily ever after. They had three children. From their letters it would appear that their love lost none of its romance. Margery sometimes wrote to John as “Right Reverend and Worshipful Sir” but on other occasions as “mine own sweetheart.” Even when the letters were full of the detail of ordinary life and for the most part very decorous, the post script often was not.

  Sir, I pray you, if you tarry long in London that it will please you to send for me for I think [it] long since I lay in your arms.

  This is the John Paston who was invited to the royal wedding. Sadly, Margery did not live to enjoy the occasion for she had died in 1495.

  Caister Castle, the fifteenth century moated manor house, took the family into war against the forces of the Duke of Norfolk. The Pastons were successful in keeping it in the family.

  What a remarkable resource the Paston letters are to medieval historians, and what a miracle that so many of them have survived. Five hundred years on, the voices of this stalwart family still ring out loud and clear. And how good to know that love blossomed for John and Margery even in the years of upheaval and death.

  Richard III vs. Henry VII: Naughty or Nice?

  by Judith Arnopp

  I have always been intrigued by the mystery of the Princes in the Tower.

  Most people are aware that, on the sudden death of their father Edward IV, the two boys were enscon
ced in the Tower, as was tradition, to await the coronation of the eldest boy as Edward V. But, although preparations for his coronation were underway, it was suddenly claimed that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been bigamous and, therefore, all their children illegitimate.

  Since illegitimacy barred the young Edward from the throne, his uncle, Richard III, was, by a statute known as the Titulus Regius, proclaimed as the rightful king and crowned in his stead.

  After his coronation in 1483, accounts of the boys’ whereabouts begin to dwindle from the historical record, and many believe they never left the Tower alive but were murdered there, suffocated in their sleep with a pillow.

  Richard reigned until August 1485 when Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven to claim the throne for himself.

  After the Battle of Bosworth, Henry Tudor (and his subsequent heirs) did their best to damage Richard’s reputation, and since that date it has been widely believed that Richard III was responsible for the boys’ deaths. Thomas More was the first to blacken his name and William Shakespeare, also writing for a Tudor monarch, twisted Richard’s character further. Consequently, many later histories are based on a literary play rather than on historical record, and historians now agree that many of the heinous crimes attributed to Richard were, in fact, committed by others.

  Tudor propaganda ensured that the surviving accounts of the years surrounding Bosworth are murky to say the least. Early in his reign Henry Tudor ordered all copies of the Titulus Regius to be “utterly destroyed” for reasons which may, or may not, appear obvious. You have to dig deep to find unbiased accounts, but they do exist, and there are several other candidates that fit the “murderer” tag just as well as Richard.

  Richard was crowned king in 1483 and would have been aware that his nephews provided a potential target for those wishing to supplant him. A prudent king would have removed them from the picture. Richard was by all accounts a religious man, and killing his nephews would have been sinful, even in those days. It would also be disloyal to his brother to whom Richard had been devoted in life.

  The act would also be a Godsend to any enemy that wished to turn the kingdom against him and, therefore, foolish. Chronicles prove that Richard was neither imprudent, sinful, nor foolish. So why, when rumours of the death began circulating, did he not just produce the boys? A lot has been read into this, and it does seem to suggest that he could not produce them. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they were already dead—they could have been sent out of harm’s way.

  Many believe Richard ordered that the boys be removed to safety, but there are now so many conflicting accounts and theories as to where they may have been moved to, that it is difficult to sift the good from the bad.

  During Richard’s reign there was a royal nursery at his castle at Sheriff Hutton where his brother George of Clarence’s children, Margaret and Edward of Warwick, resided, along with Richard’s legitimate son, also named Edward, and his two illegitimate children, John and Catherine. On Henry’s accession to the throne, one of his first acts was to secure the persons of the children therein.

  If the boys were found there then, when you consider Henry’s treatment of other surviving Yorkists, their fate seems sealed. Richard’s legitimate son Edward died of natural causes during his father’s reign, but the other children were still living at the time of Bosworth.

  Richard’s illegitimate daughter Catherine was no longer surviving as early as Elizabeth of York’s coronation in 1487, and her brother John’s fate is less clear but records show that a “base sone” of Richard’s was executed by Henry in 1491.

  Clarence’s children were also both executed by Tudors, Warwick was immediately incarcerated in the tower where he remained until accused of plotting with Perkin Warbeck. He was executed in 1499, an act made worse by the fact that the boy appears to have suffered from learning difficulties. His sister Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, managed to survive Henry VII’s rule, but under Henry VIII, at the age of approximately sixty-eight, she was executed. But I digress. I will leave that story for another day.

  True or not, I like the idea that the princes escaped, not least because of the wonderful array of “survival” theories that it has provoked. Such imaginings are a real gift to historical novelists whichever way they care to play it.

  Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was tenuous to say the least, based upon his descent from Edward III, but through his mother’s illegitimate Beaufort line. His title was Lancastrian and the House of Lancaster had long been regarded as usurpers and the direct line extinguished. He could never have won the victory nor ascended to the throne as heir of the House of Lancaster if his promise to marry Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV, had not won him the support of a few disaffected Yorkists.

  It was imperative that Elizabeth’s illegitimacy be reversed in order to bolster Henry’s position, but in legitimising her, Henry also legitimised her brothers, thus placing them before himself in the line of succession. So, if the boys were still living at this time, they would have been much more of an obstruction to Henry than they ever were to Richard, who already legitimately held the position of king. This, in my view, provides a motive.

  Of course, it’s a big if. In my opinion, a study of the characters of Richard and Henry, make the latter more likely to resort to infanticide. Not that he would have wielded the axe himself, or in this particular case, the pillow.

  Far from being the personification of evil as depicted by Shakespeare, Richard did have some qualities that Henry lacked. While Richard, having fought on numerous battlefields since his teens, was an undisputed warrior, Henry was not. At Bosworth he waited on the sidelines and let others do his dirty work for him.

  While Richard’s life is, with the exception of the puzzling execution of William Hastings, full of loyalty and honour, Henry’s is not. If Richard had wanted the boys killed, he would probably have done the deed openly, or wielded the “pillow” himself. Underhanded infanticide does not seem to have been his style.

  Henry’s character was far more secretive and underhand. Henry never felt secure on his stolen throne. His court is famous for its intrigue and spies, and I believe his reign suffered more uprisings than any other. People just didn’t like Henry, and it’s easy to see why.

  The first vengeance that Henry Tudor took as monarch was upon the body of the late King. After the battle, in an unprecedented act, the body of Richard III, an anointed king, was slung naked over a horse, arms and legs dangling, a halter tossed around his neck in symbolism of his defeat. In this indignity, he was taken to the Franciscan Priory church of the Greyfriars at Leicester where, for two days, his body was exhibited for all to see. He was buried at the friary with no ceremony. The church does not exist today—like so many others, it was destroyed when Henry’s son ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s—though as many will have heard, Richard’s bones were recently found there, in what is now a car park, and with the help of modern forensic science, questions about him are now being answered.

  Henry’s next act as King was to date his reign from the day before Bosworth thus rendering as traitors all those who had loyally fought for King Richard, so that they could then be attainted for treason.

  England lost much of its nobility during the battle, including men of great wealth like John Howard, the Duke of Norfolk. Henry appropriated their lands and kept the revenue for the crown. Some he executed for treason, among them William Bracher, Sir John Buck of Harthill, and William Catesby of Ashby St. Legers. Some, like Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, he imprisoned in the tower.

  Those of Richard’s supporters that did survive the battle were attainted and their estates confiscated; this effectively disarmed them and kept them from raising arms against the king.

  Henry then forbade all nobles to retain their own armies to prevent them from being more
powerful than himself and also to deter them from rebelling against him. It was an effective policy, and, although Henry did not manage to subdue all opposition, it is a fact that the English nobility, already in decline during the Wars of the Roses, fell rapidly from influence under the Tudors. By the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, England had just one remaining duke, that of Norfolk, and, after plotting to marry Mary Queen of Scots and restore Catholicism to England, he too was executed for treason in 1572.

  It was not just the nobility that Henry targeted; indeed, they seem to have been lower down on his list than those descended directly from the bloodline of Plantagenet. During the next three reigns, the heirs of York were systematically wiped out.

  I have tried to be objective in this brief overview, but possibly I have failed. I cannot help it. Every time I consider this argument it seems to me that Richard was the guy with the nobler tendencies. While Henry spent his youth skulking around Europe, living off others, emptying gaols in order to come and steal a crown to which he had no right, Richard was aiding his brother, King Edward, and proving almost unbelievably loyal despite disagreeing with his policies. In the short years that Richard was king, he showed promise of becoming a just ruler, championing the rights of the poor against the rich (imagine that!) and inspiring loyalty in his subjects in the north, who knew him well. He may have been a violent man by our standards, but he lived in violent times.

  Killing on the battlefield was honourable; off the field it was not. He abhorred disloyalty, as is made apparent by his reaction to Hastings’ betrayal, and, given the chance, I believe he would have made a better king than Henry who exploited rich and poor alike to bolster his own bulging coffers.