The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (18 page)

Even if this was true, it would not last for long.

In 1456 Coventry was one of the richest and most densely populated cities in England: beyond London, only Bristol and Norwich could claim to be bigger or more prosperous. Coventry’s busy cloth market was the beating heart of a proud and bustling community, living both within and beyond the recently renovated city walls, surrounded by a ditch and accessed on three sides by ornate, ancient gates. The river Sherbourne wound its way by the southern wall, and three of England’s busiest roads passed within twenty miles of the city. Coventry boasted all the features of a thriving urban centre: elegant churches and a grammar school; inns for revellers and travellers under the signs of the Swan and the Bear; a magnificent guildhall built on the remains of a castle ruined nearly three hundred years earlier; two hospitals and a hermitage; townhouses belonging to local dignitaries and merchants; and four religious houses, one of which was the cloistered college of the vicars choral, whose voices marked the liturgical rhythm of the day. In the south-east of the city proper was a rare expanse of open space: the vineyard which had once belonged to the castle. Densely populated suburbs spread out from the walls, houses dotted between pockets of marshland regularly flooded by the region’s several waterways. This was a vibrant centre of trade and power, well connected to the realm beyond.
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It was a place fit for a king – and more importantly, for a queen.

On 14 September 1456, Margaret of Anjou entered Coventry in high splendour. She came with her young son Prince Edward, who was a month short of his third birthday. Henry VI – husband, father and still in his deeply unremarkable way
king of England – had come to the city several days before the rest of his family. He was not an impressive sight. Sickness had left him feebler than ever: still blandly pious and easily swayed by whoever had command of him, he was now also physically weak and quick to tire. Henry was only thirty-four years old, but more than a decade of criticism and disappointment had left him miserably reduced. He had begun planning his tomb in Westminster Abbey, and at times acted as though he were ready to crawl into it. Pope Pius II, watching England from afar, would later describe Henry in this phase of his life as ‘a man more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit, who left everything in his wife’s hands’.
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It was therefore Margaret’s arrival in Coventry, and not Henry’s, that was marked with the greatest pageantry and display. The city was famous for its mystery plays, and the citizens put all of their dramatic expertise into celebrating the arrival of a woman who, since the serious decline in her husband’s health, was becoming one of the most formidable political actors in England. As she processed into the town she was greeted in verse (albeit somewhat pedestrian in its composition) by figures arrayed as Isaiah and Jeremiah, St Edward, St John and Alexander the Great, and players dressed as the seven cardinal virtues and the Nine Worthies. She was hailed as a ‘princess most excellent, born of blood royal’ and ‘Empress, queen, princess excellent, in one person all three’. (The actor playing Joshua, king of the Israelites, called her ‘the highest lady that I can imagine’.) Her son Edward was accorded similarly high praise: St Edward the Confessor called his young namesake ‘my ghostly child, whom I love principally’, while St John gave thanks that ‘the virtuous voice of prince Edward shall daily well increase’. The figure of Alexander the Great, one of the greatest soldier-kings in history, offered Henry the unlikely title of ‘noblest prince that is born, whom fortune hath famed … sovereign lord Harry, emperor &
king’. This was very much a token gesture among a pageant that celebrated the queen’s majesty above all. It drew to an end with the sight of St Margaret taking to the stage to slay a dragon with ‘a miracle’.
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Evidently satisfied with what she had seen, Margaret would remain in Coventry with the king, prince and royal court for much of the next year, and return frequently for the rest of the decade. Although England’s bureaucratic machinery remained in Westminster, the realm would henceforth be ruled, effectively, from the midlands.

Since the battle of St Albans, Margaret’s power had increased steadily. At twenty-six, she was now a mature and experienced public figure, confident, capable, and connected to a large circle of supporters and allies. Most importantly, she had possession of Edward, the heir to the crown, and it was through her own queenly influence and her importance as keeper of the little prince that she set about establishing herself as an alternative hub of power to Richard duke of York.

Women were not often able to exercise outright political control in the fifteenth century. Contemporary political thought held them to be weak, hysterical and physically incapable of carrying out the fundamental duties of kingship – not least riding into battle, swinging an axe, ready to make war upon their enemies. Female rule was considered unnatural, and attempts by women to seize power unilaterally were rare and usually futile. But that was not how Margaret saw it. Growing up in Anjou, she had witnessed her mother and grandmother taking charge of her father’s territories during his long periods of imprisonment, ruling in the name of a man and wielding ‘his’ authority, but in reality acting on their own. Why should she not do the same in England, either through her husband or her son?

York’s policy following his victory at St Albans had been to establish a second protectorate, similar to that which had existed during the king’s illness. He secured reappointment as protector
on 15 November 1455 and for four months did his best to exercise royal authority in the cause of unity among the lords and good governance. But whereas during York’s first protectorate the king had been obviously and totally incapacitated, during the second protectorate he was attempting to exercise royal power without any such urgent mandate.

He was obliged to reward his Neville allies handsomely for their help in ridding the realm of Somerset. Richard earl of Warwick was awarded the captaincy of Calais and a slew of grants in Wales, where Somerset had held land and titles. The Bourchier family was also well rewarded, but few other families benefited, which gave the impression that the second protectorate was a narrow clique rather than the national enterprise York seems genuinely to have imagined he could create. Politics had become far more strained and factious in the aftermath of the violence York had provoked, and although he enjoyed a few successes – restoring order to the south-west by stamping out the worst excesses committed between the Courtenay and Bonville families – this was not enough to convince the realm that Yorkist government in Henry VI’s name was the solution to its problems.

York ran into severe difficulty in early 1456, when parliament demanded another full-blooded act of resumption, by which lands granted away from the Crown would be swept back into royal possession in order to bolster the king’s finances. Since York had a mandate to try to bring some order and stability to royal government, he stood behind the policy and did his best to convince his fellow lords to do the same. But here again he found that the base of his support was extremely narrow. There was a distinct apathy towards his protectorate – and certainly he did not possess enough enthusiastic support throughout the realm to encourage men who had been personally enriched by grants from the Crown suddenly to give them up with no prospect of recompense. The Act was rejected by a large number of England’s lords and York
felt he had no choice but to resign the protectorship on 25 February 1456. He tried to remain involved in government throughout the summer, organising military defences when the king of the Scots raided the northern border and trying to deal with pockets of disorder in Wales. But his authority was almost visibly ebbing away. In public he was scorned: a display of five dogs’ severed heads was erected on Fleet Street in London in September, with each dead mouth holding a satirical poem against York, ‘that man that all men hate’. By the autumn it was clear that his rule was over. His allies and supporters began to be dismissed from their offices, and were replaced by men loyal to Queen Margaret.
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From late 1456, then, the queen tried to impose herself on the affairs of state. A correspondent watching events in London during the end of York’s second protectorate wrote to the East Anglian knight Sir John Fastolf that ‘the Queen is a great and strong-laboured [i.e. much petitioned] woman, for she spareth no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power’.
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A chronicler writing later went further, noting that ‘the governance of the Realm stood most by the Queen and her Council’. And a third writer, a partisan of York, reckoned that the queen ‘ruled the realm as her liked, gathering riches innumerable’.
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It was rumoured that she was attempting to persuade her husband to abdicate, resigning the crown to his young son, who would become, by implication, a puppet strung even more tightly to her fingers.

In part Margaret’s motivation in opposing York was sheer personal enmity. The queen had been deeply offended by the duke’s actions in 1455. Whatever the constitutional niceties of York’s argument, Margaret could not ignore the fact that the duke had raised an army, left two peers – one of them her friend Somerset – bleeding to death in the streets of St Albans, and taken the king as an effective captive back to London. York, for his part, resented the queen moving towards the centre of power. A woman, and a
Frenchwoman at that, supplanting the natural role of a duke of the royal blood was completely unacceptable. Added to this was the fact that this particular woman appeared to hate him with every fibre of her being, and was committed to undermining his attempts at government. It was no surprise that relations between the two camps were strained.

During 1457 Margaret built up her territorial power in the midlands, staffed her son’s council with loyal household men and, where she could, advanced trusted allies both through offices and other means, such as marriages. Thus in April 1457 Henry’s
half-brother
Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, was appointed as constable of Carmarthen and Aberystwyth, Welsh offices that had recently been in the hands of York himself. Meanwhile, Jasper’s elder brother Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, was a focus for the queen’s interests in south Wales, where he busied himself with a private war against two of the duke of York’s retainers, Sir William Herbert and Sir Walter Devereux.

Edmund Tudor had been granted a handsome elevation through his marriage in the autumn of 1455 to Margaret Beaufort, the twelve-year-old niece of the late duke of Somerset and daughter of the disgraced soldier John Beaufort, the duke who had died, possibly by suicide, when Margaret was one year old. Margaret was the richest heiress in England, and her hand brought with it immense wealth and power. By the summer of 1456 Margaret was pregnant. But Edmund Tudor would never see his child. He died of plague on 1 November 1456 following a short imprisonment by York’s retainers in Carmarthen Castle. Just under three months later, on 28 January 1457, in Pembroke Castle, the thirteen-year-old Margaret was traumatically delivered of a son, named Henry Tudor. Even in an age where girls became wives and mothers early in life, this was a young age at which to bear a child. Margaret was probably physically and mentally traumatised by the birth: certainly this was the last child she would ever bear.

Queen Margaret, meanwhile, did not only favour those close to the royal camp. York and his allies were excluded from the king’s council and kept firmly away from court, but they were not totally isolated following the failure of the second protectorate. The duke’s commission as lieutenant of Ireland was renewed for ten years, and he was financially rewarded for the properties and offices he lost to men like the Tudors. In the summer of 1457, when there was a fear that the French were planning an attack on the English coastline, York and his friends were appointed to muster infantry and archers to defend the realm. York’s daughter Elizabeth was married to John de la Pole, the fifteen-year-old duke of Suffolk, only son of the murdered William de la Pole. Likewise, the Neville family received cautious royal patronage. The earl of Salisbury was employed as chief steward in some northern parts of the king’s duchy of Lancaster, and he was included in defences against Scotland. Salisbury’s son Warwick was allowed to continue as captain of Calais with control of the large garrison there – a critical post given the delicate situation in France. So if there was tension as a result of Margaret’s displacement of York, there was also a hope for cautious reconciliation – this perhaps emanating from the king, whose only apparent wish in government was a pious but simple-minded desire for rapprochement. This came to a head on 25 March 1458 in London, when the Crown held a curious procession known as a Love Day.

The deaths incurred on the royalist side at St Albans were not easily forgotten. Both Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, had left sons and heirs who harboured a rancorous determination to avenge their families’ losses. Henry Beaufort, the third duke of Somerset, was twenty years old in 1456 and lucky to be alive at all, having been grievously wounded fighting shoulder to shoulder with his father
at St Albans. Henry Percy the younger, who became the third earl of Northumberland, was thirty-six, and with his younger brother Thomas, Lord Egremont, bore a fierce resentment against the Neville family. These young men and their friends were widely known to carry a ‘grudge and wrath’ against the Yorkists – a situation scarcely promising for the future stability of the kingdom.
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Henry, or those around him, decided that, rather than allow blood feud and personal vendetta to spill into further murderous violence, the two sides should be brought quite literally hand in hand to make peace and foster friendship under the royal blessing.

The court had moved from Coventry back to the south-east in the autumn of 1457, and a great council was summoned to London early in the new year. By the end of January the city’s largest lodging houses were packed with lords and their large bands of armed retainers. The duke of York brought four hundred men and stayed in his own city residence, Baynard’s Castle. Salisbury came with five hundred, and his son Warwick arrived from Calais with six hundred followers, all dressed in ‘red jackets, embroidered with a ragged staff’, Warwick’s personal emblem.
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Their rival magnates came arrayed even more forcefully: Henry duke of Somerset came to London in the company of the duke of Exeter and eight hundred men, and he was followed by the Percys – Northumberland, Egremont, Sir Ralph Percy – and John, Lord Clifford, whose father, Thomas, had also been killed fighting on the king’s side at St Albans. These northerners brought a massive force of fifteen hundred men. By early March, when the king and queen came up to Westminster to open council proceedings, London resembled a war zone. The city authorities kept an overnight watch, banned the public carrying of weapons and put men-at-arms on patrol in the streets to try to hold the peace, while thousands of royal archers could be seen posted both inside and outside the city, guarding the whole Thames corridor from Southwark down to Hounslow.