Princes in the Tower Read Online Free Page B

on to, and the reputation of his successor, Henry V, seemed to ensure that the House of Lancaster would continue to reign gloriously after his death. But Henry V died young unexpectedly in 1422, leaving as his heir a baby, Henry VI. Henry survived his minority, but he was, as Philippe de Commines tells us, 'a very ignorant and almost simple man', who cared little for the riches and show of this world. His reputation was saintly rather than regal, and as a ruler he was weak, possibly even mentally defective, being easily manipulated by his strong-minded queen, Margaret of Anjou, and his factious magnates.
    Prominent amongst these magnates were the Beauforts, dukes of Somerset, descendants of the children of John of Gaunt by his third wife, Katherine Swynford, but born before their marriage. Henry IV had in 1407 confirmed Richard H's Act of Parliament legitimising the Beauforts, but had issued a royal patent barring them from the succession. Later on in the fifteenth century it would be argued that Letters Patent could not prevail against an Act of Parliament, and that the Beauforts did indeed have the right to inherit the Crown.
    Then there was Richard, Duke of York, whose father, the Earl of Cambridge (a grandson of Edward III through his fifth son, Edmund, Duke of York), had been executed by Henry V in 1415 for plotting to seize the throne on behalf of Edmund Mortimer, whose sister Anne had been Cambridge's wife. Their son, Richard, was heir to the Mortimer claim to the throne, since Edmund died childless in 1425; that claim was based on descent through a woman from Lionel of Clarence, the second son of Edward III. As the Salic Law barring women from succeeding or transmitting a claim to the throne did not exist in England, York's was indeed a superior claim to that of Lancaster.
    Richard was four when his father suffered execution, but he was restored to his inheritance by 1425. He married 'proud' Cecily Neville, daughter of the powerful Earl of Westmorland by Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt; she bore him twelve children, in whom flowed the blood of three of Edward Ill's sons.
    York was a haughty, remote man, capable of acting impulsively without prior consultation with others. Indecisive to a fault, he lacked political judgement and was unpopular at court. When not abroad on the King's business, he resided at his ducal seats at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, Ludlow Castle on the Welsh Marches, and Bay-nard's Castle, his Thames-side mansion in London. He was nevertheless a force to be reckoned with in politics: in 1448 he formally adopted the surname Plantagenet, which had not been used by anyone in the royal House since Geoffrey Plantagenet, the father of Henry II, had died in 1151; and by 1450, he held, through inheritance, the vast lands of the former great baronies and earldoms of the Warennes, the Mortimers, the Clares, the Burghs, the Genvilles, the Braoses and the Marshals. And until Queen Margaret bore a son, he was heir-presumptive of Henry VI.
    The causes of the civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses were diffuse, and did not, to begin with, have anything to do with the succession. Faction feuds, weak government, over-mighty magnates, the loss of the English lands in France, and above all Henry VI's ineffectiveness as a ruler all gave grounds for the discontent that in the 1450s erupted into war, a war that was fought mainly by the nobility and which -- despite later, exaggerated Tudor propaganda -- hardly affected the population of three to four million souls or daily life in general. In fact, there were no more than thirteen weeks of actual fighting in thirty years. The name 'the Wars of the Roses' has its origins in the fifteenth century: the White Rose was a Yorkist badge, and the Red Rose was later declared by Henry VII to be symbolic of the House of Lancaster.
    Henry VI's ineptitude in government meant that by 1455 men were beginning to question the title of the House of Lancaster to the