by Dan Jones
21 Paston Letters, V 35
22 The letter and manifesto are printed in the notes to Warkworth, 46–9
23 Croyland Continuations, 446
24 Warkworth, 7
25 Ibid.
15 : FINAL DESTRUCTION
1 Paston Letters, V 45–6
2 Croyland Continuations, 438
3 ‘Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire, 1470’, 18, in K. Dockray (ed.), Three Chronicles of the Reign of Edward IV (Gloucester, 1988)
4 Ibid., 10
5 CSP Milan I, 1467, item 146
6 Paston Letters, V 83
7 Warkworth, 11
8 Croyland Continuations, 462
9 Ibid.
10 Blacman, 41
11 CSP Milan I, 1471, item 210
12 ‘The Arrival of King Edward IV’, 4, in Dockray (ed.), Three Chronicles of the Reign of Edward IV. Bolingbroke, of course, claimed to be returning from exile in France in 1399 to claim his usurped right to the duchy of Lancaster.
13 Ibid., 7
14 Ibid., 10
15 Cited in Ross, Edward IV, 166
16 A. Scobie (ed.), The Memoirs of Philip de Commines, Lord of Argenton (London, 1877) (hereafter ‘Commines’), 200
17 A. Thomas and I. Thornley (eds), The Great Chronicle of London (London, 1938), 215
18 Ibid.
19 Letter from Margaret of York, printed in Wavrin, Chronicles and Ancient Histories of Great Britain, III 211
20 J. Bruce (ed.), Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England and the Finall Recouerye of His Kingdomes from Henry VI (London, 1838), 17
21 Ibid.
22 Croyland Continuations, 464
23 Bruce, Arrivall of Edward IV, 19–20
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Commines, 201
27 Scofield, Edward IV, I 579–60
28 Bruce, Arrivall of Edward IV, 20
29 Von Wesel’s letter of 17 April 1471, translated and reprinted most recently in H. Kleineke (ed. and trans.), ‘Gerhard von Wesel’s Newsletter from England, 17 April 1471’ in The Ricardian 16 (2006)
30 Ibid., 10
31 Ibid. The Neville brothers were granted a decent burial by Edward: their bodies were removed to Bisham Abbey to be laid to rest near their father, the earl of Salisbury.
32 Letter to John Daunt, quoted in P. Hammond, The Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury (1993), 81
33 Croyland Continuations, 465
34 CSP Milan I, 1471, item 216
35 Bruce, Arrival of Edward IV, 28
36 Ibid.
37 Croyland Continuations, 466
38 Bruce, Arrivall of Edward IV, 28–30, for all that follows, unless indicated
39 Warkworth, 18
40 Croyland Continuations, 466
41 Ibid., 467
42 Blacman, 44
43 Bruce, Arrivall of Edward IV, 38
44 Warkworth, 21
45 W. St John Hope, ‘The Discovery of the Remains of King Henry VI in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle’ in Archaeologia (1911), 541
46 CSP Milan I, 1471, item 220
47 Ibid., 39
48 Croyland Continuations, 467
IV The Rise of the Tudors
16 : TO EXECUTE WRATH
1 Robbins (ed.), Historical Poems, 148
2 H. Ellis (ed.), Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History (London, 1844), 154–5
3 Griffiths and Thomas, Making of the Tudor Dynasty, 86–7. Bad weather marred the Tudors’ crossing of the Channel.
4 Foedera, XI 714, quoted in M. Hicks, Edward V: The Prince in the Tower (Stroud, 2003), 57–8
5 Paston Letters, IV 298
6 The Black Book, or Liber Niger Domus Regis Edw. IV, is printed in A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Household etc. (London, 1790), 15–86
7 See D. Starkey, ‘Henry VI’s Old Blue Gown: The English Court under the Lancastrians and the Yorkists’ in The Court Historian, 1999, passim but especially 20–4
8 The weak and sickly Herbert earl of Pembroke was deprived of his title in 1479, when it was given to Prince Edward, and Herbert was forced to accept a demotion to the earldom of Huntingdon.
9 Had Warwick died a natural death, his brother Montague would have inherited the Neville patrimony; the daughters would have received the rest. Since Montague also died in battle against the king, and was posthumously convicted of treason, the entire Warwick inheritance came into royal hands.
10 Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, 187
11 Ibid., 193–4
12 R. Buckley et al., ‘The King in the Car Park: New Light on the Death and Burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars Church, Leicester in 1485’ in Antiquity 87 (2013), 536
13 Poppelau, quoted in Mancini, 136–7
14 Colvin, History of the King’s Works, I 499–500
15 Or, in the more famous, more modern rendering given by the King James Bible, ‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.’ Psalm 23:1. For a detailed excerpt of Rotherham’s speech to parliament, PROME January 1478, items 1–3
16 Romans 13:4
17 In order to force Clarence to relinquish lands for redistribution to, among others, Gloucester, Edward had been forced to issue a general act of resumption in the parliament of 1473, excluding Clarence from a long list of persons exempted. For full details of the Clarence–Gloucester land feud, see Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence: George Duke of Clarence 1449–78 (Gloucester, 1992), 111–27
18 The details of the Twynho case are contained in the petition by her ‘cousin’ (probably her brother-in-law) Roger Twynho, who applied for and received a royal pardon on her behalf in 1478. One John Thursby was also hanged at the same proceedings on the equally specious charge of having murdered Clarence’s son Richard. PROME January 1478, item 17; Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 137–9
19 Croyland Continuations, 478
20 Ibid.
21 PROME January 1478, appendix 1
22 For a discussion of the malmsey wine story, see Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 200–4
23 Romans 13:2
17 : THE ONLY IMP NOW LEFT
1 Commines, I 397
2 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 164
3 Griffiths and Thomas, Making of the Tudor Dynasty, 88–90
4 Commines, I 251
5 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 164–5
6 Ibid., 135; J. Lewis (ed.), Life of Dr John Fisher (London, 1855), II 269
7 M. Jones and M. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1993), 58–9; MacGibbon, Elizabeth Woodville, 108
8 Jones and Underwood, King’s Mother, 61, quoting Westminster Abbey Muniments doc. 32378
9 Croyland Continuations, 483
10 Commines, I 264
11 Vergil’s pen-portrait was consistent with every other in also praising the king’s ‘wit’, ‘high courage’ and ‘retentive memory’, his diligence, his tendency to be ‘earnest and horrible to the enemy [ but] bountiful to his friends and acquaintance’ and his fortune in war. Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 172
12 Mancini, 66–7
13 Thomas Basin, quoted in Scofield, Edward IV, 365
14 R. Gottfried, ‘Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England’ in Journal of Economic History 36 (1976), 267–8, notes cases of influenza in the fifteenth century, ‘although it was not particularly virulent until 1485’.
15 Mancini, 70–1
16 W. Crotch, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton (London, 1928), 39
17 BL MS Sloane 3479, f. 53v
18 Ibid., 69
19 Croyland Continuations, 485
20 Mancini, 74–5
21 Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, I 4
22 Croyland Continuations, 487
23 Mancini, 82–3
24 Croyland Continuations, 487, although the author writes with hindsight and may well be influenced here by his knowledge of subsequent ev
ents
25 Great Chronicle, 230
26 Croyland Continuations, 488
27 C. Carpenter (ed.), Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483 (Cambridge, 1996), 416
28 Croyland Continuations, 489
29 Mancini, 90–1
30 For a level-headed discussion of the arguments over Edward V’s (and Edward IV’s) supposed illegitimacy, see Hicks, Edward V, 163–6
31 Mancini, 96–7
32 Croyland Continuations, 489
33 Noted by Mancini 104–5: the English were well known for their fondness for cryptic prophecies of this sort.
34 A. Sutton and P. Hammond, The Coronation of Richard III: The Extant Documents (Gloucester, 1983), 77–9, 294–5
35 Great Chronicle, 233
18 : JUDGE ME, O LORD
1 The Great Chronicle of London, 234, reports sightings of the boys during the mayoralty of Sir Edmund Shaa, which ran from Michaelmas 1482 to Michaelmas 1483, although the chronicler misdates this by a year, and subsequently garbles the sequence of events between the disappearance of the princes, the death of Queen Anne, Buckingham’s rebellion and Richard’s apparent plan to marry Elizabeth of York.
2 Horrox and Hammond (eds), BL Harleian MSS 433, III 2
3 Ibid., 234
4 Mancini, 92–3
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 The Great Chronicle dates public rumours of their disappearance to ‘after Easter’, a date we can deduce to be 18 April 1484. But see n. 3 to chapter 18 for concerns over the chronicler’s dating of events during this period.
8 The remains found during that excavation are now kept at Westminster Abbey. They were tested, very inadequately, in 1933 in an attempt to determine cause of death. For a discussion, see P. Hammond and W. White, ‘The Sons of Edward IV: A Re-examination of the Evidence on Their Deaths and on the Bones in Westminster Abbey’ in Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Loyalty, Lordship and Law (London, 1986), 104–47. Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey oppose further tests being carried out on the remains. A recent e-petition to HM Government requesting DNA analysis on the remains accrued only 408 signatures (www.thepetitionsite.org).
9 For the welter of grants to Buckingham, which effectively gave him power over the whole of Wales and the western marches, see Horrox and Hammond (eds), Harleian MS 433, II 3–4
10 As set forth in Titulus Regius, PROME January 1484, item 5
11 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 200 (‘circumspection and celerity’) and 226–7. The analysis of Richard’s skeleton and teeth performed in Leicester in 2012–13 confirmed his spinal deformation and worn molars.
12 Croyland Continuations, 490
13 Commines, II 64
14 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 197
15 As described in the act of attainder passed posthumously against Buckingham, PROME January 1484, item 3
16 E.g. Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 192–3
17 Or to borrow the delicious phrase of Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, 212, ‘he was a worthless man, and probably few lamented his passing’.
18 Griffiths and Thomas, Making of the Tudor Dynasty, 102–5; Jones and Underwood, King’s Mother, 62–3
19 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 199
20 Ibid.
21 A. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records (Wakefield, 1939), I 83
22 L. Gill, Richard III and Buckingham’s Rebellion (Stroud, 1999), 68
23 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 202
24 PROME January 1484, item 5
25 Croyland Continuations, 496
26 Text printed in P. Hammond and A. Sutton, Richard III: The Road to Bosworth Field (London, 1985), 151
27 See ibid., 151–2
28 PROME January 1484, item 21
29 PROME January 1484, item 27
30 R. Horrox, Richard III: A Study of Service (Cambridge, 1989), 325–6
31 A few entries from Prince Edward’s accounts are printed in Hammond and Sutton, Richard III, 174–5
32 Ibid., 497. A tomb at the church of St Helen and the Holy Cross in Sheriff Hutton may be that of Edward, although another tradition holds that he was buried at his birthplace in Middleham.
33 Edward of Middleham was Richard’s only legitimate son. He had two, and possibly three illegitimate children: Sir John of Pontefract, captain of Calais; Katherine Plantagenet, who married William Herbert in 1484, but died a few years later; and, possibly, a boy called Richard Plantagenet, who was born around 1469 and died in December 1550, having lived his life anonymously as a London bricklayer. The eighteenth-century antiquarian Francis Peck recorded a family legend he had heard about Richard Plantagenet: before his death he supposedly claimed to have been an observer at Bosworth and to have been presented there to his father the king on the night before the battle. The story is unproveable, but a tomb to Richard Plantagenet lies in the ruined church of St Mary’s in Eastwell, Kent.
34 Horrox and Hammond (eds), Harleian MSS 433, III 124–5
35 Ibid., III 190
36 Croyland Continuations, 499. There is evidence, albeit difficult and inconclusive evidence, to suggest that Elizabeth was aware of Richard’s intentions and may even have been considering them favourably. This has most recently been discussed by Weir, Elizabeth of York, 130– 8, who concludes after some consideration that ‘there is no evidence as to [Elizabeth’s] true feelings for Richard III’.
37 Paston Letters, VI 81–4
38 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 204
39 Commines, II 64
40 Great Chronicle, 237
19 : WAR OR LIFE
1 These three standards were presented later in the year at St Paul’s – we assume here that they had been associated with Henry’s campaign from his arrival in England.
2 Henry’s letters are quoted and discussed in Griffiths and Thomas, Making of the Tudor Dynasty, 159–65
3 Croyland Continuations, 502
4 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 221. Vergil uses this to suggest the king’s conscience ‘guilty of heinous offences’; but Croyland Continuations, 503, agrees, suggesting that the king woke and ‘declared that during the night he had seen dreadful visions, and had imagined himself surrounded by a multitude of demons’. Neither source could be described as sympathetic to Richard – nevertheless, both were by assiduous and well-informed writers.
5 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 225
6 Ibid., 223
7 Ibid., 224
8 Ibid.
9 As revealed in analysis of Richard III’s skeleton carried out by the University of Leicester in 2012–13, nicely summarised by Dr Jo Appleby at http://www.le.ac.uk/richardiii/science/osteology.html
10 Ellis (ed.), Polydore Vergil, 224
11 Croyland Continuations, 505
12 Great Chronicle, 238
13 Ibid., 239
14 The accounts for Henry’s coronation are in Wickham Legg, English Coronation Records, 198–218
15 Ibid. and S. Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), 11
16 When the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV (then merely Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford), had sallied forth for his duel with Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk at Coventry in September 1398 his pavilion ‘was covered with red roses’: Williams, Chronique de la traison et mort, 153; the royal treasure subsequently taken over by Henry IV contained numerous items decorated with roses of different hues: Palgrave, Antient Kalendars, III 313–58. ‘Rhos cochion mewn rhwysg uchel’: quoted and translated in Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses, 6
17 PROME November 1485, part I, item 9
18 Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, 421
19 B. André, The Life of Henry VII, trans. D. Hobbins (New York, 2011), 34
20 Ibid., 35
21 Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, I 156–9
22 An interesting point of comparison is the birth of Edward II at Caernarfon Castle in 1284 – another focal point of Arthuriana.
23 The deeds of these kings were not just entertainment: often
they were intended for political education, too. In 1457 the scholar James Hardyng had produced a monumental History, which expounded on the deeds of the kings, beginning in the days of Brutus. Hardyng had presented his work to Henry VI, who appeared to take no notice of the moral that was intended.
24 André, Life of Henry VII, 38
20 : ENVY NEVER DIES
1 Simnel’s origins are discussed at length in M. Bennett, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke (Gloucester, 1987), 42–55
2 D. Hay (ed.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, AD 1485–1537 (London, 1950), 13
3 André, Life of Henry VII, 47 (‘Admirably skilled …’)
4 Ibid., 46
5 Ibid.
6 Hay (ed.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 63
7 PROME November 1485, part I, item 8
8 As, indeed, it still is.
9 Hay (ed.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 56–7
10 André, Life of Henry VII, 60
11 Hay (ed.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 67
12 Ibid., 75
13 André, Life of Henry VII, 66
14 Warbeck’s Scottish expenses are printed in Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, II 326–35
15 André, Life of Henry VII, 68
16 Hay (ed.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 67
21 : BLANCHE ROSE
1 Licentiate Alcaraz, quoted in G. Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen (London, 2010), 69
2 G. Kipling (ed.), The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne (Oxford, 1990), 39
3 J. Guy, The Children of Henry VIII (Oxford, 2013), 4; D. Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (London, 2004), 76–7
4 A third son, Prince Edmund, had been born in 1499, but died in 1500.
5 Thomas, Jasper Tudor, 19–20
6 Hay (ed.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 123
7 Seward, Last White Rose, 138
8 PROME January 1504, item 21
9 Philip claimed the crown in right of his wife; Joanna’s mother, Queen Isabella of Castile, had died in November 1504. Isabella’s other daughter, of course, was Katherine of Aragon.
10 Great Chronicle, 330
11 Hay (ed.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 135
12 In Flanders the treaty was known as the Malus Intercursus – the Evil Treaty – because it was so skewed towards English interests.
