1471 - the survivors

The Tewkesbury Battlefield Society today looks at the fate over coming months and years of those who had survived the campaign of spring 1471:

Tying up loose ends The campaign recounted by the ‘Arrivall’ lasted 83 dramatic days. At the end of the narrative there were unfinished stories. The lives of King Edward IV and Richard Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III, are well documented, but others aren’t. These few sentences are to tie up some of the loose ends. These are in no particular order.  Thomas Neville, the Bastard of Fauconberg, seems not to have kept to the terms of his pardon. Details are unclear, but in September 1471 a misdemeanour in the north of England led to his execution. His head was brought back to London, to be displayed on London Bridge, the scene of his recent besieging. It was ordered that he was displayed ‘looking to Kentward’ Jasper Tudor was hunted down in Pembroke, but accompanied by his young nephew Henry he escaped from Tenby by ship. He was blown ashore in Brittany where he and Henry were placed under a loose arrest. In 1485, the pair returned, landing at Milford and fought for the throne at Bosworth. Henry was crowned king. Jasper spent his remaining years in quiet comfort, dying in December 1495. John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a committed Lancastrian, who was a commander in Warwick’s army which was defeated at Barnet fled to France after the battle. He returned two years later and was besieged on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. Captured and imprisoned he escaped, fled to France again and returned with Henry Tudor.  After the victory at Bosworth, he fought Henry VII’s rebels for him, including last, the repression of the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in 1497. In 1475, King Edward invaded France with an army of 11,000 men. He had planned on support from the Dukes of Burgundy, Brittany and St Pol but was betrayed and let down badly by all three. His only option was peace, and one of the outcomes of the Treaty of Picquigny was that Queen Margaret was ransomed to King Louis for 50,000 crowns and returned to France. To discharge her debt she was forced to sign over her inheritance. When her father died, Louis evicted her and claimed her father’s lands. She died penniless on 25 August1482 and is buried in Angers Cathedral. King Henry’s burial in Chertsey made it a place of pilgrimage, as was Prince Edward’s at Tewkesbury. This annoyed King Edward, who banned the practice. In 1484, King Richard had King Henry reinterred in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Henry VII made attempts to have him beatified and moved again, to Westminster Abbey but this came to naught and he remains at Windsor. George, Duke of Clarence continued to be false and fleeting, and a thorn in his brother’s side. From confessions obtained from one of his retainers by torture he was tried for treason and executed, allegedly by drowning in a butt of malmsey wine. Charles, Duke of Burgundy was impetuous to the end. He made more enemies than he could handle, and started a very brutal campaign against the Duke of Lorraine and the Swiss. Completely out-manoeuvred, he was killed at the battle of Nancy, fought in freezing conditions on 5 January 1477.     Louis XI died in 1483, having overseen the fall of France’s many independent feudal Lords, and the creation of a strong nation. His unconventional methods and unusual personality hadn’t made him friends, though. John Paston, wounded at Barnet and pardoned went home to Norfolk and fought through the courts, with his family, for what he believed was his. Once the claims of the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk had been defeated he settled down to the life of a squire. By good fortune, his Lancastrian leanings meant that he didn’t fight at Bosworth and his family flourished as country gentlemen and courtiers under the Tudors. Sir Henry Vernon seems to have had a charmed life. Ignoring numerous calls to arms, he was forgiven by King Edward and became an Esquire to the Body to Edward and then King Richard. Avoiding Bosworth, he transitioned to the Tudors, becoming the Controller of the household of the new king's heir, Prince Arthur. He died quietly of old age.