The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [254]
For murder it most certainly was. Henry VI died of the effects of a severe blow to the head. In 1911, when his body was exhumed and examined, his skeleton was found to be in pieces, and the bones of the skull were ‘much broken’, according to the report in Archaeologia. Moreover, ‘to one of the pieces of skull there was still attached some of the hair, which was brown in colour, save in one place, where it was much darker and apparently matted with blood’.
Croyland was in no doubt as to the cause of death.
I shall pass over the discovery of the lifeless body of King Henry in the Tower of London. May God have mercy upon, and grant sufficient time for repentance to him, whoever he may be, who dared to lay sacriligeous hands on the Lord’s Anointed! Let the doer merit the title of tyrant, and the victim be called a glorious martyr.
On 22 May, says Warkworth, the late King’s corpse was laid in a coffin and carried through the streets of London to St Paul’s where it lay in state for several days. ‘And his face was open that every man might see him, and in his lying he bled on the pavement there; and afterwards at the Black Friars was brought, and there he bled new and fresh.’ The people murmured at this, and the Great Chronicle reports that ‘the common fame then went that the Duke of Gloucester was not all guiltless’ of Henry’s death.
The chroniclers do not record where Margaret of Anjou spent the night of the 21st. However, on the following day she was certainly imprisoned in the Tower. Her reaction to the news of her husband’s death is not recorded either, but she did make a determined attempt to gain custody of his body, which was denied her. Before long, she received a letter from her grief-stricken father, King René: ‘My child, may God help thee with His counsels! For rarely is the aid of man tendered in such reverse of fortune.’ René himself had recently suffered a triple bereavement – his son, John of Calabria, his bastard daughter Blanche and his son-in-law Ferry de Vaudemont had all died within weeks of each other the previous year. ‘When you can spare a thought from your own sufferings,’ he wrote to Margaret, ‘think of mine. They are great, my daughter, yet would I console thee.’
Henry VI’s funeral service was conducted at the monastery of the Black Friars, after which his body was carried in a barge ‘suitably equipped with lamps fifteen miles up the Thames’ to Chertsey Abbey in Surrey where it was ‘honourably interred’ in the Lady Chapel.
‘There is many a great sore, many a perilous wound left unhealed,’ records the Parliament Roll of 1474, three years after the wars between Lancaster and York had ended. Croyland states that ‘this unhappy plague of division’ had spread ‘not only among princes and people, but even in every society, whether chapter, college or convent’. Many lords came out of the conflict facing financial ruin. ‘The slaughter of men was immense, for besides the dukes, earls, barons and distinguished warriors who were cruelly slain, multitudes almost innumerable of the common people died of their wounds. Such was the state of the kingdom.’
The Wars of the Roses did not in fact bring about the destruction of most of the mediaeval aristocracy, as this lament would seem to imply. Although thirty-eight peers perished, only seven noble families, not counting the royal houses, became extinct. And while the conflict undoubtedly led to the aggrandisement of some already ‘over-mighty’ subjects, other members of the aristocracy refused to become involved in it at all. Certainly the effect of the wars was to narrow the gap between the King and the magnates and gradually erode the royal authority, while the slaughter of so many lords and knights also signalled an end to the age of chivalry.
Tudor historians were fond of reminding their readers of the horrors of the Wars of the Roses, recounting how the realm had been plunged into