The Life and Times of Richard III

by Anthony Cheetham

  Still unaware of what lay in store for him, Hastings was relieved to hear that Richard had cast those familiar bogeymen, the Woodvilles, as the villains of his little drama. But the alarm was clearly sounded when the Protector went on to accuse Jane Shore of abetting the Queen in her sorcery. For Jane, once Edward’s favourite mistress, now shared the Lord Chamberlain’s bed. Nevertheless Hastings repeated that any such traitors deserved punishment, if they could be proved guilty. ‘“What,” exclaimed Richard, “thou servest me, I wean, with ifs and with ands, I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor.” And therewith as in a great anger, he clapped his fist upon the board a great rap. At which token given, someone cried “Treason!” without. Therewith a door clapped, and in come there rushing men in harness, as many as the chamber might hold.’ Hastings, Stanley, Rotherham and Morton were promptly arrested. A priest was brought so that Hastings could make his peace with God. Minutes later he was ‘brought forth into the green beside the Chapel within the Tower, and his head laid down upon a log of timber and there striken off’.

  Richard promptly sent for a number of important citizens, dressed himself up in rusty armour and explained to them that his strange attire was due to the discovery that Hastings and others had planned to assassinate himself and Buckingham at the Council table. A proclamation to this effect was immediately published to forestall another panic in the city.

  Hastings’s execution was characteristic of Richard’s response to a crisis. The remedy was impulsive, direct and quick. If More’s narrative is at least half-way accurate, it was also badly staged and politically inept. By taking the short cut, without regard for legal forms, and dressing the affair in a cloak of crude melodrama, he can only have undermined the confidence of the great men on whom his political future depended. The Woodvilles could be roughly dealt with because the baronial class were only too glad to be rid of them; but Hastings was one of them, a popular man and important office-holder, and long a close friend of the late King.

  With Hastings dead, Richard felt he had little to fear from the other three conspirators. Perhaps as a gesture to quiet the fears of the nobility, Lord Stanley was restored to the Council almost immediately. Rotherham, who had once before given proof of his ineffectiveness as an opponent, was released after a short imprisonment. Only John Morton, an altogether more subtle and dangerous enemy, was to be kept out of circulation under Buckingham’s custody in the Welsh stronghold of Brecon Castle.

  Hastings’s conspiracy now led Richard to make the most important decision of his life. Hastings’s death had narrowed the base of his support to a point where not even the office of Protector, extended until Edward V’s majority, seemed a sufficient guarantee for the future. To survive, he must rule, and to rule he must be King. Perhaps the decisive factor, after Hastings’s removal, was the personality of the young King. Already at Stony Stratford Edward had shown he was capable of standing up to his uncle in defence of his mother and her family. Dominic Mancini gives further evidence of his precocity: ‘In word and deed he gave so many proofs of his liberal education, of polite, nay rather scholarly, attainments far beyond his age.’ Most remarkable was ‘his special knowledge of literature which enabled him to discourse elegantly, to understand fully, and to declaim most excellently from any work, verse or prose, that came into his hands, unless it were from among the more abstruse authors’. With his character and intellect already cast to this degree, Edward could hardly be expected to cherish the man who had imprisoned his favourite uncle, Earl Rivers, sent his mother and brother into Sanctuary and now beheaded his Lord Chamberlain not a stone’s throw from the royal apartments.

  Any doubts that Richard was now committed to obtaining the Crown for himself were dispelled three days later on Monday, 16 June when the Council met to discuss the removal of Edward’s younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, from the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey to the Tower. The two Dukes, accompanied by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Bourchier, and a retinue of armed men, proceeded to Westminster by barge. Richard was prepared to use force if necessary, but in order to avoid a violation of Sanctuary the Archbishop went in to persuade the Queen to surrender her son voluntarily. Elizabeth was probably not deceived by Bourchier’s promise that the boy would be restored after his brother’s coronation, but she bowed to the threat of force. The Protector embraced his nephew affectionately at the door of the Painted Chamber and accompanied him to the Tower.

  With the Princes in his power and his northern followers expected in London within the week, Richard lacked only a legal fiction to justify his claim to the throne. For this purpose he dredged up the story of Edward’s marriage contract with Lady Eleanor Butler – a daughter of Old Talbot, the ‘Terror of the French’. If true, this story is another example of Edward’s disastrous passion for older women. Lady Eleanor was the widow of Sir Thomas Butler and died in 1468. Had the engagement taken place, it would have invalidated his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and made bastards of her children. There is in fact no reason to suppose that the story was not true; Edward could never resist a pretty face and troth plight was a common device for coaxing reluctant virgins into bed. Clarence had cast the same aspersions on Edward’s marriage six years before, and Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, claimed to have acted as Edward’s go-between in the affair. The news was broken to the people of London on 22 June in a carefully staged sermon at Paul’s Cross. Richard selected as his mouthpiece the Lord Mayor’s brother, Dr Ralph Shaa, who took as his text the Old Testament quotation ‘Spuria vitulamina non agent radices alias’ – ‘Bastard slips shall not take deep root’.

  In the meantime, the Lords and Commons, originally summoned in May to ratify Richard’s protectorate in Parliament, were beginning to arrive in London. Richard, Buckingham and their agents were kept feverishly busy, sounding out opinions and canvassing for support. Richard exchanged the black cloth of mourning he had worn since his brother’s death for an outfit of purple velvet, and paraded through the streets of the capital with an army of retainers. The great hall at Crosby’s Place was thronged every day at dinner-time with the Protector’s guests. On 24 June the Duke of Buckingham enlarged on the theme of Dr Shaa’s sermon with an appeal to the Mayor and leading citizens at the Guildhall. He laid great stress on the abuses of government and the financial exactions which had marked the Woodville ascendancy. Under Richard’s rule he offered them, ‘the surety of your own bodies, the quiet of your wives and your daughters, the safeguard of your goods; of all which things in times past ye stood evermore in need’. Who had been able to count himself master of his own possessions ‘amoung so much pilling and polling, amoung so many taxes and tallages, of which there was never end and often time no need?’. Reiterating Richard’s rightful claim to the throne ‘which ye well remember substantially declared unto you at Paul’s Cross on Sunday’, Buckingham reminded them that the title of King was no child’s office. ‘And that great wise man well perceived when he said: woe is that Realm, that hath a child to their King.’ The Duke, according to Sir Thomas More, was ‘marvellously well spoken’; and one eye witness was much impressed by the fact that he did not even pause to spit between sentences. Nevertheless, the speech had a cool reception until the Duke’s servants, at the back of the Hall, threw their caps into the air with shouts of ‘King Richard, King Richard’.

  Even if the people of London still had their reservations, the Parliament which met at Westminster on Wednesday, 25 June, was not disposed to argue. The majority were probably content with any arrangement that promised an end to civil strife. Others who still nursed private grudges against the Woodvilles gladly assented to a measure which ensured their eclipse. And Richard’s opponents were prepared to bide their time, cowed for the moment by Hastings’s fate and the presence in the capital of so many northerners. Unanimously, the Parliament assented to a document which followed much the same lines as Buckingham’s speech in the Guildhall and was couched in th
e form of a petition to the Duke of Gloucester to take the Crown. On the following day a deputation, headed by none other than the Duke of Buckingham, made its way to the Protector at Baynard’s Castle and presented their petition. In keeping with his taste for amateur dramatics, Richard feigned surprise and reluctance before he acceded to more shouts of ‘King Richard, King Richard’. The nobility pressed forward to take the oath of allegiance, and King Richard rode in state to Westminster Hall. Here he laid formal claim to his title by seating himself on the marble chair of King’s Bench.

  While the Lords and Commons were listening to the petition at Westminster, a more melancholy scene was enacted in Yorkshire. Under the supervision of the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Anthony Earl Rivers, Lord Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan were executed at Pontefract. Witnesses were surprised to learn that the magnificent and talented Earl wore a hair shirt next to his body. Thus Richard signified his triumph over the Woodvilles by killing the one member of the family whose talents and popularity might have redeemed the greed and cruelty of his kin and threatened the ascendancy of his executioner.

  In London arrangements were in hand for the most magnificent coronation of the century. Rich ermines, velvets and cloth-of-gold, so lately intended for Edward V’s enthronement were made to serve the occasion of Richard’s. While the Master of the Wardrobe laboured to fulfill his contract, Lord John Howard prevailed on the King to confer on him the dukedom of Norfolk and the right to bear the crown to Westminster Abbey as High Steward of England. At the beginning of July, the King held a review of the five thousand men of Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Westmorland who had at last arrived under the command of the Earl of Northumberland. The review took place at Moor Fields and provoked some disparaging comments from Londoners who noted their rusty gear and bedraggled appearance.

  On the 6 July 1483, the King and Queen, preceded by heralds and trumpeters, walked barefoot in procession to the Abbey. Behind the bishops and Cardinal Bourchier came Northumberland with the Sword of Mercy, Lord Stanley with the Constable’s mace, Richard’s brother-in-law John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk with the sceptre and Suffolk’s eldest son John, Earl of Lincoln with the orb. These were followed by the newly-created Duke of Norfolk who carried the crown, and his son, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, with the Sword of State. The King himself was flanked by Viscount Lovell and the Earl of Kent bearing the Swords of Justice. Buckingham held Richard’s train, and behind him walked the remaining earls and barons of the realm. After the King’s procession came the Queen’s, her regalia borne by two earls and a viscount. At the high altar Richard and Anne stripped to the waist and were anointed with the chrism. They then changed into cloth-of-gold and Cardinal Bourchier set the crowns on their heads. A Te Deum was sung and the royal couple received communion, before they returned to the dais at Westminster Hall for the coronation banquet.

  For King Richard III the coronation was a triumph. Not only had it set a new precedent in splendour, but it had also been attended by virtually the entire peerage of England, including Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, who had carried Anne’s train, and the Queen Dowager’s brother-in-law, Viscount Lisle. And all this had been achieved at the cost of only four lives.

  Looking back over the crowded months of April, May and June 1483, it is easy to see how the Tudor historians, reading history backwards, came to the conclusion that Richard’s path to the throne was carefully planned from the moment he left York. The clockwork sequence of events from the seizing of Edward V, the execution of Hastings, the abduction of the Duke of York, Dr Shaa’s sermon, to the mummery of the petition – hint at a cold-blooded and cynical intelligence systematically removing the obstacles that lay between Richard and the inheritance of his nephew. Even Dominic Mancini, who wrote his account only six months later and drew no pension from the Tudors, saw Richard’s usurpation in this light.

  Yet this portrait is too glib to be convincing. It does not mesh with what is known of Richard in previous years – the years of service as a soldier and an administrator with a distaste for courtly intrigues and political in-fighting. The portrait makes better sense if Richard is seen as a man whose eyes were only by degrees opened to the logical consequences of his own actions. His reaction to each succeeding crisis bears the mark of an impulsive man of action taking the short cut to his immediate objective without pausing to work out the long-term effects. If Richard is to be judged, then he must be accused not of too much guile, but of too little.

  5

  ‘The Most Untrue Creature Living’

  August–November

  1483

  Lord Hastings dead, the Queen Dowager in Sanctuary, the boy King in the Tower, the capital invaded by wild northerners, the Duke of Gloucester King.… News travelled slowly in fifteenth-century England, and the revolutionary events of the past two months had set the whole country buzzing with wild rumours and unsubstantiated gossip. The new King must therefore show himself to his subjects, dispense justice and favours with an open hand, and promise to be every man’s good lord. Two weeks after his coronation Richard set out on a royal progress through the West Country and the Midlands to Yorkshire and the North.

  But first the three men who had made his usurpation possible received their rewards. Buckingham had the lion’s share: he was appointed Constable and Great Chamberlain of England. In addition Richard recognised his long-standing claim to a huge part of the de Bohun inheritance, with an annual income of over £700. To the Earl of Northumberland went the wardenship of the West March and Richard’s palatinate in Cumberland. John Howard, the newly-created Duke of Norfolk, received Crown lands worth about £1,000 a year in Suffolk, Essex, Kent and Cambridgeshire. The princely extent of these grants, which virtually created three principalities in Wales and the West Country, in the North, and in East Anglia, show how desperately narrow had become the clique on which Richard’s power rested.

  On about 20 July the royal cortège set out from Windsor. Anxious to impress on his subjects that he ruled not by force but by consent, Richard dispensed with an armed escort and was accompanied instead by a magnificent retinue of the principal officers, lay and clerical, of his kingdom. By 23 July they were at Reading. At Oxford the King was entertained by Magdalen’s founder, William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, and attended two scholarly debates on moral philosophy and theology. At nearby Woodstock he restored to the inhabitants some lands which Edward had annexed to the forest of Whichwood. To the city of Gloucester he granted a new charter of liberties. The abbot of Tewkesbury, whose abbey housed the bones of Clarence and of Henry VI’s son, Prince Edward, received a donation of £300. At Warwick early in August, Richard was joined by his Queen. And so, by way of Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham, the procession came to Pontefract where Richard paused to prepare for the climax of his triumphant progress – the State entry into York and the investiture of his son Edward as Prince of Wales.

  The King’s secretary, John Kendal, had written in advance to the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen and Sheriffs of York instructing them ‘to receive His Highness and the Queen as laudably as their wisdom can imagine’. The city streets were to be hung ‘with cloth of arras, tapestry-work and other; for that there come many southern Lords and men of worship with them which will mark greatly your receiving Their Graces’. On 29 August the Mayor and other local dignitaries duly turned out in scarlet and red gowns to greet their Sovereign outside the city walls. His retinue included six bishops; five earls; Lord Stanley, the Steward of the Household; Viscount Lovell, the Lord Chamberlain; Sir William Hussey, the Chief Justice; Alexander, Duke of Albany; the Spanish Ambassador, de Sasiola; and a great train of royal household officials.

  An even more magnificent spectacle took place on Sunday, 7 September, after a week of plays, banquets, speeches and pageants. This was the day selected for the ten-year-old Earl of Salisbury’s investiture as Prince of Wales. The survival of a letter dated 30 August to the Master of King’s Wardrob
e, requisitioning large quantities of satins, silks, velvet and cloth-of-gold, suggests that the investiture may have been a last-minute addition to Richard’s programme. The order included no less than thirteen thousand fustian badges emblazoned with his device of the silver boar and ‘three coats of arms beaten with fine gold for our own person’. Forty trumpeters heralded the arrival of the royal party at York Minster, where the Prince was invested with a plain gold coronet and a golden rod. In honour of the occasion de Sasiola was knighted and received a collar of gold. It was, as Henry VII’s official historian, Polydore Vergil, testified, ‘a day of great state for York... there being three princes wearing crowns – the King, the Queen and the Prince of Wales’.

  While Richard was busy impressing his subjects with the majesty of his office, powerful forces were conspiring in the South to deprive him of it. Once the initial shock of the usurpation had worn off, some form of reaction on the part of the dispossessed was only to be expected. Most prominent among the dispossessed were, of course, the Woodvilles. The ex-Queen’s relatives – the Marquess of Dorset, Sir Richard Woodville and Lionel Woodville, Bishop of Salisbury – formed the sinews of a plot which bound together the chronic discontent of the Kentishmen, the outrage felt by the old guard of Edward IV’s personal friends and retainers, and the traditional outposts of Lancastrian loyalism in the south-west. The Wars of the Roses had a habit of uniting strange bed-fellows in a common aim: to these was now added the alliance of Woodville and Lancaster, created by the pervasive rumour that Edward IV’s sons had been quietly murdered in the Tower, or spirited away to some northern fortress whence they would never emerge.