The Life and Times of Richard III

by Anthony Cheetham

  These rumours transformed the prospects of a penniless young exile at the Court of Francis, Duke of Brittany. For Henry Tudor, now in his twenty-seventh year, was the sole surviving heir to the claims of the House of Lancaster. On the side of his mother, Margaret Beaufort, he traced his descent from John of Gaunt’s extra-marital liaison with Catherine Swynford. The four children of this union, who took the name of Beaufort, were later declared legitimate through the favour of their half-brother, Henry IV, although barred from the royal succession by Act of Parliament. But Acts of Parliament could be repealed as readily as they were made. On his father’s side Henry’s lineage was equally distinguished and equally tainted with the bar sinister of bastardy. Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond was the son of an obscure Welsh gentleman, Owen Tudor, who had found his way into the bed of Henry V’s widow, Queen Catherine. Owen claimed to have married the Queen, but the only proof that was ever forthcoming was the three children she bore him. Henry’s double illegitimacy offered him some protection during the early years of Yorkist rule and until 1470 he grew up quietly in the household of the Yorkist Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert. But after the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 had put paid to Lancastrian hopes and to the last two legitimate Lancastrian claimants, the fourteen-year-old boy became a valuable dynastic chess piece and was smuggled to Duke Francis’s Court in Brittany by his uncle, Jasper Tudor. But with the disaffection of the Woodvilles and the old guard of Edward’s supporters, the pawn began to assume the stature of a king.

  The chief danger to Richard’s régime lay in the possibility of a marriage alliance between Henry and one of Edward IV’s daughters. In his absence, Richard’s Council had already taken steps to guard against this unwelcome prospect by making sure that Edward’s daughters remained cooped up at Westminster. The Croyland Chronicle tells us that ‘the noble Church of the monks at Westminster, and all the neighbouring parts, assumed the character of a castle and fortress while men of the greatest austerity were appointed to act as keepers thereof’. But the actual link between the rebels at home and the Lancastrian Court in exile was supplied by a new defector who now ranked as the second man in the kingdom.

  The King was at Lincoln on 11 October when he heard the astounding news that Buckingham had joined the other conspirators already identified by his informers. Buckingham’s rebellion makes no sense unless it is assumed that his earlier support of Richard’s cause was, all along, part of a grand design to clear his own path to the throne. Tudor historians later concocted a variety of fables to account for this breathtaking volte-face – a quarrel over the de Bohun lands, remorse over the death of the Princes, the pervasive wiles of Buckingham’s prisoner Bishop Morton – but only Polydore Vergil plumbs the Duke’s motives when he reports the rumour that ‘the Duke did the less dissuade King Richard from usurping the kingdom by means of so many mischievous deeds that he afterward, being hated both of God and man, might be expelled from the same, and so himself called by the commons to that dignity’. The scheme was not as hare-brained as its ultimate failure made it appear. For Buckingham bore the unquartered arms of Thomas of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward III, and his lineage was untainted by the bastardy that blemished Henry Tudor’s Beaufort claims. Certainly the Yorkists, who had killed his father at St Albans in 1455 and his grandfather at Northampton in 1460, had no claims on his loyalty. Having used Richard to eliminate the senior branch of the Yorkist line he now planned to use the Lancastrian Tudor to unseat the junior branch. The tale of his repentance would in the meantime reconcile the Woodville rebels to co-operating with the late instrument of their downfall.

  John Morton, Bishop of Ely, a prisoner at Brecon Castle since Hastings’s execution, put Buckingham in touch with Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, and she in turn contacted her son in Brittany. Other couriers linked the Brecon conspirators with the Woodvilles. By these covert means the substance of a tripartite agreement between Henry, Buckingham and the Woodvilles was hammered out. Buckingham pledged his support to Henry’s claims; Henry promised to marry the Queen Dowager’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. By the end of September all the rebel groups had co-ordinated their plans for a simultaneous rising on 18 October, and Henry Tudor had secured the Duke of Brittany’s financial backing for an invasion by sea. Morton was doubtless astute enough to realise that Buckingham the Kingmaker had himself in mind for the throne rather than Henry Tudor, but that was an issue which could wait on Richard’s destruction.

  In the event Richard was saved by good intelligence, prompt action and foul weather. With so many different factions involved in the plot, it comes as no surprise that a few stool pigeons came to roost in Richard’s camp. Within twenty-four hours of hearing the news, the King had sent out the summonses for a royal army to assemble at Leicester by 21 October. Here is the letter he addressed to the Mayor of York:

  BY THE KING

  Trusty and well-beloved: we greet you well, and let ye wit that the Duke of Buckingham traitorously has turned upon us, contrary to the duty of his allegiance, and entendeth the utter destruction of us, you and all other our true subjects that have taken our part; whose traitorous intent we with God’s grace intend briefly to resist and subdue. We desire and pray you in our hearty wise that ye will send unto us as many men defensibly arrayed on horseback as ye may goodly make to our town of Leicester the 21st day of this present month without fail as ye will tender our honour and your own weal, and we will see you so paid for your reward as ye shall hold ye well content. Give further credence to our trusty pursuivant this bearer. Given under our signet at our city of Lincoln the 11th day of October.

  By the time that he and Northumberland were reviewing their troops at Leicester on the 21st, Richard was cheered to hear of the swift measures taken by his lieutenant in the South, the Duke of Norfolk, for the defence of London. Finding their way to the capital blocked by Norfolk’s men at Gravesend, the Kent and Surrey rebels led by Sir John and Richard Guildford were compelled to withdraw and await the promised arrival of the Duke of Buckingham.

  Thanks to the King’s effective early warning system and to an exceptional bout of heavy rains which deluged Wales at this moment, the rebel Duke had sufficient troubles of his own.

  In no drowsy manner [reports the Croyland Chronicle] King Richard contrived that, throughout Wales, as well as in all parts of the marches thereof, armed men should be set in readiness around the said Duke, as soon as ever he had set a foot from his home, to pounce upon all his property; who, accordingly, encouraged by the prospect of the Duke’s wealth, which the King had, for that purpose, bestowed upon them were in every way to obstruct his progress. The result was, that, on the side of the castle of Brecknock [Brecon], which looks towards the interior of Wales, Thomas, the son of the late Sir Roger Vaughan, with the aid of his brethren and kinsmen, most carefully watched the whole of the surrounding country; while Humphrey Stafford partly destroyed the bridges and passes by which England was entered, and kept the other part closed by means of a strong force set there to guard the same.

  Drenched by the rains and harassed by the guerillas, Buckingham’s retainers lost heart and melted away as they struggled across the Welsh borders into Herefordshire. At Lord Ferrers’s manor of Webley the Duke was abandoned even by Bishop Morton, who fled first to the Fen Country, then to Flanders. Sick with fear, the Duke himself deserted what was left of his following. He disguised himself as a commoner and took refuge in the Shropshire cottage of one of his servants, Ralph Bannaster of Wem. For Master Ralph the chief attraction of his guest lay in the £1,000 reward the King had set on his head, and he promptly betrayed the Duke to the local sheriff.

  With London in safe hands and Buckingham washed out, Richard was able to concentrate his entire army on the western rebels – Sir Richard Woodville at Newbury, Bishop Lionel Woodville, Sir John Cheyncy and Walter Hungerford at Salisbury, and Dorset, the Courtenays and Thomas St Leger at Exeter – whose only hope now lay in Henry Tudor’s fleet. But Henry did
not even set out until 31 October, and as Richard’s army marched south into Wiltshire, the rebels scattered into Sanctuary or sought shelter abroad. When the King entered Salisbury unopposed on 28 October, the great rebellion was over. Buckingham, tried and sentenced by the Vice-Constable, Sir Ralph Assheton, was beheaded in Salisbury market place on Sunday, 2 November.

  At Exeter on 8 November Richard at last had news of Tudor’s ships. Sailing from the Breton port of Paimpol on 31 October with fifteen ships and five thousand men, the fleet had been scattered at sea by a storm. When he hove to outside Poole Harbour in Dorset with his two remaining ships, the shore was lined with armed men. They were Buckingham’s men, they shouted, come to escort him to the Duke. Henry was undeceived. Sailing on to Plymouth he learned that the whole of the West Country lay in Richard’s power, and hoisted sail for the return voyage to Brittany.

  *

  One great question still overshadows the episode of Buckingham’s rebellion. What had happened to the late King’s children, Edward and Richard, the Princes in the Tower?

  The few surviving scraps of contemporary evidence offer only rumour and hearsay. Dominic Mancini unfortunately left England early in July 1483, shortly after Richard’s coronation, and does not even mention Buckingham’s revolt. Of the Princes he tells us only that, after Hastings’s execution,

  ...he [Edward] and his brother were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether. A Strasbourg doctor, the last of his attendants whose services the King enjoyed, reported that the young King, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.

  Mancini goes on to say that ‘already there was a suspicion he had been done away with. Whether, however, he has been done away with, and by what manner of death, so far I have not at all discovered.’

  The other contemporary English source – the Croyland Chronicle – confirms that these rumours, reported by Mancini as early as July, were also current on the eve of Buckingham’s rebellion in September. ‘A rumour’, it states, ‘was spread that the sons of King Edward had died a violent death, but it was uncertain how.’ However, the wording here implies that the rumour may well have been spread by the rebels with malice aforethought.

  The only outright accusation of murder that dates from this time appears in a speech made before the Estates General by the French Chancellor at Tours in January 1484. The Chancellor invited the assembled delegates to spare a thought for the children of Edward IV ‘whose massacre went unpunished, while the assassin was crowned by popular assent’. But the French, who had only a few months before torn up the Treaty of Picquigny, were obviously eager to clutch at any straw which would promote the civil discords of their enemies, and this ‘evidence’ must be taken with a pinch of salt. De Rochford most probably heard the rumours from Mancini and translated them for propaganda purposes from suspicion into fact.

  Stricter confinement, suspicion and propaganda... that is as far as the literary evidence goes. But the dearth of these contemporary sources contrasts strangely with the long and involved story given by Sir Thomas More in his unfinished fragment The History of King Richard III. More’s account, written forty years later, had such a decisive influence on subsequent versions that it is worth quoting in full:

  King Richard, after his coronation, taking his way to Gloucester to visit in his new honour the town of which he bare the name of his old, devised as he rode to fulfil that thing which he before had intended. And forasmuch as his mind gave him that, his nephews living, men would not reckon that he could have right to the realm, he thought therefore without delay to rid them, as though the killing of his kinsmen could amend his cause and make him a kindly King. Whereupon he sent one John Green, whom he specially trusted, unto Sir Robert Brackenbury, constable of the Tower, with a letter and credence also that the same Sir Robert should in any wise put the two children to death. This John Green did his errand unto Brackenbury, kneeling before our Lady in the Tower, who plainly answered that he would never put them to death, to die therefore; with which answer John Green, returning, recounted the same to King Richard at Warwick, yet in his way. Wherewith he took such displeasure and thought that the same night he said unto a secret page of his. ‘Ah, whom shall a man trust? Those that I have brought up myself, those that I had weaned would most surely serve me, even those fail me and at my commandment will do nothing for me.’

  ‘Sir,’ quoth his page, ‘there lieth one on your pallet without, that I dare well say, to do your Grace pleasure, the thing were right hard that he would refuse’, meaning by this Sir James Tyrell, which was a man of right goodly personage and for nature’s gifts worthy to have served a much better prince, if he had well served God and by grace obtained as much truth and good will as he had strength and wit. The man had an high heart and sore longed upward, not rising yet so fast as he had hoped, being hindered and kept under by the means of Sir Richard Ratcliffe and Sir William Catesby, which longing for no more partners of the prince’s favour, and namely not for him whose pride they wist would bear no peer, kept him by secret drifts out of all secret trust. Which thing this page well had marked and known. Wherefore, this occasion offered, of very special friendship he took his time to put him forward and by such wise do him good that all the enemies he had, except the devil, could never have done him so much hurt. For upon this page’s words King Richard arose (for this communication had he sitting at the draught [privy], a convenient carpet for such a counsel) and came out into the pallet chamber, on which he found in bed Sir James and Sir Thomas Tyrell, of person like and brethren of blood, but nothing of kin in conditions. Then said the King merrily to them: ‘What, Sirs, be ye in bed so soon!’ and calling up Sir James, broke to him secretly his mind in this mischievious matter; in which he found him nothing strange. Wherefore, on the morrow, he sent him to Brackenbury with a letter, by which he was commanded to deliver Sir James all the keys of the Tower for one night, to the end he might there accomplish the King’s pleasure in such thing as he had given him commandment. After which letter delivered and the keys received, Sir James appointed the night next ensuing to destroy them, devising before and preparing the means. The prince, as soon as the protector left that name and took himself as King, had it showed unto him that he should not reign, but his uncle should have the crown. At which word the prince, sore abashed, began to sigh and said: ‘Alas, I would my uncle would let me have my life yet, though I lose my kingdom.’ Then he that told him the tale used him with good words and put him in the best comfort he could. But forthwith was the prince and his brother both shut up: and all others removed from them, only one called Black Will or William Slaughter except, set to serve them and see them sure. After which time the prince never tied his points, nor aught wraught of himself, but with that young babe his brother lingered in thought and heaviness till this traitorous death delivered them of that wretchedness. [An examination of the remains generally held to be those of the Princes shows that Edward V was suffering from a bone disease of the lower jaw and his state of depression may well have been due to ill health rather than any premonition of his fate.] For Sir James Tyrell devised that they should be murdered in their beds. To the execution whereof, he appointed Miles Forest, one of the four that kept them, a fellow fleshed in murder beforetime. To him he joined one John Dighton, his own horsekeeper, a big broad, square, strong knave. Then, all the others being removed from them, this Miles Forest and John Dighton, about midnight (the silly [innocent] children lying in their beds) came into the chamber and suddenly lapped them up among the clothes, so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the feather bed and pillows hard unto their mouths, that within a while, smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of heaven, leaving to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed. Which after that t
he wretches perceived, first by the struggling with the pains of death, and after lying still, to be thoroughly dead: they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed, and fetched Sir James to see them. Which, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stair foot, meetly deep in the ground, under a great heap of stones.

  Then rode Sir James in great haste to King Richard, and showed him all the manner of the murder, who give him great thanks and, as some say, there made him knight. But he allowed not, as I have heard, the burying in so vile a corner, saying he would have them buried in a better place, because they were a King’s sons. Lo the honourable courage of a King! Whereupon they say that a priest of Sir Robert Brackenbury took up the bodies again, and secretly entered them in such place, as by the occasion of his death, which only knew it, could never since come to light. Very truth is it and well known, that at such times as Sir James Tyrell was in the Tower, for treason committed against the most famous prince King Henry the Seventh, both Dighton and he were examined, and confessed the murder in manner above written, but whither the bodies were removed they could nothing tell. And thus have I learned of them that much knew and little cause had to lie, were these two noble princes, these innocent tender children, born of most royal blood, brought up in great wealth, likely long to live to reign and rule in the realm, by traitorous tyranny taken, deprived of their estate, shortly shut up in prison, and privily slain and murdered their bodies cast God knows where by the cruel ambition of their unnatural uncle and his dispiteous tormentors.