The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones (11 page)

The two were married on July 25, 1470, in Normandy; but in fact Margaret had forbidden her son to consummate his wedding with Anne Neville so that when the time came he could marry a more suitable bride.

The Lancastrians landed in Devon. Edward was in the Midlands, and learned that Montagu, Warwick’s brother and another powerful landowner, had sided with the rebels. He was forced to flee to Burgundy with his brother Richard, Lord Hastings and Earl Rivers; they were so poor that Edward had to pay for the crossing by selling his fur-lined coat. Meanwhile his brother George had also joined the rebellion.

Queen Elizabeth and her children stayed in Westminster while Londoners closed the walls against the French mercenaries, but Warwick and Clarence rode in on October 6 and Henry was crowned again a week later. All the lords and knights present wore the badge of Warwick, now more powerful than ever. Meanwhile young John de Vere, whose father and brother had been executed by Tiptoft, presided over his trial after the hated executioner was captured up a tree near Huntingdon. Although Warwick planned to be conciliatory towards Yorkists, he would make an exemption for Tiptoft; in front of a braying, enormous London mob he went out in style, wearing his best clothes and telling the executioner to do it in three strokes.

Warwick declared that Edward IV was a bastard, and that his real father was a French archer, and therefore George would be heir presumptive after Edward of Westminster. On November 2, meanwhile, Elizabeth gave birth to a son, yet another Edward, in London, and Henry VI sent for a midwife and provided her with beef, a great kindness typical of the man, and in a grizzly twist the baby would share a fate with the gentle king – the boy’s uncle would murder them both.

However, Edward IV had by February 1471 raised up to 1,500 Englishmen and 300 Flemish mercenaries. He had also obtained ships from the Hanseatic League, the collection of mostly German city-states across the sea. Edward invaded in March, near the Humber, marched south with 4,000 men and met Sir William Stanley’s army of 2,000; the Stanleys, notoriously, never sided with anyone who might lose. (At Northampton in 1460 Lord Stanley had ignored the king’s summons, because he wished to see which way the wind blew.) 

Then they came across Clarence’s 4,000 men near Banbury. Young Richard was sent to talk to the middle brother, and persuaded him to changed sides, adding his men to the king’s. Edward entered London unopposed on April 11 and there he met his son for the first time. Henry VI greeted him with the words: ‘Cousin Edward, I am right glad to see you. I hold my life in no danger from your hands.’

There followed the Battle of Barnet three days later on Easter Sunday, at a place called Dead Man’s Bottom. Edward turned up with 10,000 men, and poor King Henry once again a prisoner, and the rebels were slaughtered. In the thick fog Warwick’s affinity mistook the Lancastrian Earl of Oxford’s banner of an Enrayed Star for the Sun in Splendour, and fired at them.

When the battle was lost Warwick tried to escape but was recognised by his ostentatious and colourful blazoned surcoat; the king’s men cut him down. His brother Montagu was also killed and their bodies were displayed at St Paul’s Cathedral to prove to the common people that they were indeed dead.

 King Edward intercepted the rebel forces in the west at Tewkesbury on May 4, a tired and desolately body of men who had walked 45 miles without rest and then had to set up defences. Even amid the battle, such were the hatreds that had overcome England that the Lancastrian fourth Duke of Somerset killed his own ally Lord Wenlock by smashing his brains out with a battleaxe. By the Avon, young Prince Edward of Westminster, wearing a coat with the arms of England, was also killed, one of 2,000 that day. It was said that after being captured, Westminster was interrogated by the king, who asked him why he had taken up arms against him: ‘I came to recover my father's heritage. My father has been miserably oppressed, and the crown usurped.’ Edward slapped the young man, and his brothers Clarence and Gloucester drew their swords and struck him down. Somerset, whose father and brother had been killed in the conflict, was executed afterwards.

King Edward re-entered London once again on May 21, with Queen Margaret his prisoner, and that night Henry VI was murdered in the Tower on the king’s orders, although according to official reports he died of ‘displeasure and melancholy’ at his son’s death; possibly he was maced to death by Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
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With Henry’s son dead, the line was finished, and his presence could only fuel further rebellion.

Brother Clarence was forgiven, and allowed all his wife Isabel Neville’s lands after 1471, as well as Richard’s job of Great Chamberlain, and yet he remained enemies with his younger brother, a rivalry fuelled by jealousy over power. Gloucester had chosen to marry Anne Neville, Isabel’s sister and the widow of Edward of Westminster, but Clarence had kidnapped her to prevent a match that would enrich his brother and had her disguised as a maid at one of his castles. Gloucester managed to rescue her.

Meanwhile, Clarence seems to have lost his mind after his wife and child died in October 1476. He turned up in Somerset and accused a local widow, Ankarette Twynho, of being a witch and responsible for his wife’s death. She was charged with sorcery and of poisoning the Lady Isabel, to whom she was once lady-in-waiting, and was executed within an hour. A Warwickshire man called John Thirsby was also hanged for murdering the royal child and another knight, Sir Roger Tucotes, was accused but escaped to London to report the incident.

Clarence was brought before the king, where he made things much worse by suggesting that the murdered Twynho had accused the king of using ‘necromancy and craft to poison his subjects’ and alleging that he was a bastard. The ‘incorrigible’ Clarence, as the king called his brother, was charged with treason and put to death, drowned in a vat of wine. A soothsayer had told King Edward IV that ‘G’ would take his crown, and this may have fuelled his paranoia about George.

The king, once so dynamic and youthful, grew fat and tired, gorged on wine and meat. Aged just 40, he became seriously ill at Easter 1483, one of his last acts being to change his will to make his brother Gloucester ‘Protector of the Realm’.

Richard, short, sickly and disfigured, from a young age showed an ambitious, devious side; he took every position available in order to increase his base of support and by the time he was 20 was already Constable and Lord High Admiral of England, Chief Justice of the Welsh Marches, Chief Steward, Chamberlain of South Wales, Great Chamberlain of England and Chief Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster. Under his brother, Richard had become so powerful in his personal fiefdom that he was known as Lord of the North, and was much loved by the north-country people. Through marriage he gained much of the estates of Warwick, although it became a love match. They named their only son, born in 1476, Edward.

(The match also said something of the incest of the time. Richard was descended from his great-great-grandfather Edward III four times over, his wife descended from him twice over.)

The new king, Edward, the fifth of that name, was just 12, when, on his way to London with his mother’s family, they were met by his father’s brother, accompanied by an armed retinue. Gloucester took the boy into his care, soon had him declared illegitimate, and himself crowned Richard III. Edward and his 10-year-old brother Richard were placed in the Tower for their safekeeping and never seen after July 1483; it was soon rumoured that the new king, who grew very unpopular, had killed them. His banner was a boar and the people of London called him ‘the Hog' behind his back, along with his cronies, nicknamed the Dog, the Cat and the Rat. One man, Sir William Collingbourne, was hanged, drawn and quartered for writing a scornful poem about Richard, his last words being ‘Oh Lord Jesus, yet more trouble’. Richard also had Earl Rivers executed, as well as several other leading nobles. After a prolonged campaign of fratricide, most of the leading lords were dead. Except one – Henry Tudor.

The Imp

There was one more claimant – ‘the imp’, as Edward IV referred to Henry Tudor, ‘the only one left of Henry VI’s brood’. Just like Daenerys Stormborn, he was therefore a threat, and Edward offered a huge reward for his capture, although he was safe as long as the King of France protected him.

The descendant of Welsh nobility, from the first men of the island, his grandfather Owain ‘son of Theodore’ was a mere footman for Queen Catherine, widow of Henry V. She used to spy on the Welshman as he bathed naked in the Thames, and English society was outraged when she then married him.

 His son, the mad king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor, had been married to Margaret Beaufort, a great-great-granddaughter of Edward III and the Red Queen to Woodville’s White Queen in the Philippa Gregory novels. Hers had been an unhappy childhood, her father having committed suicide before her first birthday, leaving the girl without a protector. She became a ward of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, and as she was considered a possible heir to the throne, he arranged her marriage to his son, when he was just two and she one. After Suffolk’s execution-cum-murder at sea, Henry VI dissolved the child’s marriage and gave his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor wardship, and betrothed her to the former. They were married when she was 12, and she was pregnant at 13, but before she had even given birth, her husband was dead, expiring in captivity at the hands of William Herbert, known as ‘Black William’, one of a powerful Yorkist family from Wales. Margaret almost died during childbirth, as did her sickly baby, and she never had children again, most likely due to infertility.

For noble women of the period, their value and importance was as potential alliance-forgers through marriage, and their ability to create an heir as soon as menstruation began. Like Sansa Stark, they were pawns to be traded. It was a highly dangerous life, with a high proportion of women dying in childbirth, mostly through blood loss; available figures from 15th-century Florence suggest 1,450 deaths per 100,000 births, compared to between four and eight in Europe today, and as it was common for women to give birth to 10 or more children, their life chances of dying in labour were high.

Just two months after giving birth, Margaret rode to the home of the powerful Duke of Buckingham and negotiated a marriage with his second son, Henry Stafford, which was happy enough, although she rarely saw her own son, who was raised by his uncle in exile. A man with small, shrewd eyes, Henry Tudor had lived rather against the odds and had developed into a cunning, untrusting survivor, but it was only as the House of York imploded in self-inflicted violence that he saw his chance to win the throne.

Tudor had tried to invade in 1483 but was forced to return to Brittany after the planned uprising was crushed, and Richard enjoyed a brief moment of peaceful rule; he was in many ways an upright and moral man, devoted to both the Church and his wife, and was popular in the north. But the following year the king’s only son died and by the end of that cruel 12 months Anne Neville was dying, and Richard was forced to deny rumours that he intended to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, aware that kinsmen of Anne would rebel. Despite Richard having accused Elizabeth Woodville of witchcraft, showing his withered arm to his ally Hastings and blaming ‘that sorceress, my brother’s wife’, she may even have encouraged the match with the deformed king who killed her sons. This may strike us as perverse, but it was the only way to secure her daughter’s safety and prosperity. Alternatively Elizabeth Woodville, who had remained in sanctuary for a year until agreeing to let her daughters attend court, believed that Richard held her sons hostage and was using her daughter as a bargaining chip. (Some, of course, believe that it was Henry Tudor who murdered the boys.)

Elizabeth of York had already endured an unsettled upbringing. When she was three, her father was forced into exile, and his cousin killed her grandfather. Later one uncle murdered another and probably her brothers too. In 1475 she was betrothed to the dauphin of France and her training as a princess would have began; however that match was broken, and she was now free, or as it could be interpreted, vulnerable.

The rumour that Richard might marry his niece was the trigger for Henry Tudor’s invasion, launched with a force of 1,800 mercenaries from France and Scotland. In August 1485 Tudor landed in Wales, his ancestral home, with a small force, and the two armies met in Bosworth just outside Leicester. Richard had been plagued by bad dreams the night before battle.

The battle turned on Lord Stanley, who was now Margaret Beaufort’s fourth husband, and who yet managed to avoid being drawn into a clash in which Henry Tudor was outnumbered. Stanley had been summoned by the king to aid him, but claimed to have sweating sickness, a mysterious disease that killed many during the 15th and 16th centuries. The king threatened to execute Stanley’s son, who he had as hostage, to which the lord replied: ‘Sire, I have other sons.’

Stanley’s affinity was uncommitted until it was clear which side was winning, and only then did he join his stepson. King Richard III charged from the front, wearing his crown, the last king of England to die in battle, and afterwards his body was stripped naked and dumped in a river. His remains were discovered in 2012, under a car park in Leicester, identified via DNA of the son of a direct female descendent of the king’s sister, Anne.

The Imp settled any dynastic questions by marrying Elizabeth of York, her mother having backed Tudor’s invasion, and reconciled most noblemen, returning their lands. And so the game of thrones ended, or at least it seemed to in retrospect, although no one at the time could have known. In fact Henry and his monstrous son continued to hunt down any uppity relatives for the next two decades, behaviour that seems repugnant now but, as with the actions of Martin’s characters, makes sense in its own context. 

George, Duke of Clarence, had a son, Edward of Warwick, who had a better claim, so Henry had him imprisoned; another rival, the Duke of Northumberland, was lynched. There were also pretenders who landed claiming to be Edward IV’s son, one an Irish conman, another a baker’s boy called Lambert Simnel, whom Henry Tudor forgave and allowed to work in his kitchens,