Fourteen Years in the Tower for His Bloodline

Edward Plantagenet was ten years old when Henry VII put him in the Tower of London. His crime was his bloodline — nephew of Edward IV and Richard III, the last legitimate male heir of the House of York. Henry didn’t need to kill him. He just needed him gone.

He left him there for fourteen years.

The Horror

The chronicler Edward Hall later wrote that by the end of Edward’s imprisonment, the years of isolation had left him “out of all company of men, and sight of beasts, in so much that he could not discern a goose from a capon.” A prince of England, kept so long from the world that he had forgotten what animals looked like.

In 1499, a pretext arrived. Perkin Warbeck — another pretender, already a prisoner — allegedly drew Edward into a conspiracy to escape the Tower. According to Holinshed, Warwick, who simply wanted his freedom, agreed to the plot. But Holinshed also records that Warwick “did not himself seek his own death — by the drift and offence of another he was brought to it.” Whether he understood what he was agreeing to is another question entirely.

He was tried, convicted, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 28th November 1499. He was 24 years old. At the time, it was widely believed the execution had been demanded by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who refused to send their daughter Catherine to marry Henry’s heir Arthur while a Yorkist claimant still breathed.

Catherine of Aragon believed for the rest of her life that her later sufferings were God’s punishment for Warwick’s death. The man had been destroyed to make her marriage possible. She never forgot it.

The Modern Relic

The Tower of London still stands. Edward’s sister Margaret Pole was also eventually executed there — by Henry VIII, forty years later, at the age of 67, in one of the most botched beheadings in Tudor history. Henry VII eliminated the brother. His son came back for the sister. The Plantagenet line was extinguished in stages.

← Back to the archive