The irony of Croyland’s description – especially his commendation of ‘those most sweet and beautiful children, the issue of his marriage… with queen Elizabeth’ – poignantly amplifies the horrors about to begin. Within four months, Edward IV would be dead, Queen Elizabeth would once more flee to sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, and ‘those most sweet and beautiful children’ would be placed in peril of their lives. Within a year, the two princes – happy, lively, intelligent boys – would disappear. Their fate, even today, is unknown.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1483 Begins
The year 1483 brought profound grief to Queen Elizabeth and the royal family. When Parliament opened on 20 January, life seemed to be proceeding normally. Parliament spent some time discussing the treacheries of France, but more in thanking Richard, Duke of Gloucester for his service against the Scots and rewarding him with hereditary rights to the marches of Scotland, the city and castle of Carlisle, and all crown possessions in the county of Cumberland – plus similar rights to additional lands he might win from the Scots. The grants conferred on Gloucester a degree of power that made him a real threat to any occupant of the throne, causing Scofield to conclude that the Parliament of 1483 ‘was at the moment completely under Gloucester’s thumb’.1
Perhaps Gloucester’s growing power explains letters written in January 1483 by Anthony, Earl Rivers attempting to elect representatives to Parliament from Norfolk, Yarmouth and Cornwall who were sympathetic to the Wydevilles. In all, Anthony tried to influence the election of five members of Parliament, an effort that, according to E.W. Ives, indicates the growing factions within that body.2
Although all seemed in good order on Candlemas Day, 2 February, when the King and Queen walked in stately procession with the court from St Stephen’s Chapel to Westminster Hall, such appearances may have masked a more contentious reality. Rivers asked to have his longstanding patent to serve as Prince Edward’s governor renewed, which was done on 27 February 1483. In a letter to his business agent, Andrew Dymmock, written on 8 March 1483, Anthony asks for a copy of that newly issued patent, along with another granting him authority to raise troops in Wales:
Send me by some sure man the patent of my authority about my lord Prince, and also a patent that the King gave me touching power to raise people, if need be, in the march of Wales.3
Since Rivers had served as governor of the prince since 1473, these requests are perplexing. The admonition to send by ‘some sure man’ also indicates something sinister in the state of England.
Around Easter (30 March), Edward IV fell ill and took to his bed. The Croyland Chronicler takes special care to state that the onset of the illness was sudden:
When the Parliament had been dissolved, the king, neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady, the cure of which would not have appeared easy in the case of a person of more humble rank, took to his bed. This happened about the feast of Easter; and, on the ninth of April, he rendered up his spirit to his Creator, at his palace of Westminster, it being the year of our Lord, 1483, and the twenty-third year of his reign.4
The nature of Edward’s sickness is unknown, although contemporaries attributed it to a variety of causes: disappointment at the Treaty of Arras, the broken betrothal between the Dauphin and Princess Elizabeth, the loss of his annual stipend from France, a chill caught while fishing, apoplexy, acute indigestion, poisoning. The King had abused his body for years with overeating and debauchery, but the sudden onset and severity of his illness indicates some cause other than general deterioration. Edward IV died just nineteen days before his forty-first birthday.
The King had time during his illness to reflect on the uneasy politics that dominated his court, and made a futile effort to reconcile the dissident factions. Within the court’s circle of advisors, two adversarial groups dominated. At the head of one was Queen Elizabeth, supported by her brothers and her two sons by her first marriage. Anthony, the most respected for his military service, piety and learnedness, spent most of his time in Ludlow with Prince Edward. Lionel, Chancellor of Oxford University, had been elevated to Bishop of Salisbury in 1482. Sir Edward Wydeville, the naval officer, became prominent only after the King’s death, when the council appointed him Admiral of the Fleet, in command of twenty ships which took to sea on 30 April or 1 May to protect against a French invasion.5 Elizabeth’s eldest son was a significant member of this faction. Sir Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, had inherited the estates of his father, Lord Ferrers of Groby, and had accompanied Edward during the 1475 invasion of France, where he was important enough to receive a pension from Louis XI.6 Recently, he had fielded 600 men in the war with Scotland.7 If contemporary rumours are true, Dorset also joined Edward IV during his debauched forays among the ladies and pleasures of London. The Queen’s second son, Sir Richard Grey, attended Prince Edward in his household at Ludlow.
Opposed to the Queen’s family were the King’s men. Led by William Hastings, Lord Chamberlain and Edward’s most intimate friend, this faction included the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Lincoln and Lord Maltravers. While Richard, Duke of Gloucester headed this group, he had spent recent years away from the court administering the north of England and conducting the war with Scotland. With the exception of Hastings, all of these men shared the ‘blood royal’.
Before he died, Edward IV called the leaders of the two factions together. Thomas More recounts a deathbed scene where Edward IV asked Dorset and Hastings to bury their animosity in the interests of his children, whose youth made them especially vulnerable:
If you among your selves in a child’s reign fall at debate, many a good man shall perish and haply he, too, and you, too, ere this land find peace again. Wherefore in these last words that ever I look to speak with you: I exhort you and require you all, for the love that you have ever born to me, for the love that I have ever born to you, for the love that our lord beareth to us all, for this time forward, all griefs forgotten, each of you love other.8
Touched by the King’s words and his imminent death, Dorset and Hastings declared their reconciliation: ‘There in his presence (as by their words appeared) each forgave [the] other, and joined their hands together, when (as it after appeared by their deeds) their hearts were far asunder.’9
The earlier amity between Hastings and the Queen, who had contracted marriages between their children, had been replaced by acrimonious feelings. Thomas More attributes the Queen’s hostility towards Hastings to the ‘great favour the King bare him, and also for that she thought him secretly familiar with the King in wanton company’.10 Edward’s many gifts to Hastings, including his appointment as Captain of Calais when the office had been promised to Anthony Wydeville, also rankled. Croyland suggests that Hastings was at fault:
[Hastings] was afraid lest, if the supreme power should fall into the hands of the Queen’s relations, they would exact a most signal vengeance for the injuries which had been formerly inflicted on them by that same lord; in consequence of which, there had long existed extreme ill-will between the said Lord Hastings and them.11
Hastings’s actions in the next several days would be fatal to the Queen’s family – and to himself.
After Edward IV’s death, the primary obligation of the nation was to assure the safety of Edward V, a boy of twelve years and five months, who was at Ludlow Castle under the governance of his uncle, Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers. The boy received news on 14 April of his father’s death. On 16 April, Edward V wrote to the Mayor of Lynn to state his intention of departing to London ‘in all convenient haste’.12 Elizabeth argued at the King’s Council that an army should be commissioned, to bring the boy to London as rapidly as possible for his coronation. Hastings and the Duke of Buckingham, both of whom resented the Wydeville governance of the prince, responded that a large display of force would only alarm those of opposing factions, remind them of past differences, and destroy the amity and peace recently achieved at the King’s deathbed. Croyland i
dentifies Queen Elizabeth as the peacemaker:
The Queen most beneficently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance, and wrote to her son, requesting him on his road to London, not to exceed an escort of two thousand men.13
The new King’s departure may have been delayed by the council discussions and the celebration of St George’s Day in Ludlow, for Edward V did not leave Ludlow until 24 April.
Meanwhile, the boy’s paternal uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, ‘wrote unto the King so reverently, and to the Queen’s friends, there so lovingly, that they nothing earthly mistrusting, brought the King up in great haste’.14 As the King’s party proceeded towards London, Gloucester headed south. Before leaving York, Gloucester took an oath of loyalty to the new King and required all northerners to do the same. Gloucester reached Northampton as Edward V’s party arrived at Stony Stratford, eleven miles away. That evening, Tuesday 29 April, Rivers met with Gloucester and Buckingham for dinner in Northampton. If animosity between Rivers and Gloucester had developed during the Parliament of 1483, Rivers clearly anticipated no danger in dining with Gloucester. Indeed, evidence that Rivers trusted Gloucester exists in an arbitration request he and Roger Townshend had submitted to Gloucester’s council sometime after 25 March 1483, requesting settlement of conflicting claims over property rights in East Anglia. Rivers would hardly have asked Gloucester to intervene if he had doubted his fairness.15
With Edward V at Stony Stratford, under the protection of his halfbrother Sir Richard Grey, his chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan, and the treasurer of his household Sir Richard Haute, his two uncles settled down in Northampton for an evening of conviviality. ‘So was there made that night much friendly cheer between these Dukes [Gloucester and Buckingham] and the Lord Rivers a great while’, and the men parted ‘openly with great courtesy’.16 Rivers went to his lodgings. Gloucester and Buckingham spent the night plotting. The next morning, Gloucester’s followers locked the doors of the inn where Rivers was staying and prevented his departure from Northampton. When Rivers protested, Gloucester’s men arrested him.
Buckingham and others rode to Stony Stratford, where ‘they came to the King, and on their knees in very humble wise, saluted his Grace: which received them in very joyous and amiable manner, nothing earthly knowing nor mistrusting as yet’.17 In the presence of the young King, Buckingham accused Earl Rivers, the Marquis of Dorset and Sir Richard Grey of attempting to rule the King and the realm, of causing dissension within the kingdom, and of destroying the ‘noble blood of the realm’. They also accused Dorset of entering the Tower of London and removing the King’s treasure. Mancini corroborates More’s version and adds the reaction of Edward V:
The youth, possessing the likeness of his father’s noble spirit besides talent and remarkable learning, replied to this saying that he merely had those ministers whom his father had given him; and relying on his father’s prudence, he believed that good and faithful ones had been given him. He had seen nothing evil in them and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil. As for the government of the kingdom, he had complete confidence in the peers of the realm and the queen, so that this care but little concerned his former ministers.
On hearing the queen’s name, the duke of Buckingham, who loathed her race, then answered, ‘It was not the business of women but of men to govern kingdoms, and so if he cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it. Let him place all his hope in his barons, who excelled in nobility and power’.18
Buckingham then took the boy into his custody and arrested Sir Richard Grey, Sir Thomas Vaughan and Sir Richard Haute.
Irony of ironies! Edward V was captured at Stony Stratford, the town where his father had resided when courting and secretly marrying his mother. The date was 30 April 1483, the eve of Edward IV and Elizabeth’s nineteenth wedding anniversary.
Gloucester’s custody of Edward V was not inappropriate. As the sole surviving brother of Edward IV, Gloucester would traditionally serve as his nephew’s ‘Protector’ until the King reached majority age. Neither had anyone reason to doubt Gloucester’s loyalty and motives. He had fought loyally and fiercely at his brother’s side through all of the wars with the cousins – from Henry VI to Earl Warwick. Unlike his brother Clarence, Richard never challenged Edward IV’s authority or his claim to the throne. During the last years of Edward IV’s reign, Gloucester had gloriously won the war with Scotland, capturing Berwick Castle on 24 August 1482, after twenty-one years of Scottish control. His service had greatly enriched the King’s coffers and prestige. His administration of England’s northern regions had earned him a reputation for honest, just and competent stewardship. He and his wife, Anne, enjoyed both political and personal popularity in northern England.
Still, Anthony’s appointment as Prince Edward’s governor gave him legal authority to control the boy’s movements, at least until the council made Gloucester’s Protectorship official. Edward IV had been clear and explicit in his orders:
Item. For the weal, surety, and profit of our said son, we will, and by these presents give authority and power to the right reverend father in God, John Bishop of Rochester, and to our right trusty and well-beloved Anthony Earl Rivers, to remove at all times the same our son, as the case shall require, unto such places as shall be thought by their discretion necessary…19
No one could imagine that Gloucester and Buckingham would violate the King’s patent and inaugurate the dreadful events of 1483. Anthony – intelligent, erudite and politically shrewd – was completely deceived.
Gloucester attempted to allay the fears of Edward V, who ‘wept and was nothing content’ at the arrest of his Wydeville relatives and at his own sequestration. At dinner, Gloucester even sent a dish from his own table to Lord Rivers, with a message that all would be well. That gesture was followed, however, by orders to send Rivers, Grey, Vaughan and Haute north, where Rivers was imprisoned at Sheriff Hutton, Grey at Middleham Castle, and Vaughan and Haute at Pontefract. The Wydevilles were isolated in the ancestral territory of the Nevilles, now owned by Gloucester.20
Queen Elizabeth feared the worst when hearing about the arrests. Memories of the 1469 murder of her father and her brother, Sir John Wydeville, at the hands of Warwick and Clarence must have flooded her soul with a dreadful sensation of déjà vu. The Queen made the only sensible move. She fled into sanctuary:
The Queen in great flight and heaviness, bewailing her child’s ruin, her friend’s mischance, and her own infortune, damning the time that ever she dissuaded the gathering of power about the King, got her self in all the haste possible with her younger son and her daughters out of the Palace of Westminster in which she then lay, into the Sanctuary, lodging her self and her company there in the Abbot’s place.21
Similarly, Anthony must immediately have sensed his impending death once he found himself in prison. He could hardly, however, have imagined the horrors to follow.
Neither can subsequent historians explain Gloucester’s change of character. Overnight, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a loyal younger brother, became an ambitious, power-mad villain who murdered not merely political foes, but his brother’s friends and family. Gloucester became a case study of absolute power corrupting absolutely.
Defenders of Gloucester argue that his villainy is unproved. They reject many accounts of 1483 because they were written later under the Tudor dynasty – victors writing history about their defeated enemy. John Morton, Bishop of Ely and a source for More’s history, had been arrested by Gloucester and ultimately elevated by Henry VII to Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury. A Tudor partisan, indeed. Yet Morton’s presence at meetings of Edward V’s council, and his service as one of Edward IV’s executors, provide invaluable first-hand testimony. Other eyewitnesses supplying More with information included John Argentine, physician to Edward V and later to Prince Arthur (son of Henry VII); John More (father of Thomas), a prominent London judge probably present at the Guildhall when Buckingham argued Richard’s claim to t
he throne; and John Roper, father of More’s son-in-law. Validation of any historical perspective must lie in its corroboration by other authorities. For the year 1483, the narratives of More and Mancini, the chronicles of Croyland and of the London writers, and the letters of contemporary citizens record the tragic events with remarkably similar accounts, varying mainly in degree of detail. All offer harrowing glimpses into the suffering of those who lived and died.
Elizabeth was not the only one to panic at the capture of Prince Edward. Wise and rational men acted precipitously and sometimes foolishly when they heard the news. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor of England, and Keeper of the Privy Seal since 1467, heard that the Queen had sought sanctuary at Westminster and immediately went to her:
He caused in all the haste all his servants to be called up, and so with his own household about him, and every man weaponed, he took the great Seal with him, and came yet before day unto the Queen. About whom he found much heaviness, rumble, haste and business, carriage and conveyance of her stuff into Sanctuary, chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trusses, all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some lading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down the walls to bring in the next way, and some yet drew to them that helped to carry a wrong way.
The Queen her self sat alone low on the rushes all desolate and dismayed, whom the Archbishop comforted in the best manner he could, showing her that he trusted the matter was nothing so sore as she took it for. And that he was put in good hope and out of fear, by the message sent him from the Lord Chamberlain. ‘Ah woe worth him’, quod she, ‘for he is one of them that labours to destroy me and my blood’. ‘Madame’, quod he, ‘be ye of good cheer. For I assure you if they crown any other king than your son, whom they now have with them, we shall on the morrow crown his brother whom you have here with you. And here is the Great Seal, which in likewise as that noble prince your husband delivered it unto me, so here I deliver it unto you, to the use and behalf of your son’, and therewith he betook her the Great Seal, and departed home again, yet in the dawning of the day.
Elizabeth Page 24