The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors
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To paint Henry VIII as a brute killer in a long line of otherwise virtuous kings was somewhat disingenuous. Henry was certainly capable of violence and cruelty towards members of his own family, but such were the times. Indeed, if anything could be said for Margaret’s death it was that it marked the end of the bloodbath that had been continuing on and off since the 1450s. When her poor, mangled body finally dropped to the ground, there remained barely a single drop of Plantagenet royal blood in England, other than the little which flowed in the veins of Henry VIII and his three children. Nearly a century of butchery was coming to an end not by choice but by default: almost all the potential victims were now dead.
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One of the earliest recorded uses of the phrase ‘the wars of the roses’ came from the pen of the nineteenth-century British writer and royal tutor Lady Maria Callcott. Her children’s book Little Arthur’s History of England was first published in 1835. In describing the violent upheaval that convulsed England in the fifteenth century, Callcott wrote, ‘For more than thirty years afterwards, the civil wars in England were called the wars of the Roses.’7 She was right and she was wrong. The precise phrase is not recorded before the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a country torn in half by the rival houses of Lancaster and York, represented respectively by the emblems of red and white roses, went back in some form to the fifteenth century.
Roses were a popular symbol throughout Europe during the middle ages, and their colours, whether deployed in politics, literature or art, were judged to have important and often opposing meanings. The fourteenth-century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio used red and white roses in his Decameron to symbolise the entwined themes of love and death.8 Roses were doodled in the margins and illuminated letters in books of prayer, calendars and scientific texts.9 Aristocratic families in England had included roses in their heraldic badges since at least the reign of Henry III in the thirteenth century.10 But in the later fifteenth century in England, red and white roses began to be associated closely with the fortunes of rival claimants to the crown.
The first royal rose was the white rose, representing the house of York – the descendants of Richard duke of York, who asserted his right to the crown in 1460. When Richard’s son Edward became King Edward IV in 1461, the white rose was one of a number of symbols he used to advertise his kingship. Indeed, as a young man Edward was known as ‘the rose of Rouen’, and on his military victories his supporters sang ‘blessed be that flower!’11 In later decades, the white rose was adopted by many of those who chose to align themselves with Edward’s memory, particularly if they wished to stake their claim to royal pre-eminence by virtue of their relationship to him.
The red rose was far less common until it was adopted and promoted vigorously by Henry Tudor (Henry VII ) in the 1480s. The earliest quasi-royal use of the red rose was by Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV ), who had his pavilions decorated with the flowers during his famous trial by combat against Thomas Mowbray in 1398.12 There is some (slight) evidence that red roses were also associated with Henry IV’s grandson, Henry VI. But it was only after the battle of Bosworth in 1485 that red roses flourished as a royal badge, representing Henry VII’s claim to the crown through his connection to the old dukes of Lancaster. The red rose was then used as a counterpoint to the white, puffing up the weak Tudor claims to royal legitimacy. (‘To avenge the White, the Red Rose bloomed,’ wrote one chronicler, studiously following the party line after Bosworth.13) As king, Henry VII had his scribes, painters and librarians plaster documents with red roses – even going so far as to modify books owned by earlier kings so that their lavish illuminations included roses of his own favoured hue.14
The red rose was more often invoked retrospectively, as its principal purpose after 1485 was to pave the way for a third rose: the so-called ‘Tudor rose’, which was a combination of white and red, either superimposed, quartered or simply wound together. The Tudor rose was invented to symbolise the unity that had supposedly been brought about when Henry VII married Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York in 1486, entwining the two warring branches, the houses of Lancaster and York, together. The story this rose told was of politics as romance: it explained a half-century of turmoil and bloodshed as the product of two divided families, who were brought to peace by a marriage that promised to commingle the feuding rivals. When Henry VII’s son Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509, the court poet John Skelton, who grew up during the worst of the violence, wrote that ‘the Rose both White and Red / In one Rose now doth grow’. The idea of ‘wars of the roses’ – and, most importantly, of their resolution with the arrival of the Tudors – was thus by the early sixteenth century a commonplace. The concept took hold because it offered up a simple, powerful narrative: a tale that made the world, if not black and white, then red and white. It implicitly justified the Tudors’ claim to the crown. And to writers over the centuries – including the Tudor historians Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, Elizabethan dramatists such as William Shakespeare, eighteenth-century thinkers such as Daniel Defoe and David Hume, and nineteenth-century novelists like Walter Scott, all of whom invoked the roses in their depictions of the wars – the idea was irresistible. But was it really true?
The answer, alas, is no. Modern historians have come to understand that the wars of the roses were far more complex and unpredictable than is suggested by their alluring title. The middle-to-late decades of the fifteenth century experienced sporadic periods of extreme violence, disorder, warfare and bloodshed, an unprecedented number of usurpations of the throne, the collapse of royal authority, an upheaval in the power politics of the English nobility, murders, betrayals, plots and coups, the savage elimination of the direct descendants of the last Plantagenet patriarch, King Edward III, and the arrival of a new royal dynasty, the Tudors, whose claim to the throne by right of blood was somewhere between highly tenuous and non-existent. It was a dangerous and uncertain period in which England’s treacherous political life was driven by a cast of quite extraordinary characters, men and women alike, who sometimes resorted to unfathomable brutality and cruelty. The scale of the violence, the size and frequency of the battles that were fought, the rapidly shifting allegiances and motivations of the rivals, and the peculiar nature of the problems that were faced were baffling to many contemporaries and have remained so to many historians. This is one very good reason why a simple narrative of warring families split and reunited took root in the sixteenth century and has endured so long afterwards. But it is also true that this version of history was deliberately encouraged in the sixteenth century for political ends. The Tudors, particularly Henry VII, promoted the red rose/white rose myth vigorously, drawing on methods of dynastic propaganda that had been employed reaching far back to promote the dual monarchy of England and France during the Hundred Years War. Their success is self-evident. Even today, with several generations of modern historians having put forward sophisticated explanations for the ‘wars of the roses’, drawing on research into late medieval law, economics, culture and political thought, the simple Lancaster/York narrative is still the one that prevails when the fifteenth century becomes the subject of screen drama, popular fiction and discussion in the press. Victory to the Tudors, then: the very notion of ‘the wars of the roses’ continues to reflect that dynasty’s innate genius for self-mythologising. They were masters of the art.
This book tells several overlapping stories. In the first place it seeks to draw an authentic picture of this harsh and troubled period, looking where possible past the distorting lens of the sixteenth century and of Tudor historiography and viewing the fifteenth century on its own terms. What we will find is the disastrous result of a near-total collapse in royal authority under the kingship of Henry VI, who began his rule as a wailing baby and ended it as a shambling simpleton, managing in between to trigger a crisis unique in its nature and unlike any of the previous constitutional moments of the late middle ages in England. This is a story not of vain aristoc
rats attempting to overthrow the throne for their own personal gain – of ‘bastard feudalism’ gone awry and ‘overmighty nobles’ scheming to wreck the realm (both have, at times, been explanations put forward for the wars) – but of a polity battered on every side by catastrophe and hobbled by inept leadership. It is the story of a realm that descended into civil war despite the efforts of its most powerful subjects to avert disaster.
For nearly thirty years, Henry VI’s hopeless rule was held together by the endeavours of fine men and women. But they could only strain so hard. The second phase of our story examines the consequences of one man’s decision that the best solution for this benighted realm was no longer to induce a weak king to govern his realm more competently, but to cast him aside and claim the crown for himself. The means by which Richard duke of York did this were not unprecedented, but they proved extremely destructive. To a crisis of authority was added a crisis of legitimacy as the ‘Yorkists’ began to argue that the right to rule was not only a matter of competence but was carried in their blood. The second part of our story charts this stage of the conflict, and its eventual settlement under the able and energetic king Edward IV, who re-established the authority and prestige of the crown and, by the time of his death, appeared to have brought England back to some semblance of normalcy and good governance.
The third part of our story asks a simple question: how on earth, from this point, did the Tudors end up kings and queens of England? The family spawned by the unlikely secret coupling of a widowed French princess and her Welsh servant during the late 1420s ought never to have found themselves anywhere near a crown. Yet when Edward IV died in 1483 and his brother Richard III usurped the crown and killed Edward’s sons, the Tudors suddenly became extremely important. The third strand to our story tracks their struggle to establish their own royal dynasty – one that would become the most majestic and imperious dynasty that England had ever known. Only from the slaughter and chaos of the fifteenth century could such a family have emerged triumphant, and only by continuing the slaughter could they secure their position. So as well as examining the wars of the roses as a whole, this book drills down into the early history of the Tudors, presenting them not according to their own myth, but as the fifteenth century really found them.
Finally, this book examines the Tudors’ struggles to keep the crown after 1485 and the process by which their history of the wars of the roses was established: how they created a popular vision of the fifteenth century so potent and memorable that it not only dominated the historical discourse of the sixteenth century, but has endured up to our own times.
That, then, is the aim. My last book, The Plantagenets, told the story of the establishment of England’s great medieval dynasty. This book tells the story of its destruction. The two books do not quite follow chronologically from one another, but they can, I hope, be read as a pair of complementary works. Here, as before, I aim to tell the tale of an extraordinary royal family in a way that is scholarly, informative and entertaining.
As ever I must thank my literary agent, Georgina Capel, for her brilliance, patience and good cheer. I also owe a great debt of thanks to my visionary editor at Faber in the UK, Walter Donohue, and to the equally wonderful Joy de Menil at Viking in the US. They and their teams have made this book a pleasure to write. I am grateful also to the staffs at the libraries, archives, castles and battlefields I have visited during the writing of this book – and most particularly to the staff at the London Library, British Library and National Archives, where I have spent a great deal of my time over the last few years. The book is dedicated to my wife, Jo Jones, who, with my daughters Violet and Ivy, has once again suffered my scribbling with love and humour.
And so to our story. In order fully to comprehend the process by which Plantagenet rule was destroyed and the Tudor dynasty established, we open not in the 1450s, when politics began to fracture into violence and warfare, nor in the 1440s, when the first signs of deep political turmoil emerged, nor even in the 1430s, when the first ‘English’ ancestors of the Tudor monarchs were born. Rather, our story starts in 1420, when England was the most powerful nation in western Europe, its king the flower of the world, and its future apparently brighter than at any time before: a time when the idea that within a generation England would be the most troubled realm in Europe would have been little short of preposterous. As with so many tragedies, our story opens with a moment of triumph. Let us begin.
DAN JONES
Battersea, London, February 2014
I
BEGINNINGS
1420–1437
‘We were in perfect health.’
KING HENRY VI (aged seventeen months)
1 : King of All the World
She was married in a soldier’s wedding. Shortly before midday on Trinity Sunday in June of 1420, a large band of musicians struck up a triumphant tune as the elegant parish church of St Jean-au-Marché in Troyes filled with splendidly dressed lords, knights and noble ladies, gathered to observe the union of two great families who had long been set against one another. The archbishop of Sens conducted the solemn proceedings in the traditional French fashion as Catherine de Valois, youngest daughter of the mad king of France, Charles VI, and his long-suffering wife, Isabeau of Bavaria, was wedded to Henry V, king of England.
Catherine was eighteen years old. She had delicate features, a small, prim mouth and round eyes above high cheekbones. Her slender neck bent very slightly to one side, but this was a lone blemish upon the fine figure of a princess in the flush of youth. The man she was about to marry was a battle-hardened warrior. He had pursed lips and a long nose, characteristic of the line of Plantagenet kings from whom he was descended. His dark, slightly protruding eyes bore a close resemblance to those of his father, Henry IV. His hair was cropped fashionably short and his face was drawn and clean-shaven, showing scars including one deep mark dating back to a battle fought when he was just sixteen, when an arrowhead had lodged deep in his cheek, just to the right of his nose, and had to be cut out by a battlefield surgeon. At thirty-three, Henry V was the finest warrior among the European rulers of his day. His appearance on his wedding day was appropriately grand. ‘Great pomp and magnificence were displayed by him and his princes, as if he were at that moment king of all the world,’ wrote the high-born and well-connected French chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet.1
The war-torn countryside around Troyes, the ancient capital of the French county of Champagne, nearly one hundred miles south-east of Paris, had been bristling for a fortnight with English soldiers. Henry had arrived in town on 20 May, accompanied by two of his three brothers, Thomas duke of Clarence and John duke of Bedford, a large number of his aristocratic war captains and some sixteen hundred other men, mostly archers. There was no room for them within the town walls, so most of Henry’s regular men had been quartered in nearby villages. The king himself was staying in the western half of town at a smart hotel in the marketplace called La Couronne (‘The Crown’). From this base he conducted himself in high majesty during negotiations for a final peace between the warring realms of England and France.
In the seven years that had passed since his father’s death in 1413, Henry V had settled an anxious realm. His father’s reign had been beset by crises, many of them stemming from the fact that in 1399 he had deposed the ruling king, Richard II, and subsequently had him murdered following an attempt to rescue him from jail. This was the violent beginning to an unstable reign.
Richard had not been a popular king, but Henry IV’s usurpation had triggered a crisis of legitimacy. He had suffered long-running financial problems, a massive insurgency in Wales under Owain Glyndwr and a series of northern rebellions, during one of which the archbishop of York was beheaded for treason. He had been very ill for long stretches of his reign, which had led to clashes with his sons – particularly the young Henry – as they strove to exercise royal authority on his behalf. For all that Henry IV had tried to govern as a mighty and authoritative king, he h
ad found himself reliant on the men who had helped him acquire the throne in the first place: principally his retainers from the duchy of Lancaster, which had been his private landholding before he was crowned. This caused a long-running split in English politics, which only his death could remedy. It came, after his final illness, in the Jerusalem Chamber of the abbot’s house in Westminster on 20 March 1413.
The accession of Henry V – king by right, rather than conquest – reunited England under an undisputed leader. Henry was a vigorous, charismatic, confident king: an accomplished general and an intelligent politician. His reign was notable for success in almost every area of government and warfare. Early on he made significant gestures of reconciliation, offering forgiveness to rebels of his father’s reign, and exhuming Richard II from his burial place in King’s Langley, Hertfordshire, and transferring his remains to the tomb Richard had commissioned, alongside his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, in Westminster Abbey. The central mission of his reign was to harness his close relations with his leading nobles to lead a war against France. In this he had been wildly successful: in less than two years of fighting Henry had pushed English power further into the continent than at any time since the rule of Richard the Lionheart more than two centuries before.