The House of Tudor (2 page)

1: A BULL OF ANGLESEY

A Bull of Anglesey demanding satisfaction - He is the hope of our race.

When the bull comes from the far land to battle with his great ashen spear,
To be an earl again in the land of Llewelyn,
Let the far-splitting spear shed the blood of the Saxon on the stubble...
When the long yellow summer comes and victory comes to us
And the spreading of the sails of Brittany,
And when the heat comes and when the fever is kindled,
There are portents that victory will be given to us...

sang the bards in the ‘long yellow summer’ of 1485, as they waited for the fleet which would carry ‘the one who will strike’, Henry Earl of Richmond, the black bull of Anglesey, the peacock of Tudor, back to the land of his fathers. There was long for Harry, they sang, whose name ‘comes down from the mountains as a two-edged sword’, for 
mab y darogan
, the long promised hero who would fulfil the prophesy of Myrddin the wizard, who would deliver his people from the Saxon oppressor and bring content to the blessed land of Gwynedd.

‘The most wise and fortunate Henry VII is a Welshman’, remarked the Italian author of 
A Relation of the Island of Britain
, and although the Welshness of the first Henry Tudor can easily be (and often is) exaggerated, Henry himself was fully aware of the importance which should be attached to the fulfilment of bardic prophesies. He was also conscious of the political advantages to be gained by polishing his image as ‘a high-born Briton of the stocck of Maegwyn’ - prince of the line of Cadwaladr of the beautiful spear. At any rate, David Powel, writing in 1584, says that the king appointed a three-man commission to enquire into the matter of his pedigree and that these seekers after the knowledge, having consulted the bards and other appropriate authorities, ‘drew his perfect genelogie from the ancient Kings of Brytaine and Princes of Wales’.

It must be admitted that the actual origins of the House of Tudor do not quite match the imaginative flights of the Abbot of Valle Crucis, Dr. Poole, canon of Hereford and John King, herald. At the same time, the historical story of the family’s rise, untidy and incomplete though it is, should be romantic enough for most people.

The first identifiable forbear of the Welsh Tudors was Ednyfed Fychan, who flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century. Ednyfed followed a successful and profitable career in the service of Llewelyn the Great and his son David, princes of Gwynedd (that is, North Wales). He was rewarded by grantts of land in Anglesey and Caernarvon, and also acquired estates in West Wales. Ednyfed married, as his second wife, Gwenllian, daughter of Rhys, prince of South Wales, and his sons, Tudur and Goronwy, inherited both his office of seneschal, or steward to the rulers of Gwynedd, and his considerable property.

The final subjugation of Wales by England in the early 1280s does not seem to have had any adverse effect on the family fortunes. Like a good many other native magnates, Ednyfed’s grandson, Tudur hen ap Goronwy, probably supported the English Crown - at least he is recorded as having done homage to Edward of Caernarvon, the first English Prince of Wales, in 1301. By the middle of the century, this Tudur’s grandson, another Tudur ap Goronwy, was established as an important landowner and a member of the new gentry class which had begun to emerge out of the decay of the old Welsh tribal society.

But unfortunately for the descendants of Ednyfed Fychan, the old Welsh tribal loyalties were not yet dead. Tudur ap Goronwy the Second had married a sister of Owain Glyn Dwr, and when Glyn Dwr rose in revolt against Henry IV at the beginning of the 1400s, Tudor’s surviving sons came out for their uncle. In fact, in a highly complicated political situation, the loyalties involved may have been as much English as Welsh. Glyn Dwr is said to have served in Richard II’s army and we know that three of the Tudur brothers had been at one time in Richard’s retinue. But whatever their motives in joining the revolt, it was to prove disastrous for the Tudur clan - as indeed it did for Wales in general.

Harsh reprisals were taken against the rebels and, according to the chronicler Adam of Usk, Rhys ap Tudur was executed at Chester in 1412. All the Tudur estates were confiscated, although one property - Penmynydd in Anglesey - was eventually recovered by the heirs of the eldest brother, Goronwy. The senior branch of the family, who took to spelling their name Theodor, remained at Penmynydd, obscure country squires taking a modest part in local affairs, until the line finally petered out towards the end of the seventeenth century, leaving nothing behind but some monuments of Penmynydd Church. And that might very well have been the whole story - if it were not for the quirk of fate which had taken the son of the youngest brother, Maredudd, into the household of Henry v.

Very little is known about Maredudd or Meredith, ancestor of the royal Tudors, except that he is said to have held some office under the Bishop of Bangor and to have been escheator of Anglesey. There is a tradition that he had to flee from justice after killing a man and that his son was born while he was on the run. But no one knows exactly where or when Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, more conveniently, Owen Tudor, was born, though it must have been in the early 1400s. Nor does anyone know exactly how or when he entered the royal service. All we know for certain is that at some point in the 1420s Owen became Clerk of the Wardrobe to Henry V’s widow, Katherine of Valois, and that in 1429, or it may have been in 1432, he and the Queen were married.

The traditional story goes that Owen and Katherine contrived to conceal their love from the world until, one day, their secret was betrayed to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Protector of the Realm. Gloucester immediately incarcerated the Queen in a nunnery, where she died of a broken heart, and threw Owen into prison. From the known facts, scanty though they are, it is possible to piece together a rather less pathetic, if no less extraordinary sequence of events.

Although all the circumstances surrounding the romance of the French princess and the ‘gentleman of Wales’ which was to have such far-reaching consequences for England remain shrouded in mystery, it seems reasonable to assume tradition is right in saying that Owen and Katherine fell in love. At least, it seems reasonable to assume that Katherine fell in love. Shakespeare regardless, her short-lived marriage to Henry V had been a matter of high politics. She was barely twenty when she became a widow and her son, ‘Harry born at Windsor’ and destined to lose all the glory his famous father had won, became King at the age of nine months. As Queen Dowager, Katherine’s position was not a happy one. She had no say in the government and none to speak of in the upbringing of her little son. Bored, lonely and with nothing to look forward to but the prospect of a lifetime of barren exile, she would naturally be susceptible to the attentions of an attractive man -’following more her appetite than friendly counsel and regarding more her private affections than her open honour’, as the chronicler Edward Hall was to put it.

There are no strictly contemporary descriptions of Owen Tudor, but Hall says he was ‘a goodly gentleman and a beautiful person’ and Polydore Vergil, who began his
History of England
in the reign of Owen’s grandson, is enthusiastic about his ‘wonderful gifts of body and mind’. An earlier chronicler, with no royal Tudor patrons to consider, is noticeably less complimentary in a passing reference to ‘one Oweyn, no man of birth neither of livelihood’. All the same, Owen obviously had something to recommend him, and good looks and personal charm would seem to be the most likely attributes. We can only speculate - but the Queen and her Clerk of the Wardrobe would have been in daily contact, they were about the same age and both were strangers in a strange land. Perhaps it is not so surprising that they should have gravitated together.

The fact that the King’s mother had ‘privily wedded’ one of her servants was not advertised. The earliest known reference to it occurs in one of the London chronicles in a brief entry under the year 1538, and says that the common people knew nothing of it until after the Queen was dead and buried. This may well be true, and it also seems likely that the young King was kept in ignorance of his mother’s second marriage during her lifetime. But it must certainly have been common knowledge in court circles generally. At least, none of the traditional accounts explain how Katherine contrived to produce four Tudor babies -Edmund, born at the royal manor of Hadham in Hertfordshire, Jasper, born at Hatfield, another son, Owen, and a daughter - without anybody apparently noticing these interesting events. Everything, in fact, points to the conclusion that the Queen and her socially undesirable husband were left in peace to enjoy the all too brief period of their married life. When Katherine retired into the Abbey of Bermondsey some time in 1436 there is no evidence at all that this was due to anything but the ‘long and grievous illness’ which finally killed her on 3 January 1437.

After the Queen’s death, her second family broke up. Edmund and Jasper were placed in the care of the Abbess of Barking, who looked after them for the next three years. The two younger children have no part in this story, but Owen later became a monk at Westminster, surviving into his nephew’s reign, and the girl is said to have gone into a nunnery. As for their father, the remainder of his career has a distinct flavour of melodrama.

Shortly after Katherine’s death, a summons was issued by the Council requiring ‘one Owen Tudor which dwelled with the said Queen Katherine’ to come into the King’s presence. Owen evidently suspected a trap, for he declined to accept the invitation unless he was first given an assurance, in the King’s name, that he might ‘freely come and freely go’. A verbal promise to this effect was duly delivered by one Myles Sculle, but Owen was not satisfied. He did, however, make his way secretly to London where he went into sanctuary at Westminster, resisting the persuasions of his friends to come and disport himself in the tavern at Westminster gate. After a period of time described as ‘many days’, days no doubt spent in reconnoitring the situation, Owen emerged from his lair to make a sudden appearance in the royal presence. He had heard, he said, that the King was ‘heavily informed of him’ and was anxious to declare his innocence and truth. But almost certainly Henry, now fifteen years old, had just wanted to take a look at his unknown stepfather and Owen was allowed to depart ‘without any impeachment’. In fact, he had freely come and freely gone - but not for long.

Like so much else about him, the reason for Owen Tudor’s arrest and committal to ward in Newgate gaol remains a mystery. Polydore Vergil says it was ordered by the Duke of Gloucester because Owen ‘had been so presumptuous as by marriage with the Queen to intermix his blood with the noble race of kings’, but there is absolutely no evidence to support this assertion. In two obscurely worded documents, one of which is dated 15 July 1437, the Council were at considerable pains to establish the legality of the arrest, having regard to the King’s recent promise of safe conduct and also, it may be assumed, to the prisoner’s royal connections. In neither of these documents is any specific charge mentioned, but from the very meagre information they do contain, it looks as if Owen was involved in a private quarrel - probably of a financial nature - with some person or persons unknown.

The next news of him appears in the Chronicle of London, which records that he ‘brake out of Newgate against night at searching time, through help of his priest, and went his way, hurting foul his keeper; but at the last, blessed be God, he was taken again.’ This exploit took place early in 1438, for in March of that year Lord Beaumont received twenty marks to cover his expenses in guarding the fugitives and bringing them before the Council. Owen, his priest and his servant were sent back to Newgate in disgrace, but a sum of eighty-nine pounds which was found on the priest was confiscated and handed over to the Treasury. Who this enterprising cleric was, where that quite sizeable amount of money came from, and why Owen had been so desperate to escape are three more unanswered questions.

The belief that Owen broke prison twice seems to have arisen from a nineteenth-century misreading of the documents. He was transferred from Newgate to Windsor Castle in July 1438, a move which is again unexplained but which seems to have marked the beginning of an improvement in his fortunes. In July of the following year he was conditionally released - one of the conditions being that he made no attempt to go to Wales or ‘parts adjacent’. Presumably the authorities were remembering the old Tudor involvement with Glyn Dwr. At last, in November 1439, he was granted a general pardon for all offences committed before October, though there is still no indication as to what those offences had been.

Owen had spent three years in gaol without trial and a further four months on probation, but from then on he became respectable. The King, ‘moved by special causes’, provided him with a pension of forty pounds a year, paid out of the privy purse ‘by especial favour’ and his name crops up from time to time over the next twenty years in the Calendars of the Close and Patent Rolls as witness to a charter, as sharing in the grant of a holding at Lambeth, as receiving an annuity of a hundred pounds; but it is an entry of 1459 which is the most significant historically, for it was then that Owen ap Meredith ap Tudur seems to have finally become Owen Tudor esquire. Owen himself followed the normal Welsh custom of adding his father’s name to his own - at least he referred to himself as Owen ap Meredith in his petition for letters of denizenship in 1432. In official documents he is variously described as Owen ap Meredith, Owen Meredith, Owen ap Meredith ap Tudur (or Tider) until 1459, when a hurrying clerk wrote him down as Owen Tuder and gave England a Tudor instead of a Meredith dynasty.

While their father was enduring his mysterious difficulties and gradually winning his way back into polite society, Edmund and Jasper Tudor were growing up. In November 1452 they were created Earls of Richmond and Pembroke respectively and thereafter were granted lands and offices by the Crown. In fact, the gentle, devout, ineffectual Henry VI showed both his half-brothers a remarkable degree of generosity, but never more so than when it came to choosing a wife for the new Earl of Richmond. On 1 November 1455, Edmund Tudor married Margaret Beaufort - an event which took him a giant step up the social ladder and which was to have an incalculable effect on the whole course of English history.