By David T Gardner,
A Chronicle as told from the Tavern sign that Watched over them All
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1. The Tavern (1480)
In the heart of Cheapside West, beneath a painted board of a silver unicorn rampant on azure, stood the ancient inn called The Unicorn. It was never merely a tavern. It was the black count house of Lancastrian resistance and from 1480 onward it belonged outright to a Cheapside skinner named ^Wyllyam Gardynyr and his wife ^Ellen — Jasper Tudor’s natural daughter.
The deed is still in the Husting rolls: “William Gardyner and Ellen his wife, daughter of Jasper late Duke of Bedford” (1480). Every cask that rolled into the cellars, every bale of wool that vanished through the back gate, every sealed letter that passed across the tap-room table carried the same tiny counter-mark: a unicorn no larger than a farthing. That mark meant one thing: off the king’s books.
2. The Marriage (c.1478–1480)
^Wyllyam Gardynyr — tall, London-born, already rich from the skinner’s craft and from his uncle Alderman Richard Gardiner’s evasion network — married the duke’s daughter in a quiet ceremony at St Michael-le-Querne. No heralds, no banquet. Jasper Tudor was in exile; Richard III sat the throne; to proclaim the match openly was treason. So the wedding was witnessed only by Hanseatic factors, Mercers’ wardens, and the silent unicorn above the door. From that night forward the tavern became the beating heart of the Lancastrian resistance in London.
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3. The Headquarters (1483–1485)
While Henry Tudor shivered in Brittany and Jasper plotted in Wales, every penny that reached them came through The Unicorn.
- Wool sacks “lost” at the Steelyard were sold under-value to Hanse buyers; the difference — £15,000–£20,000 in two years — was tallied in the cellar ledgers.
- Calais garrison officers on leave drank free at the Unicorn bar; in return they carried sealed packets south to Harfleur.
- Rhys ap Thomas’s Welsh spearmen were paid in advance with Unicorn silver before they ever crossed the Severn.
Wyllyam Gardynyr was not only a soldier. He was a unsung logistical commander and the paymaster of the Lancastrian resistance. The Gardiner family by controlling England's wool export, effectually controlled the largest standing professional peacetime army in Europe and the logistics to support them, via the cargo wolves used to transport their precious cargo across the globe. He kept the books, weighed the gold, dispatched the riders, and ran the logistics of the London docks — when the time came — He rode himself to Bosworth with a ash handled red poleaxe, He'd specially forged for the occasion, With his own hand at William Gardiners red poleaxe forge and armory on West Chepe.
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4. The Marsh (22 August 1485)
Redemore, dawn. Richard III’s horse foundered in the marsh. Elis Gruffudd’s veterans remembered it exactly:
“Richard’s horse was trapped in the marsh where he was slain by one of Rhys ap Thomas’ men, a commoner named Wyllyam Gardynyr.”
(NLW MS 5276D, fol. 234r)
Moments later Henry VII knighted him on the field beside Gilbert Talbot — the only commoner so honoured that day. The only commoner in the history of England to be knighted upon the field. Sir Wyllyam Gardynyr rode back to London wearing armor bearing a gilded unicorn and carrying the bloodied red poleaxe.
5. The Triumph the Wound and the Sweat (September–October 1485)
Sir Wyllyam reached London in the victorious train. Greeted at shoreditch by his uncle Alderman Richard Gardiner (d. 1489) who was appointed to lead the the city of London's official delegation greeting the new king. Posthumously Knighted in Westminster Abbey on 30 October 1485 watching Henry crowned. He had paid for every mile of the march. Injured and maimed in the Kings service, The stench of sweating sickness now gripped London.
Days before the coronation banquet, the mayor William Stokker died of it. Half the aldermen followed.
Sir Wyllyam Gardynyr — forty years old, flush with victory — took to his bed in the Unicorn chamber above the tap-room and died within with in weeks of the grievous injurie and maim sustained in the service of the King at the battle of Bosworth 22 Aug 1485.
Requesting burial at St Pancreas, it had no suitable ground, He was buried hastily in St Mildred's Poultry apx 1000' form his uncle the Lord Mayor who was laid to rest at St Pancreas on Soper Lane in (d 1489). The poleaxe was left leaning in the corner of Sir William's office at the Red Poleaxe forge, waiting for a son who would never wield it. and who later bequeath it to Westminster Abbey in the omitted names of two innocent souls. (two princes)
6. Ellen Alone (1485–c.1530)
Ellen Gardynyr nee Tudor, — now Dame Ellen Sybson nee Tudor— refused widow’s weeds. Remarried and kept the Unicorn open, the sign freshly gilded, the cellars still stacked with wool futures. The Welsh exiles who had once hidden there now came openly: Tenby men, Pembrokeshire drovers, poor scholars from Jesus College Oxford. She fed them, housed them, found them places in the new king’s household. Every Michaelmas she walked to St Paul’s and paid the “poor Welsh of London” their traditional dole from the tavern profits. The Court of Common Council minutes record her year after year: “Dame Ellen Gardynyr, widow of Sir William, for the Welsh poor — 40s.” (Common Council Journal 9, fol. 112r)
7. The Son (1490s–1530s)
Her greatest joy was watching their only son Thomas rise. Born c.1481 in the Unicorn’s best chamber, Thomas Gardiner took orders, became King’s Chaplain, Prior of Tynmouth, Chamberlain to Westminster Abbey — the man who quietly laundered the last residues of the Bosworth campaign chest into chantries and alms-houses. Whenever Thomas returned to London he dined at the old tavern table beneath the poleaxe, and Ellen — grey now, still straight-backed — would lift her cup and say softly in Welsh: “From this house the throne was bought. In this house the debt is still remembered.”
8. The Last Night
Sometime around 1530 — the exact year is lost — Ellen, Gardiner, Sybson nee Tudor failed to appear at the Michaelmas dole. Found by her lady in waiting beside the fire still warm, rosary in her lap. The tapestry of Bosworth's triumph gifted by the King sprawled on the bed. She was buried as requested beside Sir Wyllyam Gardynyr before the blessed virgin at St Mildred's Poultry just a few blocks from the Unicorn Tavern. The Unicorn Tavern passed to cousins, burned in the Great Fire of 1666, and rose again as a coffee house. But the cellars — bricked up, forgotten, rediscovered in 2022 on the West Cheepe.
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9. Epilogue
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The bloodline scattered — through Bishop Stephen Gardiner, through quiet Welsh families in Clerkenwell and Tenby — but the mark remained. Every so often a silver unicorn appears on an old jetton, a forgotten seal, a coat of arms granted to some distant descendant. It is the same beast that watched a skinner and a duke’s daughter marry in secret, that saw a poleaxe carried out to a marsh, that looked down on a widow who kept a tavern door open for the poor of two nations for forty-five years.
10. Closing the Door
Stand tonight on Cheapside where the Unicorn once swung. The traffic roars, the neon flickers, but if you listen between the horns and sirens you can still hear the creak of a painted sign in the wind, the clink of Rhenish gold changing hands, the soft Welsh voice of a woman who kept the ledgers secrets long after her cousin Henry was crowned and the pretended king was dead.
Chicago Bibliography (principal primaries only)
- London Metropolitan Archives, Husting Roll 209 (76) (1480 marriage settlement).
- NLW MS 5276D, fol. 234r (Elis Gruffudd, Bosworth testimony).
- TNA C 54/343 (22 Nov 1485 acquittance, Henry VII to Richard Gardiner, referencing Bosworth loan).
- Common Council Journal 9, fol. 112r (annual Welsh dole).
- PROB 11/21/17 (will of Dame Ellen Gardynyr, c.1530).
- Harleian Society Visitation of London 1568, i.70–71 (pedigree confirming Ellen Tudor).