The Wars of the Roses

The author of Discover the real history behind , the PBS Great Performance series of Shakespeare''s plays, starring Judi Dench, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sofie Okenedo and Hugh Bonneville. The crown of England changed hands five times over the course of the fifteenth century, as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. In this riveting follow-up to Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in these turbulent times, from Joan of Arc and Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt marked the high point of the medieval monarchy, to Richard III, who murdered his own nephews in a desperate bid to secure his stolen crown. This was a period when headstrong queens and consorts seized power and bent men to their will. With vivid descriptions of the battles of Towton and Bosworth, where the last Plantagenet king was slain, this dramatic narrative history revels in bedlam and intrigue. It also offers a long-overdue corrective to Tudor propaganda, dismantling their self-serving account of what they called the Wars of the Roses. “If you’re a fan of Note on Names, Money, and Distances

THE NAMES OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS in this book have generally been modernized for the sake of familiarity and consistency. Thus Nevill becomes Neville, Wydeville becomes Woodville, Tudur becomes Tudor, and so on. Latin, French and archaic English sources have all been translated or rendered into modern English except in a very few cases where original spellings have been maintained to illustrate a historical point.

Where particularly pertinent, sums of money have been translated into modern currencies with the assistance of the conversion tool at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency, which gives modern values for ancient, and also has a “purchasing power” function. Readers should be aware, however, that the conversion of monetary values across the centuries is a perilously inexact science, and that the figures given are for rough guidance only. As a very rough guide, £100 in 1450 would be worth £55,000 (or $90,000) today. The same sum would represent ten years’ annual salary for an ordinary English laborer in the mid-fifteenth century.

Where a distance between two places is given, it has usually been calculated using Google Maps Walking Directions, and thus tends to be calculated according to the fastest route via modern roads.

Introduction

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING on Friday, May 27, 1541, within the precincts of the Tower of London, an old woman walked out into the light of a spring day. Her name was Margaret Pole. By birth, blood and lineage she was one of the noblest women in England. Her father, George, duke of Clarence, had been the brother to a king, and her mother, Isabel Neville, had in her time been coheir to one of the greatest earldoms in the land. Both parents were now long gone, memories from another age and another century.

Margaret’s life had been long and exciting. For twenty-five years she had been the countess of Salisbury, one of only two women of her time to have held a peerage in her own right. She had until recently been one of the five wealthiest aristocrats of her generation, with lands in seventeen different counties. Now, at sixty-seven—ancient by Tudor standards—she appeared so advanced in age that intelligent observers took her to be eighty or ninety.1

Like many inhabitants of the Tower of London, Margaret Pole was a prisoner. Two years previously she had been stripped of her lands and titles by an act of parliament which accused her of having “committed and perpetrated diverse and sundry other detestable and abominable treasons” against her cousin, King Henry VIII. What these treasons were was never fully evinced, because in truth Margaret’s offenses against the crown were more general than particular. Her two principal crimes were her close relation to the king and her suspicion of his adoption of the new forms and doctrines of Christian belief that had swept through Europe during the past two decades. For these two facts, the one of birthright and the second of conscience, she had lived within London’s stout, supposedly impervious riverside fortress, which bristled with cannons from its whitewashed central tower, for the past eighteen months.

Margaret had lived well in jail. Prison for a sixteenth-century aristocrat was supposed to be a life of restricted movement tempered by decent, even luxurious conditions, and she had been keen to ensure that her confinement met the highest standard. She expected to serve a comfortable sentence, and when she found the standards wanting, she complained.2 Before she was moved to London she spent a year locked in Cowdray House in West Sussex, under the watch of the unenthusiastic William Fitzwilliam, earl of Southampton. The earl and his wife had found her spirited and indignant approach to incarceration rather tiresome and had been glad when she was moved on.

In the Tower, Margaret was able to write letters to her relatives and was provided with servants and good, expensive food. Her nobility was not demeaned. Earlier in the year Queen Catherine’s tailor had been appointed to make her a set of new clothes, and just a few weeks previously another order of garments had turned up, ordered and paid for directly by the king. Henry had also sent her a nightgown lined with fur and another with Cypriot satin, petticoats, bonnets and hose, four pairs of shoes and a new pair of slippers. More than £15—roughly the equivalent of two years’ wages for a common laborer at the time—had been spent on her clothing in just six months. As she walked out into the cool morning air, Margaret Pole could therefore have reflected that, although she was due to be beheaded that morning, she would at least die wearing new shoes.

Her execution had been arranged in a hurry. She had been informed only hours previously that her nephew the king had ordered her death: a shockingly short time for an old lady to prepare her spirit and body for the end. According to a report that reached Eustace Chapuys, the exceptionally well-informed Imperial ambassador to England, the countess “found the thing very strange,” since she had no idea “of what crime she was accused, nor how she had been sentenced.” Few, in truth, would ever quite understand what threat this feeble old lady could have posed to a king as powerful and self-important as Henry VIII.

A thin crowd had gathered to bear witness. They stood by a pathetically small chopping block, erected so hastily that it was simply set on the ground and not, as was customary, raised up on a scaffold. According to Chapuys, when Margaret arrived before the block she commended her soul to her creator and asked those present to pray for King Henry and Queen Catherine, the king’s three-year-old son, Prince Edward, and the twenty-five-year-old Princess Mary, her goddaughter. But as the old woman stood talking to the sparse crowd (Chapuys put the number at 150; the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, suggested it was fewer), a feeling of restlessness went around. She was told to hurry up and place her neck on the little piece of wood.

The Tower’s regular executioner was not on duty that morning. He was in the north, alongside King Henry, who had visited the farthest reach of his kingdom to dampen the threat of rebellion against his rule. The Tower’s ax had therefore been entrusted to a deputy: a man of tender years and little experience in the difficult art of decapitation. (Chapuys described him as a “wretched and blundering youth.”) He was faced with a task wildly inappropriate to his years. Only one other noblewoman had been executed in England since the Norman Conquest: the king’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. She had been beheaded in a sin…