George was delighted with the prospect of cutting a figure on the European stage, perhaps even becoming King of Burgundy one day, and was mortified when King Edward refused to allow him to marry Mary. Edward knew only too well that if his brother became Duke of Burgundy English troops would be needed to prevent the French from conquering the duchy, and he could hardly expect to receive his generous annual pension from King Louis if their two countries were at war. Elizabeth would have shed no tears over George’s departure in normal circumstances – on the contrary, she would probably have welcomed it – but she would have been alarmed by French-inspired rumours that he meant to use Burgundian arms to make himself king in England. Her sons by the king were aged only five and two, vulnerable to the ambitions of a powerful rival if their father happened to die prematurely, and she would have begged her husband to reject this and any scheme that would make George more formidable than he already was.
George responded by leaving the court in high dudgeon and by behaving lawlessly in his own territories. He had his wife’s former servant Ankarette Twynho executed on the absurd charge that she had poisoned her mistress (everyone knew that Duchess Isabel had died in childbirth), and when one of his own supporters, a Thomas Burdet, was hanged for conspiring against the king and the young Prince Edward, George travelled to London and had Burdet’s claim that he was innocent read before the royal council. No self-respecting king could tolerate such a blatant assertion that his justice was invalid, and George was arrested on, or soon after, 10 June 1477 and confined in the Tower of London. He was tried and condemned in parliament the following January (where, as the Croyland writer observed, ‘not a single person uttered a word against the duke except the king [and] not one individual made answer to the king except the duke’), and executed on 18 February 1478, traditionally by being drowned in a butt of malmsey wine. This may have been a last, melodramatic request or gesture, but it is perhaps more likely that he used an old barrel for washing purposes and was unromantically drowned in his bath!
George had made a thorough nuisance of himself, but none of the charges brought against him automatically warranted the death penalty. He had, allegedly, kept a copy of a document drawn up in 1470 naming him heir to the throne if Henry VI’s line failed, and had spread rumours that Edward was illegitimate; but such misdemeanours could have been punished by imprisonment or the loss of his estates. Contemporaries could not understand why the king found it necessary to inflict the ultimate penalty on his own brother, and his decision has continued to baffle modern writers. It has been suggested that George had threatened to claim that Edward and Elizabeth had never been properly married and that none of their ‘illegitimate’ children had any right to the succession, but whatever the reason, he was clearly regarded as a serious risk.
So did King Edward make the final, fateful decision himself, or was Elizabeth instrumental in persuading him that she and their children would never be safe so long as George lived? Dominic Mancini, who came to England five years later in 1483, says specifically that she had ‘concluded that her offspring would never come to the throne unless the duke of Clarence were removed, and of this she easily persuaded the king’. Mancini was probably handicapped by his unfamiliarity with English; but he had at least one reliable informant in the person of the royal physician John Argentine, and there is no reason to doubt that his statement reflects what people were thinking – and saying – at the time. Elizabeth’s part in the process is, like so much else, ultimately unknowable, but few could blame her if she breathed a sigh of relief when George was finally no more.
Richard of Gloucester is said to have interceded with the king for their brother and to have been angered by his execution, but his feelings did not prevent him from asking Edward to adjust the Warwick inheritance settlement in his favour. Very little is known of Elizabeth’s dealings with Richard in her husband’s lifetime, but there is nothing to suggest that he was on openly bad terms with her or with other members of her family. Richard’s biographer Paul Murray Kendall thought that ‘the queen, beautiful and rapacious, would know how to show her haughtiness to the undersized lad from Yorkshire with the awkward torso and the solemn face’, but this, like so much else in Kendall, is great literature but doubtful history. Richard spent much of the period from 1471 to 1483 serving as his brother’s viceroy in the north of England, and would have encountered Elizabeth only on great ceremonial occasions or when he periodically attended court. Their relationship was perhaps distant rather than friendly, politely formal and tinged with caution. Richard had always been loyal to her husband, but had shown that he could be as ambitious and determined as his brother George.
King Edward’s line looked set to reign long into the future, but everything changed when he died after a short illness on 9 April 1483. Elizabeth wrote to her brother Anthony Earl Rivers, the Prince of Wales’s guardian, urging him to bring her son Edward from Ludlow to London so that he could be crowned as soon as possible, and to come accompanied by as many troops as he could muster. She knew only too well that her family was unpopular in certain quarters and was prepared to err on the side of caution; but some counsellors, notably her old enemy Hastings, feared that she was planning to establish a Woodville-dominated government and objected to the large number of soldiers. Elizabeth quickly realised that she was provoking, rather then deterring, opposition, and went out of her way to reassure everyone. She ‘most beneficiently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance’, in the words of the Croyland writer, and it was agreed that the young king’s escort would be limited to 2,000 men.
When King Edward died Richard of Gloucester was in the north of England and immediately wrote to the queen and the council to express his condolences and declare his loyalty to his brother’s heir. He also dispatched a letter to Anthony Earl Rivers at Ludlow, asking when and by what route he intended to bring Edward V to London, and suggesting that they rendezvous somewhere on the way. Anthony apparently replied amiably, proposing that they meet in the vicinity of Northampton about 29 May, although when Richard arrived there he found that the main royal party had pushed on to Stony Stratford, seventeen miles further south. Anthony and Lord Richard Grey, Elizabeth’s younger son by her first marriage, returned to Northampton, where they were joined by the Duke of Buckingham, and the four noblemen passed a pleasant evening together. But next morning Anthony and Richard Grey were arrested, and Richard and Buckingham rode to Stony Stratford where they informed the young king that they had frustrated a plot to ambush them. Edward protested, but was powerless to prevent his uncle, his half-brother and other members of his entourage being sent to prisons in the distant north.
It is highly improbable that the Woodvilles intended to harm Richard – hard evidence is entirely lacking – but both parties feared the consequences if the other gained a controlling hand in government. Richard claimed that Edward IV’s last will – or a codicil added to it – had named him protector of the realm if Edward died before his son reached maturity, but the will is missing and we can only speculate upon what it might, or might not, have said. Richard was just turned thirty, a man of considerable experience and proven ability, but who surprisingly had not been mentioned in the will Edward had drawn up before leaving for France in 1475. It was Elizabeth who had been given authority to arrange the royal children’s marriages if their father failed to return safely, and whatever role Edward had proposed for Richard it is hard to believe that his wife (and her brother) were to be deprived of all influence. The problem was that the boy had been brought up by members of his mother’s family, and would inevitably prefer them to an uncle he scarcely knew.
When Elizabeth heard what had happened at Stony Stratford she tried, unsuccessfully, to raise forces and then sought sanctuary at Westminster with her five daughters, her younger son by the late king, and her eldest son the Marquis of Dorset. It was here that Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York and chancellor, found her surrounded by ‘much heaviness, rumble, haste and busine
ss, carriage and conveyance of her stuff, chests, coffers, packs, fardels [bundles], trusses all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some lading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more’. Elizabeth ‘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’. He handed her the Great Seal of England – clear evidence that, as far as he was concerned, she still counted politically – although he then thought better of it and asked her to return it to him the following day.
Richard paid his young nephew every courtesy, and seemed content when the council formally appointed him Protector. He deferred to the assembled notables when they refused to have Anthony Earl Rivers, Richard Grey and the others arrested at Stony Stratford executed immediately, and although young Edward’s coronation was postponed until 22 June there was no suggestion that it would not now happen. It is impossible to know if Richard was pursuing a carefully laid plan to its logical conclusion or whether, alternatively, he was responding to a changing situation; but on 10 June, some five weeks after reaching London, he sent urgently to the north for extra soldiers, seeking assistance ‘against the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doith intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin the Duke of Buckingham and the old royal blood of this realm’.
It would have taken the northern troops between two and three weeks to reach London, and events appear to have moved faster than Richard had anticipated. Only three days later, on Friday 13 June, he had Lord Hastings arrested in the council chamber and instantly beheaded without trial. Word was spread that Hastings had been caught conspiring with Elizabeth against the protector and had paid the penalty – an allegation so improbable that historians have baulked at it ever since. Hastings and Richard had both shared the royal exile in 1470–1, and the former had taken the lead in urging Richard to seize the initiative after King Edward died. His poor relationship with Elizabeth has already been noted, and his decision to change sides – if change sides he did – seems inexplicable. One writer has suggested that Hastings had hoped to be as close to Richard as he had been to Edward and resented Buckingham’s intrusion; but a more likely reason is that he had realised that Richard intended to make himself king. He would never have countenanced the deposition of young Edward, and his ability to summon a powerful retinue from his Midlands heartland meant that he had to be removed before Richard could proceed further. His ‘crime’, his unshakable loyalty to his late friend’s son, was a crime in Richard’s eyes alone.
Hastings’s removal was Richard’s second successful coup against those he knew would oppose him, but he had still another problem to deal with. He could not feel secure while the younger prince remained in sanctuary with Elizabeth, and on 16 June the Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of peers were sent to Westminster to persuade her to surrender him to them. They tried various ploys, arguing that the boy king was missing his brother and that Prince Richard could not claim sanctuary because he had committed no crime and no one was threatening him; but Elizabeth retorted that the first difficulty could be overcome by placing her elder son in her custody, and added that there was no reason why she and her children should not avail themselves of the Church’s protection when the times were so uncertain. Eventually the archbishop, ‘perceiving that the Queen began to kindle and chafe and speak sore biting words against the Protector’, told her bluntly that if she would trust him and these other lords they would ensure that no harm came to Prince Richard, but that if she rejected their offer they would not attempt to influence or assist her on any future occasion. Elizabeth ‘stood a good while in a great study’. She knew that Duke Richard could take her son from the sanctuary by force if he chose to, and was obliged to recognise that she had little alternative but to accept the lords’ proposal. With many tears, she gave him to the archbishop, charging him that ‘as far as ye think that I fear too much, be you well ware that you fear not as far too little’.
Prince Richard was sent to join his brother in the Tower, and six days later, Ralph Shaa, a Franciscan friar, preached a sermon at St Paul’s Cross in which he claimed that all King Edward and Queen Elizabeth’s children were illegitimate and that Richard of Gloucester was the rightful heir to the throne. This was based on a revelation made by Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, that Edward had contracted an informal – but still binding – marriage with Lady Eleanor Butler, a daughter of the late Earl of Shrewsbury, presumably at some time between the death of her first husband in 1461 and his wedding Elizabeth in 1464. The position was, apparently, that if Elizabeth had known of this, then her marriage to the king was, and would have remained, invalid; but if she was unaware of it (and Edward would almost certainly not have told her!), then their union could have been recognised after the Lady Eleanor died in 1468. This was important because the Prince of Wales was not born until 1470, but King Edward never supposed that a casual undertaking he had given years earlier (and had very probably forgotten) would one day return to haunt his son.
The lords who might have resisted Richard’s take-over had been thoroughly cowed by the destruction of Hastings, and he began his reign as king on 26 June. His nephews, Elizabeth’s two young sons, were seen playing in the constable of the Tower’s garden some little time after, but were then ‘withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether’. No one knows the answer to this, the most famous of all English historical mysteries, but one thing we can be sure of is that Elizabeth would have been desperate to learn what had become of them. She never said, nor so much as hinted, what she was able to discover, but her relationship with, and attitude towards, Richard III was bound to be affected by the extent to which she held him responsible. Did she think her sons were alive or dead, and if dead did she blame Richard or someone else?
The omens were not good. On 25 June, the day before Richard assumed the kingship, Anthony Earl Rivers, Lord Richard Grey and two other Woodville associates who had been arrested at Stony Stratford were executed at Pontefract, and Elizabeth lost both a brother and the younger son of her first marriage. The cheers and shouts of acclamation that greeted Richard’s coronation on 6 July would have rung hollow in the Westminster sanctuary, but she neither gave way to sorrow nor ceased to plan for the future. Richard left London to ‘progress’ around his new kingdom two weeks after the coronation, but had scarcely departed when word reached him of a conspiracy designed to liberate the two princes. The Croyland writer heard that ‘many things were going on in secret . . . for the purpose of promoting this object especially on the part of those who had availed themselves of the privilege of sanctuary’ (my italics), and that Elizabeth was being urged to disguise some of her daughters and smuggle them out of the country in case anything happened to her sons. The plot was nipped in the bud – four men were executed – and Richard ordered John Nesfield, a trusted supporter, to guard the sanctuary to ensure that only those with permission could enter or leave.
Richard’s tour of his kingdom proceeded pleasantly until on reaching Lincoln on 11 October he learned of a new outbreak of trouble headed by his erstwhile ally the Duke of Buckingham. No one knows why Buckingham turned against the man he had helped to the throne a few short months earlier. It is possible that, like other kingmakers, he thought that the great rewards he had received ought to have been still greater, but it has also been argued that he had been alienated by the fate of the princes (whatever that was), and even that he had killed them in the hope of becoming king himself. The Croyland chronicler tells us that the aim of the uprising was again to restore one of the princes to the throne, but that when ‘a rumour was spread that the sons of King Edward had died a violent death’ the conspirators decided to invite Margaret Beaufort’s son, Henry Tudor, the next male heir of the House of Lancaster, to return from exile and claim the kingd
om. Richard was dismayed by Buckingham’s defection, but he responded vigorously and luck was with him. The rebellion was poorly co-ordinated, and the foul weather that scattered Henry Tudor’s little flotilla of ships also prevented Buckingham, who was in Wales, from crossing the River Severn into England. The Duke was captured and executed in Salisbury market place on 2 November 1483.
Margaret Beaufort had been one of the main instigators of the Buckingham uprising, and had gone to considerable lengths to persuade Elizabeth to become party to it. Margaret’s doctor and confidant Lewis Caerleon had gained access to the Westminster sanctuary in his professional capacity, and had proposed to Elizabeth that Margaret’s son Henry should marry her eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, when he had gained the kingdom. Dr Caerleon had the ticklish task of implying that Elizabeth’s sons were dead without giving the impression that Margaret was glad of it (because it clearly improved her son’s chances of becoming king), but he was as diplomatic as he was discreet. Elizabeth may, possibly, have agreed to the plan on the understanding that her own sons’ claim to the throne would not be jeopardised if it turned out that one of them was still living, but Margaret’s thoughts would have been for Henry alone.
The failure of the rebellion can only have added to Elizabeth’s difficulties. She had now been implicated in three unsuccessful plots against Richard (with Hastings, in the July conspiracy, and most recently with Lady Margaret), and would have feared that his patience with her was all but exhausted. Christmas 1483 must have been a miserable occasion, a world removed from the gaiety of the last Christmas of her husband’s lifetime, when the Croyland writer described the royal court as ‘befitting a most mighty kingdom, filled with riches . . . and (a point in which it excelled all others) boasting of those most sweet and beautiful children, the issue of his [Edward’s] marriage with queen Elizabeth’. Now, the fate of those children, even the very existence of two of them, was uncertain, and their mother was effectively a prisoner of the state.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 18