Learning that Sir Edward Woodville’s fleet still lay at anchor in the Downs, Richard sent troops to defend Sandwich and Dover, as well as giving the vital control of the castles of Porchester in Hampshire and Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight, previously held by the Woodvilles, to his own supporters. He offered a free pardon to all men that would desert the fleet, though Woodville had countered any prospect of desertions by placing armed guards on each ship. Two Genoese carracks were placed in a particularly awkward position; they had no intention of becoming involved in internecine civil war, but only to remain on good terms with whomever happened to be in power. Plying their guards with drink, having overcome them, they managed to escape, setting sail under a blast of trumpets for London. In the confusion, the rest of the fleet scattered. Still Woodville managed to escape with two ships; more significantly he had managed to take with him £10,250 in English gold coin that he had seized from a carrack docking in Southampton water, using his position as ‘uncle unto our said sovereign lord and great captain of his navy’ to persuade the unsuspecting ship owner to hand over the money on the condition that it had been forfeit to the crown with a promise that an equivalent value in English merchandise would be offered in compensation. Sailing across the Channel, Woodville’s chosen destination was Brittany, where he not only intended to find solace at Duke Francis II’s court; he hoped to form a remarkable reconciliation with Henry Tudor.
Sir Edward Woodville’s escape was not the only problem Richard had to countenance; discovering ‘from his spies’ that Thomas, Marquess of Dorset had escaped from sanctuary at Westminster, believing that he was ‘hiding in the adjacent neighbourhood’ the duke ordered his men to hunt him out with dogs, searching the crop fields and woods around the capital, though despite this ‘very close encirclement’ Dorset was nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile Richard continued to shore up his own support by rewarding those who had colluded with him in seizing the protectorate. John, Lord Howard, for instance, was appointed chief steward of the Duchy of Lancaster south of the Trent; the day after, on 15 May, he presented Richard with a gold cup weighing 65 ounces. Many rewards went to men who had been loyal supporters of Edward IV himself, a recognition of Richard’s desire to retain a continuity between his regime and the old, hoping that he might be able to keep a stable balance of power. Of seventy grants that he made in the following month, only five of the sixty-four recipients had any definite links with the duke himself before his protectorate; in contrast, fifteen grants went to men who had been in Edward IV’s household, while many existing positions were probably retained by the former king’s men.
Yet it proved impossible to recognise the vital support that Buckingham had given the duke, without granting him an extraordinary share of royal patronage. On 10 May, as a sign of Richard’s dependence upon the duke, Buckingham was appointed chief justice of both North and South Wales, in addition to being made constable and steward of all fifty-three castles and lordships in Wales and the Marches and being given supervision of the king’s subjects in Shropshire, Hereford, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, with the power to raise both armies and revenue in these areas.
In contrast, Hastings’ only reward came in the office of master of the Mint. Perhaps aggrieved by his paltry share of patronage, his ‘extreme joy’ at Richard’s appointment as Protector had within ‘a very few days’ turned ‘into sadness’. If Hastings’ doubts about Richard’s true intentions had begun to grow, he seems finally to have spoken out on 9 June, when the council met to discuss the details of the coronation. It seems that during the meeting Richard broached the issue of the king’s younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, remaining in sanctuary at Westminster. As the date of the coronation neared, Richard argued that York should attend the ceremony as next in line to the throne. It would be ‘improper’ for the king’s brother not to be there, but this would mean his removal from his mother Queen Elizabeth in sanctuary. Hastings seems to have offered resistance to either forcing the duke to be removed from Westminster, or breaking the rights of sanctuary; perhaps he felt by now that Richard’s motives were highly suspect. Though the details of the council discussions remain obscure, they were evidently protracted, with the meeting lasting for four hours.
It seems that the council meeting was to prove the final straw for Richard. Not only did he feel his power was being been tempered, but it seemed that, with just two weeks before the coronation, there was a real chance that the Woodvilles might be able to re-establish their authority after his temporary protectorship had ended. It was hard to forget that, aged twelve, Edward was himself only three years away from attaining his majority; already he had shown his independence of mind, daring to disagree with Richard to his face. Once he had acceded to the throne, free to make his own decisions, would he forgive his uncle for arresting Rivers and his own household? If Richard were to secure his own future, he would need to act fast; it was obvious that as matters stood, that future would soon be in doubt.
He decided to strike first. The day after the council meeting, Richard wrote to the mayor and city of York, urging them to send as many men ‘as ye can make defensibly arrayed’ in order to
aid and assist us against the queen, her blood, adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doth intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin, the Duke of Buckingham, and the old royal blood of this realm, and as it is now openly known, by their subtle and damnable ways forecasted the same, and also the final destruction and disinheritance of you and all other the inheritors of prosperity and honour, as well of the north parts as other countries that belong to us.
Letters were also sent to the Earl of Northumberland, who began to raise men in the East Riding the day after the letter had reached York. For what purpose Richard intended this large army to march on London was yet to become apparent. Only the duke himself knew what his next moves were to be; within days, they would leave a kingdom stunned.
It was a sunny morning on 13 June when the council met at the Tower of London at nine o’clock. The day before, Richard had chosen to divide the council that morning, so that ‘part met at Westminster, part in the Tower of London where the king was’; later, his reasons for doing so would become brutally apparent. Arriving at the council chamber, the duke seemed in a good mood. He even asked John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, to fetch him a ‘mess’ of strawberries from the walled garden of the bishop’s house across the city. Richard’s purpose for getting Morton out of the way would soon become clear.
Once the meeting began, Richard excused himself and left the room. When he returned, his mood had changed. Appearing with ‘a sour and angry countenance’, he sat down at the council table. Suddenly he banged his fists on the table. Someone outside hearing the noise took it as a signal, and began to shout ‘Treason!’ Before the council members could understand what was happening, the room was filled with men ‘in harness, as many as the chamber might hold’. Hastings, Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, and Oliver King, the king’s secretary, were seized in the struggle, which saw Thomas, Lord Stanley struck across the face.
Before anyone could challenge the duke or his armed men, Hastings was led out into the courtyard, where after ‘scarce leisure’ to make a confession, he was summarily executed, beheaded with a sword ‘on the stock of a tree’. He had been killed, Mancini mused, ‘not by those enemies he had always feared, but by a friend whom he had never doubted’. The Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Ely were spared execution ‘out of respect for their order’, but instead were led from the capital to be imprisoned in Wales.
As soon as Hasting’s dead body was carted away to be buried, Richard explained to the council he had uncovered yet another conspiracy against him. Involving Queen Elizabeth, witchcraft and Edward’s former mistress Elizabeth Shore, its highly improbable combination of authors meant that few believed it, with many suspecting that ‘the plot had been feigned by the duke so as to escape the odium of such a crime’.
‘All men gen
erally lamented the death of that man’, one observer reported; nevertheless, no one dared to speak out. ‘All praised the Duke of Gloucester for his dutifulness towards his nephews and for his intention to punish their enemies. Some, however, who understood his ambition and deceit, always suspected whither his enterprises might lead’. Hasting’s execution had cowed men into silence, ‘expecting something similar’ if they dared to demonstrate any resistance, so that Richard and Buckingham ‘thereafter did whatever they wanted’.
The method of Richard’s sudden attack on Hastings, followed by accusations of a conspiracy, was almost identical to his treatment of Rivers and Grey several weeks before. This time, however, Richard had learnt the lesson of dispatching his rival as soon as he could. Yet even if the implausible details of any conspiracy related by Richard can be discounted, it was clear that the duke himself sincerely believed that some kind of conflict would soon arise, compromising his ability to rule as Protector. The timing of Richard’s decision to arrest and execute Hastings itself must be questioned: if the attack had been pre-planned, why did Richard not wait until his northern troops had arrived in the capital, leaving him in a much stronger position, or until he had the Duke of York in his possession? It seems that, far from being carefully orchestrated, Richard had been forced into acting before it was too late. Perhaps Hastings had discovered Richard’s plans to assemble a force to march on London; or that at the lengthy council meeting on 9 June, he had expressed enough resistance to Richard’s plans to have the Duke of York removed from sanctuary that Richard realised that Hastings’ loyalties lay not with him but with the princes. Hastings had agreed to Richard’s seizure of the protectorship since he considered it in their best interests to be brought up with their uncle instead of his enemies the Woodvilles; he did not, it seems, consider that interest went as far as to forcibly remove one of the children from the holy protections offered by sanctuary. For his resistance, Hastings had to go. ‘And thus was this nobleman murdered,’ the author of the Great Chronicle remarked, ‘for his troth and fidelity which he bare his master’, Edward V.
Hastings had been at the head of a court party that had defended the young king’s interest above all other; he had been, Polydore Vergil remarked, the person in whom ‘the nobles who favoured King Edward’s children had reposed their whole hope and confidence’. Now, ‘without justice or judgement, the three strongest supports of the new king were removed’, the Crowland Chronicler observed. In destroying Hastings, Richard had evidently not acted alone, but in concert with several noblemen. Mancini relates that it was Buckingham who had alerted Richard to secret meetings between Hastings, Morton and Thomas Rotherham in each other’s houses. The armed men who seized Hastings had been placed in charge of John, Lord Howard’s son, Thomas Howard. With their continued support, Richard was now in complete control. There was to be no turning back.
With the king already in his possession in the Tower, two days later Richard now moved to seize his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York from sanctuary at Westminster. Already he had also sought to secure the possession of Clarence’s young son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, fearing that ‘this child, who was also of royal blood, would still embarrass him’.
On the morning of 16 June, the sanctuary was surrounded by troops, described as ‘a great crowd, with swords and clubs’. As the head of a delegation to Queen Elizabeth, Richard sent the eighty-year-old Thomas Bourgchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury, accompanied ‘with many others’, who remonstrated with the queen to give up her younger son into his care, promising that York would be returned to her after the coronation. She had heard the arguments over and over for the past few weeks, but the elderly prelate’s pleading, ‘in order to prevent a violation of the sanctuary’, suggested that she realised that if she did not give up her son voluntarily, he would be taken from her by force. In the end, seeing herself ‘besieged’ and the ‘preparation for violence’, she gave up her son.
With both the princes now in his hands, Richard did not hesitate to show his real intentions, ‘not in private but openly’. Later the same day, Richard issued writs cancelling the Parliament that had been summoned for 25 June; quietly, as the day neared to the appointed coronation date, Richard postponed the coronation to 9 November, as business in the exchequer and the chancery effectively ceased. Simon Stallworth wrote to Sir William Stonor on 21 June, barely containing his nervousness at the situation, ‘for with us is much trouble and every man doubts everyone else’. With a ‘great plenty of harnessed men’ surrounding Westminster Abbey, reports continued to spread that 20,000 armed men that had mustered at Pontefract on 18 June were now heading to the capital from the north, ‘in frightening and unheard of numbers’. As the day neared to the originally appointed coronation date of 22 June, instead there was ‘privy talking in London that the Lord Protector should be king’.
Two days before the original coronation date, orders were issued by the mayor that every man was to observe a night-time curfew, with a watch carefully appointed. When the date of the coronation arrived, the only spectacle was provided by Dr Ralph Shaa, who preached a sermon from St Paul’s cross outside the cathedral, declaring Edward V and his brother illegitimate on the grounds that Edward IV had not been validly married to Elizabeth Woodville due to a pre-contract he had apparently previously entered into with a lady at court, Elizabeth Butler. Shaa even went so far as to cast doubt upon the former king’s own legitimacy, suggesting that he had been born out of an affair, though this charge was swiftly dropped. The arguments themselves were irrelevant. The purpose of the sermon was to give backing to what had already been decided: that Richard should instead claim the throne as his own. When Buckingham repeated the same charges in an eloquent speech at the Guildhall on 25 June to the city authorities, for a ‘good half hour’, only a small number of men could bring themselves to cry out ‘yea, yea’ and even then they had done so ‘more for fear than love’. But with armed men stationed outside the building, the Londoners felt that they had little choice but to support Richard’s claim.
As Richard was being petitioned to take the throne, several hundred miles away at Pontefract Castle an altogether different spectacle was taking place. Acting as judge, the Earl of Northumberland presided over the trial of Earl Rivers, Thomas Grey and Thomas Vaughan, reaching a verdict that they were all guilty of treason. Rivers had suspected that his own end was near, and had made his will two days earlier. All three were executed the same day, their bodies thrown into a common grave.
On 26 June, together with the mayor, Buckingham led a delegation of noblemen and aldermen to Richard’s mother’s residence at Baynard’s Castle where they requested that Richard accept the crown. After a symbolic hesitation, Richard agreed, and ‘attended by well near all the lords spiritual and temporal of this realm’ rode to Westminster Hall where, in a ceremony conspicuously modelled on his brother’s accession back in 1461, he ‘thrust himself into the marble chair’ of the king’s throne and was declared king. With his coronation fixed for 6 July, Richard wrote to the Calais garrison informing them of the decision, explaining simply that although Edward V had been recognised as the rightful heir, this had only taken place since men were ‘then ignorant of the very sure and true title which our sovereign lord that now is, King Richard III, hath and had the same time to the crown of England’.
The change in Richard’s appearance could hardly have been starker. Previously dressed for months in mourning black, he now clothed himself in the royal purple, riding through the capital surrounded by a thousand attendants. Richard III took instantly to the trappings of majesty, acting every part a king. When, six days before his planned coronation his ‘northern men’, numbering between five and six thousand men, had finally arrived in the capital, camping on Finsbury Fields, Richard ‘himself went out to meet the soldiers before they entered the city; and, when they were drawn up in a circle on a very great field, he passed them with bared head around their ranks and thanked them’. Stationed at intervals on ever
y street in London, they were to provide a menacing reminder of Richard’s formidable strength and supreme authority.
The coronation on 6 July was no less an impressive occasion, with Richard dressed in a gold and blue doublet, covered by a purple gown trimmed with ermine. His new queen, Anne, was carried in a litter with five ladies in waiting. Buckingham’s pre-eminence as kingmaker was underlined by his role as master of ceremonies at the coronation, having the ‘chief rule and devising’ of the ceremony, carrying the white wand of high steward. John, Lord Howard had stood at Richard’s right hand when he had assumed the throne on 26 June. Two days later the price of his collusion was paid in the form of political reward when he was created Duke of Norfolk, together with his son who became Earl of Surrey, while William, Viscount Berkeley was raised to the Earldom of Nottingham.
The creations were the first in a series of appointments designed to bolster the new king’s authority. No longer dependent upon the pretence of maintaining the status quo of his dead brother’s household, Richard began to refashion the court and council to his own making. His close friend Francis, Viscount Lovell was appointed chief butler and Lord Chamberlain, William Catesby, who may have played a part in the downfall of his former master Hastings, became Chancellor of the Exchequer, while Sir Robert Brackenbury became Master of the King’s Moneys and constable of the council. The council was packed with Richard’s own supporters, including Lovell, Brackenbury, Lord Scrope of Bolton, Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Scrope’s brother-in-law, Sir James Tyrell and Sir Richard Fitzhugh.
Despite being ‘wounded, seized and imprisoned’ during Hastings’ arrest, Thomas Stanley had managed to regain the king’s favour, being appointed steward of the household, attending the coronation where his wife Margaret Beaufort bore the queen’s train in the procession to Westminster Abbey. According to Polydore Vergil, Richard had decided it was best to come to terms with Stanley, fearing that his son George, Lord Strange ‘soon should have stirred up the people to arms somewhere against him’. It seems that Richard was also intending to try and heal old wounds, or at least to neutralise the threat that he believed Henry Tudor, still in exile in Brittany, posed.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 16