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Henry VI: The Lewknors, Queen Margaret and Tewkesbury

A Sussex family in the service of Lancaster—and a Lewknor killed in the battle that ends Shakespeare’s third play.

The Lewknors in Lancastrian service, the soldiers betrayed by divided command, and Lewes Lewkenor’s language of war.

On 4 May 1471 Sir John Lewknor of West Grinstead died fighting for the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury. Shakespeare brings the same battle onto the stage near the end of Henry VI, Part Three. Queen Margaret rallies her army, the Yorkists triumph, and the Lancastrian cause collapses. Lewknor has no speaking part, but he belonged to the army whose defeat the play dramatises.

The family within the history

The three Henry VI plays move from war in France to rebellion in England and civil war between Lancaster and York. The Lewknors appear in the historical record behind that sequence: in royal household service, Queen Margaret’s establishment, county administration and the final Lancastrian army at Tewkesbury.

Malcolm Mercer’s study, Driven to rebellion? Sir John Lewknor, dynastic loyalty and debt, reconstructs John’s career from household accounts, legal proceedings, commissions and chronicles. It gives the family connection substance: named people, offices, property disputes and a recorded death on the battlefield.

This concerns the medieval Sussex family to which the later Lewkenor story belongs. John’s relationship to his own parents and brothers can be stated from Mercer’s evidence; a precise direct descent from him to Sir Lewes Lewkenor is not established by this article.

A servant of Henry VI

John Lewknor was probably born around 1420, one of four sons of Sir Thomas Lewknor of Trotton and Philippa Dallingridge. As a younger son, he would not inherit the principal family estates. His marriage to Joan Halsham brought him property at West Grinstead in Sussex and Brabourne in Kent, together with lands elsewhere.

By about 1441 John was serving as a squire in Henry VI’s household. In 1446 he received the office of forester of “Batales Bailly” in Windsor Forest. He also served as sheriff of Surrey and Sussex at the time of Cade’s rebellion in 1450, receiving a reward for his service against the rebels. These were practical ties to the Lancastrian government, extending across the household, royal land and county administration.

Cade’s rebellion: the sheriff and the stage

In Henry VI, Part Two, Jack Cade’s rising brings the king’s authority into crisis. Henry proposes negotiation:

KING HENRY

I’ll send some holy bishop to entreat,
For God forbid so many simple souls
Should perish by the sword! And I myself,
Rather than bloody war shall cut them short,
Will parley with Jack Cade, their general.

Henry VI, Part Two, IV.iv.

John Lewknor’s service against the rising places him within the administration confronting the historical rebellion. The play gives its audience the king, rebels and great officers; the sheriff’s record restores one of the county figures involved in maintaining royal authority. It does not identify Lewknor with a character in the scene.

The brothers and Queen Margaret

John’s service formed part of a wider family attachment to Lancaster. His brother Walter served as a squire in Queen Margaret’s household during the early 1450s. Another brother, Richard of Brambletye, served in the royal household before developing a legal career. Their elder brother Roger, who inherited the principal estates, was knighted at Greenwich on 5 January 1450 in the same ceremony as Edmund and Jasper Tudor, Henry VI’s half-brothers.

Mercer’s household references include the royal accounts now held at The National Archives, E 101/409/9 and E 101/409/11 for John, and E 101/410/1, E 101/410/3, E 101/410/6 and E 101/410/9 for Walter. The family’s connection to Henry and Margaret rests on recorded service.

Accommodating the new king

Edward IV’s accession in 1461 did not immediately drive the Lewknors into rebellion. John accepted the new government and received local commissions in 1462. Roger continued to participate in Sussex administration under Yorkist rule.

The family’s conduct resists a simple division into hereditary loyalists and traitors. Long service under Henry VI could coexist with an attempt to live under Edward IV. John’s later return to Lancaster followed years of financial difficulty and political uncertainty.

Debt, marriage and disputed land

John’s position deteriorated during the 1460s. A loan of £220, contracted jointly with Thomas Etchingham and Ralph St Leger in 1460, remained unpaid. A separate action sought £197 2s. from him. Failure to appear led to outlawry in 1463; he eventually surrendered to the Fleet and received a pardon on 14 May 1466.

The lands he held through Joan made his position vulnerable to disputes over her inheritance. Joan’s uncle John Halsham challenged their arrangements concerning West Grinstead. A later agreement involving Brabourne and Sir John Scott also became entangled in litigation. Mercer treats the competing allegations as claims made by interested parties, rather than accepting either side’s account without question.

These pressures help explain the attraction of a restored Lancastrian government. Former household relationships offered a possible route back into public life. In 1470, political change presented John with the prospect of recovering influence as well as renewing an old allegiance.

The return of Lancaster

John stayed neutral during the disturbances involving Warwick and Clarence in 1469 and early 1470. When Henry VI was restored in October 1470—the brief restoration known as the Readeption—he joined the revived Lancastrian administration and entered the Sussex commission of the peace in November.

Edward IV’s return in March 1471 rapidly undermined that government. Warwick was defeated at Barnet on 14 April, the day Margaret landed at Weymouth. She nevertheless continued the struggle. John Lewknor joined the Lancastrian forces; Mercer suggests that he may have linked up with Somerset while the duke was gathering support in southern England.

“We will not from the helm to sit and weep”

Shakespeare gives Margaret an extended speech before Tewkesbury. She imagines the damaged Lancastrian cause as a ship that must continue despite losing its leaders:

QUEEN MARGARET

Great lords, wise men ne’er sit and wail their loss
But cheerly seek how to redress their harms.
What though the mast be now blown overboard,
The cable broke, the holding-anchor lost,
And half our sailors swallowed in the flood?
Yet lives our pilot still. Is ’t meet that he
Should leave the helm and, like a fearful lad,
With tearful eyes add water to the sea
And give more strength to that which hath too much,
Whiles in his moan the ship splits on the rock,
Which industry and courage might have saved?

Henry VI, Part Three, V.iv.

She replaces the fallen Warwick and Montague with the leaders who remain, and claims the pilot’s charge for herself and her son:

QUEEN MARGARET

We will not from the helm to sit and weep,
But keep our course, though the rough wind say no,
From shelves and rocks that threaten us with wrack.

Henry VI, Part Three, V.iv.

The speech gives dramatic form to the decision made by the remaining Lancastrians: whether to abandon the cause or continue against the Yorkist advance. John Lewknor was among those who continued. Shakespeare does not name him among Margaret’s soldiers, and the speech is dramatic invention rather than a record of words he heard.

Tewkesbury: killed in battle

The armies met on 4 May 1471. The Lancastrians were defeated, and John Lewknor was killed. Mercer considers it probable that he had been knighted on the eve of the battle. His death was recorded by contemporary chroniclers; Mercer cites Warkworth’s Chronicle, John Benet’s chronicle and The Great Chronicle of London.

The distinction between battlefield deaths and subsequent executions matters. John Lewknor died in the fighting. Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and John’s former household colleague Sir Gervase Clifton were executed afterwards.

Shakespeare moves directly from defeat to the disposal of the prisoners:

KING EDWARD

Now here a period of tumultuous broils.
Away with Oxford to Hames Castle straight.
For Somerset, off with his guilty head.
Go bear them hence. I will not hear them speak.

Henry VI, Part Three, V.v.

The play concentrates the consequences of victory into a few commands. Mercer’s reconstruction adds the history of one man who did not survive to become a prisoner: decades of royal service, a troubled marriage settlement, debt, accommodation with York and a final return to Lancaster.

What drove Lewknor to fight?

Mercer’s conclusion keeps personal circumstances alongside allegiance:

“The presence of Sir John Lewknor at Tewkesbury is therefore not simply a case of Lancastrian loyalism.”

Malcolm Mercer, “Driven to rebellion?”, Sussex Archaeological Collections 137 (1999), p. 158.

That reading gives the history its human scale. Loyalty was sustained through households, office and friendship; it was also tested by the loss of income, litigation and exclusion from local affairs. John’s brothers could find places under Edward IV while his own circumstances deteriorated.

Shakespeare’s civil war repeatedly turns public allegiance into a family catastrophe. At Towton, Henry watches a son discover that he has killed his father, and a father discover that he has killed his son. He addresses England:

KING HENRY

O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
Whiles lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.

Henry VI, Part Three, II.v.

This scene belongs to Towton, not Tewkesbury. Its relevance is the play’s sustained attention to what dynastic conflict does to households and individuals—the scale on which the Lewknor records allow us to examine the war.

The connection to Lewes Lewkenor

Sir Lewes Lewkenor’s later career belongs to another period of war, disputed allegiance and service abroad. The medieval family history supplies an earlier setting for those concerns. Members of the Sussex family had served Henry VI and Margaret, accepted Yorkist rule, and in John’s case returned to Lancaster and died for it.

The connection here is historical and familial. It does not depend on making John a hidden character in the play or claiming that a particular family account reached the playwright. It establishes that the Lewknors were participants in the political history dramatised across Henry VI, especially the rebellion of Part Two and the final battles of Part Three.

Talbot: betrayed by divided command

The military argument of the trilogy begins before the civil war. In Henry VI, Part One, Talbot’s danger is increased by rivalry between York and Somerset. Each blames the other for failing to send help. Sir William Lucy makes the consequence explicit:

LUCY

The fraud of England, not the force of France,
Hath now entrapped the noble-minded Talbot.
Never to England shall he bear his life,
But dies betrayed to fortune by your strife.

Henry VI, Part One, IV.iv.

Paul A. Jorgensen identifies two forms of military dissension:

friction between two or more heads of the army

insubordination resulting from a pervasive neglect of rank and degree

Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World, discussion of military dissension.

Talbot’s predicament gives the first of these a dramatic form. Commanders’ disputes become soldiers’ deaths. This concern connects the French wars of Part One with the collapse of government in the later plays, and with the arguments about leadership, pay and allegiance in Lewkenor’s account of the Low Countries.

John of Gaunt and the wars in Spain

Lewkenor answers Spanish claims of military superiority by recalling English campaigns in the peninsula. He first invokes the Black Prince’s victory at Nájera, then turns to John of Gaunt:

There they may likewise read the valorous conquests achieved by John, Duke of Lancaster, brother to the said prince, in Galicia, against Don John, son of the said Henry the usurping Bastard. Besides, the chronicles of Portugal are full of the martial prowess of the English men, and glorious victories obtained in service of their King, to whose aid they were called against the said King of Castile.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), defence of English military reputation; spelling modernised.

In Henry VI, Part Three, Oxford answers Warwick’s rejection of Henry’s title by invoking the same Lancastrian martial ancestry:

OXFORD

Then Warwick disannuls great John of Gaunt,
Which did subdue the greatest part of Spain;
And after John of Gaunt, Henry the Fourth,
Whose wisdom was a mirror to the wisest;
And after that wise prince, Henry the Fifth,
Who by his prowess conquerèd all France.
From these our Henry lineally descends.

Henry VI, Part Three, III.iii.

Both passages enlist the reputation of English arms abroad. Lewkenor uses it against Spanish intimidation; Oxford uses it to defend the Lancastrian succession. Their claims are rhetoric as well as history: the sweeping conquest of Spain asserted by Oxford should not be treated as a literal account of Gaunt’s achievements.

“Effusion of Christian blood”

Writing about the Armada and the peace negotiations preceding it, Lewkenor describes Elizabeth’s willingness to negotiate:

whilst falsely, wickedly, and abusively, he entertained her majesty’s commissioners in Flanders with a treaty of peace; to which her highness, like unto a Christian princess, and for to avoid the effusion of Christian blood, was very inclinable

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of the Spanish Armada; spelling modernised.

The same phrase enters the discussion of peace between England and France in Part One:

GLOUCESTER

Well, my good lord, and as the only means
To stop effusion of our Christian blood
And stablish quietness on every side.

Henry VI, Part One, V.i.

KING HENRY

Ay, marry, uncle, for I always thought
It was both impious and unnatural
That such immanity and bloody strife
Should reign among professors of one faith.

Henry VI, Part One, V.i.

“Christian blood” makes war between Christian rulers a moral problem as well as a contest of power. The shared expression belongs to the political and religious language of peace-making; here it connects Lewkenor’s account of Elizabethan diplomacy with the play’s representation of an earlier Anglo-French settlement.

“Tumultuous broils”: France and Tewkesbury

Lewkenor describes the consequences of the killing of the Duke of Guise and his brother the cardinal. Philip II, he argues, could anticipate further division in France:

The news of which tragical accident was not so much displeasing to the king of Spain in regard of their deaths, upon whom his factious business so much relied, as it was pleasing insomuch that the greatness of their parentage, the multitude of their followers and partisans, and the affections of the people considered, he knew that there could not but ensue many great tumultuous and in a manner irreconcileable broils.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of the Guise killings and the French religious wars; spelling modernised.

Edward IV’s first words after Tewkesbury use the same compact expression:

KING EDWARD

Now here a period of tumultuous broils.

Henry VI, Part Three, V.v.

For Lewkenor, the murder of powerful leaders threatens to multiply faction and conflict. For Edward, the defeat of his enemies appears to end them. The matching words therefore mark opposite expectations: renewed civil disorder in France and a proclaimed conclusion to it in England.

Lime-twigs and the danger of a fair appearance

Lewkenor warns prospective exiles against judging Spanish offers by their attractive appearance:

Wise men are not carried away with the appearance of things, but in matters that are doubtful, do always suspect the worst. The worst wine hath always the fairest ivy-bush; the foulest serpents lie under the best and rankest grass; and the birds that fly unto the bait without regarding the lime twigs are easiliest entangled.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), warning concerning the English seminaries; spelling modernised.

The image of birds caught on sticky twigs reappears as a spiritual terror at Cardinal Beaufort’s deathbed:

CARDINAL

He hath no eyes! The dust hath blinded them.
Comb down his hair. Look, look. It stands upright,
Like lime-twigs set to catch my wingèd soul.

Henry VI, Part Two, III.iii.

Lewkenor’s warning concerns entrapment beneath an appearance of generosity; the cardinal imagines his soul caught as he dies. The familiar practice of bird-catching gives both passages an immediate physical image for a less visible danger.

These verbal comparisons sit alongside the family and military evidence. They do not establish a direction of borrowing: Lewkenor’s book appeared in 1595, after the early theatrical history of Henry VI had begun. Their value is in the precise language, historical examples and political concerns that can be read together.

Dates and documents

Sources and further reading

1. Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595): English campaigns in Spain and Portugal; the Armada and peace negotiations; the Guise killings; warnings concerning the seminaries. Quotations use modernised spelling.
2. Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World, discussion of military dissension and divided command.
3. Malcolm Mercer, “Driven to rebellion? Sir John Lewknor, dynastic loyalty and debt”, Sussex Archaeological Collections 137 (1999), pp. 153–159. Family and household service: pp. 154–155; debt and property: pp. 155–156; Readeption and Tewkesbury: pp. 157–158.
4. J. O. Halliwell, ed., A Chronicle of the First Thirteen Years of the Reign of King Edward IV, by J. Warkworth (Camden Society, 1839), p. 18; G. L. and M. A. Harriss, eds., John Benet’s Chronicle, p. 233; A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley, eds., The Great Chronicle of London (1938), p. 218. Chronicle references identified by Mercer, notes 1 and 41.
5. The National Archives: royal household accounts E 101/409/9 and E 101/409/11; Common Pleas CP 40/803, rot. 416r; debt records C 241/246/53, C 241/248/60 and C 241/254/4; property litigation C 1/19/36 and C 4/2/116. References follow Mercer’s notes 15 and 28–34.
6. William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, IV.iv, and Henry VI, Part Three, II.v and V.iv–v. Play quotations checked against the Folger Shakespeare Library text.
7. William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, IV.iv, and Henry VI, Part Three, II.v and V.iv–v. Additional comparisons: Henry VI, Part One, IV.iv and V.i; Part Two, III.iii; Part Three, III.iii. Play quotations checked against the Folger Shakespeare Library text.

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