The new King’s coronation took place on St Peter’s Day, the 29th June 1461. Edward arrived from the Palace of Sheen at Richmond three days before the ceremony, and took up his quarters in the Tower, being received at the gates of the fortress with much pomp and state. On the eve of his coronation he gave a great feast to his adherents, knighting thirty-two of them. According to the chronicler Fabyan’s account, the new Knights of the Bath “were arrayed in blue gowns with hoods and tokens of white silk upon their shoulders,” and they rode before the King in the procession which took its course from the Tower to the Abbey at Westminster. Edward soon showed his vindictive nature by imprisoning, within the Tower, as soon as he felt himself secure upon the throne, Henry Percy, the son and heir of the Duke of Northumberland. Besides Percy, Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, with his heir, were also placed in the Tower in 1462, with some other nobles and knights who had fought upon the Lancastrian side; of these Sir Thomas Tudenham and Sir William Tyrell were beheaded on Tower Hill.
King Edward’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville, passed a few days in the Tower previous to her coronation in 1465, and both the King and Queen frequently lived in the Palace of the fortress, the Queen passing the time there when Edward was occupied in putting down an insurrection in the North.
When the whirligig of events and Warwick, the “King-maker,” brought back King Henry for a brief space of power, Elizabeth Woodville fled with her children to the Sanctuary at Westminster. The “King-maker” was defeated at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, and King Henry was brought back to the Tower once more a prisoner.
It was on Easter Sunday, in the year 1471, that Henry VI. re-entered the fortress for the last time. The fatal day of Tewkesbury was his doom, and Queen Margaret must be regarded as the cause of her luckless husband’s death. Could they have changed their rôles in life, Henry would probably have died on the throne and have left sons to succeed him. At Tewkesbury, Edward, who had left the Tower in charge of Earl Rivers, his Queen’s brother, again met Queen Margaret in arms, defeating her and taking her son prisoner. The death of this her only son, slain, it is said in cold blood, by the Duke of Gloucester, for whom she had waged unceasing war against the Yorkists, destroyed her last hopes. And on the 22nd of May 1471, the day after the triumphant Edward’s return to London, her husband lay dead in the Wakefield Tower.
The manner of his death will never be known, but the crime has always been charged to Gloucester. A great authority (S. R. Gardiner) thus writes of the death of the sixth Henry: “There can be no reasonable doubt that he was murdered, and that, too, by Edward’s directions.” Of the earliest histories relating to Henry’s death there are many and contradictory accounts. According to Polydore Vergil, Hall, Fabyan, Grafton, Holinshed, the Warkworth Chronicle, de Commines, and Sandford, King Henry was murdered by Gloucester himself. Hume alone avers that “he (the King) expired in confinement, but whether he died a natural death or a violent one is uncertain.”
Thus at length the much-tried and weary King Henry of Windsor was at rest after so many sore buffetings, defeats, perils, and misfortunes; his life’s pilgrimage was at an end.
“Good night, sweet Prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
Henry’s corpse was taken, according to Holinshed, “unreverently from the Tower” to St Paul’s, where it remained one night, and was next day buried at Chertsey, “without priest or clerke, torch or taper, singing or saying.” In later times Henry’s remains were re-interred at St George’s, Windsor. On the pavement to the right of the choir in that burying-place of our English kings, a flagstone bears written upon it in large letters, “King Henry VI.”
We have now arrived at the most dramatic point in the history of the Tower. After Henry’s death a very host of bloody deeds took place within the walls of the gloomy old fortress; murder succeeds to murder; and the blood of princes seems to ooze from beneath its prison doors.