Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (21 page)

Barred from Calais, when Warwick and Clarence finally landed in France they made straight for the court of the scheming Louis XI. The French king, keen to keep England weak and divided, advised Warwick to do the unthinkable: make peace with his arch-enemy, Queen Margaret of Anjou. Warwick saw the sense in combining against the common foe. In August 1470 he met Margaret in Angers Cathedral. The haughty queen kept the proud earl on his knees for a quarter of an hour as he begged forgiveness for his past misdeeds, and talked up the advantages of their unnatural alliance. At last Margaret relented. To seal the deal, it was agreed that Warwick’s younger daughter, Anne, should marry Margaret’s son Prince Edward. As a sop to the now redundant Clarence, it was decided that he should be heir to the throne should Edward and Anne fail to produce children.

Margaret made clear it would be up to Warwick to do the heavy lifting necessary to prise King Edward from his throne, release her husband Henry VI from the Tower, and smooth the way for her son’s belated entry to the city he had not seen since leaving it as an infant seventeen years before. To prepare for his invasion, Warwick repeated the same tactics he had used the previous year. He fomented another Lancastrian revolt in the north to lure Edward from London. Then, in mid-September, with sixty ships fitted out by King Louis, Warwick landed in Devon accompanied by Clarence, Oxford and Jasper Tudor. King Edward had left his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, pregnant with her third royal child, in the palace at the Tower, having had the apartments there expensively refurbished for the birth of what he hoped would be his first son and heir. But the queen had her mind on more than her coming confinement. Well aware of Warwick’s bitter hostility to her and her clan, she had the Tower ‘full victualled and fortified’ against a possible siege; the king having previously taken the precaution of bringing in large cannon from Bristol with extra ammunition to add to the Tower’s armoury.

Edward was in York when he heard of Warwick’s arrival. Always supremely confident of his own ability, Edward trustingly relied on another Warwick sibling, John Neville, Marquess of Montagu, to hold the north while he hurried south to meet and beat Warwick. However, at Doncaster,
Edward heard alarming news: Montagu had defected to his brother’s side and was hastening to arrest Edward. With no time to finish his dinner, Edward fled, accompanied by his youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester; his bosom friend William Hastings; and the young Lord Anthony Rivers, now head of the Woodville family. The little group rode hell for leather for the Norfolk coast, finding two Dutch ships about to sail home. Edward had no cash to pay for his passage, and gave the skipper a gown trimmed with the fur of pine martens in lieu of a fee. In this bedraggled manner they were put ashore on Burgundian soil. After a decade’s reign, Edward IV had lost his kingdom.

The news of her husband’s flight reached Queen Elizabeth at the Tower on 1 October. At the same time she heard of the rapid approach of Warwick with some 30,000 men. London was already in a state of high fear after the men of Kent, inspired by Warwick’s agents, had attacked the city, targeting, as in the Peasants’ Revolt, its large Flemish community. The Flemings, subjects of the Duke of Burgundy who had given shelter to the fallen King Edward, were considered fair game. Shaken by the sudden turn of fortune, and eight months’ pregnant, the queen abandoned any idea of defending the Tower. With her mother and two infant daughters she vacated the fortress and – not for the last time in her turbulent life – sought sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.

The next day Warwick’s advance guard entered the city. On 3 October the constable of the Tower – the sadistic John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester – peacefully surrendered the fortress. His gesture did Tiptoft little good. Although Warwick and Clarence had issued a general pardon, Tiptoft, uniquely, was excluded. Guessing what fate awaited him, the constable fled to a forest in the Midlands where he was found hiding in a treetop, and was brought back to the Tower. The cruel constable had incurred particular odium for impaling the bodies of some Warwick supporters on stakes after hanging them, and could have expected no mercy from the earl. The judge was Lord Oxford, whose brother and father Tiptoft had had butchered so gruesomely on Tower Hill. Now Oxford had the sweet revenge of seeing Tiptoft beheaded on the same spot. The constable – a noted classical scholar, despite his brutality – made a bizarre final request to the executioner. He asked that his head should be struck off with three strokes of the axe in honour of the Trinity.

Control of the Tower, and with it, custody of King Henry, had passed
to Warwick’s lieutenant, Sir Geoffrey Gate. Fearing that too sudden a transformation would tip the king’s fragile mind into insanity again, Gate selected a cleric as the most suitable person to break the shocking news to the devout but now institutionalised monarch that he was no longer a prisoner and would be required once again to act out the role of a king. Bishop Wainfleet of Winchester was chosen to bear these tidings, and he, accompanied by London’s lord mayor, gently brought Henry out from his gloomy lodgings blinking into the daylight, ‘a man amazed, utterly dulled with troubles and adversities’. Neglected during his long incarceration, the king was unwashed, scruffy, smelly and reluctant to resume his royal functions. Or, as the Cambridge chronicler John Warkworth put it, ‘Not so worshipfully arrayed, and not so cleanly kept as should seem [befit] such a prince.’

Gate made sure that Henry was given a bath and reclothed in garments suiting his renewed regal status, before moving him into the same freshly decorated apartments in the Tower’s palace that Queen Elizabeth had just left. On 5 October, Warwick’s brother, Archbishop Neville, arrived at the Tower to greet Henry, and the following day the Kingmaker himself finally entered the city. Warwick went straight to the Tower where, with much bowing and scraping to Henry, as Warkworth tells us, ‘he did to him great reverence, and brought him to the palace of Westminster, and so he [Henry] was restored to the crown again’. Another chronicler reported that the king, far from rejoicing in the sudden transformation in his status, was ‘as mute as a calf’.

On 13 October Henry was re-crowned in St Paul’s Cathedral, with Warwick carrying the king’s train, and Lord Oxford bearing his sword before him. Henry was then housed in the suitably clerical surroundings of the Bishop of London’s palace, where he did precisely nothing while Warwick ruled his realm.

The Kingmaker was surrounded by enemies – past, present and potential. In addition to the resentful Lancastrians, there were his former Yorkist friends, primarily the exiled Edward. Above all, though, there was Clarence. The treacherous duke had originally allied with Warwick out of ambition, but now, with Henry restored and his son Prince Edward as heir, Clarence’s prospects looked poorer than ever. Even before returning from France with Warwick, messages had reached Clarence from his brother, promising forgiveness if he deserted Warwick and reverted to
his family allegiance. To get the awkward duke out of the way, Warwick sent Clarence to Dublin as Lieutenant of Ireland. Here, however, in his father’s old stamping ground, Yorkist pressure on him increased. His aged mother and his three sisters combined to turn the screw and Clarence succumbed. He agreed to support Edward when the ousted king returned.

Almost as soon as he learned that his wife had given birth to his first son – another Edward – at Westminster, Edward IV made his move. With thirty-six ships, a thousand Yorkists and a small mercenary army provided by his brother-in-law Duke Charles of Burgundy, he left the Dutch port of Flushing. His fleet scattered by storms, Edward landed alone at Ravenspur in Yorkshire – auspiciously the same spot where Henry IV had put ashore seventy-two years before to wrest the throne from Richard II.

Edward made his way south, gathering troops. In the Midlands he linked up with Clarence who had collected ‘a considerable army’ and announced his defection from Warwick. The Kingmaker was in the fortified city of Coventry – a traditional Lancastrian stronghold where he and Oxford had mustered a sizeable army. The earl had left his brother, Archbishop Neville, in charge in London. Fearing that events were again tipping Edward’s way, the cleric tried a desperate measure to boost support. He paraded King Henry around the city on horseback. But the gesture backfired. One glance at the wretched king, dressed in an old blue gown, and staring absently around him, served to diminish rather than rally support. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Archbishop Neville himself put out secret feelers to Edward, offering to surrender the city. But the key to London, as ever, was the Tower. And during the night of 10 April, in a prearranged coup, Yorkist agents seized the fortress. The capital now lay wide open and the next day Edward, accompanied by his brothers Clarence and Richard, entered it at the head of his 7,000-strong army. There was no resistance.

Edward made straight for St Paul’s Cathedral where the Archbishop of Canterbury solemnly declared King Henry deposed again – and gave thanks to God for King Edward’s return. Before being reunited with his wife, daughters and newborn son at Westminster Abbey, Edward’s next port of call was the Bishop of London’s palace. Here George Neville fearfully awaited him with his royal charge. King Henry was characteristically mild-mannered in his greeting. ‘My cousin of York, you are very welcome,’ he declared, adding trustingly, ‘I know that my life will not be in danger in your hands.’ Edward wasted no time in packing Henry back
to his old familiar quarters in the Tower. Henry’s feeling on being returned to those secure surroundings – replacing various Yorkist lords who had been held there by Warwick – was probably one of relief.

Henry was soon joined at the Tower – though not in the same rooms – by Queen Elizabeth. For the second time in a few months, the two monarchs changed places. Now it was the queen’s turn to move back into the sumptuous apartments of the royal palace, along with her two daughters, baby son, and Edward’s aged mother Cecily, the Dowager Duchess of York. The king had sent his family within the Tower’s secure walls for their own safety should things go amiss on the battlefield, while he dragged Henry along with his army to be the helpless witness of yet another battle. For the restored king had pressing business: a final settling of accounts with the Earl of Warwick

The decisive battle between the two old comrades-in-arms took place at Barnet, north of London, on Easter Sunday, 14 April 1471. The engagement was fought in thick fog, which created a climate of fear and confusion. When Lord Oxford’s livery of the star and rays was mistaken for the sun-in-splendour symbol of King Edward, cries of ‘Treason!’ swept through the Lancastrian ranks, and the morale of Warwick’s army collapsed. The earl and his brother Montagu were killed fleeing the battle, the Duke of Exeter sustained severe wounds, and only Oxford succeeded in getting away. Once again, victory had gone to Edward IV, but he was not yet secure: on the day that Barnet was fought, Queen Margaret and Prince Edward landed at Weymouth.

Buffeted by storms, Margaret had been at sea for an incredible twenty days before her fleet finally limped into port. King Edward now faced the same nightmare that had defeated King Harold in 1066. Having dealt with one enemy at the cost of many casualties, he had to gird himself to face a full-scale cross-Channel invasion of his realm. Edward had barely time to draw breath after Barnet – sending King Henry back to the Tower, dismissing his victorious army, and displaying the naked bodies of his slain enemies, Warwick and Montagu, in their coffins – before he was forced to raise new troops to meet Margaret’s threat.

Edward hastily scraped together a small army at Windsor Castle before moving west to confront Margaret. He had to intercept the queen before she crossed the River Severn and reached the Lancastrian heartlands of Wales. The rival armies converged at Tewkesbury, on the Severn. The
battle that settled the fate of the House of Lancaster was short but bloody. It ended with a total Yorkist victory, murderous dissent among the Lancastrian commanders – old Lord Wenlock had his brains dashed out by the Duke of Somerset’s mace – and a massacre of the surviving Lancastrian leadership, many being dragged from sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey to their deaths.

According to rival chroniclers Prince Edward was killed either fleeing from the battlefield, crying vainly to his false brother-in-law Clarence for help, or soon afterwards when he was caught and brought before the king. Edward IV reportedly asked him what he was doing in England, and when the spirited young man replied that he had come to reclaim his inheritance from those who had usurped his father’s throne, the king flew into a Plantagenet rage and struck the youth in the face with his steel gauntlet. The blow was the signal for the king’s brothers, Richard and Clarence, along with Lord Hastings, to gather round the prince and hack him to death. A similar fate awaited Edmund, Duke of Somerset – the third Beaufort holding that title to die violently in the Lancastrian cause. He was beheaded in Tewkesbury marketplace in front of the vengeful king, along with his brother Sir John Beaufort; the Earl of Devon, and a dozen other Lancastrian knights. This time, Edward was utterly determined to wipe out the rival dynasty once and for all.

Queen Margaret was picked up a few days after the battle and brought before the king. Distraught at the death of her only son, she raged at Edward, before collapsing into passive resignation. All trace of the tigress who had been the terror of the Yorkists for more than fifteen blood-drenched years had gone. Mute with despair, she was placed in a carriage which lurched its way towards London – and to the Tower where her husband was held. But she would never see him again. On 21 May, the same night that Margaret arrived in the fortress, poor, helpless Henry VI, most pathetic of English kings, ended his unhappy earthly existence.

While the fate of the kingdom was decided at Tewkesbury, the Tower had been the centre of military action in its own right. As part of the Lancastrian plan, the Earl of Warwick’s nephew, Thomas Neville, a gifted sailor who commanded Warwick’s Calais fleet, invaded England. Neville, an illegitimate son of the late Lord Fauconberg, a Yorkist hero of Northampton and Towton, was known as ‘the Bastard of Fauconberg’. As a diversion designed to keep Edward in London, the Bastard used the
ships and men of the Calais garrison to attack Kent. The diversion was initially successful. With Edward away chasing Margaret to Tewkesbury, what had been anticipated as an in-depth raid turned into a full-scale invasion.