LITMIR.BIZ

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between the Lancastrian King Henry VI and his rival Edward of York, who had declared himself Edward IV.

      Their final showdown came at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, in May 1471. Edward – young, warlike, charismatic and supported by both his brothers, the twenty-one-year-old George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was eighteen – was determined to annihilate the House of Lancaster once and for all. The battle soon turned into a massacre, leaving thousands dead on the field. It was a decisive victory for York; a disaster for Lancaster.

      After the battle, many of the Lancastrians fled to Tewkesbury Abbey, where they took refuge in the church. The victorious Edward and his men then burst in. There are two different versions of what happened next.

      According to the official account, Edward behaved with exemplary decorum, pardoning the fugitives and offering up solemn thanks at the high altar for his victory. But the unofficial accounts tell a different and much more shocking story. Edward and his men, rather than turning their thoughts to God and mercy, began to slaughter the Lancastrians. A lucky few were saved by the intervention of a priest, vested and holding the holy sacrament in his hands, in front of whom even the bloodthirsty Yorkists felt some shame. Edward then recovered control of the situation by issuing pardons to his defeated enemies. But already enough blood had been spilt to pollute the church and to require its reconsecration.

      The Yorkists also claimed that the Prince of Wales had died in the carnage of the battlefield. But darker rumours had it that he had been taken prisoner and brought before Edward, who accused him of treason, pushed the boy away and struck him with a gauntlet. He was then murdered by Clarence and Richard. A day or two later, despite his solemn pardon, Edward ordered the beheading of most of the remaining Lancastrian leaders. Now only the life of the feeble Lancastrian king, Henry VI, stood between Edward and an unchallenged grasp of the throne.

      On 21 May Edward entered the City of London in triumph. That night, between the hours of eleven and midnight, Henry VI was murdered in the Tower of London, probably with a heavy blow to the back of the head. Only one man is named as being present in the Tower at the time: Edward’s youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who already, at the age of only eighteen, was emerging as the most effective hatchet man of the Yorkist regime. As he struck the fatal blow, he is supposed to have said, ‘Now there is no heir male of King Edward the Third but we of the House of York!’ Now, surely, the Wars of the Roses were over.

      No one, a Yorkist chronicle exulted, of ‘the stock of Lancaster remained among the living’ who could claim the throne. But one Lancastrian claimant – however remote – did remain: Henry Tudor. Fourteen years had passed since Margaret had had her son. Now the teenage Henry was in danger of his life. Not even the massive walls of Pembroke Castle could protect the boy against the vengeful power of Edward of York, and his mother urged him to flee. He took ship at Tenby, and crossed the Channel to Brittany. And there Henry had to endure a decade and a half of politically fraught exile before he would see either England or his mother again.

      II

      Having annihilated his Lancastrian enemies, Edward of York was now King Edward IV of England indeed. But the problem of nobles who were almost as rich and powerful as the king himself remained. And richest and most powerful of all was Edward’s middle brother George, Duke of Clarence, the man Shakespeare described as ‘False, fleeting, purjur’d Clarence’.

      The phrase is memorable. But it is misleading. It suggests that the key to Clarence’s story lies in his character defects. It doesn’t. It lies instead in his position. For Clarence was what Queen Elizabeth I, who would occupy the same unenviable place herself, called ‘second person’. His title, Duke of Clarence, was the one that was given in the Middle Ages to the king’s second son. As such, he was endowed with vast estates and many grand castles like Tutbury and Warwick. Here he kept what he called his ‘court’ with a state that was indeed royal. Only the life of Edward himself, and in time Edward’s two sons, stood between Clarence and the throne itself. Some second persons were content to remain merely loyal lieutenants. Clarence was not one of them. He had a power over the king that was at once malicious and deeply harmful to the peace of England. Clarence’s knowledge, should he choose to reveal it, concerned the future of the House of York itself and all that the brothers had fought for. It related to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth.

      Elizabeth Woodville was one of the most controversial women ever to have been Queen of England, with a past that could provide plenty of ammunition for a man as unscrupulous as Clarence. She was beautiful, ambitious, greedy and a widow of modest family background, on her father’s side at least. Edward first met her when she petitioned him about a problem with her late husband’s estate. Edward, young, handsome and sensual, immediately propositioned his pretty supplicant, but Elizabeth defended herself, it is said, with a knife. Edward, as seems then to have been his habit when women resisted his advances, offered her marriage. But this time it was not an empty promise to ensure a seedy seduction and the two were married secretly at her father’s house.

      Perhaps Edward had intended to repudiate this clandestine marriage to an attractive but nonetheless obviously unsuitable wife once he had got what he wanted. But he did not. Had the marriage turned out to be valid after all? Had Edward the playboy fallen in love? At any rate, six months later the marriage was made public and Elizabeth acknowledged as queen. By the mid-1470s, Elizabeth had presented Edward with five daughters and, crucially, two sons. Immortalized in stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral, they look like the perfect royal family. Edward had what every king desired: an heir and a spare and a collection of marriageable daughters.

      The elder son was called Edward; the younger, Richard. History would know them as the Princes in the Tower. But if their parents’ marriage proved to be invalid, the serene image of a happy royal family that would carry on the Yorkist line long into the future would be shattered. The boys would become bastards, and Clarence would be heir once more. So the ambitious second person revived an old rumour. It was said that the libidinous king had been married to another woman at the time he married Elizabeth, thus making the present union bigamous and therefore illegal.

      The rumour of a previous marriage may well have been true – certainly, bearing in mind Edward’s notorious way with women, it was plausible. That only made it the more dangerous, and by throwing his weight behind it Clarence had tested his brother’s patience too far. Clarence was arrested and put on trial before a specially convened parliament in January 1478. Edward had packed the parliament with his own supporters. He was himself both judge and prosecutor, and no one dared to speak on behalf of the accused but Clarence himself.

      The verdict of guilty was a foregone conclusion, and on 18 January 1476 Clarence was executed in the Tower, famously by drowning in a butt of malmsey. The middle brother of York was gone. But the problem he represented was not. The monarchy had been weakened by the Wars of the Roses. Much royal land had been given away to buy support from the nobles, some of whom, like Clarence, had threatened to become mightier than the king. Such overweening subjects were difficult to manage at the best of times. But when there were rival claims to the throne, they became a dangerous source of visibility as Clarence’s own career had shown.

      To guard against the possibility of future Clarences, Edward needed to strengthen his own position and that of the Crown. To help him do it, he enlisted a surprising ally: a man who had spent thirty years working for the enemy. Sir John Fortescue had served as the Lancastrian Lord Chief Justice; had spent years in exile with the Lancastrian Prince of Wales, and had been captured after the Battle of Tewkesbury. But the king not only pardoned him; he placed him on his council.

      At first sight, it’s rather surprising that Edward decided to spare Fortescue. An enthusiastic hanging judge, Fortescue had planned the judicial murder of the young Edward and the whole Yorkist family. He had also written powerfully and learnedly against Edward’s claim to the throne. But Edward set these personal grievances aside. He had work for the old man to do. Fortescue, the leading intellectual of Lancastrian England, would play an important part in the construction of the new, reformed Yorkist monarchy of England.

      Fortescue could be called England’s first constitutional analyst, his key ideas shaped by the years he had spent

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