And so, in scene vii, we find him with his small army before the walls of York. At first he demands his dukedom only; but when Sir John Montgomery threatens to leave him unless he proclaims himself King, he agrees to do so. (Historically, he delayed this proclamation until he reached Nottingham.) He then heads south, and the last scene of the act finds him entering the Bishop's palace in London. Before his arrival Warwick, Clarence and other lords are discussing their resistance with King Henry: each will go to his own particular territory to rally what troops he can, and they will all meet Warwick at Coventry. Edward then appears, with Richard of Gloucester, and summarily returns Henry to the Tower. Then he and his men themselves set off for Coventry, for what they hope and believe will be the final reckoning.
There was, as it turned out, no fighting at Coventry, and the confrontation in V.i at the walls of the city, in the course of which Edward challenges Warwick to come out and fight and Warwick refuses ('Alas, I am not coop'd here for defence!'), in fact occurred on 29 March, a fortnight before Edward's arrival in London. Shakespeare is right, on the other hand, in making Coventry the scene of Clarence's second betrayal - of Warwick this time - and of his return to his brother's allegiance; we learn from Polydore Vergil that he had first prevented Warwick from fighting by urging him to await his coming, and then on his arrival ordered the 4,000 men whom he had levied in the cause of Henry VI to espouse the Yorkist cause instead. When he and Edward met, the two brothers had 'right kind and loving language', swearing 'perfect accord for ever hereafter'. They were to fight side by side both at Barnet and at Tewkesbury.
The story of Barnet is quickly told. We hear nothing of the fighting, nor of the fog that shrouded the field and was as much a feature of the battle as the cold had been at Towton, almost exactly ten years before. For Shakespeare - and perhaps for us too — all that really matters is the death of Warwick, who lives just long enough to hear of the fate of his brother Montagu, and whose last words suggest a certainty of his own salvation that cannot have been shared by many of his hearers. A brief scene iii establishes that victory has been won, announces the landing of Margaret and her son and prepares us for Tewkesbury. Hall's account of the three weeks that followed stresses the Queen's despondency; and indeed she had good reason for gloom. But for the bad weather that had delayed her for three weeks in Normandy she would have been able to join Warwick before Barnet, and the result of that battle might have been very different. The news that her most powerful ally was dead had very nearly sent her straight back to France. Only the assurances of Somerset that Edward too had sustained heavy losses and that feeling in England was still overwhelmingly Lancastrian had persuaded her to stay, but they had not improved her spirits.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, stresses her courage. Addressing her son, Somerset, Oxford and her soldiers on 'the plains near Tewkesbury', she makes no attempt to conceal the gravity of the situation, but bids them take heart none the less; there can be no going back now:
Great lords, wise men ne'er sit and wail their loss,
But cheerly seek how to redress their harms.1
1. Compare Richard III, Ill.ii:
My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes,
But presently prevent the ways to wail.
What though the mast be now blown overboard,
The cable broke, the holding anchor lost,
And half our sailors swallow'd in the flood;
Yet lives our pilot still. . .
The young Prince of Wales follows in similar vein, inviting - like his grandfather before Agincourt - all those who have no stomach for the coming fight to depart,
Lest in our need he might infect another
And make him of like spirit to himself.
So begins the penultimate battle of the long and tragic civil war. Scene V represents its end: Margaret, Somerset and Oxford have all been captured. The two last are sentenced to execution and go bravely to their fate; Margaret's life is of course spared, but she is obliged to stand by while her son is murdered before her eyes, stabbed by Edward, Clarence and Gloucester in turn. At this point the dramatist in Shakespeare has once again taken over from the historian. He has chosen, quite legitimately, the alternative - and far more dramatic - version of the Prince's death as reported by Hall,1 and has then subdy improved it. In Hall's account the King does no more than strike the boy with his gauntlet, while Dorset and Hastings use their daggers. Nor is it anywhere suggested that Queen Margaret was present, either during the battle or afterwards - still less that Gloucester was about to kill her too, but was restrained at the last moment by the King.
Edward was now supreme. The House of Lancaster was effectively destroyed, and would never again imperil his throne. True, one or two Lancastrian lords, Oxford in particular and his friend Lord Beaumont, would continue to amuse themselves with isolated raids and short bursts of irregular warfare - in September 1473 the two of them would actually seize St Michael's Mount in Cornwall and hold it for several months -but they scarcely affected the security of the realm. A more serious danger in the long term might be the fourteen-year-old Henry of Richmond, who soon after Tewkesbury would sail with his uncle Jasper Tudor to France. But heavy storms in the Channel would oblige them
1. See Chapter 15, p. 303.
to put in at one of the Breton ports; and Duke Francis of Brittany, fully aware of Henry's potential importance, would keep him under close watch.
There remained the sad, defeated Henry VI - by now more an inconvenience than a threat, but still theoretically a rival to the throne. Whether the King himself would ever have ordered his elimination is arguable: Henry was widely seen to be a saint, and to Edward his murder would certainly have had overtones of sacrilege. His brother Richard, however, had no such qualms. We may perhaps doubt whether he left Tewkesbury quite as precipitately as Shakespeare suggests, 'to make a bloody supper in the Tower'; but the events represented in scene vi are, so far as we can tell, substantially true. One would love to think that the doomed King showed as much spirit at his end as his last great vituperative speech suggests; alas, it seems unlikely.
It remains only for Shakespeare to draw the various threads together and to provide a suitable closing scene. Edward refers in generous terms to the slaughtered enemies through whose blood he has 'repurchas'd' the throne, discreedy refraining to mention that several of them were not killed in battle but executed by the Yorkists afterwards; he then turns affectionately to his son — the future Edward V:
Young Ned, for thee thine uncles and myself
Have in our armours watch'd the winter's night,
Went all afoot in summer's scalding heat,
That thou might'st repossess the crown in peace;
And of our labours thou shalt reap the gain.
The irony would not have been lost on Shakespeare's audiences, even without Richard's two asides - in the second of which he cheerfully compares himself with Judas Iscariot. One tends to forget that at the time of King Henry's death the Duke of Gloucester was just eighteen years old.
A few lines before the end of this short scene we learn of the ransoming of Queen Margaret by her father and her return to France. This, as we have seen, did not actually occur until four years later, in 1475 - but where otherwise could it be reported? It forms, in any case, little more than a parenthesis. The true subject of the scene - even though it is covered in only nine lines - is Richard's villainy and duplicity:
And, that I love the tree from whence thou sprang'st,
Witness the loving kiss I give the fruit. [Aside]
To say the truth, so Judas kiss'd his master
And cried 'All hail!' when as he meant all harm.
It was this, above all else, that the Elizabethan audiences would carry home with them; it was to emphasize this that Shakespeare had been deliberately building up the character of Richard; and this that he was to make the theme of the last and greatest play of his series.
But to what extent was it justified historicall
y? Was Richard really the ogre that we see before us on the stage? These questions have been asked for over four centuries, and are still being discussed today. The next two chapters of this book will attempt to answer them.
King Edward V
[1471-1483]
RICHARD.
Sweet Prince, the untainted virtue of your years
Hath not yet div'd into the world's deceit,
Nor more can you distinguish of a man
Than of his outward show, which –
God He knows -Seldom or never jumpeth with the heart:
Those uncles which you want were dangerous;
Your Grace attended to their sugar'd words,
But look'd not on the poison of their hearts.
God keep you from them, and from such false friends!
PRINCE.
God keep me from false friends - but they were none.
KING RICHARD III
For the twelve years between the battle of Tewkesbury on Saturday 4 May 1471 and his death on Wednesday 9 April 1483, King Edward IV ruled England wisely and well, while a prolonged period of internal peace allowed the country time to recover, at least in part, from its sufferings. True, in the summer of 1475 the King led an expeditionary force into France, terrifying Louis XI to the point where, according to the Milanese ambassador, 'he almost lost his wits'; but before a shot was fired Louis invited the entire English army to a three-day feast at Amiens, by the end of which the English soldiers were far too drunk to fight. He then met Edward at the nearby town of Picquigny, where the two Kings quickly reached agreement. In return for a down payment of 75,000 crowns and further annual payments of 50,000, Edward undertook peaceably to leave French soil — and, incidentally, negotiated the ransom of Margaret of Anjou.
At home, such dissension as we know of seems to have been largely confined to the royal princes, Clarence and Gloucester. The two brothers - now by far the most powerful magnates in the realm after the King himself - had much in common. In the first twenty years of their lives they had known nothing but war. Both had experienced victory and defeat, exile and betrayal; both had killed many men with their own hands, in hot blood and in cold; both, despite their high intelligence, were greedy and ambitious, utterly self-centred and devoid of principle. In other respects, however, they were very different. Clarence shared the magnificent physique and outstanding good looks, as well as the easy charm and eloquence, of his brother Edward. Gloucester, for his part, could never have been the hunchback that Shakespeare suggests; nor, given his undoubted prowess on the battlefield, could he have had a left arm withered 'like a blasted sapling'. But contemporary chroniclers are all agreed that he was unusually small and at least slightly deformed, with his right shoulder higher than his left; and the incident during the meeting of 13 June 1483 reported by Sir Thomas More1 indicates that the left arm must certainly have been damaged in some degree. As to his looks, Polydore Vergil describes him as having 'a short and sour countenance' - though he too could be dangerously charming when he wished to be. Between such men it does not take much to start a quarrel; and by the end of 1471 they were at each other's throats — over what was, by any standards, a very major issue indeed: the enormous fortune of Warwick the King-maker.
Warwick, dying on the field of Barnet, had left two children, both daughters. Isabel, the elder, was the wife of Clarence; Anne, three years younger, had been betrothed to Edward, Prince of Wales, but he had been killed at Tewkesbury before they could be married. Though some of the vast estates were still technically the property of Warwick's widow - who had taken sanctuary at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire — Clarence expected eventually to inherit them all; Richard now decided to dispute this inheritance by marrying the sixteen-year-old Anne, who had been captured with her mother-in-law Margaret of Anjou after Tewkesbury. On hearing of his brother's intentions the furious Clarence determined to prevent him, taking possession of his sister-in-law and concealing her, disguised as a kitchen-maid, in the house of one of his retainers; but Richard found her, seized her back and removed her to sanctuary in the church of St Martin-le-Grand, where she was forced
1. See below, pp. 329-30.
to stay for several months. The two married in February or March 1472 — without the papal dispensation necessary for a marriage between cousins - after which Richard took his bride off to his favourite northern residence: Middleham in Yorkshire, one of the several castles formerly belonging to Warwick which the King had made over to him in the summer of 1471.
The quarrel rumbled on for three years until, in February 1475, a settlement was finally agreed. Even then, however, Clarence continued to sulk, believing - with some justification - that the King trusted him less than he did his brother; and towards the end of the following year he was given still greater cause for resentment. On 21 December his wife died of complications after childbirth, and the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy a fortnight later led his widow to propose a marriage between Clarence and her daughter Mary, now mistress of all her father's dominions. The Duke was naturally enthusiastic, but King Edward would not hear of it. Such a marriage would not only have made his brother at least as rich and powerful as he was himself; it would also have caused serious difficulties in his relations with France. He absolutely forbade any further discussion of the matter — thereby antagonizing the Duke still further.
Clarence had always been unstable; henceforth his behaviour became distinctly paranoid. He began suggesting that Edward was illegitimate; in East Anglia, he deliberately incited riots against him. Next he put it about that his late wife had been bewitched by Queen Elizabeth and then poisoned, and actually had one of her former waiting-women -who was by then in the Queen's service - arrested, beaten, robbed of her jewellery and put on trial at Warwick, where he personally bullied the jury into finding her guilty and had her hanged within twenty-four hours. Clearly such conduct could not be allowed to continue, and Edward struck back hard. His first step was to arrest a celebrated astrologer and friend of Clarence's, a certain Dr John Stacey of Merton College, Oxford. Under torture, Stacey confessed that he had cast horoscopes of the King and the Prince of Wales to discover when they would die, and further implicated one Thomas Burdett, a member of the Duke's household. Both men were put on trial, and despite their pleas of not guilty were hanged at Tyburn on 20 May 1477- There could hardly have been a clearer warning, but Clarence ignored it. On the following day he forced his way into a meeting of the Privy Council accompanied by a Franciscan friar, whom he obliged there and then to testify to the two men's dying protestations of innocence. Edward had had enough. By the end of June his impossible brother was in the Tower.
The trial was held in January 1478 at Westminster. The Duke of Clarence was found guilty of what the King described as a 'more malicious, more unnatural and loathly treason than was ever before committed', and was condemned to death. His mother having begged that he be spared the horrors of a public execution, on 18 February he was put to death in the Tower - almost certainly by being drowned in a butt of malmsey wine.1 He was buried next to his wife - ironically enough, in Tewkesbury Abbey. He was twenty-eight. Edward, we are told, ever afterwards regretted his brother's death and bitterly reproached himself for having allowed it; but Clarence had tried him sorely and had pushed his patience just a little too far.
Richard of Gloucester's feelings on the execution of his brother are uncertain. He certainly made a fine show of grief, but Sir Thomas More is not the only writer to suggest that his brother's death was not altogether unwelcome to him; and if indeed he ever personally interceded with the King on Clarence's behalf, his pleas have not been recorded. In his position he could hardly remain aloof; but as with the Picquigny agreement of 1475 - of which he had strongly disapproved - he tried to dissociate himself as much as possible. This was made easier by the fact that he was now spending nearly all his time in the north, which was still overwhelmingly Lancastrian—with concurrent and occasionally conflicting loyalties towards the Percys and the Nev
ills - and where Edward was determined to make him the effective successor to Warwick. It was to this end that Richard had been granted Warwick's castles of Middleham and Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire and of Penrith in Cumberland, together with all their lands. He also owned the castles of Pontefract, Barnard Castle and Skipton-in-Craven, to say nothing of Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire and his vast estates across the south.
1. The old story sounds improbable enough, but is confirmed by no less than three contemporary writers. (Except that Mancini reports that the wine was 'sweet Falernian'.) According to Philippe de Commynes, Clarence's daughter for ever afterwards wore a little wine-cask on her bracelet in memory of her father.
By 1482 he was probably the richest and most powerful magnate in English history, excepting only the monarchs themselves. And even this was not all; for when in June 1482, in his military capacity as Lieutenant-General of the North, he led some 20,000 men across the border into Scotland and briefly occupied Edinburgh without firing a shot, he also became - in the eyes of most Englishmen - a national hero.
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