Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (16 page)

For Margaret Beaufort, news that her son had arrived safely in Brittany must have come as a blessed relief from the concerns that encircled her. On 4 October 1471 her husband Henry Stafford died; he had suffered from bouts of illness, possibly resulting from the injuries he had received at Barnet. He certainly never recovered from the outcome of the battle. She began the required period of a year’s mourning, but already she was contemplating her next marriage; in choosing Thomas, Lord Stanley as her third husband, she had decided to forgo her former Lancastrian loyalties to bind her fortunes closely to those now in the ascendant at court.

Thomas Stanley had become one of the wealthiest noblemen in the kingdom, with large estates stretching across Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales. For Stanley, marriage to Margaret brought with it the prospect of further augmenting his lands, providing him with a life interest in her estates; in return Margaret would be granted an annual income from Stanley’s own lands. For Margaret, Stanley’s power lay not
merely in his wealth; his connections at court as steward of the king’s household would provide Margaret with the opportunity to be restored to Edward’s favour. In particular, the Stanley family had strong links with the Woodvilles; Thomas Stanley’s son and heir George had first married the queen’s elder sister Jacquetta, and had later been married to Joan, the daughter of George, Lord Strange. It was these connections that allowed Margaret to establish a presence at court; whatever reservations she may have had about the upstart queen, she remained silent, ingratiating herself, even attending upon the queen and her daughters on the occasion of the reburial of her nemesis, Richard, Duke of York, at Fotheringhay, in 1476.

Still Margaret’s true loyalty lay undoubtedly with her son’s welfare. Throughout Edward’s reign, she would continue to hope for her son’s eventual return from exile and into the king’s favour. It was almost as if Henry was at the heart of every decision she was to make. Ten days before her marriage, on 2 June 1472, Margaret placed her paternal estates in Devon and Somerset in trust, with the provisions that the trustees of her estate were to create a separate estate of lands for Henry Tudor’s inheritance. Ten years later, after Margaret’s mother the Duchess of Somerset had died, Margaret would make further provisions for Henry. In a document drawn up in Edward IV’s own presence in June 1482, her husband Thomas, Lord Stanley promised that he would not interfere with Margaret’s Beaufort estates, and that lands to the value of 600 marks a year would be granted to Henry, ‘called Earl of Richmond’, upon certain conditions. Henry was to return from exile, and ‘to be in the grace and favour of the king’s highness’. The document was sealed by the king himself. Stanley later recalled that it was during Edward’s reign that Margaret and others had discussed the possibility of Henry even marrying Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York, relating how the discussion had included the bishops of Ely and Worcester and a Papal representative as well as the king. The clearest evidence that, at some stage, Edward himself intended Henry Tudor to be restored to favour can be found in Margaret’s own archives where, on the back of a copy of a patent of creation of Edmund Tudor as Earl of Richmond, is written in a faint, almost illegible hand the draft text of a pardon for ‘Henry Earl of Richmond alias lord Richmond alias the said Henry son and
heir of the late Earl of Richmond to be the said Richmond or also by the name’.

The date of the pardon, surviving as only a draft, is unknown, but that it reflects not merely Margaret’s hopes, but Edward’s genuine desire for Henry Tudor to return to England should not be in doubt. Edward seems to have been determined to reconcile former supporters of Henry VI to his kingship. Between 1472 and 1475, thirty attainders were reversed, and former Lancastrians were offered positions under the new regime. It was clear to many that no hope remained for the Lancastrian cause; many understood that the most pragmatic course was to accept God’s judgement in battle, that Edward IV was indeed their rightful king. John Morton, the son of a Dorset squire, who had risen through the Lancastrian ranks as a successful lawyer and had taken part in the Parliament of Devils, made his peace with the new regime and by 1472 had been made Master of the Rolls, personally enjoying Edward’s ‘secret trust and special favour’. Morton later admitted that ‘if the world would have gone as I would have wished, King Henry’s son had had the Crown and not King Edward’. Yet now things were different: ‘after that God had ordered him to lose it, and King Edward to reign’, Morton accepted, ‘I was never so mad that I would with a dead man strive against the quick’.

For men like Morton, the Lancastrian dynasty was over: Henry VI was dead, his son killed on the battlefield at Tewkesbury. Even Margaret Beaufort recognised that her son Henry would be best placed to one day return to court, to ingratiate himself with the Yorkist dynasty through marriage, as she herself had done. Yet there remained a few ‘so mad’ that they would refuse to admit that their cause was finished.

John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, had been determined to crush the Yorkist cause. His father and his eldest brother had been executed by the Yorkists; it is hardly surprising that he was described as ‘being disposed in extreme malice against the king’. Henry VI’s restoration to the throne, the achievement of which Oxford himself played no small part, had seen the earl return from penniless exile in France to becoming one of the most powerful noblemen at court, bearing the sword of state during the procession at St Paul’s in October 1470 in which the
Lancastrian king was formally recrowned. Oxford’s influence at court was such that he had ‘the rule of them and theirs’, one contemporary wrote. Six months later, upon Edward’s return and as he drew up his soldiers in preparation for battle at Barnet, Oxford knew that the Lancastrians had the advantage, both in terms of the number of men and artillery ranged against the Yorkist pretender. The battle had started to plan, with Oxford’s men defeating the Lancastrian wing; only returning to the battle in the thick blinding fog did Oxford find that Warwick’s troops had set themselves upon him. He was not to know of their fatal mistake, confusing the badges of his men with their Yorkist opponents. Instead, the earl had fled the confusion of the battle with the sound of the cries of ‘Treason!’ ringing around him.

Several days later, Oxford wrote to his wife, ‘in great heaviness at the making of this letter; but thanked be God, I am escaped myself, and suddenly departed from my men’. Being among ‘strange people’ he had no money to even pay his messenger. Asking for all ‘the ready money you can make, and as many men as can come well horsed’, he requested that his own horse be sent ‘with my steel saddles’ to be covered with leather. ‘You shall be of good cheer, and take no thought,’ he ended his letter, ‘for I shall bring my purpose about now by the Grace of God, whom you have in keeping.’ This cryptic letter was the last the countess would hear from her husband for some time. The outcome of Tewkesbury and Henry VI’s death put paid to any hope that Oxford might bring his ‘purpose’ about; not knowing where her husband was, the countess decided that in spite of her husband’s optimism, the best course of action was to flee to the sanctuary of St Martin’s church in London. Several years later, one chronicler wrote, she was reduced to such poverty that she had nothing to live upon, ‘but as the people of their charities would give to her, or what she might get with her needle or other such cunning as she exercised’.

Still Oxford was determined to fight on. Over the next few years he was sighted in Scotland, Dieppe, making attacks on Calais, determined to become a sore thorn in Edward’s side. On 28 May 1473 he arrived on the shore at St Osyth’s, Essex, not far from his own ancestral estates. Oxford’s hope of raising a hundred gentlemen in Norfolk and Suffolk who had agreed to give their assistance was dashed by the Earl of Essex and Oxford ‘tarried not long’; shortly afterwards he was apparently
sighted on the Isle of Thanet, ‘hovering, some say with great company, and some say with few’. Oxford had hoped for French support for his endeavours, but with no chance of ever establishing a rival to Edward IV, and with France and Burgundy having come to a peaceful alliance, already the Duke of Burgundy had warned the French king ‘not to keep the Earl of Oxford in his kingdom any longer’ as part of their continued truce. Initially supportive of Oxford’s enterprises, Louis began to change his mind. ‘He fears art and fraud in the earl’, one ambassador reported.

After spending the summer at sea in piracy, capturing passing ships and obtaining ‘great good and riches’, on the last day of September 1473 Oxford took the remarkable decision to seize the small garrison at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. He had fewer than eighty men with him, but the fortress and the position of St Michael’s Mount made it next to impossible to attack. It seems that Oxford was further assisted by the support of the nearby Cornish gentry, including Henry Bodrugan who, despite being tasked by Edward with recovering the garrison, pocketed the money he had been given for the commission for himself, and despite occasional outbreaks of fighting, including one occasion when Oxford was shot and wounded ‘in the very face’ by an arrow, was mostly content to meet with the earl each day under truce, supplying him with enough victuals and supplies to last until the following summer. When Edward realised what was going on, he transferred control of the siege to Sir John Fortescue; in addition to stepping up the ferocity of the attack upon Oxford’s stronghold, he supplied Fortescue with 300 men, cannon and artillery from the Tower and four ships from the royal fleet carrying over 600 men that were able to cut off any chance of escape by sea. The siege began in earnest in late December, but Oxford’s resistance ensured that it was not for another month, when tempted by the promise of pardon for his life if not his goods, that Oxford finally surrendered on 15 February.

Oxford would spend the next nine years imprisoned in Hammes Castle in the Calais pale. His stay was a comfortable one: at first fifty marks was set aside for his ‘costs and sustenation’, later increased to fifty Flemish pounds. A year after his surrender, Oxford and his two brothers were attainted, with all their lands and goods being declared forfeit to the king. One chronicler lamented the earl’s downfall, stating
how ‘all was done by their own folly’. As the years drew on, in isolation Oxford struggled to come to terms with his own ruin, seeing no chance of restoration to his title and lands. In 1478 he took the drastic step of attempting to end his own life: John Paston was repeating well-known gossip when he wrote that Oxford was rumoured to have ‘leapt the walls and went to the dyke to the chin’, adding, ‘to what intent I cannot tell; some say, to steal away, and some think he would have drowned himself, and so it is deemed’.

Despite Duke Francis’s assurances that both Jasper and Henry Tudor would be guarded so that they would be unable to challenge his crown, Edward continued to press for both men to be returned to England. He also sought to ingratiate himself with Francis, in the hope that his support for Brittany against France might sway the Duke into handing over both the Tudors. In April 1472 he had sent his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, together with a troop of soldiers, to join the duke’s service. Having assisted the duke in repelling a French invasion on 11 September, Rivers negotiated a treaty with Francis at Châteaugiron, signalling both sides’ desire for a joint Anglo-Breton invasion of France. In November, Breton envoys led by Guillaume Guillemet arrived in England to negotiate for further military aid. It seemed as if an agreement might be reached that, in return for military assistance, the Tudors might be handed over to Edward, but still Francis insisted that in light of his earlier promise to protect Jasper and Henry, he could not break his word. Francis’s resort to chivalric honour was nothing more than an excuse; he was hardly prepared to give up his greatest bargaining tools quite yet, at least until he had gained everything he could from Edward in return. He would, however, restrict Jasper and Henry’s movements further, something which Edward welcomed, writing to the duke pledging more money and aid to Brittany.

As a consequence, around October 1472 both Jasper and Henry were taken to Suscinio, one of the duke’s country residences close to Sarzeau on the gulf of Morbihan, near St Gildas abbey. Set in a vast hunting chase on the Rhys Peninsula, enclosing the Gulf of Morbihan in southern Brittany, the castle itself was built in the thirteenth century to be used by the Dukes of Brittany as their summer residence. With several
large rounded towers formed around a courtyard, it was both secluded and ‘well sumptuous’. The keeper of the chateau was Jean de Quelennec, the admiral of Brittany since 1432, who had earned a reputation as both ‘wise and judicious’, and who gave his full support to protecting the Tudors, especially after rumours began to circulate that English envoys had been ordered to kill Henry if they were unable to secure his extradition.

Only a mile away from the sea, positioned as it was on the flat sandy expanse of the peninsula, it was soon apparent that Suscinio would be too exposed in the face of any attack or attempt to seize Jasper and Henry by ships landing nearby. The decision was made to take them back to the ducal court. In late 1473 both were at Nantes; in the absence of any further information, it must be assumed that Jasper and Henry accompanied Duke Francis’s court as it moved between the centres of Vannes, Nantes, Rennes and the nearby rural manor houses favoured by Francis, such as Plaisance, Bernon or Suscinio.

Francis’s decision to keep both Tudors close to him during this time was also influenced by the fact that it was not merely Edward who wanted to get his hands upon Henry and Jasper. The pair had intended to travel to the court of French king Louis XI, who had previously been a source of refuge to Jasper, formerly in receipt of an annual pension from Louis worth £1,200. Now the French king, treating both men as if they were members of his own household, wanted them in his own possession, back where he considered they had intended to travel had their voyage not blown them off course and where he believed they rightfully belonged. In 1474 Louis decided to send a series of detailed instructions to Guillaume Compaing, the dean of the church of St Pierre en Pont in Orleans and the French envoy at Francis’s Breton court. Compaing was ordered to seek a meeting with the duke, requesting that both Jasper and Henry be freed. First, Compaing should explain the background behind their arrival in Brittany, when their intended destination had all along been France: ‘considering the divisions in England, the Count of Pembroke, to avoid numerous perils and dangers there and save his life, has for a long time wanted to see the King’: