Only twice was Sanctuary broken at Westminster. On August 11, 1378, two knights named Hawle and Shackle, escaped from the Tower of London where they had been imprisoned by John of Gaunt, and fled to the Abbey. For greater security they took refuge in the Choir itself, during the celebration of High Mass. Alan Boxall, constable of the Tower, and Sir Ralph Ferrers with fifty armed men were close behind them, and burst in upon the service "regardless of time or place." Shackle escaped. But Hawle, chased round and round the Choir, at last fell dead in front of the Prior's Stall, pierced with twelve wounds. His servant and one of the monks who had tried to save him, were killed with him; and the stone on which he lay dead may be seen to this day with the effigy traced upon it. The Abbey—profaned by the horrible crime—was shut up for four months, and "Parliament was suspended, lest its assembly should be polluted by sitting within the desecrated precincts."[28]
The second outrage took place during Wat Tyler's rebellion, when, by his orders, one John Mangett, Marshal of the Marshalsea, was torn from one of the slender pillars of the Confessor's Shrine to which he clung for safety.
But to us, "Sanctuary" is specially interesting, as it is intimately connected with the short and tragic lives of Edward the Fifth and Richard, Duke of York, his brother.
In 1470, Edward the Fourth—betrayed by his brother Clarence, and by that terrible and splendid personage Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, "The Kingmaker"—fled over seas with a small following to the court of his brother-in-law, Charles the Bold, in Flanders. His Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, was then living in the Tower, where Henry the Sixth, the deposed king, was imprisoned; and thus by a strange conjunction, the Yorkist Queen and the Lancastrian King were within that grim building at the same time. When Elizabeth heard that her husband had taken flight, and that Henry was to be restored to the throne, she came secretly by water from the Tower, and took Sanctuary at Westminster, with her three daughters and Lady Scroope "in greate penurie forsaken of all her friends." Here Thomas Millyng, the abbot, received her with kindness, sending her provisions—"half a loaf and two muttons"—daily. And here on the fourth of November was born her
faire son, called Edward, which was with small pompe like a poore man's child christened, the godfathers being the Abbot and the Prior of Westminster, and the godmother the Ladie Scroope.[29]
The Queen remained in Sanctuary until the spring of the next year, when her husband returned in triumph to the capital two days before the great battle of Barnet. There Warwick the Kingmaker, was slain, the Lancastrian forces were broken up, and Edward was once more king of England. The Queen has given in her own words an account of her joyful meeting at Westminster.