Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Richard spent the following weeks quietly preparing the next stage of his coup: the deposition of Edward and securing of the Crown for himself. He moved into Crosby Place, one of London’s largest houses, at Bishopsgate, which became the coup HQ. Here he held secret meetings with his clique, including Buckingham, Lord Howard and his son Sir Thomas Howard. The elder Howard was soon to be made Duke of Norfolk as a reward for his support, the founder of a durable family dynasty notable for the safeguarding of its own interests above all else. Also on hand at Crosby Place was a peculiarly nasty trio of ‘new men’ who had attached themselves to Richard as the surest way of climbing the greasy pole of power. These were the lawyer William Catesby; a political hit man from Yorkshire called Sir Richard Ratcliffe; and Francis, Lord Lovell, a childhood companion of the protector. When Richard became king a popular rhyme neatly encapsulated this unsavoury gang:

  The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog,

  Rule all England under the hog.

  (‘The hog’ is a reference to Richard’s personal emblem: the white boar.)

  Meanwhile, blithely unaware of the plot thickening at Crosby Place, the council continued to meet at the Tower to plan the coronation. Lord William Hastings, the loyal Lord Chamberlain – newly appointed Master of the Mint at the Tower – was steering the arrangements. Richard used the lawyer Catesby to sound out Hastings – the one man who could conceivably stop his assumption of power – over his attitude to him seizing the Crown. Ever loyal to his dead friend and his son – he had even taken over Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore, from his late master – Hastings indignantly rejected the idea of supplanting Edward’s son and heir. Far too late, he saw where Richard was heading and desperately began to cast around for allies to stop him. But Richard moved first.

  On 10 June, the protector wrote to the city council of his power base, York, demanding that they raise and send troops ‘to aid and assist us against the queen, her blood adherents and affinity’. He sent his henchman Sir Richard Ratcliffe north with the letters. Ratcliffe also had secret orders to execute the queen’s brother Lord Rivers, and her son Sir Richard Grey, along with the other loyalists taken prisoner at Northampton. Preparations for completing the coup now entered their final phase, with Richard summoning council members to a meeting at the Tower the following day, 13 June.

  The council assembled early, but it was already light on the midsummer day as they gathered in the council chamber on the top floor of the White Tower to await the arrival of the protector at 9 a.m. Richard had made sure that his chief target, Hastings – sleepy after a strenuous night with his new mistress, Jane Shore – attended the meeting, detailing his minion Sir Thomas Howard to escort the doomed man to the Tower. When Richard entered the room, he was all amiable affability with banter and small talk. Remarking that strawberries were in season, he told John Morton, bishop of Ely, that he had noticed some juicy strawberries growing in the bishop’s garden at his house, Ely Place in Holborn, and asked to be given a present of the fruit. Morton assured him that they would be his that very day.

  Having metaphorically disarmed the council, Richard excused himself and left the room. A long one and a half hours crept by. The council members transacted some routine business as the morning dragged on. Then, suddenly, Richard was back. This time his mood was dramatically different. According to the later account by Sir Thomas More – who had it directly from an eye witness, Morton – the protector was ‘frowning, fretting and gnawing on his lips’. After sitting in glowering silence he abruptly turned to Hastings, blurting out, ‘What do men deserve for having plotted the destruction of me, being so near of blood unto the King, and Protector of his Royal person and realm?’ Taken aback, Hastings stuttered, ‘Certainly, if they have and done so heinously, they are worthy of a heinous punishment.’ This was Richard’s cue. Leaping to his feet and thumping the table he shouted, ‘What? Dost thou serve me with “ifs” and “ands”? I tell thee, they have done it, and that I will make good upon thy body, traitor! I arrest thee!’ ‘What me, my lord?’ gasped an astonished Hastings. ‘Yea, thou traitor!’ Richard repeated menacingly.

  Wildly, Richard swung round, accusing other council members – including the magnate Sir Thomas Stanley and the two trembling clerics, Morton and Archbishop Rotherham, a noted Woodville supporter – of plotting with the queen and Jane Shore (King Edward’s former mistress turned Hastings’ bedmate) against him. According to More, the charges against the two women – who, as love rivals, were unlikely co-conspirators – featured that old standby of male accusations against women: witchcraft. Richard accused them of using sorcery to wither his arm and stripped his sleeve to demonstrate the deformity. Then, on the protector’s prearranged signal, Buckingham and Howard admitted a troop of men-at-arms waiting in readiness outside. Crying, ‘Treason!’ the guards rushed to arrest Hastings, Stanley, Morton and Rotherham. The two noblemen put up a violent struggle and Stanley, diving under the table, received a bloody head wound before being subdued.

  Richard told the helplessly pinioned Hastings that he should confess his sins to a priest at once: ‘For by St Paul, I will not to dinner till I see thy head off.’ Since dinner was the meal we now call lunch, and it was already nearly noon, Hastings must have known that he faced immediate death. There was no question of due process of law (as a peer Hastings had the right to be tried by Parliament): this was to be murder with no legal niceties. Under Buckingham’s supervision, Hastings was dragged from the room, loudly protesting his innocence and pleading for mercy. A priest was summoned from the nearby church of St Peter ad Vincula, who hurriedly shrived Hastings since his killers allowed the doomed man no time for a final confession. Then, on Tower Green, the patch of grass still to be seen in front of the church today, Hastings was forced down with his neck across a rough timber builders’ block which happened to be nearby being used for repairs. Without further ado, his head was struck off with a sword: the first and the hastiest of seven executions to take place on the same spot over the next and most bloodstained century of the Tower’s history.

  Showing a mastery of public relations worthy of a twenty-first-century spin doctor, Richard first sent his agents running through the teeming streets of the city echoing the cries of ‘Treason!’. This had the desired effect of thoroughly panicking the population. Then, after enjoying the leisurely dinner he had promised himself after Hastings’ head was safely lopped, Richard summoned London’s lord mayor and a delegation of leading citizens to the Tower. He issued a proclamation – clearly drawn up before the fatal council meeting at which Hastings’ treason had been ‘discovered’ – explaining that only his drastic action had saved the kingdom from a coup mounted by Hastings in league with the Woodvilles aimed at killing the protector. The proclamation calmed distracted Londoners. The less well-informed were happy that a strong hand guided the ship of state’s tiller, while those in the know were stunned into fearful silence. The proclamation was, in fact, the exact reversal of the truth. True, there had been a coup – carried out by Richard and Buckingham. And it had completely succeeded.

  As for the alleged co-conspirators arrested with Hastings, the two clerics and Stanley were imprisoned in the Tower for a few weeks. Then, scared into silence, they were released after the intercession of the universities of Cambridge (for Archbishop Rotherham) and Oxford (for Bishop Morton) respectively. Richard, pious in his outward religious observance, may well have feared the consequences of striking at the Church. Morton was sent to distant Wales in the custody of Buckingham to keep him out of the way. Here, in Buckingham’s Brecon Castle, the cunning prelate began to work on his ambitious jailer to undermine his loyalty to Richard.

  With her lover Hastings dead, Jane Shore had no such elevated protection. Charged with plotting with her actual enemy, the queen, she too saw the inside of a Tower cell before she was made to perform a public penance. Wearing only a see-through petticoat and carrying a lighted candle, she walked barefoot from St Paul’s Cathedral through the streets of London
. But the sight of her, scantily clad and demurely submissive, excited emotions rather different from those expected. Sympathy and outright lust were both expressed, and before long Jane acquired another powerful lover – Richard’s own legal advisor, Thomas Lynom – who became her second husband and ushered her into grateful obscurity. She survived Richard’s bloody reign and the next, and was still alive – skinny and aged – in Henry VIII’s reign.

  Richard now turned to his next goal: putting the crown on his own head. To do so, he had first to deny his nephews their rightful inheritance, and obtain physical possession of both the two princes. He already had Edward safely lodged in the Tower, but so long as his brother’s heir had a spare – Richard, Duke of York, in Westminster Abbey’s sanctuary with his mother the queen – Richard’s position was shaky. Now that he had killed the only man who had stood in his way, Richard, his morbid suspicion shading into poisonous paranoia, would vent his fears on innocent children.

  On Monday 16 June, with Hastings’ blood still staining the grass outside the chamber, the council met again in the White Tower. Richard and Buckingham pressed for the young Duke of York to be removed from his sanctuary. They hid the demand behind a thin cloak of pretended concern for the young boy’s welfare, claiming that his brother needed a playmate. With some arm twisting, the council, cowed after witnessing Hastings’ fate, agreed to send the Archbishop of Canterbury, old Thomas Bourchier, to Westminster to persuade Queen Elizabeth to give up her second son. One of Richard’s hard men, Howard, accompanied the archbishop lest the elderly cleric’s persuasions proved ineffective.

  Escorted by a menacing company of armed men, Bourchier and Howard confronted the Queen in the abbot’s house at Westminster where she tearfully expressed fears for her son’s safety outside the sanctuary. But the queen knew that resistance was futile. The presence of Richard’s thugs told her that if she did not surrender her son, her own life and that of her daughters might also be in danger. If peaceful persuasion failed, the armed men would storm the sanctuary and take the boy by force. Weeping in despair, the queen eventually yielded. ‘Farewell, my own sweet son,’ she told the boy. ‘God send you good keeping. Let me kiss you once yet ere you go, for God knows when we shall kiss together again.’

  Bourchier and Howard took the little duke to the Tower by boat, entering under the dreaded dark shadows of Traitor’s Gate beneath St Thomas’s Tower. With both male heirs to the throne under his control, Richard now had it all. In terms of raw power, nothing stood between him and the crown but the frail lives of the two boys in his custody. And he was about to deal with that small problem. On the same day that the young Duke of York arrived at the Tower, another Duke Richard – the protector himself – took up residence there.

  Symbolically, young King Edward was removed from the royal apartments and confined with his brother to the Garden (now the Bloody) Tower – the small, rectangular gatehouse on the western edge of the palace which, as its name suggests, had its own garden where the boys could play. The princes’ uncle moved straight into the vacated royal apartments and began to prepare for another coronation: his own. Before then, however, he had to deny the two princes’ legal right to succeed to the throne. And that meant besmirching his own living mother as an adulteress, and branding his dead brother a base-born bastard. Richard did not flinch from the task.

  The following Sunday, 22 June, two days before Edward V’s now cancelled coronation, a public sermon was preached by a prominent cleric, Dr Ralph Shaw, the brother of London’s lord mayor Edmund Shaw, at St Paul’s Cross outside the cathedral, on the text ‘Bastard slips should not take root’. Such a central location – a fifteenth-century equivalent of a national news broadcast – meant that the sermon was officially inspired by Richard. Heavily underscoring the topical parallel to the biblical theme, Dr Shaw proclaimed that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid because the late king had promised marriage to Lady Elizabeth Butler, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Therefore, he said, the two princes in the Tower – King Edward V and the Duke of York – were both illegitimate ‘bastard slips’ and barred from succeeding to the throne.

  Warming to his theme, the preacher went further. Not only were the two boys illegitimate, but both their father Edward IV, and his brother Clarence (both conveniently dead) were bastards too – the products of an adulterous affair carried out by Richard’s mother, ‘Proud Cis’, the dowager Duchess of York. Although the duchess herself was still alive, there is no record of her feelings about being smeared as a double adulteress by her only surviving son. Dr Shaw concluded his sermon by proclaiming that only the protector was the rightful king.

  Right on cue, Richard himself, with Buckingham, proudly rode past the open-air congregation – who, according to Sir Thomas More, ‘stood as if turned to stones for wonder of this shameful sermon’. Doubtless the London crowd were left to reflect that Edward and Clarence were abnormally tall for their time, while Richard resembled in his slight build and sharp face, his late father, Richard, Duke of York. Public opinion was being thoroughly prepared for someone other than Edward V to take the crown, and there were no prizes for guessing who that someone would be.

  Two days later, Lord Mayor Edmund Shaw, following up his brother’s sermon, convened a meeting of leading Londoners at the Guildhall to rubber-stamp Richard’s coup. The meeting was packed with Buckingham’s affinity. The duke asked the assembled citizens to demand that Richard accept the crown. But this request was met with stony silence, so in desperation Buckingham signalled his retainers, who promptly cast their caps into the air, crying, ‘King Richard!’ The coup’s choreography was proceeding according to plan; the only thing missing was any enthusiasm from Londoners for their new, usurping ruler.

  Richard’s assumption of power was made formal the next day, 25 June, when a parliamentary delegation led by Buckingham waited on Richard and asked him to take the crown. Their demand was backed by a petition from Parliament castigating the late King Edward for his lax and licentious rule, ‘so that no man was sure of his life, land nor livelihood, nor of his wife, daughter nor servant, every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’. It seems that Richard felt compelled to spit on his brother’s memory, libelling him as the realm’s leading rapist, to justify his seizure of power. The next day the protector was formally proclaimed and enthroned in Westminster Hall as King Richard III, while ‘Edward Bastard, late called King Edward V’ was dethroned.

  From then on, things moved quickly. Richard rapidly fixed his coronation for 6 July, and spent the traditional pre-ceremony period in the Tower. Once in the fortress, Richard released the Woodville partisan Archbishop Rotherham of York from the cell where he had languished since Hastings’ murder. But Richard’s paranoia was as acute as ever. Fearing resistance to his usurpation, he had policed the city with the 6,000 northern soldiers his henchman Ratcliffe had brought from Yorkshire. And he placed Londoners under a 10 p.m. curfew over the three nights that the coronation celebrations lasted, forbidding them either to wear swords or to carry arms. On 4 July, Richard and his queen, Anne Neville – second daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker – were rowed downriver from Westminster to the Tower in a stately barge rather than risking riding through the sullen streets. It was repression not seen since the conquest, and the fact that it was enforced by northerners regarded by Londoners as foreign savages was an unfortunate harbinger of the coming reign.

  As if to compensate for the hideous crime he was about to commit, Richard did not stint on the magnificence of his coronation ceremonies. No expense was spared for the two days of pageantry at the Tower that preceded the coronation. On the day itself, the new king wore a doublet and stomacher of blue cloth of gold, embroidered with a pattern of nets and pineapples, and an eight-foot-long gown of purple trimmed with ermine. The queen was similarly splendidly attired in sixteen yards of Venetian lace. The royal pair rode out of the Tower, the king on horseback and the queen in a litter, and, guarded by 4,00
0 rough northern soldiers, journeyed through largely silent streets to Westminster. Once in the crowded abbey, they divested themselves of their heavy robes in the sweltering summer heat and stood, both naked from the waist up, to be anointed with holy oil before the crowns were placed on their heads by Archbishop Bourchier. But even in his moment of triumph, Richard was not content. A witness observed Richard during the ceremony and was struck by his restless nervousness as he continually looked around and behind him, compulsively biting his lips and – a characteristic and highly significant obsessive gesture – constantly half-drawing his dagger from its sheath and sliding it back. As soon as the coronation was over, Richard left his hostile capital and began a royal progress around his new realm. Left in the Tower were the two princes. Neither was seen alive again.

  The only reference to a public sighting of the princes after they were reunited in the Tower on 16 June comes in the Great Chronicle which mentioned that ‘the children of King Edward’ were ‘seen shooting [arrows] and playing in the garden of the Tower sundry times’. According to the Italian chronicler Dominic Mancini, who left England immediately after Richard’s coronation, by that date they had been deprived of their servants and ‘withdrawn to the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows’. The reference to the ‘inner apartments of the Tower proper’ and ‘bars’ suggests that Richard may have moved the boys from the Garden Tower to the heart of the fortress – the White Tower, traditional prison for royal captives. The Great Chronicle states that the boys were now subject to stricter confinement, being ‘holden more straight’; and the London chronicler Robert Fabyan confirms that they were under more ‘sure keeping’.