Root of the Tudor Rose (48 page)

Edmund married Margaret Beaufort (the great-niece of Cardinal Henry Beaufort) and she was six months pregnant when her husband died of the plague at Carmarthen in November 1456. The thirteen-year-old Margaret turned to Edmund's brother for protection and it was in Jasper's castle at Pembroke that she gave birth on the twenty-eighth of January 1457 to Edmund's son Henry, who was destined to become King Henry VII.

Throughout his life, Jasper championed the Lancastrian cause, always loyal to his half-brother the King. Owen, too, remained loyal to the Lancastrian dynasty and, as an elderly man, he fought alongside his son Jasper at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross in 1461. Owen was captured in that battle and taken to the nearby town of Hereford where he was executed. Legend has it that as he knelt before the block, he said that the head which would shortly lie in the executioner's basket was once wont to lie in Queen Catherine's lap.

Catherine was buried with due ceremony in the small Lady Chapel at Westminster but her bones were not allowed to rest for long. Wanting to build a suitable tomb for himself, Henry VII had the Lady Chapel demolished, probably with every intention of re-burying his grandmother's remains elsewhere in the abbey. But he never got around to it, neither did his arrogant son Henry VIII. In fact, no one quite got around to burying poor Catherine and she lay above ground in a loose-lidded coffin, becoming quite a tourist attraction. Visitors to the abbey, who were prepared to pay twopence for the privilege, were allowed to look at her embalmed body, even to handle it. Bizarrely, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys wrote that he had kissed Queen Catherine on his thirty-sixth birthday in 1669.

It was an ignominious fate for a woman who had changed the course of history. The daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother of kings, she also had an involvement in the realisation of three major prophecies, namely that Henry of Monmouth would achieve great success in a short life but that his son, Henry of Windsor, would lose all his father had fought for. France, too, lost by an old woman would be saved by a young one, and it was Catherine's own brother who was crowned King of France by Joan of Arc.

Then there was the ancient prophecy which claimed that, one day, a Welshman would sit on the throne of England and indeed Catherine and Owen's grandson, Henry VII, the first of the great Tudor monarchs, was descended through Owen from the royal house of Gwynedd. With Henry's accession to the English throne, the people of Wales slowly reacquired the privileges of an equal race, something which had been denied them since the English parliament of 1402 had passed penal laws designed to ensure English dominance and deprive the Welsh of some of the most basic human rights.

Llanilltud Fawr

2014

Appendix II – Living History

The people who shaped our history are often commemorated in the buildings with which they are associated. London's
Westminster Abbey
is a must-see living pageant of British history and will reward the visitor with a tangible feeling of having touched Catherine's life.

It was not until 1878 that Catherine's remains were finally given a permanent place of burial under the altar in Henry V's chantry. The Latin inscription for her on the altar can be translated:
Under this slab (once the altar of this chapel) … rest at last, after various vicissitudes, finally deposited here by command of Queen Victoria, the bones of Catherine de Valois, daughter of Charles VI, King of France, wife of Henry V, mother of Henry VI, grandmother of Henry VII, born 1400, crowned 1421, died 1438.

In fact, the dates given here are incorrect, since she is known to have been born in 1401 and died in 1437. Her painted wooden funeral effigy is on display in the Abbey Museum. She is shown to have blue-grey eyes and, unusually, her head is tilted to the left. Her slight body is about 5 feet 4 inches tall and slim-waisted. It is still possible to see the heads of the nails which, nearly 600 years ago, were used to attach Catherine's own clothes to the effigy.

King Henry V's tomb
lies beneath the arch of the chantry. Above him is the Altar of the Annunciation, where prayers were said for his soul. The ceremonial saddle, helm, and shield which were used at his funeral, are displayed in the Abbey Museum. The saddle was originally covered with blue velvet and the limewood shield still has a small section of crimson velvet remaining on the inner side. The domed helm, about sixteen inches high, is a tilting helm so would not have been worn in battle. A fifteenth-century sword, found in the Abbey triforium in 1869, is thought to be part of the king's funeral armour.

King Henry VII
: Alongside Catherine's funeral effigy in the Abbey museum is the incredibly life-like effigy head of Henry VII, the first of the Tudor kings and grandson of Catherine and Owen Tudor. He himself commissioned the magnificent Lady Chapel at the east end of the Abbey which bears his name. His tomb is situated behind the altar and on it lie gilt bronze effigies of the king and his queen, Elizabeth of York.

(
www.westminster-abbey.org
)

Owen Tudor
's family home, at Penmynydd on the island of Anglesey off the North Wales coast, is now little more than a group of houses strung out along the B5420 which links the county town of Llangefni with the Menai Strait and the house which stands on the site of Owen's home is privately owned. However, in the local church of St Gredifael, Owen's great-grandparents, Goronwy Fychan and his wife, Myfanwy, lie buried under alabaster effigies. Goronwy's sons, including Tudur who was Owen's grandfather, strongly supported their kinsman Owain Glyndŵr in his rebellion against English rule in the early 1400s, losing their land in Penmynydd as a result. Some of their descendants regained the estate later in the century, but they never achieved the same level of local influence. A fine Tudor stained glass window in the church was mindlessly vandalised some years ago but has since been restored.

(
www.anglesey-history.co.uk
)

Edmund Tudor
, Catherine and Owen's son, was almost certainly born in the manor of Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. Nothing of that building now remains but there is great local pride in the town's early association with the Tudor dynasty.

(
www.hertfordshire.genealogy.co.uk
)

Jasper Tudor
is easier to trace. Born at the Bishop of Ely's manor at Hatfield in Hertfordshire around 1431 he led a fairly well-documented life. Today, though Hatfield House is one of Britain's most interesting historic houses, its Tudor connections are almost entirely with Queen Elizabeth I, as it was her childhood home.
(
www.hatfield-house.co.uk
)
. Jasper is more in evidence at Pembroke Castle on the tip of the Pembrokeshire peninsula in South Wales. The castle's outstanding feature is its late twelfth-century keep, a massive cylindrical tower rising some eighty feet into the air, with an unusual stone dome. Views from the top are breathtaking and the castle's natural defensive position on a rocky promontory overlooking Milford Haven is immediately apparent.

In Jasper's time, it was a comfortable home rather than a fortress and he embellished the domestic buildings with fireplaces and a fine oriel window. His sister-in-law, Edward's thirteen-year-old widow Margaret Beaufort, took refuge in the castle after her husband's death. Her son, Henry, spent much of his childhood here in the care of his uncle, Jasper. Today the castle is owned and run by a private charitable trust and is open to the public.

(
www.pembroke-castle.co.uk
)

One of the author's few flights of fancy in the book you have been reading is that Owen and Catherine's daughter,
Tacinda
, was born in the medieval castle of St Donat's in the Vale of Glamorgan, overlooking the Bristol Channel. It is known that Henry Beaufort's illegitimate daughter, Jane, was married to Sir Edward Stradling who owned St Donat's at the time but there is absolutely no evidence that Catherine and Owen ever visited them. However, a splendid castle still stands on the site and it has strong American connections. John Quincy Adams, who served as the sixth President of the United States from 1825 to 1829, was descended directly from Jane and Edward Stradling. In 1925, the castle was bought by the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst as gift for his mistress, the film star Marion Davies and Hearst contributed much of his vast wealth to the sympathetic restoration of the castle. The building now houses the international sixth-form Atlantic College and also boasts a thriving Arts Centre.

(
www.castlewales.com/donats
)

Neither is there any evidence that Catherine ever lived in Baynard's Castle, which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Today, an office block owned by the BT Group and called ‘Baynard House' stands where it once stood. But the little church of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe still exists though it too was badly damaged by the Great Fire. It was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, only to be blitzed in World War II. Subsequently reconstructed within the shell of Wren's building, this charming church now offers a quiet haven in one of the busiest parts of London and there is always a warm welcome for visitors to join the congregation.

(
www.standrewbythewardrobe.net
)

The following web addresses are for other sites which have strong associations with the story and all would amply repay the reader's further investigation:

Author's note, bibliography and acknowledgements

I don't recall being taught very much at school about the history of my native Wales. The names that echo in the memory of my early education include a few Georges, Jameses, and Williams (including both Pitts), along with Magna Carta, the Corn Laws, and the Boston Tea Party, but it's also fair to say that History was never my strong suit. So it has been a great pleasure to come to the subject later in life, particularly to realise how important a part Wales and the Welsh played in the history of fifteenth-century Britain.

It was a moment of pure serendipity in a second-hand bookshop when I came across a slightly dog-eared volume entitled
Without My Wig
, which turned out to be a collection of essays by Judge Sir Thomas Artemus Jones, published in 1944 by the Brython Press of Liverpool. Clearly the learned judge took great delight in what he described as
‘peeps into the back pages of legal history'
. One of those ‘peeps' appeared as the third essay in the collection: ‘Owen Tudor's Marriage – a Missing Statute'. This was what set me on a path of joyful discovery which revealed fascinating facts at every turn.

I rummaged, searched, and explored many avenues in my quest to discover more about the sensational love story which lay at the root of the Tudor dynasty and I pored over a plethora of books on medieval history, far too many to list individually. However, I found the following particularly helpful:

•
Lives of the Queens of England Vol. II
by Agnes Strickland (1840/1849)

•
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester – A Biography
by Kenneth Hotham Vickers (1907)

•
Henry Beaufort, Bishop, Chancellor, Cardinal
by Lewis Bostock Radford (1908)

•
The Reign of King Henry VI
by R.A. Griffiths (Sutton Publishing, 2004)

•
Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses
by Alison Weir (Random House, 2011)

•
Hanes Cymru/A History of Wales
by John Davies (Penguin Books, published in Welsh in 1990 and in English in 1993)

•
When Was Wales?: a history of the Welsh
by Gwyn A. Williams (Penguin, 1991)

•
The Making of the Tudor Dynasty
by Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas. (Sutton Publishing, 1985)

•
Owain Glyndŵr: The story of the last Prince of Wales
by Terry Breverton (Amberley Publishing, 2009)

•
The Story of Wales
by Jon Gower (BBC Books, 2012)

•
The Matter of Wales: Epic views of a small country
by Jan Morris (Penguin Books, 1986)

•
A Short History of Wales
by A.H. Dodd (John Jones Publishing Ltd., 1998)

•
The Revolt of Owain Glyndŵr
by R.R. Davies (Oxford University Press, 1995)

•
Owain Glyndŵr
(Pocket Guide) by Glanmor Williams (2005)

•
Medieval Wales
by A.D. Carr (Macmillan Press Ltd, 1995)

•
Owain Glyndŵr Prince of Wales
by R.R. Davies (Y Lolfa, 2009)

Perhaps I owe my greatest debt to the online
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, an indispensable source of information on the lives of the men and women who shaped Britain. Its riches are freely available to members of subscribing local libraries and I am grateful to the
Vale of Glamorgan Libraries
service for facilitating my research.