‘Evil disposed persons (both in our City of London and elsewhere within this our realm) enforce themselves daily to sow seed of noise and dislander against our person … to our great heaviness and pity.’
Richard III, letter of March 1485
‘Nor willing or glad of the death of his Queen, but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be.’
Richard III, speech on 30 March 1485
The final months of Richard III’s reign were the unhappiest of all. He was very much aware of his unpopularity, of the sinister tales about him circulating among his unloving subjects. They spread across the Channel, too. Molinet often exaggerates yet his account of Richard’s unsavoury reputation in Europe sounds genuine enough. ‘He reigned with great cruelty’ says Molinet, ‘the most feared of all the Kings of the West.’1
It is hard to imagine a lonelier figure. He had lost his family, he would not be able to find a new wife and beget an heir, and he does not seem to have taken a mistress. Lord Lovell is said to have been ‘his best friend’ but this is mere surmise, while if Norfolk – thirty years his senior – was a trusted ally, he was usually far away. There were of course ‘Mr Ratcliff and Mr Catesby’ (as the Great Chronicle calls them) yet they scarcely sound people to inspire affection. In any case the King was not a man to have a male favourite. Nor, for all his vaunted piety, was a confessor or priest particularly close to him.
Moreover, ‘trusting few of such as were about him’, he would surely have sensed the uneasiness of his courtiers, the latent treachery everywhere. Sir Francis Bacon, who could conceivably have met people who had known survivors from Richard’s court, writes, ‘Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats among birds, they ever fly by twilight … They dispose Kings to tyranny.’ In addition, contemporaries tell us that Richard suffered from a terrifying sense of guilt and was a haunted man, sometimes on the edge of hysteria. Perhaps he awaited Henry Tudor’s invasion as a trial by battle before God. As Gairdner surmises, the King was leading ‘a life of great agony and doubt’. Bosworth may have come as a welcome relief.
There seems to have been something like a standard official portrait of King Richard. The best-known version is that in the Royal Collection at Windsor, of which there are several copies. Itself a mid-sixteenth-century copy, it depicts a most unusual face which has made a curious impression on many people. It put Dr Parr, the famous eighteenth-century scholar, in mind of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Josephine Tey, the novelist, sees
Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist … Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable.
G. K. Chesterton discerns ‘a remarkable intellectual beauty’. Paul Murray Kendall, who clearly idolized his subject, finds
a rather thin face of strongly marked but harmonious features; eyes direct and earnest, shadowed by care; a forthright nose; a chin remarkable for the contrast of its bold structure with its delicate moulding. The face suggests the whole man, a frail body compelled to the service of a powerful will.
The Croyland chronicler casts an interesting light on the clothes the King is wearing. He says that at Christmas 1482 Edward IV had appeared in ‘garments of a completely different fashion to those which had been seen hitherto in our land. The sleeves of the robes were very full and hanging, much resembling a monk’s cowl [over tunic] and were … lined with costly furs and rolled over the shoulders.’ This suggests that the only other contemporary portrait of Richard, in which his brocade doublet resembles those in his brother’s pictures, may date from before 1483 and would therefore have been painted when he was still Duke of Gloucester. (The inscription, Richards. Rex Tertius, could be a later addition.)
This other portrait of Richard is in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries. It is an early-sixteenth-century copy of a lost original and undoubtedly the earliest surviving likeness. He looks in the opposite direction to that of the better-known portrait, though here too he fiddles nervously with a ring – obviously a characteristic gesture. There is no sign of deformity in the shoulders, though this may be due to a good tailor. It is the hard-favoured, warlike visage of which More heard, an alarmingly forceful and indeed a merciless face. In the present writer’s view, here is the most convincing likeness of him.2
There is no question that the King had every intention of marrying his niece. Elizabeth was more than nubile – she was twenty in February 1485 – a tall, intelligent beauty with the same fair complexion and golden hair as her mother. (The Croyland writer describes all Edward IV’s daughters as ‘beauteous maidens’.) Richard’s sensuality may well have been aroused and heightened by the gloomy atmosphere of Lent; in the next century Grafton imagined him as having ‘fancied apace Lady Elizabeth’. But, above all, the Croyland chronicler stresses, such a marriage made both political and dynastic sense, even though the girl had been legally bastardized. Like his great-nephew Henry VIII, Richard III was in a dynastic impasse – the Earl of Lincoln was no substitute for a Prince of Wales. The King ‘saw no other way of confirming himself as King, nor of crushing the ambitions of his rival [Henry]’. Shakespeare is at his most intriguing, and entirely convincing, when he makes an anxious Richard say:
I must be married to my brother’s daughter
Or else my Kingdom stands on brittle glass.
Significantly Henry Tudor is known to have been very alarmed when rumours of the projected marriage reached him in France; in the vivid phrase of Vergil’s sixteenth-century translator, ‘it pinched him to the very stomach’. Furthermore, the King was also rumoured to be trying to marry off Elizabeth’s only other sister of marriageable age, Cecily, to someone of obscure rank, to end the Earl of Richmond’s last hope of a bride from the House of York. In desperation Henry considered marrying a Welsh lady, a Herbert – scarcely an adequate substitute, even if she was Northumberland’s sister-in-law.
Predictably ‘The Most Pleasant Song of the Lady Bessy’ claims that the girl was revolted by the thought of becoming Richard’s wife. No less predictably Polydore Vergil declares that she would have preferred ‘martyrdom to marrying a man who is the enemy of my family’. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that she accepted the situation. There was nothing against such a marriage in Canon Law; before and since then, the Church has given dispensations for uncle-niece marriages. A gentle soul, Elizabeth of York may very likely have been under pressure from her mother to take the King. The former Queen had lost faith in Henry Tudor and, with her combination of opportunism and political ineptitude, had decided to make the best of a bad job and compromise with Richard.
In early 1485 Elizabeth Woodville was writing to her son Dorset in Paris, telling him to come home and make his peace. After all his perils – hunted with hounds like an animal when escaping from Westminster, then having to flee again for his life after Buckingham’s débâcle – Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, must have been badly shaken. In any case he was a weak and unstable character. The third senior peer of England, he was living in penurious exile; his vast wealth had been confiscated, and he had had to leave many children behind him. He knew Henry Tudor’s plans; plainly he saw little hope for them – without Elizabeth of York, Henry’s chances were very slim indeed. It looked as though the present regime was going to last. The Marquess accepted Richard’s offer of a pardon. One night in February or March 1485, Dorset left Paris suddenly and secretly. This defection by someone so important and so well informed about them horrified the exiles. A warrant for his arrest was obtained from the French government and a hard-riding Humphrey Cheyney caught up with the Marquess at Compiègne and persuaded him to return to Paris, although perhaps unwillingly. We know that Henry would not trust Dorset for a long time. His distrust reflects deep pessimism about his prospects. Richard III was still very much King of England.
Si
r George Buck, one of Richard’s earliest would-be rehabilitators, compiled a strange book in the 1620s, made even stranger by being rewritten by an erratic and over-imaginative kinsman. However, Buck saw documents now lost. He claims to have seen a letter, long since vanished, at Arundel House, which throws an extraordinary light on Elizabeth of York’s response to her uncle’s amorous intentions. Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, the letter – according to Buck – asks him to intercede with the King about her marriage to him, swearing that Richard is ‘her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was in his heart and thought’. She adds that she fears the Queen will never die. What gives Buck’s story some conviction is that he is using the letter to try to show that the King did not want the marriage.
Undoubtedly Richard consulted theologians. (Again, there is an uncanny parallel with Henry VIII.) But, whatever they and the canon lawyers might say, there was no English precedent for such a match. The Croyland writer informs us that ‘the King’s determination to marry his niece Elizabeth reached the ears of his people, who wanted no such thing’. (If Malory is representative, fifteenth-century Englishmen were revolted by incest; when Mordred wishes to marry Queen Guinevere ‘and said plainly that he would wed her, which was his uncle’s wife and his father’s wife’, the Archbishop of Canterbury curses him with bell, book and candle for making ‘a foul work in this land’.) What finally decided Richard against the marriage was Catesby and Ratcliff telling him ‘to his face’ that if he did not abandon the idea and deny it publicly, even the Northerners would rise against him. They would accuse him of killing the Queen – daughter and heiress to the Earl of Warwick through whom he had first won their loyalty – in order to be able to indulge his incestuous lust for his brother’s daughter, something abominable before God. The Croyland chronicler goes on to explain that though Catesby and Ratcliff then produced theologians and canon lawyers of their own way of thinking, their real motive was fear that if she became Queen, she might try to avenge her Woodville kindred – after all everyone knew that Ratcliff had personally superintended the murders at Pontefract. This may well be true, though unquestionably Richard would have earned even more damaging unpopularity if he had made the girl his consort, merely because of such a marriage.
The Croyland writer says that ‘even the King himself seldom dared oppose’ the views of these two. ‘And so, a little before Easter, in the great hall of St John’s and before the Mayor and citizens of London, the King totally repudiated the whole idea, in a loud, clear voice. Though people thought it was more because of his advisers’ wishes than his own.’ On the other hand, Polydore Vergil says that the marriage was the brain-child of Catesby and Ratcliff – we will never know whether the chronicler or Vergil was better informed. What we do know however, from the records of the London Mercers’ Company (first printed and published in 1936) corroborates the chronicler as to the public denial. On 30 March 1485 the Mayor and Corporation were summoned to the Priory of the Knights of Rhodes at Clerkenwell, together with many lords and citizens, to listen to an extraordinary announcement by Richard. He told them that ‘It never came in his thought or mind to marry in such manner-wise [i.e. his niece], nor willing or glad of the death of his Queen, but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be.’ He complained furiously of rumours – presumably about his poisoning Anne. It says volumes for the King’s sinister reputation among his subjects that he had to descend to such a humiliation.3
During the Clerkenwell address Richard also threatened anyone caught repeating such calumnies with imprisonment until they told the authorities where they had heard them. The Mercers’ records are confirmed in their turn by a letter which the King wrote to the citizens of York very shortly afterwards. He informs them that he is aware that
divers seditious and evil disposed persons (both in our City of London and elsewhere within this our realm) enforce themselves daily to sow seed of noise and dislander against our person, and against many of the lords and estates of this our land, to abuse the multitude of our subjects and avert their minds from us.
He grumbled that the slanders were being spread by means of posting bills or by ‘bold and presumptuous open speech’, ordering the arrest of those who were spreading the rumours.
Elizabeth was packed off to Sheriff Hutton, which Richard clearly regarded as the safest place for her. He kept little Warwick there, as he had Lord Rivers during the usurpation. He was not going to risk any attempts at abduction by the Tudor’s supporters. The future mother of Henry VIII stayed in Yorkshire all spring and summer, until after the King had fought and lost Bosworth. However, at Sheriff Hutton, even if probably under surveillance, Elizabeth of York would have found herself among reassuringly distinguished company. Besides Warwick and his eleven-year-old sister Margaret (who, as the very last Plantagenet, would be executed in 1541), there were John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln – heir presumptive and President of the Council of the North – and his brother-in-law, Lord Morley. Some of Elizabeth’s sisters may have been staying there as well. A special scale of allowances of food and drink was laid down for this resident house-party, the largest measures of ale and wine being reserved ‘to My Lord [of Lincoln] and the children’. Sir Clements Markham argues speciously that these ‘children’ of high rank were in fact the former Edward V and his brother, a claim which does not merit serious consideration.
16. Sheriff Hutton Castle in the North Riding of Yorkshire, one of Richard’s favourite residences. His niece Elizabeth of York was confined here in 1484–5. From S. and N. Buck, A Collection of Engravings of Castles, Abbeys, etc.
Dynastically Richard was in a complete impasse. He had not dared marry Elizabeth Plantagenet himself; nor did he dare to marry her or her sisters to anyone else, for fear their sons might eventually claim the throne. It had quickly become clear that Lincoln was unacceptable as heir presumptive. Little Warwick, the only other surviving male of the House of York, was the King’s obvious successor, but the Attainder of 1478 would have to be reversed; if that were done, in theory at least, he would then possess a better title to the throne than his uncle. And without an assured succession Richard’s regime could not appear secure, as he must have known all too well. Everything and everyone was conspiring against the King.
At the same time there were other, more material, and new reasons for Richard’s unpopularity. Although when he had usurped the throne he found ‘ample resources’, he was soon overspent, despite the bonus of so many forfeited estates after Buckingham’s rebellion. It has long been a cliché that the Yorkist monarch evolved many of the financial methods employed by the Tudors, though at the same time it is recognized that Henry VII used them much more efficiently. Edward IV gave generous rewards to his followers in order to establish himself on the throne and only managed to balance his books towards the end of his reign. In his desperate need to buy friends Richard III handed out confiscated lands on a truly prodigal scale. The expenses of his ostentatious court, of the Breton and Scots wars and, above all, of costly precautions against invasion or revolt, quickly exhausted his funds. There is also some slight indication that Richard had always lacked financial expertise; in 1482 the Council of the Duchy of Lancaster had stated bluntly that his neglect and inefficiency over a period of years had seriously reduced the Duchy’s revenues – selling timber to raise ready cash and not replanting was one example.4
According to the Croyland writer, the King was now forced to go back to Edward IV’s compulsory loans ‘which he had openly condemned in Parliament, though he was very careful to avoid using the word “benevolence”. He sent out officials to scrape up huge sums out of all records relating to almost any sort of property holding in the realm.’ In reality Richard was probably only trying to raise a comparatively small sum, perhaps as low as £10,000; it has been calculated that in the event he obtained less than half that sum. Moreover, while Edward IV’s benevolences were extorted with no guarantee of repayment, Richard gave ‘good and sufficient pledges’ the money would be reimbur
sed. Between February and April 1485 a number of men of substance – prelates, landowners, merchants – seem to have been approached because of ‘such great and excessive costs and charges as we hastily must bear and sustain, as well for the keeping of the sea as otherwise for the defence of this our realm’. It is reasonable to suspect that all too many of those approached were sceptical about his ability to repay. Politically it would surely have been much wiser for the King to borrow from other sources rather than lose face in this way – as Gairdner emphasizes, ‘Commercial credit is a thing without which even tyrants cannot succeed.’
He was growing unpopular in York, of all places. It is true that when the news of Bosworth came, the Mayor and Corporation would record how ‘King Richard late mercifully reigning over us … was piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.’ Yet even before his reign some citizens of York were sceptical about the value of his friendship – one asked publicly in 1482, ‘What may My Lord of Gloucester do for us of the city? Nothing but grin of us!’ The Great Chronicle of London speaks of otherwise unrecorded troubles in the North during the summer of 1483 which the King had to repress in the course of his progress. In autumn 1484 there was a nasty riot at York when Richard consented to the enclosure of certain common lands; despite a stern warning from the King, who sent no less a personage than the Comptroller of his Household (Sir Robert Percy) to deliver it, armed rioting broke out again in January 1485 and there were several casualties. Nor, whatever a Mayor might say, did the city remember him with universal affection. During a drunken brawl at Christmas 1490 a local schoolmaster accused Richard of having been ‘an hypocrite, a crouchback and buried in a dike like a dog’. The Croyland writer tells us that there were many Northerners among the deserters at Bosworth.
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