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

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

  At first Henry spent time under the care of Herbert’s wife, along with her own small children, but by the age of seven he was living in the main household. This amounted to as many as 200 people. Of these, Herbert’s wife might have a few female companions to wait on her, but since the menial servants lived and slept communally, most were single men. There were many high-born servants too, as it was common for the sons of the elite to spend part of their youth in the noble household of family friends or patrons. They were expected to serve meals, help their master dress, hone their manners and learn that good service earned the ear of the one served. Even young children were expected to press for family advantage while in a household such as this.15

  Unusually, Henry’s entire education was to take place at Raglan, but he was given the best that Herbert could supply. Henry was taught grammar by graduates of Oxford University, and guidance in the practical skills of a knight, learning horsemanship, archery and how to fight with a wooden sword. He would have to wait until his teens before he began training with a real weapon. The long sword, which weighed about four pounds and was up to forty-three inches long, was a two-handed weapon that required considerable strength as well as skill to wield, as did the popular battleaxe. Amongst his playmates was another of Herbert’s wards, an older boy called Henry Percy, whose father, the Earl of Northumberland, had been killed at Towton in the Lancastrian cause. He too would have to earn his earldom back by proving his loyalty to Edward IV.

  Although Henry did not see his mother, she was permitted to write to him. It was her duty and wish to seek for him to be restored to his rights as Earl of Richmond. To this end she encouraged him to offer good service to Herbert, while at court she did her best to curry favour with the new king. Here Margaret had to adapt to a very changed culture. Where Henry VI had enjoyed, above all, decorous religious display, Edward IV promoted a chivalric aesthetic. Margaret remembered seeing her first Garter ceremony aged nine, when the Lancastrian queen, Margaret of Anjou, had appeared in new blood-red robes. The Order, founded by Edward III, had as its inspiration the knights of the legendary King Arthur’s Round Table. For Henry VI the emphasis had been on the religious ritual of the ceremonial; for Edward IV it was on courtly military display. There were other differences too: Henry VI’s quiet scholarship and austerity was replaced with the energy of a young warrior who revelled in the pursuit of pleasure. A foreign visitor judged Edward ‘a very young and handsome prince, amongst the handsomest people in the world’, and thought that ‘Never had a man taken as much pleasure from women, feasts, banquets and hunting.’ Edward IV appeared affable, and ‘so genial in his greeting that if he saw a newcomer bewildered by his appearance and royal magnificence, he would give him courage to speak by laying a hand upon his shoulder’.16 Beneath this bonhomie there lay a brutal nature, but allies had to be won to keep the peace and Edward IV was not only charming, when he wished, he was also a talented propagandist.

  Yorkist claims to be the senior royal house were being promoted in handwritten and painted pedigrees that were circulated at court. Each was richly decorated with Edward’s badges, symbols that were also seen widely on liveries, banners, and carved in stone on royal palaces. In an age used to visual messages even the illiterate could read their meanings.17 The famous badge of the Sun in Splendour recalled the three suns at Mortimer’s Cross, while adapting the sun badge of Richard II. It reminded those who saw it that God had blessed Edward in battle, with the implicit suggestion that this was because they were the true heirs to Richard II. Sometimes the Sun in Splendour was combined with another badge – that of the famous white rose. This was believed to have been the badge of Edward’s ancestor, Roger Mortimer – the man who was supposedly Richard II’s ‘true’ heir, before his right was ‘usurped’ by Henry IV.18

  As the years passed and Henry Tudor grew up, Lancastrian fortunes went from bad to worse. Henry VI left Scotland and was hiding out in the north of England when he was captured in 1465. A German merchant described him being led ‘through Cheapside to the Tower, on a small horse, a straw hat on his head, and a rope tied round his body, and each side so that he might be held’.19 A king was expected to look like a king, and the humiliation of Henry VI was a deliberate attempt to undermine his sacred status as an anointed monarch. ‘No one, either young or old’, the merchant recorded, ‘dared . . do him honour, either kneeling or otherwise, for fear of his life’.20 But as Shakespeare’s Richard II boasts, ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.’ Henry VI remained a potential focus of opposition while he lived. When Henry IV had faced unrest in January 1400, he announced that Richard II had ‘died’ in prison, and it was suggested he had starved himself. A mysterious and sudden death, similarly from grief or shame, was the likely fate of Henry VI. He remained alive only because there was little point in killing him while his son, Prince Edward of Lancaster, was safe with his mother, Margaret of Anjou, in eastern France. If anything happened to the boy, however, the deposed king would not survive for very long.

  Against this background of Lancastrian despair, Margaret Beaufort was fortunate that her efforts to ingratiate herself were given an unexpected boost by King Edward’s choice of bride. Edward had made the extraordinary decision to marry the widow of a Lancastrian knight.21 According to the chronicles, he had come across the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville by chance at a forest roadside, and immediately fell in love with her. While it is sometimes difficult to see from a picture of this period why a particular woman was judged beautiful, this is not the case with Elizabeth Woodville, with her high cheekbones and cupid-bow mouth. But the reality of the king’s love affair with her was in some contrast to the romantic fiction. Edward knew her from court, where he had hoped to claim her as a mistress. When that failed (it was said she had held him off with a dagger) he married her, becoming the first English king to marry a commoner. Elizabeth Woodville’s relatives all now expected to marry into noble families. Amongst them, her sister Katherine was married to Margaret’s nephew by marriage, the eleven-year-old Henry, Duke of Buckingham. This had a transformative effect on Margaret’s ability to attract the king’s favour, and in 1567, having not seen her son for six years, she enjoyed a full week with Henry at Raglan.22

  Margaret found Henry Tudor had grown into a lean, intelligent ten-year-old, above average height for his age, with a slight cast to his blue eyes. Margaret was grateful to see that peace – even a Yorkist peace – was keeping her son safe. The following year Margaret entertained King Edward at her husband’s hunting lodge near Guildford. She bought a pewter dinner service in London for the occasion, and served a vast array of delicacies: half a great conger eel, thirteen lampreys and several hundred oysters were washed down with five barrels of ale. As Edward’s minstrels played for the company, M
argaret could feel well satisfied. Dressed in a new gown of velvet and fine wool, she was sitting on one side of the king under a purple cloth of estate, a symbol of authority, while her husband sat on the other side. For Margaret and her son, the future seemed hopeful.

  4

  THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

  FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT THE TWELVE-YEAR-OLD HENRY TUDOR could see William Herbert manoeuvre his forces into their battle positions. For Henry, witnessing the coming battle of Edgecote Moor, six miles north-east of Banbury, was to be part of his training in war. Herbert had gathered ‘the extremity of all his power’ and his men were ‘the best in Wales’.1 A great feast had been given at Raglan before they headed out to face the enemy, which happily was not a Lancastrian army. The rebel leader was a traitor from within the House of York: Edward IV’s ambitious and brilliant cousin, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. At dawn on 26 July 1469, Warwick’s forces were still on their way to join his allies in the field, and Herbert intended to defeat them before Warwick arrived. He looked forward to his Tudor ward learning from his victory.

  The chink of armour and the noise of clanking weaponry swelled into a roar as the rebels swept forward with battle cries. The impact drove Herbert back across the river, but he put up a determined defence. His co-commander’s Welsh archers were only a few miles away and at last the news came that the archers were coming, and fast.2 Then, suddenly, the advance guard of Warwick’s army appeared, their red coats stitched with his distinctive badge of the ragged staff, sewn in silver.3 Warwick’s name alone was enough to send a bolt of terror through Herbert’s forces. The fear that Warwick could not be far behind shattered morale and sent Herbert’s army into flight. At least 2,000 Welshmen were slaughtered. Warwick also wanted prisoners, however, and he ordered his men on the hunt for those he considered to be of value. Henry’s first training in war proved to be the taste of mortal fear, as he too fled, with one man to guide him.

  As soon as the news of the battle reached Margaret Beaufort in Surrey, she sent eight of her best men across country to discover her son’s fate. When at last they sent word back, there was horror as well as relief. Henry was with Herbert’s brother-in-law at Weobley Castle near Hereford, but Herbert had been captured and executed.4 Henry’s guardian had been a dominant figure in his life and, when Margaret’s servants rode on to Weobley, she sent money for Henry to be spent on bows and arrows, ‘for his disports’: a distraction from the trauma he had been through.5 It would be over a year, however, before Margaret would see her son, as the political situation remained highly unstable.

  The origins of Warwick’s betrayal of his cousin dated back to the king’s controversial marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. Warwick, fourteen years older than Edward, and used to having his counsel heeded, had been in the middle of negotiating a match between Edward and a French princess. There was growing tension in Europe between Louis XI of France on the one side and the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany on the other, as Louis attempted to exert his authority over their independent duchies. The marriage and associated foreign policy would have meant an alliance with Louis, but it had had to be dropped after Edward revealed he had married his English bride. It then emerged that Edward favoured a Burgundian alliance. This was confirmed when his sister, Margaret of York, married Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in February 1468.

  Warwick’s resentment of the king’s growing independence only reached boiling point, however, when Edward blocked a marriage between Warwick’s daughter, Isabel Neville, and the elder of the king’s two brothers, George, Duke of Clarence.6 When Warwick rebelled he had hoped to make Clarence king, but it was only after he had formed an alliance with the Lancastrian queen, Margaret of Anjou, in October 1470, that he was able to find sufficient support to drive Edward into exile in Burgundy. Warwick’s sobriquet – ‘the Kingmaker’ – was well earned with the ailing Henry VI promptly released from the Tower and readapted as king. Prince Edward of Lancaster was promised in marriage to Warwick’s second daughter, Anne Neville, and Henry Tudor was free to leave Weobley. Jasper Tudor, newly returned from exile in France, escorted the boy from Hereford to his mother in London that same month.

  Henry had not seen Jasper since he was four years old, but Jasper’s exploits had been infamous in the Herbert household and at Weobley.7 Stories abounded describing Jasper’s raids into Wales, where he moved through the countryside like a will-o’-the-wisp, holding sessions and assizes in the name of Henry VI, reminding everyone who the true king was, before vanishing with his men. Jasper had nearly been caught in 1468 when the Lancastrian outpost of Harlech fell to Herbert’s troops, but he had escaped dressed as a peasant carrying a bundle of pea-straw on his back, before sailing for Brittany, more by his own skill, it was said, than that of his sailors.8 The ride to London with Henry marked the beginning of a close friendship between the dashing Jasper Tudor and his young nephew, and for the next fifteen years they would rarely be apart for long.

  On reaching London, Henry found himself in a city like no other. Over 40,000 people lived here, and its tall houses with their overhanging roofs seemed to block out the light and heighten the senses. Shops, cottages and taverns crowded on to the streets. Stalls glittered with goldsmiths’ work and the flash of silks, while the air was thick with the smells of beer, hot meat pies and cheese flans. Priests and monks were a ubiquitous sight, dressed in distinctive clothes and with the crown of their heads shaved, or tonsured. Well educated, they were an obvious choice for the rich to employ as their secretaries and administrators, and those in London tended to be the more ambitious members of clergy, attracted to the capital, as others were, for the opportunities it offered.9 Here and there you came across the great houses of the powerful, and gardens too. One offered a particularly striking sight: the Grocers Company had uprooted the white roses they had planted as a display of loyalty to Edward IV and had replaced them with red roses.10

  Happily reunited with his mother, Henry Tudor and his family travelled by barge to the Palace of Westminster on 27 October. King Henry VI was back in his rightful place, but for Margaret Beaufort, who had known him in better days, it was shocking to see how five years of imprisonment and mental illness had taken its toll. Henry VI had never completely recovered his health after 1453 when he had had to be spoon-fed to keep him alive. The additional strain of his recent years in the Tower had left him strangely passive: ‘simple’, was how he was described. There was an awkward moment when the frail king saw the self-possessed young Henry Tudor and made a bizarre pronouncement: ‘This truly is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield, and give over the domain.’11 The words suggest a torch being passed from one king to another. But it is most unlikely Henry VI would have intended any such prophecy. His seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward of Lancaster, would shortly be on his way to England from France with his mother the queen. There was no reason to believe he would not, one day, inherit his father’s throne. It may be that the king had confused Henry Tudor with the son he had not seen for five years.

  From London, Henry Tudor rode on to his mother’s Surrey house at Woking on the river Wye. It was a lovely manor with gardens lined with fruit trees, and beneath them the clear waters of a winding river. Margaret at last had an opportunity to lavish him with the love and attention she had been unable to give him as a little boy, but their time together was not to last. By 11 November King Edward was sailing home from Burgundy to fight for his crown with an army subsidised by his brother-in-law, Charles the Bold. Henry said his goodbyes, and having packed in his baggage his mother’s gift of a fine new horse blanket, he set off to rejoin Jasper. Together they would travel onward to south Wales to raise an army in the same region from which Herbert had drawn his men.

  Meanwhile, as Warwick scrambled to get another army ready in England to face Edward immediately, the Yorkist king took London. Henry VI was returned to the Tower, ‘as a man amazed and utterly dulled with troubles and adversity’.12 No wonder contemporaries were obsessed with the image
of the wheel of fortune, which raised men up one day, only to hurtle them down the next. It seemed to some that the world had ‘turned right queasy’.

  On 13 April 1471, with Henry VI locked in the Tower, the Yorkist cousins Warwick and Edward assembled their rival armies at Barnet in Hertfordshire. Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Stafford, had decided the family should hedge their bets on the outcome. While the fourteen-year-old Henry Tudor stayed with Jasper in the west, Stafford was preparing to fight alongside Edward IV’s forces. He feared he would not survive – this was to be ‘guerre mortelle’, and Stafford remembered well the horrors of Towton a decade earlier. On the eve of the battle, he wrote his will, naming his ‘most entirely beloved wife’ as his executor and asking simply that his body be ‘buried where it shall best please God that I die’.13

  As the first confused reports on the outcome of the battle reached Margaret, it emerged that the two sides had fought almost blind in thick fog early in the morning of the 14th. In the confusion Lancastrian archers had fired into the ranks of their own side, and with survivors crying ‘Treason! Treason!’ they had soon lost the battle. According to one account Warwick had fought on until overwhelmed, ‘beating down and killing the enemy far from his own forces’ until he was ‘thrust through and slain’.14 Another described how he ‘leapt on horseback and fled to a wood’, hoping to escape to fight another day, but that a Yorkist soldier ‘came upon him, and killed him, and despoiled him naked’.15 Battlefield commanders usually tried to escape, but trapped in that wood the Kingmaker knew better than to be taken alive and suffer a post-battle execution such as he had delivered to Henry’s former guardian, William Herbert. He had fought to the death.