Richard III

by Chris Skidmore

  Even Mancini could detect a sense that the entire spectacle was ‘contrived’. Instead it seemed that these ‘many performances of actors amidst royal splendour’ had been simply put on ‘so as to mitigate or disguise’ the king’s own ‘sorrow’, that in spite of his best efforts, nevertheless, ‘he was never able altogether to hide it.’

  As the king continued in his lavish lifestyle, so he repeated the mistakes that had cost him the crown in 1470, in his blatant favouritism towards Queen Elizabeth’s Woodville kin. The monarch was expected to be the arbiter and protector of justice, yet Edward was clearly subverting the laws of inheritance for the personal gain of his wife’s family. He could do so without challenge, for there was no longer any significant opposition to his reign; without Warwick or his brother Clarence opposing him, Edward knew that he could get away with anything that he wished. Only his brother Richard could have stood in his way, yet Richard himself had at the time been more than prepared to acquiesce in the bending of the law, and the use of parliamentary statute as a means to fix his own inheritance.

  While Edward’s own personal monarchy remained strong, the king’s actions would not be a problem; yet they were undeniably storing up problems for the future. The disinherited, men such as William Berkeley, Ralph Neville or John, Lord Howard, would not forget the treatment that they had received at the hands of the king and the Woodvilles. The unpopularity of the queen’s wider kin had only been entrenched by Edward, who sanctioned their actions and had placed his heir, Edward, and younger son, Richard, in their exclusive charge. If Edward was prepared to bend the laws of inheritance for the personal gain of the Woodvilles, what hope was there for the future, when one day Edward V would inherit his father’s throne, ensuring that the Woodvilles retained their ascendancy?

  For his brother Richard, Edward had been the most important figure in his young career so far. It had been Edward who had shaped Richard’s own destiny; Richard had followed his brother into exile, and been handsomely rewarded for his service. Edward had allowed his younger brother to establish himself as an effective overlord of the north, replacing the vacuum of power left by the death of the earl of Warwick. No matter how great Richard’s own ambition, it could only be fulfilled with the consent of the king. If Richard had cleverly and skilfully built up his power base, developing and shaping his estates and recruiting a retinue that presented his public face as a northern super magnate, Edward had permitted him to do so. Edward had permitted him, too, the luxury of running an expensive campaign in Scotland, appointing him commander-in-chief of an army 20,000 strong. It was here that Richard saw his future, an opportunity to carve out a destiny for his heirs. His plans for a palatinate demonstrate the scale of Richard’s ambition; there were only three palatinates in existence, the last granted to John of Gaunt, and none were currently in noble hands. Yet once again Edward agreed to Richard’s demands, placing him in the remarkably elevated position of being head and shoulders above the rest of the nobility. Richard had been loyal to his brother, though at times his independence of mind had tested the relationship between them; yet loyalty was not a virtue, it was a duty. Richard had sworn allegiance not only to his brother, but also to his heir, Prince Edward, in 1471. He had taken a different course to his brother Clarence, yet Edward must have known that, as a royal brother, Richard was powerful enough if he wished to cause equal difficulty. The rewards Richard received, whether in grants of land or in the support for his partition of the Warwick inheritance, only made Richard more powerful, stronger in terms of both wealth and military support. Yet Edward trusted his brother and his loyalty to the Yorkist dynasty; the consequences of that trust breaking down, the king must have considered, were too great, too awful, to contemplate.

  PART TWO

  PROTECTOR

  5

  ‘THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING’

  In contrast to the warrior-like figure that had conquered on the fields of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in middle age Edward IV had succumbed to the temptations of the court. ‘In food and drink he was most immoderate’, Dominic Mancini observed; ‘it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more. For this reason and for the ease, which was especially dear to him after his recovery of the crown, he had grown fat in the loins, whereas previously he had been not only tall but rather lean and active.’1

  The Crowland chronicler, who seems to have had a window seat looking into the dynamics of power at the Yorkist court, was harsher still in his description of the king as a ‘gross man so addicted to conviviality, vanity, drunkenness, extravagance, and passion’ that ‘in his own day he was thought to have indulged too intemperately his own passions and desire for luxury’.2 Thomas More, writing years later, confirmed how Edward, who had once been ‘of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong, and clean made’, had in ‘his later days’ through an ‘over-liberal diet’ grown ‘somewhat corpulent and burly’, though ‘nevertheless not uncomely’.3 Edward’s health seems to have declined in his final years: one later chronicler, Edward Hall, believed that Edward had contracted a malignant ‘quartan’ fever during his 1475 French expedition, a form of malaria from which he never recovered and which was aggravated by an excess of food. Yet it was a surprise to many when, around the time of the Easter feast, ‘the king, neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady, the cure of which would not have appeared easy in the case of a person of more humble rank, took to his bed’.4 Mancini wrote that the king had been taken ill while out on a fishing trip on the Thames. Edward, ‘being a tall man and very fat though not to the point of deformity’, the Italian wrote, had ‘allowed the damp cold to strike his vitals, when one day he was taken in a small boat, with those whom he had bidden go fishing, and watched their sport too eagerly. He there contracted the illness.’5

  News leaked out from the court that the king was seriously ill, and unlikely to recover. On 7 April, at York, it was shown by the mayor how the previous day news had arrived ‘that our sovereign lord the king is deceased and passed to God of whose soul shall God have mercy; where for my lord the dean desired my lord the mayor and all my masters his brethren to be this day afternoon at the Minster at the dirge of our said sovereign lord and to mourn at his mass’.6 The news was premature. In spite of his worsening condition, Edward managed to turn his attention to the prospect of his young son’s inheritance, seeking to heal old wounds at court.

  William, Lord Hastings, now in his fifties, had been one of the king’s most loyal companions at court. Having placed the teenage king on the throne in 1461, Hastings was to be a constant cornerstone of the Yorkist regime. Throughout Edward’s reign, he occupied the office of chamberlain, a position that controlled access to the king. Hastings had also been granted the captaincy of Calais in 1471, just a year after the same office had been granted to Anthony, Earl Rivers. Both offices afforded Hastings the ability not only to control royal patronage, but also to command a large body of men, the largest standing garrison controlled by the crown. Hastings’s relationship with Rivers was perhaps naturally strained, given their rivalry over Calais, but Hastings had also fallen out with the queen, who had grown jealous not only of ‘the great favour the king bare him’ but also for the fact ‘that she thought him secretly familiar with the king in wanton company’.7 Their mother’s disapproval does not seem to have prevented her own sons, Thomas and Richard Grey, together with one of her brothers, Sir Edward Woodville, from becoming some of the principal ‘promoters and companions of his vices’, for it seems that Hastings had also begun a separate feud with Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, having quarrelled with him ‘over the mistresses whom they had abducted, or attempted to entice from each other’.8 Mancini described how the feud between Hastings and Thomas Grey had led ‘the suborned informers of each’ to threaten ‘a capital charge against the other’, while the Crowland chronicler noted that ‘much ill will indeed had long existed’ between Hastings and the Woodvilles.9 Matters seem
ed to have got out of hand in August 1482, when one of Hastings’s own men, John Edwards, confessed before the king and council that he had made false allegations against Dorset and Rivers while at Calais, but only because he had been ‘in fear of his life’ and of being placed in the ‘breke’ by his master.10 The fact that copies of Edwards’s confession were prepared, undoubtedly for circulation, suggests that the Woodvilles considered the matter serious enough to make capital out of it.11

  Two days before his death, Mancini claimed, Edward had summoned and cajoled Hastings and Dorset to become ‘reconciled’ to one another; ‘yet, as the event showed, there still survived a latent jealousy’.12 The king also sought to revise his final will and testament, altering his previous testament that had been drawn up on the eve of his journey to France in 1475. Then Edward had appointed the queen to act as regent in the event of his death and the accession of his infant son. The Crowland chronicler wrote how ‘on his death-bed’, Edward had ‘added some codicils thereto’.13 Any revisions to his original will do not survive; however, it seems that the king did at some stage after 1475 make changes to his will, for the list of executors drawn up eight years previously does not match the list of executors who took charge of the king’s goods after his death. Evidence that Edward did indeed add ‘several codicils’ to his will comes from a petition of the dean and canons of Windsor, who later recalled how the king, in the ‘time of his sickness before his death’ and ‘having great remorse of conscience’, ‘right straightly charged by coporall oaths on a book’ that Queen Elizabeth, together with the archbishops of York and Ely, ‘and others to endeavour themselves to relief the said knights … surely to be helped and relieved in discharging of his conscience’.14

  If the Windsor petition is correct, then it seems that the queen, Thomas Rotherham, archbishop of York, and John Morton, the bishop of Ely, had been witnesses to these final changes to the king’s will. The Crowland chronicler, himself an insider at the king’s court, wrote how Edward drew up the alterations with his own salvation in mind: ‘Those who were present at the time of his death bear witness to this; to them, especially to those whom he left as executors of his last will, he declared, in distinct and Catholic form, that it was his intention that satisfaction, in whole or by voluntary composition without extortion, should be given to all men to whom he was a debtor through some form of contract, fraud, extortion or for any other reason whatsoever … in consequence all his faithful men were given hope that he would not be cheated of his eternal reward’, adding that ‘long before his illness he made a full testament, as one who had adequate wealth to discharge it, with many executors selected upon mature consideration to do his will’.15 The will Edward drew up in 1475, before journeying to France, survives, indicating the extensive measures the king had made for the payments of his debts, to provide for his younger son, Richard, and dowries for his daughters Elizabeth and Mary of 10,000 marks each. His heir was to continue any grants he had made to ‘divers of our Lords as well of our blood as other and also Knights, Squires and divers other our true and loving subjects and servants’ who had ‘faithfully and lovingly assisted us and put them in the extreme jeopardy of their lives, losses of their lands and goods in assisting us as well about the recovery of our Crown and Realm of England as other divers seasons and times of jeopardy’.16

  Even if Edward did add several codicils to his will, the surviving framework of the 1475 document would have remained the same, along with the expectation that all existing royal grants should be not only continued, but that these rights of inheritance should not be tampered with as the king’s expressed final wish. Most of the will, however, was devoted to Edward’s own elaborate designs for his new chantry at Windsor, with his tomb as its centrepiece. He was to be buried ‘low in the ground, and upon the same a stone to be laid and wrought with the figure of Death with a scutcheon of our Armour and writings convenient about the borders of the same remembering the day and year of our decease’; over this a vault was to be constructed, upon which would be built an altar and tomb effigy ‘of silver and gilt or at the least copper and gilt’. Already, perhaps anticipating his demise, Edward had ordered thirty-three casks of touchstone, black marble from the Low Countries, for the construction of the monument.17

  The king’s decline was clearly both sudden and unexpected, taking everyone by surprise. As the king’s health worsened, key political figures remained absent from court. His brother Richard was stationed in the north, while his heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, remained at Ludlow, under the supervision of his maternal uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers.

  Edward IV died in the early hours of Wednesday, 9 April, at the Palace of Westminster, ten days after his illness had begun. Within hours of the king’s death, early in the morning, Lord Audley and Lord Berkeley journeyed to the mayor of London upon the orders of the royal council, ‘to show and give knowledge how that the King is past out of this present life this last night’.18 They brought with them orders that ‘for the safeguard of the city and in keeping of the peace’ all officers of the city were to be summoned. Constables within the city were to be given ‘commandment and charge to see the peace be kept every to their power, and not to provoke, do or cause any debate or strife with any stranger’ while ‘every person’ was to ‘be ready in harness if need should so require’.19 The apprehension and uncertainty caused by the king’s premature death is reflected in a letter by John Gigur, the warden of Tattershall College in Lincolnshire, to his patron William Waynflete, the bishop of Winchester, written on 19 April. ‘I beseech you to remember’, Gigur wrote, ‘in what jeopardy your College of Tattershall standeth in at this day; for now our Sovereign Lord the king is dead we wete [know] not who shall be our lord nor who shall have the rule about us.’20

  A meeting of the royal council was immediately called. Letters would need to be sent to Prince Edward, now Edward V, at Ludlow informing him of his father’s death and at the same time ordering his household to make the journey to the capital, in order to be crowned. Regardless of the king’s intentions, it was clear that no one was prepared for minority rule. Few had expected Edward to die at the young age of forty-one, leaving a twelve-year-old heir. While Edward V was four years short of his own majority and therefore too young to take the reins of government, he was old enough to possess a growing strength of feeling and opinion.

  The new council seems to have been nearly an all-Woodville affair; the Crowland chronicler described how the councillors met ‘attending the queen at Westminster’. The king’s treasurer, the elderly earl of Essex, had predeceased Edward IV by a matter of days, while the new king’s uncle, Richard, remained at his estates in the north. William, Lord Hastings, remained a lone voice on the council in the capital, suspicious of the potential for the Woodvilles to seize power completely.

  In spite of Edward IV’s attempt to reconcile Hastings and the Woodvilles on his deathbed, it seems that Hastings’s suspicions of the queen’s kin lingered on. Hastings was hardly prepared for Rivers to arrive in the capital and dominate the king and country. As the king’s chamberlain, Hastings feared for his own position. If the queen’s family intended to control possession of the king, then they would need to appoint a more sympathetic chamberlain. Hastings’s role as captain of Calais might also be under threat, especially since the position had been previously coveted by Rivers. ‘He was afraid’, the Crowland chronicler wrote, ‘that if supreme power fell into the hands of the queen’s relatives they would then sharply avenge the alleged injuries done to them by that lord. Much ill-will, indeed, had long existed between the Lord Hastings and them.’21

  Hastings’s first concern involved the number of men that Rivers was intending to bring with him, accompanying the king from Ludlow to the capital. Hastings feared the prospect of the Woodvilles seizing power simply through the number of armed men who might flood through the city gates upon the king’s arrival. At a council meeting called shortly after Edward IV’s death, the Crowland chronicler noted how ‘
various arguments were put forward by some people as to the number of men which might be considered adequate for a young prince on a journey of this kind. Some suggested more, some less, with other people indeed leaving to the judgement of him who is bound by no law the number of men which his faithful followers might bring.’22 There were, however, ‘more foresighted members of the council’ present, who believed that ‘the uncles and brothers on the mother’s side should be absolutely forbidden to have control of the person of the young man until he came of age’. If the queen’s relatives ‘who were most influential with the prince’ were allowed to bring with them ‘an immoderate number of horse’, then it would be impossible to bridle the Woodvilles’ power. Hastings dug in and, continuing his argument, threatened that if the new king ‘did not come with a modest force’ he would ‘rather flee’ to Calais.23 The reasoning was enough to persuade Queen Elizabeth, who, ‘desirous of extinguishing every spark of murmuring and unrest’, wrote to the king at Ludlow to arrive in London with no more than 2,000 men. Hastings had won the argument; ‘the number was also pleasing to the aforesaid lord’, the chronicler observed.24

  If Hastings had been able to win over the council to take his initial concerns seriously, still the council was determined to have Edward V crowned as early as possible. A coronation date was set for the first Sunday of the coming month, 4 May. While the Crowland chronicler noted that the entire council was united on ‘one consideration’, that ‘all who were present keenly desired that this prince should succeed his father in all his glory’, still Edward was a child, who would need to rely on those close to him to rule and govern effectively. To crown the young king aged just twelve would be to declare him of age to rule. Edward was two years short of the expiry of his governorship as prince, and four years younger than the age of majority his royal uncles had attained. It was obvious that Edward was too young to rule alone, but, constitutionally, the very act of coronation would mean that there would be no need for a formal minority council or protectorate to rule on behalf of the king.