2.Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles (ed James Gairdner), Camden Society New Series XXVIII (1880), p. 77.
3.On 20 February 1460. W. H. Blaauw, ‘On the Effigy of Sir David Owen’ etc., in Sussex Archaeological Collection 7, 845, p. 24.
4. Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (2011), pp. 52, 53, 192.
5.David Owen was born in Pembrokeshire. See Davies, ‘Representation, Repute, Reality’ in op. cit. Also Blaauw, ‘On the Effigy . . .’ in op. cit., p. 25. Jasper also would not forget his father. In his will he paid for prayers to be said for the souls of both his parents and bequeathed the Greyfriars one of his best gowns of cloth of gold for a priest’s vestments. Testamenta vetusta: being illustrations from wills, of manners, customs, &c. as well as of the descents and possessions of many distinguished families. From the reign of Henry the Second to the accession of Queen Elizabeth, Volume 1 (ed Sir Harris Nicolas) (1826), p. 430.
6.30,000 out of a population of three million seems probable. See Michael D. Miller, at http://www.warsoftheroses.co.uk/chapter_56.htm. Other estimates are, however, much higher. The usually cautious Charles Ross estimates 50,000. See Charles Ross, Edward IV (1974), p. 36.
7.In 1996 a mass grave of the dead was excavated. The corpses showed multiple injuries to their skulls and the forearms they had raised to defend themselves.
8.D. H. Thomas, The Herberts of Raglan (1994), p. 26.
9.Blaauw, ‘On the Effigy . . .’ in op. cit., p. 25.
10.Herbert, whom Henry VI had knighted with Jasper and Edmund Tudor, had been raised to the peerage that July.
11.The governor was Sir John Skidmore.
12.Especially her property at Bourne in Lincolnshire, and Stafford’s father’s castle, Maxstoke in Warwickshire.
13.Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, p. 42.
14.Kate Mertes, ‘Aristocracy’ in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes (ed Rosemary Horrox) (1994), pp. 55, 56.
15.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 65.
16.This was not a new idea. Long royal pedigrees had been popular in the past – Henry VI had one that traced his lineage back to Adam (Henry VII later used it as the basis of his own which still hung at Richmond Palace when Elizabeth I died). They were handwritten because William Caxton did not set up the first mechanical printing press in England until 1476.
17.The rose symbol also represented Edward in a more personal way. Yorkist poets referred to Edward as the ‘rose of Rouen’: the word ‘rose’ denoting a person of exceptional quality, and Rouen being his birthplace.
18.Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘English Events in Caspar Weinreich’s Danzig Chronicle of 1461–1495’ in Ricardian 7, No. 95 (December 1986), p. 313.
19.Ibid.
20.Sir John Grey of Groby died of battle wounds in 1461.
21.Earlier marks of favour included Margaret being granted the confiscated Beaufort manor of Woking in Surrey in 1466.
22.For a fifteenth-century lamprey recipe, see http://www.godecookery.com/nboke/nboke68.html.
4The Wheel of Fortune
1.Thomas, The Herberts of Raglan, p. 61.
2.The co-commander was the Earl of Devon.
3.The ragged staff on its own was simpler than the full bear and ragged staff used on his seals. The staff represented the branch of a tree, which an ancestor had, in legend, used to kill a giant. The bear was also sometimes used as a separate badge.
4.This brother-in-law was Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers, who would be killed fighting for Richard III at Bosworth. One of his daughters was later married to a son of Owen Tudor’s illegitimate son, David. Herbert had been made Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV, i.e. he was given Jasper’s title.
5.Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, p. 49.
6.As yet, neither Warwick nor Edward had sons, and Warwick hoped his daughter’s marriage to Edward’s heir would mean he would see a future grandson one day become king. Clarence agreed to depose his brother and become king in his place, with Warwick’s daughter as queen. The two children of this marriage were to be significant figures in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. But the Battle of Edgecote Moor did not end in Edward IV’s deposition. It was far from evident that Clarence would make a better king than Edward and as a younger brother he had less right, so his candidature attracted little support. Warwick and Edward were thus obliged to come to terms – although they did not do so for long.
7.Lord Ferrers had been present at the fall of Harlech.
8.The arrival of Herbert’s forces in Harlech is recalled today in the marching song ‘Men of Harlech’:
Men of Harlech in the hollow,
Do ye hear like rushing billow,
Wave on wave that surging follow,
Battle’s distant sound?
’Tis the tramp of Saxon foemen,
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen,
Be they knight, or hinds or yeomen
They shall bite the ground!
9.Eric Ives, The Reformation Experience (2012), p. 38.
10.Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers Company (1995), pp. 519, 535.
11.Vergil, Three Books, p. 135.
12.Ibid., p. 143.
13.Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, pp. 54–5.
14.Vergil, Three Books, p. 146.
15.The account is that of John Warkworth, the Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
16.David Clark, Barnet – 1471: Death of a Kingmaker (2006), p. 56.
17.Cora L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth: King of England and of France and Lord of Ireland (1923), Vol. 1, p. 587; HMC Report 12, Appendix 4, p. 4; Clarence witnessed Prince Edward’s death and made comments in a letter written only two days later; the Lancastrian commander, Margaret’s cousin Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset – the last legitimate male of the Beaufort line – managed to escape to the local abbey and claimed sanctuary, but he was taken and executed. King Edward’s contemporary apologists claimed the abbey had no franchise for protecting traitors. Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, n. 54, p. 177.
18.John Warkworth’s account, Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, Vol. 1, p. 594. King Edward’s youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was reportedly amongst those present.
19.J. L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–1503 (2004), p. 175.
20.Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, p. 892; Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, who would be drowned in 1475, was seen by the French chronicler Philippe de Commynes as ‘next in line of succession to the Lancastrian family’, but he was not a descendant of John of Gaunt. Henry Tudor was the last man standing in the House of Lancaster.
21.Sir Roger Vaughan.
22.John Leland, quoted in Thomas, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 224.
23.Philippe de Commynes, Memoirs, The Reign of Louis XI (ed and tr. M. Jones) (1972), p. 353.
24.Griffiths and Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty, pp. 76, 77; Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, p. 58; Memorials of King Henry VII (ed James Gairdner) Rolls Series (1858), pp. 15, 16; Vergil, Three Books, p. 155.
25.Lord Stanley was appointed steward late in 1471 so this was a recent appointment at the time of her marriage, and took place exactly when she would have been considering her options.
26.He had inherited the title from his father thirteen years earlier.
5Enter Richard III
1.Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, p. 146; J Hoult, The Village, Manor and Township of Knowsley (1930), p. 32. Margaret was also close to her stepdaughter, for whom she would order clothes.
2.The Travels of Leo of Rozmital (ed and tr. M. Letts), Hakluyt Society, additional series cviii (1957), pp. 46, 47.
3.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 67; Rosemary Horrox, ‘Edward IV’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
4.The French chronicler Philippe de Commynes had seen him as ‘next in line of succession to the Lancastrian family’ after the death of Henr
y VI.
5.Writing only five years later, the Roman scholar and visitor to England Dominic Mancini described it as ‘sweet wine’, while Philippe de Commynes describes it unequivocally as Malmsey, which was a type of sweet wine imported from Greece. Today his name adorns Blandy’s Duke of Clarence Madeira.
6.The pardon survives on the back of the patent that made his father Earl of Richmond.
7.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 59; other sources mention his death as being caused by a surfeit of wine or vegetables.
8.Richard had travelled from Northampton to Stony Stratford ‘at full gallop’. Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 77.
9.Ibid., p. 137, Appendix. Description by Nicolas von Poppeleau, who met him.
10.The type of scoliosis was idiopathic adolescent onset scoliosis. It would have developed after the age of ten and got worse as he got older. He may have stood as short as four foot eight inches tall. The body also had gracile radius bones, which would fit with descriptions of his slender limbs. John Rous’ Historia Regum Angliae, completed after Richard’s death, offered the earliest aspersions on his appearance. Richard was ‘retained within his mother’s womb for two years, emerging with teeth and hair to his shoulders’ and ‘small of stature with a short face and unequal shoulders, the right higher than the left’. Scoliosis is often hereditary, so it may be relevant that not only was Richard’s great-great-nephew Edward VI described as having one shoulder higher than another, but his great-great-great-niece Lady Mary Grey was described as extremely short, ‘crook backed and very ugly’. On the other claims concerning Richard: babies are often born with full heads of hair and also long fingernails – although the story of Richard’s teeth seems far-fetched. Alison Hanham, Richard III and His Early Historians 1483–1535 (1975), pp. 120, 121.
11.A descendant in the male line of John of Gaunt’s youngest brother, Thomas of Woodstock, he also had a Beaufort mother, the daughter of Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset. Buckingham was the nephew of Margaret Beaufort’s late husband Henry Stafford.
12.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, pp. 78, 79.
13.DeLloyd J. Guth, ‘Richard III, Henry VII and the City’ in Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages: A Tribute to Charles Derek Ross (ed Ralph A. Griffiths and James Sherborne) (1987), p. 187.
14.Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens, p. 177.
15.Thomas More recorded how the night before the council meeting Margaret Beaufort’s husband Thomas, Lord Stanley, had this nightmare. Awaking shortly before midnight Stanley sent a message to Hastings suggesting they flee the city. Hastings advised him to ignore the dream as insignificant, with fatal consequences.
16.In a public sermon that day it was alleged that Edward IV was not the son of Richard, Duke of York. According to rumours circulating in France later in the century, Cecily, Duchess of York had admitted to an affair in Rouen with a tall, blond archer called Blaybourne. The London sermon did not reveal who Edward IV’s ‘real’ father was – it merely focused on Edward IV’s lack of resemblance to the Duke of York in contrast to Richard, his ‘real’ heir. But whoever Edward IV’s father was, the fact remained that the Duke of York had recognised him as his son. Edward IV was therefore legitimate in law. Edward IV was to be characterised by Richard as a true, but failed king – and his children as illegitimate. Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, pp. 94, 97.
17.The bishop was Robert Stillington; the woman was Eleanor Butler, who had in fact died before the princes were born.
18.Rotuli Parliamentorum, Vol. 3, p. 419.
19.His earldom had come through his mother, Isabella, the eldest daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker.
20.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 105. £1,000 that the City had voted as Edward V’s coronation gift was passed to his uncle as the elders bowed to what they now saw as inevitable.
21.The doctor was John Argentine. Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 93.
22.Ann Wroe, Perkin (2004), p. 68, quoting the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet.
23.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 93. He suggests they vanished before the coronation.
24.From 3 July.
25.The younger daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, and the widow of Edward of Lancaster (the son Henry VI lost at Tewkesbury).
6The Princes in the Tower
1.So said Jean Molinet. Griffiths and Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty, p. 86.
2.Christopher Wilkins, The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville and the Age of Chivalry (2010), p. 109.
3.Surviving correspondence reveals Richard III was in touch with Duke Francis in July concerning Sir Edward specifically, but later correspondence suggests Henry was also being discussed. Charles Ross, Richard III (2011), p. 195.
4.Rotuli Parliamentorum, Vol. 3, p. 419.
5.York Civic Records: John Kendall from Nottingham to the City of York, 23 August 1483.
6.One such, a copper alloy mount of a boar, crowned, was found by the Thames near the Tower in October 2012. ‘Bore’ may have been an anagram of ‘ebor’, the Latin for York – the ‘white’ boar reflecting the ‘white rose’ tradition.
7.John Ashdown-Hill, Richard III’s Beloved Cousin, John Howard and the House of York (2009), pp. 99, 100, 107. Also Michael Hicks, ‘Unweaving the Web’ in Ricardian 9, No. 114 (September 1991), pp. 106–9.
8.By the middle of August Margaret Beaufort’s half-brother John Welles was also in rebellion against Richard and had fled to Brittany.
9.Thomas More, The History of Richard III, at http://www.r3.org/bookcase/more/moretext.
10.The princes were last seen playing in the gardens of the Tower during a mayoralty that ended on 28 October. The mayor was Sir Edmund Shaa, and the timing given is in the Great Chronicle of London. The Croyland Chronicle indicates the princes were alive until at least the second week of September (when Thomas More claims they were killed). After then hope seems to have faded. One exactly contemporary record, the Colchester Oathbook, written on or about 29 September, described Edward V as the ‘late son’ of Edward IV (although this could have referred simply to his being declared illegitimate); on this and the July plot, see Ashdown-Hill, Richard III’s Beloved Cousin, pp. 99, 100, 107. Also Hicks, ‘Unweaving the Web’ in op. cit., pp. 106–9. Intriguingly a requiem Mass was held at the Sistine Chapel in Rome on 23 September for ‘Edward, king of England’. This may refer to Edward IV, yet it was usual for such Masses to be held soon after news reached the Vatican of a monarch’s death. See Cliff Davies, ‘A Requiem for King Edward’ in Ricardian 9, No. 114 (September 1991), pp. 102–5.
11. In the absence of any hard facts, fiction has provided the popular answers as to who did it, and when. On the one hand we have Shakespeare’s Richard III: a biblical Herod, killer of innocents, whose hunchback is an outward sign of a disfigured soul. This built on a tradition that already existed. After the Tudor period, however, Shakespeare’s demonising of Richard provoked a reaction and Henry Tudor was put in the frame. One of the most influential works in this regard is Josephine Tey’s detective story, Daughter of Time. Written not long after Stalin’s show trials, which strongly influenced Tey’s viewpoint, the novel ‘proves’ that the princes were killed because they had a better claim to the throne than Henry Tudor.
12.Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .’ in op. cit., p. 24.
13.Commynes, Memoirs, The Reign of Louis XI, Introduction and pp. 354, 397.
14.This is drawn from Polydore Vergil. Thomas More, writing later during the reign of Henry VIII, claimed it was the other way round and that Morton had ‘turned’ the duke to support Henry Tudor’s distant Lancastrian claims.
15.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, pp. 90–1.
16.The physician was Lewis Caerleon.
17.Elizabeth Woodville had never shown any enthusiasm for such a match, and dropped it in the spring of 1485 when she considered Henry a busted flush.
18.That he took it seriously is also
evident in the fact he would have Henry VI’s body transferred the following year from its resting place at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. This was both a gesture of reconciliation, such as Henry V had made when he had Richard II’s body translated to Westminster Abbey in 1413, but also an attempt to co-opt and take control of the cult.
19.Indeed it is exactly this role that he would come to play after 1485. Richard would first be accused by the Welsh poet Daffyd ap Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of Mathafarn in 1485/6 of being ‘the sad lipped Saracen’ (note the anti-Semitic description) ‘cruel Herod’ who ‘slew Christ’s Angels’. Jonathan Hughes, The Religious Life of Richard III (2000), p. 8.
20.Barbara Harris, Edward Stafford 3rd Duke of Buckingham (1986), pp. 29, 30.
21.On the deaths of the princes see the Great Chronicle of London (ed A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley) (1938), pp. 234–7. This was written by someone in London at the time. Also see Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, pp. 92–3; then we have the later elaborations – or inventions – of Thomas More’s The History of Richard III (ed R. S. Sylvester) (1963), pp. 88, 89, and his brother-in-law, John Rastell, quoted in Desmond Seward, The Wars of the Roses (1995), p. 364. For the story that their murder had been disguised as blood-letting, see I. Arthurson, ‘Perkin Warbeck and the Princes in the Tower’ in Much Heaving and Shaving: Essays for Colin Richmond (eds M. Aston and R. Horrox) (2005), pp. 158–217. Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (ed and tr. D. Hay), Camden Third Series, Vol. 74 (1950) suggests the death of the princes was a punishment for Edward IV’s killing of Clarence.
22.Griffiths and Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty, pp. 93, 94.
23.Croyland Chronicle at http://www.r3.org/bookcase/croyland/croy8.html.
24.Great Chronicle of London (ed Thomas and Thornley), pp. 236–7.
7The Exile
1.Henry was based at the Chateaux de l’Hermine.
2.Brother of the executed Richard Grey, and half-brother to the princes in the tower.
Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family Page 45
