Meanwhile the boy now known as ‘Edward Bastard, late called King Edward V’ and his brother were taken into the inner rooms of the Tower itself, and seen less and less until they disappeared altogether. They may have been murdered after an attempt to release them in July. The London chronicles suggest they were dead before the end of the year, while across the Channel Louis XI, who died on 30 August 1483, believed that Richard had killed the boys. During an address to the Estates General in January 1484 the chancellor of France referred to the English king having done away with his nephews.
Sir Thomas More has been accused of writing his biography of Richard as Tudor propaganda. Yet Mancini, in London at the time, bears out More. ‘The importance of Mancini’s narrative lies in the fact that he provides direct contemporary evidence that Richard’s ruthless progress to the throne aroused widespread mistrust and dislike, to the extent that at least some of his subjects were willing to believe, within a fortnight of his accession, that Richard had disposed of his nephews by violence.’14
Plots
Richard was still in the North when he learned on 11 October that a rebellion had broken out, led by Buckingham. Writing to his chancellor, he described the duke as ‘the most untrue creature living: whom with God’s grace we shall not be long till that we be in those parts and subdue his malice. We assure you there was never traitor better purveyed for’.15
The plot’s originators were the former queen and Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lord Stanley’s wife, who used Dr John Morton to turn ‘Harry Buckingham’ against the king. Aghast at Richard’s unpopularity, the duke did not wish to share his downfall. Mainly former members of Edward IV’s household, but including the Wydevilles and their friends, most of those involved were leading gentry from all over the southern counties, who at first hoped to restore Edward V. The Yorkist establishment had ‘imploded’.16 Suspecting that Edward and his brother were dead, they now planned to replace Richard with Henry Tudor, the son of Margaret Beaufort who was the last heir of the left-handed line of Lancaster. To strengthen his claim, Henry must marry Elizabeth of York, the young king’s eldest sister and heiress.
The weather was on Richard’s side. Heavy rain prevented Buckingham from joining the rebels in the southern counties, his Welsh retainers deserted him and the rising collapsed almost as soon as it began, while the duke was quickly caught and beheaded. Henry Tudor, who arrived too late, sailed back to Brittany without setting foot on English soil. Many of those involved fled the country.
However, Buckingham’s revolt turned the unknown Tudor into a serious pretender, who was soon joined in exile by a substantial number of rebels. At the same time, Richard’s narrow political power base became even narrower, restricted to three magnates – the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Stanley. Placed under house arrest, Margaret Beaufort set about turning her husband Stanley against him.
When parliament met at Westminster in January 1484, the Lord Chancellor, Bishop Russell, claimed the rebellion violated the laws of God, and a hundred men who had taken part were attainted. Another bill confirmed Richard’s right to the Crown. There were legal and economic measures, one particularly appreciated being to abolish benevolences – the arbitrary ‘gifts’ from wealthy men introduced by Edward IV. Richard was presenting himself to his subjects as a good lawmaker who looked after the common people.
On 9 April his only son Edward died unexpectedly at Middleham after a short illness. ‘On hearing the news at Nottingham where they were staying, you could have seen his father and mother in a state bordering on madness, from shock and grief’, says the Croyland author.17 The king’s loss looked like divine judgement, while the lack of an obvious successor increased his insecurity. He thought of making Clarence’s son Warwick heir presumptive, but this meant reversing Clarence’s attainder, which would give the boy a better claim to the throne than his own. Instead, he chose his sister Elizabeth’s son, John de la Pole.
A Wiltshire gentleman called William Colyngbourne wrote secretly to Henry, inviting him to invade, and then posted a famous couplet on the door of St Paul’s in July 1484:
The Cat, the Rat and Lovell our Dog
Ruleth all England under a Hog.
The Cat was Catesby and the Rat Ratcliffe – Richard’s principal henchmen – while the Dog alluded to his chamberlain’s crest and the Hog to his Boar emblem. The king grew paranoiac. ‘When he went abroad, his eyes whirled about; his body privily fenced [secretly armoured], his hand ever on his dagger, his countenance and manner like one always ready to strike again’, is what More was told. ‘He took ill rest a nights, lay long waking and musing, rather slumbered than slept, troubled with fearful dreams.’18
Richard worked feverishly to persuade Duke Francis of Brittany to hand over Henry Tudor, to whom fellow exiles had sworn allegiance as king in Rennes Cathedral at Christmas 1483. Henry had also taken an oath to marry Elizabeth of York. Francis’s chief minister, Pierre Landois, agreed to send him to England, but – probably alerted by Lord Stanley – Dr Morton heard of it and warned Henry, who in September 1484 fled to France.
Early in November 1484, the Earl of Oxford was freed by his gaoler at Hammes (a fortress guarding Calais), the pair going off to join Henry in France, followed by members of the Calais garrison. At the same time Sir William Brandon and his sons started a rising at Colchester, escaping to join Henry by boat when it failed. There was trouble in Hertfordshire, part of the same plot.19 France recognized Tudor as Henry VI’s heir, promising 4,000 troops.
Nevertheless, the Twelve Days of Christmas 1484–5 were celebrated at court with dancing and gaiety, according to the Croyland writer. He says that Queen Anne and Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s eldest daughter, wore each other’s clothes, as the two ‘were of similar colour and form’.20 This is the only clue to Anne’s appearance: she must have been a considerable beauty if she resembled her cousin Elizabeth, who had fine features and an English rose complexion. Richard was presiding over the Twelfth Night revels, wearing his crown, when spies informed him that Henry Tudor would invade England the next summer.
He paid such attention to Elizabeth that it was clear he meant to marry her. Conveniently, Queen Anne died of tuberculosis on 16 March (during an eclipse of the sun) and his far from unwilling niece could give him an heir, removing a key part of Henry’s strategy. Her mother encouraged the match, while canon lawyers assured him they could obtain a dispensation for an uncle–niece marriage. However, Ratcliffe and Catesby told him ‘to his face’ that if he did not publicly deny the plan even the northerners would accuse him of murdering the queen to indulge his incestuous lust.21 On 30 March 1485 the Mayor and Corporation of London were summoned to the Priory of the Knights of St John at Clerkenwell with many others, to hear the king tell them, ‘It never came in his thought or mind to marry in such manner-wise [his niece], nor willing or glad of the death of his queen, but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be.’ He complained of rumours, presumably of his having poisoned Anne.22 The speech gives us an idea of what the Londoners thought of him. Henry sent letters to England, asking supporters to join in ‘the just depriving of that homicide and unnatural tyrant that now unjustly bears dominion over you’.23 Increasingly alarmed, Richard spent the spring and most of the summer waiting for an invasion after learning that Tudor would be supplied with funds by the French, who feared the king might intervene in Brittany and try to reconquer Normandy. Yet by midsummer it looked as if Richard was safe. Pierre Landois was ousted by pro-French Bretons and hanged from the ramparts of Nantes. Now there was no longer a threat that Richard might intervene in the duchy, France lost interest in Henry, withdrawing their offer to help.
In desperation, Henry borrowed money from a French courtier to hire 1,000 men and seven small ships – a much less formidable force than the 4,000 troops originally promised by Charles VIII’s government. The king’s spies believed he would make for Milford, a tiny harbour in Hampshire, and Lovell assembled a fleet at Southampton to intercept h
im. In June Richard went to Nottingham Castle, at the centre of England, so he could confront his enemy as soon as he landed. In a proclamation, he denounced the followers of ‘Henry Tydder’. They were murderers, adulterers and extortioners, who would steal everyone’s estates and offices, killing and robbing on an unheard-of scale.
Richard’s challenger was an obscure Welshman, ‘descended of bastard blood’ on both sides whose grandfather, Owain Tudor, Keeper of the Wardrobe to Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, had supposedly married her. One of their sons had married Lady Margaret Beaufort, the heiress of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, and it was they who were Henry Tudor’s parents. That someone with such a feeble claim to the throne, whom few Englishmen had ever seen, could become a pretender shows how desperate men were to find an alternative to Richard.
On 7 August Henry landed, not at Milford in Hampshire but at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. Supporters joined him as he marched so that he had about 5,000 men. Richard assembled 12,000 troops at Leicester, the largest contingents those of Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William, and of the Earl of Northumberland. This was a small army for a King of England with time to prepare, but it looks as if a few people wanted to fight in his defence while so obscure a challenger as Tudor seemed to have little chance of winning.
If Richard felt doubtful about Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William, their contingents were too strong for him to act on mere suspicion. In retrospect, however, it is clear that Margaret Beaufort had converted Lord Stanley to her son’s cause. It is also clear that the Earl of Northumberland had no liking for the king, despite having worked closely with him in the North – or perhaps as a result.
Bosworth
On the morning of 22 August 1485 the two armies faced each other near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. Every reconstruction of the battle that followed is based on Polydore Vergil, who, although he spoke to people who had fought in it, wrote thirty years later. There is no full eyewitness description, just a few scraps to flesh out Vergil’s account, but this was scarcely another Towton – neither leader inspired much loyalty and the ruling class were less inclined to risk their lives. Even the topography has been misunderstood, a recent archaeological examination finding it was fought over a 4 mile area around a group of adjoining villages instead of on the traditional site.24
The veteran Lancastrian who led Henry’s army, the Earl of Oxford, attacked first, despite having fewer troops. However, archaeologists have recently discovered bullets on the battle-field, suggesting they included French arquebusiers, whose new matchlocks were highly effective against cavalry. It is also likely that there were Swiss-style pike-men among them. When the Duke of Norfolk charged at the head of the vanguard, his men-at-arms were held off by long pikes and shot down. Another attack failed, ending in Norfolk’s death. Losing his most loyal commander, fear of treachery by the Stanleys and the enemy’s weaponry explain Richard’s next, desperate move.
Seeing Henry Tudor’s dragon banner, he realized that his rival was near. If he eliminated him he would win, regardless of matchlocks or pikes. Together with the knights and squires of his household, who amounted to about a hundred and sixty men-at-arms, he charged, killing Henry’s banner-bearer with his lance, striking another of his enemy’s bodyguard out of the saddle with his axe and cutting down several more.
At the last moment, Sir William Stanley changed sides and led his own men to Henry’s rescue, overwhelming the royal household. Northumberland made no attempt to rescue the king, but watched him being killed. Richard’s horse became bogged down in the marshy ground and he was forced to dismount. Alone, surrounded by enemies, crying ‘Treason! Treason!’, he fought to the end. Even the hostile Croyland writer admits he died ‘like a brave and most valiant prince’.25 The wounds found on his skull suggest a frenzy of blows.
Stripped naked and slung over a horse, its face disfigured by banging into a bridge, the king’s corpse was taken back to Leicester where for three days it was displayed on a church pavement. Men other than valets or tailors were able to see for the first time how much higher one shoulder was than the other, and perhaps too that he had a small hump, which is not uncommon in sufferers from scoliosis. Then he was buried at the Franciscan friary – the beggars’ church; his grave was lost when it was demolished in 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries until its rediscovery in a ‘long stay’ car park in 2012.
Retrospect
Although Richard III is one of the most studied figures in English medieval history, his brief time on the throne was merely a lurid postscript to his brother’s reign. Its only lasting significance lies in providing a raison d’être for Henry Tudor. He had committed not just political but dynastic suicide. In March 1483 there had been five male Plantagenets; by August 1485 only Clarence’s disinherited son was left, the ten-year-old Earl of Warwick. Vergil was stating the obvious when he wrote of Richard ‘destroying the house of York’.26 The Great Chronicle of London (written by someone who lived in the City at the time) comments that ‘had he continued still Protector and suffered the childer 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’.27
As his namesake had prophesied three centuries before, after being begotten by the devil, the Plantagenets ended by going to the devil. Not even the Borgias killed children. Yet the last Plantagenet sovereign has a strange fascination, not just for his partisans, but for those convinced of his guilt.
15
Postscript – The Kings in the
National Myth
For where is Bohun? Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality!
Chief Justice Crewe in 1625
The place of most Plantagenet monarchs in our pantheon is a shadowy one, but once they were proudly remembered. Edward III became a hero to Henry VIII’s court through Lord Berners’s stately version of Froissart, which he translated at the king’s command, and Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) gave some idea of England’s rulers from Henry IV onwards. The Elizabethans were familiar with the entire dynasty from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577). They also learned about the Plantagenets from the theatre. While Bishop John Bale’s Kyng Johan, written in about 1538 and portraying John as a victim of papal tyranny, was performed only once or twice, it is likely that George Peele’s bloodstained King Edward the First (1593) made more impact.
Still more important, Holinshed gave Shakespeare the material for his plays about Plantagenet kings (as he did for Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.) Despite changes for the sake of entertainment – such as exaggerating the wildness of ‘Prince Hal’ – Shakespeare is often astonishingly near the mark, since he echoes the contemporary chroniclers from whom Holinshed took his information. A famous example is Richard II’s lament for his lost crown, which came from Adam of Usk.
But during the reigns of the first two Stuarts, although Edward I was venerated as a lawgiver by jurists who at the same time shuddered at the memory of John, the Plantagenets inspired no new dramas. Curiously, from Shakespeare until comparatively recent times, almost no plays were written about English history or English monarchs, let alone about the Plantagenets. Admittedly, even the most sanguine playwright would find difficulty in convincing himself he could improve on Shakespeare. On the other hand, the seventeenth century learned something of its former ruling family from the cartographer John Speed’s Historie of Great Britaine. Similarly, the eighteenth century was treated to the whole story in depth by David Hume, whose six solid volumes had a place on the shelves of every respectable library. Even so, most men and women of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries discovered the Plantagenets from Shakespeare, whom they read as we do novels – the great Duke of Marlborough once declared he had learned his history exclusively from the Bard.
What this meant
for an understanding of the Plantagenets can be gleaned from William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), in which Hazlitt analysed their portraits. King John was ‘more cowardly than cruel’, while Richard II was ‘a voluptuary, proud, revengeful, impatient of contradiction, and inconsolable in his misfortunes’. Henry IV was ‘humble, crafty, bold and aspiring, encroaching by regular but slow degrees, building power on opinion, and cementing opinion by power’. The summary of Henry V is particularly shrewd: ‘Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France . . . He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives.’ Henry VI ‘wished to pass his time in monkish indolence and contemplation’. As for Richard III, he was ‘towering and lofty; equally impetuous and commanding; haughty, violent, and subtle; confident in his strength as well as in his cunning’.
Surprisingly, Plantagenets rarely featured in nineteenth-century historical novels. Scott found room only for Richard Coeur de Lion and John. However, Edward IV came into Bulwer-Lytton’s costume drama, The Last of the Barons, which portrayed him as ‘a temporizer – a dissimulator – but it was only as the tiger creeps, the better to spring, undetected, on its prey’. Bulwer-Lytton credited Richard III with a ‘soft and oily manner that concealed intense ambition and innate ferocity’. The only other well-known mention in fiction was a vignette of a youthful Richard (when Duke of Gloucester) in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘piece of tushery’ The Black Arrow – ‘slightly deformed, with one shoulder higher than another, and of a pale, painful, and distorted countenance . . . he that rides with Crooked Dick will ride deep’. Even so, the Victorians knew all about the Plantagenet kings from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens’s Child’s History of England and John Richard Green’s phenomenally popular History of the English People. Another source was Bishop William Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England, glorifying the Lancastrians as forerunners of the Whigs, which was widely read and not just by scholars.
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