Читать книгу Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity - David Starkey - Страница 11

THE MAN WHO ordered the Crown Imperial to be made was the founder of the Tudor dynasty, Henry Tudor. But Henry was a man who should never have been king at all. He seized the throne against the odds, amid bloodshed and murderous family feuds. But behind the beheadings and the gore was the fundamental question of how England should be ruled. Henry thought he knew the answer. But his cure proved as bad as the disease.

The story begins five years before Henry Tudor’s birth, when a nine-year-old girl was summoned to court. Her name was Margaret Beaufort, and with her fortune of £1000 a year, she was the richest heiress in England. Even more importantly, as the direct descendant of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Margaret was of the blood royal. Her cousin, the Lancastrian King Henry VI, had decided that she should marry his own half-brother, Edmund Tudor – a man more than twice her age. It was a sordid mixture of money and power, with the technicalities fixed by a venal and accommodating Church.

King Henry VI was weak. He had failed in war; was incapacitated by long bouts of madness, and had fathered just one child, thus leaving the succession dangerously in doubt in an age of civil war and rival kings. The union of Margaret and Edmund would, Henry hoped, strengthen the weakened royal family. It would surely produce children, and therefore fulfil the Lancastrian dynasty’s duty to provide a line of potential successors to the crown should anything happen to the sole heir. For what was the monarchy for if it could not guarantee the continuity of effective rule long into the future?

When Margaret was barely twelve, the earliest legally permissible age for sexual intercourse, Edmund brought her to Wales, where they lived together as man and wife. Shortly before Margaret’s thirteenth birthday she became pregnant, but six months later, weakened by imprisonment during a Welsh feud and finished off by the plague, Edmund died on 1 November 1456. His child bride, widowed and heavily pregnant, sought refuge with her brother-in-law at Pembroke Castle.

And it was in a tower chamber at that castle that Margaret gave birth to the future Henry VII on 28 January 1457. Actually, it was a miracle that both mother and child survived. It was the depths of winter and the plague still raged, while Margaret, short and slightly built even as an adult, was not yet fully grown. The birth probably did severe damage to her immature body because, despite two further marriages, Margaret was to have no more children. Yet out of this traumatic birth an extraordinary bond was forged between the teenage mother and her son.

Margaret would need to be the strong woman behind her son; Henry was born into an England that was being torn apart by civil war. For their family, the Lancastrians, were not the only ones with a claim to the throne. Their opponents were the three brothers of the House of York. Also descended from Edward III, they had at least as good a claim to the throne, one which they determined to make good by force. The resulting conflict later became known as the Wars of the Roses, after the emblems of the two sides: the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York.

Such emblems, known as badges, were worn not only by the followers of the two rival royal houses, but by all the servants of the nobility and greater gentry. And the more land you had, the bigger the private army of badge-wearing retainers (as they were called) you could afford. The forces of York and Lancaster and their noble allies were evenly balanced, with the result that after fifteen years of fighting, the crown had changed hands twice between the Lancastrian King Henry VI and his rival Edward of York, who had declared himself Edward IV.

Their final showdown came at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, in May 1471. Edward – young, warlike, charismatic and supported by both his brothers, the twenty-one-year-old George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was eighteen – was determined to annihilate the House of Lancaster once and for all. The battle soon turned into a massacre, leaving thousands dead on the field. It was a decisive victory for York; a disaster for Lancaster.

After the battle, many of the Lancastrians fled to Tewkesbury Abbey, where they took refuge in the church. The victorious Edward and his men then burst in. There are two different versions of what happened next.

According to the official account, Edward behaved with exemplary decorum, pardoning the fugitives and offering up solemn thanks at the high altar for his victory. But the unofficial accounts tell a different and much more shocking story. Edward and his men, rather than turning their thoughts to God and mercy, began to slaughter the Lancastrians. A lucky few were saved by the intervention of a priest, vested and holding the holy sacrament in his hands, in front of whom even the bloodthirsty Yorkists felt some shame. Edward then recovered control of the situation by issuing pardons to his defeated enemies. But already enough blood had been spilt to pollute the church and to require its reconsecration.

The Yorkists also claimed that the Prince of Wales had died in the carnage of the battlefield. But darker rumours had it that he had been taken prisoner and brought before Edward, who accused him of treason, pushed the boy away and struck him with a gauntlet. He was then murdered by Clarence and Richard. A day or two later, despite his solemn pardon, Edward ordered the beheading of most of the remaining Lancastrian leaders. Now only the life of the feeble Lancastrian king, Henry VI, stood between Edward and an unchallenged grasp of the throne.

On 21 May Edward entered the City of London in triumph. That night, between the hours of eleven and midnight, Henry VI was murdered in the Tower of London, probably with a heavy blow to the back of the head. Only one man is named as being present in the Tower at the time: Edward’s youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who already, at the age of only eighteen, was emerging as the most effective hatchet man of the Yorkist regime. As he struck the fatal blow, he is supposed to have said, ‘Now there is no heir male of King Edward the Third but we of the House of York!’ Now, surely, the Wars of the Roses were over.

No one, a Yorkist chronicle exulted, of ‘the stock of Lancaster remained among the living’ who could claim the throne. But one Lancastrian claimant – however remote – did remain: Henry Tudor. Fourteen years had passed since Margaret had had her son. Now the teenage Henry was in danger of his life. Not even the massive walls of Pembroke Castle could protect the boy against the vengeful power of Edward of York, and his mother urged him to flee. He took ship at Tenby, and crossed the Channel to Brittany. And there Henry had to endure a decade and a half of politically fraught exile before he would see either England or his mother again.