The Tragic Demise of Edward of Warwick

The End of the Plantagenet Dynasty

On 28 November 1499, Edward, 17^th Earl of Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill, just outside the Tower of London. His death represented the end of the mighty Plantagenet dynasty in the legitimate male-line.

I explore the tragic life and times of this Warwick in my bestselling book ‘Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders: Simnel, Warbeck and Warwick’, so I apologise for not recounting his full story here. Buy my book, feed my cat!

I will, however, offer some quick insight into his final days. Through no fault of his own, Warwick had been locked up in the Tower since Henry VII had become king in 1485. It was clear that Henry, who had become king with a claim that was spurious at best, had much to fear from the royal pedigree that Warwick possessed in abundance.

Henry had learned from the downfall of Richard III that killing royal children, or even been suspected of doing so, was not the finest way to try and garner popular support, and so Warwick was set up in a chamber in the Tower, and apart from one episode a few years later, would never leave until the day of his death. He entered aged 10, and would be taken to the block aged 24.

Now, in 1499, Henry VII was in something of a pickle. Fourteen years into his reign and he was still facing challenges to his kingship. He had defeated one pretender, Lambert Simnel, in 1487, and after several years of stress, by 1497 had finally got his hands on Perkin Warbeck, who had been claiming to be the younger of the Princes in the Tower (We may come to the latest claims that Warbeck truly was Richard of York sometime, but suffice to say, for now, my research leads me to suspect Warbeck was Warbeck).

In February 1499, however, another foolish person claimed to be Edward of Warwick, the rightful king of England. This man was Ralph Wilford, the son of a London cordwainer, and unlike Simnel or Warbeck, he was quickly rounded up, tried, convicted, and hanged at St Thomas-a-Watering, south of the city. The body was left in situ for the next four days, visible to anyone using the principal route between London and Canterbury, before it was cut down and buried hurriedly in an unknown location. Wilford’s crusade, if it can even be called such, lasted barely a fortnight. He accomplished little personally other than the reward of a brutal death in front of few witnesses, but his foolishness would trigger the bloodshed that was to follow later in the year.

It was during 1499 that a fresh conspiracy was uncovered. According to the later trial records, the driving force behind this plot to depose the Tudor king was a chap named Thomas Astwood, who had already escaped execution for treason four years earlier on account of his young age. Astwood had not learned his lesson.

Leading a small cabal of rebels, which included a haberdasher named John Finch and a gentleman servant of Warwick’s named Robert Cleymond, they started spreading a prophecy that foretold of a bear shaking its chains in the streets of London. That the bear was a well-known symbol associated with successive earls of Warwick required little interpretation, and Finch advised Cleymond to let the present earl know that the battle-cry ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ would soon ring out once more in the streets around the Tower. To raise the prisoner’s spirits in the meantime, Finch handed over two pairs of gloves and a pot of spice to use until his freedom could be arranged.

Over the following months, further rebels were recruited, including a yeoman named John Williams who was able to introduce Astwood to Warwick as someone ‘who loves you well’. Warwick merely responded ‘Now, I have a special friend’. As someone whose dealings with the world outside the Tower had been limited throughout his life, it may be suggested Warwick had developed a gullible nature during his years in captivity, devoid of critical thought, and was perhaps impressionable to guests bearing kind words and friendly smiles. Before leaving, Astwood approached the earl and declared passionately ‘My Lord, I love you, and I will place myself in as great peril as I ever was in before to do you good help to put you in your right’.

The plot continued to grow, attracting figures such as Thomas Pounte, an Essex chaplain named William Walker, a draper named Edward Dixon, a broker called Edmund Carre , William Lounde, Thomas Strangeways, Thomas Longford, William Basset, Thomas Ody, and a haberdasher named William Proud. Implicated in this conspiracy too, was another prisoner in the Tower, Perkin Warbeck.

Their plan had been to break Warwick’s chains, and when the king was away from London, to escape the Tower, board a ship, and take the earl across the sea. Cleymond was key to spreading the plot, as he had some degree of movement in the Tower and was able to exchange details between Warbeck and Warwick. When Cleymond advised Warwick that they planned to seize control of the Tower using gunpowder, the innocent earl did not comprehend why they would commit such an act. Alarmed, Cleymond encouraged the earl:

‘My Lord you are well minded in what danger, sadness, and duress you here remain; but if you will help yourself according to the form and effect of the communication and discourse between us, you shall come out of this prison with me, I will take you out of danger, and leave you in surety’.

Warwick gave his assent for the plan to go ahead, and in doing so committed treason without perhaps fully understanding the consequences of what he was agreeing to. Cleymond even provided the earl with a short sword to defend himself, whilst fake shackles were prepared for Warbeck.

The plot collapsed at the start of August 1499, however, when it was revealed to the king. The conspirators were rounded up, and there has been suggestion the plot was fabricated using royal agents, perhaps facilitated by Cleymond himself as an inside man. This certainly would not have been beyond a wily monarch like Henry VII. There is little evidence that this was an invented plot, however. There were men keen to see him toppled – he merely had to bide his time and let the plotters condemn themselves with their own careless actions.

In the trial that followed, the King’s Council sat in judgement. All the bishops were present, as were members of Henry VII’s nobility such as the duke of Buckingham, the earls of Northumberland, Oxford, Surrey, Essex and Ormond, and a host of barons and household officials. Also in attendance were the realm’s leading justices, led by Chief Justice Fineux, who duty it was to show the councillors evidence he had accumulated ‘of certain treasons conspired of Edward naming himself of Warwick and Perkin and other within the Tower’. Fineux also added that it was shown ‘by the confessions of the said Edward and other’ that they had indeed intended to have ‘deposed and destroyed the King’s person and his blood’.

Despite the outward appearance of a fair hearing, The Great Chronicle suggests the outcome was predetermined and conducted ‘without any process of the law’, and when consideration is given to the wider political and dynastic climate of 1499, the event does to all intents and purposes appear to have been little more than a show trial. Regardless of his father’s attainder over two decades earlier which in theory removed him from the line of succession, Edward of Warwick nevertheless had the misfortune of an abundance of royal blood coursing through his veins, and though the wary Henry VII had been careful to ensure he was kept in seclusion for most of his life, there had always been a consistent network of supporters who had sought to press his claim.

On 21 November, with the earl of Oxford seated beneath a cloth of estate, and surrounded by twenty-three other magnates, including the duke of Buckingham, and earls of Northumberland, Kent, Surrey, and Essex, the defendant was brought into the court by Thomas Lovell, Lieutenant of the Constable of the Tower. Upon hearing the charges levied against him, principal amongst them that he colluded with a conspiracy to flee the Tower alongside Warbeck with the intention of dethroning Henry VII, Warwick made the judges’ task simple when he freely confessed his guilt.

The earl’s motivation for pleading guilty is unclear, and it is often speculated he did not understand the proceedings and possibly confessed in ignorance. He may, of course, have felt intimidated by a situation that was alien to him, having spent so many years in the Tower, and yielded far easier than someone else in his precarious position would have. Edward Hall suggested half-a-century later that ‘many men’ doubted he submitted off his own freewill because of ‘his innocence’, and that he may have been enticed to plead in such a manner, which is plausible. Warwick certainly doesn’t appear to have put up any resistance to the charges or attempted to explain his alleged actions in the hope of mercy. With guilt therefore assured by his own admission, it fell upon Oxford, with the tacit approval of the king one must imagine, to pass judgement against his fellow earl, declaring to all present:

‘That the said Earl of Warwick should be taken to the Tower of London, and from thence drawn through the middle of London to the gallows at Tyburn, and there hanged, cut down, disembowelled, and quartered in the usual manner’.

On 28 November, the 24-year-old Warwick was removed from his chamber. In deference to his royal blood, Henry VII had commuted the sentence to simple beheaded on Tower Hill.  According to the Great Chronicle, Warwick was brought out of his chamber in the Tower between two servants and at the outer gate delivered into the hands of the city sheriffs, who were responsible for leading him to a scaffold on nearby Tower Hill. It was here between two and three o’clock in the afternoon and in the shadow of the fortress he had called home for most of his life, that Edward of Warwick was beheaded, bringing the legitimate male-line of the House of Plantagenet to a bloody, and somewhat tragic, conclusion.

Tudor commentators were despondent at Warwick’s demise, with Edward Hall lamenting that it was ‘by the drift and offence of another man’ that the earl ‘was brought to his end and confusion’, having been kept so long in the Tower ‘out of all company of men and sights of beasts’ that he ‘could not discern a Goose from a Capon’. Hall also suggested that it was the earl’s title, Warwick, rather than his conduct, that was the reason for his death, for Ferdinand of Aragon feared that ‘as long as any Earl of Warwick lived, that England should never be cleansed or purged of Civil war and privy sedition, so much was the name of Warwick in other regions had in fear and jealousy’. The enduring continent-wide legacy of Edward’s famous grandfather Richard Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker, had done his cause little good in the end.

Polydore Vergil, reported that ‘the entire population mourned the death of the handsome youth’, an ‘unhappy boy’ who had been ‘committed to prison not for any fault of his own but because of his family’s offences’. Because of his Yorkist blood, Warwick ‘had to perish in this fashion in order that there should be no surviving male heir to his family’.

Henry’s own reaction to the execution suggests he was regretful such action had to be taken, necessary though it had been to secure his own family’s future. Warwick’s head was not spiked upon London Bridge as Warbeck’s had been, but rather taken along with his body by boat to Bisham Abbey for burial, interred near his kingmaking grandfather and at the king’s own considerable expense of £12 18s 2d.

It truly was a sad episode for all involved.