A Brief History of the Tudor Age (2 page)

T
HE
T
UDOR
A
GE
began on 7 August 1485, when Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, landed at Milford Haven at the
head of an army of 2,000 soldiers, intending to overthrow Richard III and make himself King of England in Richard’s place.

Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was very dubious. His grandfather, Owain ap Meredith ap Tewdwr, was a Welsh gentleman who had enlisted in Henry V’s army and fought in the great
victory of Agincourt. Like all Welshmen, Owain had only patronymics, and no surname; but in England they treated his grandfather’s name, Tewdwr, as if it were Owain’s surname, and
called him Owen Tudor. When Henry V died in 1422, and his nine-month-old son became King Henry VI, Owen became an officer in the baby King’s bodyguard.

The Queen Mother was the French Princess whom Henry V had married after his conquest of France – Shakespeare’s ‘fair Katherine of France’. She was only twenty when she
became a widow, and within a few years she had noticed Owen Tudor. According to a story which was current at the time, or shortly afterwards, she first heard about him when she was told that he was
trying to seduce one of her ladies-in-waiting, and had made
an assignation to meet the lady in a gallery in the palace. The indignant Queen Mother decided to teach Owen a lesson
by disguising herself as the lady-in-waiting and administering him a sharp rebuff. Instead, she fell in love with him. Whatever the truth of this story, there is no doubt that she became his
mistress, and they were probably secretly married.

The Duke of Gloucester, who was Lord Protector for the infant King, was very angry that Owen had presumed to marry the Queen Dowager without his consent. Owen was eventually clapped into prison,
and Katherine was forced to retire to a convent, where she died at an early age; but before this, they had had three sons and one daughter. When Henry VI became old enough to exercise the royal
power himself he released Owen from prison. Henry maintained very friendly relations with his Tudor half-brothers, and created Edmund Tudor, the eldest son of Owen and Katherine, Earl of
Richmond.

The children of the Queen Mother by a subsequent marriage to a commoner had of course no claim at all to the throne; but Edmund Tudor married Lady Margaret Beaufort, who was the
great-granddaughter of King Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, by John of Gaunt’s mistress, Katherine Swynford. John of Gaunt married Katherine Swynford, after the
death of his first wife, and a special Act of Parliament was passed which legitimized their bastard children; but there was a provision in the Act that although the children were to be regarded as
legitimate, they were not entitled to succeed to the crown of England.

Margaret Beaufort was only twelve when she married Edmund Tudor, and in January 1437, when she was thirteen, she gave birth to her son, Henry Tudor. By this time, Henry VI’s right to the
throne had been challenged by Richard Duke of York. Henry VI was descended from John of Gaunt, who was Edward III’s fourth son, by John of Gaunt’s first wife. The Duke of York was
descended on his father’s side from Edward III’s fifth son, but on his mother’s side from Edward’s third son, so in law his claim to the throne was better than Henry
VI’s. This led to civil war
between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians. Today we call this civil war the Wars of the Roses, because the Yorkists adopted a white rose, and
the Lancastrians a red rose, as their emblems. The chroniclers who wrote about the war in the sixteenth century called it ‘the Wars between the Royal Houses of York and Lancaster’; but,
contrary to what has sometimes been stated, the phrase ‘the wars between the Roses’ was occasionally used in the Tudor Age.

By 1471 the Yorkists had won the Wars of the Roses, and their leader, Edward Duke of York, had become King Edward IV. He imprisoned and murdered Henry VI; and Henry VI’s son, Edward Prince
of Wales, was killed in battle. The only surviving Lancastrian who had any claim to the throne was Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. He escaped abroad, and became a refugee in Brittany, which for a
few more years, until 1491, remained a sovereign state independent of France.

Before long, the victorious Yorkists were quarrelling among themselves. When Edward IV died, his brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, alleged that Edward’s infant children were bastards,
and made himself King Richard III. He had several of the leading Yorkist nobles beheaded, and based his support chiefly on the gentlemen of Yorkshire, which he had governed for Edward IV. It was
widely believed at the time, both in England and abroad, that he murdered Edward IV’s two children in the Tower of London; and he never disproved this by parading the children through the
streets of London, which everyone would have expected him to do if they had still been alive.

After Henry Tudor became King Henry VII, it was officially announced that Richard III had murdered the children, and this has been generally believed for five hundred years; but a few writers in
the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought that Richard was innocent, and that the children were murdered after his death by Henry VII. Since 1930, this theory has been put
forward more vigorously than ever before; but most historians who have examined the question in depth believe that Richard was guilty. The case against Richard is much stronger
than the case against anyone else. There is not a shred of evidence that Henry VII murdered the children, and he was never accused of it by any of his enemies during his lifetime.

The Yorkist nobility in the south of England, after fighting in the Wars of the Roses, were not easily shocked by crimes and atrocities; but they were shocked that Richard III had murdered his
nephews, and were perhaps even more shocked by the prospect that they themselves might be murdered by Richard and their lands given to his northern supporters. Some of them plotted to overthrow
Richard and place Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, on the throne; and to strengthen Henry’s claim and win Yorkist support, they planned that he should marry Edward IV’s daughter,
Elizabeth of York, who was being held by Richard, virtually as a prisoner, at the castle of Sheriffhutton in Yorkshire.

On Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor took an oath in Rennes Cathedral in Brittany that if he became King of England he would marry Elizabeth of York. Richard persuaded the Duke of Brittany to
extradite Henry Tudor; but Henry escaped to France, and by the summer of 1485 he had assembled, with the help of the King of France, an army of 2,000 men. Apart from a few Lancastrian supporters
who were refugees in France, his force consisted of Breton, French and Scottish mercenaries, under the command of the Breton general, Philibert de Chaudée. Although he set out to win the
crown of England with this army composed almost entirely of French and Scots, the hated national enemies of the English, he was relying on the support of Englishmen, both Yorkists and Lancastrians,
whom he hoped would join him because they hated Richard III.

He sailed from Harfleur, and after a six-day voyage landed at Milford Haven on Sunday 7 August 1485. His original plan was to march as quickly as possible towards London to encourage the people
to rise in his support; but he heard at Milford Haven that Sir Walter Herbert, who supported Richard, was at Carmarthen with an army, barring his road to England and preparing to advance on Milford
Haven. He did not wish to fight a battle
until more supporters had joined him, so he marched north, along the shores of Cardigan Bay, till he reached Machynlleth. Despite his
Welsh origin, very few Welshmen joined him.

It was said, at the time, that near Machynlleth he met the local bard, David Llwyd ap Llewellyn, and asked him to foretell whether his expedition would end in victory or defeat. David said that
he could not give an immediate answer, but would think about it during the night, and tell Henry before he marched on next morning. David discussed the problem with his wife. She told him to tell
Henry that he would be victorious, because if he foretold this, and Henry did in fact win, Henry would reward him for his prophecy; but that if Henry lost, he would not survive to reproach David
for his error. David followed her advice. Whether this story is true or not, there is no doubt that David was made a gentleman of Henry’s bodyguard soon after the victory.

From Machynlleth, Henry marched due east through Wales. His army moved quickly, and eight days after their landing at Milford Haven had reached Shrewsbury, having marched 115 miles in eight
days. Henry was very worried, for he had completely failed to rally support; but at Shrewsbury his luck changed, and as he moved more slowly, by Newport, Stafford and Lichfield, to Tamworth, his
English supporters came to him. By the time he reached Atherstone in Warwickshire on 21 August, his army had increased to 3,000 men. Richard III, who had advanced from Nottingham to meet him, was
seven miles away in the village of Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire. He had an army of 18,000 men, but 8,000 of them were the followers of Lord Stanley, who had married Margaret Beaufort after
Edmund Tudor’s death. Stanley had a secret meeting with Henry Tudor at Atherstone, but had not yet definitely made up his mind on which side he and his men would fight.

On the morning of Monday 22 August, the armies of Richard and Henry fought a battle which was named the Battle of Bosworth from the nearby village of Market Bosworth. There has recently been
some dispute over the site of the battle, but it
was almost certainly at the foot of Ambion Hill, about half a mile west of Sutton Cheney. As Richard’s men charged down the
hill, Henry’s brave and seasoned soldiers had difficulty in holding their ground against a force about twice their size. But Lord Stanley’s brother William and his 8,000 men were
watching the battle from a position on the north of the battlefield, and were apparently remaining neutral. In desperation, Henry, escorted by a small bodyguard, galloped over to Stanley’s
position to tell Stanley that it was now or never, and to urge him to join in the battle at once on his side. Richard, at the top of Ambion Hill, saw what Henry was doing, and charged down on him
at the head of his men. At that moment, Sir William Stanley attacked Richard on his flank. His intervention decided the issue. Richard cut his way through to within a few yards of Henry, but there
he was killed. In those two or three minutes, the course of English history was settled.

After his victory, Henry sent men to fetch Elizabeth of York from Sheriffhutton, while he marched to London. There he summoned a Parliament, which immediately passed an Act declaring that he was
the rightful King of England. This had become the usual practice whenever a new King had succeeded in wresting the throne of England from the former King; but Henry’s claim to the throne was
so questionable that neither he nor Parliament, nor any of his spokesmen and supporters, ever stated the grounds on which he based his title. His wife Elizabeth, the Yorkist heiress, was in law the
rightful sovereign; but Henry did not wish to become King by right of his Yorkist wife, and made a point of postponing his marriage to her until after he had been crowned King and had exercised the
royal power for five months as an unmarried man. It was not easy for him to argue that he was the lawful heir through his mother’s descent from John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, since the
Act of Parliament which legitimized their children had expressly stated that they and their descendants could not succeed to the crown; and even if they could, what right had Henry to be King while
his mother was still alive? He seems to have thought at one time
of claiming the throne by right of conquest; but the Act of Parliament merely stated that he was undoubtedly the
rightful King, and that the truth of his claim had been proved by the fact that God had given him victory on the field of battle.