The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family

by Higginbotham, Susan

  They reckoned without the lady carrying Queen Anne’s train.

  Born in 1443, Margaret Beaufort was the daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who had returned to England in disgrace after an ill-managed campaign in France.2 A possible suicide, he had hardly known his only daughter, who had been an infant when he died in 1444. After a brief, unconsummated child marriage to John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Margaret had married Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, Henry VI’s half-brother, in 1455. Probably anxious to father a child on Margaret so that he could have her estates in the event of her death, Richmond had wasted no time in consummating his marriage to Margaret, but it was he who died in 1456, leaving a pregnant young widow behind. Margaret bore her only child, Henry Tudor, in January 1457, when she was not yet 14.

  Taken under the protection of her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, Margaret married Henry Stafford, a younger son of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, in 1458. Despite the couple’s Lancastrian ties – Buckingham, a supporter of Henry VI, died at Northampton, while Margaret’s male Beaufort cousins all were either beheaded or killed in battle for their support of that king – Stafford supported Edward IV at Barnet, but was wounded and died later that year. Margaret had then married Thomas Stanley, the king’s steward.

  Her son, Henry, had had a precarious youth. He had been made the ward of William, Lord Herbert, in 1462. Like Richard, Earl Rivers, Herbert, made Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV in 1469, had been targeted by the Earl of Warwick as a royal favourite to be eliminated. When Warwick rebelled in 1469, Herbert was accompanied to the Battle of Edgecote by his young ward, whose first experience of war ended disastrously when his guardian was captured and led off to execution. Sir Richard Corbet took Henry from the battlefield to the home of Herbert’s brother-in-law, Lord Ferrers.3 Margaret’s negotiations to recover her son’s wardship were interrupted by the turmoil over the next few months, but when Henry VI’s restoration to the throne brought the exiled Jasper Tudor back to England, Henry Tudor was reunited with his uncle and then his mother in October 1470. It was a brief reunion between mother and son: after a meeting with Henry VI, who supposedly prophesised that the boy would become king, Henry, in Jasper’s care, departed for Wales in November. Holed up at Pembroke Castle after Edward IV’s victories at Barnet and Tewkesbury, Jasper and Henry escaped to Brittany in September 1471 and had remained there in exile ever since.

  Margaret had come near to restoring her son to his country and to his inheritance. In 1482, she and Edward IV agreed that Henry Tudor would return from exile and receive a portion of the estates of Margaret’s recently deceased mother. A pardon was drafted, and there was even talk of Henry’s marrying Edward’s oldest daughter. Before the scheme could reach fruition, however, Edward IV died, leaving Margaret having to start over with a new king. Undaunted, she opened negotiations with Richard, using her kinsman Buckingham as an intermediary, to allow Henry to return to England and marry one of Richard’s newly bastardised nieces. Soon, however, Margaret’s plans changed radically.

  Shortly after his coronation, Richard left on a royal progress, allowing his new subjects, many of whom in the hinterlands must have been bewildered at having had three kings in three months, to get a look at the latest wearer of the crown. One of his stops, on 26 July, was at Oxford. The chancellor who greeted him was likely not Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury, but Master William Harford, described as chancellor in a commission of the peace for Oxford dated 26 August.4 For the bishop to have to exchange pleasantries with the man who had ordered his brother’s and nephew’s execution would have been an awkward business indeed.

  Meanwhile, the Londoners were bestirring themselves at last. On 29 July at Minster Lovell, Richard III wrote a letter to his chancellor, John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, in which he ordered him to take action against ‘certain persons’ who had been engaged in what is described only as an ‘enterprise’.5 As Rosemary Horrox has suggested, this probably refers to a plot, described by John Stow, to set fires around the city and to rescue Edward V and his brother from the Tower under cover of the resulting confusion. Robert Russe, a sergeant of London, William Davy, a pardoner, John Smith, Edward IV’s groom of the stirrup, and Stephen Ireland, a wardrober in the Tower, were sentenced to death at Westminster and beheaded on Tower Hill, after which their heads were placed on London Bridge. The French chronicler, Basin, believed that fifty Londoners joined the conspiracy. The men were also accused of having written to Jasper Tudor and to Henry Tudor, as well as to other lords – the first hint of trouble from this quarter for Richard. The names of Jasper and Henry also suggest, as pointed out by Horrox, that Margaret Beaufort might have been involved, probably with the hope that Edward V would restore her son to his inheritance.

  The executions of Russe and the others, however, did nothing to silence the growing unrest. Crowland reports that the people of the south and the west began to plot to release Edward IV’s sons from the Tower and that those who had taken refuge in sanctuaries were advising that Edward IV’s daughters be smuggled overseas in case ‘any human fate, inside the Tower, were to befall the male children’. Hearing of this, Richard set up a guard around Westminster, under the supervision of John Nesfield, ‘and the whole neighbourhood took on the appearance of a castle and a fortress’.6

  At London’s actual fortress, the public was beginning to see less and less of Edward V and his brother. Mancini reports that the former king’s old attendants were forbidden access to him – a claim confirmed by records which show that they had been paid off on (18 July) – and he and his brother ‘day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows [of the Tower], till at length they ceased to appear altogether’. John Argentine, his physician and the last of Edward V’s attendants to see him, reported that the youth believed that death was facing him. Edward V’s forebodings were shared by others, as Mancini noted: ‘I have seen many men burst forth into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight; and already there was a suspicion that he had been done away with’.7

  Having left England soon after the coronation, Mancini was unable to gain more information about the fate of the princes in the Tower, nor does he have any information to give us about the rest of Richard III’s reign. But the suspicion that the boys had been murdered – never refuted by Richard III – took fire. With the princes believed dead, the rebels turned their sights to the little-known Henry Tudor as their future king.8

  The rebellion seems to have come about through several interlinking strands, which eventually intertwined. Vergil reports that in London, Margaret Beaufort, having learned of the death of Edward IV’s sons, sent her physician, Lewis of Caerleon, to Elizabeth Woodville in sanctuary to propose a marriage between Henry Tudor and the queen’s oldest daughter. Caerleon – unlike Mistress Shore – could come and go from Elizabeth’s lodgings without suspicion because of his profession. Caerleon’s role in the rebellion can be substantiated through his own astronomical tables, which show that he was a prisoner in the Tower during Richard’s reign.9 Meanwhile, Crowland informs us that at his estate of Brecon in Wales, the Duke of Buckingham, ‘being repentant of what had been done’, took the advice of his prisoner, John Morton, Bishop of Ely and wrote to Henry Tudor, urging that he come to claim the throne.

  Buckingham was a most unlikely rebel, for contrary to Shakespeare, Richard had been very much in a giving vein when it came to Buckingham. Having held no position of importance during Edward IV’s reign, he had been created chief justice and chamberlain of North and South Wales. Richard also made Buckingham constable, a hereditary Bohun office, and chamberlain and granted him the coveted Bohun estates denied for so long by Edward IV. Why Buckingham joined the rebellion after receiving so much from Richard remains a mystery. Some have suggested that he aimed at the crown himself (and killed Edward IV’s sons himself as a step toward that ultimate goal), others that he was manipulated by Bishop Morton and/or Margaret Beaufort, still others that
he believed that Richard’s reign was doomed and wanted to shield himself from reprisals by joining the rebels. Yet others believe that he was a latent Lancastrian who finally had the chance to show his true colours. The notion that he was appalled by Richard’s killing of the princes has been discounted as of late, but it should not be rejected out of hand (assuming, of course, that Richard did indeed kill them). Buckingham may not have had difficulty condoning the death of grown men, but infanticide may have been an entirely different thing to him. Horror and the fear that he had imperilled his immortal soul by his complicity with Richard could explain his willingness to risk all of his long-coveted gains for an uncertain future with an obscure and untried exile. The Crowland Chronicler’s statement that Buckingham was ‘repentant of what had been done’ may well be the truth.

  Though the name often given to the uprising, ‘Buckingham’s Rebellion’, reflects its highest-ranking conspirator, the rebels were drawn mainly from the gentry, many of them men who had flourished under Edward IV and served in his household. As Rosemary Horrox has pointed out, most of them were not embittered outsiders or unreconciled Lancastrians, but members of the Yorkist establishment who had every likelihood of prospering under the new king and every prospect of ruin if their rebellion failed. While their own motives for rebellion were no doubt multiple and complex, it is hard to escape the idea that profound revulsion at the treatment of Edward IV’s sons was their core motivation, especially when it is remembered that Henry Tudor, a mere youth when he had gone into exile years before, was an unknown quantity who had never run his own estates, much less a kingdom. Still, some of the rebels did have much to gain, and nothing to lose, by rising – in particular, the Woodvilles. The Marquis of Dorset came out of hiding, and the Bishop of Salisbury out of sanctuary, to join the rebellion. Even the low-profile Richard Woodville took part.

  Through spies, as Crowland tell us, Richard III had known trouble was brewing for some time. As early as 13 August, he had seized the lands of John Welles, Margaret Beaufort’s half-brother, and on 28 August, he ordered a commission headed by Buckingham, not yet a suspect, to enquire into treasons and felonies in London, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Middlesex, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Hertfordshire. The king’s next move came on 23 September, when Richard ordered the seizure of Bishop Lionel Woodville’s temporalities – i.e. his ecclesiastical possessions. He had good reason to be suspicious of the bishop, who is recorded as being at one of Buckingham’s manors, Thornbury, on the day before the king issued his order. While Lionel was Buckingham’s brother-in-law, it is probable that he was not at Thornbury merely for a family visit.10 On 24 September, according to the 1484 Act of Attainder against the rebels, Buckingham wrote to Henry Tudor to ask him to invade England.

  By 11 October, if not sooner, Richard had learned, as he wrote to the city of York, that Buckingham had turned traitor. His anger was still raw the next day when, in a postscript to a letter to his chancellor, he described the duke as ‘the most untrue creature living whom with God’s grace we shall not be long till we will be in those parts and subdue his malice’.11

  Probably around 18 October, Buckingham and his Woodville duchess, leaving their two daughters at Brecon Castle, travelled with their sons, Edward and Henry, to Weobley in Herefordshire.12 Shortly after they left, members of the Vaughan family (not to be confused with the Vaughan executed alongside Rivers and Richard Grey), who were loyal to the king, seized Brecon Castle, robbed it, and took Buckingham’s daughters and their gentlewomen to the Vaughan house at Tretower. Meanwhile, for about a week, Buckingham remained at Weobley, the home of Sir Walter Devereux, Lord Ferrers. There, he called the men of the country to him, presumably to gain support for his rebellion.

  Meanwhile, Richard issued a proclamation against the rebels, in which he offered a reward of £1,000 in money or £100 in land for anyone who captured the duke; 1,000 marks in money or 100 marks in land for whoever captured Dorset or the three rebel bishops (Lionel Woodville, John Morton, and Piers Courtenay, Bishop of Exeter); and 500 marks in money or 40 marks in land for the rebels of lower rank. Peculiarly, the ‘Proclamation for the Reform of Morals’, as it was officially titled, opens with a stern reminder of Richard’s desire that his subjects ‘be reconciled and reduced to the way of Truth and Virtue, with the abiding in good disposition’, then launches into a spirited and alliterative denunciation of the sex life of Dorset, ‘which not fearing God, nor the Peril of His Soul, hath many Maids, Widows, and Wives damnably and without Shame Devoured, Defloured, and Defouled, holding the unshameful and mischievous Woman called Shore’s Wife in Adultery’.13 Since Richard himself was the father of two illegitimate children, who may or may not have been conceived before his marriage and who may or may not have had the same mother, one can be forgiven for thinking the king protested too much.

  Back at Weobley, Buckingham, ‘[r]ealising that he was hemmed in and could find no safe way’,14 decided to flee in disguise. First, however, he had a ‘frieze coat’ – a coat of a coarse fabric that would not ordinarily touch a noble skin – made for his 5-year-old heir, Edward Stafford, and delivered the boy to a retainer, Sir Richard Delabere, to be kept until Buckingham sent for him with a token.15 Young Edward lived a colourful existence during the next few weeks. To shield him from discovery by the king’s men, Elizabeth Mores, who later married Delabere and was then a servant in his household, shaved the boy’s forehead and dressed him as a maiden; when travelling about, the boy rode pillion like a proper young lady. As children of traitors were not generally ill-treated, but would usually be allowed to stay with their mothers or be handed over to guardians, it is telling that Buckingham and his retainers were so determined to hide young Edward. If they had learned that Richard had ordered the murder of his nephews, this might explain their fear.

  Buckingham, of course, never had a chance to send the token to recover his son. Ralph Bannister, a retainer who had given Buckingham shelter, betrayed the duke, either out of fear or out of greed for the price on Buckingham’s head. Buckingham was taken to Shrewsbury, where, on 31 October, he was handed over to James Tyrell and Christopher Wellesbourne, who took him to Salisbury. There, his pleas for an audience with Richard III were refused, leaving what he meant to say or do had he been admitted to the king’s presence as yet another mystery to ponder. On 2 November, All Souls’ Day, Buckingham was beheaded in Salisbury marketplace.

  Buckingham’s defeat, hastened by his failure to gain widespread support from his own retainers in Wales and the torrential rains which had flooded the Severn and prevented him and his men from crossing that river, was emblematic of the fate of the rebellion as a whole, thwarted by Richard III’s able network of spies and his quick reaction. Although a hardy group of rebels had proclaimed a new king, presumably Henry Tudor, at Bodmin on 3 November, the day after Buckingham’s death, Bodmin Castle fell in mid-November.16

  Dorset escaped to Brittany, while Lionel Woodville sought sanctuary in Beaulieu Abbey. Probably Richard Woodville took sanctuary as well, as he was pardoned in 1485. Others were less fortunate: Thomas St Leger, the widower of Richard III’s own sister, Anne, Duchess of Exeter, was beheaded, as were two others in the Exeter group of rebels. Six of the Kentish rebels were put to death. As for the would-be king, although Henry Tudor had managed to raise a small force and cross over to England, he became separated from the rest of his ships and decided to await their arrival before venturing onto English soil. Having sent a boatload of men to communicate with the soldiers lining the shore, he rightfully suspected a trap when they effusively assured him that Buckingham was on his way at the head of an army. Henry sailed back to the continent, thereby leaving himself to fight another day.

  Meanwhile, with Buckingham dead, a search began for his wife and sons. While young Edward Stafford in his ‘maiden’s raiement’ avoided capture, Katherine and her other son, Henry, were found at Weobley by Christopher Wellesbourne, who, with the brother of John Huddleston, probably Richard Huddleston (married to Queen Anne’s ha
lf-sister, an out-of-wedlock child of the Earl of Warwick), took the Duchess of Buckingham to the king in London.17

  Katherine’s status after she was brought to Richard III is unclear. Some writers have claimed that she was allowed to join her sister Elizabeth in sanctuary, but there is no evidence for this. On 19 December, however, Richard III issued an order allowing the duchess to convey her children and servants from Wales to ‘these parts’, meaning London, from where the order emanated.18 This suggests that Katherine was living under close supervision. Perhaps she was placed in a house of religion or required to reside with one of Richard’s supporters, as was often the case for noblewomen whose husbands ran afoul of kings.19

  Margaret Beaufort’s punishment put Richard in a quandary; her husband had been loyal to him during the revolt, and he could not afford to forfeit his good will by attainting his wife and leaving both of the couple to suffer the consequences. Margaret’s treason, however, could not go unpunished. As a compromise, Margaret was stripped of all her lands, but her husband was allowed to enjoy the revenues during her lifetime. Vergil claims that Stanley was required by the king’s council to take all of Margaret’s servants from her and keep her ‘so strait with himself’ that she was unable to send messages to her son or to her friends.20 As for Elizabeth Woodville, she remained unmolested in sanctuary with her daughters. The 1484 attainders do not name her as a plotter; perhaps Richard III was unaware of her communications with Margaret Beaufort.

  Aside from those executed, more than 100 men were attainted in Richard III’s parliament for their role in the rebellion.21 Richard had met the first serious challenge to his reign, and had survived it.