Today in 1461, at Hereford marketplace, Owain Tudor was executed and buried in the local Greyfriars. It appears that, although he had commanded Lancastrian troops at Mortimer’s Cross and been captured, he was not expecting this fate. He may well have foreseen himself being ransomed instead until he saw the block.
Perhaps he was executed because he was thought to have married the widowed Catherine de Valois and fathered some children by her, although there is no real evidence at the time and that such a marriage would have been precluded by the 1427 Act, as Ashdown-Hill reminded us in Royal Marriage Secrets. A royal stepmother could not remarry until her son came of age, which Henry VI did not during Catherine’s lifetime.
After her death in January 1436/7, it seems that rumours, including the legend of her watching a naked servant bathing, arose and were exploited for propaganda purposes so as to use him – and his “sons”, Edmund and Jasper – to bolster Henry’s fragile regime as a counterweight to the Duke of York and his cohort. Doubtless Owen played along and boasted about these rumours.
Eight years after his end, the words “This head that shall lie on the stock that was once wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap” were attributed to him, although the phraseology varies. Perhaps he should have kept quiet or restricted himself to the facts.
murreyandblue 
What ‘facts’ were those? Should Owen have ‘confessed’ that none of Catherine’s children were his? Would that have been chivalrous? Would it have even saved him?
When we go to such length to prove that Henry VII wasn’t a ‘Tudor,’ all we are doing is making him more ‘Plantagenet’ than before. Seems to me we would want him to be at least partly ‘of low degree.’
Was everyone who wasn’t gay in the 15th century, cheating on his or her spouse? Was there no middle ground?
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