There are no strictly contemporary descriptions of Owen Tudor, but Hall says he was ‘a goodly gentleman and a beautiful person’ and Polydore Vergil, who began his History of England in the reign of Owen’s grandson, is enthusiastic about his ‘wonderful gifts of body and mind’. An earlier chronicler, with no royal Tudor patrons to consider, is noticeably less complimentary in a passing reference to ‘one Oweyn, no man of birth neither of livelihood’. All the same, Owen obviously had something to recommend him, and good looks and personal charm would seem to be the most likely attributes. We can only speculate - but the Queen and her Clerk of the Wardrobe would have been in daily contact, they were about the same age and both were strangers in a strange land. Perhaps it is not so surprising that they should have gravitated together.
The fact that the King’s mother had ‘privily wedded’ one of her servants was not advertised. The earliest known reference to it occurs in one of the London chronicles in a brief entry under the year 1538, and says that the common people knew nothing of it until after the Queen was dead and buried. This may well be true, and it also seems likely that the young King was kept in ignorance of his mother’s second marriage during her lifetime. But it must certainly have been common knowledge in court circles generally. At least, none of the traditional accounts explain how Katherine contrived to produce four Tudor babies -Edmund, born at the royal manor of Hadham in Hertfordshire, Jasper, born at Hatfield, another son, Owen, and a daughter - without anybody apparently noticing these interesting events. Everything, in fact, points to the conclusion that the Queen and her socially undesirable husband were left in peace to enjoy the all too brief period of their married life. When Katherine retired into the Abbey of Bermondsey some time in 1436 there is no evidence at all that this was due to anything but the ‘long and grievous illness’ which finally killed her on 3 January 1437.
After the Queen’s death, her second family broke up. Edmund and Jasper were placed in the care of the Abbess of Barking, who looked after them for the next three years. The two younger children have no part in this story, but Owen later became a monk at Westminster, surviving into his nephew’s reign, and the girl is said to have gone into a nunnery. As for their father, the remainder of his career has a distinct flavour of melodrama.
Shortly after Katherine’s death, a summons was issued by the Council requiring ‘one Owen Tudor which dwelled with the said Queen Katherine’ to come into the King’s presence. Owen evidently suspected a trap, for he declined to accept the invitation unless he was first given an assurance, in the King’s name, that he might ‘freely come and freely go’. A verbal promise to this effect was duly delivered by one Myles Sculle, but Owen was not satisfied. He did, however, make his way secretly to London where he went into sanctuary at Westminster, resisting the persuasions of his friends to come and disport himself in the tavern at Westminster gate. After a period of time described as ‘many days’, days no doubt spent in reconnoitring the situation, Owen emerged from his lair to make a sudden appearance in the royal presence. He had heard, he said, that the King was ‘heavily informed of him’ and was anxious to declare his innocence and truth. But almost certainly Henry, now fifteen years old, had just wanted to take a look at his unknown stepfather and Owen was allowed to depart ‘without any impeachment’. In fact, he had freely come and freely gone - but not for long.
Like so much else about him, the reason for Owen Tudor’s arrest and committal to ward in Newgate gaol remains a mystery. Polydore Vergil says it was ordered by the Duke of Gloucester because Owen ‘had been so presumptuous as by marriage with the Queen to intermix his blood with the noble race of kings’, but there is absolutely no evidence to support this assertion. In two obscurely worded documents, one of which is dated 15 July 1437, the Council were at considerable pains to establish the legality of the arrest, having regard to the King’s recent promise of safe conduct and also, it may be assumed, to the prisoner’s royal connections. In neither of these documents is any specific charge mentioned, but from the very meagre information they do contain, it looks as if Owen was involved in a private quarrel - probably of a financial nature - with some person or persons unknown.
The next news of him appears in the Chronicle of London, which records that he ‘brake out of Newgate against night at searching time, through help of his priest, and went his way, hurting foul his keeper; but at the last, blessed be God, he was taken again.’ This exploit took place early in 1438, for in March of that year Lord Beaumont received twenty marks to cover his expenses in guarding the fugitives and bringing them before the Council. Owen, his priest and his servant were sent back to Newgate in disgrace, but a sum of eighty-nine pounds which was found on the priest was confiscated and handed over to the Treasury. Who this enterprising cleric was, where that quite sizeable amount of money came from, and why Owen had been so desperate to escape are three more unanswered questions.
The belief that Owen broke prison twice seems to have arisen from a nineteenth-century misreading of the documents. He was transferred from Newgate to Windsor Castle in July 1438, a move which is again unexplained but which seems to have marked the beginning of an improvement in his fortunes. In July of the following year he was conditionally released - one of the conditions being that he made no attempt to go to Wales or ‘parts adjacent’. Presumably the authorities were remembering the old Tudor involvement with Glyn Dwr. At last, in November 1439, he was granted a general pardon for all offences committed before October, though there is still no indication as to what those offences had been.
Owen had spent three years in gaol without trial and a further four months on probation, but from then on he became respectable. The King, ‘moved by special causes’, provided him with a pension of forty pounds a year, paid out of the privy purse ‘by especial favour’ and his name crops up from time to time over the next twenty years in the Calendars of the Close and Patent Rolls as witness to a charter, as sharing in the grant of a holding at Lambeth, as receiving an annuity of a hundred pounds; but it is an entry of 1459 which is the most significant historically, for it was then that Owen ap Meredith ap Tudur seems to have finally become Owen Tudor esquire. Owen himself followed the normal Welsh custom of adding his father’s name to his own - at least he referred to himself as Owen ap Meredith in his petition for letters of denizenship in 1432. In official documents he is variously described as Owen ap Meredith, Owen Meredith, Owen ap Meredith ap Tudur (or Tider) until 1459, when a hurrying clerk wrote him down as Owen Tuder and gave England a Tudor instead of a Meredith dynasty.
While their father was enduring his mysterious difficulties and gradually winning his way back into polite society, Edmund and Jasper Tudor were growing up. In November 1452 they were created Earls of Richmond and Pembroke respectively and thereafter were granted lands and offices by the Crown. In fact, the gentle, devout, ineffectual Henry VI showed both his half-brothers a remarkable degree of generosity, but never more so than when it came to choosing a wife for the new Earl of Richmond. On 1 November 1455, Edmund Tudor married Margaret Beaufort - an event which took him a giant step up the social ladder and which was to have an incalculable effect on the whole course of English history.
The Beaufort family was the result of a long-ago liaison between John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and his daughters’ governess, Katherine Swynford, née de Roet. Their four children were indisputably born on the wrong side of the blanket, but after the death of his second wife John of Gaunt had made an honest woman of Katherine, and his Beaufort progeny (so called after the castle in France where they were born) had been legitimized by the Pope, by Letters Patent issued by Richard 11 and, for good measure, by Act of Parliament. The Beauforts grew rich and powerful - Cardinal Beaufort, last survivor of Katherine Swynford’s brood, had governed England with the Duke of Gloucester during Henry VI’s minority - and after the King and his heirs they represented the ruling family of Lancaster.
The bestowal of Margaret Beaufort, a great-great-granddaug
hter of Edward in, was a matter of State and what prompted the King to grant first the wardship and then the marriage of this important heiress of the blood royal to such a junior member of the peerage, son of an obscure Welsh esquire but with possibly complicating royal connections, is yet another mystery. Perhaps, at a time of increasing political instability, Henry simply felt that the Tudors at least could be trusted to remain loyal Lancastrians. If so, he was to be proved right.
Edmund’s marriage coincided with the outbreak of that long-drawn-out dynastic struggle among the all too numerous descendants of Edward III, conveniently known as the Wars of the Roses. The roots of the quarrel went back to the coup d’'état of 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke had wrested the crown from his cousin Richard, and, like most family quarrels, it became progressively more bitter and more complicated with the passage of time.
Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, did not live to see its outcome. Nor did he live to see his son. He died at Carmarthen in November 1456, leaving his young wife six months pregnant. Jasper at once came to the rescue, taking his brother’s widow under his protection, and Margaret Beaufort’s child was born at Pembroke Castle on 28 January 1457. There is an interesting tradition that the baby was to have been christened Owen (which sounds like Jasper’s choice), but that his mother insisted he should be given the royal and English name of Henry. Although the Countess of Richmond was herself little more than a child - she was probably only twelve years old at the time of her marriage - this sort of determination would have been perfectly in character. An intelligent, serious-minded, deeply religious girl, she later developed into a formidable personality, exercising a profound influence on the dynasty she had founded.
In the general turmoil of the 1450s the arrival of a fatherless infant in a wintry and uncertain world attracted no particular attention, and for the first five years of his life Henry Tudor stayed with his mother, snug in his uncle Jasper’s stronghold of Pembroke. Not that he saw much of his uncle Jasper. The fortunes of the Tudor family were now inextricably involved with those of the Lancastrian cause and as the deadly power-game of York and Lancaster unfolded, the Earl of Pembroke was proving himself one of Henry VI’s most useful supporters.
At first things went relatively well but early in 1461 came disaster, when the Lancastrians were heavily defeated at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross. One casualty of this reversal was Owen Tudor, quite an old man by now but who had nevertheless been present fighting under Jasper’s banner. Owen was among those captured by the Yorkists and taken to Hereford to be executed in the market place. It is ironical, but not untypical of his whole story, that it is not until the moment of his death that we get our only authentic personal glimpse of the man who sired a line of kings and whose remote descendants sit on the English throne today. It seems that the gentleman of Wales could not bring himself to believe that his luck had turned at last, for William Gregory’s chronicle says that he trusted ‘all away that he should not be headed till he saw the axe and the block, and when that he was in his doublet he trusted on pardon and grace till the collar of his red velvet doublet was ripped off. Then he said “that head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Katherine’s lap” and put his heart and mind wholly unto God and full meekly took his death.’ His head was displayed on the highest step of the market cross and there followed a gruesome incident when ‘a mad woman combed his hair and washed away the blood of his face, and she got candles and set about him burning more than a hundred’.
Jasper, tough, energetic and resourceful, escaped from Mortimer’s Cross with his life - though that was about all he escaped with. Some six weeks later the Yorkist Earl of March was proclaimed King as Edward IV and another Lancastrian defeat, at Towton, soon confirmed his position. Henry vi’s indomitable Queen, Margaret of Anjou, managed to keep the fight alive for a time, but eventually she and her son were forced to take refuge in France. Henry himself, reduced to a wandering fugitive, was betrayed to his enemies and deposited in the Tower. The eclipse of the Lancastrians seemed complete.
It was not long, of course, before the misfortunes of his relatives rebounded on the little boy at Pembroke. Jasper Tudor, wanted for treason by the new regime and stripped of his lands and title, was reported ‘flown and taken to the mountains’. With the best will in the world he no longer had any power to protect his nephew and his sister-in-law. Pembroke Castle surrendered to the Yorkists in November 1461, and Henry Tudor was separated from his mother and transferred to the custody of Lord Herbert of Raglan. It must have been a traumatic experience for a child of four-and-a-half, but his new guardian seems to have treated him kindly. In fact Lord Herbert planned to marry him to his daughter, Maud, so it is reasonable to assume that he was brought up as one of the family and given an education proper to his station in life. The names of two of his tutors are known, and he is said to have been an apt pupil.
Young Henry remained with the Herberts in Wales for the next nine years. The existence of this obscure sprig of the ruined Lancastrians did not cause the ruling Yorkist party to lose any sleep. Henry Tudor was being raised in a reliable Yorkist family - he would have plenty of opportunity to see where his own best interests lay. Then came a dramatic series of developments which temporarily altered the whole political situation, and permanently and drastically altered the status of Lord Herbert’s ward.
In 1469 Edward IV fell out with his most powerful supporter, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as ‘the Kingmaker’. Warwick went over to the other side and by the summer of 1470 he was in France, burying the hatchet with Queen Margaret, once his bitterest enemy, and canvassing the support of Louis XI for another coup d’état. By the autumn a remarkable triple alliance had been sealed. Edward, caught unawares, found it necessary to go abroad in a hurry and the brief ‘Readeption’ of Henry VI had begun.
Prominent among the returning exiles was Jasper Tudor, who had spent most of his years in the wilderness conducting a one-man guerrilla campaign against the Yorkist regime - moving from one safe house to another in Wales, then turning up in Ireland, then Scotland, making a descent on the Northumbrian coast, over to France (where King Louis recognized him as cousin), then landing in Wales again with fifty followers to make a commando-type raid on Denbigh Castle. ‘Not always at his heart’s ease, nor in security of life or surety of living’ Jasper never gave up and missed no chance, however unpromising, of keeping a spark of resistance alight.
One of his first actions on arriving in England was to make the journey to Wales to retrieve his nephew, whom he found ‘kept as a prisoner, but honourably brought up with the wife of William Herbert’. Jasper took the boy, now rising fourteen, back to London with him, and early in November Henry Tudor was presented to Henry VI. It is natural that Jasper should have been anxious to remind the newly restored King of the existence of his brother’s son, but Polydore Vergil was probably improving on the occasion when he records that Henry VI, after gazing silently on the child for ‘a pretty space’, turned to his attendant lords and remarked: ‘This truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.’ Admittedly the King was widely regarded as a holy man and a mystic who might be expected to feel moved to prophecy, but very few Englishmen in that unsettled winter would have been prepared to commit themselves for more than a few days ahead, and to the practical men of affairs at Court Henry Tudor’s future would have looked as precarious and uncertain as their own.
In spite of his signal services to the Lancastrian cause, there was no government appointment or seat on the Council for Jasper Tudor. He and his nephew were sent back to Wales with instructions to be ready to mobilize their people should the war be renewed, but Jasper did at least have the satisfaction of recovering his earldom from the Herbert family. Even this was short lived. Barely six months after his flight, Edward IV was back in England re-proclaiming himself King. On Easter Day 1471, he defeated Warwick’s army at Barnet - a battle fought, appropriately enough, in thick fog.
The Kingmaker was killed and Henry VI, ‘a man amazed and utterly dulled with troubles and adversity’, found himself back in the Tower.
On the day that Barnet was being lost and won, Queen Margaret and her son, Edward Prince of Wales, landed at Weymouth - too late to save the situation. Together with the Lancastrian lords who rallied to them, they marched up the Severn valley, hoping to join forces with Jasper Tudor and his Welshmen hurrying down from the north. But Edward IV, moving with his usual speed and tactical skill, intercepted the Queen at Tewkesbury - an encounter which ended in final and complete disaster for the Lancastrians. The last surviving male members of the Beaufort family lost their lives and the Prince of Wales, for whose sake his mother had striven so long and so gallantly, was killed as he tried to escape. On Tuesday, 21 May, King Edward returned to London in triumph and that same night, ‘between eleven and twelve of the clock’, King Henry was released from his earthly troubles by a Yorkist sword.
When Jasper heard the grim news that Queen Margaret ‘was vanquished in a foughten field at Tewkesbury and that matters were past all hope of recovery’, he retreated to Chepstow, where he narrowly escaped capture and death. Again a hunted fugitive, Jasper had to move fast if he was to be able to perform one more vitally important service for the future of his party. After the horrifying events of the past few weeks, his young nephew had incredibly become the only surviving male of the Lancastrian line. At all costs Henry Tudor must be prevented from falling into Yorkist hands.
The House of Tudor Page 2
