Since their arrest on 30 April, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, and Richard Grey, together with Edward V’s chamberlain, Richard Vaughan, had been placed in separate prisons at Sheriff Hutton and Middleham. On 23 June, while still imprisoned at Sheriff Hutton, Anthony, Earl Rivers, drew up his ‘last will’, in no doubt that he was to ‘bequeath my soul unto the great mercy of Jesus Christ, and to his dear mother our Lady Saint Mary, and to the glorious company of heaven’. He remained uncertain as to where the exact location of his death might be, requesting that ‘if I die beyond the Trent’ then he was to be buried beside St Stephen’s College in Westminster; if not, then only his heart was to be interred there. Among the executors Rivers named were the Chancellor, John Russell, and William Catesby, while Rivers added, either with a hint of irony or perhaps with genuine forgiveness, that ‘I beseech humbly my Lord of Gloucester, in the worship of Christ’s passion and for the merit and weal of his soul, to comfort help and assist, as supervisor (for very trust) of this testament, that mine executors may with his pleasure fulfill this my last will.’6
It was not until the following day, on 24 June, that Rivers learnt that he was to be moved to Pontefract for his execution; while he had envisaged in the main text of his will that Richard Grey would still survive, now the extent of the Protector’s revenge had revealed itself. If Rivers did not know of his and Richard Grey’s fate until 24 June, this suggests that Richard had only issued orders for their execution after he had postponed the coronation. Written at the end of the document, almost as a coda, is a chilling clue to the sudden change of plan. Rivers added: ‘My will is now to be buried before an Image of our blessed Lady Mary, with my Lord Richard [Grey], in Pontefract; and Ih’u have mercy of my soul.’ John Rous later recalled a ballad that he had been told, which Rivers had supposedly written while facing his death at Pontefract Castle, in which the earl mourned the ‘unsteadfastness’ of the world, ‘being of such wheeling’. ‘Remediless’, Rivers had come to terms with his ‘woeful chance’, and ‘willing to die’ could only add sardonically, ‘welcome Fortune’.7
On 25 June, Rivers was executed at Pontefract, along with Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan. Their ‘chief judge’ was the earl of Northumberland, while the Crowland chronicler believed that it had been Sir Richard Ratcliffe, the ‘chief leader and organiser’ of the northern army, who had given the orders for their execution ‘without any form of trial and in the sight of these same people’. Rous described how they were ‘cruelly killed at Pontefract, lamented by almost all and innocent of the deed charged against them … the said lords were condemned to death as though they had in fact plotted the death of Richard Duke of Gloucester … for a thing they had never contemplated, the innocent humbly and peaceably submitted to a cruel fate from their enemies’ butchers’. Rous later wrote that when Rivers’ body was stripped, the earl ‘was found to be wearing, at the time of his death, the hair shirt which he had long been in the habit of wearing against his bare flesh’ and which was later hung in front of the image of the Blessed Virgin at the Carmelite Friars in Doncaster.8
Northumberland and Ratcliffe had presided over the execution of Rivers, Grey and Vaughan without any judicial process or trial. To do so, they must have been confident that they would escape any future recrimination if Edward V came to the throne; equally, they must have been confident that the man whose orders they were obeying would seek to protect their own interests, suggesting that once they had received the death warrants from the capital, perhaps sent as late as 18 June, they were also aware that now Richard intended to seize the throne for himself. Richard would remain resolute that Rivers deserved to die for his perceived treasons. Later, when granting Rivers’ land to his supporter Roger Wake, Richard would describe the earl as ‘our rebel Anthony Woodville’.9 Whether Rivers himself had actively sought to undermine Richard seems highly unlikely; he had even agreed to march with the young king from Ludlow in April with a much reduced household of 2,000 men to dispel any rumours that he intended to unduly use force to establish a Woodville takeover. Rivers himself had been a popular man at court; even Dominic Mancini had heard reported that Rivers ‘was always considered a kind, serious, and just man, and one tested by every vicissitude of life. Whatever his prosperity he had injured nobody, though benefiting many.’10 Yet it was his influence over the young king, as Edward V’s governor, that Richard most feared. For this reason alone, he would have to die.
Once the orders for Rivers’ execution had been sent to Ratcliffe and Northumberland in the north, probably around 17 or 18 June, Richard must have understood that once the executions had been performed, there could be no turning back. If he was to secure his own preservation, he would need to seize the throne for himself. Having spent much of his protectorate working to continue the household of Edward IV, presenting himself as a beacon of stability, this sudden decision was the inevitable conclusion that Richard must have drawn if he was to escape the civil war and the kind of blood feud that he had witnessed during his younger years.
Richard’s decision could not have been a carefully crafted plan. Instead it smacks of a rushed improvisation that had not been thought through. Justification for his intention to seize the throne would need to be found fast; in his haste, Richard clutched at any straw available. Ralph Shaa’s sermon on 22 June attempting to set out the moral argument behind why Richard had a stronger claim to the throne than his nephew is a case in point. Not only had the same argument surrounding Edward IV’s own illegitimacy been hinted at by the earl of Warwick in 1469, when it was scarcely believed, but the accusation itself created huge constitutional problems for the Yorkist monarchy. The house of York had always based its claims to the crown on its own assertions of legitimate inheritance in the person of Edward IV: through Parliament, it had legislated to ensure that its Lancastrian predecessors were no more than ‘kings in deed not of right’. Suddenly, Shaa’s assertions that Edward IV was in fact illegitimate would have thrown this entirely into doubt, potentially undermining the foundations of the entire dynasty. The fact that Richard had not even consulted his own mother, Cecily, in whose London residence at Baynard’s Castle he had been staying, suggests that few could have known of Richard’s intentions.
There was one man who seems to have been guiding Richard towards the throne: the duke of Buckingham. One contemporary chronicle noted how Richard, ‘with the instigation, advice, and aid of Henry duke of Buckingham’, had ‘himself crowned on fraudulent grounds’, while, for John Rous, Richard had been ‘strongly encouraged in these things by Henry Duke of Buckingham’.11
If Shaa’s sermon had miscalculated, Buckingham was determined to resolve the situation. Two days later, on Midsummer’s Day, Tuesday, 24 June, the duke came to the Guildhall, where in front of the mayor and ‘a great multitude of citizens’ he showed ‘the title of the Duke of Gloucester, that he had unto the crown, exciting the people to take him for their king’.12 According to the Great Chronicle, Buckingham made his oration, ‘rehearsing the great excellency of the lord protector and the manifold virtues which God had endowed him with, and of the rightful title which he had unto the crown’. Buckingham’s speech, the chronicler observed, lasted a ‘good half hour’ and had been ‘so well and eloquently uttered and with so angelic a countenance, and every pause and time so well ordered’, that men who heard the speech ‘marvelled’, claiming they had never heard a better speech. When the duke had finished, exhorting the crowd to ‘admit the said lord protector for their liege lord and king’, it was, however, only ‘more for fear than love’ that a ‘small number’ cried: ‘Yea! Yea!’13
Mancini described a meeting of Buckingham and the lords, which may be the same meeting at the Guildhall. The duke’s speech marked a departure in the argument used by Shaa that Edward IV, and by default his sons, had been illegitimate. Instead, a new line of attack against the legitimacy of Edward V had been found. Buckingham argued that ‘it would be unjust to crown this lad, who was illegitimate, because his father King Edward
on marrying Elizabeth was legally contracted to another wife whom the earl of Warwick had joined him’. Mancini had heard that Warwick had ‘espoused the other lady by proxy … on the continent’ on Edward’s authority, most probably Bona of Savoy, the sister-in-law of the French king, Louis XI, who had been in contact with the earl during 1463–4 regarding a foreign marriage for the king.14 Besides this, the duke argued, ‘Elizabeth herself had been married to another, and had been ravished rather than espoused by Edward, with the result that their entire offspring was unworthy of the kingship.’ As for the son of the duke of Clarence, Richard, earl of Warwick, he had been barred from the right of succession ‘by the felony of his father’. Only Richard, Buckingham argued, with his ‘previous career and blameless morals’ a sure ‘guarantee of his good government’, remained as the inheritor to the crown, someone who ‘could bear its responsibilities thanks to his proficiency’.
In questioning the legitimacy of Edward IV’s marriage, rather than the dead king’s own title, Buckingham attempted to construct a new argument for Edward V’s deposition. That this should take place had already been decided. Richard and Buckingham just needed the best possible grounds for achieving their desired outcome. Yet Richard still remained hesitant. Vergil believed that Richard intended to delay further his proclamation as king, ‘by reason of the fear of perils hanging over him from all sides’; however, he was persuaded by ‘impatient friends’ who ‘urged him to take the realm openly and cried out either he moved quickly or he withdrew’. Still Richard wished for his title to be referred to the magistrates and judges, arguing that rather than seizing the throne ‘by force of assumed domination’, instead he might justify ‘by considered opinion it could be said to be done’.15
Buckingham’s arguments may not have convinced those listening, but for many they felt that they had little choice. After listening to the duke’s speech, ‘the lords consulted their own safety’; it was fear rather than through any sincere belief in any pretexts of legitimacy that made their own minds up. ‘Warned by the example of Hastings, and perceiving the alliance of the two dukes, whose power, supported by a multitude of troops, would be difficult and hazardous to resist’, Mancini observed, ‘they saw themselves surrounded and in the hands of the dukes, and therefore they determined to declare Richard their king and ask him to undertake the burden of office.’ Mancini described how the day after Buckingham’s address, though more likely on 26 June, the lords ‘foregathered at the house of Richard’s mother, whither he had purposely betaken himself, that these events might not take place in the Tower where the young king was confined’.16 A delegation of lords, both spiritual and temporal, and commoners then presented Richard with a bill of petition, urging him to take the throne.
The Crowland chronicler corroborates the fact that a bill, justifying Richard’s claim to the throne, had been ‘put forward, by means of a supplication contained in a certain parchment roll’, explaining how ‘King Edward’s sons were bastards, by submitting that he had been precontracted to a certain Lady Boteler before he married Queen Elizabeth and, further, that the blood of his other brother, George, duke of Clarence, had been attainted so that, at the time, no certain and uncorrupt blood of the lineage of Richard, duke of York, was to be found except in the person of the said Richard, duke of Gloucester.’ The chronicler described how at the end of the roll, ‘on behalf of the lords and commonalty of the kingdom’, Richard was urged ‘to assume his lawful rights’. ‘It was put about then’, the chronicler added, ‘that this roll originated in the North whence so many people came to London although there was no one who did not know the identity of the author (who was in London all the time) of such sedition and infamy.’ The chronicler’s doubts were shared by John Rous, who wrote how Richard had ‘found a title to the crown to disinherit his lord the king … that is, not found but feigned it for his own advancement.’17
A copy of the petition survives in a bill that was presented to Parliament the following year, later formally named the Titulus Regius. It is not certain whether this version was in fact the same as the text presented in June 1483; nevertheless, it resembles the final, refined arguments justifying Richard’s accession to the throne.
The preamble of the petition consisted of a general condemnation of the last years of Edward IV’s reign, contrasting how in times past the kingdom had ‘stood in great prosperity, honour, and tranquillity’ when the king had taken counsel from ‘persons of approved sadness, prudence, policy, and experience, dreading God, and having tender zeal and affection to indifferent ministration of justice, and to the common and politique weal of the land’. The immediate logic of the petition, no doubt written by men close to Richard, was to make a moral case for Richard’s accession as a break with the misdeeds of his brother’s reign, during which the laws of inheritance had been so perverted, and ‘all manner of equity and laws laid apart and despised’ that murder, extortion and oppression had been allowed to run rife, ‘so that no man was sure of his life, land, ne livelihood, ne of his wife, daughter, no servant, every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’.18
Among the hyperbole, one constant theme peppered the petition: Edward IV’s ‘ungracious pretensed marriage’ to Elizabeth, ‘sometime wife to Sir John Grey’. This had been conducted ‘of great presumption, without the knowing or assent of the lords of this land, and also by sorcery and witchcraft, committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, duchess of Bedford, as the common opinion of the people and the public voice, and fame is through all this land; and hereafter, if and as the case shall require, shall be proved sufficiently in time and place convenient’. It was on the legal basis of Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville that the petition focused much of its attention. It condemned that marriage as being made ‘privately and secretly, with edition of banns, in a private chamber, a profane place, and not openly in the face of the church’. And, further, it considered:
how also, that at the time of the contract of the same pretensed marriage, and before and long time after, the said King Edward was and stood married and troth plight to one Dame Eleanor Butteler, daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury, with whom the said King Edward had made a pre-contract of matrimony, long time before he made the said pretensed marriage with the said Elizabeth Grey in manner and form aforesaid.19
As a result of the pre-contract, Edward and Elizabeth had ‘lived together sinfully and damnably in adultery, against the law of God and his church’; the petition stated it now automatically followed ‘that all the issue and children of the said king been bastards, and unable to inherit or to claim anything by inheritance, by the law and custom of England’. It repeated Buckingham’s assertion that since George, duke of Clarence, had also been attainted of high treason, he had been barred from any claim to the throne. As a result, only Richard could claim to be the ‘undoubted son and heir’ of Richard, duke of York, and therefore the true heir to the English throne.
Echoing the initial accusations of bastardy placed upon Edward IV at Ralph Shaa’s sermon at St Paul’s on 22 June, the petition noted how Richard alone among his brothers had been ‘born within this land, by reason whereof, as we deme in our minds, ye be more naturally inclined to the prosperity and common weal of the same’, adding somewhat cryptically that, if necessary, ‘all the three estates of the land have, and may have more certain knowledge of your birth and filiation’. The petition went on to praise Richard for his ‘great wit, prudence, justice, princely courage, and the memorable and laudable acts in diverse battles which we by experience know ye heretofore have done for the salvation and defence of this same realm, and also the great noblesse and excellence of your birth and blood’.
Considering all these arguments, the petition concluded, ‘we desiring affectuously the peace, tranquillity and weal public of this land’ and its return to prosperity, as well as having ‘singular confidence’ in Richard’s ‘great prudence, justice, princely courage and excellent virtue’, the petit
ioners requested that they had ‘chosen in all that is in us and by this our writing choose you, high and mighty Prince into our King and sovereign lord, to whom we know for certain it appertaneth of inheritance so to be chosen’.
Once again, the official explanation for Edward V’s illegitimacy had changed. Now an entirely new basis for disinheriting Edward IV’s children had been found, this time centring not on a pre-contract with a foreign bride, but with Lady Eleanor Butler. Born Eleanor Talbot, she was the daughter of John, Lord Talbot, later 1st earl of Shrewsbury, who died on campaign in France in 1453. Her mother was Lady Margaret Beauchamp, the eldest daughter of Richard Beauchamp, 1st earl of Warwick; her mother’s half-sister, Anne, was the wife of Richard Neville, 2nd earl of Warwick, making Eleanor cousins with Isabel and Anne Neville. Eleanor, one of the couple’s five children, was probably born around March 1436. Aged fourteen, she was married to Sir Thomas Butler, the heir of Lord Sudeley: Butler died in 1461, leaving Eleanor a childless widow. It is possible that Butler was killed fighting on the Lancastrian side that spring; after Edward had become king, he confiscated Butler’s lands on the grounds that they had been granted by Lord Sudeley, still a committed Lancastrian, without royal licence. Eleanor appeared before the king to appeal the decision: Edward was nineteen and Eleanor was six years older when their meeting soon led to something altogether different. The Burgundian chronicler Commynes later claimed that Edward promised to marry Eleanor, ‘provided that he could sleep with her first’.20 Eleanor agreed, though not before Edward ‘had made this promise’ in the presence of the cleric Robert Stillington, ‘and having done so, he slept with her’. In effect, Edward had entered into a pre-contract of marriage with Eleanor: a promise of marriage, followed by sexual intercourse, was all that was needed to create a binding contract recognised by the decretals of Pope Alexander III as having entered into a union that was valid. The only means by which Edward could have broken out of this pre-contract was if he had married any subsequent bride in a church and in public: something which he had conspicuously failed to do with his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville.21
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