FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT THE TWELVE-YEAR-OLD HENRY TUDOR could see William Herbert manoeuvre his forces into their battle positions. For Henry, witnessing the coming battle of Edgecote Moor, six miles north-east of Banbury, was to be part of his training in war. Herbert had gathered ‘the extremity of all his power’ and his men were ‘the best in Wales’.1 A great feast had been given at Raglan before they headed out to face the enemy, which happily was not a Lancastrian army. The rebel leader was a traitor from within the House of York: Edward IV’s ambitious and brilliant cousin, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. At dawn on 26 July 1469, Warwick’s forces were still on their way to join his allies in the field, and Herbert intended to defeat them before Warwick arrived. He looked forward to his Tudor ward learning from his victory.
The chink of armour and the noise of clanking weaponry swelled into a roar as the rebels swept forward with battle cries. The impact drove Herbert back across the river, but he put up a determined defence. His co-commander’s Welsh archers were only a few miles away and at last the news came that the archers were coming, and fast.2 Then, suddenly, the advance guard of Warwick’s army appeared, their red coats stitched with his distinctive badge of the ragged staff, sewn in silver.3 Warwick’s name alone was enough to send a bolt of terror through Herbert’s forces. The fear that Warwick could not be far behind shattered morale and sent Herbert’s army into flight. At least 2,000 Welshmen were slaughtered. Warwick also wanted prisoners, however, and he ordered his men on the hunt for those he considered to be of value. Henry’s first training in war proved to be the taste of mortal fear, as he too fled, with one man to guide him.
As soon as the news of the battle reached Margaret Beaufort in Surrey, she sent eight of her best men across country to discover her son’s fate. When at last they sent word back, there was horror as well as relief. Henry was with Herbert’s brother-in-law at Weobley Castle near Hereford, but Herbert had been captured and executed.4 Henry’s guardian had been a dominant figure in his life and, when Margaret’s servants rode on to Weobley, she sent money for Henry to be spent on bows and arrows, ‘for his disports’: a distraction from the trauma he had been through.5 It would be over a year, however, before Margaret would see her son, as the political situation remained highly unstable.
The origins of Warwick’s betrayal of his cousin dated back to the king’s controversial marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. Warwick, fourteen years older than Edward, and used to having his counsel heeded, had been in the middle of negotiating a match between Edward and a French princess. There was growing tension in Europe between Louis XI of France on the one side and the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany on the other, as Louis attempted to exert his authority over their independent duchies. The marriage and associated foreign policy would have meant an alliance with Louis, but it had had to be dropped after Edward revealed he had married his English bride. It then emerged that Edward favoured a Burgundian alliance. This was confirmed when his sister, Margaret of York, married Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in February 1468.
Warwick’s resentment of the king’s growing independence only reached boiling point, however, when Edward blocked a marriage between Warwick’s daughter, Isabel Neville, and the elder of the king’s two brothers, George, Duke of Clarence.6 When Warwick rebelled he had hoped to make Clarence king, but it was only after he had formed an alliance with the Lancastrian queen, Margaret of Anjou, in October 1470, that he was able to find sufficient support to drive Edward into exile in Burgundy. Warwick’s sobriquet – ‘the Kingmaker’ – was well earned with the ailing Henry VI promptly released from the Tower and readapted as king. Prince Edward of Lancaster was promised in marriage to Warwick’s second daughter, Anne Neville, and Henry Tudor was free to leave Weobley. Jasper Tudor, newly returned from exile in France, escorted the boy from Hereford to his mother in London that same month.
Henry had not seen Jasper since he was four years old, but Jasper’s exploits had been infamous in the Herbert household and at Weobley.7 Stories abounded describing Jasper’s raids into Wales, where he moved through the countryside like a will-o’-the-wisp, holding sessions and assizes in the name of Henry VI, reminding everyone who the true king was, before vanishing with his men. Jasper had nearly been caught in 1468 when the Lancastrian outpost of Harlech fell to Herbert’s troops, but he had escaped dressed as a peasant carrying a bundle of pea-straw on his back, before sailing for Brittany, more by his own skill, it was said, than that of his sailors.8 The ride to London with Henry marked the beginning of a close friendship between the dashing Jasper Tudor and his young nephew, and for the next fifteen years they would rarely be apart for long.
On reaching London, Henry found himself in a city like no other. Over 40,000 people lived here, and its tall houses with their overhanging roofs seemed to block out the light and heighten the senses. Shops, cottages and taverns crowded on to the streets. Stalls glittered with goldsmiths’ work and the flash of silks, while the air was thick with the smells of beer, hot meat pies and cheese flans. Priests and monks were a ubiquitous sight, dressed in distinctive clothes and with the crown of their heads shaved, or tonsured. Well educated, they were an obvious choice for the rich to employ as their secretaries and administrators, and those in London tended to be the more ambitious members of clergy, attracted to the capital, as others were, for the opportunities it offered.9 Here and there you came across the great houses of the powerful, and gardens too. One offered a particularly striking sight: the Grocers Company had uprooted the white roses they had planted as a display of loyalty to Edward IV and had replaced them with red roses.10
Happily reunited with his mother, Henry Tudor and his family travelled by barge to the Palace of Westminster on 27 October. King Henry VI was back in his rightful place, but for Margaret Beaufort, who had known him in better days, it was shocking to see how five years of imprisonment and mental illness had taken its toll. Henry VI had never completely recovered his health after 1453 when he had had to be spoon-fed to keep him alive. The additional strain of his recent years in the Tower had left him strangely passive: ‘simple’, was how he was described. There was an awkward moment when the frail king saw the self-possessed young Henry Tudor and made a bizarre pronouncement: ‘This truly is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield, and give over the domain.’11 The words suggest a torch being passed from one king to another. But it is most unlikely Henry VI would have intended any such prophecy. His seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward of Lancaster, would shortly be on his way to England from France with his mother the queen. There was no reason to believe he would not, one day, inherit his father’s throne. It may be that the king had confused Henry Tudor with the son he had not seen for five years.
From London, Henry Tudor rode on to his mother’s Surrey house at Woking on the river Wye. It was a lovely manor with gardens lined with fruit trees, and beneath them the clear waters of a winding river. Margaret at last had an opportunity to lavish him with the love and attention she had been unable to give him as a little boy, but their time together was not to last. By 11 November King Edward was sailing home from Burgundy to fight for his crown with an army subsidised by his brother-in-law, Charles the Bold. Henry said his goodbyes, and having packed in his baggage his mother’s gift of a fine new horse blanket, he set off to rejoin Jasper. Together they would travel onward to south Wales to raise an army in the same region from which Herbert had drawn his men.
Meanwhile, as Warwick scrambled to get another army ready in England to face Edward immediately, the Yorkist king took London. Henry VI was returned to the Tower, ‘as a man amazed and utterly dulled with troubles and adversity’.12 No wonder contemporaries were obsessed with the image of the wheel of fortune, which raised men up one day, only to hurtle them down the next. It seemed to some that the world had ‘turned right queasy’.
On 13 April 1471, with Henry VI locked in the Tower, the Yorkist cousins Warwick and Edward assembled their rival armies at Barnet in Hertfordshire. Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Stafford, had decided the family should hedge their bets on the outcome. While the fourteen-year-old Henry Tudor stayed with Jasper in the west, Stafford was preparing to fight alongside Edward IV’s forces. He feared he would not survive – this was to be ‘guerre mortelle’, and Stafford remembered well the horrors of Towton a decade earlier. On the eve of the battle, he wrote his will, naming his ‘most entirely beloved wife’ as his executor and asking simply that his body be ‘buried where it shall best please God that I die’.13
As the first confused reports on the outcome of the battle reached Margaret, it emerged that the two sides had fought almost blind in thick fog early in the morning of the 14th. In the confusion Lancastrian archers had fired into the ranks of their own side, and with survivors crying ‘Treason! Treason!’ they had soon lost the battle. According to one account Warwick had fought on until overwhelmed, ‘beating down and killing the enemy far from his own forces’ until he was ‘thrust through and slain’.14 Another described how he ‘leapt on horseback and fled to a wood’, hoping to escape to fight another day, but that a Yorkist soldier ‘came upon him, and killed him, and despoiled him naked’.15 Battlefield commanders usually tried to escape, but trapped in that wood the Kingmaker knew better than to be taken alive and suffer a post-battle execution such as he had delivered to Henry’s former guardian, William Herbert. He had fought to the death.
There was still no news of Stafford, and as Margaret sent her men on to Barnet to discover whether her husband was alive, the survivors from both armies were trickling into London. Many were terribly injured. Their armour had protected the trunks of their bodies, but they had been cut below the hips and on their faces. Often they had lost their noses, and these unlucky souls retreated into the houses of friends to escape the merciless stares of the public.16 Stafford proved to be amongst the injured. Unable to march on with Edward IV to the west, he was to be spared the denouement. The Tudor army expected to join Margaret of Anjou’s forces for this final battle, but Edward IV cut off her army at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. Her seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward of Lancaster, was killed there ‘in plain battle’ on 4 May 1471.17
Two and a half weeks later Edward IV was riding through the streets of London in a victory parade with Margaret of Anjou seated in a chariot like a royal prisoner from the days of ancient Rome. He intended now to destroy the remnants of the Lancastrian royal house. In the Tower Margaret of Anjou was not permitted to see her husband, and would never see him again. Henry VI was murdered on the night of 21 May 1471, between eleven and twelve o’clock.18 The Yorkists put it about that he had taken the news of his son’s death ‘to so great despite, ire and indignation that of pure displeasure and melancholy he died’. Few can have believed it. There was, however, as yet no tradition in England of killing queens. Margaret of Anjou would be ransomed and eventually returned to France. There she died in 1482, so poor that Louis XI decided her dogs were the only things she owned worth keeping.19
With the legitimate line of the House of Lancaster extinct, one Yorkist noted that ‘no one from that stock remained who could now claim the crown’.20 Nevertheless, Edward IV was not going to take any chances with Henry Tudor remaining a possible focus of old Lancastrian loyalties. An insight into Edward IV’s intentions is given by the fact that the man he ordered to lead the pursuit of Henry and Jasper Tudor was the same man who had carried out the execution of Owen Tudor on his orders in 1461.21 Jasper had become an expert escape artist, however, and as he fled with Henry into north Wales he turned the tables on their pursuer, capturing him instead. When the man pleaded for his life, Jasper retorted ‘he should have as much favour as he showed to Owen, his father’ and so ‘caused his head to be smitten off’.22 As one Frenchman summarised it: ‘the lords in England killed their enemies, then later the children of their enemies gained their revenge’.23
Louis XI had backed the Lancastrian cause since Edward went into alliance with the Burgundians, and when Jasper and Henry at last reached the port of Tenby they set sail for France. The weather was stormy, however, and, blown off course, the Tudors landed instead at the independent duchy of Brittany. Happily the duke, Frances II, who was the son of Catherine of Valois’ sister Jeanne, welcomed his cousins ‘as though they had been his brothers’. Jasper and Henry were safe for the time being, but how long would this last? Whatever the displays of friendship from Duke Francis, they were now pawns in Brittany’s efforts to remain independent of France. King Edward would offer Duke Francis men and money in exchange for returning them to England, and there was no reason to believe he would resist the king’s bribes for ever, even if the Tudors were cousins.
It was late September before Margaret Beaufort learned of Henry’s and Jasper’s safe escape. It was good news in bad times. Margaret had watched her husband sicken from the injuries he had received at Barnet five months earlier. Married to Sir Henry Stafford aged fourteen – the same age her son now was – she had grown up with him and, each year, they had celebrated their wedding anniversary as a mark of their love. They would not do so again. Stafford died on 4 October 1471.
The grieving Margaret retreated to her mother’s house in the City, Le Ryall, to consider what to do next.24 It seemed to Margaret that the only way to secure her son’s life in the long term was to obtain a pardon from Edward IV, but regaining his trust was a formidable task. The quickest route would be to marry someone close to Edward. As a mere woman it would be assumed her loyalties were those of her husband, or, at the very least, that he could control her.
Still only twenty-eight, extremely rich and with a royal descent that would add lustre to any noble house, Margaret soon attracted the attention of the new Steward of the King’s Household, Thomas, Lord Stanley. Eight years older than Margaret and a regular member of Edward’s council, he had useful links to the queen’s family, the Woodvilles.25 He was also independently powerful, the leading nobleman of the north-west and a man of considerable cunning. He had avoided committing his retainers to any of the major battles of the past thirteen years.26 Margaret married him in June 1472, just eight months after Stafford’s death. She feared she could not afford to be sentimental if her son was ever to return to his homeland.