Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (4 page)

While Edmund and Jasper Tudor spent their childhood in the secluded environs of Barking abbey, outside the political world at court, after nearly two decades of stable government led by the minority council, events were about to take a turn for the worse.

In 1437, the year of his mother’s death, Henry VI brought his minority to an end. He had recently turned sixteen, and was keen to remove himself from the shackles of his minority council: three years earlier, aged thirteen, he had to be reminded that he was not yet old enough to take decisions. The king had been a precocious learner, whose tutor had noted how he had ‘grown in years, in stature of his person, and also in conceit and knowledge of his royal estate, the which cause him to grudge with chastising’. Now Henry was determined to rule as a fully adult monarch, with all the personal duties and responsibilities that medieval kingship brought.

Yet something was not quite right. Even Henry’s chaplain, John Blacman, whose hagiographical biography of the king helped raise Henry to saint-like proportions, and should therefore be treated with caution, admitted that the king was ‘a simple man, without any crook of craft’. An exceptionally pious young man, his chastity seemed to go against the grain of what might have been expected from the traditional debauchery at court. As one nobleman was to discover to his cost when, organising a show of young women ‘with bared bosoms’ in order to entice the king, Henry, covering his eyes, fled in anger shouting, ‘Fy, fy, for shame, forsothe ye be to blame’.

More worryingly, Henry spurned the tedious tasks of administration, preferring to be left in his study, absorbed in reading religious
works. To fill his place, Henry allowed himself to be led by his advisers, in particular his chief minister, William de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk, whom one chronicler described as England’s ‘second king’. Was Henry simply too young to properly lead the country? Or was there another reason why the king was unable to fulfil his duties effectively? Rather than deal with the important issues of the day, such as the control of English territories in France, Henry seemed more interested in establishing centres of learning such as Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge.

In council Henry appeared simple-minded, often agreeing to the last piece of advice offered to him, only to change his mind just as suddenly as a decision had been taken. Easily swayed and lavish with his patronage, he allowed Suffolk to place his allies in key positions at court, the running costs of which were becoming ruinously expensive. Outside the king’s household, rumours began to spread. A yeoman from Kent was reported in 1442 to have said that Henry was a lunatic like his grandfather, the French king Charles VI, who, believing he was made of glass, refused anyone to come near him fearing he would shatter into pieces. ‘The king was a natural fool,’ a Sussex man declared publicly in 1450, ‘and would ofttimes hold a staff in his hands with a bird on the end, playing therewith as a fool.’ ‘Another king must be ordained to rule the land,’ he presaged, stating that ‘the king was no person able to rule’.

If Henry was mentally unstable, it is likely that he suffered from some form of hereditary schizophrenia, though perhaps in his younger years the disease had not fully manifested itself as it would do so with disastrous consequences later in Henry’s life. His condition did not prevent him from marrying the fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou in March 1445; the queen arrived a month later and was crowned in Westminster in May. Margaret’s influence as a teenager must have been limited, but there was no doubt that her arrival changed the political dynamics at court. Henry had been keen to bring peace to England and France; now Margaret, along with Suffolk, would push for a solution, opening negotiations that sought a peace treaty. In 1445 England seemed to hold the advantage: occupying Gascony, Anjou, Maine and Normandy in addition to territory around Calais. All this Henry was prepared to throw to the wind in order to obtain his cherished peace.
In December 1445 Henry wrote secretly to Charles VII promising to surrender Maine and Anjou.

No one was more aghast at Henry’s manoeuvres for a French peace than the king’s uncle, Gloucester. As Henry V’s sole surviving brother, he saw himself very much as the guardian of English ambitions of conquest in France. Since Henry had no heir, Gloucester remained heir presumptive: the influence of the ‘Good Duke’ remained an uncomfortable presence for those who argued for the war to end. In 1442 an attempt had been made to discredit Gloucester when his wife Eleanor was accused of plotting the king’s death through sorcery. In February 1447 Gloucester was arrested. Five days later the duke was dead, probably from a stroke brought on by the stress of his incarceration; but despite his body being exposed to public view, rumours began to spread that he had been deliberately put to death. As one chronicler wrote, ‘some said he died of sorrow; some that he was murdered between two feather beds; and others said that a hot spit was put in his fundament. And so how he died God only knows.’

Gloucester’s death opened up the way for peace negotiations with France to be concluded, implementing the secret agreement to cede Anjou and Maine to the French king Charles VII. The fortress town of Le Mans was surrendered in 1448 in return for agreement that a truce between the two countries be extended for a further two years. Behind the dealings, as ever, was Queen Margaret who wrote to Charles, her uncle by marriage, telling him ‘in this matter we will do your pleasure as much as lies in our power, as we have always done already’.

Gloucester had not been the only nobleman concerned about the direction Henry and his advisers, the Earl of Suffolk and Margaret of Anjou among them, were leading the country. In the autumn of 1445 Henry had recalled his cousin Richard, Duke of York as commander in chief. York was furious, especially since he had not been paid his expenses or salary for several years, amounting to the enormous sum of £38,666. The duke was posted to Ireland as the King’s Lieutenant there, no doubt to remove him from the scene: as one chronicler wrote, ‘envy reared its head among the princes and barons of England, and was directed at the duke, who was gaining in honour and prosperity’. Out of sight, York smouldered, watching and waiting as the English
kingdom in France that he, along with his ancestors, had fought for, fell apart.

For those who warned that the French truce was a prelude for Charles VII’s ambitions to reconquer France, time would soon prove them correct. In July 1449 Charles VII tore up the terms of the truce and declared war, launching a full scale invasion of Normandy. The English were taken by surprise, and by October 1449 with their defences in disrepair, Rouen had fallen. It was to be the first of a series of castles, strongholds and towns that would fall without resistance. By August 1450 the English had been driven out of Normandy. It was a political disaster: ‘We have not now a foot of land in Normandy’, one observer wrote, almost in a state of shock.

The consequences of military failure reverberated across the realm as popular discontent broke out into open rebellion. The blame for English losses in France was placed squarely on Henry’s small clique of advisers, most notably a gang of three who were identified as being responsible for the king’s most disastrous decisions: Suffolk, the king’s confessor William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury and Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester. Within six months they were all dead: executed not through judicial trial, but killed at the hands of furious lynch mobs. In January 1450 Moleyns had been set upon by a mob of soldiers and seamen at Portsmouth; his death sparked further risings in Kent and London, alarming the king enough to issue orders that every member of the royal household was to be supplied with a bow and sheaf of arrows, ‘for the safety of our person’. To calm public resentment, a scapegoat was required: Suffolk, having first been placed in the Tower, was banished from the kingdom for five years. Not even this punishment could save him: as he set sail in early May, his ship was intercepted off the coast of Dover by a small fleet lying in wait for him. He was dragged aboard a ship, the
Nicholas of the Tower
, where with a rusty sword, his head was cut off ‘with half a dozen strokes’ and his corpse dumped upon the sands at Dover.

The government blamed the lawlessness of the Kentish men for Suffolk’s murder, and threatened reprisals: the sheriff of Kent even threatened to turn the entire county into a deer forest. The threats were ill-judged. A large uprising, led by a shadowy figure named Jack Cade, stirred by the penniless soldiers returning home from France, descended
upon London in June 1450, with a large rebel army gathering at Blackheath. The royal army was caught in an ambush and defeated; as Henry VI fled northwards, it seemed as if all order had broken down. On 29 June the rebels burst into the chancel of a Wiltshire church where William Ayscough was saying Mass, dragging him up a nearby hill where he was put to death. Five days later, Cade’s army entered London, capturing two noblemen who were summarily tried and executed. Matters were getting out of hand as the rebels rampaged through the streets in an orgy of violence, theft and mob rule; Londoners turned against them, forcing Cade upon promise of a pardon to disband his army, which quickly dispersed and fled. Of course the pardon meant nothing: Henry was determined to get retribution, and within ten days Cade had been hunted down and killed, his dead body beheaded and quartered, with his head placed on a spike above London Bridge. In marked contrast to his peaceful nature, the king ordered a ‘harvest of heads’, making sure that he personally attended each execution. It was a futile policy of extreme violence that merely alienated those protestors who had believed that Henry, if only removed from the grip of his advisers, would have taken their side. The rebellion had achieved nothing. None of the rebels’ demands was met, nor were their petitions heard. Instead it had exposed the reality that Henry’s kingship was a sham; it was not merely his advisers who were to blame, but Henry’s own weakness and his incapacity to govern that lay at the heart of the collapse in order.

As men pondered the consequences of what had taken place that summer, in early September a ship docked at Beaumaris Harbour in Anglesey. From the boat, Richard, Duke of York stepped out onto the sands of the beach. His arrival would shortly transform the monarchy for ever.

York’s arrival at Anglesey posed more questions than it offered answers. Why had he abandoned his office, and why had he done so unannounced? What had he hoped to achieve by returning home? Did he intend to take advantage of the government’s current weakness? What was certain was that from the moment he stepped ashore, York would become a dynamic force in English politics for the next decade.

The timing of his arrival, coming so soon after the defeat of Cade’s
rebellion, seemed too much of a coincidence. Some had suspected the duke’s involvement in Suffolk’s death; his wealth and contacts certainly could have provided for the fleet of ships that had apprehended Suffolk and inflicted his grisly death. The demands set down by Cade’s rebels had also included the request that Henry should appoint to his council ‘men of his true blood’, naming ‘the high and mighty prince, the Duke of York’ as a particular example, complaining that he had been ‘exiled from our sovereign lord’s person by the suggestions of those false traitors the Duke of Suffolk and his affinity’.

Upon landing, York’s claim that he was ‘not against the king and desired nothing but the good of England’ appeared to be a convenient fiction, especially given his proximity in blood to the crown. Arguably, since the deaths of the Dukes of Gloucester and Bedford, York had a strong claim to be the heir apparent as closest in line to the throne. Born in 1411, York’s father was Richard, Earl of Cambridge. Cambridge was the son of Edmund Langley, Duke of York, the fourth son of Edward III. His mother was Anne Mortimer, a descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward III’s second son. This gave York two separate claims to royal descent, though admittedly one was through his mother that had passed through the female line, weakening its veracity. Nevertheless York’s ancestry provided a compelling case that he should be considered Henry’s heir, particularly since the childless Richard II had considered the Mortimers his natural heirs. It was surely for this reason that Jack Cade had titled himself ‘John Mortimer’ in his official petition – the choice of surname had been deliberate, since Cade had wanted to remind people of the Mortimer claim to the throne held by York.

There was another rival claim to the throne to possibly match York’s, depending on whether one considered bastards to be acceptable heirs. Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, was the fourth son of John Beaufort, the eldest of the illegitimate children of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. Gaunt himself was the third son of Edward III, whose legitimate marriage to his first wife Blanche bore him the future king Henry IV. Unfortunately for the Beauforts, the stigma of being born out of wedlock, the result of an adulterous affair, meant that no such claim to the throne could exist, despite Gaunt’s later marriage to his mistress Katherine Swynford. In spite of his bastardy, John Beaufort
had been declared legitimate by Parliament in 1397, an act which was confirmed by John of Gaunt’s eldest legitimate son, Henry IV, in 1407. Henry had added the important proviso that the Beaufort line should never succeed to the English throne, yet it remained unclear whether royal declarations could alter the fact that the Beauforts were sprung from an illegitimate union. It did not prevent the family from becoming one of the most powerful families in the country, being granted the earldom of Dorset and later the dukedom of Somerset, though their income remained largely derived from the crown. Since Edmund’s older brothers Henry and John were both dead by 1444, he became the head of the family and the upholder of the Beaufort claim.

Discussions over who might succeed the king were bound to surface. Each of Henry’s uncles had died without leaving an heir: the king had become the only surviving legitimate male member of the house of Lancaster. After six years of marriage, Margaret of Anjou had been unable to conceive a son and heir, and it seemed as if her marriage to Henry would prove barren, a point that was not lost upon the mobs during the summer of 1450: one reason given for William Ayscough’s summary execution was the belief that he had urged Henry to pursue a life of celibacy. Were Henry to die, the choice would have to be between the competing claims of York and Somerset’s Beaufort inheritance. It was a choice that would one day resurface.