Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  When Warwick and Edward IV fell out in the late 1460s, the Kingmaker turned against his protege, chasing him from the country. To replace him, Warwick brought back the deposed Henry VI who had spent the last six years in the Tower: the restored monarch was paraded around London in the spring of 1471. But the confused and shambling king had to be shepherded down Cheapside, his feet tied on to his horse. Never much of a parade-ground figure, he now made a sorry sight, dressed in a decidedly old and drab blue velvet gown that could not fail to prompt scorn —‘as though he had no more to change with’. This moth-eaten display, reported the chronicler John Warkworth, was‘more like a play than a showing of a prince to win men’s hearts’.

  It was the Kingmaker’s last throw — and a losing one. Warwick was unable to beat off the challenge of Edward IV, now returned, who soon defeated and killed the earl in battle, regaining the crown for himself.

  As for poor Henry, his fate was sealed. Two weeks later he was found dead in the Tower, and history has pointed the finger at his second-time supplanter, Edward. Henry probably was murdered — but there is a sad plausibility to the official explanation that the twice-reigning King, who inherited two kingdoms and lost them both, passed away out of‘pure displeasure and melancholy’.

  THE HOUSE OF THEODORE

  1432-85

  IF THE WARS OF THE ROSES WERE FOUGHT BY the men, it was the women who eventually sorted out the mess. By the late 1400s the royal family tree had become a crazy spider’s web of possible claimants to the throne, and it took female instinct to tease out the relevant strands from the tangle. The emotions of mothers and wives were to weave new patterns — and eventually they produced a most unlikely solution.

  Owain ap Maredudd ap Tydwr was a silver-tongued Welsh gentleman who caught the eye of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of France. He was a servant in her household in the 1420S — probably Clerk of her Wardrobe — and being Welsh, he had no surname. The‘ap’ in his name meant‘son of’, so he was Owen, son of Meredith, son of Theodore.

  But once he had captured the heart of the widowed Queen, Owen had needed a surname. According to later gossip, Catherine would spy on her energetic Welsh wardrobe clerk as he bathed naked in the Thames, and she decided she liked what she saw.

  The court was outraged. An official inquiry was held. But Catherine stuck by her Owen and in 1432 their marriage was officially recognised.‘Theodore’ became‘Tudor’, and Owen went through life defiantly proud of the leap in fortune that he owed to love. Thirty years later, in 1461, cornered by his enemies after the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, he would go to the block with insouciance.’That head shall lie on the stock,’ he said jauntily,‘that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap.’

  From the outset, the Tudors confronted the world with attitude. Catherine and Owen had two sons, Edmund and Jasper, who were widely viewed as cuckoos in the royal nest. But the dowager Queen resolutely brought up her Welsh boys with her first-born royal son Henry VI, nine or ten years their senior, and the young King became fond of his boisterous half-brothers. In 1452 he raised them both to the peerage, giving Edmund the earldom of Richmond and making Jasper Earl of Pembroke. The two young Tudors were given precedence over all the earls in England, and Henry, who had produced no children, was rumoured to be considering making Edmund his heir. The new Earl of Richmond was granted a version of the royal arms to wear on his shield.

  The Tudors rose still higher in the world a few years later, when Edmund married the twelve-year-old Lady Margaret Beaufort, who had her own claim to the throne. The great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, she proved to be one of the most remarkable women of her time. Bright-eyed and birdlike, to judge from the portraits still to be seen in the several educational establishments she endowed, she was a woman of learning. She translated into English part of The Imitation of Christ, the early-fifteenth-century manual of contemplations in which the German monk Thomas of Kempen (Thomas a Kempis) taught how serenity comes through the judicious acceptance of life’s problems.’Trouble often compels a man to search his own heart: it reminds him he is an exile here, and he can put his trust in nothing in this world.’

  Diminutive in stature, Lady Margaret was nonetheless strong in both mind and body. She was married, pregnant and widowed before the age of thirteen, when Edmund died of plague. In the care of his brother Jasper, Margaret gave birth to Edmund’s son, Henry, in Jasper’s castle at Pembroke in the bleak and windswept south-west corner of Wales. But some complication of the birth, probably to do with her youth or small frame, meant that she had no more children. For the rest of her life she devoted her energies to her son —‘my only worldly joy’, as she lovingly described him — although circumstances kept them apart.

  The young man’s links to the succession through his mother — and less directly through his grandmother, the French queen Catherine — made England a dangerous place for Henry Tudor. He spent most of his upbringing in exile, much of it in the company of his uncle Jasper. At the age of four he was separated from his mother, and he scarcely saw her for twenty years.

  But Lady Margaret never abandoned the cause. She would later plot a marriage for her son that would make his claim to the throne unassailable, and she had already arranged a marriage for herself that would turn out to be the Tudor trump card. In 1472 she married Thomas, Lord Stanley, a landowner with large estates in Cheshire, Lancashire and other parts of the north-west. The Stanleys were a wily family whose local empire-building typified the rivalries that made up the disorderly jostlings of these years. Allied to Lady Margaret, the Stanleys would prove crucial partners as her son Henry Tudor jostled for the largest prize of all.

  HOUSE OF YORK: EDWARD IV, MERCHANT KING

  1461-70, 1471-83

  THE FLAMBOYANT EDWARD IV SHARES WITH his luckless rival Henry VI the dubious distinction of being the only king of England to reign twice. In 1461 and 1471, thanks to Warwick the Kingmaker, the two men played box and cox in what turned out to be a humiliating royal timeshare. But after Edward had defeated Warwick and disposed of Henry, he ruled for a dozen prosperous and largely undisturbed years, during which he achieved another distinction. He was the first king for more than a century and a half who did not die in debt — in fact, he actually left his successor a little money in the kitty.

  Edward was England’s first and last businessman monarch. Clapping folk around the shoulders and cracking dirty jokes, he was also an unashamed wheeler-dealer. He set up his own trading business, making handsome profits on exporting wool and tin to Italy, while importing Mediterranean cargoes like wine, paper, sugar and oranges. He ran the Crown lands with the keen eye of a bailiff, and when it came to PR with the merchant community he was a master of corporate hospitality.

  One day in 1482 Edward invited the Lord Mayor of London, the aldermen and‘a certain number of such head commoners as the mayor would assign’ to join him in the royal forest at Waltham in Essex. There, in today’s golf-course country, they were treated to a morning of sport, then conveyed‘to a strong and pleasant lodge made of green boughs and other pleasant things. Within which lodge were laid certain tables, whereat at once the said mayor and his company were set and served right plenteously with all manner of dainties… and especially of venison, both of red deer and of fallow.’ After lunch the King took his guests hunting again, and a few days later sent their wives‘two harts and six bucks with a tun of Gascon Wine’.

  It could be said that Edward IV invented the seductive flummery of the modern honours list when he made six London aldermen Knights of the Bath. Like the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Bath, which referred to the ritual cleansing that a squire underwent when he became a knight, was primarily a military honour. Now the King extended the bait to rich civilians that he wanted to keep on side: a moneylender would kneel down as Bill Bloggs, the sword would touch his shoulder, and he arose Sir William.

  Edward understood that everyone had his price — himself included. In 1475 he had taken an army across the Channel wher
e he met up with the French King at Picquigny near Amiens — and promptly did a deal to take his army home again. For a down payment of 75,000 crowns and a pension of 5:0,000 a year, he cheerfully sold off his birthright — England’s claim to the French territories for which so many of his ancestors had fought so bloodily over the years.

  The Treaty of Picquigny brought peace and prosperity to England, but not much honour. Edward’s reign was too undramatic for Shakespeare to write a play about — one reason, perhaps, why Edward is sometimes called England’s‘forgotten king’. But the beautiful St George’s Chapel at Windsor, designed to outshine the chapel that his rival Henry VI had built at Eton College in the valley below, remains his memorial. And the Royal Book reveals a sumptuous court — along with a diverting little insight into how comfortably this fleshly monarch lived. After he had risen every morning, a yeoman was deputed to leap on to his bed and roll up and down so as to level out the lumps in the litter of bracken and straw that made up the royal mattress.

  In 1483, Edward IV retired to his mattress unexpectedly, having caught a chill while fishing. He died some days later, aged only forty. Had this cynical yet able man lived just a few years longer, his elder son Edward, only twelve at the time of his death, might have been able to build on his legacy. As it was, young Edward and his younger brother soon found themselves inside the Tower of London, courtesy of their considerate uncle Richard.

  WILLIAM CAXTON

  1474

  WARS AND ROSES… WE HAVE SEEN THAT roses were rare on the battle banners of fifteenth-century England. Let’s now take a closer look at the‘wars’ themselves. In the thirty-two years that history textbooks conventionally allot to the‘Wars of the Roses’, there were long periods of peace. In fact, there were only thirteen weeks of actual fighting — and though the battles themselves were bitter and sometimes very bloody, mayhem and ravaging seldom ensued.

  ’It is a custom in England,’ reported Philippe de Commynes, a shrewd French visitor to England in the 1470s,‘that the victors in battle kill nobody, especially none of the ordinary soldiers’. In this curiously warless warfare, defeated noblemen could expect prompt and ruthless execution, but‘neither the country nor the people, nor the houses were wasted, destroyed or demolished’. The rank and file returned home as soon as they could, to continue farming their land.

  In towns and cities people also got on with their lives. Trade and business positively flourished, generating contracts, ledgers and letters that called for a literate workforce — and it was the‘grammar’ schools that taught this emerging class of office workers the practical mechanics of English and Latin. The grammar schools multiplied in the fifteenth century, and the demand for accessible low-price books that they helped generate was met by an invention that was to prove infinitely more important than considerations of who was nudging whom off the throne.

  In 1469 William Caxton, an English merchant living in the prosperous Flemish trading town of Bruges, was finishing a book that he had researched. Caxton was a trader in rich cloths — a mercer like Richard Whittington — and books were his passion. He collected rare books, and he wrote for his own pleasure, scratching out the text laboriously with a quill on to parchment. The book he was currently completing was a history of the ancient Greek city of Troy, and the mercer, who was approaching his fiftieth birthday, was feeling weary.‘My pen is worn, mine hand heavy, my eye even dimmed,’ he wrote. The prospect of copying out more versions of the manuscript for the friends who had expressed an interest was too much to contemplate. So Caxton decided to see what he could discover about the craft of printing, which had been pioneered by Johann Gutenberg in the 1440S in the Rhine Valley.

  Travelling south-east from Bruges, he arrived on the Rhine nearly thirty years after Gutenberg had started work there. And having‘practised and learned’ the technique for himself, the mercer turned printer went back to Bruges to set up his own press. In 1474 his History of Troy became the first book to be printed in English, and two years later he brought his press to England, setting up shop near the Chapter House, in the precinct of Westminster Abbey, where Parliament met.

  Caxton had an eye for a good location. Along the route between the Palace of Westminster and the Chapter House shuttled lawyers, churchmen, courtiers, MPs — the book-buying elite of England. The former cloth trader also had an eye for a bestseller. The second book he printed was about chess, The Game and Play of the Chesse. Then came in fairly quick succession a French-English dictionary, a translation of Aesop’s fables, several popular romances, Malory’s tale of Camelot in the Morte D’Arthur, some school textbooks, a history of England, an encyclopaedia entitled The Myrrour of the Worlde, and Chaucer’s bawdy evergreen, The Canterbury Tales.

  More than five hundred years later a copy of Caxton’s first edition of Chaucer became the most expensive book ever sold — knocked down at auction for £4.6 million. But in the fifteenth century the obvious appeal of the newly printed books lay in their value for money. Books became so commonplace that snobs sometimes employed scribes to copy Caxton’s printed editions back into manuscript — while both Church and government became alarmed at the access to new ideas that the printing press offered to a widening public.

  Over the centuries Caxton’s innovation would marvellously stimulate diversity in thinking, but in one important respect its impact was to standardise. Caxton loved to write personal prefaces to his publications, explaining the background of the new book he was sharing with his readers, and in one of these he describes the difficulties of being England’s first mass publisher. He was in his study, he relates, feeling rather bereft, looking for a new project to get his teeth into, and happened to pick up the recently published French version of Virgil’s Aeneid. The editor in him couldn’t resist trying to translate the great epic poem into English. Taking a pen, he wrote out a page or two. But when he came to read through what he had written, he had to wonder whether his customers in different corners of England would be able to understand it, since‘common English that is spoken in one shire varies from another’.

  To make the point he recounted the tale of a group of English merchants who, when their ship was becalmed at the mouth of the Thames, decided to go ashore in search of a good breakfast. One of them asked for some’eggys’, to be told by the Kentish wife that she did not understand French. Since the merchant himself only spoke and understood English, he started to get angry, until one of his companions said he would like some ’eyren’ — and the woman promptly reached for the egg basket.

  ’Loo,’ exclaimed Caxton,‘what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte — egges or eyren?’

  Even in this account you may notice that Caxton himself first spelled the word ’eggys’, then ’egges’ a few lines later. As the printer-publisher produced more and more books — and when he died in 1491 he was on the point of printing his hundredth — he made his own decisions about how words should be spelled. His choices tended to reflect the language of the south-east of England, with which he was familiar — he was proud to come from Kent,’where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English as is in any place of England.’

  Many of Caxton’s spelling decisions and those of the printers who came after him were quite arbitrary. As they matched letters to sounds they followed no particular rules, and we live with the consequences to this day. So if you have ever wondered why a bandage is‘wound’ around a‘wound’, why‘cough’ rhymes with‘off’ while‘bough’ rhymes with cow’, and why you might shed a‘tear’ after seeing a‘tear’ in your best dress or trousers, you have William Caxton to thank for the confusion.

  WHODUNIT? THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER

  1483

  wHEN EDWARD IV DIED EARLY IN APRIL 1483, his elder son Edward was in Ludlow on the Welsh border, carrying out his duties as Prince of Wales. The twelve-year-old was duly proclaimed King Edward V, and leisurely arrangements were made for him to travel to London for his coronation. But on the 30th of that month, with little more than a day’s r
iding to go, the royal party was intercepted by the King’s uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, at Stony Stratford on the outskirts of modern-day Milton Keynes.

  The thirty-year-old Richard was the energetic and ambitious younger brother of Edward IV. He had been ruling the north of England with firm efficiency,and he claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy to seize control of the new King. He took charge of his nephew and escorted him back to London where, after a spell in the bishop’s palace, the young Edward V was dispatched for safekeeping into the royal apartments in the Tower. There the boy was joined on 16 June by his nine-year-old brother, Prince Richard of York.

  But only ten days later, claiming that the two boys were illegitimate, Uncle Richard proclaimed himself King. It was an outlandish charge, but he was formally crowned King Richard III on 6 July 1483, and the children were never seen at liberty again. With a poignant report in the Great Chronicle of London that they were glimpsed that summer‘shooting and playing in the garden of the Tower’, the young Edward V and his brother vanished from history.

  Few people at the time doubted that the King had disposed of them. But there was no solid evidence of foul play until, nearly two centuries later, workmen digging at the bottom of a staircase in the Tower of London discovered a wooden chest containing the skeletons of two children. The taller child was lying on his back, with the smaller one face down on top of him.‘They were small bones of lads…’ wrote one eyewitness,and there were pieces of rag and velvet about them.’

  The reigning monarch of the time, Charles II, ordered an inquiry. All agreed that the skeletons must be those of the boy king Edward V and his younger brother, murdered in 1483 by their wicked uncle. In 1678 the remains were ceremonially reburied in Westminster Abbey, with full dignity, in an urn beneath a black-and-white marble altar.