Richard III

by Seward, Desmond

  In some ways, indeed, Richard’s contemporaries were severer critics than their sixteenth-century successors. Mancini’s informants were at pains to explain to him how rudely everyone had been deceived by the usurper; the Croyland chronicler (and whoever he was, he was not John Morton or any other of Henry’s fellow exiles of 1483–5) fails even to credit Richard with the remorse allowed him by Vergil and More.

  Charles Ross, in what is still the best academic study of the King, emphasises that contemporaries believed he had murdered his nephews, that the Black Legend is of pre-Tudor origin and dates from Richard’s lifetime. He, too, regards the Croyland Chronicle as the most important source of all. But even he is too cautious in drawing the obvious conclusions from his own magisterial scholarship.

  The whole controversy about Richard III hinges on the interpretation of a very brief part of his life, known from a very small corpus of material. The usurpation of April to July 1483 is the one time when we are reasonably well informed about him, the single period dealt with fully by Mancini and More, who are substantiated by the Croyland writer and Polydore Vergil. Almost every aspect of the King’s personality known to us derives from what they say of his behaviour during these vital days. Apart from certain incidents of his reign, described tersely by the Croyland chronicler and Vergil, the descriptions of his coup d’état provide almost the sole means of interpreting his career and his character.

  Dominic Mancini’s account was written in December 1483, in France, and remained forgotten until his manuscript was discovered in 1934 at the municipal library of Lille. Although this scholarly Roman visitor to London gives us no description of Richard – no doubt simply because he had not seen him – he is plainly convinced that the King is a very bad man indeed. As he was a foreigner, it would have been hard to find a more unbiased observer.

  Another foreign contemporary, to whose evidence perhaps insufficient importance has been attached, was the very well informed Philippe de Commynes, that shrewdest, most objective and most modern of fifteenth-century observers. He had actually seen Richard. In his memoirs he claims that he was ‘more filled with pride than any King of England these last hundred years’.7 He also tells us that Louis XI of France, who was not exactly squeamish, thought Richard ‘extremely cruel and evil’, and states categorically that he killed Henry VI – ‘or at least had him killed in his presence’ – as well as his nephews. Like Mancini, Commynes (who probably wrote between 1489 and 1491) had no particular reason to blacken the name of a foreign monarch.

  The best-informed of those severely critical contemporaries of whom Dr Hanham speaks was of course the author of the original source of the ‘Second Continuation’ of the Croyland Chronicle.8 It is now virtually established that the continuation incorporates a lost text written by Richard’s Lord Chancellor – far from being the production of Markham’s ‘credulous old Croyland monks’. This was John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, who must have been present at most meetings of the King’s Council. Unfortunately, in keeping with his training as a professional bureaucrat, the ‘Croyland chronicler’ is often infuriatingly discreet. Even so, he had plainly been horrified by Richard.

  Polydore Vergil, a professional Italian historian, came to England in 1502. If naturally disinclined to displease his patron Henry VII, and prone to poetic licence in wishing to write good literature, he was none the less objective and methodical. He tells us that when unable to find written records, ‘I went to every elderly man pointed out to me as having once held an important position in public life and obtained from them information about events before 1500.’ (We know that he questioned survivors from Edward IV’s court about the death of the Duke of Clarence.) Moreover, textual criticism has shown that he may well have had access to the text behind the Croyland Continuation, although Russell had died in 1494. Vergil makes slips in details and is ignorant of much which we now know about Richard, but on the whole he gives the impression that he is telling the truth as he sees it.

  When all is said, however unreliable, Sir Thomas More remains the fullest source of information about Richard III. The white and grey schools both quote whole passages from him in support of their cases, rejecting only those which contradict them – just as they do with the Tudor chroniclers. Undeniably his history has many faults. There is no question that it dramatizes the principal characters’ speeches and much else besides. It is wrong about Edward IV’s age and Lord Hastings’s Christian name, it confuses Eleanor Butler with Elizabeth Lucy, and it portrays Queen Elizabeth Woodville as a spotless figure when in reality she was a grasping intriguer. But a good deal of this was due to absence of proper records, and to the fact that the historical methods of the early 1500s were not those of today. In any case the book was never finished and is only a draft. (I have modernized quotations from More to make them read more easily. However, in general I have used the Yale edition of his works (ed. R. S. Sylvester).)

  Certainly Sir Thomas had strong moral convictions about public life, and he wanted to tell a good story. Yet it should never be forgotten that he was a brilliant and a very experienced lawyer – Erasmus thought he had the finest legal brain in Europe. No one could have been more sceptical of allegation or rumour, fairer in weighing evidence. Describing the murder of the Princes, he says he does so ‘not after every way that I have heard, but after that way that I have so heard, by such men and by such means as me thinketh it were hard but it should be true’. Indeed, his book can be seen as a remarkable piece of detective work.

  The argument that More was writing ‘propaganda’ to curry favour with a new dynasty is sufficiently refuted by the circumstances of his death.9 If anything, he was incredibly tactless. He says that the father of his powerful friend, the Duke of Norfolk, had lured Lord Hastings to his death, besides plundering Mistress Shore of all she had and reducing her to beggary, and that his friend’s grandfather – the first Duke – had been one of those most closely involved in plotting and carrying out Richard’s usurpation. Nor did he have any need to blacken Richard, whose reputation was already quite black enough. For all his literary and moral conceits and his mistakes, Sir Thomas’s History contains valuable information. Probably some of it has not been properly assessed even now.

  Kendall considers that More’s Richard cannot be ‘in any way the portrait of a human being’. On the contrary, Sir Thomas’s King Richard is all too human, far more of a real person than he is in most modern biographies. He was, as Gairdner says, ‘the natural outgrowth of monstrous and horrible times’ and a practitioner of the new Renaissance statecraft. When Shakespeare makes him claim to ‘set the murderous Machiavel to school’, there is a substantial element of truth. Richard was by no means an isolated phenomenon, let alone a freak. He belongs to the same ferociously ruthless company as Louis XI, Ferdinand of Aragon and Cesare Borgia – and Edward IV and Henry VII.

  This book is an attempt to produce a new and truer likeness of Richard III. It tries to see him through the eyes of his contemporaries, while taking modern research into account. Among these contemporaries it numbers not only Mancini and the Croyland chronicler, but Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More – discounting his dramatic effects and didactic intentions – and also the earliest Tudor chroniclers. A new, yet entirely credible, Richard emerges; certainly not a monster; but a peculiarly grim young English precursor of Machiavelli’s Prince.

  Chapter One

  THE DIFFICULT BIRTH

  ‘For I have often heard my mother say

  I came into the world with my legs forward.’

  Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III

  ‘He left such a reputation behind him that even his birth was said to have proclaimed him a monster.’

  James Gairdner, History of the Life

  and Reign of Richard the Third

  Richard III was born on 2 October 1452 at Fotheringay in Northamptonshire, sixth and youngest son of the Duke and Duchess of York. The castle, one day to see the imprisonment and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, was wh
ere he would spend his earliest years. It was a principal house, though only an occasional residence, of his parents.

  It is likely that he had a difficult birth. John Rous was plainly anxious to vilify the dead King when he wrote his Historia Regum Angliae – dedicated to Henry VII – between 1485 and 1491. Yet there may be a grain of truth in his fanciful account of Richard being ‘retained within his mother’s womb for two years and emerging with teeth and hair to his shoulders’. If clearly nonsense, it could none the less recall a long and worrying pregnancy. By medieval standards his mother at thirty-seven was old for childbearing. (She had only one more baby after him, a girl three years later who does not appear to have survived infancy.) More tells us he had heard similar tales about the King’s birth, which he is inclined to attribute to popular hatred, but he adds significant details. ‘It is … reported that the Duchess his mother had so much ado in her travail that she could not be delivered of him uncut, and that he came into the world with the feet forward.’ It sounds like a breech birth – children are not infrequently born upside-down. There was no such instrument as forceps in the Middle Ages, so the baby may have been damaged by the midwife’s efforts to pull him out. The scoliosis that curved his spine and made one shoulder higher than the other, probably set in when he was about ten but never hampered his movements - we know that it did not prevent him from wearing heavy plate armour or handling weapons. On the other hand, it was very severe and, as he grew older, he may well have been in constant pain since he was always noticeably pale. In a superstitious age deformity of this sort was seen as a mark of the Devil and no doubt he did his best to conceal it with padding.

  His father Richard, Duke of York, was a small, hard-featured man. It was later said that King Richard bore a remarkable facial likeness to him. Very haughty and arrogant in manner, the Duke was always conscious that since 1447 he had been the only living Prince of the Blood Royal, apart from his own sons, and was therefore heir presumptive to the throne. In the male line he was the grandson of Edmund of Langley, first Duke of York and Edward III’s youngest son, while in the female line, through his mother, Anne Mortimer, he was also great-great-grandson and ultimate heir of Lionel, Duke of Clarence who had been Edward III’s third son. The reigning sovereign Henry VI was only the great-grandson of Edward’s fifth son. As befitted such a descent, he was the richest man in England. Although his father, the Earl of Cambridge, had been beheaded for treason in 1415 (the year he was born), Richard inherited not only the patrimony of the Dukes of York – after his uncle was killed at Agincourt – but that of his mother’s family, the Earls of March. He possessed estates and palaces throughout England and Wales, and also Ireland where he had wide lands in the Pale. The headquarters of his vast territories in Wales and on the Welsh Borders was in Shropshire at his great castle of Ludlow, on the River Teme, where his elder sons Edward and Edmund were brought up.

  York had seen some fierce campaigning in the Hundred Years War, having been Lieutenant-General (Viceroy) of ‘France’ – the English-occupied areas of the Ile-de-France and Normandy. A mixture of pugnacity and indecision, he was not a good soldier, but he had with him that legendary warrior ‘Old Talbot’, so that, despite the French revival, he was surprisingly successful. His wife accompanied him, their eldest surviving son Edward being born at Rouen. A contemporary chronicler, Thomas Basin, describes what claustrophobic and altogether terrifying lives were led by the English in France at this time – ‘shut up for years behind town walls or in castles as though condemned to life imprisonment, living in fear and danger’. Duke Richard and his Duchess must have experienced such an existence. However, at home the court party were alarmed by York’s growing popularity and replaced him by the incompetent Duke of Somerset. Since 1448 York had been Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, where, notwithstanding his haughtiness and though he spent barely a year there, he won the lasting friendship of the Anglo-Irish lords by his lavish generosity. Even the Celtic chieftains – including the greatest, O’Neill himself – paid him homage and swore to be his liegemen.

  In 1424, when he was nine, Richard of York had married Cecily Nevill, daughter of Ralph Nevill, Earl of Westmorland, in whose household he was spending his boyhood. She was the twenty-second of the Earl’s twenty-three children, the thirteenth by his second wife, Joan Beaufort. Cicely was herself descended from Edward III since her mother’s father had been John of Gaunt. Ralph was the head of the Nevills, an ambitious and already powerful northern family which, largely by carefully calculated marriages, was fast becoming one of the richest and most influential clans in England. Ralph’s second son was the Earl of Salisbury, whose own son acquired in addition the magnificent Earldom of Warwick – which made him the wealthiest man in the realm after York – while three other of Ralph’s younger sons also obtained peerages for themselves, Lords Fauconberg, Latimer and Abergavenny.2 Yet another was Prince Bishop of Durham, who ranked among the foremost prelates in England and ruled his great palatinate as though it were an independent state.

  Born in 1415, like her husband, Cecily had spent her childhood at her father’s bleak stronghold of Raby in Co. Durham where she became famed for her beauty, acquiring the name of ‘The Rose of Raby’ – later she was given another name, ‘Proud Cis’. She appears to have begun to live with York as his wife about 1438, bearing him at least ten children though several of these died in infancy. So many brothers and sisters together with such a vast kindred were to mean that few English Kings have ever been so widely and so closely related to their aristocracy as was Richard III.

  His early life is unknown, but was no doubt uneventful. Yet these years saw the outbreak of the longest period of civil war in English history. To understand Richard and why the Wars of the Roses began, one has to know something of the 1450s. England was in a thoroughly unhappy condition. The government was almost bankrupt under a weak King, Henry VI, whose personal reign has been described as the most calamitous of any of our monarchs and who went mad within a year of the birth of the cousin who would one day murder him. The Lancastrian monarchy – so called because of its descent from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster – was collapsing. Already unpopular, ostensibly because of venal and mediocre ministers, it was discredited even more by the loss of English France. Normandy went in 1450 and Guyenne, English for three centuries, in 1451 – Talbot managed to re-occupy Bordeaux the same October that Richard was born, only to perish with his entire army the following year. At home Kent had risen under Jack Cade in 1450 in an especially vicious revolt.

  Oddly enough, it was an age of prosperity for most people. Ninety per cent of a diminishing population of perhaps as low as three million earned their living on the land – even if they were always pitifully vulnerable to a bad harvest – and for the majority wages had never been higher nor food cheaper, despite the agricultural depression of 1430–60. The mortality caused by the Black Death and recurring visitations of plague had ruined the traditional manorial economy dependent on serf labour; lords of manors switched over to tenant farming, leasing out their land on competitive rents, or, where they still farmed themselves, tried to attract labourers by good wages. At the same time, however, arable land was being turned into sheep runs or going back to forest; there were vast tracts of uncultivated land and huge woods, while many hamlets simply disappeared, their inhabitants moving into the towns. All this made country folk uneasy. In addition, the roads were full of refugees from France, who had become either beggars or brigands. Life in the towns was noticeably affected by the troubles of the cloth and wool trade, which was seriously interrupted by hostilities with France and Burgundy and with the Hanseatic League. Nevertheless, though there was considerable urban unemployment, the larger English cities remained wealthy enough. Besides cloth and wool, they exported hides, tin, lead and carved alabaster; in return the French brought wine, the Genoese and the Venetians silk, velvets, spices, sugar, gems, precious metals, armour and drugs, and the Germans timber, corn, amber and furs. For all their narrow streets and w
ooden houses, English merchants were busily building glorious guildhalls and soaring churches in the new Perpendicular style. The clergy too were prospering. Abbeys were richer than ever – ‘more like baronial palaces than religious houses’ wrote a Venetian at the end of the century – even if there were fewer monks. Secular priests made an excellent living while the Bishops were mighty lords. Indeed, there was much envy of the clergy, often expressed in a sometimes ferocious anticlericalism.

  The class who suffered most was that of landowners, especially the great. Although by continental standards the English aristocracy were not really a nobility but simply rich gentlemen, they none the less constituted a warlike élite who dominated the country. The combination of declining revenues among them and of exceptionally inept central government produced anarchy. The sixty or so English peers degenerated into something halfway between war lords and gang bosses, in the phenomenon known as bastard feudalism; they built up personal armies, ‘retaining’ local gentry with annuities. Any country gentleman who wished to save his estate and his goods – occasionally his life – had to be retained and have a protector. Finding themselves increasingly short of money, most magnates saw good reason to quarrel with each other over lands and local influence, even fighting private wars – sometimes there were full-scale pitched battles. More usually, in the struggle to preserve their wealth and authority, they simply terrorized the country round about; they beat up or murdered their weaker neighbours, or else forced them to submit by law cases during which juries were bullied into finding against them. Law and order broke down and there was widespread banditry. In consequence, there was no security for property, whether houses, movables, farmland or livestock. In the Act of 1461 which deposed King Henry, Parliament stated that under his rule