HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-14T22:34:41.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:0016 of the worst monarchs in historyhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/9-of-the-worst-monarchs-in-history/2026-04-17T11:12:27.000ZThe past has no shortage of disastrous kings, queens, and other rulers; such a list could easily have been filled with the worst Roman emperors alone. Some have been homicidal, like Nero or Genghis Khan; simply incompetent, like Edward II; completely untrustworthy, like Charles I; or amiable but inadequate, like Louis XVI of France.
But who are truly the worst, and why? Jonny Wilkes makes the case against 16 rulers from history…
1. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus
King of Rome, 534–509 BC
Before Rome had emperors, it had a line of kings going back to the city’s mythical founder, Romulus. The last, however, presided over a reign of terror so bad that the people gave up on the monarchy altogether, heralding the dawn of the Republic.
Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (commonly known as ‘Tarquin the Proud’) had seized the throne by planning the assassination of his own father-in-law, then once in power he killed senators on a whim and imprisoned or executed anyone suspected of disloyalty.
His undoing came when his son raped a noblewoman, which caused such outrage that a revolt broke out that saw the tyrannical king overthrown and exiled. In his doomed attempts to regain the throne, he persuaded neighbouring cities to attack Rome, seemingly unfazed by the damage this would do to his erstwhile kingdom.
2. Commodus
Roman emperor, 177–92 AD
There are a number of contenders to the title of ‘most despicable emperor of Rome’, so we could just as easily be discussing the cruel and murderous rules of, say, Nero and Caligula.
The bloodthirsty, vainglorious spendthrift, Commodus, however, went from inheriting an empire enjoying a long period of peace and prosperity, the Pax Romana, to leaving it broke and in turmoil. If not executing anyone he suspected of plotting against him, he was leaving the job of ruling the empire to a series of corrupt, cruel and incompetent favourites. He much preferred to fight as a gladiator, relishing in slaughtering a menagerie of animals in the arena.
No wonder, then, that Commodus was chosen as the villain in Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals masterpiece, Gladiator.
3. John
King of England, 1199–1216
Seriously, how could the arch-villain of Robin Hood not make an appearance? Beyond the tale of the fabled outlaw, John severely damaged the authority of the English monarchy. As a prince, he angered the nobles of Ireland and attempted to steal his brother Richard I’s crown, only ending up as king after Richard died without a legitimate heir. Notably, he also managed to outmanoeuvre a rival claim from his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, whom he is later believed to have had murdered.
Within a few years in power, John had lost Normandy – the foundation of his family’s Angevin empire on the continent – then he emptied the kingdom’s coffers trying to win it back. His oppressively high taxes, his clashes with the church and his cruel and conniving personality all led to a revolt of England’s barons.
Under threat of civil war, John was forced to seal Magna Carta, a historic document that limited royal power. He then proceeded to ignore it. The barons rose up again and John’s reign ended, dying of dysentery, as he fought to keep hold of his kingdom.
4. Wanyan Chenglin
Emperor of the Jin dynasty, 1234
On 9 February 1234, with the warriors of the Mongol empire besieging the city of Caizhou, the emperor of the Jin dynasty in China, Aizong, knew that his 10-year reign would be over shortly. That said, he did not want to be the last in his line, so he abdicated and passed the throne to his general, Wanyan Chenglin, before taking his own life.
The reluctant new emperor began a reign that would be doomed to last just a matter of hours. He was killed leading his soldiers in a last stand when the Mongols broke through the city walls.
5. Charles the Bad
King of Navarre, 1349–87
The name gives away why he belongs on this list, doesn’t it? Charles earned ‘the Bad’ for his duplicitous and treacherous behaviour in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Although King of Navarre in Spain, he owned a lot of land in northern France, which put him in the middle of the conflict, and his response was to keep flipping sides.
Driven solely by ambition, he believed he should be on the French throne, and he plotted and murdered to get it. All the while, Navarre went ignored. What made him truly bad, though, was that his schemes failed utterly. Charles is perhaps best-known today for his grisly end in 1387, when the brandy-soaked sheets he had been wrapped in to cure an illness accidentally caught fire, burning him alive.
6. Henry VI
King of England, 1422–61, 1470–71
Ascending the throne of England as an infant and the son of the hero of Agincourt, the young Henry VI was always going to struggle to live up to his dynastic legacy.
Not helped by his total lack of leadership, it went even worse than feared: he lost control of France (won by his father Henry V), suffered a mental breakdown, and saw his kingdom plunge into the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrian cause would be headed not by the king, but his queen, Margaret.
Henry’s role amounted to being kicked off the throne by the Yorkist Edward IV, then placed back on it by the ‘kingmaker’, the Earl of Warwick, and finally losing it again after being captured.
7. Christian II
King of Denmark and Norway, 1513–23
Christian’s reign may seem more insignificant than terrible at first glance, but it signalled the end of the Kalmar Union, which had bound together the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden for well over a century. Having been crowned in the first two of those countries in 1513, he set out to secure the third.
It would not be until 1520 that he captured Stockholm, although, hardly magnanimous in victory, his immediate action was to execute 82 nobles. The so-called Stockholm Bloodbath fuelled a Swedish rebellion against Christian and weakened his authority back in Denmark and Norway.
He was overthrown and exiled, and then when he launched a desperate bid to win back his thrones by force, he was imprisoned for the rest of his life.
8. Ivan the Terrible
Tsar of Russia, 1547–84
As the first tsar, Ivan was in some ways an able ruler since he laid the foundations of the Russian empire. He became known as ‘the Terrible’ for a reason, though. Having hated the nobles from an early age (at 13, he had one fed to a pack of dogs), he wasted no time in purging the upper classes.
The domain he inherited clearly was not enough: he instigated numerous, and disastrous, wars of expansion, and even established his own fiefdom within his land where, essentially, anything went. With Ivan prone to paranoia and fits of rage, no one was safe: he ordered a full-on attack on one of his own cities, Novgorod, and beat his daughter-in-law into having a miscarriage, then murdered his son.
9. Rudolf II
Holy Roman Emperor, 1576–1612
Despite being hailed as a generous patron of the arts and sciences, Habsburg emperor Rudolf II utterly failed in his role as the leader of one of Europe’s major powers. Rather than focusing on politics and administration, he instead shut himself away to focus on personal pursuits like alchemy.
When he did show some determination – starting a war with the Ottoman empire to unify Christendom – it proved a disaster. His subjects in Hungary revolted and his family made him hand over power to his younger brother.
Rudolf’s most damning legacy, however, was that his miserable tenure as emperor has been blamed as one of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.
- Read more | What was the Habsburg jaw?
10. Louis XV
King of France, 1715–74
It could certainly be argued that Louis XV’s status as a poor king of France was overshadowed by his successor, Louis XVI, since he was the one who lost his head in the French Revolution. Yet Louis XV’s reign sowed the seeds of the people’s discontent that would lead to such a violent rejection of the monarchy. In short, he was a deeply ineffectual ruler, let alone the all-powerful absolutist king that France had become accustomed to under Louis XIV.
Reports of corruption and handing over influence to his mistresses hurt the crown’s authority, while his wars and extravagant spending depleted the coffers. France became a less powerful nation under his rule, and smaller too: he gave up New France in the Americas after the disastrous Seven Years’ War.
11. Ferdinand VII
King of Spain, 1808, 1813–33
Shortly after taking the throne in 1808, Ferdinand handed over his kingdom – and himself – to Napoleon Bonaparte. Six years of captivity in France later, he returned with a need to prove his absolutist credentials and so ditched Spain’s liberal constitution that had been written in his absence. This led to multiple uprisings, notably the revolt of 1820, which ushered in three years during which the king was forced to accept a constitutional regime.
While more selfish than monstrous, Ferdinand’s legacy and place on this list were confirmed by two things: he oversaw the loss of nearly all of Spain’s colonial territories in the Americas and, following his death, his petty bid to exclude his brother from the succession resulted in a long civil war.
12. Ranavalona I
Queen of Imerina, 1828–61
To try and hold back the wave of European colonisation in Africa, Queen Ranavalona I, of modern-day Madagascar, would go to any lengths. She wanted to purge all foreign influence, expelling missionaries, persecuting Christians and restricting trade. She even tried to have a giant pair of scissors made so that she could literally chop foreigners in half.
The ones who suffered the most, however, were her people: to preserve her land’s self-sufficiency and way of life, as she saw it, Ranavalona used forced labour for her royal projects and fear to maintain order.
Many executions took the form of the tangena ordeal, a witch-hunt-style trial where the accused was made to ingest poison and if they showed any adverse effects, they were deemed guilty. It is claimed that as much as 50 per cent of the population perished during her rule.
13. Leopold II
King of the Belgians, 1865–1909
Leopold II may not have been a terrible king in Belgium itself, but with the Congo Free State, he revealed just how much of a monster he could be. In 1885, he created his own state in central Africa, having convinced European powers that he intended to improve the lives of the people living there.
In reality, this privately owned kingdom allowed Leopold to exploit the Congolese people so that he could make money from its ivory and natural rubber reserves. Under his system of forced labour, any workers who failed to meet their quotas would be punished with mutilation. Leopold’s preferred method was chopping off hands and feet. Millions died from the brutality and rampant diseases.
This was an age where European empires carved up and exploited the African continent, so the fact that international outrage finally forced Leopold to hand over the Congo Free State illustrates the appalling extent of the atrocities.
14. Khalid ibn Barghash
Sultan of Zanzibar, 1896
Not only did Khalid ibn Barghash rule for just three days, but he was ousted in the shortest war in history. So, in truth, there is no knowing whether he would have been a bad ruler: there wasn’t enough time. In 1896, the sultan of Zanzibar died, which put the British in a tough position. They controlled the islands off the east African coast as it served as a strategic trade post for the Indian Ocean.
Against British wishes, Khalid, who may well have killed his predecessor, assumed the role of sultan and fortified the palace with around 3,000 supporters. The British sent warships, though, and initiated a brief bombardment. The Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted around 38 minutes, and Khalid fled into exile.
15. Nicholas II
Tsar of Russia, 1894–1917
The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia for more than 300 years – and it all ended during the reign of Nicholas II. Not suited to wielding autocratic power over a huge empire, he made a catalogue of errors and refused to adapt beyond his rigid belief that he had the divinely ordained right to rule.
In 1905 alone, Russia lost a war with Japan and broke out in revolution, yet Nicholas only made cursory changes and tried to move on. His court became dominated by the strange and ambitious mystic, Rasputin, his nobles and politicians abandoned him, and his decision to take command of the armies in the First World War meant that he was held personally responsible for every defeat and death.
Revolution erupted again in 1917, forcing his abdication. While imprisoned by the revolutionaries, Nicholas and his entire family were murdered. It was a bloody and definitive end to the tsars, as Russia became a communist regime.
16. Edward VIII
King of England, 1936
Edward became king on 20 January 1936, on the death of his father George V. Before the year was out, he had abdicated in disgrace. His brief reign had entirely been focused on his wish to marry an American named Wallis Simpson, but she had been divorced once and was seeking a second, making her wholly unacceptable to the royal family, the political establishment and the church.
Yet his reputation as a bad monarch could have been even worse had he stayed: Edward has long been accused of being a Nazi sympathiser, who toured Hitler’s Germany almost two years before the Second World War.
]]>Think you know everything about the Tudors? Here are 15 facts that will prove you wronghttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/think-you-know-everything-about-the-tudors-here-are-15-facts-that-will-prove-you-wrong/2026-04-12T15:00:00.000Z1. The Tudors weren’t known as the Tudors
Although we use ‘Tudor’ as a nifty shorthand for both the era and the dynasty, it wasn’t used at the time either by the monarchs or their people. Neither did they see it as a distinct period: in fact, Henry VII went to great lengths to emphasise the continuity with his royal predecessors, even down to using the same tailor whom Edward IV had employed.
He also emphasised his Lancastrian roots and tried to downplay his Welsh origins, aware that his grandfather Owen Tudor had married well above him when he bagged Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois as a bride. Throughout the period 1485–1603, the people identified as subjects of each successive king or queen, as well as taking pride in their local affiliations, rather than seeing themselves as ‘Tudor people’.
2. They had a pretty dodgy claim to the throne
When Henry Tudor won the crown from Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, he was quick to stress his legitimacy. But there was more than a hint of protesting too much. In fact, the Tudors were descended from Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt, and his long-standing mistress, Katherine Swynford.
Moreover, Henry VII’s father Edmund was the child of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, by her Welsh attendant. With such a dubious bloodline, it’s little wonder that England’s first Tudor king wasted no time in marrying Elizabeth of York, the eldest child of Edward IV. Their marriage united the warring houses of York and Lancaster and, crucially, gave the Tudors some much-needed legitimacy.
3. Henry VII was no miser
The first Tudor king has a reputation for penny-pinching. But while he kept a close eye on his expenditure, he knew how to splash the cash when it was to his advantage.
In the early years of his reign, when he was under constant threat from rivals and pretenders and many of his subjects questioned his right to be king, he spent lavish sums on dressing the part. Just over a week after defeating Richard III at Bosworth, he ordered a set of new gowns fashioned from cloth of gold, satin and royal purple velvet at a cost of £336, which roughly equates to £225,000 in today’s money.
During the two years that followed, he spent an eye-watering £5,386 (£3.6 million) on his wardrobe. But his generosity had its limits. His wife, Elizabeth of York, struggled to make ends meet throughout their marriage.
4. You would smell Henry VIII before you saw him
For the last 20 years of his life, Henry was tormented by pain from a chronic leg ulcer, which was aggravated by a serious fall from his horse while jousting in 1536. The ulcer often became inflamed and – unsurprisingly – Henry was a difficult patient, refusing to rest for long enough for it to heal. At its worst, the suppurating wound could be smelt from three rooms away.
- Read more | Was this the moment Henry VIII became a tyrant?
5. Henry VIII’s love of hawking was almost the death of him
Henry’s love of sport was well known throughout the court. As a young king, he would spend hours hunting, jousting, shooting arrows and playing tennis. Hawking was another of his favourite sports and his private apartments contained an impressive array of falconry equipment.
But in 1525, Henry was almost killed while pursuing his hawk. Attempting to pole vault over a ditch, instead he fell headfirst into it and almost drowned. Thankfully, his quick-thinking footman, Edmund Moody, managed to pull him out in the nick of time.
6. Henry VIII was a bit of a prude
Contrary to popular belief, Tudor England’s most-married monarch wasn’t much of a lothario. In fact, he had twice as many wives as mistresses. There is only evidence of three extramarital affairs.
The women involved were Bessie Blount (the mother of Henry’s not-so-subtly-named illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy), Mary Boleyn (sister of his second wife Anne) and ‘Mistress Shelton’, who was either Margaret or Mary Shelton, both cousins of Anne Boleyn.
Although there was a rumour that he once had an affair with Anne’s mother Elizabeth, he stoutly denied it: “Never with the mother!”
7. Anne Boleyn did not have a sixth finger on one hand
This oft-repeated tale is based on scurrilous gossip written almost 50 years after Anne’s death. A host of hostile Catholic tracts about Anne appeared in the 1580s as part of a smear campaign against her ‘heretic’ daughter, Elizabeth I.
Nicholas Sander was one of the most influential and claimed that Anne had been Henry VIII’s daughter as well as his wife, the result of his clandestine affair with her mother. Feeding on the rumours of witchcraft that had circulated at the time of Anne’s demise, he asserted that she had a sixth finger on her right hand and a large ‘wen’ (a boil or mole) under her chin.
Such blemishes were commonly thought to be the ‘Devil’s Mark’ – a symbol of having made a pact with Satan. In fact, Anne was proud of her long, slender fingers and always took care to show them off to best effect… all 10 of them.
8. Anne of Cleves was not ugly
You may have heard the story: Henry VIII fell in love with Anne of Cleves’ portrait and immediately signed on the dotted line of the marriage contract. But when he met his bride in person, he was appalled that she was nothing like her profile picture. So, he had the marriage annulled before you could say ‘off with her head’.
In fact, Holbein’s portrait was faithful to Anne, and many contemporary accounts praise her beauty. If anyone had cause for complaint about their betrothed’s physical assets, it was Anne. Henry was no oil painting by the time she married him in January 1540. Pushing 50, he was bloated, ulcer-ridden and almost certainly impotent. It was with understandable haste that Anne agreed to an annulment just six months later.
9. Edward VI kept a diary
The boy king was the only Tudor monarch to leave behind a private journal. But if you’re expecting a tell-all exposé full of secretly expressed desires, grudges and hopes, you might be disappointed. In fact, it’s a rather dry summary of the events of his reign.
Even the execution of his once-cherished uncle is afforded only the following curt line: “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off today.” Overall, the diary reveals a boy who was precociously intelligent, as might be expected for Henry VIII’s “precious jewel”, who had the best of everything growing up.
But he also appears cold, unfeeling and uncompromising – a dangerous blend of traits that might have made him an even greater tyrant than his father if he lived to maturity.
10. Lady Jane Grey was queen for 14 days, not nine
Jane has gone down in history as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’. But while it’s true that she was proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 and deposed by Mary Tudor on 19 July, her reign technically began as soon as Edward VI had breathed his last on 6 July.
On his deathbed, Edward changed the succession in favour of his Protestant cousin Jane to prevent his Catholic half-sister Mary claiming her right. He was heavily influenced by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who had married his son Guildford to Jane.
Even so, Edward’s ‘Device’ for the succession was legally-binding, so Jane was the rightful queen as soon as the young king died. Yet she is always referred to as ‘Lady’ rather than ‘Queen’ and is often omitted from the roll call of English monarchs altogether. That owes much to Mary Tudor’s propaganda: to seize the throne, she had to present Jane as a usurper.
11. ‘Bloody Mary’ wasn’t all that bloody
Mary I’s obsession with returning England to the Roman Catholic faith spurred her to have around 300 Protestant heretics burned at the stake. But while there is no doubting the horrific nature of their deaths, Mary acted out of conscience rather than brutality.
Blinded by her own faith, she genuinely believed that she was saving her subjects from eternal damnation by bringing them into the Roman Catholic fold. Furthermore, the number of people who died on Mary’s orders was just a fraction of those who suffered at the hands of her far bloodier father, Henry VIII.
He sent more men and women to their deaths than any other Tudor monarch. Anyone who refused to fall in with his will was sent to the block – commoners, statesmen and wives alike. It even became a crime to think differently from the king. Contemporary records are patchy and inconsistent, so it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many deaths Henry was responsible for. Estimates vary from a few thousand to as many as 72,000.
12. Mary Tudor was a bit of a party girl
Despite her reputation for sober-mindedness and piety, Mary loved to have fun. One of her favourite companions was Jane Fool, a female jester. The queen was also an avid gambler and loved to play cards and board games. She also entertained lavishly and spent huge sums on feasting and drinking.
A scandalised Spanish ambassador reported: “There is plenty of beer here, and they drink more than would fill the Valladolid river [known as the Pisuerga river today]… The ladies and gentlemen put sugar in their wine, with the result that there are great goings on in the palace.”
13. Elizabeth I employed the original James Bond
The queen’s personal astrologer Dr John Dee was one of her closest advisers. She would regularly consult him about the most apposite moment to undertake key events, such as her coronation.
An astrologer, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Dee was one of the most learned men of the age. But he also carried out more covert assignments for his royal mistress. She employed Dee as a spy, and he would report on intrigues abroad using complex codes. He signed his letters with the numerals ‘007’.
14. Elizabeth I was (apparently) a man
The ‘Bisley Boy’ legend states that in 1542, the future Elizabeth I (then aged around nine) was sent to Overcourt House in the Cotswold village of Bisley to escape the plague in London. Whilst there, she sickened with a fever and died. Knowing that Henry VIII was on his way to visit his daughter, her panic-stricken governess searched the village in vain for a girl who resembled Elizabeth closely enough to fool the king.
The only child of the right age and colouring was a boy, so in desperation she dressed him in the princess’s clothes and the deception was complete. This unlikely tale dates from the 1800s and was made popular by Dracula author Bram Stoker in his book Famous Impostors.
There is no contemporary evidence to support it and more than a whiff of misogyny about the whole thing. How else could Elizabeth have ruled so successfully for so many years? She must have been a man.
15. Elizabeth I didn’t leave her throne to James VI
But as she lay dying at Richmond Palace in March 1603, she finally settled the matter, gasping that she would have none but “my nearest kinsman the King of Scots”.
This deathbed scene was recorded by the contemporary historian William Camden, who had been commissioned to write a biography of the celebrated queen during her lifetime. But dramatic new research by the British Library has proved that Camden was forced to rewrite it on the orders of the new king to make his accession look more predetermined than it had been.
Using transmitted light, the researchers found that in his original manuscript, written at the time of Elizabeth’s death, Camden had recorded that she died without naming a successor. But a few years later, his words were covered over with the lie that ushered the Stuarts to the Tudor throne.
]]>What did Anne Boleyn REALLY look like? Our new research could change everythinghttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-did-anne-boleyn-really-look-like-our-new-research-could-change-everything/2026-03-13T17:30:55.000ZClose your eyes and picture Anne Boleyn. Chances are you can conjure up a pretty clear and detailed image in your imagination – because few figures in English history seem as visually familiar as Henry VIII’s second queen.
Representations of her face appear everywhere: in films, television dramas and novels, in museum gift shops and digital reconstructions. She is often depicted in popular culture as an elegant brunette whose sophistication distinguishes her from others at court. Over time, this image has hardened into something close to fact. Anne Boleyn, we are told, was devastatingly beautiful.
Yet this certainty is built on fragile foundations, and surviving evidence provides a less concrete understanding of Anne’s appearance. No formal painted portraits from life survive today, though images in a number of smaller, more intimate formats – particularly miniatures – are candidates for having captured her true likeness based on contemporary encounters. The more-familiar portraits featuring the now-iconic ‘B’ pendant necklace, meanwhile, were likely created decades later, influenced by politics, artistic convention and hindsight.
For generations, historians assumed that any accurate representations created during Anne’s life had been lost altogether, erased after her execution in 1536 on the orders of Henry VIII. That story is compelling, but it is wrong. My research – which underpins Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn, a new exhibition at Anne’s childhood home, Hever Castle – suggests that her true likeness remained visible long after her dramatic death.
Her image circulated widely in several different forms: in print, on medals and in drawings that outlived her. Alongside written descriptions left by those who saw her, these sources allow us to come close to understanding how Anne Boleyn looked. They also prompt a more revealing question: during her lifetime, was Anne admired for beauty – at least, as the 16th century understood it? And how much did beauty really matter in a court where power, conviction and function carried far greater weight?
Ideals of beauty
Today, audiences are encouraged to believe that Anne Boleyn must have been very beautiful indeed to have displaced Queen Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII’s affections, and to have inspired him to reshape England’s religious and political landscape in order to marry her. This assumption reflects modern ideas about attraction and agency far more than it does the reality of Tudor mores. Different priorities shaped ideals of female beauty then: light colouring and complexion were widely admired. In 16th-century England, though, beauty alone rarely secured influence. At court, education, connections and presence mattered far more than looks. Intelligence, conversation and the ability to command attention in a highly performative environment were prized qualities. Anne excelled in these attributes.
- Read more | Anne Boleyn’s fatal French connection
Anne stood out, but not because she perfectly embodied an ideal of beauty. Her continental education, her penchant for French fashions and her finely honed courtly manner set her apart in a milieu still shaped by conservative English expectations. Contemporary responses to her appearance consistently suggest moderate attractiveness rather than conventional beauty. To understand that distinction properly, we must turn to the accounts of her appearance and demeanour from people who saw her.
Consistent picture
Contemporary descriptions of Anne are limited but broadly consistent. Simon Grynaeus, a German humanist who visited the English court in 1531, wrote to a compatriot that she was “young, good-looking, of a rather dark complexion”. In October 1532, the Venetian ambassador Carlo Capello, in a report later recorded in Marino Sanuto’s Diarii, described her as “not one of the handsomest women in the world… of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised… and her eyes, which are black and beautiful”.
Lancelot de Carle, secretary to the French ambassador in London, wrote a long poetic account of Anne’s fall and execution in 1536, emphasising her expression and presence rather than physical features. Even sympathetic observers were measured: the reformist cleric John Barlow described her as “reasonably good-looking”, a phrase that in Tudor usage suggested composure and refinement rather than striking beauty.
What emerges is not the image of a woman celebrated for physical perfection but of someone whose appearance was animated by intelligence and presence. Observers repeatedly returned to her eyes and manner. The French diplomat Lancelot de Carle said of her eyes that she “knew well how to use [them] with effect”, capturing a sense of engagement, wit and command that made her captivating in person.
For centuries, the absence of a painted portrait from Anne’s lifetime was explained by a dramatic story: that Henry VIII ordered every likeness of her be destroyed after her execution. The image of a furious king erasing the woman for whom he had broken with Rome is powerful, but has no basis in contemporary sources. The story appeared first in the 19th century, when historians sought an explanation for Anne’s apparent visual disappearance.
What happened after the queen’s fall was administrative rather than vengeful. Anne’s badges and monograms were removed from royal buildings and replaced with those of her successor, Jane Seymour, just as Catherine of Aragon’s emblems had earlier been replaced by Anne’s. The King’s Works accounts for September 1536 list payments for removing Anne’s devices alongside those of Cardinal Wolsey, the king’s former chief minister, by then long dead.
No orders to destroy Anne’s portraits have been found, and even the command to remove her emblems was carried out only partly. Many of her falcon badges remain in the roof of Hampton Court’s Great Hall, blackened with paint but intact. Moreover, inventories taken after Henry’s death show that he continued to own objects that had once belonged to Anne and were decorated with her iconography, albeit packed away in chests. Anne herself had become valueless to him, but the gold and silver fashioned into her goods had not. He did not destroy them, just ensured that they were no longer seen.
The people’s prints
Though no painted panel portrait survives from Anne’s lifetime, images of her certainly do. Some of the most revealing were created not for the elite interiors of palaces but for public circulation. In the summer of 1533, the prolific printer Wynkyn de Worde was employed to publish a pamphlet titled The Noble Tryumphaunt Coronacyon of Quene Anne. Its cover features a small woodcut long dismissed by historians as a generic courtly scene. However, in collaboration with historian Jessica Carey-Bunning, I have identified this as a narrative composition including three contemporary images of Anne Boleyn at distinct stages of her relationship with Henry VIII.
The woodcut provides a visual sequence affirming the validity of the union. To the left, Henry courts Anne; in the centre, the couple are joined in marriage; and in the most prominent image, at the right, Henry and Anne are crowned beneath a cloth of estate, the king’s hand resting on his queen’s stomach. To a contemporary viewer, this was an explicit declaration of pregnancy. When the pamphlet was published, Anne was about six months pregnant with the child who would reign as Elizabeth I.
This woodcut image operated as a tool of legitimacy, fertility and dynastic hope. It was intended not to capture Anne’s features but, rather, to put her face to work. It was circulated deliberately and widely at the most politically sensitive moment of her queenship.
Other contemporary images reinforce this visibility. A lead prototype or proof known as the ‘Moost Happi’ medal, likely commissioned in anticipation of a male heir and struck in 1534, depicts Anne in part profile wearing a gable hood, and bears the initials AR (for Anna Regina). Edward Hawkins, keeper of antiquities at the British Museum in the 19th century, suggested that another surviving lead prototype showing Henry was a companion to Anne’s medal. My discovery of a fully cast example of the companion medal of Henry, fashioned as a hat pin in modest tin, indicates that these likenesses were destined for a wide distribution beyond the court – an effort to disseminate images of the king and his new queen.
Another contemporary image of Anne survives in a sketch of her coronation banquet, depicting her crowned beneath a cloth of estate in Westminster Hall, the focal point of an elaborate theatrical display. Even in this crude drawing, Anne is unmistakably the axis around which the ceremony revolves. Together, these show that Anne was among the most visually represented queens of early Tudor England.
Something rarer also survives: a glimpse of Anne Boleyn as she may have been seen by those who knew her personally. A chalk drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor, depicts a woman in a fur-trimmed nightgown with a simple coif, her eyes lowered in contemplation. Though its subject has long been debated, recent scholarship by Dr Kate Heard has fundamentally reshaped understanding of this work, strongly supporting its identification as Anne Boleyn.
The drawing dates securely to Holbein’s second period in England, when he was working at the heart of the Tudor court, producing preparatory studies for both painted portraits and miniatures – and, crucially, working extensively under Anne’s patronage. The apparent informality of the portrait, once used to argue against the identification, now strengthens it. Comparable works by the Horenbout workshop similarly depict elite sitters such as Henry VIII’s son, the Duke of Richmond, in a state of undress, intended for private viewing.
Technical examination by the Royal Collection Trust has revealed that the sitter’s hair was originally far darker than it appears today. Layers of red, brown and black chalk have been largely worn away, with only remnants visible. Most compelling, however, is the later inscription identifying Anne as the sitter, based on an attribution by Sir John Cheke, who had met Anne in 1534, benefited from her patronage, and was closely connected to her circle through his wife, Mary Hill. If identified correctly, which now seems highly likely, this drawing represents the most direct surviving contemporary likeness of Anne. It shows her not as a crowned emblem of dynastic hope, as her public image had been crafted, but as a thinking, contemplative and private individual.
The Windsor drawing also unlocks the meaning of a later engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar titled Faith, or St Barbara, produced in 1647. This print, based on a now-lost Holbein design once in the Earl of Arundel’s collection, depicts a crowned female figure holding a chalice and wafer set against a landscape of cliffs and water.
When compared closely with the Windsor drawing, the resemblance is striking: they share the same profile, jawline, eye shape and cranial structure. The correspondence between the two strongly suggests that Holbein’s use of Anne’s face for Saint Barbara was drawn from his preparatory study. In this reading, the Windsor drawing was not an isolated likeness but part of a broader artistic conception.
The choice of that saint is significant because, like the reformist Anne, Barbara was associated with steadfast Christian faith and resistance to coercion when compelled to revert to traditional beliefs. In Anne’s book of hours, King’s MS 9, the illumination of Saint Barbara shares compositional similarities with the Windsor sketch and Hollar engraving, including a distinctive looped plait, indicating direct visual continuity. Portraying Anne in this guise would have aligned her queenship with conscience and reform.
Seen in this light, the image becomes both devotional and political. It presents Anne not simply as consort but as belief embodied. Saint Barbara was martyred and executed by the sword – a parallel that later viewers of this image could hardly have missed. The tragic irony is inescapable, though clearly it lies beyond the image’s original intent.
The possibility that Anne’s contemporary likeness survives in smaller, more intimate painted formats is strongly supported by this pairing of the Windsor sketch and the image of her as Saint Barbara. Two other near-identical portrait miniatures – one now in the collection of the Duke of Bucchleuch, the other in the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada – long associated with Anne, share a striking physiognomy with these two. When viewed together, the alignment of the facial structures is too close to be dismissed as a coincidence. These works appear to preserve a recognisable likeness circulating within and shortly after Anne’s lifetime, intended for private recognition rather than public proclamation.
Though we can’t be absolutely certain of the person whom they portray, these miniatures stand as the most plausible painted candidates for capturing Anne Boleyn’s likeness from life.
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Changing faces
After her execution, Anne’s image fell out of use. When it re-emerged during the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth I, it was in a radically altered political landscape. One of the most familiar images of Anne today is the portrait painted c1584 and catalogued as NPG 668 in the National Portrait Gallery. Long treated as a posthumously created likeness of Anne herself, it preserves something else: Elizabeth’s face.
Art historian Lawrence Hendra has identified the creator of this famous panel painting as the as-yet-unnamed ‘Pearl Artist’. Comparing this artist’s other works – including portraits of Elizabeth I, her half-sister Mary I and her great-grandfather, Edward IV – it is clear that the painter used the same facial pattern for each sitter, including Anne Boleyn. The elongated facial structure, refined nose and controlled expression closely mirror Elizabeth’s physiognomy.
This effort to make Elizabeth’s relatives, some of whom likely bore no resemblance to one another, look alike was deliberate. In the 1580s, Elizabeth’s position was vulnerable. She was unmarried, without an heir, and facing both internal Catholic resistance and external threat. So repainting her ancestors with her own facial features anchored her visually as the rightful queen at a time when her legitimacy was again in question. Ensuring that Elizabeth looked like her father’s relatives as well as her mother, who had been accused of adultery, was a covert attempt to transform Anne from a condemned queen into a dynastic foundation stone, visually legitimising her daughter’s rule.
A different but equally deliberate innovation appears in the so-called Hever Rose portrait. Recent multi-modal scientific analysis by the Hamilton Kerr Institute, combined with dendrochronology (the dating of the wooden panel), places its painting in c1583, just one year before the famous picture in the National Portrait Gallery. Infrared reflectography reveals that the artist initially followed a pre-existing design but then interrupted it, inserting fully articulated hands holding a rose.
This moment matters, because it marks the first time Anne’s hands appeared in her posthumous iconography – a choice that was almost certainly polemical. In the early 1580s, defamatory claims by Nicholas Sander alleging that Anne possessed a sixth finger were already circulating widely in manuscript, years before they appeared in print. By depicting elegant, unblemished hands, with each finger made carefully visible, the artist offers a quiet but pointed rebuttal to this claim.
Both portraits respond to the same anxiety. In a period when Elizabeth’s legitimacy was under attack, Anne’s image was re-engineered to defend it: her face reshaped to mirror the queen’s, her body corrected to refute slander. Art became a form of political repair.
Lost likeness
Nearly five centuries after her execution, we may never know precisely what Anne Boleyn looked like. Her face survives only in fragments, refracted through prisms of politics, art and memory. Yet this uncertainty is not a failure of evidence; it is part of her history.
The images and descriptions that survive show that Anne was not invisible, and not admired solely for her beauty. She was compelling because of her presence, intelligence and conviction. She understood the power of being seen, and used imagery, print and ceremony to assert her place in the world.
In the end, the question of her appearance matters not because it satisfies curiosity but because it restores agency. Anne Boleyn was not merely a face shaped by others but an active participant – through her patronage of Holbein and the Horenbout family, not least – in how she was represented, remembered and contested. Approaching 500 years on, we are still learning to see her clearly.
Unpicking locks
What colour was Anne Boleyn's hair?
Modern portrayals often depict Anne with jet-black hair, reinforcing an image of dark, exotic beauty. The historical record, however, is more ambiguous. Contemporary descriptions mention dark eyes and darker complexion, but none explicitly describe hair colour – likely because it may not have seemed remarkable enough to comment upon.
Some later sources describe Anne as “witch-like” with black hair; others suggest chestnut or reddish tones. The poet Thomas Wyatt may have been referring to her when he wrote of a “brunet” woman. In Tudor usage, that could refer to dark hair, darker skin or both, and was often used to signal complexion rather than colouring alone.
Genetics adds more uncertainty. Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth I, was red-haired, as was Henry VIII in his youth. Red hair is linked to variants of the MC1R gene expressed only if inherited from both parents, so Anne must have carried at least one such variant. Though not proof that she herself was red-haired, this significantly increases the likelihood, and makes chestnut or auburn tones entirely plausible.
Later portraits often show Anne with lighter reddish-brown hair. These may reflect attempts to align her appearance more closely with Elizabeth’s, reinforcing dynastic continuity. In a culture where fair hair was associated with virtue, this shift was politically advantageous.
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Did Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville marry for love?https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/marrying-for-love-edward-iv-and-elizabeth-woodville/2022-04-06T15:00:00.000ZHenry VIII tends to be the monarch who gets frequently cited for breaking the royal marital mould by choosing his own wives from among his subjects. In particular, the narrative arcs of his relations with cousins Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard continue to fascinate, five centuries after his passion turned to hatred and he sent both of them to their deaths. However, Henry was only following the example set by Edward IV, the Yorkist grandfather whom he resembled in both looks and appetite. Edward may not have had as many wives as Henry, but his liaisons with women were just as complex and, perhaps, equally destructive on a national scale. Instead of following the traditional kingly route and negotiating for an influential foreign bride, Edward followed his heart and chose his wife for her personal qualities. Despite the scandal this created, the marriage proved successful and lasted until his death.
Why was Elizabeth Woodville "an unlikely queen”?
Five years older than her royal husband, Elizabeth Woodville was an unlikely queen. Her legendary blonde beauty entranced the young king to the extent that he married her in spite of tradition, in spite of advice, perhaps even in spite of himself. While none could fault her personal charms, Elizabeth was considered an unacceptable choice for an English queen by most of Edward’s advisors.
She was a widow, a mother already, born and married into Lancastrian families, the daughter of a mere knight, a man whom Edward had formerly held in contempt. She brought no dowry or international connections, no territories or promise of diplomatic support. What she did bring was her fertility, bearing the king 10 children in addition to the two sons from her first husband, Sir John Grey. Elizabeth also brought in a model of queenship that differed vastly from that of the woman she replaced, the Lancastrian Margaret of Anjou. Elizabeth may have begun her reign as unsuitable and unpopular but in fact, she was the perfect embodiment of the beautiful, submissive, fertile queen – an archetype of medieval literature.
Exactly when Elizabeth and Edward first met is unclear. They may well have been thrown together in the small, elite world of the English aristocracy, at court or some important event in the 1450s. The pair may even have known each other as children, as Elizabeth’s parents appear to have served in Rouen while Edward’s father was resident there as Lieutenant of Normandy. However, for much of Edward’s youth, Elizabeth was married and unavailable, a situation which only changed shortly before he became king. It is possible that he admired her before this point but, even if they had never previously seen one another, their attraction was quickly and decisively established.
Edward’s victory at the battle of Towton in 1461 put the Woodvilles in a difficult position – the family had fought on the ‘wrong’ side and survived. Yet in June 1461, Edward stayed at their home at Groby, Leicestershire, and granted a pardon to Elizabeth’s father, heralding a new relationship between the family and the Yorkists. The newly-widowed Elizabeth is almost certain to have sought shelter under her parents’ roof, so this may well have been a critical moment in their relationship.
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When did Elizabeth Woodville meet Edward IV?
Elizabeth’s first clear contact with Edward’s court came on 13 April 1464, only a few months before the suggested date of their marriage. She appealed to William, Lord Hastings, probably in his role as overseer of the Yorkist Midlands, for his assistance in a dispute arising with her mother-in-law. Legend has Elizabeth waiting for Edward under an oak in Whittlebury Forest, a helpless widow, hoping to plead for the inheritances of her sons. Perhaps he did come riding by, hear her problems and fall in love. When she became aware of his intentions and agreed to become his wife, knowing his position, she cannot have known what lay ahead, but she must have agreed to collude in his veil of secrecy. Her decision to marry the king cannot have been one she would have taken lightly.
Elizabeth married Edward in secret, some time before September 1464. The exact date and circumstances of this event are still hotly debated among historians, especially because the choices Edward made were later used to undermine his dynastic line. The ceremony appears to have taken place in the chapel at Groby, with the collusion of Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, Countess Rivers, although it was kept secret from her father at that point. This choice was hardly surprising, given the reaction Edward could anticipate to the match, but there is also the possibility that the ritual was intended as a means of seduction rather than a lasting commitment.
Some historians have suggested that the king was, in fact, already married at this point. Almost 20 years later, after Edward’s death, the question of his children’s legitimacy turned upon a statement made by Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who asserted that a prior arrangement between Edward and Eleanor Butler, née Talbot, invalidated his marriage to Elizabeth. This argument was used to depose Edward’s eldest son Edward V and replace him with Edward’s brother, Richard III. Eleanor was already conveniently long-dead by this time, as were any other witnesses, so the plausibility of the claim rested upon what was known of Edward’s character. His contemporary reputation as a womaniser did little to allay this possibility, and the secret marriage to Elizabeth only added to the doubts. At the time, there was no way that Edward could have predicted his early death, or his brother’s actions, although by rejecting the usual practice of conducting a royal marriage in public, he called his motives into question.
A desire to be together
Edward and Elizabeth were married for 19 years. Their relationship spanned a turbulent period, during which Edward lost and regained the throne, faced rebellion and was forced into exile. This meant that there were periods when the couple were separated, unsure whether or not they would see each other again. Edward also had mistresses, especially towards the end of his life, when he famously loved the company of Jane Shore. However, this was by no means unusual at the time, so would not necessarily have been a cause for conflict in the way that modern, post-Romantic sensibilities might anticipate. It was almost expected, for reasons of health and safety, that men would abstain from sleeping with their pregnant wives, but required sexual outlets elsewhere. While Edward might share another woman’s bed, he had made Elizabeth his queen and, unlike his grandson Henry VIII, he never intended to dislodge her from that position. Sex with other women would have been a diversion and a physical outlet, rather than an attempt to replace Elizabeth; it was advised by physicians as essential to health and might even have been welcomed by the queen later in life, or while she was indisposed. In spite of these issues, the marriage never appears to have foundered or weakened. Despite these difficulties and the opposition to their union, both were united in their desire to be together.
Today, it is difficult to recover the intimate details of a private life that was not committed to letters or a diary. Yet, it is possible to look at the indications that suggest the marriage did work, on a personal level, and Edward’s ability to maintain the union in the wake of the contemporary dislike of Elizabeth’s family. In defying expectations that he had a duty to use marriage as a diplomatic tool, Edward prioritised love, perhaps lust, in a way that exposed his own feelings. There was no question that he desired Elizabeth and was prepared to take considerable risks to make her his queen.
Yet amid all the controversy, Elizabeth’s own feelings are less transparent. A few of the chroniclers mention her initial resistance to Edward’s advances on moral grounds, refusing to become his mistress in a way that made him determined to make her his wife. However, this does not appear to have been as conscious a policy as that which Anne Boleyn would use six decades later. There is no question that Edward was a great catch for a knight’s widow. Apart from his considerable personal charms, to bag a king was the ultimate achievement as a career marriage, and brought unprecedented advantages to the Woodville family, something which Elizabeth must have been acutely aware of. But this may have been a realistic move, not a cynical one. It was the happy union of attraction and advantage that would have made the match so unique.
Elizabeth bore Edward 10 children, with their youngest arriving just three years before the king’s death. Of their seven girls and three boys, only five daughters reached adulthood, the others falling victim to illness, or disappearing inside the Tower of London, as was the case with the two elder boys, Edward V and his brother Richard (known to history as the Princes in the Tower). The provision for the young Prince Edward’s education and establishment at Ludlow Castle in the 1470s show that his parents cared deeply about the way his learning was imparted, his leisure hours and the influences upon him. He was to be allowed time to play, to enjoy his dogs and horses, and to be well fed, well slept and preserved from the influence of those who might be uncouth, ill, or of evil intent. The royal family appears to have been a close, warm unit, which retained a sense of loyalty and mutual support throughout Edward’s reign and afterwards. Their household accounts and the glimpses offered by eyewitnesses capture their mutual investment in the life they had created together and fought to protect. The eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, continued to help her sisters and their offspring after she had married Henry VII and become queen.
A productive partnership
As 1483 dawned, Edward and Elizabeth might still have anticipated many years together. They had been married almost 19 years, the country was at peace and Edward himself was approaching his 41st birthday. He was middle-aged by contemporary standards, and although not as active and fit as his earlier years, had contemplated personally leading an army against the Scots just one year previously. The marriage had been placed under considerable pressure by Edward’s conflicts with his nobility, as rivalry was created by jealousy at the new-found wealth of the Woodvilles. Yet there are no surviving anecdotes that relate to conflict between the couple, or any lessening of affection. None of the gossipy stories that relate to the wives of Henry VIII, or those of Henry VI, Richard III and Henry VII, emerge about Edward and Elizabeth. Their partnership appeared complementary, harmonious and enduring, with Edward adopting a martial style of leadership, ruling by merit of his larger-than-life personality and Elizabeth taking the typically feminine role of the supportive and fertile but essentially apolitical queen.
Edward’s premature death in April 1483 ended a productive partnership before it had fully come to fruition, before their eldest son was of age. Having been the ‘glue’ that bound the disparate elements of his court together, Edward’s absence proved to be the catalyst that precipitated civil chaos. Losing control of power, and of her sons, Elizabeth witnessed the deaths of her friends and relatives before peace was restored under her son-in-law, Henry VII. She retired to Bermondsey Abbey, spending her final days in seclusion before being laid to rest in a humble grave, at her own request, alongside Edward in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. They lie there today, permanently united in death, their marriage standing as a symbol of the strong rule they embodied in life.
Amy Licence is a historian of the late medieval and early Tudor period, and the author of Edward IV & Elizabeth Woodville: A True Romance (Amberley Publishing 2016)
]]>Elizabeth Woodville: Edward IV’s controversial queen consorthttps://www.historyextra.com/period/plantagenet/elizabeth-woodville-edward-ivs-controversial-queen/2022-02-07T12:50:40.000ZWhy did Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV appal so many people?
When, in the autumn of 1464, Edward IV informed his councillors that he had made a secret marriage, his choice of bride – Elizabeth Woodville – went against all the conventions of his day. Kings were supposed to marry in order to cement a foreign alliance – Elizabeth would be the first English queen since the Norman Conquest. Kings were also supposed to marry fellow royalty – Elizabeth was the daughter of a mere knight.
The secrecy of the ceremony was another problem. In the years ahead, the first parliament of Edward IV’s brother, Richard III, would denounce this as an “ungracious pretensed marriage”, having taken place “secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private chamber, a profane place”.
Worse still, in an age when many people believed a king’s bride should be a virgin, Elizabeth was a widow. If that wasn’t bad enough, her first husband had been killed in the Wars of the Roses fighting for the Lancastrians against Edward IV’s Yorkists. And she was even five years older than Edward – though, as the king pointed out, with two young sons by her first marriage, she had at least proved her fertility.
More seriously, it was later alleged that Edward had no right to marry Elizabeth at all, having been earlier secretly precontracted to someone else. The charge was raised in 1483, after Edward’s death, when Richard of Gloucester signalled his intention to take the throne as Richard III on the grounds that Edward’s sons – Richard’s nephews – were illegitimate. One Bishop Stillington was said to have declared that he had earlier married Edward to Eleanor Butler (née Talbot), daughter to the Earl of Shrewsbury.
The evidence for Stillington’s accusation is, at best, circumstantial – Eleanor was dead by 1483, so no one could ask her, and the earlier marriage hadn’t been an issue in 1464. But for it to be raised at all shows that the marriage was, indeed, hugely controversial.
Did she marry for love – and, if so, why was that so shocking?
It wasn’t only Elizabeth’s lowly background and colourful past that proved so shocking to England’s court, it was also the fact that she and Edward may have married for love. For a king to choose his wife for love or lust – for “blind affection”, as the Italian historian Polydore Vergil would put it at the beginning of the 16th century – was so odd as to amount almost to an indecency. So much so that it would later be alleged that Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, had used witchcraft to bring the two together.
But is it true that Edward and Elizabeth genuinely loved one another? Popular early versions of their first meeting certainly suggest so. Several describe a lustful king trying to force himself on a virtuous lady, who refuses to live with him “unchastely”. One tale even has Elizabeth defending herself with a dagger; another has Edward holding a knife to her throat. But all the tales end happily. The king was so struck by the lady’s virtue that he married her, in secret.
And yet it’s possible that cold political calculation had some influence in Edward’s decision to marry Elizabeth. The king may have seen some propaganda value in an alliance with a woman with connections to the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses, and even in choosing an English bride. Edward’s choice of Elizabeth may also have signalled his growing independence from the powerful magnate Warwick the Kingmaker (who had alternative marriage plans for Edward). And it wasn’t as if Edward was marrying a peasant – though Elizabeth’s father was a mere knight, her mother sprang from the royal line of Luxembourg.
For all that, there’s no reason to doubt that this was a match made chiefly on the grounds of personal attraction. In fact, it was perhaps the first such in English royal history – but not the last. It could be argued that it was with Elizabeth Woodville that the notion of marriage for love as a viable option entered the chronicles of British royalty. Following her lead, all of Elizabeth’s royal grandchildren – Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor and Mary Tudor – displayed a belief in their right to personal happiness; a belief that marriage and love should not be wholly different matters; a belief which, in May 2018, we witnessed once more in the wedding of Meghan Markle to Prince Harry.
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Did she exploit her power to enrich her cronies?
Of all the charges levelled at Elizabeth down the centuries, the one that she unreasonably enriched her whole extensive family has arguably proved the most damaging.
The way the Woodvilles and their connections hoovered up positions and advantageous marriages was certainly remarkable. (One of Elizabeth’s brothers, aged around 20, was married to the Duchess of Norfolk, in her sixties.) A Milanese envoy reported that the Woodvilles “had the entire government of this realm”. But Elizabeth was only doing what any contemporary would have done, and it is debatable how much of the Woodville advancement was really implemented on the queen’s initiative. In an age when kin was key, Edward himself may have used these marriages and gifts of offices to strengthen his own power base.
And on a broader point, what can we say of Elizabeth’s role as queen consort? Clearly not everyone in the English court was enamoured of Edward’s choice of wife, but the king himself certainly thought highly of his queen’s abilities. So much so that, when he crossed the English Channel to lead an invasion of France in 1475, he left his small son, Edward, as ‘Keeper of the Realm’, and that son in Elizabeth’s charge. The will he made then names her the first of 10 executors: “Our said dearest wife in whom we have most singularly put our trust.”
Yet despite being loaded with such great responsibilities, Elizabeth was not a political animal. There is no evidence of her having exercised overt political influence – and, having witnessed the influential role that Margaret of Anjou played during her husband, Henry VI’s fraught reign, many of Elizabeth’s contemporaries would have regarded this as a good thing.
Away from the political arena, Elizabeth seems to have had a lot going for her as a queen. She was beautiful, a patroness of arts and industry, and a gracious presence at ceremonies. For example, in 1472, she entertained the visiting Flemish courtier Lord Gruuthuse to a great banquet with dancing in her own chamber, and was noted as having ordered the resplendent cloth of gold hangings for his bed.
Above all she was fruitful, presenting Edward with 10 children, most of whom survived the perils of infancy. In other words, for as long as her husband was alive, Elizabeth seemed the model of what a late-medieval queen was supposed to be.
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Could Elizabeth have saved her sons from Richard III?
When in April 1483 Edward IV suddenly died, he left the throne to his 12-year-old son, another Edward, who was being raised in Ludlow, Shropshire under the tutelage of Elizabeth’s talented brother Anthony Woodville. Elizabeth’s first instinct may have been conciliatory – one contemporary chronicler described how she “most beneficently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance” as the crown was passed to her son. But this wasn’t enough to allay the fears of some people – notably Richard of Gloucester – that the boy would grow up wholly under Woodville influence. When Richard intercepted Edward and Anthony Woodville on the journey to London, Elizabeth immediately fled with her other children and her belongings into the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey.
In June, Richard wrote to York for men to assist him “against the queen, her bloody adherents and affinity” who he claimed were trying to murder him. But he had not yet declared any intention of seizing the throne for himself; and it was on this basis that Elizabeth was persuaded – or coerced – into allowing her younger son, Richard, to be taken away from her to join his brother in the Tower of London.
Immediately afterwards, the elder Richard’s adherents started spreading stories that the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth was invalidated by the former king’s precontract to Eleanor Butler. Their sons were thus declared illegitimate, and as the summer wore on the boys disappeared from view, their fate one of the most debated mysteries of British history.
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When did she learn that the princes in the Tower were dead?
In that summer of 1483 Elizabeth, still in sanctuary, entered into a conspiracy with an unlikely ally: Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor, who since the death of Henry VI had been the Lancastrian claimant to the English throne. A marriage was agreed between Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, and Margaret’s son, Henry, and both ladies would raise their supporters against Richard.
It is often said that Elizabeth Woodville’s actions showed she believed her sons were dead. Why else would she support a plan to promote Henry Tudor? Polydore Vergil, a few decades on, dramatically described how she heard of their murder, and “with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair”.
But it is unclear whether the rebellion initially planned to place Henry Tudor on the throne, or whether that came only after rumours of the princes' death began to spread. Edward IV himself had discussed the possibility of marrying his daughter to Henry, and thus bringing the Lancastrian heir safely into the fold. Either way, the rebellion failed, and in January 1484 Elizabeth Woodville was stripped of her queenly status and income.
Two months later, “dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England” was persuaded to leave sanctuary and allow her elder daughters to go to their uncle Richard’s court. It has been argued she would never have done so unless she had by now come to believe Richard was innocent of her sons’ deaths – or even that they had not died at all. Elizabeth disappears from the records for the rest of Richard’s reign, which paves the way for one theory that the younger of her sons, at least, survived and was given into her charge, in an obscure part of the country.
But it is equally possible that she was enough of a pragmatist simply to realise that some sort of life had to be made for her surviving daughters, whatever had happened to her sons. They could not remain in sanctuary indefinitely.
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Did she support a revolt against Henry VII?
Yes – and no. After Henry seized the English crown from Richard III – and brought the Wars of the Roses to an end – he fulfilled his promise to marry Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth of York. He also restored his new mother-in-law to her rank as queen dowager, giving her a grant for life of six manors in Essex and an annual income of £102. When Elizabeth of York gave birth to a son, the infant’s godmother, Elizabeth Woodville, carried the little prince to the high altar at the christening.
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But less than a year into the new reign, Elizabeth had already begun negotiating a lease on a manor within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Her position at court might well have been difficult given the pre-eminence of that other dowager figure, Margaret Beaufort, ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’.
Soon Elizabeth would, willingly or otherwise, find her plans changing again. In February 1487 all the lands granted to her were taken away from her – albeit only to be given to her daughter. She was given a small annuity and, abruptly, took up residence in Bermondsey Abbey.
Elizabeth may herself have chosen this retirement, but the timing is suggestive, coming hard on the heels of a threat to Henry VII’s throne. In 1487, Lambert Simnel was made the figurehead of a Yorkist uprising against Henry and at first claimed (though he later changed his story) to be the younger of the princes in the Tower. There may have been some fear that a discontented Elizabeth – resentful that Henry seemed determined to keep his wife, Elizabeth’s daughter, in the background – might lend a rebel her support.
Certainly Elizabeth’s life ahead lay mostly in the convent, with only a very few recorded appearances at court, and her death on 8 June 1492 was followed by a humble and almost shabby funeral with (as a herald noted) “nothing done solemnly”.
This article was first published in the May 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]>How Edward IV reclaimed his throne at the battle of Tewkesburyhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/battle-tewkesbury-1471-what-when-who-fought-who-won-bloody-meadow/2021-04-12T12:20:46.000ZOn 14 April 1471, the very same day that Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick was meeting his end just north of London at the battle of Barnet, Henry VI’s wife Margaret of Anjou and his son Edward of Westminster were arriving back in England from exile in France.
After landing at Weymouth they were joined by Lancastrian supporters led by the Duke of Somerset. Knowing that they needed to reinforce their army if they were to stand any chance of defeating Edward IV, they headed for Wales where they knew they could count upon the support of Jasper Tudor.
Realising what the Lancastrians were up to, Edward set off in hot pursuit. The Lancastrians never made it to Wales. Their plans to cross the Severn at Gloucester were scuppered when the city refused to let them in; instead they were forced to march north in a bid to cross the river at Tewkesbury. They reached the town on 3 May after covering the last 24 miles in just 16 hours. But Edward was closing in. Not wanting his army to be caught in a bottleneck as they tried to cross the river, Somerset chose to stand and fight.
What happened at the battle of Tewkesbury?
The following morning he drew up his forces south of the town, where Edward’s Yorkists confronted them. Somerset, who had taken command of the troops on the Lancastrian right, had come up with quite a crafty plan. Leaving a few men to mask what he was up to, and with his movement hidden by trees, he led the bulk of his force in a flanking march round the Yorkist left. It was a bold move and had all gone to plan Somerset would have taken the Yorkists by surprise.
However Edward, who was no mean general himself, had foreseen the danger and had hidden 200 cavalry to guard against such a move. Somerset duly launched his attack against Edward’s left flank and in fact enjoyed some success before the Yorkists fought back and the 200 cavalry joined the fray. Somerset was now being attacked on two sides, and to make matters worse Lord Wenlock, an ex-Yorkist who had been given command of the Lancastrian centre – failed to advance in support of his commander.
Who won the battle of Tewkesbury?
Gradually the pressure on Somerset’s troops began to tell; they were pushed back before they finally broke and fled. Some got away, others got no further than what is now called Bloody Meadow. Somerset managed to escape back to his lines where he angrily sought out Wenlock. According to one account he rode up to the former Yorkist “called him traytor [and], with his axe he strake y braynes out of his hedde”.
Under increasing pressure from the Yorkists and with their leadership in disarray, Lancastrian resistance collapsed. The fleeing Lancastrians were pursued to the town where many were cut down. Others drowned as they tried to cross the Severn. Edward of Westminster was amongst the slain. Somerset and a number of other Lancastrian leaders tried to seek refuge in Tewkesbury Abbey – they were later taken out, tried and executed.
Why was the battle of Tewkesbury important?
Edward IV's victory and the death of Henry VI’s son and heir destroyed hopes of a Lancastrian succession and led to 14 years of peace. Edward finished the job by having Henry VI quietly murdered in the Tower of London. But it wouldn’t be the end of the Wars of the Roses, which bloomed once more following Edward IV’s death in 1483 and the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.
Julian Humphreys is a historian and battlefields expert
This content was first published by HistoryExtra in 2011
]]>The battle of Barnet, 1471: the Wars of the Roses clash that killed the Kingmakerhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/battle-barnet-1471-what-happened-who-won-death-kingmaker/2021-03-24T11:40:58.000ZIt was a foggy Easter Sunday in 1471, and Warwick the Kingmaker was running for his life. His army had just been defeated by the forces of his former ally, Edward IV, and now his only hope was to reach his horse and ride away to safety. But he was no longer a young man. His armour slowed him down, his enemies closed in and he was knocked to the ground. Someone pulled up his visor, a blade flashed, and one of the most powerful men in England became just another corpse on the blood-soaked fields around Barnet.
When Edward IV had won the throne in 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, he knew that he could never have done so without the support of Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick. Initially, at least, the king was content to follow his advice. But in 1464, Edward secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, a beautiful Lancastrian widow. It was a humiliation for Warwick, who had been trying to arrange Edward’s marriage to a French princess to cement an alliance. He felt his influence slip further as the king heaped favours on his new wife’s family, arranged profitable marriages for her siblings and favoured an alliance not with France, but with Burgundy.
Warwick’s attempts to reassert his position in 1469 led to a period of chaos and rebellion, as he and the king jockeyed for power. In 1470, Warwick concluded an alliance with his old enemy, Margaret of Anjou – the wife of Henry VI – and Edward was forced into exile. Henry VI was reinstated as king, with Warwick as the country’s effective ruler.
But Edward still had plenty of fight left in him. In March 1471, he raised an army and returned to England to reclaim his throne. On 25 March, he reached Leicester, where he was joined by 3,000 men – retainers of his old friend, Lord Hastings. Four days later, he arrived outside Coventry, where Warwick was based. Secure behind its powerful city walls, the Earl probably planned to sit it out until he could be joined by his various allies, but his plans were wrecked when one of these, the Duke of Clarence, changed sides and joined his brother the king. Edward now decided to strike for London and, on 11 April, the city opened its gates to the Yorkist king.
Battle of Barnet facts
Fought on: 14 April 1471 Location: North of Barnet, Greater London Outcome: Victory for Yorkists
Warwick, who had followed Edward south, drew up his army on high ground north of Barnet and offered battle. On 13 April, Edward – no doubt hoping to defeat his former ally before he could join forces with Margaret – led his army back up the Great North Road and advanced through Barnet. By now, it was getting dark, so he decided to spend the night in order of battle, ready to attack in the morning. However, in the failing light, he miscalculated where Warwick’s army actually was and pitched his camp much nearer to the Earl’s forces than he intended. Furthermore, the two armies weren’t directly opposite each other. Each army’s right flank overlapped its opponent’s left – a misalignment that would have a major effect on the course of the battle on the following day.
What happened on the battlefield?
That night, Warwick tried to make the most of his superiority in artillery by ordering a bombardment of the King’s position. His primitive cannon duly opened fire, but because the two armies were so close, his guns overshot the Yorkist army. Edward made sure that Warwick’s men were unaware of their error by forbidding his own gunners from shooting back, with the result that Warwick’s gunners pounded away all night with little effect.
The following day was Easter Sunday. Edward had his troops ready for battle before dawn. The precise site of the action is still unknown, although an ongoing archaeology project being carried out by the Battle of Barnet Project may eventually supply us with some answers. What does seem likely is that the two armies were both deployed in three 'battles' or divisions in the vicinity of the Great North Road. The Lancastrians were drawn up, with Warwick and his brother the Marquess of Montagu in the centre, flanked on the left by forces under the Duke of Exeter and on the right by the troops of the Earl of Oxford. Edward's army was deployed in a similar way. The king was in command of the centre, while the flanks were led by his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and his friend Lord Hastings. Exactly who was where is a matter of debate.
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A contemporary account said there was “so exceeding a mist that neither host could plainly see the other”, and the smoke from Warwick’s guns can only have made the visibility even worse. As a result, as the two armies closed in for combat, neither was aware that they weren’t correctly aligned. As one chronicle put it: “So it was, that the one end of their battle overreached the end of the King’s battle, and so, at that end they were much mightier than was the King’s battle at the same [end] that joined with them, which was the west end… and, in likewise at the east end, the King’s battle, when they came to joining, over-reached their battle, and so distressed them there greatly…”
Outnumbered and outflanked by the Lancastrians, the troops on Edward’s left soon broke and fled down the road to Barnet, with Oxford’s men in hot pursuit. Some of the fugitives didn’t halt until they reached London, where they announced that Edward had been defeated, causing brawls to break out between the supporters of the rival factions. Oxford’s men stopped in High Barnet, where they set about both looting the village and rifling through the Yorkist baggage.
In the centre, completely unaware of what had happened, the armies battled it out with men laying about each other with swords, bills, poleaxes and maces. Farther east, where they outflanked the Lancastrians, it was the Yorkists who had the advantage, and as they pushed back their opponents, they slowly rotated through 90 degrees.
Meanwhile, Oxford had managed to persuade some of his men to leave their plundering and return to the fray. Peering through the fog, Warwick’s men saw them coming. The line of advance of Oxford’s men must have made them look like Yorkist reinforcements, and if one contemporary chronicle is to be believed, the star badges of Oxford’s men bore an unfortunate resemblance to the sun badge of Edward IV. Thinking they were about to be attacked, Warwick’s men loosed arrows into the advancing troops. Oxford’s men shot back and in the ensuing chaos, Lancastrian morale collapsed and their line began to crumble.
How did the Earl of Warwick die?
Finally, amid cries of “treason”, it broke altogether. It was now that the Lancastrian army suffered the bulk of its casualties. Among them was the Earl of Warwick himself, chased down and killed as he tried to get to his horse and ride away. His brother Montagu was also killed, along with perhaps 1,000 Lancastrians, but Oxford succeeded in escaping to Scotland.
The battle was over before noon. Edward hurriedly returned to London and, in an act of pure theatre, strode into St Paul’s Cathedral while a service was taking place and laid Warwick’s banner on the altar. He then ordered that the bodies of Warwick and Montagu be brought to the city and displayed on the cathedral steps so that there could be no rumours that they were still alive. Three days later, they were taken for burial at Bisham Abbey.
It had not been an easy victory. At least 500 Yorkists had fallen, including Lords Cromwell and Saye, and many more had been wounded, among them Edward’s brother Richard (the future Richard III). A merchant in London who witnessed the return of the Yorkist army later wrote: “Those who went out with good horses and sound bodies brought home sorry nags and bandaged faces without noses etc and wounded bodies, God have mercy on the miserable spectacle…”
But Edward’s victory and the deaths of Warwick and Montagu had broken the power of the Nevilles. Much of their land in the north would be taken over by Richard. Three weeks later, Edward completed his triumph by defeating Margaret at Tewkesbury and killing her son, the Prince of Wales. The Lancastrian cause was all but extinguished and Edward made doubly sure by having Henry VI, now a pathetic prisoner in the Tower of London, quietly put to death.
Julian Humphrys is a historian and battlefields expert
This article was first published in the June 2018 edition of BBC History Revealed
]]>A Triple Bond Broken: The Destruction of the House of Yorkhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/house-york-podcast-lecture-thomas-penn/2020-10-17T11:15:47.000ZIn a lecture he delivered at our 2019 BBC History Magazine History Weekend in Winchester, historian and author Thomas Penn explores the turbulent relationship between three brothers: Edward IV, George, Duke of Clarence and Richard III.
]]>Edward IV: champion of the Wars of the Roseshttps://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/edward-iv-champion-of-the-wars-of-the-roses/2020-03-03T16:00:46.000ZShakespeare did not have much time for Edward IV. None of his history plays are dedicated to England’s first Yorkist king. Instead, the writer split that monarch’s reign between two plays: Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III – and Edward almost disappears between the two. A shallow, fickle man, he is overshadowed first by the heroic Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, then by his own villainous younger brother. In Richard III, the second part of his reign (1471–83) is reduced to five scenes, in which the king is a bit player in all but two. Rendered sick and pliable, Edward is largely irrelevant to the course of events as he is manipulated by the Machiavellian Richard.
In part, Shakespeare’s representation reflected a Tudor perception that Henry VI was the legitimate king until 1471, but this depiction also emerged from the playwright’s instinct – which decreed that Richard III was a more dramatic subject. But though that might make compelling theatre, it is a travesty of history.
Edward’s eventful life began in Rouen on 28 April 1442. He was the eldest surviving son of Richard, Duke of York (then serving as governor and lieutenant general of the English-held duchy of Normandy) and his duchess, Cecily Neville. Edward spent much of his childhood at Ludlow, where he was brought up to succeed to the Marcher inheritance of the Mortimer family, from whom he was descended through his paternal grandmother.
Edward was just a boy when he became Earl of March, and at the age of 13 became embroiled in a civil war when his father rebelled against the Lancastrian king Henry VI, sparking the Wars of the Roses. Edward fled to Calais in the company of his cousin Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’) after the rout of Ludford Bridge in October 1459. They returned in 1460 and defeated the Lancastrians at Northampton in July. That autumn his father laid claim to the throne in place of Henry VI. Denied the crown at that time, York was instead installed as heir – but on 30 December 1460 he was killed at the battle of Wakefield.
A fair white rose
On becoming duke, Edward, who was then in the Welsh Marches, acted with precocious confidence, speed and decisiveness. Still only 17, and now fully in command, he overwhelmed the local Lancastrian forces at Mortimer’s Cross. Moving rapidly on London, and rallying en route the remnants of Warwick’s army that had been defeated at St Albans, Edward reached the capital before the main Lancastrian army.
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There, through a hastily rigged ‘election’, he made himself king on 4 March and immediately pursued his enemies north. He caught up with them in Yorkshire and routed them on the field at the battle of Towton on 29 March. Returning to Westminster in triumph he was crowned on 28 June. Thus did the teenage Edward IV transform his family’s fortunes and win the first round of the Wars of the Roses, which his father and Warwick had almost lost.
There was great hope of a new beginning. “Let us make us a gay garden... with this fair white rose... the Earl of March,” ran a verse composed when Edward first became king. Yet it took time – longer, in fact, than expected – for him to establish himself securely on the throne. The far north of England was not finally subdued until 1464, and the distant north-west of Wales held out until 1468. Edward’s deposed predecessor, the feeble Henry VI, was at large until 1465. Even after Henry was captured and incarcerated in the Tower, his son and heir, Edward of Westminster, was safe in exile with his mother, Margaret of Anjou in France, representing a focus for further resistance.
Timeline: the rise and fall of Edward IV
28 April 1442 Edward is born in Rouen, son of Richard, Duke of York and Duchess Cecily. Because he was born abroad, rumours of illegitimacy later spread. 30 December 1460 Richard is killed at the battle of Wakefield; Edward becomes duke. 4 March 1461 Edward seizes the throne, and goes on to destroy a large Lancastrian army at Towton on 29 March, finally being crowned on 28 June. 1 May 1464 Edward secretly marries Elizabeth Woodville. 1467 Edward forges an alliance with the duchy of Burgundy, leading to an open rift with Warwick. October 1470 Edward flees to Holland and Henry VI is restored by Warwick. March–May 1471 Edward recovers the throne, defeating Warwick at Barnet on 14 April and Margaret of Anjou at Tewkesbury on 4 May. Henry VI is murdered on 21 May. July–August 1475 Edward invades France and is bought off at the Treaty of Picquigny (29 August). 18 February 1478 George, Duke of Clarence, is executed in the Tower of London by means unknown. 9 April 1483 Edward IV dies at Westminster after a short illness. The new king, his 12-year-old son Edward V, is deposed three months later by the Duke of Gloucester, the young king’s uncle, who takes the throne as Richard III (pictured).
At first Edward was able to hold his own. He was, though, in the shadow of and dependent on support from the powerful Warwick – an older and experienced politician – along with the Neville family and their followers, and members of the Yorkist family affinity who had been promoted to positions of authority.
And the young Edward was his own worst enemy. He was tall and imposing, reputedly one of the most handsome princes of his age. He fought and worked hard to establish himself on the throne at the very beginning. But by 1464 he began to take his ease and enjoy himself in the typical pursuits of a young aristocrat: jousting, hunting, feasting and womanising. He had a particular penchant for young widows. A bachelor still, a marriage alliance with a European power was an important diplomatic card and was being actively pursued by Warwick. But in 1464 Edward secretly married an English widow, Elizabeth Woodville, behind Warwick’s back. Initially the ‘Kingmaker’ accepted the fait accompli, but it marked the beginning of a rift between them – a schism that intensified when the king began to empower members of the queen’s family, especially her father, Earl Rivers, as a counterweight to Warwick.
Deposition and recovery
By the end of 1467, after Edward completed a treaty with the Duke of Burgundy that had been opposed by Warwick, king and Kingmaker were at loggerheads. In 1469 Warwick moved against the man he considered beholden to him, thus launching the second round of the Wars of the Roses. In truth, a usurper would always need to be wary of powerful supporters, and Edward IV cannot be faulted for seeking to distance himself from the Nevilles and build up his own independent power. But he was deceitful in his dealings with Warwick and complacent about the consequences.
At first, in 1469, Warwick sought to control the king by force. When that did not work, the following spring he sought to replace Edward with the king’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, to whom Warwick married his eldest daughter, Isabel. Finally, when that strategy also failed, Warwick fled to France, where Louis XI brokered a reconciliation with Margaret of Anjou and the House of Lancaster.
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In October 1470 Warwick invaded England with French support and restored to the throne the hapless Henry VI. Outmanoeuvred, Edward and a handful of his closest followers fled to Holland. Edward had promised, one informed contemporary remarked, “to restore peace and prosperity, but instead there had been nothing but trouble and loss of goods”. The kingdom as a whole welcomed the restored Henry VI. The house of Lancaster was seen as the better bet, and the usurpation of the Duke of York seemed to have come to an end.
In March 1471 Edward took one last desperate gamble. Sponsored by the Duke of Burgundy, but with very few men, he landed at the mouth of the Humber. Once more a hopeless situation became a triumph. Gradually gathering support from his old loyal servants and with the timely turn of coat of his brother George, he first destroyed Warwick at the battle of Barnet on 14 April, then on 4 May defeated a Lancastrian army, newly arrived in England under Margaret of Anjou, at Tewkesbury.
In that battle the young Lancastrian Edward, Prince of Wales, was killed – perhaps murdered after the fighting had ended. His death sealed the fate of Henry VI, who was himself murdered in the Tower on the night of 21 May. All of Edward’s enemies, Nevilles and Lancastrians, had been vanquished. As a bonus, during his absence Elizabeth Woodville had given birth to his first son, the future Edward V. By such a remarkable change of fortune Edward was now not only king again but finally secure on the throne. To all intents and purposes, the Wars of the Roses – two of them, at least – were over.
Thomas More and Shakespeare both told us that Edward IV was a womaniser – but was it true?
“He is the bluntest wooer in Christendom”
It is not possible to identify all Edward IV’s sexual conquests. He had three known mistresses and at least three, possibly five, illegitimate children. His most famous mistress was Elizabeth Lambert, later known as Mistress Shore. Thomas More later joked about three harlots, “the merriest, the wiliest and the holiest”. Shore was the merriest; he did not name the other two, who were more high-born. More condoned Edward’s “fleshy wantonness”, claiming that he took his pleasure without violence and that his subjects accepted it was natural for a vigorous young man to behave as he did. Some historians have questioned whether Edward was really so promiscuous. But a contemporary noted current gossip that the king was licentious in the extreme, pursuing indiscriminately the married and unmarried, noble and lowly. He added that Edward was “most abusive” to women after he had seduced them, immediately casting them aside. Nevertheless, this contemporary was told that Edward took none by force. In contrast, the recitation of Richard III’s title to the throne stated: “For every good maiden and woman in England stood in dread to be ravished and defouled.” Though Richard carefully did not name his brother, it must have been the dead king he had in mind. Now Richard may well have wished to slander Edward, but he was in a position to know, and to exploit for his own ends, what had gone on. We may then question whether Edward IV was the harmless philanderer More took him to be.
In fear of no one
It took Edward two more years to impose his authority completely. In an effort to unite his kingdom he adopted a well-worn strategy: he embarked on a war with France. Considerable effort was expended diplomatically, politically and logistically to forge an alliance against Louis XI, to raise taxes from parliament and to raise troops and supplies. He was on schedule when, in July 1475, he launched his attack. But at the last minute he was abandoned by his chief ally, Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Rather than fight the French alone, Edward came to terms at Picquigny and accepted a generous pension (or tribute, as he called it) from Louis XI. Declaring that he had won a great victory without striking a blow, he returned home.
In truth, it was an ignominious anticlimax. But though it did nothing to unite the kingdom behind him, it does not seem to have weakened Edward’s standing. More threatening was another quarrel with Clarence, which culminated in a show trial in parliament; the duke was found guilty of treason, and in February 1478 was put to death. Yet he was guilty only of insubordination, not treason, and the judicial murder of Edward’s brother was a vicious act that shocked contemporaries. After it, as a well-placed commentator later remarked: “He could rule as he pleased throughout the whole kingdom [and] appeared to be feared by all his subjects while he himself stood in fear of no one.”
Thus Edward became untouchable. The long hoped-for peace and prosperity finally came. At the centre of a splendid court, his finances on a sounder footing, he exuded wealth, power and authority. Now with an heir and a spare, all looked well for the future of a Yorkist dynasty, Edward could indulge himself without fear of opposition.
Yet his regime remained the rule of a faction that had won power in a civil war, and was overly dependent in the regions on a favoured loyal few – especially, in the north, on his youngest (and only surviving) brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester. As the years passed, more great lords who were not part of the inner circle became alienated, especially by the manner in which the king perverted the law to favour members of his family.
Down again
From 1475 onwards Edward went to seed, and by the early 1480s the once-handsome youth had run to fat as a result of excessive eating and drinking. His unhealthy lifestyle probably brought on his early death. He was not yet 42 when, at the end of March 1483, he fell ill, probably from a stroke. He died on 9 April and was buried with great ceremony in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
His tomb was never completed. The deposition three months later of his heir, Edward V, then only 12, was completely unexpected. Had Edward IV lived for a further four years, his son would have succeeded without challenge. Moreover, no one anticipated that the threat to the succession would come from – of all people – the new king’s uncle, Richard of Gloucester, who took on the responsibility of governing the kingdom during his minority. But because of the fault lines in Edward IV’s regime, the ruthless Gloucester was able to depose his nephew and make himself King Richard III; there were just too many disaffected lords who were ready to support the usurper. Two years later, the dynasty fell.
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The Wars of the Roses, if understood as the dynastic conflict between the rival royal houses of Lancaster and York, were won by Edward IV. He was twice the comeback kid, in 1461 and 1471. His military achievement was remarkable. He won every battle he fought – six in total. His method was simple: get at the enemy as soon as possible, and engage them in hand-to-hand combat on foot. He led by example: “manly, vigorously and valiantly in the midst and strongest” of his enemies until they were overwhelmed. Yet, as one contemporary commented: “He was not cut out for war,” which he avoided if he could. By inclination he was a man of peace – a man who preferred to enjoy the pleasures of peace.
Edward’s political ability and standing as a monarch are, on the other hand, harder to assess. He has been characterised as one of the greatest of English kings, a man of profound political ability who rescued his kingdom from a shambles and left his dynasty secure on the throne. But he has also been portrayed as a mere pleasure-seeker who lacked judgment and was largely ineffective as a monarch, failing to reunite his kingdom after civil war. In truth, he was both: sometimes one, sometimes the other, and even on occasion both at the same time.
However we might envisage this enigmatic king, Edward IV’s dynasty did not survive his premature death. The plots, rebellions and battles after 1483 contested his legacy and for this he bore some responsibility. Yet this upheaval was not a continuation of the dynastic conflict between Lancaster and York, though it suited Henry VII to present himself as heir to Lancaster – healing the dynastic division by marrying Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth of York. Edward IV had ended the original Wars of the Roses in 1471; what followed his death was merely an extended coda.
AJ Pollard is a medieval historian and professoremeritus at Teeside University. His new book Edward IV: The Summer King, in the Penguin Monarchs series, is published by Allen Lane in July
This article was first published in the May 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Blood brothers: Richard III's battle with his siblingshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/blood-brothers-richard-iiis-battle-with-his-siblings-king-edward-george-family/2020-01-13T16:00:29.000ZThe House of York versus the House of Lancaster. Edward IV versus Henry VI. White rose versus red. The Wars of the Roses – the vicious conflict for the English crown that dogged the kingdom for three decades in the 15th century – has long been described as a grand dynastic struggle waged by competing families. And not without reason.
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But during this time, the war began to turn inwards: a destructive chain of rebellion, deposition, vendetta, fratricide, usurpation and regicide that originated within the house of York itself. At the heart of this unparalleled act of dynastic self-harm was the mutually destructive relationship between three royal siblings on the same side of the great dynastic divide: Edward IV, the future Richard III, and the middle brother, George, Duke of Clarence, who wanted to be king but never was. It’s impossible to understand this bloody period in English history – culminating in the rise of the Tudors – without understanding the forces that drove these three brothers apart.
The key figure in the bitter familial dispute was Edward IV, the eldest son of Richard, Duke of York, and the man who, in 1461, had seized the crown from his hapless Lancastrian foe, Henry VI. At first, Edward seemed a breath of fresh air after the chaotic reign of his predecessor. Six foot four inches in his stockinged feet, he was a magnetic, virile war-leader. One good authority thought him “the most beautiful prince my eyes ever beheld”. Edward did everything intensely: fighting, governing, deal-making and partying. He loved luxury, maintaining a sensational wardrobe and court (an important aspect of kingship, given the significance of ‘magnificence’, or outward splendour) and projected the supreme self-confidence of his motto, counforte et liesse, comfort and joy.
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But beneath this excess of energy something darker was at play. Historians have often struggled to reconcile Edward’s manifold excesses and contradictions, but perhaps something approaching an answer can be found in the deeply rooted narcissism that fuelled his compulsive behaviour: the gourmandising, drinking, rapacious womanising and addiction to pleasure that quickly caused unease among his advisors. He displayed typically narcissistic traits: a marked lack of empathy, a thin-skinned inability to accept criticism, a constant desire for affirmation, and an indecision that manifested itself at crucial moments. These negative qualities all fuelled the slow breakdown in relations within the House of York during the 1460s, in particular with his brother Clarence and with his influential cousin Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who had done so much to put him on the throne and whom he increasingly ignored.
In his later years, Edward underwent the kind of physical transformation paralleled by that of his grandson Henry VIII, with his doctors entirely failing to put the brake on his prodigious appetites. As he became more obese, his fine features began to blur with fat – “gross”, winced one commentator. The king’s physical decline was mirrored in a growing listlessness and depression: precisely the kind of enfeebling that his councillors had worried about. Increasingly, his rule became involuted, his dealings with both subjects and foreign princes contorted, obsessive and avaricious. With all this came a terrifying unpredictability. Tellingly, one commentator remarked how those outside Edward’s charmed circle began to desert the king, perhaps convinced that the game of courtiership wasn’t worth playing.
Vulnerable wealth
Edward loved his family. As a newly crowned king, that love was sharpened by his experience of the conflict of preceding months, which had seen his father, Richard, Duke of York, and Edmund – his closest brother, with whom he had grown up at the family home of Ludlow – killed by a Lancastrian army at Wakefield. In the early years of his kingship, his love was concentrated especially on his two remaining brothers, his protective fraternal impulse perhaps exaggerated by the substantial age gap between them: George was 11 to his 19, and Richard was eight.
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The two younger boys had known little but political upheaval, the backdrop to their early years the bloody antagonism between the houses of York and Lancaster. Early in 1461, after the murder of their father, they had been spirited out of the country to Flanders for their own safety. But when they returned to England in the June of that year, their lives had been swiftly transformed. With their big brother Edward now king of England, they were first and second in line to the throne. They needed endowments to reflect this new, exalted status, and Edward, flush with the confiscated wealth of his Lancastrian opponents, rewarded them accordingly.
Both George and Richard were given royal dukedoms. George received the dukedom of Clarence (which had originally belonged to the second son of Edward III, from whom the Yorkists were descended), together with a vast portfolio of lands, instantly making him one of the greatest noblemen in England. Richard, meanwhile, was handed the title of Duke of Gloucester. His landed settlement was rather more of a ragbag: his majority was some way off, and Edward had plenty of other Yorkist supporters to reward.
Circumstances had raised Edward, Clarence and Richard into a place of exceptional power and wealth. Yet the sense that they could lose everything in an instant rarely left them. This precariousness was at times overwhelming: it distorted their behaviour and decision-making, their views of the world and, ultimately, of each other.
Edward was hardly the first king to prioritise his family. Nevertheless, he was specific about his rationale for doing so. While he subscribed to the prevailing view that the “might of the land” rested in the “great lords”, he stressed that power should most of all be concentrated in the hands of his family, the “king’s blood”. The quantity of royal blood in people’s veins correlated directly to the extent that they should “of right” be “honoured and enhanced of right and power”. Edward, in other words, would build up his brothers, heaping them with possessions and riches.
But with every grant, Edward intended to bind his siblings more tightly to him: tied, he explained, not only by the “bonds of nature”, or blood, but by the “bonds of so great benefit” that he had given them. It was a way of underscoring not just their familial closeness, but the servitude that lay at the heart of their fraternal relationship. Edward would envelop George and Richard in his smothering love – but he expected their unconditional loyalty in return. In the first instance, this applied especially to George, or as he now was, the Duke of Clarence.
Clarence, for his part, would prove phenomenally disobedient. In the early years of Edward’s rule, the de facto heir to the throne grew up fast; by all accounts, he was intelligent, with a quicksilver wit. But he also had the overdeveloped sense of honour and self-entitlement characteristic of the landed classes of the age. Barely into his teens, he was already hungry for power and pricklingly sensitive about his new status – which, was, as he well knew, fragile. Once Edward married and had children, Clarence would cease to be heir to the throne. More pressingly, the exceptional wealth with which he had been endowed was vulnerable to the demands of rival claimants. Clarence was “not born to have any livelihood”: his lands had been confiscated from their previous, Lancastrian, incumbents. As soon as these noble families had made their peace with the Yorkist regime, they would be wanting those titles and lands back – and what the king gave, the king could always take away.
Fraternal knot unravels
By the late 1460s, Clarence’s sense of insecurity had deepened, fuelled by a growing resentment against Edward. One way of acquiring hereditary landed wealth – not subject to the whims and vagaries of royal favour – was to marry a rich heiress, and Clarence’s eye had alighted on one of the greatest of them all. This was Isabel Neville, the older daughter of his Yorkist cousin, the powerful and influential Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. But while the upwardly mobile family of Edward’s new queen, Elizabeth Woodville, was busy marrying into the Yorkist establishment, Edward categorically refused to let his brother’s match go ahead.
Convinced that Edward was denying him what was rightfully his, Clarence also felt excluded from the king’s inner circle, one increasingly dominated by members of the queen’s Woodville family and their affiliates. This burgeoning sense of grievance was recognised and nurtured by Clarence’s putative father-in-law, Richard, Earl of Warwick. Himself estranged from Edward, the king he had once helped put on the throne, Warwick saw Clarence as his new project and convinced him he could do better. Clarence duly married Warwick’s daughter in defiance of Edward’s wishes and, aged 19, went into open rebellion against his own brother.
It was impressionable behaviour: one contemporary, trying to explain it, shrugged that Clarence had “a mind too conscious of a daring deed”. And such behaviour had enormous consequences. In 1470 Clarence, alongside Warwick and a French-backed Lancastrian army, forced Edward into exile and restored Henry VI to the throne.
Henry rewarded Clarence by making him next in line to the throne after his son. But Clarence soon realised that the newly The three Yorkist brothers who dominated England restored Lancastrian regime couldn’t give him what he wanted. And so he made up with Edward again.
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In spring 1471, after an emotional reunion, Edward and Clarence joined forces in the battles of Barnet, where Warwick was killed, and Tewkesbury, where the house of Lancaster was all but exterminated. As one poet, triumphantly proclaiming unity between the Yorkist brothers, asserted: “The knot was knit again.”
That knot quickly began to loosen. The escalating infighting had pitched Clarence against Edward’s household men – who, whatever their fine words in public, had “other language” about Clarence’s actions in private – and against Queen Elizabeth Woodville, whose father and brother Clarence had had executed during his rebellion against his brother Edward. As a haze of paranoid mistrust settled around Clarence, a new element was added to this toxic stew: the youngest Yorkist brother, Richard.
Richard seemed to be everything that Clarence was not. Fiercely loyal, dependable and obedient, he had fled into exile with Edward in 1470, and had then fought with remarkable ferocity in the battles of 1471, belying not only his youth – he was still only 18 – but his apparent physical fragility. Even though the scoliosis that had begun to afflict him was hardly detectable, in time it doubtless contributed to the contrast, remarked on time and again by contemporaries, between Richard’s slight frame and his “great heart”.
Growing up in the shadow of the grabby, aggressive Clarence, Richard learned to keep quiet and to bide his time. Perhaps driven by a desire to order the messy reality around him, Richard prized the abstract ideals that he found in books – chivalry, justice, piety, loyalty – which could be defined and enumerated. Edward valued Richard’s fidelity and rewarded his youngest brother accordingly, setting him up as Warwick’s de facto heir in the north-east of England. For Richard, this was the great landed powerbase that he craved.
Whispering campaign
If Richard shared Clarence’s hunger for wealth and power, he also shared the predicament of how to make his vast gains permanent, to protect them for his family line in perpetuity. In this regard, Edward was prepared to indulge Richard as he had never done Clarence. He allowed Richard to marry Warwick’s younger daughter, Anne, which in turn enabled his younger brother to consolidate his hold on the late earl’s lands, and to move in on Clarence’s share of the Warwick estates, inherited through his wife, Isabel.
All of this served to fuel Clarence’s persecution complex, which, despite the brothers’ reconciliation in 1471, had never really gone away. By 1477, the whispering campaign against him at court had grown intense; this, allied to his enduring inability to control his tongue and a vicious lashing-out that resulted in the judicial execution of some of Clarence’s former servants, helped convince a mistrustful Edward that his brother was still trying to usurp his throne. In early 1478, the unthinkable happened. In a rigged trial, Clarence was found guilty of treason, condemned to death by his brother the king, and executed in the privacy of the Tower.
Throughout all this Richard kept quiet, and slowly made himself indispensable to Edward. He was also persuasive, encouraging the king to become embroiled in a pointless war against Scotland. Edward, meanwhile, fed his brother’s military aspirations, appointing him leader of his army with the promise that Richard could keep whatever territory he conquered north of the border. So when, in 1483, Edward died leaving a 12-year-old heir, Richard considered himself the natural candidate to run the country as protector until the boy-king came of age.
Richard’s seizure of power was driven by the peculiarly corrosive mix of vulnerability, self-serving opportunism and conviction that had come to characterise the politics of the age. In the newly precarious world that followed Edward’s death, Richard believed that the Woodvilles were out to get him; he also took a dim view of the late king’s failure to live up to the ideals of kingship. Edward, as Richard saw it, had sunk into a pit of depravity and vice, and the country had suffered. The all-too-convenient revelation that Edward’s marriage had been invalid, and that his sons were bastards, allowed Richard to present himself as the only true-blooded alternative.
He was a keen student of kingship and was convinced that he knew what it took to rule. He would be the ideal king: expansive, open-handed and just. At home, he would bring peace, reimpose the rule of law and champion the poor and downtrodden; abroad, he would show himself the war-leader that Edward had failed to be. These ideals swiftly disintegrated on contact with the realities of kingship.
A shattering death
Richard’s binary view of the world – one in which he was on the side of “virtue” and his enemies of “vice” – had served him well on the battlefield and as his brother’s right-hand man. As king, it served him poorly. Inflexible and impulsive, his inability to live up to the ideals he had so publicly proclaimed looked to many like hypocrisy and a profound failure in kingship. He was further handicapped by the shattering death of his son and heir, Edward (who succumbed as a child to an unspecified illness), and by his increasing reliance on a small cabal of followers. The notorious verse pinned to the door of St Paul’s Cathedral in the summer of 1484 – “The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog/Rule all England under a hog”, a reference to three of Richard’s closest advisors and Richard’s boar badge – wasn’t a gratuitous insult: it went to the heart of what people felt had gone so quickly wrong with his regime.
Most of all, Richard was unable to control the narrative around the fate of the princes, Edward IV’s two sons, who he had declared illegitimate and had locked in the Tower of London. In a sense, what Richard had or hadn’t done was irrelevant: it was what people believed that mattered – and “the people”, as one chronicler wrote, “laid the blame only on him”. It was this, ultimately, that drove Yorkists loyal to Edward IV and the princes to find an alternative figurehead in Henry Tudor, an exiled Lancastrian with the merest smattering of royal blood – itself an astonishing comment on Richard’s rule.
Richard died as he had lived. On the eve of Bosworth, he saw the coming battle as a nihilistic encounter. If victory fell to him, he would “ruin” Tudor and his followers; after all, he pronounced, Tudor would do “exactly the same” to Richard and his men if he lost.
Few subscribed to this vision of total destruction; indeed, many of Richard’s declared supporters sat out the battle on the sidelines. Nevertheless, people did see Bosworth as a settling of scores, not between the houses of York and Lancaster, but between two factions of the house of York: Richard and his supporters against Yorkists faithful to Edward IV and his line. But if, as one commentator remarked after the event, it was “King Edward’s sons whose cause, above all, was avenged in this battle”, the real winner was another king entirely: Henry Tudor.
The three Yorkist brothers who dominated England
Edward IV
Family
Married to Elizabeth Woodville; children included Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury (the princes in the Tower), and Elizabeth of York, who would go on to marry Henry VII.
Strengths
He was hugely charismatic, exuding strength, authority and self-confidence.
Weaknesses
A narcissist, his behaviour became increasingly compulsive. His prodigious appetites resulted in ballooning weight later in life.
Downfall
Edward died of an unspecified illness – possibly typhoid or pneumonia – in April 1483. His sudden death, aged 40, shocked the nation.
George, Duke of Clarence
Family
George was married to Isabel Neville, older daughter of the powerful magnate Richard, Earl of Warwick. Henry VII regarded the couple’s oldest son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, as a threat and had him executed in 1499.
Strengths
He was intelligent and quick-witted.
Weaknesses
George’s intelligence was matched by a sense of self-entitlement and a wilful independence of mind – characteristics that, in his relationship with his brother Edward, would cost him dear.
Downfall
Edward IV lost patience with his recalcitrant brother in 1478 and ordered his execution in the Tower of London.
Richard III
Family
Richard married Anne Neville, younger daughter of the Earl of Warwick. He had one legitimate son, Edward of Middleham, who died as a child.
Strengths
Loyal, dependable, idealistic and brave, he gained a formidable reputation as a soldier in the 1471 battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury.
Weaknesses
His inability to practise the kingly ideals he preached – as well as a failure to control the narrative surrounding the fate of the princes in the Tower – led ultimately to his downfall.
Downfall
His killing at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 ushered in Henry VII, the first of the Tudors.
Thomas Penn is a historian and author, whose latest book, The Brothers York: An English Tragedy, (Allen Lane, 2019)
This article was first published in the November 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
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