Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (17 page)

Henry fled his capital to distant Kenilworth Castle in Leicestershire. Before leaving, the king confined the hated and grasping treasurer, Lord Saye, to the Tower as the safest place for him. Once the king had gone, those members of the council remaining in London took refuge there too. Memories of the massacres during the Peasants’ Revolt were still fresh among the ruling caste. The rebels’ numbers had been swelled by support from Sussex, Surrey and Essex, as what had begun as a little local difficulty grew into a full-scale insurrection.

On 29 June a swaggering Cade, wearing full armour beneath a scarlet cloak, and with the silver spurs of the slain Sir Humphrey Stafford jingling
at his heels, was back on Blackheath with a much larger army. By 1 July he had advanced as far as Southwark, opposite the Tower. On 3 July Cade crossed the Thames and entered London. He came as a conqueror, clad in a royal blue velvet gown, carrying a shield studded with gold nails, and with a squire bearing a sword before him as if he were a king.

Cade paused on London Bridge, drew his sword, and slashed through the ropes holding the drawbridge. The capital lay prostrate before him, and to underline the fact he was formally presented with the keys of the city. He proclaimed, ‘Now is Mortimer Lord of this city,’ before stalking off to be wined and dined by London’s aldermen, one of whom carved Cade’s meat as if he was his lord. That night Cade returned to his quarters at the White Hart Inn in Southwark, but came back across the bridge the next day with his army at his back. The rebels’ mood had turned ugly, and they assembled in front of the Tower demanding the head of Lord Treasurer Saye. The Tower’s governor, Lord Thomas Scales, although a grizzled veteran of the Hundred Years’ War, thought discretion the better part of valour and tamely turned the hated minister over to the mob.

A terrified Saye was dragged to the Guildhall where he was reunited with his son-in-law William Crowmer, the Sheriff of Kent, who had been taken from the Fleet prison. The two men – with a score of their cronies – were given a summary ‘trial’ before being marched to Cheapside and beheaded. Cade’s rising was degenerating into the bloody chaos of Wat Tyler’s revolt. Marking the descent into barbarity, Cade had the heads of Saye and Crowmer impaled on spears and obscenely made to ‘kiss’. The heads and the naked, bleeding torsos were then paraded around London before being spiked above London Bridge. Meanwhile, many of Cade’s men had begun to loot London. Cade himself, pressed to pay them, extorted money from the city merchants who had hitherto backed him.

That night, after Cade and his leading followers had reeled drunkenly back across London Bridge to the White Hart, a worried delegation of merchants, led by the lord mayor, made their way through the fearful streets to the Tower. They pleaded with the governor, Lord Scales, to act against the spiralling anarchy. Scales agreed and ordered the 1,000-strong Tower garrison under Captain Matthew Gough, a fellow veteran of the fighting in France, to bar the city’s gates against the return of Cade’s marauding army in the morning.

When Cade and his men realised what was happening, they stormed out of Southwark and a pitched battle ensued on the bridge. Ordinary
citizens living in the houses along the bridge were caught up in the fighting; and some were flung screaming into the Thames. The battle raged all night, and Gough was among the forty-two Londoners slain. Cade’s men lost 200, and eventually gave way, burning the drawbridge as they retreated. Cade had shot his bolt. On promise of a pardon, he agreed to go home; but as in 1381, the authorities had no intention of keeping their word once the immediate danger had passed.

Cade was declared an outlaw. Deserted by his followers, he fled into the Sussex woods. He was followed by royal puirsuivants, led by Alexander Iden, who had succeeded the murdered Crowmer as Sheriff of Kent. Iden cornered Cade in a garden at Heathfield where he was mortally wounded. Flung into a cart and brought to London, his body was beheaded and quartered. His head was set upon London Bridge, the scene of his last battle, in place of his victims Saye and Crowmer, facing south towards Kent. Cade’s quartered corpse was displayed as a grim warning in the various parts of the kingdom where his rebellion had flared and failed.

Royal retribution did not stop there. In a judicial massacre known as ‘the harvest of heads’ Henry personally presided over the trials and executions of forty-two Kentish rebels. Feeble and pious he may have been, but with Margaret at his side, Henry VI did not lack the bloodthirsty tendencies of his forefathers. But despite the repression, Cade’s rebellion, the symptom of the woeful misgovernment of the kingdom under this broken reed of a man, was also a bloody taster of yet more brutal struggles to come.

CHAPTER SIX

ROSES ARE BLOOD RED

IN AUGUST 1453
Henry VI’s always weak mind gave way entirely. He went mad after suffering a ‘sudden fright’. The onset of the attack may have been sudden, but in view of his antecedents, was scarcely surprising. Henry’s maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, had also had fits of madness, suffering the awkward delusion that he was made of glass. Though exact diagnosis of Henry’s illness is now impossible, this suggests that a gene of mental instability was transmitted through his mother, Catherine de Valois. The attack left Henry in a paralysed stupor – possibly catatonic depression or schizophrenia – unable to move from the chair where he sat. He remained in this sad state for the next eighteen months.

By the time that Henry was struck down, the political situation was rapidly reaching a point where the two factions – the court party and the York party – were so bitterly divided that only violence could resolve the issue. Time after time the rival sides squared up, only for a temporary truce to force the feud underground. Such a moment had come in May 1451 when a member of York’s affinity, Nicholas Young, MP for Bristol, moved a petition in the Commons calling for York officially to be made the childless Henry’s heir apparent. Young was locked in the Tower for his impertinence.

As the year went on, both sides manoeuvred for advantage, knowing that conflict could not be avoided for ever. Among the most loyal supporters of the king were his young half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor. Following Henry V’s death in 1422, his widow, Catherine de Valois, was left bereft, a lusty young woman in the prime of life. She did not remain single for long. Owen Tudor, a handsome young Welshman of obscure origins, had become her Keeper of the Wardrobe. According to romantic rumour Owen had caught the queen’s notice when he stumbled, incapably drunk, into her lap. Intrigued, she spied on him as he swam
nude, liked what she saw, and in the late 1420s, secretly married him. Although frowned on by the court, the union between queen and commoner was a happy one, producing six children. Owen was packed back into obscurity after Catherine died in 1437, but his two eldest sons, Edmund and Jasper, inherited their father’s charm and won the favour of Henry VI and Queen Margaret.

On 5 January 1453 the Tower was a scene of splendour when the king invested his two half-siblings as earls. Edmund became Earl of Richmond, while Jasper was made Earl of Pembroke. On the chilly winter day, the two new noblemen were grateful to be arrayed in costly furs and gowns of cloth of gold and velvet; along with lands and incomes befitting their new status. The Lancastrian cause was further consolidated during this same Christmas holiday, when Queen Margaret at last fell pregnant. The queen’s favourite since Suffolk’s murder was the new head of the Beaufort clan, Edmund, 2nd Duke of Somerset – to the extent that he was rumoured to be the father of the son to whom she would give birth in October, after seven years of fruitless marriage to the apparently asexual and puritanical Henry.

Desperate to hide the king’s condition, the queen had her lolling, speechless sack of a husband secretly transported to Westminster to await the birth of her baby, which took place on 13 October. She was safely delivered of a healthy boy, whom she named Edward. But when the child was shown to Henry there was no reaction: he briefly glanced at the infant before casting his eyes down again. But now the king’s illness could no longer be concealed. Unless he acknowledged Edward as his heir, a regency would have to be declared. A regency council was duly summoned. Finally, the Duke of York made his move.

In December 1453, after York’s ally Sir William Oldhall had been appointed Speaker of the House of Commons, and London had filled with armed Yorkist adherents, the Commons impeached Somerset for treason. The same day, he followed the path already trodden by Suffolk to the Tower. Within hours, however, the queen had ordered her favourite’s release and Somerset left the fortress for his house at Blackfriars. Word that he was free soon spread, and a crowd of York’s supporters besieged his house and ransacked it. The duke barely escaped with his life, fleeing by barge along the river back to the safety of the Tower.

Queen Margaret was desperate to prevent York from being made regent.
On every count – his royal blood, his record as a competent administrator, and his status as the realm’s most powerful nobleman – York was qualified to rule in the mad king’s stead. But for Margaret, her future and that of her newborn child were at stake. If York once sat in her husband’s place, would he ever be shifted? Henry might never recover, his heir was a helpless baby, her chief supporter, Somerset, was in the Tower, and she herself was widely hated. All Margaret had going for her was the support of those nobles – a majority on the council – reluctant to give York regal powers; and her own tenacious will. For months she fought a desperate rearguard battle to get herself or Somerset – whom she had again freed from the Tower – appointed regent. But while many nobles were suspicious of York’s dynastic ambition, they did not wish to be ruled by a haughty, imperious foreign woman. In March 1454, York became Protector of the Realm.

York’s first act was to send Somerset back to the Tower. Tellingly, when the guards came to arrest him, they found Somerset in the queen’s apartments. Although powerless to prevent his detention, the fearless Margaret went out of her way to demonstrate her continuing loyalty to her favourite, even visiting him at the Tower. York packed her off with her son to join Henry in Windsor Castle while he set the dislocated kingdom to rights. Backed by the powerful Neville family, headed by the Earl of Salisbury, whom he made chancellor, and by Salisbury’s son, the Earl of Warwick, York made a good start, ruthlessly slashing court expenditure and travelling north to knock the heads of the warring Neville and Percy families together. While in the north, York locked up his unstable young son-in-law, the Duke of Exeter, hereditary constable of the Tower, in Pontefract Castle, as punishment for a revolt that Exeter had joined in Yorkshire the previous year. This, while demonstrating York’s admirable impartiality, had the unfortunate effect of turning the duke into a fanatical opponent of his father-in-law’s house, and a fierce partisan of the Lancastrians in the coming struggle.

Back at the Tower, Somerset was scheming furiously to regain his freedom and influence. According to a Yorkist newsletter, from his cell Somerset recruited friars and seamen as spies to discover who was loyal to him, and who had strayed into York’s camp. The same newsletter claimed that Somerset’s henchmen had rented lodgings around the Tower with a view to seizing the fortress.

* * *

Then, on Christmas Day 1454 at Windsor, King Henry, like Rip Van Winkle, awoke from his long stupor. His recovery was as unexpected as the onset of the madness had been the previous year – and as unwelcome to York as it was good news for the court party. As soon as the king showed signs of regaining his senses, his son was again brought to him. This time he expressed delight and wonder, attributing Prince Edward’s paternity to the Holy Ghost. It was given out that the king was ‘well-amended … and in charity with all the world, and he would that all the Lords were so’. But despite the king’s pleasure in his own return to health, as historian R. L. Storey remarks, ‘If Henry’s insanity had been a tragedy, his recovery was a national disaster.’

Henry had emerged from the tunnel of his madness a mere shadow of the already feeble man who had entered it. If he had been weak before, now he was a powerless puppet of whichever faction possessed his person. Pious and unworldly previously, now he appeared utterly lost in his dreams and devotions. Nor was his recovery permanent. The insanity would return periodically for the rest of his sad life, and from henceforth Henry was an empty husk in royal raiment, king in name only and a pathetic cipher to be manipulated at will. On 9 February 1455 Henry was sent before Parliament publicly to demonstrate his recovery. He promptly dismissed York from the protectorate, restoring power to Somerset’s cronies. A week later, on 16 February, Somerset himself was released from the Tower and the Duke of Exeter was freed in Pontefract. York grimly concluded that with his enemies back in the saddle and bent on his destruction, only the utmost ruthlessness could save him – and the kingdom.

Early in May, Margaret and Somerset issued, in Henry’s name, a summons to all loyal lords to gather at Leicester, in the Lancastrian heartlands, for a great council to reaffirm fidelity to the king and cast the Yorkist lords (who were not invited) into outer darkness.

Hearing of the summons, York, Salisbury and Warwick struck first. They marched south with an army of some 6,000 men and ambushed the outnumbered court party at St Albans, twenty miles north of London. The resulting clash was more of a skirmish than a true battle, but it was savage enough. An appalled Abbot Whethamstede witnessed the slaughter from St Albans Abbey: ‘I saw a man fall with his brains beaten out, another with a broken arm, a third with his throat cut and a fourth with a stab wound in the chest, while the whole street was strewn with corpses.’

Arrows flew, one finding its mark in King Henry’s neck. As the injured
king took refuge in a tanner’s cottage to have his wound dressed, his standard bearer abandoned the royal banner and fled. Meanwhile, across St Peter’s Street, the Duke of Somerset was making a last stand outside the Castle Inn. Like the doomed Duke of Suffolk, Somerset recalled an encounter with a soothsayer who had foretold that he would die outside a castle. Now he rushed out of the tavern and laid about his enemies, killing four of them before he was struck down with an axe.