The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors

by Dan Jones

  St Albans was soon overrun. Amazingly, it seems that Buckingham and Somerset had failed to prepare for the possibility that the barricades would fall so swiftly, for as the town bell was rung in urgent alarm and fighting spilled from street to street, there was a general scramble for the defenders to pull on their full armour. They were unprepared and overwhelmed, and when one of York’s allies, Sir Robert Ogle, brought several hundred men crashing into the marketplace, blades slashing and arrows fizzing through the late morning air, the short conflict was effectively decided in favour of York’s men. From the puncturing of the barriers the fighting lasted around half an hour. But it was a shocking experience all the same.

  In the middle of the mêlée stood the king himself, terror presumably spreading across his pale, round face, for the son of Henry V had managed to reach the age of thirty-three without ever having stood before a siege or in the chaos of a battle. Like the best of his lords, he was imperfectly armoured, and was lucky to survive when a stray arrow bloodied his neck. (‘Forsothe and forsothe,’ the king is said to have remarked, employing his favourite and only oath, ‘ye do foully to smite a king anointed so.’19) For his protection, if not the maintenance of his royal dignity, Henry was hustled into a nearby tanner’s cottage to hide while the street fighting played out. As he left, his banner, which in every battle was to be upheld to the death, was easily pulled to the ground, its defenders scattering into the streets.

  After only a short stay in his reeking hideaway, Henry was captured and taken away to proper safety in the precincts of the abbey. York’s men had absolutely no interest in doing him physical damage, for it was a crucial component of the duke’s political campaign to argue that he was fighting for and not against the king. But Henry’s companions were not so lucky. York and the Nevilles had come to St Albans to eliminate their enemies, and in the disorder they had created, they were able to achieve their goal. By midday, when hostilities came to a conclusion, the streets groaned with bloodied and injured men. Given the numbers of combatants – probably around five thousand in total – it is slightly surprising that fewer than sixty were killed. But of the dead men there were three of great significance. First was Thomas, Lord Clifford, who had so bravely held the town’s defences while the first hour’s blows were traded. Second was Henry earl of Northumberland, the most senior male in the Percy family and as a result the chief enemy of the Nevilles. And third was the greatest enemy of them all: Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset.

  Somerset had fought for the duration of the battle of St Albans. Although he may have been an unlucky commander, he was at least used to seeing military action during his long service in France. Several chronicles of the battle record that after the king had been taken to the abbey, and as fighting was coming to its conclusion on St Peter’s Street, Somerset was pushed back into defending a tavern under the sign of the Castle. At his side was his son Henry Beaufort, nineteen years old and already a courageous warrior. Whereas the earl of Wiltshire had timidly, if pragmatically, fled the scene of the battle disguised as a monk, the Beauforts stood their ground and struggled to the very last. Young Henry Beaufort was wounded so severely in the fighting that he left St Albans dragged on a cart and close to death. His father was not so fortunate. It was he over whom the whole conflict had arisen, and he was a marked man from its outset. Eventually overcome by his enemies, Somerset was dragged from the tavern and hacked to death in the street. With the end of his life arrived the end of the battle. Troops aroused by the bloodshed continued to create havoc in the streets, but this was now an armed rout, rather than a purposeful battle. Safe beneath the high vaulted ceilings of the abbey church, York, Salisbury and Warwick respectfully took Henry VI before the shrine of St Alban himself, then requested that they now be received as his faithful subjects and advisers. The king, who had absolutely no choice in the matter, accepted that the lords had ‘kept him unhurt and there … granted to be ruled by them’.20 As soon as this was done, York gave the order for all violence outside the abbey to cease. His orders were eventually obeyed. But it was only some time later that anyone dared to gather up the bloodied corpses of Somerset and the rest of the men killed on the streets of St Albans, in a day of violent upheaval that would leave its stain on England for two generations to follow.

  *

  Henry was escorted back to London by the Yorkists on Friday 23 May and deposited in his apartments in the palace of Westminster, before moving on to the bishop’s palace. The following day he was paraded before the city of London ‘in great honour … the said duke of York riding on his right side and the earl of Salisbury on the left side and the earl of Warwick [bearing] his sword’, and on Sunday 25 May in a ceremony at St Paul’s he sat in state and was handed his crown by the duke of York.21 All this presented a picture of majesty and kingly authority, but it was even more spurious than it had ever been. For even if he could be presented to the public in stately highness as ‘a king and not as a prisoner’, beside the three lords who had emerged victorious from St Albans, it was quite obvious that now more than at any time before, Henry VI was a royal cipher.22

  Meanwhile, as York worked to establish for the second time his authority as the chief councillor of the king and the effective governor of England, stories of the battle of St Albans began to spread. They circulated in England and they crossed the Channel: within days the fracas was the talk of diplomats across Europe. On 31 May 1455 the Milanese ambassador, who had left London earlier in the month, wrote a letter from Bruges to the archbishop of Ravenna in which he reported the ‘unpleasant’ news that in England ‘a great part of the nobles have been in conflict’. ‘The Duke of York has done this, with his followers,’ wrote the ambassador, recounting the deaths and injuries that had befallen Somerset and his allies. Yet if the violence was shocking, there was a seasoned pragmatism in the ambassador’s report. York, he wrote, ‘will now take up the government again, and some think that the affairs of [the] kingdom will now take a turn for the better. If that be the case, we can put up with this inconvenience.’ Three days later the ambassador filed an update confirming his earlier notes. ‘Peace reigns,’ he wrote. ‘The Duke of York has the government, and the people are very pleased at this.’23

  Even if this was true, it would not last for long.

  III

  The Hollow Crown

  1455–1471

  I spoke quietly to his Majesty about English affairs …

  He remarked with a sigh that it is impossible to fight against Fortune.

  SFORZA DE BETTINI OF FLORENCE,

  Milanese ambassador to the court of Louis XI1

  10 : Princess Most Excellent

  In 1456 Coventry was one of the richest and most densely populated cities in England: beyond London, only Bristol and Norwich could claim to be bigger or more prosperous. Coventry’s busy cloth market was the beating heart of a proud and bustling community, living both within and beyond the recently renovated city walls, surrounded by a ditch and accessed on three sides by ornate, ancient gates. The river Sherbourne wound its way by the southern wall, and three of England’s busiest roads passed within twenty miles of the city. Coventry boasted all the features of a thriving urban centre: elegant churches and a grammar school; inns for revellers and travellers under the signs of the Swan and the Bear; a magnificent guildhall built on the remains of a castle ruined nearly three hundred years earlier; two hospitals and a hermitage; townhouses belonging to local dignitaries and merchants; and four religious houses, one of which was the cloistered college of the vicars choral, whose voices marked the liturgical rhythm of the day. In the south-east of the city proper was a rare expanse of open space: the vineyard which had once belonged to the castle. Densely populated suburbs spread out from the walls, houses dotted between pockets of marshland regularly flooded by the region’s several waterways. This was a vibrant centre of trade and power, well connected to the realm beyond.1 It was a place fit for a king – and more importantly, for a queen.

  On 14
September 1456, Margaret of Anjou entered Coventry in high splendour. She came with her young son Prince Edward, who was a month short of his third birthday. Henry VI – husband, father and still in his deeply unremarkable way king of England – had come to the city several days before the rest of his family. He was not an impressive sight. Sickness had left him feebler than ever: still blandly pious and easily swayed by whoever had command of him, he was now also physically weak and quick to tire. Henry was only thirty-four years old, but more than a decade of criticism and disappointment had left him miserably reduced. He had begun planning his tomb in Westminster Abbey, and at times acted as though he were ready to crawl into it. Pope Pius II, watching England from afar, would later describe Henry in this phase of his life as ‘a man more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit, who left everything in his wife’s hands’.2

  It was therefore Margaret’s arrival in Coventry, and not Henry’s, that was marked with the greatest pageantry and display. The city was famous for its mystery plays, and the citizens put all of their dramatic expertise into celebrating the arrival of a woman who, since the serious decline in her husband’s health, was becoming one of the most formidable political actors in England. As she processed into the town she was greeted in verse (albeit somewhat pedestrian in its composition) by figures arrayed as Isaiah and Jeremiah, St Edward, St John and Alexander the Great, and players dressed as the seven cardinal virtues and the Nine Worthies. She was hailed as a ‘princess most excellent, born of blood royal’ and ‘Empress, queen, princess excellent, in one person all three’. (The actor playing Joshua, king of the Israelites, called her ‘the highest lady that I can imagine’.) Her son Edward was accorded similarly high praise: St Edward the Confessor called his young namesake ‘my ghostly child, whom I love principally’, while St John gave thanks that ‘the virtuous voice of prince Edward shall daily well increase’. The figure of Alexander the Great, one of the greatest soldier-kings in history, offered Henry the unlikely title of ‘noblest prince that is born, whom fortune hath famed … sovereign lord Harry, emperor & king’. This was very much a token gesture among a pageant that celebrated the queen’s majesty above all. It drew to an end with the sight of St Margaret taking to the stage to slay a dragon with ‘a miracle’.3 Evidently satisfied with what she had seen, Margaret would remain in Coventry with the king, prince and royal court for much of the next year, and return frequently for the rest of the decade. Although England’s bureaucratic machinery remained in Westminster, the realm would henceforth be ruled, effectively, from the midlands.

  Since the battle of St Albans, Margaret’s power had increased steadily. At twenty-six, she was now a mature and experienced public figure, confident, capable, and connected to a large circle of supporters and allies. Most importantly, she had possession of Edward, the heir to the crown, and it was through her own queenly influence and her importance as keeper of the little prince that she set about establishing herself as an alternative hub of power to Richard duke of York.

  Women were not often able to exercise outright political control in the fifteenth century. Contemporary political thought held them to be weak, hysterical and physically incapable of carrying out the fundamental duties of kingship – not least riding into battle, swinging an axe, ready to make war upon their enemies. Female rule was considered unnatural, and attempts by women to seize power unilaterally were rare and usually futile. But that was not how Margaret saw it. Growing up in Anjou, she had witnessed her mother and grandmother taking charge of her father’s territories during his long periods of imprisonment, ruling in the name of a man and wielding ‘his’ authority, but in reality acting on their own. Why should she not do the same in England, either through her husband or her son?

  York’s policy following his victory at St Albans had been to establish a second protectorate, similar to that which had existed during the king’s illness. He secured reappointment as protector on 15 November 1455 and for four months did his best to exercise royal authority in the cause of unity among the lords and good governance. But whereas during York’s first protectorate the king had been obviously and totally incapacitated, during the second protectorate he was attempting to exercise royal power without any such urgent mandate.

  He was obliged to reward his Neville allies handsomely for their help in ridding the realm of Somerset. Richard earl of Warwick was awarded the captaincy of Calais and a slew of grants in Wales, where Somerset had held land and titles. The Bourchier family was also well rewarded, but few other families benefited, which gave the impression that the second protectorate was a narrow clique rather than the national enterprise York seems genuinely to have imagined he could create. Politics had become far more strained and factious in the aftermath of the violence York had provoked, and although he enjoyed a few successes – restoring order to the south-west by stamping out the worst excesses committed between the Courtenay and Bonville families – this was not enough to convince the realm that Yorkist government in Henry VI’s name was the solution to its problems.

  York ran into severe difficulty in early 1456, when parliament demanded another full-blooded act of resumption, by which lands granted away from the Crown would be swept back into royal possession in order to bolster the king’s finances. Since York had a mandate to try to bring some order and stability to royal government, he stood behind the policy and did his best to convince his fellow lords to do the same. But here again he found that the base of his support was extremely narrow. There was a distinct apathy towards his protectorate – and certainly he did not possess enough enthusiastic support throughout the realm to encourage men who had been personally enriched by grants from the Crown suddenly to give them up with no prospect of recompense. The Act was rejected by a large number of England’s lords and York felt he had no choice but to resign the protectorship on 25 February 1456. He tried to remain involved in government throughout the summer, organising military defences when the king of the Scots raided the northern border and trying to deal with pockets of disorder in Wales. But his authority was almost visibly ebbing away. In public he was scorned: a display of five dogs’ severed heads was erected on Fleet Street in London in September, with each dead mouth holding a satirical poem against York, ‘that man that all men hate’. By the autumn it was clear that his rule was over. His allies and supporters began to be dismissed from their offices, and were replaced by men loyal to Queen Margaret. 4

  From late 1456, then, the queen tried to impose herself on the affairs of state. A correspondent watching events in London during the end of York’s second protectorate wrote to the East Anglian knight Sir John Fastolf that ‘the Queen is a great and strong-laboured [i.e. much petitioned] woman, for she spareth no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power’.5 A chronicler writing later went further, noting that ‘the governance of the Realm stood most by the Queen and her Council’. And a third writer, a partisan of York, reckoned that the queen ‘ruled the realm as her liked, gathering riches innumerable’.6 It was rumoured that she was attempting to persuade her husband to abdicate, resigning the crown to his young son, who would become, by implication, a puppet strung even more tightly to her fingers.

  In part Margaret’s motivation in opposing York was sheer personal enmity. The queen had been deeply offended by the duke’s actions in 1455. Whatever the constitutional niceties of York’s argument, Margaret could not ignore the fact that the duke had raised an army, left two peers – one of them her friend Somerset – bleeding to death in the streets of St Albans, and taken the king as an effective captive back to London. York, for his part, resented the queen moving towards the centre of power. A woman, and a Frenchwoman at that, supplanting the natural role of a duke of the royal blood was completely unacceptable. Added to this was the fact that this particular woman appeared to hate him with every fibre of her being, and was committed to undermining his attempts at government. It was no surprise that relations between the two camps were strained.

&nb
sp; During 1457 Margaret built up her territorial power in the midlands, staffed her son’s council with loyal household men and, where she could, advanced trusted allies both through offices and other means, such as marriages. Thus in April 1457 Henry’s half-brother Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, was appointed as constable of Carmarthen and Aberystwyth, Welsh offices that had recently been in the hands of York himself. Meanwhile, Jasper’s elder brother Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, was a focus for the queen’s interests in south Wales, where he busied himself with a private war against two of the duke of York’s retainers, Sir William Herbert and Sir Walter Devereux.

  Edmund Tudor had been granted a handsome elevation through his marriage in the autumn of 1455 to Margaret Beaufort, the twelve-year-old niece of the late duke of Somerset and daughter of the disgraced soldier John Beaufort, the duke who had died, possibly by suicide, when Margaret was one year old. Margaret was the richest heiress in England, and her hand brought with it immense wealth and power. By the summer of 1456 Margaret was pregnant. But Edmund Tudor would never see his child. He died of plague on 1 November 1456 following a short imprisonment by York’s retainers in Carmarthen Castle. Just under three months later, on 28 January 1457, in Pembroke Castle, the thirteen-year-old Margaret was traumatically delivered of a son, named Henry Tudor. Even in an age where girls became wives and mothers early in life, this was a young age at which to bear a child. Margaret was probably physically and mentally traumatised by the birth: certainly this was the last child she would ever bear.