The Last Plantagenets (48 page)

T
HERE was clear evidence now that the Plantagenet stock was changing with the passing of the years and becoming diluted through foreign marriages. The uniformity of stature, the strength, the startling good looks were not as apparent as before. Other strains were showing themselves: the flaxen hair of the Netherlands, the Valois nose, the Castilian duskiness, the black hair of the Mortimers. But at this stage there entered on the scene a young man who was completely and perfectly Plantagenet.

Edward, Earl of March, oldest son of Richard of York, stood six foot three in his bare feet. He had the exact shade of blue eyes, the strong but handsome features, the proper share of gold in his hair. The age had many expressions of characteristic vulgarity meaning the same as the later and more polite “squire of dames,” and they fitted Edward as closely as the hose on his splendid legs. It was said that he owed his popularity in London to the secret passion that all housewives entertained for him. Even when he reached middle age and became heavy, even a little bloated as well as careless in his dress, he was still so handsome that women could not resist him.

He had in his heart no scruples, no mercy, no fear. And of supreme importance at this point in history, he had a fighting heart and a gift for generalship which put him head and shoulders above the other leaders of the day. In his mastery of strategy, he inclined to what was sometimes called the modern school, the enlightened methods of warfare introduced by another Englishman a century before, that superlative leader of professional armies, John Hawkwood.

The Wars of the Roses did not end at once with Edward’s appearance
on the scene, but the ultimate triumph of the White Rose became inevitable.

Unaware at first of his father’s defeat and death, young Edward moved out of Shrewsbury with a large army to join Richard in the north. At Gloucester he learned of the disaster at Wakefield and realized that the finger of destiny had touched his shoulder. It was now his right, or at least his opportunity, to win the throne of England. Pausing long enough to recruit his army to 30,000 men, he wheeled south and destroyed at Mortimer’s Cross an army of mercenaries from France, Brittany, and Ireland under the Earl of Wiltshire and one of the king’s half brothers, Jasper Tudor. It was here that a miracle of nature was observed. Before the battle began there appeared to be three suns in the sky and this, for some reason, convinced Edward that he was certain to win.

It was not the nature of this nineteen-year-old leader to delay or to temper his designs with devious reasoning. He marched straight to a junction with the defeated army of Warwick and then on to London, while Margaret withdrew into the north. A council was held at Baynard’s Castle and the young victor had no difficulty in convincing the others present that he was now the rightful King of England. The next day, March 4, 1461, he walked into Westminster Hall, a resplendent vision in rich blue velvet with plumes in his cap, seated himself on the throne, and announced himself king.

Parliament was not sitting, but Edward had no intention of waiting for a new House to convene. Thrones had been lost that way. The people of London had filled the hall. Outside, the streets were black with cheering spectators. Trumpets were sounded and then a herald demanded if the people would accept this new king. A mighty shout was the answer.

“Yea! Yea!” cried the trained bands and the wealthy men of the guilds. If the shades of John of Gaunt and his own father, Richard of York, both of whom had coveted the throne but had temporized, lacking the resolution to act in this direct way, were listening and watching, they undoubtedly said to themselves, “This is what I should have done.”

Edward, the perfect man of action, did not sit down in London to enjoy the ease and the sweet taste of success in his mouth. He marched immediately to the north and fought a battle at Towton near Tadcaster in Yorkshire. The combined armies were over 100,000 in size, the Lancastrians
having a slight advantage in numbers. It proved to be the bloodiest battle ever waged on English soil.

Fought on the converging slopes of a wide division in the hills, it was at first a contest between archers. The Yorkists had the better of it because a snowstorm came up and blew across the depression into the faces of the Lancastrians. The latter troops were under a continuously heavy barrage of arrows but were unable to reach the other line with their own. The lines then converged and for hours they fought desperately, hand to hand, foot to foot, knowing that surrender meant death. The slaughter was terrible to behold and the snow turned red as soon as it touched the ground.

The Yorkist reserves under the Duke of Norfolk arrived late in the afternoon but, as it developed, at the best moment to throw the Lancastrians into a panic. They began to show against the left flank of the Red Roses. Edward, showing rare skill, had them deploy in an ever lengthening line in order to outflank the foe. It was then that a general retreat of the Lancastrians began, in the course of which the losses were even heavier than in the fighting.

The saddened ex-king, poor, gentle Henry, had not been on the battlefield because it was fought on Palm Sunday. He went instead to York and spent the day in prayer and meditation.

Henry and his wife and son managed to retreat into Scotland, where they remained for the next four years. Margaret, who never conceded that they were beaten, spent the time in never ceasing efforts to enlist assistance from abroad. It may not have occurred to her that by allying herself with England’s most active foes she was alienating all sympathy for herself and her husband in the land over which she was determined her son must reign. If it did, she brushed the consequences aside. With her it had become a fight to the death and no considerations of policy or expediency were allowed to influence her.

After an abortive effort to arouse the north of England, and another defeat, Margaret left Henry in Scotland and sailed for France. As the Scots, soon after, concluded a fifteen-year truce with Edward, now firmly ensconced on the English throne, the desolate and abandoned king had to betake himself elsewhere. For a full year he stayed in concealment in a rough stretch of hill and dale between Yorkshire and Lancashire. After that he seems to have lived in a monastery, his identity concealed from the monks although the prior without a doubt knew who
he was. He probably was happy in this life, his time fully occupied by the regular devotions and periods of contemplation. For some time thereafter he maintained himself in the Furness Fells, attracted no doubt by the proximity of the great Cistercian Abbey. Much of the time he disguised himself in the brown robes of a friar, his head muffled in a cloak to conceal his lack of tonsure, a begging bowl under his arm.

Here Henry of England must be left for an interval while other aspects of this bitter and seemingly endless struggle are examined. A strange and dismal experience this, for a king, but one which the gentle Henry accepted with his usual patience.

T
HE Wars of the Roses, seemingly, were over. The Lancastrians had been decisively beaten. Queen Margaret and her son were somewhere on the continent, begging frantically for assistance in resuming the conflict. She was willing to give back to the French every inch of their soil still held by the English, including the all-important port of Calais. She offered the English border city of Berwick to the Scots. She had no scruples whatever about the concessions she was willing to make at the expense of the English nation. Henry was known to be wandering, a sad wraith in a friar’s robe, somewhere in the north of England and would inevitably be taken prisoner. Edward IV was firmly enthroned and striving to restore order with the assistance of the powerful man who had done so much to place him there.

The death of Warwick’s father at Wakefield had made him the richest man in England. He inherited the earldom of Salisbury with extensive landholdings in Yorkshire and the west country; and, of course, he still held his previous honors and the quite tremendous estates which had come to him through his marriage with the Warwick heiress. His income probably exceeded that of the king. He held most of the key posts under Edward and had gradually gathered all the administrative and diplomatic reins into his extremely able hands.

Edward seems to have been willing at first to let the mighty Warwick take the burden of goverment off his own shoulders. An inconvenient attack of measles made it necessary for the siege of the northern strongholds still in Lancastrian hands, particularly Alnwick and Bamborough, to be conducted by Warwick. These massive and strategic castles passed back and forth from hand to hand but finally came into the Yorkist maw, clearing the country of all Red Rose centers, with the exception of
Harlech Castle in Wales. The Earl of Pembroke took an army up into the Welsh hills to see what could be done about Harlech. His own brother, Sir Richard Herbert, a stout Lancastrian adherent, was in command of the garrison. The younger brother scoffed at the demand for the surrender of this castle so famed in story and song. “I held a town in France till all the old women in Wales heard of it,” he declared. “And now all the old women in France shall hear how I defend this castle.” He held out bravely but finally all the old women in England heard that he had been compelled to capitulate.

Warwick was above everything else a diplomat. His shrewdness and his overpowering personality made him as useful as Cardinal Wolsey would later prove in Henry VIII’s behalf. His chief task was to make it impossible for Margaret to arrange any alliances on the continent. To accomplish this he tried to establish a permanent peace with the French king, the shrewd and miserly Louis XI, in preference to continuing the Burgundian alliance. This was the wiser course of the two, but the people of England preferred the Burgundian bond because of trade advantages. Warwick, knowing himself right, brushed the national prejudice aside and strove with ceaseless energy to improve relations with France. He succeeded certainly in destroying the doubts of the continental neighbors and convincing them that Edward was on the throne to stay. He was soon regarded abroad as the pillar of the English throne.

Edward, now in his twentieth year, would have to marry. As he was the most prominent and eligible bachelor in Christendom, Warwick used the problem of a wife for him as his most useful diplomatic weapon. Among all the princesses available, some young, some mature, some pretty, some with large noses and bulging frames, Warwick fixed his mind on wedding the handsome young monarch to a sister-in-law of Louis XI, Bona of Savoy. This seemed such a suitable match that the resourceful commoner was on the point of going to France to see the fair Bona and to discuss terms with the devious Louis when Edward himself disrupted the plan. He chose a wife for himself and married her secretly.

John of Bedford, the most able and trustworthy of the brothers of Henry V, was married twice, his second wife being Jaquetta of Luxembourg. She is described in historical records as being handsome and lively, an understatement as, in reality, she was very handsome and
extremely lively. When Bedford died, she was escorted to England by a guard of English knights under the command of Sir Richard Woodville. Now it happened that Woodville was considered the handsomest man in England. After an interval, the lively Jaquetta married the young knight, but the fact was concealed for five years. Parliament was very angry about it when the truth was revealed (the House seems to have been more easily stirred to indignation by such matters than by the needs of the people) and the dowry of the duchess was confiscated. Later it was restored and the duchess and her handsome spouse took up their residence at Grafton Castle. In the meantime a daughter had been born and named Elizabeth. There might be some to dispute the claims to supreme pulchritude of the parents, but there was never any shadow of doubt that the daughter grew up to be the loveliest lady in the whole land. Other children came along and they all had their share of this heritage of good looks. All of them were filled, almost from childhood, with ambition and self-will, their most amiable trait being a readiness to stand together and support one another in their avaricious designs.

Elizabeth was appointed a maid of honor to Queen Margaret and at the age of twenty-one, a dazzlingly fair creature, was married, quite happily, to John Grey, son of Earl Ferrers of Groby. John Grey took the Lancastrian side and was commander of Queen Margaret’s cavalry. He died of wounds sustained in the second Battle of St. Albans, leaving his widow with two healthy young sons. When the White Rose triumphed and Edward became king, he promptly confiscated the property of Bradgate, the seat of the Grey family, leaving Elizabeth and her two boys in a condition almost of penury.

The duchess Jaquetta, who was clever and a schemer, patched up her differences with Edward, and the latter sometimes saw her while hunting in the forest of Whittlebury, a royal chase near Grafton. This enabled the new young widow to employ an old and well-tried stratagem to bring her case before the young and highly susceptible king. One day, as he was riding through the forest, he saw a lady, holding two small boys by the hand, under a stately tree which was to stand for many centuries thereafter and to be known as the Queen’s Oak. He reined in his horse (perceiving how lovely she was), and the widow threw herself at his feet. She pleaded with him earnestly to take pity on the sad lot of her small sons.

To understand what followed it must be believed that, although the king was more ardent in the pursuit of fair ladies than of the deer in the royal forest, he had never seen one to compare with the slender widow kneeling beside his horse. He remained in the saddle in a state of breathless wonder.