John, Lord Howard’s creation as duke of Norfolk, coming just days after Richard’s accession, is a reminder that Richard had been able to build support for his removal of Edward V with the promise of righting perceived injustices committed by Edward IV. Self-interest drove men such as John Howard to support Richard as their king, against the Woodvilles, from whom they felt there would be little hope of redress. While claims that Richard himself had long harboured a hatred of the Woodvilles are false, this is not necessarily the case for those who were prepared to support Richard as an anti-Woodville alternative. In providing for the royal family and its Woodville relations over the later years of his reign, Edward had stoked tensions between the Woodvilles and the rest of the nobility, who had good cause to feel disenfranchised by the king’s treatment of their own rights of inheritance in order to provide for his children and the queen’s Woodville kin. One of the most egregious examples of this concerned the king’s treatment of the Mowbray inheritance of the dukes of Norfolk, when Edward had co-opted the inheritance of the duke of Norfolk through the death of the child bride of Richard, duke of York: Howard had effectively been disinherited in favour of the young prince. It is hardly surprising then that Howard became an early supporter of Richard’s protectorate.
As early as 4 June, it seems that Howard was already lobbying for the possibility that Richard would reconsider the division of the Mowbray inheritance: on 4 June, Howard paid 20s to ‘John Feeld for to have out certain writings of livelihood from my lord Berkeley’, suggesting that the Mowbray inheritance was under discussion.25 Less than ten days later, it would be Howard’s own son, Thomas Howard, who would be one of the armed men who ambushed William, Lord Hastings, leading him to his death. For his support, Thomas was also created earl of Surrey. William, Viscount Berkeley, who had also been disinherited of the Mowbray inheritance by Edward IV and the Woodvilles, was another early champion of Richard’s kingship, writing on 28 June requesting ‘your most noble and abundant grace’ as a ‘humble and faithful subject’.26 For his support, Berkeley would be created earl of Nottingham. Edward Grey, Lord Lisle’s support for Richard had been noted in Simon Stallworth’s letter of 21 June: on 26 June, the same day as Richard’s accession, Lisle requested letters patent from Richard in a submission in which he described himself as ‘your humble and true liegeman’, adding how ‘he shall ever pray to God for your most noble and royal estate’.27 Lisle was now elevated in the peerage to become Viscount Lisle. Those northerners who had given their early support to Richard would also be later rewarded, with several grants issued highlighting the ‘service done at great labour and charge, in particular about the acceptation of the crown and royal title of this kingdom’.28 The earl of Northumberland, in supporting the provision of Richard’s northern army, even went so far as to provide personally for five bucks and 100 shillings, which he gave to the soldiers from York, and would later be rewarded by Richard with the lordship of Holderness, ‘in consideration of good gifts and laudable services to us both in our taking up of our reign and crown and in the defence of our kingdom of England against Scotland’.29 Men joined Richard’s cause not merely because they hoped that he would provide for their own self-interest; Richard himself stirred the ambitions of men, openly promising them rewards for joining his cause. ‘And, my lord, do me now good service, as ye have always before done’, he had written to Ralph, Lord Neville, on 11 June, ‘and I trust now so to remember you as shall be the making of you and yours.’30
Appointments that had been made during his protectorship were swiftly confirmed. On 15 July, John Gunthorpe, appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal on 10 May by ‘Edward bastard late called King Edward the Vth’, who ‘to his great cost’ had yet to be paid, was finally reimbursed.31 New commissions of the peace were issued, yet with the obvious exception of the removal of the Woodvilles and their associates, few changes were made. In Hertfordshire, where Elizabeth Woodville’s possession of duchy of Lancaster lands in the county had resulted in a large number of Justices of the Peace with Woodville roots, including the executed Anthony, Earl Rivers, and Sir Thomas Vaughan and the still imprisoned John Forster, more sweeping changes were needed. While one local man, Richard Swanessey, was added to the bench, the new king chose to add three Yorkshiremen – Edward Goldsborough, Nicholas Leventhorpe and Richard Scrope, the brother of the king’s close friend, John, Lord Scrope of Bolton – to the commission. The adoption of these northerners into the county, despite each having interests in the county either through marriage or land ownership, is striking, and an early sign of the king’s desire to place loyalty to his northern followers above integration into local society.32 Richard was determined to display that loyalty, above all else, would be rewarded.
The new king seemed to be in little doubt that he still commanded the loyalty of Edward IV’s household men, despite his deposition of Edward V. In issuing new commissions of the peace on 26 June, even in Kent, the centre of Woodville influence, few changes were made to its membership, with Sir John Fogge, an ally of the Woodvilles whom Richard had been determined to conciliate, remaining on the commission. Two new members even included Sir John Guildford, a Woodville kinsman, and Richard Page of Horton, who had been an annuitant of Edward IV. In Wiltshire, a new commission of the peace issued on 20 July even included Lionel Woodville, Elizabeth Woodville’s brother and the new bishop of Salisbury, which Richard must have considered gave him a right to sit on the commission.33
Richard’s intention seems to have been to establish himself as a king who would continue to operate as his brother had; he would rule as Edward IV would have done, as the head of a network of royal servants and a household that his brother had created. Richard’s northern followers would remain within their local positions: there were a few opportunities for northern men to make the transition southwards, such as Sir Ralph Ashton, a northern retainer of Richard’s who was appointed as a commissioner of the peace in Kent, but probably only because he had married into Kentish society only a few weeks previously.34
There would be further reward for those who had proved instrumental in gaining him the throne. On 13 July, Richard granted the duke of Buckingham his ultimate prize: the Lancastrian share of the Bohun inheritance, lands he had coveted for so long, the grant explaining that the award had been given for ‘the true faithful and laudable service the which our said cousin hath in many sundry wise done unto us’. The agreement would need to be ratified by an Act of Parliament, with a promise that ‘in our next parliament to be holden he shall be surely and lawfully by act of parliament’ restored to the formal title of the lands, which had previously been partitioned by Henry VI.35 Still, the duke was allowed to enter the manors immediately and start drawing an income from their lucrative revenues. A schedule attached to Buckingham’s grant reveals that the thirty-eight manors, across eighteen counties mainly situated in East Anglia and southern England, represented a value of £1,100 annually. The lands also provided a significant resource of patronage, with hundreds of royal offices and positions in Essex and Hertfordshire being dependent upon the territory.36 Further rewards were given to John Howard, now duke of Norfolk, including the power to array troops on behalf of the king in East Anglia, Cambridgeshire and the Home Counties on 16 July, and the office of Admiral on 25 July, together with a grant of forty-nine manors across East Anglia and other southern counties.37
Across the realm, recognising the opportunity to secure favour from the new monarch, some were swift to ingratiate themselves to the new regime. The inhabitants of ‘your poor town’ of Yarmouth wrote to Richard, requesting their letters patent be granted, pledging that ‘your said true liegemen and humble subjects shall ever pray to God for the continual preservation of your most noble and royal estate’.38 It was to the rest of the country that Richard now looked to secure his authority as king, planning to depart from the capital on a summer progress that would eventually take him north to York.
On Saturday, 19 July, having spent the past six days at Greenwich,
Richard departed from the capital by boat, intending to set out on a progress of his new realm. His first destination was Windsor Castle, where Richard may have inspected progress on his brother’s tomb within its two-storey chantry, set within the half-built chapel of St George that Richard himself had contributed to. He was joined by his wife, Queen Anne, and John Howard, the new duke of Norfolk, whose household accounts record how ‘my lord’s grace departed to Windsor with the king’, while Buckingham remained in the capital.39 After spending four days there, the royal household journeyed towards Reading; Howard returned to London, while Anne remained at Windsor for the next few weeks.
While at Reading, Richard continued his policy of rapprochement in an attempt to appear a merciful king. A surviving agreement dated 23 July records that the king agreed he would be a ‘good and gracious sovereign lord’ to William, Lord Hastings’s widow, Katherine, and her children, ‘not suffering them to be wronged nor entreated contrary to our laws’. The king affirmed that Hastings would not be attainted, thereby protecting his heirs from confiscation of his lands, allowing them to ‘have and continually enjoy such name, pre-eminence, interest, rights, possessions and inheritments as be descended from the same William’. Katherine would also hold all castles or manors that had been enfeoffed ‘to the use of the said William the day of his death’, aside from the manor of Loughborough, ‘which to us and our dearest wife in her right belongeth’. Still Richard stood by his original charge that Hastings had sinned against him. Katherine and her heirs were to be pardoned for ‘all offences and other things done by the same William to us or our progenitors’.40 Other letters of pardon were sent to Hastings’s brother, Sir Ralph Hastings, on 2 August.41
The following day, 24 July, Richard arrived at Oxford. Magdalen College had been given advance notice of the king’s proposed journey, and on 22 July William Waynflete, the bishop of Winchester and founder of the college, came to ‘oversee the condition of his college and the building of the same and also to receive honourably the most illustrious Lord King Richard the Third’. Richard was greeted outside the university by the chancellor of the university, where he was ‘honourably received’. The chancellor was none other than Bishop Lionel Woodville, Queen Elizabeth’s brother. Woodville had previously fled into sanctuary in May, certainly before 9 June. On 3 June, when new commissions of the peace were issued for Dorset, Lionel Woodville’s name had been removed.42 Yet by 26 June, the date of Richard’s unofficial accession to the throne, Lionel Woodville was restored to the Dorset commission of the peace, and on 20 July was appointed to the commission for Wiltshire, a sign not only of Richard’s determination to heal old wounds, but an indication also of the Woodville family’s desire to be reconciled to the new king.43
Richard’s visit to Oxford is well documented, and the Magdalen College accounts reveal that the king, after taking part in a procession, listened to a speech by Waynflete before staying overnight. Richard’s royal train was accompanied by prelates and nobles, including the earls of Lincoln and Surrey, Lord Lovell, Thomas, Lord Stanley, Lord Audley, Richard Ratcliffe and John Alcock, the bishop of Worcester and the tutor to Edward V, ‘and many other nobles who all stayed overnight in college’. On 25 July, the accounts continue, ‘at the command and desire of the lord King’, two ‘solemn debates’ were held in the great hall of the College. The account waxes lyrical about the generosity of the king, detailing Richard’s gifts of venison and money to the disputants, before enthusiastically closing with the words, ‘Vivat Rex in eternum’ – ‘May the king live for ever.’44
On 25 July, Richard and his entourage departed from Oxford’s north gate for his royal palace of Woodstock. According to John Rous, during his visit Richard ‘by popular request disafforested a great area of the country which King Edward IV his brother had annexed and incorporated in the forest of Wychwood under forest law, against conscience and to the public damage’.45 Richard then journeyed to Minster Lovell, the residence of his close confidant Francis, Lord Lovell. So confident were the university authorities that the king’s visit to Oxford had been a success that they decided to send a petition to the king at Minster Lovell on behalf of Bishop Morton of Ely, and a graduate of Balliol College, who had remained imprisoned since his arrest on 13 June in the Tower at the time of William, Lord Hastings’s execution.46
Richard was determined to enjoy his summer progress, as the Crowland chronicler noted, ‘wishing therefore to display in the North, where he had spent most of his time previously, the superior royal rank, which he acquired for himself’.47 Richard departed Minster Lovell for Gloucester, where he stayed overnight, agreeing to a new charter for the town, ‘because of the special affection which we bear towards the said town … considering the good and faithful actions of the said bailiffs and burgesses in causes of particular importance to us’, awarding Gloucester with the freedom to elect its own mayor.48 The king then journeyed on to Tewkesbury, where Richard may have paid his respects to his late brother Clarence’s grave. Certainly Clarence was in his thoughts, for, on 4 August, Richard arranged for the remaining debt of 310 marks from a total loan of 560 marks owed by ‘our late brother the Duke of Clarence, whom god pardon’ to be ‘full contented and paid’.49
On Friday, 8 August, Richard arrived at Warwick, where he was joined by his wife, Anne, who had been residing at Windsor Castle for the past two weeks. Warwick Castle had been one of Queen Anne’s principal homes during her childhood. The royal family’s arrival there marked not only a celebration of Richard’s accomplishments, but the realisation that the Neville family had finally achieved the dream that Anne’s father, the earl of Warwick, had been unable to obtain for his daughters: the throne. In celebration of the occasion, the Warwickshire monk John Rous presented the royal couple with two detailed rolls, filled with carefully drawn pen and ink drawings celebrating the ascent of the Neville family. In one of the rolls, alongside a drawing showing Richard and Anne crowned and wearing their coronation garments, Rous praised Richard effusively, writing that he was:
The most mighty prince Richard by the grace of God King of England and of France and Lord of Ireland by very matrimony without discontinuance or any defiling in law by heir male lineally, descending from King Harry the Second, all avarice set aside, ruled his subjects in his realm full commendably, punishing offenders of his laws, especially extortioners and oppressors of his commons, and cherishing those that were virtuous; by the which discreet guiding he got great thank of God and love of all his subjects rich and poor and great laud of the people of all other lands about him.50
But it was Anne, that ‘most noble lady and princess’, whose attention Rous had sought to cultivate, the visit being the fulfilment of her true Neville ancestry. She had been, Rous wrote in his manuscript, ‘marvellously conveyed by all the corners and parties of the wheel of fortune and eftsone [soon after] exalted again’ after the death of her first husband, Prince Edward, ‘to the most high throne and honour over all other ladies of this noble realm anointed and crowned Queen of England wife unto the most victorious prince king Richard the Third’, adding further, ‘in presence she was seemly amiable and beauteous and in conditions full commendable and right virtuous and according to the interpretation of her name Anne full gracious’.51
The scale of the celebrations can be glimpsed from the growing size of the royal court that filled Warwick Castle.52 Foreign ambassadors had also begun to gather to pay their respects to the new king and queen. It was at Warwick, Rous observed, that ‘ambassadors from the King of Spain came to the king for a marriage between the king’s only son and the daughter of the King of Spain’. Queen Anne brought with her a Spanish envoy, Gaufridius de Sasiola, who arrived in England expecting Edward V on the throne, but was determined that his journey would not be wasted, and sought an audience with the new king. On 8 August, de Sasiola presented the official report that he had come to give, that the queen, ‘my supreme mistress’, wished to ‘have a good and firm peace’ and to ‘make, enter into and establi
sh with the said lord King good and firm leagues, agreements and alliances’. If Richard wished to ‘wage war’ against France, ‘for the recovery of his lands, lordships and possessions which appertain to the crown of England’, then Isabella was willing to lend him ‘the use of all her sea ports and the necessary victuals and arms at a low cost; and at sea her ships, armed, for reasonable wages’.53 Already Richard had appointed Bernard de la Forssa, an experienced diplomat who had perfomed similar missions for Edward IV, to journey to Spain. Fortunately, Forssa had yet to sail, so Richard sent fresh instructions from Warwick indicating that he was willing to negotiate a new treaty if Queen Isabella so wished.54 To Elizabeth, the king replied, explaining how he had read the queen’s ‘very sweet and pleasant’ letters, which were heard ‘with joy and gladness’. ‘For this we give your highness great thanks, the greatest we can possibly give. In case there is anything in our power that we can do for your highness to achieve a happy and auspicious outcome to this very great business’, Richard requested that Elizabeth might accept Forssa’s embassy, and ‘urgently to hear him and give him credence’.55
During his progress, Richard also dispatched a series of diplomatic letters to the French king, Louis XI, informing him of his accession and willingness to maintain the current peace that had been agreed during Edward IV’s reign. Louis wrote to Richard on 21 July thanking him for ‘the letters that you have written to me by your herald Blanc Sanglier, and thank you for the news of which you have apprised me. And if I can do you any service I will do it with very good will, for I desire to have your friendship’. On 18 August, Richard replied, requesting that the French king intervene to prevent English ships being attacked by French pirates on the seas, jokingly ending his letter: ‘I pray you that by my servant, this bearer, one of the grooms of my stable, you will let me know by writing your full intention.’ Two days later, at Nottingham Castle, on 20 August, Richard wrote again to the French king, this time to make a particular, more personal, request. ‘I have written to my servant Blanc Sanglier, now being with you, to make provision of certain wines of the growth of Burgundy and la Haute France, for myself and the queen my consort. I therefore pray you, my lord my cousin, that you will give order to your officers and subjects to suffer him to procure the said wines, and freely conduct them and pass into this my realm of England, without any disturbance or contradiction, and you will do me in this a very singular pleasure.’56
Richard III Page 26