The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (38 page)

He died, following a lingering illness, on 21 April 1509, and was succeeded by his seventeen-year-old son, Henry VIII. The succession was a nervous, secretive affair, stage-managed by the wizened and arthritis-crippled Margaret Beaufort, by now approaching her sixty-sixth birthday but still as acute a political operative as she had ever been. The effort took its toll. She died on 29 June the same year and was buried in an astonishingly beautiful tomb in the new Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, made by the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who also made Henry VII’s tomb. She had lived long enough to witness the coronation of her grandson: the crowning triumph of an eventful life. Not since the accession of Henry V in 1413 had an adult (or nearly adult) king inherited the throne from his father. Margaret Beaufort, an astonishing woman in any age, had been a key player in the long struggles that were waged over the English crown. Victory and vindication were hers.

Young Henry came to the throne confident and ready to rule. He was well educated, charming and charismatic: truly a prince fit for the renaissance in courtly style, tastes and patronage that was dawning in northern Europe. He had been blessed with the
fair colouring and radiant good looks of his grandfather Edward IV: tall, handsome, well built and dashing, here was a king who saw his subjects as peers and allies around whom he had grown up, rather than semi-alien enemies to be suspected and persecuted. One of the new king’s first acts was to issue a general pardon, although pointedly excluding the de la Poles, the detested Empson and Dudley, and around eighty named others. Shortly afterwards he married his brother’s twenty-three-year-old widow, Katherine of Aragon. And then, as soon as possible following the deaths of his father and grandmother, the new king – modelling himself on his legendary ancestor Henry V – began planning for a war in France. Over the course of a century all of the French lands traditionally claimed by English kings had been lost. Like his Plantagenet forebears, young Henry made it his ambition to win them back.

Beginning in 1512 Henry would send armies over the Channel to torment the French. If not especially successful, these campaigns were at least highly enjoyable to a military society that had had precious little opportunity to fight abroad since the 1450s. Here was a young king who seemed naturally to understand the style and much of the art of kingship from the very beginning. For emulating Henry V was not a challenge limited solely to the mind of Henry VIII. In 1513–14, a book entitled
The First English Life of Henry V
had been published, lauding the memory of the hero of Agincourt for the explicit purpose of guiding the new king towards ‘the example of [ Henry V’s] great wisdom and discretion’, and praying that he might be ‘provoked in his said war’ against the French.
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(In this, the author found a much more willing audience than the Italian humanist Tito Livio Frulovisi, whose
Vita Henrici Quinti
had been ignored by Henry VI in the 1430s.)

Henry VIII’s purpose as king, however, was to be more than simply Henry V reborn. The new king was also, as the poets and
propagandists of the new reign pointed out gleefully, the living manifestation of the Tudors’ self-made myth: Henry was, to quote his tutor John Skelton, ‘the rose both red and white’. He was neither Lancaster nor York, but both: the heir of both Henry VI and Richard duke of York; unity personified. The Tudor rose continued to abound as a motif of his reign: it adorned buildings and decorated royal palaces; it was painted in choirbooks and illustrated manuscripts prepared for the king’s library; it was even doodled on the king’s private prayer roll.
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Hope, which had been long frozen under the later rule of Henry VII, was reawakened by the accession of his son.

Yet under his bluff and bold exterior, Henry VIII could be as ruthless as his father had been. Although his position was much improved as a king who had legitimately inherited his crown, rather than having wrenched it from a dying rival on a battlefield, he could not afford wholly to ignore the dynastic vulnerabilities that had occupied his father’s mind so feverishly. In the Tower, Edmund de la Pole was a potentially toxic prisoner, while Richard de la Pole remained at large, somewhere across the sea. Ageing Yorkist diehards might still harbour a grudge, and while Henry VIII could afford to be magnanimous in his newly acquired kingship – he restored George duke of Clarence’s daughter Margaret Pole to her estates and promoted her to a position of dignity and independence, giving her the old family title of countess of Salisbury – he knew he was not wholly free of the enemies whom his father had made. And he was prepared to act swiftly and savagely if necessary to contain them.

The catalyst was Henry’s war in France. As a young, thrusting king with an urge to prove himself and a talented and rising new first minister by the name of Thomas Wolsey, Henry launched a second invasion of France in 1513, which he led himself, while Queen Katherine stayed at home as regent to oversee renewed hostilities with the Scottish king James IV.
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But Henry could
not in good conscience go over to France and risk his life in battle in the knowledge that he held in captivity a man who had very recently claimed the crown of England for himself. ‘It was feared that when the king was out of the country, the people might perhaps be eager for a revolution; they might snatch Edmund forcibly from the Tower [and] give him his liberty,’ wrote Vergil.
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Shortly before the king embarked for France, he gave the order that Edmund de la Pole, erstwhile earl of Suffolk, should have his stay in the prison abruptly terminated. On 4 May 1513 the White Rose was taken out of prison, hauled up to Tower Hill and summarily beheaded.

There was, however, one more left. One White Rose had been lopped off, but another grew from the same stem. Richard de la Pole had been loose ever since absconding from England with his brother in 1501. After his brother’s capture and repatriation he had wound up in Buda, in the kingdom of Hungary, where he made an unlikely success of his career in exile, under the protection of King Ladislaus II, who paid him a pension until 1516 and made sure that he stayed far beyond the reach of the frustrated English kings. Financially secure and warlike by nature, Richard distinguished himself on the battlefield, fighting in the wars that raged in the unstable kingdoms and fiefdoms of northern Italy, southern France and the Spanish peninsula. He was a talented and brave captain, well respected by those who saw him fight, and he quickly made powerful friends, including the French dauphin, Francis. From 1513, when his brother was killed, he claimed the title of duke of Suffolk and adopted the nickname White Rose – or variations thereof, including Blanche Rose and La Rosa Blancha.
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As ever, in continental politics and war, the possession of a
rival claimant to the English throne was a great boon for anyone who wished to vex the king of England. Thus, when Henry VIII invaded France in 1513, Louis XII recognised Richard de la Pole as the rightful king of England. The transaction was clear: if Henry wished to reopen the foreign wars of his Plantagenet ancestors, then in return Louis was more than happy to reopen the question of the English succession. In 1514 he equipped de la Pole with an army of twelve thousand men, much larger than the force that had accompanied Henry VII when he crossed the sea and successfully deposed Richard III in 1485. They were rumoured to be ready to depart from Normandy in June 1514, and it is very possible that they would have done so had not Henry VIII decided against sending another expensive army to France that summer, choosing instead to make a peace with the ageing French king, by which Henry’s eighteen-year-old sister Mary married Louis and became queen of France. (She would hold the position for only three months, since Louis died on New Year’s Day 1515, to be succeeded by his cousin Francis I.)

The peace was well timed, and averted the threat of a Yorkist invasion, but it was still clear that under Richard de la Pole’s tenacious challenge Henry VIII was no more able to ignore the threat of the White Rose than his father had been. Before long he had resorted to much the same tactics as the old king: hiring assassins, commissioning spies to work the European channels, and applying diplomatic pressure to try and keep the White Rose at bay. But none of it worked. Like Henry VIII, Francis I was a young, thrusting and lively king determined to make an impression. More importantly, he was friendly with Richard de la Pole, so support for the White Rose continued. There were rumours of an invasion under or a rising in the name of the would-be Richard IV in 1516, 1521, 1522, 1523 and 1524. None ever came to fruition, but Henry and his ministers were seldom allowed to forget that every move abroad came at a potential price in
domestic harmony. And in the end, only the unexpected outcome of a battle fought halfway across Europe would bring Henry VIII the dynastic security he so badly craved.

Before the sun had risen on 24 February 1525, a French army led in person by Francis I was moving around the walls of Pavia, a heavily fortified military town in the heart of Lombardy, some twenty miles south of Milan. More than twenty thousand men had been camped out in siege formation around Pavia for nearly four months, attempting to starve out the nine thousand men, mainly mercenaries, who were inside the city walls. They were about to be confronted by an equally mighty relieving force of fighters loyal to the Spanish emperor Charles V, with whom Francis was pursuing what would be a long, complex and bloody war for domination of the Italian peninsula. From first light the assault began: the crash of cannon and arquebus mingling with the rumble of cavalry hoofs as two gigantic armies flew into one another with utter ferocity.

Richard de la Pole was in command of the French infantry, fighting alongside another experienced and capable captain, François de Lorraine, who commanded a crack unit of mercenary
landsknechts
known as the Black Band. But 24 February was not to prove a blessed day for either man. During a battle that raged for nearly four hours the French army was split and finally routed by a fierce and brilliantly organised Spanish imperial effort. Francis I was knocked from his horse and pinned to the ground before being chivalrously picked up and taken as a prisoner for Charles V. The casualties on the French side were appalling, and included many commanders and captains. The French lost a miserable field, and with it their position in Lombardy, from which they would retreat at great speed almost as soon as the battle was over. And by the end of the battle, Richard de la Pole – the
White Rose, last remaining grandson of Richard duke of York and rival king of England – lay dead.

The shock and scale of the French defeat stunned many in Europe. But it absolutely delighted Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey. French fortunes in war, which had ridden so high for so long, now stood in tatters: their king a humiliated captive, their armies destroyed. Henry could now seriously begin to plot a repeat of the feats of his ancestor Henry V: to storm France, recover the ancient Plantagenet patrimony and restore English rule from Normandy to Gascony. He could even fantasise, if his allies should prove themselves agreeable, about taking back the crown of France which Henry VI had last worn in Paris in 1431. And all of this could be conceived without the tiresome prospect of a French king conjuring up another puppet claimant to the English throne. De la Pole was dead! The price of war abroad need no longer be plotting and intrigue at home. Now conquest would not have to be weighed against dynastic security. The ghosts of the previous century could finally be forgotten.

A French historian writing in the eighteenth century described – or perhaps imagined – the conversation between Henry VIII and the messenger who found the king in bed during the early days of March 1525 and told him the outcome of the battle of Pavia. Having discoursed at length about the capture of Francis I and the destruction of the French army, the messenger went on to report the wonderful news about the last White Rose. ‘God have mercy on his soul!’ Henry is said to have exclaimed. ‘All the enemies of England are gone.’ And then, pointing to the messenger, he cried, ‘Give him more wine!’
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The death of the last White Rose in 1525 was really the final rattle of opposition to the Crown to have its origins in the wars that had shaken the realm since the first outbreak of violence during Henry VI’s reign in the 1450s. By the 1520s the generation that ruled and moved England were, by and large, not veterans of Bosworth or Stoke. Anyone who had participated in either of those battles would be in his fifties – approaching old age, by the standards of the time. Few could now remember the horrors of Towton. Henry VIII’s generation were children of (relative) peace, and though the elderly would have spoken of the violence of civil war, and shared their memories of the ferocious battles that had taken place in the midlands, the marches of Wales, the outskirts of London and the far north, the truth was that most of the protagonists and the participants of the wars were long dead. The wounds were passing into the realm of history and folklore.

One very important reason for this was that the central issue that had lain at the root of the wars appeared to have been resolved. This was not a case of an overmighty nobility having been blunted, of a system we now call ‘bastard feudalism’ having been destroyed, or of a radical shift having occurred in the power structures of England, as has sometimes been argued. Rather, it was the result of a final restoration of determined and legitimate kingship that would have been recognisable to men who had lived a century earlier, during the heyday of the Plantagenets. Henry VIII was not merely a king who had inherited his crown by right of birth rather than conquest: he was a majestic, assertive, warlike prince who combined the swagger and grit of Edward IV with
the appetite for all the trappings of Renaissance princeliness that was common to the other great monarchs of his generation: most especially Francis I of France and Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. Although ‘the wars of the roses’ had in the 1480s become wars of dynastic legitimacy, their origins were not in a squabble about blood. Rather they had lain squarely in the English polity’s inability to cope with the inane, destructively pliant kingship of Henry VI. This vacillating king, peaceful and pious, had unleased a half-century of political trauma.

Henry VIII could hardly have presented a more different character. ‘Our king is not after gold, or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory and immortality,’ the English scholar-courtier Lord Mountjoy had written to the great Dutch humanist Erasmus on Henry VIII’s accession in 1509. Henry had many faults, as the second half of his reign would amply demonstrate, but during his early years it was clear that personal authority had finally been restored to the crown by a king whose right to rule was stronger than that of any of his predecessors since 1422. Henry’s accession thus solved two problems at once: it addressed the vague and random problem of personal authority on the part of the man who happened to become king, and the question of legitimacy as a matter of blood-right, which had been disastrously thrown open in 1460 when Richard duke of York had decided to abandon his quest for political leadership and claim the crown. The basic symbols and images of Tudor kingship presented Henry VIII as the embodiment of red rose and white rose reunited. He understood the role, and played it perfectly.

This is not to say, of course, that Henry could afford to ignore dynastic threats completely, as the Richard de la Pole saga had demonstrated. Alternative Plantagenet and ‘Yorkist’ lines of royal descent were thin, but they still existed. In the spring of 1521 Henry had acted ruthlessly to press charges of treason – conspiring or imagining the king’s death – against Edward Stafford, duke 
of Buckingham, whose long line of descent from Thomas of Woodstock connected him to Edward III, and whose loud mouth, insufferable pride and arrogant bearing had been inherited all too obviously from his father, the foolish kingmaker duke who had rebelled against Richard III. Edward’s crime was largely a case of grumbling about royal policy, listening to prophecies concerning the king’s life and muttering that he himself might one day make a better monarch. But this was enough to bring down the greatest nobleman in England. Buckingham was subjected to a show trial at Westminster Hall, had a guilty verdict delivered to him by a tearful duke of Norfolk and was beheaded at the Tower of London on 17 May 1521. The charges against him were largely trumped up, and his trial stage-managed to produce the inevitable judgement. It is hard to imagine that Buckingham would have been so sorely treated by the king were it not for the Plantagenet blood of which he was so proud.

Other noble families might have presented Henry with concerns if he had put his mind firmly to it, but by the end of the 1520s the king’s mind was occupied with dynastic matters of a different sort. His marriage to his brother’s widow Katherine of Aragon had produced only one surviving child, Princess Mary, and his head had been turned by the woman who would become his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The issues of religious reform that exploded out of his search for a divorce during the early 1530s provided new political dividing lines just as deadly as those that had existed between the various factions of Lancaster, York, Neville, Tudor and the rest during the fifteenth century. To be sure, dynastic issues were still alive, but they were now fused with the politics of religion, shaped by domestic concerns and Henry’s increasingly monstrous sexual psychology and hunger for power and grandeur.

It was in this context that he persecuted the Pole family, condemning the aged Margaret Pole to her hideous butchery at the
block in the Tower in 1541, cursing Cardinal Reginald Pole’s name all around Europe and having another of Margaret’s sons, Henry Pole, Lord Montague, likewise executed for high treason on 9 January 1539 alongside Henry Courtenay, marquess of Exeter. Montague and Exeter’s principal crime was to oppose the king on matters of religion, and to rebel (or be suspected of rebelling) against the royal supremacy. The fact that Margaret Pole was the daughter of George duke of Clarence, and one of the only remaining links to the wars of the fifteenth century, was not on its own enough to justify her losing her head in 1541. But it was almost certainly an aggravating factor in her execution.

All the same, the death of Margaret Pole still represents a watershed: she was the last aristocrat who could claim with much seriousness to carry Plantagenet blood in her veins. The pseudo-royal families of York, Beaufort, Holland, de la Pole and Pole were effectively all gone. The Nevilles and Staffords had been bludgeoned into submission. The old nobility had by no means been destroyed as a unit of society, but many great and ancient families had been wiped out. ‘How many men, in the name of God immortal, have you killed?’ wrote Reginald Pole, raging at Henry for the judicial murder of his mother. The answer was simple: enough. The politics that stirred men’s hearts and moved their hands to their swords in anger had shifted decisively from dynasty to faith. After the king died in 1547 the great arguments of his children’s reigns were not Lancaster versus York but evangelism versus papism, reform versus the old ways and, ultimately, Protestant versus Catholic. The wars of the roses were well and truly over.

And yet. On Saturday 14 January 1559, at about two o’clock, Henry VIII’s younger daughter, Elizabeth, rode through London, from the Tower down to Westminster, on the eve of her
coronation. As usual, a great series of pageants had been organised to illustrate the many ways in which the new queen’s majesty was righteous and worthy.

At the corner of Fenchurch Street and Gracechurch Street a large stage was erected across the street, ‘vaulted with battlements’ and built on three separate levels. According to the official record of the procession:

Beside this Henry sat his second wife, Anne Boleyn, and on the stage above them sat a final figure, representing Elizabeth I herself, ‘crowned and apparelled as the other princes were’. The whole pageant was ‘garnished with red roses and white and in the forefront of the same pageant in a fair wreath was written … “The Uniting of the two houses of Lancaster and York.”’ A great play was made on Elizabeth’s name: like Elizabeth of York, who brought unity to the realm through her marriage, it was explained, the new Elizabeth would ‘maintain the same among her subjects’. Unity, said the official account, ‘was the end whereat the whole device shot’.
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Those men and women of London who stood and gawped as the queen’s procession passed by would have understood instantly the version of history that was being suggested by
the rose pageant. It had, after all, been repeated at length for more than seventy years. Buildings were decorated with the Tudor roses and other associated emblems of the dynasty. Great stained-glass windows installed in churches during the sixteenth century blazed with red and white petals.
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Anyone who had been lucky enough to browse the books of the royal library would have found the exquisite illustrations on the pages decorated with roses red, white and Tudor – in many cases these were added to books that had been inherited from earlier kings, particularly Edward IV. Other books, too, were emblazoned with the simplified dynastic story of the wars of the roses. Nowhere can Tudor teleology be seen more clearly expressed than in the full title of Edward Hall’s chronicle, ‘The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, Beeyng Long in Continual Discension for the Croune of this Noble Realme, with all the Actes Done in Bothe the Tymes of the Princes, Bothe of the One Linage and of the Other, Beginnyng at the Tyme of King Henry the Fowerth, the First Aucthor of this Deuision, and so Successively Proceadyng to the Reigne of the High and Prudent Prince, King Henry the Eight, the Vndubitate Flower and the Very Heire of Both the Sayd Linages’.
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As if this were not clear enough, the frontispiece to the publisher Richard Grafton’s 1550 edition of Hall’s chronicle made things visually unmistakeable. The writhing branches of a rosebush prickled their way around the title, growing from the bottom of the page: on either side they were occupied by rival members of the broken Plantagenet dynasty. At the very top of the page, inevitably, sat the magnificently porcine figure of Henry VIII, the messiah, the end of history.

The frontispiece was such a popular motif that it was repeated and reused on other, unconnected works: the same family tree appeared unmodified in John Stow’s 1550 and 1561 editions of Chaucer’s works, introducing the section on the
Canterbury Tales
.
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Just as John duke of Bedford had plastered occupied France with genealogies advertising the legitimacy of the joint monarchy during the 1520s, and just as Edward IV had obsessively compiled genealogies tracing his rightful royal descent from centuries long gone, so too did the Tudors drive home the simple, visual message both of their right to rule and their version of history. By Elizabeth’s reign, the mere sight of red and white roses entwined was enough to evoke instantly the whole story of the fifteenth century: the crown had been thrown into dispute and disarray by the Lancastrian deposition of Richard II in 1399; this had prompted nearly a century of warfare between two rival clans, which was a form of divine punishment for the overthrow of a rightful king; finally in 1485 the Tudors had reunited the families and saved the realm. It was that simple.

By the 1590s, when Elizabeth I was old, her own reign decaying and a new crisis of rule beginning to loom, the Tudor story of the fifteenth century was a matter not only of historical fact, but of public entertainment. A generation of playwrights mined the monumental histories of Hall and his successor Raphael Holinshed to unearth material for a new and extremely well-received form of spectacle: the English history play. One of the most popular eras for depiction on the stage was the fifteenth century. And the greatest of all the dramatists was William Shakespeare.

In or around 1591 – the dating is a matter of dispute – Shakespeare wrote, or more likely contributed to, the play that is now called
Henry VI Part I
. The play’s events concern the early stages of the wars of the roses, charting the loss of England’s lands in France and the political upheaval that resulted. In the famous ‘rose garden’ scene, Richard duke of York (called here Richard Plantagenet) and various other noblemen squabble and align into two factions, selecting red or white roses to represent themselves:

RICHARD PLANTAGENET

SOMERSET

WARWICK

SUFFOLK

SOMERSET