Tudor (5 page)

Sir Henry Stafford became devoted to his young wife. A friend later recalled that Margaret was ‘of singular easiness to be spoken unto'. She was the kind of woman who never forgot a kindness, or a service done for her. She was intellectually curious, read extensively, and worked hard at managing her estates, which she did with great efficiency. She found she had an excellent ‘holding memory' for those things, ‘of
weight and substance wherein she might profit', as well as great determination. Her friend later observed that she would not let a positive opportunity pass her by, ‘for any pain or labour'.
³⁰

Margaret's wealth ensured that the family were able to live on the grandest scale, and as the fifteenth-century
Noble Babees Noble Book
reminded children, magnificence was a matter of noble duty. Fine clothes and great feasts were not a matter of personal indulgence but intended to advertise the degree to which a noble was willing to help their ‘dependers', the families that looked to them for protection and advancement. Indeed nobles were expected to recall Christ's example of self-sacrifice. Margaret loved to entertain lavishly, but however many dishes she served at her table she always ate and drank moderately. She also liked ‘to be joyous' and ‘to hear those tales that were honest to make her merry', but after joking for a while, she would have a reading from the life of Christ, and then move the conversation on to more serious and spiritual matters.
³¹
As Margaret got older and more pious, she would even occasionally wear haircloth beneath her rich clothes, as a reminder of Christ's suffering for men and of her duties.

For Margaret, as for many other members of the nobility, Christ was often physically present in her house. It was usual to hear Mass daily, as she did in her private chapels, and in Catholic belief, at the moment of consecration the bread and wine is transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ – the miracle known as transubstantiation. If Christ's presence felt immediate, the Devil unfortunately also seemed close at hand. It was said the Devil had once been a high-ranking angel, but when God revealed that His son, Christ, was to be born a man, the Devil in his pride could not tolerate having a mere human raised above him. He had rebelled against God and now sought to destroy all peace and harmony.
³²
People had a visceral fear of the violence the Devil sought by exploiting mens' weaknesses. Yet such conflict was coming to England soon enough.

After the bloodshed at St Albans in 1455 Henry VI had worked hard to reconcile his quarrelling subjects. It was the desire for vengeance that meant in the end he failed. As one chronicler recorded, ‘there was evermore a grouch and wrath had by the heirs of them that were slain'.
³³
It sapped the will of the supporters of the king's chosen councillors, and of their Yorkist enemies, to keep the peace. This in turn affected all those ‘dependers' who were expected to offer service in battle for their masters if called on to do so. The century of war with France meant all boys were trained from childhood to fight ‘up and down the streets clashing on their shields with blunted swords or stout staves', and even the girls were expert archers.
³⁴
An army could be raised quickly.

The blue-eyed three-year-old Henry Tudor lost his step-grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham, at the Battle of Northampton in July 1460; over the following months the killing would continue to sweep around him like a tornado, spiralling with all the peculiar viciousness of a family vendetta.

3

A PRISONER, HONOURABLY BROUGHT UP

A
PAPER CROWN CLUNG, FLUTTERING, ON ONE OF A ROW OF HEADS
impaled on the southern gate to the City of York. Until September 1460 the fighting had been about whom Henry VI should have as his councillors, but then the Duke of York had claimed the throne, arguing he had the senior descent in the female line from Edward III, making his ancestor, Roger Mortimer, Richard II's rightful heir, and the House of Lancaster usurpers.
¹
It was an unpopular move, soon abandoned, and now God had given his judgement on it. The duke was dead, killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December. ‘York could look upon York' the Lancastrians jeered as they spiked his head high on the gate, the paper crown mocking his former ambitions. Next to it was the head of one of his younger sons, aged seventeen, and that of his brother-in-law. Soon there would be a fresh settling of scores.

Only weeks later, in the first days of February 1461, Jasper and Owen Tudor's Lancastrian army confronted the late duke's eldest son and heir, Edward of York, at Mortimer's Cross, Herefordshire. Blond, handsome, and standing at six feet three, Edward of York was only nineteen and he lacked the experience of the Tudor commanders. But no one had ever seen anything like the strange dawn that greeted them on that icy morning. Blinking in the breaking light the rival armies saw three suns appear in the sky. The phenomenon, known as
a parhelion, is caused by light shining through ice crystals in the atmosphere. Edward, a natural leader, seized the opportunity to tell his frightened troops that the triple stars represented God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost which were shining a blessing on their enterprise. With his army's morale renewed, ‘freshly and manly he took the field upon his enemy, and put them at flight, and slew three thousand'.
²

Few other details of the battle survive, but we know that Jasper escaped and was on the road when he learned, to his horror, that his father, Owen Tudor, was captured. Owen lived not far from Jasper at Pembroke Castle, and he had also remained close to Henry VI, who had give him the plum post of Keeper of the Parks of north Wales, ‘in consideration of his good services' the previous year.
³
Even in his old age, Owen was prepared to fight in his stepson King Henry's cause – but it would be for the last time. Edward had ordered that Owen be executed along with eight other Lancastrian commanders. In Hereford, where he was taken, Owen still assumed he would be ransomed when a Yorkist solider grabbed the collar of his red doublet and ripped it off to expose his neck. Facing the rough wooden log that served as the block, and now realising his fate, he recalled with mordant wit how ‘The head that shall lie on the stock was wont to lie on Queen Katherine's lap.' At the fall of the axe the extraordinary life that began with a stumble at a dance was ended.

Owen Tudor's head was placed on the top step of the market cross where a woman ‘combed his hair and washed away the blood off his face', before she placed candles around him.
⁴
No one has yet suggested who she was. The watching crowd thought she was mad, as she carefully lit over a hundred small flames. She was surely, however, the grief-stricken mother of Owen's illegitimate son, David, who was almost two. Even as an old man in his fifties, it seems Owen had had the power to attract a woman's love.
⁵

The four-year-old Henry Tudor would have understood his grandfather's fate only as an absence. Owen had been a familiar face at
Pembroke, yet he was nowhere to be seen when Henry was brought with his mother and stepfather to the castle in May. It was here Margaret Beaufort had come looking for protection from Jasper before Henry was born. But Jasper too was absent: he was on the run. In the three months since Mortimer's Cross, Edward of York had reasserted his father's claim to the throne, denounced Henry VI as a false king, and been proclaimed Edward IV in London on 4 March. For twenty-five days there were two kings in England, a situation ended on 29 March with a decisive battle at Towton in Yorkshire. It was one that left Henry's family, and much of England, traumatised.

Margaret Beaufort's husband, Sir Henry Stafford, and her stepfather, Lord Welles, had been arrayed with the Lancastrian forces while Henry VI spent the day in prayer nearby. It was Palm Sunday, a spring day. But the wild flowers in the fields and hedgerows were bitten by unseasonable cold and the sky was low and dark. The two armies, the largest England had ever seen – amounting to perhaps more than 30,000 out of a population of three million – faced a fight to the death.
⁶
When the banners of two kings were unfurled it invoked ‘
guerre mortelle
', the most ruthless form of armed combat in the Middle Ages, with no quarter given for the supporters of a false king.

As the men began to put on their armour there were flurries of snow. By 10 a.m a snowstorm was blowing straight into the faces of the Lancastrian forces. The Yorkists advanced on foot into the whiteout. Blind, and with the wind against them, the arrows fired by the Lancastrian archers fell short. The Yorkists collected them and returned them: thousands of arrows a minute poured into the Lancastrian ranks, leaving them with no choice but to engage their enemy. As the armies hammered at each other the sheer weight of numbers on the Lancastrian side forced the Yorkists back, but with Edward IV and his cousin germane, ‘that noble knight and flower of manhood', Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, leading from the front the Yorkists gave ground only slowly.

For hour upon hour the Lancastrians and Yorkists battled on.
When the heaps of dead made it impossible for the men to engage, short truces were arranged so the corpses could be heaved out of the way to allow the fighting to continue. In late afternoon the Duke of Norfolk had brought reinforcement for the Yorkists and as daylight faded the Lancastrian ranks at last gave way. Bridges over the nearby rivers had broken under the weight of fleeing men. Some fell into the freezing water, drowning in their heavy armour. Others who had cast off their helmets to help them breathe as they ran became easy targets for the Yorkists who smashed their skulls in a frenzy of bloodlust.
⁷
A last stand was made to the north at the little town of Tadcaster. Then it was over, save for the executions of those survivors who had not managed to escape. The bodies, scattered over an area of at least six miles by four, included that of Margaret's stepfather Lord Welles, the only father she had ever known.

Relieved that Stafford had survived, Margaret spent time with her mother in the first terrible weeks of grieving for Lord Welles. Meanwhile, Henry VI had fled into exile in Scotland with his queen and their son. Most surviving supporters of the House of Lancaster now judged it prudent to acknowledge the authority of King Edward. Jasper was an exception, but he would soon follow his half-brother into exile. Pembroke Castle was left garrisoned with sufficient food, men and arms to withstand a long siege, however, and there Margaret Beaufort now awaited King Edward's next move, anxious to see what he intended for her son, the ‘false' King Henry's nephew.

Over the summer Margaret ensured that something of Henry's normal life continued.
⁸
Henry would later honour Owen Tudor's son David with wealth and knighthoods, and since the boy lived nearby and was close in age, he was, perhaps, a playmate.
⁹
Henry was also old enough to learn to read and it was a mother's task to teach their young children. One of the favourite images of the Middle Ages was that of St Anne, the mother of the Virgin, teaching her daughter to read. Margaret had a variation on this image in the Book of Hours she inherited from her own mother, with St Anne and the Virgin
teaching Christ to read. The most popular books of the period, they were divided into eight sections, imitating a monk's ‘Office' or cycle of daily devotions. Those of aristocrats were illuminated with pictures that had a special significance for them, and people added whatever religious stories or prayers they fancied.
¹⁰
Margaret would note major events in her life, including, later, the outcome of battles.

The aftershocks of Towton were already being felt in Wales. King Edward had given one of his principal supporters, William, Lord Herbert, the task of seizing Jasper Tudor's estates, and on 30 September Herbert arrived at the twin-towered gates of Pembroke Castle with a large force.
¹¹
The governor Jasper had placed in charge succumbed to the promise of a pardon and the castle was surrendered without a fight.
¹²
Margaret was then simply informed of Edward's intentions for her son Henry: she was to hand him over to Herbert as his ward. King Edward hoped that, in due course, he could co-opt Henry Tudor to the Yorkist cause, and had intimated to Herbert that if Henry proved loyal, he could in time inherit his father Edmund Tudor's lands and his title, as Earl of Richmond. With this in mind Herbert had invested over £1,000 in securing the wardship and planned to marry Henry to his daughter, Maud. Margaret had to accept this willingly if she was ever to see her son again, and there was no struggle, therefore, when the unhappy mother said her goodbyes to her child in February 1462, just after his fifth birthday.

Henry had travelled often between the family properties in the Midlands and Pembroke Castle.
¹³
He was used to being on the road, sitting on a horse with a servant holding him securely, a train of men and carts stretching far behind. This time he was without his familiar servants or family and taken to a new destination: Raglan Castle in the south-east of Wales. The adventure of leaving home had begun all too soon, and it would be many years before he saw his mother again.

When Raglan Castle was approached from the village, a hexagonal sandstone tower came into view before the rest of the fortress loomed
over the slight rise on the hill. The castle was entered through a new gatehouse, leading to a large cobbled courtyard framed by a ‘hundred rooms filled with festive fare'.
¹⁴
It was here, Henry later recalled, that he was to spend his childhood, ‘kept as prisoner, but honourably brought up'. The vast hall where he ate his meals was thirteen metres high, with beams of Irish oak and a gallery where music was played. The family chapel, where he prayed, was equally impressive, twelve metres long, with brilliant yellow decorative tiles. Outside, orchards, fishponds and deer parks gave way on the horizon to the dramatic Welsh wilderness and the harsh peaks of the mountains.