Category: Wars Of The Roses

Death of John Morton

15/9/2019

Today in 1500 the death of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor of England and Cardinal.

Morton passed through the Wars of the Roses unscathed whereas those of whom he was of service and were of a higher rank perished, those such as Margaret of Anjou, Richard Neville, Edward IV and Richard III.

Morton encouraged Buckingham in his rebellion against the Richard, and it is he who is considered to be the source of much of what was written about the king - the murder of his brother George, Duke of Clarence and the murder of the Princes in the Tower are but two. Thomas More's 'History of Richard III' was based on Morton's account of the time.

However, Morton was a survivor who knew how to take care of himself, he died an old man at Knole House in Kent, a property that had been granted to the See of Canterbury on the death of Thomas Bourchier in 1486, his political machinations continuing under the new Tudor king.

He was buried at Canterbury Cathedral.

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Birth of George Duke of Clarence

21/10/2018

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On this day in 1449 the birth in Dublin of George, Duke of Clarence to Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville.

George's life is viewed as a long list of facts that give us some insight into his life and there isn't much written about Clarence as a person at all so because of this Clarence's character is hard to define. However, I have often wondered if we could apply the modern term 'middle child syndrome' to help understand his personality. Maybe it was his position within his family that made him the man he was, looking at the personality traits of a modern 'middle child' surprisingly Clarence fits the 'profile' on a number of points.

1. Middle children are not particularly interested in family hierarchy or ranking:

Clarence could not have cared less that his brother was king, he would undermine him given an opportunity, he had joined in all the careless talk, calling into question the legitimacy of the kings birth. His later actions had convinced Edward that he was looking to take the throne out from under him.

2. Middle children are more interested in taking advice from others outside the main family group:

Clarence was reliant on his cousin Richard Neville rather than Edward or Richard. He took Neville's 'advice' on more than one occasion, joining him in supporting a northern rebellion and went along with the idea to restore King Henry VI to the throne of England, realising too late that listening to Neville was not a good idea after all.

3. Middle children are risk takers and are more rebellious than their siblings:

Clarence certainly ticks both these boxes. By rebelling with Neville, Clarence risked everything and lost. He lost his position as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and by organising yet another rebellion, because of the loss of his Warwick lands to Richard, he caused a major rift that was ultimately the last nail in his coffin.

4. Middle children don't like conflict:

This is one category that Clarence doesn't fit into.

Of course, Clarence wasn't a middle child at all, he was number six of seven so you could argue that this hypothesis doesn't make any sense at all.....but it does if you look at it from the point of view that he was eventually slap bang in the middle of three boys. His older brother Edmund had died at the Battle of Wakefield aged just seventeen, I wonder if he had lived he would have shown the same personality traits as Clarence or would Clarence have been a different person altogether?

Supposition this may be, but whatever the cause Clarence turned out to be a weak self-centred man, and in the end, it was greed and jealousy that cost him his life.

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Birth of Margaret Pole

12/8/2018

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On the 14th of August in 1473 the birth of Margaret Pole, the daughter of George Duke of Clarence and Isabel Neville at Castle Farleigh, an estate not too far from Bath in Somerset.

This west country castle was once the ancestral home of the Hungerfords, a family who had sided with the Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses and were punished for that with execution and the loss of their estates. Castle Farleigh was granted to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, however, in 1473 it was linked with the Duke of Clarence for it was here that Isabel gave birth to Margaret.

Isabel Neville died in 1476 and Clarence was executed two years later, Margaret lived out the rest of her childhood with her paternal cousins in the royal household. Six years following the accession to the throne by Henry Tudor she was married to Richard Pole by whom she would have five children - the four sons were thorns in the sides of Henry VIII. However, Margaret was a member of the young Katherine of Aragon's household during the reign of Henry VII and under Henry VIII she was governess to Henry's daughter Mary. During the troubles between Catherine and Henry and Henry and Mary, Margaret would stay true to their cause.

By the end of 1538, Margaret was in trouble and found herself embroiled in the fall out of the arrests of her sons Geoffrey and Henry Pole on a charge of treason. She was detained at Cowdray Park, the home of the Earl of Southampton. It wasn't long before trumped up charges were brought against her, and she was sent to the Tower where she was kept for just under two years. Poor Margaret was not treated well during her incarceration, the conditions were austere and inadequate for a woman her age let alone her status, the room was cold and damp and she suffered as a result.

Margaret Pole would die at the hands of an inexperienced executioner on the 27th May in 1541 - she was sixty-eight years old.

The above image is considered to be that of Margaret Pole as she wears a tiny barrel charm on a bracelet which is taken to represents her father's death in a barrel of Malmesbury wine. This, of course, is a case of fabricating the evidence to fit the crime. Not only did this one tiny detail added weight to the vat of wine theory but it means that this portrait has been wrongly attributed.

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Death of John Beaufort

15/3/2017

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John Beaufort, the first of the Beaufort's, a family base born was highly regarded and gave good service to the crown. He was a diplomat and performed a number of official roles. He escorted his niece Blanche to Cologne for her marriage, and Joan of Navarre from Brittany into England for her marriage to the king. Regardless of his royal position he had little to show for it, there were no estates or money to inherit, and what land he held was granted by Richard II and Henry IV.

The Beaufort family were the children born to Katherine Swynsford and John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III. They were given the name of Beaufort from Gaunt's castle in Champagne, in north-east France. Following the death of his second wife in 1394 Gaunt married Katherine in the February 1396. The following year Richard II acknowledged the children as members of the royal family and addressed them as consanguineos sous - his cousins. Just under one hundred years later, the last of the Beauforts would use this family connection to assert the Lancastrian's right to the throne of England, a claim that had no basis, as the Lancastrian king Henry IV had excluded them from the line of succession. This made no difference of course, if Henry IV claimed the throne by murder and usurpation then the son of the last remaining Beaufort could take it by conquest.

It seems John Beaufort was out shined by nearly all of his family, most had a role in an event that history remembers, John Beaufort is only really remembered as the bastard offspring of an adulterous affair. He died of an unknown illness on the 16th March 1410 at just forty years of age. Even in death he shares his tomb with his wife and her second husband in Canterbury Cathedral.

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February 12th, 2017

12/2/2017

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On the 15th February 1382, the Earldom of Suffolk fell into abeyance on the death of William Ufford when he collapsed and died whilst climbing the stairs into Parliament.

Ufford was highly regarded, he carried the royal sceptre at the coronation of ten year old Richard II and was a councilor during the king's minority and was one of Richard's men who put down the Peasants' Revolt in 1381.

Three years after Ufford's death, part of the family estate and the Earldom of Suffolk passed to Michael de la Pole, William's cousin via sisters Catherine and Margaret Norwich, mother's to Pole and Ufford respectively. However, the vast majority of the Suffolk estate passed in accordance to Ufford's will to his sister Cecily, the wife of John Willoughby of Eresby in Lincolnshire.

William's father Robert, was granted the Earldom of Suffolk in its second creation in March 1337 and they take their name from their manor in Ufford in Suffolk, being descended through the family of Peyton. The Ufford name died along with William in 1382, their bloodline however continued through three daughters.

The descendants of the de la Pole and the Willoughby families play important parts in history. Michael de la Pole's grandson William was blamed for the loss of French territories Maine and Anjou, a scapegoat who was exiled and murdered in 1450. The Willoughby's, in the form of Robert Well's, fought against Edward IV at Losecoat field in 1470 and fourteen year old Catherine Willoughbly would marry Charles Brandon.

William Ufford was buried at Campsey Priory, in Campsea Ashe, Suffolk.

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The Death of Richard II

14/2/2016

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February 14th 1400 is traditionally thought to be the date of death of Richard II.

Many would argue that Richard's deposition by Henry Bolingbroke was justified, however his lonely death in a dungeon in the bowels of Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, supposedly by starvation, was murder. And just as Henry Tudor would do, nearly eighty five years in the future, Henry Bolingbroke would have to work hard to prove that he was the rightful king and not a usurper who had taken the throne illegally.

Richard II had inherited the throne of England at the age of ten. Four years later, in 1381, he successfully ended the Peasant Revolt, but followed this achievement with extravagances and favouritism, all of which alienated a number of high ranking lords.

One famous incident, which you could argue was the beginning of the end for Richard, was his actions when dealing with the famous duel (it didn't take place) between Henry of Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray. Before it even began, Richard stepped in banishing Bolingbroke and exiling Mowbray. It was during his banishment that Bolingbroke's father died and Richard deprived him of the right to inherit his fathers land, much angered, Henry returned to England and landed atRavenspur in the summer of 1399.

At Flint Castle, Henry bullied Richard into abdication on the promise not to have him killed. How clever he was, Henry knew that with throne of England unoccupied he could claimed the throne of a deposed king and therefore he was not guilty of usurpation with malice aforethought.

By the February of 1400 Richard was a prisoner at Pontefract Castle.

According to John Leyland, the Tudor antiquarian, Pontefract's castle had, at one time, a two walled outer bailey, 'six roundells, three bigge and three small' that made up the the castle’s keep which measured 63-64 feet in diameter that had within one of them a "very frightful small dungeon.”

It was into one of these dungeons that Richard is said to have been thrown and abandoned. So much for Henry's promise at Flint Castle to spare Richard's life!

And so Henry Bolingbroke became Henry IV of England, and the House of Lancaster was born, but the problem of succession never went away and we all know what happened next.

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The Man who Killed Richard III: Who Dealt the Fatal Blow at Bosworth?' by Susan Fern.

19/5/2015

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‪The app 'A Year Ago Today' keeps popping up on my private Facebook timeline, evidently this is what was going on my page that day.

I wrote:

I am dead proud of myself.......A new book is out about King Richard III and with my photograph on the cover.

Its the nearest I will ever get to having anything to do with the Richard in print.

#Blowingmyowntrumpt

"A new book by Amberley Publishing, 'The Man who Killed Richard III: Who Dealt the Fatal Blow at Bosworth?' by Susan Fern.

On 22 August 1485, on a battlefield in Bosworth, Leicestershire, King Richard III was dealt a death blow by the man who had sworn loyalty to him only a few months earlier. He was Rhys ap Thomas, a Welsh lord, master of Carew Castle in Pembrokeshire. For his service that day he was knighted on the field of battle by Henry Tudor. With the discovery of Richard's skeleton, it is now possible to answer this question of who dealt the fatal blow to this iconic English king. Richard III's wounds bear a striking resemblance to the contemporary poem which describes how he died and names Rhys ap Thomas as the man who dealt the fatal blow.

Rhys ap Thomas’s life had been inextricably linked with both Richard and Henry; all three young men grew under the shadow of the Wars of the Roses, suffering losses and betrayals. Ironically on his death Rhys chose to spend his final days at the Grey Friars in Carmarthen, being buried by the monks as Richard had been almost forty years before, perhaps in an act of remorse. This is the story of the man who helped forge the course of British history."

Here is my original image

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Towton 25

3/1/2015

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29th March 1461

It is very easy to view the medieval battle weary knight, riding into the distance on his worn out steed, scarred and blooded in a romantic light isn't it? We visualise our armoured hero, victorious, always living to fight another day. But at Towton, on the 29th March 1461, it is said that 28,000 men lost their lives, this should shock us but it doesn't really, does it?

When I think of this, I am guilty of visualising the smokey, body strewn, blood soaked battlefield scene of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. With images like that, it is very hard for us to really understand the extent of these poor men's injuries. Today we have evidence of the wounds the medieval man inflected on one another and I would like to feature a man who died that day, whose real name we do not know, but who is known as Towton 25.

This soldier had survived battle before.

But at Towton he was not so lucky.

A closer look at the wounds this man received that cold Palm Sunday at Towton revealed:

"A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough—somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died—to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out. Towton 25 suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal.The next one almost certainly was. From behind him someone swung a blade towards his skull, carving a down-to-up trajectory through the air. The blow opened a huge horizontal gash into the back of his head—picture a slit you could post an envelope through. Fractures raced down to the base of his skull and around the sides of his head. Fragments of bone were forced in to Towton 25's brain, felling him. His enemies were not done yet. Another small blow to the right and back of the head may have been enough to turn him over onto his back. Finally another blade arced towards him. This one bisected his face, opening a crevice that ran from his left eye to his right jaw. It cut deep: the edge of the blade reached to the back of his throat."

What I am getting round to is sometimes we need to realise just how horrific medieval warfare was without looking at it through rose coloured glasses.

When I do it makes me want to cry!

In the link attached, Christopher Maudsley helps us see the reality of medieval warfare by featuring Towton 25 and his fellow warriors.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/christopher_maudsley/sets/72157633310702191

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Death of John Morton

Birth of George Duke of Clarence

Birth of Margaret Pole

Death of John Beaufort

February 12th, 2017

The Death of Richard II

The Man who Killed Richard III: Who Dealt the Fatal Blow at Bosworth?' by Susan Fern.

Towton 25

29th March 1461

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