Three months after the onset of Henry’s illness Margaret gave birth to a son and the future of the Lancastrian dynasty seemed secure. But Henry acknowledged his son only with the flickering of his eyes and he could not even raise a finger in the government of his kingdom. Without a king as the final decision-maker, England was paralysed. Who would act in his name? Margaret – her position immeasurably strengthened as mother of the heir – put herself forward as queen regent. But Margaret commanded little support among the lords. Instead they nominated the duke of York as protector and defender of England.
York ruled England for close to a year. And he did so well and moderately – in everything, that is, apart from his treatment of Somerset. Somerset was promptly arrested and held in prison without trial for the duration of the protectorate. But at Christmas 1454 Henry’s bout of insanity ended as suddenly as it had begun. Things now came full circle once more. York was dismissed from the protectorate and Somerset released and reinstated. But this time York was not prepared to accept the reversal. And this time he had allies – powerful ones.
One of the symptoms of the decline of royal government under Henry VI was the growth in the number and intensity of private feuds in the localities. Worst was the dispute between the two great northern families of Neville and Percy. The fatal development of 1455 was the alignment between the Percy–Neville feud in the north and the struggle between York and Somerset in the centre. The Nevilles, led by the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, allied with York, the Percy earl of Northumberland with Somerset. York and his allies marched on London and the two sides met in the marketplace at St Albans. York triumphed: Somerset was cut down in the street and Henry, deserted beneath the royal banner, was slightly wounded in the neck. Civil war had begun.
Once more York professed loyalty to Henry and once more he became protector. But he had overreached himself. The situation was quite different to 1454. The king was no longer mad; there was an heir to the throne; and the Lancastrian nobility had regrouped. York resigned as protector. But the country was still close to anarchy and the king had slumped into apathy. Instead Queen Margaret took the reins of power. She rallied the nobility to the crown and in 1459 she brought charges against York. He was left more or less isolated and fled to Ireland.
But the Yorkists remained a powerful force. Less than a year later York’s son Edward and the earl of Warwick raised an army and defeated and captured Henry at Northampton. York himself returned from exile and entered London in royal state. In the ensuing parliament York formally laid claim to the throne. He was greeted with a shocked silence, because no one – not even York’s followers – wanted a repetition of the usurpation of 1399. So York was forced to accept a compromise: Henry would remain king while he lived, and York would succeed only after his death. But they all reckoned without Margaret’s ferocious mother love.
Margaret refused to see her son’s inheritance forfeit and broke the truce when she led the Lancastrian forces against York. Margaret was victorious: York was killed in battle and his head, adorned with a paper crown, displayed on the walls of York.
But Henry VI was at this time, according to the pope, ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit and spirit’. He was a broken man, ill, helpless and utterly incapable of ruling. Nor had the death of York ended the challenge to the throne. For York’s son, Edward, and his allies were still at large. And Margaret’s act of vengeance against York had raised the stakes. Promises counted for nothing. It was kill or be killed; rule or be crushed by the victors.
Edward and his close ally the earl of Warwick were defeated at the second battle of St Albans (during which Henry sat under a tree, singing to himself). But Margaret was deeply unpopular, especially in the south, where London shut its gates against her after the battle. Thereafter she was unable to repeat her successes. Owen Tudor and his son Jasper (Henry’s half-brother) raised another Lancastrian army in Wales. But Edward defeated them at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire.
The tide had very definitely turned. Edward marched on London and the City opened its gates to the Yorkists. The earl of Warwick proclaimed Edward king of England at St George’s Fields in Southwark and a hastily convened and one-sided council concurred. The next day he was crowned as Edward IV. A month later the Yorkists comprehensively defeated a much larger Lancastrian army at Towton in Yorkshire in a notoriously bloody battle. Henry was captured and imprisoned; Margaret and her son fled into exile. York’s son was king of England. But he could not sit securely on the throne.
VI
The monarchy had reached its lowest point since the ninth and tenth centuries, when the unitary kingdom of England had first coalesced round the regional monarchy of Wessex. Wessex, I have argued, was a participatory society, which balanced an effective monarchy at the centre with institutions of local government that required and got the active involvement of most free men. It was this combination which enabled Wessex to survive and absorb the Viking invasions and finally to thrive. It is also why, after the destructive violence of the Norman Conquest and its immediate aftermath, the Norman kings decided that both the ethos and the methods of Anglo-Saxon government were too useful to be abandoned. Instead, the great lawgiver kings of the Middle Ages, such as Henry II and Edward I, embodied them in an elaborate framework of institutions: the common law, the Exchequer and Parliament.
But by the late fifteenth century much of this was played out. The sense of mutual responsibility between crown and people, which was the great legacy of the Anglo-Saxon nation-state, had eroded, and Parliament was flatly refusing to impose adequate taxation. And the nobility were more and more successfully interposing themselves between the king and his subjects. They were not dividing England into separate statelets, as happened in France and had threatened to happen in England in that earlier period of crisis under Stephen. Instead, and more insidiously, they were taking over the machinery of royal government itself.
Their instrument was the noble household. As the vast size of their surviving houses and castles shows, the nobility kept households of scores or even hundreds of servants. They came from every rank of society: from labourers and craftsmen, through clerks and lesser gentry, to fellow nobles, who were proud to serve in princely households like those of John of Gaunt or Richard of York. Their prime task was domestic, to keep their lords in the luxurious style to which they were accustomed. But they also ran their estates, extended their local influence and, above all, fought their wars – whether against the French abroad or their fellow nobles or even the king himself at home.
Historians call this phenomenon ‘bastard feudalism’. And it coloured all aspects of late medieval English society: its art, literature, religion and, especially, its politics. It even had its own language. The servant in this special sense was known as a ‘retainer’; he was bound to his lord by a contract known as an ‘indenture’, and he wore his lord’s emblem known as a ‘badge’.
And the badge is the key to it all. The Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York were the badges of the two rival branches of the royal house. The name ‘Wars of the Roses’ is a later, Romantic invention. But the wars, which include some of the biggest and bloodiest battles fought on English soil, were real enough. As was the takeover by badge-wearing retainers of the machinery of local government, justice, representation in Parliament and even the throne itself. Twice, in 1399 with Henry Bolingbroke and now again in 1461 with Edward of York, the biggest bastard-feudal lord had become king. Where would it stop?
Contemporaries too were aware that something had gone wrong. Indeed, with the chaos and violence of the Wars of the Roses, it was hard not to be. And the various competitors for the throne vied with each other in issuing manifestos for reform. In 1399, the House of Lancaster had promised to revive the monarchy. Sixty years later, the House of York was making similar, even more extravagant, promises. But would it be able to keep them? Or was it more than a matter of mere personalities? Would the institutions of English king
ship fashioned under the Anglo-Saxons, and perfected under the Henrys and Edwards, have to change as well? Was England on the threshold not merely of a new dynasty but of a new monarchy?
PART III
THE IMPERIAL CROWN
Chapter 14
The Man Who Would Be King
Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III, Henry VII
IN LATE 1487, THE KING commissioned a new crown. And he would first wear it on the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January 1488. This was the climax of the Twelve Days of Christmas, when in English court ritual the monarch re-enacted the part of the Three Kings who had presented their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ child.
The new ‘rich crown of gold set with full many precious stones’ caused a sensation. As well it might. The circlet was thickly encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds, highlighted with large and milky pearls. From the circlet there rose five tall crosses alternating with the same number of similarly proportioned fleurs-de-lis. These too were thickly set with stones and pearls, with each fleur-de-lis in addition having on its upper petal a cameo carved with an image of sacred kingship. The crown was surmounted by two jewelled arches, with, at their crossing, a plain gold orb and cross, and it weighed a crushing seven pounds.
It was the Imperial Crown of England. As such it sits on the table at the right hand of Charles I in his family portrait by van Dyck as the symbol of his kingly power.
The man who ordered the Crown Imperial to be made was the founder of the Tudor dynasty, Henry Tudor. But Henry was a man who should never have been king at all. He seized the throne against the odds, amid bloodshed and murderous family feuds. But behind the beheadings and the gore was the fundamental question of how England should be ruled. Henry thought he knew the answer. But his cure proved as bad as the disease.
I
The story begins in 1453, four years before Henry Tudor’s birth, when a nine-year-old girl was summoned to court. Her name was Margaret Beaufort, and with her fortune of £1000 a year, she was the richest heiress in England. Even more importantly, as the direct descendant of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, Margaret was of the blood royal. Her cousin, the Lancastrian King Henry VI, had decided that she should marry his own half-brother, Edmund Tudor – a man more than twice her age. It was a sordid mixture of money and power, with the technicalities fixed by a venal and accommodating Church.
But the key issue was the succession to the throne. As we have seen, Queen Margaret had just become pregnant after eight years of marriage. But the succession could hardly depend on a single life. The union of Margaret and Edmund would, Henry hoped, strengthen the depleted royal family. It might even, bearing in mind the uncertainties of the times, produce a plausible heir to the Lancastrian throne.
When Margaret was barely twelve, the earliest legally permissible age for sexual intercourse, Edmund brought her to Wales, where they lived together as man and wife. Shortly before her thirteenth birthday Margaret became pregnant. But six months later, weakened by imprisonment during a Welsh feud and finished off by the plague, Edmund died on 1 November 1456. His child bride, widowed and heavily pregnant, sought refuge with her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, at Pembroke Castle.
And it was in a tower chamber in the castle that Margaret gave birth to the future Henry VII on 28 January 1457. Actually, it was a miracle that both mother and child survived. It was the depths of winter and the plague still raged, while Margaret, short and slightly built even as an adult, was not yet fully grown. The birth probably did severe damage to her immature body because, despite two further marriages, Margaret was to have no more children. Yet out of this traumatic birth an extraordinary bond was forged between the teenage mother and her son.
Margaret would need to be the strong woman behind her son. For after the battle of Towton the Lancastrians were down and out. The boy was simply an irrelevance. Richard of York’s son Edward IV sat on the throne; Henry VI was deposed, on the run and ground down by mental disability; and the heir to the Lancastrian dynasty, Prince Edward, was a miserable exile. Jasper Tudor also went into exile and the earldom of Pembroke was given to a loyal supporter of the House of York. Henry Tudor owed his birth to the efforts to keep the Lancastrian family well stocked. What did that matter now?
Edward IV was a young, charismatic king who had won the throne in battle. Like his namesake kings, Edward was a warrior and looked it – over six feet four inches tall. Although he was nineteen when he won the throne, he was a shrewd and capable soldier and leader. He promised much after years of disaster under a meek and incapable monarch. And he used his personal qualities to make good his military conquest of England. He won over former enemies with his charm and magnanimity. Those he could not bring to his side he overcame by force of arms. He sent feelers out to his brother monarchs on the Continent to bolster his position at home and abroad. He even began negotiating marriage with the royal houses of France – not a bad prospect for a young man who had so recently fought his way to the throne.
But the qualities which made Edward an attractive king were also his undoing. He was open and affable and this easy charm got him into trouble. In 1467 he made a startling admission to his council at Reading. Three years before, he told them, he had married in secret. And it was not even a good match in a political or diplomatic sense. Elizabeth Woodville was one of the most controversial women ever to have been queen of England, with a past that could provide plenty of ammunition for Edward’s enemies. She was beautiful, ambitious, greedy and a widow of modest family background, on her father’s side at least. Her first husband had died fighting on the Lancastrian side at the second battle of St Albans. Edward first met her when she petitioned him about a problem with her late husband’s estate. Edward, young, handsome and sensual, immediately propositioned his pretty supplicant. But Elizabeth defended herself, it is said, with a knife. Edward, as seems then to have been his habit when women resisted his advances, offered her marriage. But this time it was not an empty promise to ensure a seedy seduction and the two were married secretly at her father’s house.
Perhaps Edward had intended to repudiate this clandestine marriage to an attractive but nonetheless obviously unsuitable wife once he had got what he wanted. But he did not. Had the marriage turned out to be valid after all? Had Edward the playboy fallen in love? Whatever the case, Edward’s supporters were amazed. Marry me, marry my family, Elizabeth might have said. Elizabeth’s family queued up for reward and power. Her five brothers and five sisters were married into the nobility. And her male relatives were given positions of power and influence. Suddenly there was a ready-made royal family which could not believe its luck.
But there was already a royal family – Edward had two equally hard-nosed and ambitious brothers, George, duke of Clarence and Richard, duke of York. And there were those who considered they were as good as royal. Edward had come to the throne with the help of one of the most powerful landowners in the country, his first cousin the earl of Warwick. After he had made Edward king of England, Warwick had made himself governor of England. As a Frenchman joked in a letter about the English to Louis XI: ‘They have but two rulers, M de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten.’ Such was the power of the earl that Edward had kept the news of his impulsive marriage from his mentor. Now, however, the kingmaker was being edged out, as he saw it, by the cuckoos in the nest – the greedy Woodville clan.
The Woodvilles stepped into the role of ‘evil counsellors’, well known from history and recent events. They were blamed for high taxes and all other disasters in the short reign. The duke of Clarence joined Warwick in opposing the king and the Woodvilles. Together they stirred up trouble, hoping to eliminate their rivals and have themselves restored to the inner royal circle. But the king did not give in to them. Together they reminded Edward of what had happened to Henry III, Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI, when those kings had ‘estranged the great lords of their blood from their secret Council and [were] not advised by them’. Then they decide
d to repeat history in a more vivid way: they would dethrone Edward. But who would be king? Clarence perhaps? Or what about poor old Henry VI?
The rebellion awoke the Lancastrian cause. In 1470 Margaret the warrior queen, with her son Edward, began to plot their return and the ever-loyal Jasper Tudor invaded England with French backing and Warwick’s support. This time it was Edward IV and loyal Yorkist nobles who had to flee into exile. Henry VI was back on the throne after just nine years, put there by Warwick the kingmaker. And Warwick sealed his dominance by marrying his daughter to the prince of Wales.
Edward was forced to fight to reclaim his throne. Once again he was roused to action by a crisis. From Burgundy he regrouped the Yorkists and secured foreign alliances. In March 1471 he landed on the Yorkshire coast. Clarence abandoned his new allies and joined his brother. In April they were in London and on Easter Day Edward IV defeated the earl of Warwick at the battle of Barnet, in the midst of which the earl was slain.
The final showdown came a month later at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. Margaret and Prince Edward had landed at Weymouth and were making for the Welsh marches to join up with Jasper Tudor’s forces. En route, they were cut off by a united front of the Yorkist royal family and nobility at Tewkesbury. Clarence was back on the side of his elder brother Edward, and they were joined by their younger brother Richard. The battle soon turned into a massacre, leaving thousands dead on the field. It was a decisive victory for York; a disaster for Lancaster.
After the battle, many of the Lancastrians fled to Tewkesbury Abbey, where they took refuge in the church. The victorious Edward and his men then burst in. There are two different versions of what happened next.
According to the official account, Edward behaved with exemplary decorum, pardoning the fugitives and offering up solemn thanks at the high altar for his victory. But the unofficial accounts tell a different and much more shocking story. Edward and his men, rather than turning their thoughts to God and mercy, began to slaughter the Lancastrians. A lucky few were saved by the intervention of a priest, vested and holding the holy sacrament in his hands, in front of whom even the bloodthirsty Yorkists felt some shame. Edward then recovered control of the situation by issuing pardons to his defeated enemies. But already enough blood had been spilt to pollute the church and to require its reconsecration.
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