Chapter LII The Union of the Two Roses
At the time of the battle of Bosworth the eldest daughter of Edward of York and Elizabeth Woodville was immured in the Castle of Sheriff Hutton, within the walls of which her cousin, Edward Plantagenet, was also secure. After Richmond’s victory both were removed to London: Elizabeth of York by high and mighty dames, to be restored to the arms of her mother; Edward of Warwick by a band of hireling soldiers, to be delivered into the hands of a jailer and imprisoned in the Tower.18
It soon appeared that Richmond was not particularly eager to wed the Yorkist princess. He was not, however, to escape a marriage. When Parliament met, and the king sat on the throne, and the Commons presented a grant of tonnage and poundage for life, they plainly requested that he would marry Elizabeth of York; and the lords, spiritual and temporal, bowed to indicate their concurrence in the prayer. Richmond, perceiving that there was no way by which to retreat, replied that he was ready and willing to take the princess to wife.
The marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York was fixed for the 18th of January, 1486, and the ceremony was performed at Westminster. The primate, soon to be laid in his grave and succeeded by the Bishop of Ely, officiated on the occasion, and every thing went joyously. The knights and nobles of England exhibited their bravery at a grand tournament; the citizens of London feasted and danced; the populace sang songs and lighted bonfires; the claims of the King of Portugal, the heir of John of Gaunt, and the existence of Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the heir of Lionel of Clarence, were conveniently forgotten; and the marriage of a spurious Lancastrian prince and an illegitimate daughter of York was celebrated by poets and chroniclers as “The Union of the two Roses.”
The End
Footnotes
1 “Edward the First hath justly been styled the English Justinian. For, in his time, the law did receive so sudden a perfection, that Sir Matthew Hale does not scruple to affirm that more was done in the first thirteen years of his reign to settle and establish the distributive justice of the kingdom than in all the ages since that time put together.... It was from this period that the liberty of England began to rear its head.”—Blackstone’s Commentaries.
2 “Lionel of Clarence married Elizabeth, daughter of William de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, and had a daughter, Philippa, wife of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. John of Gaunt was thrice married. His first wife was Blanche, heiress of Lancaster, by whom he had a son, Henry the Fourth, and two daughters—Philippa, married to the King of Portugal, and Elizabeth, to John Holland, Duke of Exeter. His second wife was Constance, eldest daughter of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile, by whom he had a daughter, Katherine, married to Henry the Third, King of Castile. His third wife was Katherine Swynford, by whom he had two sons—Henry Beaufort, Cardinal of St. Eusebius and Bishop of Winchester, and John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, ancestor of the dukes who fought in the Wars of the Roses, and of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry the Seventh. But both the sons of Katherine Swynford were born before wedlock. Edmund of Langley espoused Isabel, second daughter of Peter the Cruel, and had two sons—Edward, Duke of York, who fell at Agincourt, and Richard, Earl of Cambridge, who married Anne Mortimer, daughter of the Earl of March, and left a son, Richard, Duke of York.”—See Sandford’s Genealogical History.
3 A serious quarrel—destined to be fought out eight years later on Hexham Field—occurred about this date between the chief of the Beauforts and Warwick’s younger brother, who, in 1461, became Lord Montagu. “It was not long after that dissension and unkindness fell between the young Duke of Somerset and Sir John Neville, son unto the Earl of Salisbury, being then both lodged within the city. Whereof the mayor being warned, ordained such watch and provision that if they had any thing stirred he was able to have subdued both parties, and to have put them in ward till he had known the king’s pleasure. Whereof the friends of both parties being aware, labored such means that they agreed them for that time.”—Fabyan’s Chronicle.
4 “But the earl’s two sons—the one called Sir John Neville, and the other Sir Thomas—were sore wounded; which, slowly journeying into the north country, thinking there to repose themselves, were in their journey apprehended by the queen’s friends, and conveyed to Chester. But their keepers delivered them shortly, or else the Marchmen had destroyed the jails. Such favor had the commons of Wales to the Duke of York’s band and his affinity, that they could suffer no wrong to be done, nor evil word to be spoken of him or of his friends.”—Hall’s Union of the Families of Lancaster and York.
5 “At that period, the men-at-arms, or heavy cavalry, went to battle in complete armor; each man carried a lance, sword, dagger, and occasionally a mace or battle-axe; his horse, also, was, to a certain extent, in armor. A considerable part of an English army consisted of archers, armed with long bows and arrows; and another part consisted of men armed with bills, pikes, pole-axes, glaives, and morris-pikes.”—Brooke’s Visits to Fields of Battle.
6 “One of the greatest obstacles to the cause of the Red Rose, was the popular belief that the young prince was not Henry’s son. Had that belief not been widely spread and firmly maintained, the lords who arbitrated between Henry VI. and Richard, Duke of York, in October, 1460, could scarcely have come to the resolution to set aside the Prince of Wales altogether, to accord Henry the crown for his life, and declare the Duke of York his heir.”—Sir E. B. Lytton’s Last of the Barons.
7 “The chase,” says Hall, “continued all night, and the most part of the next day; and ever the northern men, when they saw or perceived any advantage, returned again and fought with their enemies, to the great loss of both parties.”
8 “George Neville, brother to the great Earl of Warwick, at his installment into his archbishopric of York, made a prodigious feast to the nobility, chief clergy, and many gentry, wherein he spent 300 quarters of wheat, 330 tuns of ale, 104 tuns of wine, 1 pipe of spiced wine, 80 fat oxen, 6 wild bulls, 1004 sheep, 3000 hogs, 300 calves, 3000 geese, 3000 capons, 300 pigs, 100 peacocks, 200 cranes, 200 kids, 2000 chickens, 4000 pigeons, 4000 rabbits, 204 bittours, 4000 ducks, 400 herons, 200 pheasants, 500 partridges, 4000 woodcocks, 400 plovers, 100 curlews, 100 quails, 100 egrets, 200 rees, above 400 bucks, does, and roebucks, 5506 venison pasties, 5000 dishes of jelly, 6000 custards, 300 pikes, 300 breams, 8 seals, 4 porpoises, and 400 tarts. At this feast the Earl of Warwick was steward, the Lord Hastings comptroller, with many other noble officers, 1000 servitors, 62 cooks, 515 scullions.”—Burton’s Admirable Curiosities in England.
9 “Herbert was not a little joyous of the king’s letter, partly to deserve the king’s liberality, which, of a mean gentleman, had promoted him to the estate of an earl, partly for the malice that he bare to the Earl of Warwick, being the sole obstacle (as he thought) why he obtained not the wardship of the Lord Bonville’s daughter and heir for his eldest son.”—Grafton’s Chronicle.
10 “The absence of the Earl of Warwick,” says Hall, “made the common people daily more and more to long, and be desirous to have the sight of him, and presently to behold his personage. For they judged that the sun was clearly taken from the world when he was absent. In such high estimation, among the people, was his name, that neither no one man they had in so much honor, neither no one person they so much praised, or, to the clouds, so highly extolled. What shall I say? His only name sounded in every song, in the mouth of the common people, and his person was represented with great reverence when public plays or open triumphs should be showed or set forth abroad in the streets.”
11 “It is vain,” says Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, “that some writers would seek to cleanse the memory of the learned nobleman from the stain of cruelty, by rhetorical remarks on the improbability that a cultivator of letters should be of a ruthless disposition. The general philosophy of this defense is erroneous. In ignorant ages, a man of superior acquirements is not necessarily made humane by the cultivation of his intellect; on the contrary, he too often learns to look upon the uneducated herd as things of another clay. Of this truth all history is pregnant.”
12 “On the 14th of February,” says Fabyan, “the Duke of Exeter came to London, and on the 27th rode the Earl of Warwick through the city toward Dover for to have received Queen Margaret. But he was disappointed, for the wind was to her so contrary that she lay at the sea-side, tarrying for a convenient wind, from November till April. And so the said earl, when he had long tarried for her at the sea-side, was fain to return without speed of his purpose.”
13 “Of the death of this prince,” says Fabyan, “divers tales were told; but the most common fame went, that he was sticked with a dagger by the hands of the Duke of Gloucester.”
14 “Sir John Arundel had long before been told, by some fortune-teller, he should be slain on the sands; wherefore, to avoid that destiny, he removed from Efford, near Stratton-on-the-Sands, where he dwelt, to Trerice, far off from the sea, yet by this misfortune fulfilled the prediction in another place.”—Polwhele’s History of Cornwall.
15 “The most honorable part of Louis’s treaty with Edward was the stipulation for the liberty of Queen Margaret.... Louis paid fifty thousand crowns for her ransom.”—Hume’s History.
16 “Jocky of Norfolk, be not too bold,
For Dickon, thy master, is bought and sold.”
17 When Margaret Plantagenet was married to Charles the Rash, Caxton accompanied that royal lady to her new home, and, while in her service in Flanders, learned the art of printing. Having returned to England, and been presented by Anthony Woodville to Edward of York, he, under the king’s protection, set up his printing-press in the Almonry at Westminster.
18 After a long and cruel captivity, Warwick was, in 1499, executed on Tower Hill, “for no other offense,” says Dugdale, “than being the only male Plantagenet at that time living, and consequently the most rightful heir to the throne.” Fuller, in his Worthies of England, says that “Henry, being of a new lineage and surname, knew full well how the nation hankered after the name of Plantagenet; which, as it did outsyllable Tudor in the mouths, so did it outvie it in the hearts of the English.”
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