by Thomas Penn
At Grantham on 19 October, Richard came to a decision. Howard was pushing back successfully against the southern insurgency, imposing control in Kent. Forced to retreat, the rebels were being forced west through southern England. Richard himself headed southwest. He was aiming for Salisbury, one of the centres of insurgency, where he could trap the rebels, sandwiching them between his army and Howard’s forces to the east. There, too, he could block any attempt by the southern rebels to link up with Buckingham’s forces as they moved out of Wales and into England.35
On the 23rd, as he led his assembled army out of Leicester, Richard issued a proclamation against the rebels. The initial bewilderment of a few days earlier was replaced by an implacable conviction. Richard, the proclamation stated, had gone out of his way to demonstrate his commitment to the regal virtues of mercy and justice, hoping through his personal example to persuade evildoers back to the ‘way of truth and virtue’. But this had not happened. Instead, a group of traitors had plotted his destruction – and Richard had identified precisely what was fuelling their treason.
On seizing power back in April, Richard had loaded his actions with moral justification, portraying his late brother’s court as a pit of iniquity. At his coronation, with most of Edward IV’s men apparently reconciled to his kingship, this narrative had faded from the official discourse, Richard instead presenting himself as his brother’s natural successor. Now, in his October proclamation – or, as it was officially titled, ‘Proclamation for the reform of morals’ – these original accusations acquired a fresh intensity, a sharper internecine edge. Not only Edward and his wife’s Woodville family, but all those loyal to the late king, were tarred with the same brush.
The rebels, the proclamation stated, were ‘oppressors and extortioners’ of the king’s subjects and ‘horrible adulterers and bawds’. It was unsurprising that Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset should have rebelled. Such behaviour was entirely consistent with his rotten morals: his ‘devouring, deflowering and defouling’ of countless ‘maids, widows and wives’, behaviour summed up by his adultery with that ‘unshameful’ and ‘mischievous’ woman, Edward IV’s former mistress Jane Shore. The late king’s former household servants-turned-rebels – all listed by name, from Sir George Brown and John Cheyne to bishops John Morton and Lionel Woodville – were similarly tainted. Their treasonous uprising, evidence of their moral depravity, was nothing less than a war on truth and virtue by the forces of damnable ‘vice and sin’. In this view, the house of York had fractured into black and white. Edward IV’s line was rotten to the core; Richard III’s was the only true way.36
As Richard headed towards Coventry, Buckingham’s rebellion was already beginning to disintegrate. The duke was a notoriously bad landlord, ‘a sore and hard dealing man’; as he belatedly realized, such poor lordship failed to translate into solid support. No sooner had he ridden out of Brecon then the castle was sacked by members of the local Vaughan family – nominally the duke’s own supporters – who abducted his two daughters. The news reached Buckingham at the Herefordshire castle of Weobley, where he was trying unsuccessfully to mobilize the locals. Morale was already plummeting among his forces: Welsh tenant-farmers of Buckingham’s, who hated him at the best of times, had been coerced into mobilizing ‘without any lust to fight for him’. This general reluctance to take up arms was exacerbated by the continued terrible weather, widespread flooding and news of a well-organized royal army that faced them across the Severn – that was, if they could cross at all. Having destroyed all the bridges, Richard’s troops were blocking all the routes into England.37
As Buckingham’s army fragmented, he and John Morton split up. Morton made his undercover way out of the country to Flanders. The duke wasn’t so decisive, or so lucky. He hid in the Shropshire house of one of his childhood servants, Ralph Bannaster, who, enticed by the large royal reward on offer for Buckingham’s capture, promptly handed him over to the authorities in the shape of the ubiquitous Sir James Tyrell. Tyrell then brought him south to Salisbury, where Richard arrived on 1 November. Now, it was Buckingham who begged for a meeting with Richard. Richard refused to see him; he also refused the duke a trial. The following day, All Souls, Buckingham was beheaded.38
The southern uprisings, meanwhile, were already running out of steam; now, following Buckingham’s execution, and confronted by a large royal army, they crumbled. The ringleaders scattered. Many fled headlong into the southwest, in front of the pursuing royal army, trying to link up with the rebels led by Dorset, St Leger and the Courtenay family. They aimed, too, to link up with the leader on whom their hopes were now pinned. In co-ordination with Buckingham’s rebellion and the southern insurgents, Henry Tudor was sailing from Brittany with a large force of men. Tudor, though, was nowhere in sight.39
Communication between the rebels had been poor and Tudor was late. By the end of October, when Tudor set sail from the Breton port of Paimpol with a fleet of fifteen ships and some five thousand troops, Richard’s men had secured all the major ports along the Hampshire and Dorset coast. At dawn the following day, shoreline patrols at Poole Bay spotted two ships limping into harbour. Tudor’s fleet had run into storms and had scattered. Most of his ships had turned back; Tudor had ploughed on. From the strand, royal troops tried to entice him ashore, shouting that they were Buckingham’s men come to rendezvous with him. Wisely, Tudor ignored them.40
As he sailed further west, hoping to link up with the southern insurgents, Tudor was harassed by detachments of seaborne marines off the east Devon port of Exmouth and, further south, at Dartmouth, Saltash and Plymouth. Finally, a boatload of his men managed to get ashore, where they heard the news of Buckingham’s death and the failure of the southern insurgency. An attempt to proclaim Henry Tudor king of England at the Cornish town of Bodmin – involving the bishop of Exeter Peter Courtenay, a handful of Edward IV’s household men, some of Buckingham’s rebels and a few local loyalists – was fruitlessly symbolic.41 By now Richard, based in Exeter, was hunting down the remaining insurgents: in Rougemont Castle he beheaded several, chief among them Thomas St Leger.
Tudor turned back. As he made for Brittany, storms swept him up the Channel as far as the Cotentin Peninsula, adding an extra two hundred weary miles overland back to the Breton court at Vannes. His prospects bleak, he worried that his long-time backer Duke Francis might come to see him as a liability rather than an asset.42 However, as autumn deepened into winter, there was one consolation: the situation had clarified. As a stream of rebels fleeing Richard’s wrath arrived in Brittany to bolster his ranks, it had become evident to anybody opposing Richard that Henry Tudor was now the only game in town.
In just a few weeks Richard had put down a potentially catastrophic challenge with what was, on the face of it, a display of crushing royal authority. Those not executed or in custody were on the run. As the king mopped up resistance in the southwest, his men were already busy at work, moving onto the rebels’ lands and seizing property, assets and goods in the king’s name.43 Where, following his coronation, Richard had a smattering of patronage with which to reward his followers, he now had a flood – not only the lands, but the royal offices held by many of the leading rebels, between a third and a half of whom had been servants of the late king, Edward IV. And that, for Richard, was the problem.
Across the shires of southern England these men, influential figures in their local communities, had been crucial nodes in the network of royal authority: men ‘through whom may be known the disposition of the counties’, imposing justice and security in the king’s name, enforcing the crown’s rights and collecting its income, and when necessary raising cash and troops on the king’s behalf. Just under fifty such men were convicted in their absence as rebels – which, of course, left many more people who weren’t, ostensibly at any rate. Yet for each man that rebelled, there were plenty more who had the same instincts but just chose to keep their heads down. That, at any rate, was how Richard saw it. Dealing with two counties at the h
eart of the insurgency – Wiltshire and Hampshire – he issued an order to confiscate the lands not just of the rebels involved, but of all significant property-owning gentry. The rebellion had shaken Richard’s trust not simply in certain named insurgents, but in the entire network that he had inherited from his brother and which, he hoped, had transferred its loyalties to him. Now, he realized, he couldn’t rely on it at all.
In the rebellion’s aftermath, Richard’s solution was instinctive. Needing trusted, reliable servants to patch the gaping holes in these torn networks, he reached not for local replacements, but men with whom he was long familiar, who had worked for him as duke of Gloucester and who were – barring one or two exceptions – northerners. No sooner had he annexed rebels’ lands and offices than he regranted them away to his supporters, even transferring the ownership of land before its forfeiture by the rebels concerned had been recognized in law.
In the weeks and months that followed, ‘strangers’ with unfamiliar accents took possession of estates across southern England, stepping into the shoes of local officers and elbowing their way into tight-knit communities. From Devon to Kent, these northerners were transplanted into local society as substantial new landowners. They were men who – as Richard wrote to the town of Tonbridge in Kent regarding the arrival of his household knight Marmaduke Constable – had come ‘to make his abode among you and to have the rule within the honour and town’. These were visible and uncomfortably dominant bearers of royal authority, their presence intended to detect, disrupt and block any further attempts at insurgency and to ensure that Richard’s will and laws were obeyed. It was hardly a move to broaden the base and appeal of Richard’s regime – but in the current climate he prioritized absolute loyalty, even if it meant relying on a smaller pool of tried and trusted servants. These ‘plantations’ were the gaze of Richard’s ‘inward eye’ in action. Property-owning southerners didn’t like it; they found it, as one chronicler put it, a ‘tyranny’.44
The atmosphere was still heavy with coercion when, on 25 November, Richard rode across London Bridge into the capital, accompanied by the usual cluster of corporate representatives. With the south of the country in a state of emergency, and rebels still on the run, the Channel ports were in lockdown; travellers were stopped and searched, and documents of all kinds confiscated. For the last month, wrote the wool merchant William Cely from Calais, nobody travelling to London was prepared to act as a courier. The aggravation wasn’t worth it: ‘no man went that would bear any letters for searching.’45
On Tower Hill there was a further round of beheadings, among them Sir George Brown, the chamber servant of Edward IV who had rejected Richard’s motto and his authority. Driving home his moralistic mission, Richard ordered the public shaming of his late brother’s mistress Jane Shore, whose liaisons with Hastings, Dorset and ‘other great estates’ made her, in Richard’s eyes, the living embodiment of everything that had been wrong with Edward IV’s regime. She was made to walk through London’s streets in her kirtle – which, for the higher ranks at least, was considered underwear – holding a lighted taper. The move backfired, at least according to Thomas More. Londoners, he said, had only sympathy for the exceptional dignity with which she bore her ‘great shame’.
A sense of expansive relief and gratitude pervaded Richard’s rewards to his followers, while the Christmas celebrations that year provided a welcome release of tension. At court, the wine flowed. The invitees to a Twelfth Night banquet included the mayor of London and a select group of citizens. Richard was eager to cultivate the city, whose donations had shored up the early years of his brother’s reign, and whose leading businessmen he now approached in person for fresh loans to cover the ‘great charges’ he had sustained in putting down the rebellion, pledging fine plate from the king’s jewelhouse as collateral. At the festivities, the king presented the mayor with a fine gold cup encrusted with pearls and lapis. Then, in a moment of sozzled largesse, he promised to London the independent borough of Southwark south of the River Thames, together with a £10,000 grant to extend the city walls round it. The corporation didn’t bother following up the offer, made in a moment of festive overindulgence. It was hardly feasible and besides, Richard hardly had £10,000 to give.46
Meanwhile, away in Brittany, another ceremonial was being enacted. On Christmas Day in Rennes Cathedral, Henry Tudor made his group of exiles a solemn promise. His first act, on gaining the crown of England, would be to marry Edward IV’s oldest daughter Elizabeth, currently still in Westminster sanctuary with her sisters and mother. In return, the fugitives swore oaths of loyalty to Tudor ‘as though he had already been created king’.
With this exchange of pledges, Tudor officially became the leader of the Yorkist rebels loyal to Edward IV and his sons. In the absence of Edward’s two heirs – missing, presumed dead – the late king’s servants now preferred to take their chances with a long-exiled Lancastrian of sketchy blood rather than accept the rule of Richard III.47
Following the bloody upheavals of the previous months, an unspoken, unanswered question lingered. It was the question associated with the foundation of Richard’s rule, and with the new stature of Henry Tudor among the Yorkist exiles in Brittany. What had happened to Edward IV’s sons? In France, they thought they knew the answer. In January 1484, the French chancellor went on the record: Richard, he stated, had had the princes killed.48 In England, by contrast, there was a collective omertà at the heart of power. Either people didn’t know what had happened to the boys – or, if they did, they weren’t saying.
The uncertainty affected government departments. Exchequer officials in Westminster, trying to process ongoing business, kept bumping up against the problem of how to refer to Edward V. There were signs of formulas having been written out, then rejected and redrafted. One official wrote up a memorandum in which 9 April was mentioned: the day of Edward IV’s death and, consequently, the first day of his son’s reign. Somebody else had come along and erased the original wording, in its place writing simply ‘the xxiijrd year of King Edward the Fourth’ in a capacious hand, adding a couple of horizontal lines to fill up the space of what had clearly been a longer formula – one perhaps too tellingly revealing of Edward V’s fate. In official documents, the wording eventually settled on was ‘Edward bastard, late called Edward king of England’. ‘Late’, or its Latin equivalent ‘nuper’, was used to refer to people in the past tense. Depending on the context, it meant either ‘former’ or ‘dead’. In the cases of Edward IV and Buckingham, the latter killed and stripped of his title and lands by Parliament, it meant both. In the case of the disappeared Edward V, ‘late called king’ was an ideal hedge.49
Whether or not Richard was anxious about the uncertainty, he redoubled his efforts to establish his rule in the minds of his subjects. Towards the end of January Parliament finally convened at Westminster. Chancellor John Russell got to his feet and delivered the sermon that he had waiting to give since the previous June – though, in the meantime, he had revised his text, now obligingly lingering on the threat presented by the enemy within, from such ‘as ought to have remained the king’s true and faithful subjects’.50 The following day the Commons elected their speaker, a man whose exceptional closeness to the king compensated for his complete lack of previous parliamentary experience: William Catesby. Catesby had some delicate business to see through. First on the agenda was the ratification of Richard’s right to the throne of England, and the invalidation of his late brother’s line.
The parliamentary declaration setting out Richard’s royal title, or titulus regius, laid out in lurid detail the now well-rehearsed reasons for Richard’s claim. First among them was the ‘ungracious feigned marriage’ between Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. A specific reason for the marriage’s invalidity had now been pinpointed. Edward, while sleeping around in the early 1460s, had apparently made a secret marriage, a ‘pre-contract’, to Eleanor Butler, a noblewoman who – perhaps conveniently – was how long dead and unable
to tell her side of the story. It was a promise perhaps made, as was Edward’s habit, in a haze of lust, as he tried to get her into bed. The revelations had come, so it was said, from Robert Stillington, bishop of Bath and Wells and Edward’s former chancellor. From Edward’s bigamy had resulted the perversion of all ‘politic rule’ in England, and the bastardy of his children. Given that Parliament had already declared the duke of Clarence’s children ‘barred from all right and claim to the crown’ on account of his treason, there was as a result ‘no other person living’ except Richard, undoubted son and heir of Richard duke of York, who was rightfully entitled to claim the crown ‘by way of inheritance’.51
The titulus regius was not, or so it was claimed, Richard’s declaration of his own title. Rather, it was the ratification of the people’s will, the rubber-stamping of a ceremony which, so the declaration now asserted, had been carried out back in June 1483 at Baynard’s Castle: then, an assembly of the lords and commons had ‘elected’ Richard king, presenting him in person with this very document. Yet as the titulus regius now stated, this informal deputation hadn’t carried with it the weight of parliamentary authority – which, in turn, had made many people doubt Richard’s claim to the throne. Therefore Parliament, whose authority ‘commands before all things most faith and certainty’, would enlighten the people, by putting on record its statement of the king’s title. If anybody was still unsure whether Richard was the lawful king of England, Parliament had pronounced.52