Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (15 page)

Outnumbered, Somerset’s force was slowly being driven back up the slope. It was at this point that Edward performed a masterstroke, ordering his 200 men-at-arms waiting hidden in the woods to launch a surprise attack into the side of Somerset’s beleaguered troops. The duke’s men scattered, ‘dismayed and abashed’; some fled along the lanes, some into the park and down to the meadow by the river running alongside the abbey, but most would suffer the same fate of being cut down and killed as they ran. Somerset, however, refused to give up, making his way back to the Lancastrian centre whose troops had stood motionless at Lord Wenlock’s order. Riding up to the aged nobleman, Somerset was in no mood for excuses; according to a later account, in a fury, he raged at Wenlock, and before he had a chance to respond, Somerset seized his battle axe and beat his brains out, though a more contemporary chronicle suggests that this dramatic confrontation never took place, with Wenlock being captured and executed after the battle.

As the division between the Lancastrian leaders had become horrifically apparent, Edward took the opportunity to engage with the diminished Lancastrian defensive line, now under the command of Prince Edward. Hacking away with battle axes and stabbing with swords, the hand-to-hand conflict did not last long. Already demoralised by their
initial defeat, the front of the Lancastrian line gave way, leading to a mass flight towards the river Avon and the sanctuary of the abbey. Edward gave his soldiers permission to pursue the chase with ruthlessness, ordering that they should be killed and despoiled. The most significant victim was the seventeen-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, who, having been recognised by his surcoat emblazoned with the royal arms, was hacked to death. The son of Sir William Cary, who had been in the service of the prince ‘at the field of Tewkesbury’, remembered how Edward had been ‘slain for his true faith and allegiance’ by ‘the servants of the said King Edward the iiiith’. By the time the fighting had ceased, the bodies of the Earl of Devon and Somerset’s brother, John Beaufort, also were among those littering the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Somerset and other Lancastrian leaders and men had fled into Tewkesbury Abbey, confident that the holy rights of sanctuary would protect them while they remained inside the building. At first, in the elation of victory, Edward offered a pardon to everyone inside the church. He soon decided to change his mind. In spite of the abbot’s protestations, Yorkist soldiers burst into the abbey brandishing weapons and dragged the fugitives out with such violence that enough blood was spilt on the stone floors that the abbey needed later to be reconsecrated. According to one chronicler, Edward himself was there, sword in hand, and had to be brought to his senses by a priest bearing the sacrament aloft.

In the aftermath of battle, vengeance would be swift. Under the direction of his brother Richard and the Duke of Norfolk, the trial of Somerset and around a dozen prominent Lancastrian knights was swiftly organised and with sentence summarily passed, they were sentenced to death. Dragged out into the town’s marketplace, they were quickly beheaded, though they were spared the indignity of being drawn and quartered, and were given honourable burials.

Margaret of Anjou had watched the battle unfold powerless from the tower of Tewkesbury Abbey. Somehow, realising that defeat was inevitable, perhaps watching the flight of her forces towards the abbey, she fled to a religious house near Malvern, where she was arrested three days later and taken to London.

Edward’s victory at Tewkesbury could have hardly been more comprehensive; after crushing a significant attack on London organised
by ‘the Bastard of Fauconberg’, an illegitimate son of Warwick’s uncle, he marched into London in triumph on 21 May, ‘ordering his standards to be unfurled and borne before him’. That same night, Henry VI died in the Tower. The official account declared that the king had died of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’ upon hearing of the fate of his cause. Few believed it. John Warkworth, in his chronicle written around 1480, wrote how Henry had been murdered ‘between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the Duke of Gloucester and many others’. The following evening, Henry’s body was taken to St Paul’s Cathedral, where his body lay in an open coffin, ‘that he might be known’. The next morning it was escorted up the river to Chertsey Abbey for burial. According to the Milanese ambassador, Edward had ‘chosen to crush the seed’ of the Lancastrian dynasty. With Henry and his heir both dead and buried, the king could not have contemplated a greater success.

That ‘great and strong laboured woman’, Margaret of Anjou, no longer a queen but a childless widow and broken woman, was taken to the Tower where she remained in custody for four years until she was ransomed to Louis XI and returned to France. There was little chance that she might become the focus for any disaffection; she lived out her final days first in a chateau near Angers then at Dampierre, near Samur, where she died on 25 August 1482.

The Lancastrian dynasty had effectively been erased from history. ‘In every part of England,’ one commentator wrote, ‘it appeared to every man that the said party was extinct and repressed for ever, without any hope of again quickening.’ With Warwick dead, Edward was the master of his own kingdom. For the first time his throne, together with the future of the house of York, looked secure. On 3 July Parliament assembled to swear its allegiance not only to their undisputed king, but also to his infant son Edward, Prince of Wales, as their successor. In the joy of victory and the celebration of success, it was perhaps easy to forget or even dismiss the fact that the Earl of Oxford had fled to Scotland, or that Jasper Tudor remained at large in Wales, in control of Pembroke Castle, and with him, his fourteen-year-old nephew Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne, in the aftermath of the Lancastrian destruction, now seemed so remote as to be almost insignificant.

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Jasper Tudor had only just departed from Chepstow when the devastating news arrived that Margaret and Somerset had been ‘vanquished’ at Tewkesbury. He had marched from South Wales, in the hope of crossing into England to provide the additional troops he had been sent to raise, but had been unable to reach Margaret and her forces in time to prevent defeat. Realising that the scale of the defeat was so great that ‘matters were past all recovery’, he returned to Chepstow Castle, to consider what, if at all, the next possible course of action might be. Reflecting upon the disaster, he could have been forgiven for wondering what might have been if only Somerset had delayed battle until he had the chance to join him. According to the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil, he lamented ‘that headiness, which always is blind and improvident’ that had resulted in Somerset’s defeat.

Secluded behind the defensive walls at Chepstow, high upon the Welsh bank of the river Wye, Jasper continued to seek advice from his friends about his next move. Together with Warwick’s death at Barnet, the outcome at Tewkesbury altered radically the position of his own family. Whether he knew yet of Henry VI’s death in the Tower, the death of Prince Edward had effectively destroyed the Lancastrian inheritance to the throne. Aside from the Duke of Exeter, one of the closest claimants to its lineage seemed to be his nephew Henry Tudor, currently residing in Pembroke Castle. With his mother Margaret forced to submit herself to Edward IV and make peace with the Yorkist regime once more, Jasper understood that the welfare of the boy lay in his hands alone.

Events left Jasper with little choice but to act decisively. Edward had sent Roger Vaughan of Tretower, described as ‘a very valiant man’, to arrest Jasper by trickery or some other secret means. Ten years previously, it had been Vaughan who had ordered the execution of Jasper’s father Owen Tudor, after the battle of Mortimer’s Cross; when Jasper ‘being advertised’ that Vaughan was approaching Chepstow, he was determined to have his revenge. Arresting Vaughan in the town before he had the chance to plan Jasper’s own capture, he swiftly had him beheaded. According to a later report, facing his death upon the block, Vaughan pleaded for Jasper’s mercy, but was met with the reply from Jasper that ‘he should have such Favour as he showed to Owen his Father’.

Jasper understood that to secure his nephew’s safety he would have to leave Chepstow immediately and travel to Pembroke Castle. He arrived only just in time, for Edward, hearing news of Vaughan’s death, was already in pursuit. The king now sent Morgan ap Thomas, the grandson of Gruffyd ap Nicholas, to besiege Jasper and his household at Pembroke. Thomas had been a strong friend of the earl’s, following his family’s traditional loyalties to the Lancastrians, but it is more than likely that his decision to turn against Jasper was a personal one: he was married to one of Sir Roger Vaughan’s daughters, and it seems that family loyalties on this occasion superseded previous alliances, especially considering the cold-blooded treatment his father-in-law had received at Jasper’s hands.

There was little chance that Thomas would gain access to the impregnable fortress; instead he decided to encircle the castle, digging trenches and ditches around it so that ‘there was no possible means of escape’. With all communications, including supplies and rations, from outside now prevented, Thomas intended to starve Jasper and Henry out of hiding.

Relief only came eight days later in the form of Morgan ap Thomas’s younger brother David, who arrived at Pembroke with a force of 2,000 men, described as a ‘ragged regiment, with hooks, prongs and glaives, and other rustic weapons’, and began to attack his brother’s siege. He was soon able to free Jasper and Henry, conveying them to Tenby. Jasper knew that the heavily fortified harbour would be able to hold out from any siege: the earl had himself ordered its walls to be strengthened in 1457. Six feet thick, with a continuous platform running around the top, the moat was also widened to thirty feet. But with William Herbert, the other Earl of Pembroke, and Lord Ferrers having been dispatched to crush any resistance in Wales and moving closer towards the region, to hold out for too long would be hopeless. Jasper understood that his and his nephew’s safety could only be secured in flight.

A ‘barque’ was hastily prepared, provided by the prominent merchant Thomas White, mayor of the town several times between 1457 and 1472 and who had worked with Jasper on the town’s reconstruction, and his son John. On 2 June Jasper, together with Henry and ‘certain other his friends and servants’, set sail for France, presumably to seek refuge at the court of Louis XI. However, storms blew the ship off course, and
after apparently landing briefly at Jersey, they landed at the small port of Le Conquet, on the westernmost point of the peninsula, in northwest Finistère near Brest. Instead of disembarking in France, as Jasper had hoped, they found themselves in the territory of the duchy of Brittany, ruled by Duke Francis II. Initially, Jasper must have cursed what had seemed an ill wind that had blown them away from their planned destination; later, it would prove a remarkable stroke of fortune.

Jasper had hoped to seek the protection of his cousin the French king Louis XI, who had previously sheltered the earl at his court and had awarded him a pension. Arriving in Brittany as he had done, this was now out of the question. Instead, he would need to seek asylum at the court of Duke Francis. As soon as they landed, news reached Francis of the Tudors’ arrival. Sending a ‘good and safe guard’ to meet the new arrivals to his shore, Jasper and Henry were accompanied to the ducal palace, the Château de l’Hermine at the walled hilltop city of Vannes, where Duke Francis II was residing. There Jasper ‘submitted himself and his nephew to his protection’. The duke knew that both would be valued pawns in any future diplomatic games between France and England; he received his new guests ‘willingly, and with such honour, courtesy, and favour’. Treating them as if ‘they had been his brothers’, he pledged to Jasper that he would protect him and his nephew ‘from injury, and pass as their pleasure to and fro without danger’. The chronicler Philippe de Commynes was present at the duke’s court when Henry and Jasper arrived at Vannes. ‘The duke,’ he observed, ‘treated them very gently as prisoners.’

By late September, news of Jasper and Henry’s escape was common knowledge. Sir John Paston wrote to his brother that ‘it is said that the Earl of Pembroke is taken on to Brittany; and men say that the King shall have delivery of him hastily, and some say that the King of France will see him safe, and shall set him at liberty again’. When Edward IV heard the news of Jasper and Henry’s escape and safe landing in Brittany, discovering that they had been ‘courteously received and entertained’ by Francis, he was furious: ‘which matter indeed he took very greviously, as though his mind gave him that some evil would come thereby’. He sent secret messengers to Francis, promising great reward if he would hand over the earls.

The tactic backfired: Francis had already been ‘very merry’ when he discovered news of Henry’s arrival, knowing that ‘by having him in his grasp he could always command King Edward’ since if the French king had obtained possession of the boy, ‘he would have easily crowned him King of England’. Edward’s expressed interest in obtaining Henry and Jasper, seemingly at any cost, only increased the value of his captives; ‘the earls were so rich a prey’ he was determined not to release them, and instead kept them more closely guarded than before. He could not return them to England, he told Edward’s messengers, ‘by reason of his promise and fidelity’; instead he would ‘for his cause keep them so sure as there should be no occasion for him to suspect that they should ever procure his harm in any manner’. When the ambassadors returned to the English court with Francis’s message, Edward was determined to ensure the duke stuck to his word, writing further to Francis, calling on his ‘honour, good fame, and constancy’ to keep Jasper and Henry under arrest, promising at the same time money, aid and ‘huge gifts’ if he would do so. Understanding the advantage that possession of the Tudors had brought him, Francis knew that he would need to prevent their escape. He ordered that Jasper’s personal servants be removed, and that his own men were placed around the two earls, ‘to wait upon and guard them’.