Murdered in the Tabloids: Billposting and the Destruction of the Duke of Suffolk in 1450

Abstract

This essay examines the media campaign surrounding the sensational murder of the most powerful political figure in mid fifteenth-century England, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Once a great war hero, Suffolk became unpopular when the English suffered military defeat in France and lost Normandy in 1449, a disaster for which Suffolk was singularly blamed by the public at large. He was impeached by parliament only to be saved and sent into exile by King Henry VI. On his journey to the continent his ship was intercepted by another called Nicholas of the Tower, and he was beheaded by the ship’s sailors in the name of vigilante justice. This essay considers the political verses or bills put in circulation prior to Suffolk’s murder which satirized and lambasted the duke’s role in Henry VI’s faltering government on the eve of the Wars of the Roses. The billposting campaign deliberately encouraged the duke’s downfall and eventual murder, and so Suffolk might be considered the first great victim of proto-tabloid journalism in England, signaling the importance of both publicity and public opinion during the ensuing Wars of the Roses.