'Edmonde Poole Erle of Southfolke, sonne to Ihon duke of Southfolke, and lady Elizabeth sister to kyng Edward the IV, beyng stoute and bolde of courage, and of wyt rashe and hedy, was endited of homicide & murther, for sleyng of a meane person in his rage and fury...' - Hall’s Chronicle, 1548
Illustration - A drunken street brawl, Etching, 16th century
The hour was late when the four drunken noblemen and their sleepy attendants left the tavern in London’s Cheapside. Tired as they were, their good humour continued as Edmund, de la Pole, 6th Earl of Suffolk, Lord Thomas Courtenay, heir to the earldom of Devon, William Brandon and Thomas Neville tottered along Seething Lane but, as they passed the Church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower, the laughing stopped. Standing in their way was a gang of ruffians and Edmund let his hand stray to his sword.
“God’s Wounds, will London never be rid of these footpads?” he growled.
“Come my Lord Suffolk, it does not become an earl, especially one who is a prince of the blood royal, to trade blows with commoners. For the sake of our honour, we should find another way home,” advised Brandon but Edmund was not a man to shirk a fight and he continued to march purposefully towards the cutthroats who blocked his path.
“Move aside, for your betters wish to go home,” Edmund demanded but the leader of the footpads stood his ground.
“I do not yield to the spawn of traitors,” he replied and he spat into the mud.
“This is the earl of Suffolk, in whose veins flows the blood of the Plantagenet kings so have some respect!” snapped Neville angrily but the man merely laughed.
“The earl who was once a duke has no right to call himself either, and it is only through the mercy of our Sovereign Lord Henry that he doesn’t find himself chained to a wall in yon Tower,” he sneered and he pointed a short, grubby finger towards the mighty fortress, which could be glimpsed beyond All Hallows’ church.
“You dare bandy words with me? As God is my witness, you shall pay for your insolence!” Edmund bawled.
“And you shall pay for taking the name of The Lord in vain. Was it not the judgement of God that skewered your uncle, the tyrant Crookback, on a Welshman’s bill at Bosworth and filled your vile caitiff of a brother so full of arrows at Stoke he looked like a porcupine?” jeered the footpad but this insult was too much for the hot-headed earl.
With a visceral cry of hatred, Edmund sprang at his tormentor, sword in hand, and his companions had little choice but to follow him into the fray. The furious fight that followed. may have been nothing more than an ugly street brawl but, when it was over, three of the footpads were lying face down in the mud.
The sight of the corpses brought the surviving brawlers to their senses, and they scattered, but even in the 16th Century, the arm of the law was long. A few days after the battle of Seething Lane, Sir Reynold Bray arrived at Edmund’s lodgings in Thames Street to formally arraign the earl of Suffolk for the murder of a man named Thomas Crue.
Though the subsequent investigation was a farce, and no witnesses came forward to give evidence, Edmund was almost certainly guilty. Contemporary historians describe him as being, rash, headstrong and proud and the killing of commoners by nobles was no great crime in medieval Europe.
Since the beginning of Henry’s reign at least two members of the noble jousting set had been acquitted of murder in similar circumstances but Crue had been a plaintiff in a case that was about to be heard by the Privy Council and England’s first Tudor king was determined to show his subjects that no one was above the law. Edmund was therefore offered a full pardon, as he expected, but only if he admitted his guilt in open court.
Given the choice between humiliation or beheading, Edmund reluctantly chose the former. Yet in the months following the Thomas Crue affair, he began to realise that being forced to plead for his life had been part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to destroy his credibility as a claimant to the throne.
To be fair to Henry, his deep distrust of the de la Poles was not without foundation. Edmund’s father, John, 2nd Duke of Suffolk, was married to Richard III’s sister, Elizabeth of York and, in the months before the climactic Battle of Bosworth, England’s last Yorkist king had begun the process of making the most senior of his nephews his successor. The eldest of John de la Pole’s eleven children was also called John and to distinguish him from his father he is generally known by his courtesy title, Earl of Lincoln.
Following the death of his own son, Edward of Middleham, Richard III had appointed Lincoln as his Lieutenant in Ireland and President of the Council of the North. These important positions were usually given to the king’s heir and Richard had also betrothed Anne de la Pole, his 7 year-old niece, to the 12 year-old duke of Rothesay, son and heir of the Scottish King James III, but the Yorkist defeat at Bosworth had changed everything.
At first, Lincoln had accepted the Tudor victory and had sworn the required oaths of loyalty at the coronation of the victorious Henry, but the proud earl had too much Yorkist blood in his veins to stomach a descendant of Lancastrians on the throne for long. Just two years after Henry seized the crown, Lincoln threw in his lot with the ill-starred pretender Lambert Simnel, who had been groomed to impersonate the imprisoned earl of Warwick.
Despite being only ten years old and barred from the succession by an act of Parliament, the real Warwick had been sent to the Tower immediately after Bosworth because Henry feared that this nephew of Edward IV had a better claim to the throne than himself. Now, Warwick/Simnel’s supporters claimed that the boy had escaped from his Tudor prison and was ready to reclaim his Yorkist birthright.
In truth, Lincoln was probably using Simnel as a ‘stalking horse’ to disguise his own bid for the throne and the fact that he convinced his aunt, Margaret, dowager Duchess of Burgundy, to finance the plot gives weight to this theory but their dream of restoring the House of York had ended in the slaughter of Stoke Field. To this day the shallow ditch on the outskirts of Newark, where Lincoln and his army of German mercenaries met their grisly end, is known as the Bloody Gutter and the repercussions of the Yorkists’ defeat would have a serious consequences for the entire de la Pole family.
The rebel earl’s treachery was punished by the forfeiture of his lands and titles, which was the usual fate of those who took up arms against the king but Henry went much further. Even though the ageing duke of Suffolk had been too old, and his brothers too young, to play any part in the Simnel rebellion the king seized all the estates that Lincoln would have inherited from his father in addition to the lands he had acquired during his lifetime. At a stroke, Henry had successfully disinherited the duke’s seven surviving children, thereby depriving them of the means to mount another rebellion, but most of Lincoln’s siblings were more interested in winning crowns in heaven than on earth.
After the collapse of her marriage plans, Anne de la Pole had joined the nuns of Syon Abbey, and she eventually became their prioress. Her brother, Edward, was appointed Archdeacon of Richmonda and Craven in 1484, but he died the following year. Another brother, Humphrey, took a degree in law at Cambridge, but spent most of his life as an obscure parish priest. No doubt Edmund would also have taken Holy Orders had it not been for the catastrophe of Bosworth.
Five years before the fateful battle, Edmund had been sent to Oxford to study theology and this had been at the express wish of his other uncle, Edward IV. By sending his nephew to Oxford, Edward hoped to restore the university’s flagging reputation and, the boy’s tutor, could barely contain his glee at being given a prince to educate.
‘Our community if it had a thousand tongues, could not recount how much it is indebted to you… that you have sent the Lord Edmund Pole, your nephew, to your University, to its no slight distinction,’ he wrote in a letter dated 28 March 1482 and he goes on to describe Edmund as ‘a penetrating, eloquent and brilliant genius,’ even though the boy was only nine years old. The learned don’s effusive reports stand in stark contrast to the barely literate letters that Edmund wrote as an adult but, in fairness, it has to be said that the future earl of Suffolk never completed his education.
Had Edward IV survived the unknown illness that killed him, Edmund might have followed his brothers and sister into the cloister but the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower, the accession of Richard III and the sudden death of new king’s own son, meant the de la Pole brothers all took a step closer to the throne.
In theory, the brothers’ cousin, the earl of Warwick, had a better claim to the throne than any of the de la Poles but he had been removed from the line of succession after his father, the duke of Clarence, had rebelled against Edward IV. After Clarence’s execution, his son was barred from the succession by an act of Parliament so the de la Poles became the clear favourites to continue the Yorkist line. Edmund was one of the seventeen Knights of the Bath created on the eve of Richard III’s coronation, where his father had carried the king’s sceptre, but then came the battles of Bosworth and Stoke Field.
Despite these calamity of Lincoln’s rebellion, for a while it seemed as if Henry was prepared to forgive the de la Poles and the family might recover all it had lost. In 1487, barely five months after Lincoln’s death, the young Edmund accompanied his father to another coronation, that of his cousin, Elizabeth of York, who was Henry’s wife and queen. Thereafter Edmund became a noted member of the Tudor court; in 1488, he spent the festivals of Easter, Whitsun and All Hallows with the royal family at Windsor and the following year he celebrated Christmas at Henry’s palaces of Sheen and Westminster.
No doubt the ageing duke and duchess of Suffolk watched their eldest surviving son’s progress at court with a growing sense of hope. If the new king continued to favour Edmund, they might be able to persuade Henry to reverse the act of attainder that had ruined them but, to reach the next rung on the ladder of royal favour, Edmund would have to distinguish himself in battle.
The first opportunity for Edmund to win his spurs came in June 1489 when Henry decided to invade France. Ostensibly, Henry was trying to open a second front in the Franco-Breton War and repay Brittany’s duke, who had sheltered the Tudor pretender for 14 years, but the details of this complex conflict need not concern us here. All that needs be said is that a large contingent of Henry’s expeditionary force was commanded by Henry Lovell, Lord Morley, who had married Edmund’s older sister, Elizabeth .
To disguise their true purpose, it was announced that these troops were to strengthen Calais’ garrison but Morley’s real mission was to reinforce Lord Daubeney’s attack on the French besieging the Flemish town of Diksmuide. Thanks to the efforts of Sir James Tyrell, who had saved a local man from being lynched and recruited him as a guide, the Englishmen were able to find a way though the French siege lines and catch their enemy by surprise. The unsuspecting French were slaughtered in their trenches but at the very moment of his triumph Lord Morley was shot and killed.
In truth, Morley’s death was his own fault because he had refused to dismount or discard the elaborate coat that marked him as an officer but the English were so incensed by their captain’s death they killed all their prisoners in revenge. Elizabeth de la Pole was equally heartbroken and for many years she refused to celebrate Christmas. Morley’s young widow also spurned every offer to remarry and she died, aged 51, around 1520.
Although Edmund is not mentioned in the contemporary sources as being at the siege of Diksmuide, it is highly likely that the young heir to the Suffolk dukedom was one of the squires under Morley’s command . We know that he and Morley often attended court together and the Suffolk-born Tyrell was a de la Pole family friend. We also know that Edmund was definitely in the English army that again took the field against the French three years later.
On this occasion, Henry’s causus belli was to end French support for another Yorkist pretender, Perkin Warbeck. Like Simnel five years before, Warbeck was a fraud who had been groomed by unscrupulous Yorkists to impersonate Richard, Duke of York, who was the younger of the missing sons of Edward IV. Once again the conspirators managed to convince Margaret of Burgundy, to bankroll their attempt to put a ‘White Rose’ on the throne, but the plotters’ attempt to raise Ireland against the Tudors had come to nothing and Warbeck had been forced to seek sanctuary in France.
Naturally, the French king, Charles VIII, was quite willing to back anyone who could cause trouble in England so Henry responded by attacking Boulogne. For this campaign, the king took command of his army in person and one of the 12,000 Englishmen who marched out of Calais on 19 October 1492, was Edmund de la Pole, though he had little choice in the matter because he was now duke of Suffolk.
The old duke had died in May 1491 and Edmund, as his successor, had to fulfil his father’s feudal obligations to fight for his sovereign, even though the rich manors to which he should have succeeded had been seized by the king following his late brother’s attainder. As a result, Edmund was one of the poorest peers in England but he still lived in a world, where land and wealth could be won, or recovered, by the sword.
Unfortunately for Edmunds ambitions, Henry quickly decided against storming Boulogne’s heavily defended walls and protracted sieges rarely provided an opportunity for noteworthy heroics. In fact, the only English casualty during the entire campaign was Sir John Savage, who had the misfortune to be ambushed whilst reconnoitring the enemy fortifications. The lack of action notwithstanding, the siege of Boulogne served Henry’s purpose admirably and the French king signed the Peace of Étaples at the beginning of November 1492.
Under the terms of this humiliating treaty Charles banished Warbeck from France, paid Henry 745,000 ducats in war reparations and a personal pension of 25,000 ducats a year. This colossal sum was equal to an entire year’s revenue for the English crown but Henry’s nobles grumbled that their feudal obligation to raise, pay and equip the men of the royal army, had reduced them to penury.
Ironically, the already impoverished Edmund had not been required to bring a large retinue to Boulogne. Nevertheless, the new duke of Suffolk was already living beyond his means and an entry in the king’s accounts, for March 1492, noted that Henry had paid Edmund 13s. 4d. to hire his minstrels. Employing musicians suggests that Edmund was desperately trying to keep up appearances but Henry was not deceived for a moment and it was not long before he insisted on downgrading the Suffolk title from duke to earl.
The king’s reasoning, that if Edmund no longer had sufficient income to justify the lofty rank he had inherited form his father he would have accept the lesser title, was sound but Henry could not resist turning the screw. In order to receive enough of the forfeited Suffolk inheritance to qualify even as an earl, Edmund had to pay an indemnity of £5,000, in yearly instalments of £200 during his mother’s life, rising to £400 after her death, and worse was to follow.
It had long been Henry’s policy to try and convince any sceptical nobles that the Tudors were the true heirs to the illustrious House of York. To this end, he had married Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, disinherited Edward IV’s de la Pole nephews and waged war against the French, who had backed Warbeck’s claim to be Edward IV’s son, Richard, Duke of York. However, the pretender’s flight to the court of Edward IV’s other sister, Margaret of York, dowager duchess of Burgundy, threatened to wreck all these carefully laid plans. Henry VII therefore planned a new propaganda campaign whereby his younger son, the future Henry VIII, would be created duke of York.
By conferring a title that had been held by the younger of the missing Yorkist princes on his own son, Henry would outflank Warbeck. Moreover, by giving Edmund a prominent role at both the investiture ceremony and the lavish tournament that had been planned to celebrate the little prince’s elevation, he would demonstrate to the world that the de la Poles had been surpassed in the Yorkist succession.
Accordingly, Edmund led the procession of the Three Estates, which opened the ceremony of investiture, and he bore his sword point down to symbolise his surrender. A week later, Edmund captained the challengers, who would battle the answerers chosen to defend the young prince’s honour, and it was no accident that all the members of his team had blood ties to the House of York or connections to East Anglia.
The four men chosen to fight alongside Edmund were Henry Bourchier, 2nd Earl of Essex, who was the nephew of Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville. Likewise, George Neville, 3rd Baron Bergavenny, was a cousin of Richard III’s queen, Anne Neville and his father-in-law was the equally well-connected, Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The father of Sir John Peche had been a favourite of Edward IV and Sir Robert Curson was a wealthy Suffolk parvenu whose brand new Ipswich mansion covered more than two acres. Curson, Essex and Bergavenny would all feature in Edmund’s future and we will hear more of them later.
To really emphasise Henry’s message, all of Edmund’s opponents had once been prominent Lancastrians or ex-Yorkist who had deserted the white rose and adopted the red. Their captain was George Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury, who had fought Edmund’s brother during the Simnel crisis. Sir Edward Darrell and Sir Edward A. Burrough had also distinguished themselves at Stoke Field whilst the giant, 6 foot 8 inch, Sir John Cheney, who had served Edward IV as his Master of Horse, had joined the exiled Henry Tudor in Brittany after falling from the Yorkist king’s favour.
The other members of answerers included Sir Thomas Brandon whose brother had been killed at Bosworth defending Henry’s standard, and the Breton nobleman Sir William de la Riviere who had been appointed Henry’s Master of Henchmen.
The great tournament took place over three separate days at the beginning of November 1494 and there was plenty of feasting and dancing at the end of each day’s contest. Besides celebrating his triumph over the House of York, Henry hoped these sumptuous festivities would mark the dawn of a new Golden Age and he had ordered wooden grandstands to be constructed in the grounds outside Westminster Hall to hold the thousands of spectators who had paid handsomely to watch the contest.
It was typical of Henry to try and recoup the cost of his propaganda from those who were expected to take part and among the illustrious names on the on the guest list were Edmund’s mother and her daughters. The attendance of the last Yorkist kings’ sister and nieces would be a very public demonstration of their acceptance of Henry’s rule and if the de la Pole ladies were present, it is reasonable to assume that the dowager Duchess of Suffolk’s youngest sons, William and Richard, were with them.
At the time of the Westminster tournament, the boys would have been in their early teens and it is easy to imagine them idolising their glamorous big brother. Indeed, Edmund must have looked like Lancelot reborn as he entered the tiltyard clad in a glittering suit of gilded armour but Edmund’s show of splendour was a sham.
Due to his state-imposed poverty, Edmund had been forced to take out an eye-watering loan to equip himself for the event but at least he had spent the money well. Besides his enormously expensive armour, which contemporary chroniclers described as a masterpiece of the goldsmiths’ art, golden bells had been braided into the mane of his mighty warhorse and silver bells had been stitched into its bridle, which, cheekily, had been trimmed with ducal ermine.
At the beginning of the tournament, Edmund and his team entertained the crowed with feats of horsemanship but at the sound of a trumpet they retreated to the far end of the field to allow the answerers to enter. Once these preliminaries over, Edmund opened the contest by running six bruising courses against Sir Edward Burrough. Later that same day, he ran another six courses against the battered Sir Edward and twelve against Sir William de la Riviere.
The second day of competition was even more spectacular than the first with the combatants entering the field under large, portable pavilions that identified them to the cheering crowd. These costly canopies were embroidered with each knight’s heraldic emblems and Edmund’s was especially splendid. It was made of ruinously expensive red silk, embroidered with his motto, “For to accomplish” and his crest of a golden lion, with a forked tail, was crowned by a spangled coronet.
Another departure from the opening day’s contest was Edmund’s livery. On the first day he had worn the Tudor colours of white and apple-green but on the second he was clad in the old blue and mulberry colours of York. No doubt this change of costume was intended to symbolise the Tudor absorption of their Yorkist rivals but did not affect Edmund’s martial prowess. During his third bout with the battered Sir Edward Borough Edmund broke his sword in an epic battle that lasted twenty-three strokes and this earned him the day’s prize of a golden ring, set with a large diamond.
The third day of the tournament required the combatants to fight for the honour of a lady and the chosen maidens, all dressed in gowns of pure white silk with sleeves of crimson velvet, entered the field riding snow white palfreys. Edmund received the favour of his cousin, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, Countess of Sussex, and it hardly needs to be said that this pairing was loaded with hidden meaning.
The mother of Lady Elizabeth was Catherine Woodville, sister of Edward IV’s queen, whilst her father, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, had been executed by Richard III for abandoning the Yorkist cause and leading a pro-Tudor rebellion. Lady Elizabeth’s widowed mother had later married Jasper Tudor, Henry’s uncle, and the career of her brother, Edward, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, closely resembled that of Edmund de la Pole. Though Buckingham had kept his dukedom, his loyalty to his Tudor kin was always suspect by virtue of his Yorkist blood.
It is impossible to know how much Edmund was aware of these subliminal messages but he certainly wasted no time in striking the first blow for his lady. In the first pass, he and the luckless Sir Edward Burrough broke their lances into splinters but Edmund had scored the winning blow by hitting his opponent’s helmet. When it came to the swordplay, Edmund gave Sir Edward another sound thrashing, which was so brutal Burroughs may have suffered lasting brain damage.
Sometime after the Westminster tournament, poor Sir Edward was barred from taking his seat in parliament on the grounds he had become ‘distracted of memory’. Though there was a long history of madness in Sir Edward’s family, the effects of being repeatedly beaten about the head cannot have improved his mental health but at least Edmund’s concussed victim was awarded the day’s prize of another diamond ring.
Considering, that the earl of Suffolk was the clear victor in all his bouts with Sir Edward, the presentation of such a valuable ring to the loser was surely a snub but the success of the Westminster tournament marked an apparent upturn in Edmund’s fortunes. Less than a year later, Henry paid Edmund the honour of staying with him at Ewelme, which was the de la Poles’ principal residence in Oxfordshire, but this outward display of royal favour disguised yet another calculated insult.
