Challenge for a Throne

By Robert Silverberg

Read the real life Game of Thrones, the basis George R.R. Martin says he used for the GoT series... A time full of amazing intrigue, battles, incredible characters, and lots of, er, death.

In the fifteenth century, two families of royal descent, the Houses of York and Lancaster, clashed in an epic series of civil wars to win and control the throne of England.

Fantasy & Science Fiction Grandmaster Robert Silverberg brings the personalities, politics, and events of this complex and exciting period to vivid and relevant life, with two dozen illustrations by noted SF author and artist Judith Ann Lawrence (Judy Blish).

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463732564

Robert Silverberg

<p>Robert Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and the prestigious <em>Prix Apollo.</em> He is the author of more than one hundred science fiction and fantasy novels -- including the best-selling Lord Valentine trilogy and the classics <em>Dying Inside</em> and <em>A Time of Changes</em> -- and more than sixty nonfiction works. Among the sixty-plus anthologies he has edited are <em>Legends</em> and <em>Far Horizons,</em> which contain original short stories set in the most popular universe of Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, and virtually every other bestselling fantasy and SF writer today. Mr. Silverberg's Majipoor Cycle, set on perhaps the grandest and greatest world ever imagined, is considered one of the jewels in the crown of speculative fiction.</p>

Book preview

CHALLENGE FOR A THRONE

by

ROBERT SILVERBERG

Illustrated by Judith Ann Lawrence

Produced by ReAnimus Press

Other books by Robert Silverberg:

The Gate of Worlds

Conquerors from the Darkness

Time of the Great Freeze

Enter a Soldier. Later: Another

The Longest Way Home

The Alien Years

Tower of Glass

Hot Sky at Midnight

The Queen of Springtime

Shadrach in the Furnace

The Stochastic Man

Thorns

Kingdoms of the Wall

Scientists and Scoundrels

1066

The Crusades

The Pueblo Revolt

The New Atlantis

The Day the Sun Stood Still

Triax

Three for Tomorrow

Three Trips in Time and Space

© 2019, 1967 by Robert Silverberg. All rights reserved.

https://ReAnimus.com/store?author=robertsilverberg

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v.1907211647

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations

Genealogical Tables

Epigraph

I - Of Kings and Kingdoms

II - The Royal Cousins

III - The Downfall of a King

IV - Lancaster—Glory and Decline

V - The Saintly King

VI - The Rise of York

VII - Challenge for a Throne

VIII - The Wars of the Roses

IX - King Edward IV

X - The House of York Triumphant

XI - A Tale of Two Kings

XII - The Destruction of Lancaster

XIII - King Richard III

XIV - Bosworth Field

Bibliography

Original About the Author

About the Artist

About the Author

List of Maps and Illustrations

Edward the Black Prince, taken from the effigy on his tomb at Westminster Abbey

The Duke of Mowbray and Henry of Bolingbroke prepare to duel

Richard II being taken to Pontefract

Prince Hal and Henry IV, taken from paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, London

Henry V at Agincourt

Map of Europe

Joan of Arc identifies the Dauphin

Cardinal Beaufort

The Duchess of Gloucester

Henry VI, taken from a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London; and Margaret of Anjou, taken from a medal struck in 1463 by Pietro da Milano, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The death of Suffolk

Margaret shows Henry VI his son

Map of England in the fifteenth century

Yorkist troops desert - [more]

Richard of York acquires a paper crown

Yorkist lights a handgun

The Battle of Towton

The court of Edward IV

Elizabeth Woodville, taken from a painting at Windsor Castle

Margaret of Anjou, her son Edward, Louis XI, and the Duke of Warwick

Edward IV, taken from a painting at Windsor Castle; and the Duke of Clarence, taken from a manuscript, probably contemporary

Map showing the battle at Barnet [early] - [and late]

The Duke of Somerset and Lord Wenlock

Edward IV parleying with Louis XI

Henry Tudor, taken from a painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London; and Rhys ap Thomas

The Tudor Rose

Genealogical Tables

The descendants of Edward III

The Lancastrian Line

The Yorkist Claim

The Tudor Claim

Of comfort no man speak:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:

And yet not so—for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our land, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s,

And nothing can we call our own but death,

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos’d,

Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court....

           —Shakespeare: Richard II, Act III, Scene II

I

It was a war of brother against brother, of cousin against cousin, a cycle of blood and death that lasted nearly a century. Three crowned kings died by violence; earls and dukes and lords perished like cattle in a slaughterhouse. It was a murderous time, a dangerous time to be alive and an Englishman. For England it was a time of testing. An uncertain nation, divided against itself, entered that crucible of blood; and when the last battle was fought, the last act of villainy performed, a different kind of nation emerged. Out of the terrible English civil wars of the fifteenth century came the splendid, mighty England of the sixteenth.

We call those wars the Wars of the Roses. No one who fought in them would have recognized them by that name. It was coined by Sir Walter Scott in a novel published in 1829, Anne of Geierstein. The roses were real enough, symbols of the two great families of Lancaster and York that fought for England’s throne. The red rose was the rose of Lancaster; the white, the rose of York. But Lancaster and York had many badges other than their roses, and the warrior of 1471, say, did not think of himself as fighting a war of roses. He was fighting a war of men, a war of rival kings. The roses of Lancaster and York had sharp thorns, and pricked deeply into the flesh, bringing forth rivers of blood. Sir Walter Scott has given us a pretty name for a brutal, ugly, dreadful century of conflict.

If it takes fighting to make a war, then the Wars of the Roses began in 1455 and ended in 1471. But a war sends echoes rumbling through time in two directions; what erupted in 1455 had been smoldering since 1399, and what was extinguished in 1471 remained aglow until 1485. For those who lived at that time, the shape of events was unclear and tangled, a muddled twisting and turning of the course of power. Now one family ruled, now another, and no man could predict fate’s next grim prank. But the passing of centuries gives a pattern to long-ago happenings. It draws together the great moments and erases the dull years between them, so that we see only the climaxes, the highlights. Thus we receive impressions that are too simple, though not false. It seems to us that the powerful forces of fate must have been at work, balancing injustice with injustice, crime with crime, usurpation with usurpation, so that the rhythm of history would come out cleanly and symmetrically.

To us the pattern of the Wars of the Roses is particularly well balanced. At the beginning, a king was pushed from his throne and a usurper took his place. After many years of troubled rule, the usurper’s family was thrust aside by a second line of usurpers, who claimed with some justice to be the rightful kings. Then this second line turned on itself in a ghastly torrent of blood; and out of the western mists came a man of royal blood to overthrow the last of the false kings and give England a new dynasty of greatness.

Such is the broad outline of that century of the sword. Richard II’s downfall gave the throne of England to the Lancastrian kings, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI. Then Lancaster was put aside by York: Edward IV ruled, and after him came his dark-souled brother, Richard III, taking the rightful place of the boy who should have been King Edward V. Finally, Henry VII, an exile returning to his native land, restored order, united by marriage the warring houses, and laid the foundations for England’s greatness; his descendants have worn the royal crown to this day.

As we will see, the real story is something more than a shuttling succession of Richards, Henrys, and Edwards. Each change of dynasty was nothing less than a revolution; and nations are shaped by their revolutions. The issues were complex, the questions raised were difficult to answer, and nothing in the story is quite what it seems to be at first glance. There are few heroes and few villains. The neat pattern we impose on events proves, upon close examination, not to be so neat.

To understand any of it, we must begin somewhat earlier than the beginning....

England has always been a land set apart from the rest of Europe, not merely by design of geography, but by something more subtle. England stands at the rim of the continent, cut off by miles of water from the feuds and migrations of Europe. Over thousands of years, shifting groups of men and women crossed those miles of water, putting their own distinct stamp on the life of the island.

The names of the earliest comers are lost in time; all that remains are the mounds in which they buried their dead, and the ruins of the great prehistoric temples, like Stonehenge. By Julius Caesar’s day, two thousand years ago, the island was held by a people called the Britons. Then the conquering Romans came and turned the island of the Britons into the province of Britannia, or Britain. The Romans ruled Britannia for four centuries. After they departed, about A.D. 450, tribesmen out of Germany invaded the land. These barbarians—the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes—drove the Britons beyond the mountains, into the regions we call Wales and Scotland. What had been called Britain now came to be known as Angle-land, or simply England.

Under the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, England became a rich and pleasant land. At first each little district in Anglo-Saxon England had its own tribal chieftain, who called himself a king; but in time one king established himself as supreme over all the others. Hardly had this royal dynasty grown secure on the throne, though, than fierce new invaders came—Viking pirates out of Denmark. The Danes raided England from 835 on, taking possession of large sections of it. In the year 1013 the Danish king made himself King of England.

But the Danes were overthrown and briefly men of Anglo-Saxon blood ruled England again—until that memorable year of 1066, when William, Duke of Normandy, came to conquer and reign. The blood of the Vikings flowed in the veins of William and his Normans, but they were French in language and French in culture. They shattered the power of the old Anglo-Saxon nobility and carved up England to please themselves. William—now King William I of England—kept the best land for himself and his family, but rewarded his loyal followers with fine estates.

Thus a new ruling class was grafted onto the English stock. The peasants and commoners of the towns were Anglo-Saxons, often with a mixture of Danish blood; but the nobles were the sons of the conquerors. They were the masters, these French-speaking ex-Normans. Gradually, as the centuries passed, they blended into the population they had conquered. But there was always a wide gulf separating the proud nobles—who spent their time feasting, hunting, or making war—from the men who tilled the soil and kept the shops.

William the Conqueror gave England a form of government quite different from that of most other lands. France, for instance, was ruled by a king; but France had many dukes who controlled whole provinces that were virtually kingdoms within the kingdom. Sometimes these local dukes had more power than the king himself. William, in fact, had been just such a mighty duke in France, and he wanted no local rulers of this sort to plague him now that he had won a country of his own. He took good care to scatter the estates of his earls and barons, giving them strips of territory here and there but not letting any of them gain power over a single great domain.

In William’s England the king was supreme. He made the laws and the important decisions; he could create earls, and he could strip them of their lands; he led troops personally in battle; he was the greatest landowner in the kingdom. Surrounding the king were chosen advisers, but he could listen to them or not, as he wished. Most important, the throne belonged to the king’s family; it was a piece of property that could be handed down from father to son.

William intended that his direct descendants should rule England forever.

And so it has happened. The present royal family of England can trace its ancestry back to King William I. But there have been many zigs and zags in that ancestral line over the nine centuries since William conquered England.

When King William died, his son William Rufus became William II. William II met a mysterious death after ruling for thirteen years, and since he had no children, he was succeeded by his younger brother, Henry.

King Henry’s son, Prince William, died before Henry did. That created a problem. The only other direct heir to the throne was King Henry’s daughter Matilda. However, according to the custom of the day, a daughter could inherit her father’s property but not his title. Matilda could not become Queen of England. Who would rule?

William the Conqueror had not anticipated such a problem. He had assumed that there would always be plenty of sons in his family, so that the crown could descend from generation to generation. But neither he nor anyone else had worked out fixed laws for the succession. Everything had been left to chance, in the hope that there would always be a male heir.

When King Henry died in 1135, Matilda tried to take the throne. But the barons hesitated to give the throne to a woman. Nor could the throne go to Matilda’s husband, Count Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou. Geoffrey was not descended from William the Conqueror, and so, as a mere in-law of the royal family, was disqualified. Matilda and Geoffrey had a two-year-old son, Henry Plantagenet; but it was unthinkable in such dangerous times to allow an infant to become king. The king must be a man and a warrior.

During this period of confusion, Matilda’s cousin Stephen came forward and seized the throne. Stephen was a grandson of William the Conqueror, so at least he had the right to say he was of royal blood. But he was the son of William’s only daughter, Adela. His descent from the Conqueror, therefore, was in the so-called female line. That introduced another complication. Did a member of the female line have a right to take the throne? Or could the kingdom descend only through male descendants of William I? No one had any satisfactory answer on this point, either, so vague were the laws of succession, and in any event no heir in the male line existed.

What was not vague at all was Stephen’s determination to be King of England. Once he was on the throne, he stayed there for nineteen years, even though some of the nobles backed the claim of Princess Matilda and her baby son. Civil war broke out; Matilda was forced to flee to France.

Did it really matter—except to the few people directly involved—who was king? That question naturally arises as we look back to the year 1135 and the quarrel between Stephen and Matilda. It is a question that will arise again and again as we make our way through the story of the Wars of the Roses.

The answer is that it did matter, very much. Today the monarch of England is merely a symbolic figure; but in the Middle Ages the king was the government. The safety of the realm depended on his valor, his wisdom, and his skill in ruling. A successful king had to be trained from childhood to perform the tasks that one day would be his. If the king were weak or lazy or cruel, the welfare of the nation was threatened.

So it was an important concern, this business of who was to be king; and it was important, too, that the king be chosen in a legal way. Men had to respect the king. They could not respect a man who had stolen the throne. King William I had won the throne in a way that all could honor—through his bravery and strength. Therefore, so it was agreed, his descendants had the right to be kings of England. But each of those descendants had to come to power in a proper manner.

In the United States we are guided by a written Constitution that sets forth the way in which our leaders are chosen. We follow the regulations that were set down when our country was born, subject to the modifications that proved to be necessary in the original plan. Hence, every four years we hold an election and decide who is to be our President.

But England has never had such a written document. Instead of a formal constitution, she simply has a body of tradition, developed over the centuries. The English do things the way they have always been done in England—and when it turns out that the traditional way has ceased to work, they abandon it and try a new way.

But in 1135 the traditions were very new. There had been only three kings since the Norman Conquest: William I and his sons, William II and Henry I. When Henry I died without leaving a prince as his heir, no guidance could be found in past events. That left room for Stephen to take power. All during Stephen’s reign the faction of Matilda’s son, Henry Plantagenet, insisted that he was the rightful king. In the end, since King Stephen had no sons, he named young Henry as his heir. And in 1154 Stephen died and Henry Plantagenet became King Henry II.

England’s unwritten tradition of royal inheritance now had grown a little. Both Stephen and Henry II had come to the throne through the female line. And so, although it was still agreed that the daughter of a king could not become queen and reign herself, it was now accepted that her children might inherit the throne.

As it happened, there was no need to invoke that tradition for hundreds of years. The Plantagenet family produced an ample quantity of sons in generation after generation. Henry II was followed as king by his son Richard the Lion-Hearted; and when Richard died without a son, the crown passed to his brother John. King John’s son was the next king—Henry III. Some new difficulties arose at that point, for Henry III was only nine when his father died. But the leading barons of the realm placed him on the throne and ruled in his name until he was of age. England thus received her first boy-king; and his reign was a troubled one. It was an omen for a later time when other boys would mount the throne.

Henry III ruled for more than half a century. At his death, his oldest son became King Edward I, who was in turn succeeded by his son, Edward II, in 1307. In Edward II’s time another problem arose. This Edward was a foolish and idle man, the first member of his family who was unfit to be king. England was threatened by war and inner turmoil. What was to be done? The king was deemed God’s anointed ruler, a mighty and nearly sacred figure. It was a serious matter to rip the crown from a legitimate king. But if Edward II remained on the throne much longer, disaster and chaos would result.

It was a desperate time, and desperate measures were taken. Roger Mortimer, the first Earl of March, led a rebellion against the king. Supported by King Edward’s own queen, Mortimer seized the king and put him to death in 1327. But the rebellious nobleman did not dare to make himself king in Edward’s place, although the thought probably occurred to him. Mortimer was not of royal blood, and the country would accept as its king only a man descended from William the Conqueror. So Mortimer allowed the fourteen-year-old son of the murdered monarch to become King Edward III. Another article had been added to England’s growing unwritten constitution: If a king is unworthy of the throne, his people may cast him aside.

Edward III proved to be one of the strongest kings in England’s history. While still in his teens he brought order out of the chaos that his deposed father had left. Roger Mortimer attempted to act as the real ruler, using Edward III as a puppet, but the young king would have none of that; in 1330, when he was eighteen years old, he arrested Mortimer, accused him of the slaying of Edward II, and had him hanged.

With England under control, the vigorous king turned to foreign war. The relations between England and France had been tense for decades. In the time of Henry II more than half of France had actually been controlled by England, through inheritance from William as Duke of Normandy, through the dowry of Henry’s French-born queen, and through later conquest. But these possessions had nearly all been lost under Edward II. All that remained to England was a narrow strip of land along the western coast.

Edward III resolved to win back the French territories England had lost. He opened war in 1337—scarcely imagining that he was commencing what history would call the Hundred Years War. English troops commanded by the valiant king invaded France and in 1346 won a great victory at Crecy. Then the frightful plague known as the Black Death, which killed a third of the population of Europe, interrupted the war for several years. In 1356 came another great English triumph at Poitiers; the King of France himself was taken prisoner and carried off for ransom.

Through the victories of Crecy and Poitiers, Edward III had regained England’s old possessions in France and gained a rich harvest of treasure as the ransom for the French king. England hailed her warrior king with ringing cheers—and also praised his stalwart sons, who had fought as brilliant generals in the French campaigns.

No other King of England has ever had so many sons as Edward III. When he was fifteen, four months after the murder of his father, he married his second cousin, Philippa of Hainault, and between 1330 and 1355 she presented him with seven sons and five daughters. Two of the sons and three of the daughters died young. The others lived and had many descendants, so that England was filled