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The coronation took place on Sunday 6 July 1483. Richard, in a doublet of blue cloth of gold and a purple velvet gown trimmed with ermine, rode from the Tower - into whose most sumptuous apartments he had moved a few days before — to the Palace of Westminster, accompanied by Queen Anne in a magnificent Utter, escorted by five ladies-in-waiting on horseback. There followed the Duke of Buckingham and most of the English peerage, attended by a vast retinue of knights and gende-men. After a brief pause at the palace, the King and Queen walked barefoot to the abbey, where they were duly crowned. Despite the obvious reluctance of Archbishop Bourchier to perform the ceremony —underlined by his refusal to attend the coronation banquet afterwards
- all those present agreed that no more impressive ceremony could ever have been staged in London.
Yet no one could have failed to note the absentees. Edward IV's widow, Queen Elizabeth, was still in sanctuary with her daughters at the Abbot's Lodging, where the music of the coronation service must have been clearly audible to them. More significant still was the absence of her two sons. Early in the previous month, soon after the little Duke of York had joined his brother in the Tower, the two boys had been seen on several occasions playing together and practising their archery; more recently, however, there had been no sign of them. Bastards they might be, though few people really believed it; they remained the King's nephews, and as such might have been expected to take their seats in the abbey, where their very presence might have been seen as an indication that they had accepted their new position and were now loyal subjects of their uncle. It would also have successfully scotched the rumours already circulating that they had been quietly done away with.
If we are to believe Dominic Mancini - whose account, with its wealth of circumstantial detail, certainly suggests a remarkable degree of inside knowledge - immediately after the execution of Hastings on 20 June the two Princes 'were taken into the innermost rooms of the Tower, and as the days went by began to be seen more and more rarely behind the bars and windows, until at length they ceased to appear altogether'. Mancini adds that according to his friend Dr John Argentine, the royal physician who had been called to the Tower to see young Edward, the Prince was going to confession daily and doing penance 'because he believed that death was facing him'. We shall never know for certain precisely how the boys met their fate - but there is no doubt at all that they were killed and very little that the King was responsible. The first full reconstruction of the affair is that of Sir Thomas More. It is by no means universally accepted, but it is professedly based on the reports 'of them that much knew and little cause had to He', and despite repeated attempts by the highly articulate defenders of Richard to prove it false it still carries more conviction than any other.1 Rumours of the murders were already circulating at the time of the coronation, when the King must certainly have been turning the possibility over in his mind; the weight of the evidence, however, suggests with More that the fatal decision was taken only when he was at Warwick in mid-August, and that it was then prompted by reports of a plot to free the Princes and spirit them abroad, probably to Holland. The man first ordered to do the deed was the Constable of the Tower, Sir Robert Brackenbury; but Brackenbury, to his eternal honour, refused outright and it was only then that Richard turned to a knight from Suffolk named Sir James Tyrell, whom he knew to be ambitious, efficient and entirely loyal to himself. Tyrell, writes More, devised that they should be murdered in their beds. To the execution whereof he appointed Miles Forest... a fellow flushed in murder beforetime. To him he joined one John Dighton, his own horsekeeper, a big broad strong square knave. Then all the others being removed from them, this Miles Forest and John Dighton about midnight (the innocent children lying in their beds) came into the chamber and suddenly lapped them up among the clothes - so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard unto their mouths, that within a while, smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of heaven, leaving to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed. After the wretches perceived them - first by the struggling with the pains of death and after, long lying still - to be thoroughly dead, they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James to see them, Who, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stairfoot, meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones.
i. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the various arguments that have been put forward. Readers avid for more information are referred to Richard III by Desmond Seward, revised edition (1997), pp. 143—55.
Nearly two centuries later, in 1674, workmen demolishing a staircase in the White Tower came upon a wooden chest. Inside it were the bones of two children, which Charles II ordered to be transferred to an urn in the Henry VII Chapel of Westminster Abbey. When this was opened in 1933 the bones were found to be of males, of four feet ten inches and four feet six and a half inches; their ages were given respectively as about twelve and ten.
18
The Final Reckoning
1483 to 1485
K.RICH.
Remember whom you are to cope withal:
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways;
A scum of Bretons and base lackey peasants,
Whom their o'er-cloyed country vomits forth
To desperate adventures and assur'd destruction.
You sleeping safe, they bring to you unrest;
You having lands, and bless'd with beauteous wives,
They would restrain the one, distain the other.
And who doth lead them but a paltry fellow,
Long kept in Bretagne at our brother's cost? A milksop!
One that never in his life Felt so much cold as over-shoes in snow.
KING RICHARD III
From Warwick the King travelled by way of Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham to York, where he was given a magnificent reception. He was genuinely popular in the north, of which he had been the effective governor during the last years of his brother Edward's reign and where he had ruled with firmness and justice. Whether or not the quickly spreading rumours about the fate of the little Princes had reached Yorkshire before him we do not know; but they were unproven and certainly in no way diminished the warmth of his welcome. On what appears to have been the spur of the moment, he decided to invest his nine-year-old son Edward of Middleham as Prince of Wales in York Minster; the ensuing ceremony is said to have been almost as impressive as his own coronation two months before. All too soon, however, messengers arrived with news as serious as it was surprising: his oldest friend and the most powerful of his subjects, Henry Stafford Duke of Buckingham, had risen in open revolt against him.
Why Buckingham should have acted as he did remains a mystery. According to Shakespeare, he was furious at the King's refusal to grant him the earldom of Hereford which he had been promised. But Buckingham already possessed titles and estates in plenty; and in any case there was no reason to think that he would not be granted the earldom later, when Richard might be in a more generous mood. We should remember, on the other hand, that the atmosphere in the south was by now very different from that in the north. As the truth about the Princes had gradually dawned upon the people, London in the late summer of 1483 had come alive with plots and rumours of plots; and it may well be that Buckingham had become seriously alarmed at the strength of feeling against the King. If Richard were to be overthrown - as seemed increasingly likely - his own survival would obviously depend on breaking with him as soon as possible. Sir Thomas More goes so far as to suggest that ambition too played its part: that Buckingham might have considered making his own bid for the crown. He was after all a Beaufort, a grandson on his mother's side of that Edmund, second Duke of Somerset, who had been killed at St Albans in 1455, and consequently a great-great-grandson of John of Gaunt; his claim was arguably every bit as good as that of Richard III himself.1
But if the young man - we do not know
exactly when Buckingham was born, but he was probably still under thirty - ever had any delusions about his own succession, these were quickly cast aside. The rightful heir to Edward IV was now unquestionably the eldest of his seven daughters, Elizabeth of York; though in these troubled times the choice of an eighteen-year-old girl — who was, incidentally, still in sanctuary with her mother — would have been disastrous. If an able, energetic man was required, capable of leading armies in war, there remained only the Beauforts. Buckingham was admittedly of Beaufort stock through his mother, but she traced her descent only from the youngest of John of Gaunt's grandsons. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, being descended from the latter's elder brother, had indubitably the better
1. It is true that Henry IV had done his best to bar the Beauforts from the succession by adding to Richard II's patent of legitimation the words excepta dignitate regali (see Chapter 13, p. 261); but he had failed to make these words law by means of a subsequent act of parliament. The exclusion was therefore by now generally considered to have no legal validity.
claim; and if he were to marry Elizabeth this claim would be stronger still. The additional fact that his grandmother, Katherine of Valois, had been the widow of the ever-glorious Henry V may have had no legal relevance; but it certainly took nothing from his reputation.
What seems virtually certain - and is confirmed by More - is that Buckingham was greatly encouraged by Dr John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Morton had been arrested at the same time as Hastings; but after a brief period in the Tower he had been transferred at Buckingham's request to the latter's castle at Brecon in Wales. Already in his early sixties, he had a firmly Lancastrian background: taken prisoner at Towton, he had escaped from the Tower to join Queen Margaret in France and had accompanied her to Tewkesbury. Only after the Battle was lost and the young Prince of Wales killed did he transfer his allegiance to Edward IV, whom he then served with similar devotion.1 He could not, however, show the same to Richard. Perhaps he already knew, or suspected, the truth about the Princes; perhaps his long experience told him that the new King was simply too unpopular to maintain himself on the throne. At any event he seems to have become something of a father figure to Buckingham and to have directed him, during their long discussions at Brecon, towards the course of action which he subsequently took.
Morton's first action after winning Buckingham's support for his plan was to contact Henry's mother Margaret Beaufort. Though still only forty and deeply devout - she is said to have heard six masses every day — the daughter of John Duke of Somerset and great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt was a powerful, even formidable woman. She had given birth to Henry in January 1457 after the death of his father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and shortly before her fourteenth birthday; she had then married first Lord Stafford, Buckingham's uncle, and then Lord Stanley, later to be Earl of Derby. True, she had not seen her son - who had been brought up in Wales by his uncle Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke - since he was two years old, a quarter of a century before; but she, like Morton, had no doubt in her mind that
1. It is unfortunate for Morton, and more than a little unfair, that he should be best known for the eponymous 'Morton's Fork' - a form of taxation devised under Henry VII, whose Chancellor he later became. This in fact was not his invention at all; on the contrary, he always did his best in the Council to restrain the King's avarice.
he was best qualified for the throne. Already she had been in secret contact with the former Queen in her Westminster sanctuary, proposing the marriage between her son and the Princess Elizabeth; on hearing from Morton of Buckingham's support for the conspiracy, she sent at once to Henry in Brittany to tell him the news, urging him to leave as quickly as possible to join the Duke in Wales.
The rebel forces gathered fast. Among them were virtually all the Woodvilles, who could have asked nothing better; then there were the many Lancastrians in Wales, the west country and the south-east; and finally a vast number of honest men who had simply been disgusted by Richard's murder of his nephews and his usurpation of the throne and were determined that he should be somehow brought to justice. With so many different and disparate groups, co-ordination was difficult; but there was a general plan that they should all rise simultaneously on 18 October. Had they been able to do so they might, with a modicum of good luck, have succeeded. Unfortunately those in the south-east were unable to wait and acted prematurely; the Duke of Norfolk, who was in London and like the majority of Londoners had remained - however reluctantly - loyal to Richard, managed to prevent the men of Kent from crossing the Thames and joining their fellows; and the rebels withdrew to Guildford, there to await the main spearhead which was marching from Wales under Buckingham himself.
The Duke left Brecon on the 18th as planned, but got no further than the Forest of Dean. On the very day of his departure the heavens opened. The deluge continued uninterruptedly for over a week, during which both the Severn and the Wye burst their banks, flooding the countryside for miles around. After ten days of waiting it was clear that the rebellion was doomed. The army dispersed and Buckingham himself fled in disguise to Shropshire, where he sought refuge with one of his old retainers, a certain Ralph Bannister; but he was soon discovered, and the £1,000 which Richard had put on his head proved too strong a temptation for Bannister, who surrendered him to the authorities. His request for an audience with the King was refused, and on All Souls' Day, Sunday 2 November, he was beheaded in the market place at Salisbury. In the weeks that followed, many of his fellow insurgents met a similar fate, their lands and estates being confiscated and shared out among Richard's northern henchmen — making the King more unpopular in the south than ever.
Fiasco as it turned out to be, Buckingham's rebellion had one vitally important consequence: it turned the political spotlight firmly on Henry, Earl of Richmond. Previously almost unknown, Henry was now the generally accepted Lancastrian contender for the crown, with a wide and enthusiastic following. Sailing from Paimpol in Brittany towards the end of October, he had run into the same storm that had shattered Buckingham's hopes; and when he had eventually arrived at Poole in Dorset it was plain to him from the number of armed troops around the harbour that the projected rising had failed. Without hesitation he had ordered his captains to turn about, and had returned to Brittany to find his suspicions confirmed. Some of the rebels, however — they included Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset - had managed to escape across the Channel, and these he summoned to Rennes for a discussion of future plans. It was there in the cathedral, early in the morning of Christmas Day 1483, that they knelt before him and did him homage, just as if he were already an anointed King; he in return swore to marry Elizabeth of York and to lead them back to England and victory.
By the beginning of the year 1484, King Pdchard III was a seriously worried man. True, he was living like a Renaissance prince, in greater splendour than any English King before him; but, as Sir Thomas More wrote,
he never had quiet in his mind, he never thought himself sure. Where he went abroad, his eyes whirled about, his body secredy armoured, his hand ever on his dagger, his countenance and manner like one always ready to strike back. He took ill rest a-nights; lay long waking and musing, sore wearied with care and watch; rather slumbered than slept, troubled with fearful dreams - suddenly sometimes started up, leapt out of his bed and ran about his chamber.
Buckingham's treachery had shaken him profoundly. Whom now could he trust? Lord Stanley, to whom he had given Buckingham's former office of Constable of England, was for the moment loyal but, as he well knew, ready to turn his coat at any moment; the Earl of Northumberland, now Lord Great Chamberlain, was scarcely more reliable. Only old John Howard, whom he had created Duke of Norfolk a few months before, was tried and true; but he was by now well into his fifties, by the standards of the day an old man.
It was perhaps in a vain attempt to ease his conscience that Richard was by now spending vast sums of money on chantries and chapels in which requiems could be sung for the dead. The
Grey Friars of Richmond in Yorkshire were paid generously to say i ,000 masses for the soul of Edward IV; similar payments were made to the abbeys of Tickhill and Knaresborough, and the King even had plans for a vast chantry with six altars and a hundred priests to be attached to York Minster, in which masses could be said in perpetuity round the clock. About Henry VI — whom, it must be remembered, he had almost certainly murdered with his own hands - he seems to have been particularly uneasy. Henry was considered by most Englishmen to be a saint, and a considerable pilgrim traffic had grown up around his grave in Chertsey Abbey, which was already said to have been the scene of several miracles. Some time during the summer of 1484 Richard decided that the body should be transferred from the abbey to some more appropriate shrine, and in August he made a special journey down from the north to attend its reburial in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, just to the south of the high altar.
For his own troubled spirit, however, there was to be no rest. His only son, Edward of Middleham, had died on 9 April at the age often: once again, the King found himself without an heir. And wherever he looked, he saw enemies. For a surprisingly long time he had continued to ignore the most dangerous of them: in the general proclamation that he had issued on 23 October 1483 after Buckingham's abortive rising, the name of Henry of Richmond was conspicuous by its absence from the list of the leading insurgents. It was to be several more months before he would begin to take Henry seriously. He had no delusions, on the other hand, about the general insecurity of his position. Throughout 1484 he did everything possible to improve his image - making progresses through the country, performing ostentatious acts of generosity, publishing high-minded and sanctimonious declarations of intent, bestowing privileges, distributing offices and estates with a lavish hand; but it was useless. Already by the spring of 1484 the truth about the Princes was known throughout the kingdom. The people could not -and would not — forget.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 37