Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  As the first confused reports on the outcome of the battle reached Margaret, it emerged that the two sides had fought almost blind in thick fog early in the morning of the 14th. In the confusion Lancastrian archers had fired into the ranks of their own side, and with survivors crying ‘Treason! Treason!’ they had soon lost the battle. According to one account Warwick had fought on until overwhelmed, ‘beating down and killing the enemy far from his own forces’ until he was ‘thrust through and slain’.14 Another described how he ‘leapt on horseback and fled to a wood’, hoping to escape to fight another day, but that a Yorkist soldier ‘came upon him, and killed him, and despoiled him naked’.15 Battlefield commanders usually tried to escape, but trapped in that wood the Kingmaker knew better than to be taken alive and suffer a post-battle execution such as he had delivered to Henry’s former guardian, William Herbert. He had fought to the death.

  There was still no news of Stafford, and as Margaret sent her men on to Barnet to discover whether her husband was alive, the survivors from both armies were trickling into London. Many were terribly injured. Their armour had protected the trunks of their bodies, but they had been cut below the hips and on their faces. Often they had lost their noses, and these unlucky souls retreated into the houses of friends to escape the merciless stares of the public.16 Stafford proved to be amongst the injured. Unable to march on with Edward IV to the west, he was to be spared the denouement. The Tudor army expected to join Margaret of Anjou’s forces for this final battle, but Edward IV cut off her army at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. Her seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward of Lancaster, was killed there ‘in plain battle’ on 4 May 1471.17

  Two and a half weeks later Edward IV was riding through the streets of London in a victory parade with Margaret of Anjou seated in a chariot like a royal prisoner from the days of ancient Rome. He intended now to destroy the remnants of the Lancastrian royal house. In the Tower Margaret of Anjou was not permitted to see her husband, and would never see him again. Henry VI was murdered on the night of 21 May 1471, between eleven and twelve o’clock.18 The Yorkists put it about that he had taken the news of his son’s death ‘to so great despite, ire and indignation that of pure displeasure and melancholy he died’. Few can have believed it. There was, however, as yet no tradition in England of killing queens. Margaret of Anjou would be ransomed and eventually returned to France. There she died in 1482, so poor that Louis XI decided her dogs were the only things she owned worth keeping.19

  With the legitimate line of the House of Lancaster extinct, one Yorkist noted that ‘no one from that stock remained who could now claim the crown’.20 Nevertheless, Edward IV was not going to take any chances with Henry Tudor remaining a possible focus of old Lancastrian loyalties. An insight into Edward IV’s intentions is given by the fact that the man he ordered to lead the pursuit of Henry and Jasper Tudor was the same man who had carried out the execution of Owen Tudor on his orders in 1461.21 Jasper had become an expert escape artist, however, and as he fled with Henry into north Wales he turned the tables on their pursuer, capturing him instead. When the man pleaded for his life, Jasper retorted ‘he should have as much favour as he showed to Owen, his father’ and so ‘caused his head to be smitten off’.22 As one Frenchman summarised it: ‘the lords in England killed their enemies, then later the children of their enemies gained their revenge’.23

  Louis XI had backed the Lancastrian cause since Edward went into alliance with the Burgundians, and when Jasper and Henry at last reached the port of Tenby they set sail for France. The weather was stormy, however, and, blown off course, the Tudors landed instead at the independent duchy of Brittany. Happily the duke, Frances II, who was the son of Catherine of Valois’ sister Jeanne, welcomed his cousins ‘as though they had been his brothers’. Jasper and Henry were safe for the time being, but how long would this last? Whatever the displays of friendship from Duke Francis, they were now pawns in Brittany’s efforts to remain independent of France. King Edward would offer Duke Francis men and money in exchange for returning them to England, and there was no reason to believe he would resist the king’s bribes for ever, even if the Tudors were cousins.

  It was late September before Margaret Beaufort learned of Henry’s and Jasper’s safe escape. It was good news in bad times. Margaret had watched her husband sicken from the injuries he had received at Barnet five months earlier. Married to Sir Henry Stafford aged fourteen – the same age her son now was – she had grown up with him and, each year, they had celebrated their wedding anniversary as a mark of their love. They would not do so again. Stafford died on 4 October 1471.

  The grieving Margaret retreated to her mother’s house in the City, Le Ryall, to consider what to do next.24 It seemed to Margaret that the only way to secure her son’s life in the long term was to obtain a pardon from Edward IV, but regaining his trust was a formidable task. The quickest route would be to marry someone close to Edward. As a mere woman it would be assumed her loyalties were those of her husband, or, at the very least, that he could control her.

  Still only twenty-eight, extremely rich and with a royal descent that would add lustre to any noble house, Margaret soon attracted the attention of the new Steward of the King’s Household, Thomas, Lord Stanley. Eight years older than Margaret and a regular member of Edward’s council, he had useful links to the queen’s family, the Woodvilles.25 He was also independently powerful, the leading nobleman of the north-west and a man of considerable cunning. He had avoided committing his retainers to any of the major battles of the past thirteen years.26 Margaret married him in June 1472, just eight months after Stafford’s death. She feared she could not afford to be sentimental if her son was ever to return to his homeland.

  5

  ENTER RICHARD III

  MARGARET BEAUFORT AND THOMAS, LORD STANLEY WERE AN effective partnership. At Lathom Castle in Lincolnshire Margaret assisted her husband in local arbitration awards. At court she helped him manage the below-stairs household concerned with mundane daily necessities such as providing food, drink, lighting and fuel, and which was part of his role as steward. He, in turn, ensured she took part in ceremonial occasions, even attending the christening of Edward IV’s children. Over the years their mutual respect and affection grew. Stanley liked to give her expensive fabrics and gowns in rich greens and elegant striped black damasks.1 She, in turn, would buy Stanley valuable books, such as the one with special prayers to protect him in battle and from plague, the deaths that had taken her previous husbands. But the chief purpose of the marriage for Margaret was that it opened up the possibility of the king’s favour for her son. Progress towards the pardon she longed for proved agonisingly slow, however.

  It cannot have helped Margaret’s cause that the gentle, mad, Henry VI had come back to haunt King Edward in the guise of a popular saint. Edward IV had promulgated a belief that the defunct House of Lancaster had been cursed by their usurpation of Richard II, and that was why they were no more. But the dead king had come to be venerated, with rich and poor alike judging him to have been an innocent whose troubles gave him some insight into the difficulties of their own lives. Miracles were reported at the site of his modest grave in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey. A peasant claimed that Henry VI had even deigned to help him when he had a bean trapped in his ear, which popped out after he had prayed to the late king. People scribbled prayers to Henry VI in their Books of Hours, and painted images of him in their churches, while Edward tried, and failed, to put a halt to the growing cult.

  Edward’s court was often an uncomfortable place for Margaret in other respects too. Once described as ‘the most splendid court . . . in all Christendom’, it was growing decadent.2 The strikingly handsome, young King Edward was now fat, and it was later claimed he not only ate vast amounts, he also liked to ‘take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more’. The same (hostile) source claims Edward showed similar incontinence when it came to sex, acquiring mistresses, married and unmarried, with ‘no discrimination’.3
Certainly there were mistresses, and vicious quarrels broke out between courtiers (sometimes over women), while Edward’s murderous streak took its toll within the royal family.

  In 1475, Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, a descendant of Henry IV’s sister, ‘fell’ off an English ship in the Channel and drowned, reputedly on the king’s orders.4 The following year Edward IV almost succeeded in persuading Francis, Duke of Brittany, to return Henry Tudor to him, pretending he hoped to arrange a royal marriage for him. It was only because a Breton friend managed to convince Duke Francis that Henry still needed his protection, and remained a useful pawn, that his life was saved. The most shocking event came in 1478, when the king ordered the death of his own brother, George, Duke of Clarence, who had married Warwick the Kingmaker’s elder daughter. Later immortalised by Shakespeare as ‘false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence’, the silver-tongued duke had reconciled with Edward before the Battle of Barnet, but the brothers had begun quarrelling again. After a farcical trial for treason Clarence was executed in the Tower. The hard-drinking king may have thought the method a kindly one – he had Clarence drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine.5

  It was a further four years, and Henry Tudor had already turned twenty-five, before Margaret’s determined efforts to appease Edward at last achieved a draft pardon for her son.6 Whether it would ever be signed was another matter. His stepfather, Stanley, later claimed that Edward IV had grown genuinely interested in arranging a marriage for Henry with one of his daughters. But there is no contemporary evidence for this. On the contrary, Edward offered Duke Francis of Brittany 4,000 archers in exchange for Henry and Jasper Tudor that same year.

  Henry’s future remained very uncertain therefore, when, on 9 April 1483, the king died, aged only forty. He had suffered regular bouts of ‘an ague’, and his carousing had also taken its toll. In this weakened state he had succumbed to a cold he caught when out fishing.7 Margaret Beaufort’s efforts to cultivate the House of York would have to begin anew. But after the frustrations of the previous dozen years it was possible a genuine opportunity to help her son might appear and Margaret was determined that, if it did, she would seize it, whatever quarter it came from.

  The day after the king’s death, Stanley and Edward IV’s other councillors acknowledged his twelve-year-old elder son as Edward V. The new king was at Ludlow with his maternal uncle, Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, when he received the news and learned he would be crowned on 4 May. Since Edward V was a minor, some had expected a Protector would rule England in the king’s name until he reached his majority. The immediate coronation meant that Edward V would instead rule alone, with the guidance of a council. His mother’s Woodville relatives, with whom he lived, were likely to be highly influential in deciding who those councillors were, a fact that was immediately resented by the Woodville family’s enemies.

  Happily for the Woodvilles, the leading choice for Protector, Edward IV’s surviving brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, accepted the decision to crown Edward instead. A pious man who had always been loyal to the late king, he swore an oath of loyalty to his nephew promptly at York, where he was based. He also agreed to meet Edward V on his journey to London and accompany him on his formal entrance into the city. Richard was already expected, therefore, when he arrived at the meeting point at Stony Stratford on 30 April, his horse still sweating from the gallop.8

  There was no sign in Richard of his brother’s decadent style of living. Thirty years old, he was a soldier, about five feet eight, with a wiry build, slender limbs, fine bones and dark features.9 It was claimed later in the century that his right shoulder was notably higher than his left, and indeed the body of Richard excavated in Leicester in 2012 has severe scoliosis (an S-shaped spine.) The Shakespearean legend of Richard’s hump may have originated in this, and certainly it would have reduced his height considerably, but it is worth recording that the sixteenth-century Tudor king Edward VI also had one shoulder higher than another, which was not perceived as a gross deformity.10

  Riding with Richard and his substantial force of retainers was also the large, imposing figure of Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. He was a descendant of Thomas Woodstock, the younger brother of John of Gaunt, and the only other adult royal male in the kingdom.11 Edward V knew his maternal uncle, Lord Rivers, had left to have dinner with Richard and Buckingham at Northampton the night before, and it was surprising to see that he wasn’t with them. But an explanation would surely soon be forthcoming.

  Richard and Buckingham dismounted and fell to their knees before the golden-haired boy, greeting the twelve-year-old with ‘mournful’ looks. They expressed profound sorrow at his father’s death. But then, to the boy’s astonishment, they began to speak angrily of corrupt councillors who had overthrown his father’s will, which they said had named Richard as Protector. They accused the same councillors of being responsible for his father’s death, in having encouraged him in his vices, and finally they warned the young king that both his life and Richard’s were in danger.

  Edward V, described by one of his bishops as having ‘a ripe understanding, far passing the nature of his youth’, insisted vigorously his father had appointed his councillors for him, and that he had complete confidence in them, as well as ‘the peers of the realm and the queen’. At this mention of Elizabeth Woodville, Buckingham exploded: ‘it was not the business of women but of men to govern kingdoms, and so if he cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it’.12

  Buckingham was said to have resented being married off aged eleven to one of Elizabeth Woodville’s low-born sisters, and he made it clear he viewed the Woodvilles as upstarts. He had been one of the first to contact Richard with his concerns about the power they were about to wield – but he was not alone. Another contact had been Edward IV’s best friend William, Lord Hastings, who had quarrelled previously with members of the Woodville family. Their letters to Richard have not survived, but it is possible they had suggested to Richard his life was in danger, as he claimed. History had seen Edward IV, Henry VI and Richard II all face dangers at the hands of their adult male heirs. The Woodvilles had reason to see Richard also as a possible threat to Edward V, while Richard had the death of his brother Clarence to consider. If one royal duke was easily disposed of, so might another be. At the very least his standing as a royal duke was threatened by a Woodville monopoly of power. It made sense, therefore, for Richard to take the role of Protector long enough to destroy the Woodvilles and gain the king’s trust.

  There was shock in London when the news arrived that Richard had seized control of Edward V and that Lord Rivers had been arrested on charges of treason. Richard’s action appeared, however, to be directed only against the Woodvilles and people were given no reason to suppose that Edward V’s coronation would not go ahead. On 4 May, 400 citizens in mulberry gowns greeted the king on his official entry, and, dressed in blue velvet, he was escorted to the luxury of the Bishop’s Palace in St Paul’s Churchyard, where he was lodged. Richard, dressed in ‘coarse black cloth’ as a mark of mourning for his brother, was to stay nearby in Bishopsgate Street.13

  With Elizabeth Woodville in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey along with her youngest son and five daughters, the situation remained tense, nevertheless. Richard issued a reassuring statement, rescheduling the coronation for Sunday 22 June. Events were, however, taking on a momentum that Richard may not have anticipated before he had seized the king. It was clear that Edward V did not accept that he was being rescued from evil councillors. The Woodvilles now had scores to settle with Richard, and when the king grew up, they would get their opportunity. How safe even was the future of Richard’s nine-year-old son? It was also valid to wonder if England might not be better off in the hands of an experienced, adult royal, than a child puppet of the upstart Woodvilles. But if Edward V was to be deposed Richard had first to overawe, or dispose of any diehard Edwardian loyalists.

  On 10 June Richard wrote secretly to the City of York, summoning his northern supporter
s. He warned that the queen and her adherents planned to ‘murder and utterly destroy’ him and Buckingham, ‘the old Royal blood of this realm’.14 He then called a council meeting to take place at the Tower on Friday the 13th, ostensibly to discuss the coronation. Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Lord Stanley, and Edward IV’s former intimate, Lord Hastings, were amongst those present. According to a Tudor account, Stanley had slept badly. He told Hastings he had had a nightmare in which they were being gored in the face by a boar and blood was pouring over their shoulders. As everyone knew, Richard’s badge was the white boar. Hastings advised him to dismiss his fears.15 But barely had the meeting begun when it descended into violence. Hastings – who had been completely loyal to Edward – was arrested by Richard’s men, taken outside and beheaded on Tower Green. Stanley, who cut his forehead as he ducked under the table, was also arrested, but quickly released.

  As a shaken Stanley returned home to Margaret, Richard ordered Elizabeth Woodville to hand over Edward V’s little brother, the Duke of York. He claimed the boy was needed to accompany the king for the coronation, which he still insisted was scheduled to go ahead. With the abbey surrounded, Elizabeth Woodville had little choice but to capitulate, and on 16 June the two princes were lodged in the royal apartments at the Tower. This was not imprisonment – at least not officially so. The Tower was a royal palace as well as a fortress, and this was where monarchs traditionally awaited their coronations. But the prospects for Edward V and his younger brother looked increasingly grim. Richard was now courting popularity riding through the capital dressed in regal purple and entertaining significant citizens to dinner.

  There was no coronation on Sunday 22 June.16 Instead on the 25th the young king’s uncle, Lord Rivers, and his half-brother Richard Grey (a son of Elizabeth Woodville’s first marriage to a Lancastrian knight) were executed. The following day an assembly of lords and other notables, led by Buckingham, presented Richard with a petition urging him to accept the throne. The Bishop of Bath had come forward as a witness to claim that Edward IV had been contracted in marriage to another woman at the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville.17 Following this bigamous marriage, it was argued that Edward IV had fallen into further sin, ‘the order of all politic rule was perverted, the laws of God, and God’s Church, and also the laws of nature and of England’.18