The surprise death of Edward IV’s unreliable brother-in-law Duke Charles (aged only 43) in a snowstorm while attacking a well-armed Swiss infantry force at Nancy in January 1477 thus precipitated major crisis in England and altered the balance of power at court. Clarence was refused the right to woo Charles’ daughter, the young Duchess Mary, and stayed in England where his conduct became ever more unstable. Seemingly driven by a grudge against the King, he claimed that Isabel had been poisoned (by whom? the Woodvilles?) and peremptorily arrested (i.e. kidnapped), tried and executed her ex-lady-in-waiting for murder; he then started putting about prophecies that ‘G’ would be the next King. Quite apart from the illegal nature of dabbling with black magic, referring to the King’s demise and seeking to find the name of his successor was treason rather than bad taste in mediaeval England, and Clarence turned up uninvited at a Council meeting to make noisy allegations against his enemies. After a surprisingly long period of indulgence, Edward arrested him and arranged for a Parliamentary trial and death-sentence, delaying carrying the latter out until he was officially ‘reminded’ and then killing the Duke privately.
There was no indication of Edward IV being in poor health in 1477–8, so the danger posed by Clarence to the succession was probably not an urgent reason for the King removing him. The fact that Clarence had participated in politics in 1469–71 as an ally of his father-in-law Warwick, who had killed Queen Elizabeth, Woodville’s father and brother and may have been behind charges that her mother was a witch, may indicate that the Queen was a lead actor in Clarence’s downfall as she feared his open boasts that he was Edward’s real heir. It remains unproven that Richard ’s claim of June 1483 that Elizabeth and Edward’s marriage was irregular was correct and that Clarence’s boasts meant that he had found this out–logically, from the story’s 1483 ‘witness’ Bishop Robert Stillington. But it would make Clarence’s near-treasonous behaviour logical, as a grudge-driven assertion of his ‘rights’, rather than totally surprising.
Edward had contemplated the Clarence-Mary match as part of the Burgundy alliance in 1468, but circumstances had been different–Mary’s father had been alive (meaning that Burgundian lands and power would not go immediately to the unstable Clarence) and Clarence had not yet betrayed Edward as he did in 1470–1. Similarly, a Low Countries domain for a brother of King Edward (Richard not Clarence) had been contemplated in the abortive Warwick-Louis XI talks of 1466. The scheme could be traced right back to Henry V’s brother Duke Humphrey’s efforts to take over Holland as the husband of Duchess Jacqueline in 1424–6 so it was not unprecedented. It had a degree of logic, in removing a restless and ambitious royal prince from English politics, as Humphrey’s plan had done in the 1420s–but then his brother Bedford had vetoed it due to its infuriating Jacqueline’s previous husband’s brother, Duke Philip of Burgundy. Now Edward apparently feared what use Clarence could make of the Low Countries’ resources in invading England. It was unfortunate that Isabel died when she did, reviving confrontation between Edward and Clarence, but it had a major impact on events in 1483. It is possible that Isabel (died aged c. 25) and her sister Anne (died aged c. 29) were both tubercular; the latter’s condition was also to be a major factor in English politics, in 1483–5.
Had Isabel been alive the confrontation between Edward and Clarence would not have come about over the Burgundy marriage, if at all, and the Duke would still have been alive and in possession of half the Warwick inheritance in April 1483. He was as much of a danger to Edward V as Richard was, and from his past activities would have seemed a more apparent threat. It has been plausibly suggested that it was the realistic Elizabeth who persuaded her husband to destroy Clarence in 1477–8, with Edward as hesitant about responding to his provocations as he had been to Warwick in 1469. Edward had been accused of conniving at legal intimidation and fraud by his magnate allies’ retainers in the 1460s, as the Pastons could bear witness given what had happened at Caister Castle.
The Stony Stratford incident: was Richard not Rivers the plotter in April–May 1483?
Edward V’s maternal uncle and guardian, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, had been chosen by the late King to superintend the boy’s upbringing at Ludlow Castle–headquarters of the York family’s hereditary Mortimer lands–in the mid-1470s. This also involved supervising the new ‘Council for the Marches of Wales’, of which the Prince was titular head. He was the equivalent of the usual respected and experienced knight chosen to supervise well-born fifteenth century boys’ upbringing, and train them as his squires, instead of them being kept at their parents’ residence. Warwick had brought up Clarence and Richard in his household at Middleham Castle; usually this knightly ‘fostering’ had not applied to royal male children, though even the young Henry VI had been entrusted to a veteran noble warrior (Warwick’s father-in-law, Richard Beauchamp, also Earl of Warwick) as personal ‘governor’. Prince Edward’s presence at Ludlow served to keep an eye on the Marcher lords and build up their loyalty to the royal heir, and was to be repeated by Henry VII with Prince Arthur and by Henry VIII with Princess Mary. A noted jouster and devout pilgrim who had visited Santiago de Compostella, Rivers was suitable to train the next king as a knight as well as politically reliable. He was duly in control of Edward V at his accession, and set about escorting him to London for his coronation; but as a Woodville he was supposed by the ‘official’ later Ricardian account to have been in league with a plot by his kin to keep Richard from becoming ‘Protector’. By precedent, the under-age King could have both a personal guardian–Rivers’ role–and a political ‘Protector’ who held royal rank; in the 1420s Warwick and (in France) Bedford had held these roles for Henry VI and Duke Humphrey had sought the ‘Protectoral’ rank within England. In 1327 Edward III’s personal ‘guardian’ had been his kinsman Earl Henry of Lancaster; political power had lain with Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer. There was thus no reason for Rivers and Duke Richard to quarrel over the late King’s arrangements, apart from personal ambition and mistrust.
Rivers and the new King’s escort were not in a hurry to ride to London, but according to Richard’s version of events Rivers did not inform him of his intentions. Worse, Rivers had been plotting with his sister the Queen to ‘hurry’ Edward V to London for an early coronation so that Richard’s authority as Protector would lapse, giving full political power to the Woodville-led Council not Richard. Only the late King’s Chamberlain and personal friend William, Lord Hastings, prevented this; alarmed at the Woodville ‘plot’, he wrote to inform Richard (then in Yorkshire) and advise him to hasten to London to take up his Protectorship before he was outmanoeuvred and the late King’s will sidestepped. Richard decided to intercept the royal party en route from Ludlow, and was offered help by his distant cousin, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (married to the Queen’s sister but kept from influence at court for years and out for revenge). Richard and Buckingham met up and closed in on the royal party, and Rivers blithely rode into a trap at Stony Stratford when they intercepted him and the new King en route to London at the beginning of May 1483. Evidently not expecting treachery, he rode over from his nephew’s lodgings to dine with Richard, retired to bed in the inn rather than insisting on returning to the King, and woke up next morning to find Richard’s men surrounding his lodging.7 He would not have been so careless had the aggrieved royal brother out to intercept him been Clarence, a man with a long record of deceit and desertion of his allies, not to mention violence. If Edward had died leaving Clarence as his next adult male heir, the unstable Duke would have had every legal right to demand the ‘governorship’ of the new King and senior place on the regency Council, as had gone to the next adult male heir in 1327 and the next adult male heir in England in 1422.
We have only Richard’s subsequent word for it that Rivers and his escort intended to bring Edward V quickly to London before Richard arrived so that they could crown the boy and declare a Protectorship unnecessary. It is far from clear that a coronation ended the requirement for
an under-age king to have a ‘Protector’; the legal tutelage of Edward III had continued beyond his coronation (1 February 1327) and that of Henry VI beyond his English coronation (6 February 1429). Edward had been crowned soon after accession, without any change to his status; Henry had been too young at accession and had had to wait for seven years. At the most, crowning Edward V would have been the occasion to legally ‘fix’ arrangements for the governance of England until his adulthood. Given that Edward IV had died on 9 April 1483 and news must have reached Ludlow within a few days (probably on the 14th),8 Rivers does not seem to have acted with much haste to be as far from London as Northamptonshire on 29 April. The likelihood is that he had no intention of denying Richard his rights, whatever Queen Elizabeth intended to do, and that he was ‘framed’ by Richard to justify removing him; he was kept away from London so he could not defend himself before his peers and was quietly executed in Yorkshire in June. At best he faced a short trial, before a tribunal hand-picked by Richard within the precincts of his place of captivity.9 The nature of his disposal was unprecedented for peacetime since the 1390s, though similar politically dangerous peers had been executed without a public trial (if any) in the recent political disturbances since 1455. Even Richard II had held full royal power when he disposed peremptorily of his enemies the ‘Appellants’ in 1397–9; Richard was not yet king and thus showed his contempt for traditional legal practice. His equally sudden and ruthless arrest and beheading of Hastings on 13 June 1483 was to be even more blatant, and both events led to panic in London. One recent suggestion is that Richard had found (circumstantial and unprovable?) evidence by mid-June that Rivers and the Queen’s son Dorset had poisoned Edward IV so they could run a regency for Edward V–but this can only be a guess.10
Had Clarence been the potential threat to the alleged ‘Woodville plot’ to seize control of the regency, or the Queen and Rivers quite reasonably feared his potential given his past record, Edward V would have been likely to be brought to London far more quickly. The new King’s escort would not have trusted Clarence as they evidently did Richard, and if Richard was seeking enhanced power (or the throne) this early he was not certain to have backed his long-term rival Clarence against the Woodvilles. We cannot be certain if Richard backed, opposed, or cold-bloodedly stood aside from Clarence’s disgrace in 1477–8, or if he blamed the Woodvilles for it. Much has been made of contemporary Mancini stating this–but was it only gossip?11 But had both brothers been alive and in charge of large armed affinities in April–May 1483, as would have seemed probable until 1477, the struggle for control of Edward V’s person would have taken a different course from real events–and Richard could have linked up with Rivers to deny Clarence control of the new King’s person and government. Clarence, like Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in 1422, would have faced implacable hostility from elements of the Council.
Was Edward V doomed in 1483? The disputed evidence of the More account and the bodies
The older Edward V was at succession the less likely he was to be overthrown, and it is apparent that even in May 1483 he was able to express disquiet at Richard’s allegations about his Woodville relatives’ motives.12 He was supposed to be healthy in May/June 1483, but the incipient illness (and/or morbidity) that affected him after his deposition, when he had need of the royal physician, Dr Argentine, and according to Dominic Mancini said he feared for his life,13 was linked to the signs of osteomyelitis found in 1933 in the jawbone of the elder body found in 1674. The latter evidence, however, has since been interpreted by other medical experts to point out that the osteomyelitis in this case was advanced enough to indicate long-term serious ill-health, which was not the case with what is known of Edward V–so was the body his after all?14 In 1933, it was not proveable that the body in queston was male–unlike an autopsy today. The probable source of Mancini’s story was Dr Argentine, given that the latter was one of the few visitors that the deposed King was allowed to receive in the Tower.
If the bones discovered then were those of the Princes–they were certainly approximately the right age–Edward could easily have died before his accession or as a young adult king. Due to the lack of a DNA test, however, it cannot be said that the bones were genuine; the age of victim was approximately correct but some post-1485 sources denied the bodies had been hidden in the White Tower. More to the point, was the site–a staircase leading from the original structure of the White Tower to a later, lower annex built alongside its south wall–correct? If Sir Thomas More’s story of c. 1510 was correct a priest had dug the remains up after the initial burial and put them somewhere more fitting, in consecrated ground–though possibly the site of the 1674 discovery was close enough to St John’s Chapel in the Tower to count as ‘consecrated’. There had been other children’s bones discovered earlier in the seventeenth century somewhere hidden in the White Tower. Or was More’s account really feasible? How could the murderers dig under a stone staircase at night in an inhabited part of the royal palace in the Tower without someone hearing them and coming to investigate, or at least telling Henry VII where to look after Richard’s overthrow?15 Are the 1674 bodies evidence of anything?
If Edward V had died his next brother Richard, Duke of York, aged ten in 1483, would thus have succeeded as ‘King Richard III’ with another struggle over the next regency a possibility. He had been married off by Edward IV as a small child to the equally young Anne Mowbray, heiress of the Dukes of Norfolk, and when the girl died in 1481 the King shamelessly defied the law by keeping the vast inheritance for himself in Richard’s name rather than passing it on to Anne’s relatives. The claims of the latter were ignored until Richard of Gloucester seized power, when he gave the Norfolk title and most of the lands to one claimant–conveniently his own henchman, John Howard. A loyal Yorkist veteran in his early sixties, this minor Norfolk nobleman of semi-royal descent was one of the few men not of a northern background who Richard could trust and was to lead his vanguard at Bosworth in 1485. If Richard of York had succeeded to the throne on Edward V’s death as still the nominal possessor of the Dukedom of Norfolk, it is uncertain if he or his regents would have merged the latter with the Crown (which already held the dukedoms of Lancaster and York) or handed it to a claimant like Howard in return for political support.
1483: An unexpectedly early succession
The succession of either of Edward IV’s sons to the throne could have been as late as the 1500s if Edward IV had lived into his 60s–among his ancestors Henry III had lived to 65, Edward I to 68, Edward III to 64, John ‘of Gaunt’ to 59, and his great-grandfather Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, to 60. His mother, Cecily Neville, lived to around 80. Edward IV’s death on 9 April 1483, a few weeks short of his 41st birthday, was unexpected despite his apparent sluggishness in recent years. The contemporary writer of the continuation of the ‘Croyland (Abbey) Chronicle’–possibly Bishop John Russell–and the slightly later Polydore Vergil, neither with a patron to please with biased writing about Edward, reported that Edward’s court in its later years was notable for gluttony, licentiousness, and exhaustive high living, which logically would have undermined the King’s health. Edward’s close friend and Chamberlain William, Lord Hastings, and his stepson Thomas Grey (Marquis of Dorset) were named as the King’s principal encouragers in dissipation.16 Mancini stated that the King’s death followed a chill caught on the Thames at Windsor in the aftermath of one session of gluttony. Vergil said the cause was unknown and hinted at poison; by 1548 Hall believed it was fever (malaria?) caught in France in 1475, exacerbated by gluttony. The caustic evidence of the French chronicler Philip de Commignes states that when he saw the King at his ‘summit meeting’ with Louis XI on the fortified bridge at Picquigny in 1475 he had developed a serious weight-problem since their last encounter a few years before,17 and Edward’s willingness to be bought off during that campaign has been attributed to laziness as much as prudence.
Richard III’s propaganda, such as the petition calling on him to assume the thr
one on 25/6 June 1483, undoubtedly made much of the excessive gluttony and debauchery at Edward’s court,18 and exaggerated that as in its lurid claims about witchcraft by Elizabeth Woodville and her mother to ensnare Edward into marriage in 1464. The written accounts of Edward’s court bear similarities to stock writings about such behaviour, traceable back to the biographies of the more unrestrained Roman emperors such as Nero and Elagabalus. This is not to deny their essential truth, only that their recorders resorted to stock phraseology in describing them and some details may have been invented. Logically it is arguable that a sustained programme of over-indulgence could have undermined Edward’s health so that a chill could carry him off at the age of 40, and Richard’s subsequent attacks on Edward’s boon companions–Lord Hastings and the Marquis of Dorset in particular–for leading the King astray have exaggerated rather than invented their role. The Italian observer Dominic Mancini, written off by his detractors for not understanding English adequately so not a trustable witness, was, however, a uniquely valuable ‘outsider’ with no patron to please in his account of what he saw and heard in London in May–July 1483. He also states that Edward IV was well known for making free with his subjects’ wives, including middle-class Londoners–in which category ‘Jane Shore’ can be placed. (The Shore ‘legend’ unfortunately owes much to later plays, not traceable fifteenth century facts; her real name was ‘Elizabeth’.19)
The War of the Roses Page 14