The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [129]
Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had for several months been protecting King Henry’s interests in Wales. For generations the Tudors and the House of Mortimer had been sworn enemies due to territorial rivalries in the principality. Nevertheless, Richmond had given his support to York because he believed that the latter’s reforms could only benefit the King. But York was heir to the Mortimers, and his affinity in South Wales had recently taken it upon themselves to reassert his authority there. In the spring of 1456 the Queen had ordered Richmond to move against them.
Initially, the Earl enjoyed some success against the rebel Gruffydd ap Nicholas, who had now allied himself with York’s supporters and seized and garrisoned several royal castles. Richmond wrested Carmarthen Castle from him and restored the authority of the King to the surrounding region. However, York himself was constable of Carmarthen Castle, and may well have resented Richmond’s occupation of it, for in the summer of 1456, the Duke’s adherents, Sir William Herbert, Sir Walter Devereux, and men of the Vaughan family, marched on Carmarthen, seized the castle, and took Richmond prisoner.
At this time, however, the King had good reason to be grateful to York, for on 15 August the King of Scots, taking advantage of the political situation, had invaded England with – according to Benet – ‘100,000 men, and burned twenty villages, but he was routed by the Duke of York’. Soon afterwards the King sent for York and Warwick to join him on his progress, and Benet says they ‘were received most graciously’ by Henry, ‘though the Queen loathed them both’. Margaret was about to prove to York that she held the upper hand.
Once the King and Queen had settled at Coventry they summoned a great council of nobles to meet there. All the Yorkist lords were invited but, mistrustful of the Queen, having presented themselves in council, they withdrew and left Coventry without delay, ‘in right good conceit with the King, but not in great conceit with the Queen’. York went to Ludlow, Salisbury to Middleham, and Warwick to Calais.
Margaret now persuaded Henry to dismiss York’s partisans from office and replace them with men of her own party. On 5 October Henry Bourchier, York’s brother-in-law, was replaced as Treasurer by Shrewsbury, who had recently quarrelled with Warwick and made an enemy of him. On the 11th Archbishop Bourchier was dismissed from the chancellorship, which was given to William Wayneflete, Bishop of Winchester, a prominent member of the court faction. News of these changes must have angered the Yorkists and aroused their anxieties, though the Queen as yet had made no move against her real adversaries. At his wife’s behest, Henry VI summoned Parliament to meet at Coventry, so that the measures planned by the Queen’s party could be implemented, a reassertion of the authority of the Crown as exercised by Margaret of Anjou.
That autumn, Richmond was released from captivity in Carmarthen Castle, although he remained in the castle, free to come and go. But he did not long enjoy his liberty. On 1 November he died, aged only twenty-six, probably of natural causes and possibly in an epidemic, although he may have succumbed to the effects of wounds received earlier in the year. There were even whispers of murder at the time, but no evidence exists to substantiate such claims, nor were any charges laid