The once-warlike King Edward IV of England died in his bed on April 9, 1483, aged only forty. The royal council gave no official explanation for his death. This naturally led to confusion, and contemporary commentators speculated about the causes. They reported variously that he died of apoplexy, melancholy, or fevers. Modern historians remain perplexed. Charles Ross, Edward IV's most scholarly biographer, concludes that it is impossible to know what killed the king, although his notorious self-indulgence was surely a factor. In pointing to the king's gluttony, Ross was following his predecessor, the eminent early twentieth-century historian Cora Scofield, who believed it likely that Edward had died from a stroke, or perhaps acute indigestion, citing the contemporary French chroniclers Thomas Basin (1412–1491) and Jean de Roye (ca. 1425–ca. 1490) as her authorities. In making her conjecture, Scofield emphasized the king's unhealthy lifestyle. As she observed, “Had Death delayed his work three weeks longer, Edward would have been forty-one years old. It was an early age for a man to die, even then when the average life span was considerably shorter than it is today; but for libertinism and high living, to both of which, there is no doubt, Edward was much given, even the strongest constitution must sooner or later pay the price.”

In spite of the mystery surrounding the king's death, Ross and Scofield could point quite confidently to the ill effects of this self-indulgence because contemporaries did not hold back in their criticism of the king. A chronicler of Crowland (or Croyland) Abbey in Lincolnshire, for example, describes him as “a gross man […] addicted to conviviality, vanity, drunkenness, extravagance, and passion.” At another place, he writes that the king “indulged too intemperately his own passions and desire for luxury.” Domenico Mancini, an Italian visitor to London at the time of, or shortly after, Edward's death, adds detail to this picture, reporting that “In food and drink he was most immoderate: it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more. For this reason, and for the ease, which was especially dear to him after the recovery of his crown, he had grown fat in the loins.”