by Thomas Penn
On 14 April, five days after leaving Westminster, a royal messenger dismounted at Ludlow Castle, and news of the ‘lamentable and most sorrowful tidings’ of his father’s death was broken to Prince Edward. Updates on the council’s deliberations followed soon after. Within two days the prince, comforted in his ‘sorrow and pensiveness’ by his uncle and governor Anthony Woodville, was echoing the council’s resolution. In a letter to the town of Lynn on the north Norfolk coast – a letter almost certainly penned for him by Woodville, whose town it was – the boy proclaimed his intention to ‘govern, rule and protect this our realm of England’, and to be ‘crowned at Westminster’.44
Word of Edward IV’s death had already reached Richard at Middleham, on the other side of the country. Since the first rumours of his brother’s demise, Richard had probably been anticipating news – but, in any case, he had his ear to the ground. His lines of communication with London and the southeast were exceptional: the previous summer, the system of posts put in place to ensure rapid communication between him and Edward during his invasion of Scotland had brought news to the king of Berwick’s surrender – a distance of some 340 miles – in an astonishing thirty-six hours.45 Now, in the days following his brother’s death, a constant stream of messengers shuttled between Westminster and north Yorkshire with news of discussions in the council chamber. Many of these agents, according to ‘common report’, were from Hastings. As Richard assembled the retinues that would accompany him south to his nephew’s coronation, he digested the council’s discussions, filtered for him through Hastings’ uneasy perspective on events.
Edward IV’s final journey started on the evening of Wednesday 16 April. Following mass in Westminster Abbey, his coffin was heaved onto a carriage draped in black velvet and, over the coffin, a black pall with a cross picked out in white cloth-of-gold. Atop it was a life-size effigy, ‘like to the similitude of the king’, dressed in his royal robes and crown, orb and sceptre clutched in its stiff hands. Drawn by six black-caparisoned coursers, and protected by a canopy of imperial purple borne by four of the late king’s household knights, the solemn cavalcade set off up King Street towards Charing Cross, a company of banner-bearing knights and squires headed by John Howard, themselves led by a gaggle of heralds and bishops. After overnighting at Syon monastery, the procession halted the following day at Eton; there, bishops John Russell and John Morton censed the coffined body, bathing it in drifts of incense as the college’s assembled students knelt murmuring prayers, white-surpliced, bare-headed, tapers in one hand and psalters in the other. Then the procession moved on, crossing the Thames at Windsor Bridge and towards the castle with its great drum keep.46
In the castle’s lower ward stood Edward’s new chapel of St George, a half-realized vision in perpendicular Gothic. His coffin was borne up the nave, whose lower walls had begun to rise from their foundations, and into the choir, in a more advanced stage of completion: its pendant vaulting soaring overhead, windows glazed and carved stalls in place, walls and floor lined with black cloth. At the north-eastern end, ready to receive the body, was the newly finished ‘sepulture’ and, above it, the chantry chapel where masses would be sung in perpetuity for the dead king’s soul. Dominating the choir was a massive wooden hearse, a multi-storey wooden stage, ‘marvellous well wrought’, festooned with banners, flags and escutcheons, in which the coffin was placed. That night, after the Office of the Dead had been sung, a ‘great watch’ was kept over the body by lords, knights, squires and yeomen of the late king’s chamber and household.47
Inside the candlelit hearse stood a group of lords, among them Hastings and Dorset, uncomfortably close, Edward’s household steward Lord Stanley, and John Howard. The rest, hooded and in mourning black, stood in concentric circles radiating outward from the hearse: from the late king’s brother-in-law Thomas St Leger and his giant master of horse John Cheyne; to the Oxfordshire knight Sir William Stonor and the gentleman usher William Collingbourne. Throughout the night they remained shoulder to shoulder, constant and motionless, their shrouded faces illuminated by the burning brands they held, the last collective expression of a household’s unswerving loyalty to the king they had served.48
The next morning the final rites began, commendations of the departed soul followed by masses and offerings. Edward’s richly embroidered coat of arms, shield and crowned helmet were all offered up to his former chancellor Thomas Rotherham in his capacity as archbishop of York. Then, through the doors in the temporary west wall, came John Cheyne leading a warhorse in black trappings; riding it was Sir William Parr, bareheaded and in white armour, gripping a battleaxe point downwards. Riding the length of the choir, Parr dismounted and, led by the heralds of the absent Richard and the duke of Buckingham, made his way to the high altar, offering himself to God.
The solemn ritual was punctuated by an unseemly scuffle between the two offerors, lords Berkeley and Maltravers, as to who should stand on the favoured right side. Berkeley lost out, his claims of senior rank trumped by Maltravers’ lineage. Along with John Howard, Berkeley was one of those who, due to benefit from the death of the old duke of Norfolk, had been passed over when Edward IV settled the duke’s entire inheritance on his second son, Richard. Having kept his head down while Edward was alive, Berkeley was now flexing his muscles. While his spat with Maltravers was brief and quickly resolved, it was a sign that, with Edward not yet in the grave, the political order was already loosening.49
The mass ended, offerings of cloth-of-gold were laid on Edward’s coffin. One herald, vainly trying to scribble the offerors’ order of precedence as he peered over the packed crowds, managed to note that the last to offer – first in ‘nearness of blood’ to the late king, was Edward’s teenage nephew John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, who, in the absence of the dead king’s brother Richard, was designated chief mourner.50
Finally, with the great officers of Edward’s household gathered round the open grave, the coffin was lowered into the ground. Together, Hastings, Stanley, the treasurer Sir John Elrington and Sir William Parr, all weeping openly, snapped their staves of office and threw them into the grave, after their king. One herald, a Portuguese named Roger Machado, glossed the self-evident symbolism. They were now, he said, ‘men without a master and without office’.
It was a sentiment echoed in one of the many verse epitaphs and laments for the king’s soul that, painted on placards and boards, hung around his tomb: a poem that came from the heart of Edward’s household, told in the voice of one of the servants left bereft by his passing. This was a narrator struggling to deal with the shock of the king’s death: he ‘was here yesterday’, went the uncomprehending refrain. For him, Edward was the peerless war-leader, the wellspring of knighthood, the ‘freshest’ in battle, the ‘most dread’ prince whose deeds were immortalized ‘in gests, in romances, in chronicles near and far’. In his eyes, even Edward’s debacle in France eight years before had acquired the lustre of an epic enterprise, the French miraculously subdued both by ‘force and might’ yet ‘without stroke’. Edward, too, had made Scotland ‘yield’ – almost, it seemed, in person. This, though, was no sycophant. Rather, it was the hard, unyielding loyalty of the household retainer: a man who had followed his king willingly into battle and who had seen him ‘in every field, full ready for our right’, whose identity and cause were inseparable from those of his king. For him Edward, magnificent in his robes of estate, was an affirmation of his own place in the world: indeed, ‘it was a world to see him ride about’. He was the ‘sun, the rose, the sunbeam’ – never had Edward’s badges seemed more apt – and his ‘royal company’, his household men, bathed in his lustre. The king’s household was this author’s universe: his mind’s eye recollected Edward’s retinues, ‘his lords, his knights all’, his ‘palaces made of lime and stone’ and his household servants dining together, breaking bread in the hall. Then, suddenly, that constant, glorious light had been snuffed out.
Now, a desolate present stretched before the narr
ator. In the Westminster streets, Edward’s weeping, black-clad retinue shuffled towards him – mere ‘wretches’ now, deprived of ‘the lantern and the light’. Coming to terms with this barren, insecure new reality, he choked, ‘makes my heart quake’.51
What now could loyal followers of Edward IV do? For the poet, the answer was simple: there was ‘no choice, no other grace’ than to be faithful to the memory of their dead master, to death. But for the late king’s servants, as they accompanied Edward’s coffin to its last resting place at Windsor and stood vigilant together through the night, the pressing question was what form that fidelity might take. After all, masterless in this insecure new world, they needed to find a new light to follow. This was no literary conceit. Back in 1461, after the death of Charles VII of France, his former chamberlain summed up perfectly this reactive compound of loyalty and self-interest. Addressing the late king’s household, he told them that he ‘and all other servants had lost a master’. And, he continued, with brutal clarity, ‘every man must think for himself, and each one should provide for himself.’52
Now, in that spring of 1483, Edward’s servants were thinking along much the same lines. Nobody more so than the man whose perspective adhered most closely to that of the devastated, lamenting poet, and who perhaps gave a similar speech to the late king’s household: his own chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings.
On Saturday 19 April, the day after Edward’s last rites, as London’s mayor and aldermen met to discuss their reception of the new king, the council convened again. In the meantime, two letters had arrived from Richard. The first – warm, comforting, ‘loving’ – was written to Queen Elizabeth Woodville herself. Consoling her in her loss, Richard assured her that he would offer ‘submission, fealty, and all that was due from him to his lord and king, Edward V, the first-born son of his brother the dead king, and queen’. The second letter, a precise edge to its courtesy, was addressed to the council.
Apprised of the council’s deliberations, Richard set out his own position clearly. Drawing attention to his record of unimpeachable loyalty to his brother the late king, ‘at home and abroad, in peace and war’, he pledged an equal loyalty to the new king, and indeed all his brother’s offspring if – ‘God forbid’ – the youth should die. He would lay his life on the line to protect the children from danger. Then, he came to the crunch.
Richard asked the councillors, as they made their plans for the new government, to bear in mind his own ‘deserts’. He was, he stated, entitled to the government of the kingdom: both by law and as set out in his brother’s will. Asking that the councillors consider his record of service and what was best for the country, he ended with an emphatic reiteration: ‘nothing contrary to law and his brother’s desire’, he told the council, ‘could be decreed without harm’.53 While Richard’s request was open-ended, everybody knew what he meant. He wanted to be protector.
Richard’s demand had the council scrambling for historical precedent. The previous century was littered with useful examples of ‘protectors’, from Humphrey duke of Gloucester’s rule during the long minority of his nephew Henry VI to Richard duke of York’s two protectorates during the adult Henry’s incapacitating bouts of mental illness in the 1450s. None, however, adumbrated what Richard now had in mind.
Over the previous hundred years or so, when councils tried to establish a working government in the absence of a sane or adult monarch, they had always come back to the same problem. If you appointed a protector of the realm, usually the foremost nobleman of royal blood, you risked handing that nobleman quasi-regal authority. Such powers were temptingly open to abuse: indeed, back in 1377, Richard II’s uncle John of Gaunt was forced to issue a public denial to Parliament that he wanted the throne for himself.54 Consequently, councils had always resisted demands for a full regency, in which royal powers were conferred on a proxy king. More than that, they had always split the role of protector in two. Nobody, however close to the king by blood, was allowed to hold the post of ‘tutela’ – tutor or governor of the king – and ‘defensor’, defender of the realm. Back in 1428, when Henry VI’s uncle Humphrey of Gloucester had lobbied incessantly to be given the care of the young king, the council was unmoving: in handing him the title of ‘protector’, they clarified that it was explicitly not ‘the name of tutor, lieutenant, governor, nor of regent, nor no name that should import authority of governance of the land’. Protector, here, was simply another term for ‘chief councillor’, with special responsibility for the kingdom’s security – a sop to Humphrey’s sense of his own dignity rather than anything else. During Henry VI’s periods of insanity, Richard of York was handed precisely the same powers as Humphrey: powers which York swore not to use without the council’s backing.55
Yet this combined governance – protectorship of the realm and custody of the king – was apparently what Richard had now requested, citing both ‘law’ and his ‘brother’s desire’. In his last will and testament Edward had, so it was said, entrusted his sons ‘to the tuition’ – the upbringing – ‘of Richard his brother’. Yet even if Edward had granted these powers on his deathbed – which, given the lack of precedent, was highly unlikely – it was academic, given that a dead king’s will had no permanent force in law. Neither did Richard’s close blood relationship with the new king carry any legal weight.56
To a council determined to preserve a delicate balance between interest groups, such precedent was a helpful prop. Nevertheless, one caucus of conciliar opinion – the same group that had protested so vigorously against the dominance of the Woodville ‘uncles and brothers’ – insisted on tabling Richard’s request. Accordingly, the council was presented with a choice. The first was that Richard head up a regency government. The second was that he be offered precisely the same role that Duke Humphrey had been given some half-century before: the role of chief councillor in a governing council that would help the new king to reign in his own right, with the honorific title of ‘protector’. The council voted ‘in a majority’ for the second option. Edward V would rule with the guidance of a council, his uncle Richard at its head.
Even now, there were voices of caution. Such decisions about the government’s composition and the coronation needed to involve Richard, the realm’s greatest magnate of royal blood: they were too important to be finalized in his absence. If Richard arrived with everything settled, especially his own role in his nephew’s government, he might receive the council’s decision ‘reluctantly’. He might, indeed, ‘upset everything’.
At which point Thomas, marquis of Dorset cut in: ‘we are so important’, he breezed, ‘that we can make and enforce these decisions, even without the king’s uncle’. On a point of procedure Dorset was right: the council did have executive power. But to some on the council, the comment dripped with contempt and impunity – and, moreover, it indicated the Woodvilles’ real agenda to arrange the government to suit themselves.
Dorset then proceeded to back up his words with deeds. The new government’s structure was ratified, and the council took immediate steps to combat French aggression, mandating Dorset to ‘keep the sea’. The queen’s youngest brother, Sir Edward Woodville, was instructed to assemble a navy and an expeditionary force of two thousand marines, for which he was given £3,670 in cash out of the royal treasury now under Dorset’s control in the Tower. A detachment of three hundred men was dispatched to reinforce the garrison at Calais: an urgent and necessary intervention for the defence of the realm, or – seen another way – an attempt to prevent the enclave’s lieutenant, Hastings, from asserting his military independence. The Woodvilles had played everything by the book. Through the council, it seemed that they were set to dominate the minority rule of Edward V.57
By this time, Richard was on his way south. At York, he stopped to hold obsequies for his brother in the Minster – a funeral service ‘full of tears’ – and to make a public commitment to the new regime. Summoning all the region’s nobility, he made them swear binding oaths of loyalty to th
e new king, Edward V. Richard, it was noted, led by example: he ‘swore first of all’.58 The summons also had another purpose: some of these nobles and their men would accompany Richard to London, swelling his company to the permitted two thousand men. And, as well as receiving updates from Hastings, while in York Richard received another messenger, this time from the duke of Buckingham.
Buckingham’s adult life had been an exercise in frustration. One of the greatest noblemen in the land, married to one of the queen’s sisters, he was exceptionally close to the centre of power but, under Edward, excluded from it. He had been shouldered out of his family’s traditional spheres of influence in the Welsh Marches, where the prince’s council now dominated, and the north midlands, where the lands he coveted were bestowed instead on Hastings. Buckingham’s role in the Yorkist establishment had been restricted to walk-on parts, as a glittering courtly bauble and occasional useful idiot: in his honorific role of high steward, he had rubber-stamped Clarence’s guilty verdict and death sentence. Whether or not Buckingham resented his childhood marriage to Katherine Woodville – though vocal in his ‘loathing’ for women in general, there was no sign that he detested his wife with any particular vehemence – he resented her family, who had come to represent everything that he felt had held him back.
During Buckingham’s childhood years in Edward’s household, Richard had been a regular presence at his side, the two boys appearing together in the regime’s rituals and ceremonies. The relationship appeared to have endured. Shortly after Buckingham received news of Edward’s death, he sent a trusted messenger to Richard, promising his support in this ‘new world’, and offering to attend on him with a thousand men should need arise. Richard, it was said, sent the messenger back with thanks and ‘diverse privy instructions by mouth’.