The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  With Richard’s killing, it was all over. His men streamed across the surrounding fields in flight, shedding armour as they ran. They were pursued and slaughtered by Lord Stanley’s troops: belatedly, and ingloriously, Tudor’s father-in-law had got involved. Those who could, surrendered. William Catesby was captured, along with the quiescent earl of Northumberland and Thomas Howard, son of the dead duke of Norfolk. And, as his soldiers picked at the corpses of their enemies, stripping them bare of valuables, a disbelieving, traumatized, elated Henry Tudor made his way up a nearby hill, along with a clutch of his commanders, nobles and knights.

  There, to shouts of ‘God save King Henry!’, Lord Stanley placed Richard’s coronet – apparently found in a hawthorn bush – on the head of his son-in-law. Tudor, it was said, gave orders for the wounded to be tended, and for the dead to be buried honourably. If the orders applied to Richard, they weren’t carried out.

  As the battlefield was cleared, bodies piled onto carts, Richard’s body was stripped of its fine armour and clothes, trussed up ‘like a hog’ – a sneering reference to his badge of the white boar – and heaved, naked, over the back of a horse, a noose round its neck. On the way back to Leicester, it became a plaything for Tudor’s victorious, blood-drunk troops: somebody stabbed it in the right buttock with a dagger, so hard that the dagger blade penetrated through to Richard’s pelvis.11

  The indignities weren’t over. Back in Leicester, Richard’s body was put on display in the Franciscan Priory there ‘for all men to wonder upon’ – and to make sure, just as Edward IV had done with Henry VI back in 1471, that everyone knew he was dead. But if the custom was common enough, the manner of it was not: Richard’s body was lain out still covered in ‘mire and filth’. Neither was his interment. He was buried ‘irreverently’, without the appropriate funeral rites: ‘in a ditch like a dog’, some said.12

  Commentators made no attempt to airbrush this treatment. Even pro-Tudor writers were appalled by the lack of humanity afforded Richard’s corpse. But this savage treatment of him, they pointed out, was in a way the point. This was a ‘miserable spectacle’, remarked Vergil, but ‘not unworthy for the man’s life’. In other words, Richard got what was coming to him. He was no true king but a usurper, who had abused his vows of ‘allegiance and fidelity’ to his own nephews: the abuse of his body drove home the fact. But, added another chronicler, the natural order of things had been righted. Richard had tried to destroy his late brother’s family line, and now, those faithful to the memory of Edward IV and the disappeared princes had triumphed. It was ‘King Edward’s sons whose cause, above all, was avenged in this battle’ – a battle which would come to be named after a nearby town: Bosworth.13

  On 7 November 1485, Henry Tudor’s first Parliament opened at Westminster. His title to the throne was declared. Unlike the circumlocutions of Richard III’s titulus regius, it stated briefly and simply that, for the avoidance of doubt, the crown of England and all its possessions belonged to Tudor, his lawful heirs, ‘and no-one else’. There was no further validation needed. Richard III’s reign, meanwhile, was swiftly delegitimized. Backdating his reign to the day before Bosworth – when the battle was fought, therefore, Tudor was the king and Richard the usurper, his supporters by definition traitors – Tudor annulled Richard’s titulus regius, eradicated it from parliamentary record, and ordered that all surviving copies should be seized and burned, in order that Richard’s claim may be ‘forever out of memory and forgotten’. Tudor understood perfectly well the power of such documents. And in convicting Richard’s key followers – among them Ratcliffe, Catesby, Lovell, Brackenbury and the Northamptonshire sheriff Roger Wake – he made a wry nod to the rhetoric by which Richard had tried to sustain his own kingship. All kings, Tudor observed, had a duty to promote and reward virtue, and to oppress and punish vice.14

  Dealing with the Yorkist line of Edward IV, which had brought Tudor to power and whose cause he had embraced to add legitimacy to his own, was not so straightforward. Tudor duly rewarded those who had fled into exile with him, but as Yorkist loyalists quickly found, he had no intention of turning the political clock back to a time before Richard III’s reign. That November, there was no mention whatsoever in Tudor’s own claim to the throne of his bride-to-be, Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York. As one dismayed former councillor of Edward put it, Tudor could supply all that ‘appeared to be missing’ in his own title to the throne by marrying Elizabeth: why, the implicit question ran, didn’t he do so?15

  Although Tudor had been happy for people to paint him as the ‘avenger of the white rose’, he was not about to allow his own claim to the crown to depend on that of his wife. Tudor wanted to draw a line under the fratricidal Yorkist conflict that had brought him to power; besides which, the fate of Richard had shown what happened when kings came to lean on an overly narrow base of support. Tudor had avenged the white rose – but he had no intention of making good its claims. He would be king in his own right, and if people refused to acknowledge him as such, he would make them.

  When Parliament was prorogued for Christmas, the Commons made a humble request to the new king. Given that Parliament had now unequivocally decreed that the right to the crown of England should ‘rest, remain and stay in the person of the lord king and the heirs lawfully begotten of his body’, they suggested, he was now safe to marry ‘that illustrious lady Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV’. From such a marriage, people hoped for offspring ‘from the stock of kings, to comfort the whole realm’. After the Commons’ petition had been made, the Lords spiritual and temporal rose collectively from their seats, bowed to the still figure who, swathed in his purple robes of state, sat on the throne of England, and asked, again, whether the king would marry Elizabeth of York. Acknowledging their request, Henry VII replied that he was content to do so.16

  Epilogue

  Sometime in 1486, the year after Bosworth, an ageing Warwickshire antiquary called John Rous finished his Historia regum Angliae, a history of the kings of England that he had been working on for the previous six years. Originally commissioned by one of the surveyors working on St George’s Chapel, Windsor, as a way of giving Edward IV some ideas about which past monarchs he might like to commemorate in the new building, Rous’s book had been overtaken by Edward’s death and the cataclysmic upheavals of Richard’s reign. At first, Rous had been highly complimentary about Richard, writing verses in his praise. But then Bosworth had happened. Dedicating his history to Henry VII, Rous painted a grotesque pen-portrait of the king’s predecessor. The infant Richard, Rous claimed, had emerged from his mother’s womb after a gestation period of two years, sporting a full set of teeth and shoulder-length hair. As an adult he had developed markedly uneven shoulders – right higher than left – and was a ‘despicable’ person: smooth-mannered, duplicitous and exceptionally cruel. The princes, Edward IV’s sons, had been slaughtered in his care, and he ruled ‘in the way that Antichrist is to reign’. Richard had, Rous grudgingly admitted, met an honourable death, fighting nobly ‘despite his little body and feeble strength’ – though even here he couldn’t resist a dig. Richard, he wrote, shouted ‘Treason’ over and over again, ‘tasting what he had often administered to others’.1

  Rous’s damning portrayal of Richard was an exercise in self-preservation. He was hardly alone. In the aftermath of Bosworth, many who had profited from Richard’s rule conveniently found that they had been averse to it all along. Petitioning against his attainder in Henry VII’s first parliament, Catesby’s brother-in-law Roger Wake, who had played an instrumental role in Richard’s seizing of power at Stony Stratford, claimed that it had been against his ‘will and mind’ to fight for him – an impulse that, by the last desperate days of Richard’s reign, was shared by all too many. But in his presentation of Richard, Rous was making Henry Tudor’s own point for him. Just as Richard was a physical anomaly, so was his reign, an unnatural deformation in the true lineal descent of kings that had now been corrected and straightened out.2r />
  In the first years of Henry VII’s rule there were many who didn’t see it that way. Yorkists of ‘old royal blood’ abounded: men such as Richard’s informal heir John de la Pole who, grooming a boy to impersonate Clarence’s young son – another who, on paper, had a far more convincing claim to the throne than Tudor – raised conspiracy, international backing and an army. On a hot June day in the English midlands, De la Pole and his forces were massacred at the Nottinghamshire village of East Stoke. One man who got away was Richard’s former chamberlain, Francis, Lord Lovell, who spent the rest of his days in the obscurity of a Scottish exile. The young pretender, the son of an Oxford joiner named Lambert Simnel, was put to work in the royal kitchens as a spit turner. The threat from Richard’s supporters seemed contained. Contained enough, at any rate, for Henry VII in 1495 to commission a new alabaster tombstone for Richard’s grave, together with an epitaph commending the dead king’s bravery and complimenting Henry himself on honouring Richard ‘piously’ and – a nod to Henry’s priorities – ‘at your expense’.3

  It was, however, the other side of the Yorkist family that proved most problematic for Henry Tudor. As everybody knew, his opportunity had only come because of the supposed deaths of Edward IV’s heirs, a fact that he both simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed, continuing to downplay the claims of his wife’s family: it wasn’t until 1487, after Elizabeth of York had given birth to their first son, the new dynasty incarnate, that Henry finally had her crowned his queen. By then, her mother had also left court. Restored to her royal dignity, Elizabeth Woodville had since proved an uncomfortable reminder of the true origins of Henry’s claim, while her equivocations during Richard’s reign suggested that she was a less than fully paid-up member of the Tudor project. Perhaps subject to some gentle arm-twisting, she took up residence at Bermondsey Abbey; Henry, meanwhile, transferred her dower lands to her daughter the queen. On her death in 1492 Elizabeth Woodville was buried at Windsor Castle alongside her dead husband, as both she and he had wished. Her funeral, mirroring her own directions, was a paltry affair: economies had even been taken with the ceremonial lighting, which used ‘never a new torch but old torches … and torches ends’. All her daughters were there, except the heavily pregnant queen, and alongside them a young woman called Grace, ‘a bastard daughter of King Edward’ who had, perhaps, grown to love her adoptive mother. Elizabeth Woodville had nothing to bequeath, no worldly goods to leave the queen, ‘my dearest daughter’, nor to ‘reward any of my children, according to my heart and mind’. Instead, she left them all she could: her blessing.4

  Yet dissident Yorkists were already targeting the fundamental flaw in Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne. Backed by Margaret, the dowager duchess of Burgundy – who had always been closer to her brothers Clarence and Richard than Edward, whom she had never really forgiven for his failure to come to Burgundy’s aid – conspirators claimed to have found another Yorkist heir: the younger of Edward IV’s sons, who had not been murdered by his uncle Richard after all, and had come to claim his throne. Although the Tudors dismissed him as the son of a Flemish boatman named Perkin Warbeck, the boy was convincing – and he stirred visceral loyalties in the Yorkists who had since transferred their allegiances to Henry VII. Turning the political clock back to April 1483, Warbeck’s appearance threatened to wreck the settlement represented by Henry VII and Elizabeth of York’s marriage and offspring.

  Alarmingly for Henry, Warbeck managed to reunite plotters on both sides of the Yorkist divide. Ex-servants of Clarence joined forces with those who had fought for Richard III and those loyal to Edward IV’s sons; even the Yorkist matriarch Cecily, now approaching eighty years old, was linked with the conspiracy.5 Yorkist loyalists had become the enemy within: having absorbed them, Henry now purged them. Identified as a ringleader, Sir William Stanley – who had been Henry’s chamberlain, responsible for his personal security – was beheaded, but the conspiracy endured. Henry did what he had to do. Warbeck was captured, tortured and executed; so too, to prevent him becoming a focus for rebellion, was Clarence’s real son, a harmless, backward child. In 1502 Richard’s close adviser Sir James Tyrell – who had, astonishingly, managed to transition to the new regime – was found guilty of plotting with another of the De la Pole family and executed for treason. In the days and weeks after his beheading, word spread that Tyrell had confessed to arranging the murders of Edward IV’s sons, a confession which, the Tudor regime hoped, would put the matter to bed once and for all.

  Through all this, Henry VII’s relationship with Elizabeth of York endured. This was a true union. When, in 1503, she died in childbirth, Henry was devastated, as much for his personal loss as for the political catastrophe it represented. With his first son already dead, the future of the dynasty now lay in their second, the boy who would become Henry VIII. The last illness-ravaged years of Henry VII’s reign were a desperate exercise in hanging on until the boy could reach his majority: anything to prevent a re-run of spring 1483.

  Over time, though, Yorkists of both camps came to identify with the Tudor regime. John Howard’s son Thomas – wounded at Barnet fighting for Edward, and at Bosworth in Richard’s cause – was persuaded to follow the long road back to Henry VII’s favour, eventually inheriting the dukedom of Norfolk that Richard had conferred on his father. When Henry VII died in April 1509, having dragged his family to the brink of a first untroubled dynastic succession in over a century, among the select few gathered at the king’s bedside in his privy chamber was George, Lord Hastings: grandson of Edward’s chamberlain William, he had also inherited his political instincts. Others, like the inscrutable figure of Thomas Montgomery, had woven an even more dextrous path. One of Edward IV’s most valuable advisers, Montgomery had transferred to Richard’s service – adding to his already substantial personal wealth in the process – and, having put in a discreet appearance at Bosworth on Richard’s behalf, had adroitly fallen into step with the Tudor regime with no discernible change of pace.6

  His maternal grandfather incarnate, the young Henry VIII embraced Edward IV’s lifestyle, surrounding himself with the descendants of Edward’s household men: Parrs, Greys, Brandons, Guildfords and Bourchiers. Deeply aware of his own Yorkist inheritance, he had also inherited Edward’s suspicion of the other side of the family. Still on the run, Richard III’s youngest De la Pole nephew, Richard, became known as ‘White Rose’: a badge the Tudors now associated with their enemies. When in 1514 De la Pole threatened to invade England to claim his inheritance – backed, in time-honoured fashion, by French funds and using Brittany as a launchpad – Henry scrambled to make peace with France. He wasn’t about to make Richard III’s mistake again.

  As the sixteenth century unfolded, the faultlines in the house of York, overlaid now with the religious conflict sweeping Europe, continued to shape Tudor fortunes. This time it was Clarence’s descendants who were at the heart of the problem. His grandchildren, foremost among them Cardinal Reginald Pole, deplored Henry VIII’s treatment of his first wife Katherine of Aragon, his religious choices, and his inferior claim to the throne. For Henry, the Poles – together with other Plantagenet families the Courtenays and the Nevilles – became an existential threat. He tried to eliminate them in a frenzy of torture and execution, and in 1541 had his seventy-year-old aunt, Clarence’s daughter Margaret, executed for treason: a killing that echoed Edward IV’s judicial murder of his brother over sixty years before. But Reginald Pole endured, spearheading England’s return to the Roman religion under Henry’s daughter Mary. On 17 November 1558, now back in London, Pole died of flu; that same day, across the city, Mary also died and Henry VIII’s younger daughter was proclaimed Elizabeth I of England.

  In Elizabeth’s reign, a time when the civil wars had finally passed from living memory, the story of York finally ceased to be a live issue for the Tudors. Moralizing histories of the conflict became simply a way of throwing the Tudor achievement into starker relief while entertaining the public with the ghastliness of t
he Yorkists’ fratricidal relationships. In decades to come, accounts of Edward’s self-indulgence, Clarence’s vaunting ambition and Richard’s tyranny were offered to monarchs as examples of how not to do it, their authors often more concerned with flattering or pointing out the foibles of their dedicatees than with the accuracy of their history.

  When the clouds of civil disorder once more started to gather in the mid-seventeenth century, the story of the house of York again assumed a terrible immediacy. It was crucial, William Habington urged Charles I in his Historie of Edward the Fourth, that these ‘rugged times’ be explored, ‘in order to avoid the byways of error and misfortune’. Back then, he wrote, the conflict had finally been resolved and ‘sovereignty found a happy calm’. It was a comparison made more in hope than expectation. A year after Habington’s book was published, England was once again at war with itself.7

  1. Detail from an illuminated genealogy, probably created to commemorate Edward IV’s accession in 1461, showing the superior Yorkist line of descent. Here, Edward’s claim to the crown is decorated with images of kingship and the Yorkist badges of the white rose and the sun in splendour; the fetterlock; the white lion of the Mortimer earls of March and the black bull of Clarence; the white hart of the Yorkists’ ancestor Richard II; and Edward’s own motto ‘counforte et lyesse’, ‘comfort and joy’. Below Edward himself are listed his siblings, foremost among them his brothers George and Richard