by Dan Jones
Richard III was not exactly physically imposing. He had been born with his father’s dark looks but without his brothers’ extraordinary height, and although only thirty years old he had by this stage fully developed the crooked spine that must have caused him extreme physical discomfort and caused him to walk with one shoulder raised higher than the other. He had nervous tics: he ground his teeth, which the historian Polydore Vergil described, noting that ‘while he was thinking of any matter he did continually bite his nether lip’. Vergil, writing later and with some prejudice, also wrote that the king ‘was wont to be ever with his right hand pulling out of the sheath to the midst, and putting in again, the dagger which he did always wear’. Nevertheless, he said, not even Richard’s detractors could deny that he had proven himself over his relatively short life to have ‘a sharp wit, provident and subtle’ and to possess ‘courage … high and fierce’. Most notably of all, he was bright and decisive, ‘a man much to be feared for circumspection and celerity’.11
Thus, despite his diminished bodily appearance, Richard could still project majesty. On his northern progress he travelled with a massive retinue, including numerous bishops, earls and barons, a Spanish diplomatic embassy, his wife, his nine-year-old son Edward of Middleham (who as heir apparent was now styled prince of Wales and earl of Chester) and his captive nephew, Clarence’s son, Edward earl of Warwick. Richard granted charters of privileges to the towns that he visited, allowing some of them the new right to appoint mayors and aldermen. He generously refused to take the customary gifts of money that he was offered by each town: rather, he paid for repairs to castles and settled old debts including a large sum outstanding for Clarence’s tomb at Tewkesbury Abbey. ‘He gave the most gorgeous and sumptuous feasts and banquets, for the purpose of gaining the affections of the people,’ wrote one chronicler.12 At York he feasted in stately splendour, wearing his crown. During his long stay in the city he promised to bestow vast riches and liberties on the citizens, the minster and the people of the local area. Everywhere he went he gave out his personal insignia: little badges in the shape of a boar, thirteen thousand of which were distributed. The boar was a visual pun on Eboracum – the ancient Roman name for York, which was usually shortened to Ebor, and in handing it out Richard was making a very particular statement: he was a king of the north. The people of the north, in their turn, showed their admiration. The Warwick-based historian John Rous, who was at least in his sixties at the time of Richard’s visit, and an expert in the long and varied past of the house of Plantagenet, described the new king as ‘by true matrimony without discontinuance or any defiling of the law by heir male lineally descending from King Henry II’. Given the tumult and confusion of Rous’s own lifetime, this extravagant statement smacked rather more of flattery than accuracy. But it was testament to the open-handed energy with which Richard went about selling his kingship to the realm.
In setting out his stall as a northern king, Richard dangerously underestimated the power of the south. At the end of July, disturbing news reached the travelling court: a plot had been uncovered to remove the Princes from the Tower. Buildings in the city of London were to be set alight, causing enough panic and pandemonium to distract the Tower’s guards, at which point the Princes would be broken out of their jail. Richard responded by sending orders south commanding the plotters, at least one of whom was a former member of Edward IV’s household and another of whom was a senior official in the Tower, to be tried and executed. He ordered soldiers to surround Westminster Abbey, to prevent the escape of the Woodville women who were sheltering in sanctuary there. It is extremely likely that at this point he also gave the instructions that led to the death of the Princes in the Tower. The actual murderer’s name was never discovered (although Richard’s servant Sir James Tyrell gave a dubious confession many years later). Philippe de Commines, writing from the French court, heard that the deed had been orchestrated by the duke of Buckingham, although this too is unlikely.13 If Buckingham were responsible for carrying out Richard’s orders to kill the Princes, then it would have been the last loyal act that he carried out. In October 1483 he turned against the king whom he had helped to create, joined a rebellion of former associates of the old king Edward IV, and switched his allegiance to the only candidate for kingship still alive and even vaguely plausible: Henry Tudor.
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It was a sure sign of the woe that had befallen the English crown that anyone should ever have considered Henry Tudor as a potential king. His father Edmund had been a half-brother of Henry VI, and his mother Margaret Beaufort had a small measure of Plantagenet blood in her veins. In ordinary circumstances these facts would hardly have amounted to a strong dynastic claim to kingship. In 1483 Henry was essentially the heir to a disgraced and minor Welsh Lancastrian family, who had lived the majority of his life in the castles of south Wales and western Brittany and was unknown to most of the people of England, whether great or small. But Richard III’s usurpation of the crown had broken every rule of political propriety, and with it opened up new and previously unthinkable possibilities. Whereas in the long distant past adult kings such as Edward II and Richard II had been forced from the throne as punishment for long and tyrannous misrule, and while Henry VI’s inanity had eventually led the English polity into a civil war which cost him his crown, Edward V had done nothing whatever to deserve his fate. He was a blameless king whose only fault was to accede at the age of twelve. It was inevitable that many members of the Woodville family and the old king’s affinity would never accept Richard III as their king, and would strive immediately for his replacement. More generally, Richard’s violent and unprincipled coup, snatching office on entirely specious grounds and by murderous means, dealt a severe blow to the fragile dignity of a crown that had been fought over and grabbed back and forth for nearly thirty years. Not since the dark days of the 1140s, when King Stephen and Empress Matilda had carved up the realm in a civil war that contemporaries had called the Shipwreck, had kings of England been so vulnerable to assaults. If Richard could seize the crown, why should it not in turn be seized from him?
The rebels who plotted to burn London over the summer and turn the Princes loose from the Tower had attempted to make contact with Henry Tudor before they were discovered. Since they believed that Edward V was alive, they did not contact Henry with a view to making him king, but he was now ‘at his own liberty’ in Brittany and was therefore looked upon by dissidents as a possible ally in the struggle against the usurper Richard III.14 Ferment was bubbling among Edwardian loyalists, and by early August a series of conspiracies and rebellions had begun, which drew Henry Tudor ever closer to their heart. All across the southern counties of England, men were preparing to rise up against the new regime. At the end of August Richard III was concerned enough to command the duke of Buckingham to lead treason commissions into counties across the south-east, from Kent, Sussex, Surrey and London to the Home Counties. A month or so later, on 22 September, the king sacked his master of the rolls, Robert Morton, evidently fearing that treason was spreading to the ranks of the royal administration. In fact, it had already penetrated far deeper into the royal circle. By the end of September, it was spoken of openly that the Princes were dead.
On 24 September Buckingham, Richard’s most exalted and lavishly rewarded noble ally, defected. He wrote from his Welsh castle of Brecon to Henry Tudor in Brittany, asking him, according to one account, ‘to assemble a great fleet and bring an army and a great number of foreigners from Brittany with them over the sea, and to land in this realm to destroy [ Richard’s] most royal person’.15 Although Buckingham had been the most ardent follower and facilitator of Richard’s usurpation, and the man who had profited most handsomely from the ousting of the Woodvilles, he was now persuaded that his fortunes would be increased even further by turning coat once again. In the years that followed it was suggested that he did so because Richard had been slow to grant him a portion of the earldom of Hereford, which he felt he was owed as the resul
t of a marriage made by one of his ancestors in the fourteenth century.16 More likely it was simply because he was a feckless character who was drawn to intrigue. Buckingham appears to have calculated in September 1483 that the rebellious spirit swelling across the south would be sufficient to push Richard off the throne, and that his own political survival and advancement therefore depended on backing the rebels. He was sorely mistaken.
It is telling that Edward IV never considered Buckingham a suitable figure either for a substantial landed endowment or for significant involvement in government. Like the duke of Clarence, Buckingham appears to have been essentially vain and short-sighted.17 All the same, his defection was a serious problem for Richard III. There had already been covert communication between the circles of Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, and Edward’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville, hidden away in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey: the women were determined to proceed with marrying Henry to Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. This alliance would formally unite the rump of Lancastrian support in England with what remained of the Woodville faction.18 In the autumn of 1483 their plans became entwined with both the general rebelliousness of the south and the self-serving machinations of Buckingham. Despite Richard III’s attempts to earn his realm’s loyalty and trust, he was now faced with the first serious challenge to his rule, less than four months after he had seized the crown.
In the three and a half weeks that followed his letter to Henry Tudor, Buckingham did his best to raise an army from his lands in south Wales, assembling men and munitions at Brecon Castle. He was hampered by abysmal weather: autumn skies lashed rain on the land and made troop movements difficult and unpleasant. Buckingham was also hamstrung by his own reputation as a ‘sore and hard-dealing man’ who was despised by the tenants he was attempting to stir into action. Nevertheless, in the end he managed to assemble a ‘great force of Welsh soldiers’, while also contacting the perpetually fractious men of Kent, who never needed much encouragement to rise up against the established order. He ignored letters of increasing belligerence sent to him by Richard, demanding that he give up his plotting immediately and come to the royal presence.19
Unfortunately for Buckingham, the men of Kent began their rebellion too early. They attempted to rise on Friday 10 October but very swiftly fell away again when the duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, led a resistance force out of London. Further unrest fanned out across the south of England, with local risings in Sussex, Essex, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and into the south-west in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. But these do not seem to have been especially well co-ordinated. Neither did the threat of yet another outbreak of civil war command any serious noble support. Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Lord Stanley, declined to raise his men in the north-west, and most of the rest of the regional magnates also sat on their hands. Buckingham hesitated and did not begin his western campaign until Saturday 18 October, by which time it was too late. When the duke prepared to march east into England he found that ceaseless rain had caused the banks of the Severn to burst, flooding the surrounding lands and making the river quite impassable. The Welshmen in the duke’s army were ‘brought to the field against their wills and without any lust to fight for him’. They had been browbeaten in the early part of October and by the end of the month were inclined to go home, dry their feet and avoid any more contact with the man who commanded them.20
Buckingham headed north-east, into the marches, and did his best to raise the people of Herefordshire. Unfortunately, news had already reached them that Richard III was moving with an army from the north towards the rebellious duke, upon whose head there was now a £1,000 bounty for having ‘traitorously turned upon us contrary to the duty of his liegance’.21 Faced with failure, Buckingham abandoned what remained of his army and went into hiding in Shropshire, in the house of his servant Ralph Bannister, whom he had known and trusted since his childhood. But trust had its limits. On 1 November Bannister sold Buckingham out. He was captured and taken to Salisbury in Wiltshire by Sir James Tyrell, where Richard, having ridden imperiously through his realm in search of the rebels, now held court. Richard’s men interrogated Buckingham, who confessed ‘without torture’ and asked to ‘have liberty to speak with king Richard’. His request was flatly refused and on Sunday 2 November the duke was hauled into the marketplace in Salisbury and beheaded.
Many centuries later a decapitated skeleton, with its right arm also hacked off, was found beneath the kitchen of a pub called the Saracen’s Head, on the spot where Buckingham was supposed to have been executed. As soon as the bones were touched they disintegrated, leaving only dust behind them.22
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As Buckingham’s head rolled in the dirt of Salisbury’s market square, Henry Tudor was being tossed by the waves in the sea. His mother had kept him informed of events in England, and Henry had spent September and October in Brittany fitting out a fleet of fifteen ships, sufficient to carry a force of five thousand soldiers across to England for an invasion. His sponsor in this great adventure was his long-time jailer Duke Francis II, who gave the twenty-six-year-old exile ships, sailors and a considerable amount of money in loans to help them on their way. They pushed off with a good wind from Paimpol, a pleasant fishing village on the northern tip of the Breton coast, probably on the night of 1 November. But as anyone who had braved the Channel during the stormy months of darkness knew, the weather could quickly turn foul. Henry and his uncle Jasper were blown by ‘a cruel gale of wind’, which drove some of their ships north to Normandy, while others were sent back to Brittany. Eventually, Henry’s ship limped in sight of the English coast at Poole, where it anchored alongside the one other vessel that had passed safely through the tempest. On land they spied a number of lookouts, clearly waiting for their arrival. But something in the scene struck Henry as ominous. He sent a small craft to investigate the situation on shore: when it made contact with the men on land, they all cried that they were sent from Buckingham to greet Henry and bring him to the successful rebel headquarters, ‘which the duke himself had at hand with a notable excellent army’.23 It was a trap, and Henry could smell it. The wind was still blowing in the direction of Normandy. He weighed anchor and followed it, leaving England to a triumphant Richard III and abandoning the fight for another day. It was a very wise move.
Henry had been proclaimed king in his absence at Bodmin on 3 November by a small group of English rebels, but as he returned to Brittany he found that his position was as weak as it had ever been. His actions during Buckingham’s rebellion had confirmed him as an unrepentant enemy of the English crown. The possibility of rehabilitation into the English nobility – so close in 1482 – was now dead. The only option left to Henry was to claim the crown outright. In a ceremony held at Vannes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483, at which his supporters swore homage to him as if he were an anointed ruler, he in return swore an oath to marry Elizabeth of York as soon as his claim to the crown was realised. How exactly it was to be realised was not very clear. International relations stood in a muddle, for on 30 August 1483 Louis XI of France had died, leaving a thirteen-year-old successor, Charles VIII, whose regent was his elder sister Anne. Henry’s value as a pawn in relations between England, France and Brittany was now diminished, as was the likelihood that Francis II – whose health was beginning to fail – would wish to finance a second invasion of England.
Henry’s main source of hope lay with the small but swelling community of exiles who fled England following the failure of Buckingham’s rebellion with their lives in danger and their property at default. There was no shortage of outcasts. In January 1484 Richard III called his first parliament and used it to deliver a full-scale attack on his enemies, to defile the memory of his brother’s reign and to secure the allegiance of all the lords of England to his own rule and the future rule of his heir, Edward of Middleham, prince of Wales. The act Titulus Regius praised Richard as the only legitimate heir to his father Richard duke of York and condemned the ‘ung
racious feigned marriage’ between Edward IV and ‘Elizabeth Grey’ – as Elizabeth Woodville was now to be known – which, the act stated, ‘was presumptuously made without the knowledge and assent of the lords of this land, and also by sorcery and witchcraft committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother Jacquetta, duchess of Bedford’.24 At a specially convened meeting in a committee room in Westminster, ‘nearly all the lords of the realm’ swore an oath of adherence to Prince Edward ‘as their supreme lord, in case anything should happen to his father’.25 Then the parliament set about systematically destroying those whom Richard perceived to have crossed him the previous autumn.
The January parliament passed attainders against a large number of Richard’s enemies, most prominently Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, John Morton, bishop of Ely, Lionel Woodville, bishop of Salisbury, and Peter Courtenay, bishop of Exeter, as well as Margaret Beaufort – who retained her life and liberty but had her lands transferred to her husband. Dorset and the bishops were therefore among those who took up residence in Brittany, where they found themselves in the company of Sir Edward Woodville, Richard Woodville and numerous loyal old servants of Edward IV, including Sir Giles Daubeney and John Cheyne, who had been personal attendants to the old king, John Harcourt, once a faithful follower of Lord Hastings, and Reginald Bray, who was connected to Margaret Beaufort and the Stanleys. All were wanted men and many had lost virtually everything. All now clung to the desperate notion that Henry Tudor might one day invade England again, to cast aside yet another anointed king.