8Since sanctuary protected those in danger of harm and the boy had done no wrong, there was no reason for him to be there. Those who did not need sanctuary could not claim it.
The reasons were so compelling that Gloucester proposed taking the boy by force, if necessary: ‘He that takes one out of sanctuary to do him good, I say plainly that he breaks no sanctuary.’1 Such logic and eloquence persuaded not only the secular members of the council, but many of its spiritual leaders, to seize the boy if necessary. Nevertheless, the council decided to try persuasion yet once more and sent Thomas Bourchier, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, to meet with Elizabeth.
The Cardinal Archbishop did not visit Elizabeth alone, but in company with other members of the King’s Council, whose presence indicated consensus, rather than a mere individual request. The collective weight of those imposing men must have had enormous impact on the Queen. This was, after all, the council which had served Edward IV and Elizabeth so loyally and well during the past nineteen years. The Queen herself had consulted the council frequently about state and household affairs. Moreover, the Cardinal Archbishop was the very man who had presided over the coronations of both Edward IV and Elizabeth, the man whom Edward IV had designated in his 1475 will to assist his executors ‘according to the great trust that we have in him’. If not this personal friend and spiritual head of the Church in England, whom could Elizabeth trust?
Alone, Elizabeth had to stand against the combined political and spiritual forces of the realm. More tells us that she held her own with logical rebuttals of the Archbishop’s arguments:
1If Prince Edward needed his young brother for company, why not place them both in their mother’s custody, especially considering the ‘infancy’ of the younger boy?
2Considering the recent illness of Prince Richard, from which he was ‘rather a little amended than well recovered’, it would place his health at risk to take him from his mother, who knew best how to care for him.
3The imprisonment of her brother Anthony and son Richard indicated that enemies were intent on procuring ‘their destruction without cause’.
4Protection of herself and her family could not be assured when ‘greedy’ men prevailed.
5Her son had every right to seek sanctuary: ‘A place that may defend a thief may save an innocent.’
6If Edward V needed ‘play fellows’, could they not be provided by other children, his peers, rather than by his recently ill brother, who as yet had ‘no lust for play’?
7Since the law made the mother the guardian of children, no one had the right to remove her son from her protection.
Elizabeth cited three laws that confirmed her right to keep Prince Richard: man’s law allows the guardian to keep the infant, nature’s law allows the mother to keep her child, and God’s law provides sanctuary to protect her son. She stated that her fears originated in the same fears that the law recognises when it forbids ‘every man the custody of them by whose death he may inherit less land than a kingdom’.2 The Queen refused to deliver Richard, Duke of York to the Protector.
Archbishop Bourchier, whose sincerity no one doubts, saw that he was losing the argument, that the Queen was becoming angry, and that she might say ‘sore biting words against the Protector’. He cut short the discussion and used an approach that even Elizabeth could not refute. The Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury pledged his body and soul, ‘not only for his surety but also for his estate’, if she delivered Prince Richard to him. Otherwise, he would depart and never entreat her further. Did she think that he and the other men with him lacked both wit and troth? Were their wits so dull that they could not perceive what the Protector intended? Did she doubt their faithfulness, loyalty and honesty in thinking that they would take her son if they perceived any evil intended toward the child?
‘The Queen with these words stood a good while in a great study’, More reports.3 Dare she challenge the integrity of the spiritual leader of the Church in England, a personal friend so trusted by her husband and herself? How could she oppose Gloucester’s men, who already surrounded Westminster Sanctuary ready to seize the prince by force? How could she find means to convey the boy elsewhere?
At the last she took the young Duke by the hand, and said unto the lords: ‘my Lord… and all my lordes, I neither am so unwise to mistrust your wits, nor so suspicious to mistrust your troths. Of which thing I purpose to make you such a proof, as if either of both lacked in you, might turn both me to great sorrow, the realm to much harm, and you to great reproach. For lo here is… this gentleman’.4
…And therewithall she said unto the child: ‘Farewell, my own sweet son, God send you good keeping, let me kiss you once yet ere you go, for God knoweth when we shall kiss together again. And therewith she kissed him, and blessed him, turned her back and wept and went her way, leaving the child weeping as fast.
When the Lord Cardinal and these other lords with him had received this young Duke, they brought him into the Star Chamber where the Protector took him in his arms and kissed him with these words: ‘Now welcome my Lord even with all my very heart’.
…Thereupon forthwith they brought him to the King his brother into the Bishops Palace at Paul’s, and from thence through the City honourably into the Tower, out of which after that day they never came abroad.5
Prince Richard departed from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey on 16 June 1483. Another contemporary chronicle summarises that fateful day:
The Duke of Gloucester went to Westminster and took with him the Archbishop of Canterbury: where by fair means and for trust that the Queen had in the Archbishop, which said Bishop thought nor intended no harm, she delivered to them the Duke of York, a child about the age of 7 years, whom the said Duke conveyed unto the Tower and there caused him to be kept with the Prince, his brother.6
With both boys in his protection, Gloucester could move more aggressively. He next set about discrediting the children of Edward IV by proclaiming them to be bastards, illegitimate children of Edward IV, with no rights to the throne of England. For good measure, the legitimacy of Edward IV and his brother Clarence was also challenged, never mind that such an accusation slandered Gloucester’s own mother, the Duchess of York, who was still living.
The purveyor of these claims of illegitimacy was Ralph Shaa, Doctor of Divinity, popular London preacher, and brother of the Lord Mayor. On Sunday 22 June, Doctor Shaa delivered at Paul’s Cross a sermon entitled ‘Bastard Slips Shall Never Take Deep Root’. First establishing the importance of matrimony, then the unhappiness and ‘lack of grace’ of bastard children conceived in adultery, he declared that Richard, Duke of Gloucester was the only rightful heir to the throne. Doctor Shaa claimed that both Edward IV and Clarence were illegitimate and he provided proof: neither man resembled their father Richard, Duke of York, but ‘their favours more resembled other known men than him’. Only Gloucester, the Lord Protector, ‘the very noble prince, the special pattern of knightly prowess, as well in all princely behaviour as in the lineaments and favour of his visage, represented the very face of the noble Duke his father’.7
Mancini, More and Polydore Vergil all report Shaa’s claim that Edward IV was a bastard, an accusation so outrageous that some modern historians find it hard to accept. Bertram Fields, for instance, rejects the tale as Tudor propaganda, arguing that Gloucester was living with his mother at Baynard Castle during much of this time and would not have slandered her so publicly. Michael Jones, however, not only accepts the claim, but attributes its source to the Duchess of York herself. Jones even identifies the probable father of Edward IV as a handsome French archer named Blaybourne, who took advantage of York’s long absences from his wife during the French wars.8 The rumour of Edward IV’s illegitimacy first surfaced in 1469, when Clarence made the same allegation to clear his way to the throne, 9 and Jones believes that Cecily Neville, still seething with anger at Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth, admitted her indiscretion then to assist Clarence to the throne.
Mancini indic
ates that the rumour of Edward’s illegitimacy was common gossip in the streets of London during the summer of 1483, when no one would have dared repeat it if Gloucester had objected. Allegations do not constitute truth, however, and claims of illegitimacy that slandered mothers were frequently bruited about to challenge the inheritance rights of their children. Margaret of Anjou was accused of adultery when Edward of Lancaster was born in 1453, an accusation that gained credibility from the illness of Henry VI. That story was probably planted by Warwick and the Duke of York, as they plotted to claim the throne for York. Again, in 1469, Warwick and Clarence could have won without fighting if Edward IV and his children had been removed from the York lineage, a powerful motive for gossip about the Duchess of York’s infidelity. In 1483, Gloucester was merely following family tradition in slandering his mother.
Solid evidence exists to refute any claims that Cecily Neville was complicit with Gloucester in proclaiming Edward’s bastardy. Her will, made in 1495, specifically and lovingly declares the parentage of her son, who had been dead for twelve years:
I, Cecily, wife unto the right noble prince Richard, late Duke of York, father unto the most Christian prince my Lord and son King Edward the iiiith, the first day of April the year of our Lord 1495… make and ordain my testament in form and manner ensuing.10
With her final words on this earth, Cecily Neville set the record straight. She twice stated clearly and unequivocally that Edward IV was the son of Richard, Duke of York. Further, not one word in her will mentioned either Clarence or Richard III. Was she still suffering the hurt and humiliation she felt when her sons publicly proclaimed her an adulteress? Cecily’s will designated personal items to be distributed to the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth and to the de la Pole descendants of her daughter Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. If the Duchess of York ever harboured resentment at Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville, it was long forgotten in her loving bequests to the Queen and to ‘my daughter Bridget… my daughter Cecily… my daughter Anne… my daughter Katharine.’ The son and daughter of Clarence, still living, were not mentioned.
Charges of Edward’s bastardy were only the beginning of Doctor Shaa’s propaganda. The Doctor of Divinity also resurrected the tale of Edward’s precontract to another woman (whose identity varies from Lady Elizabeth Lucy to Lady Eleanor Butler, both of whom had been mistresses of Edward IV). Any pre-contract would have invalidated Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth and made all of their ten children illegitimate, thus disentitling Edward V as King. In all claims of the alleged pre-contract, no one ever mentioned Edward’s nineteen years of married life, during which all of England had welcomed and cheered Elizabeth as the King’s wife. Nor did the slanderers recall that each of their ten children were welcomed at birth with joyous celebrations and royal rituals proclaiming them princes and princesses.
At the point in Doctor Shaa’s sermon where he proclaimed these charges of illegitimacy, Gloucester was supposed to arrive and the people spontaneously cry ‘King Richard! King Richard!’ But the timing was off and Gloucester didn’t show up, forcing Doctor Shaa to move on in his prepared remarks. When the Duke finally appeared, the good Doctor went back to repeat his words and point to Gloucester: ‘This is the father’s own figure, this his own countenance, the very print of his visage, the sure undoubted image, the plain express likeness of the noble Duke, whose remembrance can never die while he liveth.’
But instead of crying ‘King Richard! King Richard!’, the people ‘stood as they had been turned into stones, for wonder of this shameful sermon’, after which the preacher went home in shame and kept ‘out of sight like an owl’.11 Doctor Shaa died within the year, a broken man: ‘Doctor Shaa by his sermon lost his honesty, and soon after his life, for very shame of the world, into which he durst never after come abroad.’12
But if the Doctor of Divinity was ruined, the Protector pursued his plan with even more daring. On 24 June, the Tuesday following Shaa’s sermon, the Duke of Buckingham addressed a Guildhall convocation of lords and knights, the Mayor, aldermen, and commons of the city, to add secular strength to Shaa’s religious rant. Buckingham recalled the recent years of civil bloodshed, with its devastation of families and country, then he attacked the recently deceased Edward IV:
For no woman was there any where young or old, rich or poor, whom he set his eye upon, in whom he any thing liked either person or favour, speech, pace, or countenance, but without any fear of God, or respect of his honour, murmur or grudge of the world, he would importunely pursue his appetite, and have her, to the great destruction of many a good woman, and great dolour to their husbands, and their other friends…13
Buckingham reiterated Shaa’s lies about the illegitimacy of Edward’s children:
The children of King Edward the Fourth were never lawfully begotten, forasmuch as the King (leaving his very wife Dame Elizabeth Lucy) was never lawfully married unto the Queen their mother, whose blood, saving that he set his voluptuous pleasure before his honour, was full unmeetly to be match with his, and the mingling of whose bloods together, hath been the effusion of great part of the noble blood of this realm. Whereby it may well seem that marriage not well made, of which there is so much mischief grown…14
Once more, the theme of ‘noble blood’ recurs. To claim that the Queen was ‘unmeetly to be match’ with Edward harks back to Warwick’s obsession with his blood royal, and his chiding of Elizabeth’s father and brother for their low class origins. Once more, Jacquetta’s heritage, titles and rank disappear in xenophobic parochialism and self-interested promotion. How ironic, this claim that Wydeville blood had tainted the realm, when the miscarriages and the sickly children born to the Neville cousinwives of Clarence and Gloucester demonstrated the sad consequences of incestuous unions, of commingling only ‘noble blood’.
In his speech, Buckingham touched only lightly on the bastardy of Edward IV himself, because ‘nature requireth a filial reverence to the Duchess his mother’. Nevertheless, he declared that the common law of the land must recognise the Lord Protector as the only ‘lawfully begotten son of the fore remembered noble Duke of York’. Added to the general wisdom that ‘Woe is that realm that hath a child to their King’, Buckingham urged the citizens to petition Gloucester to accept the throne. When the crowd continued its silence, even after the City Recorder repeated the petition, a small claque of Buckingham’s servants began crying ‘King Richard! King Richard!’, sufficient support to schedule a meeting with the Protector the next day.
On 25 June 1483, Buckingham, in company with the Lord Mayor, aldermen, lords and knights, visited Baynard’s Castle to petition Gloucester to assume the throne. The Protector first demurred, declaring that the ‘entire love he bare unto King Edward and his children’ prevented him from accepting the offer. With persuasion, however, he changed his mind.
On that same day, the Queen’s brother Anthony Wydeville was executed. Her son, Sir Richard Grey, her cousin, Sir Richard Haute, and the prince’s elderly chamberlain, Sir Thomas Vaughan, were either already dead or killed that day as well. In blaming the Protector for the executions, The Great Chronicle states the cause was ‘more of will than of justice’.15
Anthony Wydeville’s will, made on 23 June 1483, asks first that his heart be buried in the Chapel of ‘Our Lady of Pew beside Saint Stephen’s College at Westminster’, a chapel he had supported in happier days.16 He willed the land inherited from his father and his first wife, Lady Scales, to his brother Edward, with 500 marks set aside to pray for the souls of his first wife and her brother, Thomas. He decreed that his ‘fee simple land’ be sold to fund a hospital at Rochester for thirteen poor folks, and other deeds of charity, such as paying prisoners’ fees, visiting the prisons of London and burying the dead.
His will also enumerated debts to be paid, and designated that his plate and personal possessions be given to his wife. All household servants received their wages for the Midsummer’s quarter, along with a black gown. His clothing and horse harness we
re to be sold and the money used to buy shirts and smocks for poor folks, excepting his ‘tawney cloth of gold’, which went to the Prior of Royston, and his trapper of black cloth of gold, to Lady Walsingham. Certain designated lands remained ‘with the manor of Grafton toward the funding of the Priest of the Hermitage’. Tybold, his barber, received five marks and his servant, James, forty shillings.
The will appointed as executors the Bishop of Lincoln, the Bishop of Worcester, the Chief Judge of the King’s Bench, the Chief Judge of the Common Place, and six others of whom any three had ‘full authority and power’. As if he could foretell the future actions of Gloucester, his will concluded with a plea:
I beseech humbly my Lord of Gloucester, in the worship of Christ’s passion and for the merit and weal of his soul, to comfort, help and assist, as supervisor (for very trust) of this testament, that my executors may with his pleasure fulfill this my last will, which I have made the day abovesaid.17
Anthony’s executioners discovered that he was wearing a hair shirt next to his skin, a self-imposed penance to remind himself of mortal imperfections.18 The Carmelite Friary at Doncaster hung the hair shirt before the statue of the Virgin Mary to symbolise the piety of this virtuous man. Unfortunately, Anthony’s penance could not save his family – or England – from two more years of bloodshed.
On 26 June, the Protector proceeded to Westminster Hall in company with a great train of followers to sit in the royal chair in the Court of the King’s Bench. The symbolism of that act was unmistakable: the King’s Bench was the royal seat of judgement, where the King heard pleas to the crown and dispensed justice. King Richard III dated his reign from this day, rather than from his coronation date of 6 July 1483. Mancini reports that ‘the cardinal of Canterbury, albeit unwillingly, anointed and crowned him king of England’.19 The Archbishop’s state of mind is corroborated by his absence at the coronation banquet: ‘on the right hand of the King [sat] the Bishop of Durham in the Cardinal’s stead’.20 Perhaps the Cardinal Archbishop was remembering his pledge of troth to Queen Elizabeth when he persuaded her to give up Prince Richard to his protection.
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