In 1562 Peter Bruegel the Elder completed his huge oil painting entitled The Triumph of Death. It shows a panoramic landscape overrun by skeletons, all traces of humanity and civilisation destroyed; fires burn, ships are wrecked, trees rot, creatures lie dying, the skies darken with smoke and the tolling of bells marks the end of the world. In this apocalyptic vision, death is the great leveller, taking rich and poor alike. A king and a cardinal feature among the dozens of bodies strewn across the canvas, cheek by jowl alongside servants and peasants. A few piteous human pleasures are parodied: one skeleton takes a woman in an embrace, a jester hides and the games of chance, chess and cards, have been scattered. Stylistically, art has come a long way from the fresco of The Three Living and the Three Dead at St Andrews, Wickhampton. The mise-en-scène of Bruegel’s painting highlights the immense cultural change that had taken place between the creation of the two works but it touches the same themes as the church image: the fear of unexpected and unavoidable death; the need to take steps during life to ensure that the soul was prepared. While medieval culture often depicted death with a wry, dark humour, recognising the earthly world as a battlefield for the soul, the reality was a very real preoccupation with the manner of death, which manifest itself in an individual’s behaviour, patronage, their will, bequests and gifts, as well as in art, literature and ecclesiastical architecture. As markers for this era, these two very different paintings encompass the paradox of change and and may serve as symbols, even chronological brackets, for the ten young men featured in this book.
The century spanning 1450–1550 was a time of great change, from the end of the Hundred Years’ War through to the succession of England’s first ruling queen. In 1450, it was still a medieval, Catholic country, crammed full with religious houses and shrines overflowing with relics and jewels, a world where the Lancastrian kings still claimed their right to rule France and alternated their dynastic feuds with pilgrimage and piety. The nobility founded elaborate chantries, where lights flickered in remembrance of their souls; the dying left great sums to the Church to ensure that a multitude of prayers would hasten their path through purgatory. Their bequests paid for the repair of church buildings and furnishings, for alms to the poor, for verses to be painted on church walls and for the construction of magnificent tombs featuring effigies of themselves in prayer. In effect, before the Reformation, the rich man could buy his way into heaven. Just over 100 years later, by the time of Edward VI’s death, England had broken with Rome and established its own national church. Centuries of social ritual and the prevailing culture had been redefined by the Renaissance and the Reformation. The Bible was translated into English and a new Book of Common Prayer was made available in all churches, whose rood lofts and statues had been dismantled. The wealthy might have taken up residence in the old monastic houses but anybody who could read could open a Bible, and all those who were conscious could listen and interpret it for themselves. The ultimate goal of Christianity, the salvation of the soul, had become more widely accessible across the social spectrum. Save for the brief interlude of Mary’s reign, England had become a Protestant realm. Yet, despite this national sea change, the constants of life and death remained. Medicine could no more save a boy dying in 1553 than it could in 1484 and the struggle for the throne still resulted in violent death in 1554, just as it had in 1460. The rites of passage defining the cycle of life might be administered differently, but the inevitability of death was the same.
These 100 years were a dangerous time to be a young aristocratic male. They witnessed the flower of English manhood being slaughtered on the battlefield, a child king murdered in the Tower, youths languishing with untreatable illness and the axe falling upon claimants to the throne. During the Wars of the Roses, noble youths ran the risk of being killed in the conflict between the houses of York and Lancaster; in a pitched battle, like John, Earl of Lincoln, or in flight from one, like Edmund, Earl of Rutland. Death might also follow in the form of the executioner in the battle’s immediate aftermath, as happened to Edward, Prince of Wales in 1471. Sometimes, as in the case of Edward, Earl of Warwick, this end came years later, simply because of his parentage. After those wars subsided, the greatest killer of young men of royal blood was disease, which remained largely untreatable. With the arrival of the sixteenth century, the sweating sickness, the plague and tuberculosis offered more to fear than defeat in battle. Their royal status and the health precautions taken for Edward of Middleham, Prince Arthur, Henry Fitzroy and Edward VI were not sufficient to protect them from what was perceived to be God’s will. Thus, although this work straddles the divide between avoidable and unavoidable death, exploring the time-specific circumstances of each, these ten individuals are connected by the very fact that they died in youth. The manner of death’s coming, and the spiritual state of its victim, were to prove of infinitesimal importance to those concerned, and their subsequent historical reputation, but the simple fact of death, the absence of existence, was an unarguable line in the sand. Their hearts stopped beating. What this book has attempted to analyse is the effect of the sudden disappearance of an individual and its impact upon their dynastic line, within the context of changing beliefs about death.
These ten young men experienced one of four kinds of death. They lost their lives in battle, by execution, through illness or, in the case of Edward V, probably by murder. In almost every case, they had advance warning of their end, or its likelihood: Edward of Westminster and John of Lincoln were well aware of the potential dangers of battle and would have taken Holy Communion or at least prayed and confessed their sins beforehand. Edward of Warwick and Guildford Dudley knew they were to be executed and had time to seek out the services of a priest and come to terms with their end. Henry Fitzroy and Edward VI were aware of their declining health and could prepare accordingly. And, while the circumstances of Edward of Middleham’s death are unclear, his adult carers would more than likely have seen signs that prompted them to seek prayers for their charge. The illness of Prince Arthur was more unexpected and developed quickly, but it is likely that he remained sufficiently conscious to recognise the approach of death and have the chaplain of Ludlow Chapel to visit him. The two exceptions are Edmund, Earl of Rutland and Edward V, whose deaths were sudden. When leaving Sandal Castle on 30 December 1460, Edmund was not anticipating coming under attack from the Lancastrian forces. His final flight towards the chantry chapel on Wakefield Bridge indicates not just a bid for sanctuary, but the recognition of a critical symbol, the hope to attain spiritual salvation. The actions of his brothers in 1476, reburying him in a chapel of his own and, no doubt, ordering prayers and memorials, were hoped to help his chances of passing through purgatory, had he been lingering there sixteen years later. The reason why the death of Edward V in 1483 proved so shocking to his contemporaries went beyond his age and status. If we accept the version of events in which the young king was smothered in his sleep, then his murderers robbed him of the opportunity to make a good death. Death in sin, or in sleep, was deeply feared at the time, leaving the soul vulnerable to be stolen by the Devil. This can explain the artistic depictions of the princes as angelic, often with a book, offering the hope that they had said their prayers before bedtime.
Illness was a constant threat to life throughout the medieval and early modern period, between the two great plague years of 1348 and 1665. It could come on suddenly, killing within hours, like the dreaded sweat, or one of the many bubonic resurgences seen every few years. John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century advice on avoiding the plague was partly emotional – to avoid sorrow and heaviness, and to remain glad – and partly practical – to flee wicked airs and infected places, to drink good wine and only eat wholesome meat, to smell sweet things and keep clear of black mists. He also recommended the avoidance of brothels and baths, as ‘the exchange of humours in such places causes great harm’.1 A century later, Sir Thomas Elyot was advising that those of a sanguine and choleric temperament were more likely to be infected with the pestilence than those who were phlegmatic or melancholy. He prescribed keeping out of the sun, advised against sitting too close to the fire and consuming hot herbs, prescribing many sharp, tart flavours like vinegars and capers. However, he agreed with Lydgate that the best remedy of all was to ‘flee from the place corrupted’ and not to receive any guests or deliveries into the house. He concluded his advice by putting his trust in the power of God above man’s reason or counsel.2 After all, putting one’s trust in God was all that could really be done in the face of such threats as the plague, pox or sweat, which spread through this period unchecked with such devastating consequences. The sweating sickness disappeared as unexpectedly as it had appeared, and its exact nature and origins remain a mystery. It is likely to have contributed to the death of Arthur, Prince of Wales as the Tudor dynasty was in its infancy, and saw off the last males of the Brandon line in its final outbreak of 1551.
Illness also claimed the lives of young and potential kings elsewhere in Europe, including Juan, Prince of Asturias, aged 19 in 1497; Francis, Dauphin of France, aged 18 in 1536; and Francis II of France, aged 16 in 1560. Another similarly devastating loss would befall England in 1592, with the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, the eldest son and heir of James I, at the age of 18. As a consequence, the throne passed to his sickly younger brother, who became Charles I. Death was also an occupational hazard of royalty in Scotland at this time, as a glance at the Stewarts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proves. James I was murdered at 42; James II was murdered at 29; James III died in battle at 36; James IV was killed at Flodden at 40; James V died at 30, heartbroken after the Scottish defeat of Solway Moss; Mary, Queen of Scots was executed; and her second husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, died in suspicious circumstances.
Sudden death was the most feared of all, even more than lingering illness and execution, which at least gave warning and allowed time for preparation. The coroners’ inquests in the Middlesex rolls of 1549 highlight the strange and brutal circumstances that overcame individuals unexpectedly, and regularly, fuelling this fear and giving rise to a state of mental readiness to encounter death, in whatever form it may take. As Lady Jane Grey advised her sister, her contemporaries should never take their eye off the Devil, or relax their guard against constant threats. In January 1549, a Philip Powley died unexpectedly in Newgate gaol of a ‘divine visitation’, while in March a Robert Mason was attacked upon King’s Bridge and received two stab wounds to the head. In April 1550, Peter Applegard died of the pestilence in a hospice while Anthony Skedall was killed by a blow to the head from a staff in May. Ralph Croft was dispatched by a sword in June, John Christian was stabbed with a dagger in August while in the same month, William Wreyke had his neck broken by an assailant. Stabbings or other mortal wounds were inflicted monthly within the Middlesex district.3 The ‘Everyday Life and Fatal Hazard in Sixteenth-Century England’ project, run by Stephen Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski, documents a range of odd and unusual premature deaths, from collapsing scaffolding to a pig bite which became infected, collapsing pits and accidental strangulation by a belt, jokes gone wrong and falls from trees by boys attempting to rob birds’ nests. One man stumbled in a rutted road and was stabbed by the dagger he wore at his belt, another was pulled into a spindle, a third fell on rocks during a game and others died of cold or fell into rivers while attempting to cross. Others died by falling downstairs, crushed under carts, falling down wells, hit by flying hammers, polevaulting to take a short cut, attacked by stags and crushed by a falling flitch of bacon.4 The bizarre and domestic nature of many of these unfortunate ends, and there are many, must have given death the grim appearance of a joker, waiting to pounce in even the most innocuous of circumstances.
Illness, violence and death were not the only threat to the medieval and Tudor aristocracy. Fertility could be a major problem, and a proportion of adult males failed to father families, or else produced only illegitimate offspring. The genetic line might pass through the descendants of daughters in the family, to the benefit of other dynastic branches, but the titles of their parents became extinct. One Tudor family which illustrates the fragility of male survival and inheritance is the Radcliffes. John Radcliffe, the Ninth Baron Fitzwalter, born in 1452, had married Margaret Whetewell and fathered six children in the 1480s, of which only one was a boy. John was beheaded in Calais in 1496 for supporting Perkin Warbeck but his son, Robert, found favour at the court of the young Henry VIII, marrying the sister of the Duke of Buckingham. This was the point at which the family line might have waned, if Robert had succumbed to the terrible new sweating sickness, or been killed in a joust, or claimed by another illness or accident. When the line rested on the shoulders of one individual, such random events could easily eclipse dynastic fortunes, resulting in the passing of titles and lands sideways, to cousins, or even out of the family altogether. However, Robert turned the fortunes of the Radcliffes around, by marrying three times and fathering seven children, five of whom were boys. It seemed, by the late 1530s, that he had provided sufficient heirs to continue the dynasty. Yet of those five boys, three failed to produce offspring: one died in infancy and while the two others reached adulthood and were married, both died without leaving an heir of either gender. That left Robert’s two eldest sons, by his first wife. The first, Henry, fathered two boys. The eldest, Thomas, died without issue but his brother, also Henry, produced a son, who married twice and outlived his four children. Robert’s second son, Humphrey, also had two sons; the first died young and the second married twice but produced no surviving heir. Thus, in 1629, within three generations of Robert’s efforts to expand his family, his line of the Radcliffes was extinct. Their titles passed to a cousin.
The story of the Radcliffes yields some important data about a family who were not directly engaged in warfare, or responsible for the royal inheritance. They were, in many ways, a typical aristocratic family of the era, as far as such a thing existed. Between the birth of Robert in 1483 and the death of his great-grandson in 1629, at least fourteen direct descendants of Robert were born. Of these, eleven were males, which was a very promising ratio, but of those eleven, six, perhaps seven, failed to father children of either gender, often despite being married. This raises the question of fertility within the family as several of these heirs were married more than once, placing the focus specifically upon the males. When it came to the offspring of Robert’s mother, quite a different story emerges. Elizabeth Radcliffe, née Stafford, had three siblings. Her younger brother Henry had no issue and her sister Anne bore eight children, but her eldest brother, Edward, had four children who went on to produce forty-five offspring between them. It is difficult to say what led some family lines to multiply while others dwindled but, with the help of modern science, we can guess that it must have been a combination of health, age, gynaecological issues, sperm motility and opportunity.
Another family, that of Henry VIII’s close companion and brother-in-law Charles Brandon, provides an even more extreme example of the dwindling of male genes. Tracing the male line from Sir William Brandon, born in 1456, a striking imbalance emerges between the survival of boys and girls. William fathered three legitimate children with his wife Elizabeth Bruyn. The eldest, William, died before 1500, in his mid- or late teens; the youngest was a girl, and the middle child was Charles Brandon, born in around 1484. Charles was married four times. His first match was declared invalid, without issue, and the second provided him with two daughters. After that, Charles married Mary Tudor, dowager Queen of France, sister of Henry VIII, and she bore him four children. The eldest, a boy named Henry, lived from 1516 to 1522, but inspired the name of his sibling, also named Henry, who was born the year after his namesake’s death. Yet this second Henry did not survive either, dying at the age of 10 or 11 in 1534. Charles and Mary’s two daughters fared no better when it came to producing boys. Frances produced three daughters, the eldest of whom was Lady Jane Grey, while Eleanor Brandon had a girl and two boys, both of whom died in infancy. Following Mary’s death, Charles remarried for a final time. His fourth wife gave him two sons: Henry, born 1535, and Charles, born in 1537. When both boys died of the sweating sickness in 1551, their father’s dukedom of Suffolk became extinct. Henry Machyn reported at their month’s mind that ‘yt was grett pity of [their] dethe, and it had plesyd God, of so noble a stock they were, for ther is no more left of them.’5 Of the seventeen live births resulting from the paternity of Sir William Brandon, nine were female. Of the eight males in the family line, seven died before reaching adulthood.
Similar statistics indicate the dynastic difficulties of the Tudors. Of the twenty-three live births of two generations engendered by Henry VII, eleven were male and only two – Henry VIII and James V of Scotland – produced offspring. While Henry VII fathered seven, perhaps eight, children, at least three died in infancy and only Margaret, Henry and Mary became parents. While Henry’s struggles to father a son have already been covered, and Mary was only survived by daughters, the offspring of his sister Margaret also illustrate this difficulty. Of the six children born to her by James IV of Scotland, only a single boy survived. This stands in contrast with more fertile or fecund contemporaries, like the Devereux family. John Devereux, born in 1463, became a parent in the 1480s, like Henry VII. His two surviving legitimate offspring were Walter and Anne. Anne went on to produce four boys and four girls of her own. Walter, who inherited the title of Baron Ferrers of Chartley, and became First Viscount Hereford, married twice and fathered five children. After three generations, a total of forty-eight children survived to adulthood and, of the thirty-nine whose gender is known, twenty were male. While some dynasties, like the Tudors, Radcliffes and Brandons, inexplicably dwindled in numbers through illness, accident and failure to reproduce, others like the Devereux multiplied and thrived, carrying their genes and inheritance into the seventeenth century.
Although they were involved in a deadly feud with the Neville family, and took part in many of the key battles of the Wars of the Roses, the branch of the Percys descended from Henry Hotspur proved to be successful progenitors who avoided death during youth. Hotspur died in 1403 at the Battle of Shrewsbury, but through the next three generations of his direct descendants there were forty-eight live births, divided equally so that exactly half were male and half were female. Another fifteenth-century success story when it came to fertility and fecundity, were the Woodvilles, who became notorious among their enemies for the number of their offspring. Richard, Earl Rivers and Jacquetta Woodville had a family of fourteen, all but one of whom reached adulthood. This yielded them twenty-five legitimate grandchildren of whom eleven were boys, which appears to offer good odds for the continuity of their line. However, these grandchildren were all borne by the Woodvilles’ daughters, and none of their sons had issue except for one illegitimate child. Moreover, six male members of the family were killed by their opponents: Richard was executed with his son John in 1469; his eldest son Anthony and his grandson Richard Grey were executed in 1483 and his two other grandsons died in the Tower. As a result, the Earl Rivers title became extinct upon the death of his last surviving son, Richard, in 1491. Fecundity was not a problem for the Woodvilles, but the survival of their men was.
Other dukedoms that became extinct during this period through lack of surviving male heirs were those of Bedford (Jasper Tudor, 1495), Buckingham (Edward Stafford, 1521), Clarence (Edward Plantagenet, 1499), Exeter (Henry Holland, 1475), Gloucester (Richard III, 1485) Northumberland (John Dudley, 1553) and Richmond (Henry Fitzroy, 1536). However, although the Wars of the Roses and illnesses like tuberculosis did kill off some of the English aristocracy, others survived. Research indicates6 that in each generation through around a quarter of the nobility died leaving no male heir. This was a loss for those branches of the family tree, but it was also an opportunity for others to step into their shoes and inherit their titles or estates, moving into the positions they had vacated, as George, Duke of Clarence had upon the death of his elder brother Edmund, Duke of Rutland. Whenever a death occurred, a new career was waiting to develop and newly created noble families benefited. This book, therefore, has been focused on the ‘opportunity cost’ of ten individuals; the chance passing to the next in line and what was made of that chance. This movement creates the cyclical model of the English aristocracy, in a state of constant attack by violence and illness, but also in constant renewal through the elevation of new blood and the processes of inheritance and reward.
The questions raised about the premature ends of young aristocratic males in this period also invite comparisons across time. England is no longer fighting a civil war and medical understanding has developed beyond measure, but there may well be a wider phenomenon of males dying young, something inherent, either cultural or biological, that transcends the specific circumstances of time and place. A number of worldwide studies about the causes of death in young males in the twenty-first century reveals a constant trend. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the US records that the number one cause of death among white males in the 15–19 bracket7 in 2013 was ‘unintentional injuries’. These accidents accounted for 43.7 per cent of all deaths. It was the same in the 20–24 age range, where an even larger 50.3 per cent were claimed in this way. The second cause of death for both age groups was suicide. Homicide claimed 8.5 per cent of the late teens and 8 per cent in the 20–24 range, while cancer accounted for 6 per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively and heart disease for 2.6 per cent and 2.7 per cent. Other causes included birth defects, influenza, stroke and septicaemia. The figures for 2004 and 2006–11 tell the same story.8 The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recorded 1,203 deaths among young people aged 15–24, of which 820, or 68 per cent, were males. More than three quarters of these mortalities were considered avoidable; again, accidental or unintentional death. The leading causes were injury and poisoning, which includes accidental poisoning by drug overdose. Next, suicide accounted for a quarter, and accidents in vehicles another quarter, with violent assault the fourth main cause.9 The Office for National Statistics in the UK found that for young men aged 5–19, the main cause of death in 2009 was transport accidents, followed by suicide and homicide. After that came lymphoid cancer, congenital defects, cerebral palsy, brain cancer, bronchitis, bone cancer and meningitis. Among the 20–34 age group, three main causes stood out far more than the others: suicide, accidental poisoning and accidents. The statistics also state that, worldwide, men under the age of 25 are three times more likely to die in transport accidents than young women.10 The World Health Organization, which covers all continents, listed the deaths of 1.3 million adolescents in 2012. The key causes were road accidents, suicide, violence and respiratory disease.
What emerges from these modern statistics is the high significance of violence and accidents claiming the lives of young men. In twenty-first-century terms, this might translate into a range of incidents from car crashes to assaults, falls or unintentional overdoses. This raises the question of risk-taking behaviour as a cultural rite of passage for young men, then and now: while today’s youths might attempt to prove themselves by driving too fast, fighting or overindulging in abusive substances, their fifteenth-century counterparts would have come of age by proving themselves in battle. Risk-taking behaviour among young men is a culturally recognised aspect of the modern world, and adolescence is considered a period of turbulent change and transition. Writing on this topic in the Forum for Qualitative Social Research, Elaine Sharland states that ‘most commentators agree that this is a period in which major transitions are to be negotiated, both in the internal self, and with the expectations of the external world.’11 This pedagogical realization might be the product of a specific moment in time but it is not exclusive to it. Recognition can be found in Elyot’s Castell of Health (1536) that the age of 14 was important in terms of rites of passage, with specific dietary advice included for the recognised frailties of boys before they attained that age, after which they might follow the general guidelines laid down for male health. Young aristocratic males five centuries ago did not experience the ‘teenage’ years in the same way as their modern counterparts but the comparison is not completely anachronistic, as they certainly recognised the transitional phases of life and understood that there were certain rites of passage to pass through in order to gain social acceptance. For medieval and Tudor boys, these included reaching the age of legal majority, the inheritance of estates, getting married, taking a position in the legal courts or a post in the royal service, or proving oneself battle. This was embedded in their cognitive development as much as it was a cultural construct. While the focus upon developing as an ‘individual’ is a modern concept which these ten young men would not have recognized, their emphasis was upon dynasty and duty. To be of service to their family and sovereign, to do their duty to God, they sought to attain certain goals to reach the place for which they believed their birth had destined them.
What can be stated for certain is that the largest cause of premature death in young men today is accident or violence, and that of the ten young medieval and Tudor men studied in this work, six died by violence. A smaller percentage of young men die of illnesses like tuberculosis or pulmonary disease in the modern world, due to the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of such conditions. It is to be expected that these illnesses could claim a higher proportion of our historical case studies, which they did, accounting for four out of the ten deaths.
In the period 1450–1550, young women died too. They have been conspicuously absent from this book because they deserve a separate study of their own. Their experiences of mortality were similar in some ways to those of young men but also vastly different in others. The ways in which they met death were as specifically gendered as was those of their brothers and husbands in battle. One of the main killers of women in their late teens and twenties was childbirth and injuries or infections arising from it. Just as susceptible to disease as the men, women’s relation to illness and death was different in a legal and social sense. In their roles as daughters, wives and mothers, they were the vessels that carried men’s heirs, physically responsible for delivering the next generation, but it was the male line through which the titles and estates usually passed. This meant that their loss left a different imprint upon families and dynasties: the question of death and the heiress, or death and the mother, would require a separate book of its own. Such a book about the significant aristocratic women dying young in this period might include Mary of York, the second daughter of Edward IV, who passed away in 1482 at the age of 14, although her loss was essentially personal, without dynastic implications. It would certainly include Catherine Howard, who lost her head for reputed adultery and Jane Grey, telling a similar story to that of Guildford. For such a work to find sufficient women, the age bracket would need to be widened to include those dying in their late twenties, a few years older than John de la Pole, and Edward, Earl of Warwick, who, at the age of 24, were the eldest of the ten youths included in this volume. This would allow for the inclusion of Isabel Neville, Duchess of Clarence, Warwick’s mother, who died aged 25, and Anne Neville, Queen of England and mother of Edward of Middleham, who died aged 28, both of whom appear to have died from some wasting illness like tuberculosis. There would also be Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third queen, mother of Edward VI, whose death at 28 prevented the arrival of any royal siblings, whose existence would have changed the course of English royal history. What the aristocratic family trees of England show that, during this period, setting aside childbirth, women did not die young in the same numbers as their male counterparts did. The fact that Arthur died in 1502 and Catherine survived, is a story in itself.
Edmund, Earl of Rutland; Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales; Edward V; Edward of Middleham, Prince of Wales; Edward, Earl of Warwick; John, Earl of Lincoln; Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales; Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset; Edward VI; and Guildford Dudley. In the biographies of these ten young men it is possible to glimpse the paths they might have taken, the promise they might have fulfilled. But beyond the hour of their death, all is speculation. A surprising number of young men in positions of power met an untimely, premature end during this century and the focus of this book has been the evidence of their lives and the effects of their death. As ten trajectories cut short, the impact of their loss was felt in dynastic, family, political and religious terms. Rather than musing on what ‘might have been’, the observation of what was, of what did come to pass, provides an interesting insight into the opportunity-seeking behaviour of the court and the English aristocracy. Sometimes eagerly, sometimes with reluctance, their positions were filled by someone waiting in line, who benefited in terms of finances or power, or who breathed a sigh of relief and survived thanks to another’s death.
In the cases of Edward of Westminster and Edward of Middleham, death brought a particular family line to an end. Henry VI had no more sons to continue the fight for his cause, nor any daughters to marry to powerful foreigners who might invade England and restore the Lancastrian line. The direct descent that came from Edward III, through John of Gaunt, Henry IV and Henry V, came to an end on the battlefield at Tewkesbury. The result of this was that Edward IV was able to regain his throne and reign for another twelve years. Upon the death of Edward of Middleham, the position of his father, Richard III, became a little less stable, as it removed the possibility of future challenges to anyone wishing to topple him from the throne. Had Richard left a surviving legitimate son in 1485, the disparate Yorkist threats of his reign might have united under a more significant leader, posing a real challenge to Henry VII. Edward of Middleham’s death meant that there were no direct legitimate descendants of Richard III and the dubious honour of being his heir passed to John, Earl of Lincoln, prompting his challenge to the Tudors in 1487, and his resulting death.
In some cases, premature death meant the replacement of one ruler by another. Although he had never been formally crowned, the 12-year-old Edward V inherited the throne upon the death of his father on 9 April 1483. As his father’s eldest son, with the right conferred upon him in Edward IV’s will and as consequence of his investment as Prince of Wales and the oaths of the nobility, he was accepted in April as the country’s next legitimate king. No public challenge was raised until June, during which month he was still using the royal seal. The result of his disappearance, and his assumed death, was that the throne was taken by Richard III, ushering in a new phase of Yorkist history. In some cases, the death of an individual was to the advantage of their siblings: George, Duke of Clarence stepped into the shoes of his elder brother Edmund; Henry VIII succeeded where Arthur had not; and even Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury later received part of the inheritance denied to her brother Edward, Earl of Warwick.
Sometimes death ensured continuity, where there would otherwise have been change. The loss of John, Earl of Lincoln in battle, and the execution of Edward, Earl of Warwick preserved the regime of Henry VII in the 1490s. By contrast, premature death could lead to chaos: Edward VI’s untimely end created a succession crisis in which the expected line of descent was temporarily bypassed, projecting Guildford Dudley briefly to power by virtue of his marriage. Just as Edward VI’s death created the opportunity for Guildford, death allowed greater security for the continuance of Mary I’s regime. Another result of the deaths of Edward VI and Guildford, after the lost opportunity of the Wyatt rebellion, was the national reversion to Catholicism and rejection of recent ecclesiastical reforms.
It is impossible to ‘undo’ these deaths and see subsequent history as independent from them. Each of them changed history by living and by dying. The existence of each of these ten young men is worth remembering for what they did achieve and represent, for the part they did play in medieval and Tudor politics, and as symbols for the eternal shadow in the mind of their contemporaries regarding the power of death. Just as in 1443, and the birth of Edmund, Earl of Rutland, through to the execution of Guildford Dudley in 1554, life was a continual paradox of struggle and opportunity, of celebration and failure, of fighting to improve the lot of the dynasty and of personal struggle against enemies and illness. The deaths of aristocratic heirs in the medieval and Tudor periods are metonymic for the eternal struggle of mankind, and the fact that, after it has been lost, life goes on.
Here is the reste of all your businesse,
Here is the porte of peace and restfulnes
to them that stondeth in stormes of disease,
only refuge to wretches in distrese,
and all comforte of myschefe and mis-ease.12