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00:001471 a new England is being forged in the fire of civil war amid the savagery stand three women
00:14and never daughter of the most powerful nobleman in England at 14 about to emerge as a player in
00:23her own right with her own strength and startling resolve Elizabeth Woodville a commoner whose beauty
00:34won her the hand of a king now entering middle age about to reveal that she was a woman to be feared as
00:41well as admired and Margaret Beaufort who survived childbirth at 13 to become a formidable and devious
00:52politician her life dedicated to one thing the cause of her son Henry Tudor these women would
01:02join together as allies and betray each other as rivals they would intrigue and conspire drawing on
01:08family feelings and old quarrels trying to track down these women and discover what they were doing
01:15is worth the effort because they are the founders of our nation just as much as the more famous men
01:22they were just as cunning just as ruthless we call this era the wars of the roses but they called
01:32it the cousins war and in this family feud the women were vital approach the conflict through their eyes
01:39and suddenly its greatest mysteries from the controversial character of Richard III to the
01:45fate of the princes in the tower become clearer this is my chronicle of how three women shaped one of the
01:53most turbulent periods in English history
01:57the sailors were IN這樣 on the 14th of april 1471 a young couple arrived from France on the south coast
02:20England to claim their inheritance. Returning from exile to his homeland was
02:26the new Lancastrian Prince of Wales. At his side, his 14-year-old bride Anne
02:32Neville. Their marriage in France a few months earlier had been the cornerstone
02:39of a pact between Anne's father, Warwick the Kingmaker, and the Prince's family.
02:45A pact which had led to the restoration of the House of Lancaster and King
02:51Henry VI. For Anne, now allied to the Lancastrian cause, a bright future beckoned.
03:01We have to consider this moment as being pivotal in Anne's history. She's embarked on
03:06this voyage across the Channel, believing that she's in a strong position to become
03:10the next Queen of England. But Anne and her new Lancastrian-in-laws were greeted
03:16with catastrophic news. That very day, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, the man
03:26they had overthrown, the Yorkist King Edward IV, had killed the Earl of Warwick
03:31at the Battle of Barnet. And within hours of her arrival, she's told that her much admired
03:38father is dead and that effectively her cause is lost. After less than six months in power,
03:45the Lancastrians were overthrown. Anne's mother responded to the news by fleeing into sanctuary
03:55at a nearby abbey. Anne was abandoned. Still only 14, Anne found herself effectively an orphan,
04:05entirely dependent on her 17-year-old husband and, more importantly, her formidable mother-in-law,
04:12Margaret of Anjou. With the Lancastrian King Henry now a prisoner in the Tower,
04:19his Queen, Margaret, took control. She headed northwards, raising troops as she went,
04:28in a desperate bid to salvage the Lancastrian cause. King Edward, fresh from his victory
04:35over Warwick, dashed across the country to intercept them.
04:48After an agonising race, the two armies finally met here, in marshy fields outside Tewkesbury,
04:54near the Welsh border. Anne and her mother-in-law probably watched the battle from high ground nearby,
05:00and Anne saw her young husband ride out to face the enemy that had killed her father just a few weeks earlier.
05:10The next few hours would determine not just Anne's future, but also that of Elizabeth Woodville,
05:21waiting anxiously in London for news of her husband, King Edward.
05:27And the Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort also knew that the destiny of her son, Henry Tudor,
05:37was bound up with that of the Lancastrian army at Tewkesbury.
05:46Anne marched to the battlefield alongside troops, steeled for combat.
05:51Anne marched to the battlefield.
05:54Medieval warfare was particularly brutal.
06:00Tactics didn't count for a great deal.
06:03It was two armies getting together and thumping each other,
06:08till one side thumped the other one to death.
06:11For Anne, the trauma was made worse when her husband's Lancastrian army broke
06:23and fled back towards the abbey at Tewkesbury.
06:29It would be the scene of one of the worst atrocities of the wars.
06:32At the end of the Battle of Tewkesbury,
06:37many of the leading Lancastrian commanders had sought sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey.
06:43Edward drags, literally drags the Lancastrian commanders from Tewkesbury Abbey
06:51and beheads them summarily.
06:53Edward is determined to leave no Lancastrian claimant alive.
07:07Anne's 17-year-old husband, the Prince of Wales, was among the dead.
07:16The young prince was buried here beneath the choir in Tewkesbury Abbey.
07:20The plaque reads in Latin,
07:23Here lies Edward, Prince of Wales, cruelly slain while but a youth.
07:29Thou art the sole light of thy mother and the last hope of thy race.
07:35But this was put here in the Victorian era.
07:39At the time, his memorial was this.
07:45The sun in splendour, the emblem of York, shining down on his body.
07:50The message could not have been clearer.
07:53King Edward was back in power.
07:57A few days later, as Queen Elizabeth welcomed home her triumphant husband,
08:03the Lancastrian King Henry VI, was quietly murdered in the Tower of London.
08:08As for Anne, she was taken prisoner, probably here at Little Malvern Priory, close to the battlefield at Tewkesbury.
08:22It's hard to imagine what Anne had been through. Still only 14, she had been married, widowed and effectively orphaned in just a few months.
08:34She had witnessed the horror of battle. She had seen her own prospects destroyed.
08:38Utterly alone, in a hostile world, now she was a prisoner of war.
08:45Her world must literally have been turned upside down.
08:50From a situation in which, one day, possibly within the comparatively near future, she would have become Queen of England,
08:57she is now a complete nobody.
09:02The future looked bleak for Anne, but Elizabeth Woodville's fortunes were transformed.
09:09For Elizabeth, the previous two years had been desperate.
09:16She had been forced to seek sanctuary in a crypt at Westminster Abbey,
09:20while her husband, the Yorkist King Edward IV, was driven into exile by the Lancastrian Rising.
09:31The Yorkist victory at Tewkesbury meant she was Queen once more, her position unassailable.
09:36Her old rival, the Earl of Warwick, who had always resented her marriage to King Edward and schemed against her, was dead.
09:47And the ordeal of the previous two years had revealed hidden strengths.
09:53In the summer of 1471, Elizabeth Woodville has survived the turns of Fortune's Wheel.
10:01She has gone through a terrible ordeal, has shown personal resolution.
10:07It shows in stark relief that she's tough, she's courageous, and she has presence of mind.
10:16Now 34, Elizabeth had matured from provincial beauty to hard-headed politician.
10:27Most importantly, she had provided her husband with a son and heir, born in Sanctuary at Westminster.
10:34A second son would soon follow.
10:35Elizabeth was Queen again.
10:43But the position of her Lancastrian rival, Margaret Beaufort, was more complex.
10:49In 1471, this was Margaret's principal residence, Woking Palace, near London, where she lived with her husband, Henry Stafford.
11:00It was here she had waited anxiously for news of the wars through those dark spring months.
11:11Although her son's future was bound up with the House of Lancaster, her husband Stafford had taken up arms for York.
11:22A cunning, two-pronged insurance policy that Margaret would employ successfully throughout her life.
11:34She plays the game of divided loyalties very effectively.
11:37She's protected by her Yorkist husbands and at the same time is covertly working for her Lancastrian son.
11:42But King Edward's victory was a disaster for her, forcing her son Henry Tudor to flee into exile in France.
11:52The slaughter at Tewkesbury meant he could claim to be the first in line to the throne on the Lancastrian side.
11:59A rival and a threat.
12:01Margaret.
12:06Margaret, now 27, would not see her son again for 14 years.
12:12And there was tragedy too when her husband, Henry Stafford, returned from the wars mortally wounded and died at Woking.
12:21His loyalty to the House of York had protected her.
12:26Margaret knew she must choose her next husband just as carefully.
12:31The man she turned to was Thomas, Lord Stanley.
12:36Stanley was a great magnet.
12:38He was a powerful man.
12:41He was someone who'd steered a middle path through the Wars of the Roses,
12:45but right now he was fairly high in Yorkist favour.
12:48So it was a good secure match for her and to protect her family's interests.
12:57Margaret is playing the game that she had played consistently throughout the 1460s and would go on to play in the 1470s.
13:07And that's to protect the inheritance and status of her son.
13:13I think Stanley may have been a man after Margaret's own heart.
13:19He was wary, he was chancy, he was shrewd and out to protect his own family's position.
13:28And she may have thought, here's a man I can do business with.
13:31She chose Thomas, Lord Stanley of all the possible candidates because he was a Yorkist, hugely wealthy and commander of one of the largest private armies in England.
13:44Above all, she recognised in him a kindred spirit, a man self-serving like her.
13:49She gambled her life on the possibility that he might, if the price was right, betray his king.
13:58It would prove to be one of the shrewdest moves of Margaret's life.
14:01But in that summer of 1471, few would have believed that the House of Lancaster had any hope of ever regaining the throne.
14:10The House of York looked unbeatable and our story could end here with Elizabeth as a victorious queen.
14:21But the York dynasty had extraordinary capacity for self-destruction and its downfall would begin with Anne Neville.
14:29Despite being born a Warwick, the most powerful noble family in England, Anne has traditionally been painted as one of the great victims of history, an heiress with no control over her own fortune.
14:49Anne has been presented very much as a political pawn, that's the phrasing that comes up about her over and over again.
14:54I'm not so sure about this. Anne was Warwick's daughter. She's been brought up to envision herself as a princess or a queen, or at least to have the highest possible marriage that she could have within the land.
15:11After the Battle of Tewkesbury, Anne was sent by King Edward to live at the home of her sister, Isabel, who was married to the King's brother, George Duke of Clarence.
15:21A tangled family dynamic, typical of the Cousins' War.
15:32Anne and Isabel were married to men on opposing sides of the field of battle.
15:38And then, when Anne's husband is killed, Edward forces them all to live together.
15:43So there they are, Clarence, Isabel and Anne, as a very unhappy threesome, I'd have thought.
15:58Anne was effectively a prisoner of her sister and brother-in-law, who were determined to prevent her claiming her share of the Warwick lands.
16:06Anne is very aware of her legal rights.
16:13Anne is determined to exercise these rights and get her hands on her half of her rightful inheritance.
16:19She does this extraordinary thing.
16:21She does this incredible, courageous thing, which is she escapes.
16:25She runs away to the church of St. Martins, throws herself in sanctuary and upon the protection of her brother-in-law, Richard of Gloucester.
16:32Anne seized control of her own destiny.
16:37But that's not how historians have traditionally described her escape.
16:42Anne fled to her recent enemy, King Edward's youngest brother, later Richard III, the most notorious king in English history, immortalised as one of Shakespeare's greatest villains.
16:55Richard had fought against Anne's family at both Barnet and Tewkesbury, and had played a leading role in the slaughter of her male relations.
17:08Yet, shortly afterwards, Richard and Anne were married.
17:17Shakespeare portrayed Anne as a victim.
17:20For Shakespeare, the marriage is entirely Richard's idea.
17:25Anne sees him as her enemy, the murderer of her father, her husband and her father-in-law.
17:31But she is instantly seduced, the epitome of female fickleness.
17:37It sounds as if even Shakespeare himself doubted that this would ring true.
17:42He writes,
17:43The truth is that the marriage was a pragmatic arrangement on both sides.
17:58Yes, Richard's interest was Anne's share of the vast Warwick inheritance, above all the mighty Middlham Castle in Yorkshire.
18:05But the match was in Anne's interest too.
18:09It was not until the Tudor propaganda machine blackened Richard's reputation that people started to suggest that he was a man so evil that in marrying him, Anne must have been a victim of his rape or a passive fool.
18:27A devilish husband has to have a stupid wife.
18:30It seems to me far more likely that the two young people who had known each other from childhood could see the benefits of marriage.
18:39Anne could escape from George's control and she could reward Richard with her enormous land holdings in the north of England, including the great Middlham Castle.
18:49It may even have been a love match. It certainly did Anne no harm.
18:54She is in effect George of Clarence's prisoner. The only nobleman who can actually stand up to George of Clarence is his younger brother, Richard of Gloucester.
19:05So the only way she can regain her freedom, the only way she can get her half share of her father's inheritance, is to marry Richard.
19:12Far from being a dupe and a victim, Anne had made a hard-headed, calculated decision.
19:21To us, it may seem shockingly cynical, but that is to impose our own mindset on a very different age.
19:28We are appalled at the idea of a young woman making a marriage with a man who has been responsible for the deaths of so many of her family.
19:37We simply can't think of it like that. We have to understand that marriage was a business.
19:43Lots of the women did actually change sides, did marry, and could almost have these career changes, a marital career that overrode the concerns of whom had killed whom.
19:53It was about establishing yourself in the most powerful position possible, and for women of the elite classes, as Anne was, she would have been brought up from birth to accept this, and to play the game as well as she possibly could.
20:07Anne soon provided Richard with a son, and the couple took up residence at Middleham, from where Richard would effectively rule the north of England.
20:17Anne was back on the winning side.
20:24And the Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, was about to make her own move against the man Anne had escaped, the King's ever-troublesome younger brother, George.
20:36George, Duke of Clarence, Edward's brother, had always been a problem.
20:43He was always convinced that he was owed more place, more power in the land than he was being given.
20:51Elizabeth loathed her brother-in-law.
20:53In 1469, George had briefly rebelled against King Edward, and although the two had later reconciled, the rebellion had resulted in the murder of Elizabeth's father and her brother.
21:07She hadn't forgotten or forgiven.
21:09In 1478, things really came to a head, and the way in which they did so involved Elizabeth in the fray.
21:18Because George had been spreading stories that Edward's marriage to Elizabeth was invalid, because he was already contracted to another lady.
21:30And, of course, that would have made their children illegitimate.
21:33This threatened Elizabeth.
21:36More importantly, it threatened her son and heir.
21:42The House of York was divided once more, and many people at the time had no doubt who was responsible for the events that followed.
21:54A contemporary chronicler wrote,
21:55The Queen had concluded that her offspring would never come to the throne unless the Duke of Clarence were removed, and of this she easily persuaded the King.
22:09Clarence was arrested, tried and executed, according to legend, by being drowned in a butt of malmsy wine.
22:19George, Duke of Clarence is buried here beneath my feet in the crypt at Tewkesbury Ave.
22:25His final resting place is almost permanently flooded these days.
22:30But on drier days, it's possible to view bones, supposedly belonging to George and his wife Isabel, in a glass case.
22:39A sad and macabre end for a man who had dreamed of being King.
22:45Like the Earl of Warwick before him, George had identified Queen Elizabeth as an obstacle to his ambitions,
22:54and as a formidable and dangerous adversary.
22:58But like Warwick before him, George had not understood quite how dangerous.
23:03Now, they were both dead, and she was still Queen of England.
23:07In Yorkshire, Anne and Richard were the main beneficiary of George's death, inheriting many of his lands.
23:23But Anne's behaviour suggests that she too was wary of her sister-in-law, Elizabeth.
23:30Anne was married to the second most powerful man in the kingdom.
23:34She was a royal duchess, and an heiress in her own right, but she hardly ever went to court.
23:42She spent most of her time here, at Middleham Castle in the north of England.
23:47I believe she was terrified of the Queen.
23:50She may even have believed that she was a witch.
23:52To us, the suggestion seems absurd, but belief in witchcraft was deeply held in the medieval world.
24:02Dark rumours had always swirled around the Queen.
24:06How else to explain the enchantment of the King of England by a commoner?
24:11The problem foremost of Edward's nobleman was that there was no rational explanation for what he'd done.
24:20Because by marrying one of his own subjects, he'd broken with convention.
24:24And the only logical explanation they could find was witchcraft.
24:31George, Duke of Clarence, had revived the old suspicions surrounding the royal couple.
24:37And just because we don't believe in witches, it doesn't mean that Anne didn't, and possibly her husband as well.
24:44I think Richard and Anne were genuinely frightened by witchcraft.
24:50And I think there was a real element of fear that the Queen might be employing sorcery.
25:00But Anne also had a second, simpler reason for hating the Queen.
25:05Anne was the heir of the Kingmaker, the Earl of Warwick, Elizabeth's old enemy, killed by King Edward twelve years earlier.
25:14She had married his enemy, but Anne remained Warwick's daughter.
25:21She must have hated the Woodvilles.
25:24The problems that her father had, in terms of accepting their social rise, the conflicts he had.
25:32This was his daughter, his surviving representative.
25:37Anne may be the key to understanding the dramatic, bewildering events that were about to unfold.
25:44Anne may be the same.
25:46Anne may be the same.
25:48At the start of April 1483, King Edward caught a chill while out boating.
25:54Just 40 years old, within days, he was dead.
25:58The death of Edward IV created a huge impact politically. It was unexpected.
26:11The news comes as a shock to Elizabeth when Edward dies.
26:14She has a few days to work out that he is actually going to die.
26:17And then, of course, her thoughts go immediately to her son.
26:20With her husband dead, Elizabeth's sole concern was to ensure that the young Prince Edward, born to her in sanctuary twelve years earlier, ascended the throne safely.
26:34What's fascinating about the period after King Edward's death is the speed at which Elizabeth reacted.
26:43Her son, the heir to the throne, Edward, was only twelve years old, and she was the first person to understand that he might be in danger.
26:50She ordered him to come to London from his castle near Wales with as many troops as possible, as fast as possible.
26:59Elizabeth Woodville, well, with the advantage of hindsight, it's clear that she anticipates the danger.
27:05And it shows that she is astute and politically alert, where others perhaps just don't see the possible threat.
27:16The Royal Council felt the Queen was overreacting.
27:20Fatally, she allowed herself to be persuaded to limit the number of troops accompanying her son to just 2,000.
27:28As the twelve-year-old Edward set off from the Welsh borders, his uncle Richard left Middleham Castle, intercepting him at Stoney Stratford,
27:41in order, he said, to accompany him to the tower where kings traditionally stayed prior to their coronation.
27:47Elizabeth's response was to dash back into Sanctuary at Westminster with her five daughters and her remaining nine-year-old son Richard.
28:01What she does is very decisive and very rapid.
28:05Her primary motivation is to protect not only herself, but her children, and particularly her second son, the Duke of York.
28:12She can't do anything to help Edward, but she can keep Richard safe.
28:15Again, the Royal Councillors told her she was overreacting.
28:22But the behaviour of Anne Neville, in far away Yorkshire, suggests that Elizabeth's fears about her brother-in-law were completely justified.
28:32Anne did not travel south for the coronation.
28:36Anne not only fails to appear in London, which, as the second lady of the nation, she would absolutely have been expected to do,
28:41but she hasn't ordered any robes. Her account books show no special preparations, nor do they show any evidence of illness which might have kept her away.
28:50Quite simply, Anne knew that it wasn't going to happen.
28:54According to Shakespeare, Anne disapproved of Richard's seizing power.
28:58But why would Warwick, the Kingmaker's daughter, object to being made Queen?
29:04Where is the evidence for Anne being passive or disapproving?
29:07I can't find any evidence.
29:10For all we know, it could actually be Anne that was the driving force behind Richard.
29:13It could be a scenario like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, where we've got this very powerful woman.
29:17Now, she was in a position to be able to come back and revenge her father.
29:24Pressure from Anne would help explain the great mystery of Richard's sudden transformation.
29:31Through the ups and downs of the Cousin's Wars, he had always been his brother Edward's most faithful follower.
29:37His motto, loyalty binds me.
29:41But now, Richard moved against Edward's heirs with ruthless speed, executing leading supporters of the new king.
29:52On June 16th, he sent a delegation to Elizabeth, still in Sanctuary at Westminster, demanding the release of her second son, 9-year-old Richard.
30:02Supposedly, so that he could attend the coronation of his brother.
30:07It's clearly very, very dangerous to release Richard, her son, but what choice does she have?
30:15The truth is, Sanctuary was a moral rather than a physical concept.
30:20Elizabeth was there in Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey.
30:24Right next door in Westminster Palace, Richard was waiting with his troops.
30:30His troops were surrounding the Sanctuary.
30:31There must have been the knowledge behind all this, that if Elizabeth didn't let the boy go, he could simply have been taken.
30:41It looks as though Elizabeth had no option but to release her child into the hands of her enemies.
30:49We have a description of Elizabeth parting from her son.
30:54It's not an eyewitness account.
30:56It reports her saying,
30:57Farewell, my own sweet son.
31:00God send you good keeping.
31:02Let me kiss you once, yet ere you go.
31:05For God knoweth when we shall kiss together again.
31:09It's a great scene.
31:12I wonder was it played by a great actress.
31:15Years later, there would be rumours of a prince in exile waiting to return to England and claim his crown.
31:23Is it possible that the boy that Elizabeth handed over was not Richard?
31:27My own belief is that Elizabeth was far too astute to sit and wait for Richard to take her second son, just as he had taken her first.
31:41I think she handed over a servant boy, muffled up in a scarf.
31:46To the royal counsellors, all middle aged and elderly men, one small child looked much like another.
31:52Whoever it was that was handed over, the two boys in the tower were never seen again.
32:12A few weeks later, on July the 6th, 1483, in Westminster Abbey, Richard had himself crowned King of England.
32:22At his side, his wife Anne, Queen at last.
32:29Just as her dead father, the Kingmaker, had always planned.
32:37From her place of sanctuary nearby, Elizabeth would have been able to hear the trumpet sound and the people cheer as her son was usurped.
32:46And as the coronation procession made its way to the altar, holding Anne's train was none other than the Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort, the great survivor, given a central role because of her Yorkist husband's prominent position in the new court.
33:04Margaret Beaufort is the consummate politician, and we've already seen how she accommodates herself to whatever regime is in power.
33:14She went right on trying to negotiate for what she most wanted, the return of her son from exile.
33:21She tried to negotiate it with Edward, now she tried to negotiate it with Richard.
33:27Margaret's son, Henry Tudor, was now 26, and had been in exile in France for the last 12 years.
33:35Margaret opened negotiations with Richard for Henry's return the day before his coronation.
33:40But then, quite suddenly, she changed tack.
33:45Perhaps Richard was unresponsive, but a politician like Margaret couldn't fail to notice the new opportunities that were opening up.
33:55With King Edward, his brother George, and the two young princes out of the way, suddenly only Richard and his son stood between Henry Tudor and the throne.
34:07And now, a remarkable alliance was forged.
34:14Using secret messages passed by a doctor, the Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort and the Yorkist Elizabeth Woodville slowly agreed a pact.
34:27One that would ultimately transform English history.
34:31At its heart, a marriage alliance.
34:34Between Margaret's son, Henry, and Elizabeth's oldest daughter, Elizabeth of York.
34:43It's really, this fantastic historical moment is not about the men, it's all about the women.
34:50It's about the imprisoned queen and, you know, the ambitious mother who are working between them to marry the rightful heir, in a sense, Elizabeth of York.
35:00She's the one who's got all the royal blood, all the prestige, to the slightly dubious young man with a very tiny tincture of royal blood in his veins, but an awful lot of ambition.
35:11By late summer, the two women were plotting armed rebellion.
35:20They even recruited one of Richard's closest friends and allies, the ambitious Duke of Buckingham.
35:25But each of the three conspirators had different conflicting aims.
35:36My own belief is that they were all using each other.
35:39The Queen wanted to defeat Richard and restore her son to the throne.
35:44The Duke of Buckingham hoped to use Margaret's and Elizabeth's troops against Richard and then claimed the throne himself.
35:51And Margaret planned that her two allies would destroy each other.
35:55The rising would probably have succeeded, but for terrible weather.
36:02Torrential rain left Buckingham stranded in Wales by rising floods.
36:07He was captured and executed.
36:12Margaret Beaufort, despite her treasonous plotting, was spared,
36:16a beneficiary of the culture of chivalry, a culture she was a master at manipulating.
36:23It's an interesting feature of the Wars of the Roses that the lives of women were respected.
36:29The convention was that women were not treated in the same way as men.
36:36I think chivalry was the most marvellous shield for women.
36:40It was a disguise.
36:42Chivalry was something they could hide behind.
36:44When it suited them, they could play the role of the weak woman who needed to be defended.
36:48And of course that gave them a great deal more scope to act autonomously in private.
36:53But it was not just chivalry that saved Margaret.
36:57She was also, once again, using her husband to play a double game.
37:03Margaret Beaufort and Thomas Lord Stanley are pursuing a double indemnity insurance policy.
37:09So they decide that Stanley will back one side and Margaret will back the other.
37:14So regardless of the outcome, that they'll be able to negotiate some sort of compromise.
37:20It sounds very, very cynical, but I think that's exactly what they do.
37:26Rather than facing execution, as a man would have done, Margaret was placed under house arrest with her own husband as jailer.
37:35And although the rebellion had failed, her position was not nearly as bleak as it appeared.
37:44This looks like defeat, but it was a brilliant strategic victory for Margaret.
37:49All the Yorkists, who prepared to fight for the princes in the tower against the usurper Richard, had now shown their hand.
37:56And since the princes had disappeared, they had no cause but that of Henry Tudor.
38:01She had lost a battle, but she had split the house of York.
38:05Suddenly Henry, in his rather sort of shabby court in exile, finds great numbers of powerful men who've participated in the Yorkist dissident cause coming over to join him.
38:20Margaret had harnessed the anger of those Yorkists who saw Richard as a murderer and a tyrant,
38:26and she'd recruited that anger to the cause of her own Lancastrian son.
38:32But Elizabeth Woodville, still in Sanctuary, was about to make an extraordinary decision, tearing up her earlier agreement with Margaret.
38:46In the spring of 1484, Elizabeth does a deal with Richard.
38:51She agrees to come out of Sanctuary as long as Richard will swear this oath to protect her children to her daughters and to arrange suitable marriages for them.
39:01Although we might consider that Elizabeth is making a deal with the devil, in practical terms, what else can she do?
39:08She was approximately 15 years older than Richard III.
39:13So, as far as she knew, there would be no other king but Richard III in her lifetime.
39:19Elizabeth's decision to do a deal with the man most believed had killed her sons and send her daughters back to court at Westminster has forever blackened her reputation.
39:33The ultimate proof for some of her cynicism and cold-hearted ambition.
39:40But isn't there a far simpler explanation for her behaviour?
39:45Perhaps she signed the agreement because she didn't think Richard had killed her sons.
39:50After all, to this day, there's no evidence that he did.
39:53And if Richard didn't kill them, then who did?
39:59The other person with a clear motive was Margaret Beaufort.
40:04She knew her son Henry Tudor could never ascend to the throne while the princes were alive.
40:09And she had access to the tower in the late summer of 1483 through her co-conspirator, the Duke of Buckingham, and through her husband.
40:18I don't know if Margaret Beaufort killed the princes, but I believe that their mother Elizabeth thought so.
40:27It's a belief that would only have dawned on Elizabeth after the failure of the rebellion.
40:35But her reconciliation with Richard left her perfectly placed to exploit a sudden, dramatic downturn in the fortunes of the new queen, Anne Neville.
40:47At Middleham Castle in early April 1484, Anne's son, her only child, died.
41:04Both Richard and Anne were heartbroken, distraught by their son's death.
41:12One chronicler wrote,
41:14You might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness by reason of their sudden grief.
41:21But Richard's thoughts very quickly turned to the future.
41:29Anne was in poor health and appeared unlikely to produce more children.
41:35The worst thing that could happen to a medieval queen was to fail to produce a son.
41:44So really, the nightmare that would take some of Henry VIII's wives in the next century had now overtaken her.
41:52Perhaps Richard and Anne turned to each other in private in their grief.
42:01But Richard's public reaction to his son's death and to Anne's illness was cruel and humiliating.
42:10When he announced after the Christmas court of 1484, 1485, that he had been advised for medical reasons not to have sexual intercourse with his wife and that he was no longer sleeping with her.
42:22Effectively, this is a public statement as to the redundancy of the queen.
42:27And for Richard to have announced this in such a public way was effectively saying, Queen Anne's on the scrap heap, you know, let's look for the next queen.
42:36The woman Richard turned to was none other than Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth Woodville's daughter, the sister of the missing princes.
42:46Supposedly betrothed to Henry Tudor.
42:52The rumours were truly scandalous that Richard was courting his niece, the princess, under the very nose of his wife.
43:01Elizabeth, the former queen, observed from a distance the perfect positioning of her daughter.
43:08If Richard married her, she would be queen.
43:11If he was overthrown by Henry Tudor, Henry would make her queen.
43:15I doubt very much that anyone considered the feelings of Anne Neville, least of all Elizabeth.
43:22Their contemporaries were horrified, but for Richard, his young niece Elizabeth was extremely eligible.
43:31She is the solution to all his problems.
43:35Elizabeth represented the other half of the Yorkist claim.
43:40This was the reason that Henry Tudor in exile had made a public promise to marry her.
43:46And Richard had exactly the same motive for doing so.
43:49He not only gets all this vast political advantage and reunites the country,
43:54but he gets a young and fertile bride who can give him the heir he so desperately needs.
43:59On March the 6th, 1485, an eclipse of the sun occurred over England, and Queen Anne died, perhaps of tuberculosis.
44:20She was buried in an unmarked grave in Westminster Abbey, a quiet end to a dramatic life.
44:49Anne had outlived her first husband, a prince, and perhaps chose her second, a king.
44:58She changed sides in the cousin's war, not once, but twice.
45:03She escaped from house arrest and claimed her inheritance.
45:07And she fulfilled the dreams of her father, the kingmaker, and took the crown of England.
45:13Her downfall was something she couldn't control, however ambitious and determined.
45:18She had only one child, and he died young.
45:22Anne's death was so convenient, so timely, that there were rumours that Richard had poisoned her.
45:31In this turbulent political atmosphere, Richard was forced to abandon the idea of a hasty marriage to Elizabeth of York,
45:40at least for the time being.
45:43Elizabeth Woodville had not quite succeeded in restoring herself to the heart of power.
45:50But for Margaret Beaufort, the death of Richard's son meant that now just one man stood between her son and the throne.
45:59Richard himself.
46:02At the start of August 1485, after 14 years in exile, Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven in South Wales, at the head of a small army.
46:21He headed east, through his family's Welsh heartlands, gathering support as he went.
46:29King Richard summoned his own forces to Nottingham, and the two armies eventually met at Bosworth, west of Leicester, on August 22nd.
46:40Alongside foreign mercenaries, the army Henry drew up at Bosworth that morning was a combination of Lancastrians and dissident Yorkists,
46:50hostile to Richard, an alliance forged by his mother, Margaret Beaufort.
46:55But who did Elizabeth Woodville want to win?
46:59It's always been assumed that Elizabeth was hoping and praying for Henry Tudor's victory,
47:05for vengeance on the murderer of her two sons.
47:08But in fact, there were very few Woodville supporters in Henry's army at Bosworth.
47:14I think the reality was that Elizabeth Woodville had made some tough, shrewd political decisions,
47:22and she had decided to back the regime of Richard III.
47:27I think that more important than anything to her is the bloodline of the dynasty which her daughter represents,
47:34and which, like it or not, Richard of Gloucester also represented.
47:39Hatred of Richard would have come second to hatred of the idea of the Lancastrians regaining the throne.
47:47For Margaret Beaufort, this day was the culmination of a lifetime of hoping, scheming, and praying.
47:57Although under house arrest, she had been actively recruiting for Henry.
48:02If he was defeated, even the code of chivalry might not save her from a traitor's death.
48:07But victory would make her mother of the King of England.
48:12Everything now hinged on one man, Margaret's husband,
48:17the ever-calculating, ever-self-serving Lord Stanley.
48:24Stanley was supposedly on Richard's side,
48:27but as the two armies lined up at Bosworth that morning,
48:30his forces could be seen strategically placed precisely halfway between them.
48:36We all know that Richard lost at the Battle of Bosworth,
48:52but Shakespeare, working as a Tudor spin doctor,
48:55has him going down beneath the swords and shouting,
48:58a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,
49:02trying to get off the battlefield and save his own skin.
49:05In fact, Richard died fighting bravely,
49:08and his last words were,
49:10treason, treason, treason.
49:13He knew he had been betrayed,
49:16and the traitor was Thomas Lord Stanley.
49:20The forces of Margaret's husband Stanley had joined the battle on Henry's side.
49:25Just at the moment, it seemed the young pretender would be overwhelmed.
49:30The intervention of the Stanleys is absolutely decisive.
49:33If they had not intervened,
49:35Richard III would have cut down and killed his challenger, Henry Tudor.
49:40Margaret had rightly judged that her husband was prepared to betray his king,
49:48and in his final moments,
49:50King Richard knew it was Margaret Beaufort
49:53who had cost him his throne and his life.
50:01The last Plantagenet King of England was stripped naked,
50:05his dead body abused,
50:07and dragged from the battlefield to be buried in an unmarked grave,
50:11only rediscovered recently.
50:19Meanwhile, at Woking,
50:21Henry's mother Margaret was waiting for him.
50:24The new king might have been expected to tour his kingdom
50:27to call a great council of nobles, but he didn't.
50:31The first thing he did was come here to Woking Palace
50:36and spend two weeks almost in seclusion with his mother, Margaret Beaufort.
50:40It's as if he wanted to make up for the 14 years they had been apart,
50:44and certainly he wanted her guidance on how to rule the kingdom
50:48that she had helped him win, but which was a strange land to him.
50:52Top of the agenda was the resurrection of the marriage alliance with Elizabeth of York,
50:59so vital for bolstering Henry's weak claim to the throne.
51:04But, significantly, the wedding was delayed.
51:08He doesn't marry her for five months,
51:10and I think that must be to do with the fact
51:13that he'd heard the rumours of the relationship with Richard
51:17and wanted to be absolutely certain
51:19that his Yorkist bride wasn't carrying his rival's child.
51:25It wasn't quite the fairytale romance,
51:27the uniting of the houses of York and Lancaster,
51:30of the red and white roses,
51:32that the Tudor propagandists suggested.
51:35And no-one was more cynical about this wedding
51:41than the mother of the bride.
51:44Elizabeth Woodville gave her daughter in marriage
51:47to the family that may have killed her sons.
51:51It was the only way to get her daughter on the throne,
51:54but she may have never truly supported them.
52:00I'm sure that Henry Tudor and, indeed, Margaret Beaufort
52:03never altogether trusted Elizabeth Woodville.
52:06They'd made an alliance of necessity,
52:08but I think they must always have known
52:11that her interests were not necessarily altogether
52:14the same as theirs.
52:16Despite the fact she was now the Queen Mother,
52:19Elizabeth found herself quickly shunted aside.
52:2318 months into Henry's kingship,
52:26there's this sudden change.
52:28Elizabeth retires, or is ordered to retire,
52:32to the convent at Bermondsey,
52:34where she spends most of the time
52:36for the remaining five years of her life.
52:40By the beginning of 1487,
52:41there's only room for one Queen Mother,
52:44and that's Margaret Beaufort.
52:49Just why Elizabeth was sent to a convent
52:51was never made clear by the Tudors.
52:54She seems to have been plotting against the new regime.
52:59If, as I believe, her son Richard was waiting abroad in exile,
53:03she may have been hoping for his return.
53:06He was, after all, heir to her dynasty.
53:09But Elizabeth died in comparative poverty in 1492,
53:18at the age of 55.
53:21Her body was taken to Windsor
53:23and laid to rest beside that of her husband, King Edward.
53:28The Tudors, mother and son,
53:30kept the funeral of this most difficult of in-laws low-key.
53:35Elizabeth died knowing that she was the first commoner
53:40to marry into the royal family,
53:42the first English woman to rise to the throne of England.
53:46She married for love
53:48and gave her husband ten children, three of them boys.
53:52She defended her reputation against charges of witchcraft
53:56and her throne against rebellions.
53:58She saw her daughter become Queen of England
54:02and she would give her name to the greatest Tudor of them all,
54:06Elizabeth I.
54:09But it was Margaret Beaufort who shaped the Tudor dynasty,
54:26and with it, the next century of English history.
54:30She went on to found two colleges in Cambridge
54:34which commemorate her to this day.
54:36And although she was the only one of our three women never to be Queen,
54:41she was ultimately more powerful than both Elizabeth and Anne.
54:47Margaret invented for herself this title
54:50once Henry had taken the throne,
54:52My Lady the King's Mother.
54:55She lays down the rules for his court,
54:58she advises him,
54:59she has rooms right beside him when they travel.
55:02She travels with him often.
55:04And later in his kingship,
55:06she exercises his authority in the Midlands.
55:09She's the most important person in the kingdom after the king,
55:13and sometimes one might argue
55:15she's the most important person in the kingdom full stop.
55:19Above all, Margaret Beaufort shaped the way we view her era,
55:24commissioning some of the earliest histories, propaganda,
55:27a self-serving legacy we still wrestle with
55:30when we try to understand the period.
55:33I admire Margaret Beaufort,
55:38but I always take her with a pinch of salt.
55:41I believe she was very careful
55:43what stories she told of her childhood,
55:45and she virtually dictated the history of her times.
55:49The blackening of the reputation of Richard III,
55:52and the disappearance of rival women from the record,
55:55were all inspired by her.
55:57For herself, she chose an image of female vulnerable piety.
56:04But there was much more to her than that.
56:10Born to a bastard line of the royal family,
56:12she had survived a child marriage
56:14and the agonising birth of her only son.
56:17She had successfully navigated the turbulent waters
56:22of the cousins' wars, marrying carefully and cunningly.
56:27Now she was the last woman standing
56:30and had achieved what had appeared impossible,
56:33the restoration of her house of Lancaster
56:36and the ascent of her son Henry to the throne.
56:42She knew exactly what she wanted,
56:45and she was prepared to break any promise,
56:48tell any lie,
56:49do whatever it took to get there.
56:52For me, that makes her a heroine.
57:00Margaret's son Henry died before her,
57:02aged 52 in 1509.
57:08He commemorated himself
57:09with the magnificent Henry VII Chapel
57:12in Westminster Abbey.
57:15And it was here Margaret herself would be buried
57:21after taking the reins
57:23and guiding the 17-year-old Henry VIII
57:26through his coronation and wedding.
57:30She died the very day after his 18th birthday,
57:33aged 66, her job done.
57:39All three of our women shaped the era they lived through,
57:42yet they have been almost willfully ignored by historians
57:45who prefer to focus on kings and battles.
57:51The historical facts show them relentlessly pursuing their ambitions,
57:55faithful to their houses,
57:57utterly determined for their sons.
57:59The fascinating, complex reality of their lives has been hidden
58:06by old-fashioned views of what women can and should do.
58:11But only by understanding them can we understand their age.
58:14Rescuing the memory of these women is worth the effort,
58:20because these are the founders of the nation,
58:22just as much as the more famous men.
58:26Their history is partly obscured, almost forgotten.
58:29but these are our forebears,
58:32and they're my heroines.
58:34sports.