The story of Edward of Westminster returns this narrative to the winding streets of medieval Rouen in 1445, when the city was still in English hands and Richard, Duke of York was Lieutenant of France, and his two eldest sons, Edward and Edmund, were learning their letters in the nursery. Henry VI had not yet fallen ill and the trials of the coming decades were yet to unfold, so the families of York and Lancaster were working in unison, each focused on their individual service for the greater good of the realm. York had every reason to anticipate his imminent reappointment and was considering a match between his eldest son and a Valois daughter, as King Henry VI’s future heirs, while Edmund’s future lay in Rouen. York was not the only one arranging marriages and, that spring, it fell to the duke to conduct a very important visitor into the city.
The 23-year-old Henry VI was about to marry the niece of the Valois Charles VII, in the hopes of creating a lasting peace between the two countries. His bride, the 15-year-old Margaret, was the daughter of René of Anjou, whose swathe of titles included Count of Piedmont, Count of Provence and Forcalquier, Lord and Count of Guise, Duke of Anjou, Lorraine and Bar, King of Naples, titular King of Jerusalem and Aragon, which included Corsica, Majorca and Sicily. In reality, though, René’s list of possessions was far more impressive than the extent of his actual power and finances. His daughter travelled to meet her bridegroom without a dowry and in the expectation that Henry would reverse tradition and pay for their wedding. One impressive item that René did own was a book of hours, known as the London Hours, which was produced and illuminated two decades before it came into his possession. Adding to the work, René commissioned an image of himself as le-roi-mort, an artistic memento mori that captures him as an animated corpse, looking back at the viewer in a state of decay. It is a disturbing image, clearly fashioned to be a portrait in allegory, with his body scarred, flesh taut and his stomach split open to reveal his intestines. A magnificent white castle on the hilltop behind, and his crown studded with pearls and topped with fleur de lys, serve as a reminder of his worldly status, in contrast to the scroll he holds, which bears the legend ‘dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return’. The king would commission a similar image from his artist Coppin Delft in 1450, as part of a fresco to sit above his tomb in the Cathedral of St Maurice at Angers.
On 22 March, the future queen, nemesis of the House of York, arrived in Rouen. No direct record of her appearance survives, but an Italian who had never seen her reported that she was ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark’. Otherwise, she is portrayed conventionally as blonde in all but one of the contemporary manuscript illustrations. Around this time, she was described as ‘already a woman: passionate, proud and strong-willed’. Margaret and Henry were technically already married, as the bride had undergone a proxy ceremony in the French city of Nancy in February, at which the Duke of Suffolk represented Henry. A month later, York travelled to Pontoise to meet her and conduct her north, travelling by barge along the Seine, to a reception worthy of a queen that awaited her in Rouen. Accounts of her time there are mixed. Some state that the journey made Margaret unwell, so that she missed the ceremonies and the Countess of Shrewsbury took her place, while she was conducted to her lodgings. She was probably taken to the royal suite in Rouen Castle, where she would have been greeted and attended by Cecily, Duchess of York. Other sources proclaim her presence at the head of a troop of nobles, preceded by 600 archers and knights, followed by a dizzy round of events. One of her biographers, Jock Haswell, has her pawning her silver wedding presents in order to pay for gifts to reward her boatmen and sailors.1 Whatever the truth of her situation, Margaret remained there for two weeks over Easter, before York accompanied her on the next leg of her trip to Honfleur, which she reached on 9 April. As the duke returned to Rouen for his final months of the lieutenancy, Margaret sailed for England aboard the Cokke John, enduring such terrible conditions that she was carried ashore by the Duke of Suffolk and the Privy Council records state that she was ‘sick of the labour and indisposition of the sea’.2 Margaret’s formal marriage to Henry VI took place on 23 April, followed by a coronation in Westminster Abbey on 30 May. By the time the York family returned to England that October, Margaret was an established wife and queen. Her next duty was to provide the country with an heir.
In many ways, Henry and Margaret were temperamental opposites. She was mature beyond her years, driven, ambitious and resolute. He was a more ascetic character, reflective, sensitive, humane, pious and serious; a founder of colleges, a pardoner of traitors and murderers, a generous patron and well-intentioned. This combination did not always sit well with his contemporaries’ expectations of medieval kingship, which valued a more martial, physical sort of virility. The king was considered eccentric, choosing to wear a long drab gown and round-toed shoes, in contrast to the fashionable pointed Crakow style. Henry was also chaste in his dealings with his wife, although not so chaste as to eschew her bed, as some of his detractors claimed. He may have been abashed at the sight of naked dancers and encouraged his courtiers to reject sexual vices, but he did keep ‘his marriage vow wholly and sincerely, even in the absence of the lady … neither when they lied together did he use his wife unseemly’.3 Yet eight long years passed before Margaret fell pregnant. The couple spent the Christmas season of 1452 together at the Palace of Pleasaunce at Greenwich, enjoying masques and feasts, and it was at the end of this happy time that Margaret finally conceived. That April she undertook a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham to give thanks for her advancing pregnancy. Henry was delighted to learn of her condition, awarding Richard Tunstall a life annuity of £40 for bringing him the news to his ‘singular consolation … grete joy and comfort’.4 However, the nation’s consolation and comfort was to be shaken that summer when Henry fell ill and was unable to comprehend, let alone witness, his son’s birth.
Edward of Westminster was born on 13 October 1453. In the Catholic calendar, it was the feast of Edward the Confessor, who had built an earlier version of Westminster Abbey and whose remains had been translated into his tomb on that day. This probably lay behind the decision to name him Edward, breaking the royal use of the name Henry for three generations. He was christened in the abbey by William Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester with the font arrayed in russet cloth of gold and a mantle embroidered with pearls and precious stones costing almost £555.5 Henry had been unable to recognise his son, as recounted by the Duke of Norfolk: ‘at the Prince’s coming to Wyndesore, the Duke of Buckingham toke hym in his armes and presented hym to the Kyng in godely wyse, besechyng the Kyng to blisse him and the Kyng gave no maner answere.’ The duke tried again, but then the queen arrived and ‘toke the Prince in her armes, and presented hym in like fourme as the Duke had done, desiryng that he shuld blisse it, but alle their labour was in vayne’. Henry still made no answer, only once did he look at the prince and then cast his eyes downwards again, saying nothing.6
At Pentecost 1454 Edward was created Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester at Windsor Castle. He was to receive an annual allowance of £1,000 until he was 8 years old, transferring all other revenues from his lands and estates to the king, in whose household he was intended to reside until his majority at 14.7 If it seemed that all was now settled for the royal family, their detractors still had the powerful weapon of gossip. While Edward’s arrival had been long anticipated, and should have made the Lancastrian inheritance secure, the timing of his birth was unfortunate. Henry’s illness and character, coupled with the factional nature of politics and the influence of certain advisors upon the queen, led to rumours about the child’s paternity. The birth also brought the question of authority to the fore, with the dual problem of an incapacitated king and an heir who was an infant. Until Edward’s birth, Henry’s heir had been the Duke of York, an experienced adult, who was now displaced by the child. There was no guarantee that Henry would ever recover sufficiently to be able to govern, suggesting a long regency and the potential for rivalry for influence over Edward as he grew. Keen to retain her influence, Queen Margaret proposed herself as Protector, but her gender, inexperience and nationality counted against her and the role was awarded to York. For the time being, though, young Edward remained blissfully unaware of the thunder rumbling around the throne.
As unexpectedly as he had fallen ill, Henry VI recovered. At the end of 1454, he was finally able to recognise his son, in an encounter described by a letter written by Edmund Clere to his cousin John Paston. Writing from Greenwich on 10 January, he related how:
On Monday afternoon the Queen came to him, and brought my Lord Prince with her, and then he [Henry] asked what the Prince’s name was, and the Queen told him, Edward; and then he held up his hand, and thanked God thereof. And he said he never knew him till that time … and he asked, who were godfathers? And the Queen told him and he was well apaid [content].8
The fissures appeared between the houses of Lancaster and York while Edward was in his infancy. He was learning to walk when the first clash took place at St Albans, when his father was brought back to London humiliatingly as a puppet, and 2 years old during York’s second Protectorate. It is likely that the boy was with his mother during this time, in Cheshire, at Kenilworth and at Coventry, as she tried to establish an alternative royal support base to London, which was loyal to the Yorkists. Legends that they were captured and robbed, and that Margaret appealed to the men’s sense of loyalty to her son as their future monarch, may date from this period. They were essentially popular in the north, and the Welsh shires gifted the prince over £12,000, to be paid over six years.9 Margaret and Edward’s considerable support was also reflected in pageantry designed to welcome the family to Coventry in September 1456, featuring Edward’s namesake Edward the Confessor, prophets, Roman emperors, the four cardinal virtues and nine worthies who honoured the Lancastrians as the future rulers of England, treating the prince as a future king:10
Like as mankynde was gladdid by the birgth of Jhesus
So shall this empire joy the birthe of your bodye
The knightly curage of Prince Edward all men shall joy to see.11
He was presented as inheriting the qualities of his grandfather, Henry V, and adopting the mantle of Julius Caesar, all under the guidance of his mother. Edward spent almost his entire life living closely with Margaret of Anjou; the two were hardly ever parted, and her influence was recognised in Coventry as formative in shaping a desirable English king.
A group of four loyal Lancastrian knights was established to manage and administer the prince’s estates during his troubled period of his infancy: the son-in-law of the Duke of Somerset, James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire and Fifth Earl of Ormond had replaced York as Lieutenant of Ireland; John, Viscount Beaumont had served in France and was Lord Great Chamberlain and Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster; John Sutton, Lord Dudley was a favourite of Henry VI and the family of Thomas, Lord Stanley had supported the Lancastrian takeover in 1399. Edward would have come to know them well, as their job was to authorise his expenditure and supervise his officials. He was also served by Robert Wittingham as his receiver-general, Thomas Throckmorton as his attorney-general and Giles St Lo as the keeper of his wardrobe.12
Edward’s sixth birthday was approaching when the Yorkists were defeated at Ludford Bridge, and his enemies were exiled and attaindered. It was a high point for his cause. In the Parliament of late 1459, the Lords made a solemn vow in the presence of the king to honour the prince and accept him as Henry’s heir, and receive him as their king when the time came. It was around this time that the visiting Italian Raffaelo de Negra reported that Edward was ‘a most handsome boy, six years old’.13 The following February, the young prince was issued with a powerful commission of oyer and terminer, allowing him to preside as a judge over local Assize court hearings. Months later, though, the Yorkists returned with a decisive victory at Northampton and regained control of the king.
Edward was just 7 years old when his future was greatly altered by the Act of Accord that named the Duke of York as heir to the English throne. Henry was forced to sign under duress, meaning that the prince was formally disinherited of his titles, future and lands. Exactly what role the Yorkists imagined Edward fulfilling in the future cannot be imagined. Margaret’s response was to appeal to her Valois relations to invade England but when this came to nothing, she fled, taking Edward north to the Scottish court. In Edinburgh, they were received by the newly widowed regent, Mary of Guelders, who was ruling for her infant son. Mary’s situation must have provided Margaret with a vision of exactly what she had hoped to achieve in England. A letter to the city of London composed on Edward’s behalf that December objects to the actions of the Duke of York in the strongest possible terms, describing him as ‘a fals traitour that ceasith not his said malice but utterly entendith the distruccion of my lord and of my lady and the disherityng of us’. He was acting in self-interest, not for ‘the wele of this my lords reaulme and the seurete and welfare of his subgettes to the same’ and had rejected the prince’s ‘rightful and lineal’ descent and place in the succession. Edward vowed to free his father from captivity in a way that protected the city from harm and any who threatened its stability and peace would be punished.14 What Edward offered, even as a 7-year-old boy whose literary skills were unlikely to have been equal to such a composition, was hope. With Henry VI locked away and their enemies in control, it was the vision of a Lancastrian future, in the martial tradition of Henry V, that the boy embodied.
Margaret and Edward were staying with Mary of Guelders at Lincluden Abbey in Dumfries when the Battle of Wakefield was being fought in December 1460. She was not riding among her troops on a white palfrey, encouraging them to die for her cause, as narrated by the chronicler Waurin,15 or in a position to order the decapitation of York or relish his head being placed upon Micklebar Gate, topped with a paper crown, as some historians have claimed. She and Edward were 170 miles to the north. News that the Duke of York and Edmund, Earl of Rutland had been killed would not have arrived in Scotland until early in the New Year, but the young prince must have been old enough to realise its significance. The previous March, his mother had made the decision to dismiss his governess, Lady Lovell, in the belief that it was time for him to commit ‘to the rules and teaching of men, rather than stay further under the keeping and governance of women’.16
Yet whatever triumph the queen and prince felt at York’s death was to be short-lived; the Italian priest Francesco Coppini wrote to warn them that Wakefield was only a ‘trifling victory’ and advised Margaret to make peace while she was in a strong position. In response, Margaret headed south, wearing the crimson and black badge of the Prince of Wales, featuring a plume of white feathers, the unruliness of her Scottish army instilled fear into her subjects. Margaret’s troops won a victory at St Albans, after which she was reunited with her husband, and Prince Edward with his father, after nine months apart. Waurin relates that Margaret encouraged her son to order and witness the executions of their enemies, and Henry VI’s formidable biographer, Professor R.A. Griffiths, accepts and repeats this incident. Waurin had been wrong before and his account must be treated with caution, but the possibility cannot be ruled out. If Edward was encouraged to witness Lancastrian acts of justice, it was to put his legal commission into perspective and, modern sensibilities aside, must be seen within the context of threats to his realm and future kingship. The prevalence of death in the fifteenth century would have made it far more of a reality for a child than a single traumatic event. Any scruples might also have been lost in the euphoria of success. Prince Edward was knighted by his father on the evening after the battle. He wore a regal costume of purple velvet covered in goldsmiths’ work and then took up the sword himself to knight his allies.
Just as it seemed as if the Lancastrians were again in the ascendant, their momentum was dramatically lost. York’s eldest son, Edward, Earl of March had been absent from St Albans in order to intercept the troops of Jasper Tudor, coming from the west. March won a convincing victory at Mortimer’s Cross, forcing Jasper to flee, and then another in a final encounter at Towton, where the Lancastrians suffered catastrophic losses. For some reason, Margaret failed to capitalise on her success and return to London, allowing March to enter the city and proclaim himself Edward IV. For the young prince, this was a worse blow than the Act of Accord. Now his dynasty had been displaced, his father usurped and himself relegated to the status of outsider. In the coming years, this other Edward, the first Yorkist king and the prince’s namesake, would become his nemesis.
With the Yorkists in the ascendant, the only option for the Lancastrian royal family was flight once more. Margaret and Edward rode at speed to Berwick, with their enemies in pursuit, then on to Linlithgow Palace, where Mary of Guelders provided them with lodgings in the convent of Blackfriars in Edinburgh. Henry made his way separately to join them, landing at Kircudbright. He was soon followed by a delegation sent by Edward IV, requesting that Mary surrender ‘Harry, late usurpant King of our said Realm, Margaret his wife and her son’, a request that was backed by Edward’s allies Philip of Burgundy and the Valois Dauphin Louis. Under this strain, Mary was able to offer the exiles a safe place to stay but no help in terms of an invasion force or finances. Margaret retaliated by sending ambassadors to France, to appeal to her father’s family and to Burgundy, but the general mood of the moment was tending towards peace, not the renewal of war. A letter from her ambassadors in France lists the twenty-one men who had fled with Margaret and were to form her court in exile over the coming years. The following April, Margaret set sail for France, determined to return at the head of an invading force. Yet the death of her uncle Charles VII meant the accession of his estranged son Louis XI, who quickly came to terms with the new Yorkist regime. Recognising that his supportive words would not be backed by action, Margaret returned to Scotland and bid farewell to her husband at Bamburgh. With Prince Edward, she sailed for the Burgundian port of Sluys in July 1463, to seek assistance from Duke Philip. Edward was three months off his tenth birthday. He would never see his father again.
Having failed to inspire Philip the Good to back Henry as the rightful King of England, Margaret was forced to admit that she was temporarily defeated. Mary of Guelders was unable to offer more support; she was likely to have been incapacitated by the illness that would kill her on 1 December that year, at the age of 30. In the autumn of 1463, therefore, Margaret accepted an offer from her father of a pension of 6,000 French crowns and the residency of Château Koeur-la-Petite, lying 4 miles to the south-west of Saint Mihiel-en-Bar, near a bend in the River Meuse, in the Duchy of Bar, Lorraine. It was to be their home for the next seven years, the most permanent and significant home that the young prince would know.
The two villages of Koeur-la-Grande and Koeur-la-Petite sit about a mile apart and look, to all appearances, to be typical small settlements of the area. The Voie des Koeurs, which connects them, reveals flat lands on both sides, its route lined by a handful of square, beige houses, and most landmarks, including the church, small square and pond, dating to a later period. Much of the village was destroyed in fighting during the First World War but two surviving postcards show images of an ‘ancien Château’ and ‘vieux Château’, clearly the same building, in existence shortly before this time. The two images are taken from a similar perspective, showing a building of substantial size, with a long wing of two storeys, flanked by seven large decorative archways containing smaller windows. At the far end it abuts a taller section with three storeys and, on the near end, closest to the photographer, another part contains a small doorway up three steps and a shuttered window. One photograph shows that the building is constructed of old, substantial stones at the foundation level. Children sit on the step, a broom leans against the wall and local people stand on the path before it, alongside a small expanse of grass and a tree. It may well be that this was the place where the Lancastrians stayed, repaired and improved by later generations, or else this building was erected on the foundations of the original. The existence of a Ruelle de Château midway between the main road and a tributary of the river suggests its original location, although the building there is listed as dating to the first part of the eighteenth century. Here, or near here, the exiled queen and prince established their own Lancastrian court.
A veteran of English law, and loyal servant of Henry VI, Sir John Fortescue, was appointed as tutor to the 10-year-old Edward. Born in 1394, Fortescue was an MP and chief justice, trusted by Henry to the extent that he appointed him Lord Chancellor in exile, although this was technically invalid as he was not in possession of the great seal, the essential ingredient to make the matter legal. In France, he composed a number of works on subjects like the nature of law and the law of nature, on the differences between an absolute and a limited monarchy, on England’s constitutional framework and the conceptual and political basis of English law. As Edward’s tutor, he wrote De Laudibus Legum Angliae around 1468–71, a manual to assist a future monarch. It takes the form of a dialogue between tutor and pupil, with Fortescue proposing certain areas of study and the prince replying. Although some artistic translation has occurred between the reality and the record, the details appear to derive from essential truths in Edward’s character, or at least record a literary version of him. Fortescue compliments his pupil on his inclination to employ himself ‘in such manly and martial exercises’, as it was his duty to fight battles for his people and judge them ‘in righteousness’. While Edward engaged in ‘feats of arms’, Sir John, referring to himself as ‘Chancellor’, wished him to turn to ‘the study of the laws’. On hearing this, ‘the Prince looked very intently at the old knight’ and replied that law was merely human, when he should be studying the divine.17 Through their debate of the law, Edward is ‘overcome’ by the Chancellor’s ‘reasonable discourse’ but discouraged ‘lest I employ all my younger years’ to reach the required proficiency. The debate continues. The literary Edward asks a number of questions pertinent to the era and English dynastic conflict, such as how it may come to pass that one king can rule over his people absolutely while such power is unlawful for another and how a man might protect himself while living under a corrupt government.18 It seems unlikely that, cast out by usurping Yorkists, the pair did not discuss such matters during their exile.
De Laudibus Legum Angliae also rings true in its attempts to teach Prince Edward about his native land, which are worth quoting at some length for the depiction they give of England in the 1460s:
At the time your highness was obliged to quit England, you were very young, consequently the natural disposition and qualities of your country could not be known to you … England is a country so fertile that, comparing it acre for acre, it gives place to no one other country; it almost produces things spontaneous [sic] without man’s labour or toil. The fields, the plains, groves, woodlands, all sorts of lands spring and prosper there so quick [sic], they are so luxuriant … the feeding lands are likewise enclosed with hedgerows and ditches, planted with trees which fence the herds and flocks … there are neither wolves, bears nor lions in England, the sheep lie out a nights without their shepherds … the inhabitants are seldom fatigued with hard labour, they lead a life more spiritual and refined … from hence it is that the common people of England are better qualified and inclined to discern into such causes which require a nice examination than those who dwell upon their farms.19
England, explained Fortescue, was ‘so thick-spread and filled with rich and landed men’ that each village contained at least one, and they comprised the local juries. ‘Other countries, my Prince’, he continued, ‘are not in such a happy situation, are not so well stored with inhabitants’. Fortescue praised the English geographical concentration of ‘persons of rank and distinction’ and the way in which society was arranged and justice delivered, concluding that Edward should cease to be surprised that ‘that law, by means of which in England the truth is enquired into, is not in common to other countries, because other parts of the world cannot furnish juries of such great sufficiency or equally qualified’.20 The Chancellor continued to compare life in England with that in France, calling certain examples to mind in a way that indicates they had been witnessed by the prince while living at Koeur-la-Petite. He prompted Edward to recall:
a condition you observed [in] the villages and towns in France … during the time you sojourned there. Though they were well supplied with all the fruits of the earth, they were oppressed by the King’s troops and their horses, that you could scarcely be accommodated in your travels … [and] the soldiers treated them at such a barbarous rate.
He also criticised the taxes which obliged the villagers to offer up a quarter of their earnings annually, the hardship and misery of the peasants and the secretive, illegal way in which justice was administered. In comparison, he stated, the English drank wine not water, were well clothed ‘in good woollens’ and fed ‘in great abundance’.
These contrasts between countries, and Edward’s response, are illuminating. Firstly, the prince disputed the differences between civic law and that of the Scriptures, keeping his mind on the standard set by religion, in a move that sounds very much like an utterance made by his father. Edward has often been characterised by historians in the bloodthirsty mode offered by a couple of hostile chroniclers, in complete contrast to the pious, reflective King Henry. Yet, if there is truth in Fortescue’s reported dialogue, the prince’s constant concern with spiritual matters closes this divide considerably. The Edward of De Laudibus Legum Angliae is a young man who not only understands the medieval concept that temporal life is brief in comparison with the divine, but seeks to apply this to his life. He chooses to ‘give the preference to that law which does most effectually cast out sin and establish virtue’.21 He was also merciful, like his father, in contrast to the accounts of him being ‘blooded’ at executions, giving his opinion that the law was most ‘eligible which shews more favour than severity to those parties involved in it’. In addition, Edward was generous, stating that ‘all matters of hardship are odious and were as much as possible to be restrained’ while ‘favours are to be amplified’.22 The text also exposes a small personal detail about the prince’s character, which is valuable amid so little surviving information. Twice, the reader is informed that his favourite saying is ‘comparison is odious’.
These extracts raise an interesting new identity for Edward. He may have been English-born, and created Prince of Wales, but through exile to Scotland and France at such a young age, he lost something of his identity as an Englishman. Lacking in experience of the customs of his land, his absence recast him as a foreigner, already half-French by birth, he became even more ‘other’ and ‘different’ by virtue of his circumstances. The years he had spent as a child travelling in the north with his mother, often in flight from danger, would not have equipped the prince with a comprehensive understanding of the country, which was essentially London-centric. He had not been in England since around his seventh birthday and, by the time he reached 17, those experiences would have receded enough to seem distant. When he considered the conquest of England, as he and his mother did frequently, it was almost as foreigners. This distance was in stark contrast to the new king, Edward IV, who might have been born in Rouen, but whose childhood and adolescence were spent in England, and who enjoyed great popularity in London. Although the prince drew allegiance as a figurehead of the Lancastrian cause, the implications of his difference from the ruling Yorkists should not be dismissed.
There were other figures in Koeur-la-Petite who influenced the growing youth. Along with the ever-present Margaret was a group of her chaplains, headed by a Thomas Bird, Bishop of Asaph, who had formed part of the queen’s entourage upon her entry to England in 1445.23 There was also the poet George Ashby, who arrived at the castle in 1464. He was a former keeper of the signet to Henry VI who had either just been released, or had escaped, from the Fleet Prison in London, perhaps having been incarcerated there by the Yorkists. His poem The Active Policy of a Prince is dedicated to Edward, in the anticipation that he would follow its maxims once he had taken the throne. Divided into three sections representing the past, present and future, it exhorted him to live within his means and not make the same mistakes as his father. He praised Edward for his circumspection, for living without funding from Parliament, for choosing his advisors carefully and listening to them, for paying debts, being quick and decisive, and staying in charge. The prince was encouraged to remember the recent conflicts as well as those of the past, and to think carefully before beginning fresh conflict:
I would fain you keep in remembrance
The be right well advised by good sadness
By discreet prudence and faithful constancy
Before you begin a war for any riches,
Or out of fantasy or simplicity.
For war may be lightly commenced
The doubt is how it shall be recompensed.24
With Margaret were about fifty members of the exiled Lancastrian court, including the dukes of Exeter and Somerset, the earls of Ormond and Devon, Edward’s receiver-general Sir Richard Wittingham, his chamberlain Sir Edmund Hampden and his chancellor John Morton, later to be the Archbishop of Canterbury who would build his own memento mori tomb. Jasper Tudor, the king’s half-brother, was in France during the first winter of the prince’s exile and may have travelled the 170 miles east to report on his efforts to raise funds from Louis XI. Their resources were stretched but, through her prudence, Margaret used her income to sustain them. As Sir John Fortescue wrote to the Earl of Ormonde, who was then in Portugal, ‘we are all in great poverty, but yet the Queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so we be not in extreme necessity. Her highness may do no more than she doth.’25
A surviving letter written by Prince Edward to the Earl of Ormond shows his focus on his enemies and his desire to prove how good a writer he was, a touching combination of adult military concerns and childishness:
Cousin Ormond, I grete you heartly well, acerteyning yow that I have hearde the gode and honorable report of your sad, wise, and manly guiding ageynst my lordis rebellis and your adversaries, in the witche ye have purchased unto yow perpetuall lawd and worship. And I thank God, and so do ye also, that ye at all times under his proteccione have escaped the cruel malaise of your said adversaries; and for as much as I understand that ye are nowe in portingale, I pray yow to put you in the uttermost of your devoir to labore unto the kyng of the sayd realme, for the furtherance and setting forthe of my lord, in the recovering of his ryght, and subduing of his rebells. Wherin, if ye so do, as I have for undowted that ye wyll, I trust sume frute shall follow, w’ god’s mercy, witche spede yow well in all your workes. Writen at seynt mychacl, in Bar, w’ myn awn hand, that ye may see how gode a wrytare I ame.26
In 1465, two lots of distressing news arrived from England. At the end of May, Edward IV’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville, was crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey. This was an insult to Margaret on a number of levels, given Elizabeth’s social status and her previous widowhood, as well as the fact that there were now two rival queens, a blow which must have specifically hurt Margaret. Then, in July, King Henry was captured again by the Yorkists. Having spent the last year in flight, trying to avoid his enemies, Henry VI had made himself a base of sorts at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. Eventually, he was tricked into accepting hospitality from his enemies and taken hostage in Lancashire, whence he was led south, tied to his saddle, and incarcerated in the Tower of London. With his father no longer at liberty, a greater burden fell upon the shoulders of the young Prince Edward, representing as he did the hopes for the Lancastrian dynasty: from this point, if not before, his thoughts and preparations must have been dominated by the idea of regaining his kingdom.
In February 1467, Prince Edward’s character was reported to the Duke of Milan by Giovanni Pietro Panicharolla, the Milanese Ambassador to France, who was then at Berri with King Louis, who had embarked upon a pilgrimage. On the way, he encountered Margaret’s brother, the Duke of Calabria, with whom he dined and talked. The ambassador reported that it had recently been suggested that the Earl of Warwick, dissatisfied with Edward IV’s foreign and marital policies, might join with Margaret and oust the Yorkists. At dinner, Louis XI considered the possibility that Prince Edward might be offered as a hostage to guarantee loyalty to the earl, but this would have been a totally unacceptable option to Margaret, even an outrage. Panicharolla wrote that ‘this boy, though only thirteen years of age, talks of nothing but cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle or the peaceful occupant of that throne.’ The meal ended in argument, Calabria accusing the king of having ‘never loved their house’ and Louis retorting sharply that they had given him reason not to.
Panicharolla’s report of Edward’s character requires further examination. Neither Margaret nor Edward was present, so it is difficult to know whether this description came from life, or from hearsay, or whether the ambassador had ever met the prince, or was passing on rumour, or what he believed his Milanese employers wished to hear, just as the Duchess of Milan was flattered that Margaret was not as fair as herself. Given his situation in exile, following the death of loyal friends and the incarceration of his father, the suggestion that Edward thought of ‘making war’ upon his enemies might be an understatement. At 13, he was on the threshold of manhood, of legal majority, the age when young kings were traditionally allowed to rule alone. If it is true, the notion of ‘cutting off heads’ likely sprang from adolescent enthusiasm, frustration and the suppression of his ambitions in exile. Dynasty and birthright were everything to a young man of the nobility: as far as Edward was concerned, he had been robbed of both, and his parents dishonoured. Yet there is also another dimension. His enemy, Edward IV, was often cited by contemporaries, and later historians, for his military prowess, his focus on the chivalric arts and martial rituals. In order to defeat him, the prince would have to compete on an equal playing field. There was something chivalric and romantic about the court of an exiled prince, about the dreams and ambitions he cherished for the future, the certainty of the belief that he would one day return as the avenger and rule England. It was what kept him going; he was the answer to his parent’s woes, his nation’s avenging knight. The legacies of Henry IV and Henry V hung about his neck. Sir John Fortescue presents the other side of this ‘bloodthirsty’ prince, describing first-hand how Edward ‘applied himself wholly to feats of arms, much delighting to ride upon wild and unbroken horses, not sparing with spurs to break their fierceness … he practised also sometimes with the pike, sometimes with the sword’, dealing his partners ‘savage blows’. He was a young man of focus and determination who was preparing himself for the time when he would face experienced grown men in battle.
In May 1467, Louis made the suggestion that Margaret and Edward might come to live at the French court. Panicharolla related to the Duke of Milan that Margaret’s nephew, son of the Duke of Calabria, had gone to visit her at Koeur-la-Petite, but also that Louis had dispatched the Count of Vaudemont to accompany her back to the king. It appears that Margaret never went, though. The reason may appear in the ambassador’s letter of four days later, which reports that Louis was on his way to Rouen to meet the Earl of Warwick.27 Sensing that she was being summoned to comply with the French king’s plan to join her to the earl, the exiled queen may have refused. Margaret was not yet ready to sign a deal with her mortal enemy; three more years would pass before she would consider it. It may also have been that Edward was ill during this time, preventing their departure. Apparently, that year he recovered from a serious malady, after which his mother undertook a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Nicholas de Port, the patron saint of Lorraine, to give thanks for his recovery.
In 1469, the Yorkist dynasty fractured. Edward IV’s younger brother, George, Duke of Clarence fled to Calais with the Earl of Warwick and was married to Warwick’s elder daughter, Isabel. From there, they launched a first challenge to the king. This failed but by May 1470 Warwick was determined to topple his former friends. That April, a false report arrived in France that the earl had defeated Edward IV in battle, and that the Yorkist king was dead. The new Milanese Ambassador, Sforza di Bettini, reported that Louis XI was announcing the news ‘very joyfully’.28 No doubt a similar report reached Koeur-la-Petite, giving cause for celebration, even prompting plans for a Lancastrian return. But the messenger was partially mistaken: Edward was not dead, although he was indeed defeated, and forced into exile in Burgundy while his pregnant queen sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps it was due to the advocacy of Sir John Fortescue that Margaret finally agreed to travel to meet Louis and discuss a possible marriage alliance between Prince Edward and Warwick’s younger daughter, Anne. Bettini also reported the rumour that Warwick was intending to return to England with the prince, who would rule for his father: ‘accordingly it is believed that he will return soon, taking with him, so they argue, the Prince of Wales, son of King Henry, and will take the part of that King to see if, in that way, he will enjoy better success’.29
By 25 June, Edward and Margaret had arrived at the Château of Amboise, on the Loire, 300 miles to the west of Koeur-la-Petite. They were received ‘in a very friendly and honourable manner’ by Louis, who spent ‘every day in long discussions with that queen to induce her to make the alliance … and to let the prince, her son, go with the Earl to the enterprise of England’. Initially, Margaret showed ‘herself very hard and difficult’ and would ‘on no account whatever’ allow Edward to go with Warwick ‘as she mistrusts him’.30 Instead, it was suggested that the prince remain behind and Jasper Tudor take his place at Warwick’s side. On 22 July, Margaret finally met the outlawed earl in person at Angers. Bettini reported that Warwick knelt before her ‘with great reverence’ and ‘asked her pardon for the injuries and wrongs done to her in the past’. Margaret ‘graciously forgave him’ and he ‘did homage and fealty’ to her, swearing his loyalty to Henry, Margaret and Edward ‘as his liege lords unto death’.31 The formal betrothal between the 16-year-old Edward and the 14-year-old Anne took place on 25 July, at Angers Cathedral, with oaths sworn on fragments on the ‘true cross’. Warwick set sail for England. The others were to join him after he had restored Henry VI.
Anne was not the bride that Edward and Margaret had once anticipated. As he was a future King of England, they would have sought a princess of royal blood, and previous suggestions had included daughters from the Valois and Burgundian houses. There was also the advantage that a foreign alliance could have brought a new player into the York-Lancaster dynamic, a potentially powerful backer for Margaret’s cause, had she looked beyond the triumvirate of England, France and Burgundy. It is a mark of how low the Lancastrian cause had been brought that Margaret was prepared to marry her only son to the daughter of her enemy. What Edward thought of the match is not recorded. They must have seen Warwick as their best, perhaps their only, hope of restoring the dynasty. Bettini was under the impression that the wedding and consummation would take place straight away32 but in the end, the actual ceremony was delayed until 13 December. Historians have doubted whether this was followed by a full wedding night, with the young couple sharing a bed, but it was imperative for the Lancastrian cause that Edward father an heir, and crucial that the marriage was considered legitimate once they all arrived in England. Warwick had restored Henry VI to the throne, and the King had been led through the streets to a ceremony at St Paul’s. All that remained was for the Lancastrians in exile to return and claim their rightful places. Yet Margaret delayed. It was to prove fatal, literally and metaphorically.
Perhaps Margaret was being cautious, waiting to ascertain that Warwick’s success would prove lasting and that he would remain loyal. Perhaps she was doubtful of her reception, having not set foot in England for seven years. Prince Edward might have urged her to leave sooner; equally he may have counselled her to delay until they were ready. The weather certainly held them back, returning their battered ships to port when they finally attempted to sail on 24 March 1471. For whatever reason, Edward, his wife and mother did not land at Weymouth until 14 April. By then it was too late. Edward IV had already returned, coming ashore in Yorkshire the previous month and gathering supporters as he marched south. On that very day, he had met and killed Warwick at the Battle of Barnet. Hearing the news, the Lancastrians would have been devastated, but they chose not to give up. They hurried to the shelter of Cerne Abbey to plan their next move and loyal Lancastrians flocked to join them.
On 4 May, the 17-year-old prince prepared for battle. This was the culmination of his years of preparations, of dreaming about avenging his parents and destroying his enemies. Beside him in the field were the Beaufort brothers Edmund and John, sons of the Duke of Somerset, who took the right of the field. On the left was John Courtenay, Earl of Devon, who had been with Edward in exile, while in the centre was the veteran soldier Lord Wenlock, who had defected from the Yorkist side, accompanied by Prince Edward himself. The Lancastrians had a slight advantage in numbers, with around 6,000 men against the Yorkists’ 5,000. They also had the advantage of arriving first, enabling them to take position, meaning that their enemy found it difficult to advance upon them and resorted to their archers first. Edmund Beaufort then led an attack but was beaten back and driven into the way of 200 Yorkist spearmen who had been concealed in the trees. His flank scattered and headed for the river, where they were cut down in a ‘bloody meadow’. Beaufort then turned on Wenlock, accusing him of not coming to his aid and, reputedly, attacked and killed him. The rest of the Lancastrians tried to flee for sanctuary in the nearby abbey, but Prince Edward did not reach it. The questions of when and how he died, as in the case of Edmund, Earl of Rutland remain controversial.
Weeks after the battle in 1471, Bettini reported that the Yorkists had ‘not only routed the prince but taken up and slain him, together with all the leading men with him’.33 Another contemporary source, the pro-Yorkist Historie of the Arrival of Edward IV, stated that Edward, ‘called Prince’, was put ‘to discomfiture and flyght’ and ‘was taken, fleinge to the town wards and slayne in the fielde’.34 It also contained a miniature depicting the execution of Edmund Beaufort by axe shortly after the fighting, with Edward IV looking on. The prince may have met a similar end. Two years later, a French chronicle, the Histoire de Charles, dernier duc de Bourgogne, claimed that Edward had been surrounded by his enemies and killed in cold blood. Polydore Vergil, the Italian historian of Henry VII, who first visited England in 1502, based his account of the battle on primary sources which have now been lost. He described a scene in which Edward IV questioned the prince about his opposition, whereupon the ‘excellent yowth’ replied his purpose was to free his father from oppression and regain the usurped crown. The king then reputedly struck him in the face with a gauntlet and waved him away for execution. A similar story was reported by Robert Fabyan, a London chronicler and sheriff writing before 1512, in which the king ‘strake him with his gauntlet upon the face, after which stroke, so by him received, he was by the King’s servant incontinently slain’.35
This account became the general version of Edward’s death, being repeated by sixteenth-century writers Hall and Holinshed. Shakespeare’s depiction of the event in Henry VI part III is a dramatisation of their narrative, with a defiant prince speaking for his father and challenging Edward IV’s right to rule:
Speak like a subject, proud ambitious York!
Suppose that I am now my father’s mouth;
Resign thy chair, and where I stand kneel thou,
Whilst I propose the selfsame words to thee,
Which traitor, thou wouldst have me answer to …
I know my duty; you are all undutiful:
Lascivious Edward, and thou perjured George,
And thou mis-shapen Dick, I tell ye all
I am your better, traitors as ye are:
And thou usurp’st my father’s right and mine.
Although Edward speaks heroically, his moment in the limelight is brief. The prince is sidelined in the drama, a supporting figure in the anti-Ricardian narrative, a view informed by the hindsight that overrides the possibility of the youth’s opposition and potential kingship in 1471. Shakespeare even has Edward insulting Richard as a ‘scolding crookback’, which seals his fate. He is defiant, angry and brave, and perhaps foolhardy as he meets his end. There is none of the pleading, praying and pathos with which Edmund, Earl of Rutland dies, earlier in the same play. It was to Edward’s mother, Margaret of Anjou, that Shakespeare gives any comparable sentiment:
O Ned, sweet Ned! speak to thy mother, boy!
Canst thou not speak? O traitors! murderers!
They that stabb’d Caesar shed no blood at all,
Did not offend, nor were not worthy blame,
If this foul deed were by to equal it:
He was a man; this, in respect, a child:
And men ne’er spend their fury on a child.
What’s worse than murderer, that I may name it?
No, no, my heart will burst, and if I speak:
And I will speak, that so my heart may burst.
Butchers and villains! bloody cannibals!
How sweet a plant have you untimely cropp’d!
You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirr’d up remorse:
But if you ever chance to have a child,
Look in his youth to have him so cut off
As, deathmen, you have rid this sweet young prince!
It is to be expected that the Lancastrians would present Edward as a martyr, their lost hope, and that the Yorkists would attempt to belittle his abilities, making him into a caricature of contrasts, bloodthirsty but essentially cowardly, unlike the martial virility epitomised by Edward IV. The pro-Lancastrian Warkworth chronicle depicts Prince Edward ‘crying for succour’ to his brother-in-law Clarence, before he was ‘slain in the field’,36 creating more of a sense of pathos and pity for the young man, but this is a rare voice. Over the course of time, many historians have been swayed by the narrative of the victors, which is why a re-evaluation of the prince is so long overdue.
Edward’s remains were buried in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey but the exact location is uncertain today. A brass memorial plaque in the floor of the choir records the event in Latin, which broadly translates as: ‘Here lies Edward, Prince of Wales, cruelly slain whilst but a youth. Anno Domini 1471, 4 May. Alas, the savagery of men. Thou art the sole light of thy Mother, and the last hope of thy race.’ It seems unlikely that Edward was ever given anything more in terms of a tomb or memorial. His mother was not in a position to insist upon it, or to finance it, and the Yorkists might have been reluctant to erect such a monument to the last Lancastrian prince, as a potentially dangerous reminder for his supporters. It would have been appropriate for Edward IV to order masses said for the youth’s soul, as a violent death was considered significant in the individual’s experience of the afterlife. Death in battle, however honorable, would have necessitated a period of time in purgatory, which could be sped up by the prayers and intercessions of the living. However, following the battle, the abbey was closed for a month and reconsecrated as a result of the bloodshed and the violation of its sanctuary; it may by that this process also included arrangements for Edward’s bodily remains and spirit. The path to heaven was determined not just by the manner of one’s death but also one’s good deeds during life. Not to make such arrangements would have been a heinous act in the eyes of the Church and a black mark against King Edward’s own future salvation.
Prince Edward’s death put an end to Lancastrian hopes. The alternative ending, had his side somehow defeated the Yorkists at Tewkesbury, is of the complete restoration of Henry VI, with his son ruling as Protector until his natural death. Edward could have fathered children with Anne, and subsequent wives after her death in 1485, ensuring a strong continuation of the Lancastrian dynasty. The Yorkists’ brief interlude would have been merely a blip in generations of kingship by inheritance. This would also have transformed the life and reputation of Margaret of Anjou, who would have retained her close influence and lived out her days in comfort but, critically, she would have been able to return to the epitome of quiet, dedicated queenship she modelled before her husband’s illness. Later historians would have praised her tenacity, resourcefulness and patience in exile, rather than painting her as a ‘she-wolf’ with an unnaturally masculine focus on war. Margaret of Anjou’s name would have become a byword for successful medieval queenship, of stepping into the breach when the need arose, then retiring with dignity. But the Battle of Tewkesbury was one of those visibly defining moments of history, when the outcome turned upon a knife edge, balanced between outcomes that were absolute in their finality. The moment of Edward’s death may alternatively have been his beginning, but it turned out to be his end. He was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey.
The immediate result of Tewkesbury was the collapse of one dynasty and the empowering of another. Just over two weeks later, Henry VI was killed inside the Tower of London. Until the battle, his life had been guaranteed by that of his son, who presented a far more formidable opponent. Following the prince’s death, there was no point in the Yorkists keeping Henry alive as a figurehead for subsequent rebellion. The Arrivall states that Henry died of grief on hearing the news but the timing of Edward IV’s recrowning, the following day, suggests that it was by design. The broken Margaret of Anjou was forced to submit to Edward IV, captured by Sir William Stanley and taken through the streets as a prisoner to Wallingford Castle, then to the Tower of London. She was ransomed to the French in 1475 and spent her seven remaining years living in France, in poverty, and reliant on a pension from Louis XI. Later, Lancastrian supporters would transfer their loyalty to the prince’s half-cousin, Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII.
Most subsequent descriptions or portrayals of Prince Edward tended to recast him according to the taste of the moment. An early eighteenth-century illustration by Royal Academician Thomas Stothard was made into an engraving by Augustus Fox in 1824, to appear in editions of Henry VI Part III. It depicts the prince as a Blakean figure, draped upon the earth, childlike and vulnerable having lost his armour, with curls and folds of fabric loose around him. A woman in white, presumably Margaret, hovers behind him in a low, flowing robe, half-bent, with arms outstretched, hair long and untied, in line with Romantic sensibilities. Her body shields her son from the armed figures behind, poised to draw their swords as they contemplate his demise.
Prince Edward’s death did not give rise to much outcry, or to a devoted following, as did the deaths of some young men in battle. The majority of his supporters had been killed and those remaining recognised that they had little choice but to suppress their grievances and fall in line with the victorious Yorkists. Undoubtedly, his long absence in France meant that Edward had grown up out of the sight of the English, so there was less sympathy for him than if he had been able to maintain a high profile in the country he hoped to rule. The death of his father, Henry VI, drew a greater reaction from the English people, many of whom had been born under his reign, or still felt the ties of four decades of loyalty. The death of a young man trained for battle was one thing, but the murder of an old man, ill and unstable, in prison and helpless, and an anointed king, was quite another. Unable to openly condemn what was probably his murder, sympathy for the Lancastrian king was channelled into a religious cult, which reported miracles at his first burial place of Chertsey Abbey, then followed him to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Towards the end of the century, when his half-nephew, Henry VII, was seeking to have the former Lancastrian canonised, miracles dating from between 1471 and 1500 were recorded in chronicles. Out of 400 instances, 174 were selected to form the text The Miracles of King Henry VI – curing the sick, saving the innocent and similar acts. The cult rapidly died out as the sixteenth century advanced, suggesting that it had sprung more from the loyalty of his contemporaries than from a strictly pious cause. Yet in those crucial years of the aftermath, when history was being rewritten, it took the focus off the prince. Edward remains an unsympathetic figure in modern treatments of the Wars of the Roses, his shadowy life too brief, and too Lancastrian, to evince much unbiased investigation. It should be remembered that the Battle of Tewkesbury was by no means a forgone conclusion, and the evidence of his life suggests that he would have made a formidable English king in the model of Henry V.