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5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors
Ruth Goodman, who teaches our new HistoryExtra Academy course on Tudor life, shares five insights about the dynasty’s legacy
1. The Tudors brought peace and prosperity to England Bringing peace was probably the most important thing the Tudors did for us. The British countryside is littered with the sites of medieval battles – places where opposing forces stomped over crops, burned barns and rounded up people’s sons. For centuries, rival aristocrats made and broke alliances, and killed those who got in their way. Henry Tudor took the throne in exactly this way at Bosworth in 1485, when he persuaded a number of warlords to desert their king, Richard III. But there it stopped. Intrigue and power politics were thenceforth undertaken by more covert means. Everyone became a bit safer, the day-to-day became a bit more predictable, and lots of people got a little bit richer. Less war meant that more crops made it to market, more young men were available for work, and there was less damage done to buildings, less thievery with menaces and safer travel. In turn, this meant more trade and a greater willingness to invest. The peace the Tudors brought to their lands benefited all – rich and poor alike. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-540735906webready-614eaac.jpg" width="5572" height="3714" alt="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" title="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Henry VIII was a reluctant reformer When the Tudors came to power, the Catholic church was already struggling to maintain its grip upon the minds and souls of Europe. New ideas about the nature of God and the state of Christianity were circulating. So when Henry VIII lost patience with the pope, there were plenty of people delighted by the opportunity to rethink England’s official religious position. Read more | Tudor England had no standing army, but this humble hobby kept its people ready for war Henry himself seems to have been happy to leave the religion as was. He just wanted the power and money the pope had been leveraging from his kingdom. He was quickly convinced, though, that he should also have the money and assets of the monasteries. A significant number of influential and vocal people wanted much more, however, pushing for a ‘purer’ form of Christianity that did away with priests entirely and abandoned the rituals and traditions of Catholicism. Others, of course, wholeheartedly defended the time-honoured form of faith. The result was a fracturing of society. Hundreds, both Protestant and Catholic, were executed for refusing to change their form of faith and follow the state-sponsored format – one that changed radically several times. But for all the death and fear, the upset and soul-searching, a new freedom of thought also emerged. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-463916919webready-ea853dd.jpg" width="3432" height="2288" alt="A painting showing a person, holding the page of a book which sits on a table" title="During the Tudor era, literacy grew, in part because Protestantism emphasised reading the Bible rather than the word of God being mediated by a priest (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. The Tudor era brought a rise in literacy A few years before Henry Tudor took the throne, in 1476, William Caxton printed his first book on English soil. As printing presses became established and the price of books plummeted, reading became affordable to many more people. There was also more choice. Alongside religious texts, books of popular stories, advice manuals, joke books, medical texts and scandal sheets were published. At the same time, there was a new religious pressure for Britons to learn to read. The Protestant faith required its adherents to stop relying on priests and to read the Bible for themselves. This applied to everyone: shepherds and ploughmen as well as nobles and merchants – even women. Teaching people to read became a new religious duty and literacy rates started to climb. Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. They drove the expansion of industry The Tudor monarchs – Elizabeth, in particular – were very keen to kickstart new industries and update old ones. In order to do this, specialist workers from Europe were encouraged to resettle on these shores. Some came as refugees fleeing religious persecution in France and the Low Countries, bringing new textile-making skills. Others were purely economic migrants with mining expertise or knowledge of new glassblowing and brass-founding techniques. The strategy worked – and these new arrivals provided the core of know-how and experience around which English industry could grow. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain 5. The health of the nation improved Rates of fatal illness fell during the Tudor period – though this was the result of sheer luck, as certain major diseases mutated into less virulent forms. When a new, often lethal form of the plague arrived in England in 1348 – the Black Death – it killed around a third of the population, suddenly and catastrophically. Plague returned to Britain many times over the centuries that followed but, by the start of the Tudor era, the outbreaks were becoming smaller and more people were surviving. Meanwhile, another major killer known as the sweating sickness – a mysterious disease causing rapidly developing symptoms including shivers, headaches, dizziness, pains and, soon afterwards, sweating and commonly death – came and went. The first epidemic broke out in 1485, just as the Tudor era was beginning, and the last came in 1551, after which it apparently vanished completely. With both of these big killers in retreat, the population began to grow. Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian and broadcaster. Her books include How to Be a Tudor (Viking, 2015) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here
The other prince in the Tower: the tragedy of Edward of Warwick
The 1499 execution of Edward of Warwick snuffed out the final embers of the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Norton introduces the last male heir to the House of York – and explains why he “had to perish” to secure the crown for Henry VII
On 28 November 1499, Edward of Warwick – the 24-year-old heir to the House of York – finally left the Tower of London. It was only the third time in 14 years that he’d been outside the infamous Norman fortress – but he wasn’t able to appreciate the moment. He was not striding out towards freedom but instead, flanked by two men, being marched the short distance to Tower Hill, where an executioner waited on a temporary wooden scaffold. Between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, Warwick was beheaded for treason. His execution marked the culmination of years of political instability. For much of the 15th century, England had been embroiled in civil war as the houses of York and Lancaster vied for the throne. After Henry Tudor took the crown from Richard III in 1485, Warwick was taken to the Tower, aged just 10. He was not the first Yorkist prince to meet this fate, of course. His cousins, the better-known princes in the Tower, had been similarly imprisoned here in 1483 – and their subsequent disappearance remains the most infamous cold case in medieval and early modern English history. Listen | All eight episodes of our podcast series, The Princes in the Tower: a Medieval Murder Mystery In comparison, the story of Edward of Warwick has been largely overlooked – perhaps because of the absence of mystery and conspiracy in his tale, which is no less tragic. The “unhappy boy”, as he was called by contemporary Italian scholar and diplomat Polydore Vergil, was one of the longest-standing residents in the Tower’s near-thousand-year history. So how did this third prince come to be in the Tower? To understand, we must go back to the beginning of his tale – because his execution brought to an end a lifetime of tumult. His story reflects the turbulent times through which he lived, when brother fought brother and cousin met cousin in battle. Edward of Warwick: early life in the Wars of the Roses On his birth in February 1475, Warwick was fourth in line to the throne. He was orphaned just days before his third birthday, when his father, George, Duke of Clarence, was executed for treason. Relations between George and his brother, Edward IV, had long been fraught. George had rebelled against the king once already, in 1470; though forgiven, he was never again fully trusted by that monarch. Following his wife’s death in December 1476, several weeks after giving birth, George became convinced that she had been murdered by one of her ladies-in-waiting, Ankarette Twynho. Next April he had Ankarette abducted, tried and unlawfully executed – thereby infringing upon the rights of the king in exacting justice. Read more | The Wars of the Roses: the 15th-century clash of kings that heralded the dawn of the Tudor dynasty George’s error was compounded weeks later when one of his retainers, Thomas Burdett, was arrested for necromancy and, despite his denials, was executed. The following day, George burst into the king’s council chamber to protest – which was the last straw in the brothers’ relationship. Edward was in no mood to forgive George another transgression and, in a grim precursor to his son’s fate, George was arrested and kept in the Tower awaiting trial, at which he was found guilty of high treason. He was executed on 18 February 1478. An act of attainder against Clarence stripped Warwick of his inheritance, and he was tainted by his father’s crime for the rest of his days, “barred from all right and claim to the crown”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL5937945web-30462d1-e1731336289933.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="George, Duke of Clarence, father of Edward of Warwick. Fraught relations with his brother Edward IV culminated in George’s execution in 1478 (Photo by Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images)" title="George, Duke of Clarence, father of Edward of Warwick. Fraught relations with his brother Edward IV culminated in George’s execution in 1478 (Photo by Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images)" /> In 1480, care of the boy was given over to the king’s stepson, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, who paid £2,000 for Warwick’s wardship. Edward may have lived at the Tower during this time – Dorset was constable there for a period – but, if he did, it was certainly not as a prisoner. He seems to have been cared for reasonably well despite his father’s treason: Edward IV’s wardrobe accounts show that the boy was given costly gifts. In summer 1481, he received “for his wear and use” nine pairs of shoes – four of the expensive, higher-quality double-soled kind – and a pair of “tawny Spanish leather” boots. Was Edward of Warwick a threat to Richard III? However, 15th-century English politics were nothing if not unpredictable. In April 1483, Edward IV died suddenly. His heir was Warwick’s cousin, the 12-year-old prince set to become King Edward V – but the boys’ uncle Richard moved to seize power. In June, Edward IV’s children were declared illegitimate and, with Warwick also ineligible, Richard was next in line. Edward V, who was at the Tower while ostensibly preparing for his coronation, was joined there by his brother, Richard of York. They were never again seen beyond its walls. Read more | Philippa Langley on the Princes in the Tower: “It was clear we had to consider the possibility that they survived” Though legally invalid, Warwick’s claim to the throne was stronger than his uncle’s, and an act of parliament could easily have reversed George’s attainder. But, rather than joining his cousins in the Tower, Warwick was moved to the royal household. He even attended Richard’s coronation on 6 July 1483. The new king did not seem to view Warwick as a threat; indeed, Richard even seems to have begun planning for his future. Knighted in York that September, the boy was then moved to Sheriff Hutton in north Yorkshire. This was not a quiet, remote estate where he and other royal children lived in obscurity. On the contrary: in 1484, it was one of two administrative centres for Richard’s Council of the North, a body established to give subjects in that region access to the king’s justice, and one on which Warwick was even given a position. The castle was essential for the running of the council and, though Warwick’s role was minimal – he was only nine years old – it was no doubt expected that it would increase as he grew older. Richard was clearly setting up his nephew for a position of importance in the north, and for a while Warwick’s future seemed bright. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL1066157web-ba5fc79-e1731336142289.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Richard III, in a c1520 portrait. The last Yorkist king seems to have seen his nephew as an asset rather than a threat (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" title="Richard III, in a c1520 portrait. The last Yorkist king seems to have seen his nephew as an asset rather than a threat (Photo by Bridgeman Images)" /> What happened to Warwick under the Tudors? That all changed when, in August 1485, Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven on the Pembrokeshire coast. With an army of mercenaries and Lancastrians at his back, Henry made his way into England, meeting the king in battle at Bosworth Field. Richard III was killed and, as the sun set on 22 August, the crown that – according to legend – had been found by the victor in a hawthorn bush now belonged to Henry VII. Though still only 10 years old, Warwick represented one of the most significant threats to the new king. Despite the attainder, with the princes in the Tower missing, presumed dead, Warwick was next in line. He was taken into custody almost immediately and, as London prepared for another coronation, he was incarcerated in the Tower – for no crime save his royal blood. Little is known about where Warwick was kept in the Tower, but chronicler Edward Hall wrote that he was kept “out of all company of men and sight of beasts”. Whereas the other princes in the Tower had been seen roaming the grounds and “taking the air” during the early stages of their stay in 1483, Warwick was not granted this liberty. Indeed, he would never taste true freedom again. What did Warwick have to do with Lambert Simnel? It is testament to the security under which he was kept that the first pretender to Henry VII’s throne initially claimed to be Warwick, escaped from captivity. That boy, later identified as Lambert Simnel, was also about 10 years old, and was guided by Richard Simons, an Oxford priest. Simons took the boy to Ireland, where Yorkist support could still be found and where, in May 1487, Simnel was crowned king at Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin. Clearly, the real Warwick was so well sequestered that Simnel’s supporters had no trouble believing – or claiming to believe – that he was not imprisoned at all. But the episode also demonstrated that significant support could still be amassed for a Yorkist heir – even one whose claim was void. This was exactly why Warwick was being held in the Tower: even as a child with no legal right to the crown, his very existence threatened Henry VII. To put to bed the “foolish notion that the boy was in Ireland”, Henry had the real Warwick paraded through London to St Paul’s Cathedral along a route lined with citizens. After hearing a sermon and – on Henry’s instruction – speaking to several men, Warwick then returned to the Tower. This demonstration of his real location did not stop Simnel, though, who invaded England, reinforced by prominent Yorkists such as Warwick’s cousin John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. The matter came to a head in June 1487 at the battle of Stoke Field, where it is thought that as many as 7,000 died, Lincoln among them. Simnel was captured and, having received a pardon in recognition of his young age, was sent to work in the royal kitchens. Warwick, however, remained in the Tower despite his innocence. Perkin Warbeck, another princely pretender In 1490, another pretender to Henry’s throne burst onto the political scene overseas. This was Perkin Warbeck, born in Tournai (today in Belgium), who claimed to be Richard of York, the younger of the princes in the Tower. He was endorsed by Charles VIII of France, James IV of Scotland, and Warwick’s aunt, Margaret of Burgundy. Like Simnel before him, Warbeck tried to take the crown, invading England several times after 1491 – always unsuccessfully. In 1497, he landed in Cornwall and, though he was declared King Richard IV at Bodmin Moor, he was soon captured by the king’s forces and taken to the Tower. After confessing that he was not really the son of Edward IV, Warbeck was – like Simnel – treated remarkably fairly by Henry VII. Not only was he moved to the royal household, he was even allowed to attend banquets. It was captivity of a different kind, yet one much more lenient than Warwick’s. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/W862FJweb-033a334-e1731336544469.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Edward of Warwick joined his cousins the princes in the Tower, and numerous other royals in being incarcerated in the Tower of London over the centuries (Photo by Steve Vidler/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Edward of Warwick joined his cousins the princes in the Tower, and numerous other royals in being incarcerated in the Tower of London over the centuries (Photo by Steve Vidler/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The contrast is stark: the latter had been imprisoned for over a decade, whereas those who had actively attempted to usurp the crown lived far more comfortably. Their lack of royal blood meant that, though Simnel and Warbeck had raised armies and invaded, Warwick remained the biggest threat to Henry’s security. It was only when Warbeck tried to escape in 1498 that he was taken back to the Tower. Here his story intersects with Warwick’s, putting them both on a path to destruction. In a rare glimpse of the latter’s character, he reportedly spoke to Warbeck through a hole in the ceiling, urging him to “be of good cheer and comfort”. In the event, he would have neither; within months, a plot was uncovered to break out both men, involving stealing from the treasury and blowing up the Tower’s gunpowder store. On trial, Warwick reportedly confessed that he “consented to break prison and depart out of the realm with Perkin” – though, Hall noted, “because of his innocence... many men” doubted Warwick had agreed to the plot “of his own free will”. Indeed, a life in seclusion may have led to naivety on Warwick’s part, and he may not have understood the full extent of what he was agreeing to when he was “made privy [to] the enterprise”. Why was Edward of Warwick sentenced to death? Both men were tried for treason, and Warwick was found guilty on 12 November 1499. The trial records state that he was to be “drawn and hanged” – the most brutal method of execution, reserved for traitors. Warbeck had been similarly sentenced. This did not come as a surprise. Some believed that the scheme had been “the king’s device” – that “Perkin was but his bait to entrap the Earl of Warwick”. Though there is no evidence that the plot was fabricated, it is not outside the realms of possibility. At the time, Henry was negotiating the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, whose parents were hesitant. Francis Bacon later claimed that her father, Ferdinand II of Aragon, “had written to the king in plain terms, that he saw no assurance of [Arthur’s] succession as long as the Earl of Warwick lived; and that he was loth to send his daughter to troubles and dangers”. Hall, too, noted that Ferdinand “imagined that as long as any Earl of Warwick lived, England should never be cleansed or purged of civil war”. To secure the alliance with Spain, Warwick had to die. Why isn’t Warwick as well remembered as the Princes in the Tower? On 23 November, Warbeck suffered a traitor’s death at Tyburn, and his head was set on a spike on London Bridge; Warwick’s nobility spared him this grisliest of punishments. Instead, his sentence was commuted to beheading on Tower Hill. Afterwards his body, “with the head laid into a coffin”, was taken for burial at Bisham Priory, the resting place of his Neville ancestors. “The entire population mourned the death of the handsome youth,” Vergil wrote later, “who was committed to prison not for any fault of his own but because of his family’s offences.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/H6E0GYweb-e17b277-e1731336606887.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 1505 portrait of Henry VII. He may have schemed Warwick’s death to secure the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon (Photo by Peter Barritt/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A 1505 portrait of Henry VII. He may have schemed Warwick’s death to secure the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon (Photo by Peter Barritt/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Despite reported public grief, there were no reprisals for Henry VII. Richard III had been maligned for the alleged murder of the other young royals, but there was no great uproar at the death of this third prince. It is impossible to say why, but perhaps it was because of his age. At 24, his death was tragic – but much less shocking than those of the princes in the Tower who, if they did indeed die in 1483, had been just 12 and 9 years old. Perhaps, too, it was also because there were few left who could take up the Yorkist mantle. Though John de la Pole’s brothers Edmund (nicknamed the ‘White Rose’) and Richard (the ‘Last White Rose’) both tried, neither succeeded in raising the same kind of Yorkist spirit that tormented Henry VII in the latter years of the 15th century. And though the Tudor quest for security would spill more Yorkist blood in the years to come, the direct male line of the House of York died with Warwick. In Vergil’s words, “Edward had to perish in this fashion in order that there should be no surviving male heir to his family”. Read more | The Tudors: 51 moments that shaped the royal dynasty A life without freedom Henry VII had paid for the Spanish alliance with Warwick’s blood – and it proved to be a poor investment. Arthur died in 1502, and in 1509 Catherine of Aragon married Henry VIII. But when Henry’s plan to divorce her was revealed, Catherine “used some words that she had not offended, but it was a judgment of God, for her former marriage was made in blood; meaning that of the Earl of Warwick”. Though she argued that her marriage remained valid, Warwick’s death clearly lay heavy on her mind. Henry VII had justified the young man’s execution with the accusation of treason, but there remained some – like Catherine – who saw the tragedy in it. For the sole reason that he was Clarence’s son, Warwick was forced to live a life without freedom – and, just like the thousands who died during the Wars of the Roses, ultimately lost it. Sarah Norton is a historian specialising in kingship in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
The rise of Henry VII: how a life of cheating death prepared him for the throne as the first Tudor king
Want to know why Henry VII is remembered as an intensely suspicious king, wracked by paranoia? The answer, writes Nathen Amin, lies in his death-defying rise to power
Portraits of Henry VII typically share a few key traits. They depict a man with a lean, strong face, a shock of brown hair escaping from beneath a black cap. A long nose; often the ghost of a smile. And dark, piercing eyes. Watchful? Wary? Suspicious, even? Certainly that’s how history has remembered him: as a king driven to the edge of tyranny by his rampant paranoia, cursed with a debilitating suspicion of those around him that left him isolated and unloved towards the end of his reign. Francis Bacon, writing in the early 17th century, remarked that Henry was “a dark prince, and infinitely suspicious”, who would admit no one “to his power or to his secrets”. There is an element of truth in Bacon’s judgment that Henry became “lost in a wood of suspicions”. Read more | Henry VII: the greatest pretender Henry’s wary nature is typically attributed to his shaky claim to the throne. The first Tudor monarch was unable to escape the taunt that he was a usurper with no right to call himself king. In fact, his renowned paranoia was the inevitable consequence of a traumatic youth – a trait ingrained long before he harboured ambitions to wear a crown. If we delve deeper into Henry’s background, we can draw a fuller picture of one of our most circumspect of monarchs – one that might elicit sympathy for a long misunderstood king. Growing up with the enemy Henry was not born to rule. Indeed, he was born far from the throne, both figuratively and literally. The son of Margaret Beaufort, an English heiress of royal descent, and a half-Welsh, half-French earl named Edmund Tudor, Henry was born in Pembroke Castle on 28 January 1457. It was an inopportune moment to arrive in the world: civil war was brewing between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, remembered today as the Wars of the Roses. Henry was related on both sides of his family tree to the beleaguered Lancastrian king Henry VI, who was both his maternal cousin and his paternal half-uncle. He never knew his father, Edmund Tudor, who died three months before Henry was born. Edmund, who had been engaged in conflict with a Yorkist faction led by William Herbert, perished in uncertain circumstances in Carmarthen in November 1456, having not long been released from a Yorkist prison. In any case, Margaret was just 13 years old when she gave birth to Henry, and the baby’s welfare was entrusted to his uncle Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/07/F3PEBE-9ea8023-e1721916654762.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="The 12th-century Pembroke Castle was Henry VII’s birthplace, but also where he and his uncle Jasper were besieged by the forces of Edward IV in 1471, when Henry was just 14 (Photo by Christopher Nicholson/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="The 12th-century Pembroke Castle was Henry VII’s birthplace, but also where he and his uncle Jasper were besieged by the forces of Edward IV in 1471, when Henry was just 14 (Photo by Christopher Nicholson/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> A series of battles between 1459 and 1461 ultimately displaced the Lancastrians from the English throne. Henry’s grandfather, Owen Tudor, was executed and his uncle Jasper was forced into penurious exile. At just four years old, Henry’s wardship was sold by the new Yorkist king, Edward IV, to none other than Herbert, the avowed enemy of the Tudors, who had been closely implicated in the death of the boy’s father, Edmund, just five years earlier. Being just a child, Henry had no input in this decision. He spent the next decade living with the Herberts at Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh border. There he enjoyed a stable life and a solid education. War, however, continued to rear its ugly head. At the battle of Edgcote in July 1469, Lord Herbert fought rebels loyal to Edward IV’s wayward brother George, Duke of Clarence, and cousin Richard Neville, better known as Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’. Herbert, whose side lost the battle, was captured and beheaded. It is possible Henry was himself present at this engagement; if so, it would have been a horrifying first experience of warfare. When Clarence and Warwick helped restore the Lancastrian king Henry VI to the throne the following year, though, the door was opened for the young Henry Tudor to be reunited with Jasper, the uncle he barely knew. Edward IV targets Henry Tudor The Lancastrian resurgence proved short-lived: in May 1471, Edward IV wrested back his crown in battle then, over the days that followed, ruthlessly eliminated the flower of Lancaster. Among the dead were Henry VI; his son, Prince Edward of Westminster; and his cousins Edmund and John Beaufort. As a consequence of this bloodletting, the previously lightly regarded Henry Tudor, still just 14 years old, was suddenly in the Yorkist crosshairs. As one foreign ambassador remarked, Edward IV was determined to “crush the seed” of Lancastrianism. Henry was at Chepstow with Jasper when they were set upon by a Yorkist soldier sent by the king to seize them. His uncle was able to turn the tables and kill this would-be captor but, conscious that reinforcements would soon appear, the two Tudors quickly set off across the wilds of south Wales. At Jasper’s seat, Pembroke, they were besieged for eight tense and terrifying days before escaping to the nearby coastal fort of Tenby. Uncle and nephew scrambled through a network of underground tunnels down to the harbour, where they hopped into a waiting vessel. Their departure marked the start of 14 years of exile for Henry. Tossed by a storm, the Tudors eventually made landfall in Brittany. There they received the protection of Duke Francis II. Henry's life in exile When Edward IV discovered that Henry had escaped, he sought to manipulate Francis’s very real fears of being conquered by the acquisitive French crown. Brittany and Yorkist England were allies, and Edward expected Francis to surrender the Tudors at once. But Francis hesitated. If he turned over Henry, he would have no bargaining chip with which to extract military or financial support from the English, who were equally keen that the Bretons didn’t deliver the Tudors to the French. Hampered by geopolitics, Francis instead swore “upon his honour” to protect his guests. Hence the disconcerted Henry found himself a pawn in a fluid Anglo-French-Breton diplomatic tussle; like a ship in a tempest, his fate lay outside his control. For much of the next dozen years, Henry was closely observed, his movement curtailed and his servants heavily vetted. According to a contemporary observation by the Frenchman Philippe de Commines, the Tudors were treated “very handsomely for prisoners”, but it was clear that they were vulnerable to the whims of others. This became evident five years into Henry’s Breton exile. In early 1476, Edward IV sought once more to get his hands on this evasive Lancastrian ally who remained tantalisingly out of his grasp. An embassy was sent across the Channel armed with chests of gold, hoping to persuade the Bretons to release their Tudor guest. Duke Francis’s resolve was weakened, and he “committed the sheep to the wolf”, handing Henry to Edward’s delegation. The jubilant English envoys decamped to Saint-Malo, ready for the voyage back to their awaiting king. Still just 19, Henry likely viewed the ships in the harbour with trepidation, knowing that, as “the only imp” of Henry VI’s blood still living, he was being “carried to his death”. So, at the final moment, Henry faked an illness. This provided an opportunity for the Bretons to change their mind, and in the confusion that ensued he managed to slip away from his captors, fleeing through the narrow streets to claim sanctuary in the cathedral. When the Englishmen tried to force their way in, they were beaten back by the outraged local populace and returned home empty handed. Rise of Richard III The next six years of Henry’s exile passed with little incident, living once more at the Breton court under the aegis of a contrite duke. For much of this time, Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, worked hard to convince a mellowing Edward IV to permit her son to return home – and not to the chopping block. By June 1482 she had wrested a draft pardon from Edward, which stipulated that Henry could return provided he bend the knee to the Yorkist king. He would be restored to the earldom of Richmond, and there was even a potential marriage to Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, on the cards. But on 9 April 1483, before the negotiations could be concluded, Edward IV died. Within weeks the deceased king’s brother had orchestrated a coup to become Richard III. The Yorkist court was bitterly divided between those who accepted the sidelining of Edward’s sons and those who didn’t. And when rumours spread that Richard’s nephews – popularly known today as the princes in the Tower – had been put to death, dismay manifested into outright rebellion. Read more | Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower? Concerned that Richard seemed unwilling to honour the pardon Edward IV had drafted for Henry, Margaret Beaufort now extended the hand of friendship to the princes’ grief-stricken mother, Elizabeth Woodville. The two women arranged to put past differences behind them to take down a common foe. The Duke of Buckingham – who himself had a royal claim – was persuaded to abandon his erstwhile ally, Richard, and lead the crusade. Buckingham roused his tenants in October 1483, intending to link up with the Woodville contingent and an invading Henry Tudor. The uprising, however, proved farcical. Buckingham was captured with ease, and was executed soon afterwards. The Woodvilles were scattered, and Henry never even succeeded in making landfall in England. The upshot of Buckingham’s death, combined with the belief that the Yorkist princes had been killed, was that there now remained only one realistic challenger for Richard’s crown: Henry Tudor. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/07/KDFNTT-02d9781-e1721916878653.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="A portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, who persuaded Edward IV’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville, to help bring down Richard III (Photo by Historic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, who persuaded Edward IV’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville, to help bring down Richard III (Photo by Historic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Henry as heir to the throne There is no evidence from before the end of 1483 that Henry or his mother had any aspirations for him to be king. And he was regarded by one foreign contemporary, Philippe de Commines, as a “person of no power, and one who had been long prisoner” who was “not the next heir to the crown”. Even so, Henry saw an opportunity – and seized it. On Christmas Day 1483, Henry made a solemn promise to English rebels gathered before him in St Peter’s Cathedral, Rennes. If they sponsored his unlikely bid to be king, he would return their seized estates and offices. To further bind the Yorkist element to his cause, he swore to marry Elizabeth of York and symbolically unite the two warring royal houses. It was a bold gambit – but it paid off: the rebels pledged their fealty “as though he had already been created king”. This marked an astonishing turnaround in Tudor fortunes. Now regarded by Richard III as “the king’s great rebel and traitor”, Henry’s task was daunting. He spent the first few months of 1484 trying to persuade Duke Francis of Brittany to fund a fresh enterprise against the English king, but was himself nearly outmanoeuvred by a wily Richard. When Francis was taken ill, Richard sent across another embassy to deal with the Breton treasurer, Pierre Landais. Seeking personal enrichment, Landais promised to have an oblivious Henry seized and handed over. Fortunately for Henry, the Tudor camp had a spy in Richard’s council, and a messenger swiftly travelled to Brittany to warn Henry of his impending betrayal. Through necessity, the young Tudor had grown into a cautious adult, and took this news gravely. He summoned a few trusted figures to his side, and hatched yet another escape plan. He had already made two improbable flights during his lifetime: first as a 14-year-old in Tenby and again as a 19-year-old in Saint-Malo. Now, aged 27, he looked to complete a third. At some point in September 1484, Henry departed his court-in-exile under the pretence of visiting an acquaintance. Just a few miles into his journey, Henry and his companions left the road. He quickly changed into the clothes of a servant and, suitably disguised, rode hard for the French border. When they realised that something was afoot, the Bretons sent out a search party to bring Henry back. Stopping only briefly to water his exhausted horse, Henry made it into France with just an hour to spare. Once again, he had completed a remarkable escape. Once the French discovered that Henry was on their turf, they immediately welcomed him to court, where he was treated with every courtesy. More importantly – and for their own ends – the French crown publicly sponsored Henry’s campaign to “recover the Kingdom of England”, and began to source funding and soldiers. The path to Bosworth Field Richard III was outraged by this development, and rued his failure to get his hands on Henry. On 7 December 1484, the king issued a scathing proclamation – a masterful exercise in propaganda, lashing out at the “rebels and traitors” who had taken as their captain a man of “ambitious and insatiable covetousness [with] no manner, interest, right or colour” to his crown. All, Richard thundered, had not only forsaken their rightful king and natural country, but were murderers, adulterers and extortioners, moral delinquents who would inflict great harm on the English people if successful in their venture. Richard expected all “good and true Englishmen” to remain loyal. Henry and his supporters persevered, however. Having secured a series of personal loans from a number of merchants to bolster his war chest, by the summer of 1485 the would-be king was ready to set sail. He led a modest force largely comprising French mercenaries and a few hundred English rebels with nothing to lose. Read more | Bosworth: the dawn of the Tudors On 1 August 1485, Henry stepped onto a ship moored in Harfleur harbour. As he awaited a favourable wind to take him across the Channel to his uncertain fate, he may have reflected on his life to this point – and his repeated brushes with death. Removed from his family as a child, he had possibly witnessed the beheading of his guardian, and been forced to flee for his life on more than one occasion while still in his teens. As a claimant to the English throne, his life was still in constant peril. It is easy to picture Henry on the deck of his ship, staring out to sea, vowing that – if this unlikely quest proved successful – he would never again be a pawn in others’ games. History has adjudged Henry a king racked with suspicions; a trait that left him unloved and unmourned at death. His path to the throne, however, had taught him to be wary of both friend and foe. His court biographer, Polydore Vergil, wrote of Henry that “his mind was brave and resolute and never, even at the moments of the greatest danger, deserted him”. Life experience had taught Henry to be guarded. Far from a weakness, it was an attribute that served him well as king. He was suspicious, yes, but successful – and a true survivor. Nathen Amin is an author specialising in the reign of Henry VII. His new book is Son of Prophecy: The Rise of Henry Tudor (Amberley, 2024) This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
The power behind the throne: women in the Wars of the Roses
They masterminded coups, brokered peace deals and may even have led troops into battle. Sarah Gristwood unlocks the stories of the women who shaped one of the bloodiest dynastic clashes in English history
The events of the middle and late 15th century were, we have always been told, driven by men. It was a story of the battlefields on which kings, dukes and earls fought for control of the country during the Wars of the Roses; a great dynastic confrontation that saw the houses of York and Lancaster battle for control of the English crown from 1455–85. This assumption of male dominance is as automatic as the one that saw Margaret Beaufort ignore her own claim to the throne in favour of her son, Henry Tudor, or as the heiress Anne Neville being passed between Lancaster and York as though she were as insentient as any other piece of property. Yet the actions of the women forged during the Wars of the Roses would, ultimately, prove to matter as much as the battlefields. Referred to as that “great and strong-laboured woman” by Sir John Bocking in 1456, Margaret of Anjou, with her determination to hold onto the reins of power, played a vital part in pushing England into civil war. It was two other women, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, who brokered the marriage that sealed the peace deal. From Henry VI’s wife to Henry VII’s mother, it was women who acted as midwives to the Tudor dynasty. The women behind the so-called Wars of the Roses were playing a game of thrones. The business of their lives was power; their sons and husbands the currency. The passion and pain of the lives echo through William Shakespeare’s history plays – and yet, those plays apart, most of us know very little about their extraordinary stories. This is due, in part, to the patchy nature of the source material. The sources for this particular period are “notoriously intractable”, as JR Lander, an expert on the Wars of the Roses, put it – and more so for women who fought on no battlefields and passed no laws. The detailed records – and the aristocratic letters you find even from the days of Henry VIII less than 50 years later – are largely absent. What’s more, the years that saw the disappearance of the princes in the Tower of London hold more than their fair share of insoluble mysteries and popular history has traditionally preferred to deal in certainties. But it is worth persevering and trying to unlock these women’s stories. The more you look at their actions, their alliances and at the connections between them, the more you start to see an alternative engine of history. The she-wolf: Margaret of Anjou (1430-83) Wife of Henry VI When Margaret of Anjou was brought to England in 1445, to wed the Lancastrian king Henry VI, she was widely regarded as little more than a pawn in a marriage contract designed to cement a truce in the long war with France. Within a matter of years, her single-mindedness would prove a major catalyst in sparking the Wars of the Roses. In fact, such was Margaret’s impact upon her adopted nation that, a century or so after her death, Shakespeare immortalised her as a “she-wolf”, with a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide”. Despite Shakespeare’s verdict, it’s possible that Margaret would never have figured so prominently in the political arena if events had not forced her hand. In 1454 the queen (who was, to contemporaries, “a manly woman, using to rule and not be ruled”) made a bill of five articles – “whereof the first is that she desires to have the whole rule of the land”, or so one correspondent said. By then, just as she gave birth to Edward, their only son, her husband fell into a catatonic stupor. Margaret was desperate to prevent power falling entirely into the hands of Henry’s cousin the Duke of York and his party, who she saw as dangerous rivals to royal authority. As rivalry turned to armed conflict, the queen, as a woman, could only act through deputies. (Though 30 years before, legend had it, her grandmother Yolande of Aragon, a powerful protector to Joan of Arc, had donned silver armour and led her own troops against the English.) But time and again, reports would speak of Margaret’s Lancastrian forces – rather than of her husband’s – and at the second battle of St Albans in 1461 one reporter, the Milanese Prospero di Camulio, seems to suggest that she was in the fray. “The Earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and… pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.” The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle, “King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trust better to her party than to his own…” An anecdotal report of a speech once credited to Margaret is as heroic in its own way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury. “I have often broken [the English] battle line,” she told her men. “I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen… I will either conquer or be conquered with you.” After Richard of York’s heir, Edward IV, captured Henry VI’s crown in 1460, Margaret by no means ceased campaigning. The next decade saw her tirelessly touting for support around the continent and in Scotland, where she won help from another prominent woman, Mary of Guelders, ruling as regent for her infant son James. Indeed, it would be Margaret’s unlikely alliance with a former Yorkist, the powerful Earl of Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’, (cemented by a marriage between her son and his daughter Anne Neville) that led to Henry VI’s brief reinstatement in 1470. But the following spring, the deaths of her husband and son at Yorkist hands left Margaret no pieces to play on the political stage and she died in France impoverished and embittered. The Rose of Raby: Cecily Neville (1415–95) Mother of Edward IV and Richard III Born the beautiful ‘Rose of Raby’, daughter of the powerful Earl of Westmorland, Cecily Neville was 15 years older than Margaret of Anjou, and already long married to Richard, Duke of York when Margaret, her sometime friend and rival, became queen. Ironically, it was the death of Cecily’s husband (and her second son) at the battle of Wakefield, a decisive Lancastrian victory fought in 1460, that gave her a political role. Only three months later, her eldest son took the throne as Edward IV and, in the early days of his reign, it was said of her that she, “holds the king at her pleasure”, to rule as she wished. Perhaps that perception did not last long; certainly it did not survive Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville – but it is Cecily’s subsequent role that has been a matter of most debate among historians. Where, firstly, did she stand over the dissent between Edward IV and his younger brother Clarence? The dispute led ultimately to Clarence’s execution – allegedly drowned in a butt of malmsey – in 1478. Even more importantly, what was her view of her son Richard’s seizure of the throne and dispossession of her grandsons after King Edward’s death in 1483? How did she react to suspicions that Richard had murdered them in the Tower? One theory – that of historian Michael K Jones – suggests that Cecily supported Clarence’s claim that his elder brother (Edward IV) was illegitimate, and that he himself was the rightful heir. She may even have been the guiding spirit behind Richard III’s coup. It would be at her house that the meetings that prepared his takeover were planned. Evidence is, however, somewhat scanty. It is possible that Cecily took a large step away from the spotlight in the years following Clarence’s death. She was, after all, already in her sixties, which was old, by the standards of the day. It would have been quite understandable if she were simply as punch drunk as any other old fighter, keeping herself out of the fray. Cecily is perhaps the best example of the comparatively poor biographical legacy of the last Plantagenet women. Though her long life was beset by conflicts as shocking as can ever have rent any family, we cannot, rather frustratingly, be sure where her own strongest allegiance lay. The tragic lady: Anne Neville (1456–85) Wife of Richard III Born the daughter of the powerful Earl of Warwick, Anne Neville was first married off by her father, the ‘Kingmaker’, to the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, to cement an alliance with Margaret of Anjou, hitherto Warwick’s bitter enemy. After both the prince and Warwick himself were killed in a crushing Yorkist defeat of the Lancastrians at the 1471 battle of Barnet, Anne (the great niece of Cecily Neville) passed into the hands of the Duke of Clarence. He, according to one contemporary chronicler, tried to keep her hidden, disguised as a kitchen maid, for fear her fortune should fall into his brother Richard’s clutches. Clarence failed and in 1483, after a decade of largely obscure married life, Anne was crowned as Richard III’s queen. Within two years she was dead amid rumours Richard had caused her demise either through poison or psychological warfare; a figure as tragic, if less scandalous, as Shakespeare imagined her in his Lady Anne (Richard III). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2012/09/GettyImages-51243971-42c8cd9.jpg" width="2339" height="4242" alt="Anne Neville in 1473: rumours surrounded the cause of her death just two years into her marriage to Richard III. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Anne Neville in 1473: rumours surrounded the cause of her death just two years into her marriage to Richard III. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> The commoner queen: Elizabeth Woodville (c1437–92) Wife of Edward IV, mother of the princes in the Tower When Elizabeth Woodville was wed in secret to the young Yorkist king, Edward IV, in 1464, she became the first English woman to be crowned queen consort since the Norman Conquest. She is said to have demanded marriage as the price of her virtue, just as Anne Boleyn would do to Elizabeth’s grandson, Henry VIII. The daughter of a minor peer (though her mother came from a royal European house), Elizabeth was the widow of a Lancastrian knight, with two children already to her name. The idea of a king making a love match with a commoner was itself controversial, and no less anger was aroused by the sudden rise to prominence of the whole Woodville family. Elizabeth Woodville has often been dismissed as a woman of almost unparalleled shallowness, yet the plots of her later years may tell a more complicated story. After her husband died in 1483, news that Richard, Duke of Gloucester (Richard III) had taken possession of her young son, Edward V, sent Elizabeth flying into sanctuary. Her behaviour in the following months has been extensively canvassed. Her decision to allow her younger son to join his brother in the Tower, where the boys disappeared from public view, and the fact that she allowed her daughters to leave sanctuary and go to dance at their uncle’s court – the court of the man who may have murdered their brothers – has been scrutinised. Probably she felt she had no other options, but generations of historians have struggled to explain a pragmatism that seems to verge on sheer insensibility. One theory goes so far as to suggest that at least the younger of the princes in the Tower may have been alive and secretly released into her care. There was something else going on here. The 16th-century Italian historian Polydore Vergil relates how, only weeks into Richard III’s reign, Elizabeth gave her consent to a joint conspiracy suggested by the Lancastrian heiress Margaret Beaufort and relayed to the dowager queen in sanctuary by Margaret’s physician, the Welshman Lewis Caerleon. Vergil reports that Elizabeth promised Margaret that she would recruit all of Edward IV’s friends if Henry Tudor would be sworn to take Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of York in marriage as soon as he had the crown. Although the 1483 rebellions failed to topple Richard from his throne, this was the deal that would ultimately produce the Tudor dynasty. The fiery plotter: Margaret ‘of Burgundy’ (1446–1503) Sister of Edward IV and Richard III Youngest daughter of Cecily Neville, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, Margaret’s childless marriage to Charles, Duke of Burgundy never deterred her from intervening in the affairs of her native country. Once a mediator between her warring brothers Edward and Clarence, it was after Henry VII assumed the throne that Margaret plotted most actively as chief promoter of the pretender to Henry VII’s throne Perkin Warbeck, as well as of his predecessor Lambert Simnel. With more than a touch of the misogyny displayed by most contemporary commentators, Vergil claimed Margaret, driven by “insatiable hatred and fiery wrath”, continually sought Henry’s destruction – “so ungovernable is a woman’s nature especially when she is under the influence of envy”. The unifier: Elizabeth of York (1466–1503) Daughter of Edward IV & Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Henry VII, mother of Henry VIII As the new Henry VII strove to confirm his rule after victory at Bosworth and bring unity to the country, his own fragile claim to the throne from his mother’s Lancastrian blood was immeasurably strengthened by marriage to the Yorkist heiress. There seems to have been no thought, in the world of practical politics, that Elizabeth of York might actually take the throne herself. A century on, Francis Bacon would nonetheless report that Henry feared he might be seen as ruling only though Elizabeth’s right, and being “but a king at courtesy”. Perhaps that is why she seems to have been sidelined by her cannier husband into anonymous domesticity and a string of pregnancies, the last of which caused her death in 1503. “The queen is beloved because she is powerless”, one ambassador reported, damningly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2012/09/GettyImages-486781255-6f78d6c.jpg" width="3926" height="5479" alt="A c1500 portrait of Elizabeth of York who, with the birth of her son Henry VIII, ensured that the Tudor dynasty thrived. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A c1500 portrait of Elizabeth of York who, with the birth of her son Henry VIII, ensured that the Tudor dynasty thrived. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> But once again there is a question mark – a hint of something stranger and stronger behind the placid facade. The 17th-century antiquary George Buck claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth herself early in 1485, expressing her burning desire to marry her uncle Richard III, and her fear that his queen – that same Anne Neville who had once been married to a Lancastrian prince – “would never die”. There are many question marks over Buck’s alleged discovery of the letter, but there were indeed rumours that Richard wanted to marry his niece. He was forced to go into London and deny them publicly. Whatever doubts may have remained, Elizabeth’s marriage to Henry VII seems to have been broadly happy. The union certainly fulfilled the main, dynastic imperative, producing the prince who would become Henry VIII. Looking back to the sometimes turbulent lives of medieval queens it might almost be argued that a quieter and more predominantly domestic model for the consort’s role was on the way. Except, of course, that Elizabeth of York was grandmother to two queens (Mary and Elizabeth) who did assume the throne in their own right; and that, too, is her legacy. The ambitious Tudor: Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509) Mother of Henry VII Margaret Beaufort was England’s wealthiest heiress when, at the age of 12, she was married to Edmund Tudor, who was a comparatively humble Welshman. Margaret was something of a dark horse throughout the years of Yorkist power yet, crucially, she was – through her descent from John of Gaunt – a vital carrier of the Lancastrian bloodline. She was still only 13 and already a widow when she gave birth to her son Henry, Edmund having died of the plague. The experience possibly damaged her slight physique, since her two subsequent marriages produced no more children and, later in life, she would take a vow of celibacy. This meant that all her ambitions centred on Henry. Yet in 1471 she felt compelled, for safety, to send him into exile in Brittany. She would see her son again only 14 years later and in the most dramatic of circumstances. In the summer of 1485, Henry Tudor landed with a small invasion force on the Welsh coast. He launched a campaign to take King Richard III’s throne, urged on by a flow of money and messengers from his mother. The fact that Margaret was able to offer her son any support at all was, in itself, quite an impressive achievement. She was then being kept under genteel house arrest on the Lancashire estates of her third husband, Lord Stanley – the penalty for her part in plotting with Elizabeth Woodville to launch that earlier rising against Richard. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2012/09/GettyImages-113489560-0712bee.jpg" width="4053" height="5184" alt="A portrait of Margaret Beaufort, who wielded an impressive influence over her son, Henry VII. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)" title="A portrait of Margaret Beaufort, who wielded an impressive influence over her son, Henry VII. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)" /> But just how much influence was Margaret able to exercise on Stanley? It’s a question that historians have been pondering over for years. The Stanleys’ last-minute decision to send their forces to support Henry helped win the day for the Lancastrians and secure Richard III’s demise. Margaret would be quick to claim the power and position she felt was owed to her once Henry had assumed the throne. ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, as she came to be known, in some ways overshadowed her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth of York, maintaining Henry’s authority in the Midlands, laying down the rules for the ceremonies of court and exercising to the full her own powers of patronage. Outliving her own son by a few months, she survived to play an active role in shepherding her grandson into power – a final coup for the woman who, above all others, did the most to usher in the Tudor century. Sarah Gristwood is the author of Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (Harper Press, September 2012) This article was first published in the September 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
History explorer: Tewkesbury Abbey and four more places linked to the Wars of the Roses
As part of a series in which experts nominate British locations to illustrate historical topics, Sarah Gristwood visits Tewkesbury, where the battle for England's crown was fought to the death during the Wars of the Roses
Historians can’t agree on when – and where – the Wars of the Roses ended. A few would declare it to have been as late as the battle of Stoke Field in 1487, when Henry VII saw off the last Yorkist army to oppose him. The popular vote goes to the battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III – but by then the nature of this great familial squabble had already changed. It was perhaps the battle of Tewkesbury – which took place 14 years earlier, in 1471 – that saw the conclusion of the conflict that truly pitted York against Lancaster. Certainly, that clash brought to an end the so-called Lancastrian ‘Readeption’ that aimed to restore Henry VI to the throne of England. After the Yorkists seized power in 1461, Edward IV reigned successfully for a decade until, in the autumn of 1470, he was abruptly toppled from his throne. Richard Neville, aka Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, the powerful Yorkist magnate, had suddenly changed sides and struck an unlikely deal with the exiled Margaret of Anjou, queen to the Lancastrian Henry VI, whom Edward had deposed. In 1470, as Warwick’s armies seized control of England, it was Edward who was force to flee into exile. The feeble Henry VI was nominally returned to his throne, and for six months Warwick controlled the country while Margaret (with her son – another Edward, the Lancastrian Prince of Wales) bided their time across the Channel. They may have waited too long. In the spring of 1471, everything changed again. That March, Edward IV was back, and with a fresh army. On Easter Sunday, 14 April, he met Warwick’s forces at the battle of Barnet, in an encounter in which Warwick was slain. This was the news that greeted Margaret after she landed at Weymouth, causing her to fall to the ground, the chronicles report, “like a woman all dismayed with fear”. But all was not yet lost. While Margaret gathered more troops, her ally Jasper Tudor raised another army in Wales. However, she was separated from him by the river Severn. The crossing at Gloucester was blocked by the Yorkists, so she turned towards Tewkesbury. The race to the river was on. The weather was unseasonably hot for early May, and men and horses became frantic for lack of food and water. When they reached the town of Tewkesbury late in the afternoon of 3 May, Margaret’s exhausted men could go no further. Battle was joined the next morning, in terrain one chronicle describes as a morass of “evil lanes and deep dykes, so many hedges, trees and bushes, that it was hard... to come to hand”. Margaret herself took refuge in the abbey. Legend tells that she mounted the 200 steps of its tower – still accessible today by prior arrangement – from where she could view the fighting all too clearly. What she saw, to her horror, was an overwhelming Yorkist victory, thanks in part to Edward’s clever deployment of his forces but also to the failure to advance of one veteran Lancastrian commander. A nearby field is still dubbed Bloody Meadow in memory of the slaughter of hapless Lancastrians that took place there. Among the dead was Margaret’s son, probably killed as he fled the battle scene. Bloodshed in Tewkesbury Abbey Many of the defeated Lancastrians fled into the abbey, claiming sanctuary. The different chronicles vary sharply in their versions of what happened there – and the propaganda war of this era, in which the different sides told two quite different stories, is a saga that can be traced through the stones of Tewkesbury Abbey. Edward and his two brothers – George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard of Gloucester – pursued the fugitives onto consecrated ground, demanding that the abbot hand them over. One tale tells of Edward bursting into the church itself, sword in hand, at the very moment Mass was being celebrated, only to be confronted by the abbot wielding the Host. The story describes a bloodletting so great – perhaps even under the very pillars of the nave that still stand today – that the church had to be reconsecrated. What is certain is that the Lancastrian leaders were handed over, tried, and summarily executed in Tewkesbury’s marketplace the next day. They are buried under what now serves as the abbey shop. Margaret herself had fled farther afield. She was captured three days later in a “poor religious house” near Malvern, and displayed in Edward IV’s train as he re-entered London in triumph. That night, Henry VI died – “of pure displeasure and melancholy”, said the Yorkists, though the Lancastrians all-too credibly told a different story. Margaret was kept in custody until she was eventually ransomed back to her native France, where she died in poverty. After Tewkesbury she had become irrelevant. She had been a formidable fighter – a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide,” as William Shakespeare would describe her. But now she had no Lancastrian claimant for whom to fight. The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI In life Henry VI was a pitiful ruler who plunged England into disarray. But in death he became a national hero, hailed for saving the sick and the wrongly accused. Lauren Johnson explores the miraculous afterlife of a medieval monarch A resting place of royal remains Margaret of Anjou's son. Edward, was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey, where he is commemorated by a plaque – ironically placed right under the ‘Sun in Splendour’ emblem, representing the victorious York brothers, on the ceiling. Edward’s plaque was laid during Sir Gilbert Scott’s Victorian restoration of Tewkesbury. The church (purchased by the townspeople when the rest of the abbey disappeared in the Dissolution of the Monasteries) retains genuine medieval remains aplenty: the famous bosses in the nave, the exquisite stonework of the chantries, the glass of the quire clerestory – and the mortal remains of one of the wars’ most debatable personalities. Edward IV’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, had originally joined Warwick’s coup but, in the weeks before Tewkesbury, had come back over to his brother’s side. Six years later, however, the fickle Clarence rebelled again. Reputedly executed by being drowned in a butt of malmsey wine, in 1478, he was buried beside his wife, Isabel, Warwick’s daughter, in Tewkesbury Abbey. A grating on the floor behind the altar hides the cramped vault where the bones of George and Isabel lie jumbled. Indeed, Tewkesbury keeps some of its extraordinary history hidden from the casual eye. For example, horse armour taken from the battlefield by monks strengthens the reverse side of the closed door to the sacristy. And the town itself is riddled with myriad alleys to be discovered as you explore the countless agreeably junky antique shops and delightfully eccentric tea rooms. But on the other side of the abbey from the town’s timber-framed houses, the lush, green ground where the armies struggled in 1471 still looks much the same. Get a Battle Trail plan from the town’s visitor centre, or see the display in the museum, and the Wars of the Roses are laid out before you – the whole messy human story. Find out more about visiting Tewkesbury Abbey Edward IV: champion of the Wars of the Roses Edward IV, the first Yorkist king of England, was given short shrift by Shakespeare. Yet, argues author AJ Pollard, Edward was a remarkable military leader <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/05/GettyImages-463895493-ca6b081.jpg" width="3426" height="4134" alt="Edward IV, 15th century King of England, c1540. Artist: Anon" title="Edward IV, 15th century King of England, c1540. A Plantagenet of the Yorkist line, Edward (1442-1483) came to the throne in 1461. The first half of his reign was marked by civil war against the Lancastrians. Edward was forced into exile in France in 1470, but returned to decisively defeat his enemies at the Battle of Tewkesbury the following year. From the National Portrait Gallery, London. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> Four more places to explore linked to the Wars of the Roses Cambridge No battles were fought here, but the city is still one of the best places to get a feel for the late 15th century. Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville and Anne Neville were all patrons of Queens’ College, while King’s College was founded by Henry VI, and construction of its famous chapel continued under Henry VII and his son Henry VIII– an example in stone and glass of the progress of a vital half-century. Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, founded both St John’s and Christ’s colleges; she kept her own set of rooms in the latter, and visited regularly. Find out more about visiting Cambridge Tower of London The Tower of London is associated above all with the mysterious fate of Richard III’s nephews, the unfortunate princes. But it’s also where Elizabeth Woodville first took refuge in 1470, where Elizabeth of York retreated during the rebellion of 1497, and where Henry VI died in mysterious circumstances. Its strategic and symbolic importance in the medieval era is still evident today. Find out more about how to visit the Tower of London and book tickets with Historic Royal Palaces Middleham Castle, North Yorkshire The north of England provided Richard III with the power base he needed to seize the English throne, and Middleham Castle in the Yorkshire Dales was his favourite residence. His short-lived son was Edward ‘of Middleham’, who died there in childhood. Largely ruined, and now in the care of English Heritage, the castle nonetheless retains evocative reminders of Richard’s day. Find out more about how to visit Middleham Castle and book tickets with English Heritage Bosworth battlefield, Leicestershire The precise conduct of the battle in which Richard III was killed seems always to be in dispute – but there’s no questioning the interest created by the new heritage centre: family-friendly, it’s informative for adults, too. Ever wondered why the battle was fought at Bosworth? Because the site is crossed by Roman roads – themselves tributes to even earlier English history – and battles were fought in places to which troops could travel quickly. Find out more about how to visit Bosworth battlefield This article was first published in the June 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Wars of the Roses: the 15th-century clash of kings that heralded the dawn of the Tudor dynasty
The Wars of the Roses were the civil wars fought between the Yorkist and Lancastrian dynasties in the 15th century. Explore the conflict in full – from its root causes and who's who, through to the realities of civil war in the Middle Ages and 12 unbelievable incidents that occurred during the wars
Seen as one of the bloodiest episodes in English history, the Wars of the Roses inspired not only the quill of William Shakespeare but also the typewriters and word processors of an army of historical novelists. It was a period that saw the deaths of kings, the extinction of royal dynasties and the brutal slaughter of much of England’s nobility, but they were much more than a simple fight to the death between two royal houses. Explore who fought, what happened and details some of the ambition, heroism, loyalty, treachery, greed and pure self-interest that lay behind this dramatic period of conflict. Jump to each section: What were the Wars of the Roses? Wars of the Roses timeline: the three phases of fighting Who’s who in the Wars of the Roses? Why is it called the Wars of the Roses? When did the Wars of the Roses end? Who won the Wars of the Roses: Lancaster or York? Wars of the Roses facts: 8 realities about the clashes for England’s throne 12 unbelievable incidents in the Wars of the Roses What were the Wars of the Roses? Although popularly seen as a long, dynastic struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York, the Wars of the Roses were in fact three separate wars, each with different causes, fought in the 15th-century. Wars of the Roses timeline: the three phases of fighting Writing for BBC History Revealed, historian and battlefields expert Julian Humphrys recounts the twists and turns in the contest for England's throne... Phase one: the ire of Richard of York The initial conflict was caused by the inadequacies and poor mental health of the Lancastrian Henry VI of England, and the ambitions of Richard of York, great-grandson of Edward III, a leading English magnate who demanded a top role in government. This tense situation was exacerbated by rivalries among the country’s aristocratic families. In May 1455, York and the noble Neville family attacked the royal court at St Albans, killing a number of leading Lancastrian nobles. Conflict broke out again in 1459 and, the following July, York captured the Henry VI at the battle of Northampton and then later claimed the throne for himself. Eventually, a compromise was agreed, which allowed Henry VI to remain king, but with York installed as his heir. However, Henry’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, refused to accept the disinheritance of her son, Edward 0f Westminster, Prince of Wales, and raised an army to fight for the Lancastrian cause. York was defeated and killed at the battle of Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in December. But the crushing victory won by York’s son, Edward IV, at the battle of Towton in March 1461, effectively settled the issue in favour of the Yorkists, although occasional fighting would continue in the North East for a further three years. Phase two: the defection of the Earl of Warwick The second war was primarily caused by the discontent of the mighty nobleman Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, as he’s often known, had been a supporter of Edward IV but, following the king’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, Warwick saw his influence slip away. In 1469, he rebelled, briefly taking Edward prisoner. The following year, Warwick made an extraordinary alliance of convenience with his former foe, Margaret of Anjou, forcing Edward IV into exile and temporarily restoring Henry VI to the throne. In 1471, the exiled Edward returned to England and brought his enemies to battle separately, defeating and killing Warwick at the battle of Barnet, now in Greater London, and beating Margaret at the battle of Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, where her son was killed. Edward then had Henry VI quietly done away with and ruled unchallenged as Edward IV until his early death in 1483. He was succeeded by his 12-year-old son, Edward V. Phase three: the conflict shifts from Yorkists vs Lancastrians, to Tudors vs Royals Edward IV’s death, on 9 April 1483, took everyone by surprise. His brother Richard of Gloucester was in the north, while his heir, the 12-yearold Edward, Prince of Wales, was at Ludlow, Shropshire, in the care of his mother’s family, the Woodvilles – a house among Richard’s enemies. As the Woodvilles travelled to the capital, they were intercepted by Richard, who took charge of his nephew and arrested members of the Woodville faction. Richard of Gloucester assumed Protectorship of the Realm. Over the following month, preparations were made for the young King’s coronation but, on 13 June, Edward IV’s old friend William Hastings, who had supported Richard against the Woodvilles, was seized and summarily executed in the Tower. Richard claimed that Hastings had been plotting with the Woodvilles against him, but it may be that Richard had already decided to make himself king and realised that Hastings would never accept the deposition of Edward V. On 16 June, the Archbishop of Canterbury persuaded Elizabeth Woodville to hand over her other son Richard, Duke of York, so he could attend his brother’s coronation. The two boys were then housed in the royal apartments in the Tower of London. The coronation never took place. On 22 June, it was declared that, because Edward IV had been pre-contracted to marry another woman before he wed Elizabeth Woodville, his marriage to her was invalid and the boys were illegitimate. On 26 June, Richard assumed the throne and, ten days later, he and his wife were crowned in a lavish ceremony. But Richard’s support was limited. Many of Edward’s supporters, especially in the South, were alienated by Richard’s actions. They fatally split the old Yorkist establishment and enabled Henry Tudor – a largely unknown exile – to mount a challenge for the throne. In 1483, many of Edward IV’s former servants rebelled against Richard III. The rising was stamped out, but dissatisfaction was rife. Richard had alienated many by favouring men in his own Northern power bloc. Further grants of confiscated rebel land and property to his supporters only added to his unpopularity. As a result, although few nobles were prepared to openly support Henry Tudor in his bid, few supported Richard, either. On 22 August 1485, Richard was killed at the battle of Bosworth, and Henry seized the throne. Two years later, on 16 June, Henry VII defeated a rebellion by some of Richard III’s former supporters at Stoke, near Newark. After some 30 years of intermittent conflict, the final battle had at last been fought. Lancaster and York: 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about the rival houses in the Wars of the Roses Both houses claimed the throne through descent from the sons of Edward III. Kathryn Warner shares seven facts about the families who fought the series of civil wars in England and Wales… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/MC5RYP-6b7e194.jpg" width="1024" height="1082" alt="A 20th-century fresco 'Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens' by Henry Payne. It depicts a scene by Shakespeare, showing Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset being challenged by Richard, 3rd Duke of York to choose between the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster. (Photo by Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A 20th-century fresco 'Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens' by Henry Payne. It depicts a scene by Shakespeare, showing Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset being challenged by Richard, 3rd Duke of York to choose between the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster. (Photo by Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Who are the key figures in the Wars of the Roses? Henry VI (1421–71) Henry was nine months old when he succeeded his father Henry V. His adult years were punctuated by periods of insanity. He was overthrown by the Yorkists in 1461, reinstated in 1470, but then murdered in the Tower of London after the Lancastrian defeat at Tewkesbury. Margaret of Anjou (1430–82) The French wife of Henry VI, she ruled in his place during his insanity. A determined woman, she tried to exclude Richard of York from government and fought vigorously to secure the succession of her son, Edward of Westminster, until his death at Tewkesbury in 1471. Richard, Duke of York (1411–60) Richard was a descendant, through both his parents, of Edward III. He was the leading opponent of royal policy in the 1450s and claimed the throne himself in 1460. He was killed at the battle of Wakefield that December. Edward IV (1442–83) Tall, strong and popular with his men, Edward IV became Yorkist leader after his father Richard’s death at Wakefield. His victory at Towton secured him the throne. Briefly exiled in 1470, he returned to defeat his enemies at Barnet and Tewkesbury and ruled for a further 12 years before unexpectedly dying at the early age of 41. Elizabeth Woodville (1437–92) The widow of a Lancastrian knight, Elizabeth married Edward IV in 1464. He favoured her family, thus alienating Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’. Her sons, Edward V and Richard Duke of York, disappeared in mysterious circumstances after her husband’s death in 1483. Her daughter, Elizabeth, later married Henry VII, uniting the warring factions. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (1428–71) The most powerful noble in the country, Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ helped Edward IV attain the crown in 1461. When he saw his influence being eclipsed by the Woodville family, he allied with his former enemy, Margaret of Anjou and restored Henry VI to the throne, only to be killed at the Battle of Barnet in 1471. Anne Neville (1456–85) Anne Neville married Edward of Westiminster, Prince of Wales, to cement an alliance between her father, Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, and Edward’s mother Margaret of Anjou. After her husband’s death at Tewkesbury she married Richard of Gloucester (the future Richard III) and was crowned queen alongside him in 1483. Richard III (1452–85) Although as Duke of Gloucester he had loyally served his brother Edward IV, on the latter’s death he ousted his nephew, Edward V, and assumed the throne. Unable to rally much support during his short reign, he was defeated and killed by Henry Tudor at Bosworth in 1485. Henry VII (1457–1509) Returning to Britain after years of exile, Henry Tudor won the crown at Bosworth. By marrying Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, he united the houses of Lancaster and York. He died in 1509 when the throne passed to his surviving son, Henry VIII. Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509) A descendant of John of Gaunt, Margaret was married to Edmund Tudor at the age of 12. By 13 she was a widow and a mother – of the future Henry VII. She later married Sir Henry Stafford and finally Thomas Stanley, and was involved in the plot to place her son on the throne. The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI In life Henry VI was a pitiful ruler who plunged England into disarray. But in death he became a national hero, hailed for saving the sick and the wrongly accused. Lauren Johnson explores the miraculous afterlife of a medieval monarch... The Wars of the Roses: four huge questions answered Historian Lauren Johnson answers four of the biggest questions surrounding the Wars of the Roses... Why is it called the Wars of the Roses? This was a civil war fought between two roses – the household of York, which was which now has come to be symbolised by a white rose, and the household of Lancaster, which has come to be symbolised by a red rose – hence the name Wars of the Roses. Although the title 'Wars of the Roses' only comes into use in the early 19th century, the idea of two different dynasties represented by roses does go all the way back to the 15th century. Edward IV is initially known as the Rose of Rouen, because he was born in Rouen in Normandy and his family symbol is a white rose. And there are ballads from this time in praise of him that address him as that, and describe England as a garden with the rose being planted in it. And one of the family symbols of the House of Lancaster is the red rose. The imagery is there, and it's picked up very early on: probably the most important person in terms of creating the idea of the Wars of the Roses is Henry VII, who has a Lancastrian claim. He marries a princess of the House of York called Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the roses, which he demonstrates by placing the Tudor rose – a combined red and white rose – everywhere. There's a huge amount of written imagery from Henry VII's time, and particularly from when Henry VIII takes the throne, that combines these two rival bloodlines in one peaceful, lovely family. Did the Tudors invent the Wars of the Roses? It was in Henry VII's interests to propagate the concept of a titanic clash of dynasties in the 15th century – and for 500 years we've bought the lie, according to Dan Jones... When did the Wars of the Roses end? To keep things simple, we could say that the Wars of the Roses ended after Bosworth in 1485 when Henry Tudor takes the throne. We can say that with hindsight, because we know the Tudors go on to rule right through until 1603 with the death of Elizabeth I. At the time, it was probably a lot less clear cut than that. We see two pretenders come and invade England – Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck – and they represent a real threat to Henry VII, which goes on for over a decade after Bosworth. You could arguably stretch when the Wars of the Roses end right into the reign Henry VIII, because there's still a lot of Yorkists around at that time who have claims to the throne, who represent a potential rival dynasty. But with hindsight, around 1485 is when it ends. Who won the Wars of the Roses: Lancaster or York? Henry Tudor wins at Bosworth. Now, is he a Lancastrian or a Yorkist? That's the difficult question because through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, he has a Lancastrian claim to the throne. But it's absolute rubbish. It's incredibly distant. It's arguably illegitimate. Effectively, the reason that he is considered the victor is because he is king by conquest, the same as William the Conqueror, and at the time this is seen as God shining a light on him and choosing him as the future. But Henry chooses to marry Elizabeth, a Yorkist princess, because he knows he needs the support of the Yorkists. His children all therefore inherit both sides of the dynasty. His son Henry VIII is acclaimed as the union of these two roses, as someone who has the bloodline of the rival families in his veins. His sister Margaret goes on to become queen of Scotland and, ultimately, it's through her dynasty that the Stuarts coming to power in England and in Scotland again. She is a product of both York and Lancaster. So you could say, that ultimately peace wins. Would the Wars of the Roses have ended in 1471 had Edward IV lived a bit longer? It depends on your perspective as to 1483, and whether you think that Richard, Duke of Gloucester really believed that he was under threat from the Woodvilles, which is what he said was the reason for him taking control of the Princes in the Tower; whether you think he really believed that the princes were illegitimate, which again is what he said he believed; or whether you think that really it was his personal ambition that was driving things at that point. Or indeed a mixture. It's entirely possible that Richard III was responding to a perceived threat that may actually have been a bit exaggerated. If Edward IV had lived longer, his sons would have been older by the time they were coming to power themselves. They are only 12 and nine when Edward IV dies, which again means the prospect of a child king. Having lived through Henry VI, people were a bit anxious about that. I wonder if Richard's concern about the Woodvilles and about being supplanted, much in the same way his father the Duke of York had been so anxious about not having a hold on power in the reign of Henry VI, would have overridden everything else almost regardless. LISTEN: Lauren Johnson discusses the Wars of the Roses in full in this Everything You Wanted To Know episode of the HistoryExtra podcast Wars of the Roses facts: eight realities about the clashes for England's throne Writing for BBC History Revealed, historian and battlefields expert Julian Humphrys explores what civil war was like in the Middle Ages... They were not wars between the regions of Lancaster and York While the first war had a regional flavour, with Lancastrian forces coming largely from the north and the Yorkists from the south and Midlands, these were not wars between rival regions and certainly not between the cities of York and Lancaster. A noble’s title often did not equate to the area in which he held land, and it's worth noting that, for much of the period, the city of York supported the House of Lancaster. Should the Wars of the Roses be described as York v Beaufort? The Wars of the Roses have been long renowned as a feud between the houses of York and Lancaster – but can the conflict instead be seen as a deadly grudge between York and Beaufort? Nathen Amin invesitgates... <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/York_Beaufort_main-cc6dc02.jpg" width="800" height="530" alt="An 1864 illustration depicts King Henry VI and the Dukes of York and Somerset, after York's return from Ireland in 1450. Artist James William Edmund Doyle. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="An 1864 illustration depicts King Henry VI and the Dukes of York and Somerset, after York's return from Ireland in 1450. Artist James William Edmund Doyle. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> Although men from all over England took part in the wars, much of the country saw virtually no fighting Rather than trying to conquer swathes of territory, armies would roam the nation gathering recruits, before seeking out their enemies. As a result, many key battles were fought on or near major routes like the Great North Road or outside big towns like York, Ludlow and London. Sieges were far from common – the only sustained period of siege warfare took place in the northeast, after the battle of Towton in 1461, when fortifications like Alnwick and Bamburgh changed hands with bewildering regularity. The fighting there finally ended in 1464, when Bamburgh surrendered to the Yorkists. In doing so, it became the first English castle to be battered into submission by gunpowder artillery. Read more | Bamburgh Castle: The real Bebbanburg of The Last Kingdom There were fewer than 15 months of fighting during the entire 30 years The image of the Wars of the Roses as one long unbroken period of bitter bloodshed was partly created by later historians, done to exaggerate the evils of the period in order to contrast them with the peace and prosperity of their own age. In fact, campaigns were usually very short, leading one contemporary writer, Philippe de Comynes, to comment that “If any conflict breaks out in England one or other of the rivals is master within ten days or less”. This may be a overstatement, but the fact remains that in more than 30 years of ‘warfare’ there were fewer than 15 months of actual campaigning in the field. England was generally spared the destructive scorched-earth tactics employed by its men in the Hundred Years' War At this time, men of fighting age were often forced to join an army. Towns were occasionally sacked and looted – as troops passed through an area, it was common practice to strip the settlement of supplies and cause a fair degree of destruction. Even so, fighting was more about the elimination of rivals than the conquest of territory; sieges were comparatively rare. As Philippe de Comynes wrote: “Out of all the countries which I have personally known, England is the one where public affairs are best conducted and regulated with least violence to the people. There neither the countryside nor the people are destroyed, nor are buildings burnt or demolished. Disaster and misfortune fall only on those who make war, the soldiers and the nobles.” Treachery on the battlefield was relatively common At Ludford Bridge (1459), Northampton (1460) and Bosworth (1485), leaders changed sides at the last minute with disastrous consequences for their former allies. The Lancastrian armies disintegrated among bitter accusations of treachery at Barnet and Tewkesbury (both 1471), while Henry VII was concerned that he might be undone by treachery at Stoke in 1487. Not all of those who fought were English Nobles and knights with their retinues of well-trained and well-equipped men-at-arms formed the backbone of most armies, and both sides bolstered their forces through local levies, notably using Commissions of Array – an ancient way of drafting men for service in times of national emergency. Since the late-13th century, every able-bodied man had to have his own polearm or bow and be ready for duty at a day’s notice. But a variety of foreign mercenaries also plied their trade during the Wars of the Roses. These included Swiss, French, Flemish and German pikemen, and specialist troops such as artillerymen and handgunners. A contingent of Burgundian handgunners fought for the Earl of Warwick in 1461 and, ten years later, 500 Flemish handgunners fought for Edward IV. Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth was, in part, thanks to the French mercenary pikemen in his ranks. And, two years later, a large contingent of fearsome German mercenaries fought vigorously but unsuccessfully against Henry’s army at Stoke. England’s neighbours frequently took the chance to intervene in the Wars of the Roses Henry VI, the Earl of Warwick and Henry Tudor all received help from France during the Wars of the Roses. France’s enemies, the Burgundians, favoured the Yorkists, supporting Edward IV and later the Earl of Lincoln in a rebellion against Henry VII. The Scots turned out to help Margaret of Anjou in 1460-61 (and received the town of Berwick in exchange for their support) while the rebel army that was defeated at Stoke (1487) included a large proportion of Irish troops. England’s neighbours were happy to play host, too: Calais (which was in English hands) was the Earl of Warwick’s base in 1460, Edward IV took refuge in Bruges in 1470 and the young Henry Tudor spent his exile in Brittany. The power behind the throne: women in the Wars of the Roses They masterminded coups, brokered peace deals and may even have led troops into battle. Sarah Gristwood unlocks the stories of the women who shaped the Wars of the Roses – including Margaret of Anjou, Cecily Neville and Margaret of Burgandy... <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2012/09/GettyImages-463971633-f38db3b-e446efe-e1637599487921.jpg" width="341" height="244" alt="Pragmatist or heartless? A portrait of the young Elizabeth Woodville (1437-1492). The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Pragmatist or heartless? A portrait of the young Elizabeth Woodville (c1437-1492). (The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> 12 unbelievable incidents from the Wars of the Roses Writing for History Extra, historian Matthew Lewis shares 12 lesser-known facts about the conflicts… Jack Cade’s 1450 rebellion rocked the Lancastrians In July 1450, a mysterious man known as Jack Cade led a huge force of common men from Kent into London to protest against the ailing government of the Lancastrian king Henry VI. This episode is generally regarded as being outside the bounds of the Wars of the Roses, but those edges are blurred and elastic. When Jack Cade entered the capital he struck the London Stone, which can still be seen on Cannon Street, and, according to Shakespeare, proclaimed: “Now is Mortimer lord of this city!” After this, Cade openly adopted the provocative name John Mortimer. The Mortimer line was considered by many to be senior to the Lancastrian line, since the Mortimers were heirs apparent to Richard II – so adding weight to the later Yorkist claim to the throne. In 1460 Richard, Duke of York would trace his lineage from Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, whose only daughter had married Edmund Mortimer. The House of Lancaster was descended from John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son. The Mortimer Earls of March had been considered the lawful heirs of the childless Richard II before he was deposed, and the Lancastrian kings eyed them with suspicion. Was Jack Cade a son of this deposed line seeking restitution? Many would later claim that Richard, Duke of York had arranged for Cade to use the name ‘Mortimer’ to measure the response to it. Stow’s Chronicle, a Tudor source, claimed that the object of the uprising was to place York upon the throne, and Baker’s later A Chronicle of the Kings of England called Cade “an instrument of the Duke of York”. Cade – who was captured and fatally wounded following the failure of his rebellion – is a fascinating, elusive figure. Was he a genuine claimant to the throne, a social campaigner, or a puppet? The Earl of Wiltshire took to his heels to protect his face James Butler, 1st Earl of Wiltshire and 5th Earl of Ormond, was a good-looking man. So good-looking, in fact, that it hampered his performance on the battlefield. Loyal to the Lancastrian cause, Butler rose to prominence under Henry VI and fought for the king at the first battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455. The Lancastrian forces lost to those led by the Duke of York, the Earl of Salisbury and the infamous ‘kingmaker’, the Earl of Warwick. Several Lancastrian leaders were killed and Henry VI was injured and captured, but Butler escaped. How Henry VI's love of peace cost him the throne – and his life Gregory, a resident of London who kept a detailed chronicle covering the early Wars of the Roses, quipped that Butler, then in his early thirties, “fought mainly with his heels for he was frightened of losing his beauty”. Butler wrote to the Duke of York from Petersfield to ask if he could return to the king’s side and, if not, to be allowed to retire to his estates in Ireland. Butler was on the losing side once more at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross (February 1461) and again at the battle of Towton (March 1461), after which he was captured and executed – his looks finally lost for the Lancastrian cause. The friar’s cannon fooled Queen Margaret’s army The first battle of St Albans was followed by a period of peace, but it wasn’t to last long. By the autumn of 1459, Yorkist forces were massing at Ludlow in Shropshire, from where they planned to take the fight to King Henry VI’s Lancastrians again. Among those marching south to join them was an army under the Yorkist Earl of Salisbury. Yet Salisbury wasn’t to reach his destination unimpeded. Henry VI’s wife, Queen Margaret, got wind of the movements and sent a force twice the size of Salisbury’s to intercept him at Blore Heath in Staffordshire. Against the odds, Salisbury won the day but his tired, battered column still needed to reach Ludlow. Thomas, Lord Stanley had a large force in the field within a few miles of Blore Heath, and the Lancastrian army might still have regrouped and pursued their Yorkist foes. Salisbury’s answer, according to Gregory, was to leave one of his cannons behind and pay an Augustinian friar to fire it “all that night in a park that was at the back side of the field”. In the dark the Lancastrian army and Stanley’s force were disorientated and kept looking for a battle that had ended hours earlier. The clever ploy ensured that Salisbury reached Ludlow safely. The 5 greatest mysteries behind the Wars of the Roses It is one of the most keenly studied periods in British history, and the inspiration for the ever-popular Game of Thrones. But the Wars of the Roses is still full of uncertainty, contention and debate. Dan Jones explores the top five unanswered questions… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/03/GettyImages-520681987-eb6f5c4.jpg" width="5344" height="4296" alt="The ‘Princes in the Tower’: Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, disappeared in mysterious circumstances following the death of their father, King Edward IV. (The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="The ‘Princes in the Tower’: Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, disappeared in mysterious circumstances following the death of their father, King Edward IV. (The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> Lord Stanley had a lucky escape When parliament met at Coventry in November 1459 to deliver punishment for those rebels involved in the recent Yorkist uprising, a small piece of business was recorded among the rolls of the session that might have radically altered the course of the Wars of the Roses. Following the battle of Blore Heath (September 1459) and the subsequent clash at Ludford Bridge at Ludlow (October 1459), Richard, Duke of York and his allies had been forced to flee and were all attainted, stripped of lands and titles for their treason. At the end of the parliament rolls is a call from the commons for Thomas, Lord Stanley to also be attainted for treason. According to the charge, Henry VI had summoned Stanley to Nottingham, but “Lord Stanley, notwithstanding the said command, did not come to you; but William Stanley his brother, with many of the said lord’s servants and tenants, a great number of people, went to the Earl of Salisbury, and they were with the same earl at the attack upon your liege people at Blore Heath”. Further accusations are levelled, but Henry deferred consideration of them. Given the Stanleys’ later prominence and their part in the battle of Bosworth (1485) – playing a critical role in Henrv Tudor’s victory over the Yorkist Richard III – the landscape of the second half of the 15th century might have been very different had Henry taken umbrage in 1459. An Italian bishop helped the Yorkist cause Bishop Francesco Coppini of Terni played a crucial but often overlooked role in the Yorkist seizure of power in 1461. Pope Pius II had sent Coppini to England as a papal legate in 1459 to seek Henry VI’s assistance in a crusade against the Turks. His secondary mission, given him by his patron Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, was to encourage Henry to invade France. Henry’s French queen sent the legate away with a flea in his ear and Coppini retreated to Burgundy nursing his bruised pride. On the continent, he came into contact with the exiled Yorkists at Calais. The Earl of Warwick’s silver tongue flattered the bishop’s wounded ego, promising that a Yorkist government would see his master’s aims met. Thus Coppini enthusiastically took up their cause, landing at Sandwich in 1460 when Warwick invaded. When they arrived in London, he preached to the English bishops in York’s support and wrote to Henry VI advising that he grant the Yorkists an audience. Coppini was present at the battle of Northampton (July 1460) when Henry VI was captured again, but when the tide turned against the Yorkists in late 1460 he was forced to flee to the continent. After defeating an army fighting in the name of, though not led by, Henry VI at the battle of Towton (March 1461) and replacing him as king, the Yorkist Edward IV sought Coppini’s return – only for Coppini to be replaced as legate. Although Coppini accompanied the new legate, the French and Lancastrians protested against his presence and he was sent back to Rome. He had, however, played a vital role in the establishment of Yorkist government. A double-crossing fighter was knighted for his pains Andrew Trollope was knighted in the aftermath of the Lancastrian victory at the second battle of St Albans (February 1461). Trollope had been the leader of the Calais garrison, the only standing army in the pay of the crown and therefore the closest thing to a professional force in the kingdom. The Earl of Warwick had brought Trollope and his men to Ludlow to bolster the Yorkist force there, but it was Trollope’s midnight flit to the king that destroyed the Yorkists’ hopes at Ludford Bridge (October 1459). Chronicles record Trollope visiting the Duke of York at Wakefield and tricking him into believing that he was returning to the fold. York’s subsequent foray out of Sandal Castle cost him his life and increased Trollope’s standing at the Lancastrian court. At the second battle of St Albans, Trollope was prominent once more in the Lancastrian assault on the Yorkists within the town. The newly freed Henry VI had his son, Prince Edward, knight Trollope on the field, even though, Gregory reports, Trollope had trodden on a caltrop (a weapon made of two or more sharp nails or spines, placed in the ground to slow the advance of horses and human troops) during the battle and been unable to move, protesting “I have not deserved it for I slew but 15 men, for I stood still in one place and they came unto me”. Trollope’s star was soaring, but it would fall at the apocalyptic battle of Towton (March 1461), where he was killed leading the Lancastrian attack. The siege of Bamburgh cost Sir Ralph Grey his head By 1464, Edward IV had been king for three years and was establishing himself, but he had not quite eradicated Lancastrian resistance. The battles of Hedgeley Moor (April 1464) and Hexham (May 1464) had seen Lancastrian rebels from over the Scottish border attack Neville envoys from Edward IV heading north. During the incursion, the Lancastrians seized Alnwick, Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh Castles. Two were swiftly surrendered after Lancastrian defeats, but Sir Ralph Grey remained at Bamburgh Castle. After refusing to leave, Grey was issued with a grisly threat: King Edward did not want to have to damage a vital castle near to the Scottish border, and so promised Grey that the first cannon ball fired at the walls would cost his head. Each subsequent shot that damaged a wall would cost another head, working down the line of command until every man was executed. Two guns named Newcastle and London pounded the walls. A smaller cannon named Dijon found its range and consistently fired shot directly through Grey’s apartment window. The siege was brief, and in spite of the threat the men within were spared. Sir Ralph, though, was stripped of the honour of being a Knight of the Bath and sentenced to be beheaded. A Latin scholar became butcher of England John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester was constable of England, responsible for the administration of the king’s justice. Tiptoft was a widely respected academic, a talented lawyer and a Latin scholar. His early career had been brimming with promise, and his star had continued to rise under the new Yorkist regime. In 1470, while Edward IV was threatened by his brother George, Duke of Clarence and his cousin the mighty Earl of Warwick, a clutch of Warwick’s men were captured on the south coast trying to escape. Tiptoft oversaw the trials of 20 of what Warkworth’s Chronicle described as “gentlemen and yeomen”, probably representing the highest-status prisoners taken. After what was little more than a show trial, all 20 were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. To drive home the fate of those opposing Edward, all 20 bodies were subjected to further humiliation: Tiptoft ordered each of the dismembered corpses to be hung upside down. Twenty wooden stakes, sharpened at both ends, were then driven through the buttocks of the 20 corpses and the heads stuck on the end protruding from the bodies. Tiptoft was reviled, named the butcher of England, and when the Lancastrians retook the country, he found himself unable to escape their retribution. He was executed on Tower Hill on 18 October 1470. Nibley Green was the scene of the last private battle in England On 20 March 1470, two private armies took to the field on Nibley Green at North Nibley in Gloucestershire. One army was led by Thomas Talbot, Viscount Lisle, and the other by William, Lord Berkeley. They had been involved in a long-running dispute over an inheritance that had been stalled in the courts without a resolution for either side. As King Edward IV’s grip on power slipped in the face of rebellion by his cousin, the Earl of Warwick, men of power began to exploit the vacuum of royal authority created by the trouble at the top. Lord Berkeley won the small battle. Lord Lisle was killed and his adversary paid for building work to the church where many of the casualties were buried. The battle of Nibley Green was the last battle between private armies in English history, but was a symptom of the coming storm. Sieges at Caister Castle and Hornby Castle were further evidence of the breakdown of law and order. A loyal duke rose from the ‘dead’ Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter was a perfect example of the problems created by the Wars of the Roses. The Holland family had close ties to the Lancastrian royal line. Henry was a great-grandson of John of Gaunt but had married Anne, the eldest surviving child of Richard, Duke of York and his wife, Cecily. Henry remained loyal to the Lancastrian cause, fighting against his father-in-law and brothers-in-law. At the battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471, Easter Sunday, Holland supported the Earl of Warwick’s attempts to prevent the return of King Edward IV – who Warwick had helped to overthrow the previous year – and to preserve the throne of the newly reinstalled Lancastrian Henry VI. Early in the fighting, at around 7am, Henry Holland was cut down. At the end of the battle he was stripped of anything of value, as the victorious forces looted the bodies littering the field. At around 4pm, as the battlefield was being cleared, Henry Holland was discovered clinging on to life. His wounds were treated and once he was well enough he took sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. In 1475 Henry volunteered to serve during Edward IV’s invasion of France. On the return journey he drowned in the Channel amid a storm of rumours that Edward had ordered him to be pushed overboard to rid himself of another with Lancastrian blood. The Archbishop of York was tricked out of his treasure George Neville, Archbishop of York was a brother of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (the ‘kingmaker’). After Edward IV’s triumph at the battle of Barnet (April 1471) – when he won back the throne, killing the ‘kingmaker’ in the process – George hid his vast wealth. He was, after all, uncertain of his future – even though he personally handed London and King Henry VI to the returning king. In spite of his brother’s role in the expulsion of the Yorkist king, George seemed to continue in favour on Edward’s return. In 1472, George was with the king at Windsor enjoying the hunting when Edward announced that he would honour the archbishop with a visit to his manor at Moore. The excited George hurried to Moore and began recalling all of his hidden plate and finery to prepare to welcome the king, even borrowing large sums of money. The day before Edward’s visit, a messenger delivered a summons to George to attend the king at Windsor. As soon as he arrived, George was arrested for treason. His property was seized by the king, his mitre broken and the jewels from it used to make Edward a new crown. Men were sent to Moore to recover all of the archbishop’s conveniently gathered goods. Imprisoned at Hammes near Calais, George was later released but died in 1476 in poverty and disgrace. A pirate earl created a king In September 1473, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford captured St Michael’s Mount off the south coast of Cornwall. King Edward IV sent Sir Henry Bodrugan to lay siege to the tidal island fortress. Eventually, word reached Edward that each day at low tide Bodrugan was allowing the earl to leave the fortress and then return unmolested. When Oxford complained that his provisions were running low, Bodrugan had fresh supplies brought to the earl. The king was furious and sent a squire of the body (a close personal servant of the king), John Fortescu, to replace Bodrugan. Finally, on 15 February 1474, after several engagements and after promises of pardons had lured some of Oxford’s men away, St Michael’s Mount was relinquished. Upon entering the castle, Fortescu found enough supplies to last for many more months. Oxford was imprisoned at Hammes Castle until his escape during the reign of Richard III, when he joined the exiled Henry Tudor. He would go on to lead Tudor’s army at the battles of Bosworth in 1485 and Stoke Field in 1487 to create and defend the Tudor monarchy. A soldier, an earl, a pirate, a prisoner, a general and a favourite of the early Tudor regime, John de Vere’s career was a perfect example of the changing fortunes of the Wars of the Roses. This article is curated from content first published in BBC History Revealed and HistoryExtra between 2015 and 2021
Richard III: your guide to the last Yorkist king of England
Richard III (1452–85) was the last Yorkist king of England, whose death at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 signified the end of the Wars of the Roses and marked the start of the Tudor age. Many myths persist about the last Plantagenet king, whose remains were discovered beneath a Leicester car park in 2012; three years later he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral. We share a comprehensive guide to the much maligned English king…
In this comprehensive guide to King Richard III, historian Julian Humphrys looks at the life and changing reputation of England's most controversial king, Chris Skidmore shares a timeline of key moments in the life of Richard III – plus there's common myths about the Yorkist king considered by the late historian John Ashdown-Hill… Jump to each section: Richard III's birth and family The princes in the Tower Henry Tudor and the battle of Bosworth Richard III's changing reputation Did Richard III have a hunchback? Uncovering Richard III's remains Timeline: key dates in the life and rule of Richard III Did Richard III aim to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York? Large crowds lined the streets as the coffin containing the remains of Richard III was taken to Leicester Cathedral for reinterment on 26 March 2015. The Archbishop of Canterbury led the service, members of the royal family were present, Queen Elizabeth II herself wrote a message for the order of service, while the Leicester authorities made it clear that Richard was being buried not just with dignity but with honour. For many of those present, Richard was a much-maligned king who was finally getting the respect he deserved. But not everyone saw it that way. Writing in The Guardian, Polly Toynbee bemoaned the fact that Britain "mourned a monster" simply because he had been king. Even today, this controversial monarch continues to divide opinions. Richard III's birth and family Born in 1452 at Fotheringhay, Northamptonshire, Richard was the fourth son of Cecily Neville and Richard of York, whose conflict with the Lancastrian Henry VI was a major cause of the Wars of the Roses. In 1460, Richard's father was killed at the Battle of Wakefield but in 1461, his eldest brother, Edward, defeated the Lancastrians at the battle of Towton. became Edward IV and appointed Richard Duke of Gloucester. Unlike his unreliable sibling, George, Duke of Clarence, whose machinations would see him executed in 1478, Richard appears the very model of a loyal younger brother. Living up to his motto of 'Loyauté me Lie' (Loyalty Binds Me), he joined Edward in exile after Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick had restored Henry VI to the throne in 1470. The following year, they returned to England and Richard contributed to the Yorkist victories at Barnet (where Warwick was killed) and Tewkesbury where he led Edward's vanguard. Read more | Edward IV: champion of the Wars of the Roses Richard was well rewarded. He was given control of lands confiscated from the Nevilles and his marriage to Warwick’s daughter, Anne Neville, gained him more territory in the north of England, which became his power base. As Edward’s lieutenant in the north, he seems to have been an able administrator and the chronicler John Rous described him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons". Richard’s importance was national as well as regional; in 1471, he was appointed both constable and admiral of England and in 1482, he commanded the invasion of Scotland that led to the capture of Berwick. Yet his position was not as secure as it might appear. The lucrative offices he held were dependant on the will of the monarch, while the act of parliament which gave him those Neville lands that had formerly belonged to Warwick’s brother, Montagu, added to his insecurity. It stipulated that Richard and his heirs could only hold them while Montagu’s son George Neville or any heirs he had were alive. If that family line died out, the lands would revert after Richard’s death to another branch of the Neville family. The princes in the Tower Even so, had it not been for his brother Edward’s early death in April 1483, Richard might well have lived out his days as a successful regional magnate, and instead of the innumerable books we now have about him, we’d probably have to content ourselves with the odd biography and a few PhD theses. But the king’s death changed everything. Edward had named Richard as protector of his son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V, but the problem was that the boy was at Ludlow in the care of his mother’s family, the Woodvilles, and Richard, like many in the kingdom. didn’t trust them. To secure his own position, Richard had to act quickly. As Edward travelled to London escorted by his uncle Anthony Woodville and his half-brother Richard Grey, Richard intercepted them at Stony Stratford. Claiming there was a plot against him, he arrested Woodville, Grey and a third knight, Thomas Vaughan, and took control of the young king. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2017/09/55b.GettyImages-625256044-e73f6e1.jpg" width="1024" height="860" alt="Illumination of Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers" title="Illumination depicts Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, presenting the Dictes and Saying of the Philosophers to his brother-in-law, Edward IV. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> After sending his prisoners to his castle at Pontefract, Richard escorted Edward to the capital and lodged him in the Tower of London, to be joined later by his brother. There was nothing sinister in this – the Tower had yet to acquire its gruesome reputation, and it was traditionally used by English monarchs prior to their coronations. The Woodvilles had never been popular, and Richard’s actions seem to have been met with approval by other members of the late king’s household, notably the Duke of Buckingham, who’d helped him at Stony Stratford, and Edward IV’s old friend William Hastings. Despite the claims of later Tudor writers, there’s no evidence that Richard’s actions up to this point were part of a plot to seize the throne, and the preparations for Edward’s coronation went ahead as normal. But that would soon change. Read more | Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower? During a Council meeting in the Tower of London on Friday 13 June, Richard suddenly announced that there was another conspiracy against him, arrested three councillors and, with no regard whatsoever for due process of law, had Hastings summarily executed. It was nothing less than murder, and even the most devoted supporters of Richard struggle to justify it. Why did Richard have Hastings killed? Some claim that Richard had discovered that Hastings was plotting with the Woodvilles against him, but Hastings had a long-standing dislike of the Woodvilles and had supported Richard’s move against them in April. It’s more likely that Richard had now decided to seize the throne, but because Hastings was fiercely loyal to young Edward, he had to be disposed of first. Why did Richard decide to make himself king? The official reason was publicised by Dr Ralph Shaa in a sermon preached at St Paul’s Cross on 22 June. Because Edward IV had been precontracted to another woman (later identified as Eleanor Butler) before he married Elizabeth Woodville, the Woodville marriage wasn’t valid and Edward V and his siblings were therefore illegitimate. Technically, the son of the late Duke of Clarence was next in line, but he was barred from the succession because his father had been attainted for treason. The next legitimate candidate was therefore Richard. However, many believe that Richard had already made up his mind to take the throne, and the bastardisation of his nephews and nieces was simply a political manoeuvre to clear them out the way. Although ambition may have motivated Richard, he may simply have believed that the country needed an experienced adult as ruler. He may also have felt that he had no choice. Edward was known to be close to the Woodvilles, and Richard must have realised that there was a good chance that he would find himself sidelined as soon as the young king came of age. What’s more, the recent death without issue of George Neville meant that Richard had just lost much of the land he’d hoped to leave to his son. On 25 June, Woodville, Grey and Vaughan were executed at Pontefract, almost certainly on Richard’s orders, while in London his ally the Duke of Buckingham addressed an assembly of lords and commoners outlining Richard’s claim to the throne. Their response was initially lukewarm, but eventually a petition was drawn up asking him to become king. He accepted on the following day and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July. Browse and listen to all episodes in our podcast series which delves into the medieval murder mystery of the Princes in the Tower Listen to all episodes After his coronation, Richard set off on a progress around his kingdom. While he was away, news reached him of an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the princes from the Tower. It has been suggested that this led Richard to order their deaths, for after August the two boys were never seen again. Rumours began to spread that they had indeed been killed, and Richard’s failure to display the living boys did nothing to dispel them. The next uprising against him certainly suggested they were dead, for it aimed to set Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian exile, on the throne. Many of the participants in Buckingham’s rebellion, as it was known, were former members of Edward IVs household who had been shocked by what they saw as Richard’s usurpation, and it’s unlikely that they would have fought for Tudor had they believed that Edward V or his brother were still alive. Their support for Tudor tells us something else. The fact that they were prepared to support a Lancastrian exile with a distant claim to the throne against the brother of Edward IV shows just how far the Yorkist cause had been split by Richard’s actions. After suppressing the revolt, Richard tried to strengthen his hand by granting the land and offices forfeited by the largely southern rebels to a small group of his trusted servants, many of them from the north, but this merely added to his unpopularity. Richard had opposed the Woodville clique, but now he was ruling through a clique of his own. Although on a personal level little went right for Richard – his only legitimate son died in 1484 and his wife in March 1485 – there were at least signs of the good government that had characterised his time in the north. His only parliament sat early in 1484, and the statutes it passed included reforms to aspects of the legal system, laws to protect English merchants against unfair foreign competition, the outlawing of benevolences (royal financial demands without parliamentary approval) and the establishment of the College of Arms. Despite the efforts of later Tudor writers to portray him otherwise, it’s clear that Richard was no more tyrannical than other monarchs of his time - and considerably less so than the son of his successor. Indeed, Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England under King James I, described Richard as "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". Henry Tudor and the battle of Bosworth On 7 August 1485, Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven with a small army of French mercenaries, former Yorkists and diehard Lancastrians. Nineteen months earlier, he had strengthened his appeal to disaffected Yorkists by promising to marry Edward IVs daughter Elizabeth were he to gain the throne. Richard was reportedly delighted by the news of the landing; victory over Tudor would not only rid him of a troublesome focus of opposition, it would also imply divine approval of his own regime. On 22 August, Richard confronted him at the battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire. Richard had the larger army but a third force, under William and Thomas Stanley, two former stalwarts of Edward IVs regime, lurked in the wings. Richard had good reason to be wary of them – they had been his rivals for influence in the north and Thomas was married to Henry Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort. Richard tried to secure their loyalty by holding Thomas’s son hostage, but when they eventually joined the battle in support of Henry, it proved decisive. Spurning flight, Richard led a mounted charge in a desperate bid to kill Henry Tudor. It came within a whisker of success, but Richard found himself unhorsed and, as Polydore Vergil later put it, he was cut down "fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Not even the most virulent of his Tudor critics ever accused Richard of cowardice. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/03/GettyImages-590538810-3cadaa4.jpg" width="1024" height="775" alt="On 22 August 1485, Richard confronted Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" title="On 22 August 1485, Richard confronted Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" /> Richard III's changing reputation The century after Bosworth would see a succession of accounts, all portraying Richard in a highly unfavourable light. Rous, who had earlier praised Richard, now described him as a monstrous tyrant, born with teeth and hair after being in his mother’s womb for two years. Polydore Vergil, an Italian commissioned by Henry VII to write a history of England, claimed Richard planned to seize the throne as soon as his brother died. Thomas More accused Richard of a succession of murders, including Henry VI and of course the Princes in the Tower, and describes him as "ill featured of limbs, crook backed…" Later Tudor writers like Hall and Hollinshed told similar stories. Did Richard III have a hunchback? Strictly speaking, no. At the time, a deformed body was linked with an evil mind, and this led many to argue that the portrayal of Richard as a hunchback was pure invention – part of the campaign by Tudor writers to blacken his name. So, the revelation that the skeleton uncovered in the Leicester car park had a seriously deformed spine caused quite a sensation. Although this was a scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine) rather than a kyphosis (a true hunched back) and it’s been proved that it wouldn’t have prevented him from charging into battle, it’s thought that one of Richard’s shoulders would have been noticeably higher than the other. But the evidence for Richard III being a hunchback is at the very least dubious, writes Justin Pollard. During Richard’s lifetime no sources, even the hostile ones, claimed this, although you could argue that no one would dare. It is only after his death at the battle of Bosworth Field that the story emerges in a number of sources all of which can certainly be called ‘pro-Tudor’. Richard Rous wrote two histories of Richard III. The first was published in the king’s lifetime, and doesn’t mention any deformity. The second was published after the king’s death, when, living in the new politics of the Tudor age, Rous has changed his mind and Richard is portrayed as a hunchbacked monster. Of course it is Shakespeare whose words have most formed our image of Richard. He got his information indirectly (via Hall and Holinshed) from a book by Thomas More, who got his information from Polydore Vergil, who was a contemporary of Richard’s. Vergil is however a rather biased source, being the paid chronicler of Richard’s killer and successor Henry VII. More was himself also in the pay of Henry VII’s son and successor, Henry VIII, and so can hardly be called pro-Ricardian. In an age when physical appearance was believed to be a good indicator of personality, Tudor historians had little problem in describing a man most had never met as being as twisted on the outside as they claimed he was on the inside. It all helped their Tudor masters, perhaps uncertain as to their own legitimacy, to sleep more soundly in their beds. Inevitably, this 'Tudor' version of events would be challenged, notably by George Buck in 1619, Horace Walpole in 1768 and Clements Markham in 1906. Nineteen twenty-four saw the foundation of the Fellowship of the White Boar, the forerunner of the Richard III Society that has done so much to foster interest in the period, and which spearheaded the campaign to rediscover Richard's remains. In 1951, those who harboured doubts about Richard's involvement in the murder of the princes found unexpected support in the form of crime novelist Josephine Tey. In The Daughter of Time, Tey's fictional detective is recovering from a broken leg when he sees a portrait of Richard III. Convinced that his features are not those of a murderer, he examines the evidence and concludes that Richard's guilt was a fabrication of Tudor propaganda. Recent decades have seen a decided switch in public attitudes to Richard. He’s now seen by many not as a villain, but as a man largely innocent of the crimes he’s been accused of and whose rule was cruelly cut short by betrayal on the battlefield. Others are more circumspect. Rejecting the ‘Tudor myth’ of a calculating schemer who revels in evil, they nevertheless point out that while Richard may not necessarily have been a bad man, he was certainly a bad king whose actions ultimately led to the destruction not only of himself but also of the Yorkist dynasty. Finally, of course, there’s William Shakespeare. Drawing on the writings of Hall and Holinshed, Shakespeare’s play Richard III gives us a villainous hunchback who had plotted all along to seize the crown. (In doing so he may have been aiming a sly dig at Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s unpopular minister who did have a hunchback). He makes Richard responsible for just about every significant killing in the Wars of the Roses – from the Duke of Somerset at St Albans in 1455 (quite difficult as Richard was only two at the time) to the Princes in the Tower 30 years later. Shakespeare’s Richard is a monster, but there’s no denying he’s a memorable one. It’s tempting to conclude that that without the lasting interest caused by that grossly unfair portrayal, Richard’s short and unsuccessful reign would be largely consigned to the footnotes of history, there would be no Richard III Society and this controversial king’s body would still be resting under a Leicester car park. Uncovering Richard III's remains After his death at Bosworth, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars, a Franciscan friary in Leicester. Legend had it that when the friary was dissolved in 1538, Richard’s remains were thrown in the river Soar, but many were unconvinced. In 2011, Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society approached Leicester University with funds towards an archaeological project to find Richard’s remains, which she argued were probably still in the ground. Excavations began in August 2012 and, almost immediately, a skeleton was found in what would be identified as the choir of the friary church. Analysis suggested a man in his early 30s who’d suffered fatal battle-related injuries and, remarkably, had a curvature of the spine. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the individual lived between 1450 and 1540. The signs suggested it was probably Richard; that probability became a certainty when DNA samples from two of the King’s collateral descendants matched that of the skeleton. Read more | A timeline of the discovery of Richard III's remains Why wasn't Richard III buried at York? Because, in keeping with normal practice, where remains found in archaeological digs are reburied in the nearest consecrated ground, the exhumation licence granted to the University of Leicester made provision for Richard’s bones to be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. This didn’t stop people suggesting alternative sites: Westminster Abbey (where his wife is buried); Windsor (his brother); Fotheringhay (his father) – and York Minster. Supporters of York pointed out Richard’s close links with the city, and tried to argue, not totally convincingly, that his endowment of a large chantry in York was evidence that he wished to be buried there. In May 2014, the High Court threw out a call for wider consultation over the reburial by the pro-York ‘Plantagenet Alliance’, and Leicester got the green light. Julian Humphrys is a historian and development officer at the Battlefields Trust. This article was first published in the May 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed Quiz | How much do you know about Richard III? Test your knowledge Timeline: key dates in the life and rule of Richard III Chris Skidmore traces the key episodes in the rise and fall of Richard III 1452: 2 October | Richard is born at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, 11th child of Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville. He later records in his Book of Hours that “on this day was born Richard III at Fotheringhay” – third-person confirmation of his exact date of birth. He is delivered by caesarean section, having been in a breach position, or so later rumours suggest. More implausible is John Rous’s description of Richard as being born “with teeth, and hair to his shoulders”. Though both stories are examples of the black legend that will quickly develop around the king after his death, we do know that Cecily, aged 37 at the time, suffered a particularly painful labour. The birth, she later wrote, had been “encumberous” and “to me full painful and uneasy”, causing, she noted, an “infirmity” that was “not hid on my wretched body”. 1461: 29 March | Richard’s brother Edward wreaks a devastating victory against the Lancastrian army of Henry VI at Towton in North Yorkshire, one of the bloodiest battles in English history. The victor claims the thrown as Edward IV. Richard’s youth had been overshadowed by the deteriorating relationship between his father, Richard, Duke of York, and Henry VI, with violent confrontations ending in the death of York outside Sandal Castle near Wakefield in 1460. After Edward’s victory at Towton, though, Richard returns from exile in Burgundy as a royal prince, his status suddenly elevated as the king’s brother. Within a year he is created Duke of Gloucester. 1460s | Richard spends his adolescence in the household of the Earl of Warwick, ‘the Kingmaker’, who had been instrumental in helping to establish the Yorkist dynasty. Warwick anticipates that the favour will be returned, expecting that his daughters, Isabel and Anne, will be married to the highest in the land – ideally the king’s brothers. Edward disagrees, and the king’s marriage to the low-born Elizabeth Woodville further alienates Warwick. In 1470, Warwick rebels, taking with him Edward’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, who is by now married to Isabel. Richard, however, remains loyal to his brother, following Edward into exile in the Netherlands in October when Warwick and Clarence conspire successfully to put Henry VI back on the throne. While abroad, Edward and Richard are hosted by the Burgundian nobleman Louis de Gruuthuse, whose book collection leaves a lasting impression on both men. 1471: 14 April | Edward and Richard clash with Warwick at the battle of Barnet on Easter Sunday. They had earlier returned to England to reclaim the kingdom, landing in Yorkshire in March before marching southwards, gathering troops and welcoming their brother Clarence back into the Yorkist fold. Richard leads the vanguard of his brother’s forces at Barnet, and is wounded in the battle – he is later praised for his bravery. Fighting takes place in a thick fog, resulting in the Lancastrian forces accidentally attacking each other. Warwick flees the battle on horseback, but is discovered in a nearby wood and killed. Blood brothers: Richard III’s battle with his siblings 1471: 4 May | Edward and Richard face the army of Henry VI’s wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, and her son, Prince Edward, in fields near Tewkesbury Abbey. Margaret and her son had landed on the south coast on the day of the battle of Barnet; Edward IV and Richard, learning of the invasion, had marched towards the Lancastrians, at times travelling 36 miles in a single day. At the battle of Tewkesbury Richard is again successful in destroying the Lancastrian army, and Prince Edward is killed on the battlefield. The following day, Richard presides over the trial and execution of the Lancastrian commander, the Duke of Somerset, who is dragged out of the abbey after attempting to seek sanctuary there. 1471: 21 May | Henry VI is found dead, having once more been placed in the Tower of London. His body is taken for burial at Chertsey Abbey, and it is noted how his coffin ‘bleeds’ on the journey. The official Yorkist version of events describes how Henry dies “of pure displeasure and melancholy” on hearing of the defeat at Tewkesbury – the death of Prince Edward and the capture of Queen Margaret has left the hopes of the Lancastrian dynasty in tatters. However, another chronicler, John Warkworth, is in no doubt that Henry had been “put to death, the twenty-first day of May… between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the Duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward”. This version has never been proved. Thomas More, notoriously hostile to Richard, could only claim that “as men constantly say” Richard had killed Henry “with his own hands”. 1472: February | Richard is rewarded for his service at Barnet and Tewkesbury with the Earl of Warwick’s estates and offices in the north. Set to replace Warwick as the pre-eminent northern nobleman, Richard wants more: in particular, he plans to marry Warwick’s daughter, Anne. This is opposed by Richard’s brother Clarence, who – being married to Warwick’s other daughter – is sole beneficiary of the earl’s inheritance. Richard retrieves Anne from Clarence’s custody and, despite being her cousin and brother-in-law, quickly marries her. This sparks a major row between the brothers. Richard wins the dispute, and takes half of Warwick’s possessions. 1475: June | Edward decides to raid France, launching the largest invasion force England has ever mustered. Richard brings 100 men-at-arms and 1,000 archers to add to Edward’s 15,000 strong army. However, when assistance promised by the Duke of Burgundy fails to materialise, Edward gets cold feet and instead in August chooses to sign the Treaty of Picquigny with the French king Louis XI, which provides the English king with a substantial annual pension. Richard, who has been hankering after military glory, is “not pleased by the peace” and does not attend the official ceremony. However, Richard does visit the French king shortly afterwards and is happy to receive “very fine presents, including plate and well-equipped horses”. 1476: 30 July | Richard, Duke of York is reburied at Fotheringhay after a nine-day procession in a huge, ornate hearse. He had been executed at Wakefield in 1460, his head displayed on a spike in York and his body placed unceremiously in a grave at Pontefract. Richard acts as chief mourner, leading the cortège of the coffins of his father and brother, Edmund, Duke of Rutland, along with several hundred mourners. The funeral is marked by an elaborate feast for 1,500. 1478: 18 February | The Duke of Clarence is executed – reputedly drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. Unlike Richard, who is building a reputation as a stalwart of the Yorkist dynasty, Clarence was disenchanted with his own prospects, and seemed again to be flirting with rebellion. In 1477 he was arrested for his involvement in the death of one of his servants. Edward was determined to see his brother punished, and led the treason trial against him. According to one source, Richard is overwhelmed with grief at his brother’s death and vows to avenge it. Neverthless, he is still content to see Clarence’s title of Earl of Salisbury given to his own son, Edward of Middleham (b 1473) three days before Clarence’s death. 1482: 24 August | Richard seizes the castle at Berwick from the Scots after a short siege. War had erupted between England and Scotland during the early 1480s; in 1480, Richard was appointed lieutenant general of the north, leading several border raids. In June 1482, Richard leads a full invasion of Scotland with a force of around 20,000 men. This army devastates surrounding areas as it marches to Edinburgh in a bid to overthrow King James III and install the Duke of Albany as puppet ruler. In the end, Albany backs down. Richard’s seizure of Berwick for England is richly rewarded by Edward and remains perhaps his most lasting achivement. 1483: 9 April | Edward IV dies unexpectedly, leaving the throne to his 12-year-old son, proclaimed Edward V. It is clear that the new king will be led by his Woodville relations, particularly his governor Anthony, Earl Rivers, Elizabeth Woodville’s brother. The young king and Rivers depart Ludlow for the coronation, set for 22 June; Richard intercepts them at Stony Stratford on 29 April. Next day, Richard arrests Rivers and seizes the young king. Elizabeth flees into sanctuary, and Richard is proclaimed Protector of the Realm. 1483: 13 June | After a period of seeming stability, Richard calls a council meeting at the Tower of London, where William, Lord Hastings is accused of conspiracy and beheaded. Richard is now clearly determined to seize the throne, having detected a conspiracy: on 10 June, he had written to the city of York, asking for support “to aid and assist us against the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doeth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us”. His young nephew Richard, Duke of York, is placed in the Tower, joining Edward V. 1483: 26 June | Richard seizes the throne, taking his seat in the king’s marble chair at Westminster Hall. The new king bases his claim on a revelation that Edward IV had made a ‘pre-contract’ for marriage with Eleanor Talbot in 1464, thus rendering his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville illicit and their children illegitimate. Richard is crowned on 6 July. Edward V is scrubbed from the records and referred to simply as ‘Edward the Bastard’. 1483: 29 July | Richard writes that several men have been arrested after an ‘enterprise’ is discovered. According to the chronicler John Stow, this may have been a failed attempt to free the princes in the Tower, and ultimately may have sealed their fate. Other sources suggest that the princes were murdered on the advice of the Duke of Buckingham; Thomas More suggests that Richard decided to have them killed while in Warwick during his summer progress. A lack of evidence means that the fate of Edward V and Richard, Duke of York remains unknown to this day. 1483: October | Richard receives news that a huge uprising is being planned by former household men of Edward IV with the intention of placing Henry Tudor on the throne. Richard is stung by the news that Henry, Duke of Buckingham, a previously loyal supporter, has joined the uprising. Declaring him “the most untrue creature living”, Richard crushes the rebellion, while floods prevent Buckingham from raising troops in Wales. Meanwhile, Henry Tudor sails from Brittany in the hope of landing near Plymouth. Forced to turn back, he is soon joined by hundreds of English exiles who flee abroad after the failed rebellion. 1484: January | Richard’s only parliament is finally called, with the purpose of passing legislation declaring his right to the throne. More than 100 rebels are attainted – their property and titles forfeit – providing a rich supply of patronage to reward the king’s northern supporters. Legislation includes xenophobic bills against Italian merchants trading in England, though customs duties on books are abolished, as is the practice of ‘benevolences’ – forced loans to the king. Bondsmen working on crown lands are also freed. 1484: 9 April | Edward of Middleham, Richard’s young son, dies two months after Richard orders his court to swear a new oath recognising Edward as heir tovthe throne. The king and his wife, Anne, are stunned. The Crowland Chronicler observes that “you might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief”. Richard is without an heir. 1484: May | Richard entertains the European nobleman Nicolas von Poppelau, who leaves the best first-hand account of the king and his court. For eight days Poppelau dines at the king’s table, recording how Richard tells him of wishes to crusade: “With my own people alone and without the help of other princes I should like to drive away not only the Turks, but all my foes.” Poppelau describes the king as “three fingers taller than I, but a bit slimmer and not as thickset as I am, and much more lightly built; he had quite slender arms and thighs, and also a great heart,” and how he “hardly touched his food, but talked with me all the time”. 1484: 7 December | Richard issues a proclamation against Henry Tudor and his followers, declaiming them as “open murderers, adulterers and extortioners contrary to truth, honour and nature” who would “do the most cruel murders, slaughters, robberies and disinheritances that ever were seen in any Christian realm”. Earlier, on Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor had sworn that he would take Elizabeth of York as his wife if he successfully invaded England. Henry won French backing and began to prepare a fleet, while intrigue in England continued. In December, William Colyngborne, a servant of Richard’s mother, was sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered after being caught lampooning Richard’s key advisors. 1485: 16 March | Queen Anne dies after suffering from an illness, possibly tuberculosis. Rumours circulate that Anne has been poisoned; some add that Richard plans to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York. At Christmas 1484, the Crowland Chronicler had noted how “vain changes of apparel … of similar colour and shape” were presented to Elizabeth as well as Anne. Richard’s rumoured plans are condemned by his advisers, who tell him that “if he did not abandon his intended purpose … all the people of the north, in whom he placed the greatest reliance, would rise in rebellion against him.” 1485: 7 August | Henry Tudor lands 30 ships at the opening of Milford Haven, a week after setting sail from France. Richard quickly hears news of Tudor’s landing – and is reportedly overjoyed. Believing that he will crush Henry, whose forces number only 2,000 or 3,000 and are dwarfed by the vast army gathered by the king at Nottingham, Richard delays his departure from the city to observe the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on 15 August. 1485: 22 August | Richard’s forces face Henry’s men on a patch of marsh known as ‘Redemore’, south of Market Bosworth. Richard’s army is twice the size of Henry’s but, as fighting begins, it becomes clear the king does not have the full loyalty of his army. Betrayed by Sir William Stanley, Richard makes a brave final charge at Henry but is hacked to death. His body is stripped and taken to Leicester, where it is later buried in the Grey Friars priory. Chris Skidmore is a historian and politician, and the author of several books on late medieval and Tudor England. This timeline first appeared in the Richard III Special Edition from the makers of BBC History Magazine Listen | Chris Skidmore, author of a major biography Richard III, offers his fresh take on some of the biggest debates surrounding the Yorkist king's life 6 myths about Richard III Many myths persist about King Richard III. Did he murder the Princes in the Tower? Did he want to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York? In 2015 late historian John Ashdown-Hill responded to common charges levied at Richard III… Richard was a murderer William Shakespeare’s famous play, Richard III, summarises Richard’s alleged murder victims in the list of ghosts who prevent his sleep on the last night of his life. These comprise Edward of Westminster (putative son of King Henry VI); Henry VI himself; George, Duke of Clarence; Earl Rivers; Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan; Lord Hastings; the ‘princes in the Tower’; the Duke of Buckingham and Queen Anne Neville. But Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan and Buckingham were all executed (a legal process), not murdered: Clarence was executed by Edward IV (probably on the incentive of Elizabeth Woodville). Rivers, Grey and Vaughan were executed by the Earl of Northumberland, and Hastings and Buckingham were executed by Richard III because they had conspired against him. Intriguingly, similar subsequent actions by Henry VII are viewed as a sign of ‘strong kingship’! There is no evidence that Edward of Westminster, Henry VI, the ‘princes in the Tower’ or Anne Neville were murdered by anyone. Edward of Westminster was killed at the battle of Tewkesbury, and Anne Neville almost certainly died naturally. Also, if Richard III really had been a serious killer in the interests of his own ambitions, why didn’t he kill Lord and Lady Stanley – and John Morton? Morton had plotted with Lord Hastings in 1483, but while Hastings was executed, Morton was only imprisoned. As for the Stanleys, Lady Stanley was involved in Buckingham's rebellion. And in June 1485, when the invasion of his stepson, Henry Tudor was imminent, Lord Stanley requested leave to retire from court. His loyalty had always been somewhat doubtful. Nevertheless, Richard III simply granted Stanley's request - leading ultimately to the king's own defeat at Bosworth. Richard was a usurper The dictionary definition of ‘usurp’ is “to seize and hold (the power and rights of another, for example) by force or without legal authority”. The official website of the British Monarchy states unequivocally (but completely erroneously) that “Richard III usurped the throne from the young Edward V”. Curiously, the monarchy website does not describe either Henry VII or Edward IV as usurpers, yet both of those kings seized power by force, in battle! On the other hand, Richard III did not seize power. He was offered the crown by the three estates of the realm (the Lords and Commons who had come to London for the opening of a prospective Parliament in 1483) on the basis of evidence presented to them by one of the bishops, to the effect that Edward IV had committed bigamy and that Edward V and his siblings were therefore bastards. Even if that judgement was incorrect, the fact remains that it was a legal authority that invited a possibly reluctant Richard to assume the role of king. His characterisation as a ‘usurper’ is therefore simply an example of how history is rewritten by the victors (in this case, Henry VII). Read more: Did fear drive Richard III to the throne? Richard aimed to marry his niece It has frequently been claimed (on the basis of reports of a letter, the original of which does not survive), that in 1485 Richard III planned to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. There is no doubt that rumours to this effect were current in 1485, and we know for certain that Richard was concerned about them. That is not surprising, since his invitation to mount the throne had been based upon the conclusion that all of Edward IV’s children were bastards. Obviously no logical monarch would have sought to marry a bastard niece. In fact, very clear evidence survives that proves beyond question that Richard did intend to remarry in 1485. However, his chosen bride was the Portuguese princess Joana. What’s more, his diplomats in Portugal were also seeking to arrange a second marriage there – between Richard’s illegitimate niece, Elizabeth, and a minor member of the Portuguese royal family! Richard slept at the Boar Inn in Leicester In August 1485, prior to the battle of Bosworth, Richard III spent one night in Leicester. About a century later, a myth began to emerge that claimed that on this visit he had slept at a Leicester inn that featured the sign of a boar. This story is still very widely believed today. However, there is no evidence to even show that such an inn existed in 1485. We know that previously Richard had stayed at the castle on his rare visits to Leicester. The earliest written source for the story of the Boar Inn visit is John Speede [English cartographer and historian, d1629]. Curiously, Speede also produced another myth about Richard III – that his body had been dug up at the time of the Dissolution. Many people in Leicester used to believe Speede’s story about the fate of Richard’s body. However, when the BBC commissioned me to research it in 2004, I concluded that it was false, and I was proved right by the finding of the king’s remains on the Greyfriars site in 2012. The story of staying at the Boar Inn is probably also nothing more than a later invention. Richard rode a white horse at Bosworth In his famous play about the king, Shakespeare has Richard III order his attendants to ‘Saddle white Surrey [Syrie] for the field tomorrow’. On this basis it is sometimes stated as fact that Richard rode a white horse at his final battle. But prior to Shakespeare, no one had recorded this, although an earlier 16th-century chronicler, Edward Hall, had said that Richard rode a white horse when he entered Leicester a couple of days earlier. There is no evidence to prove either point. Nor is there any proof that Richard owned a horse called ‘White Syrie’ or ‘White Surrey’. However, we do know that his stables contained grey horses (horses with a coat of white hair). Richard attended his last mass at Sutton Cheney Church It was claimed in the 1920s that early on the morning of 22 August 1485, Richard III made his way from his camp to Sutton Cheney Church in order to attend mass there. No earlier source exists for this unlikely tale, which appears to have been invented in order to provide an ecclesiastical focus for modern commemorations of Richard. A slightly different version of this story was recently circulated to justify the fact that, prior to reburial, the king’s remains will be taken to Sutton Cheney. It was said it is believed King Richard took his final mass at St James’ church on the eve of the battle. For a priest to celebrate mass in the evening (at a time when he would have been required to fast from the previous midnight, before taking communion) would have been very unusual! Moreover, documentary evidence shows clearly that Richard’s army at Bosworth was accompanied by his own chaplains, who would normally have celebrated mass for the king in his tent. The late John Ashdown-Hill is the author of The Mythology of Richard III (Amberley Publishing, April 2015). This article was written by the late John Ashdown-Hill and was first published by HistoryExtra in March 2015 The Richard III Society For more information about Richard's life and times, news of events and details on how to join the society, check out the Richard III Society website at www.richardiii.net
Alternate history: what if Richard III had won at Bosworth?
Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Emeritus Michael Hicks about how Richard III might have recovered his reputation, to some extent, and consigned the Tudors to historical obscurity
Each month BBC History Revealed asks a historical expert for their take on what might have happened if a key moment in the past had turned out differently. This time, Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Emeritus Michael Hicks about what might had happened had Richard III triumphed over Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 Richard III had a clear advantage going into the battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. As king of England, he commanded an army two or three times the size of the ragtag Lancastrian force that sailed from France, he had brought more cannon, and he was a seasoned warrior. His enemy, a Lancastrian with a tenuous claim to the throne named Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), had never seen battle. When Richard heard of Henry’s landing, he was overjoyed: he had a chance to crush this pretender once and for all. “With the larger army, substantial ordnance and archery, and a fighting ground of his choosing, Richard was best-placed for a defensive battle,” says Michael Hicks, Professor Emeritus at the University of Winchester and author of Richard III: The Self-Made King (Yale, 2019). “Henry had to attack a strongly entrenched position.” Yet Richard famously lost the day, ending 331 years of Plantagenet rule and ushering in the Tudor dynasty, as key allies failed to join the fray and, in some cases, actually turned on their king and attacked his flank. If the brothers Lord Thomas and Sir William Stanley had stayed loyal to Richard – or if they had heeded the king’s warning that he would execute Thomas’s son if they didn’t fight for him– and if Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had come to Richard’s aid, then Henry Tudor’s reign might never have begun. Henry gambled everything on achieving a decisive victory with his 5,000-strong army, an uneasy alliance of Lancastrians, disgruntled Yorkists, Bretons, French, Scots and Welsh. The pivotal moment came when Richard, spotting Henry at the rear of the action, led a mounted charge. Breaking through, he unhorsed the mighty John Cheyney, killed Henry’s standard bearer and came within killing distance of Henry himself. With one more slash of his blade, Richard could have ended Henry’s bid for the throne and made safe his own rule. Hicks says: “Richard would have continued to reign with his dynasty secured. It’s unlikely another formidable threat could have been raised for years, if then.” Would the Tudors have become a historical footnote? Henry may well have perished in the battle, along with his uncle Jasper, leaving no heir to carry on his claim. “If Henry had died, who knows who might have taken his place as contender to the throne” says Hicks. “His strength was that he was not Richard. But how could a newcomer secure support?” Even if, in the case of a Yorkist victory, Henry had survived, what awaited him would have been capture and possible execution or exile. The name of the Tudors would have become nothing more than a historical footnote. With victory in battle seen as proof of God’s favour, Richard – even though he had faced stern opposition following his taking of the throne in 1483 and the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower – could have strengthened his position. In the aftermath, he would undoubtedly have extinguished any remaining Lancastrian support and taken vengeance on those who had not supported him. “Richard had a track record for executing opponents and would certainly have disposed of the Tudors, the Earl of Oxford and any traitors,” says Hicks. This may well have included the Stanleys and Northumberland. A priority of Richard’s continued reign, with significant political, diplomatic and dynastic implications, would have been to remarry. He had lost his son and wife Anne within a year so securing a new queen would have been vital. “Richard needed a fertile wife able to bear children,” says Hicks. “She would need to have been a lady of royal or perhaps noble birth, but definitely not a parvenu and widow, which his brother Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville, had been.” A promising prospect was Portuguese princess Joanna, sister of John II, as this union would have formed a strategic alliance. Richard may have looked to enhance this alliance by marrying his niece, Elizabeth of York, to John’s cousin, Manuel. Hicks suggests that Elizabeth may even have been Richard’s option for his own bride. “Marrying Elizabeth would have strengthened his own position and denied her title to foes. Richard would have needed to seek approval from the Pope for the union, but there were precedents to uncle-niece marriages.” Richard could then have turned his attention to governing the realm. Pursuing a commitment to law and justice, and a willingness to reform, as seen in the years before Bosworth, he may have made further changes to the legal system, which could have benefited the poor and under-represented. His sights would also have been on foreign matters. Although the French had aided Henry, Hicks points out that they were never “officially hostile and so would have cultivated good relations”. By fostering relations with France, Spain and Portugal through marriage alliances or treaties, Richard’s ongoing reign would still have impacted England in the decades after his death. If there was no Tudor dynasty, there would have been no Henry VIII. So, as Reformation swept over Europe, England may have remained Catholic – Richard was a pious and conventional Catholic, and his successors would probably have been the same – or, at least, not moved over to Protestantism as quickly as seen in the 1530s with Henry VIII’s split from Rome. “If Richard continued after Bosworth, he would have been a more consistent ruler than Edward IV, similar to what we saw in Henry VII’s centralising and authoritarian rule, and more conventionally chivalric,” says Hicks. Now regarded as a divisive figure – murderer or misunderstood? – Hicks concludes that Richard could instead have been seen as a “competent medieval king, seldom remembered”. In context Richard, fourth son of the Duke of York, was not destined to be king of England, even after his brother won the crown in the Wars of the Roses and became Edward IV. When Edward died in 1483, his son Edward V ascended the throne, but Richard, chosen as Lord Protector, supplanted his nephew only a few months later. As Richard III, he faced opposition both from nobles whom he had replaced with his own supporters and from Yorkists, who named him a usurper and suspected murderer of his two nephews – the Princes in the Tower. A Lancastrian with a feeble royal claim, Henry Tudor, was declared king by the rebels and defeated Richard at the battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. Henry VII united the roses of York and Lancaster by marrying Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s daughter, while Richard’s reputation was denigrated by Tudor propaganda, including in the popular works of William Shakespeare. Michael Hicks is Professor Emeritus at the University of Winchester and author of Richard III: The Self-Made King (Yale, 2019). He was speaking to freelance writer Jonny Wilkes This article was first published in the November 2020 edition of History Revealed
10 things you need to know about the battle of Bosworth
The battle of Bosworth, fought on 22 August 1485, was the last significant clash of the Wars of the Roses. The armies of Yorkist king Richard III were defeated by Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), which heralded the end of the Plantagenet dynasty and marked the birth of the Tudor age. Richard III was killed during the brutal battle. But how did Richard III die? Here, Chris Skidmore, author of Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors, brings you 10 facts about one of the most famous battles in English history
For many, 22 August 1485 remains one of the key dates in British history. Yet what exactly took place in the early hours of the morning (the battle was over by noon) still remains tantalisingly elusive. So, what are the facts? Many myths surrounding Bosworth remain prevalent – stirred by the imaginings of Shakespeare, whose famous words, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse”, placed in the mouth of the defeated Richard III, are occasionally still recounted as part of the narrative description. Despite decades of research into what exactly happened at Bosworth, and where exactly the battle was fought, it seems truth remains inconvenient when it comes to telling a good story. That shouldn't stop anyone knowing the basic facts of one of the most famous battles in English history, however. So for anyone interested in knowing as far as possible 'what happened', here are 10 key things to bear in mind… The battle of Bosworth wasn't actually fought at Bosworth It only became known as the battle of Bosworth from around 25 years after it was fought. Instead, contemporaries knew it as the battle of 'Redemore', meaning place of reeds. Other names for the battle included 'Brownheath' and 'Sandeford'. The site of where the conflict took place has now been located two miles from the battlefield centre, close to the villages of Dadlington and Stoke Golding. The landscape would have been a marshy plainland (later to be drained), across which ran a Roman road. Listen | Historian and politician Chris Skidmore offers his take on pivotal moments such as Richard’s seizing of the throne, his death at Bosworth and the disappearance of the princes in the tower It is hard to imagine the scale of battle Richard III's army, at around 15,000 men, was approximately three times the size of Henry Tudor's army at just 5,000 men. Meanwhile the Stanley brothers (Henry Tudor's step-father, Thomas Lord Stanley, and Sir William Stanley) had around 6,000 men between them. These numbers meant that the battle site would have had to stretch across several miles. Treachery at Bosworth: what really brought down Richard III At the same time, Richard had an impressive military arsenal One account mentions 140 cannon, while the archaeological searches of the battlefield have found more than 30 cannonshot – more than any other discovered on a European medieval battlefield. Henry Tudor had landed in Wales on 7 August, and had marched more than 200 miles into England Richard III had been 'overjoyed' to hear of his landing, confident that he would defeat the 'rebel'. So confident was the king that he even delayed leaving his base at Nottingham by a day in order to celebrate a feast day. A novice when it came to battles, Henry Tudor remained stationed at the back of the field, while his forces were led by the Lancastrian general, John de Vere, the earl of Oxford, who also led Henry's vanguard In between the two forces was a marsh, which Oxford managed to navigate around, keeping the marsh on his right, before launching an attack against Richard III's vanguard, led by the aged John, duke of Norfolk. Bosworth: the dawn of the Tudors It was Oxford's crushing of Richard's vanguard that began to turn the battle for Henry: Richard's troops began to desert him In particular, his 'rear guard' – 7,000 men led by Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland – stood still, and 'no blows were given or received', suggesting that Northumberland's men were kept out of the action. Perhaps they were unable to cross the marsh. Alternatively, tales of Northumberland's treachery were rife. Later he was killed by his own supporters for 'disappointing' Richard. Whatever the cause, the fact that the rear half of Richard's army did not engage in battle left the king in real trouble. Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower? Richard was offered a horse to flee the battle, but refused “God forbid I yield one step”, he is reported to have said. “This day I will die as a king or win”. Richard spotted the standards of Henry Tudor (soon to be Henry VII) and decided to charge towards him with his mounted cavalry, perhaps some 200 men in total, wearing the crown over his helmet. The 5 greatest mysteries behind the Wars of the Roses The battle around the standards was brutal All accounts attest to Richard's strength in battle. Even John Rous, who compared Richard to the Antichrist, admitted “if I may say the truth to his credit, though small in body and feeble of limb, he bore himself like a gallant knight and acted with distinction as his own champion until his last breath”. Richard knocked down Sir John Cheyney, who at six foot eight inches was the tallest soldier of his day, while Henry's standard-bearer Sir William Brandon was killed. Richard's own standard-bearer, Sir Percival Thribald, has both his legs cut from underneath him, but still managed to cling to the king's standard. What happened after the battle of Bosworth? It was only when Henry was in 'immediate danger' that the Stanleys – or rather Sir William Stanley – came to his aid, crashing into the side of Richard's men and sweeping them into the marsh Sir William had nothing to lose if Richard had won – he had already been declared a traitor days previously. His wily elder brother, Thomas Lord Stanley, despite being married to Henry Tudor's mother, Margaret Beaufort, seems to have thought best to stay out of the battle altogether. When Henry was crowned on a nearby hill, one source reported that it was Sir William Stanley, rather than his brother, who placed the crown on Henry's head. Listen to historian Nicola Tallis exploring the life of Tudor matriarch Margaret Beaufort, in this lecture recorded at BBC History Magazine’s 2019 History Weekend Thanks to the discovery of Richard's remains, we now know in detail how Richard must have met his end One report puts his death down to a Welsh halberdier – the halberd being an axe-like weapon on the end of a six-foot long pole. The king's helmet seems to have been cut away (there are cut marks on the skull's jaw suggesting that the helmet's strap has been cut off) to expose his head. Several gouge marks in the front of the skull seem to have been caused by a dagger, perhaps in a struggle. Then the two wounds that would have killed Richard include the back part of his skull being sheathed off by what seems to be a halberd; if this did not kill him, a sword blade thrust from the base of the skull straight through the brain certainly would have done the job. Listen | Following the momentous announcement in 2013 that the body found in a Leicestershire car park was indeed Richard III, we spoke to Leicester archaeologist Lin Foxhall and Phil Stone, chairman of the Richard III Society, to get an inside view on the developments Richard was then placed on the back of a horse, trussed up like a hog (his insignia) with his 'privy parts' exposed, to be taken to Leicester, where his body was put on public display. Was the skeleton in the Leicester car park really Richard III? In conclusion, Bosworth remains a battle with an enduring appeal: it is not simply a tale of defeat and victory, but also of treachery and intrigue. But as recent discoveries have shown, the battle's own history remains very much a living one, with our understanding of where the battle was fought and how exactly Richard III died being completely transformed in recent years. The story of Bosworth, 529 years on, remains very much alive. Chris Skidmore is the author of Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2013) This article was first published by HistoryExtra in August 2014
Unburied treasures: the 10 greatest discoveries made by the British public
From Bronze Age cups to souvenirs from Hadrian’s Wall to coins hidden at the height of the Viking wars, the British public has discovered hundreds of thousands of archaeological finds, many of which have been recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Now, 23 years after it was found ed, the PAS – run by the British Museum and Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales – has recorded more than 1.5 million finds. To mark that milestone, we asked six PAS archaeologists to nominate 10 discoveries that they believe have done most to transform our knowledge of the past…
Compiled by Michael Lewis The Ringlemere Cup gives us the rarest of glimpses of life in Britain more than three millennia ago We know very little about the people who occupied the south-east corner of the British Isles 3,500 years ago. Yet a little light was shone onto this distant world on 4 November 2001, when metal-detectorist Cliff Bradshaw started scanning the fields of Ringlemere Farm, near Sandwich in Kent. What Bradshaw found nestled beneath the surface that day is one of the oldest treasures ever discovered in Britain. It was a Bronze Age gold vessel dated to 1700–1500 BC, and such was its age and rarity (it is one of only two gold Bronze Age cups found in England) that it was acquired by the British Museum. The Ringlemere Cup was originally 11cm high with corrugated sides. I say ‘originally’ because, when Bradshaw discovered the vessel, it was severely misshapen – presumably after being hit by a farmer’s plough. Had Bradshaw not chanced across the object, it might have been lost forever. So what was the cup used for – and by whom? We can only guess. But a clue is provided by the fact that it has a rounded base. This means that the vessel could not stand alone, suggesting it might have had a ritual use – perhaps it was held or passed around, a bit like a modern-day communion vessel. Maybe it was made to carry an alcoholic or herbed drink as part of a ceremony – although that is, of course, firmly in the realms of speculation! What we are more confident of is that the cup was deposited (perhaps ritually) within a barrow in a prehistoric complex that dates back to c2300 BC, but with activity on the site going back even further in time. We also know that the Ringlemere Cup is one of six stylistically similar Bronze Age vessels that have been discovered across Europe – suggesting that, even at this distant point in history, ideas and skills were transmitted across the continent. Yet it is unlikely that the cup itself was created on the continent. Archaeologists believe that this cup was probably made locally, maybe fairly close to its findspot – all of which means that the metalworking expertise required to create a high-status object like this almost certainly resided in Bronze Age Britain. Michael Lewis, Head, PAS & Treasure, British Museum Listen | As the Portable Antiquities Scheme records its 1.5 millionth find, we spoke to Michael Lewis, who is head of the scheme, about some of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries in its history The discovery of thousands of coins suggests that Roman Britain may have been an agricultural powerhouse ‘Grots’. It’s not the most glamorous of words. But to historians of Roman Britain, it’s a thing of beauty. ‘Grots’ is a term sometimes used to refer to the worn and corroded base-metal Roman coins discovered across England and Wales in their thousands. Every Roman emperor (not to mention almost all usurpers) issued their own coinage. This makes Roman coins a uniquely valuable source of information for the evolution of Roman Britain from Claudius’s invasion in AD 43 through to the collapse of the province more than three centuries later. What is perhaps most remarkable is the sheer number that have been identified. By 2005, the Portable Antiquities Scheme had recorded just over 34,000 Roman coins. In the intervening 15 years, the numbers have grown to 320,000 – the largest dataset of its kind worldwide. Myth-making and belonging: the coins of the Roman provinces But it is where these coins have been discovered – every bit as much as their volume – that has done most to shape our understanding of the province of Britannia. In short, the regions that have yielded the highest numbers don’t necessarily correspond with those that traditionally come to mind when we think about ‘Roman Britain’. Take what is known as the Valentinianic period (AD 364–378). These 14 years in the second half of the fourth century have yielded high concentrations of coinage in the rural landscapes of the South West (notably Wiltshire), East Anglia and Yorkshire. That is perhaps surprising in itself. But, when combined with other forms of evidence, it has helped cast Roman Britain in a whole new light. The fourth century sees a growth of the rural landscape, villa construction, the fortification or reinforcement of rural settlements like Mildenhall in Wiltshire, and the appearance of other objects such as Late Roman military belt fittings. Meanwhile, literary sources highlight the importance of grain ships plying their trade between Britain and the Rhine. This suggests that the rural Roman landscape may have been an important grain bowl in the late fourth century for the Roman armies on the Rhine, a conclusion almost unreachable prior to the PAS – and had it not been for the many ‘grotty’ Roman coins recorded. Andrew Brown, assistant finds adviser and treasure curator, British Museum Few historians had heard of Domitianus – until a single coin suggested he may have been Roman emperor Back in 2003, a metal-detectorist called Brian Malin was scouring farmland near Chalgrove, not far from Oxford, when he discovered a jar containing 4,957 Roman coins dating to between AD 251 and 279. The Chalgrove (II) hoard, as it’s known, was a significant find but, seemingly, nothing out of the ordinary – after all, more than 600 hoards are known to have been discovered in Britain from this period. But then the coins were taken to the British Museum to be conserved and identified – and everything changed. For staring out from one of the coins was an individual that no one expected to see. He was a Roman emperor named Domitianus – and, until then, many historians didn’t even believe he existed. This wasn’t the first time that Domitianus had appeared on archaeologists’ radars. An identical coin, rediscovered in 2003, was found in a hoard in France in 1900, yet some scholars rejected it as a hoax because there was no supporting evidence for Domitianus. We now have that evidence, and it has enabled us to paint a partial picture of this little-known emperor. Domitianus was, it seems, a very short-lived emperor of the Gallic empire, a breakaway state that existed north of the Alps between AD 260 and 274. A general of the same name was involved in a failed revolt in Milan in AD 268, but it is unclear if this is the same individual. What we do know is that Domitianus became emperor in Gaul for a few days or weeks in AD 271. It was, it appears, the shortest of reigns – but time enough, at least, to mint a few coins! Sam Moorhead, national finds adviser, British Museum The Staffordshire Moorlands Pan is a remarkable souvenir of life guarding Hadrian’s Wall For 300 years after its inception in AD 122, Hadrian’s Wall was the most monumental element of a grid of garrisons and roads that formed Roman Britain’s northern frontier. This mighty piece of Roman engineering would have made quite an impression on the many soldiers from across the empire who travelled north to man it. We know this from the letters and diary entries they wrote recording their experiences. We also know it from the works of art they commissioned as souvenirs of their time on the empire’s edge – the most striking surviving example of which is surely the Staffordshire Moorlands Pan. Discovered by detectorists at Ilam in the Peak District in June 2003, this artefact is one of a group of enamel-decorated pans that were crafted to celebrate the wall’s existence. Around its rim are inscriptions naming the four forts on the western end of Hadrian’s Wall – Bowness-on-Solway, Drumburgh, Stanwix and Castlesteads – each of which is placed, we’re told, “on the line of the Wall of Aelius”. The pan even name-checks its likely owner, one Draco. To the veterans who took such items home – of which Draco was perhaps one – the sequence of garrison names recalled a route endlessly marched from the Solway flatlands west of Carlisle to the Pennine hills. Beneath the text are swirling polychrome enamel circles, a decorative technique originating in northern Europe but favoured by military consumers. Not even the loss of the pan’s handle and base can detract from its beauty. And you can see it for yourself at one of the three museums at which it is on rotational display: Tullie House Museum (Carlisle), the Potteries Museum (Stoke-on-Trent) and the British Museum. Sally Worrell, national finds adviser, UCL The discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard propelled early medieval England into the nation’s consciousness Some finds add a few brushstrokes to our understanding of a historical period. Others, like the Staffordshire Hoard, change the picture completely. Take a closer look at the Staffordshire Hoard… Detectorist Terry Herbert’s discovery of 4,600 fragments of seventh-century war-gear and other objects in a field near the village of Hammerwich in 2009 was the find of a lifetime. But it was a lot more than that. It turned the early Anglo-Saxon period, swathes of which have long been shrouded in obscurity, into a topic of genuine public interest. Suddenly – thanks to exquisite pieces such as a possible representation of a Jewish priest’s crown, and the Staffordshire helmet, pieced together from hundreds of precious fragments – the world saw the craftsmanship and sheer exuberance of Anglo-Saxon art. The Staffordshire Hoard – parts of which are on display at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent – raised many questions, of course. Was it buried as loot, or hidden for security? Could it have been a ritual offering? Why is feminine jewellery – the gold object most commonly recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme among seventh-century finds – entirely absent? Attempting to get to the bottom of these puzzles will only increase our fascination with this remarkable find, and the period in English history that produced it. Kevin Leahy, national finds adviser, PAS The Watlington Hoard is evidence of the struggles between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons as the tide turned in Alfred’s favour The late ninth century was a time of great tumult in Britain. In England, the Viking ‘Great Army’ conquered the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia, and seized control of much of Mercia. Then, in the mid-870s, it turned its sights on Wessex. Even the soon-to-be great King Alfred was forced into hiding on the Somerset Levels. But, in 878, Alfred emerged from Athelney, defeating the Vikings at the battle of Edington. The Viking leader, Guthrum, sued for peace with Alfred and agreed to leave Wessex. After spending the winter of 878/79 in Cirencester, the Vikings headed to East Anglia to settle, probably taking a route along the Icknield Way in southern Oxfordshire. It was here, near to the small town of Watlington, that detectorist James Mather made a discovery that sheds light on this moment in history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/07/8WatlingtonHoard-eff0119-scaled-e1595588707699.jpg" width="1024" height="768" alt="Viking silver ingots, jewellery and Anglo-Saxon coins" title="Some of the Viking silver ingots, jewellery and Anglo-Saxon coins buried near modern-day Watlington, probably by a member of the Viking Great Army. (Credit British Museum/Portable Antiquities Scheme)" /> The find, known as the Watlington Hoard, is made up of Viking silver jewellery and ingots, plus 203 silver coins. It is the first large Viking hoard from the Upper Thames Valley, made even more significant by the presence of the coins. These consist mainly of rare pennies of Alfred the Great (reigned 871–99) and Ceolwulf II of Mercia (874–c79), produced using the same design for both kings. Two-hundred of the pennies belong to two joint designs: the Cross-and-Lozenge (of which there are 187) and the Two Emperors (of which there are 13). Depicting two rulers below an angel, it is the latter design, copying a late Roman gold coin, that has attracted the most attention. But both types essentially suggest the same thing: a recognition of the benefits of economic cooperation. Wessex and Mercia had issued coins using shared designs since the 860s, an alliance that the coins show continued under Alfred and Ceolwulf, even if historical documents said otherwise. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (written in Wessex from the 890s) described Ceolwulf as “a foolish king’s thegn”, a puppet of the Vikings. Historians now see him differently, accepting him as the king of the Mercians, with the coinage an important part of his rehabilitation. The coins indicate that Alfred and Ceolwulf’s pennies were probably struck in large numbers, too, so this was no fleeting alliance. This is not the only way in which the coins are important: differences in inscriptions, the style of the coin design and the names of moneyers reveal a great deal about the chronology of the coin production and the mints where they were struck, probably at Canterbury, London and Winchester, with another in Mercia. The Watlington Hoard (now on display at the Ashmolean Museum) may bring to light new knowledge about Alfred and Ceolwulf, but the chances are it was buried by a member of the Viking Great Army as it made that journey to East Anglia. In fact, the hoard may have been part of the peace deal struck between Alfred’s Wessex and Guthrum’s Vikings following the great clash at Edington. John Naylor, national finds adviser, Ashmolean Museum The Chew Valley Hoard is a time capsule from those turbulent few years when William the Conqueror’s new regime was at its most vulnerable The Norman Conquest is one of the most famous examples of regime change in medieval Europe. But how great was the rupture that followed William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings? Following the discovery of 2,581 silver pennies and halfpennies in Somerset last year, we are now in a better position to answer this much-debated question. Buried in the chaotic early years of William’s reign, the Chew Valley Hoard is the largest ever recovered from this period in English history. Its contents, divided between Harold II’s only issue and the first coin-type of William’s reign, increase the number of coins available for study hugely, doubling those for Harold and increasing by five times those for William. The size of the find is key to our understanding of the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Norman rule. With such a large sample size we’ll be able to compare England’s coinage each side of the Conquest – where it was minted, the names of the moneyers who produced them, the numbers of dies used – and explore exactly how radical change was after 1066. Everything you wanted to know about the Norman conquest, with Marc Morris As well as opening a window on the late 1060s, the Chew Valley Hoard also threw up some surprises – including two coins using the obverse (heads) of one of Harold II’s coins and the reverse (tails) of one of William’s. Using coin dies from different issues (known as ‘muling’) is a rare find in this period, and might reflect a paucity of new dies or an attempt to (illegally) cut costs when William’s issue was introduced, by reusing an old die. Another coin reuses a die of Edward the Confessor, with one of William’s dies. These oddities aside, the Chew Valley hoard provides a remarkable glimpse into a turbulent moment which had long-reaching effects on England’s state and society. John Naylor Viking treasures from Ireland to Afghanistan were hidden – possibly from advancing Anglo-Saxons – in the Vale of York Hoard Incredibly, much of the Vale of York Hoard fits into its little silver-gilt cup. Yet this is a treasure that punches way above its weight. That’s because, contained within its gold and silver arm-rings, jewellery, ingots, coins and the cup itself is the story of the Vikings’ elaborate and wide-ranging trade links – all embellished with a good bit of thieving. The hoard contained treasures from across the known world. The cup was probably looted from a church in Carolingian France, much of its jewellery came from Ireland – and, as for its 600 or more Anglo-Saxon, Carolingian and Islamic silver coins, they were minted as far afield as Afghanistan. The hoard was found by father and son David and Andrew Whelan near Harrogate in 2007. What the Whelans found was, historians believe, buried not long after 927, when King Æthelstan seized the kingdom of Northumbria, forming the first united English kingdom. This dating may give us a clue as to why the hoard was buried in the first place. Was it deposited here by Vikings for safe-keeping as the English drove them from the kingdom? Kevin Leahy The depth of devotion to the cult of Thomas Becket was revealed by a find on the banks of the Thames In 2016, Tony Thira was mudlarking along the Thames foreshore when he chanced upon a medieval badge, seemingly of St Thomas (Becket) of Canterbury. On the face of it, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about his find: pilgrim badges are not excessively rare discoveries, and the Portable Antiquities Scheme has recorded many souvenirs associated with St Thomas. But the pristine condition in which this fragile badge emerged from the Thames mud – where it had lain for perhaps 700 years – marked it out as special. The badge, which probably dates to the 14th or 15th century, appears to depict Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. It’s believed that four knights struck the blows that sent Becket to his grave, though the badge has room for just one – and, if you look closely, you can see the hand of God descending over the archbishop at the point of his martyrdom. The killing of such a high-ranking ecclesiastic in his own cathedral, on the apparent orders of King Henry II, shocked all of Christendom – it was, in many ways, the 9/11 of its day. As Geoffrey Chaucer recounts in his Canterbury Tales, pilgrimage to holy places became a phenomenon in the Middle Ages, with people of all backgrounds travelling sometimes great distances. Soon the cult of Becket was drawing hundreds of pilgrims to the spot where he died Read more about the cult of Thomas Becket Pilgrim badges are a testament to this practice. They were not only proof of pilgrimage, but people believed that they turned into a kind of lucky charm once they’d touched holy relics. Illustrations show people wearing badges on caps, but they might have been worn anywhere. Some were fixed to books, others hung up around the home. The basic principle was that if you touched the badge its spiritual qualities would be passed on to you too. Michael Lewis How a discarded boar badge helped inspire a rethink on Richard III’s final moments Richard III has been associated with the emblem of a boar for centuries – and not always in a way the Yorkist king would have enjoyed. In his play of 1593, Richard III, William Shakespeare has the Earl of Richmond declare the king a “wretched, bloody, and usurping boar, That spoiled your summer fields and fruitful vines.” It was a description that helped secure Richard’s place in infamy. Shakespeare may have applied more than a little artistic licence when describing Richard’s life, but there’s no denying that this animal was indeed the king’s emblem. It is known that, in 1483, boar badges were made for Richard’s coronation and also the investiture of his son, Edward, as Prince of Wales. A number of boar-shaped objects, as well as items with the boar-motif, have over the years been recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. None, however, are more significant – or evocative – than a silver-gilt livery badge in the form of a boar found at the site of the battle of Bosworth, where Richard so famously lost his life. Although broken, the badge (which is now on display in the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre) must have been lost on the spot by a member of the king’s personal household. It was discovered during a metal-detecting survey to better place the location of the battle – and (along with other evidence as part of the 2005–09 survey) it has moved the epicentre of the battle about 3km from where previously thought, and led to a reassessment of the course of the clash. Indeed, some people now think that the badge identifies the actual spot where King Richard perished, but that might be reading too much into it! With thanks to Gareth Williams, Neil Wilkin and Richard Abdy. Michael Lewis will be discussing Britain’s greatest archaeological finds on our podcast. To listen, go to historyextra.com/podcast Find out more about the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and the Code of Practice for Responsible Metal-detecting You can also catch up with the BBC Four comedy series Detectorists, starring Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones, on BBC iPlayer. This article was first published in the August 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine