Royal Murder Page 16

  The Lancastrians were arrayed on the slope of Towton Hill and they felt they had the advantage as they saw the Yorkists advancing towards them, heads down in the chilling wind. The archers waited patiently to send waves of arrows to add to their discomfort when suddenly the wind changed its direction and began to drive snowflakes into the faces of Lancastrians. The swirling curtains became so thick the armies could no longer see each other.

  The Yorkist bowmen had a newly designed arrow which, thanks to extra feathers, had an increased range of forty yards. They began firing in the direction of the enemy lines with the result the Lancastrian bowmen believed they were within bowshot of the unseen Yorkists. They replied with flight after flight of arrows, unaware that their conventional shafts were falling far short. Thus such trivial things as feathers can affect the course of history.

  With their firepower exhausted the Lancastrians had to leave their high ground and trudge through the blinding snowstorm to engage the enemy hand to hand. All morning they fought until, according to the Bishop of Exeter, bodies were littered over an area six miles long and three wide. Finally the Lancastrian line broke and so many armoured men were drowned retreating across a swollen stream that their corpses formed a bridge for the fugitives who followed, pursued by vengeful Yorkists who butchered them as far as the walls of York. Over thirty thousand men died that bitter day, the majority being Lancastrians.

  Because it was a holy day King Henry had not wanted to commit sacrilege by being present at the scene of the slaughter, so when news of the defeat reached him at York he was able to escape with the queen and Prince Edward. Meanwhile the victorious Edward took down the head of his father, his brother and his uncle from the Micklegate Bar and replaced them with the heads of his fallen foemen. In June he returned to London for his coronation.

  Leaving Henry hiding in Harlech, Queen Margaret journeyed to Brittany to solicit help from Louis XI. At Chinon he offered her twenty thousand livres and an authorisation to raise an army among French knights eager for profitable adventure. In return he demanded the last piece of English territory on the Continent — Calais. Margaret agreed to this on behalf of Henry, should he win back his crown. In October, 1462, she landed her small army near Bamborough Castle which she took along with the castles of Alnwick and Dunstanburgh. But the tide was still running hard against the Lancastrians and the following year, on May 15, the queen’s army was routed at the battle of Hexham.

  Again King Henry and Queen Margaret escaped; he fled north into Scotland where for a period his movements remain a mystery, she crossed to France with her son and lived in Anjou for the next seven years.

  * * *

  For a year Henry was a hunted fugitive, travelling secretly between the homes of old Lancastrian supporters in Westmorland, Lancashire and Yorkshire. To this day traditions of his clandestine visits remain in various castles. Finally he was betrayed at Cantlow, and in June, 1465, he was taken to London astride a miserable hack, his legs bound to his stirrups and with a mocking placard on his back. Warwick met the fallen king at Islington and encouraged the mob to jeer him by personally leading him three times round the pillory as though he was a criminal, shouting, “Behold the traitor!”

  Henry did not respond to the insults until he received a blow on the face whereupon he rebuked the man who had done it with the expression “Forsooth and forsooth, ye do foully to smite a king anointed so.”

  For the next five years he remained a prisoner in the Tower, “dirty, sickly, ill-dressed and neglected,” but he bore his misfortune with almost superhuman patience. It would seem that he did survive because it was in the new king’s interest to keep him as long as Prince Edward lived so the youth could not lay claim to the throne as Henry’s successor. And before his mysterious death Henry was destined to be once more hailed as a king.

  This came about as the result of a bitter quarrel between Warwick and King Edward in 1470. Warwick fled to France and sought his old enemy Queen Margaret. After apologising for his past offences against her he astounded her by announcing that he wished to espouse the Lancastrian cause. Their combined armies would invade England and in his role of King-Maker he would restore Henry to the throne. This alliance would be sealed by his daughter Anne Neville marrying Margaret’s son Edward. After some hesitation the thought of a return to power conquered the queen’s aversion to Warwick and she agreed.

  In September King Edward was in the south suppressing a revolt when Warwick’s army, which had been backed by Louis XI, landed unopposed at Portsmouth and Dartmouth. In London excitement grew when a Franciscan, Dr William Goddard, preached at St Paul’s in favour of King Henry, the men of Kent rose against the Yorkists who had usurped him and so many men flocked to Warwick’s standard that he had an army of sixty thousand when he reached the capital. Now it was Edward’s turn to fly across the Channel.

  In London two bishops sought Henry in the Tower, finding him “not so clenely kepte as schuld seme suche a Prynce.” They dressed him in a blue velvet gown and took him to Westminster where he was described as “a sack of wool, a shadow on a wall, the blind man in a game of blind man’s bluff, a crowned calf.” But as Warwick’s puppet he wore the crown of England for six months.

  Edward returned to England in March, 1471, and after raising an army he arrived in London where the mob, having cheered Henry a short while before, welcomed him back as their king. Henry greeted him with the sad words, “Cousin you are welcome, my life will be safe in your hands.”

  Warwick was defeated at Barnet on Easter day, and Henry was returned to the Tower. Some weeks later Queen Margaret — still the She Wolf of France — landed with French troops in Dorset for her final attempt to win back her son’s birthright, but Edward defeated her at Tewkesbury and Prince Edward was among those killed. King Edward then returnee} to the capital and Henry was murdered.

  Twelve years after the event John Warkworth, master of St Peter’s College, Cambridge, wrote: “And the same night that King Edward came to London, King Henry, being in ward in prison in the Tower of London, was put to death on the 21st day of May, a Tuesday night betwixt eleven and twelve of the clock. The Duke of Gloucester was at the Tower, and on the morrow King Henry was chested and brought to Paul’s, and his face was open that every man might see him. And in his lying he bled on the pavement there; and afterwards at the Black Friars was brought, and there he bled new and fresh; and from thence he was carried to Chertsey Abbey in a boat, and buried there in Our Lady’s Chapel.”

  The hint is there that Richard Duke of Gloucester, brother of King Edward, had a hand in the murder. De Commines wrote that the duke “killed poor King Henry with his own hand, or else caused him to be killed in his presence.” Yet there is no proof of this other than the statement that he was in the Tower that night, but the Tower was a royal residence as well as a prison so there is no great significance in this, most of the court were probably there as well.

  On the other hand household accounts suggest that Henry was alive until the 24th of the month, and if this were so Richard is exonerated from being involved in the actual killing as he was then in Sandwich.

  A writer in the Croyland Chronicle declared: “I pass over in silence how at this period the body of King Henry was found in the Tower of London lifeless. May God spare and grant time and repentance to him, whoever thus dared to lay such sacrilegious hands on the Lord’s Anointed; whereof the doer deserves the title of a tyrant, and the sufferer that of a glorious martyr.”

  On this the historian James Gairdner commented: “When we consider that the writer of this was a member of Edward IV’s Council, we must own that the language is remarkably strong, and at the same time intentionally vague, so as not to implicate anyone expressly. The deed was so clearly abetted by authority, that it was not expedient then to speak the whole truth about it.”

  The official version of Henry’s death given out at the time was that he had “died disconsolate and of pure melancholy” on hearing of the death of his son, but we do k
now for certain that there was another cause. In 1911 Henry’s bones were disinterred and to one of the pieces of the cranium there was still some hair attached which was brown in colour except in one place where it was much darker and seemed to be matted with blood, while the back of the skull appeared to have been crushed by a blow.

  Some time after Henry was interred at Chertsey his body was translated to Windsor where the tomb became a shrine for pilgrims who remembered the saintly character of the king. Soon there were stories of miracles occurring there, and over the centuries more than a hundred and seventy-four have been attributed to the royal martyr, making him one of history’s great miracle workers. Twenty-two of Henry’s miracles have been confirmed by the Vatican, and in England today the King Henry VI Society still endeavours to promote his canonisation.

  Contents

  CHAPTER SEVEN - The Murder of the Duke of Clarence

  THE EXPEDIENT CHANGING of allegiances was a commonplace aspect of politics during the Wars of the Roses; cynical magnates weighed the benefits of the White Rose against the Red, commanders joined the enemy in the midst of battle, citizens hailed a leader one year and howled for his death the next — yet no one achieved the turncoat fame of Edward IV’s brother George who became known to history as “false fleeting Clarence.”

  Edward of York could have had no inkling of this when he was declared king in place of Henry VI in March, 1461. One of his first acts was to recall his brothers George and Richard, aged eleven and eight respectively, from Utrecht where they had been sent when their father had been killed at the battle of Wakefield the year before. Soon George was made Duke of Clarence, a title emphasising the hereditary claims of the House of York, and Richard became Duke of Gloucester.

  In 1466 there was an attempt to arrange a match between Clarence and Mary, the daughter of the Count of Burgundy, but this came to nothing as Warwick the King-Maker had other plans for the young duke. This was due to an increasing rift between Edward and the grim earl who had played such an important role in winning him the crown. At first there was no doubt that Warwick, as the power behind the throne, was more influential than the young man who sat upon it. The situation was put pithily in a letter to the King of France from the Governor of Abbeville who collected the gossip of English-held Calais for his master. “They tell me they have but two rulers in England,” he wrote, “Monsieur de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten.”

  The situation irked Edward who was determined to be a proper sovereign and not a puppet like the poor pious king he had deposed, but he held his peace until he judged the time was ripe for him to prove his independence. Warwick, meanwhile, was endeavouring to arrange a politically advantageous marriage for the king with a lady of the royal household of France. King Louis was eager to sign the agreement but as time passed he began to sense that something was wrong, and this was confirmed in October, 1464, when he learned Warwick would never be coming to seal the settlement, King Edward had created a sensation at a Council assembly by announcing that he had been secretly married for the past four months.

  One can imagine the mortification of the haughty Warwick. That his protégé had thrown away a great political opportunity for the sake of a highly unsuitable woman was bad enough, but worse was the fact that Edward had made him appear a fool before the English nobility and the French king. In his letter of explanation to the latter he was unable to hide his chagrin and Louis believed that he was ready to make war on his old comrade-in-arms. But Warwick was too old a campaigner to allow himself to fall into such a trap. He bit back his resentment and on Michaelmas Day actually led the new queen into Reading Abbey for presentation to the Council; her other escort was the Duke of Clarence.

  Dame Elizabeth Grey, the daughter of Sir Richard Woodville, was the widow of a Lancastrian knight who had been fatally wounded at the second battle of St Albans. She already had two sons and was five years older than the king when he met her at her mother’s house at Grafton. It is said that she waited by the road along which King Edward was riding in order to appeal to him to restore her children’s inheritance. He was greatly attracted to her and, used to easy conquests, was surprised when she refused to fall into his arms and bed. Instead she told him that “she knew herself to be unworthy to be a queen, but valued her honour more than to be a concubine.”

  Then, according to the Chronicle of the White Rose, “Edward being a lusty prince who attempted the stability and modesty of divers ladies and gentlewomen, when he could not perceive none of such womanhood, wisdom and beauty, he then with a little company came unto the manor of Graf ton and after resisting at divers times, seeing the constant mind of the said Dame Elizabeth early in a morning he wedded her.”

  Although the marriage was seen as unsuitable because the bride was “not the daughter of a duke or earl”, it is likely that Edward, who certainly loved her, also saw the value of a Lancastrian connection and envisaged the Woodville family as a counter-balance to the domineering Neville clan of whom Warwick was the leading member. This certainly became his policy for within little more than a year of Elizabeth Grey becoming queen her five sisters were married to the Duke of Buckingham and the eldest sons of the Earls of Arundel, Essex, Kent and Pembroke, her brother, aged twenty, was wedded to the immensely rich Duchess of Norfolk, then eighty, and her son was betrothed to the Duke of Exeter’s heiress whom Warwick had intended for his own nephew. The queen’s father was created Earl Rivers, made a knight of the Garter and appointed Treasurer.

  Warwick must have brooded on the ever-increasing power of these upstarts, but the blow came when Edward yet again humiliated him before the French. Warwick’s foreign policy had always been to ally with France against Burgundy and in 1467 he went to Paris for this purpose. On his return he learned that behind his back Edward had arranged for his sister Margaret to marry the Duke of Burgundy, a scheme which was guaranteed to alienate the French. To add insult to injury Warwick’s brother, Archbishop George Neville, who had been chancellor, had been deprived of the Great Seal by the king in person.

  Warwick’s indignation was monumental. Was this his reward for all the years he had fought for the White Rose? His father and brother had died for the cause, and now he was being rejected in favour of the Lancastrian Woodvilles!

  In retaliation the earl proposed to the Duke of Clarence, who was still heir presumptive, that he should marry his elder daughter Isabel — Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was already in love with Anne, the younger girl. To Clarence this meant that he would stand to inherit vast estates, and feeling resentment at the meteoric rise of the queen’s family he was eager to fall in with Warwick’s intrigues — perhaps the King-Maker had already hinted that if he could make one king he could make another. The obstacle to the marriage was the fact that Clarence and Isabel were related which meant a papal dispensation would be required. This must have given some comfort to Edward when rumours of the proposed match reached him — he had a highly organised network of spies — for he knew that if his brothers married Warwick’s two children the earl would come dangerously close to the throne.

  He summoned Clarence and Gloucester and demanded the truth from them. Clarence immediately denied the suggestion but added that “it would not be a bad match”. At this the king ordered them from him in a fit of rage worthy of his Plantagenet blood.

  When Warwick attempted to buy a dispensation the king prevailed upon the Pope not to grant it, but he knew that this would not be the end of the matter. He sensed danger and enrolled “two hundred strong varlets of the best archers in England to be about his person”, and once again the kingdom became tense with impending conflict. In June, 1469, Edward had to march to Yorkshire to quell an uprising which had been engineered by the Nevilles. His absence allowed Clarence to cross the Channel to Calais where Warwick, as Keeper of the Sea, was preparing a fleet which he claimed was to sail against the French. He had obtained a secret dispensation from Paul II and on July 11, 1469, his brother the archbishop married Anne Neville to the
Duke of Clarence in the Church of Notre Dame.

  The next day the three conspirators signed and issued a manifesto calling upon all “true subjects” to assemble at Canterbury on July 16 to assist them in an armed demonstration to call King Edward’s attention to the “deceivable covetous rule and guiding of certain seditious persons.”

  The conspirators landed at Kent and marched north to join forces with a rebel army under the command of a mysterious gentleman known simply as Robin of Redesdale. It is thought that Robin was in fact Sir John Conyers who, like his lieutenants, was related to Warwick. There was no opposition to the earl and Clarence when they passed London as King Edward was based at Nottingham awaiting reinforcements.

  On July 26 Robin of Redesdale attacked the royalist position at Edgecote. Edward’s Welsh troops gave a good account of themselves until a contingent of Warwick’s men bore down on them from the rear; the King-Maker and Robin were now joined and the royal troops fled the field. At news of the defeat Edward left Nottingham, hoping to link up with an army led by the earls of Devonshire and Pembroke. The morale of his soldiers was shattered by Edgecote and they began to desert on the march. Few remained when the king halted for the night at Honiley, three miles from Kenilworth. At midnight he was awakened by the clatter of weapons and looking out he saw the house was surrounded by armed men loyal to his brother Clarence and Warwick. He ran into the next room to be greeted by Archbishop George Neville who ordered him to dress. Typically Edward retorted that he would finish his rest first.