Chaos in England, 1493

[Basileus Giorgios]

A bit of a very rough TL idea I'd never write, but thought might be a promising springboard for discussion.

One of the most interesting little titbits I read in The Hollow Crown by Dan Jones is that in 1482, there was a serious proposal by the regime of Edward IV to return the last Lancastrian claimant, Henry Tudor, to England. Henry would be made, at a stroke, England's greatest landowner, and presumably would have been married into the royal family to keep him loyal, given Edward's many daughters. Of course, the troubles of OTL 1483 put a stop to this.

So, I wondered to myself, what if Edward IV had lived a few more years? And I came up with this scenario that I thought was quite fun...

In this TL, Edward IV eventually expires in 1488, with the throne passing relatively smoothly to his seventeen year old heir, Edward V. Edward proves to be a military tyro and launches two heroic and successful (well, in the short term) campaigns against the French. He is married in 1491, and a daughter, Elizabeth, is born the following year. In 1493, the Scots invade England with French backing and the dashing young King Edward marches north to confront them. He is mortally wounded in battle, however, and dies in York. His pregnant wife is shocked into miscarrying her second child, a son, and the apparent heir to the throne is a girl a little short of one year old.

There are now numerous potential Regents. Most notably, these include:

- The deceased king's uncle, Richard of Gloucester, still only forty one and a vigorous and wily commander with two sons of his own, the elder of whom is the legendary Edward of Middleham, nineteen years old and already a hero of the French wars.
- The king's younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, a relatively quiet and pious young man, but well liked by the commons and the Church, and as yet unmarried.
- The king's brother-in-law, Henry Tudor of Richmond, married to Princess Cecily of York and with three young children. The last claimant to the House of Lancaster and perhaps the best-connected and richest landowner in England.

So... anyone any thoughts on how this could play out?

 

[RousseauX]

This scenario would be missing way too much information to make an accurate guess.

Mostly, what happens the Yorkists like Hastings or Buckingham who were executed by Richard OTL? How well do the Woodsvilles accumulate power TTL given another 10 years? Do we assume the distribution of key territories (like the Percies in the north) remain as OTL 1483 in the intervening period?

My guts say your scenario comes down to a power struggle between the Woodsvilles and Gloucester, but who wins out probably depends on how things played out in court politics between 1483 and 1493.

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

This scenario would be missing way too much information to make an accurate guess.

Mostly, what happens the Yorkists like Hastings or Buckingham who were executed by Richard OTL? How well do the Woodsvilles accumulate power TTL given another 10 years? Do we assume the distribution of key territories (like the Percies in the north) remain as OTL 1483 in the intervening period?

My guts say your scenario comes down to a power struggle between the Woodsvilles and Gloucester, but who wins out probably depends on how things played out in court politics between 1483 and 1493.

This is the stuff I thought a good discussion would cover. It's not a period I know a lot about at all, but I'm eager to learn more, so I was hoping a thread like this would attract some knowledgeable folks to give their opinions and build on the initial idea.

 

[LSCatilina]

As we discussed, I think campaigning against France would be more risky than IOTL.

Henry Tudor beneficied from Valois having supported a pretender against him, and beneficing then of a casus belli with a clear objective : make France pay for the troubles, litterally.

Edward V may turn as did the late feudal high nobility (as in, full of knighthood idealisation), but Charles VIII was as well the prototype of the ambitious young king. Attacking for the lulz, critically when searching a diplomatical stability with his neighbours in order to captate the Angevine inheritency may be not the wisest move.

Hit-and-run campaigns are probably safe, but wouldn't be really good grounds for "glorious king" tropes : any prolonged warfare may as well end with an earlier reconquest of the Pale of Calais.

A war against Scots, with some raids on France may do it, but I think Edward V may do better on Scotland.

Anyway.

Richard of Gloucester is probably the most well placed : skills, political influence, legitimacy. With the bonus of being less of a threat.

Richard of Shrewsbury may be an alternative choice, but your description doesn't scream for political activism and initiative.

Henry Tudor would be, for me, out of question. Too suspect of being a troublesome element to be considered as a political tutor for the king.
Furthermore, his marriage with a York daughter may be butterflied there. The IOTL union with Elizabeth was only proposed with Richard III takeover.

Among the non-quoted : what about Henry Stafford and William Hastings? If it goes roughly as IOTL, they may display some loyalty to Edward V and his brother and beneficy from proximity with the queen-mother. Not as Lord regent, of course, but with an important political power.
Speaking about it, wouldn't she be possibly alive ITTL, with a more quiet life and longer close to royal politics? She could have an important role in this situation.

 

[jefferypendragon]

At that time in history Richard of Shrewsbury would of been declared king immediately after his brothers death not Edward V's infant daughter declared queen regnant.

At this time the customary law of royal succession only allows male monarch's while allowing succession through a female line.

Edward V would of had no reason to try and designate his daughter heir by Act of Parliament so... her sons would have a strong claim but not her.

 

[duke of bedford]

Have Edward V married to Joanna "la loca", throw the Spanish succession into the mix.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

There were strong suspicions that this "rehabilitation" of Henry Tudor (including talk of a marriage match to Elizabeth of York--little did they know...) was a ploy to get him close enough so that he could be eliminated. We know the script for how such a thing would likely happen: there'd be the discovery of a dastardly plot, a show trial, and an execution, and after that no more Lancastrian threat.

And the thing is, no matter how this plays out that's what makes the most sense when it comes to thinking of this as a strategy. From Edward's view, it secures the succession for his children. From Henry's view, no way is any inducement to go back to England sufficient to counterbalance the huge risk that he's going to be quietly done away with, Henry VI-style, or worse.

Now, the wider premise of the timeline is sound without the Henry Tudor element.

However you define it, and whatever moral judgment you place on what happened to the English throne in the three years after Edward IV's death in OTL,it is dynastically an own goal. Edward was a well-regarded enough king in England that if there was no intra-York bloodletting on the occasion of his death the Tudors would have had no support to make their play. As the Yorkist hold on England strengthens, they just become the Lancastrian equivalent to the de la Poles, occasionally significant in international diplomatic gameplay but never a real threat, until eventually they die out and it's all very sad. (If you're me.)

So I would just leave Henry Tudor out of it. Or have him participate in the Scottish invasion in a way similar to Perkin Warbeck, only competent. And maybe, if I wanted to make really sure Uncle Gloucester doesn't get up to any of his shenanigans, I'd let Edward IV live until 1490 so that a regency isn't even at all technically necessary.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Oh, and something you need to think about: if you still have Gloucester on one side and the Woodvilles and Greys on the other, because none of these players on the scene have eliminated each other the way they did in 1482-1485, that rivalry is still going to be expressing itself in feuding and squabbling and probably some degree of violence.

Attendant upon this will be a crucial psychological difference in the country. That last round of violence really did take a country that was already exhausted and dispirited and pushed it even further, so that I think at the end there was a premium placed on peace and quiet. If you don't have the crescendo of violence in the reign of Richard III, with Buckingham's rebellion and Henry Tudor's invasion, you're going to see people acting in a different way than they did in our time line. They are going to be much more willing to pursue the vendettas just as they did before. There's going to be the continued risk of uprisings. People might even still try some nonsense with the Earl of Warwick.

Certainly, your Edward V is not going to just arrive on the scene and be taken seriously by all these older, shrewder, more experienced persons just because he's the king. There would be a bit of "Go play boy, we'll call you when we need you." Now, how he responds to that is up to you and is going to be demonstrative of the character you want to create. But that is really the situation he will find, I think. There's going to be a lot of him riding herd on troublemakers of the previous generation ("Mother! Uncle! Behave!"), who will have had no reason to learn their lessons, and every reason to think they're the ones who should really be in charge.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

One final note. This, like all surviving House of York timelines, can really throw into starker relief what is not necessarily clear from actual history.

So, one of the many many many bothersome things about the White Queen TV show was that when Henry shows up at Milfordhaven he's wholesome, very English and very boyband, rather than the scrawny, conniving French-speaker we know and love. It's important that Henry received his political education in the courts of France, and it's a well-known fact that he wanted to rule England as a French king does France. This isn't some passing or insignificant detail. From the courts of Brittany and France in the late fifteenth century England would have had to have seemed like the way we think of Iraq or Syria, plus crossbows.

From that perspective, Henry had an analysis of the English problem, which was the ability of the major nobles to use their affinities to turn the kingdom into a giant casino in which they would compete two or three times every generation, at huge cost to the country. What Henry does after he takes power is to whittle away at the foundations of that system, restricting the nobles' power to maintain their private armies, and then developing a whole legal architecture to sap their wealth and restrict their ability to use it against him, even if it meant making sure a given nobleman was legally required to enter into his presence once per day. It was a system based on a threat, and like any such system it only worked to the extent people believed he was willing to make good on it.

It's almost like the dialogue between Henry and the nobility of England proceeded thusly:

"But my lord, how shall I know if I displease you?"
"By your own arterial spray."

(In fact, this exposes a problem with Thomas Penn's Winter King hypothesis: rather than thinking of the latter reign of Henry VII as a departure from the first half, if you look at the broad arc of Henry's career, it makes perfect sense to think of the England of the cowed and terrified nobility of 1508 as the end-stage of a process that would have been instigated by the young man of 1485, brought up on the horror stories of Towton and Barnet and the rest.)

But my point with respect to this timeline idea is this: Henry VII's reign is the story of England's monarchy finally putting the rowdy nobles to bed without their supper. This happens because Henry, growing up outside of England and its dysfunctional politics, has a structural analysis more or less of how things came to be in such a dreadful state.

So now instead of that we have York: The Next Generation. Which promises to be really interesting. But one of the problems that has to be answered is whether Edward V and his successors deal with the structural problem of the over-powerful nobility. Moreover, if he comes of age within the system rather than outside it, does he have an understanding of the nature of the problem? Does he have the skill and imagination to handle it? And perhaps most interestingly, if defanging the nobility involves nastiness with Dear Uncle et fils, might things still get rocky inside the royal house?

 

[Ladymadchan]

My money is on Richard of Shrewsbury becoming King.

If Henry Tudor is lucky, he gets to return to England and inherit his mother's considerable estates. Realistically if he ends up marrying York girl, it isn't going to be Elizabeth of York, but one of the younger girls.

 

[mcdnab]

Few thoughts:
1) Assuming a longer living Edward IV - then undoubtedly he is succeeded by his eldest son in say the late 1480s without problem.
2) Edward IV lives longer then he might achieve at least one or two of his marital ambitions in regard his children - the dumping of his French alliance and the 1483 death of Louis means war with France might be more likely - particularly as Edward was keen on marrying his heir to Anne of Brittany. (Foreign marital alliances make any attempt at a coup harder but not impossible) However in the past Edward was willing to be bought off by the French - so say some form of peace is made to enable Charles to pursue his Italian ambitions.
3) War with Scotland was on and off in the early 1480s and likely to continue as both Edward and Gloucester involved themselves in James III's difficulties with his nobles and brother - if all goes to plan though James IV becomes King at an early age - and it isn't unlikely that he accepts an unpopular English marriage to buy off Edward.
4) The Woodville family don't exist as a faction - most of Elizabeth of York's sisters were married to Yorkist peers who already supported Edward (only Buckingham was the exception to that and they certainly didn't act in concert as a faction), her eldest brother is a main player and was well regarded but is not particularly well endowed financially and showed little personal ambition to improve his estates, her son is close to his step father and a longer Edward IV means Dorset's heir is probably married to the King's niece Anne St Leger before his uncle's death and controls the Holland holdings in the South West increasing his influence and power.
5) You suggest some kind of dynastic squabble if your Edward V dies without a clear heir - if he does then there is no real issue - In OTL Gloucester's coup was largely down to him seizing an opportunity in a power vacuum. In your time line - the King is survived by an adult brother who is an enormously wealthy landowner who is in my view going to be unchallengeable as either regent for his infant niece or as king in his own right with at least one or two of his sisters married to powerful foreign monarchs or their heirs (Anne had been intended for Philip the Fair, Catherine for Juan of Aragon and Castile for example it is not inconceivable that in a row with the French and searching for equally anti-french alliances that Elizabeth or Cecily is married to the widowed Maximillian)
6) Gloucester is also likely to have dynastic problems of his own and be weaker in this tl - there is no reason to think that if his brother survives his wife and son won't still die on schedule - If Anne survives but the son still dies then he might be childless and with a parcel of Neville's champing at the bit to regain their properties. There was also little antagonism between him and the Queen and her family prior to Edward IV's death he has no great motive in this timeline to move against his brother's children.
7) Buckingham is likely to still be a resentful individual as he was deprived of the influence his family traditionally held in Wales and the borders for example (due to the Prince of Wales' council) he is still going to be agitating for the de Bohun inheritance which Edward kept. However it is debateable whether he would have enough guts or support for a revolt and to succeed.
8) Henry Tudor is in my view far more likely to remain in exile - Edward IV had no desire to bring him home he was only a minor threat and the only people who regarded his claim seriously were his mother, his uncle and himself. If Edward has been at war with France in the 1480s then he is more likely to have been handed over by the French as part of a peace deal, or killed. If by some chance a deal was struck then Edward risks alienating Margaret Beaufort's third husband (who with her son under attainder might have hoped to hold on to some of her lands after her death) Lord Stanley. Assuming he does return home - then given his mother outlived him in OTL there is no guarantee that he is doing anything but living in relative poverty waiting for his inheritance and trying to protect it from her husband and others).
9) Regarding the comparisons between the Henrician period and the Yorkist period - Henry VII's advantages were that most of the great magnates were gone or were minors it was far easier for him to keep them in their place through a range of measures and to ensure the strength of the crown, to many his policies went further but were a continuation of Edward IV's policy of increasing the reliance of nobles and gentry on his (or the monarch's) patronage, he also used the gentleman of his household far more in terms of controlling parts of the country, almost all of Edward's great magnates (Gloucester, Clarence until his death, Dorset, Buckingham, Pembroke, Exeter etc) were his creatures and very reliant on his favour and support.

 

[Dr. Waterhouse]

Few thoughts:

2) Edward IV lives longer then he might achieve at least one or two of his marital ambitions in regard his children - the dumping of his French alliance and the 1483 death of Louis means war with France might be more likely - particularly as Edward was keen on marrying his heir to Anne of Brittany.

Well, with respect to Anne of Brittany, Edward V can just take a number, because the Habsburgs and Valois were avidly trying to pursue that match too. Moreover, given the French experience with English monarchs as vassals, it's safe to assume that if there was a serious chance of an Anglo-Breton match forestalling that would become the chief objective of France, easily outweighing any thought of Milan or Naples. Now, Margaret of York's presence in Mechelen obviously makes a Anglo-Habsburg alliance against France more of a possibility, but damn, as Henry VIII discovers in OTL very quickly, Maximilian is a very fickle and expensive ally to have.

I say if there's serious pursuit of a Breton strategy on the part of the English we're getting a full-scale War of the Breton Succession, far more involved and nasty than Henry VII's little adventure in OTL. It sounds cool, and would be fascinating.

The one thing not to forget in imagining how that plays out is the agency of Anne herself. Her ideal result is any in which Brittany is not absorbed into the crown lands of a monarchy. So the winner of the small matter of her consent to a marriage might be the sovereign who does not want to marry her himself. For instance Edward might throw at her a certain cantankerous, recently widowed uncle with military skill, which would have the added benefit of keeping him out of the young king's flowing blonde hair.

 

[mcdnab]

Well the match of Edward Prince of Wales and Anne of Brittany had found favour with Francis of Brittany but you are right France was going to do all in its power to prevent it. But it is worth remembering that it took military action by France to ensure the match with Charles went ahead and the lady herself would spend the rest of her life trying to ensure Brittany's independence to the extent of trying to leave it to her second daughter rather than Claude (wife of Francis I of France).
The French have serious problems in the mid 1480s with the French regent in conflict with Orleans and with Francis of Brittany. I can see a deal between Brittany and England in return for military support being possible but whether it actually results in a wedding is of course questionable.
Maximilian is one of many grooms suggested for Anne and certainly would give him revenge on the French for the Treaty of Arras - Charles of France of course is actually betrothed to Margaret of Austria at this period and only dumped her when Anne was under French control - but supporting England and instead marrying say Elizabeth or Cecily of York (who are at least of age) with the support of his step mother in law would tie England/Burgundy in alliance against a relatively weak France with a young King more interested in making good in Italy.
Given Edward IV's record on being bought off though and the fact he was seriously sick of fighting might result in a different deal at the end - marrying Anne to Richard of Shrewsbury for example would guarantee Breton independence from both England and France and might make a short-term solution to both.

 

[tallthinkev]

Wars that are just too complicated.

Totally the wrong place to post what I had posted.