Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (6 page)

I
F THE WARS OF THE ROSES WERE FOUGHT BY
the men, it was the women who eventually sorted out the mess. By the late 1400s the royal family tree had become a crazy
spider’s web of possible claimants to the throne, and it took female instinct to tease out the relevant strands from the tangle.
The emotions of mothers and wives were to weave new patterns — and eventually they produced a most unlikely solution.

Owain ap Maredudd ap Tydwr was a silver-tongued Welsh gentleman who caught the eye of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of France.
He was a servant in her household in the 1420S — probably Clerk of her Wardrobe — and being
Welsh, he had no surname. The‘ap’ in his name meant‘son of’, so he was Owen, son of Meredith, son of Theodore.

But once he had captured the heart of the widowed Queen, Owen had needed a surname. According to later gossip, Catherine would
spy on her energetic Welsh wardrobe clerk as he bathed naked in the Thames, and she decided she liked what she saw.

The court was outraged. An official inquiry was held. But Catherine stuck by her Owen and in 1432 their marriage was officially
recognised.‘Theodore’ became‘Tudor’, and Owen went through life defiantly proud of the leap in fortune that he owed to love.
Thirty years later, in 1461, cornered by his enemies after the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, he would go to the block with insouciance.’That
head shall lie on the stock,’ he said jauntily,‘that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap.’

From the outset, the Tudors confronted the world with attitude. Catherine and Owen had two sons, Edmund and Jasper, who were
widely viewed as cuckoos in the royal nest. But the dowager Queen resolutely brought up her Welsh boys with her first-born
royal son Henry VI, nine or ten years their senior, and the young King became fond of his boisterous half-brothers. In 1452
he raised them both to the peerage, giving Edmund the earldom of Richmond and making Jasper Earl of Pembroke. The two young
Tudors were given precedence over all the earls in England, and Henry, who had produced no children, was rumoured to be considering
making Edmund his heir. The new Earl of Richmond was granted a version of the royal arms to wear on his shield.

The Tudors rose still higher in the world a few years later, when Edmund married the twelve-year-old Lady Margaret Beaufort,
who had her own claim to the throne. The great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, she proved to be one of the most remarkable
women of her time. Bright-eyed and birdlike, to judge from the portraits still to be seen in the several educational establishments
she endowed, she was a woman of learning. She translated into English part of
The Imitation of Christ,
the early-fifteenth-century manual of contemplations in which the German monk Thomas of Kempen (Thomas a Kempis) taught how
serenity comes through the judicious acceptance of life’s problems.’Trouble often compels a man to search his own heart: it
reminds him he is an exile here, and he can put his trust in nothing in this world.’

Diminutive in stature, Lady Margaret was nonetheless strong in both mind and body. She was married, pregnant and widowed before
the age of thirteen, when Edmund died of plague. In the care of his brother Jasper, Margaret gave birth to Edmund’s son, Henry,
in Jasper’s castle at Pembroke in the bleak and windswept south-west corner of Wales. But some complication of the birth,
probably to do with her youth or small frame, meant that she had no more children. For the rest of her life she devoted her
energies to her son —‘my only worldly joy’, as she lovingly described him — although circumstances kept them apart.

The young man’s links to the succession through his mother — and less directly through his grandmother, the French queen Catherine
— made England a dangerous place for Henry Tudor. He spent most of his upbringing in exile, much of it in the company of his
uncle Jasper. At the age of
four he was separated from his mother, and he scarcely saw her for twenty years.

But Lady Margaret never abandoned the cause. She would later plot a marriage for her son that would make his claim to the
throne unassailable, and she had already arranged a marriage for herself that would turn out to be the Tudor trump card. In
1472 she married Thomas, Lord Stanley, a landowner with large estates in Cheshire, Lancashire and other parts of the north-west.
The Stanleys were a wily family whose local empire-building typified the rivalries that made up the disorderly jostlings of
these years. Allied to Lady Margaret, the Stanleys would prove crucial partners as her son Henry Tudor jostled for the largest
prize of all.

T
HE FLAMBOYANT EDWARD IV SHARES WITH
his luckless rival Henry VI the dubious distinction of being the only king of England to reign twice. In 1461 and 1471, thanks
to Warwick the Kingmaker, the two men played box and cox in what turned out to be a humiliating royal timeshare. But after
Edward had defeated Warwick and disposed of Henry, he ruled for a dozen prosperous and largely undisturbed years, during which
he achieved another distinction. He was the first king for more than a century and a half who did not die in debt — in fact,
he actually left his successor a little money in the kitty.

Edward was England’s first and last businessman monarch. Clapping folk around the shoulders and cracking dirty jokes, he was
also an unashamed wheeler-dealer. He set up his own trading business, making handsome profits on exporting wool and tin to
Italy, while importing Mediterranean cargoes like wine, paper, sugar and oranges. He ran the Crown lands with the keen eye
of a bailiff, and when it came to PR with the merchant community he was a master of corporate hospitality.

One day in 1482 Edward invited the Lord Mayor of London, the aldermen and‘a certain number of such head commoners as the mayor
would assign’ to join him in the royal forest at Waltham in Essex. There, in today’s golf-course country, they were treated
to a morning of sport, then conveyed‘to a strong and pleasant lodge made of green boughs and other pleasant things. Within
which lodge were laid certain tables, whereat at once the said mayor and his company were set and served right plenteously
with all manner of dainties… and especially of venison, both of red deer and of fallow.’ After lunch the King took his guests
hunting again, and a few days later sent their wives‘two harts and six bucks with a tun of Gascon Wine’.

It could be said that Edward IV invented the seductive flummery of the modern honours list when he made six London aldermen
Knights of the Bath. Like the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Bath, which referred to the ritual cleansing that a squire
underwent when he became a knight, was primarily a military honour. Now the King extended the bait to rich civilians that
he wanted to keep
on side: a moneylender would kneel down as Bill Bloggs, the sword would touch his shoulder, and he arose Sir William.

Edward understood that everyone had his price — himself included. In 1475 he had taken an army across the Channel where he
met up with the French King at Picquigny near Amiens — and promptly did a deal to take his army home again. For a down payment
of 75,000 crowns and a pension of 5:0,000 a year, he cheerfully sold off his birthright — England’s claim to the French territories
for which so many of his ancestors had fought so bloodily over the years.

The Treaty of Picquigny brought peace and prosperity to England, but not much honour. Edward’s reign was too undramatic for
Shakespeare to write a play about — one reason, perhaps, why Edward is sometimes called England’s‘forgotten king’. But the
beautiful St George’s Chapel at Windsor, designed to outshine the chapel that his rival Henry VI had built at Eton College
in the valley below, remains his memorial. And the Royal Book reveals a sumptuous court — along with a diverting little insight
into how comfortably this fleshly monarch lived. After he had risen every morning, a yeoman was deputed to leap on to his
bed and roll up and down so as to level out the lumps in the litter of bracken and straw that made up the royal mattress.

In 1483, Edward IV retired to his mattress unexpectedly, having caught a chill while fishing. He died some days later, aged
only forty. Had this cynical yet able man lived just a
few years longer, his elder son Edward, only twelve at the time of his death, might have been able to build on his legacy.
As it was, young Edward and his younger brother soon found themselves inside the Tower of London, courtesy of their considerate
uncle Richard.

W
ARS AND ROSES
…
WE HAVE SEEN THAT
roses were rare on the battle banners of fifteenth-century England. Let’s now take a closer look at the‘wars’ themselves.
In the thirty-two years that history textbooks conventionally allot to the‘Wars of the Roses’, there were long periods of
peace. In fact, there were only thirteen weeks of actual fighting — and though the battles themselves were bitter and sometimes
very bloody, mayhem and ravaging seldom ensued.

’It is a custom in England,’ reported Philippe de Commynes, a shrewd French visitor to England in the 1470s,‘that the victors
in battle kill nobody, especially none of the ordinary
soldiers’. In this curiously warless warfare, defeated noblemen could expect prompt and ruthless execution, but‘neither the
country nor the people, nor the houses were wasted, destroyed or demolished’. The rank and file returned home as soon as they
could, to continue farming their land.

In towns and cities people also got on with their lives. Trade and business positively flourished, generating contracts, ledgers
and letters that called for a literate workforce — and it was the‘grammar’ schools that taught this emerging class of office
workers the practical mechanics of English and Latin. The grammar schools multiplied in the fifteenth century, and the demand
for accessible low-price books that they helped generate was met by an invention that was to prove infinitely more important
than considerations of who was nudging whom off the throne.

In 1469 William Caxton, an English merchant living in the prosperous Flemish trading town of Bruges, was finishing a book
that he had researched. Caxton was a trader in rich cloths — a mercer like Richard Whittington — and books were his passion.
He collected rare books, and he wrote for his own pleasure, scratching out the text laboriously with a quill on to parchment.
The book he was currently completing was a history of the ancient Greek city of Troy, and the mercer, who was approaching
his fiftieth birthday, was feeling weary.‘My pen is worn, mine hand heavy, my eye even dimmed,’ he wrote. The prospect of
copying out more versions of the manuscript for the friends who had expressed an interest was too much to contemplate. So
Caxton decided to see what he could discover about the craft of
printing, which had been pioneered by Johann Gutenberg in the 1440S in the Rhine Valley.

Travelling south-east from Bruges, he arrived on the Rhine nearly thirty years after Gutenberg had started work there. And
having‘practised and learned’ the technique for himself, the mercer turned printer went back to Bruges to set up his own press.
In 1474 his
History of Troy
became the first book to be printed in English, and two years later he brought his press to England, setting up shop near
the Chapter House, in the precinct of Westminster Abbey, where Parliament met.

Caxton had an eye for a good location. Along the route between the Palace of Westminster and the Chapter House shuttled lawyers,
churchmen, courtiers, MPs — the book-buying elite of England. The former cloth trader also had an eye for a bestseller. The
second book he printed was about chess,
The Game and Play of the Chesse.
Then came in fairly quick succession a French-English dictionary, a translation of Aesop’s fables, several popular romances,
Malory’s tale of Camelot in the
Morte D’Arthur,
some school textbooks, a history of England, an encyclopaedia entitled
The Myrrour of the Worlde,
and Chaucer’s bawdy evergreen,
The Canterbury Tales.