by Thomas Penn
As the councillors arrived at the Tower, Richard greeted them with pleasant small talk, asking Morton for some strawberries from the garden at his Holborn residence, which, Richard had heard, were particularly good. The doors of the council chamber were closed. The attendees took their seats around the council table and waited for Richard to speak.28
At first Richard said nothing but sat in his place looking increasingly agitated and chewing on his bottom lip, his characteristic nervous tic. An uncomfortable silence settled on the chamber. Then he started talking. He had, he told the assembled councillors, called the meeting for one specific reason: he wanted to show them in what ‘great danger of death’ he stood. In the last few days, he had been ill, unable to eat or drink, and had grown weak and short of breath: what was more, some of his body parts had begun to ‘fall away’. By way of proof he held out his arms, straight, in front of him: one was shorter than the other. This was the result of his scoliosis, which made his right shoulder slightly higher than his left – and it was a moment later seized on with relish by Tudor chroniclers. Richard then repeated the accusations he had made a few days before in the letters carried by Ratcliffe: Elizabeth Woodville was plotting, by witchcraft, ‘to destroy me, that am so near of blood unto the king’.29
For some moments, nobody said anything. Hastings broke the silence. If the queen was found guilty, he offered, she should certainly be punished. Richard replied sharply that he knew the queen had done it – evidence enough. Hastings unhesitatingly offered the same reply.
Suddenly Richard rounded on Hastings, shouting at him, banging on the table, accusing him of being a ringleader in the queen’s plot. It was the signal for a group of Richard’s men, stationed secretly in a room next door. They barged in, weapons drawn, and arrested Morton, Rotherham, the late king’s secretary Oliver King, Lord Stanley, who had narrowly avoided a flailing sword – wielded, probably, by his hostile north-western neighbour Robert Harrington in an opportunistic attempt to settle their long-standing feud – and Hastings. The men were marched out of the council chamber and detained separately in the Tower’s many cells. All except Hastings, who was forced outside to Tower Green, hastily shriven by a priest from the Tower chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, pushed to his knees and beheaded.30
In Richard’s eyes, Hastings had transformed from close supporter to existential threat. Over the past weeks, Richard had taken the temperature among certain influential councillors – men like Morton, Rotherham and Hastings – regarding the proposed extension of his protectorate, as laid out in Russell’s parliamentary sermon. These were men loyal to Edward V, the living continuation of Edward IV’s regime; men who, while acquiescing in Richard’s protectorate, had in recent weeks raised concerns about the way he was exercising power. Richard had been alarmed to find that these councillors habitually ‘foregathered together in each other’s houses’. He tried to find out what was being discussed. What apparently did for Hastings were private conversations with the man he regarded as being in his ‘special trust’ – William Catesby. In these conversations, Hastings reiterated his unyielding allegiance to Edward V and revealed his misgivings about Richard’s plans for power; he also gave the names of other councillors with similar concerns. Catesby dutifully reported everything back to Richard and Buckingham.
To Richard, Hastings’ intransigence was a source of extreme frustration. Hastings’ initial endorsement of Richard’s protectorate had been crucial in securing the backing of the old Yorkist establishment. But Hastings now unequivocally wanted Edward V to be crowned – which inevitably meant the ending of Richard’s protectorate and, in practice, some sort of accommodation with the Woodvilles. To Richard, such a scenario was unthinkable. Not only would it leave him open to counter-accusations from the Woodvilles, but the upcoming Parliament – whose business he was trying so hard to dictate – represented the perfect chance for his opponents to move against him. His sense of vulnerability was increased by the recent death of George Neville, the boy whose portion of the Warwick patrimony had been handed to Richard and had become the foundation of his northern power. With his passing, the male Neville line was extinguished – and so too were Richard’s hopes of passing the inheritance on to his own son. As decreed by Parliament back in 1475, when Richard died so too would his family’s ownership of the lands.31
The political situation was now very muddy. Richard, who more than most craved the certainty of a clearly ordered world, found what he perceived to be Hastings’ lack of loyalty confusing and overwhelming: so excruciatingly unbearable that he had to rid himself of Hastings as soon as possible. At Richard’s side, Buckingham was equally concerned. With hungry eyes on a portfolio of north midlands estates currently in Hastings’ possession, lands which he believed were his by right, he was emphatic in his belief that Hastings had to go.32
In attending the council meeting at the Tower that morning Hastings, like Anthony Woodville before him, had walked into a trap. He had, according to Thomas More, ignored the curious nature of the meeting itself, Lord Stanley’s repeated warnings not to attend and, on the way to the Tower, a handful of bad premonitions. But then, Hastings perhaps reasoned he had nothing to fear. After all, as he saw it he was not being disloyal to the protector, but faithful to the family that he had served for almost a quarter of a century.
Richard’s agents quickly arrested a go-between. John Forster, Elizabeth Woodville’s long-standing receiver-general, had been in regular contact with Elizabeth in sanctuary; he was also a close friend and colleague of both Hastings and Morton. Imprisoned in the Tower, Forster was kept without food and water for forty-eight hours until he signed over his profitable stewardship of the abbey of St Albans, held jointly with Hastings, to William Catesby.33
As news of the arrests spread, Richard sent a herald into the city to announce to anxious Londoners that a plot against the regime had been foiled: the conspirators had been arrested and their ringleader Hastings executed. The situation was under control. If there was shock at the murder and what it portended – especially among those who like the goldsmith Hugh Brice and London’s current mayor Edmund Shaw had been closest to Hastings and the old Yorkist establishment – people kept their thoughts to themselves. A city chronicler offered an explanation for Londoners’ subdued response. Despite their misgivings people simply refused to believe what was happening; there was, he wrote, ‘some hope’ that Richard had simply acted as ‘an avenger of treason and old wrongs’, not as a man with ambitions to seize the throne.34 For the next two days, it seemed as though this hope might be borne out. The preparations continued for Edward V’s coronation, now only a week away. Then, on 16 June, everything changed.
At Westminster that Monday morning boats disgorged a mass of Richard’s men, heavily armed, who deployed round the sanctuary, sealing it off. Through the sanctuary gates, heading for Elizabeth Woodville’s lodgings, came a knot of councillors, foremost among them Chancellor John Russell and the elderly figure of Cardinal Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury. Over the weekend, Richard had convinced the council that Edward V’s nine-year-old brother should be present at the coronation. A man practised at smoothing out the knottiest of situations – over two decades before, he had confronted a glowering Richard of York, talking him down from claiming the throne – Bourchier had been deputed to persuade Elizabeth Woodville to hand over her second son. Wisely, Richard and Buckingham had stayed behind in Westminster Palace.
Talking through things with the queen, Bourchier was all persuasive reassurance. It wasn’t right, he told Elizabeth, that the young prince should be absent from Edward V’s coronation. It looked improper and besides, the young king wanted his brother at his side, for comfort. Elizabeth should release the boy: he would play a full and honourable part in the ceremonies and would then be returned to her afterwards. Besides, if Elizabeth refused, Richard’s troops would come and take the prince by force. Elizabeth agreed.35
Bourchier led the boy out of sanctuary and across Westminster Palace Y
ard to Richard and Buckingham, waiting in the doorway of the council chamber. Greeting his nephew with ‘many loving words’, Richard helped him onto a waiting boat that ferried him downstream to the Tower, now under the command of one of Richard’s household servants, the Durham man Robert Brackenbury.36 With both Edward IV’s sons in his custody, Richard made his move.
Later that day, he ordered Edward V’s coronation to be postponed until 9 November, almost five months distant. Parliament was cancelled. The next day, London’s mayor and aldermen announced the return of monies collected for the king’s coronation gift to their donors; in Westminster, a chancery clerk processed the appointment of three men to provide meat for the king’s household in the Tower. These were to be the last official mentions of Edward V’s reign.
Soon, the workings of government started to betray tell-tale signs of regime change. Officials, uncertain of Edward V’s authority, dated documents by the year of grace rather than the regnal year – or, increasingly, did nothing. Business ground to a halt.37
Across the city at Crosby Place, Richard kept ostentatious open house. In the following days, he issued a proclamation calling men to join him – ‘his highness’, now – in London, and publicly broadcast his accusations against the Woodvilles, who had tried to destroy his ‘royal person’. Replacing his mourning black with purple robes, he went on procession through the London streets with a thousand horsemen. Londoners were unimpressed: he was ‘scarcely watched by anybody’. Anticipating unrest, the city corporation ordered companies of militia onto the streets, detachments stationed on Cheapside and Cornhill.38
The following Saturday, the 21st, Simon Stallworth wrote again to Sir William Stonor, a letter markedly different in tone to the one he had written less than two weeks previously. Running through the sequence of events triggered by Hastings’ beheading, he reported ‘much trouble’ and a general sense of unease: ‘every man doubts other’. Londoners were anxious about the imminent arrival of Richard’s northern armies. There was general uncertainty, too, over the fate of John Morton and the other detained councillors, still in the Tower: ‘I suppose they shall come out nonetheless’, Stallworth wrote, then paused and drew a line through the sentence. He mentioned, too, the arrests of ‘Foster’ – John Forster – and ‘Mistress Shore’, Edward IV’s former mistress Jane Shore, who was also rumoured to have been in relationships with Hastings and his enemy Dorset. Then, Stallworth signed off, shakily: ‘I am so sick I may well not hold my pen.’39
On the morning of Sunday 22 June, Edward V’s cancelled coronation day, a huge crowd comprising Richard, Buckingham, several more lords and their retainers and hangers-on gathered at Paul’s Cross to hear a sermon by the Cambridge theologian Ralph Shaw. Brother to London’s mayor, Ralph was an eloquent and popular speaker; people hung on his words, which was why he had now been chosen to deliver the bombshell that everyone had, consciously or otherwise, been anticipating. Taking as his theme a verse from the Book of Wisdom, Spuria vitulamina non agent radices altas – in Thomas More’s forceful translation, ‘bastard slips shall never take deep root’ – Shaw proclaimed that Edward V was not the real king of England after all.
Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, Shaw elaborated, had been found to be bigamous. When the pair were wed, back in the spring of 1464, Edward had failed to disclose that he had already signed a precontract of marriage with another woman – which meant that Elizabeth was no lawful queen and, consequently, that her children were bastards. There was more. Edward IV himself was illegitimate. Back in 1441, while Richard of York was away at the front, valiantly trying to hold back the French advance through Normandy, his wife Cecily was sleeping around. Edward had been the result. You could tell Edward was a bastard, Shaw explained, because – a strapping, strawberry-blonde six-footer – he looked nothing like his father. Neither, for that matter, did Clarence. Richard, on the other hand, ‘little’ and dark, did.
There was little that was new about Shaw’s sermon. The rumours around Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage, and indeed Edward’s own illegitimacy, stemmed from the bloody summer of 1469: then, on top of his allegations of sorcery against Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta, the earl of Warwick had written to the French king Louis XI declaring Edward a bastard. The letter’s contents had circulated widely, on the international stage at least, and had taken root. Six years later, following Edward’s aborted invasion of France, an irate Charles the Bold had started calling him ‘Blaybourne’, after the name of Cecily’s alleged lover. Clarence had apparently tried to fan the flames in the last fevered year of his quarrel with Edward. Then, with his death, the rumours had gone cold. Now, Richard blew life back into them: blazing up, they acquired a new ferocity, fuelled by Richard’s resolute belief in the illegitimacy of Edward’s offspring.
In churches throughout the city congregations listened agog to their parish priests, relaying Shaw’s allegations in their Sunday sermons. People were equally titillated and appalled. One bystander echoed a prevailing view when he fumed that such preachers were both irresponsible and immoral in equal measure: ‘they should have blushed’. What was more, in alleging Edward IV’s bastardy, the preachers – their words tacitly endorsed by the new regime – were accusing Cecily duchess of York, the family’s matriarch, of adultery. In indulging these stories, Richard seemed perfectly happy to dishonour his own mother.40
Another uncomfortable parallel perhaps occurred to those long enough in the tooth to remember. Back in 1461 Edward IV’s inauguration ceremonies, masterminded by George Neville, had contrasted the ‘unnatural’, illegitimate Lancastrian line with the purity of York. Richard was now doing much the same to define himself against his late brother and his brother’s children.
It was now the height of summer. On St John’s Eve, crowds turned out for the Midsummer Watch, the annual civic display of military might that saw two thousand heavily armed militiamen parading through London’s streets, accompanied by a battery of drummers and fifemen, armour gleaming in the torches and bonfires that illuminated the city – a procession put on for the ‘honour of the king’. Amid the ‘neighbourly drinking’ and the children running loose with wooden spears and blunted swords, people now knew who England’s new king was going to be.41
The following day, the duke of Buckingham arrived at the Guildhall to set out Richard’s right to the throne and reassure the concerned corporation. All sweet reasonableness, his face an ‘angelic mask’, Buckingham again laid out the evidence for the illegitimacy of Edward IV and his children before turning to the truly noble qualities that, besides his untainted royal blood, made Richard undeniably England’s king. First and foremost were his ‘blameless morals’ – here, Buckingham glossed over the fact of Richard’s own bastard children, John, now in his teens, and Katherine – which were a ‘sure guarantee’ of the order and good government he would bring to the realm.42 Then there was Richard’s liberality, which Buckingham was in no doubt would come as a relief to London’s business leaders after years of Edward’s ‘insatiable covetise’. The new regime, Buckingham implied, would be strongly inclined to treat the city’s mercantile and financial affairs with a much lighter touch.
Buckingham’s thirty-minute peroration was a masterpiece in public relations and rhetorical skill: even its pauses, noted one chronicler, were perfectly judged. But when he had finished, there was silence among the assembled Londoners. Then, suddenly uproar. Among the crowd, a group of men led by Richard’s household servant John Nesfield shouted: ‘King Richard, King Richard’, flinging their caps in the air in stage-managed spontaneity in an effort to coax acclamation out of the uncertain corporation.43
Richard now moved against his political opponents. Thomas marquis of Dorset, in Westminster sanctuary with his mother Elizabeth Woodville, knew what was coming. He fled and, eluding a manhunt with ‘troops and dogs’, went to ground. Meanwhile, two hundred miles north at Pontefract Castle, Richard’s urgently summoned forces were ready to march south under the comman
d of Northumberland and Richard Ratcliffe. Before they did so, a brief, vicious ritual took place. Freed from the constraints of Edward V’s council, Richard had sent orders for the immediate execution of Anthony Woodville, Sir Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan.44
Even in the most excessive of Edward IV’s treason trials, there had always been a veneer of due process, a sense that the judgment handed down ‘belongeth after the law’, as John Tiptoft had once put it: a sentiment that found its most extreme expression in the horrifying parody of a trial that was Clarence’s judicial murder. Richard was a man intimately acquainted with the law of treason. Yet as Thomas More put it – and whatever More’s politics, he knew his law – Woodville and his fellow prisoners were condemned ‘hastily, without judgement, process or manner of order’. When it came to ridding himself of knotty problems, Richard was making a habit of putting necessity first and law a distant second. It was a way of operating that resembled not so much Edward IV, but both brothers’ one-time mentor, Richard earl of Warwick.
As they stood in the open air, awaiting their turn to kneel and put their heads on the block, Woodville and his friends were reportedly denied the chance even to say a few last words in their defence. A man whose pious obsession with mortality was more pronounced than most, Woodville had, along with his last will and testament, left behind a poem in which he reconciled himself to what he knew what was coming. ‘Such is my dance’, he shrugged, ‘Willing to die.’45