The House of Tudor (3 page)

The Beaufort family was the result of a long-ago liaison between John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and his daughters’ governess, Katherine Swynford, née de Roet. Their four children were indisputably born on the wrong side of the blanket, but after the death of his second wife John of Gaunt had made an honest woman of Katherine, and his Beaufort progeny (so called after the castle in France where they were born) had been legitimized by the Pope, by Letters Patent issued by Richard 11 and, for good measure, by Act of Parliament. The Beauforts grew rich and powerful - Cardinal Beaufort, last survivor of Katherine Swynford’s brood, had governed England with the Duke of Gloucester during Henry VI’s minority - and after the King and his heirs they represented the ruling family of Lancaster.

The bestowal of Margaret Beaufort, a great-great-granddaughter of Edward in, was a matter of State and what prompted the King to grant first the wardship and then the marriage of this important heiress of the blood royal to such a junior member of the peerage, son of an obscure Welsh esquire but with possibly complicating royal connections, is yet another mystery. Perhaps, at a time of increasing political instability, Henry simply felt that the Tudors at least could be trusted to remain loyal Lancastrians. If so, he was to be proved right.

Edmund’s marriage coincided with the outbreak of that long-drawn-out dynastic struggle among the all too numerous descendants of Edward III, conveniently known as the Wars of the Roses. The roots of the quarrel went back to the
coup d’'état
of 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke had wrested the crown from his cousin Richard, and, like most family quarrels, it became progressively more bitter and more complicated with the passage of time.

Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, did not live to see its outcome. Nor did he live to see his son. He died at Carmarthen in November 1456, leaving his young wife six months pregnant. Jasper at once came to the rescue, taking his brother’s widow under his protection, and Margaret Beaufort’s child was born at Pembroke Castle on 28 January 1457. There is an interesting tradition that the baby was to have been christened Owen (which sounds like Jasper’s choice), but that his mother insisted he should be given the royal and English name of Henry. Although the Countess of Richmond was herself little more than a child - she was probably only twelve years old at the time of her marriage - this sort of determination would have been perfectly in character. An intelligent, serious-minded, deeply religious girl, she later developed into a formidable personality, exercising a profound influence on the dynasty she had founded.

In the general turmoil of the 1450s the arrival of a fatherless infant in a wintry and uncertain world attracted no particular attention, and for the first five years of his life Henry Tudor stayed with his mother, snug in his uncle Jasper’s stronghold of Pembroke. Not that he saw much of his uncle Jasper. The fortunes of the Tudor family were now inextricably involved with those of the Lancastrian cause and as the deadly power-game of York and Lancaster unfolded, the Earl of Pembroke was proving himself one of Henry VI’s most useful supporters.

At first things went relatively well but early in 1461 came disaster, when the Lancastrians were heavily defeated at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross. One casualty of this reversal was Owen Tudor, quite an old man by now but who had nevertheless been present fighting under Jasper’s banner. Owen was among those captured by the Yorkists and taken to Hereford to be executed in the market place. It is ironical, but not untypical of his whole story, that it is not until the moment of his death that we get our only authentic personal glimpse of the man who sired a line of kings and whose remote descendants sit on the English throne today. It seems that the gentleman of Wales could not bring himself to believe that his luck had turned at last, for William Gregory’s chronicle says that he trusted ‘all away that he should not be headed till he saw the axe and the block, and when that he was in his doublet he trusted on pardon and grace till the collar of his red velvet doublet was ripped off. Then he said “that head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Katherine’s lap” and put his heart and mind wholly unto God and full meekly took his death.’ His head was displayed on the highest step of the market cross and there followed a gruesome incident when ‘a mad woman combed his hair and washed away the blood of his face, and she got candles and set about him burning more than a hundred’.

Jasper, tough, energetic and resourceful, escaped from Mortimer’s Cross with his life - though that was about all he escaped with. Some six weeks later the Yorkist Earl of March was proclaimed King as Edward IV and another Lancastrian defeat, at Towton, soon confirmed his position. Henry vi’s indomitable Queen, Margaret of Anjou, managed to keep the fight alive for a time, but eventually she and her son were forced to take refuge in France. Henry himself, reduced to a wandering fugitive, was betrayed to his enemies and deposited in the Tower. The eclipse of the Lancastrians seemed complete.

It was not long, of course, before the misfortunes of his relatives rebounded on the little boy at Pembroke. Jasper Tudor, wanted for treason by the new regime and stripped of his lands and title, was reported ‘flown and taken to the mountains’. With the best will in the world he no longer had any power to protect his nephew and his sister-in-law. Pembroke Castle surrendered to the Yorkists in November 1461, and Henry Tudor was separated from his mother and transferred to the custody of Lord Herbert of Raglan. It must have been a traumatic experience for a child of four-and-a-half, but his new guardian seems to have treated him kindly. In fact Lord Herbert planned to marry him to his daughter, Maud, so it is reasonable to assume that he was brought up as one of the family and given an education proper to his station in life. The names of two of his tutors are known, and he is said to have been an apt pupil.

Young Henry remained with the Herberts in Wales for the next nine years. The existence of this obscure sprig of the ruined Lancastrians did not cause the ruling Yorkist party to lose any sleep. Henry Tudor was being raised in a reliable Yorkist family - he would have plenty of opportunity to see where his own best interests lay. Then came a dramatic series of developments which temporarily altered the whole political situation, and permanently and drastically altered the status of Lord Herbert’s ward.

In 1469 Edward IV fell out with his most powerful supporter, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as ‘the Kingmaker’. Warwick went over to the other side and by the summer of 1470 he was in France, burying the hatchet with Queen Margaret, once his bitterest enemy, and canvassing the support of Louis XI for another
coup d’état
. By the autumn a remarkable triple alliance had been sealed. Edward, caught unawares, found it necessary to go abroad in a hurry and the brief ‘Readeption’ of Henry VI had begun.

Prominent among the returning exiles was Jasper Tudor, who had spent most of his years in the wilderness conducting a one-man guerrilla campaign against the Yorkist regime - moving from one safe house to another in Wales, then turning up in Ireland, then Scotland, making a descent on the Northumbrian coast, over to France (where King Louis recognized him as cousin), then landing in Wales again with fifty followers to make a commando-type raid on Denbigh Castle. ‘Not always at his heart’s ease, nor in security of life or surety of living’ Jasper never gave up and missed no chance, however unpromising, of keeping a spark of resistance alight.

One of his first actions on arriving in England was to make the journey to Wales to retrieve his nephew, whom he found ‘kept as a prisoner, but honourably brought up with the wife of William Herbert’. Jasper took the boy, now rising fourteen, back to London with him, and early in November Henry Tudor was presented to Henry VI. It is natural that Jasper should have been anxious to remind the newly restored King of the existence of his brother’s son, but Polydore Vergil was probably improving on the occasion when he records that Henry VI, after gazing silently on the child for ‘a pretty space’, turned to his attendant lords and remarked: ‘This truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.’ Admittedly the King was widely regarded as a holy man and a mystic who might be expected to feel moved to prophecy, but very few Englishmen in that unsettled winter would have been prepared to commit themselves for more than a few days ahead, and to the practical men of affairs at Court Henry Tudor’s future would have looked as precarious and uncertain as their own.

In spite of his signal services to the Lancastrian cause, there was no government appointment or seat on the Council for Jasper Tudor. He and his nephew were sent back to Wales with instructions to be ready to mobilize their people should the war be renewed, but Jasper did at least have the satisfaction of recovering his earldom from the Herbert family. Even this was short lived. Barely six months after his flight, Edward IV was back in England re-proclaiming himself King. On Easter Day 1471, he defeated Warwick’s army at Barnet - a battle fought, appropriately enough, in thick fog. The Kingmaker was killed and Henry VI, ‘a man amazed and utterly dulled with troubles and adversity’, found himself back in the Tower.

On the day that Barnet was being lost and won, Queen Margaret and her son, Edward Prince of Wales, landed at Weymouth - too late to save the situation. Together with the Lancastrian lords who rallied to them, they marched up the Severn valley, hoping to join forces with Jasper Tudor and his Welshmen hurrying down from the north. But Edward IV, moving with his usual speed and tactical skill, intercepted the Queen at Tewkesbury - an encounter which ended in final and complete disaster for the Lancastrians. The last surviving male members of the Beaufort family lost their lives and the Prince of Wales, for whose sake his mother had striven so long and so gallantly, was killed as he tried to escape. On Tuesday, 21 May, King Edward returned to London in triumph and that same night, ‘between eleven and twelve of the clock’, King Henry was released from his earthly troubles by a Yorkist sword.

When Jasper heard the grim news that Queen Margaret ‘was vanquished in a foughten field at Tewkesbury and that matters were past all hope of recovery’, he retreated to Chepstow, where he narrowly escaped capture and death. Again a hunted fugitive, Jasper had to move fast if he was to be able to perform one more vitally important service for the future of his party. After the horrifying events of the past few weeks, his young nephew had incredibly become the only surviving male of the Lancastrian line. At all costs Henry Tudor must be prevented from falling into Yorkist hands.

It is not entirely clear whether Henry was with his uncle’s army - more likely he had been left behind at Pembroke. At any rate, Jasper made straight for Pembroke from Chepstow and was promptly besieged in the castle by Morgan Thomas, acting on instructions from Edward IV. But the Tudor luck held. Morgan Thomas’s brother David was an old friend of Jasper’s, and after about a week he succeeded in getting uncle and nephew through the ‘ditch and trench’ of the besiegers’ lines. Jasper and Henry, with a small party of servants and followers, reached the coast at Tenby where they found a ship, helped it is said by Thomas White, mayor of the town. It would be fourteen years before they saw Wales again.

The refugees were making for France where they might reasonably expect to be granted political asylum. But, fortunately as it turned out, a storm blew them on to the coast of Brittany. According to Polydore Vergil, Duke Francis II ‘received them willingly, and with such honour, courtesy and favour entertained them as though they had been his brothers, promising them upon his honour that within his dominion they should be from thenceforth far from injury, and pass at their pleasure to and fro without danger.’

Not surprisingly Edward IV had not been pleased by the Tudors’ escape and attempted to bribe Duke Francis into giving them up - with the inevitable result of impressing the Duke with a sense of the value of his guests. He had promised them asylum, he told the English ambassador, and of course he could not break his word, but he would undertake to keep uncle and nephew ‘so surely’ that the King of England need not be afraid ‘they should ever procure his harm any manner of way’. Edward was obliged to agree to this arrangement, which proved highly advantageous to Brittany. Jasper and Henry were separated, deprived of their English servants and guarded instead by Bretons, while in return Duke Francis collected a handsome pension from King Edward.

We know virtually nothing about how Henry and Jasper passed their years of confinement. Their material needs would have been provided for; they would have had books and music and been able to take exercise, but all the same - for Henry especially - it must have been a singularly cheerless existence. Time was passing and Henry Tudor was growing into a man helpless to defend himself, entirely dependent on the goodwill of a protector who might at any moment be subjected to irresistible pressures from outside. Fretting in his Breton gaol, he can have seen very little prospect of ever being able to lead a normal life, or indeed of ever being in a position to recover his father’s earldom of Richmond.

Then suddenly, in April 1483, Edward IV was dead. His two small sons fell into the hands of their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and were lodged in the Tower of London, pending the coronation of the thirteen-year-old Edward v. But before this could take place, Gloucester had made the interesting discovery that Edward IV’s marriage to Queen Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid and that his children were therefore illegitimate. By the end of June Richard of Gloucester had been proclaimed King and it was noticed that the young princes were no longer to be seen shooting and playing in the Tower gardens. Yet another successful
coup d’'état
had apparently been accomplished. The Yorkists, though, were still in the saddle, and on the face of it there seemed no particular reason why the fortunes of the exiled Lancastrians should be affected one way or the other. Nevertheless, within three months there was to be a sensational improvement in their circumstances.