Richard III

by Seward, Desmond

  One man definitely not delighted by all the junketings at York – celebrations unparalleled in the city’s recent history – was Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. From his later behaviour one can see that secretly the Earl was angered by Richard’s return to the North. He must have resented his presence there during Edward IV’s reign and it is very likely that he had helped with the usurpation in the hope of being rewarded by the restoration of Percy dominance. But if the King was to keep visiting the North regularly and continue to use it as a power base, then Northumberland would still be overshadowed – the monarch himself on one’s doorstep was even worse than a Royal Duke. The enthusiasm for Richard shown by York – over which the Earl wished to regain the control exercised by his forefathers – must have irritated him intensely. He would have been further incensed on learning that the King was establishing a permanent Royal Household in the North at Sheriff Hutton. Northumberland may gloomily have suspected, and with justice, that this was going to develop into something more.

  Leaving his Queen and his son behind him at Middleham, Richard resumed what appeared to be a triumphant progress. He spent several nights at Pontefract, a favourite residence, and then travelled by way of Gainsborough to Lincoln. Here astounding news reached him on 11 October. A widespread and well-planned rebellion had broken out against him – it was led by his dear friend and mightiest subject, the Duke of Buckingham.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘HIM THAT HAD BEST CAUSE TO BE TRUE’

  ‘From hostile nobles he has not only to fear desertion, but that they will rise against him; since they are far seeing and astute in matters of state, they always move in time to save themselves and to extract favours from the man they think is going to win.’

  Machiavelli, Il Principe

  ‘The malice of him that had best cause to be true, the Duke of Buckingham, the most untrue creature living.’

  Richard III, letter of 12 October 1483

  Paradoxically the Duke of Buckingham’s revolt inaugurated the seven prosperous months of Richard III’s reign – October 1483 to April 1484. He put down with ease what at first sight looked like a very formidable rebellion indeed, and then ruled with a splendour which staggered even Commynes. Parliament met, and proved gratifyingly tractable. Even Elizabeth Woodville would eventually agree to leave sanctuary with her daughters. Yet although the Duke was to be crushed, his revolt spelt Richard’s eventual doom. It united all the many strands of opposition.

  No one knows what made Buckingham turn against the King. One might have thought he would have been satisfied by such enormous rewards. More says, ‘A man would marvel why the Duke plotted against the King; and surely the occasion of their variance is by divers men diversely reported.’ Sir Thomas may well be right in identifying jealousy as Buckingham’s motivation. Some observers detect a long-term plan to bring down the House of York and replace it with himself. This seems to have been the opinion of many contemporaries; Polydore Vergil tells us, even if he reflects their opinion, that

  the multitude said that the Duke did the less dissuade King Richard from usurping the Kingdom, by means of so many mischievous deeds, upon that intent that he afterward, being hated both of God and man, might be expelled from the same, and so himself [Buckingham] called by the commons to that dignity, whereunto he aspired by all means possible …

  Certainly the Duke was very much aware of his own descent from Edward III.

  However, there is another simpler, more convincing possibility – that Buckingham had very quickly reached the conclusion that a regime so unpopular as that of the new King could not endure. One of Edward IV’s greatest strengths had been an ability to win genuinely popular support – it was one of the principal props of his monarchy. It was precisely this quality which Richard III lacked. And without it he could not hope to overcome the widespread indignation at his usurpation. Indignation was turning into hatred as rumours circulated that the boys had been liquidated. An unknown, but undoubtedly contemporary, chronicler writes simply that he had ‘put to death the children of King Edward, for which cause he lost the hearts of the people. And thereupon many gentlemen intended his destruction.’ The Duke was probably the first man to identify a political loser, and certainly the last to back one. He must have been badly shaken by the rising fury against the new regime. He knew that a serious rebellion was being planned; its leaders must have approached him very early on and, as will be seen, they were men of substance and position, not just adventurers. More tells us that what finally decided Buckingham on his course of action was the long discussions which he held with Dr John Morton, Bishop of Ely, whom the King had most unwisely placed in his custody – ‘whose wisdom deceived the Duke’s pride, to his own deliverance and the Duke’s destruction’.1

  According to Sir Thomas, Buckingham may have been considering putting forward his own claim to the throne. He shows Morton flattering the Duke about his ability, and how he possessed ‘excellent virtues meet for the rule of a realm’. Unfortunately More’s History ends at this precise point, and we know that, even if it had continued, the author would have been unable to explain the real reasons for Buckingham’s astonishing volte-face in the autumn of 1483. But, had the Duke really intended to aim at the crown, it is more than likely that it was the Bishop who – after first convincing him that Richard could not survive – persuaded Buckingham to step down in favour of the senior Beaufort-Lancastrian candidate, an obscure exile called Henry Tudor. His basic motive was self-preservation – he knew now that the King was doomed and he was determined not to go down with him.

  Like the Duke of Buckingham, Dr Morton had a Lancastrian background. Indeed, he was now in his sixties, having been born in 1420, when the Lancastrian dynasty was at its zenith under Henry V. A typical prelate politician of the age, he had served Henry VI well and faithfully – in More’s words, ‘He had been steadfast upon the party of King Henry while that party was in prosperity, and nevertheless left it not nor forsook it in woe.’ Taken prisoner at Towton in 1461, instead of changing sides like most of his fellow Bishops, who recognized the new Yorkish monarch, he had escaped from the Tower of London and gone to France to Margaret of Anjou and her son. This was at a point when their cause seemed quite hopeless and he knew that he would have to live as a penniless exile. He accompanied Queen Margaret on the disastrous road to Tewkesbury in 1471. Only when her son was dead and her cause finally lost, and only then, did he transfer his allegiance to Edward IV, whom he served with equal steadfastness. Sir Thomas makes him tell Buckingham,

  If the world would have gone as I would have wished, King Henry’s son had had the crown and not King Edward. But after God had ordered him to lose it and King Edward to reign, I was never so mad that I would with a dead man strive against the quick. So was I to King Edward faithful chaplain and glad would have been that his child had succeeded him.

  Thomas More, whose good opinion is not to be dismissed lightly, had a ‘pleasant remembrance’ of Morton and quite clearly admired and respected him. As a youth he was attached to his household, by which time the former Bishop of Ely – now in his eighties, but still sharp and vigorous – was Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England. In Utopia More puts a fascinating and attractive portrait of the old man into Ralph Hythloday’s mouth: ‘He was not more honourable for his authority than for his prudence. He was of a mean stature, and though stricken in age, yet bare he his body upright. In his face did shine such an amiable reverence as was pleasant to behold, gentle in communication, yet earnest and sage.’ In his youth, Utopia continues, John Morton was ‘taken from school into the court, and there passed his time in much trouble and business, being continually tumbled and tossed in the waves of diverse misfortunes and adversities. And so by any and great dangers he learned the experience of the world.’ This estimate of his qualities is confirmed by Mancini, writing over thirty years before – ‘of great resource and daring,’ he says of the Bishop of Ely, ‘trained in politics since King Henry [VI]’
s time’. The Italian also stresses his unshakeable loyalty. There is no need to emphasize that Henry VII, who was nobody’s fool, quickly arrived at a very similar estimate.2

  However, Morton has had a bad press in popular history, most unfairly. This is largely because of the merciless taxation he is supposed to have levied when Henry VII’s Lord Chancellor. In fact, ‘Morton’s Fork’ – a device for crushing any unwilling tax-payers into the ground – should really be called ‘Fox’s Fork’ since, according to More, it was Bishop Richard Fox who invented it. Furthermore, in spite of worldliness and a reputation for pluralism, Morton was a devout and responsible churchman, even according to Sir Thomas’s demanding standards. Far from being the time-serving politician of tradition, he was something of a hero – which is plainly how More saw him. He has also been accused of being the real author of Sir Thomas’s History (a theory long since disproved) and of telling a pack of lies about Richard – regardless of More’s opportunities of checking his facts. Certainly he does not appear to have given More the impression that he was a liar.

  The King may well have entrusted him to Buckingham because of his reputation as a brilliant administrator, with instructions to win him over. If an experienced politician, Morton was obviously by no means a compulsive intriguer, as he had firmly demonstrated by his steady loyalty to both the Houses of Lancaster and York. Despite his fidelity – and perhaps even readiness to fight for – Edward V during the usurpation, he was being treated with what looks like calculated leniency on Richard’s part. Had he shown willingness to co-operate with the new regime, like Rotherham, he could no doubt have expected speedy forgiveness and preferment. Either, as with so many contemporary Englishmen, he simply could not stomach the dispossession and murder of the Princes – he may have learnt of the latter from Buckingham – or else his unusually acute political instinct told him that the country would never be at peace under its new King. Some distinguished modern historians have argued that, given time, Richard III’s undoubted abilities and the excellent government he would have provided might have made his subjects accept him. Probably most of them were not prepared to give him the time. It was surely the Bishop of Ely’s fertile brain which found a solution to unite the entire opposition to the usurper, whether it was Lancastrian, dissident Yorkist or even Woodville. Dr John Morton was going to be the architect of Richard’s ruin.

  For all the Petition and the Coronation, in strict law the rightful Yorkist claimant – now that Edward V and his brother were dead – was Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. But she was still in sanctuary at Westminster and in any case at that date a woman, let alone an eighteen-year-old girl, was not acceptable as a candidate for the throne of England. A grown man was needed, who, besides possessing a claim to the throne, could lead a political party and – in name at least – command armies in battle. There was such a man.

  Despite Richard’s alleged boast when he murdered Henry VI, there were still heirs of Edward III through the female line, and not primarily Buckingham. The children of John of Gaunt (Edward’s fifth son) by Catherine Swynford – the Beauforts, so called from the French castle in which they had been born – had entered the world as bastards, but Richard II had legitimated them with a Patent, which was confirmed by Act of Parliament. Their half-brother Henry IV, himself born in legitimate wedlock, had formally acknowledged this Patent though adding the words excepta dignitate regali (save for the throne), which debarred them from succeeding to the throne; he omitted to make the disqualification law by a further Act of Parliament. Much later, lawyers were to argue with justice that a royal Patent could not alter one confirmed by Parliament, and that in consequence the Beauforts were in no way debarred from the succession. Beyond question, during Henry VI’s reign they had acted as full Princes of the Blood and had been tacitly accepted as such. The last legitimate Beaufort males had perished at Tewkesbury, but the family survived in the female line. Buckingham’s mother had of course been a Beaufort. However, her first cousin, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond (now wife to Lord Stanley), was the senior representative. By the first of her marriages – to Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, Henry VI’s half-brother who had died in 1456 – Margaret had given birth to a single child, Henry.

  By origin the Tudors were mere North Welsh hedge squires from Anglesey.3 They claimed the legendary King Cadwallader as their ancestor, but in real life had been the smallest sort of Cymric gentry until the scandalous marriage of Henry’s grandfather to the widow of Henry V, when he was still her Clerk of the Wardrobe; his father, Maredudd ap Tudur, had been a bastard and butler to the Bishop of Bangor. Yet for all the obscurity of his male forebears, Henry Tudor was a Beaufort and therefore the Lancastrian claimant to the throne of England. Edward IV had been very well aware of the existence of ‘the only imp now left of Henry VI’s brood’ and had once or twice tried to get possession of him, presumably with a view to liquidation. ‘He [Henry] told me on one occasion,’ Commynes remembers, ‘that since the age of five he had been guarded like a fugitive or kept in prison.’ Henry had seen almost nothing of his mother – only fourteen when she bore him – and spent his early childhood in the household of the Yorkist Lord Herbert, who intended to make him his son-in-law. He was not rescued by his own family until the Readeption of Henry VI when his uncle, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, found him and then after Tewkesbury fled with him to the semi-independent Duchy of Brittany. Here, Commynes informs us, from the age of fifteen ‘he had lived the life of a prisoner’, although Duke Francis II treated him ‘reasonably well’. Probably about 1475 to 1476 King Edward very nearly laid hands on Henry by pretending that he wanted to marry him to one of his daughters; the youth only escaped by falling ill and delaying his departure for England. During his illness a friendly Breton explained the true situation – that he was being sent to his death – to Francis II, who relented and kept him in Brittany.

  Yet Henry Tudor had been considered for the hand of Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, before her brothers’ disappearance. We know from the Calendar of Papal Registers that Margaret Beaufort discussed with King Edward the possibility of such a marriage, while a draft pardon for Henry survives. This explains why Dr Morton, the Queen Dowager and Buckingham recognized him as the obvious bridegroom for Elizabeth, acknowledging his claim to the throne.4

  Contemplating the horrific visage of the miserly old Welshman painted by Michael Sittow in 1505, with which we are so familiar, one may wonder how such a creature could attract any adherents at all. But in 1483 he was only twenty-seven and an early sketch (admittedly known only from a sixteenth-century copy) shows a surprisingly amiable, even debonair young man. Polydore Vergil, who often met him in later life and who wrote after he was safely dead, tells us that ‘His appearance was remarkably attractive and his face was cheerful, particularly when speaking.’ Professor Chrimes, the author of his definitive biography, says,

  We have to think of a man impressive and outstanding – tall, rather slender, dignified, of sallow complexion, and rather aquiline features, whose most striking characteristic was the vivacity of his expression and the brilliance of his small blue eyes, especially animated in conversation.

  His ruthlessness only showed itself after he had won the throne, his excessive avarice and the mad Valois streak only towards the end of his life. Unquestionably he was almost as unscrupulous as Richard, but he was far more intelligent, much subtler. However, in the mid-1480s optimists no doubt discerned a romantic young royal fugitive who was the last representative of a tragically lost cause. Exiles and opponents of the King must have been delighted to find a leader who was more Beaufort and Valois prince than Welsh adventurer. Thanks to Buckingham and Dr Morton – and, above all, to his mother – he was soon to become an infinitely preferred alternative to Richard III.

  As soon as the Duke had been won over by the Bishop, the latter sent a message to Margaret Beaufort’s chief steward, Reginald Bray, asking him to visit Brecon discreetly in order to discuss a matter o
f some delicacy. Clearly Bray was impressed by Morton’s plan and the Duke’s support, returning to his mistress with a glowing report. But Margaret Beaufort had already concocted her own scheme, which was very similar to the plot being hatched at Brecon.

  Although the real Lancastrian and Beaufort claimant to the throne, like Elizabeth of York Margaret was ruled out as a pretender simply because she was a woman. Still only forty, she had had three husbands: Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond; Lord Humphrey Stafford, Buckingham’s uncle; and, since 1473, Lord Stanley. A remarkable survivor, she had seen the court of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou and would live to be aware of that of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Too little is known about her, yet though convention forced her to keep the most discreet of profiles, she was the first great Tudor and the first successful female politician in English history. The bronze tomb effigy by Pietro Torrigiano in Westminster Abbey – that greatest of monuments to Richard’s overthrow – shows a strikingly handsome face of austere refinement with strong, if superbly delicate, features; when young she must have been a considerable beauty. Devout, perhaps saintly, she heard six Masses every day and was an ascetic with a taste for mysticism; she personally translated The Mirror of the Souls from the French, besides initiating the translation and printing of many other devotional works, including the Imitation of Christ. Her future confessor was Bishop John Fisher, a canonized Catholic saint. Nevertheless, Margaret was masterful and plainly attracted by power – during her son’s reign she would be described by an informed observer as one of the half dozen most influential people in England, and was allowed to sign herself ‘Margaret R.’ King Richard had no more dangerous opponent than this quiet, pious lady.

  To judge from her behaviour in 1483, and from what we may guess about it in 1485, Margaret was an unregenerate Lancastrian and a natural politician, as shrewd as she was courageous and determined. (Sir George Buck describes her, quaintly but accurately, as ‘a lady of a politic and contriving bosom’.) Her ambition, both for herself and her son, was surely fuelled by a sense of moral outrage. No doubt she venerated the memory of poor Henry VI and abhorred Richard for having butchered him, let alone for being a usurper. It is clear that by early September at latest, probably very much sooner, she was aware that the Princes in the Tower had been murdered. Someone with no less keen a political instinct than the Bishop of Ely, she must have realized at once how powerful a candidate for the throne her only child – whom she had not seen for a quarter of a century, when he was still a baby – would become if he married Edward IV’s eldest daughter.