by Linda Simon
Two young boys stood in the way of Richard’s accession to the throne. The twelve-year-old Prince Edward was at Ludlow, in Wales, under the tutelage of his uncle, the queen’s brother Earl Rivers, when news came of his father’s death and his imminent coronation. He prepared to journey to London, but the Woodvilles exercised extreme caution. It was not until late in the month that some two thousand soldiers had been assembled and proceeded to the capital.
On April 30, Earl Rivers, following his nephew’s entourage, was intercepted by Richard with some three hundred soldiers and arrested. Richard and Buckingham then rode to Stony Stratford, where they overtook the prince, attended by Sir Thomas Vaughan, his chamberlain, and his half brother, Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage, Sir Richard Grey.
Richard advised Prince Edward that a plot had been devised against him, in which both Vaughan and Grey were instrumental. Edward protested, but the atmosphere of doubt and suspicion was so thick that the youth was eventually convinced. Rivers and Grey were imprisoned at Pontefract, whose thick walls had already witnessed centuries of violence. On June 25, both were beheaded.
At first, Edward and his younger brother, Richard, were guarded at Stony Stratford. The queen and her other son, the marquis of Dorset, fled into sanctuary at Westminster, where frightening rumors reached them. In early May, when Richard and the duke of Buckingham finally arrived in London, the boy king had been moved to the Tower; his brother, to Westminster.
Because it was usual for a king to rest at the Tower before his coronation, Richard’s removal there of his nephew was not seen as an act of rebellion. Edward was permitted to confer with his most trusted counselors: among them, Hastings, Morton, and Stanley. The coronation was set for late June, and the council debated over whether or not Richard’s protectorate should continue for the entire minority of the king. Richard had no doubt the council would sanction his continuing as protector, but he grew increasingly suspicious that the intimate advisers surrounding the king were becoming overly sympathetic to the Woodvilles and would allow their influence in government to thwart his own eventual rule.
Those three advisers were closely watched. Each was influential; each, in his own way, could be a formidable opponent to Richard. Sir Thomas Stanley was wealthy, with large landholdings and great command over several key areas in England and Wales. He could assemble vast troops, if he were called on for aid, and could be indispensable in an insurrection. Bishop Morton combined the authority of the Church with a natural presence that inspired respect and deference. He had decided, as a boy, to devote himself to his country. “Having endured many changes of fortune,” wrote his disciple
Thomas More, “he had acquired at great cost a vast stock of wisdom, which is not soon lost when purchased so dear.”[72] He had been loyal to Henry VI, an active Lancastrian, but had been wooed by Edward IV to support the Yorkist cause when he became king. If Morton yielded because of expediency in 1461, he nevertheless had retained his own identity and inner strength.
In 1478, Morton’s appointment as bishop of Ely had been celebrated with great pomp. The bishop walked barefoot the two miles from his palace at Downham to the cathedral and then, after the ceremonies, retired with his guests to the palace of Ely for a feast as grand as any that might be held at Westminster. Three courses, each comprising some dozen dishes, included venison, cygnet, pheasant, peacock, rabbit, perch, curlew, plover, crayfish, larks, and sturgeon. Though, as spokesman for the Church, he was concerned with extravagance and ostentation, decrying “the base avarice of a few,” he admitted his weakness for fine fare, and his reputation as a gourmand was well known.
It was, in fact, the bishop’s strawberries that Richard pretended to covet one June day when he interrupted a meeting of Hastings, Stanley, and Morton. “My lord,” Gloucester said, “you have verie good strawberries at your garden in Holborn, I require you to let us have a mess of them.” The request did not seem to surprise Morton, who replied, “Gladlie, my lord … would God I had some better thing as readie to your pleasure as that!”[73]
If Richard’s craving did not upset Morton, it unnerved Stanley, who the night before had had an unsettling dream concerning himself and Hastings. He “thought that a boare with his tuskes so rased them both by the heads, that the bloud ran about both their shoulders. And forsomuch as the protector gave the boare for his cognisance, this dreame made so fearefull an impression in his heart, that he was throughlie determined no longer to tarie …”[74] He started from the dream before midnight, and immediately sent a messenger to Hastings, begging him to ride away with him. But Hastings refused. Now, as the men waited for Bishop Morton’s servant to return with the strawberries and for Richard to come back to claim them, Stanley wondered if he should not have acted on the omen.
When the protector returned, he was not as convivial as he had been just one hour before; he seemed tense, angry, even bellicose. Without warning, he burst out and accused the men of treachery against his rule and alliance with the Woodvilles. Richard’s wrath was directed especially at Hastings, who, among the three, had a special connection to his late brother’s reign. After Edward’s death, the king’s favorite mistress, Jane Shore, had passed on to Hastings, and the liaison made Hastings’ loyalty to Richard questionable. In his fury, Richard accused Shore of witchcraft, conspiring with the queen to cause one of his arms to wither. The accusation was incomprehensible to the counselors. Richard’s arm had been withered since birth; besides, Elizabeth hated Jane Shore as only a wronged woman could, and surely would have chosen another accomplice if she had been foolish enough to stoop to witchcraft. The men were stunned.
Suddenly Richard’s aides moved to restrain them. In the struggle, Stanley was struck on the side of the head and slid under a table, bleeding as he had in his nightmare. Morton was sent to the Tower; Stanley was allowed to remain under arrest in his own rooms. But Hastings was led out and immediately executed.
Stanley’s sudden fall from power was a severe blow to his wife’s plans. Deeply concerned over her husband’s safety, Margaret realized that without his influence to shield her she could not proceed with her scheme to bring her son back to England. If Stanley was to be banished from court, she herself would be a virtual exile from the center of power. Her closest allies were the very men Richard had singled out for punishment. Only Buckingham, she thought, might one day be useful to her. For the time, at least, he remained in Richard’s favor.
Even Jane Shore was not exempt from Richard’s wrath. Shortly after Hastings’ death, Richard forfeited most of her wealth, accumulated from years of fortunate liaisons, and sent her to prison. He persisted in his charge of witchcraft, but when nothing could be proved, shifted instead to charging her with being a whore. “Every man laughed … to hear it then so suddenly highly taken,” Thomas More remembered,[75] but Richard would not be made a fool. He forced Thomas Kemp, bishop of London, to sentence Jane to the public penance of walking in a Sunday procession with a candle in her hand, dressed only in a white sheet. But she could not be humiliated. She blushed demurely and seemed even more attractive than she had before. Righteous women, flocking to see the harlot shamed, found they were moved to pity rather than censure. The men were enthralled.
Richard now turned his attention to the two heirs. Edward was in the Tower, but his brother had been allowed to join Elizabeth at Westminster. Richard’s ally, Archbishop Thomas Bourchier, pleaded with Elizabeth to allow her son to join Edward. She was understandably reluctant, frightened by the rumors she had heard about Richard’s plan to do away with the children to clear his own path to the throne. But the prelate’s argument won her over. First he told her that the populace desired to see the young son of Edward IV, whose presence alone could quash disturbing rumors of dissension in the realm. Then he tried to convince her that the young king himself missed his close companion; she would deepen her child’s grief if she refused to allow the two brothers to share each other’s company.
Elizabeth was not fully reassured by
these reasons, so Bourchier tried a more philosophical argument. Since her son was too innocent to have committed any crime, he told her, the boy had no need of sanctuary. She had nothing to fear as long as she believed that her son was guiltless. At last she allowed the child to go. “Farewell, my own sweet son; God send you good keeping,”[76] she said, kissing the weeping child. She never saw him again.
With the children under his control and out of the sight of the sentimental populace, with his opponents eliminated or imprisoned, Richard moved to the next step of his plan. He was determined to convince the lords and commoners that the children of Edward and Elizabeth were, in fact, bastards and therefore unable to inherit the crown. He claimed that Edward had been betrothed to another woman before his marriage to Elizabeth — his brother’s attachments to Eleanor Butler and Elizabeth Lucy, both noblewomen, made the accusation credible — making the Woodville marriage adulterous and the offspring illegitimate.
Using Buckingham as his mouthpiece, Richard presented the slander to the citizens of London in the Guildhall in late June. Then again on Sunday, June 22, the day on which Edward was to have been crowned, Dr. Ralph Shaa, a popular preacher, stood at St. Paul’s Cross and repeated the fabrication to credulous masses, adding that Edward IV himself may have been an adulterous child of the dowager duchess of York: he never had looked much like his father. “This is,” the speaker concluded, pointing each time to Richard, who made his appearance just at the final words, “the father’s own figure; this is his own countenance — the very print of his visage, the sure undoubted image, the plain express likeness of that noble duke.”[77]
The carefully staged performance, patterned after Edward IV’s usurpation in 1461, was to have ended with a unanimous cry of “King Richard! King Richard!” But for both Buckingham and Shaa the audience stood mute, “as they had been turned to stone, for wonder of this shameful sermon.”[78] Buckingham was annoyed at the obstinate crowd and attempted to exhort them to acclaim the new king: Did they want Richard or not? But the listeners merely began to whisper to one another, still stunned. At last some of Buckingham’s servants and Richard’s henchmen, gathered together at the rear of the crowd, cried out for the proposed king and tossed their caps into the air. Buckingham, clutching at the opportunity, thanked the audience for their hearty and unanimous approval. The next day, he told them, he would lead them to request, as humbly as they might, that Richard take over the realm from the bastards.
Richard’s plan was enacted so quickly, and was essentially so absurd, that the populace of London had no time to consider its real meaning for them. On June 25 Richard was asked to take the crown and modestly agreed. Before a great audience at Baynard’s Castle, Buckingham again read the petition that awarded Richard the throne, this time to a more enthusiastic group of citizens. Richard then rode to Westminster and, at the moment that he first sat on the marble King’s Bench, declared his reign begun. One June 26, 1483, Richard wrote later, “we entred into owre just title taking upon us oure dignities royall and supprane gouvernaunce of this oure royme of England.”[79]
VII - The Rebel
NOW THAT RICHARD had achieved his goal, Stanley, with his powerful associates and great wealth, was once again embraced as a loyal supporter. He became steward of the royal household, a position he had held under Edward IV, and was appointed by Richard to the Order of the Garter, an elite fraternity of noblemen that had been instituted by Edward III. Margaret Beaufort, too, was taken into the king’s favor. For her coronation robes, she received ten yards of scarlet for her livery, six yards of crimson velvet for a long gown, six yards of white cloth of gold, six and a half yards of blue velvet, and six and a half yards of crimson cloth of gold for another gown. At the coronation ceremony, Stanley bore the king’s mace. His wife carried the train of the new queen in a ceremony that was among the most elaborate ever staged in England.
Because of his precarious claim to the throne, Richard III knew that pageant and rite were essential to inspire awe in his subjects. He realized, as well, that threat of insurrection could not be ignored. From his captains throughout the land, Richard called for troops to protect him. The city of York, where Richard’s support was especially strong, sent a contingent of soldiers each paid twelve pence per day for his participation in the events. Every man, however, was required to provide his own glove leather tunic, summer garb for the deflection of arrows and swords.
The number of troops astounded and even alarmed many onlookers. Some six thousand soldiers assembled with Richard on July 1, 1483, at Finsbury fields outside London, where the king-elect passed among them and thanked them for their presence. Then the huge procession made its way to the city. Many of the nobility, some of whom had once been staunch Lancastrians, prepared to kneel before the new king and his queen, Anne of Warwick.
The unfortunate Anne had seen her father, the failed King-Maker, fall at the hands of the Yorkists. When she was sixteen, she had been married to the son of Henry VI, but within a year found herself a widow when Edward was slain at Tewkesbury. Anne was a desirable heiress, despite her family’s political affiliations, and in 1473 she was taken in marriage by Richard of Gloucester. Unlike Margaret Beaufort, who remarried in the same year, Anne seems to have had little choice in the selection of her husband. Dutifully, Anne presented Richard with a son, Edward, born at Middleham Castle in 1474. By the time she walked barefoot, as queen, upon a carpet of striped cloth, accompanying her husband to pray at St. Edward’s shrine, she was already suffering from the consumption that, aggravated by personal sorrow, would soon kill her.
From the shrine, the sumptuously arrayed king and queen proceeded to the altar, where they would be anointed and crowned. Above Anne’s head a canopy floated, with golden bells at each corner. She herself wore a coronet of gold and precious stones. Bishops flanked her. A mass of noblemen and noblewomen followed her. Perhaps none was so stirred by the ceremony as Margaret Beaufort. Listening to the long chorus of Latin songs, watching as the monarchs were divested of their robes and anointed, Margaret could not help but picture her own son receiving the crown to which he was heir. The Te Deum was sung, and at the offertory Margaret sat at Anne’s left, kneeling in homage with her peers. There were many, kneeling just as she was at that moment, with as little good will toward Richard and as little loyalty to the Yorkists as Margaret herself felt. Her husband and the men he could easily sway, former supporters of Edward IV, the aides of her late second husband, Henry Stafford — all these would feel no remorse if Richard were deposed; all might be counted on to rally to her own cause.
Margaret also attended the coronation banquet, which began at four and lasted for five and a half hours, long even for medieval feasts. Her husband was among those who served the king from platters of gold and silver, which followed one another in seemingly endless succession. Each course contained numerous dishes — fish, fowl, meat, and game — spiced and sauced. Without forks, which had not yet been imported from the continent, diners could manage only minced, diced, or otherwise finely cut-up food, which they could pick up with their fingers or which would adhere to a chunk of bread. Recipes, whatever their basic ingredients, included unlikely combinations of spices, wine, and sweetening, sometimes effectively disguising rotting meats. Each course was preceded by a “subtlety,” a sculpture in sugar depicting some historical or allegorical figure appropriate to the occasion. These were masterpieces of detail, and it is no wonder that chefs and their assistants were treasured members of any court’s staff.
The opulence of the feast did not impress Margaret, whose asceticism extended to her eating habits. No one bothered to notice how little she ate and drank, how she turned away from the dripping fingers and greasy mouths of her dining partners. No one missed her when she departed early from the festivities to retire to the silence and solace of her rooms.
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Within one week of the coronation, Buckingham realized his reward. In a grant soon endorsed by the first Parliament of the reign, he came int
o his inheritance of over £1000 per year and lands that included the manor of Amersham in Buckinghamshire; the Castle of Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire; Brecon, Hay, and Huntingdon castles in Wales; and three manors in Wiltshire. Besides this ample realm, he was made chief justice and chamberlain of North and South Wales and had the constableship, stewardship, and receiver generalship of the king’s lands there. He used his own seal to raise troops, appoint officials, and assemble arms. In his own dominion, he was nearly as powerful as the king.
But he was not king, and perhaps he believed that he might have a chance — as much chance as Richard III had had — to take the crown. He believed that the easy acquiescence of the lords and commoners to Richard’s stunning deception was caused, at least in part, by their fear of imminent civil war. Richard’s forces were strong and well organized and ably commanded; the Woodvilles could boast no such army behind them, since Richard had taken many of Edward IV’s finest troops with him.
Buckingham, warily watching the progress of Richard’s reign, was convinced that it would end in doom. His own authority would be assured only if he sided with those who opposed Richard. Historians have speculated that Buckingham quarreled with Richard and angrily defected. But there seems little reason to have quarreled with a man who had handed him half a kingdom. Buckingham felt no loyalty to his monarch. He was a quintessential opportunist, and would follow power, wealth, and the lure of fame.
At Buckingham’s stronghold, Brecon Castle, Bishop John Morton was kept as Richard’s prisoner. There, Morton received an occasional visitor, Reginald Bray, a man Buckingham had no reason to suspect. Bray had been steward to Sir Henry Stafford and continued to serve Margaret. He was one of her most trusted business and estate advisers and soon became her political confidant. Unknown to Buckingham, Bray had used his visits to apprise Morton of Margaret’s plans to secure the crown for her son. When those plans had been well thought out, Buckingham himself was gradually advised of them.