Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling, we’re looking at a bizarre
royal execution, that of George Duke of Clarence, in the Tower of London in 1478. George was
the younger sibling of the King and the story of how Edward IV killed his brother has made
George’s one of the most famous royal deaths in English history. Stay tuned to hear about
the strange way in which Clarence supposedly met his end, whether or not the stories about
his horrible cause of death are true, the role his sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth Woodville,
may have played in his death and whether he was killed in an attempt to prevent a prophecy
about the royal succession coming true.
Just to let you know before we dive in, that next week’s video (which is Christmas themed)
will be going live a couple of days early, on Wednesday at 8pm UK time. This is because
I prefer not to post on Christmas Eve which is falling on a Friday this year. I’m sure
a lot of you are too busy on that day to watch YouTube and as you may or may not know, I
like to babysit my videos for the first couple of hours that they’re up and answer the
early comments, but I expect to be busy that evening too, so I just decided it was easier
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George Plantagenet was born here in Dublin Castle on 21 October 1449 during his father’s
term as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (by the by, I know that this image dates to over 130
years later, but it’s the oldest depiction I’m aware of of the Castle). His parents
were Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville and he had an older brother named Edward and
a younger one named Richard. You probably know them better as Edward IV and Richard
III. Together, these boys were known as the three sons of York and they would play major
roles in the conflict now known as the Wars of the Roses. It’s not my intention to get
sucked into giving a history here of these long and complicated Wars, but a brief summary
of the Yorks’ involvement up to 1478 will help you to understand how George ended up
dead at the behest of his brother at the age of just 28.
The boys’ father died, along with their 17 year old brother Edmund, at the Battle
of Wakefield in December 1460. A little over two months later and still aged only 18, Edward
took the throne from Henry VI who was quickly locked up in the Tower of London, though his
wife, Margaret of Anjou and their son, Edward, Prince of Wales, remained free. The 11 year
old George was created Duke of Clarence, showered with lands and other titles and was at the
time, the heir to his childless brother’s throne. The two would go on to have a fractious
relationship however. In 1469, against his brother’s express commands, George married
Isabel Neville, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, a man who was turning from a staunch ally
of Edward’s into his enemy. Together these two men became a joint thorn in the King’s
side, scheming to depose Edward and replace him with George. When this failed, they allied
themselves with Queen Margaret and the Prince of Wales, successfully deposed Edward and
put Henry VI back on the throne in October 1470.
Warwick now married his younger daughter Anne to Prince Edward and George, not happy with
his decrease in status in the new regime, soon switched sides again and went back to
his brother in April 1471. Edward retook the throne the same month and Warwick was killed
fighting against him on 14 April at the Battle of Barnet. The 17 year old Prince of Wales
died on 4 May at the Battle of Tewkesbury, while Henry VI was locked up in the Tower
of London again and soon died or was murdered there, but that’s a story for another video.
Publicly, the York brothers were reconciled but their relationship continued to deteriorate
over the next 7 years, especially as George and Richard engaged in a spat over the Warwick
inheritance, as George was married to Isabel Neville, while her sister Anne, the one-time
Princess of Wales, married Richard, who was the Duke of Gloucester, in 1472. George’s
judgement and mental state then took a nose dive after the death of his wife in December
1476, most likely from childbirth complications. He had one of her servants abducted and in
the course of a single day in April 1477, had the woman indicted, convicted and executed
for supposedly poisoning Isabel. Clarence was further angered by the fact that Edward
had taken Richard’s side in the dispute over the Warwick inheritance and by the King’s
refusal to allow him to remarry where he chose. Then, several of his servants were accused
and found guilty of planning the King’s death. Though Clarence was not involved, he
stupidly had one of the men’s scaffold speeches, in which he declared his innocence, read out
to the royal council. When Edward found out, this combined with the judicial murder of
Isabel’s servant pushed him over the edge. He had Clarence arrested and thrown in the
Tower of London and the Duke was quickly found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.
Some sources (and I’ll be discussing these in a moment) said that Edward’s wife, Queen
Elizabeth Woodville, urged her husband to have the Duke killed, fearing that her own
son would never succeed to the throne while George lived. This was because there were
questions over the legality of her marriage to Edward, who had possibly married another
woman, named Eleanor Talbot, before wedding Elizabeth. If Elizabeth’s children were
illegitimate, George was next in line and had already shown himself prepared to depose
his family from the throne. There is also a story, likely apocryphal, that Edward and
Elizabeth were frightened by a prophecy that Edward would be succeeded by a man whose name
started with the letter G. This of course could also be read as being his other brother,
Richard, Duke of Gloucester. For more on the fate of Edward and Elizabeth’s sons, the
so-called Princes in the Tower and the involvement their Uncle Gloucester may have had in their
mysterious disappearance from the Tower of London in 1483, see my video on their story,
which I’ll leave linked on screen and in the description box.
But now, back to George, whose death sentence was carried out within the Tower on 18 February
1478. The apparent manner of his death, if the stories are true, is one of the strangest
methods of execution ever employed for a royal prisoner.
According to numerous sources, the Duke of Clarence was drowned to death in a vat of
malmsey wine. How likely is it that this bizarre tale is true however? To answer that, let’s
look at the what the sources say and how far we can trust them. The earliest account we
have of Clarence’s cause of death was written about five and a half years after the event.
It was composed by an Italian scholar named Domenic Mancini in late 1483 as part of a
report written for the Archbishop of Vienne. Mancini said that
the queen remembered the insults to her family and that it was said she was not the legitimate
wife of the King. Thus she concluded that her offspring by the king would never come
to the throne unless the duke of Clarence was removed; and of this she easily persuaded
the king … Accordingly whether the charge was fabricated or a real plot revealed, the
Duke of Clarence was accused of conspiring the King’s death by means of spells and
magicians. When the charge had been considered before a court, he was condemned and put to
death. The mode of execution preferred in this case was that he should die by being
plunged into a jar of sweet wine.
Mancini had recently been in England (he left in the summer of 1483) and though he didn’t
speak English, he had good court connections and would have had access to translators whilst
there to obtain the latest gossip. It was also in his best interests to provide accurate
information to his superior, the Bishop, rather than tell tall tales which could quickly be
disproved. I therefore see no reason to doubt that he was telling the truth, or at the very
least, what he believed to be true.
Writing in about 1484, we have another account, this time from the French writer, Jean De
Roye, which says that it was only at the behest of the men’s mother, Cecily, dowager Duchess
of York, that Clarence’s fate was not much worse. De Roye says that after Edward locked
George up:
the said King Edward assembled his council, by whose deliberations he [meaning Clarence]
was condemned to be led from the said Tower of London, being dragged on his buttocks to
the gibbet of the said city of London, and there to be cut open and his entrails thrown
into a fire, and then his neck should be cut and his body made into four quarters. But
afterwards, by the great prayer and request of the mother of the said Edward and Clarence,
his sentence was changed and moderated, so that in the month of February of the said
year, Clarence being a prisoner in the Tower of London was taken and brought out of his
said prison, and after he had been confessed, was thrust alive in a cask of Malmsey opened
at one end, his head downwards, and there he remained until he had given up the ghost,
and then he was pulled out and his neck was cut.
De Roye concludes by saying (correctly) that Clarence was taken to be buried with his wife
Isabel at Tewkesbury Abbey.
Other near contemporary sources follow broadly the same story. Phillipe de Commynes, who
was originally from Flanders but who worked in the courts of Burgundy and France, wrote
in the mid-1490s that ‘King Edward caused his brother the Duke of Clarence, to be drowned
in a pipe of malmsey, charging him with a design of endeavouring to dethrone him’.
French writer Olivier de La Marche (who died in 1502) claimed that ‘the King of England
found a way of having his brother again [which I think means gaining physical custody of
him]; and had him killed in a bath, as it is said.’ This differs a little from most
other sources as Clarence is not drowned in wine, but the basic mode of execution remains
that same. Other writers were less certain of what had occurred. The Crowland or Croyland
Chronicle, which is probably a late 15th century English document masquerading as one which
dates back to the 12th century, states only that ‘in a few days after, the execution,
whatever its nature may have been, took place (and would that it had ended these troubles!)
in the Tower of London, it being the year of our Lord, 1478, and the eighteenth of the
reign of king Edward.’ Most accounts follow the drowning in wine narrative however.
Another French chronicler, Jean Molinet (who died in 1507), wrote in his book Chroniques,
1476-1506, that Edward allowed Clarence to choose his own mode of death ‘and he prayed
that he could die in a vat full of Malvasia, [meaning Malmsey] and so it was.’ Molinet’s
work is therefore especially important as it provides an explanation as to where the
idea for this strange execution method came from. The English chronicler, Robert Fabyan,
who was writing no later than the early 1510s and whose book, The New Chronicles of England
and France, was published in 1516 said that ‘This yere, that is to mean ye xviii. day
of February, the duke of Clarence … brother to the kynge, thanne beyng prysoner in ye
Tower, was secretely put to deth & drowned in a barell of maluesye within the sayd Tower.’
Italian author Polydore Vergil, who arrived in England in 1502, drafted his book Anglicae
Historiae in 1512-13, though it wasn’t published until 1534. According to him, Edward ‘suddenly
commanded the arrest and execution of his brother Duke George of Clarence, who was put
to death, as they say, in a barrel of Cretan wine, setting the worst example in human memory.’
When Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas More, came to write his History of King Richard
III in the 1510s (though it was unpublished until 1557), he claimed that Elizabeth Woodville
had been partly to blame for what happened and said ‘wer hee fautye were hee faultlesse,
attained was hee by parliament and judged to the death, and thereupon hastely drouned
in a Butte of Malmesey’. He adds though that Edward, despite having ordered his brother’s
death, regretted it afterwards and ‘pitiously bewailed and sorrowfully repented’.
Nearly a century after Clarence’s demise, English chronicler, Ralph or Raphael Holinshed,
whose Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland were published in 1577 wrote that
‘finallie the duke was cast into the Tower, and therewith adiudged for a traitor, and
priuilie drowned in a butt of malmesie, the eleuenth of March, in the beginning of the
seuententh yeare of the kings reigne.’ The date of Clarence’s death does not match
earlier sources, but once again, we see the same strange method of execution. Holinshed
also mentions the prophecy of a man with a name starting with G taking the throne which
supposedly alarmed Edward and Elizabeth so much.
There is one last tantalising piece of evidence in the form of this portrait. It is possibly
of Clarence’s daughter, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury and is now housed in the National
Portrait Gallery in London. At first all seems normal enough, but look at the sitter’s
wrist. She is wearing a tiny wine casket on it which, it has been mooted, was an allusion
to the fate of her father. This is assuming the portrait is Margaret however, which is
not certain.
So what to make of all these sources. Well on the downside, none of them date from 1478,
the year of Clarence’s death and (with the possible exception of the portrait) none are
traceable to a member of the royal family, to a person who claimed to be present at the
execution, or to any official governmental record. On the upside, though not quite contemporary
accounts of his death, most of the sources I have talked to you about were written within
living memory of the events of February 1478 and it is striking how similar they are. Indeed,
there is no source which gives any cause of death for George other than drowning and the
vast majority say that it was in wine. For me, this level of uniformity amongst independently
written sources is a strong indicator that the broad strokes of the story they are telling
are true. Just compare the stories surrounding George’s death to the multitude of tales
surrounding the supposed murder of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower in the years after
their disappearance in 1483. In that case, no date of death could be agreed upon and
numerous potential causes of death were put forward. In George’s case, all the rumours
or stories of what had happened to him are so well aligned with one another (even decades
after the fact, when there had been plenty of time for conspiracy theories to spring
up), that I find them to be compelling. In other words, if I had to put money on it,
I would say that George Duke of Clarence was indeed drowned in wine in the Tower of London
on 18 February 1478.
I’m interested in what you think however. Let me know in the comments below if you find
the story of George’s demise to be believable and if not, why not. Remember too to like
the video and subscribe to the channel. If you’re interested in this period of history,
you might also like my videos on the life of Henry VII or my playlist on the six wives
of Henry VIII. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.