Richard III
Page 45
These wounds were neither severe nor deep enough to have resulted in Richard’s death; yet more would follow. Aside from other, smaller sword and dagger wounds – further evidence of a prolonged struggle – the back of Richard’s skull indicates that the king suffered massive trauma through two separate blows that would have killed him instantly. There is no way of knowing in what sequence they occurred, but it is possible that one of them was delivered by a halberd, as referred to by Molinet, crashing down onto Richard’s skull as its axe was held aloft on its six-foot-long pole. An entire piece of bone has been sheathed clean off from the skull, the incision so clean that the offending weapon must have been used with incredible velocity and power. By this time, Richard may have been on his knees, at the mercy of his captives. Yet they would show none. Another blow confirms that the king’s demise was immediate: a sword thrust – delivered at the base of the occipital bone of the skull, near the first vertebrae of the spine – driven straight through his brain. The wielder of the sword delivered the thrust with such aggression that the weapon did not stop until it reached the opposite side of Richard’s skull, the pointed tip leaving a small mark as evidence of the horrific violence that Richard had succumbed to.
It was a brutal and bloody death, yet Richard had been determined to end his life defending his crown and his honour. No one, not even Richard’s most determined enemies, would deny that the king’s final end came in a display of chivalric bravery. ‘As for King Richard’, the Crowland chronicler noted, ‘like a spirited and most courageous prince, he fell in battle on the field and not in flight.’41 Even John Rous had to admit that despite Richard having been ‘unexpectedly destroyed in the midst of his army by an invading army small by comparison … let me say the truth to his credit: that he bore himself like a noble soldier and despite his little body and feeble strength, honourably defended himself to his last breath, shouting again and again that he was betrayed, and crying “Treason! Treason! Treason!”‘42 Rous’s open admiration of Richard’s courage in battle was echoed by Polydore Vergil, who, despite his antagonism towards the enemy of his Tudor patron, could not but admire Richard’s ‘proud and fierce spirit which did not desert him even in death, which, abandoned by his men, he wished to approach rather than to save his life by shameful flight.’43
EPILOGUE
‘HIS FAME IS DARKENED’
At the sight of Richard’s last stand and death, his forces ‘threw down their weapons and willingly surrendered’ to Henry. ‘Which the majority would have done of their own accord even when Richard was alive’, Polydore Vergil later commented, ‘assuming it could have been done without danger.’ ‘Many northerners, in whom, especially, King Richard placed so much trust, fled even before coming to blows with the enemy’, the Crowland chronicler wrote, ‘and so there remained no worthy or trained troops to make the glorious victor, Henry VII, submit himself again to the trial of battle.’ 1 The Great Chronicle described how Sir William Stanley ‘won the possession of King Richard’s helmet with the crown being upon it’, but only after doing so ‘incontinently, as it was said’. Sir William ‘came straight to King Henry and set it upon his head saying, “Sir, here I make you King of England.”‘2
The day after the battle, 23 August, the mayor and aldermen of York met in their council chamber. John Sponer, who once again had been sent to ‘the field of Redemore to bring tidings from the same to the city’, had managed to flee the site of the battle, bringing with him the awful news that the city most feared: ‘that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason of … many others that turned against him, with many other lords and nobles of this north parts, was piteously slain and murdered’; the clerk writing the minutes of the meeting added, ‘to the great heaviness of this city’.3
A thousand men had been killed in the battle, including John, duke of Norfolk, Lord Ferrers, Robert Brackenbury and Richard Ratcliffe. Francis, Viscount Lovell, managed to escape the battlefield, finally seeking refuge in the sanctuary of St John at Colchester. William Catesby was not so fortunate. Arrested on the battlefield, he was taken to Leicester. On 25 August, Catesby narrated his final will and testament, asking for ‘all lands that I have wrongfully purchased’ to be restored to their owners. He hoped that his wife and children would be safe: ‘I doubt not the King will be a good and gracious Lord to them, for he is called a full gracious prince’, adding, perhaps hopeful of a last-minute reprieve, that he had ‘never offended him by my good and free will; for god I take to my judge I have ever loved him’. Almost as an afterthought, Catesby added a bitter, final, note: ‘My lords Stanley, Strange and all that blood help and pray for my soul for ye have not for my body as I trusted in you.’4 The following day Catesby was executed in the Market Square at Leicester, his head being cut off ‘as a last reward for his excellent service’, the Crowland chronicler wrote mockingly.
Richard’s body, the Crowland chronicler wrote, was ‘discovered amongst the dead’. Stripped of all its armour and clothes, the king was thrown naked over the back of a horse by one of Henry’s Welsh troops, his head and arms hanging down on one side and his legs on the other, his ‘hair hanging as one would bear a sheep’, while a rope was placed around his neck.5 The Great Chronicle went further in providing the detail of how Richard, his ‘body despoiled to the skin and nought being left about him so much as would cover his privy member, was trussed behind a pursuivant called Norroy, as a hog or other vile beast, and so, all besplattered with mire and filth, was brought to a church in Leicester for all men to wonder upon, and there lastly irreverently buried’.6 ‘A wretched sight indeed’, Polydore Vergil mused, ‘but very worthy of the man’s life.’ ‘And so he who had miserably killed numerous people’, Jean Molinet reflected, ‘ended his days iniquitously and filthily in the dirt and the mire, and he who had despoiled churches was displayed to the people naked and without any clothing.’
Taken to Leicester, Richard’s body was placed on public display for two days, ‘with everyone wishing to look at it’. There could be no doubting that the king was dead. ‘The king ascertaineth you’, Henry Tudor’s first proclamation as King Henry VII read, ‘that Richard duke of Gloucester, late called King Richard, was slain at a place called Sandeford, within the shire of Leicester, and brought dead off the field unto the town of Leicester, and there was laid openly, that every man might see and look upon him.’ At some point after his death, it seems Richard was to suffer the final indignity of having a dagger thrust between his buttocks, the blow being delivered with such force it lacerated to the bone; perhaps with this in mind, the Crowland chronicler described how ‘many other insults were offered’ to the corpse. Richard was given a simple burial in the Greyfriars’ Church, wrapped in merely a shroud. It would not be until ten years later that Henry VII would finally pay a meagre £10 1s for an alabaster tomb, ‘with his picture cut out, and made thereon’ to mark the king’s grave.7
With the despoliation of Richard’s body, so too the king’s reputation would need to be destroyed. Within days of the battle, the Welsh bard Dafydd Llwyd ap Llywelyn ap Gruffudd of Mathafarn wrote an ode ‘to King Richard who destroyed his two nephews … Poets are in better heart’, Dafydd rejoiced, ‘that the world prospers and little R. is killed – a grey, cheerless forked letter which had no respect in England.’ Richard, he wrote, ‘could neither rule nor govern England. He could not carry the part, he would not fit the breach where Edward stood.’ Describing Richard as ‘a pale leg, vain overseer’, he continued: ‘A servile boar wrought penance upon Edward’s sons in his prison. If he slew without favour of the bench his two young nephews, I marvelled in a measure of anger at God, that the earth did not swallow him. Shame on the sad-lipped Saracen that he slew Christ’s angels … The little boar lives not, no killing was more charitable’, the poem continues, variously describing Richard as ‘the little caterpillar of London’, ‘the old cock’, ‘a little ape, the magpie’s love’, adding, ‘he is slain, my wish was that God prosper him who kill
ed him. Success to whomsoever killed the dog slain in the ditch.’8
Elsewhere in the country, it was a different story, for the moment at least. The city of York remained in a state of denial over Henry Tudor’s victory; instead of recording the royal style, its ledger merely read ‘the throne being vacant’. When Henry sent Sir Roger Coton to the city the following day, he was met by the mayor and aldermen within the protection of the castle, since Coton ‘durst not for fear of death come through the city’. The choice of an inn named the Boar for the meeting must have made Coton feel just as unwelcome. When Coton officially proclaimed the new king, the city council merely wrote that he was ‘the king named and proclaimed Henry the VII’; in contrast, several months later, they were still referring to ‘the most famous prince of blessed memory, King Richard, late deceased’. When, in 1486, Henry attempted to replace the city’s recorder, one of Richard’s chief adherents, Miles Metcalfe, the city refused to accept the king’s nominee and instead chose another Ricardian supporter, John Vavasour. Later, in June 1486, the city again rejected Henry’s choice of swordbearer for the city, resolving that he ‘should never enjoy the office … or other office within the said city’.9
Gradually, however, the establishment of Tudor rule and the defeat of Richard’s final supporters, among them Francis, Viscount Lovell, and John, earl of Lincoln, at the battle of Stoke in June 1487, brought with them an acceptance of the new version of Richard’s reign, as seen through Tudor eyes. For the Italian poet Pietro Carmeliano, who had sought patronage at Richard’s court, dedicating a Life of St Catherine to him in fulsome terms, new masters now needed to be served. In a poem celebrating the birth of a son and heir, Arthur, to Henry Tudor and his new wife, Elizabeth of York, Richard was now portrayed as a ‘murderous tyrant’ responsible for killing Henry VI, running a sword through his entrails. Carmeliano’s slavish efforts paid off: by 1490, he was employed as Henry’s Latin secretary.
Around the same time, the Warwickshire monk John Rous wrote a short History of the Kings of England, ending with Richard’s reign. Conveniently forgetting the praise he had lavished upon Richard during his progress to Warwick in 1483, Rous now wrote that Richard was ‘small of stature, with a short face and unequal shoulders, the right higher and the left lower’, though the words ‘right’ and ‘left’ were added later, possibly by a second hand. ‘This King Richard, who was excessively cruel in his days, reigned for three years and a little more’, Rous concluded, ‘in the way that the Antichrist is to reign. And like the Antichrist to come, he was confounded at his moment of greatest pride … Although his days were short’, Rous closed, ‘they were ended with no lamentation from his groaning subjects.’ Taking the work he had composed in 1483, Rous now translated his English text into Latin, conveniently removing all mention of his previous praise of the dead king, describing Richard only as the ‘unhappy husband’ of Anne Neville.10
While both Rous and Carmeliano had a new patron to impress, other near-contemporary chroniclers, recording events somewhat more dispassionately, came to the same conclusions. ‘And thus ended this man with dishonour as he that sought it’, the author of the Great Chronicle wrote at the turn of the century, ‘for had he continued still protector and have suffered the children to have prospered according to his allegiance and fidelity, he should have been honourably lauded over all, whereas now his fame is darkened and dishonoured as far as he was known, but God, that is all merciful, forgive him his misdeeds.’11
At York, the capital of Richard’s own adopted heartland, memories of the dead king lingered. In December 1490, a quarrel broke out in a house between one John Painter and a schoolmaster, William Burton. Burton had arrived at the house, ‘busy of language’ and ‘distempered either with ale or wine’, when he took exception to Painter’s presence, and ordered him out of the house. Some months later, details of their exchange were leaked to the city authorities. Painter, William Burton claimed, had told him that the earl of Northumberland ‘was a traitor and betrayed King Richard, with much other unfitting language concerning the said earl’. Painter denied this, and gave his own version of events, describing how Burton himself had stated that ‘King Richard was an hypocrite, a crouchback, and buried in a dike like a dog.’ Painter retorted that he lied, ‘for the king’s good grace hath buried him like a noble gentleman’. Attempting to resolve the situation, the prior of Bolton wrote to inform the city council that ‘where it is reported they should be busy with King Richard, they were not, but that the said schoolmaster said, he loved him never, and was buried in a dike’.
Richard’s reputation would continue to be shaped by later commentators and historians, men such as the Italian Polydore Vergil, who did not arrive in England until 1502, and of course Thomas More in his famous history of Richard’s reign. Both versions of events would contribute significantly to the fashioning of the so-called ‘black legend’ of Richard III. Their observations, even their words themselves, would be copied directly to form material for other chronicles and histories, which in turn became the historical basis for Shakespeare’s own drama.
In the months that followed Richard’s death, however, for the Crowland chronicler, dwelling upon Richard’s life and short reign, it proved a time for reflection. ‘I observe from the chronicles’, he noted in an addition to his narrative, ‘that no such end for a king of England, being killed that is on a battlefield in his own kingdom, has been heard since the time of King Harold, who was an intruder and was defeated in battle by William the Conqueror coming from Normandy whence also these men had come.’ It was at this point that the chronicler chose to include a poem, written ‘taking into account the banners and badges of today’s victor and vanquished and at the same time those of King Edward’s sons whose cause, above all, was avenged in this battle, and what befell all three kings who after the Conquest of England were called Richard’. Like his namesakes Richard I and Richard II, Richard had ‘in common an end without issue of their body, a life of greed and a violent fall’. He was, the poem continued, ‘not content until he suppressed his brother’s progeny and proscribed their supporters; at last, two years after taking violent possession of the kingdom he met these same people in battle and now has lost his grim life and his crown’. The poem ends: ‘In the year 1485 on the 22nd day of August the tusks of the Boar were blunted and the red rose, the avenger of the white, shines upon us.’12
‘Since it is the custom of writers of history normally to keep silent about the actions of living persons’, the Crowland chronicler stated, he had ‘decided to put an end to his labours with the death of King Richard.’ 13 Completing his work at Crowland Abbey on the last day of April 1486, he turned to a final poem:
You who read all these changes in the fortunes of great men, why do you not scorn all the mutabilities of the world; why does the glory of vain pomp touch you or your mind? For kings have fallen who would not submit to kings and who, abandoning the front door, entered through the back, confounding at the same time themselves and their own, not to mention mixing up the public with the private, so that neither blood, age, nor valour in battle, after this, could make a king …14
There are few words better suited to reflect upon the turbulent, transitory nature of Richard’s own life. He had reigned as Richard III for 788 days; in battle he died aged 32 years, 10 months and 21 days.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has taken far longer than I anticipated to write, yet its completion would not have been possible without a number of people who have helped, inspired and provided their tireless support along the way. I am extremely grateful to my dedicated editorial team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, whose patience and enthusiasm for this book has been truly appreciated. Alan Samson commissioned the book, and has been generous with both his time and advice throughout the project. Bea Hemming, the editor of my previous two books, dedicated herself to working on the first draft of the manuscript, helping to shape the final version; Simon Wright expertly helped to finish editing the book, patiently
guiding me to completion. Celia Hayley brilliantly helped to weave different drafts of the manuscript together seamlessly, providing the encouragement to finish off the final material needed for the book. Mark Handsley has been an expert copyeditor, and Holly Harley diligently helped to finish the final stages of the book. Throughout the entire process, Georgina Capel has been a wonderful agent, kind and supportive, her commitment to the book and to myself never wavering.