3.Described as a wart: ‘The Song of the Lady Bessy’, Griffiths and Thomas p. 168. Popular around 1500 it survives only in versions that date from a century later. For full text see http://www.archive.org/stream/mostpleasantsong00londrich/mostpleasantsong00londrich_djvu.txt.
4.Henry may also have believed that Richard was involved in the death of Henry VI. ‘Of the death of [Henry VI] diverse tales were told, but the most common fame went, that he was sticked with a dagger, by the hands of the duke of Gloucester’ (Robert Gaugin’s Compendium (1497). See Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .’, op.cit., p. 22).
5.Henry was still sending gifts to the cathedral in 1502, and St Vincent’s intercession is sought in Henry’s will. Margaret Condon, ‘The Last Will of Henry VII’ in Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII (ed T. Tatton-Brown and R. Mortimer) (2003), p. 133.
6.Virginia K. Henderson, ‘Rethinking Henry VII: The Man and His Piety in the Context of the Observant Franciscans’ in Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe (ed D. Biggs, S. D. Michalove and A. C. Reeves) (2004), n. 111 p. 344.
7.Buckingham’s former prisoner turned ally, the Bishop of Ely, John Morton, had escaped England and had a spy at Richard’s court. In August or September 1484 Morton contacted Henry from his place of exile in Burgundy and warned him that plans were laid in Brittany for his arrest. Pierre Landais was the same man the duke had sent at the last minute to prevent Henry’s repatriation in 1476. On Duke Francis’ senility, see Robert J. Knecht, The Valois (2004), pp. 108, 109.
8.Vergil, Three Books, pp. 206, 307. To the relief of the remaining exiles in Britanny Duke Francis was so embarrassed to discover his Tudor guests had been obliged to flee that he paid their passage to follow Henry.
9.Anne disliked Richard’s rapprochement with Brittany. But the situation in France was far from stable. Anne had a rival for the regency in the senior prince of the blood, Louis, Duke of Orléans.
10.There are those that argue that her subsequent return to court proves she didn’t believe Richard had killed the princes. But this document spells out pretty clearly what she feared for her daughters at his hands without a written agreement. And if the princes’ fate was unknown, Richard’s execution of her other son Richard Grey, and her brother, Lord Rivers, was acknowledged. She was simply doing the best she could for her daughters just as Frances, Duchess of Suffolk would do in the next century when she and her younger daughters served as ladies-in-waiting to Mary I, after the queen had executed her husband and elder daughter, Lady Jane Dudley in February 1554. British Library Harleian MSS 443, f. 308.
11.Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .’ , op. cit., p. 47. Vergil was wrong to claim that Henry planned to marry Maude Herbert instead. She was already married to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry). Maude’s brother, William Herbert 2nd Earl of Pembroke, had been married to Richard’s bastard daughter, Katherine, in February 1484.
8Bosworth
1.Original letters illustrative of English history; including numerous royal letters: from autographs in the British Museum, and one or two other collections (ed H. Ellis) (second series, 1827), Vol. 1, p. 163.
2.‘The Song of Lady Bessy’: Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (2004), p. 346.
3.The Mortimers were descended from Cadwaladr through the Welsh prince Llywelyn the Great. By contrast the Tudors’ closest verifiable connection was an ancestor who had been an officer of Llywelyn’s. Virginia K. Henderson, ‘Retrieving the “Crown in the Hawthorn Bush”: The Origins of the Badges of Henry VII’ in Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England (ed D. Biggs, S. D. Michalove and A. C. Reeves) (2002), n. 41, p. 255.
4.The narratives were attached to painted genealogies circulated at court. Alison Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda: Pedigree, Prophecy and the “British History” in the Reign of Edward IV’ in Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (ed Charles Ross) (1979), pp. 171–92. The prophecy begins as follows: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Book 7, Chapter 3: The Prophecy of Merlin: ‘As Vortegirn, king of the Britons, was sitting upon the bank of the drained pond, the two dragons, one of which was white, the other red, came forth, and approaching one another, began a terrible fight, and cast forth fire with their breath. But the white dragon had the advantage, and made the other fly to the end of the lake. And he, for grief at his flight, renewed the assault upon his pursuer, and forced him to retire. After this battle of the dragons, the king commanded Ambrose Merlin to tell him what it portended. Upon which he, bursting into tears, delivered what his prophetical spirit suggested to him, as follows: “Woe to the red dragon, for his banishment hasteneth on. His lurking holes shall be seized by the white dragon, which signifies the Saxons whom you invited over; but the red denotes the British nation, which shall be oppressed by the white. Therefore shall its mountains be levelled as the valleys, and the rivers of the valleys shall run with blood. The exercise of religion shall be destroyed, and churches be laid open to ruin. At last the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners. For a boar of Cornwall shall give his assistance, and trample their necks under his feet.”’ http://www.caerleon.net/history/geoffrey/Prophecy1.htm.
5.Sydney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’ in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 44 (1961–2), pp. 17–48, esp. pp. 23, 24, 37, 38. And these stories inspired other prophecies. A notable example describes the overthrow of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke and prophesies how this act of injustice was to be avenged by a king who would come to the throne in 1460 – the year Edward was crowned (according to the contemporary method of dating the year from the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March).
6.David Starkey, ‘King Henry and King Arthur’ in Arthurian Literature 16 (ed James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy) (1998), p. 181.
7.Philippe de Commynes, quoted in Griffiths and Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty, p. 129.
8.Blaauw, ‘On the Effigy . . .’ in op. cit., pp. 25, 38, 39.
9.R. A. Griffiths, ‘Henry Tudor: The Training of a King’ in Huntington Library Quarterly 49, No. 3 (summer 1986), pp. 208, 209.
10.It also helped that she was a woman: as Polydore Vergil observed, ‘the working’s of a woman’s wit was thought of small account’. Vergil, Three Books, p. 204.
11.Sir William was chamberlain of Chester and chief justice of north Wales.
12.According to legend the Dun Cow was a ‘monstrous beast four yards high and six yards long’, providing an inexhaustible supply of milk to people in Shropshire. One day a woman decided to see if the cow would fill a sieve. This so enraged the cow that it broke loose and ran amok. It was slain on Dunsmore Heath near Rugby by the mythical Guy of Warwick from whom the Nevilles claimed descent. There is a theory that ‘Dun Cow’ is a corruption of ‘Dena Gau’, or Danish region, and that Guy of Warwick defeated the Danes there. Henry could recruit amongst the Neville affinity because Warwick the Kingmaker had died in the Lancastrian cause, and although Richard III had married his daughter, Anne Neville, when she died Henry’s allies had spread rumours successfully that Richard had poisoned her. DeLloyd J. Guth ‘Richard III, Henry VII and the City’ in op. cit., pp. 192, 197, 198. In the seventeenth century the Cow’s rib was at Warwick Castle.
13.Great Chronicle of London in English Historical Documents Vol. 5 1485–1558 (ed David Douglas) (1967), p. 110.
14.Ibid.; Vergil, Three Books, p. 222.
15.Great Chronicle of London in op. cit., p. 110.
16.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, pp. 100, 101.
17.Vergil, Three Books, pp. 222, 223.
18.This man, named Bigod, later worked in the household of Margaret Beaufort. Quoted in Michael Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth (2000), p. 87.
19.Hall, Chronicle, p. 419. He refers to ‘Jack of Norfolk’, Shakespeare to ‘Jockey’, also a diminutive of John. Dickon is the equivalent of t
he modern ‘Dicky’ for Richard.
20.She was dead by 1485 but they had several children.
21.‘The Ballad of Bosworth Field’ in Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth, pp. 152–7; springals fired stones using a compressed spring.
22.The chronicler Hall recalled Norfolk ‘manfully died . . . to his great fame and laud’. Hall, Chronicle, p. 419. Other accounts suggest a different death. According to the Burgundian Jean Molinet writing in around 1490, Norfolk was captured and Henry Tudor sent him to the Earl of Oxford, who executed him. For yet more accounts of his death and descriptions of the hole in the skull of what may be Norfolk’s body, dug up in the nineteenth century, see Ashdown-Hill, Richard III’s Beloved Cousin, pp. 114, 115, 129. Several fifteenth-century sources including Molinet are also quoted at length at http://www.r3.org/bosworth/chron3.html. On Longe, see John Alban, ‘The Will of a Norfolk Soldier at Bosworth’ in Richardian 22 (2012).
23.http://www.r3.org/bosworth/chron3.html: early 1486, Diego de Valera, Castilian courtier, in E. M. Nokes and G. Wheeler, ‘A Spanish account of the battle of Bosworth’ in Ricardian 2, No. 36 (1972), p. 2. It is a sentiment repeated in ‘The Song of Lady Bessy’: ‘For upon this field will I like a many die.’ http://www.archive.org/stream/mostpleasantsong00londrich/mostpleasantsog00londrich_djvu.txt.
24.Hall, Chronicle, p. 418.
25.Recorded by John Rous of Warwick (d.1492).
26.Hall, Chronicle, p. 419.
27.http://www.r3.org/bosworth/chron3.html#molinet. The halberd is a long shaft with an axe blade mounted with a spike, and a hook or thorn behind. It remains the ceremonial weapon of the Swiss Guard to the Vatican.
28.According to the ballad tradition of ‘The Song of Lady Bessy’, the original of which was current in 1500, ‘They beat his bassnet to his head/Untill the braine came out with bloode.’ Several accounts describe the body being assaulted, although the helmet must have stayed in reasonable condition to be used later to crown Henry.
29.Contemporaries never mentioned any hawthorn bushes at Bosworth. The colour green, also used by the Tudors, is another symbol of renewal. Henderson, ‘Retrieving the “Crown in the Hawthorn Bush”’, in op. cit., pp. 170, 245.
30.Great Chronicle of London, in op. cit., p. 110.
31.Diego de Valera’s account: see Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth, p. 138.
32.A. F. Sutton and L. Visser-Fuchs, The Hours of Richard III (1990), pp. 39–40.
33.York Memoranda, 23 August 1485: see Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth, p. 131. The Earl of Northumberland would never be forgiven for his failure to fight for his king. A few years later, when he was attacked by a Yorkshire mob angry over tax collection, his retainers stood by and allowed him to be lynched.
Barons, knightis, squyers, one and alle,
. . . Turnd ther backis and let ther master fall,
. . . Alas his golde, his fee, his annuall rente,
Upon suche a sort was ille bestowde and spent!
(John Skelton 1460?–1529, ‘An Elegy on Henry 4th Earl of Northumberland’).
34.DeLloyd J. Guth, ‘Richard III, Henry VII and the City’ in op. cit., pp. 194–5.
9The Rose and the Passion
1.Mancini, Usurpation of Richard the Third, p. 103.
2.More, The History of Richard III.
3.Visser-Fuchs, ‘English Events in Caspar Weinreich’s Danzig Chronicle’ in op. cit., pp. 316, 317.
4.Dates differ: Great Chronicle of London says 3 September in op. cit., p. 111; Vergil, Anglica Historia, pp. 2–5.
5.Griffiths and Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty, p. 167.
6.Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (2007), p. 117.
7.Great Chronicle of London in op. cit., p. 111.
8.The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England 1275–1504 (ed Chris Given-Wilson) (16 vols., 2005), Vol. 15 (ed Rosemary Horrox), p. 107.
9.His mother’s possessions illustrate the connection: amongst them she would later bequeath a jewelled ornament of a ‘rose with an image of Our Lord and in every nail a pointed diamond, and four pearls, with tokens of the passion on the backside’. Henderson, ‘Retrieving the “Crown in the Hawthorn Bush”’ in op. cit., p. 245. The Passion was also associated with the fashionable cult of the Holy Name, of which Margaret Beaufort was an enthusiast, and would do much to promote. The symbol IHS (an abbreviation of Jesus) even became a badge of the Tudors, and the rose was often depicted with the monogram at its heart. Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (2002), pp. 147–63. See the image on p. 157 depicted in Margaret Beaufort’s translation of ‘The Mirror of Gold for the Sinful Soul’, etc. Today the red rose is a symbol of love – as, in a religious sense, it always was.
10.Henderson, ‘Rethinking Henry VII’ in op. cit., p. 336.
11.English Coronation Records (ed Leopold George Wickham Legg) (1901), pp. 203–6.
12.Harris, Edward Stafford, pp. 29, 30.
13.As well as that of his younger brother, Henry.
14.They do not seem ever to have grown close – Jasper never mentioned her in his will.
15.His heirs would later come to be the last white-rose opponents of the Lancastrian house.
16.As John Fisher recalled.
17.Ross, Richard III, pp. 136, 138.
18.Just how important his wife’s looks were to him is indicated by the detailed list of twenty-four questions he later posed concerning a possible future bride – the young Queen of Naples in 1505. He was very concerned to discover whether she had ‘any hair on her lips’ and asked open-ended questions about her breasts, hair and eye colour, complexion, fingers, arms, neck, and almost every other part of her body. CSPS 1 (436). For details of Elizabeth of York’s effigy, see Harvey and Mortimer, The Funeral Effigies of Westminister Abbey, p. 45.
19.The heiress was Mary Bohun; also for reference to the position of carver see National Archives, Cowdray 4934, f. 67.
20.Blaauw, ‘On the Effigy . . .’ , op. cit., p. 25, quoting British Library Cotton MSS Vitellius B XII, p. 124. Sir David would also attend the baptisms of Elizabeth and Henry’s first son, Arthur, and the future Henry VIII, as well as attending Arthur’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon.
21.Henry’s great ally John Morton, Bishop of Ely, had spent several months in Rome early in 1485 promoting the advantages of Henry Tudor as King of England. The papal bull was issued with astonishing speed on 27 March 1486, confirming Henry’s right to the throne as endorsed by victory in battle, ‘and by the ordinance and authority of Parliament made by the three estates of this land’. Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols. (eds P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin) (1964–9), Vol. 1, No. 5, pp. 6–7.
22.Henry also stopped using the heraldic device of the Dun Cow, with its Neville associations.
23.Anglo, ‘Early Tudor Propaganda’ in op. cit., p. 27.
24.Public vows of betrothal followed by consummation made a marriage legal before a wedding. It is therefore possible Elizabeth’s child was conceived before the ceremony. Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (2005), p. 139.
25.Raluca Radulescu, ‘Malory and Fifteenth-Century Political Ideas’ in Arthuriana 13, No. 3 (2003), p. 39.
10Securing the Succession
1.A Benedictine monastery.
2.Beaufort Hours in F. Madden, ‘Genealogical and Historical notes in Ancient Calenders’ in Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica I (1834), p. 279.
3.Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (1485): ‘And many men say that there ys wrytten uppon the thumbe thys: HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM, REXQUE FUTURUS’.
4.A Collection of Letters and State Papers, from the Original Manuscripts of Several Princes and Great Personages in the Two Last Centuries, etc. (comp. Leonard Howard) (2 vols., 1756), Vol. 1, pp. 228, 229.
5.E. M. G. Routh, Lady Margaret: A Memoir of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1924), pp. 64, 65.
6.Griffiths and Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty, p. 183; Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, p. 69.
7.For th
e servant Henry Parker’s account, see British Library Add MSS 12060.
8.The esquire was Thomas Kyme.
9.Arlene Naylor Okerlund, Elizabeth of York (2009) pp. 95–7; Excerpta Historica (ed Samuel Bentley) (1831), p. 285.
10.John Leland, De Rebus Britannicis (ed Thomas Hearne) (1774), Vol. 4, p. 254.
11.Ibid.
12.Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .’ in op. cit., p. 6; Ricardian 7, No. 95 (December 1986).
13.Leigh Ann Craig, ‘Royalty, Virtue, and Adversity: The Cult of King Henry VI’ in Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 35, No. 2 (summer 2003), p. 190.
14.Condon, ‘The Last Will of Henry VII’ in op. cit., p. 133.
15.On her subsequent treatment and funeral, see Chapter 11.
16.The Danzig merchant who knew Henry as ‘King Richmond’ referred to the pretender without quibble in his chronicle as ‘the son of . . . the Duke of Clarence’. Visser-Fuchs, ‘English Events in Caspar Weinreich’s Danzig Chronicle’ in op. cit., p. 317.
17.The fact that her only surviving son, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, was arrested during the crises is indicative of Henry’s suspicion that even members of the extended family could not be entirely trusted not to betray him.
18.The duke had been killed fighting the Swiss at Nancy in January 1477, losing the French province of Burgundy back to the French crown.
19.The father is variously described as an organ maker, a tailor, a barber or a baker. It has also been suggested the name Simnel could have origins from within the Duchy of Burgundy. There is mention of a ‘son of Clarence’ in Mechelen in July 1486 (Hicks, The Wars of the Roses, p. 243). Simnel was a word often used to describe a sweet bread or cake in England. Lambert was an occupational name for a shepherd (lamb-herd) and also an old English name (from Landbeorht). Whether Lambert Simnel was his real name is another matter. People were overheard calling the boy ‘John’ in conversation.
20.Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 25.
21.Beaufort Hours, f.240v: thanks to Eric Ives for help with the Latin translation.
Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family Page 46
