Richard III

by Seward, Desmond

  Nevertheless, the Duke of Somerset – Edward Beaufort, whose father and brother had already perished in the merciless conflict – was a brave and experienced commander. His troops were loyal and soon refreshed by a proper night’s rest. He knew how to make the most of the ground, taking up a strong entrenched position with his 3,000 men on a long, low ridge south of the town of Tewkesbury – it could only be attacked through ‘foul lanes and deep dykes, and many hedges, hills and valleys, a right evil place to approach’. He also used his scouts to familiarize himself with this difficult terrain.6

  Somerset himself commanded the Lancastrian right, the Earl of Devon the left. The centre was nominally under the seventeen-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, but in reality commanded by the octogenarian yet still extremely formidable Lord Wenlock, a veteran of Henry V’s campaigns. They might well have won, if only they had been content to stay on the defensive and rely on their archers as in the old wars in France.

  The Yorkists numbered about the same, 3,000 combatant troops. King Edward took the centre, Richard the right and Hastings the rearguard.7 The right was also the advance guard and, early on the morning of Saturday 4 May, was the first to engage the enemy with arrow and artillery fire. Knowing the tangled terrain below him, Somerset was confident that if he left the high ground and took his men down he could surprise Gloucester’s attack from the flank and break it up before it had properly begun. His intelligence failed to inform him that the King had positioned 200 lances in the trees of Tewkesbury Park. Somerset engaged Richard’s troops at closer quarters and found a hotter reception than he had expected, being pushed back; as he was about to retreat uphill, the squadron concealed in Tewkesbury Park hurtled into his men who ‘were greatly dismayed and abashed, and so took them to flight into the park and into the meadow that was near, and into lanes and dykes, where they best hoped to escape the danger’ – as the Historie of the Arrivall recalls. Edward was now able to overwhelm the Lancastrian divisions one by one, he and Hastings charging up the hill at them. They were already shaken by Somerset’s rout and by Gloucester attacking their centre from the flank. Somerset, who had got back safely, went berserk – he rushed up to Wenlock, shouting that he was a traitor for not having supported him properly, and then struck the old man down with his axe. The Lancastrian army disintegrated. But there was no escape, since behind lay the River Avon. About a thousand died in the field which sloped down to it – and was renamed ‘Bloody Meadow’. Those who were not hacked to death drowned in the river.

  Chapter Five

  THE END OF THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER

  ‘Where his advantage grew, he spared no man’s death whose life withstood his purpose.’

  Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third

  ‘Where’s that devil’s butcher,

  Hard-favour’d Richard?’

  Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III

  The years 1470 and 1471 were when Richard saw most of Edward IV, fighting at his side, learning how to make and keep allies, how to outwit enemies. His brother taught him a lot. In war, to move fast – the value of engaging one’s opponent as soon as possible. In government, how to treat local or personal loyalties with the most delicate consideration, to reward magnates with new titles and confiscated estates, to woo burgesses with municipal privileges and take good care of mercantile interests. In government too, to manipulate Parliament and the law of the land in the service of one’s interests.

  Edward also showed his young brother the value of murder as a political instrument. Gloucester was an enthusiastic pupil, who speedily made himself useful. If 1471 was the year in which he first saw death in battle, killing and seeing his followers killed at his side, it was also a year when he first sent men to execution without mercy and in which he first committed murder.

  Although Edward had granted them a free pardon on the Saturday that Tewkesbury was fought, the Duke of Somerset and his party were dragged out of the Abbey on the following Monday. The doomed men, who had no doubt kept their weapons, resisted desperately and there was so much bloodshed that the church was afterwards reconsecrated. They were brought before Richard, in his capacity as Constable of England.1 Brusquely he condemned them to death. Immediately after he had pronounced sentence they were taken to a block set up in Tewkesbury market-place and beheaded without further ceremony.

  Edward’s and Richard’s admirers argue that Tewkesbury Abbey was not technically a true sanctuary, that they had every right to court-martial ‘traitors’ taken in battle. Nevertheless, among those beheaded was Henry VI’s Lord Treasurer, Fra’ John Langstrother, the Prior of Clerkenwell. As a professed Knight of Rhodes, he was a religious under full vows and therefore canonically immune from the death penalty – he was the only member of his Order to be executed in England until the religious persecution of Henry VIII.2

  Gloucester has other claims to being his brother’s hatchetman. He has been accused of being personally responsible for the deaths of three kinsmen in 1471 – the Prince of Wales, Henry VI and the Bastard of Fauconberg.

  On the whole, modern opinion is inclined to acquit the young Duke of the murder of Edward of Lancaster after Tewkesbury. At a first glance the contemporary English sources – of which there are very few – seem to provide good grounds for acquittal, agreeing with Commynes that ‘the Prince of Wales was killed on the battlefield’. Dr Warkworth (Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, who wrote about a dozen years later) reports how the boy was overtaken as he fled and slain as ‘he cried for succour to his brother-in-law, the Duke of Clarence’. The latter himself, writing only two days afterwards, claims that ‘Edward, late called Prince’ had been ‘slain in plain battle’. The Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England, written at the King’s command by a Yorkist official within three weeks of the battle, also says that ‘Edward, called Prince, was taken, fleeing to the townwards [of Tewkesbury] and slain in the field.’ So too does the Tewkesbury Chronicle. His name heads a list, ‘Ded in the Feld’, compiled probably just after the battle – ‘Edward that was called Prynce’. However, the Croyland chronicler is ambiguous, stating that Henry VI’s son had been slain ‘either on the field or after the battle, by the avenging hands of certain persons’.

  Save for Warkworth, while they say where Edward of Lancaster died, none of these sources describes how. Obviously Clarence and the Yorkist author of the Arrivall of Edward IV would omit anything embarrassing about his death. There is an alternative and horrific account of what really happened, admittedly by chroniclers who wrote a little later. The gap in time is only a matter of thirty years at most, and James Gairdner points out that if the true facts were ‘preserved only by tradition till the days of Polydore Vergil and of Hall … they are not on that account unworthy of credit’.3 Dr Hanham (in the course of trying to demolish Gairdner), makes the extremely relevant point that many modern historians who use tape recorders place considerable value on ‘tradition’, which they have renamed ‘oral history’; she also concedes that she has ‘probably laid less stress than is just on the importance of the living informants … It cannot be denied that sometimes evidence may be handed down in a verbal form over a surprisingly long period and with astonishing fidelity.’4

  Although Horace Walpole cites the Croyland writer’s statement in defence of Richard, it could bear precisely the opposite interpretation in the light of oral history. Vergil, whose researches into Richard’s career began about 1502, and who almost certainly spoke with men who had actually fought at Tewkesbury, is the first to accuse him of Edward of Lancaster’s murder, together with Clarence and Hastings.5 Though More does not say that Gloucester did the deed, he implies that with Hastings, Richard ‘was one of the smiters of Prince Edward’. Certainly all early-sixteenth-century chroniclers believe that he was implicated.

  The most detailed version of the alternative account of how young Edward died ‘in the field by Tewkesbury’ is given by Hall. The Prince, ‘a goodly feminine and well featured young gentleman’, was take
n prisoner by Richard Croft (the King’s former tutor) and brought to his master, who had offered a hundred pounds for the boy dead or alive, though promising that if not yet dead, his life would be spared. After a long, cold look at his rival, Edward IV asked why he had dared to bring an army against him. The reply was ‘to recover my father’s Kingdom and inheritance’. The King then either pushed him away or struck him with his steel gauntlet, whereupon ‘they that stood about – which were George, Duke of Clarence; Richard, Duke of Gloucester; Thomas, Marquess Dorset; and William, Lord Hastings – suddenly murdered’ the young Prince.

  Most modern historians question the alternative account, though in different ways. Kendall considers that Warkworth was telling most if not all of the truth and that Clarence was probably responsible for killing the boy, if he did not do it himself. Yet Gairdner, however unfashionable, surely carries conviction in arguing that the oral tradition noted down by Vergil and Hall could well have been correct and that it is reasonable to suspect Richard’s complicity. Only the historians’ attitude of mind has changed since Gairdner wrote – there is no new evidence, and it would be unwise to dismiss the great Victorian’s intuition too easily.

  There is no doubt at all that Gloucester was implicated in Henry VI’s death. Dr Warkworth, of whose testimony as to Prince Edward’s end so much is made by Kendall, gives a moving report.

  And the same night that King Edward came to London, King Harry, being in ward in prison in the Tower of London was put to death the 21st day of May on a Tuesday night between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the Duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward, and many other; and on the morrow he was chested and brought to Paul’s and his face was open that every man might see him. And in his lying he bled on the pavement there; and afterwards at the Black Friars was brought, and there he bled new and fresh; and from thence he was carried to Chertsey Abbey in a boat and buried there in Our Lady’s Chapel.

  As will be seen, the fact that Warkworth says that Henry is still buried at Chertsey indicates that he is writing before the reign of Richard III.

  It is important that the corpse was supposed to have bled – popular superstition thought it a sure sign of sanctity. Contemporary Englishmen undoubtedly regarded King Henry as very holy indeed. The Great Chronicle of London preserves a Londoner’s impression: ‘After my mind he might say as Christ said to Pilate, “Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo”, for God had endowed him with such grace that he chose with Mary Magdalene the life contemplative and refused of Martha the active.’ To judge from his behaviour when he ascended the throne, no one was more impressed than Richard Gloucester, who himself plainly came to believe that the last Lancastrian King was a saint. None the less, the Great Chronicle adds grimly, ‘of whose [Henry’s] death the common fame then went that the Duke of Gloucester was not all guiltless’. A later tradition reports that he entered St Paul’s while the King was lying there, whereupon the corpse bled in witness that the young Duke was its murderer.

  Understandably the Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV – so often quoted to absolve Richard of guilt at Tewkesbury – states blandly and most unconvincingly that Henry VI ‘died of pure displeasure and melancholy’.6 The Croyland chronicler, also cited to exculpate Richard at Tewkesbury, hints that he had a shrewd idea of what actually happened.

  I will say nothing about how at this time the body of King Henry was found lifeless in the Tower of London. May God have shown mercy to the man who thus dared to lay his sacrilegious hands on the Lord’s anointed and have granted him time for repentance. He it was who did the deed deserves the name of tyrant, just as the victim deserves that of glorious martyr.

  Writing a short while after Richard III’s own death, the admittedly partisan John Rous says of him, ‘He caused others to kill the holy man King Henry VI, or as many think, did so by his own hand.’ Commynes reports that immediately after Tewkesbury, ‘the Duke of Gloucester, Edward’s brother, who later became King Richard, killed this good man [Henry] with his own hands or at least had him killed in his presence in some hidden place’.7

  There was good reason to think that the much decried Tudor historians were in this instance very near the truth. More is unequivocal. Richard

  slew with his own hands – as men constantly say – King Henry the Sixth, being prisoner in the Tower, and that without commandment or knowledge of the King [Edward], who would undoubtedly, if he had intended that thing, have appointed that butcherly office to some other than his own born brother.

  He adds that, when Richard had killed his cousin, he cried, ‘Now there is no heir male of King Edward the Third but we of the House of York!’ Vergil, Fabyan and Hall echo the Great Chronicle of London in alleging that ‘the most common fame’ was that Henry was ‘stuck with a dagger by the hands of the Duke of Gloucester’.8 The dagger, or one like it, was still being venerated as a holy relic at Reading Abbey when it was dissolved in 1534.

  No one will ever know exactly how Henry VI met his death, but it is certain he died violently. An examination of his skeleton in 1910 found that his skull had been ‘much broken’. Tradition has it that the murder was committed in the octagon chamber on the first floor of the Wakefield Tower in the Tower of London. If Edward IV was ultimately responsible, no contemporary or Tudor source says that he was at the Tower on the fatal night. Even Kendall admits Richard’s involvement, that Edward sent him ‘with a delegation of noblemen to bear an order to Lord Dudley, Constable of the Tower: that feeble candle, the life of Henry the Sixth, was to be snuffed out’. He does not dispute the likelihood of Gloucester having done the deed himself. However, he makes no mention of the opprobrium incurred by the Duke as the murderer of an anointed King – something regarded as worse than sacrilege in that extraordinarily superstitious age.

  The Bastard of Fauconberg, Thomas Nevill, was Warwick’s illegitimate nephew and yet another of Richard’s close kindred, being the son of a first cousin. ‘Captain’ of the King-maker’s navy, his job had been to prevent reinforcements reaching Edward from Burgundy. The Great Chronicle of London tells us that ‘having a multitude of rovers’ with him, he landed in Kent ‘and there a-raised much idle people’ and then advanced on London. His ships sailed up the Thames, their cannon firing into the City and burning Aldgate and London Bridge. The Bastard went by land. His original intention had been to rescue Henry VI from the Tower, but he decided to deal with King Edward first. He had brought troops from Calais and was joined by so many recruits that he was rumoured to have more ‘than twenty thousand good men well harnessed [armoured]’. Warkworth comments that he posed a greater threat to Edward than anything the King had faced at Barnet or Tewkesbury.

  What followed smacks of classical Italian Renaissance statecraft, an episode straight from the pages of Guicciardini. Edward, badly outnumbered, sent agents to enlist the help of one of Fauconberg’s allies – Nicholas Faunt, Mayor of Canterbury – in persuading him to withdraw to Blackheath. In Warkworth’s words, ‘And for as much as fair words and promises make fools fain, the Bastard commanded all his host to turn to Blackheath again.’ The King seems to have made a secret bargain with him, since Fauconberg then ‘stole away from the host’ with only 600 horses, and returned to his ships at Sandwich. Here he surrendered to Richard Gloucester, who arrived on 27 May – six days after dispatching Henry VI. As an experienced soldier, the Bastard probably expected that he had something to offer Edward, who granted him a free pardon on 10 June. Fauconberg then accompanied Richard to the North on a campaign to pacify the Border, which was still swarming with small bands of Lancastrians, besides being plagued by Scots raiders. Meanwhile, Nicholas Faunt was hanged, drawn and quartered at Canterbury.

  No one has left an account of just what happened between the Duke and the Bastard. All that we know is that Richard had Fauconberg beheaded at Middleham ‘notwithstanding he had a charter of pardon’ and sent his head south to be displayed on London Bridge ‘looking into Kentward’. It is possible that he was caught try
ing to escape to the Continent, but, if so, it is curious that he did not do so when he still had the opportunity. One cannot avoid the suspicion that he was led into a trap. As More explains, Gloucester was always ‘close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not hesitating to kiss whom he thought to kill, pitiless and cruel, not for evil will always but oftener for ambition and either for the surety or increase of his position’. The Bastard of Fauconberg never stood a chance with this boy of eighteen. Cesare Borgia could not have done better.9

  It is true that the young Duke acted as his brother’s tool in these killings, and Edward IV must bear much of the responsibility for them. Nevertheless, Richard was an alarmingly efficient instrument. He had learnt the political advantages of murder, how to eliminate discreetly anyone who stood in his way. So far there was no reason for him to appreciate its disadvantages.

  Chapter Six

  THE RIVALRY WITH CLARENCE

  ‘Some wise men also think that his drift, covertly conveyed, lacked not in helping forth his brother of Clarence to his death … But of all this point is there no certainty.’

  Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third