The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  On 4 May, the day of Edward V’s now-postponed coronation, the royal party rode into London, accompanied by the corporation’s reception committee, clad in Yorkist mulberry. Proclamations were shouted to the onlooking crowds. The young king and the nation had been rescued from a terrible fate and, to prove it, four cartloads of weapons were produced, confiscated from Anthony Woodville and his men, seeming proof positive of the intended ambush. As the procession wound through the streets to the bishop of London’s palace opposite St Paul’s, where Edward V would take up temporary residence, people saw that the royal retinues now also wore Richard’s boar badge.

  With the young king securely lodged, Richard – who based himself at Crosby Place, a sumptuously modernized merchant’s house on Bishopsgate – convened a meeting of the council who, along with London’s mayor and aldermen, swore oaths of loyalty to Edward V. In the following days, people’s worries subsided. The way forward seemed clear: the young king, with uncle Richard at his side, was an arrangement that ‘promised best for future prosperity’. As Hastings, ‘bursting with joy’, put it to anybody who would listen, the transfer of power had been achieved with no killings and about as much blood spilt ‘as might have come from a cut finger’. This, he said, was how to bring about a ‘new world’. Two blood relatives of the queen – Anthony Woodville and Dorset – had simply been replaced in the king’s administration by ‘two nobles of the blood royal’, Richard and Buckingham.13

  The council’s first piece of business was to confirm Richard as protector. As Richard started to govern, he did so with a reassuringly studied observance of protocol, seeking the council’s consent and goodwill in his decision-making. A revised date for Edward V’s coronation was quickly confirmed: it would take place on 22 June, with Parliament convening three days later to ratify the new order. Meanwhile the new order itself, as Hastings was stressing, looked very much like the old.14

  There were a few notable exceptions. Head and shoulders above everybody else was Buckingham who, having been denied almost any power by Edward IV, was now deluged with favour by a grateful Richard. He was handed a staggering portfolio of land grants that together amounted to what was, more or less, an independent fiefdom in Wales and the Marches, regions recently controlled by the Woodville-dominated council of the prince of Wales. Indeed, the role of Buckingham – a constant, insistent presence at Richard’s shoulder ‘with his advice and resources’, as one commentator put it – seemed almost a power-sharing one.15 Catesby, meanwhile, was handed the chancellorship of the earldom of March, a powerful post that brought him further within Buckingham’s orbit. Others, from Yorkist veterans like John Howard to Richard’s childhood friend Francis Lovell, received a smattering of patronage; there were, too, a few minor reshuffles. By and large, though, the status quo was preserved. It had been the Woodvilles whose grasping ambitions had endangered the future of the Yorkist dynasty – or so the story now went. They had been neatly removed, no harm done.

  To many besides the overjoyed Hastings, the message was clear. Richard was the continuity candidate, the keeper of his late brother’s flame, and clearly the most appropriate protector of his heir Edward V. When the question of the young king’s accommodation was raised, Buckingham’s proposal of the Tower met with a general nodding of heads. After all, it was the traditional pre-coronation venue, and it was secure. On Cheapside, people turned out to watch the boy being escorted to his new residence, enjoying the spectacle with a few drinks.

  Nevertheless, there were plenty of loose ends. It quickly became clear that the late king’s finances were in something of a mess. If the general impression was that Edward IV had left a kingdom awash with cash, the reality was rather different: his treasury and coffers were found to contain some £1,200, plus a quantity of silver plate minted into coin and some dodgy currency. Factoring in anticipated incomings from his wool exports, the sale of one of the king’s jewels and some loans, the available liquidity came to around £6,040 2s 8d. None of which should have come as a surprise, given Edward’s two costly campaigns against Scotland and the extra annual expense now involved in the upkeep and garrisoning of Berwick, but for an administration facing immediate security challenges it was not an encouraging picture. Hastings had written immediately to his brother in Guisnes advising him that there was no extra money for reinforcements or wages: he should make do with what he had.16

  Blame for the kingdom’s precarious finances was now placed squarely on the Woodvilles. The recent cash payments to Dorset and Sir Edward Woodville for naval protection of England’s southern coastline, authorized by the royal council, were construed as theft, the pair having absconded with Edward’s ‘immense treasure’. Judiciously, Dorset hadn’t hung around to argue his case. Sir Edward was already at sea. Richard monitored the fleet’s progress off the south coast, all the while removing Woodville-appointed officials from key coastal fortresses and replacing them with other men who, having served Edward IV, were happy enough to transfer their loyalties to the new regime. When Sir Edward’s ships materialized in Southampton Water, Richard’s men were waiting. His fleet captured, Woodville himself got away, fleeing with a pair of royal ships.17

  After the first cautious days of his protectorship, Richard grew more aggressive, confident of the council’s backing. He ripped up Woodville networks by the roots. Moving onto their lands, Richard’s men turfed out their occupants with the flourish of official letters, confiscating all the moveable goods they could find and riffling through accounts and paperwork: among those annexing Anthony Woodville’s estates was a gratified Roger Wake.18 Nor did the extended Woodville family escape. In Kent, the manor of Ightham Mote was confiscated; its owner Sir Richard Haute, the queen’s cousin and a household official of the young king, had been among those arrested at Stony Stratford and sent north. With Richard’s escalating belligerence, however, came renewed tension. The council may have conceded the fact of his protectorship, but it wasn’t prepared to let him off the leash.

  In the following weeks, concerns were raised in the council chamber about the impunity with which Richard was acting. Councillors expressed vocal anxiety about the well-being of his prisoners, currently detained without charge. They pointed out, too, that Richard didn’t seem particularly bothered about the queen’s ‘dignity and peace of mind’: in sanctuary, Elizabeth Woodville was already living hand to mouth.19

  In response, an indignant Richard went on the offensive. He told the council that Anthony Woodville and his associates had plotted to murder him. The evidence was damning, and they were clearly guilty. He directed the council to convict them of treason.

  The council debated Richard’s appeal at length before rejecting it. There was, it declared, no convincing case to be made – a polite way of saying that Richard had in fact provided no good evidence to support his accusations. Even if there had been evidence of a Woodville plot, the council added, it could not be construed as treason, for at that point the council had not yet invested Richard with the protectorship. It was a clever ruling. While not disputing Richard’s claim that the laws of treason should apply to him as protector, it was an implicit reminder to Richard of the temporary and conditional nature of his role. He was protector by authority of the council, and ultimate power rested with the council, not with him.20

  Richard’s insistence on the death penalty for his opponents was the kind of move made all too often in the last few decades: seeking legal endorsement for what was essentially a political settling of scores. Richard was convinced of the Woodvilles’ guilt. But his demand also carried with it a hint of vulnerability and an awareness of the growing unease within the council. For the sake of unity it had been happy to sanction Richard’s initial seizure of power, but with young Edward’s coronation barely weeks away, there was an upswell of sympathy for the new king’s maternal family: it would not do for them to be in prison while he was crowned.

  As Richard knew, such sympathy brought with it resentment against his rule. While they were still ali
ve, the Woodvilles remained a threat. They needed to be permanently removed. But the council, packed full of experienced legal minds, had emphatically dismissed Richard’s case. Its judgment was perhaps influenced by the disconcertingly regal way Richard was now going about government. The consensus-driven approach of his first weeks in office had evaporated. Now, he was ‘commanding and forbidding in everything like another king’.21

  Around this time the new chancellor John Russell, bishop of Lincoln, promoted by Richard from his post of privy seal, sat down to draft his opening sermon for the Parliament that would follow Edward V’s coronation.22 Typically, such orations set forth a monarch’s vision for government and it was striking quite how much the new king’s aims, as articulated in Russell’s sermon, now suited Richard. A masterpiece of radicalism dressed as conformity, it outlined a continuation and dramatic extension of Richard’s powers as protector – powers that Parliament was expected to endorse.

  Russell opened by making all the right noises on political and financial reform. Reaching for an assortment of tried and tested ideas, his speech called for renewal and unity. He praised the nobility as the key to good government – islands of stability in the choppy seas that were the perpetually revolting commons – while at the same time reproving them for the self-interest that had been the source of so much trouble and ordering them to pull together ‘amiably’ for the sake of their new young king and the well-being of the country. There were a few sneery references to recent events. The ‘tempestuous Rivers’, which threatened to overwhelm the islands of the nobility, was a mouldy pun on the monopoly of favour enjoyed by the queen’s father at Edward IV’s court back in the late 1460s. Russell now dusted it off to deploy against the imprisoned Anthony Woodville – the current Earl Rivers – and the queen’s family more widely. It was a cheap gag but, Russell probably reasoned, it would raise a laugh. More crowd-pleasing metaphors followed. Acknowledging the heavy tax burden of recent years with a wry nod to Edward IV’s ballooning weight and greed, Russell noted that the belly of the body politic had ‘waxed great’. The new government would be lean, its fat trimmed. Taxes would be consumed in responsible moderation, and king and council would work hard to digest the ‘great and weighty matters’ with which the kingdom was confronted. All this was predictable and, to a nation concerned about both security and taxes, welcome.

  At this point, Russell shifted focus. What great good fortune it was, he stated, that ‘during his years of tenderness’ the young king’s uncle Richard should be at hand to take on the role of his ‘tutor and protector’.

  Clearly, Russell continued, Edward V wasn’t yet old enough to rule in person. Until he was, the best arrangement was for Richard to continue to wield power and authority on his behalf. Richard was an exemplary public servant, comparable to the Roman consul Lepidus in his disinterested loyalty to the common good. He possessed that rare combination of virtue and birth inherent in true nobility, as well as wisdom, experience and ‘martial cunning’: attributes from which the young king would benefit immensely as he learned how to rule. Of all the new Parliament’s business, Russell concluded, this confirmation of Richard in his role of protector was the most urgent and should be done immediately. It would bring enormous relief to the king who, in conclusion, Russell now ventriloquized: ‘Uncle’, the boy’s voice said, ‘I am glad to have you confirmed in this place to be my protector.’

  The erudite cadences of Russell’s sermon could not conceal a dramatic departure from the plans agreed by the council following the late king’s death. Following Edward V’s coronation, Richard would not only continue in his role as protector; he would do so in an enhanced role. Russell was asking Parliament to vest unprecedented powers in Richard: both the ‘tutele’ or personal control of the king, and the protectorship of the realm. Precisely that combination of roles, in other words, which had been denied to Humphrey of Gloucester some sixty years previously, and which the council had explicitly withheld from Richard in the days after Edward IV’s death.23

  There was more. If Richard’s credentials were impeccable, Russell stated, so was his lineage; indeed, he was ‘next in perfect age of the blood royal’. Some weeks before, in his letter to the council laying out his claim to the protectorship, Richard had sworn fealty to Edward V and, in the event of his death, to all his late brother’s offspring. Implicit in Russell’s comment, though, was a rather different definition of Richard’s position: should anything happen to the young king, Richard would be next in line to the throne.24

  This was a sermon written under Richard’s close direction. It contained the distinct sense that Richard, increasingly uncomfortable about what would happen after Edward V’s coronation, was redefining his role, not simply as the young king’s protector, but – and here were shades of the Parliament of 1460, which had made his father Richard of York and his heirs next in line to Henry VI – as his successor.

  The sermon carried a hint of Russell’s own discomfort. As he put it uneasily, he hoped that his proposals would have ‘such good and brief expedition in this high court of parliament as the ease of the people and the condition and the time requireth’. Very probably, he was expecting the opposite: that, at best, the plans would have a rocky ride through Parliament. In the end, he was spared the trouble. His speech would never be made.

  On Monday 9 June, Simon Stallworth, an agent to the Oxfordshire knight Sir William Stonor, wrote from London to his master with an update on the political situation. Stonor, Dorset’s brother-in-law, was anxious for news. Stallworth, however, didn’t have much to tell him. The queen, her second son and their supporters – Dorset among them – continued to sit tight behind the heavily guarded walls of Westminster sanctuary, immune to Richard’s efforts to persuade them out; Dorset’s goods were still being seized wherever they were found. That day, a four-hour-long council meeting, headed by Richard and Buckingham and involving ‘all other lords’, had been held at Westminster – Edward V, still in the Tower, hadn’t been present – but, as usual, nobody had bothered to update Elizabeth Woodville on its business.25

  For all that, Stallworth reported, London and Westminster buzzed with the ‘great business’ of preparing for the upcoming festivities: the sense of expectation was palpable. And at that point, he continued, Stonor would be in London himself for Edward V’s coronation, ‘and then shall you know all the world’.

  If Russell’s draft sermon stressed that it would be business as usual for Richard’s protectorate following Edward V’s coronation, in public the atmosphere seemed different. Running through Stallworth’s comments was a sense of anticipated catharsis. The boy king would be brought out of the Tower, into the open – and then, things would change. This was what Elizabeth Woodville hoped. And what Richard feared.

  The following day a messenger left Richard’s household at Crosby Place, rode out of London through Bishopsgate and headed north fast. A bruising military man from Cumberland in the far northwest, Richard Ratcliffe was one of Richard’s close councillors, his loyalty proven through years of service in the northern borderlands and on campaign in Scotland. Ratcliffe’s uncompromising reputation preceded him: in Thomas More’s pithy character assassination, he was ‘as far from pity as from all fear of God’. The messages Ratcliffe now carried with him, from Richard himself, were urgent, shocking and highly confidential. In them Richard called on his northern supporters, chief among them the earl of Northumberland, to raise an army and head south to London as rapidly as possible. One letter to the mayor and corporation of York, requesting as many armed men as they could provide, explained why.

  The queen, her family and followers, Richard stated, were plotting to ‘murder and utterly destroy’ him and Buckingham, and ‘the old royal blood of this realm’. The threat, indeed, was more widespread even than this. The Woodvilles plotted the ‘final destruction and disinheritance’ of all other ‘inheritors and men of honour that belong to us’ – anybody of note, that was, who had any connection with Richard.26 Ratcliffe, th
e letter concluded, would communicate everything more fully by word of mouth.

  These were sweeping allegations. Yet the letter to York’s corporation, at any rate, contained little that was new – or, indeed, concrete. From the outset, Richard’s seizure of power had been based on the threat of Woodville aggression, charges repeated constantly in the six weeks of his protectorate. Something had triggered his sudden, apparently panicked demand for military aid: the question was, what?

  The letter mentioned the Woodvilles’ use of the ‘subtle and damnable’ practice of ‘forecasting’ – the use of astrology or witchcraft – to try to bring about the deaths of Richard and Buckingham. A serious charge, though as Richard admitted, it was already ‘openly known’, old news. Indeed, he may have been referring to the allegations of sorcery against Jacquetta and Elizabeth Woodville back in 1469: allegations which, despite having been dismissed by Parliament itself, had lingered in the popular memory.

  But with most of the Woodville ringleaders in prison or on the run, the nature of the plot and the question of who was masterminding it remained unclear – at least, in Richard’s letters. Perhaps Ratcliffe, committing the names and details to memory, told the recipients in person.

  On the morning of Friday 13 June, three days after Ratcliffe left for the north, several leading councillors made their way to the Tower for a council meeting summoned by Richard the day before. On his orders, the council had been split into two: one group, consisting of the majority of the lords – effectively a working party to discuss the coronation plans – was convening upriver in Westminster under Chancellor Russell; the other, at the Tower, would be chaired by Richard himself. As well as Hastings and Catesby, this second group included councillors who had been associated with the conciliar pushback of the previous weeks: men like Edward IV’s former chancellor Thomas Rotherham, John Morton and, a man who had never been entirely well disposed towards Richard, the late king’s household steward Thomas, Lord Stanley.27