Yet Richard of Gloucester had been his ward. Warwick had known Edward from boyhood and stood at his side at Towton, an event of such savagery I am sure it marked all those who survived it. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that Warwick, Edward IV, Gloucester, Clarence and Montagu were all members of the Order of the Garter, yet it is a strange thought.
We will never know for sure what went through Warwick’s mind in early April 1471. He died at the Battle of Barnet just days later. Warwick may not have been a great battle tactician, but at Coventry he didn’t need to be. He had them cold – and he let them pass. The man who fought at Edward’s side at Towton was not a coward and that is the only other explanation that fits the events.
Note: George of Clarence did indeed change sides again, betraying his father-in-law. Edward, Richard and George met on the Banbury road and there was ‘right kind and loving language betwixt them’ – at least for a while.
For a long time in English schools, Clarence being drowned in a ‘vat of Malmsey wine’ was one of the famous deaths everyone knew, along with Henry I dying after consuming a ‘surfeit of lampreys’ (eels), or Nelson struck down at the Battle of Trafalgar. I am not certain that is true today, though I hope it is. Stories make culture and may be more important than we know.
Note on the Battle of Barnet: Over Easter 1471, London became the gathering point for the house of York. Estimates of numbers are always tricky, but sources agree that Edward’s army was still fairly small, with between seven and twelve thousand men. Warwick is generally accepted to have outnumbered them at least three to one. Edward cannot have expected his run of luck at Barnet, so was it madness for him to leave a defensible city and attack? He was with his brothers and they were all young men. It is possible they pushed each other on – and that could easily have led to disaster. Yet Edward was also the victor of Towton and a near-mythical figure in battle. At twenty-eight and restored to fitness, he would have been terrifying to face, his presence worth thousands in terms of morale. As Henry V had fought at Agincourt, so Edward continued a tradition of martial kings and the highest stakes.
Today, Barnet is a part of London. In 1471, it was a spot on the London road about eight miles from the Tower, a town with open countryside all around. Neither Warwick nor Edward IV would have chosen it as a battlefield. It was just where they clashed on the road and where, at last, Warwick was killed, a great and turbulent career brought to a violent close. He had chosen between kings more than once – and had both Edward and Henry in his personal custody on one occasion. Warwick had made disastrous decisions as well as great ones – and yet he truly forgave Margaret of Anjou and worked to restore Lancaster to the throne and undo all he had brought about. It is my suspicion that, for all his faults, he was actually a great man.
I hope I have covered Barnet with some accuracy, based on my reading of the events. It is true that Edward approached under cover of darkness and that his army was too close to be troubled by Warwick’s intermittent cannon fire all night. It is also true that when Edward attacked at between four and five on Easter morning, the thick mist meant he did not see the armies had overlapped. His right wing plunged forward, his left fell back – and tens of thousands of fighting men turned with Edward at the hub of the wheel. On Warwick’s side, Oxford routed the York left wing and drove them back to the town of Barnet. His return would prove utterly chaotic, including the fact that his estoile symbol was similar-looking to Edward’s Sun in Flames. Cries of treachery went up on Lancaster’s side and men simply panicked. Edward took advantage and Warwick’s brother Montagu was killed, causing a collapse at the centre that dragged Warwick in as well. It was an inglorious end to Warwick’s extraordinary life. It is true that the bodies were displayed in London and also true that Edward did not have them cut into pieces as was common, but instead had them returned to the family for burial at Bisham Abbey.
Queen Margaret of Anjou and her son Edward of Lancaster, Prince of Wales, did indeed set foot in England for the first time in ten years on the same day that Warwick was killed in battle. They’d set out almost a week before but been driven back by storms.
It is not difficult to imagine Margaret’s initial despair when she heard Warwick had fallen. Yet she allowed herself to be reassured by Edmund Beaufort, Lord Somerset. He knew the south of England and was vital in raising a great army there in what would truly be Margaret’s last throw of the dice.
King Edward sent out his own commissions of array for fresh soldiers, having lost some decent part of his army at Barnet. The only difficulty lay in that he didn’t know where Margaret would strike and had to pursue her over vast stretches of land. He knew she had gone to Wales once before and suspected she might head north to the River Severn and cross into Wales somewhere around Gloucester or Tewkesbury.
Margaret reached Bristol and found great support there, gaining men and funds and equipment, including cannon. Edward chose a good spot to array for war and was then informed that Margaret had not stopped to face him but gone on. Once more, he had to march in pursuit.
In the race to reach Wales, Edward had sent messengers ahead and Gloucester and its bridge across the Severn remained closed to Margaret, just as Hull had been closed to him a few weeks before. Margaret’s lords and forces pushed on to the next great crossing, the ford at Tewkesbury. They arrived after a march of twenty-six miles. Edward’s army force-marched thirty-six miles to intercept them before they crossed. Both were exhausted, but Edward was determined to repay the humiliations he had suffered.
The ford across the river by Tewkesbury could not be attempted by night, or with a hostile army in range and ready to attack. The Lancaster forces had to fight and it was a close-run thing.
Edward could not lay claim to any great tactical skill at Tewkesbury. He did keep a reserve of two hundred spears and they proved useful, but the decisive tactic was a missile attack by Gloucester on the person of the Duke of Somerset, who had lost his older brother and his father to the Wars of the Roses. He responded with an enraged charge downhill, giving up the advantage of terrain. Edward’s centre was then able to break up the Lancaster forces piece by piece. There is a surviving story that Somerset made his way back up the hill and killed his ally Baron Wenlock for failing to support his position.
Prince Edward was killed as the York centre broke through, taking with him the last hopes of Lancaster and effectively ending the wars in that one stroke.
I jumped from 1471 to 1482 in Part Two. This was not because nothing of interest happened in between. The invasions of France and Scotland in particular are fascinating. My focus though was on the Wars of the Roses as a whole. It is true that, in some ways, this is Edward IV’s story, but it is also the story of Margaret of Anjou – and York and Lancaster. For those interested in a vivid historical life of this half-forgotten king, I recommend Edward IV by Charles Ross for all the details that would have been out of place here. I also recommend Richard the Third by Paul Murray Kendall. Both are wonderful reads, full of details I could not find space to include. For example, Kendall mentioned that Richard and his wife, Ann, would have been stripped to the waist for part of the coronation service, to be anointed in oil. Not only does this raise the question of how female nudity was considered at that time, but also has a bearing on the fact that no contemporary source ever mentioned Richard having a hunchback. As I have said before, he was a renowned swordsman, and even bare to the waist, he caused no especial interest. My feeling is that he actually would have been slightly twisted, with one shoulder raised – as we can see from the scoliosis of his skeleton – but that a mass of muscle would have been ordinary to a medieval swordsman, as would scars and marks of all kinds on the skin.
At a distance of five centuries, it is impossible to know for certain what killed Edward IV. We know he drank prodigious amounts, astonishing visitors to his court. We know Edward had suffered any number of blows to the head in his life. Some sort of haemorrhage or stroke seems most likely. One contemporary source suspected pois
on, but a clot is more likely.
He was forty at the time of his death. It seems a tragic loss, even today. If Edward IV had ruled for fifty years like Edward III, there would have been no Richard III and no Bosworth Field – but then also no Tudors and no Elizabethan age.
A note on names: King Henry VI had a son named Edward, who became, briefly, Prince of Wales. As did King Edward IV, as did King Richard III. Their brother George, Duke of Clarence, also had a son named Edward, who became Earl Warwick and was in the care of his uncle Richard for a time as one who had a better claim to the throne than Richard himself. Just as there were too many Richards, for a while, there were just too many Edwards. No writer of crime or romantic fiction ever had such a problem. I do not know if Richard III’s son was called ‘Ned’ or not.
It is true that Duke Richard of Gloucester intercepted Prince Edward as he was brought home to his coronation in London. Gloucester moved so swiftly and so calmly that it supports a diagnosis of a double stroke in his brother, which gave Richard time to prepare.
There are few men in history with so many ardent fans, some of whom will believe no wrong of Richard at all. Yet he moved to have his brother’s children declared illegitimate just days after Edward IV breathed his last. Why then would he have them killed, some ask, if they were no longer a threat to him? Because Richard of Gloucester had lived through the triumphs and disasters of the Wars of the Roses. His father had been attainted. Richard had been attainted himself, with King Edward – and they had gone on to recover their power and titles. Of all men, Richard knew the danger of a potential enemy left alive. King Henry VI of Lancaster had been allowed to live. The result was there to be seen and judged.
Richard had one of his brother’s sons in the Tower. He gained the other with a deputation to Sanctuary where Elizabeth had fled with her children. No less a figure than the Archbishop of Canterbury led the boy away, after a discussion over whether it violated Sanctuary or not to remove the boy. His mother apparently acquiesced, but what else could she possibly say or do with the Protector’s armed men surrounding the fortress in the grounds of Westminster Abbey?
Richard had the wit and flair to dispose of his enemies by accusing them of plots against the boys, whereas the likelihood was that they were involved in plots against him. He had Lord Hastings executed as well as Lords Rivers, Grey and Vaughn. Lord Stanley was also arrested for a few days but then released. Richard put far too much trust in a man married to Margaret Beaufort, as it turned out.
Julius Caesar had a son with Cleopatra. The boy was known as Ptolemy Caesarion and he should have inherited twin empires. He would have done, in fact, if Augustus Caesar had not had him executed when he was just seventeen. That same benign Augustus also had his grandson killed so that the young man would not interfere with the peaceful handover of power to Emperor Tiberius. Such events can be called tragedies, of course, but not really a surprise.
In regard to his nephews, Richard would have quietly rid himself of those future threats some time during the summer of 1483. Richard had a wife and a son at the time, though as was so terrible and so common, both would die not long after. In those first warm months of his reign, Richard would merely have been securing his own bloodline. He was no vacillating Hamlet, but a man of action who had moved with vigour to take a chance few others would have seen.
The murder of the boys would have been done quietly, without evidence. It would have been seen as a shameful act and certainly a sin, but a necessary one. At least one potential uprising was averted when the whisper went round that the boys were not alive to rescue.
There are some who say it was Lord Buckingham, perhaps in answer to a cry from Richard, not unlike that of Henry II in an earlier century when he said, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ – and four knights went to Canterbury to murder an archbishop. History can be a dark and bloody story. In the end, the princes were murdered by or at the order of only three candidates: Richard III, Buckingham or Henry VII, clearing his own decks for the house of Tudor.
I am confident Richard gave the order. Buckingham’s 1483 rebellion was at first an attempt to restore the house of York through the princes in the Tower. The news that they had been killed completely hamstrung his coalition. Buckingham tried to change horses to a Lancastrian rebellion, but failed completely. He may even have intended to support Henry Tudor all along, but the key point is that there is a motive for Richard to have ordered the deaths of the princes.
King Richard was never the hunchbacked murderer of Shakespeare’s play, delighting in his own evil. I would be surprised if he wasn’t the one who killed Henry VI in his cell, though again certainty is impossible. Richard was not a saint, any more than his brother Edward was. Henry VI could well have been, but history is not kind to saints.
As a final thought on Richard, he showed his power and perhaps a touch of greatness after the 1483 rebellion. He executed only ten and attainted ninety-six, and then went on to pardon around thirty of those. He was back in London only four months after leaving on his first Great Progress around the country. His reign was then rocked by the death of his son and, a few months after that, the death of his wife. Tuberculosis is the most likely cause in both cases, a scourge. If Richard had won at Bosworth, there is no real reason to suppose he couldn’t have recovered it all – a new wife, new children, a long reign. He fought hand to hand and unhorsed Henry’s giant bodyguard, Sir John Cheyney, with a broken lance. Cheyney survived the battle and was present for Henry’s coronation in London.
Richard Plantagenet was just thirty-two when he was brought down. Who knows what he might have done if he had lived? I recommend the fascinating book Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors by Chris Skidmore.
A note on dates: The Battle of Bosworth was famously fought on 22 August 1485, but that was under the Julian calendar, created by Julius Caesar and a Greek astrologer, Sosigenes. It was extraordinarily accurate for 46 BC and set the length of a year at 365 days with a leap day added every fourth year in February – then the end of the Roman year. (Which is how September, October, November and December were named: they were the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months in a calendar that began in March.) Over almost two thousand years, unnoticed extra hours on the length of a year added up; this was eventually revised in the Gregorian Calendar of 1752, when the calendar had to be advanced by eleven days. However, the fifteenth century was only nine days wrong. Bosworth was therefore actually fought on 31 August 1485, by the calendar we still use today.
Whatever his weakness or illness was, Henry VI was a good man. He certainly deserved better than to be murdered in his rooms at the Tower of London. I have stood where he was killed. I am sorry he could not have been spared a life that saw his son cut down before manhood and his wife broken and humiliated in her attempts to save her husband. Somehow, it is part of the exquisitely painful nature of her story that Margaret died in 1482, in France, with King Edward IV still strong and apparently ready to rule for decades. If Margaret had lived only a few years longer, she would have seen all her enemies destroyed and at least some part of the house of Lancaster returned to the throne. Yet she did not. In some ways, this was her story – and her tragedy.
Conn Iggulden
London, 2015
Acknowledgements
After the death of my father, I hoped my mother would recover and grow strong once again. Instead, she was gone within the year. I would like to acknowledge her here, in the first of my books she will not read.
Her love of words and particularly poetry was a huge influence on me. She told me that history was a collection of stories about real people, with dates. I miss her advice every day, because she used to give me advice every day.
A ship spreads white sails into the morning breeze. I stand and watch until she hangs as a speck between sea and sky – and someone says: ‘There. She is gone.’
And at that moment, as someone at my side says, ‘She is gone,’ there are other eyes watching for her arrival – and g
lad voices are raised to shout: ‘Here she comes. There she is!’
Henry Van Dyke
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2016
Copyright © Conn Iggulden, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustration of dragon by Sally Taylor
Cover illustration of vines by Vince McIndoe
Author and title type by Carol Kemp
Series title type by Charles Stewart
ISBN: 978–1–405–92148–0
Conn Iggulden, Ravenspur: Rise of the Tudors
(Series: # )
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