History of England 1-6

York’s most significant task was to defend the southern coast against French incursions and the northern frontier against the Scots; he was also obliged to protect the last remaining English settlement at Calais. So he named his ally, Warwick, as captain of that town. For all these preparations he needed money to be granted by the parliament house. That proved a complicated and arduous task, made infinitely more difficult when in February 1456 the king was brought by the lords to Westminster in order to abrogate the proceedings and effectively to overrule the protector. At that point York, resentful and weary, resigned or was made to resign from his post.

The king was now nominally in command, but the real power lay with his wife. Margaret of Anjou was according to a contemporary ‘a great and strong laboured [strong-minded] woman’ who arranged everything ‘to an intent and conclusion to her power’. She was certainly more masterful than her husband. Her essential purpose was now to safeguard the interests of her infant son and to make sure that he succeeded his ailing father. In this respect, York was still the principal enemy made all the more dangerous by the death of Somerset.

She moved the king and court to the middle of her landed estates around Coventry, with the castle of Kenilworth as her stronghold, thereby setting up a base of power as an alternative to York who remained in London. The citizens had taken up his cause, and the queen did not feel safe among them. The councils of the realm were literally divided, and the course of affairs seemed likely to drift. One contemporary observed that ‘the great princes of the land [pre-eminently York and Warwick] were not called to Council but set apart’.

For the next three or four years there is little mention of the king; he spent much of his time travelling through the midlands, staying at various favoured abbeys or priories. It is said that above all else he enjoyed sleeping. No speeches by the king are reported. He was ‘simple’; he upheld no household, and he prosecuted no war. Little or no attempt was made at governance, apart from the routine business of finance and patronage. Even in these spheres, however, the queen’s wishes and decisions were paramount. The Lancastrian court, and the Yorkist lords, watched each other eagerly and suspiciously; the air was filled with threat.

The court returned to Westminster, in the winter of 1457, accompanied by a force of 13,000 archers; it was widely believed that the king and queen had returned in order to overcome York and to overawe the city. Political life had always been a form of gang warfare, in a scramble for lands and riches. Now it showed its true face. The streets of the city were filled with supporters of the Lancastrians and the Yorkists; the younger relatives of the Lancastrians who had been killed at St Albans had come for vengeance.

Another source of unrest arose in that winter. In the summer of the year a French fleet had landed at Sandwich and devastated the town, a signal example both of the failure of English policy and of English weakness. The merchants of London, in particular, were horrified and outraged at the threat to maritime trade. In such an environment no one could feel safe.

Confronted with the possibility of civil war breaking out in the capital between the supporters of both sides, the principal figures reached a form of compromise in which the relatives of the dead were offered financial compensation for their loss. Money, in England, is always the best policy. This agreement was followed by what was known as a ‘love day’, in which sworn enemies literally joined hands and proceeded to a solemn service in St Paul’s Cathedral. But the love did not last. The royal court showed no favour to York or to the Nevilles, and in the spring of 1459 Henry ordered his loyal nobles to gather at Leicester with ‘as many persons defensibly arrayed as they might according to their degree’. The king was, in other words, calling for the armed retainers of the lords to be put at his disposal. A great council was held in June at Coventry, to which York and his supporters were not invited. At this assembly the renegade lords were denounced for their disloyalty.

York and Warwick now gathered their forces, and marched towards Worcester where they held their own council. Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, was intent upon joining them with 5,000 men. The queen’s army intercepted him, however, on the road from Newcastle-under-Lyme; Salisbury beat off the attack, killing the queen’s commander and scattering what must now be called the enemy. The battle, lasting for more than four hours, claimed the lives of 2,000 men; the battlefield itself became known as ‘Deadmen’s Den’. So it had come to this. The English were fighting and killing the English, the men of Yorkshire against the men of Shropshire, the men of Wiltshire against the men of Cheshire.

Despite Salisbury’s victory, York and his allies were now confronted by a large royal army bearing down upon them. They retreated from Worcester to Ludlow, where they established an armed camp. Yet it was clear enough that York was uneasy about confronting the king in open battle where he could be accused of high treason. A contingent of Warwick’s forces from Calais then deserted and, knowing themselves to be vulnerable, York and the Nevilles fled under cover of darkness; York returned to his old fiefdom, Ireland, while Warwick and Salisbury sailed to Calais. Their lands were seized by the king and they were declared to be traitors. Their cause seemed to have ended ingloriously.

The coastal defences of the country were now strengthened, with the possibility of an attack both from Calais and from Dublin; meanwhile, in the spring of 1460, Warwick sailed to Ireland in order to consult York on the next move. It came in the form of invasion. In the early summer of 1460 Warwick and Salisbury landed at Kent and began a march to the friendly territory of London. The leaders of the capital welcomed them and even offered them money. The Nevilles said that they had come to ‘rescue’ the king from his evil councillors; they professed nothing but goodwill towards Henry himself; they were not rebels, but reformers of the body politic; they wished to lighten taxation and to reduce the king’s debts; they pledged to reform the workings of the law and to lift the manifold oppressions of the king’s courtiers. It was the standard rhetoric of the period, but it was received warmly by the citizens and by the people of south-eastern England. It seems likely, however, that York and Warwick had brooded on the possibility of killing the king together with his wife and son. It should be remembered that these were all vicious and ruthless men.

Warwick remained in the city for only three days before marching north in search of the king’s army. He found it outside Northampton and, before sending his forces into battle, he ordered them to hunt down and kill the king’s entourage; the senior nobility and the knights were not to be spared. The fighting lasted less than an hour, and the victory went to Warwick after the slaughter of the king’s closest companions. Henry himself was taken into custody and once more escorted to London, where he was king only in name. ‘I follow after the lords,’ he is described as saying in a poem of the time. ‘I never know why.’ He was a puppet monarch. Nevertheless the queen and her son, the young Prince Edward, were still at large.

York returned from Ireland ten weeks after the battle, and bore about him all the appurtenances of royalty. He no longer dated his letters according to the years of Henry’s reign, as was the custom, and he bore the arms of England on his banners. He arrived as the parliament in Westminster, summoned by Warwick, was beginning its proceedings; his trumpets sounded as he made his entrance, and a drawn sword was carried before him. He then made his way towards the vacant throne and put his hand upon it as if to claim possession; this unexpected and unlawful act was greeted with surprise and dismay by the lords assembled. It looked as if York had miscalculated his popularity, and underestimated their residual loyalty to their rightful king.

He demanded to be installed as the monarch. When asked to make a courteous visit to Henry he replied that ‘I know of no person in the realm whom it does not behove to come to me and see my person rather than that I should go and visit him.’ The king himself was too frightened to encounter York. The lords demurred at York’s demand, and passed the question to the judges; the judges in turn refused to meddle in such ‘high matters’ and passed the problem back to the lords. The question was ‘above the law and past their learning’. In any case no man wished to perjure his oath of loyalty to the anointed sovereign. In his incapacity Henry had become the emblem of his age; the senior members of the realm were struck by indecision. Emptiness ruled at the heart of government.

Eventually the lords, in English fashion, proposed a compromise. Henry would retain the crown but, on his death or at the time of his willing abdication, York and his heirs should succeed him. Since York was ten years older than Henry, the lords were playing a game of wait and see. When the king accepted this proposal he was effectively disinheriting his son, and stripping him of his rightful inheritance. But he was in no position, and perhaps in no condition, to remonstrate on the matter. The feelings of Queen Margaret on the issue of succession are hardly in doubt; but for the moment she was on the run. She retreated with her son to Wales, but then fled to Scotland; she left her forces under the command of the earl of Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, half-brother to the king. So the Tudors properly enter English history. Jasper Tudor was the fruit of an unlikely marriage when Katherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V, became the wife of a junior courtier by the name of Owen Tudor. The older Tudor had joined his son on behalf of the queen. No one, however, could possibly have imagined the ultimate success of his family line.

By the end of 1460 the queen reappeared in the north of England, having persuaded the great lords of that region to support her against the Londoners and the south-easterners. She mustered some 10,000 armed retainers, as York and Salisbury marched north to meet them. Battle was joined outside Wakefield, in the course of which both York and Salisbury were despatched; it was for the Lancastrians some recompense for the slaughter at St Albans and Northampton. The head of York was wreathed in a paper crown, and placed on the southern gate of the city of York known as Micklegate Bar. It bore a sign saying ‘Let York overlook the town of York.’

So it seemed thatMargaret of Anjou had won, with the benefits flowing to her son as well as to a weak and feeble king; but Henry himself remained in London, in the control and at the mercy of Warwick. That magnate had not marched north with his allies, but had remained behind to protect what was now a Yorkist administration at Westminster. According to the agreement reached by the lords between the king and York, the heir to the throne had now become York’s son, Edward of March. Two young Edwards, Prince Edward at the age of seven and Edward of March at the age of eighteen, were now pitted against one another.

Edward of March had in fact already taken to the field in defence of the Yorkist inheritance. He marched at the head of his army, with the aim of preventing the Welsh forces led by Jasper Tudor from aligning with the main body of Lancastrian troops in the north. At the beginning of February 1461 he encountered the Tudors in Herefordshire, at a place known as Mortimer’s Cross. Before battle was joined the unusual appearance of a parhelion or sun dog became visible in the air, where by means of small ice crystals a second sun seems to appear beside the first. The soldiers on the earth knew nothing of ice crystals, of course, but the manifestation of two suns suggested some great change in the direction of the world. Two sons were, after all, in conflict. And there were about to be two kings of England.

The victory was won by Edward of March; Jasper Tudor fled, but his father was not so fortunate. Owen Tudor was taken to the block where he was heard to murmur that ‘the head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on the lap of Queen Katherine’, the widow of Henry V whom he had married. His head was carried from the scaffold and placed on the market cross of the local town. It was here that a madwoman combed his hair and washed the blood from his face.

Margaret was already marching towards London, emboldened by the death of York; the Tudors were unable to join her, of course, but still she moved steadily to the south. All the while she allowed her troops to pillage and plunder the lands of her Yorkist enemies through which they passed. Warwick mustered his army in London to prevent her from entering the capital, where most of his power and resources lay; he took the king with him, as a form of insurance. He must also have hoped that Margaret would not attack an army that effectively held her husband hostage.

His hopes were misjudged, however. On 17 February 1461, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met once more at St Albans, but on this occasion the Lancastrians were successful. The king was rescued; he had been placed for safekeeping a mile away, where it was said that he laughed and sang beneath a tree. Many of the leading Yorkist nobles were slaughtered. Warwick fled the scene with a handful of companions.

It is reported that Henry was overjoyed to see his immediate family once more and, in his excitement, he knighted his young son. The seven-year-old boy in turn knighted some thirty of his followers. Margaret, with the king in her possession, now stood close to the gates of London. It was reported in the chronicles that ‘the shops keep closed, and nothing is done either by the tradesmen or by the merchants. Men do not stand in the streets or venture far from home’. They had heard the news of the devastation wreaked by Margaret’s troops in the north of England. John Paston wrote to his father that they ‘are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the south country, and that will ask a mischief’.

On hearing the news of Margaret’s advance, Edward of March – who was now after his father’s death the duke of York – left the site of his victory by the Welsh border and took his forces east to intercept her; he met Warwick in Oxfordshire, close to the Cotswolds, and together they moved towards London. Their purpose now was to occupy the city and to declare Edward to be the lawful king. The citizens were disposed to accept them, and the gates were shut against Margaret of Anjou.

When Edward arrived, he was greeted by the Londoners; the streets were crowded with his supporters and he took the crown almost by acclamation. His right to the title was proclaimed, at St Paul’s Cross and elsewhere, while Henry VI was declared to have forfeited the throne by reneging on his agreement to make York his heir. On 4 March Edward entered St Paul’s Cathedral, and then proceeded in state towards Westminster where he was crowned as Edward IV. All those present did homage to him, as he held the sceptre of Edward the Confessor. They chanted the refrain:

Verus Vox, Rex Edwardus

Rectus Rex, Rex Edwardus.

He was the true voice and the rightful king. He was nineteen years old and, at a height of 6 feet and 4 inches (1.9 metres), a commanding figure. He was every inch a proper king. The ambassador from Burgundy said that ‘I cannot remember ever having seen a finer looking man’.

Yet Henry VI could still be construed to be the anointed sovereign; he was not dead, and he had not abdicated. So effectively two kings of England reigned. Two suns were visible in the sky. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, put it perhaps more vividly in The Holy State and The Profane State where he remarked that ‘they lived in a troublesome world, wherein the cards were so shuffled that two kings were turned up trumps at once, which amazed men how to play their games’.

Edward took steps to resolve this unsatisfactory situation by going in pursuit of Margaret and of Henry. On 29 March the two armies met at Towton in Yorkshire, the royal family having taken the precaution of returning to York to await developments. They were right to do so. Edward won a signal victory on the battlefield; the conflict, held in a snowstorm, is thought to have involved some 50,000 soldiers of whom approximately a quarter perished. Much of the Lancastrian nobility were destroyed. Henry and Margaret, together with their son, escaped into Scotland. The old king, if we may call him that, was to remain at liberty for another four years as an emblem of the surviving Lancastrian claim to the throne. Only the first part of the Wars of the Roses was over.

34

The world at play

Many miniature jugs have been found in the soil of medieval dwellings; they have been interpreted as toys for children. The son of Edward I was given a miniature cart as well as the little model of a plough. From an excavation in London was removed a toy bird, made out of lead and tin; in its original state it would have rocked on a horizontal rod, at the same time as its tongue would appear and reappear from an open beak. Miniature faces were made out of tin, with large ears and eyes and spiked hair. For the very young, rattles were made. Glove puppets were common. Dolls of wood or of cloth were known as ‘poppets’. Tops were called ‘scopperils’ or things that jump about. Hobby-horses were small wooden horses. So the children played as they have always done. But the call of the world was not far distant. The boys were trained in wrestling and in shooting with bow and arrow. They were taught how to imitate the calls of birds, and how to tell the time from the shadows cast by the sun. The girls were trained in weaving, in sewing and in laundering.

Childhood did not last for very long. In the time of the Saxons the age of adult responsibility was twelve at which point the boy or girl could be set to proper full-time work, in the fields of the country or in the streets and markets of the town. In later centuries a boy was criminally liable from the age of seven and could make his will at the age of fourteen.

The more fortunate were granted an education. Some children were given to the monks at a very young age, and were never seen again in secular clothing. The child’s hair was shaved from the round area of the scalp, so that he already resembled a monk. His cloak was taken from him at a special Mass as the abbot declared ‘May the Lord strip you of the old man.’ The boy was then given a monk’s cowl with the words ‘May the Lord clothe you with the new man.’ One elderly monk recalled how in 1080, at the age of five, he began school in the town of Shrewsbury where ‘Siward, an illustrious priest, taught me my letters for five years, and instructed me in psalms and hymns and other necessary knowledge’. A long tradition of clerkly learning already existed.

From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, in fact, the cloister schools of the monasteries provided the principal means of education; the lessons included those of grammar, rhetoric and natural science. The art of singing was also taught. They are not dead institutions. The school of St Albans, established in the tenth century, is still in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The grammar school of Ely, now known as the King’s School, also has an Anglo-Saxon origin; one of its boarding houses is reputed to be the oldest residential building in Europe. The present grammar school of Norwich was instituted in the eleventh century. Many other examples can be found.

It was widely believed that priests should also be schoolmasters, and a church decree of 1200 declared that ‘priests shall keep schools in the towns and teach the little boys free of charge. Priests ought to hold schools in their houses … They ought not to expect anything from the relatives of the boys except what they are willing to give’. Such schools remained in use throughout the period of this book.

In the twelfth century a number of larger schools also emerged, as part of what has been called the ‘renaissance’ of that century in humane learning; they grew up beside the cathedrals, or beside the houses of canons, or in the towns reliant upon great monasteries. Their influence and reputation spread, and between 1363 and 1400 twenty-four new schools were founded. They became known as the grammar schools, despite the fact that grammar was not the only subject; the art of letter-writing was the subject of study, as well as the disciplines of record-keeping and commercial accounting. ‘Business studies’ began in the medieval period.

A fortunate male child received his education at the court of the king or the nobles. If a superior spoke to him, he was trained to take off his hat and to look steadfastly in that person’s face without moving his hands or feet. He was taught to put his hand in front of his mouth before spitting. He was not to scratch his head and was to ensure that his hands and nails were always clean.

Other forms of education were also available. An apprentice was chosen between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and entered a formal bond by which he agreed to spend between seven and ten years with his master while learning the ‘secrets’ of his chosen trade. It was by far the most common way of fully entering the adult world, although of course it had its risks. It was not unknown for masters to treat apprentices very roughly, or for apprentices to absent themselves without leave. Apprentices also had a reputation for being unruly and even violent; one of their favourite games, when they found themselves in a group, was known as ‘breaking doors with our heads’.

By the middle of the twelfth century Oxford had become well known as a seat of learning and of scholarship. At the very beginning of that century Theobald of Etampes was calling himself ‘magister Oxenefordiae’. It was the one place in England ‘where the clergy had flourished most’, according to Gerald of Wales who in 1187 gave a public dissertation there on the topography of Ireland. By that date more than twenty teachers of arts, and ten teachers of canon law and theology, are listed; it was reported in 1192 that the town was so filled with clerks that the authorities of Oxford did not know how to support them. A deed for the transference of property in Cat Street, around 1200, attests the presence of a bookbinder, a scrivener, three illuminators and two parchment-makers; so the ancillary trades of learning were already in large supply.

Yet it was crime, rather than scholarship, that effectively formed the university. In 1209 a student killed a woman of the town and then fled. In retaliation the authorities of Oxford arrested the student’s room companions and hanged them. All the teachers and students of Oxford left the schools, in disgust, and dispersed to other places of learning. A substantial number of them migrated to Cambridge, where the second English university was then established.

When the teachers of Oxford were persuaded to return in 1214 they insisted upon an official document to regulate the relationships between what at a later date would be called town and gown. That document, expressing the intention of electing a chancellor, became the source of the university’s corporate authority. Cambridge followed the same principle as Oxford and its first chancellor is recorded in 1225. Scholastic communities also existed at Northampton and Salisbury, but eventually they withered on the vine; otherwise those two old towns might also have hosted great universities.

The universities had no public buildings, and the lectures were delivered in churches or in rooms hired for the purpose. The students lived in lodgings and inns. A Master of Arts could hire a large tenement, and advertise for scholars; he had created a ‘hall’ in which his pupils would live and learn. Tackley Inn, Ing Hall, Lyon Hall, White Hall and Cuthbert Hall were premises in which grammar was taught. Each of the halls specialized in a particular discipline or set of disciplines, but they were essentially unregulated. They could be riotous.

The colleges of Oxford were first erected for the poorer students. Balliol College, for example, was endowed as a home for poor scholars by 1266. The founders of the colleges were the most prominent ecclesiastics and nobles, particularly of royal blood; it was considered to be a religious duty, and the members of the college were pledged to sing innumerable Masses for the souls of their patrons. The fundamental intent of the college was to create learned clergy, and it was thus an adjunct of the Church in every sense. The fellows of Queen’s College in Oxford wore purple robes as a memorial to the spilled blood of Christ. Teachers very gradually moved to the more regularized life of these institutions, which by the fifteenth century had become individual houses of learning.

The students themselves were classified as ‘northern’ or ‘southern’, with the river Nene (it rises in Northamptonshire, and runs for 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk) being nominated as the boundary; the northern and southern contingents were often fiercely tribal, and the most trivial incident in a tavern or lodging house could provoke mass attacks one upon the other. Even the masters participated. A serious confrontation between southern and northern masters at Cambridge, in 1290, led to a general migration to the school of Northampton. The country was still in a sense divided into ancient kingdoms.

In 1389 some Oxford scholars from northern England fell upon their Welsh counterparts, shooting at them in the lanes and streets of the town; they called out ‘War, war, slay, slay, slay the Welsh dogs and their whelps.’ They killed some, and wounded others; then they dragged the rest to the gates. Before they ejected them they pissed on them and forced them ‘to kiss the place on which they had pissed’. The chronicler adds that ‘while the said Welshmen stooped to kiss it, they would knock their heads against the gates in an inhuman manner’.

Violent struggles also took place between the students and the townspeople. A skirmish at Swyndlestock Tavern, in the centre of Oxford, led to a bloody affray in 1354. The landlord’s friends rang the bell of the church of St Martin, the signal to alert the people of the town. A crowd gathered and assaulted the scholars with various weapons, whereupon the chancellor of the university rang the rival bell of the university church of St Mary. The scholars, alerted, seized their bows and arrows; a pitched battle between the two factions lasted until night fell. On the following day the townspeople sent eighty armed men into the parish of St Giles, where many of the scholars lodged; they shot and killed some of them, when once again the university bell was rung and a large assembly of Oxford pupils set upon the townspeople with their bows and arrows. But they were outnumbered. 2,000 people of the town advanced behind a black flag, crying out ‘Slay! Slay!’ or ‘Havoc! Havoc!’ or ‘Smite hard, give good knocks!’ These were the war cries of the medieval period. A general carnage ensued, with many deaths. All the scholars of Oxford seem to have fled, leaving the university empty for a while.

Less violent diversions can also be cited. An inspection of the pupils of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the very early years of the sixteenth century, revealed that ‘Stokes was unchaste with the wife of a tailor … Stokysley baptised a cat and practised witchcraft … Gregory climbed the great gate by the tower and brought a Stranger into College … Pots and cups are very seldom washed but are kept in such a dirty state that one shudders to drink out of them … Kyftyll played cards with the butler at Christmas time for money.’ Other students were accused of keeping as pets a ferret, a sparrow-hawk and a weasel.

It is perhaps not surprising that, in a society of very young men, casual and sporadic violence was common. The students entered the university at an age between fourteen and seventeen, where they embarked upon a course of study that lasted for seven years. Grammar, rhetoric and dialectic were taught in the first three years; these disciplines were followed by arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry. The students attended lectures and tutorials, but they also disputed among themselves in formal debates. Disputation was an important aspect of medieval life in every sphere. The examinations themselves were entirely oral and were prolonged for four days. The successful candidate would then be given the title of Master of Arts. The more learned moved on to the study of theology; that pursuit took another sixteen or seventeen years, more or less consigning its devotees to an academic life.

The learning promulgated in Oxford and Cambridge was not all of a scholastic kind. More informal schools, established in the two towns to take advantage of their general reputation, taught lessons in conveyancing, accountancy and commercial law; these were frequented by the sons of the greater farmers and landowners, and by the administrators of such estates, to keep abreast of the ever more complex world of property ownership and property speculation. A great enthusiasm for knowledge of a practical nature can be observed in this period.

The appetite for education was in any case instinctive, the natural child of emulation and ambition in an expanding world. By the beginning of the thirteenth century every town had its own school.

I would my master were an hare,

And all his books were hounds,

And I myself a jolly hunter:

To blow my horn I would not spare!

If he were dead, I would not care.

So wrote the author of a fifteenthcentury poem, ‘The Birched Schoolboy’. The schoolmaster sat on a large chair, often with a book in his lap, while the boys were grouped on simple benches around him. He would dictate the rules of Latin grammar, for example, while the boys would scribble them on wax tablets or chant them in unison. Schooling began at six in the morning and, with appropriate breaks, concluded at six in the evening. Another verse describes the life of the boy out of the schoolroom. When he was young, John Lydgate

Ran into gardens, apples there I stole,

To gather fruits I spared not hedge nor wall,

To pluck grapes from other men’s vines

I was more ready than to say my matins,

My lust was to scorn folk and jape,

To scoff and mock like a wanton ape.

In a world of much casual and spontaneous violence the beating of children was customary and familiar. Agnes Paston beat her daughter, Elizabeth, ‘once in a week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places’. Elizabeth herself was twenty years old at the time. Agnes Paston also ordered her son’s schoolmaster to ‘truly belash him’ if he was disobedient. The sentiment would be expected from a loving mother. It was advised that a child should be beaten until he or she admitted guilt and cried for mercy. But childhood was not simply a world of whips and blows. Many educational manuals espoused the cause of gentleness mixed with firmness; excessive punishment was generally denounced.

Thomas More, who was born in 1478, believed that three out of every five of the English people could read; that might be an overestimate, and he might only have been considering the men and women of London, but it is testimony to the growing literacy of the country. The development of the unfamiliar medium of printing, in the latter decades of the fifteenth century, created a new audience with new skills. This was the age in which the poster and the handbill came into use and in which some of the larger towns had libraries. The Guildhall Library, established in 1423, exists still. Four new grammar schools were established in London in the space of one year. In the last decades of the fifteenth century free schools were endowed at Hull, Rotherham, Stockport, Macclesfield and Manchester.

Schoolboys were not allowed to dice or to use bows and arrows on the premises; they were, however, given time and opportunity to engage in the more suitable sport of cock-fighting. ‘Wehee!’ was the cry of liberation from the schoolroom. It was an age of ‘leaping about’, of running and of wrestling. Birds were snared or brought down with sling and stone. Bede recalls that in his youth he had engaged in a primitive form of horse-racing.

The medieval schoolboy played croquet, football, skittles, marbles. Tennis was played against a wall rather than across a net, with the palm of the hand rather than a racket; rackets were not introduced until the end of the fifteenth century. ‘Cambuc’ was a form of golf, with a curved stick known as a ‘bandy’. Skating, with skates made out of bone, was popular. A game known as ‘tables’ resembled backgammon. Chess was common and there were circular chessboards; stray chess pieces have been excavated from medieval dwellings. Card games were not introduced until the middle of the fifteenth century. Bowmanship was important; in ‘penny-prick’ an arrow was fired at a hanging penny coin. Dice were very frequent. ‘You shall have a throw,’ one schoolboy tells another in a schoolbook of the 1420s, ‘for a button of your wristlet.’ Play is as old, and as ever renewed, as the world.

35

The lion and the lamb

The new king, Edward IV, was according to Thomas More ‘a goodly personage, and very princely to behold … of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and cleanly made’. A contemporary chronicler, Dominic Mancini, writing just after Edward’s death, gave a more ambiguous account. ‘Edward was of a gentle nature and cheerful aspect; nevertheless should he assume an angry countenance he could appear very terrible to beholders.’ Of course it was one of the duties of a king to appear very terrible, especially one who had succeeded Henry VI; the previous king had been more lamb than lion. Mancini went on to report that ‘he was easy of access to his friends and to others, even the least notable. Frequently he called to his side complete strangers, when he thought that they had come with the intent of addressing or beholding him more closely.’ Come, he might have said. Look at me. Yes. I am your king. ‘He was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity … of revealing his fine stature more protractedly and more evidently to onlookers.’ He had a voracious appetite and, like many gourmands, he often vomited in order that he might eat again. In time this affected his girth; More commented that in his later years he became ‘somewhat corpulent and boorly, and nevertheless not uncomely’.

In his youth his pride was touched with vanity, and like many previous monarchs he indulged in the theatrical and spectacular aspects of kingship. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent a little over £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, an extraordinary sum when the average annual wage of a labourer was approximately £6. He draped himself in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, in tawny silk and in green satin. He owned hundreds of pairs of shoes and slippers, hats and bonnets; he wore amethysts and sapphires and rubies in abundance. They were talismans as well as jewels. The amethyst gave hardiness and manhood; the sapphire kept the limbs of the body whole; if poison or venom were brought into the presence of the ruby it became moist and began to sweat. Edward possessed a toothpick made of gold, garnished with a diamond, a ruby and a pearl.

It was not just a matter of personal aggrandizement, although of course that played a large part in the acquisition of wealth. One of the purposes of becoming king was to become the richest person in the land. But it was also a way of asserting the wealth and status of the kingdom; it was a display of national power. So self-love, and self-aggrandizement, can be construed as devotion to duty.

Of course that kingdom was still divided or, at the least, unstable. The survival of Henry and his son was a serious embarrassment to the new monarchy, especially since the Lancastrian dynasty had many loyal followers in the west as well as the midlands of the country. Edward had no power at all in the far north, where the old king was just over the border in Scotland. The largest part of Wales supported Henry, who also commanded more supporters among the magnates of the country. Thirty-seven noble families had fought for him and with him; only three of those went over to Edward’s side.

So the new king had to shore up his defences, as far as that was possible, partly in order to prevent the French from taking advantage of any internal confusion. He brought many previous Lancastrian supporters under the cover of his good lordship, principally by granting them territory; he was forced to trust, and to favour, those who had offended against him. Where the Lancastrians could not be reconciled, they were arrested or eliminated. The earl of Oxford and his son, for example, were beheaded at Tower Hill on charges of treason.

A commission of judges proceeded through twentyfive shires and eight cities in order to pursue political malcontents. No great set-piece battles were being fought but, in the first two years of his reign, there was probably more fighting than in any other period of the war; in 1461 he took under his control the estates of 113 enemies. This was the territory granted to his supporters. In that year he also created seven new barons.

The king then found it convenient to create a foreign crisis; it helped him to raise money for his own purposes and to unite his subjects in common enmity. In the spring of 1462 he claimed that the new king of France, Louis XI, was set to destroy ‘the people, the name, the tongue and the blood English of this our said realm’. Edward can be considered the first English king who eschewed France altogether; he had no French possessions to defend, other than the garrison town of Calais, and was truly king of England only.

In the following year the exchequer was asked to provide the requisite funds to raise an army and a fleet against his manifold enemies at home and abroad. It was supposed that the king would march against the Lancastrian supporters in Northumberland and elsewhere, or that he would invade Scotland; in the event, none of this came to pass. He did not lead his troops into battle. ‘What a wretched outcome,’ one fifteenthcentury chronicler reported, ‘shame and confusion!’ Yet it would be wrong to consider Edward as an inactive king. He arranged truces both with France and with Scotland. He took his court to York, and from there he supervised the slow domination of the northern shires.

From the beginning Edward proved himself to be a strong king; he was an expert administrator and had concluded that the survival of his throne depended upon financial and political stability. In an age of personal kingship this was necessarily a very heavy burden on the monarch, whose presence was required everywhere and whose authority had to be imposed directly. He kept a close scrutiny on commerce and on his customs revenues; he summoned members of the London guilds in order to guide or harangue them. Thousands of petitions were delivered to him every year. It was said that he knew ‘the names and estates’ of nearly all the people ‘dispersed throughout the shires of this kingdom’, even those of mere gentlemen. A king who had won his throne by force could not be aloof or detached; he had to remain at the centre of human affairs. He needed goodwill as well as obedience. That is why Dominic Mancini described him as being ‘easy of access’. It has been said that Edward began the movement towards the ‘centralized monarchy’ that characterized the Tudor period; but in truth he had little choice in the matter. It was not a bureaucratic or administrative decision; it was personal instinct.

He had an interest in the administration of justice, too, and in the first fifteen years of his reign he travelled all over the kingdom for his judicial visitations. In the first five months of 1464, for example, he attended the courts at Coventry and Worcester, Gloucester and Cambridge and Maidstone. Several reasons can be adduced for this activity. Pre-eminent among them was his effort to check or punish violence between the noble families; he had a personal interest in preventing riot or disorder that might threaten the security of the various counties. He intervened in a struggle between the Greys and the Vernons of Derbyshire, for example, and closely interviewed the retainers of both sides. He made much use of the commission known as ‘oyer et terminer’, designed to hear and determine felonies or misdemeanours in an expeditious manner. It was composed of his own men, from the household or from the court, and of local magnates who could not be easily coerced.

The commissioners were not always successful, however, in summoning witnesses. The senior knights of Herefordshire confessed to them that ‘they dare not present nor say the truth of the defaults before rehearsed, for dread of murdering, and to be mischieved in their own houses, considering the great number of the said misdoers …’. In the early years of Edward’s reign, when the final outcome of the struggle between the Yorkists and Lancastrians was still in doubt, private violence had by no means abated.

The king’s own legal practice, however, was far from perfect. He regularly interfered with the process of the courts to ensure favourable judgments in the interests of his most powerful supporters. He never prosecuted the retainers of those men upon whose loyalty he relied. This was of course not an unusual procedure for any king, whose rule relied more upon realpolitik than any judicial principle. Edward also had a vested interest in efficient or at least swift justice, since the revenues of the courts greatly augmented his income.

Another aspect of his character can be noted. One contemporary chronicler remarked that he had a liking for ‘convivial company, vanity, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyment’. These do not seem to be mortal offences in any king but, rather, the proper setting for the projection of authority and sovereignty. In the next sentence, after all, the chronicler goes on to praise the king’s acute memory and attention to detail. Yet Edward made one decision in his private affairs that had more serious consequences. In the spring of 1464 he secretly united himself with a commoner in a marriage that emphasized his passion rather than his judgment. Elizabeth Woodville was a widow with two children; and, unlike most royal brides, she was English. She was not altogether common, however, since her father was a knight and her mother a widowed duchess. It was reported that, having decided that she would be a queen rather than a royal mistress, she had resisted the king’s advances. Edward was known to be libidinous and to have had many sexual liaisons, but it seems that Elizabeth was the first to have refused him. A rumour spread through the courts of Europe that in desperation he had even put a knife against her throat. Yet she held out, to her ultimate satisfaction.

The king’s choice was a cause of some dismay to those who believed that a king should only marry someone of royal blood. The fact that he married her in secret, slipping away from his courtiers on the first day of May 1464 with the pretence of going hunting, suggests that he himself knew that he had married beneath his rank. It was also believed preferable to marry a virgin. A newsletter from Bruges in the autumn of 1464 observed that ‘the greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied at this and, for the sake of finding means to annul it, all the nobles are holding great consultations in the town of Reading where the king is’. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, had already begun negotiations with the French king on the matter of Edward’s marriage to Louis XI’s sister-in-law. Those plans were now in disarray. The ‘consultations’ of the lords, however, were meaningless. As a friend of Warwick remarked, ‘we must be patient despite ourselves’. On 29 September 1464, Warwick and the duke of Clarence, the king’s younger brother, escorted Elizabeth Woodville into the chapel of Reading Abbey where she was honoured by the assembled company as their lawful queen.

In the following summer Henry VI was captured; since the defeat at Towton he had retreated to Scotland and to the various loyalist castles of northern England. He was effectively a king in hiding, and such was his invisibility that Edward was not sure in which county he was being concealed. Margaret, in the meantime, had taken refuge on her father’s lands in Anjou. The old king was seen at a dinner given by his supporters in Ribblesdale; he fled the area, but was betrayed by a monk. He was eventually caught in a wood known as Clitherwood, just on the border of Lancashire, and taken back to London on horseback with his legs tied to the stirrups; it is reported that he wore a straw hat, and was pelted with rubbish by some abusive citizens. He remained in the Tower for the next five years, with a small party of courtiers enlisted to serve the prisoner known only as Henry of Windsor.

The new queen’s family, the Woodvilles, were in the ascendant at court and might be seen to threaten the position of Warwick and the other Nevilles. The king also arranged a series of marriages between Elizabeth’s immediate relatives and various available aristocrats; since she had five brothers and seven sisters, this diminished the prospect of further patronage for many more distinguished families. Her younger brother, for example, was married off at the age of twenty to the sixty-five-year-old duchess of Norfolk; the duchess was a wealthy widow who had already buried three husbands, but she also happened to be the aunt of Warwick himself. Warwick’s feelings at what was described at the time as a ‘maritagium diabolicum’ are not recorded. He would have been justified in thinking, in the language of the time, that the honour of his family had been disparaged and that his elderly relative had been made to look ridiculous. In fact the old lady outlived her young spouse, who ended on the scaffold. Louis XI disclosed the fact that he had received a letter expressing Warwick’s dismay at Edward’s behaviour; he hinted that Warwick might even try to supplant his sovereign, but all is lost in a mist of diplomatic surmise and posturing. The French king was not known for nothing as ‘the spider king’.

A more tangible source of discord can be found in the foreign affairs of the nation. Warwick wished above all else for an alliance with France, while Edward favoured an accommodation with Burgundy and Brittany. Various strands of policy were involved. Warwick was receiving many favours from Louis XI, while the Woodvilles were related to the noble families of Burgundy. Burgundy was also the largest market for English cloth, and thus the principal trade partner of the English merchants. In any case the French were the ancient enemy who at this time were harbouring ambassadors from Margaret of Anjou.

In 1467 a commercial treaty was signed between England and Burgundy, swiftly followed by a peace accord and by the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to the duke of Burgundy. In his defeat and disappointment Warwick retired to his estates in Yorkshire, where it was rumoured that he had begun conspiring against his sovereign; it was said that he had been able to suborn the duke of Clarence in a plot against the throne. A French chronicler, Jean de Waurin, reported that Warwick promised Clarence that he would give him his brother’s crown. The old allies had fallen out.

Other rumours were circulating in the spring and autumn of 1467. The most astonishing of them was that the two inveterate enemies, Warwick and Margaret of Anjou, would enter an alliance and would invade England with the purpose of destroying Edward IV. It is not clear who proposed the bargain, but many observers suspected that the French king would do anything to stir up unrest and riot in the enemy country. Warwick and his kinsmen still attended the English court, however, and appeared to be on amicable terms with the king himself.

The break came in the summer of 1469. In June a rebellion in the northern shires was fomented by ‘Robin of Redesdale’ alias ‘Robin Mend-All’ alias Sir John Conyers who was a cousin of Warwick himself; it was in part a popular rebellion, inspired by those who were discontented with Edward’s rule. The king was on pilgrimage to Walsingham, but on hearing news of the gathering insurrection he broke off his pious journey and marched with his retainers to Nottingham. He was hearing rumours from all sides of the treacherous designs both of Warwick and of his own younger brother; it was also reported that Warwick’s brother, George Neville, the archbishop of York, was part of the insurrection. In a defiant spirit he wrote to the three of them, demanding their unconditional loyalty to confirm the fact they were not ‘of any such disposition towards us, as the rumour here runneth’.

No such news reached the king. He was informed instead that the duke of Clarence was about to marry Warwick’s daughter, despite the fact that he had already forbidden the union, and that the parties concerned were sailing to Calais for the ceremony. It was a clear act of defiance and disobedience.

From Calais, Warwick and his associates then issued a proclamation in which they took the part of the northern rebels against a king who was being governed by ‘the deceivable covetous rule and guiding of certain seducious persons’; the last adjective suggests a modern mingling of seductive and seditious. These suspect persons were of course the Woodvilles, who had already been asked by the king to return to their home territories for safekeeping. Warwick invited his supporters to meet him at Canterbury on 16 July. It is possible that he intended to declare Edward illegitimate and to replace him with Clarence. This was not a struggle between Yorkists and Lancastrians, but between two factions of Yorkists.

Warwick and his newly aggrandized forces crossed the Channel and marched upon London, where Warwick himself was very popular; then they made their way towards Coventry, where they determined to join the men in league with Robin Mend-All. The king’s army came up to challenge them, but a sudden attack by the rebels forced them to disperse. Some of the commanders of the king’s army were taken on Warwick’s orders, and in a gratuitous act of injustice he beheaded them on the following day.

Edward himself was by this time on the road to meet his army, and did not learn of its defeat until it was too late to turn back. His men promptly deserted him. This is the best to be made out of a confused narrative. He decided to turn back to London, accompanied by a small retinue, when he was surprised by the forces of the archbishop of York. The king was taken, with all due courtesies, and promptly confined to Warwick Castle. Two of the most prominent members of the Woodville family, the father and younger brother of the queen, were captured and beheaded on Warwick’s order. He now controlled both the country and the king.

He could do nothing with either of them. The earl was in practice the ruler of the country, but he lacked legitimacy and moral authority. He could hardly rule on the king’s behalf if he kept the king confined to a castle. Edward’s council seems grudgingly to have accepted Warwick’s direction, but the hiatus in national affairs provoked outbreaks of local violence and rebellion. Once more the great families of the realm could attack one another with impunity. Only one remedy offered itself. The king had to be released from custody and allowed to resume his sovereignty. So Edward IV returned to be met by a contrite earl, archbishop and younger brother who pleaded that they had acted only in the interests of the realm. Edward and his supporters then processed towards London, where they were met by the mayor and aldermen in their scarlet regalia. ‘The king himself’, John Paston wrote, ‘has good language of the Lords of Clarence, of Warwick, and of my Lords of York and Oxford, saying they be his best friends.’ But he added that ‘his household men have other language’. His household, in other words, were inclined towards revenge.

Yet the king realized that the stability of the realm had to be regained at all costs. According to the chronicler Polydore Vergil ‘he regarded nothing more than to win again the friendship of such noblemen as were now alienated from him …’. He invited Clarence and Warwick to join the sessions of a great council that was called to arrange ‘peace and entire oblivion of all grievances upon both sides’. He also allowed his four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, to be betrothed to Warwick’s nephew. Warwick had of course only recently murdered the young girl’s maternal grandfather and uncle. The politics of power are always realistic.

Nevertheless the earl had been dealt a grievous blow; it had been proved that he could not wield authority without the presence of the king. In the spring of 1470 he was once again implicated in armed rebellion. The revolt came from Lincolnshire where certain families, afraid of the king’s justice or offended by the king’s depredations, rose up with the intention of giving the crown to Clarence. When Edward took the field against them they cried out ‘A Clarence! A Clarence!’ and ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ It was all the evidence the king required. His army defeated the Lincolnshire men with ease, and the site of the battle became known as ‘Lose Coat Field’ for the number of clothes bearing the livery of Warwick or of Clarence that the soldiers discarded in their flight. After his overwhelming victory, his two opponents fled to the safety of the court of Louis XI in France. Some of their collaborators were not so fortunate. One of Warwick’s ships was seized at Southampton, where the gentlemen and yeomen on board were beheaded. A sharp stake was then driven through their posteriors, and their heads were impaled on top.

Warwick and Clarence were now joined by Margaret of Anjou. She, too, had left her familial lands and arrived at the court of the French king. Louis had three birds in his hand, but Margaret and Warwick had been fierce enemies for a long time. The king now entered into protracted negotiations in order to reconcile her to the man who had been ‘the greatest causer of the fall of Henry, of her, and of her son’. He spent every day in long discussions with her until eventually she deferred to him. Margaret now agreed to conspire with her once inveterate enemies and to overthrow Edward IV. Her husband, still in the Tower, would regain the throne; her son Edward, prince of Wales, would marry another of Warwick’s daughters and thus become brother-in-law to Clarence. The families of York and Lancaster would therefore be finally united. The young couple were betrothed in Angers Cathedral.

Warwick and his new ally now began preparations for the great invasion of England. Edward kept his eyes upon the coasts but, in the summer of 1470, he was distracted by news of further rebellions in the north inspired by Warwick’s cause; he was obliged to march to York and Ripon. He could not be sure where Warwick’s fleet might land – anywhere from Wales to Northumberland – and he took a calculated risk in going northward. While he lingered in York, having successfully overcome the incipient rebellion, the news came in the middle of September that Warwick and Clarence had landed at Exmouth in Devon from where at once they began their march towards him. The king was in hostile country in any case, and it became increasingly clear that Warwick was acquiring supporters as he moved forward.

The public records of Coventry reveal that Clarence and Warwick ‘drew to them much people’ and that ‘they were thirty thousand’ by the time they reached the city. Edward had left York for Nottingham, but he was still in desperate circumstances. He had ‘sent for lords and all other men’, but to his dismay ‘there came so little people to him that he was not able to make a field against them’. In the words of the public record Edward ‘went to Lynn’. In fact he made a rapid retreat to what is now King’s Lynn where he took ship and sailed towards the Low Countries. He had few men, and little money; such was his penury that he had to pay for his transport with the furred gown he was wearing.

Eventually he landed in Holland, where the governor of the province was known to him; he was in Burgundian territory, and the duke of Burgundy was an ally. The duke, having married Margaret of York two years before, was also the king’s brother-in-law. So Edward was, for the time being, safe from his enemies. Elizabeth Woodville and her mother had already taken sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. The sanctuary stood at the bottom of the churchyard to the west of the abbey. It was described as ‘a gloomy building, of sufficient strength to withstand a siege’. It was here that the queen was delivered of a son.

Warwick returned to London in order to confirm his supremacy. Margaret and her son remained in France, waiting for Henry VI to be given back his throne. So the once abandoned king was led from the Tower after an imprisonment of five years; he was wearing a long gown of blue velvet, but he was ‘not so cleanly kept as should be such a prince’. In his captivity he sometimes quoted words from the seventh psalm to the effect that ‘My help cometh of God, who preserveth them that are true of heart’. Now God had worked an unlooked-for wonder. Truly He moved in mysterious ways. At the opening of Henry’s parliament the archbishop of York preached upon the text ‘Turn, O backsliding children’.

But if Henry was once more king in name, Warwick was the puppet master. Henry was according to a contemporary chronicler no more than ‘a crowned calf, a shadow on the wall’. Warwick now had to balance a variety of interests in order to preserve his rule; he had to satisfy his Lancastrian supporters as well as the Yorkists who had favoured Edward IV. He also had to manage the ambitions of Clarence, who might have wished the crown for himself. These various tensions and divisions did not augur for good rule. The noblemen of England had in any case become increasingly disenchanted with the protagonists on both sides, and were inclined merely to give their support to the strongest at any given moment. ‘Trust not much upon promises of lords nowadays,’ Margaret Paston told her son, ‘that you should be the surer of the favour of such men. A man’s death is little set by nowadays. Therefore beware of simulation, for they will speak right fair to you that would you fared right evil.’

Soon enough another reversal of fortune complicated a story already filled with strange turns and accidents. In the early spring of 1471 the duke of Burgundy agreed to finance an invasion of England by Edward, and on 14 March the exiled monarch landed at Ravenspur on the coast of Yorkshire; his reception was not at first encouraging. ‘There came right few of the country [Yorkshire] to him,’ according to a contemporary history, ‘or almost none.’ The men of Holderness turned him away, and he was only permitted to enter York on the declaration that he had come to claim his father’s dukedom rather than the English crown.

Nevertheless he kept on moving towards London. He marched towards Doncaster and, learning that Warwick was gathering his forces in Coventry, turned towards that city. The duke of Clarence now deserted the earl in favour of his brother; with Henry VI back on the throne, and with Margaret of Anjou poised to return to England with her son, he may have realized that his chance of gaining the crown was now remote. He was also suspected by his erstwhile enemies; he was held, as a contemporary wrote, ‘in great suspicion, despite, disdain and hatred with all the lords … that were adherents and full partakers with Henry’. But his actions may have had no logic to them at all; he was young, impressionable and impulsive with little control over his tongue or over his actions. He was a shuttlecock flying in all directions.

Edward, leaving Warwick embattled in Coventry, decided to move swiftly upon the capital and to announce himself once more to be king. The archbishop of York, brother of Warwick, tried to rally support by parading Henry VI through London; the king was still wearing the blue velvet gown in which he had been dressed when he left the Tower. Edward entered the city and urgently sought an interview with the old king. ‘My cousin of York,’ Henry told him, ‘you are very welcome. I know that in your hands my life will not be in danger.’ In this he proved to be mistaken. The unhappy monarch was once more consigned to the cold walls of the Tower, while Edward was united with his wife and his newborn son fresh out of sanctuary. Very little time could be spent in celebration, however, and on the following morning the king ‘took advice of the great lords of his blood, and other of his council, for the adventures that were likely to come’. The adventures reached a climax on 14 April at Barnet, a small town north of London, where the Yorkists won the victory with a confused set of skirmishes in thick fog; in the subsequent rout Warwick himself was killed. The ‘kingmaker’ was slain by the forces of the king.

The earl of Warwick is not a happy figure. Lands and wealth had been heaped upon him by an over-generous monarch, and as a result he became fractious and over-mighty; he proclaimed himself to be the representative of the rights of England, and yet he was merely the tool of faction and of family; he aspired to glory, but in victory he was cruel and vindictive; he was a politician without any grasp of political strategy, and a statesman who had a habit of opposing the national interest at every juncture. His vanity, and his ambition, destroyed him. In these respects, he was not so different from his eminent contemporaries.

Margaret of Anjou and her seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward, had sailed from France without knowing of Edward’s victory over Warwick. The news greeted her soon after her landing at Weymouth, in Dorset, with her followers. It was too late to flee; she could only fight. She made her way north towards Bristol, picking up supporting forces on the way, but Edward’s army was approaching from the east. At this moment John Paston wrote to his mother, Margaret, that ‘the world, I assure you, is right queasy’. On 4 May 1471, in a meadow just to the south of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians were overtaken by the Yorkists; in the subsequent mêlée Prince Edward was killed and Margaret was taken prisoner.

Edward IV returned in triumph to London less than three weeks later. On that same day, Henry VI was killed in the Tower of London. It was said that he had expired from melancholy, but the truth is no doubt more prosaic. He had been murdered on the orders of the victorious king, who wished to hold no hostages to fortune. It was claimed later that his assassin was Edward’s youngest brother, the duke of Gloucester, but this inference may entirely be due to Gloucester’s later fame as the inglorious Richard III. It seems appropriate, at any rate, that he should now enter this history of England as a man of shadows.

In any event the Lancastrian royal family, descended directly from Henry IV, was now extinguished. Henry’s body was taken from the Tower to St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was laid out ‘open vysagid’ so that all might recognize him. Margaret of Anjou was incarcerated in the Tower, where she remained for four years before being ransomed by Louis XI; she spent the rest of her days, impoverished, in France. Her life had been lived in a storm that had claimed her husband and her son.

A vignette of Henry VI may be included here. On one occasion, in the 1450s, he visited Westminster Abbey in order to mark out the site of his tomb. He ordered a stonemason to scratch with a crowbar the position and dimensions of the vault that he wished to be built in the floor of the abbey. He did not require a monumental tomb; he wanted to rest beneath the quiet stone. As he conferred with the abbot, he leaned on the shoulder of his chamberlain; the king was then only in his thirties, but he was already tired with the demands of the world. There has rarely been a wise king in England, let alone a good one. But it is still possible to concede a certain amount of sympathy to a man who seems to have been wholly unsuitable for the duties of kingship.

It is often said that the opposing sides in the Wars of the Roses were engaged in an act of mutual destruction, and that the noble families of England were noticeably thinned as a result of the fighting. In fact the pressure of time and circumstance always worked against the survival of any noble house, and it has been calculated that in any period of twentyfive years a quarter of the nobility left no sons to inherit their titles and so lapsed into inconsequence. There must always be a steady flow of ‘new blood’ to keep the governance of the land in good health. The Wars of the Roses did not interrupt what was essentially a continuing process.

In a larger sense, too, the world went on its own way despite the immediate disturbance of the wars. The fact of conflict of course weakened the body politic, and loosened the ties between the realm and the nobility, but there is no evidence of general desolation or dislocation. Few towns or cities were affected by the disturbances, and only those in the immediate vicinity of the battles would have suffered from the factional struggle. The vast resources of the Church were not touched, and in general the clergy remained as distant observers of the conflict. The law courts at Westminster were still in session and the judges rode on circuit throughout the country. The French chronicler and historian Philippe de Commynes remarked at the time that ‘there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fell only upon the soldiers, and especially on the nobility’.

There is also no sign of economic decline as a result of the wars. By the 1470s there was a resurgence of trade, a trend in which the king himself took an active interest. The author of the Crowland Chronicle states that Edward ‘in person, having equipped ships of burden, laded them with the very finest wools, cloths, tin and other products of his realm, and like a man living by merchandise, exchanged goods for goods …’. The appearance of a merchant king helps to disperse any notion of economic degeneracy. ‘There is no small innkeeper, however poor and humble he may be,’ an Italian observer wrote, ‘who does not serve his table with silver dishes and drinking cups …’

In any case the life of a nation is perhaps better compared to a sea than to a pond. Exhaustion and renewal, decay and growth, occur simultaneously. So it was that in 1476 William Caxton established in the almonry of Westminster Abbey the first printing press in England. Ten years later the first water-powered pump was introduced to a coalmine at Finchale near Durham. In 1496 the first blast furnace in England was operating at Buxted in Sussex. This industrial revolution was already provoking complaint. A parliamentary Bill of 1482 declared that hats, bonnets and caps made ‘by men’s strength, that is to say with hands and feet’ were infinitely superior to those ‘fulled and thicked in fulling mills’. At the same time very many humble people were still living on the land in the same conditions as their Saxon ancestors.

36

The staple of life

Among the bare fields and deserted gardens of the derelict Roman villas grew wild garlic and onions. ‘I grow very erect, tall in a bed,’ runs one Anglo-Saxon riddle on the onion, ‘and bring a tear to a maiden’s eye. What am I?’ The essential ingredient on the poorer tables, however, was that derisory ‘mess of pottage’ for which birthrights could be sold. The richer Anglo-Saxons ate wheaten bread, but bread of rye or barley was more common. They also consumed vast quantities of pork, the pigs grown fat on the inexhaustible supplies of acorns and beech-nuts to be found in the woods and forests of the country. The smallholder might also have a few razor-backed pigs on the common land. Venison and poultry were popular among the more wealthy Englishmen. Supplies of fish, among them salmon and herring, were plentiful. Horse-flesh was sometimes eaten. For many centuries large knives and coarse wooden spoons were the extent of the cutlery, the meals often eaten out of communal bowls. Then ‘after the dinner they went to their cups,’ according to one chronicler, ‘to which the English were very much accustomed’. A weak ale, compounded with various spices, was the drink of choice. But the Anglo-Saxons also consumed a drink known as ‘morat’, essentially mulberry juice mingled with honey.

The diet of the Normans was not very different, since the agriculture of the country was not materially changed by the invasion. The status of the lord, however, was such that he could eat only wheaten bread. When land was granted to him, it had to be capable of growing wheat; soil that could not bear that crop was of little value to him. That is why few Norman settlements were established in the higher and colder grounds of the Pennines, of Cumbria and other northern regions. The Normans were found among the wheat. They made their bread in the form of buns or cakes, often marked with a cross. They particularly enjoyed a form of gingerbread that was known as ‘peppered bread’.

One difference was evident. They preferred wine to the native ale or mead, and much of it was transported from France. A twelfth-century philosopher, Alexander Neckam, stated that wine should be as clear as the tears of a penitent. He also declared that a good wine should be as sweet-tasting as an almond, as surreptitious as a squirrel, as high-spirited as a roebuck, as strong as a Cistercian monastery, as glittering as a spark of fire, as subtle as the logic of the schools of Paris, as delicate as fine silk, and as cold as crystal. The language of the wine connoisseur has not notably diminished in fancifulness over the centuries.

Through the medieval period little interest was evinced in what were once known as ‘white meats’, namely cheese and butter and milk. They were associated with the diets of common people, and were therefore to be avoided. Milk, however, was mixed in sweet confections. Olive oil, rather than butter, was used in cooking. Fresh fruit was considered to be unhealthy, and the most common vegetables were scorned except by the poor who considered them to be a kind of free food. The land was so fruitful that, in a good season, it may have been possible for a poor man or a wanderer to survive from the fields and hedges alone. Peas and beans, leeks and cabbages, could also be stolen from the small garden adjoining every cottage. ‘I have no money,’ Piers Plowman complains in the month before harvest. ‘I have a couple of fresh cheeses, a little curds and cream, an oatcake and two loaves of beans and bran baked for the children. I have some parsley and shallots, and plenty of cabbages …’ It is possible, therefore, that the diet of the poor was healthier than that of the rich.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the meat had become highly flavoured with spices such as aniseed and liquorice. The richer families preferred strong and even coarse flavours. It is otherwise difficult to account for the attraction of the grampus and the porpoise even to royal appetites. The ‘sea-calf ’, known in more recent times as the seal, was also a delicacy. The tongue of the whale, another royal dish, was either boiled with peas or roasted. Strongly flavoured birds, such as the peacock or the heron or the bittern, were also on the menu. ‘Powdered salmon’ was salmon sprinkled with salt. The smell of the conger eel was said by one enthusiast to be so wonderful that it would make a dead man sniff.

The first English cookery book, The Forme of Cury, was written in the late fourteenth century by Richard II’s master cooks – ‘cury’ meaning the dressing of food. A dish of shelled oysters and hare’s flesh must be flavoured with honey. Pork is to be fried and then mixed with saffron and raisins. Pheasant could be mingled with cinnamon and ginger. Spices were not used to disguise the taste of less than healthy meat; they were used for their own sake, and were part of the predilection for strong flavours. They were also used to colour the meats and other dishes; indigo turned the food blue, and saffron converted it to yellow; blood and burnt toast crusts provided the red and the black.

It is instructive that in The Forme of Cury, and in other compilations of recipes, there is seldom any mention of the quantities of the necessary ingredients. Medieval units of measurement are in fact always vague and imprecise. There was no need, or desire, for exactness. It was not a ‘scientific’ age. So gross underestimates and overestimates, at least by the standards of modern accuracy, were likely to be made. The monks of Ely believed that their isle measured 7 miles by 4 miles (11.2 by 6.4 kilometres), whereas in fact it had the dimensions of 12 miles by 10 miles (19.3 by 16 kilometres). It was declared, in the reign of Edward III, that there were 40,000 parishes in England; there were in fact fewer than 9,000, a huge error in one of the most basic measurements of the country. When we read in the sources that ‘innumerable miracles’ were attested at a site of pilgrimage, or that the king led an army of ‘fifty thousand men’, we may be given leave to doubt the claims.

Space and time were fluctuating and essentially indefinable. An acre of land (0.4 hectares) could be measured in three different ways. Various time systems, such as the regnal year or the papal year or the liturgical year, could be chosen. The charters and memoranda of the period were, before the thirteenth century, largely undated; a bond might give the year of transaction as ‘after the espousal of the king of England’s son and the king’s daughter’ or ‘after Gilbert Foliot was received into the bishopric of London’ which we know to have been 1163. Many people were unsure of their exact age; one old warrior, John de Sully, claimed to be 105 and to have fought at the battle of Najera in 1367. If that is correct, then he had carried arms at the age of eighty-seven. The father of another old soldier, John de Thirwell, was reported to have died at the age of 145. The hour of the day was measured by the shadows cast by the sun; clocks were not introduced until the fifteenth century, but they were heavy, cumbersome and not necessarily precise. The time measured by the church bell was that of the canonical day from prime to vespers. And everyone knew that a yard was the length of the king’s arm. What else could it be?

37

The king of spring

Edward IV was at last king without rival; the birth of a son to the queen in sanctuary at Westminster, followed soon after by that of another infant boy, suggested that the line of York might stretch onward indefinitely. But he had two brothers – George, duke of Clarence and Richard, duke of Gloucester – who at some later date might make their own claims for supremacy.

The younger brother, Gloucester, was rewarded for his loyalty during the commotions of the previous years. From the autumn of 1469 he was constable of England, and led his own supporters in the king’s battles against the rebels; he had also sailed with Edward in flight from King’s Lynn to Holland and, at the climactic battle of Tewkesbury, he had led the vanguard of Edward’s army. For services rendered, therefore, in the spring of 1471 he was made Great Chamberlain of England; this was the position once held by Warwick. Gloucester was also granted much of Warwick’s territory in the north of England and, from this time forward, he became the champion and warlord of the northern territories with his base in the great castle of Middleham in North Yorkshire. He was given the hand of Lady Anne Neville, Warwick’s younger daughter, who had been married to the unhappy Prince Edward; the fifteen-year-old girl was now in alliance with the man who had helped to destroy her family, but it was of course more prudent to marry one of the victors. Romance was rarely to be found in the royal estate.

The older of the two brothers, Clarence, was the greater threat or perhaps just the greater nuisance. He had already proved himself to be disloyal to the king, in his temporary alliance with Warwick and Margaret, and now he turned furiously against his younger brother. He wanted to be Great Chamberlain; he wanted the Warwick lands of the north; he also wanted the lands owned by Lady Anne Neville herself. The brothers challenged one another in a set debate before the royal council, and both were applauded for their eloquence. Clarence, however, emerged as the temporary victor; he was given Warwick’s estates in the midlands, as well as the title of Great Chamberlain. Yet Gloucester still retained his hold over the north.

In the period after his victory Edward prosecuted his erstwhile enemies with great dispatch. It was said that the rich were hanged by their purses and the poor were hanged by their necks, but in truth the king was interested in taking money rather than lives. The cities that had opposed him, such as Hull and Coventry, were deprived of their liberties and then fined for their restoration; individual magnates who had supported Margaret or Warwick were also penalized. The records of the parliament house are filled with reports of taxes, acts of settlement, attainders and forced contributions to the king’s purse which were known without a trace of irony as ‘benevolences’. Yet he could be generous as well as severe; many former foes were taken back ‘into the king’s pardon’ and prominent Lancastrian clerics such as John Morton entered his service. Morton later became bishop of Ely and archbishop of Canterbury.

The great continental problem remained with Louis XI of France. The French king had aided Warwick and abetted Margaret of Anjou, in their claims to the control of the English throne, and he was still encouraging the rebel Lancastrians who sheltered in his dominion. He represented a threat that had to be rebuffed. But if Edward had the will, he did not necessarily have the means. He entered negotiations with the neighbours of France, the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, on a proposal for a triple invasion. These two duchies were subjected by feudal ties to France, but were in practice independent. Edward succeeded, at least, with Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

On 4 July 1475 a large force of English troops sailed for Calais from Dover, prepared to meet up with the Burgundian forces. Edward was accompanied by the majority of the nobility, together with 15,000 men. He carried with him 779 stone cannon balls and more than 10,000 sheaves of arrows; he also transported cloth of gold, for sumptuous display, and ordered the building of a small house made of wood and covered with leather which he could use on the battlefield. It was a portable royal chamber.

Charles the Bold did not live up to his name, however, and arrived at the garrison town with only a few supporters. He had left most of his men engaged in the siege of a town in Flanders. Edward, apparently moved to great fury, almost immediately began talks with Louis XI in order to broker some kind of peace. The French king was eager to oblige, not wishing for the distraction of foreign soldiers on his soil, and a month later the two kings met on a bridge at Picquigny near Amiens.

A wooden barrier had been placed in the middle of the bridge, to ensure against any surprise attack, and the soldiers of both sovereigns were massed on either side. An impersonator, wearing the clothes of the French king, walked beside Louis. Three of Edward’s retinue were dressed in the same cloth of gold as their sovereign. It was a precaution. Edward approached the barrier, raised his hat and bowed low to the ground; Louis reciprocated with an equally elaborate gesture. ‘My lord, my cousin,’ Louis said, ‘you are very welcome. There is nobody in the world whom I would want to meet more than you’. Edward replied in very good French.

A solemn treaty was signed in which Louis agreed to pay the English king the large sum of 75,000 crowns as well as an annual pension of 50,000 gold coins on condition that English troops left the country. Satisfied by what amounted to a bribe, Edward returned to England. It was also agreed that his eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, should marry the French king’s eldest son. In the usual manner of these arranged royal marriages, the proposal came to nothing.

Edward returned richer if not exactly more glorious. He had said in advance of the expedition that he wished to regain English possessions in France and even to advance himself upon the French throne. This was the rhetoric of the period, and was not necessarily believed. In any case the ambitions were misplaced. But if Edward had sailed with every intention of extorting a bribe from the French king, his mission had been admirably successful. Some evidence for this comes from a French historian who was with the court of Louis XI at the time. Philippe de Commynes states that Edward had begun to negotiate with Louis even before he left Dover. Commynes then goes on to speculate that Edward wanted to keep for himself all the money he had raised in England for the royal expedition.

In that event he had been engaged in an act of dissimulation on a very large scale; in the months before the planned invasion, the patent rolls reveal the combined efforts of ‘carpenters, joiners, stonecutters, smiths, plumbers, shipwrights, coopers, sawyers, fletchers, chariot-men, horse-harness men and other workmen’ in preparation for war. The truth may be that the English king was ready for a range of different results. He was simply waiting on events, to see what chance or fortune would throw in his way on the principle that when nothing is ventured nothing is gained. The historical record is made up of unintended consequences and unexpected turns of fate.

Edward did not publish all of the principles of the treaty made at Picquigny; but it soon became clear to the parliament house and the people of England that, as a result of the abortive French expedition, the king had been made richer and they had been rendered poorer. Yet Edward now was too strong to withstand.

He soon deployed that strength against his own brother. Clarence had effectively become ungovernable. According to the Crowland Chronicle, the most reliable source of information for the period, he ‘now seemed more and more to be withdrawing from the king’s presence, hardly uttering a word in council, not eating and drinking in the king’s residence’. He had some cause for disaffection. On the death of his wife, after childbirth, it was suggested that he should marry the daughter of Charles of Burgundy; Edward refused to countenance such a union, because with the support of Burgundy, Clarence would become too powerful. For similar reasons Edward would not permit Clarence to marry the sister of the king of Scotland.

In April 1477 Clarence accused one of his wife’s attendants, Ankarette Twynyho, of having murdered her mistress with ‘a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison’; an armed gang of his men seized the unfortunate woman and took her to Clarence’s town of Warwick where she was hanged. It was a form of judicial murder. Three months later one of the squires of his household was charged with necromancy in pursuit of the king’s death and, on being pronounced guilty, was drawn to the gallows at Tyburn. On the following day Clarence came to the royal council and caused to be read a proclamation of the man’s innocence; Clarence then withdrew. He had effectively challenged the king’s honesty as well as his system of justice. Edward therefore summoned Clarence to appear before him and, in the presence of the mayor and aldermen of London, declared that he had acted ‘as if he were in contempt of the law of the land and a great threat to the judges and jurors of the kingdom’.

At the beginning of 1478 a session of the parliament house was summoned where, in front of the lords, the king accused his brother of various crimes against the throne; some witnesses were called, but it was clear that they had been instructed in advance. The duke defended himself as best he could, even pledging to endure trial by combat, but the assembled lords declared him to be guilty of treason. The lords of the parliament were no doubt bound to support the king’s wishes in the matter, and did not need to be duped into delivering their verdict. Yet the evidence was weak and perhaps concocted. Clarence was taken to the Tower where, a few days later, he was murdered by surreptitious means. It has often been stated that he was drowned in a butt of malmsey wine; this curious detail may, oddly enough, reflect its accuracy. It might indicate, however, that he was drowned in his bath; bathtubs were often made out of sawn-down wine barrels.

The king had killed the elder of his two brothers by dubious means. It was an act of ruthlessness that sealed the supremacy of the king. A soothsayer had prophesied that the reign of Edward would be followed by one whose name began with ‘G’. So George, duke of Clarence, was despatched. The name of the younger brother, Gloucester, obviously did not occur to him. It was said at the time that the queen, and her Woodville relations, had also been eager to destroy Clarence; his eloquence and fair looks posed a challenge to her young sons in the event of Edward’s death. Rumour was piled upon rumour; the murderous court was filled with shadows and suspicions. The path to glory for Edward IV had once been carved through the corpses of his enemies; now it mounted over the body of his brother. The king, according to the Crowland Chronicle, ‘performed the duties of his office with such a high hand, that he appeared to be dreaded by all his subjects, while he himself stood in fear of no one’.

Apart from consolidating his rule, and maintaining his royal profits, Edward spent a great deal of time in arranging as many advantageous marriages as possible for his immediate kin. His investments in wool and cloth, as a working merchant, were small in comparison with the investment in his family. In all he had three sons and seven daughters; two of them died in infancy, leaving two sons and six daughters. The merry-go-round began, with daughters being betrothed to the heirs of Scotland, France and Burgundy. The prince of Wales, Edward, was played as a bargaining chip with Brittany. The king wanted hard money in exchange; he did not wish to pay the dowries for his daughters, in particular, and so engaged in prolonged negotiation to avoid that necessity. In fact none of his children were married by the time of his death, for the principal reason that they were still too young. All his plans, intentions and schemes came to nothing. The thousands of words spent in speeches and diplomacy vanished into the air.

His younger brother was more secure than ever. Richard of Gloucester remained the paramount lord of northern England. The Percy family were supreme in Northumberland, and the East Riding of Yorkshire, but the rest of the north came under the direct control of Gloucester. Edward had no reason to doubt his loyalty, however, and he seemed by far the best choice to be named ‘Protector’ of England and of the king’s eldest son.

The moment came sooner than expected. In the spring of 1483 Edward IV became mysteriously and dangerously ill. It is reported that he caught cold on a fishing trip. Commynes says that he died of ‘quaterre’ or apoplexy. The Crowland Chronicle states that he lay down ‘neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady’. There is a suggestion of death by poison. In truth the only malady may have been that of self-indulgence; he ate and drank copious amounts; he had grown fat and debauched. Only a very pious king could avoid such a fate. Edward IV expired in his fortieth year.

Edward died without debts, the first king to remain solvent for 200 years. It was, perhaps, his greatest achievement. He had made no great legislative or judicial advantages, but he had at least consolidated the role and power of royal government. He had learned to make it work after the intermittently weak reign of Henry VI. That was the sum of it. The fact that England emerged from his reign more prosperous than before has everything to do with the underlying strength and purposefulness of a growing nation.

Edward was not strong enough, in any case, to ensure that his eldest son would be safely crowned as his successor. The warden of Tattershall College in Lincolnshire wrote to the bishop of Winchester that ‘for now our sovereign lord the king is dead, whose soul Jesu take to his great mercy, we know not who shall be our lord nor shall have the rule about us’. Yet the transition appeared to have been immediate and graceful. Edward, prince of Wales, was acclaimed as Edward V.

The young heir apparent was at Ludlow, near the border of Wales, at the time of his father’s death; he was in the company of his uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, when he was summoned back to London by his mother. A council had been called in the capital, of which the principal member was Lord Hastings. Hastings, like Gloucester, was loyal to the Yorkist monarchy rather than to the Woodville family; when he learned that the queen had asked her brother to guard her son’s return to London with as large a force as he could assemble, he sensed the possibility of an unwelcome show of strength. He threatened to retire to Calais if the Woodvilles attempted to overawe the city, and at the same time he wrote to Gloucester with the troubling news.

Elizabeth Woodville then agreed to a compromise in which the young king would have an escort of no more than 2,000 men. Gloucester had been alerted to the possibility that the Woodvilles would control the king in more than name, however, and that they would supplant his role as the rightful Protector of the realm. He marched from his northern lands and joined his supporter, the duke of Buckingham, in Northampton at the end of April. This was just ten miles north of the place where the royal party had halted on their march to London; Stony Stratford was at the junction of Watling Street and the Northampton Road.

The two sides hailed each other with expressions of friendship. Rivers and his companions greeted the two dukes and entertained them at a house close to Northampton itself; they spent a convivial evening, but on the following morning Rivers was arrested and on charges of treason sent to a northern prison. Gloucester and Buckingham then rode out to Stony Stratford, and informed the young king that his uncle and others of his affinity had been engaged in a deep conspiracy against him. Edward objected, and protested that ‘he had seen nothing evil in them and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil’. But the force of a fourteen-year-old will was no match for that of Gloucester. Gloucester also informed the king that Rivers had played some part in the dead king’s debaucheries, thus fatally weakening him; this was in keeping with the strong moralism of his character. The young king remarked that he had full confidence in his mother, to which Buckingham replied that he should put no faith in women.

When the news of the arrest reached London the Woodville family and its supporters were in alarm. They tried to raise an army, but London was barren soil for them. So the queen took her other son and her daughters into the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. This was the second occasion when she had sought the protection of the holy place, but the circumstances were now infinitely more dangerous. Two families were vying for control; no council was strong enough, and no group of nobles powerful enough, to come between them. The dead king should have foreseen the consequences of his actions, in building up two centres of over-mighty subjects, but he had made no effort to forestall them. So now the queen sat down among the rushes strewn on the floor of the sanctuary, surrounded by ‘much heaviness, rumble, haste and business, carriage and conveyaunce of stuffe into Sanctuarie, chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trusses, all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some lading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down the walls to bring in the nearest way …’.

Gloucester had taken immediate action to secure the person of the monarch in order to underline his authority in any struggle with the Woodvilles. He wrote to the council, and to the mayor of London, insisting that he had acted to preserve the life of the king and that he had no designs upon the crown. On 4 May he brought Edward V to London and, as a sign of his good faith, he insisted that all the lords and aldermen should swear an oath of fealty to their new monarch. Edward was taken first to Ely Place, but then was removed to the Tower of London as the appropriate place to prepare for his coronation.

Six days later Gloucester was appointed as Protector, although the length and extent of his protection was not made clear. The coronation itself was to be held on 22 June, and at that point the young king could declare himself ready to rule on his own account. That might be the wish of his mother. Henry VI had been fit to rule at the age of fifteen; Richard II assumed the duties of kingship at the age of seventeen. So in theory Gloucester had precious little time to enforce his authority. He may also have feared that the Woodvilles were set upon his destruction.

The fact that the queen herself remained in sanctuary demonstrated the uncertainty and danger of the situation. One of Gloucester’s first actions as Protector was to remove the kin and allies of the Woodvilles from positions of influence. In that decision he seems to have had the support of the majority of the royal council, who did not see the dismissals as part of any plot to seize the crown. Gloucester also rewarded his allies. The duke of Buckingham, for example, was granted control of Wales and its border lands; it was a happy coincidence, perhaps, that he also usurped the power of the Woodvilles in that region.

The chroniclers of the period concur that by the end of May Gloucester had prepared himself to seize the crown; hindsight may be the real judge here. It is possible that Gloucester himself did not know, or was not sure, what to do; he recognized as well as anyone, from the history of his own family, the power of chance and the unexpected.

The first real sign of his intentions came in a letter to his northern allies on 10 June, in which he asked them to come to his aid ‘and assist us against the queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doeth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin, the duke of Buckingham, and the old royal blood of this realm …’. His words suggest fear and insecurity in equal measure. He did not mention Hastings as possible victim of these intrigues, because he now had cause to suspect him as well. It seems likely that Hastings had become aware of Gloucester’s decision to supplant the young king, and had decided to resist the attempt; all of the chroniclers report his loyalty to Edward.

On 13 June, at nine in the morning, Gloucester joined the council at the White Tower of the Tower of London in a good humour. There is a lively account of the meeting by Thomas More, in his life of Richard III; the record has often been treated with scepticism, but More’s principal source was undoubtedly John Morton who as bishop of Ely was present on the occasion. ‘My lord,’ the duke of Gloucester said to the bishop, ‘you have very good strawberries in your garden in Holborn. I request you let us have a mess of them.’

‘Gladly, my lord,’ the bishop replied. ‘Would to God I had some better things as ready to your pleasure as all that.’ The bishop despatched his servant, and Gloucester retired to his chamber. He returned to the council, an hour later, in a much altered state. He was now in a sour and angry mood; he had a habit, when perplexed or enraged, of chewing his lower lip. ‘What do those persons deserve,’ he asked the councillors, ‘who have compassed and imagined my destruction?’

Hastings was the first to answer. ‘They deserve death, my lord, whoever they are.’

‘I will tell you who they are. They are that sorceress, my brother’s wife [Elizabeth Woodville] and others with her.’ He then named Elizabeth ‘Jane’ Shore, who had been Edward IV’s mistress, a most unlikely associate of the queen. At this point he pulled up the sleeve of his doublet, and showed to the council his withered left arm. This deformity was not a new one – More says that the arm ‘was never other’ – but it served the purpose of proving witchcraft against his opponents. Then Gloucester turned on Hastings himself and furiously accused him of treason. Hastings was bundled away and summarily executed, beheaded on a log of wood that lay close to the door of the Tower chapel.

The Great Chronicle of London, compiled towards the end of the century, concluded that thus ‘was this noble man murdered for the troth and fidelity which he bore unto his master’, the ‘master’ being the young king held in the Tower. By swiftness and surprise Gloucester had managed to destroy the man whom he suspected of barring his path to the throne. It seems likely, too, that Gloucester had been given information that Hastings had decided to attempt a rescue of the young king from confinement; this may help to explain his impassioned letter to his northern allies on 10 June.

On 16 June Gloucester’s personal troops surrounded the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, where the king’s younger brother was still being kept. The queen herself was persuaded to yield up her son by the persuasions of the archbishop of Canterbury, who argued that the heir apparent needed the company of his younger brother. The prelate declared that, on his ‘wit and trouth’, he would preserve the safety of the boy and that he would return him to her after the coronation. ‘As far as you think I fear too much,’ the queen replied, ‘be you wel ware that you fear not too little.’ She may have come to her decision in the knowledge that Gloucester’s troops might force themselves into the sanctuary and remove her son by violent means.

She surrendered Duke Richard with the words ‘Farewell my own sweet son, God send you safe keeping, let me kiss you once again before you go, for God knows when we shall kiss together again.’ He was then escorted to the Tower to join his brother for the coming coronation. Nine days later the queen’s brother, Earl Rivers, was beheaded in Pontefract Castle. ‘I hold you are happy to be out of the press [of London]’, an adviser wrote to the Lord Chancellor, ‘for with us is much trouble and every man doubts other.’

The news of the death of Hastings had already provoked consternation in London, only quelled by the gentle ministrations of the mayor who claimed that there had indeed been a plot against the Protector’s life. Now the time had come for Gloucester to justify himself to the citizens and prepare them for his seizure of the crown. On 22 June a tame doctor of theology, Ralph Shaw, delivered a sermon at St Paul’s Cross – the main centre for government proclamations in the period – in which he stated that Gloucester was the only legitimate son of Richard, duke of York, and thus the only true candidate for the throne. Another report, duly circulated at the time, declared that the two young princes in the Tower were also bastards. It is most unlikely that either claim had much substance, but it is possible that Gloucester believed one or both of them. Wherever a moral high ground was to be taken, he seized it with alacrity.

He could easily have convinced himself, for example, that Edward IV had what was called a ‘pre-contract’ with another woman and that his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was thereby fraudulent. He had also seen at first hand the debauchery of Edward’s court, and may have surmised that the occupant of the throne was in truth not king at all. Ambition might breed in him a false sense of duty. Fear also was an element in his calculation. Edward V, if he were crowned king, would have no compunction in destroying the man who had killed his uncle. Gloucester was obliged to move quickly.

Two days after Shaw’s sermon the duke of Buckingham, Gloucester’s paramount ally, made a speech to similar effect before the mayor and aldermen of London in the Guildhall. Once more the dubious claim to the throne was delivered with much earnestness and piety – and, as the Great Chronicle of London puts it, ‘without the impediment of spitting’. The response of the Londoners was, by all accounts, lukewarm to the point of tepidity; the few calls of ‘yeah, yeah’ at the end were uttered ‘more for fear than for love’. The servants of Buckingham roused one or two apprentices to cry out ‘God save King Richard!’ and as a result the event was deemed to have been a great success.

On the next day the parliament assembled at Westminster, and a roll of parchment announcing Richard’s title to the throne was presented to the Lords and Commons. It was given unanimous consent by these various worthies from towns and shires, and on 26 June a large concourse proceeded with Buckingham to Gloucester’s mansion in London, Baynard’s Castle, where the roll was read out to him; he was then exhorted to take up the crown and, after a period of modest reflection, he decided so to do. He was therefore proclaimed as Richard III.

King Richard rode in state to Westminster Hall where he was seated in majesty upon the marble chair of King’s Bench; this was the seat in which the monarch reposed when he was dispensing justice. Richard had immediately taken on the role of the wise and just king. He delivered a speech to the Lords and Commons, in which he pleaded for fairness and equity in the proceedings of justice. No man was outside the law. All parties should be treated equally. This may be considered a reproof to Edward IV, whose family interests often led him to break or bend the law for immediate profit.

Some in fact welcomed the advent of Richard’s reign. He was known to be a good administrator, and a fine soldier. Surely his reign would prove superior to that of a fourteen-year-old boy under the thrall of his mother and his remaining Woodville relations? Edward V was king for eighty-eight days, a king for spring and early summer; he thus earns the unhappy distinction of enjoying the shortest reign of any English sovereign but in death his influence, as we shall see, was profound.

38

Come to town

In the fifteenth century England was still predominantly a rural society, with only a fifth of the population living in approximately 800 towns. Only one city, London, could be compared with the cities of the European continent; the other urban centres were essentially large towns, with populations well under 10,000. York and Norwich were the exceptions, with populations of 30,000 and 25,000 respectively. The more important of them, such as York and Chester, were walled; so were the port towns such as Southampton. At the other end of this demographic range, the majority of towns contained populations of hundreds rather than thousands. Many of these smaller towns were simply ringed with a ditch.

A Venetian traveller, at the end of the fifteenth century, noted that the country was ‘very thinly inhabited’ with ‘scarcely any towns of importance’. We may imagine a land with an uneven distribution of relatively small settlements, in utter contrast to the territories of the city-states in northern Italy. The small towns had not yet reached maturity; they were part of the great unconscious of England.

The most significant public buildings were constructed of stone; the churches were of stone, as were the bridges. But only the richest merchants built their houses of that material. The rest were constructed as before with timber or wattle-and-daub; the streets between them were narrow, dirty and malodorous, combining the less desirable aspects of the farm with the detritus of town life. Pigs and chickens roamed the streets and houses; there is a case from Girton in Cambridgeshire where, in 1353, a hen caused a fatal fire by scratching glowing ashes onto a child’s bed of straw. Cattle were kept in the gardens of some town houses, and the back gardens resembled the ‘strips’ of the common farmland producing fruit and vegetables. Orchards and streams lent for a moment the illusion of open country. In many towns you would never be very far from the sound of running water.

The clamour was great, rising in a crescendo on market day, but a few minutes’ walk would take the visitor into the relative silence of the fields or woods. The town gradually faded into the country, with dwellings and yards becoming fewer and fewer until pasture or field or wood became the landscape. The wind was fresher here, less contaminated by foul smells and the fear of infection, and the earth softer beneath the feet. Yet it would be ill-advised to create a picture of pastoral bliss; many trades were pursued in the cottages and hamlets of the countryside, among them clothmaking and leatherworking. Fewer clothmakers resided in the town than in the country, where labour was cheaper and less regulated.

The towns were nevertheless the centre of commerce and of administration; they were the sites of assembly and of public entertainment. The market cross was the place where proclamations were made concerning the affairs of the town and the kingdom; this was the cross to which royal heralds would come with news of battle. Here, too, were the town stocks and the ‘pound’ or cage for offenders. Some towns were built in the shade of a castle or abbey, in which they found their most reliable and prosperous customers. Relations were not always harmonious, however, and the monks and citizenry of Bury St Edmunds were engaged in several violent confrontations; abbots did not make good landlords.

Other towns were built at the confluence of rivers, where trade was assured. A number of towns had a whole range of purposes. They grew organically without any plan or coordination; a new street would be laid out when traders multiplied; huts and houses were built outside the walls according to demand. They persisted and became hallowed by time. In towns as diverse as Winchester and Saffron Walden the building plots, the width of the streets, the topography of the market, still persist and are still visible.

The inhabitants of any town were deemed to be free after the residence of a year and a day, as we have observed, but the towns themselves were not centres of freedom. Many of them were subject to lords and bishops who took the proceeds of rents and taxes. Their internal administration was controlled by a hierarchy as rigid and as severe as any to be found in the nominally feudal areas of the countryside; the mayor and councillors were taken from the class of the richest merchants, and they effectively dominated all aspects of the town’s life. They ran the guilds; they organized the courts; they regulated the markets. The merchants, owning property, were the ‘freemen’ or citizens. They lived in the same quarter of the town, often side by side, and their families intermarried as a matter of habit.

Specifically or predominantly urban crafts were in demand. The potter worked beside the mason and the tiler; the glover and the draper may have been found in the same small street; the skinner and the tanner were closely allied; the carpenter and the cooper frequented the same timber-yard. In the market at Salisbury were Oatmeal Row, Butchers’ Row and Ox Row. In Newcastle there were Skinnergate, Spurriergate and Saddlergate. These men formed their own craft guilds, in part to defend themselves from the claims of the merchant guilds, but they were far inferior in status to the richer merchants who supervised and generally organized their working practices. Resentment, and even open confrontation, often arose between various members of the two groups; but the ties of commerce guaranteed that no general or permanent collapse of order could occur.

Beneath the craftsmen and the traders were the apprentices, the labourers and the household servants. There were always potentes and inferiores. Nothing in medieval England existed outside a formal social discipline of high and low. That was the nature of the world. At the lowest level of all were the poor or diseased people, attracted to the town by the possibility of begging or charitable relief. The late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represented the great age of the almshouses and the hospitals. The larger towns had acquired schools by the fourteenth century, and in the following century one or two of them even possessed lending libraries. That is one pertinent difference between town and country; the level of literacy was higher in one than in the other. These public buildings in themselves expressed the civic pride of the town, exemplified also in the growing emphasis on civic ritual and procession. The mayor had become ‘my lord mayor’, preceded in ceremonial array by the sergeant carrying the sword and mace of the city. Spectacle and squalor resided, as always, on the same streets.

The Angelus or Gabriel bell rang at dawn to awaken the townspeople. Scores of bells pealed in each town, their particular sound alerting the people to begin or to end various tasks. After the Angelus had sounded, business began almost at once; the water-carriers congregated at the wells, and the butchers prepared the meat for their first purchasers. No traders were allowed to open their shops until six o’clock, however, and no goods could be sold before that time. In London no fish could be sold in the streets before Mass had been celebrated at certain stated churches. In the larger towns other bells rang out at nine or ten o’clock to signify that ‘foreigners’, or outsiders, could now begin to bargain in the markets. This was the hour when the first meal of the day was taken. The bells rang at midday for the consumption of the ‘noonschenche’ or noon-drink. This was also the time when builders and other labourers were allowed to sleep for an hour.

The afternoon was a less animated period than the morning; those who had travelled to the towns with their country produce now began to make their way back. Most shops closed at the dying of the light, but cooks and butchers could work until nine in the evening. That was the hour when the curfew bell was rung, ordering the men and women of the town to return to their dwellings. The workers in the fields now had to hasten home before the gate was closed against them. The bell tolled until the gate was shut. The town slept before beginning once more its customary round.

39

The zealot king

Richard III was formally crowned on 6 July 1483, after a great procession that took him from Westminster Hall to the abbey. For a moment the uncertain events of the world changed into the order of ritual and spectacle. To the sound of trumpets heralds came out carrying the king’s armorial insignia; they were followed by the bishops and abbots with their mitres and croziers, the bishop of Rochester bearing the cross before the archbishop of Canterbury. The earl of Northumberland followed the prelates, with the Curtana sword of mercy in his hands; Lord Stanley came after, bearing the mace, and then Lord Suffolk with the sceptre; the earl of Lincoln followed them with the cross and orb, while the earls of Kent and Surrey carried other swords of state. The Earl Marshal of England, the duke of Norfolk, now stepped forward carrying the crown. He was followed by the king himself, wearing a robe of purple velvet furred with ermine and clad in a surcoat of crimson satin. Four lords held a canopy above his head as he walked towards the great west door of the abbey. This was the prize he had wished for. Anne Neville, his wife and now queen of England, followed him with her own noble procession.

Soon after the coronation, Richard set out on a wide circuit of his kingdom both to parade his majesty and to reconcile himself with perhaps recalcitrant subjects. He travelled from Oxford on to Gloucester and Worcester. In York he decided that he should be crowned for a second time, as if the ceremony in London had obtained the homage of only half his subjects. He was in many respects considered to be primarily a northern lord.

The image of Richard III has been outlined in letters of fire by William Shakespeare, who in turn derived much of his account from the history of Thomas More. More may have been a saint but he was also in part a fantasist, who had good partisan reasons for wishing to excoriate the memory of the last Yorkist king before the rise of the Tudor dynasty. Thus for More, and for Shakespeare, Richard was the smiling and scheming villain, the hunchback of dubious purpose, an abortive thing snatched violently from his mother’s womb. There may be some truth in this caricature, but caricature it remains.

The king, for example, was not a hunchback. As a result of strenuous martial training one arm and shoulder were overdeveloped, thus leading to a slight imbalance, but nothing more. Shakespeare suggests that he was ‘not made to court an amorous looking glass’ but two early portraits reveal a face not devoid of handsomeness. He is relatively small and slight, at least in comparison with his elder brothers; he looks preoccupied, if not exactly anxious. A German observer noticed that he had delicate arms and legs, but possessed ‘also a great heart’ by which he meant magnanimity. The archbishop of St Andrews remarked that ‘nature never enclosed within a smaller frame so great a mind or such remarkable powers’.

That ‘great heart’ was soon being called into question. Soon after the coronation had been celebrated, rumours and suspicions were whispered about the fate of the princes in the Tower. In the earlier months of the year the two boys had been seen shooting and playing in its garden. But then they disappeared from view. As the summer of 1483 turned to autumn the doubts grew louder and more persistent. Polydore Vergil, an historian as strongly biased against Richard as Thomas More himself, reports that the king decided upon the deaths while conducting his northern tour. In his account the king wrote to the constable of the Tower, Sir Robert Brackenbury, demanding that the boys be killed. When Brackenbury refused the king turned to a more compliant servant, Sir James Tyrell, who arranged their deaths with the help of two accomplices. They ‘suddenly lapped them up among their clothes, so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the feather bed and pillows hard unto their mouths, that within a while smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls …’. Other accounts of their fate included death by poison and death by drowning.

The most authentic commentary comes from another chronicler, Dominic Mancini, who reports that the two boys were drawn more and more into the inner chambers of the Tower and that their personal attendants were gradually dismissed. At the mention of the name of Edward V many men burst into tears but ‘whether, however, he has been done away with, and by what manner of death, so far I have not at all discovered’. It was a mystery at the time, and has remained so ever since.

The fact is that the two boys themselves were never seen again beyond the walls of the Tower of London. There has been much speculation about their fate, but the only reliable conclusion must be that they were killed while they were in captivity. The occasion and nature of their death cannot now be known. Other candidates for the role of murderer in chief have also been suggested, including the duke of Buckingham and Henry Tudor who succeeded Richard to the throne. In the latter account Henry ordered their murder after his victory at the battle of Bosworth. But this is essentially a fancy. There can be little doubt that the two boys were murdered on the express or implicit order of Richard III. He may have persuaded himself that the two boys were indeed illegitimate, but that their baleful presence was a continuing threat to his regime.

The house of the Plantagenets, from Henry II to Richard III himself, was brimming with blood. In their lust for power the members of the family turned upon one another. King John murdered, or caused to be murdered, his nephew Arthur; Richard II despatched his uncle, Thomas of Gloucester; Richard II was in turn killed on the orders of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke; Henry VI was killed in the Tower on the orders of his cousin, Edward IV; Edward IV murdered his brother, Clarence, just as his own two sons were murdered by their uncle. It is hard to imagine a family more steeped in slaughter and revenge, of which the Wars of the Roses were only one effusion. It might be thought that some curse had been laid upon the house of the Plantagenets, except of course that in the world of kings the palm of victory always goes to the most violent and the most ruthless. It could be said that the royal family was the begetter of organized crime.

There had been usurpers before, wading through gore, but Richard III was the first usurper who had not taken the precaution of winning a military victory; he claimed the crown through the clandestine killing of two boys rather than through might on the battlefield. This was noticed by his contemporaries. The god of battle was not on his side. The first example of his uncertain status came in an uprising of some southern nobles in the autumn of 1483. They were the prominent magnates of the shires south of the Thames and the Severn, many of them having served in the household of Edward IV. They were led by the duke of Buckingham, who had previously been one of Richard’s most loyal and assiduous supporters. It has been presumed that Buckingham, believing Edward V to be still alive, had decided that the better course lay in supporting the young king’s cause. He may, however, have wanted the crown for himself. Or it may be that horror at the news of the princes’ deaths led him into precipitate action. Richard’s reaction was one of fury towards ‘the malice of him that had best cause to be true’, as he wrote, ‘the most untrue creature living’. In any event the rebellion was unsuccessful. Richard and his commanders rode down the rebels and Buckingham, captured at Salisbury, was summarily executed.

Another eminent figure was involved in this first rebellion. Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, was a descendant of Edward III through the illegitimate (but later legitimated) issue of John of Gaunt. When Henry VI died in the Tower, Henry Tudor became de facto head of the Lancastrian household. As a result he found it necessary to flee to France, where he could escape the attentions of Edward IV and protect himself against the rise of the house of York.

At the time of the succession of Richard III Henry Tudor had become the most significant opponent of the new regime, therefore, made even more commanding by the troubled circumstances of Richard’s accession. He was also aided by his mother. Lady Margaret Beaufort came into contact with Elizabeth Woodville, still claiming sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, through the agency of a Welsh doctor who ministered to both great ladies. It was agreed between them that Henry Tudor should marry Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. This is also the best possible indication that Elizabeth the queen knew her two sons to be dead. Why else would she support another man’s claim to the throne?

With this guarantee Henry sailed to England at the time of Buckingham’s rebellion; all but two of his fifteen ships were scattered by a tempest and, when he hovered close by the coast of Dorset, he discovered that the revolt had ended ignominiously. So he returned to Brittany, followed by the rebels who had managed to evade the king’s wrath. Henry Tudor set up what was in effect an alternative court.

Yet Richard was for the moment safe. He tried to make his position even more secure by promoting northerners into the positions previously held by the magnates of the south, although of course this proved less than popular with the southerners themselves. They did not want ‘strange men’ in their shires, where rule was generally maintained by a closely knit group of relatives. Each shire was essentially a family business. The king was now stripping its assets.

The nature of his subsequent rule, however, has perhaps been judged unfairly because of its inauspicious beginnings. He had all the makings of a firm and even ruthless administrator. He set up a ‘council of the north’ to consolidate his power in that region, and it proved to be such a necessary tool of administration that it continued into the middle of the seventeenth century. Such was his zeal for public business that more than 2,000 official documents passed through his hands in the course of two years. Everything came to his attention, from the preparations for battle to the mowing of hay at Warwick. The high dignitaries of the Church, in convocation at the beginning of 1484, addressed his ‘most noble and blessed disposition’. This may be the standard language of the supplicant, but differs so notably from the usual accounts of Richard III that it deserves to be mentioned. The more benevolent view of the king is strengthened by the words of a popular ballad, ‘Scottish Field’, in which is described:

Richard that rich lord: in his bright armour.

He held himself no coward: for he was a noble king.

The king also gained the reputation of being a good lawmaker. When at a later date an alderman of London disagreed with Cardinal Wolsey over a proposed exaction, he reminded the prelate that such forced taxation had been forbidden by a statute of Richard III. ‘Sir,’ Wolsey said in his usual high-handed manner, ‘I marvel that you speak of Richard III which was a usurper and a murderer of his own nephews, then of so evil a man how can the acts be good?’ The alderman replied that ‘although he did evil yet in his time were many good acts made not by him only but by consent of the whole body of the realm which is in parliament’. So, contrary to the Tudor myth of the evil hunchback, memories of Richard III’s good governance remained in London fifty years after his death. Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor in a different reign, commented upon ‘the politic and wholesome laws’ passed in Richard’s first and only parliament.

Piety, verging on moralism, seems to have been the most abiding aspect of his character. In the Act claiming his title to the throne the king denounced the rule of Edward IV as that of one who, determined by ‘adulation and flattery and led by sensuality and excess, followed the counsel of persons insolent vicious and of inordinate avarice despising good virtuous and prudent persons …’. It seems likely that he did believe the Woodvilles to be of ‘sensual’ stock, and therefore justified to himself the murder of the two princes as a means of cleansing the body politic.

Two months after publishing this attack upon the Woodvilles he sent a circular letter to the bishops of England in which he declared that his fervent wish was ‘to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced’. This might just be an act of public piety but, after the death of his wife and only son, he composed a prayer of more private intent in which he asked God ‘to free me thy servant King Richard from all the tribulation, grief and anguish in which I am held’. His son, Edward, had died at the age of eleven in the spring of 1484; the insecurity of the York lineage was clear to all. His wife followed her child to the grave early in the following year. Richard was effectively alone in the world, prey to the ‘grief and anguish’ he lamented in his prayer.

Another intriguing aspect of his religious faith can be found. He owned a copy of the Wycliffite translation of the New Testament, as well as William Langland’s Piers Plowman; both of these books had been condemned by a synod of the Church in 1408. They smacked of Lollardy and a more austere version of Catholicism. It can be safely concluded that Richard was interested in an unorthodox and more rigorous piety, wholly in keeping with what can be surmised of his stern character. He need have no scruples if he was doing the work of the Lord.

The death of his wife freed him for a further matrimonial alliance, and serious reports emerged at the time that he planned to marry Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest daughter, thus pre-empting her betrothal to Henry Tudor. It was even rumoured that he had poisoned his wife in order to hasten the new marriage. It never seemed likely, however, that he would be able to marry the girl whose brothers he had destroyed. Even by the standards of this harsh and cruel age, it would not be considered to be a blessed union. In any case his disdain for the Woodvilles was well known.

Yet the rumours persisted, to the point where Richard was obliged to summon a council in which he denied ever having wished to marry Elizabeth of York. Even his closest supporters had been horrified at the prospect and, according to one of the chronicles, declared to his face that the people ‘would rise in rebellion against him, and impute to him the death of his queen’. There was widespread mistrust of him, especially of his harsh and unyielding temper. We have the paradox of a man of faith who was also a man of blood. But is it such a paradox, after all? Those of an austere faith may be the most ruthless and relentless, especially if they believe that they are acting in God’s best interests. Richard III has often been accused of hypocrisy, but his real vice might have been that of zealotry burning all the brighter with his belief that he was surrounded by enemies.

Elizabeth of York was of course engaged elsewhere. In the cathedral of Rouen, on Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor pledged that he would marry her on being crowned the king of England. His supporters, all the time swelling in numbers, then swore loyalty to him and to his claim. Polydore Vergil states that Richard III was now ‘vexed, wrested and tormented in mind with fear almost perpetually’. He travelled around his kingdom, never staying in one castle or monastery for very long. He arranged for a force of soldiers to seize Henry Tudor from the duchy of Brittany but Henry, warned in advance, fled across the border into France.

It was from this country that he launched his invasion of England in the summer of 1485. An exile of twenty-two years was about to come to an end. Richard could not of course predict the point of invasion, despite the presence of his spies in Henry’s entourage; so he settled on Nottingham as a convenient site for a court that was now essentially a war camp. Nottingham was in the middle of the kingdom and in any case close to his northern territories, from which most of his support would undoubtedly come. In that early summer, the king issued a general proclamation in which he denounced Henry Tudor as a bastard on both sides of the family and as a minion of the king of France; if he seized the throne he would ‘do the most cruel murders, slaughters and robberies and disherisons that ever were seen in any Christian realm’.

On 7 August Henry landed at Milford Haven, in Pembrokeshire, with seven ships and 1,000 men. The French were happy to finance the venture as a way of distracting Richard from his designs to aid the old enemy of Brittany. Henry began moving northwards through Haverfordwest to Cardigan, where his forces were joined by some of his Welsh allies; Henry was the nephew of Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, and was thus considered by Welshmen to be Welsh. A bardic song rang in the valleys:

Jasper will breed for us a dragon –

Of the fortunate blood of Brutus is he

A Bull of Anglesey to achieve;

He is the hope of our race.

Henry needed a myth to bolster his uncertain claim to the throne. In any case the Welsh affinity was of vital importance to him. As he led his troops through Wales he flew the red dragon of Cadwallader, from whom he claimed ancestry, on the white and green colours of the Tudors. He advanced into England through Shrewsbury and at Newport, in Staffordshire, he was greeted by his first English adherents. His was still a vulnerable army, made up of men from France and Brittany as well as Wales and England, and might not have been considered powerful enough to confront the king of England. Even by the time he reached Shrewsbury, however, it was clear to the king that a rebel army had come into England without meeting any serious resistance.

Richard himself could not necessarily rely on the loyal support of the magnates; he had alienated the great families of the south, and of the midlands, by imposing upon their shires the members of his northern affinity. He had a feudal, rather than a national, sense of his kingdom, and his past actions made it impossible for him to knit the nation into unity. From Nottingham Richard marched to Leicester where he issued a call to arms, urging his subjects on their utmost peril to join him. He had refused to advance to Leicester until after the feast day of the Assumption, another example of his overweening piety. He told his retainers to ‘come with such number as you have promised, sufficiently horsed and harnessed’.

The duke of Norfolk and the earl of Northumberland were among those who obeyed his summons. The men of the north also responded quickly, with the city of York sending eighty men ‘in all haste’. The duke of Suffolk made no move. Another great nobleman, Lord Stanley, held back on the excuse or pretext that he was suffering from the sweating sickness; whereupon Richard seized his son and told Stanley that, if he did not arrive with his forces, the young man’s head would be cut off. In the event Lord Stanley and his brother arrived with sufficient men, but their loyalty was ever in doubt. The king did not know whether they would enter battle as his friends or as his foes.

When the armies met on Bosworth Field, on 22 August, the advantage lay with the king. He had mustered 10,000 men, while Henry commanded half that number. There are no authentic descriptions of the battle itself, except that it began with the sound of gunfire; both sides had artillery, including cannon and the recently fashioned handguns. The bursts of fire solved nothing, and a bout of hand-to-hand fighting followed. At some point Richard decided to move up and attack Henry Tudor himself, in a deliberate decision to terminate the conflict as soon as practicable. It was a rule of war that an army would disperse or retreat as soon as its commander was killed. He may also have believed that some of his men were about to desert him.

Taking only his most loyal supporters with him he galloped hard into the mass of men around Henry Tudor, wounding and killing as many as he could reach with his sword. He is said to have cried out ‘Treason! Treason! Treason!’ He had made the mistake of separating himself from the main body of his army, but his sortie was effective for a while; then Sir William Stanley, who had stayed apart, now entered the battle on the side of Henry Tudor. In the ensuing chaos Henry’s men surrounded the king and attacked him; he was engulfed, and his horse was killed beneath him. His blood ran into a small brook, and it was still being reported in the nineteenth century that no local person would drink from it. The dead king’s prayer book was later found in his tent on the field of battle.

An hour’s fighting had sufficed. After the battle was over, the crown that he had worn upon his helmet was found lying on the field. It was taken up and placed on the head of Henry Tudor. Richard’s body was stripped of its armour and carried on a horse to the Franciscan house in Leicester where it was buried without ceremony in a stone coffin. The coffin was later used as a horse trough, and the bones of Richard III scattered. He is the only English king, after the time of the Normans, who has never been placed within a royal tomb. He had ruled for a little over two years, and was still a young man of thirty-two. The great dynastic war was over. The roses, white and red, were laid in the dust.

40

The king of suspicions

The life of Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, had been one of poverty and exile. On the triumph of Edward IV he had been hurried from Wales to Brittany by his uncle, Jasper Tudor. He would have remained an isolated and obscure scion of the Lancastrian affinity, an offspring of the bastard (but later legitimated) line of John of Gaunt, if the perverse actions of Richard III had not raised him up as a claimant to the English throne. The alienation of support suffered by the king, principally through the removal of the two princes, gave Henry the opportunity of stepping forward. It was his time.

After the victory at Bosworth Henry VII made a slow progress south. According to one who knew him, Polydore Vergil, he was ‘slender but well built and strong’ and his height was above the average; his appearance was ‘remarkably attractive, and his face was cheerful especially when speaking’; his eyes were ‘small and blue’. He had high cheekbones, hooded eyelids, a high-bridged pointed nose and thin lips. A picture of the king in majesty begins to develop. Vergil also notes, however, that in later years his hair grew white, his teeth were few and blackened with decay, and his complexion sallow.

The coronation was fixed for 30 October, and a parliament summoned for 7 November. It was proclaimed before the Lords and Commons that the reign of Henry had begun on 21 August, the day before the battle of Bosworth; by this sleight of hand Richard could be accused of high treason for opposing his sovereign lord even though he had at the time been the lawful king. The statute book has rarely contained any greater absurdity. Henry also desired to be crowned before the parliament convened because he did not wish it to be believed that his regal authority had been conferred by the assembly; what parliament could make, it might also unmake.

But by what right did Henry claim and hold the crown? It was not from the fact of birth. He derived all right of birth from his mother and, since she was still alive, the throne ought to have been hers. His promise to marry Elizabeth of York, thus finally uniting both principal families, was by no means sufficient or even appropriate; it might mean that he was crowned only because of his association with the house of York. If Elizabeth of York had died before him without issue, he might theoretically have to leave the throne and give place to the next in succession. It was not to be considered. That is the reason he postponed the wedding until after the coronation. He had to be king before he became husband.

The essential justification for his assumption of rule was simply that he had won on the field of Bosworth; the god of battles had blown Richard away. Victory was always seen to be a sign of divine favour, although the bewildering number of surprises and reversals in the feuds of the Wars of the Roses had led some to question that belief. The crown had changed by force five times in the preceding thirty years, and so its bestowal might be seen as a question of luck rather than of grace. The passing of the defeated king was not mourned; but the new king was a usurper whose rule might be endured rather than enjoyed. The power and significance of the crown itself might be considered to be a little tarnished. There was no sense of a glorious dawn. Eventually the king felt obliged to ask for a bull from the pope to guarantee his authority.

As king, therefore, Henry was not secure. Only in the last ten years of his reign did he achieve that happy state. He had spent his life in exile, and had little if any acquaintance with England and the English. He had never been involved in government, and had owned no great territories of English land. He was happier speaking French. The great families of the country could hardly have considered him to be one of their own, and had for the most part stayed out of his struggle with Richard. They were in effect neutral observers of his ultimate victory. Only two nobles fought with him at Bosworth and they, like him, were exiles. So at the age of twenty-eight he took up the burden of kingship without preparation or instruction.

He had to build up his support piece by piece. He was always cautious and circumspect, characterized equally by reserve and by suspicion. At the time of his coronation he established a royal bodyguard of 200 men, known as the yeomen of the guard; they wore jackets of white and green and carried weapons, part spear and part battleaxe, known as halberds. These men were the origin of the standing army of a later generation. Henry was emulating the French king, who had his own personal bodyguard; in this, as in other matters, he took the French court as his model. It was the one he knew best. He also extended his defences by other means, and sent garrisons to Plymouth and to Berwick in case of possible invasion.

He clothed himself in the mantle of pomp and power as a way of disarming any opposition to his rule. He claimed that he was descended from Brutus, the Trojan founder of London, and he identified himself with the supposedly saintly Henry VI. He spent much time and effort in an attempt to have the dead king canonized. He was the first king of England to put a stamp of his true image on the coinage of the country; the silver shilling showed him in profile, while the gold sovereign bore an image of him seated in majesty on a Gothic throne with the crown imperial upon his head. It was one of the many images of his ‘majesty’ popular during his reign. Despite his alleged parsimony he spent profusely on the magnificence of a court that became notable for its ceremonies and displays. He also refurbished the royal image by introducing the motif of the white and red roses intertwined as a symbol of regal unity. The red rose had never been a very important emblem for the Lancastrians, but it was of use to Henry as a device. So began the myth of Tudor renovation that was celebrated by Holinshed and Shakespeare.

He had every motive to justify and expand his royalty; a usurper is always in danger, and almost at once the Yorkist faction began to conspire against him. Some of the former king’s supporters rose against Henry, at Worcester and in Wales, but they were easily dispelled. The throne was further strengthened by the birth of a son and heir at Winchester in 1486; this was the city in which the ‘Round Table’ was to be seen, and the infant was given the name of Arthur. Henry was eager to employ or to exploit any royal connection he could find.

Another attack upon his throne was launched at the end of this year by Yorkists who claimed that they had rescued the young earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence and therefore a proper heir to the throne, from long imprisonment. This was enough to arouse all the hopes of the defeated. The fact that the real Warwick was even then immured in the Tower of London did not in any way diminish their enthusiasm. The boy had emerged in Dublin, and in that city on 24 May 1487 he was proclaimed as Edward VI. A crown had been taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary and placed in ceremony upon his head.

The real name of the supposed king was in fact Lambert Simnel. Of his earlier life, little enough is known. It seems that he was characterized by a pleasing appearance and an uncommon manner, leading some bold spirits to believe that he could indeed impersonate an earl. He also caught the attention of Edward IV’s sister, Margaret of Burgundy, who would in future years do everything in her power to restore the Yorkist dynasty. Other Yorkist sympathizers, the earl of Lincoln and Lord Lovel among them, were eager to participate in the conspiracy. Its most surprising member, however, must be Henry’s mother-in-law. Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Edward IV, might have been considered to be above suspicion. Her daughter, Elizabeth of York, was the reigning queen. What had she to gain in supplanting her son-in-law and effectively dispossessing her daughter?

It seems likely that she felt herself and her kin to have been humiliated by Henry’s seizure of the crown. There were rumours that Henry was not treating his wife with due respect or kindness. He had delayed the wedding, and was still delaying the queen’s coronation. He did not like the Yorkist connection; he had been fighting against it all of his adult life. He had married Elizabeth for reasons of state. So the mother turned against him, and supported the pretensions of Lambert Simnel.

Henry, alarmed at this threat to his rule, extracted the real earl of Warwick from the Tower and had him paraded through the streets of London. The young man also attended High Mass at St Paul’s, where he was allowed to converse with those who were familiar to him. Simnel’s supporters in Dublin of course denounced him as an imposter. From her palace in Flanders Margaret of Burgundy proceeded to hire 2,000 German mercenaries under the command of the earl of Lincoln. It was said by the Tudor chronicler, Edward Hall, that she was a ‘diabolical duchess’ and ‘a dog reverting to her old vomit’; the vomit was directed against Henry Tudor.

The German mercenaries landed in Dublin as the army of the proclaimed Edward VI where they enlisted more soldiers and mercenaries. They sailed to England with the counterfeit king, and Henry rode out with his army against them. They met at East Stoke on 16 June, where the 12,000 men of Henry defeated the 8,000 men under the command of the earl of Lincoln. Lincoln himself was killed in the mêlée, and Simnel was captured. Lovel had fled the scene of battle. Francis Bacon, in his life of Henry VII, remarks that Lovel lived long afterwards ‘in a cellar or vault’. It has been said that, during building work at Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, an underground chamber was discovered; here was found the skeleton of a man, sitting in a chair with his head reclining on a table. Fortune had not favoured him.

Yet the battle of Stoke had been finely balanced. It is significant that some of the gentry had held back from supporting Henry with one excuse or another, and that many rumours or ‘skryes’ – commotions – were spread concerning the king’s fate. The fortunes of battle are always uncertain, and the fragility of his rule was emphasized by the fact that he had been forced to fight for his crown only two years after Bosworth. The battle of Stoke may be considered to be the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Yet the victor was relatively merciful. Lambert Simnel was employed by him as a turnspit in the royal kitchens, and later became the king’s falconer. Elizabeth Woodville was removed to a nunnery in Bermondsey, where she spent the rest of her life. At a later feast with the lords of Ireland Henry remarked that ‘My masters of Ireland, you will crown apes at last’.

It was important for the king to stabilize and to strengthen his power. He preferred to govern through intimates rather than through the great men of the land; he did not exclude the aristocracy from his council, but he did not place his whole trust in them. Instead he surrounded himself with a retinue of self-made men who owed all their loyalty to the king. He preferred lawyers to magnates, and listened to the advice of great merchants rather than great lords. Of course he needed the nobility and the lords to control the counties in which they resided; in the absence of a police force and a standing army, he relied upon their support. But he was careful not to increase their number, and created only three earls and five peers in the whole course of his reign.

The king also worked through tribunals and courts which were under his control, principal among them the Star Chamber which was used to awe certain over-mighty subjects into submission. If they were guilty of perverting the course of justice, or of acquiring a small army of retainers, or of inciting disorder, they were quickly punished. Justice Shallow exclaims, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, that ‘I shall make a Star Chamber matter of it … the Council shall hear it: it is a riot … Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.’ The councillors were gathered in a chamber of which the roof was painted with stars. There was no jury, and no appeal. The camera stellata or chambre de éstoiles is first mentioned in the reign of Edward III, but Henry VII widened its powers for his own benefit.

Henry also involved himself in the close administration of royal finance, and the details of expenditure in the account books bear his initials; he went through them line by line. Throughout his reign he was determined to exact every possible claim and right he possessed; in that, however, he was not very different from his predecessors. He strengthened his personal hold over his cash when he diverted much of his earnings away from the exchequer, an official body, to his own private treasury. The revenue from the crown lands, the fees for the drawing-up of writs, the fines levied on prisoners, the old feudal payments, all flowed directly into his hands.

The foreign adventures of Henry were by no means over. He had consistently supported Brittany in its struggle against the power of France; it was to Brittany, after all, that he owed his earlier freedom. He had placed troops in the duchy armed and prepared for war against the French king, Charles VIII. Henry gathered a fleet and persuaded the parliament to raise a tax in order to subsidize the venture. He knew that the threat or promise of war could always fill his treasury. Charles VIII was of course eager to distract and destabilize the English king, and entered into negotiations both with Scotland and with Ireland to plan a campaign. The enemies of England only needed a cause.

So it was that in the late autumn of 1491 a young man of seventeen emerged in Cork claiming to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower of London. As Richard IV, he was the true Yorkist king of England. He was fluent and convincing about life at the court of his father; he recalled the details of his imprisonment in the Tower. He even remembered what he had said to the murderers of his brother. ‘Why are you killing my brother? Kill me and let him live!’ He was personable, and dressed in fine style.

He declared that he had been taken from the Tower and delivered to a certain lord for execution; but this lord, pitying his innocence and revering his royalty, sent him abroad after extracting an oath from him that he would not reveal his true identity until a number of years had passed. The time had now come for the rightful king to emerge into the light. Some were convinced of his identity on first observing him. He had the natural grace and dignity of the royal blood. His real name was Perkin Warbeck, and he was believed to be the son of a Flemish boatman.

The Irish deputy, the earl of Kildare, was not wholly enthusiastic about the young man’s presence in the country; Kildare had supported the pretensions of Lambert Simnel four years before, and was understandably reluctant to commit himself again to a Yorkist revenant. But the great pretender had friends elsewhere. Warbeck readily accepted an invitation to travel to the court of Charles VIII, where he was received with acclaim as the one and only king of England. He was known as ‘Richard Plantagenet’, and his retinue grew larger.

Henry was growing sick, perhaps with frustration and fear. The bills of his various apothecaries were seven times larger than before. He made a treaty with Charles VIII, who was himself eager to avoid war over the matter of Brittany; one of the clauses of the treaty stipulated that Charles would not harbour any of Henry’s enemies. Warbeck then promptly crossed the border and made his way to the court of Margaret of Burgundy at Malines. ‘I recognized him,’ she wrote, ‘as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday.’ Others from the old court of Edward IV also claimed to know him, almost by instinct. He was now being called by Margaret of Burgundy the White Rose, the pure and fragrant emblem of the Yorkists.

The duchess also ensured that he acquired wealthy and influential allies. He was sent to the funeral of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, in Vienna where he met the great and the good; among them was Frederick’s son, Maximilian, who now had command of the entire Habsburg Empire. Maximilian and the White Rose became fast friends. The pretender was soon coining silver groats in his own name; his armed guard was dressed in red and blue.

But Henry had not been idle. The danger was too acute for that. He applied trade sanctions against the Burgundian territories, where Warbeck was being sheltered. English goods, and in particular English cloth, were in turn barred from the Netherlands and elsewhere. The financial consequences were severe for merchants and workers on both sides, but the dynastic struggle took priority over economic affairs. Henry had also spent much money in trying to learn of Perkin Warbeck’s real origins, and his envoys in Europe were now busily retailing the facts of his supposedly baseborn family.

The king feared that an invasion was imminent; he sent as many ships as he could find to patrol the seas along the Suffolk coast and ordered troops to guard the principal ports of the realm. He asked his supporters to supply men-at-arms who would be ready to fight at a day’s notice.

He had spies in Warbeck’s entourage also, listening to every conversation. It was said of the king that he handled every case ‘circumspectly and with convenient diligence for inveigling, and yet not disclose it to the party … but keep it to himself and always grope further’. It was discovered that small clusters of Yorkist supporters, in Calais and Suffolk and elsewhere, were ready to rise on behalf of the claims of ‘Richard Plantagenet’. Some of them were still working at Henry’s court and in Henry’s household. This was the moment to arrest and imprison them.

The most senior conspirator turned out to be in fact Henry’s chamberlain, Sir William Stanley, the man who had engineered the king’s victory at Bosworth. At his subsequent trial he was alleged to have said that ‘if he knew for sure that the young man were King Edward’s son, he would never bear arms against him’. Under other circumstances these would be unexceptionable sentiments but, in Henry’s reign, the words meant a traitor’s death.

On 3 July 1495, the White Rose and his mercenary army landed at Deal in Kent; but the invasion proved abortive. The forces of the pretender were overwhelmed, and Warbeck retreated to the relative safety of the seas. His captured soldiers were marched to Newgate or the Tower. Henry could draw even more comfort from the fact that the English had not rallied to Warbeck’s banner; they had remained unexcited by his landing and unwilling to support him.

Warbeck had been rebuffed, but he sailed on to the old Yorkist haven of Ireland. He made the unlucky choice of Waterford as his point of entry, where the citizens actively resisted any attempt to enlist them into his war. For a few months he wandered through Ireland, a putative king without a kingdom, living in secrecy and fear. His fortune changed once again, however, when he was invited or invited himself to the court of James IV in Edinburgh. The young king of Scotland – approximately Warbeck’s own age – was happy to take up any opportunity of embarrassing and weakening the old enemy of England. Warbeck provided the occasion. He arrived in the winter of 1495 and was greeted by the Scots as a conquering hero. He received more than promises, however; he obtained a bride. A close relative of the Scottish king, Katherine Gordon, was betrothed to him. She was not exactly a princess, but she was the next best thing.

So the White Rose and the Scottish king, now cousins by marriage, set about the invasion of England. James IV may have had in mind one of the border wars by which Anglo-Scottish hostilities were conducted, with the assumption that the English would then rise up in support of young Richard IV. Henry himself could not be sure of the outcome. He prepared to muster a force of 20,000 men, and launch a navy of seventy ships against the Scots; to widespread and furious resentment, he levied taxes and forced loans to pay for the proposed expedition. In the event the invasion proved to be a fiasco, and the White Rose professed himself to be horrified by the bloody depredations of the Scottish troops before they fled back over the border. Once again he was seen to be an unlucky prince.

He lingered in Scotland for a few more months, feeling increasingly unwelcome at the court of James IV, before venturing everything on another English assault. With his wife and a few supporters he sailed to Cornwall by way of Ireland. He had been informed that an army of Cornish rebels was waiting to greet him in the southwest of England, the men of Cornwall having marched a few months before towards London in protest against what they considered to be unjust taxation. They had been joined by men from the other western counties, all of them refusing to pay for the war against the Scots. Why should they finance a distant struggle in which they had no part? Like many such rebels, however, they marched as far as Blackheath before their leaders were cut down. Another opportunity now presented itself. They believed that they had found a leader of royal blood.

Once more Warbeck was singularly unsuccessful; some men from Devon and Somerset joined him, but the town of Exeter refused him entry. His followers, tired and hungry, began to desert his army; the king sent messengers among them, promising them pardons if they laid down their arms. Warbeck, sensing defeat, fled for sanctuary to the abbey at Beaulieu. Henry surrounded the church, and the pretender was persuaded to surrender. He came out of sanctuary dressed in cloth of gold, but his pride was soon extinguished. He was taken back to London, a trumpeter riding before him to blow mock flourishes into the air, where his confession was published. It is likely to have been written by the king’s councillors, and to have borne as little relation to the truth as his original claim. Several versions of his life were soon circulating in England and in Europe. No one really knew the facts of his origin or his upbringing; it is possible that he was chosen for his role at an early age, and then brought up in the court of Margaret of Burgundy herself. It was said at the time that he was in fact an illegitimate son of Edward IV. Henry himself professed to believe that he was the illegitimate child of Margaret and a local bishop. Perkin is still wrapped in mist.

His end was in plain sight, however. He escaped from his guards at the palace of Westminster, where he seems to have been living as the king’s confined guest, but was recaptured. He was then consigned to the Tower, the guest of the king in a more oppressive sense, where he lingered for more than a year. Yet the fears and the suspicions of the king still surrounded him. He was accused of plotting treason with another prisoner, none other than the young earl of Warwick who had been impersonated by Lambert Simnel. The king now took the convenient opportunity of killing the two young men who threatened his throne. Warbeck was hanged, and Warwick beheaded.

The earl of Warwick had been imprisoned, and killed, for the sole offence of being the Yorkist heir. He was an innocent and, in detention for fifteen years, it was said that he ‘could not discern a goose from a capon’. He had to die all the same. A happier postscript may be found in the welcome provided to Perkin’s young wife; Katherine Gordon settled down in the English court, and eventually remarried.

Henry was now believed to be securely placed upon the throne. ‘This present state,’ the Milanese ambassador reported, ‘is most stable even for the king’s descendants, since there is no one who aspires to the crown … His Majesty can stand like one at the top of a tower looking on what is passing in the plain.’ The view from the tower is, of course, different from the view on the plain where there may be discordance and resentment. Two Spanish envoys suggested as much when they concluded that the king ‘has established good order in England, and keeps the people in such subjection as has never been the case before’.

Yet Henry fell sick in the month after the executions; he recovered, but his health was now gravely damaged. He was as devout as he was superstitious. He attended Mass each day but he also consulted astrologers and soothsayers. He listened eagerly to prophecies concerning the crown and the kingdom, at a time when he was pursued by private misfortunes. In the spring of 1502 his eldest son and heir, Arthur, died from disease or illness. On his death his strong and intelligent younger brother, Henry, became the heir. Six months before Arthur had married Catherine of Aragon, thus binding together the English and Spanish thrones, but Henry was now in turn betrothed to her. The king continually postponed any marriage, however, in the hope that a better prospect for his son might emerge. The young Spanish lady was caught in the middle of international events, starved of money and of affection.

In the year after the death of her eldest son, Elizabeth of York, the queen of England, suffered a miscarriage and succumbed to a post-partum infection. Henry was severely affected by this fresh sorrow, and it was said that he ‘privily departed to a solitary place and would no man should resort unto him’. Elizabeth lay in state in the Tower, and was then given a ceremonial funeral in Westminster Abbey. Two years later the king sought another bride. He pursued the queen of Naples for her dowry as well as for her presumed attractions. He despatched envoys to Italy with the following questions. ‘Whether she be painted, and whether her visage be fat or lean; whether there appeared to be any hair about her lips; whether she wore high slippers to increase her stature; whether her breath was sweet; whether she be a great feeder or drinker?’ He then pursued Joanna of Castile, in the hope of governing that country as regent, even though the lady herself was known to be insane. The courtships came to nothing, and Henry never married again.

He did enjoy some success, the most prominent being the marriage of his eldest daughter to the king of Scotland. The wedding of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1502 was the balm upon the wound inflicted by the advocacy of Warbeck. By his engineering of dynastic marriages, in fact, Henry did manage to consolidate the position of England among the ruling families of Europe. In so doing he abandoned the aggressive and expansionist policies of the Plantagenet kings. We may interpret that as a victory of his ‘foreign policy’. In any case war was expensive; it also required taxation that stirred up the people.

Despite the brief interruption in the commerce between England and the Low Countries, as a result of Margaret’s welcome for Warbeck, Henry did his best to foster the market in unfinished wool and finished cloth; they were now the principal exports, and the king wished to expedite the trade. He promoted English commerce in other areas, also, and there was scarcely a country in Europe with which he did not enter trade relations; Iceland, and Portugal, and the Baltic states, all came within his purview.

He was by no means a statesman striving for the common good; he was eager only to enjoy the fruits of the increase in customs revenue that went straight into his coffers. He traded on his own account, too, and in one year earned £15,000 from the import of alum used in the manufacture of soap. This was in theory a papal monopoly, but he considered the risk of excommunication less important than the making of profit. The figure of the king in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ – in the counting house counting out his money – is likely to have been based on Henry VII.

The possibility of profit also promoted him to support the expedition of Bristol merchants over the seas to the ‘isle of Brazil’, better known as Newfoundland, where they found immense fishing grounds. He also gave John Cabot and his three sons a licence for a voyage of discovery in the western oceans, thus beginning the story of English exploration. Cabot touched down on the coast of North America, while all the time believing that he had reached Asia, and the colonial flag was raised. Hakluyt relates that the Bristol merchants brought back three native Americans from Newfoundland to Henry’s court; they were ‘clothed in beasts’ skins and ate raw flesh, and were in their demeanour like to brute beasts’. Henry made sure that they were furnished with suitable lodgings in Westminster and, within two years, they were ‘clothed like Englishmen and could not be discerned from Englishmen’. Hakluyt adds that ‘as for speech, I heard none of them utter one word’. By the time that Sebastian Cabot reached Hudson Bay, on a subsequent voyage, the king was dead.

In his last years his suspiciousness intensified, to the extent that at the time of his death he was considered by many to be the tyrant of England. He had withdrawn further into the private world of majesty. Disturbed by the knowledge that senior members of his household had colluded with Perkin Warbeck, in an attempt to restore the Yorkist dynasty, the king decided to set himself apart from those who had customarily surrounded him. He created a Privy Chamber to which only his intimates had access. He lived and worked in a private set of chambers, secluded from the more open reception rooms of the Great Chamber and the Presence Chamber; now he could truly maintain his distance and, of course, keep his secrets. The royal household of the medieval period, established largely upon the retinue of men-at-arms surrounding the king and sharing his activities, was finally supplanted by the idea of a private court administered by servants and royal officials. In the last thirteen years of his reign he summoned only one parliament, in 1504.

Yet he maintained the magnificence of his court; as befitted a great king, jousts and processions and tournaments were organized on a grand scale. Tumblers and dancers were brought before him; he purchased or was given animals for the royal menagerie, and he liked to parade ‘freaks’ for the benefit of the courtiers. The king enjoyed gambling, too, and played card games such as Torment, Condemnation and Who Wins Loses. He liked to hawk and to hunt every day, and five falconers were enrolled in his entourage. He seems particularly to have enjoyed the company of ‘fools’ or jesters; at least five of them could be found in court at any one time, including Scot and Dick ‘the master fools’ and Ringeley ‘the abbot of misrule’.

Medieval humour is now perhaps an arcane subject. One phrase became a catchword in the fourteenth century. ‘As Hendyng says’ or ‘quoth Hendyng’ was a way of encapsulating a piece of wit or wisdom. ‘Friendless are the dead, quoth Hendyng’ or ‘never tell your foe that your foot aches, quod Hendyng’ or ‘Hendyng says, better to give an apple than to eat an apple’ were repeated in street and field.

Many jokes or puzzles were posed, and a game of question-and-answer was called ‘Puzzled Balthasar’. What is the broadest water and the least danger to walk over? The dew. What is the cleanest leaf among all other leaves? The holly leaf, for nobody will wipe his arse with it. How many calves’ tails can reach from the earth to the sky? No more than one, if it is long enough. What is the best thing and the worst thing among men? Word is both best and worst. What thing is it that some love and some hate? It is judgment.

A thousand proverbs and sayings rose into the air:

Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell?

A ring upon a nun is like a ring in a sow’s nose.

Your best friend is still alive. Who is that? You.

The sun is none the worse for shining on a dunghill.

He must needs swim that is borne up to the chin.

An hour’s cold will suck out seven years of heat.

The last sentence is redolent of the entire medieval period.

In the quieter times the king worked with his advisers undisturbed. Two of the most prominent of them, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, were set to harry and to prosecute the great ones of the realm. They dominated a small committee, called the Council Learned in the Law, specifically established to enforce the king’s rights and to collect the king’s debts. But they also had more informal ways of proceeding. If the eminent families spent little, and made no outward show, then they could spare a present of money to the king; if they spent lavishly, and lived in style, then they could afford to share their magnificence with the king. This was the ‘fork’ upon which the king impaled his victims.

Empson and Dudley also imposed fines or bonds upon the members of the nobility who had in any way breached the law. The earl of Northumberland was fined £5,000 for unlawful retaining. Lord Abergavenny was fined £70,000 for the same offence; Henry collected only £5,000 of that enormous sum, with the threat of seizing the rest if the lord did not behave satisfactorily. Anyone could be accused before a judge and, if he did not answer the summons, his goods could be confiscated and the presumed guilty party imprisoned at the king’s pleasure. Thus did the king buy the obedience of those mightier subjects whom he did not trust. But he could not purchase their loyalty. He was feared by all, but he was not loved or admired by many. ‘All things’, wrote Thomas More of the king’s reign, ‘were so covertly demeaned, one thing pretended and another meant.’

As Dudley said at a later date, from the hindsight provided by a prison cell, ‘the pleasure and mind of the king’s grace was much set to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure, wherefore diverse and many persons were bound to his grace in great sums of money’. Dudley also confessed that he had illegally extorted money on the king’s behalf from eighty victims. The king had in effect established a financial autocracy, an absolutism all the more feared because of exorbitant fines and the threat of endless imprisonment. This was the legacy that he left to his son and heir, who became Henry VIII. He kept notebooks in which he jotted down his caustic or suspicious thoughts and observations about those around him; when a pet monkey tore up one of these books, the courtiers were according to Francis Bacon ‘almost tickled with sport’.

It could be said that, like Scrooge, Henry VII feared the world too much. Certainly, like Scrooge, he tried to protect himself with a wall of money. Yet he was avaricious with a purpose; he told one of his councillors that ‘the kings my predecessors, weakening their treasure, have made themselves servants to their subjects’. He did not intend to beg or borrow, only to extort with menaces. In the process the annual royal income increased by approximately 45 per cent, and he was one of the few monarchs in English history to clear his debts and to die solvent. He was also the first king since Henry V to pass on his throne without dispute.

Money was power. It enabled the king to protect his throne and his dynasty; Henry told the Spanish ambassador that it was his intention to keep his subjects poor because riches would only make them haughty. He may have become more harsh, and more rapacious, in his last years; but it is equally likely that his natural tendencies were reinforced by age. He was in declining health, and in the final three years of his reign he was more or less an invalid. In his will he declared that 2,000 Masses should be said for the sake of his soul, within the space of one month, at sixpence a Mass. He died at his palace of Richmond on 21 April 1509, to general relief if not open rejoicing. ‘Avarice’, one noble wrote, ‘has fled the country.’ Yet the days of royal avarice were just beginning.

A conclusion

When we look over the course of human affairs we are more likely than not to find only error and confusion. I have already explained, in the course of this narrative, that the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence.

So the great movements of the period, as described in the present narrative, may seem to be without direction and without explanation except in terms of day-to-day expediency; in that sense they are without historical meaning. What seem to be, in retrospect, the greatest and most important changes tend to go unnoticed at the time. We may take the slow progress of the English parliament as an example. The government of king with parliament was not framed after a model; the various parts and powers of the national assembly emerged from occasional acts, the significance of which was not understood, or from decisions reached by practical considerations and private interests. The entry of knights and townsmen, later to become known as ‘the Commons’, provoked no interest or surprise. It was a matter of indifference.

Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress or evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part in what we are pleased to call the ‘development’ of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition. It should be noticed, in a similar spirit, that most of the battles fought in medieval England were governed by chance – a surprise charge, or a sudden storm, might decisively change the outcome. This should come as no surprise. Turmoil and accident and coincidence are the stuff of all human lives. They are also the abiding themes of fiction, of poetry and of drama.

One result of historical enquiry is the recognition of transience; the most fervent beliefs will one day be discredited, and the most certain certainties will be abandoned. Opinions are as unstable and as evanescent as the wind. We may invoke, with George Meredith, ‘Change, the strongest son of Life’.

The history of England is therefore one of continual movement and of constant variation; the historian, propelled onward by these forces, has scarcely time or inclination to glimpse the patterns of this ceaseless activity. Thomas Babington Macaulay once wrote, when surveying the passage of English history, that in the course of seven centuries a ‘wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most civilized people that ever the world saw’; at the beginning of the twenty-first century it would perhaps be difficult to pay the same compliment. We cannot find what he called ‘progress’ in the morals or in the culture of the English nation.

Yet we find something else of much greater interest and importance. From the beginning we find evidence of a deep continuity that is the legacy of an unimaginably distant past; there seems always to have been an hierarchical society with a division of labour and of responsibility. Yet there is a different kind of continuity, largely unseen and impalpable. The nation itself represents the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the myth of some fated or providential movement forward. Below the surface of events lies a deep, and almost geological, calm.

Many examples are to be found in this volume. The polity of England, for example, seems always to have been highly centralized; the political system was integrated; the legal and administrative systems were uniform. We have seen that, from at least the time of the building of Stonehenge, England has been a heavily organized and administered country. Unlike the provinces and sub-kingdoms of France or of Spain, or the fissiparous states and duchies of northern Europe, or the city-states of Italy, England was all of a piece.

Other forms of continuity are also evident. Modern roads follow the line of old paths and trackways. The boundaries of many contemporary parishes follow previous patterns of settlement, along which ancient burials are still to be found. Our distant ancestors are still around us. There is a history of sacred space almost as old as the history of the country itself. Churches and monastic communities were placed close beside the sites of megalithic monuments, as well as sacred springs and early Bronze Age ritual spaces. I have already noticed that the churchyard of the parish church of Rudston, in East Yorkshire, harbours the tallest Neolithic standing stone in England. The pilgrim routes of medieval Kent trace the same pattern as the prehistoric tracks to holy wells and shrines. We still live deep in the past.

Continuity, rather than change, is the measure of the country. It has been suggested that the cities and towns of England decayed at the end of the Roman occupation. But this is pure speculation. They may simply have changed their function while preserving their role as the centres of administration. The urban population remained, thus continuing a tradition of town living that can be glimpsed within a Neolithic settlement in Cornwall; in 3000 BC the enclosure, surrounded by a strong stone wall, accommodated 200 people. Can this be understood as an early English town? A village or small town at Thatcham, in Berkshire, has been in place for 10,000 years.

In the countryside, there is even greater evidence for continuity. The Anglo-Saxon ‘invasion’, for example, was once deemed to mark a decisive break with the past. Yet in fact there is no discernible change in agricultural practice. In historical terms there are no ‘breaks’. We have seen that the same field systems were laid out by the Germanic settlers; the new arrivals preserved the old boundaries and in Durham, for example, Germanic structures were set within a pattern of small fields and drystone walls created in the prehistoric past. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Germanic settlers formed groups which honoured the boundaries of the old tribal kingdoms. They respected the lie of the land. The Jutes of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight took over the prehistoric lands of the Belgae; the East Saxons held the ancient territory of the Trinovantes, and the South Saxons established themselves within the prehistoric borders of the Regnenses. They even retained the same capitals. The sacred sites of the Saxons, at a slightly later date, follow the alignment of Neolithic monuments. All fell into the embrace of the past. The evidence suggests, therefore, that the roots of the country go very deep. Even now they have not been severed.

In this volume there have been endless variations upon the same principal theme or themes – the uneasy balance between the sovereign and the more powerful nobles, the desire for war pitted against the overwhelming costs of conflict, the battle for mastery between Church and sovereign, the precarious unity of monarch and parliament, are all part of this narrative. There are also enduring fault lines that create discord and crisis. We may mention here the barren attempts to regulate social life, the slow decay of the feudal order, the antipathy to central government in the shires, the rivalry of noble families in local affairs, the blundering efforts to regulate foreign and domestic trade. Identical political and constitutional problems recur again and again; it could even be said that change occurs only when the same factors combine in different ways.

Another salient fact arises from the history of England. All the monarchs from the time of the Norman invasion were, on the male side, of foreign origin. Only the last of them in this volume, Henry VII, was of island ancestry with progenitors from an ancient Welsh noble family. This does not consort well with the notion of English independence, but it fits more closely with the facts of the matter. The Normans were succeeded by the Angevins, who were in turn supplanted by the Welsh; the Welsh were followed by the Scots, who were removed by the Hanoverians. The English were a colonized people. I have written elsewhere about the heterogeneity of English culture, in Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, but it is perhaps worth recalling that the great literary enterprises of the country derive largely from European originals.

A further point may be made. I had thought of including the histories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland within this volume but there was too great a risk of their seeming to become merely extensions of England in the process. Wales joined in a political and legal union with England in 1536, and Scotland entered a political union in 1707; but their cultures and their identities, like those of Ireland, are too dissimilar to warrant inclusion in this study. This may in turn lead to what has been called an ‘anglo-centric’ version of the past but, in a history of England, such a bias is hard to avoid. Only a history of the world could cope with the difficulty.

No philosopher, ancient or modern, has yet been able to divine the springs of human conduct or human character; so, on a more general scale, we can have little trust in historians who confidently describe the causes or consequences of such events as the Hundred Years War or the sealing of Magna Carta. In their vain attempt to follow the ignis fatuus or will-o’-the-wisp of certainty, their efforts will be at best uncertain and at worst contradictory. The wisest historians admit that their speculations may be misplaced and their interpretations incorrect.

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognize that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire. A drama, or a poem, is of course subject to manifold interpretations according to the judgment and imagination of the reader. Yet in that sense it resembles the events related within this volume. We might quote the words of Milton in Paradise Lost:

So shall the world go on

To good malignant, to bad men benign,

Under her own weight groaning …

Now we look ahead to the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, encompassing the great reformation of religion in the sixteenth century. We may in the process be able to glimpse, and perhaps restore, the poetry of history.

THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books I found most useful in the composition of this volume.

1: HYMNS OF STONE

Bradley, Richard: The Passage of Arms (Cambridge, 1990).

—— An Archaeology of Natural Places (London, 2000).

Collis, John: The Celts (Stroud, 2003).

Cunliffe, Barry: Iron Age Communities in Britain (London, 1991).

—— Facing the Ocean (Oxford, 2001).

Darvill, Timothy: Prehistoric Britain (London, 1987).

Harper, M. J.: The History of Britain Revealed (London, 2002).

Hawkes, Christopher and Jacquetta: Prehistoric Britain (London, 1943).

Hills, Catherine: Origins of the English (London, 2003).

James, Simon: The Atlantic Celts (London, 1999).

Mercer, Roger: Farming Practice in British Prehistory (Edinburgh, 1981).

Oppenheimer, Steven: The Origins of the British (London, 2006).

Pryor, Francis: Britain BC (London, 2003).

Slack, Paul and Ward, Ryk (eds): The Peopling of Britain (Oxford, 2002).

Stringer, Chris: Homo Britannicus (London, 2006).

2: THE ROMAN WAY

Arnold, C. J.: Roman Britain to Saxon England (London, 1984).

Burnham, B. C., and Johnson, H. B., (eds): Invasion and Response (Oxford, 1979).

Dark, Ken: Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Stroud, 2002).

Faulkner, Neil: The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain (Stroud, 2004).

Frere, Sheppard: Britannia: A History of Roman Britain (London, 1967).

Millett, Martin: The Romanization of Britain (Cambridge, 1990).

Reece, Richard: My Roman Britain (Cirencester, 1988).

Salway, Peter: Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981).

—— The Roman Era (Oxford, 2002).

Todd, Malcolm (ed.): A Companion to Roman Britain (Oxford, 2004).

Webster, G.: The Roman Invasion of Britain (London, 1980).

3: CLIMATE CHANGE

Fox, Cyril: The Personality of Britain (Cardiff, 1938).

Jones, Martin and Dimbleby, Geoffrey (eds): The Environment of Man (Oxford, 1981).

Mackinder, H. J.: Britain and the British Seas (London, 1902).

Parry, M. L.: Climactic Change, Agriculture and Settlement (Folkestone, 1978).

Rackham, Oliver: The History of the Countryside (London, 1986).

4: SPEAR POINTS

Abels, R. P.: Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1988).

Arnold, C. J.: An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdom (London, 1988).

Blair, John: The Anglo-Saxon Age (Oxford, 1984).

—— The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005).

Campbell, James (ed.): The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982).

Chadwick, H. M.: The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge, 1924).

Charles-Edwards, Thomas (ed.): After Rome (Oxford, 2003).

Higham, N. J.: Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1992).

—— An English Empire (Manchester, 1995).

Hill, Paul: The Age of Athelstan (Stroud, 2004).

Hodges, Richard: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (London, 1989).

Jackson, Kenneth: Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953).

Jolliffe, J. E. A.: Pre-Feudal England (Oxford, 1933).

Kirby, D. P.: The Making of Early England (London, 1967).

Loyn, H. R.: The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1984).

Morris, John: The Age of Arthur (London, 1973).

Myres, J. N. L.: The English Settlements (Oxford, 1986).

Pryor, Francis: Britain AD (London, 2005).

Randers-Pehrson, Justine Davis: Barbarians and Romans (London, 1983).

Reynolds, Andrew: Later Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1999).

Stenton, F. M.: Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1971).

Tatlock, J. S. P.: The Legendary History of Britain (New York, 1974).

Thomas, Charles: Celtic Britain (London, 1986).

Wood, Michael: In Search of the Dark Ages (London, 1994).

5: THE BLOOD EAGLE

Cavill, Paul: Vikings (London, 2001).

Dark, K. R.: Civitas to Kingdom (London, 1994).

Davies, Wendy: From the Vikings to the Normans (Oxford, 2003).

Faith, Rosamond: The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London, 1997).

Foot, P. G., and Wilson, D. M.: The Viking Achievement (London, 1970).

Hadley D. M. and Richards, J. D. (eds): Cultures in Contact (Turnhout, 2000).

Loyn, H. R.: The Vikings in Britain (London, 1977).

Sawyer, P. H.: The Age of the Vikings (London, 1971).

Smyth A. P.: King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995).

Stafford, Pauline: Unification and Conquest (London, 1989).

Whitelock, Dorothy: The Beginnings of English Society (London 1952).

6: THE MEASURE OF THE KING

Poole, A. L.: From Domesday Book to Magna Carta (Oxford, 1955).

Harvey, Barbara: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001).

Wormald, Patrick: The Making of English Law (Oxford, 1999).

7: THE COMING OF THE CONQUERORS

Barlow, Frank: Edward the Confessor (London, 1979).

—— The English Church, 1000–1066 (London, 1979).

Brown, R. A.: The Normans and the Norman Conquest (London, 1969).

Clarke, P. A.: The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford, 1994).

Fleming, Robin: Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991).

Garmonsway, G. M.: Canute and his Empire (London, 1964).

Lawson, M. K.: Cnut (Stroud, 2004).

—— The Battle of Hastings (Stroud, 2007).

Loyn, H. R.: Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (London, 1962).

McLynn, Frank: 1066 (London, 1998).

Walker, I. W.: Harold (Stroud, 1997).

Williams, Ann: Ethelred the Unready (London, 2003).

9: DEVILS AND WICKED MEN

Barlow, Frank: William Rufus (London, 1983).

Douglas, D. C.: The Norman Achievement (London, 1969).

—— William the Conqueror (London, 1964).

Freeman, E. A.: A History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford, 1870–79).

—— The Reign of William Rufus (Oxford, 1882).

—— William the Conqueror (London, 1898).

Green, Judith: The Government of England under Henry I (Cambridge, 1986).

—— The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997).

—— Henry I (Cambridge, 2006).

Hicks, Carola (ed.): England in the Eleventh Century (Stamford, 1992).

Hollister, C. W.: Henry I (London, 2001).

Maitland, F. W.: Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1897).

Mason, Emma: William II (Stroud, 2005).

Rex, Peter: Hereward (Stroud, 2005).

—— The English Resistance (Stroud, 2006).

Rowley, Trevor: The Norman Heritage (London, 1983).

Strickland, Matthew (ed.): Anglo-Norman Warfare (Woodbridge, 1992).

10: THE ROAD

Cox, R. H.: The Green Roads of England (London, 1914).

Gelling, Margaret: Signposts to the Past (London, 1978).

Hoskins, W. G.: The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955).

Jusserand, J. J.: English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1889).

11: THE LAW IS LOST

Appleby, J. T.: The Troubled Reign of King Stephen (London, 1969).

Brooke, Z. N.: The English Church and the Papacy (Cambridge, 1931).

Chibnall, Marjorie: The Empress Matilda (Oxford, 1991).

Cronne, H. A.: The Reign of Stephen (London, 1970).

Crouch, David: The Reign of King Stephen (London, 2000).

Holt, J. C.: Colonial England (London, 1997).

Matthew, Donald: King Stephen (London, 2002).

13: THE TURBULENT PRIEST

Amt, Emilie: The Accession of Henry II in England (Woodbridge, 1993).

Barber, Richard: Henry Plantagenet (Ipswich, 1964).

Barlow, Frank: Thomas Becket (London, 1986).

Bloch, Marc: Feudal Society (London, 1961–62).

Dark, Sidney: St Thomas of Canterbury (London, 1927).

Grary, H. L.: English Field Systems (London, 1959).

Hall, Hubert: Court Life under the Plantagenets (London, 1899).

Norgate, Kate: England under the Angevin Kings (London, 1887).

Pain, Nesta: The King and Becket (New York, 1964).

Roberts, B. K.:The Making of the English Village (London, 1987).

Salzman, L. F.: Henry II (London, 1917).

Vinogradoff, Paul: The Growth of the Manor (London, 1904).

—— Villainage in England (Oxford, 1927).

Warren, W. L.: Henry II (London, 1973).

14: THE LOST VILLAGE

Beresford, Maurice: The Lost Villages of England (London, 1969).

Oswald, Alastair: Wharram Percy (York, 2004).

15: THE GREAT CHARTER

Appleby, J. T.: England without Richard (Ithaca, 1965).

Brundage, J. A.: Richard Lionheart (New York, 1974).

Church, S. D. (ed.): King John (Woodbridge, 1999).

Gillingham, John: Richard the Lionheart (London, 1978).

Holt, J. C.: The Northerners (Oxford, 1961).

—— Magna Carta (Cambridge, 1992).

Jolliffe, J. E. A.: Angevin Kingship (London, 1956).

Turner, R. V.: King John (Stroud, 2005).

Warren, W. L.: The Governance of Norman and Angevin England (London, 1987).

—— King John (Berkeley, 1961).

Wilkinson, Bertie: The High Middle Ages in England (Cambridge, 1978).

16: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Harding, Alan: The Law Courts of Medieval England (London, 1973).

Musson, Anthony: Medieval Law in Context (Manchester, 2001).

Musson, Anthony, and Ormrod, W. M.: The Evolution of English Justice (London, 1999).

Salzman, L. F.: English Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1926).

17: A SIMPLE KING

Burton, Janet: Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300 (Cambridge, 1994).

Carpenter, D. A.: The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990).

—— The Reign of Henry III (London, 1996).

—— The Struggle for Mastery (London, 2003).

Clanchy, M. T.: From Memory to Written Record (Oxford, 1993).

Harding, Alan: England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993).

Harvey, Barbara: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001).

Hennings, M. A.: England under Henry III (London, 1924).

Lloyd, Simon: English Society and the Crusade (Oxford, 1988).

Maddicott, J. R.: Simon de Montfort (Cambridge, 1994).

Powicke, F. M.: King Henry and the Lord Edward (Oxford, 1947).

—— The Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1962).

Stacey, Robert: Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III (Oxford, 1987).

18: THE SEASONAL YEAR

Hutton, Ronald: The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994).

Postan, M. M.: The Medieval Economy and Society (London, 1972).

Powicke, J. M.: Medieval England (London, 1931).

19: THE EMPEROR OF BRITAIN

Jenks, Edward: Edward Plantagenet (London, 1902).

Knowles, David: The Religious Orders in England, Volume One (Cambridge, 1948).

Morris, J. E.: The Welsh Wars of Edward I (Oxford, 1901).

Morris, Marc: A Great and Terrible King (London, 2008).

Ormrod, W. M., (ed.): England in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1986).

Pasquet, D.: An Essay on the Origins of the House of Commons (Cambridge, 1925).

Plucknett, T. F. T.: Legislation of Edward I (Oxford, 1949).

Prestwich, Michael: Politics and Finance under Edward I (London, 1972).

—— The Three Edwards (London, 1980).

Salzman, L. F.: Edward I (London, 1968).

Stones, E. L. G.: Edward I (Oxford, 1968).

Wilkinson, B.: Studies in the Constitutional History of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Manchester, 1937).

20: THE HAMMER

Julius, Anthony: Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010).

Mundill, R. R.: England’s Jewish Solution (Cambridge, 1998).

21: THE FAVOURITES OF A KING

Davies, J. C.: The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (Cambridge, 1918).

Fryde, Natalie: The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II (Cambridge, 1979).

Haines, R. M.: King Edward II (London, 2003).

Hamilton, J. S.: Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall (London, 1988).

Howell, Margaret: Eleanor of Provence (Oxford, 1998).

Johnstone, H.: Edward of Carnarvon (Manchester, 1946).

Maddicott, J. R.: Simon de Montfort (Cambridge, 1994).

Raban, Sandra: England under Edward I and Edward II (Oxford, 2000).

Tout, T. F.: The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History (Manchester, 1936).

22: BIRTH AND DEATH

Carey, H. M.: Courting Disaster, Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1992).

Clay, R. M.: The Medieval Hospitals of England (London, 1909).

Finucane, R. C.: Miracles and Pilgrims (London, 1977).

Getz, Faye: Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton, 1998).

Hunt, Tony: Popular Medicine in Thirteenth Century England (Woodbridge, 1990).

Rawcliffe, Carole: Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud, 1995).

23: THE SENSE OF A NATION

Carpenter, D. A.: The Reign of Edward III (London, 1996).

Edwards, G.: The Second Century of the English Parliament (Oxford, 1979)

Given-Wilson, C. J.: The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1987).

Haines, R. M.: The Church and Politics in Fourteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1978).

Hewitt, H. J.: The Organisation of War under Edward III (Manchester, 1966).

Horrox, Rosemary (ed.): The Black Death (Manchester, 1994).

Keen, M. H.: England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973).

McFarlane, K. B.: The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973).

McKisack, May: The Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1959).

Mortimer, Ian: The Perfect King (London, 2006).

Ormrod, W. G.: The Reign of Edward III (Stroud, 2000).

Prestwich, Michael: Plantagenet England (Oxford, 2005).

Rubin, Miri: The Hollow Crown (London, 2005).

Stubbs, William: The Constitutional History of England (Oxford, 1874).

Waugh, S. L.: England in the Reign of Edward III (Cambridge, 1991).

24: THE NIGHT SCHOOLS

Aston, Margaret: Lollards and Reformers (London, 1984).

Dahmus, J. H.: The Prosecution of John Wycliffe (New Haven, 1970).

Lambert, M. D.: Medieval Heresy (London, 1977).

McFarlane, K. B.: John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London, 1952).

—— Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972).

Robson, J. A.: Wycliffe and the Oxford Schools (Cambridge, 1961).

Thomson, J. A. F.: The Later Lollards (Oxford, 1965).

Workman, H. B.: John Wycliffe (Oxford, 1926).

25: THE COMMOTION

Allmand, C. T. (ed.): War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages (Liverpool, 1976).

Bevan, Bryan: King Richard II (London 1990).

Bird, Ruth: The Turbulent London of Richard II (London, 1949).

Du Boulay, F. R. H. and Barron, C. M. (eds): The Reign of Richard II (London, 1971).

Fletcher, Christopher: Richard II (Oxford, 2008).

Fryde, E. B.: The Great Revolt of 1381 (London, 1981).

Gillespie, J. L. (ed.): The Age of Richard II (Stroud, 1997).

Jones, R. H.: The Royal Policy of Richard II (Oxford, 1968).

Mathew, Gervase: The Court of Richard II (London, 1968).