The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [5]
I tell this so that when I recount that Owen’s eldest son, Edmund, married Margaret Beaufort, thirteen-year-old heiress to the claims of the House of Lancaster, you will not imagine they lived quietly. The battles raged all about them. Edmund escaped from all these cares by dying at the age of twenty-six, leaving his wife great with child. That child was my father, born when his mother was but fourteen. It was January 28, 1457.
WILL SOMERS:
Seeing this date chilled me. It was also on January 28 that Henry VIII died. In 1547—the reversal of the numbers it is like a parenthesis. The father born, the son dying.... Yet I do not believe in such things. I leave them for Welshmen and the like.
HENRY VIII:
She named him Henry, a royal Lancastrian name. Yet at that time he was by no means an important heir, merely a remote figure in the overall confusing fabric. This in spite of being the grandson of a queen (on his father’s side) and the great-great-great-grandson of a king (on his mother’s). But as the battles went on, those with higher claims to the throne were killed (Henry VI’s only son, Edward, and Richard, Duke of York), and each battle advanced Henry Tudor closer to the throne. In the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, every male Lancaster was destroyed, save Henry Tudor. And he fled to Brittany with his uncle Jasper.
Henry VI was done to death in the Tower that same year. The Yorkists did it. It was a mercy: Henry VI was, perhaps, a saint, but he was not meant to be King. His poem,
Kingdoms are but cares
State is devoid of stay
Riches are ready snares
And hasten to decay,
proves that. A Yorkist sword released him from the cares of his kingdom, and I cannot but say they did him a good office.
But my father’s tale is also long to tell: there is nothing simple in these histories. Father went into exile, crossing the Channel to Brittany, where the good Duke Francis welcomed him—for a fee. Edward IV pursued him, tried to have him abducted and murdered. Father outsmarted him—Edward was stupid—and outlived him, watching and waiting in Brittany e of York. They say he had them smothered as they slept, and buried them somewhere in the Tower.
Many men smarted under Richard’s rule and fell away, joining Father in Brittany until he had a court in exile. And in England there was such discontent that rebellious subjects invited Father to come and claim the throne.
He tried first in 1484; but fortune was against him, and Richard caught and executed his principal supporter, the Duke of Buckingham. The next year things were again ready, and Father dared not wait longer, lest what support he had erode. He set sail and landed in Wales with an army of only two thousand men, against a known ten thousand for Richard III.
What compelled him to do this? I know the story well, yet I also know Father: cautious to the point of inaction, suspicious, slow to decisions. Still, at the age of twenty-eight he risked everything—his life as well—on what looked to be a hopeless venture. Two thousand men against ten thousand.
He was greeted wildly in Wales, and men flocked to join him, swelling his ranks to five thousand, still only half the number of Richard’s forces. Still he pressed on through the August-yellow fields, until at last they met a few miles from Leicester, at a field called Bosworth.
There was fierce fighting, and in the end some of Richard’s men held back. Without them the battle was lost. Richard was slain, hacked in a dozen