William Herbert, and brought up among the Herbert children at the castle of Raglan in south Wales.
On both sides of his family, the young Henry’s lineage was entwined with the house of Lancaster. As half- blood relatives of the Lancastrian kings, the Beauforts shared with them a magnificent forebear, the house’s founder John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster – but their descent was through Gaunt’s mistress and they were bastards. The Beauforts were subsequently legitimized – but, as their detractors were quick to point out, they had been barred, by Act of Parliament no less, from ever claiming the English throne. Nevertheless, the Beauforts had gloried in the reign of Henry V, France’s reconqueror and the victor of Agincourt, before his son Henry VI had squandered everything. The Tudors had also attached themselves to the house of Lancaster and, despite their tenuous hold, were rising fast: during the troubled 1450s Edmund Tudor, half-brother to Henry VI, had been high in royal favour. The mother they had in common was Henry V’s young wife, Catherine of Valois, daughter of the French king. But Edmund’s father had been a charming, fast-talking Welsh chamber servant of Catherine’s: the pair had fallen in love after Henry V’s death and had married secretly. Royal blood, then, ran in the veins of the young Henry earl of Richmond, but it was irretrievably tainted.
Despite the overwhelming victory of Towton, Yorkist rule struggled to take root. With the deposed Henry VI still alive, it was a time of queasy uncertainty, in which self-interested manoeuvring, internecine feuding and struggles for power and land could all be justified by invoking the claim of whichever king best suited people’s circumstances. First and foremost, Edward IV had to establish his dynasty, and the great men who had brought him to power now sought to arrange his marriage to a foreign princess, of Burgundy, perhaps, or Castile. But, ‘greatly given to fleshly wantonness’, Edward wanted a cold, lynx-eyed beauty called Elizabeth Woodville. When she refused to sleep with him, he married her clandestinely and made her his queen. It was unwise. The widow of a Lancastrian knight, Elizabeth was a commoner; her large clan rushed to court, scrabbling for royal favour, titles, land and rich marriages. Pushed to one side, the Yorkist nobles whose ambitions Edward had wrecked through his impulsive marriage watched the arriviste Woodvilles basking in his affections.4 Gradually, the nobles’ discontent and jealousy turned to betrayal, and they joined forces with exiled Lancastrians. In October 1470, Edward IV was forced to flee to the continent, to the Burgundian Netherlands, and the helpless Henry VI was brought out of his place of incarceration in the Tower of London.
To the young Henry of Richmond, his uncle’s brief, inglorious second coming was memorable. Taken to London, he was reunited briefly with the mother he had not seen for years, before returning to south Wales, this time in the company of his Tudor uncle Jasper. Six months later Edward IV returned to England, and people again weighed their loyalties in the balance. As Edward’s army approached London, Henry VI was paraded, bewildered, through the city streets dressed in an old, faded blue gown, the archbishop of Canterbury leading him gently by the hand. Days later, Edward entered the city unopposed, then, marshalling his forces, exacted decisive revenge in two savage battles: north of London at Barnet and, rampaging into the southwest, in the flood plains of Tewkesbury. Those leading Lancastrians not killed in combat were executed immediately afterwards: they included Lady Margaret Beaufort’s cousin the duke of Somerset, hauled out of sanctuary and beheaded, and Henry VI’s son and heir. Henry VI himself, reincarcerated in the Tower, was murdered. The house of Lancaster had been all but exterminated.5
Still in her twenties, Lady Margaret Beaufort had become an astute political survivor. She and Jasper Tudor, a constant thorn in Edward’s flesh over the preceding decade, well understood the heightened significance of her son’s half-blooded lineage. That September, Jasper and the fourteen-year-old Henry fled Pembroke Castle, where they had been holed up against the Yorkist armies, across the sea to the traditional Lancastrian refuge of France. Storms took them west, to the north-western tip of mainland Europe, the embattled duchy of Brittany. There, Henry became a pawn in a different game.6
Duke Francis of Brittany, who had no sons, received Henry kindly and treated him well. But he also knew the boy’s value. As dynastic conflict flared across northern Europe, the French king, Louis XI, was spinning a web round territories that France claimed as its own but which, like Brittany, remained stubbornly independent. Now, in Henry, Duke Francis had a bargaining chip: a commodity desired not only by England but also by France – which wanted Henry in order to keep its island neighbour at bay.
Amid rumours of English and French agents and plots, of kidnap and murder, Henry was transferred from fortress to fortress, never settled, always ready to move at a moment’s notice. Dependent on the whims of others, he learned to think like the fugitive he now was: to watch and assess loyalties, to sift information from rumour and, caught in the wash of European power politics, to understand how they affected his own fortunes. He developed an exile’s patience, inured to a life in which stretches of empty time were punctuated by sudden alerts, moments of danger in which logical clear-headedness meant the difference between life and death. Once, in November 1476, Duke Francis temporarily succumbed to Edward IV’s offers of funds and military aid in exchange for the nineteen- year-old Henry’s extradition. But at the port of St Malo, Henry gave his English guard the slip, feigning illness and dodging into sanctuary. When he made it back to the Breton court, Francis was all contrition.7
In England, meanwhile, the uncertainty of the 1460s had given way to order under the self-assertive magnificence of Edward IV. He and Elizabeth Woodville had ten children, including two surviving sons, and his dynasty seemed assured. When the forty-year-old king, a man of insatiable and debauched appetites, died grossly fat on 9 April 1483, the older of his two sons, the twelve-year-old Edward Prince of Wales, was named his heir. But Richard duke of Gloucester, the younger brother of the late king, had other ideas. Elizabeth Woodville’s clan, he felt, had got too close to the heart of power. Arresting and executing leading members of her family, and inveighing against the perversions of his brother’s rule, he placed the two princes, his nephews, in the Tower, then crowned himself Richard III in the name of the ‘old royal blood of this realm’. That summer the princes, previously observed ‘shooting and playing’ in the Tower gardens, disappeared into its depths, never to be seen again.8
Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters had withdrawn behind the high walls of Westminster Abbey seeking sanctuary. Secretly that summer, on behalf of her son, Lady Margaret Beaufort opened communication through agents – priests, an astrologer the two matriarchs favoured – who were able to pass unchallenged through the heavily guarded gates. A pact was agreed. Henry earl of Richmond would return from Brittany to claim the throne, and he would take as his queen Elizabeth of York, the oldest of Edward IV and Elizabeth’s daughters. The families of Beaufort and Woodville – or, if the point was stretched somewhat, the houses of Lancaster and York – would be united; so too would England. Heralds and historians were good at these genealogical sleights of hand. On their brilliantly illuminated parchment rolls, coats-of-arms, badges and portraits were erased and cut out; others appeared in their place. A dynasty that had been eradicated could blossom miraculously like a rose in winter, its lineal descent fully formed, its succession inevitable. Now, with the merging of the red rose and the white, Henry was presented as the successor to Edward IV, the king who had all but obliterated his family and had only narrowly failed to do the same to him. While the logic was flawed, the symbolism was irresistible.9
Meanwhile, away in the Welsh castle of Brecon, Richard III’s right-hand man, the duke of Buckingham, had been co-opted to the new alliance by the suggestive promptings of a prisoner that the king had unwisely entrusted to Buckingham’s care, an experienced political operator, Bishop John Morton of Ely.10 Conspiracy brewed; agents slipped out of the country to Brittany, working to coordinate uprisings in England with an invasion force led by Henry and backed by Breton funds. That autumn of 1483, Woodville loyalists rose in rebellion along the south coast from Kent to Devon, Buckingham marched out of Wales at the head of an army of retainers, and Henry prepared to set sail from Brittany. But the weather that October was foul, and he left late. Sailing into the teeth of a storm, his fleet was scattered. By the time he appeared off the south Devon coast, there was only one other ship in sight. He turned back.
He was lucky not to have made landfall. Richard III had already quashed the uprisings. Buckingham’s forces were routed, the duke beheaded. Besides which, the motives of Buckingham, a vain man with Lancastrian blood, had been opaque; possibly, he had wanted the crown for himself. Pursued by a vengeful Richard III, the leading Woodville rebels fled, in time-honoured fashion, to the continent – to Brittany.
That winter, even in London where gossip and information were rife, people knew little about the shadowy figure who was now claiming the crown as his by right. Arriving in Brittany, the Woodville exiles found a sallow young man, with dark hair curled in the shoulder-length fashion of the time and a penchant for expensively dyed black clothes, whose steady gaze was made more disconcerting by a cast in his left eye – such that while one eye looked at you, the other searched for you.11 He was, in the words of the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet, a ‘fine ornament’ of the Breton court, a man who worshipped Breton saints, spoke immaculate French and whose courtliness had a distinctly Gallic tinge. The soft politesse concealed a sharp observer, a gleaner of
