The War of the Roses

by Timothy Venning

  One possible solution was the heiress of Brittany, Francis II’s daughter Anne (born in 1476), the Duke’s chief minister Landois having obligingly tried to aid Richard in 1484 by handing over Henry Tudor who had to flee to France. (The Breton ducal house was descended from Edward I.) This would entail a long wait for children, but England had been a long-term ally of Breton independence from France (involving a civil war in the 1350s) and Brittany was strategically vital. Unlike in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there was no multitude of sovereign ducal houses in the Low Countries that England could use for a marital alliance–the territories had been united under the House of Burgundy and had then passed via Richard’s sister Margaret’s stepdaughter (Mary) to the Habsburgs.

  Marrying Anne would end the current French attempts to secure Anne for King Charles and unite Brittany with France, though it would have entailed a war with France over control of the Duchy. The real-life Breton succession-crisis erupted in 1488, long enough after Bosworth for Richard to be looking around for a foreign war to bolster his regime and soon enough for him to have still been unmarried. In addition, Richard had been a rare critic of Edward IV for allowing Louis XI to buy him off during the invasion of France in 1475, and had refused a generous ‘present’ from Louis for his acquiescence; he had been noted for past hostility to French power and to a peaceful settlement with the country. In 1488/9 France was a credible target for a Continental expedition, quite apart from having sheltered and funded Henry Tudor. Richard was capable of leading an expedition to France himself, either to Brittany to secure the borders from French invasion or to Picardy to link up with Maximilian for a more successful version of the 1475 invasion. Ultimately, an expedition to Picardy was most likely to end up bogged down in sieges with the Habsburg prince losing his enthusiasm for the war, though Richard was likelier than the less martial Henry VII in 1492 to have fought a long war and have taken one or two towns (Boulogne or Tournai?). The logical course of a war in Artois was to extend the English ‘Pale’, as Henry VIII was to attempt in 1513–14 and 1544.

  It would need a long English commitment, as in the early 1350s, to secure Brittany against a determined French attack backed by some local nobles and force the French King, an inexperienced teenager at this time, to accept any ‘union of crowns’ between Ricardian England and Brittany. In real life Henry VII sent a small force to assist Brittany in 1488, commanded by the rehabilitated Sir Edward Woodville, and had to abandon the project; but the vigorous and determined Richard could have fought a war with France lasting several years and with luck have secured Anne’s person and hand (had the pro-French faction not kidnapped her and carried her off to be married to Charles VIII). English troops could then have remained in Brittany to ensure that the French did not invade, and Richard had the prestige of success against the national enemy without the expense of a long war. The Bretons being noted for their independent spirit, it would have had to be agreed by Richard and the Breton Estates that the two countries would be governed separately. Presumably if Richard and Anne had had two or more children, one would succeed to England and one to Brittany.

  Other aspects of foreign policy and the succession

  The deposition of James III of Scotland by a magnate revolt on his son’s behalf would have been likely to take England by surprise under Richard as it did under Henry. Richard had had long personal experience of fighting in southern Scotland, though also of Scots nobles and princes going back on their promises. Concentrating on France and Brittany in 1488–9, he would have been unable to take advantage of the situation but could subsequently have threatened invasion and induced the new King to marry an English princess (possibly one of Edward IV’s daughters as the late King had planned, possibly Clarence’s daughter Margaret). Richard had a valuable resource for international diplomacy in his nieces, provided that their illegitimacy (or not) was not an insuperable bar for status-conscious foreign princes. Given that the Princes were still missing and any reversal of Titulus Regius on the girls’ behalf would imply that Richard had been wrong to declare them all bastards and might have had the Princes killed as well, it would be easier for a special Parliamentary Act to declare the Princesses legitimated without rights on the succession. If Richard was still childless and his heir Warwick or Lincoln was intended to marry Elizabeth of York, this sort of resolution would aid their union as a reconciliation with partisans of Edward IV’s children. Whether Richard would have felt confident enough to grant more southern sheriffdoms, keeperships of royal estates, and other positions of local power to the local gentry instead of key northerners is uncertain and would probably have depended on the risks of new revolts. Without such conciliatory gestures the chances of revolt would have been higher, particularly if Henry Tudor had still been at large and had been backed by France in retaliation for Richard’s ‘interference’ in Brittany. Richard would have needed to build up loyal magnates to control the south of England from the threat of revolt or invasion (East Anglia would have been under the control of John Howard’s son Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk, disgraced in real life by Henry VII.) But granting extensive lands and titles to newcomers not of ancient–or local–birth would have run the same risks of abuse for the ‘parvenus’ as Richard II faced for his ‘duketti’ in 1397–9.

  The usurpations of Henry IV and Edward IV had been controversial, but armed force and the acquiescence of most of the magnates had kept them on their thrones for their lifetimes (though Edward had had to regain his once). Provided that his health survived better than Henry IV’s, Richard would have had the advantage of having seen off his main challengers in 1483 and 1485 and his success would have disconcerted potential opponents. If he had married a princess nearer his age than Anne of Brittany, or even an English relative from among the senior aristocratic families, he could have had several adult sons by the mid-1500s. The husband or sons of Elizabeth of York would have posed a threat to Richard’s children, with the question of Edward IV’s marriage unresolved whatever the legal fictions that Richard had enacted about it, and some ambitious noble or a foreign power could have sponsored a pretender claiming to be Edward V or his brother in the 1490s. The likeliest offender was France, as the real-life backers of the pretender ‘Warbeck’ were Richard’s sister Margaret and probable ally Maximilian–who would have been Richard’s supporters. If Richard was to be killed in battle or die naturally leaving young children, there was a strong chance of another civil war with Warwick, Lincoln or his brother(s), and a husband of one of Edward IV’s daughters involved. But with luck Richard III could have lived into his sixties and died as late as 1515 or 1520, after a long and successful reign that had started no more rockily than Edward III’s did in 1327–30, Henry IV’s in 1399–1405, or Henry VII’s in 1485–7. The convenient death of the King’s predecessor had thrown shadows over the reigns of the first two, though at least they had been able to produce the deposed sovereign’s bodies (there is a question over the case of Edward II66) and pretend that they had died naturally.

  The question of his nephews’ murder would have continued to hang over his dynasty, but there is less likelihood under Richard III’s own rule (or that of his son) of any writers in England daring to mention it openly. If the story of Tyrrell being commissioned by Richard to organize the murder during the post-coronation ‘progress’ was true, Tyrrell would not have been talking about it as he would have remained a loyal, probably well-bribed supporter of Richard and not been arrested for treason in 1502. He would have hidden his secret and at the most told his family who might have been willing to talk about it after Richard was dead. Richard could hardly have replied to any invasion by a French-backed ‘Edward V’ by producing the body of the real ex-King and claiming that he had been killed by Tudor agents, even assuming that Richard knew where the bodies had been buried. As with Henry VII, the problems outweighed the benefits of reminding people about the disappearances. If, on the other hand, Buckingham or Tyrell had smuggled the princes abroad, one of them could h
ave asked for the French aid as an adult–but been unable to prove their authenticity? Even if Richard’s death, around 1500 or 1510, led to another civil war no husband of one of the sisters of ‘Princes’ (or Warwick) would have wanted to publicize the idea that they might still be alive and available as a rival contender. Nobody (except the French or a surviving Henry Tudor in exile?) would have had a motive to publish stories about the murder as long as Richard was alive and king.

  The Ricardian regime might well have outlived those few senior courtiers who knew the truth, and nobody have been left alive with knowledge of events by the time that the matter was considered by some historian–conceivably More himself–once Richard was dead. The King would have had an unsavoury reputation, but the scandal have been as conveniently ignored in English politics as were the mysterious and convenient ‘natural’ deaths of Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI. Unlike that trio or the ‘martyred’ Thomas of Lancaster, there would have been no shrine to serve as a potentially embarrassing centre for criticism of the current dynasty. Even his successor might well have found the episode too embarrassing to refer to it, unless that ruler–a husband of one of Edward IV’s daughters?–had his own reasons to blacken Richard’s name. The chances of any bodies being recovered in 1674 would have been minimal, and the mystery would have been even more insoluble than in reality.

  Chapter Six

  The Afterglow of the ‘Sun of York’, 1485–1525: A Possible Yorkist Restoration?

  August 1485–early 1486: a weaker royal position than 1461 or 1471?

  Contrary to later simplification, the battle of Bosworth was not the ‘end of the Wars of the Roses’. This was the image presented by Shakespeare, as mooted by the 1548 Tudor chronicler John Hall, with the battle as the end of a cycle of vicious dynastic feuding and Henry VII restoring harmony by marrying Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. It was a neat and logical ending to the thirty years of political instability, but–as mentioned in the previous section–the truth is rather more messy. Bosworth solved nothing, as like Mortimer’s Cross and Towton (1461) or Barnet and Tewkesbury (1471) it left one regime deposed by military force but potential rivals for the throne still alive. After 22 August 1485 Henry swiftly had his lieutenant Sir Reginald Bray collect Princess Elizabeth, his promised bride, and Clarence’s son the Earl of Warwick from Sheriff Hutton Castle and escort them to London so neither could be used by refugee Yorkists as a pretender; he also had the adherence of Richard III’s nephew and presumed heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln.1 Richard’s closest ally, Lord Lovell, had disappeared and was clearly intent on escaping to do further mischief, but ended up in sanctuary at Colchester Abbey2 rather than raising a rebel army to hold out in a remote location as Queen Margaret did in Northumberland after Towton and Jasper Tudor did in North Wales after Mortimer’s Cross. Of Richard’s two senior commanders at Bosworth, the Duke of Norfolk was dead (and his son Thomas, Earl of Surrey, in custody) and the Earl of Northumberland had possibly failed to support Richard in battle and duly swore allegiance to Henry but was given no immediate trust.3 The other two members of Lovell’s alleged triumvirate, Ratcliffe and Catesby, were dead–the first killed in the battle and the second executed afterwards. But was this ‘clean sweep’ of opponents any more impressive than Edward IV’s in 1471? The battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury had also left the defeated faction in disarray minus its existing leadership–Prince Edward, Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, Lord Montague, and Lord Wenlock were killed in or after the battles, Queen Margaret was in custody, the Duke of Somerset was executed, and Henry VI was disposed of and then claimed to have died naturally. The Lancastrian cause had been crushed for twelve years and in 1483 had only been revived when new pretender Henry Tudor (not even of fully legitimate royal blood) allied himself to the revolt of Edward IV’s ‘loyalists’ against the usurper Richard III. The autumn 1483 revolt had at least started out in the deposed Edward V’s name and once he was presumed dead Henry still had to promise to marry his sister and heiress (Elizabeth) to hitch the Lancastrian cause to that of Richard’s enemies. Arguably, the Yorkist cause was no worse off in 1485 than their enemies’ cause had been in 1471; and it had the bonus of at least one adult male Yorkist claimant, the Earl of Lincoln, pardoned and active at court ready to defect from the (temporary?) winners. He duly did so despite all the rewards Henry had given him and fled to Burgundy early in 1487 as a new Yorkist claimant emerged there.4 The young Earl of Warwick, Clarence’s ten-year-old son, was in the Tower but if not executed could be used as a figurehead; on past precedent he could be released by defecting court politicians during an uprising as Archbishop Neville had released Henry VI in the 1470 revolt. Notably Lincoln defected just after Henry had paraded Warwick in public–thus he knew that new pretender Simnel, aka ‘Warwick’, was a fake.

  Moreover, Henry VII had a far weaker claim to the throne than Edward IV had had in 1461 and 1471–he claimed the throne by right of his Beaufort descent, his mother, Margaret, being the daughter of John, Earl/ Marquis of Somerset (d. 1444), eldest son of the eldest son of the third marriage of John ‘of Gaunt’. As mentioned earlier, the problem with this was that all John’s Beaufort children were born illegitimate, in the lifetime of his second wife Catherine of Castile, and were legitimated but excluded from claiming the throne by Act of Parliament in 1396.5 In fact, Margaret should have been proclaimed queen herself by this argument, and her resignation of her claim in her son’s favour was never legally confirmed;6 it was presumed that only a man could rule and/ or an adult male war-leader was needed for turbulent times. The only female ruler of England to date had been the disastrously contentious and allegedly arrogant Empress Matilda, Henry I’s legal heir who was recognized as such by his vassals at his request but superseded by her cousin Stephen on her father’s death in 1135 and only ruled ‘de facto’ briefly in 1141 before a successful revolt drove her out of London. Henry could also claim the throne by unofficial ‘right of conquest’, i.e. proof of Divine support, as Henry IV had done in 1399 when he superseded the arguably superior legal claim of the under-age Edmund Mortimer.7 Ingeniously, Henry VII dated his reign from 21 August, the day before the battle of Bosworth,8 so he could claim that everyone who had fought for Richard III had committed treason and would therefore forfeit their lands if they did not surrender and swear allegiance to him–his subtle use of legal blackmail was well-established from his accession.

  His claim on the loyalties of the remaining Yorkist adherents was centred on his Christmas Day 1483 oath at Rennes Cathedral to marry Elizabeth of York, as heiress of Edward IV, if her brothers were presumed dead. He duly did this as promised, but there were two legal problems–which explain the delay in the marriage from his arrival in London (3 September) to 18 January 1486.9 This was not due to the insecure new King preferring to have himself crowned first (30 October)10 so as to assert the primacy of his personal right to the throne and head off any Yorkist attempt to make him merely a ‘king consort’; for one thing he and his leading adherents had to have their past attainders reversed by Parliament (which met on 7 November) and for another Parliament and the judges had to invalidate Richard III’s Act Titulus Regius, which had bastardized Elizabeth and her sisters. As seen above, this contentious legal centrepiece of the Ricardian usurpation had exhibited (or invented?) the story of Edward IV’s ‘pre-contract’ to marry Eleanor Butler, making his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville illegal, and it had to be reversed to make Elizabeth of York legally the heiress of her father and the transmitter of his claims to the throne. But reversing it also restored the rights of Edward V and his brother Richard if they were still alive–and the indications are that Henry had no idea if this was true or not. As a result, the indictment of Richard III as a usurping tyrant referred to him as someone who had committed ‘infanticide’ without giving names or dates,11 and if the story that Sir Thomas More was to record c. 1510 about Sir James Tyrrell doing the murders was already current he was not treated as a scapegoat and forced to confess.
Instead, he was pardoned–twice in quick succession–for unspecified crimes committed under Richard and removed from the country to serve as commander at Guisnes Castle, near Calais. Indeed, when Titulus Regius’ was struck from the legal records as invalid its contents were not listed, as would have been normal practice; the judges recommended to Parliament that when they cancelled it by a new Act its scandalous contents were not mentioned. Similarly, everyone possessing a copy of it was required to hand it in by April 1486 or else–a clear attempt at a ‘cover-up’. 12 (It is significant that Henry ordered Bishop Stillington, allegedly the witness to Edward and Eleanor’s pre-contract and certainly the man cited as such by Richard III, to be arrested as soon as he took the throne.13) This indicates that Henry feared that the question of the alleged Butler betrothal was unable to be conclusively settled and so suppressed it. The two linked questions of Elizabeth’s illegitimacy and the potential survival of her missing brothers made Henry’s position far more unstable than Edward IV’s had been in 1461 or 1471–the question of whether Edward was illegitimate does not seem to have been raised until later. The matter of Henry and Elizabeth being fourth cousins and so needing a Church court decree of absolution before they could marry–or even a papal ruling, which would take longer to obtain–was also a cause for delay. In fact, the decree was granted just before they married so the King clearly intended to marry as soon as it was legally ‘safe’ to do so. There is thus no question of Henry seriously considering abandoning his oath to marry Elizabeth once he was on the throne; if he had done so the chances were that her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and half-brother the Marquis of Dorset would have quickly been plotting to place another Yorkist claimant on the throne as Elizabeth’s husband. Lincoln was the obvious choice, Warwick being nine years Elizabeth’s junior.