Leanda de Lisle - Tudor: Passion. Manipulation. Murder. The Story of England’s Most Notorious Royal Family

TUDOR

ALSO BY LEANDA DE LISLE

After Elizabeth: How James King of Scots won the Crown of England in 1603

The Sisters who would be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey

TUDOR

Passion. Manipulation. Murder.
The Story of Englands
Most Notorious Royal Family

LEANDA
DE LISLE

PUBLICAFFAIRS

New York

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Chatto & Windus.

Published in 2013 in the United States by PublicAffairs, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved.

Copyright 2013 by Leanda de Lisle.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 8104145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

Typeset in Arno Pro by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Library of Congress Control Number: 201394541

ISBN 978-1-61039-364-5 (EB)

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Eric Ives

Contents

PAGE

1:

2a:

2b:

3a:

3b:

3c:

4a:

4b:

4c:

5a:

5b:

5c:

6a:

6b:

7a:

7b:

7c:

9:

10a:

10b:

10c:

10d:

10e:

10f:

11a:

11b:

11c:

12a:

12b:

12c:

13a:

13b:

14a:

14b:

15a:

15b:

15c:

15d:

16:

For Gods sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

RICHARD II ACT 3, SCENE 2

In fifteenth-century France it was believed that the English bore the mark of Cain for their habit of killing their kings. Before the slaughter of Richard III in 1485, when the Tudor crown was won on the battlefield of Bosworth, a series of English kings had been deposed and then died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances that century. The overthrow of the first of these, Richard II, in 1399, had brought a long-standing element of instability to the monarchy.

At that time, the paternal ancestors of the Tudors were modest landowners in north Wales and even this status was lost the following year. In 1400 they joined a Welsh rebellion against Richard IIs heir, the usurper Henry IV, first king of the House of Lancaster. The family was ruined after the rebellion was crushed, but eventually a child of the youngest son left Wales with his son to seek a better life in England. It was this man, Owen Tudor, who was to give the Tudor dynasty its name. Looking back, Owens life is that of a modern-day hero: a common man who lived against convention, often thumbed his nose at authority, and died, bravely, with a joke on his lips. Owen, however, is lost to the family story in histories of the Tudors that so often begin at Bosworth in 1485. So is the remarkable life of Owens daughter-in-law, Lady Margaret Beaufort, whose descent from the House of Lancaster provided the basis for her son Henry Tudors royal claim. Indeed his reign, as Henry VII, rarely merits more than a chapter or two before these Tudor histories propel us towards Henry VIII and the divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Written by the children of the Reformation, the Reformation has become where the story of the real Tudors begins; but the Tudors were the children of an earlier period, and their preoccupations and myths were rooted in that past.

The famous mystery of the disappearance of the princes in the Tower in 1483, which turned Henry Tudor from a helpless exile into Richard IIIs rival overnight, becomes less mysterious when it is considered in the light of the culture and beliefs of the fifteenth century; the life of Margaret Beaufort also emerges in a more sympathetic light once we have recalibrated our perspective, and the actions of Henry VIII and his children can likewise be much better understood. England was not predominantly Protestant until very late in the Tudor period, and habits of thought were still shaped by Englands long, and recent, Catholic past. Similarly, while the Tudors are often recalled in terms of a historical enmity with Spain, this too is history written with hindsight: the Armada did not take place until a generation after Elizabeth became queen. It was memories of the Hundred Years War with France that remained strong, and although the war that began with Edward III laying claim to the French throne had ended in 1453, over thirty years before Bosworth, it was to have a lasting impact on Englands political character.

The English had not needed French land, as the country was under-populated after the Black Death. Successive English kings had been obliged to persuade their subjects to come into partnership with them to help achieve their ambitions for the French throne. The result was that in England military service was offered, not assumed, and royal revenue was a matter of negotiation, not of taxation imposed on the realm. English kings were, in practical terms, dependent on obedience freely given, and that had to be earned. They had certain duties, such as ensuring peace, prosperity, harmony and justice (if a crown was taken from an expected heir or an incumbent monarch, the perceived ability to restore harmony within the kingdom was particularly important) and kings were also supposed to maintain, or even increase, their landed inheritance. Englands empire in France had reached its zenith under Henry IVs son, Henry V, and his son Henry VI was crowned as a boy King of France as well as England. But then he lost the empire he had inherited. The humiliation of the final defeat at French hands in 1453 was not something England had recovered from even a century later, which is why the Tudors were devastated by the loss of Calais. It was the last remnant of a once great empire.