Richard III

by Chris Skidmore

  If Eleanor hoped that the king might honour his promise, she was quickly disappointed. She may have gone to live with her sister Elizabeth, residing at Framlingham Castle in Norfolk, and became involved with the Carmelite Friary in Norwich, as well as giving bequests to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She died in 1468, aged only thirty-two; her death was certainly unexpected, for her sister and executrix was out of the country at the time.22

  Years later Philippe de Commynes would write how the bishop of Bath and Wells, Robert Stillington, had ‘revealed to the duke of Gloucester that King Edward, being very enamoured of a certain English lady, promised to marry her, provided that he could sleep with her first, and she consented. The bishop said that he had married them when only he and they were present. He was a courtier so he did not disclose this fact but helped to keep the lady quiet.’ Stillington, having revealed to Richard the details of the pre-contract, then ‘helped him a great deal in the execution of his evil plan’.23 Much has been made of Stillington’s role in revealing the so-called ‘pre-contract’, providing the final justification needed for Richard to seize the throne, yet what matters is not so much whether the pre-contract story were true or false, but whether people believed it to be true or not. Under canon law, the existence of a pre-contract would have presented a strong case for declaring the sons of Edward IV illegitimate. Edward had been in effect practising bigamy, and would have been seen as an adulterer. This rendered him incapable of marrying at any time in the future, since under canon law marriage was forbidden to a person who had been ‘polluted’ by adultery, when that adultery had involved a marriage contact. This had important implications for Edward’s own marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. Having entered into a marriage pre-contract with Eleanor Butler, Edward was in effect committing adultery with Elizabeth, which then prevented him from legally marrying her.24 Questions remain over whether Richard should have technically presented his case to a church court for judgement, but if he was acting on Stillington’s advice, he possibly believed that the church’s judgement would be behind him.

  If Stillington had provided the material for the final version of the petition presented to Richard, justifying his claim to the throne, then it was also clear he was only furnishing Richard with additional, more detailed evidence for a claim he was already convinced he had. From the sermon preached by Dr Ralph Shaa at St Paul’s Cross on 22 June, setting out Edward IV’s own illegitimacy, to the final establishment of the claim that in fact it was Edward IV’s children who were illegitimate due to the fact that Edward had been betrothed to another woman before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, it seems that there was no one clear version of why Edward V was to be pronounced ‘Edward the bastard’. Edward IV’s playboy reputation left enough latitude for other candidates to be found, but eventually the pre-contract argument would settle upon Eleanor Butler. The accusation was mere justification of a decision that had already been taken, and would have been taken anyhow: Richard had already resolved to secure the throne and depose his nephew.

  What it is important to reflect upon is not necessarily the exact details of the pre-contract accusations and their validity in canon law, but the fact that contemporaries do not seem to have discussed in any great detail why the deposition should be taking place. As Mancini wrote, ‘acts in the name of Edward V since the death of his father were repealed or suspended, seals and titles changed, and everything confirmed and carried on in the name of Richard III’.25 It was this passive acceptance of Richard’s accession that is most striking about his seizure of the throne, and the lack of resistance to what was considered a done deal.

  Of course, both the Crowland chronicler and the text of the parliamentary petition could be later inventions: at the precise time of Richard’s accession, the exact mechanism of Edward V’s deposition might not yet have been finalised. Certainly the official records of the Exchequer remained vague about the legitimacy of Richard’s title. When a writ dated 14 June in Edward V’s reign was not able to be issued until after Richard had ascended the throne, the text of the grant explained that Richard ‘as true and undoubted king of this realm of England by divine and human right’ had taken ‘the royal dignity and power and the rule and governance of the same realm for himself’ from ‘Edward the Bastard, formerly called Edward the fifth, king of England without just title exorcising and in possession of the government of the same realm, the royal dignity of the same and of the power, in the realm of England, from the same Edward legitimately having been removed by usurpation’.26 In a separate document, a response to a letter from Lord Dynham, the governor of Calais, who wrote requesting what to tell his men who had sworn oaths of fealty to Edward V, Richard sent instructions on 28 June explaining that although ‘such oath of allegiance’ to Edward V ‘was made soon upon the death of the said king Edward the iiiith to his son, not only at Calais but also in diverse places in England by many great estates and personages’, they had been ‘ignorant of the very sure and true title which our sovereign lord that now is, king Richard the iiird, hath and had the same time to the crown of England’. In spite of the previous oath that they had sworn, ‘now every good true Englishman is bound upon knowledge had of the said very true title, to depart from the first oath so ignorantly given to him to whom it appertained not’. Richard’s ‘sure and true title’, the letter explained, ‘is evidently showed and declared in a bill of petition which the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons of this land solemnly porrected [reached out] unto the king’s highness at London the xxvith day of June …’27

  Once Richard had formally accepted the petition declaring Edward V and his brother Richard illegitimate, the assembled group conducted him to the Palace of Westminster, walking on foot and followed by a ‘great train’ that included ‘a great company of lords and gentlemen, with also the Mayor and the crafts’.

  Richard himself rode on a specially provided saddle of rich crimson cloth of gold, ‘wrought with nets and roses’, together with a saddle for his swordbearer, indicating that the entire spectacle had been prearranged, and that the presentation of the petition was a mere formality, part of the display intended to demonstrate Richard’s accession.28 Two days later, Richard was able to boast to Lord Dynham at Calais how, ‘notably assisted by well near all the lords spiritual and temporal of this realm’, he ‘went the same day unto his Palace of Westminster, and there in such royal honourable apparel within the great hall there, took possession and declared his mind that the same day he would begin to reign upon his people; and from thence rode solemnly to the cathedral church of London, and was received there with procession with great congratulation and acclamation of all the people in every place and by the way that the king was in that day’.29

  Arriving at Westminster Hall, Richard put on his royal robes and, with a sceptre in his hand, formally took possession of the throne by sitting in the marble chair of the Court of King’s Bench. Richard then informed the assembled judges that he intended to ‘take upon him the crown’ and would ‘ministreth the law, because he considered that it was the chiefest duty of a king to minister the laws’. He ordered that the judges appear before him, while he spoke, ‘commanding them in right straight manner that they justly and duly should minister his law without delay or favour’, as one chronicler reported, ‘justly and indifferently to every person as well to poor as rich’.30 According to a later chronicler, with this ‘pleasant oration as he could’, Richard intended to ‘win the hearts of the nobles, the merchants and artificers, and in conclusion all kind of men, but special the lawyers of this realm’. Determined that ‘no man should hate him for fear’, Richard ‘declared the discommodity of discord, and the commodity of concord and unity’; at the same time he made a proclamation of pardon to ‘all offences committed against him’.31

  As proof of his new-found clemency, Richard ordered that Sir John Fogge should be brought before him. Fogge was a Woodville associate, and former household official of Queen Elizabeth, who had fled into sanctuary ea
rlier in the year. In front of the gathered audience, Richard publicly took him by the hand, ‘which thing the common people rejoiced at and praised’, one commentator observed, ‘but wise men took it for a vanity’. After he had given his address, Richard made the short walk across to the abbey, where at the church door he was met with a procession led by the abbot, who handed to him the sceptre of St Edward, which the king then offered up at the shrine of St Edward in the abbey.32 Returning to Baynard’s Castle, ‘whomsoever he met, he saluted’.

  The following day, at three o’clock, the council gathered in a room within the chapel of Baynard’s Castle. There Richard, in the presence of Bishop Stillington of Bath and Wells, Bishop Courtenay of Exeter, Bishop Goldwell of Norwich, the duke of Buckingham, Thomas Stanley and John Gunthorpe, delivered the Great Seal enclosed in a ‘bag of white leather’ to John Russell, confirming his reappointment as Chancellor.33 According to one chronicler, ‘hasty provision’ was now made for Richard and Anne’s coronation, with the Keeper of the Great Wardrobe, Piers Curteys, receiving orders on 27 June to have materials and clothes for the ceremony prepared within six days. There was an enormous amount to do, not only in preparing the royal garments, but clothes for the entire procession of the nobility who would be involved in the ceremony. It was traditional for the king to issue special gifts of scarlet robes to knights and nobility attending the coronation; whereas Henry IV issued 2,895 ells (3,618¾ yards) to 611 people, only 522¾ yards of cloth were issued for Richard’s coronation, an indication of the hastily arranged nature of the ceremony, which had to be planned within days not weeks.34 Still, the total cost of the coronation would finally amount to £3,124 12s 3¾d, much of which would be spent on expensive cloths of gold, velvet and no fewer than 68,701 ‘powderings’ of ‘bogy shanks’, a fur made of lamb’s wool.

  Within three weeks, Richard had gone from sitting in meetings of the council in early June as Protector, planning Edward V’s coronation on 22 June, to ordering his own coronation as Richard III. Just twenty days had passed, yet the speed at which events had unfolded was breathtaking. Whether by design or whether he had felt he had no other option but to pursue the throne, by accident or ambition, by the influence of others or by his own individual actions, Richard had managed to secure the kingdom for himself, perhaps faster than any other king in English history. Within twenty days, Richard had not only turned every single acceptable political convention on its head, but had done so by departing entirely from his own self-image as the loyal brother and Protector, dumbfounding his contemporaries. Across his path to the throne, he had cut down some of the most influential and important members of the Yorkist nobility, the broken bodies of Hastings, Rivers, Grey and others testament to his ruthlessness. Yet Richard’s success was not his alone; he had already recognised the part the duke of Buckingham had played in his accession, yet there were other members of the nobility who saw in Richard a means for their own advancement. They too, in due course, would expect reward. Meanwhile, thousands of northern men continued their march upon the capital, men whose own loyalties had been carefully cultivated by Richard as a northern overlord. Now they came southwards, not, as they had intended, to protect their lord from attack, but to witness his accession as king.

  PART THREE

  KING

  10

  ‘GOING IN GREAT TRIUMPH’

  In advance of the coronation, security was tightly controlled. On 2 July, a proclamation was issued strictly forbidding any quarrels or violent behaviour, with a curfew being enforced, so that ‘every man be in his lodging by x of the clock in the night’, while no one ‘other than such that his highness hath licenced’ should bear arms, ‘that is to say glaives, bills … long or short swords and bucklers’ under pain of imprisonment.1 Meanwhile the capital braced itself for the arrival of the northern army that was anticipated to reach the city at any moment. ‘Armed men in frightening and unheard of numbers were summoned from the North’, the Crowland chronicler wrote. The sense of foreboding had its antecedents in recent history, with a general suspicion amongst southerners bordering on paranoia about the savageness of their northern counterparts.2

  This time, things would be different. The army was not that of an invading force; rather, it now represented the retinue of a king. On 3 July, the Mercers’ Company recorded their preparations to receive ‘the earl of Northumberland and the earl of Westmorland with many other knights, esquires, gentiles and commons now coming out of the North, to the number 10,000 men or more’. Noting how the two earls with their company currently ‘doth hove and abode’ in the field between London and Halywell, the mercers observed how Richard intended to ride out into the field and had commanded ‘that the King’s desire is to see all the said Company whole in their array’. Every member, the mercers concluded, should gather at the Leadenhall at eleven o’clock on 6 July, to travel to Bishopsgate and through the city ‘set in a ray’.3 John Stowe described the northern army, on his first sighting of it as it reached the capital, as ‘meanly apparelled, and worse harnessed’.4 Mancini, who believed that Richard had summoned the troops from his own estates and those of the duke of Buckingham, since ‘he was afraid lest any uproar should be fomented against him at his coronation, when there would be a very great concourse of people’, described how Richard ‘himself went out to meet the soldiers before they entered the city; and, when they were drawn up in a circle on a very great field, he passed them with bared head around their ranks and thanked them’.5

  After surveying his assembled army from Finsbury Fields, Richard returned to the city, processing along Bishopsgate, Leadenhall, Cornhill and Cheapside, arriving at St Paul’s to hear mass. As Richard made his journey, he would have seen the 156 men from the city companies wearing specially hired white harnesses who lined the route, on the orders of the mayor, Edmund Shaa.6 Returning to Baynard’s Castle, Richard exchanged gifts with his Duchess Anne, the future queen, who was busy in preparation for the coronation in just three days’ time; their joint coronation was to be the first double coronation for both a king and a queen since the coronation of Edward II and Isabella in 1308. Anne had ordered a ‘long gown of purple cloth of gold, wrought with garters and roses’ and lined with white damask to be specially made for her husband, as ‘the gift of our sovereign Lady the Queen’.7 In return, Richard gave Anne twenty-four yards of precious purple cloth of gold, twenty yards of which had been ‘wrought with garters’, and seven yards of purple velvet, ‘to our said sovereign Lady the Queen for to have of the especial gift of our said sovereign Lord the King’.8

  The next day, 4 July, Richard and Anne departed Baynard’s Castle together for the Tower of London. Usually the journey was the occasion for the monarch to pass by a multitude of pageants, plays and salutes from the city companies, yet these were absent for Richard’s coronation, no doubt due to lack of preparation time. Instead it seems that the new king and queen chose to be escorted to the Tower by barge on the river, possibly on a freshly painted green and white barge, decorated with ostrich feathers and a gold crown and white lion, bearing the royal arms.9 After taking part in the ceremony of creating new knights of the Bath, Richard was served his dinner by the seventeen esquires chosen to be knights, before they were taken away to be bathed. Since it was a Friday, only fish was served that night, comprising a short menu of two courses of nine, then twelve dishes, including salt fish, crabs, pike and gurnard for starters, then more elaborate freshwater fish dishes, including tench, bass, conger, salmon, perch, trout and a roast porpoise.10 While the prospective knights were then to continue their evening at prayer, each with a lighted taper, until dawn, Richard and Anne would have departed to bed early, in preparation for more elaborate ceremonies the next day, as part of the vigil of the coronation. The following morning, Richard personally knighted those esquires who had stayed up until dawn; yet another dinner followed, with the newly created knights again serving the king two courses of thirteen, then fifteen dishes of fish. A large gathering must have been in attendan
ce, for among other fish, 250 pikes, 600 plaice, 7,000 whelks and 1,344 salt eel were ordered for the dinner.11

  Meanwhile, outside in the Tower grounds and on the streets of the capital, preparations busily continued, ready for the king and queen’s procession that afternoon along the streets towards Westminster. The streets had been freshly swept and new gravel placed along the route, while behind the hastily erected barriers stood the city’s companies in their best liveries, including the merchants of the Steelyard at Gracechurch, and the Goldsmiths’ Company at the western end of Cheapside. ‘Sights’ had been constructed at certain points along the route, with stands of minstrels and singing children waiting in anticipation to greet the monarchs, while monuments such as the cross at Cheapside were freshly painted and gilded, as had been planned for Edward V’s aborted coronation.

  At one o’clock, the procession departed from the Tower. The nobility led the way, followed by the aldermen of the city clothed in scarlet, then the newly created knights of the Bath dressed in blue and white. Next came the clergy and officers of the king’s household, the mayor, Sir Edmund Shaa, with the herald John Wrythe, the Garter King of Arms, immediately behind. Next followed the sword of state, commonly known as the ‘king’s sword’, which was carried in its scabbard by Thomas Howard, the newly created earl of Surrey. To Surrey’s right, his father, John, duke of Norfolk, rode as Earl Marshal of England; to his left, the duke of Buckingham, wearing blue velvet ‘embroidered with the naves of carts burning in gold’, rode as Lord Great Chamberlain.