The king at first suffered a sudden ‘frenzy’, after which he could neither move, nor speak. His ‘wit and reason withdrawn’, he had to be spoon-fed to keep him alive. These symptoms indicate a severe form of depression, but it has also been suggested that he was suffering from catatonic schizophrenia, or even porphyria. It is possible he had inherited a disposition to mental illness through his mother.17 Her father, Charles VI, had suffered periods of madness for the last thirty years of his life, and believed for a time that he was made of glass. When Henry VI’s son was born in October, Henry was incapable even of acknowledging him.18 In this desperate situation his cousin, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was made Protector, a role that encompassed the protection of the physical person of the monarch, as well as of the realm. It proved to be a role he was reluctant to give up as the king’s faculties returned.
The Duke of York had long claimed to stand for good government in opposition to the king’s preferred councillors – and he did not want to see them back. On 22 May 1455, nine days before Margaret Beaufort’s crucial twelfth birthday, thousands of York’s retainers attacked the king and his accompanying force in the streets of St Albans, twenty-two miles north of London. The local abbot saw one man fall ‘with his brains dashed out, there another with a broken arm, a third with a throat cut and a fourth with a pierced chest’.19 The killing ended with the king grazed by an arrow, and surrounded by the bodies of his noble servants and knights. The period which the nineteenth-century novelist Sir Walter Scott romantically but inaccurately termed the ‘Wars of the Roses’ had begun.20
The simple five-petal design of the heraldic rose was inspired by the wild dog rose that grows in English hedgerows. As a symbol it had a long association with the Virgin Mary, who is sometimes called the ‘Mystical Rose of Heaven’. But although the king’s grandfather, Henry IV, had once used red roses to decorate his pavilion at a joust, their use as a Lancastrian royal badge was not widespread before the advent of the Tudors.21 Equally, the white rose had yet to be associated strongly with the House of York.22 Lancastrian supporters sometimes even boasted white-rose badges.23 Whatever the origin of the term Wars of the Roses, however, the coming succession of battles between royal cousins would prove to be bloody and real enough.
When Margaret turned twelve it was decided she should marry Edmund Tudor without delay, before the Duke of York could intervene. While it was usual for young brides to stay with their parents or guardians until they were physically mature – in their mid-teens, at least – Margaret would not be returned home after her wedding. Instead she discovered she was also to leave England with Edmund. He was under orders to consolidate royal power in the unsettled regions of north and south Wales and he had to consummate their marriage for it to be irrevocably valid. If she became pregnant it would also guarantee he received the income from her estates.
The belief that children were more ‘mature’ then than they are today is misplaced. In physical terms they were far less so. This placed Margaret in great danger at childbirth. Nevertheless, by late August of the following year she was three months pregnant. Little good it did Edmund Tudor, captured that same month by a supporter of the Duke of York. Although released from Carmarthen Castle only a few weeks later, his health had suffered and he proved insufficiently strong to fight off the plague that was sweeping the town. The Welsh poet Llywelyn Fychan, lamenting the death of his four daughters killed by plague a century earlier, noted pustules like ‘brittle coal fragments’ scattered over their bodies.24 There had been regular epidemics over the previous decade, but Margaret was still appalled by her husband’s death on 1 November.25 For the rest of her life she would keep books describing the best means of protection from the disease.
Having given Edmund a hurried burial in front of the high altar at the Greyfriars in Carmarthen, Margaret now had to consider what to do next.26 Thirteen years old, pregnant and alone in a remote region of Wales, she would surely have liked to return home. But icy rains could turn the roads to mud in hours and with her baby due in less than two months, she was in no state to travel to her mother in the Midlands. Instead, as soon as she was able, Margaret began making her way to Pembroke Castle, held by her brother-in-law and guardian, Jasper Tudor. Margaret was terrified that the plague which had killed Edmund would follow her.27 Happily it did not. She found safety within the castle’s massive walls, where Jasper joined her as soon as he had permission to leave the king’s side.
In January, when Margaret’s pregnancy entered its last weeks, she withdrew into a tower room overlooking the river. This was the traditional period of confinement, in which the expectant mother rested before her labour. When it came the pain was terrifying. As her later friend and confessor John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, recalled, Margaret was never ‘a woman of great stature’ and ‘she was so much smaller at that stage’. The birth of her son on 28 January 1457 left her immature body so damaged that she would never be able to bear another child. He was given a Lancastrian rather than a Tudor name, the same name as her cousin the king: Henry.28
Just over a month after Margaret had delivered her baby Jasper travelled with her to meet Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, in Gwent. It was less than two years since the Battle of St Albans and already a second marriage was to be arranged for her. Buckingham had a reputation for having an ungovernable temper. Famously he had tried to stab the French rebel leader Joan of Arc during an interrogation in 1431. But he was the only man in England whose power matched that of the Duke of York, and his second son, Henry Stafford, was free to marry. An agreement between Jasper and Buckingham was soon thrashed out. Although the Staffords were not descendants of the Lancastrian house, they were of royal blood, as descendants of John of Gaunt’s youngest brother Thomas of Woodstock.29 Margaret’s marriage to Stafford, sealed when her son was a year old in January 1458, thus had a political dimension, yet it was also to prove happy.
Sir Henry Stafford became devoted to his young wife. A friend later recalled that Margaret was ‘of singular easiness to be spoken unto’. She was the kind of woman who never forgot a kindness, or a service done for her. She was intellectually curious, read extensively, and worked hard at managing her estates, which she did with great efficiency. She found she had an excellent ‘holding memory’ for those things, ‘of weight and substance wherein she might profit’, as well as great determination. Her friend later observed that she would not let a positive opportunity pass her by, ‘for any pain or labour’.30
Margaret’s wealth ensured that the family were able to live on the grandest scale, and as the fifteenth-century Noble Babees Noble Book reminded children, magnificence was a matter of noble duty. Fine clothes and great feasts were not a matter of personal indulgence but intended to advertise the degree to which a noble was willing to help their ‘dependers’, the families that looked to them for protection and advancement. Indeed nobles were expected to recall Christ’s example of self-sacrifice. Margaret loved to entertain lavishly, but however many dishes she served at her table she always ate and drank moderately. She also liked ‘to be joyous’ and ‘to hear those tales that were honest to make her merry’, but after joking for a while, she would have a reading from the life of Christ, and then move the conversation on to more serious and spiritual matters.31 As Margaret got older and more pious, she would even occasionally wear haircloth beneath her rich clothes, as a reminder of Christ’s suffering for men and of her duties.
For Margaret, as for many other members of the nobility, Christ was often physically present in her house. It was usual to hear Mass daily, as she did in her private chapels, and in Catholic belief, at the moment of consecration the bread and wine is transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ – the miracle known as transubstantiation. If Christ’s presence felt immediate, the Devil unfortunately also seemed close at hand. It was said the Devil had once been a high-ranking angel, but when God revealed that His son, Christ, was to be born a man, the Devil in his pride could not tolerate h
aving a mere human raised above him. He had rebelled against God and now sought to destroy all peace and harmony.32 People had a visceral fear of the violence the Devil sought by exploiting mens’ weaknesses. Yet such conflict was coming to England soon enough.
After the bloodshed at St Albans in 1455 Henry VI had worked hard to reconcile his quarrelling subjects. It was the desire for vengeance that meant in the end he failed. As one chronicler recorded, ‘there was evermore a grouch and wrath had by the heirs of them that were slain’.33 It sapped the will of the supporters of the king’s chosen councillors, and of their Yorkist enemies, to keep the peace. This in turn affected all those ‘dependers’ who were expected to offer service in battle for their masters if called on to do so. The century of war with France meant all boys were trained from childhood to fight ‘up and down the streets clashing on their shields with blunted swords or stout staves’, and even the girls were expert archers.34 An army could be raised quickly.
The blue-eyed three-year-old Henry Tudor lost his step-grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham, at the Battle of Northampton in July 1460; over the following months the killing would continue to sweep around him like a tornado, spiralling with all the peculiar viciousness of a family vendetta.
3
A PRISONER, HONOURABLY BROUGHT UP
A PAPER CROWN CLUNG, FLUTTERING, ON ONE OF A ROW OF HEADS impaled on the southern gate to the City of York. Until September 1460 the fighting had been about whom Henry VI should have as his councillors, but then the Duke of York had claimed the throne, arguing he had the senior descent in the female line from Edward III, making his ancestor, Roger Mortimer, Richard II’s rightful heir, and the House of Lancaster usurpers.1 It was an unpopular move, soon abandoned, and now God had given his judgement on it. The duke was dead, killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December. ‘York could look upon York’ the Lancastrians jeered as they spiked his head high on the gate, the paper crown mocking his former ambitions. Next to it was the head of one of his younger sons, aged seventeen, and that of his brother-in-law. Soon there would be a fresh settling of scores.
Only weeks later, in the first days of February 1461, Jasper and Owen Tudor’s Lancastrian army confronted the late duke’s eldest son and heir, Edward of York, at Mortimer’s Cross, Herefordshire. Blond, handsome, and standing at six feet three, Edward of York was only nineteen and he lacked the experience of the Tudor commanders. But no one had ever seen anything like the strange dawn that greeted them on that icy morning. Blinking in the breaking light the rival armies saw three suns appear in the sky. The phenomenon, known as a parhelion, is caused by light shining through ice crystals in the atmosphere. Edward, a natural leader, seized the opportunity to tell his frightened troops that the triple stars represented God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost which were shining a blessing on their enterprise. With his army’s morale renewed, ‘freshly and manly he took the field upon his enemy, and put them at flight, and slew three thousand’.2
Few other details of the battle survive, but we know that Jasper escaped and was on the road when he learned, to his horror, that his father, Owen Tudor, was captured. Owen lived not far from Jasper at Pembroke Castle, and he had also remained close to Henry VI, who had give him the plum post of Keeper of the Parks of north Wales, ‘in consideration of his good services’ the previous year.3 Even in his old age, Owen was prepared to fight in his stepson King Henry’s cause – but it would be for the last time. Edward had ordered that Owen be executed along with eight other Lancastrian commanders. In Hereford, where he was taken, Owen still assumed he would be ransomed when a Yorkist solider grabbed the collar of his red doublet and ripped it off to expose his neck. Facing the rough wooden log that served as the block, and now realising his fate, he recalled with mordant wit how ‘The head that shall lie on the stock was wont to lie on Queen Katherine’s lap.’ At the fall of the axe the extraordinary life that began with a stumble at a dance was ended.
Owen Tudor’s head was placed on the top step of the market cross where a woman ‘combed his hair and washed away the blood off his face’, before she placed candles around him.4 No one has yet suggested who she was. The watching crowd thought she was mad, as she carefully lit over a hundred small flames. She was surely, however, the grief-stricken mother of Owen’s illegitimate son, David, who was almost two. Even as an old man in his fifties, it seems Owen had had the power to attract a woman’s love.5
The four-year-old Henry Tudor would have understood his grandfather’s fate only as an absence. Owen had been a familiar face at Pembroke, yet he was nowhere to be seen when Henry was brought with his mother and stepfather to the castle in May. It was here Margaret Beaufort had come looking for protection from Jasper before Henry was born. But Jasper too was absent: he was on the run. In the three months since Mortimer’s Cross, Edward of York had reasserted his father’s claim to the throne, denounced Henry VI as a false king, and been proclaimed Edward IV in London on 4 March. For twenty-five days there were two kings in England, a situation ended on 29 March with a decisive battle at Towton in Yorkshire. It was one that left Henry’s family, and much of England, traumatised.
Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Sir Henry Stafford, and her stepfather, Lord Welles, had been arrayed with the Lancastrian forces while Henry VI spent the day in prayer nearby. It was Palm Sunday, a spring day. But the wild flowers in the fields and hedgerows were bitten by unseasonable cold and the sky was low and dark. The two armies, the largest England had ever seen – amounting to perhaps more than 30,000 out of a population of three million – faced a fight to the death.6 When the banners of two kings were unfurled it invoked ‘guerre mortelle’, the most ruthless form of armed combat in the Middle Ages, with no quarter given for the supporters of a false king.
As the men began to put on their armour there were flurries of snow. By 10 a.m a snowstorm was blowing straight into the faces of the Lancastrian forces. The Yorkists advanced on foot into the whiteout. Blind, and with the wind against them, the arrows fired by the Lancastrian archers fell short. The Yorkists collected them and returned them: thousands of arrows a minute poured into the Lancastrian ranks, leaving them with no choice but to engage their enemy. As the armies hammered at each other the sheer weight of numbers on the Lancastrian side forced the Yorkists back, but with Edward IV and his cousin germane, ‘that noble knight and flower of manhood’, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, leading from the front the Yorkists gave ground only slowly.
For hour upon hour the Lancastrians and Yorkists battled on. When the heaps of dead made it impossible for the men to engage, short truces were arranged so the corpses could be heaved out of the way to allow the fighting to continue. In late afternoon the Duke of Norfolk had brought reinforcement for the Yorkists and as daylight faded the Lancastrian ranks at last gave way. Bridges over the nearby rivers had broken under the weight of fleeing men. Some fell into the freezing water, drowning in their heavy armour. Others who had cast off their helmets to help them breathe as they ran became easy targets for the Yorkists who smashed their skulls in a frenzy of bloodlust.7 A last stand was made to the north at the little town of Tadcaster. Then it was over, save for the executions of those survivors who had not managed to escape. The bodies, scattered over an area of at least six miles by four, included that of Margaret’s stepfather Lord Welles, the only father she had ever known.
Relieved that Stafford had survived, Margaret spent time with her mother in the first terrible weeks of grieving for Lord Welles. Meanwhile, Henry VI had fled into exile in Scotland with his queen and their son. Most surviving supporters of the House of Lancaster now judged it prudent to acknowledge the authority of King Edward. Jasper was an exception, but he would soon follow his half-brother into exile. Pembroke Castle was left garrisoned with sufficient food, men and arms to withstand a long siege, however, and there Margaret Beaufort now awaited King Edward’s next move, anxious to see what he intended for her son, the ‘false’ King Henry’s nephew.
Over the summer Mar
garet ensured that something of Henry’s normal life continued.8 Henry would later honour Owen Tudor’s son David with wealth and knighthoods, and since the boy lived nearby and was close in age, he was, perhaps, a playmate.9 Henry was also old enough to learn to read and it was a mother’s task to teach their young children. One of the favourite images of the Middle Ages was that of St Anne, the mother of the Virgin, teaching her daughter to read. Margaret had a variation on this image in the Book of Hours she inherited from her own mother, with St Anne and the Virgin teaching Christ to read. The most popular books of the period, they were divided into eight sections, imitating a monk’s ‘Office’ or cycle of daily devotions. Those of aristocrats were illuminated with pictures that had a special significance for them, and people added whatever religious stories or prayers they fancied.10 Margaret would note major events in her life, including, later, the outcome of battles.
The aftershocks of Towton were already being felt in Wales. King Edward had given one of his principal supporters, William, Lord Herbert, the task of seizing Jasper Tudor’s estates, and on 30 September Herbert arrived at the twin-towered gates of Pembroke Castle with a large force.11 The governor Jasper had placed in charge succumbed to the promise of a pardon and the castle was surrendered without a fight.12 Margaret was then simply informed of Edward’s intentions for her son Henry: she was to hand him over to Herbert as his ward. King Edward hoped that, in due course, he could co-opt Henry Tudor to the Yorkist cause, and had intimated to Herbert that if Henry proved loyal, he could in time inherit his father Edmund Tudor’s lands and his title, as Earl of Richmond. With this in mind Herbert had invested over £1,000 in securing the wardship and planned to marry Henry to his daughter, Maud. Margaret had to accept this willingly if she was ever to see her son again, and there was no struggle, therefore, when the unhappy mother said her goodbyes to her child in February 1462, just after his fifth birthday.
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