Henry Read Online Free Page B

coronation.
    For Elizabeth of York, the handover of her little brother Richard was probably even more distressing than Gloucester’s previous detention of Edward V. As the eldest son, Edward had been escorted by his parents at the age of only three to Ludlow Castle in the Marches of Wales, there to be put through a rigorous programme of literary, political and religious education to fit him for the throne. He was given his own household and council, and formal ‘ordinances’ or regulations were issued which spelled out the arrangements for his upbringing in minute detail.
    Thereafter, brother and sister met only on the rare occasions that Edward came to court.
    Richard, in contrast, had been part of Elizabeth of York’s life from the moment of his birth in August 1473. As the second son, he had remained at home with his mother and his sisters. And he had been the liveliest and most attractive of brothers. Years later, a foreign visitor recalled seeing the family together, with Richard at its heart: ‘He was, the visitor remembered, a very noble little boy and that he had seen him singing with his mother and one of his sisters and that he sang very well. He was also, the visitor added, very pretty and the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.’ 9
    Now he too was swallowed up in the Tower.
    * * *
    While Elizabeth as sister mourned, the queen mother as dynast plotted revenge. She found a willing fellow-plotter in Henry Tudor’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Despite her Lancastrian blood, Lady Margaret had quickly accommodated herself to the realities of power in Yorkist England. Indeed, following her third marriage to Thomas, Lord Stanley, Edward IV’s lord steward, she became a leading light in it.
    But with Richard’s usurpation and the disappearance of the princes in the Tower, it was clear that the tide had turned. Lady Margaret was not one to be left behind. Using the Welsh physician and necromancer Dr Lewis Caerleon as intermediary, agreement was quickly reached. Margaret Beaufort’s son Henry Tudor would be betrothed to Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest daughter Elizabeth of York; a joint rising would overthrow Richard III and Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York, now king and queen, would inaugurate a new unified regime in which York and Lancaster would sink their ancient differences.
    The marriage of Henry’s parents now seemed a serious possibility.
    It proved easier said than done. Richard was a competent and energetic general, and saw off with ease the series of badly coordinated regional revolts which was all the confederacy could throw against him. If Henry Tudor had joined them, as had been planned, he would most likely have been captured or killed. And even if he had escaped, his cause would have been damned by personal failure.
    But, once again, his luck held. Or rather, a catalogue of mishaps turned out to be for the best. He did not set sail till things were almost over; when he arrived off England, he found the coast occupied by troops loyal to Richard III and decided not to land; finally, storms blew him back to the French coast and – as it turned out – to safety and the opportunity to fight again another day.
    There was even a grain of comfort in the defeat of the English risings. Some four hundred of the participants escaped and fled abroad to join Henry Tudor back in Brittany. Almost all the leaders were men of substance: there were Woodville relations, veterans of Edward IV’s household and important figures in the local government of the south-eastern shires. Augmented with recruits of this number and calibre, Henry Tudor’s following started to look like a half-plausible government in exile.
    Things were put on a formal footing during Christmas 1483, when the exiles held a quasi-parliament at Rennes, the Breton capital, and exchanged oaths: Henry swore to marry Elizabeth of York; his followers, old and new, took an oath of allegiance to Henry Tudor as king of England.
    But the strange