A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (16 page)

Surrounding himself with greedy and inept advisors who picked his coffers clean, Henry allowed England to slide into disorder, debt and decay. Crowned ruler of France as well, he stood by as the once vast English possessions there were gradually snatched away by the likes of Joan of Arc until almost nothing was left. And further undermining his effectiveness were his debilitating bouts of insanity.

As England fell into ruin and France leaked away under Henry’s timid rule, the king’s powerful cousin Richard, Duke of York, watched with increasing agitation. Descended from two of Edward III’s sons on both his parents’ sides, York had a claim to the throne that was arguably superior to Henry’s. In time, out of sheer frustration, he would move to assert it. An ugly family clash was looming.

The Duke of York was put in charge of the kingdom while cousin Henry suffered through one of his early bouts with madness, but his influence quickly waned after the king recovered his senses. Seeking to gain more control—and especially to oust Henry’s greedy favorite, their mutual cousin, the Duke of Somerset—York confronted Henry by force at St. Albans in 1455. Somerset was killed and the king wounded in the neck by a passing arrow. It was the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, yet while the Yorkists were now ahead by one, the removal of King Henry VI, was not yet part of their plan. That would come later.

The meek monarch sought peace and reconciliation more than anything else, but his ferocious French queen, Margaret of Anjou, was eager to quash York once and for all. Since she was the partner in the marriage with all the mettle, Margaret usually got her way. London at this time was swarming with agitated supporters of both the Duke of York and the Lancastrian King Henry as the government tried to mediate their differences. Ever the dependable sap, the king staged a “loveday” ceremony to encourage and display family unity. Although Queen Margaret went along with the idea—even walking hand in hand with her sworn enemy York in a procession to St. Paul’s Cathedral—she did so with clenched teeth.

Margaret was convinced York was out to steal Henry’s throne, a suspicion that became all the more gnawing after St. Albans, when Henry suffered through another one of his “episodes” and the royal duke once again assumed control of the kingdom. Raising an army, the angry queen defeated her husband’s cousin at the Battle of Ludlow in 1459 and sent him scurrying away to Ireland. She then introduced legislation declaring him a traitor. The act, which not very subtly deplored York’s “most diabolic unkindness and wretched envy” and his “execrable and most detestable” deed at St. Albans, was passed by the group of English peers who subsequently became known as “The Parliament of Devils.”

Bill or no bill, the now-outlawed Duke of York was far from finished. He returned from Ireland, his forces routed the king’s at Northumberland, and Henry was brought back to London a prisoner. When York himself entered the city, he formally submitted his claim to the throne. For once, Henry VI stood up for himself. In defiance of his cousin York’s claim, he proclaimed to a gathering of peers, “My father was king [Henry V]; his father was also king [Henry IV]; I have worn the crown for forty years, from my cradle. You have all sworn fealty to me as your sovereign, and your fathers did the like to my fathers. How then can my right be disputed?”

While no one was prepared to unseat an anointed king, York now held the power. Parliament came to a compromise of sorts, reluctantly declaring that the duke would be first in line to inherit the crown, displacing Henry’s only son, Edward of Lancaster. Now Queen Margaret was
really
mad. Raising another army in 1460, she had her forces attack York’s at the Battle of Wakefield and the duke was killed. His severed head was displayed on the gates of York city with a paper crown stuck to it—a fun, kind of medieval way of mocking his kingly pretensions.

Heading south, the king’s victorious Lancastrian forces then attacked the remnants of York’s in the second Battle of St. Albans. King Henry was reunited with his family after reportedly spending the entire skirmish laughing and singing to himself. Margaret, meanwhile, treated their son to a little post-battle entertainment; she allowed the seven-year-old Prince of Wales to condemn the Yorkist leaders and then watch their executions. The queen, however, would have little time to gloat. The Duke of York was dead, but his formidable seventeen-year-old son and heir, Edward, was gathering strength. Certainly he didn’t find the stunt with his father’s head one bit funny.

The people of London also were unamused by all the looting and pillaging King Henry’s forces had done while heading south. They slammed the city’s gates shut on the royal family and their Lancastrian army and instead welcomed in York’s son, who immediately declared himself King Edward IV. Issuing a rather windy proclamation, Edward lamented that in the time of “our adversary, he that calleth himself King Henry the Sixth” there existed “not plenty, peace, justice, good governance, policy and virtuous conversation, but unrest, inward war and trouble, unrightwiseness, shedding and effusion of innocent blood, abusion of the laws, partiality, riot, extortion, murder, rape and vicious living, have been the guiders and leaders of the noble realm of England.” It was an elaborate justification for the second usurpation of the throne by a family member in less than a century. And this one would not be the last.

Edward IV was now sovereign, but Henry VI still lived. England’s new monarch chased the old to the north, where he met and defeated the ex-king’s forces at Towton in the most savage encounter of the long, dreadful family feud. “This battle was sore fought,” one chronicler wrote of the cold winter clash, “for hope of life was set [a]side on every part and taking of prisoners was proclaimed a great offence.” The snow shimmered with the blood of thousands hacked apart or pierced by arrows, including that of forty-two Lancastrian knights whom Edward ordered immediately beheaded on the battlefield after their capture.

The new king had proved a victorious warrior at Towton. With his hulking frame covered in gilded armor and his helmet adorned with a jeweled coronet, he inspired his forces whenever he appeared among them in the thick of battle. Cousin Henry, on the other hand, characteristically spent the night praying. After the devastating loss, the deposed royal family made a midnight escape to Scotland, carrying whatever possessions they could.

The former King Henry VI became an elusive shadow, hovering forlornly around his lost kingdom for years to come. In 1465, after wandering from refuge to refuge, he was finally captured, betrayed by a monk who had been sheltering him. “He fell into the bloody hands of his deadly enemies, his own subjects,” as one contemporary put it. To compound the indignity, the former king of England—his feet tied to the stirrups beneath the belly of his horse and wearing a straw hat—was paraded through several towns on his way to imprisonment in the Tower of London. Parliament, meanwhile, had declared “the said Henry, usurper” a traitor, while enthusiastically confirming Edward’s claim to the throne after his formal coronation.

Despite pockets of Lancastrian resistance, often led by the indefatigable former Queen Margaret, Edward IV’s Yorkist regime seemed secure. The Wars of the Roses, however, were far from over. King Edward wore the crown, but he had another close relative, the Earl of Warwick, to thank for it. Known to history as “The Kingmaker,” Warwick was the second most powerful man in England. Problem was, he wanted to be the first. The eventual confrontation between the king and his “over mighty subject” would result in the stunning restoration of Henry VI. Given the family history, Edward should not have been surprised by the turn of events.

The king’s relationship with Warwick started to deteriorate gradually as the earl attempted to control his royal kinsman in exchange for all the help he provided in gaining Edward the crown. But when the king married Elizabeth Woodville, a former lady-in-waiting to ex-Queen Margaret, relations between the two collapsed entirely. Warwick loathed the new queen, primarily because she had a load of upstart relatives whom she sought to advance. With King Edward’s support, they married well, reaped huge financial rewards, and were given influential positions in government. The mighty earl felt threatened by all these arrivistes and lashed out.

His first move was to encourage a popular revolt in Kent in 1469, seeding widespread discontent over Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s relatives. Her father and brother were early victims of the rebellion, beheaded without trial on Warwick’s orders. It was a none too subtle message from the earl to cousin Edward IV that he was not happy. Warwick’s cohorts, including Edward’s own brother, the Duke of Clarence, continued to sow rebellion, even capturing the king at one point. Edward was forced to abandon any pretense of friendship with his treacherous relatives and declare war. Though he issued a proclamation in the spring of 1470 denouncing Warwick and brother Clarence as “rebels and traitors,” he would lose his crown that fall.

Warwick was convinced that he could never control Edward the way he wanted. He also realized the English people would never accept his ally, the Duke of Clarence, as their sovereign. If he wanted to wield power, his only option was to restore the simple-minded and malleable Henry VI. Sailing to France, Warwick made an uneasy peace with his former enemy, Queen Margaret, and swore fealty to Henry. Then he invaded England. Edward barely had time to escape before the earl’s forces swarmed London, and the kingmaker moved to put back on the throne the same monarch he had helped knock off it nine years earlier.

A dazed and bewildered Henry VI was released from the Tower of London, where it was noted that he looked and smelt like a prisoner who had definitely not been given the royal treatment. According to a chronicler, they “new arrayed him, and did to him great reverence, and brought him to the palace of Westminster.” Meek and simple as ever, “mute as a crowned calf,” as one put it, Henry got his old job back. This time he would be Warwick’s puppet.

King Henry barely had time to readjust the seat of his newly restored throne before King Edward returned to England with an army in 1471. Warwick was killed in the Battle of Barnet, and Queen Margaret was defeated several weeks later at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Her seventeen-year-old son, Edward of Lancaster, heir to the throne and last hope of the Lancastrians, was killed. Lodged once again in the Tower, Henry VI was quietly murdered there as his cousin, once again, became Edward IV. The dead king’s corpse was openly displayed in London to show anyone who may have doubted it that the house of Lancaster was finished.

Thus, the Wars of the Roses were temporarily suspended. With no one left to fight, the house of York simply turned on one another. Besides the Duke of Clarence, whom Edward eventually had executed, the king had another brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had served him well during the clashes with his Lancastrian foes. Richard, however, proved himself a far better brother than an uncle.

 

After Edward IV died in 1483, his eldest son by all rights should have succeeded him as King Edward V. Thanks to his dear uncle Richard, though, he was never crowned. Richard, who had been named Protector in Edward IV’s will, snatched away the thirteen-year-old boy-king as he traveled to London for his coronation and immediately lodged him in the Tower of London. Edward was soon joined there by his younger brother, the duke of York, whom Uncle Richard had lured out of sanctuary at Westminster. The “Protector” then proceeded to have both his nephews declared bastards and took the crown for himself as King Richard III.

The two young boys in the Tower were never seen or heard from again. Although certain partisans of Richard III dispute it,
²¹
most historians believe the usurping king had them murdered—smothered to death as they slept, by some accounts. It was a crime that even in the darkest of ages the English people could not stomach. “The hatred which Richard’s crime had roused against him throughout the land remained sullen and quenchless,” wrote Winston Churchill in his
History of the English Speaking Peoples
, “and no benefits bestowed, no sagacious measures adopted, no administrative successes achieved, could avail the guilty monarch.”

Two years after the wicked uncle managed to become King Richard III, the Wars of the Roses briefly resumed. In 1485, the last remaining Lancastrian heir, who became Henry VII, defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field, where he was killed. With the last Yorkist king dead, Henry united the battling houses of York and Lancaster when he married Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth, and established the house of Tudor. After one final Yorkist uprising at Stoke in 1487, the Wars of the Roses were officially over. The bloody legacy of the great family clash, however, would spill over well into the next century.

Henry VII efficiently executed any Yorkist relatives who got too close to his throne, but he was plagued nevertheless by people claiming to be dead relatives. One of them, Perkin Warbeck, was the son of a boatman who claimed to be the younger of Edward IV’s sons murdered in the Tower of London by their uncle Richard III. Warbeck went from a pesky imposter to a serious threat when his bold impersonation received the backing of various European monarchs and surviving Yorkists, including the dead boy’s own aunt. Proclaimed “Richard IV,” Warbeck launched an invasion of England before he was finally captured and eventually hanged.

During the next reign, Henry VIII’s multiple marriages were prompted in part by his desire to avert the chaos of the previous century by siring a son to succeed him peacefully. Even after he achieved this goal, though, Henry still faced an extremely dangerous Yorkist foe: his sixty-nine-year-old kinswoman Margaret, Countess of Salisbury. Although the king had once revered this daughter of the Duke of Clarence almost as a mother, late in his reign he suddenly decided that she was an intolerable threat. Henry ordered the old lady beheaded in 1541, but she didn’t go quietly. Attempting to escape the headsman’s ax, the countess ran around the scaffold trying to elude him. With the executioner in hot pursuit, she was hacked to death. The Tudor dynasty was now safe for its last monarchs, all half-siblings, to make each other’s lives miserable.