Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  This was not the end of the Lancastrians, however. Henry VI, his wife Margaret and their son Edward had fled to Scotland, plotting revenge. In 1464 Lancastrian attempts to raise support for their cause in the north of England, and thwart King Edward’s peace negotiations with Scotland, were defeated at two battles less than a day’s ride from the border.22 Nonetheless, Margaret of Anjou sided with Scottish rebels. Lancastrian allies in France threatened England from the south. The wealthy and powerful Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who had fought with the Yorkists and secured the throne for Edward, dangerously felt sidelined, and in defiance of Edward, had arranged for his daughter to marry the king’s brother George, now the Duke of Clarence. Edward desperately needed to secure his throne.

  The project began badly. In 1469 supporters of Warwick and Edward met in Northamptonshire at Edgcote.23 Warwick’s forces won, leaving 2,000 dead on the battlefield and hunting down and beheading fleeing aristocrats. Edward was arrested, though pressure from the aristocracy forced Warwick to release him.

  Eight months later Warwick attempted a second coup, and this time Edward was the victor, gaining confirmation at the battle that his own (and RICHARD's) brother Clarence was also fighting against him.24 Warwick’s next move was to invade from France, now allied with Margaret of Anjou and planning to reinstate her husband Henry as king. They had enough support to make Edward flee across the Channel. For the next six months Henry VI was back on the throne.

  Then, in March 1471, it was Edward’s turn to invade. After seizing a clearly confused king in London, he rode 16 km (ten miles) north with his troops to Barnet. Facing Warwick’s army under cover first of darkness and then mist, he secured a victory. Fifteen hundred died – among them Warwick himself.25 Less than three weeks later and 160 km(100 miles) to the west, battle was joined again, at Tewkesbury.26 Here Edward defeated Margaret’s army. She was arrested. The 2,000 dead included her son Edward and, along with those subsequently executed, several Lancastrian rebels. Henry VI was executed in the Tower. For Edward IV, the wars in England were over.

  All this time his younger brother RICHARD – now the Duke of Gloucester – had shown great loyalty, holding order in the north on behalf of the king or joining him when asked. RICHARD saw his first military action at Barnet and Tewkesbury, at the latter perhaps in command of the royal vanguard. He was given Warwick’s vast estates, and over the next decade entrenched his growing power in the north. In 1482 he was put in charge of the English army during warfare with Scotland.

  GLOUCESTER’s loyalty to the crown was matched by attention to his family. The bodies of his father, the Duke of York, and his brother, Edmund, had been hastily buried in Pontefract Priory after the Battle of Wakefield. In 1476 RICHARD managed their reburial at Fotheringhay with dramatic ceremony. Later he and his wife Anne had one child, a son, who died aged eight, less than a year before his mother. RICHARD seems to have felt real loss at these deaths, and he cared well for two illegitimate children born before his marriage. In contrast, his brother Clarence’s increasingly erratic behaviour culminated in his execution for treason – famously being drowned in a ‘butt of malmsey wine’ – after being tried personally by his king and older brother, Edward IV. But up to this point, there is nothing to suggest that RICHARD was anything other than an exemplary man and lord of his time.27

  Then, in April 1483, after a short illness, Edward IV unexpectedly died.

  Prince Edward, Edward IV’s oldest son, was in Ludlow. He automatically became the uncrowned king. RICHARD was in York. In London, men debated whether he alone, or as leader of a council, should care for the 12-year-old king’s interests. With the unifying authority of Edward IV gone, dynastic suspicion and envy found new life.

  Edward V, accompanied by his family and retinue, set out for the capital from the west, and RICHARD came down from the north. At RICHARD’s suggestion, the parties met at Stony Stratford, 16km (ten miles) south of Northampton. The king, along with his mother (born Elizabeth Woodville), her brother, her older son by her first marriage and her cousin, were seemingly astonished to be subjected immediately to a dynastic coup.

  RICHARD, aided by Henry Duke of Buckingham, arrested the Woodvilles, knelt before the boy-king and proclaimed himself sole protector. It seems RICHARD believed he had foiled a plot against himself, which we know as the Woodville conspiracy. For us, as with so much that is soon to come, there is little substantial evidence to explain the incident. That is not unusual for this time: extraordinary events left no better evidence than prosaic ones, such that the details of almost everything told in this chapter could be questioned or reinterpreted. The actions of the next two years, three months and 22 days have been subjected to at least as much scrutiny, retelling and making of myth and fantasy as any other period of British history. And still we often do not know what really happened.

  Looking down on the bared heads of Buckingham and his uncle, Edward V apparently told them not to worry. But it was too late. RICHARD imprisoned the four seized men, including Edward’s personal attendant, in Yorkshire. His request for their execution was declined, but he ordered it himself as soon as he had the prerogative. He was made official protector. He enriched Buckingham with Woodville estates and gave him considerable power in Wales and the south. The young king was made at home in the Tower of London (a fortified royal palace with a prison attached).

  A few months later, in June, RICHARD charged four more lords with aiding the Woodville conspiracy. One was executed on the spot and three were retained. Elizabeth’s other young son, another Richard, second in line to the throne, was taken to the Tower to join his brother. RICHARD put it about that the two princes were illegitimate, and thus ineligible to reign, and pronounced himself king. Though no one seemed to know what happened – incriminating in itself, one might think – the princes were never seen again; it was widely assumed they had been killed.28 Whatever his motivations, it becomes easy, perhaps, to think of RICHARD as a deluded dictator. Edward IV’s rule by law and authority was being replaced by one of fear. Whether, judged by the culture and the particular events of the time, that made RICHARD a good king or a bad, is debatable. It certainly made his position dangerous.

  Raised to power by claiming to have thwarted an attack on royalty, RICHARD could have been expected to be immediately nervous of his own security. With spectacular ceremonies and generous gifts – cutting taxes, returning land to local communities and helping churches – he toured the country, parading the monarch’s unique status and promising better times. He was particularly munificent in York, where he planned a new college in which priests would pray for him and his family (though he died too soon, and it never happened).

  RICHARD’s devotion to religion and concern for the poor are said to have been genuine and sincere,29 but drawing sympathy by advertising their importance to him was a wise strategy. Almost at once traitors, real or imagined, were identified. Less than three months after RICHARD’s coronation, his former ally Buckingham was known to be plotting with Henry Tudor and Edward IV’s widow Elizabeth Woodville – rival interests brought together by uncertainty, fuelled by the apparent loss of the princes in the Tower.

  Rebellion grew across the south, attracting not just those who feared the future, but many who had already lost property, status or people close to them, executed or killed in battle. On his way down from York to London, RICHARD wrote in his own hand in fear and dismay at Buckingham’s treachery, of ‘the malice of him that had best cause to be true’.30 But luck was with the king. Open revolt began prematurely in Kent. In Wales, local lords attacked Buckingham’s own castle, and stormy weather forced him to cross the River Severn into England without his troops. RICHARD tracked him down to Salisbury and had him beheaded. The storms also scattered Henry Tudor’s fleet, most of which returned to Brittany without making British landfall.

  The rebellion had failed. But its cause remained. And now, as the king followed the tried process of attainting suspects – over a hundred lost their estates
in RICHARD’s only parliament, in January 1484 – yet more had cause to fear and resent. Contacts were maintained between former backers of Edward IV in England and Henry and his allies in France. Henry had French support, too, from a monarchy fearing English hostility. RICHARD had reason to expect another invasion.

  Map showing locations mentioned in the text, and the key routes by which forces reached Bosworth field in August 1485 (information from Foard and Curry, and others). (Mike Pitts/Drazen Tomic)

  It came in August 1485. Henry landed in southwest Wales, with French mercenaries, at the entrance to an enclosed estuary; at its head was Pembroke Castle, the place where he had been born and which was now in RICHARD’s control. While Henry marched through Wales towards Shrewsbury, north of the royal castle at Ludlow, RICHARD gathered men of power around him and moved to Leicester. Requests for military support were met by contingents riding from the north and east.

  In four days the two forces converged 25 km (15 miles) southeast of Leicester. Henry had marched from Shrewsbury down Watling Street, the old Roman road that headed straight for London. With a larger army, RICHARD had probably taken another Roman road that met Watling Street near Atherstone, where Henry was camped.31 RICHARD settled down in open country near Sutton Cheney, with some ten thousand soldiers.

  It had been 14 years since an English king had confronted a rebel army across a battlefield. No one there could have been unfamiliar with what had happened in the 16 years before that: perhaps thirty or forty thousand men had died in a dozen battles, with many more surviving the terror, the bloodshed, the excavation of mass graves, the avenging executions, the mourning and the upheaval of lives. As darkness fell, thousands must have wondered: was this the start of another generation of killing? Or was it, finally, the end of wars? Many of them would never know.

  The nearest town was a couple of miles to the north, known, since Edward I had granted it the right to hold a market every Wednesday, as Market Bosworth.

  The next day they fought.

  Scene 1

  A bridge

  I’m walking from the west towards the historic core of the great, sprawling low-rise City of Leicester. Along this route, one day in August 1485, a king marched out to do battle; and on the next day, a new king marched in with his predecessor’s body.

  Leicester remembers the loser, which is why I am looking at a street sign that says King Richards Road. Beside it, with an arrow pointing up the quieter Tudor Road, is a warning: Humps for half mile. Even before his grave was found in a car park, Richard was truly the tarmac king.

  It’s an appropriate epithet, perhaps, for a man who was celebrated in this city more by myth and legend, the common gossip of inns and news sheets, than by the grandeur of official monuments – and also for a city that, at least where I am now, is apparently defined by tarmac, by corridors of traffic that cut and divide.

  When King Richard finally got a public memorial here, in 1856, it was set in a factory wall by a local builder called Benjamin Broadbent, a few hundred yards on as I stand, where the road crosses the River Soar. A willow tree had done the job for those who knew, marking the site of Richard’s grave, but it had been cut down. Mr Broadbent wanted something more permanent than a tree and more informative than a road name. The raised letters of his carved stone slab could be read as people left town over Bow Bridge or lingered at the Bow Bridge Inn opposite: ‘Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III the last of the Plantagenets 1485.’1

  Contemporary records describe how Richard was quietly buried not here, but within the city walls, in the church of Leicester Greyfriars, having first been displayed for a couple of days so the people could witness beyond doubt that the king was dead. Henry VII later paid for a monumental stone tomb. Along with everything else at the site, this seems to have disappeared when the friary was seized by Henry VIII’s accountants at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1538.

  Since the mid 19th-century, Leicester has been celebrating Richard III and the Wars of the Roses in street furniture. (Mike Pitts)

  Neither was Richard himself allowed to rest. According to tradition, an angry mob, at last able to get their hands on the hated tyrant, dug up his body, strode out of the city through the west gate with the decaying remains, and lobbed them into the river. There happened to be an old cemetery nearby. When the crowd had drifted away, ‘a few pitying bystanders … drew the corpse out of the water, and hastily placed it in consecrated ground’.2

  Early in 1861 workmen started to take the bridge down, stone by stone, removing the very structure, it was thought, that had conveyed Richard’s army to Bosworth. It was too narrow for modern traffic, just six feet across, with little niches either side for pedestrians to dodge into as carriages passed. And, it was said, its five stone arches impeded the river’s flow after heavy rain, causing flooding.

  Over the next two years the old Bow Bridge was replaced with a shiny new cast-iron structure, higher and wider and suspended over beams that completely cleared the water. Yet such progress brought a loss.

  Along with the bridge, a favourite Leicester spot for recalling Richard III had been the Blue Boar Inn. The king was said to have stayed there before setting out to Bosworth. Supposedly it was then called the White Boar Inn, but was hastily rebranded when news reached Leicester of Henry’s victory – a white boar being Richard’s heraldic badge, and a blue boar, conveniently, the device of one of Henry VII’s generals. Richard’s visit not only brought fame to the hotel, but launched a small industry around the royal bed (in which the most remarkable incident was a landlady’s murder and the subsequent execution of at least one man by hanging and of a woman by fire).3

  In addition, tales of the fevered despoliation of Richard’s tomb had unleashed a material counterpart to the royal bed for gossip and commerce – a royal coffin. Some 50 years in the ground before retrieval and a further 75 before first noted, the coffin could not be wood, and a stone one was duly found and proudly displayed at another inn.4

  View of Bow Bridge across the River Soar, shortly before its demolition in 1861, looking west; an engraved stone (right) proclaims that Richard III’s remains lie nearby. (Album/Quintlox/SuperStock)

  By 1861 the coffin had long disappeared. The old Blue Boar Inn, a fine piece of medieval town architecture, had been demolished in 1836. That left the bridge as ‘the only relic reminding the historical student of Richard’s presence in Leicester’. Now that had gone, too. The town was entirely ‘without a memorial of the king whose name lives in every man’s thoughts’.5

  Well, perhaps not quite. The construction of a new bridge gave the opportunity for some inventive new commemoration. As I approach, the first thing I see is a cast-iron plate marking the name, Bow Bridge, partly obscured by the luxurious greenery and white elderflowers of a late, very wet summer. The bridge itself – strictly there are two, for two parallel lanes – is rich in historical imagery, cast in iron, newly restored, and painted in white, red, gold and black. At the centre of each parapet is Richard III’s coat of arms, with a touch of blue. Two white boars hold up his crest, their hind legs standing on a motto – barely visible under layers of paint – that reads Loyaute me Lie, or loyalty binds me.6 Either side, in alternating panels, are red and white roses.

  The new Bow Bridge, completed in 1862, was cast iron; the decorated parapets, recently painted, feature red and white roses and Richard III’s coat of arms detailed in blue and gold. (Mike Pitts)

  As the quaint medieval bridge was swept away for industrial splendour, myth was fixed in iron. ‘Upon this bridge’, reads a cast plaque, ‘stood a stone of some height, against which King Richard by chance struck his spur.’ A wise woman noticed, and predicted that as his foot hit the stone on his way out, so on his return his head, hanging limp, would do the same. Forsooth.

  The story, and the style, came from John Speed’s Historie of Great Britaine, published in 1611. It was well known, if only from Speed’s telling, but for one anonymous citizen of Leicester its representa
tion on the new bridge was a mistake, favouring ‘the puerilities and fictions of the gipsy fortune teller’ – what another writer judged rather to be a ‘historically interesting … tradition’ – over proper history.7

  Yet while people argued about the relative merits of history and custom, the construction of the bridge had thrown up some solid evidence that no one was expecting. During the work, the river had been dammed so that the bed was comparatively dry. When the stone piers were taken out, wooden stakes were found, and faggots – bundles of twigs. These could have been part of the bridge’s foundations, or conceivably from an earlier bridge, perhaps even a Roman one. More curious still, workmen digging on the east side of the bed unearthed an almost perfect human skeleton, close to a stone pier; the skull of a horse and an ox horn were found nearby.8

  The men must have wondered if they’d stumbled on the king. Even as they wiped the dark mud from the bones, they could have read – or if needs be, have had read to them – Broadbent’s words, looking down on the dry river bed: ‘Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III’. The story spread quickly. King Dick had been found.

  Meanwhile, the remains were bundled into a basket and carried off for examination. A local surgeon announced the skeleton to be that of a 20-year-old male (thus too young to be Richard III) of lower than average height. The skull was shown to a passing phrenologist – apparently the sort of visitor to be taken for granted at that time – who said it revealed a man of ‘inferior intellectual development, who possessed some constructive skill, with large animal propensities’, or, in plain English, an idiotic builder.