Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  Consider Isabel Neville, daughter of an immensely wealthy earl, another Richard, later known as Warwick the Kingmaker. Isabel’s father needed her both to preserve his riches and to bolster them. She was 17 when in 1469 she married George, Duke of Clarence. The duke was the younger brother of the then king – Edward IV – a match that, if things went well, should have assured dynastic income and safety, as well as offering the promise of power. But things did not go well.

  Isabel had four children. The first was stillborn in a ship off Calais. Another survived for less than three months. A third did better: he was 24 when Henry VII had him beheaded, extinguishing the legitimate male line of the House of Plantagenet. Isabel’s daughter lived longest, only to face execution by Henry VIII.

  Isabel herself, however, never knew of the violent demise of her two longest-living children, having died shortly after bearing her last. Though her cause of death is now thought to have been natural, her husband George convinced himself she had been poisoned, and arranged for the brutal arrest and hanging of one of his late wife’s ladies-in-waiting. Like marriage, the courts could be used for personal ends by those with authority.

  This was the world known to RICHARD Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, Constable of England and then KING RICHARD III – to list a few of the successive names and titles of the eighth son of the Duke of York. The Lancastrians and the Yorkists supplied the dynastic backbone for the Wars of the Roses, as individuals exploited family and political loyalties to further their ends. RICHARD was born a Yorkist. His eldest brother would become king Edward IV, but the three preceding kings, Henry VI, V and IV, were Lancastrians. Though RICHARD’s father, Richard Duke of York, sought to overthrow Henry VI, it was his sons who succeeded in ascending the throne. Ultimately, however, the feud between the two families ended at Bosworth, when the new House of Tudor left both Lancastrians and Yorkists behind.

  For two centuries England was ruled by the male descendants of one man, Edward III (1327–77), and fought over by the inter-marrying factions of Lancaster and York; the Tudor Henry VIII (1509–47) could trace ancestry to Edward through both houses.

  Yet these Lancastrians and Yorkists were all descended from Edward III, who had died only 75 years before RICHARD was born. And it was this shared lineage, and shared claim to the throne, that was the cause of their animosity. So too were other families caught up in the feuding, marrying into whichever dynasty they saw fit. Isabel Neville and her sister Anne, for example, were descended from a daughter of John of Gaunt (founder of the Lancastrian dynasty), herself a half-sister of the Lancastrian Henry IV. Anne’s first husband would be his direct descendant Edward Prince of Wales, Henry VI’s son, later killed in battle. A year later, Anne would marry the future RICHARD III, giving up the title Princess of Wales but in time becoming Queen of England.

  And the Tudors were not so different. Like Anne Neville, Henry VII (first king of the Tudor line) was descended from Henry IV’s father, John of Gaunt. But the wife who bore his successor Henry VIII would be a Yorkist – Edward IV’s eldest child. The Tudors might as well have been known as a Lancastrian-Yorkist alliance (indeed this union was what their combined red and white rose emblem symbolized): or, in a word, Plantagenets, the house from which both families anyway derived.

  If history tends to simplify the record to make a clearer story, it was a mess genealogically. This tangle was easily exploited by warring factions. And in 1452, Richard Duke of York, soon to be father to the future RICHARD III, set out to see what he could achieve by doing exactly that.

  The Duke of York was descended from Edward III’s fifth son, Edmund. Other things being equal, this put his claim to the throne behind that of descendants of the four sons born earlier. One of these had conveniently died before his first birthday (as Louis Mazzini put it, looking at a newspaper, ‘Sometimes the deaths column brought good news, sometimes the births column brought bad’). The oldest son had fathered Richard II, who, childless, was usurped by his cousin Henry IV, heir of Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. That left in the way Henry IV’s (Lancastrian) descendants – currently represented by the king, Henry VI – along with other descendants of the fourth son, and family descended from the third son.

  A fine initial R (for Ricardus, Latin for Richard) with roses, crown and royal motto, illuminated on animal skin in 1484 at the top of a legal document prepared at the king’s court. (Bristol Record Office)

  But York had other advantages: he was not in fact descended only from Edward III’s fifth son. His father had married into the third son’s family, so that through his mother, the duke could claim royal ancestry through Edward III’s third son, trumping the Lancastrian line (descended from the fourth son) and outpaced by none. The young duke himself had been married to the ten-year-old Cecily Neville, descended from Edward III’s fourth son, like the Lancastrians. This meant that the Duke of York’s children could claim descent from all the sons of Edward III who had any effective claim to the throne.

  And finally, York’s hereditary claim was fuelled by a desire for revenge. His father had joined a conspiracy to seize power from Henry V. It failed. After a trial in Southampton, the conspirators were beheaded, notwithstanding his father’s impassioned pleas. The orphaned duke – his mother had died the day after he was born – was then four.

  So in 1452, emboldened by Henry VI’s ‘manifest incompetence’,9 York made public his ambitions and marched on London – to no great effect. Outmanoeuvred by the Duke of Somerset, a Lancastrian supporter and another descendant of Edward III’s fourth son, the Duke and his wife moved to Fotheringhay, where two months later RICHARD was born.

  In 1891, Henry Wheatley described the Temple Gardens, set in an old legal district in the City of London, as a ‘fine, open space, fronting the Thames’; a private space, walled and gated. Such it is when, according to Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part 1, the Duke of York and five other men – among them the Duke of Somerset – leave the busy halls for the quiet privacy of the garden to discuss delicate matters. It is an apocryphal but poignant scene.

  ‘Admit it’, says York. ‘You know I’m right.’

  His friends equivocate. Exasperated, York lays down a challenge. ‘Look at these roses,’ he says. ‘If you are with me, pick a white flower.’ Somerset takes the offensive: pick a red rose, he says, and support me.

  Warwick plucks a white rose, Suffolk a red. Vernon, when pushed, picks a ‘pale and maiden blossom’, dismissing Somerset’s jest that should he prick his finger his blood would redden the flower and divert his allegiance.

  There remains only a lawyer. ‘The argument you held was wrong in you’, he says, addressing Somerset. He too plucks a white rose.

  Confident in victory, York taunts Somerset. ‘Where is your case now?’

  ‘In my scabbard,’ snaps Somerset, ‘ready to soak your rose in blood.’

  The two men exchange escalating insults. When Somerset has stomped off, Warwick makes a prophecy. This garden brawl, he says, ‘Shall send between the red rose and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night’.

  If only so few. York was ready for battle. The Wars of the Roses, into which the people of England were dragged and slaughtered and during which the aristocracy found the old chivalric ways would no longer offer personal safety, had begun.

  In 1891, Wheatley surveyed the Temple Gardens. ‘Such is the smoke and foul air of London’, he wrote, ‘that the commonest and hardiest kind of rose has long ceased to put forth a bud.’ Perhaps they died in 1452.10

  The atmosphere among the English aristocracy, already disturbed by York’s rebellion and fears that their king Henry VI lacked the strength to maintain peace, was further troubled by events in France. In July 1453 an English army was defeated at the Battle of Castillon. The rout finally drained the capital won by earlier generations at Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). It marked the loss for England not just of hopes for control of France – ending the Hundred Years’ War – but of confidence at home. Henry VI was
reported to have gone mad.

  With only an infant son and a wife who was a niece of the king of France, the ailing king saw support for himself and his Lancastrian dynasty fall away. Despite his recent failure to seize power, York rapidly strengthened his position, rewarding promises of loyalty with political appointments as he was himself granted the power of protector, responsible for the crown – now in the person of a five-month-old heir, Prince Edward – and kingdom.

  Then, bizarrely, Henry appeared suddenly to regain his senses. Somerset, released from the Tower of London where York had contained him, plotted retribution. York was dismissed. Diplomacy had lost its force.

  In May 1455 the king set out for Leicester. York intercepted him at St Albans. Battle was met.11 But this was no Agincourt, with army pitched against army in open field. Earls hunted down fellow aristocrats in the city streets. The wounded king cowered in a cottage, absorbing the reek of piss from tanning pits. Somerset was found hiding in a pub and murdered, his red blood staining the yard. Other dukes and earls were hurt or killed, racking up the score of those seeking revenge. Henry’s miraculous recovery had ‘turned a tragedy into a national disaster’.12 The round of killing would not end until Bosworth was done.

  York again became Henry VI’s protector, but within months he had lost the privilege. As the king wavered in and out of reality, the queen, Margaret of Anjou, focused on bolstering the Lancastrian power that her young son would inherit. So York too needed to look to his supporters. Yet both sides had cause to fear the Scots to the north and the French to the south, while English government struggled to have any control in Wales. And it was there that another descendent of Edward III (through his fourth son), the young Margaret Beaufort, contrived to launch a third dynastic contender for power: early in 1457, three months after the death of her husband Edmund Tudor, she gave birth to their only son in the safety of Pembroke Castle. She named him Henry. York’s son RICHARD was then four. In a little under 30 years Henry and RICHARD would meet at Bosworth, the one to gain a throne and become Henry VII, first Tudor monarch, the other to lose it.

  A heraldic – rather than lifelike – representation of Richard III and his queen, Anne Neville, in the Salisbury Roll, perhaps intended to show them at their coronation in July 1483. (Courtesy of the Duke of Buccleuch)

  The queen’s present concern, however, was not Margaret Beaufort and the Tudors, but the Yorks. In 1459 she summoned a council that found the Duke of York outside the law, and both parties prepared for conflict. York’s supporters set out to join the duke at his castle in Ludlow, bringing men across the Channel from Calais, and down from Middleham Castle in Yorkshire. Queen Margaret arranged to ambush the Middleham contingent at Blore Heath, near the border between Staffordshire and Shropshire. The Lancastrian forces greatly outnumbered the Yorkist, but the latter were forewarned by spies. Using the marshy landscape to tactical advantage, they escaped with a clear victory, leaving 2,000 Lancastrian dead.13

  As news reached Ludlow of this defeat and Yorkist supporters arrived from north and east, the duke might have felt a moment of confidence. If so, it soon passed. Setting out for London, he met the king’s full army, twice the size of his. He returned to Ludlow, where his men built defences out of earthworks and wagons, near Ludford Bridge. Darkness came early on an October night. The Calais wing, having seen the royal flag that marked the presence of Henry VI himself, defected to the Lancastrians. Around midnight York and his teenage sons, Edward and Edmund, and his two supporting earls left camp to cross the bridge into town in search of a pub. They never went back: York fled to Ireland with Edmund, and the earls moved south with Edward, borrowed a boat and left for Calais.14

  The next morning the king and queen pardoned the abandoned soldiers and allowed their own troops to loot Ludlow and abuse its citizens. York’s wife Cecily had apparently been left to look after herself and their three younger children, Margaret, George and RICHARD; the last had celebrated his seventh birthday less than a fortnight before.15 They were taken into royal care.

  Parliament was summoned, and the rebels were ‘attainted’ – stripped of their titles and property, enriching those loyal to the crown and further embittering the Yorkist cause. By the following June, in 1460, they were ready to strike back. They invaded England.

  To the Lancastrians’ alarm, the attack came not from Ireland led by the Duke of York, but from his supporters and eldest son, Edward, sailing over from France and marching on London through Kent. Leaving the Tower under siege, they continued the journey northeast. The armies met in fields beside the River Nene, just south of Northampton.16

  The king’s forces, feeling secure, perhaps, behind their newly dug fort despite being heavily outnumbered, rebuffed negotiations. The Yorkists attacked. One of the king’s lords betrayed him and let in the opponents. The summer afternoon was marked by unseasonably heavy rain, such that ‘the [king’s] guns lay deep in the water, and so were quenched and might not be shot’. Fleeing Lancastrians drowned in the swollen river. By some accounts it was all over in half an hour. Casualties may have been relatively low, but they included several lords. Henry, sheltering in his tent, was seized by an archer.

  The queen fled first to Wales, and then Scotland. Cecily and her children moved to a mansion in London. When the Duke of York finally made his way over from Ireland, he marched under the arms of Edward III’s third son, a clear threat to the legitimacy of Henry VI, whose claim was only through the fourth son. To further make the point, York strode into the palace of Westminster through the king’s entrance, apparently expecting to be hailed as the new monarch: but Parliament wasn’t ready for that, and he fumed out, snubbed. York’s subsequent more diplomatic approach went better (and enriched the fortunate lawyers), and he was granted the right to inherit the throne after the king’s natural death in place of Henry and Margaret’s son. In the meantime he could draw a comfortable salary befitting a royal heir.

  War was now inevitable. The king’s sanity may have been in doubt, but he otherwise seemed healthy, and he was ten years younger than York. Queen Margaret cared less about her husband’s prospects than her son Edward’s, who had been disinherited. Drawing on considerable Lancastrian support, she prepared to invade England, giving York the excuse he needed to force events. Leaving Cecily with Margaret, George and RICHARD in London, the duke sent their oldest son Edward to confront the queen’s allies in Wales, and set off north with Edmund.

  The crown owned an old castle at Sandal, near Wakefield and 40 km (25 miles) southeast of York. The duke spent a cold, wet Christmas there with his troops, while the queen camped 16 km (ten miles) to the east. Then on 30 December 1460, for reasons that are not recorded, York left the safety of a stone fort towering over the surrounding landscape and charged ahead of his men to confront the queen’s forces. He was surrounded ‘like a fish in a net’ and killed, along with his son Edmund and, according to varied reports, 700 to 2,500 of his army. Shakespeare has the queen and her men torture York, smearing him with his son’s blood and crowning him with paper before stabbing him to death.17

  York’s strongest ally, Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury (and grandfather of Isabel and Anne), was captured and executed the next day. His head was taken with the Duke of York’s and Edmund’s to the city of York, where they were displayed above Micklegate Bar. ‘York’, says Shakespeare’s queen, ‘may overlook the town of York.’18

  Barely had he heard the news from Wakefield than York’s son Edward, who was at Ludlow, learned that a Lancastrian force was marching on Hereford, 32 km (20 miles) to the north. With his father dead and himself already experienced in battle, Edward was now Henry VI’s recognized successor and a prominent figure caught in the spiralling cycle of ambition and revenge, of armed conflicts and extra-judicial executions. The armies met at Mortimer’s Cross. Edward secured a rapid victory, leaving 4,000 Lancastrian dead.19

  Meanwhile, fired by success and growing aristocratic support, Queen Margaret had continued south and routed Yorkist forc
es in St Albans.20 Anticipating her imminent arrival in London, York’s widow Cecily sent her sons George and RICHARD to the safety of family friends in France. But Margaret in fact moved north, and it was Edward who reached the capital. On 4 March 1461, at 19 years old, he was proclaimed king.

  Now needing more than ever to remove the Lancastrian threat, the new Edward IV confronted the former queen’s forces in Yorkshire, at Towton. Here, in driving March sleet, tens of thousands of men on either side fought through a long day. They included a significant proportion of England’s most powerful lords, though Margaret, Henry and their son Edward were safe in York. It was an overwhelming victory for the king.

  Towton was the bloodiest battle ever recorded on English soil. Fleeing soldiers trod over corpses floating in a deep brook. The River Wharfe ran red. Many thousands died. Archaeologists examined the remains of 39 men packed into a shallow grave at the battlefield, after it had been accidently disturbed during building work in 1996. ‘Many of the individuals’, they reported, ‘suffered multiple injuries … far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death’.21

  A few months later, in June, RICHARD’s mother Cecily recalled him and his brother George to a traumatized England. Her oldest son was king, transforming her status. But the cost was high. Her husband, her other young adult son, her brother and his son had all died at Wakefield. These were not the only losses she had to bear. Cecily had the support of three daughters aged between 15 and 21, but half her 12 children were gone – four boys and a girl had died before their first birthdays. George and RICHARD were now second and third in line to the throne, respectively. But their most formative years had been a time of pain.