The Fall of The Beauforts

The Battle of Tewkesbury and the Demise of a Formidable Dynasty

Welcome to another edition of ‘Hiraeth’ from me, Nathen Amin.

Hiraeth is a Welsh word that means a longing for the past, for places, people and a time we can no longer reach. In this regular newsletter, I try my best to explore that past. If you’d like to learn more, please consider subscribing to get all posts, videos, talks, reviews and more directly to your inbox - and best of all - it’s FREE!

On 4 May 1471, the Battle of Tewkesbury was fought between a Yorkist army commanded by Edward IV, and a Lancastrian force nominally fronted by Prince Edward, heir of Henry VI, but led by men like Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset.

The following is an adapted extract from my bestselling book ‘HOUSE OF BEAUFORT: THE BASTARD LINE THAT CAPTURED THE CROWN’ that recounts that fateful and bloody day.

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“As his father and elder brother had before him, it was now Edmund Beaufort’s turn to prepare his army to oppose an advancing Yorkist force. He adopted a strong defensive position near Tewkesbury Abbey, with the River Avon to his rear and facing ‘foul lanes, and deep dikes, and many hedges with hills, and valleys’.

According to the author of the Yorkist chronicle The Arrviall, it was a ‘right evil place to approach, as could well have been devised’, suggesting Edmund had wisely picked his spot. On the morning of Saturday 4 May, approach Edward did, his army ‘in good array’ and displaying their assorted battle standards.

In response, one imagines the Lancastrians raised their own banners, the Beaufort portcullis flying defiantly above the heads of Edmund and John Beaufort. Queen Margaret of Anjou had retreated to a local religious house, her seventeen-year-old son Prince Edward remaining on the battlefield for his first engagement, a battle which determined not only his destiny, but those of the soldiers assembled around him, including the Beauforts.

The Lancastrians organised into three battles, with the right commanded by Edmund Beaufort, the centre by Lord Wenlock and Prince Edward, and the left by Devon. Wenlock’s presence may have been contentious. As a Yorkist follower, he had been allowed to seize some Beaufort goods in 1467 before defecting with Warwick.

King Edward’s army was led by himself, his youngest brother Richard of Gloucester, and Lord Hastings, with the dukes of Clarence and Norfolk also present. As the Lancastrians’ strong position was ‘difficult to be assailed’, Gloucester used his archers to unleash a ‘right-a-sharpe shower’ of arrows, followed with cannons which ‘so sore oppressed’ their enemy. This shower of arrows may have prompted Edmund Beaufort’s next move. The author of the Arrivall reported:

‘Edmond, called Duke of Somerset, having that day the vanguard, whether it were for that he and his fellowship were sore annoyed in the place where they were, as well with gunshots, as with shot of arrows, which they ne would nor durst abide, or else, of great heart or courage, knightly and manly advanced himself, with his fellowship, somewhat aside-hand the King’s vanguard, and, by certain paths and ways therefore afore purveyed, and to the King’s party unknown, he departed out of the field, passed a lane, and came into a fair place, or close, even afore the King where he was embattled, and, from the hill that was in that one of the closes, he set right fiercely upon the end of the King’s battle’.

It is therefore unclear whether Edmund’s fierce attack was born of desperation, courage or overconfidence. It may even have been a combination of all three factors.

Edward Hall later generously considered the move ‘more courageous than circumspect’. The decision to abandon his defensive position was undoubtedly a risky manoeuvre, and Edward IV ‘full manly set forth’ upon Edmund Beaufort’s men, ‘and with great violence’, forced them back up the hill and into Richard of Gloucester’s retinue who responded with unbridled ferocity.

Now King Edward’s tactical mastery prevailed; before the battle, the king had positioned two hundred mounted spearmen in a wood a quarter mile from the battlefield. Recognising a ‘good opportunity t’employ themself well’, they emerged ‘all at once, upon the Duke of Somerset’.

Edmund and his soldiers, already on the back foot, were ‘greatly dismayed and abashed’ when they encountered the extra troops and started to flee in panic, some heading back into the lanes and dykes, and some for a nearby meadow.

Most were brutally cut-down before they could reach safety, their blood staining the earth where they fell. The terror amongst the Lancastrians gradually spread through the ranks, and the remainder of their resistance collapsed. The battle as a contest was over, and the slaughter began in earnest.

Edmund Beaufort could only observe with dismay as his men were butchered all around him, reminiscent of the gruesome scene that greeted his brother Henry Beaufort at Towton a decade earlier and father at St Albans in 1455.

Hall recounts a dramatic confrontation between Edmund and Wenlock, who had failed to engage his forces, with Beaufort accusing his fellow commander of treason before taking his axe and caving in Wenlock’s skull with such savagery his brains were exposed. No contemporary chronicle mentions such an incident and Hall did have a penchant for theatrical embellishment, although that is not to say Edmund and Wenlock did not clash in some way.

With escape into the surrounding countryside presumably unfeasible, perhaps due to tiredness or injury, Edmund fled into the nearby abbey which he hoped would provide sanctuary against the devastating bloodshed occurring outside.

It was maybe then he learnt how his brother John Beaufort was one of many lying dead on the battlefield, along with young Prince Edward, for whose future they had all been fighting. Fabyan and Hall later claimed the prince had been brought in front of the Yorkist leaders and callously murdered, but the contemporary, if biased, Arrivall suggests he was ‘slain in the field’’ as does Warkworth.

According to the latter chronicles, Edward IV entered the abbey after his victory and promised to pardon those dwelling inside. If Edmund believed his life had been spared, however, he was wrong. Edward’s fingers had been burnt once before by showing clemency to the Beauforts.

On 6 May 1471, two days after the battle, Edmund Beaufort was dragged from the abbey and ‘brought afore the Kynge’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester and Constable, and the Duke of Norfolk, Marshall of England’.

After a trial in front of the two dukes, Edmund Beaufort, the last remaining Beaufort descended in the male-line, was charged with having ‘provoked and continued the great rebellion that so long had endured in the land’. Accordingly, he was ‘judged to death’ alongside around a dozen other supporters. With one swift swing of an executioner’s axe in the crowded Tewkesbury marketplace, the House of Beaufort in the legitimate male-line was no more.

But of course, the Beaufort legacy does not die at Tewkesbury…

Anyway, if ever there was a day to open my bottle of Tewkesbury 1471 Gin, featuring the iconic artwork of the master Graham Turner, it may be today!

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