Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke (eBook)

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Blood and Roses

It is no longer fashionable to discern in fifteenth-century English life the ‘mixed smell of blood and roses’. In seeking to evoke the early summer of 1487, however, it is hard to dismiss Johan Huizinga’s haunting image from the mind.1 In the literal sense, it was most certainly a time of blood and roses, at a time when on the banks of the river Trent flowers bloomed amid the carnage. In more figurative senses, as well, images of ‘blood’ and ‘roses’ loomed large in the consciousness of English people in the mid-1480s. A central concern was with the fate of the house of Plantagenet, which had ruled England for over three centuries, with the extinction or survival of its blood-line, and with the contending claims of princes and pretenders to represent and embody it. The two main branches of the ruling dynasty, which over the previous three decades had disputed the crown, had lately become more and more identified with roses: the red rose of Lancaster and Beaufort and the white rose of York. More recently, the fledgling regime of Henry VII had actively promoted this symbolism, and elaborated on it for propagandist purposes. The marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York, a union of the blood-lines of the rival dynasties, was appropriately depicted as two roses entwined. The new royal house of Tudor would adopt as its best known emblem the double rose.2

Huizinga did not write for the literal-minded or even the emblematicallyminded, nor for that matter with England in mind. What he sought to express in the image were the contrasts and paradoxes of European life and culture in later middle ages. For this noted Dutch historian, the ‘mixed smell of blood and roses’ epitomised the contrasts in experience – between suffering and joy, adversity and prosperity, war and peace – which were then more keenly felt, and the oscillations in mood – between tenderness and cruelty, love and hate, piety and worldliness – which then seemed more violent and striking. Even if alongside the rich and ebullient tapestry of continental experience, the fabric of English life appears a little bland and colourless, this sort of duality is nonetheless strikingly apparent. English men and women of the late fifteenth century felt and acted with a directness and a passion that even some foreign observers found disconcerting. In the theatre of English public life, most especially, the contrasts and upheavals were notoriously overdrawn and precipitate.

In perceptions of their age, there was among people in England at this time, and remains among historians studying this era, a deep-seated ambivalence. In celebrations of the Tudor triumph, apologists for the new order painted up the contrasts between the horrors of civil war that lay in the past, and the blessings of peace brought in by Henry VII. It was an old refrain, repeating a great deal of the rhetoric used by the Yorkists against the Lancastrians. A mixture of propaganda and pious hope, it belied the present, which in the first years of the Tudor era looked fraught with danger, but also misrepresented the past. The civil strife of the last thirty years had indeed been disruptive. Political dissension had fed on dynastic instability to produce a series of crises, resolved only through battle, execution and murder. Yet images of wholesale carnage and destruction need to be set in a larger frame. Contemporary lamentations about the state of England need to be seen in relation to expectations, and the truth was that the English, well accustomed to fighting in foreign lands, were unused to war, however limited, in their own land. Certainly it is misleading to depict the country as embattled and ravaged by war. In most parts of the realm it was hard even to come across evidence of recent fortification, save of the ornamental sort. In the late fifteenth century there were widespread signs of depopulation, decay of tillage and urban decline, but all of these developments must be attributed to the plague and structural economic changes over a longer time-span. Foreign visitors to England are better guides to the condition of the country, and judging from their reports the dominant impression was of a pleasant, prosperous and peaceful land.3

Within an easy day’s ride of London there were certainly places which seemed wholly unruffled by the commotions of the time. The copse-lined Chilterns, through which all the traffic between the metropolis and the midlands passed, were studded with sleepy hamlets and bucolic villages. Even the towns of the district had a serene beauty which belied their importance as markets and communication-centres. Where land had been set aside as park or gamereserve, the countryside could be positively arcadian. In a place like Berkhamsted it would be easy to forget the troubles of the time. Though a royal lordship, its castle had no military importance. For a quarter of a century it had been the home of a remarkable lady who had become more withdrawn and devout with the years. For her the days passed in a carefully regulated round of prayers, devotional reading and works of charity. Though a widow since 1460, and increasingly reclusive, she would never succeed quite in losing her public identity. Around the realm there were still old men who could recall her in the prime of her womanhood as the ‘rose of Raby’. More generally, she was known as Cecily, dowager duchess of York, the mother of kings, the grandmother of princes and pretenders.4

The serenity of her ambience seems a far cry from the hurling world in which Henry Tudor was forced to defend his crown against invasion and insurrection. After the tragedies of her own life, the perturbations of 1487 were doubtless of little moment to her. Nonetheless, in important respects, the lady at Berkhamsted is a natural focus of attention. With her quiet and circumscribed routine, she can be presented as the still centre of a great storm, which after lashing the realm for a generation and violently overthrowing kings and noble houses, seemed now to be approaching its final crisis. No one alive at this time had been so closely involved in the internecine strife of the previous thirty years, and the grand old lady thus provides the most convenient reference-point from which to consider its complex course. At the same time her status as the matriarch of the house of York makes her life-story the simplest way to introduce many of the people involved directly or indirectly in the crisis of 1487, to trace the intricate interlacing of family and politics at this time, and to gain some impression of the problems that arose when the destinies of nations were tied to blood-lines.

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Strictly speaking, the house of Neville was not of the old aristocracy. Though it could trace its descent back to the Norman Conquest, and it had a respectable lineage through into the early fourteenth century; it was only at the end of the fourteenth century that Ralph Neville, lord of Raby, emerged as a major force in northern society, was appointed warden of the west march and given the title of earl of Westmorland. His advancement was remarkably rapid, and indicates a man of considerable acumen. Growing up in the last years of Edward III’s reign, and first winning his spurs in France at around the age of sixteen, he subsequently applied his martial skills exclusively to border warfare. The royal favour he enjoyed under Richard II owed not a little to the king’s concern to establish a counterweight in the north to the house of Percy. Yet the quality of the man and the solidity of his achievement are clear from his ability to continue the process of dynastic aggrandisement in more difficult times. He made all the right moves in 1399, when Richard II was overthrown by Henry of Bolingbroke, and successfully rode out the storms of 1403–5, when the Percys tried to overthrow the Lancastrian dynasty that they had helped establish. Thenceforward, his credit at the Lancastrian court guaranteed by his marriage to Henry IV’s half-sister, Joan Beaufort, his position in the north was uncontested. During the reign of Henry V he was at the height of his reputation. At the time of his death in 1425, he was one of the council of regency for the infant Henry VI, an honoured elder statesman of the Lancastrian regime.5

He was a prodigiously successful dynast in a more obvious sense. By his first wife he sired nine children, including a son and namesake who succeeded him as earl of Westmorland. His second wife, Joan Beaufort, the daughter of John of Gaunt, bore him another fourteen children, all with royal blood flowing in their veins. It was this branch of the house of Neville whose aggrandisement was to be one of the most remarkable and disruptive political developments of the fifteenth century. The eldest of the sons was Richard, who through marriage to the heiress of the Montagu’s, became the earl of Salisbury. His son in turn was to marry the heiress of the Beauchamps, earls of Warwick, and was to be known in later ages as Warwick the Kingmaker. The old earl of Westmorland was no less active in arranging advantageous matches for his daughters as well as his sons. Among his sons-in-law were to be Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. The life of his youngest and, by all accounts, fairest daughter, Cecily, was to be transformed by the most glorious alliance of all. Shortly before her father’s death, and though still a child, she married Richard of York, a prince of the blood royal.

Despite the youth and innocence of both bride and groom, it was a heady match from the outset. While she was kin to the house of Lancaster, his lineage had wholly different implications. In...