Tudor (66 page)

11
.
  
In the absence of any hard facts, fiction has provided the popular answers as to who did it, and when. On the one hand we have Shakespeare's Richard III: a biblical Herod, killer of innocents, whose hunchback is an outward sign of a disfigured soul. This built on a tradition that already existed. After the Tudor period, however, Shakespeare's demonising of Richard provoked a reaction and Henry Tudor was put in the frame. One of the most influential works in this regard is Josephine Tey's detective story,
Daughter of Time
. Written not long after Stalin's show trials, which strongly influenced Tey's viewpoint, the novel ‘proves' that the princes were killed because they had a better claim to the throne than Henry Tudor.

12
.
  
Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .' in op. cit., p. 24.

13
.
  
Commynes,
Memoirs, The Reign of Louis XI
, Introduction and pp. 354, 397.

14
.
  
This is drawn from Polydore Vergil. Thomas More, writing later during the reign of Henry VIII, claimed it was the other way round and that Morton had ‘turned' the duke to support Henry Tudor's distant Lancastrian claims.

15
.
  
Mancini,
Usurpation of Richard the Third
, pp. 90–1.

16
.
  
The physician was Lewis Caerleon.

17
.
  
Elizabeth Woodville had never shown any enthusiasm for such a match, and dropped it in the spring of 1485 when she considered Henry a busted flush.

18
.
  
That he took it seriously is also evident in the fact he would have Henry VI's body transferred the following year from its resting place at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey to St George's Chapel, Windsor. This was both a gesture of reconciliation, such as Henry V had made when he had Richard II's body translated to Westminster Abbey in 1413, but also an attempt to co-opt and take control of the cult.

19
.
  
Indeed it is exactly this role that he would come to play after 1485. Richard would first be accused by the Welsh poet Daffyd ap
Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of Mathafarn in 1485/6 of being ‘the sad lipped Saracen' (note the anti-Semitic description) ‘cruel Herod' who ‘slew Christ's Angels'. Jonathan Hughes,
The Religious Life of Richard III
(2000), p. 8.

20
.
  
Barbara Harris,
Edward Stafford 3rd Duke of Buckingham
(1986), pp. 29, 30.

21
.
  
On the deaths of the princes see the
Great Chronicle of London
(ed A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley) (1938), pp. 234–7. This was written by someone in London at the time. Also see Mancini,
Usurpation of Richard the Third
, pp. 92–3; then we have the later elaborations – or inventions – of Thomas More's
The History of Richard III
(ed R. S. Sylvester) (1963), pp. 88, 89, and his brother-in-law, John Rastell, quoted in Desmond Seward,
The Wars of the Roses
(1995), p. 364. For the story that their murder had been disguised as blood-letting, see I. Arthurson, ‘Perkin Warbeck and the Princes in the Tower' in
Much Heaving and Shaving: Essays for Colin Richmond
(eds M. Aston and R. Horrox) (2005), pp. 158–217. Polydore Vergil's
Anglica Historia
(ed and tr. D. Hay), Camden Third Series, Vol. 74 (1950) suggests the death of the princes was a punishment for Edward IV's killing of Clarence.

22
.
  
Griffiths and Thomas,
The Making of the Tudor Dynasty
, pp. 93, 94.

23
.
  
Croyland Chronicle at
http://www.r3.org/bookcase/croyland/croy8.html
.

24
.
  
Great Chronicle of London
(ed Thomas and Thornley), pp. 236–7.

7
     
The Exile

  
1
.
  
Henry was based at the Chateaux de l'Hermine.

  
2
.
  
Brother of the executed Richard Grey, and half-brother to the princes in the tower.

  
3
.
  
Described as a wart: ‘The Song of the Lady Bessy', Griffiths and Thomas p. 168. Popular around 1500 it survives only in versions that date from a century later. For full text see
http://www.archive.org/stream/mostpleasantsong00londrich/mostpleasantsong00londrich_djvu.txt
.

  
4
.
  
Henry may also have believed that Richard was involved in the death of Henry VI. ‘Of the death of [Henry VI] diverse tales were told, but the most common fame went, that he was sticked with a dagger, by the hands of the duke of Gloucester' (Robert Gaugin's
Compendium
(1497). See Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .', op.cit., p. 22).

  
5
.
  
Henry was still sending gifts to the cathedral in 1502, and St Vincent's intercession is sought in Henry's will. Margaret Condon, ‘The Last Will of Henry VII' in
Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII
(ed T. Tatton-Brown and R. Mortimer) (2003), p. 133.

  
6
.
  
Virginia K. Henderson, ‘Rethinking Henry VII: The Man and His Piety in the Context of the Observant Franciscans' in
Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe
(ed D. Biggs, S. D. Michalove and A. C. Reeves) (2004), n. 111 p. 344.

  
7
.
  
Buckingham's former prisoner turned ally, the Bishop of Ely, John Morton, had escaped England and had a spy at Richard's court. In August or September 1484 Morton contacted Henry from his place of exile in Burgundy and warned him that plans were laid in Brittany for his arrest. Pierre Landais was the same man the duke had sent at the last minute to prevent Henry's repatriation in 1476. On Duke Francis' senility, see Robert J. Knecht,
The Valois
(2004), pp. 108, 109.

  
8
.
  
Vergil,
Three Books
, pp. 206, 307. To the relief of the remaining exiles in Britanny Duke Francis was so embarrassed to discover his Tudor guests had been obliged to flee that he paid their passage to follow Henry.

  
9
.
  
Anne disliked Richard's rapprochement with Brittany. But the situation in France was far from stable. Anne had a rival for the regency in the senior prince of the blood, Louis, Duke of Orléans.

10
.
  
There are those that argue that her subsequent return to court
proves she didn't believe Richard had killed the princes. But this document spells out pretty clearly what she feared for her daughters at his hands without a written agreement. And if the princes' fate was unknown, Richard's execution of her other son Richard Grey, and her brother, Lord Rivers, was acknowledged. She was simply doing the best she could for her daughters just as Frances, Duchess of Suffolk would do in the next century when she and her younger daughters served as ladies-in-waiting to Mary I, after the queen had executed her husband and elder daughter, Lady Jane Dudley in February 1554. British Library Harleian MSS 443, f. 308.

11
.
  
Davies, ‘Information, disinformation . . .' , op. cit., p. 47. Vergil was wrong to claim that Henry planned to marry Maude Herbert instead. She was already married to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (see
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
entry). Maude's brother, William Herbert 2nd Earl of Pembroke, had been married to Richard's bastard daughter, Katherine, in February 1484.

8
     
Bosworth

  
1
.
  
Original letters illustrative of English history; including numerous royal letters: from autographs in the British Museum, and one or two other collections
(ed H. Ellis) (second series, 1827), Vol. 1, p. 163.

  
2
.
  
‘The Song of Lady Bessy': Helen Cooper,
The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare
(2004), p. 346.

  
3
.
  
The Mortimers were descended from Cadwaladr through the Welsh prince Llywelyn the Great. By contrast the Tudors' closest verifiable connection was an ancestor who had been an officer of Llywelyn's. Virginia K. Henderson, ‘Retrieving the “Crown in the Hawthorn Bush”: The Origins of the Badges of Henry VII' in
Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England
(ed D. Biggs, S. D. Michalove and A. C. Reeves) (2002), n. 41, p. 255.

  
4
.
  
The narratives were attached to painted genealogies circulated at court. Alison Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda: Pedigree, Prophecy and the “British History” in the Reign of Edward IV' in
Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England
(ed Charles Ross) (1979), pp. 171–92. The prophecy begins as follows: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Book 7, Chapter 3: The Prophecy of Merlin: ‘As Vortegirn, king of the Britons, was sitting upon the bank of the drained pond, the two dragons, one of which was white, the other red, came forth, and approaching one another, began a terrible fight, and cast forth fire with their breath. But the white dragon had the advantage, and made the other fly to the end of the lake. And he, for grief at his flight, renewed the assault upon his pursuer, and forced him to retire. After this battle of the dragons, the king commanded Ambrose Merlin to tell him what it portended. Upon which he, bursting into tears, delivered what his prophetical spirit suggested to him, as follows: “Woe to the red dragon, for his banishment hasteneth on. His lurking holes shall be seized by the white dragon, which signifies the Saxons whom you invited over; but the red denotes the British nation, which shall be oppressed by the white. Therefore shall its mountains be levelled as the valleys, and the rivers of the valleys shall run with blood. The exercise of religion shall be destroyed, and churches be laid open to ruin. At last the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners. For a boar of Cornwall shall give his assistance, and trample their necks under his feet.”'
http://www.caerleon.net/history/geoffrey/Prophecy1.htm
.

  
5
.
  
Sydney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda' in
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
44 (1961–2), pp. 17–48, esp. pp. 23, 24, 37, 38. And these stories inspired other prophecies. A notable example describes the overthrow of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke and prophesies how this act of injustice was to be avenged by a king who would come to the throne in 1460 – the year Edward was crowned (according to the contemporary
method of dating the year from the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March).

  
6
.
  
David Starkey, ‘King Henry and King Arthur' in
Arthurian Literature
16 (ed James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy) (1998), p. 181.

  
7
.
  
Philippe de Commynes, quoted in Griffiths and Thomas,
The Making of the Tudor Dynasty
, p. 129.

  
8
.
  
Blaauw, ‘On the Effigy . . .' in op. cit., pp. 25, 38, 39.

  
9
.
  
R. A. Griffiths, ‘Henry Tudor: The Training of a King' in
Huntington Library Quarterly
49, No. 3 (summer 1986), pp. 208, 209.

10
.
  
It also helped that she was a woman: as Polydore Vergil observed, ‘the working's of a woman's wit was thought of small account'. Vergil,
Three Books
, p. 204.

11
.
  
Sir William was chamberlain of Chester and chief justice of north Wales.

12
.
  
According to legend the Dun Cow was a ‘monstrous beast four yards high and six yards long', providing an inexhaustible supply of milk to people in Shropshire. One day a woman decided to see if the cow would fill a sieve. This so enraged the cow that it broke loose and ran amok. It was slain on Dunsmore Heath near Rugby by the mythical Guy of Warwick from whom the Nevilles claimed descent. There is a theory that ‘Dun Cow' is a corruption of ‘Dena Gau', or Danish region, and that Guy of Warwick defeated the Danes there. Henry could recruit amongst the Neville affinity because Warwick the Kingmaker had died in the Lancastrian cause, and although Richard III had married his daughter, Anne Neville, when she died Henry's allies had spread rumours successfully that Richard had poisoned her. DeLloyd J. Guth ‘Richard III, Henry VII and the City' in op. cit., pp. 192, 197, 198. In the seventeenth century the Cow's rib was at Warwick Castle.

13
.
  
Great Chronicle of London
in
English Historical Documents Vol. 5 1485–1558
(ed David Douglas) (1967), p. 110.

14
.
  
Ibid.; Vergil,
Three Books
, p. 222.

15
.
  
Great Chronicle of London
in op. cit., p. 110.