News of Edward IV’s death reached Ludlow on 14 April. Anthony, Earl Rivers, the guardian of the young king, had already put in hand dispositions to recruit a substantial force to accompany Edward V to London. In March, he had sent instructions to his business agent in London, Andrew Dymmock, who was to send him copies of the royal letters patent that enlarged his political powers in Wales and gave him authority to muster troops. The Woodvilles intended to raise a large army, and only the determined resistance of the late king’s chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, who opposed their plan in council, briefly restrained their ambitions. Hastings took the extraordinary step of threatening to retire to Calais and mobilize the garrison there on his own behalf, if his wishes were not met. As a result this force was limited to 2,000 men. It was still a considerable body and Hastings was powerless to prevent the coronation being moved forward to 4 May. The Woodvilles intended to crown Edward V as soon as he reached London, and seemed on the verge of achieving a coup, one that would leave them in command of the country.
Richard heard of Edward’s death a day later, on 15 April. At the same time, or shortly afterwards, he received a letter from William, Lord Hastings informing him of what was taking place in London. It is likely that Hastings warned him of the unbridled ambition of the Woodvilles, and he may even have suggested that Richard try to seize control of Edward V before the young king reached London. However, with the Woodvilles already mobilizing armed support for their cause, this was not an easy course to pursue.
Faced with this dangerous situation, and careful not to be wrong-footed by these rapidly moving events, Richard acted correctly. He informed the queen of his support for the regime and that he would come to London to offer his loyalty to the new king.
On 19 April Edward IV was solemnly buried at Windsor. On that day, with remarkable prescience, John Gigur, the warden of Tattershall College in Lincolnshire, wrote to William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester: ‘Now our sovereign lord king is dead – whose soul Jesus take in his great mercy – we do not know who shall be our lord and who shall rule over us.’ The Woodvilles were doing their best to resolve Gigur’s uncertainty. The following day a council meeting was held where, according to the Croyland Chronicler, ‘the most urgent desire of all present was that the Prince should succeed his father in all his glory.’ In fact, the council was dangerously divided, with a small but important group, clustered around the figure of William, Lord Hastings, strongly opposed to what the queen’s family was doing.
On 21 April Richard held a remembrance service for his brother at York and had all the nobility of the region swear an oath of loyalty to the young king. Richard wrote to Anthony, Earl Rivers, suggesting that they rendezvous on the journey south. This proposed meeting carried an undercurrent of menace. Richard was all too aware that two previous Dukes of Gloucester who had aspired to the Protectorate, Thomas of Woodstock in the fourteenth century and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI, in the mid-fifteenth, had died violently or suddenly. Woodstock was murdered – probably on the orders of Richard II – in 1397; Humphrey had died in suspicious circumstances in 1447. The Woodvilles held the political and military initiative, and their forces would considerably outnumber Richard’s own personal retinue.
This was a threatening scenario, but Richard’s reaction to it was restrained. He had limited his retinue to 300 men, although he could certainly have recruited more. In September 1450 his father, Richard, Duke of York, had also restricted his retinue to around 300 men on his return from Ireland to demonstrate his continued loyalty to the Lancastrian King Henry VI. And Richard and his entourage were still in mourning for his brother, Edward IV.
If events were to change, Richard had a vital factor working in his favour: his courage and proven experience in war. In contrast, it was rumoured that the outwardly affable and cultivated Rivers, who enjoyed the panoply of the joust and tournament, was – in a moment of crisis – in fact a coward. In 1471 Edward IV had responded to Rivers’s request to go abroad on pilgrimage with the dismissive remark that it was entirely typical of him, with the country in a state of turmoil, to try to absent himself as quickly as possible. Five years later, in 1476, it was Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who was to make a similar observation. Rivers had arrived at Duke Charles’s court full of grand gestures. He first offered his services to the duke for his forthcoming campaign, but when told that the enemy army was rapidly approaching had a sudden change of heart, and abruptly made his excuses and rode off at speed. Duke Charles bluntly told the Milanese ambassador that Rivers had left ‘because he is afraid’.
Richard knew that he was outnumbered by the Woodville forces, but would have trusted in the excellence of the 300 or so men in his personal retinue. His northern followers were tough, experienced in war and resolutely loyal. Richard had fought with these men on the Scottish border and knew their quality. And it was quality not quantity that would count in any confrontation with Earl Rivers. As one astute contemporary writer – known as Gregory’s Chronicler – had observed, the outcome of a clash of arms was not determined by the number of troops in the engagement, but the prowess of the ‘fee’d men’, those men retained by fee to follow their lord. Richard had retained a strong following among the men of the north and he was confident of the mettle of his supporters.
On 24 April Rivers and Edward V left Ludlow for the Midlands and then for London, and Richard departed from York for Nottingham. Richard desperately needed allies and he had now made contact with another leading magnate isolated from the court and suspicious of the Woodvilles, Henry, Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham had been staying on his Welsh estates at Brecon when news reached him of Edward IV’s death and he was now also heading towards the Midlands. Rivers had suggested that they should all meet at Northampton on 29 April, allowing them the chance to progress to London together. It was – outwardly at least – a well-intentioned and conciliatory gesture. But whether his real motives were as accommodating remained to be seen.
On 29 April the Woodville fleet suddenly and hurriedly put to sea, with the 2,000 men retained by Sir Edward Woodville now reinforced by a further 1,000 troops gathered by the Marquis of Dorset. The remains of the royal treasure was loaded on board and taken with them. Later that same day, the royal party accompanying Edward V moved through Northampton and on to Stony Stratford, a further thirteen miles away. Rivers then returned to Northampton to meet Richard and Buckingham, taking his retainers with him, but leaving the king and his entourage at a safe distance.
What now transpired can be interpreted in two very different ways. The commonly held view, elaborated on in later Tudor sources but also found in the contemporary account of Mancini, saw Rivers as an innocent victim.
In this version of events, Edward V asked Rivers to go and greet Richard, and pay his respects. The earl may have wanted to convince Richard that the council’s plans were in the best interests of the country. But Rivers was adopting a conciliatory approach, although he ordered the young king to continue his journey to London the next morning, with or without him. Rivers then travelled back to Northampton, explaining to Richard, who had lodged in an inn there, that the reason for Edward V’s unexpected departure was a lack of suitable accommodation. Rivers’s own retainers were nevertheless posted in Northampton and all the villages around it.
Richard apparently accepted this situation with equanimity, inviting Rivers to dine with him that evening. Richard and Rivers began dinner, and the Duke of Buckingham arrived later. According to Sir Thomas More, ‘there was made that night much friendly cheer between the two dukes [Richard and Buckingham] and Earl Rivers.’ Seeing nothing amiss, Rivers was lulled into a false sense of security, and retired for the night at a neighbouring inn in good spirits. The following morning he found himself under arrest. Richard and Buckingham then hastened to Stony Stratford, seized other Woodville supporters of the young king – Rivers’s nephew Sir Thomas Grey and the king’s chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan – dismissed the majority of Edward V
’s followers and replaced his entourage with their own supporters. The young king’s protests were roundly dismissed, and he was escorted to London under Richard’s watchful guard.
Edward V’s brave complaint against the arrest of members of the Woodville family he had grown up with, and clearly trusted, was recorded by Mancini, and was almost certainly based on eyewitness testimony. Richard, while showing all due deference to the king in person, was brusque in his response: Rivers had made an attempt against himself and Buckingham, and was now paying the consequences for it. The king should properly be surrounded by those of the old blood of the realm, not by new and dangerous upstarts, a slighting reference to the Woodville family’s pretensions.
Knowing the course of historical events over the next two months, it is easy to see this as an excuse or a pretext to take control of the king’s person, a control that Richard would never subsequently relinquish.
But Richard’s justification may have been based on the true course of events. If Rivers was unsuspecting and well-meaning, and had blundered into a trap, it is hard to see why he had been vigorously recruiting a substantial army to escort Edward V to London. It is entirely plausible that this armed force had in fact been deployed to confront Richard and Buckingham, possibly with the intention of arresting the two dukes or even ambushing them, and this was the real motive for first moving Edward V a safe distance away, to Stony Stratford. If this was indeed Rivers’s intention, Richard may have learned of it, and struck first.
This was certainly what Richard claimed when reporting his action to Edward V, saying that he had heard about the ambush from an informer in Rivers’s camp. An echo of such a scenario can be found in events some twenty-three years earlier, at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. In January 1460 the Lancastrian regime of Henry VI had ordered Rivers (then more modestly titled as Sir Anthony Woodville) and his father to Calais to arrest and imprison those Yorkist lords sheltering there, the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury, and Richard’s oldest brother Edward, Earl of March (the future Edward IV). Learning of this, the Yorkists had struck first, launching a daring attack on the Woodville forces still assembling at Sandwich, and dispersing them before they were able to put this plan into effect. Both the Woodvilles were seized and taken back to Calais, where they were berated in front of the garrison soldiers for their upstart pretensions in attempting to arrest those of far greater aristocratic lineage and nobility of blood than themselves.
A contemporary chronicler vividly described the scene, in the great hall of Calais Castle, as the Woodville father and son were hauled in under the cover of darkness:
My lord Rivers was brought to Calais, and before the lords with eight score torches, and there my lord of Salisbury rated [insulted] him, calling him a knave’s son that he should be so rude as to call him and these other lords traitors, for they shall be found the King’s true liegemen when he should be found a traitor. And my lord of Warwick rated him and said that his father was but a squire … and was only by marriage made himself a lord, and it was not his part to have such language of lord’s being of the King’s blood. And my lord of March rated him in likewise.
Social standing, nobility of blood and the true aristocracy of the realm were invoked again in Thomas More’s rendition of the quarrel that broke out, in the presence of Edward V, at Stony Stratford on 30 April 1483. Richard and Buckingham had already arrested Earl Rivers, and explained to the young king that they had done so because of the ambush Rivers had set up, and out of fear for their own safety. Now they turned on Rivers’s nephew Sir Richard Grey. More related: ‘They picked a quarrel with Sir Richard Grey, the king’s half-brother, saying that he, and the Marquis [of Dorset] his brother and the Lord Rivers his uncle, had planned to rule the king and the realm, and to set variance [quarrels] amongst the lords and to subdue and destroy the noble blood of the realm.’
There is an uncanny similarity between the dramatic about-turn at Sandwich and Calais in 1460 and that of Northampton and Stony Stratford in 1483. However, in the first, we are inclined to believe the complaint of the Yorkist lords, because their grievances were subsequently written up positively by chroniclers supportive of the new dynasty of Edward IV. In the second, we are disinclined to believe the complaint of Richard and Buckingham for much the same reason, as it was then reported negatively by sources sympathetic to the Tudors. But were they in fact so very different? In Richard’s case, it was a complaint he upheld scrupulously, in a letter to the Mayor and common council of London before he arrived in the capital, explaining the course of events and in a parade of captured Woodville weaponry once he reached it.
As news of what had happened was brought to London, the queen’s initial reaction was to raise another army and free Edward V from Richard’s clutches. Sir Edward Woodville’s fleet was now at sea, and the Marquis of Dorset attempted to enlist fresh men for this new cause. But there was little enthusiasm for such a scheme among the magnates arriving in the capital for the expected coronation. As Mancini observed: ‘When they had exhorted certain nobles, who had come to the city, and others to take up arms, they perceived that men’s minds were not only irresolute, but altogether hostile to themselves. Some even said openly that it was more just and profitable that the youthful sovereign should be with his paternal uncle…’ This was a sign that Richard’s letter to the Mayor of London, in which he explained that his actions were not directed against the king but his Woodville following, was at the time both believed and accepted by much of the political community.
The Woodville coup had failed, and faced with this collapse of support the queen took her younger son Richard and her daughters – together with her son by her first marriage, the Marquis of Dorset, and her brother Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury – and retreated into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. Richard entered the capital on 4 May, and the royal council, with Woodville influence now largely removed, confirmed his position of Protector. Lord Hastings vouched for Richard’s good intentions towards the new monarch. And for the next five weeks, Richard was to govern the country in Edward V’s name. The young king was first lodged in the Bishop of London’s palace, and shortly after moved to the Tower of London, but at this stage he was installed in the royal quarters there, not imprisoned, and this was a course of action sanctioned by the entire council. His coronation was postponed until 22 June, but in the meantime all necessary preparations for the event were put in hand. It seemed that Edward V would soon be crowned King of England.
According to the Tudors, all this was mere pretence. The court historian Polydore Vergil believed that when Richard seized Earl Rivers at Northampton he had already decided to take the throne himself. Thomas More suspected that he was planning this even before the death of his brother, Edward IV. Governing in the name of Edward’s young son and successor was thus a sinister sham, allowing Richard time to make good his own plans to usurp the throne. If this was true, it was far from obvious at the time. All acts of government in this period were carried out in Edward V’s name, Edward acting ‘by the advice and assent of our most entirely beloved uncle, the duke of Gloucester, protector and defender of our realm’, or ‘by the advice of our council’. If it was a deception, it was an elaborate one; there was little sign of anything untoward. As the Croyland Chronicler put it, Richard ‘exercised this authority with the consent and the good will of all the lords’.
If Richard was indeed masking his true intentions, and playing a double game, it is surprising that one of his first actions on reaching London was to ask the council to authorize the trial of Earl Rivers and his confederates Sir Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan for treason. These men were now securely held in Richard’s keeping in the north, and as an additional precaution had been separated, with Rivers held at Sheriff Hutton, Grey at Middleham and Vaughan at Pontefract. If Richard was already planning to usurp the throne, he would be able to eliminate them whenever he wished. Richard’s request to the council – which was refused, on the technical grounds that when the ambush att
empt was made he was not yet Protector – comes across as motivated more by genuine anger than duplicity.
The records of Edward V’s fledgling government ran for a little over a month. With the royal treasury emptied, money was scarce, but Richard’s concerns as Protector seemed genuine enough. Maintaining the English outpost at Berwick, won so importantly the previous year, was a high priority. Henry, Earl of Northumberland – Richard’s most senior commander in the Scottish campaign of 1482 – was installed as captain there and a vigorous building programme was ordered, to bring the fortress up to scratch. A naval force was also gathered to deal with the Woodville fleet, now lying off the Downs, but no fighting was necessary since Richard’s tactic of promising pardons to those who deserted achieved the desired result peacefully.
On 15 May 1483 Richard made a major grant to his principal ally the Duke of Buckingham, who was given unrivalled power in Wales to replace the influence of Earl Rivers, who had led the prince’s council there. Buckingham was allowed a wide mandate, to assemble troops wherever he saw fit, ‘for the keeping and defence of the peace in these parts’ and the financial backing to put this policy into immediate effect. Ludlow Castle, the centre of Rivers’s regime on the Marches of Wales, was to be handed over to Buckingham straight away. The urgency of these measures showed continued concern over the army that Rivers had recruited from this region the month before, which although dispersed might still be a source of unrest. Their thoroughness suggested that military action may indeed have been attempted against Richard and Buckingham on 29 April at Northampton.
The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds Page 12