The Life and Times of Richard III Read online

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  About The Life and Times of Richard III

  About Anthony Cheetham

  Table of Contents

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  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Map

  Introduction

  Part 1: York and Lancaster 1452–61

  Part 2: The Kingmaker 1461–71

  Part 3: ‘Loyalty binds me’ 1471–83

  Part 4: The Usurper April–July 1483

  Part 5: ‘The Most Untrue Creature Living’ August–November 1483

  Part 6: The King 1483–4

  Part 7: Bosworth 1484–5

  Part 8: Scorpio Ascendant 1485

  Select Bibliography

  Genealogical Tree

  Index

  About The Life and Times of Richard III

  About Anthony Cheetham

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Map

  Introduction

  The most controversial king in English history – his passionate admirers would still not deny this title to Richard III, while continuing to see in him the most maligned of our sovereigns. As for those nourished beyond redemption on the black legend of Crookback Dick, even they must admit that his reign contains a spectacular historical problem in the deaths of the Princes in the Tower, the exact truth about which is still not known even after a lapse of five hundred years. Of course the trouble with this type of riddle, as Anthony Cheetham ably shows in a highly readable new biography, is that although it arouses the detective instinct in us all, at the same time there is the risk of its overshadowing the whole reign – to say nothing of the true personality of the man himself.

  Thus it is especially valuable to have the fact of Richard’s early life unrolled, including his own position in the complex family tree of York and Lancaster, for without this it is impossible to assess the man. It is a youth of promise, both military and administrative, including a decisive action at Tewkesbury and excellent handling of the North on his brother’s behalf, as a result of which he was termed by those in a position to know ‘our full tender especial good lord of York’. By the age of thirty he had been made Hereditary Warden of the Western Marches of Scotland by Edward as a reward for his good services to the Crown. Hard-working, brave, small in stature but still handsome (not in fact a hunchback, although one shoulder may have been slightly higher than the other), the ascetic figure of Richard presents a strong contrast to his brother the King, a golden-haired giant in youth but becoming ‘overweight and oversexed’ with age, and loaded with the problems that his indulgent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had landed on the country in the shape of her grasping relations.

  Indeed it is in this contrast that Anthony Cheetham looks for the source of Richard’s trouble with the old régime on his brother’s death; this plodding, even Puritanical, character, disliking the free and easy ways of his brother’s Court. Even the usurpation is seen in the context of the terrible disaster that the minority of a child king could bring upon a country, Richard in his short reign concentrating on much constructive work towards better government. There still remains the problem of the young Princes’ fate: here Anthony Cheetham is in no sense concerned to whitewash his subject. He contributes instead a lucid discussion of the evidence – showing incidentally how much of it derives from subsequent Tudor propaganda – at the end of which he demonstrates how, if Richard was guilty, at least it accords with the straightforward personality of the man, a man who was so far from being Shakespeare’s calculating villain, that he probably possessed if anything ‘too little guile rather than too much’.

  1

  York and Lancaster

  1452–61

  At the Northamptonshire castle of Fotheringhay, on 2 October 1452, Cicely, Duchess of York, gave birth to a son, who was christened Richard after his father. The Duchess was renowned for her beauty and for her enduring devotion to her husband. Known as ‘the Rose of Raby’, she had married comparatively late, in her mid-twenties, and accompanied her husband on his tours of duty in the French territories conquered by Henry V and in the Irish pale. Undaunted by the hazards of war, travel or continual pregnancy, she had already borne ten children in three different countries before the young Richard first saw the light of day. Six of these children – three boys and three girls – had survived the rigours of infancy: in 1452 Richard’s eldest brother Edward was ten years old, Edmund was nine, and George was four.

  All three inherited something of their mother’s looks and robust constitution. Richard, the last of Cicely’s surviving children, seems to have inherited neither: a weak and sickly child, he struggled through his early years, causing an anonymous rhymster to comment, with a note of surprise, that ‘Richard liveth yet’. In looks and height he would later resemble his father, a shortish man with plain, forthright features.

  Richard, Duke of York, was the greatest magnate and landowner in the kingdom, excepting the king himself. From his mother, Anne Mortimer, he inherited the vast Welsh border estates of the earldom of March, the earldom of Ulster and the Irish lordships of Connaught, Trim and Clare; from his father, Richard, Earl of Cambridge, the dukedom of York and the earldoms of Rutland and Cambridge. Through both his parents York also inherited the royal blood of Edward III. On the one side he traced his descent from Lionel, Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III; on the other he was the grandson of Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund of Langley. These family relationships are of more than passing interest: their shadow lies across the short and violent span of Richard’s life, and stains the whole chapter of English history known as the Wars of the Roses.

  The fortunes of the House of York were founded on the fact that their royal descent was arguably better than that of the reigning House of Lancaster. For while York could claim descent from the second son of Edward III, Henry VI could trace his only from Edward’s third son, John of Gaunt. King Henry thus owed his crown more to the successful usurpation of his grandfather, Henry Bolingbroke, than to the legitimate laws of inheritance.

  These dynastic subtleties might well have remained purely academic, if the kingdom had not been wracked, in the years preceding Richard’s birth, by a series of crises that left the King bankrupt, the barons at each others’ throats and the country shorn of its empire overseas. King Henry himself was most to blame. At a time when the King was expected to be his own prime minister and commander in chief combined, Henry was interested only in charity and prayer. This saintly incompetent allowed his ministers to pillage the royal coffers to the tune of about £24,000 a year. Nor was he able to devise an effective policy towards the besetting problem of his dwindling possessions in France. Henry V’s great conquests had saddled his son with an embarrassing legacy – crushingly expensive to maintain, humiliating to abandon. In 1444 his advisers persuaded the King that he must cut his losses, come to terms with the French and marry a French princess. The bride chosen by Henry’s advisers was Margaret of Anjou, daughter of René, Duke of Anjou, and niece of the French King, Charles VII. Although she was only fifteen years old, Margaret’s dazzling looks, her lively intelligence and her impetuous energy soon wrought a transformation in the routine of her husband’s Court. With more gratitude than foresight she also linked her fortunes – and the King’s – with the second-rate ministers who had made her a Queen. But the French truce negotiated by her favourite protégé, William de la Pole, Earl (later Marquess and Duke) of Suffolk, lasted only two years. In 1448 the province of Maine was ceded to the French: in 1449 Normandy went the same way. By now the country was baying for the blood of the appeasers whom it held responsible for these disasters – S
uffolk, Somerset and Queen Margaret.

  In the following spring discontent boiled over into open rebellion. Suffolk was assassinated. Jack Cade and an army of Kentish rebels marched on London and forced the King to flee from his own capital. The Bishop of Salisbury was murdered by his flock who ‘spoiled him unto the naked skin, and rent his bloody shirt into pieces and bare them away with them and made boast of their wickedness’.

  Someone had to call a halt. Richard, Duke of York had already identified himself as an opponent of the Court party and as a long-standing enemy of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. In 1445 Somerset had blocked the renewal of York’s appointment as the King’s Lieutenant in France. Four years later he had engineered York’s removal from the Court to an honourable exile as Lieutenant of Ireland. By 1451 it was also beginning to look as if York, or his eldest son Edward, would one day inherit the Crown. Henry’s three uncles had all died childless, and the King still had no children by his French wife.

  Cade’s rebellion provided York with an excuse to return from Ireland and seek a confrontation with the King. Faced with the evidence of his misgovernment, Henry caved in and agreed to put matters right by consulting his Parliament in October. Parliament was solidly for York. Among the many reforms they demanded were Somerset’s imprisonment and York’s recognition as the King’s chief councillor. But by December Queen Margaret was once again calling the tune. Somerset was reinstated and Parliament was prorogued. When it reassembled in May 1451 one Thomas Young of Bristol was committed to the Tower for proposing that York should be named as heir apparent. As far removed from power as ever he was in Ireland, York retired to his castle of Ludlow in the Welsh Marches.

  The struggle between the reformers and the Court party had now assumed the character of a vicious personal duel between York and Somerset. With Henry refusing to name his heir, York was afraid that his rival might persuade the Queen to override his legitimate claims. For Somerset too had a claim to the throne through his descent from John of Gaunt and his mistress Catherine Swynford. Early in 1452 York was ready to try again – this time with an army at his back. In a proclamation issued at Ludlow on 3 February, he protested that he was ‘the King’s true liege man’: his reforms had been negated ‘through the envy, malice and untruth of the said Duke of Somerset’ who ‘laboureth continually about the King’s Highness for my undoing and to corrupt my blood, and to disherit me and my heirs’. When York’s army reached London he found the city’s gates closed, and Henry at Blackheath with a force that outnumbered his own. Anxious to avoid bloodshed at any price, the King induced York to surrender on the promise that Somerset would be arrested and tried. But the Queen would not give up the new favourite who had taken Suffolk’s place in her affections. The King, always putty in her hands, was induced to break his word. York, who had obediently given himself up, was forced to undergo the humiliation of swearing a public oath never again to take up arms against the King.

  Thus, in the year of Richard’s birth, the kingdom already teetered on the brink of civil war. In the twelve months that followed, two events of cardinal importance sufficed to push it over the edge. On 17 July 1453 John Talbot, veteran of countless battles and sieges in the English reconquest of France, was killed at the battle of Castillon, and the last English army in France was annihilated by French cannon. By the year’s end Bordeaux had fallen, Guyenne acknowledged Charles VII and the Hundred Years’ War was at an end. At Henry’s accession thirty years before, the Plantagenet dominions in France had embraced Normandy, Picardy, Ile de France and Gascony: now only Calais and the Channel Islands remained. An irreparable blow was dealt to English pride. Henry’s government was branded with the stigma of defeat, and his French Queen became a symbol of England’s shame. The defeated soldiers returning from the wars roamed the countryside in armed bands, a menace to the already disintegrating fabric of public order. Most important of all, the loss of empire dissolved the restraining bonds of patriotism which had held the domestic squabbles of the aristocracy in check.

  Worse was to follow. Less than a month after Castillon, a bout of insanity deprived King Henry of speech and sense.

  Her husband’s madness brought out both the best and the worst in Queen Margaret. Still only twenty-three years old, she devoted her spectacular energy and courage to the defence of Henry’s rights. But she was deaf to the real grievances of the Court’s political opponents, construing their reforms as a direct assault on the royal prerogatives. While Somerset could do no wrong in her eyes, she had conceived a special loathing for the Duke of York. Without Henry’s moderating influence, the Crown now became an instrument of faction. Queen Margaret did not hesitate to press her claims. In October her position was much strengthened when she gave birth to a son, Edward of Lancaster. This was a harsh blow to York’s chances but popular feeling still ran high in his favour. The prospect of another long royal minority had little appeal for the Commons who assembled in Parliament early in 1454 to settle the question of the regency. Despite the protests of the Court, Richard of York was declared ‘protector and defenser’ on 27 March.

  * * *

  The Fifteenth-Century Wool Trade

  Wool has been described as ‘the flower and strength and revenue and blood of England’, and during the late medieval period it was undoubtedly the principal source of wealth to the country. The revenue derived from the trade brought wealth both to secular merchants and to the great monasteries. Thus many of the fine houses and churches built in the fifteenth century were based upon wool.

  * * *

  The protectorship did not survive the year’s end. In December King Henry recovered his wits and formally recognised his son. Somerset, who had been committed to the Tower twelve months previously, was released, and York’s ministers were dismissed. Both the Queen and Richard were now set on bringing matters to a head. York withdrew to Sendal Castle in Yorkshire and set about raising an army in conjunction with his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury. The Queen and Somerset summoned their supporters to a meeting of the Great Council at Leicester. The Yorkists mobilised first and marched south, and with an army of about three thousand men, they collided with the royal army at St Albans. In the first pitched battle of the Wars of the Roses, York was completely victorious. Somerset was slain and the King himself received a flesh wound from a Yorkist arrow.

  York’s dilemma was that he still claimed to act in the King’s name. But, while the King was ruled by the Queen, his only sanction lay in superior force. The next three years were characterised by an armed truce during which the Queen’s party slowly regained lost ground. The resurrected protectorship which York forced on the King was again abolished. A hollow reconciliation staged at St Paul’s in March 1458 produced no real solutions, and the Duke of York confined himself warily to his estates.

  The Yorkists entered the next round of hostilities with only two positive gains. The Merchants of the Staple, the most influential financial organisation in the country, backed them rather than the King as the best hope for a return to good government. The second was that the captaincy of Calais passed, on Somerset’s death, to Cicely Neville’s young nephew, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Both as a refuge and as a springboard for invasion, Calais was an asset of incalculable value.

  As usual the country at large suffered greater hardship than the principals who had brought about the breakdown of central government. The following summary by an anonymous chronicler, though biased in favour of the Yorkists, probably gives a fair picture:

  In this same time, the realm of England was out of all good governance, as it had been many days before, for the king was simple and led by covetous counsel, and owed more than he was worth. His debts increased daily, but payment was there none: all the possessions and lordships that pertained to the crown the king had given away, some to lords and some to other simple persons, so that he had almost nought to live on. And such impositions as were put to the people, as taxes, tallages, and quinzimes, all that came from them was spended on
vain, for he held no household he maintained no wars. For these misgovernances, and for many others, the hearts of the people were turned away from them that had the land in governance, and their blessing was turned into cursing.

  In Devonshire the Courtenay family terrorised the countryside in pursuit of private vendettas. In Northumberland the Nevilles took full advantage of their temporary ascendancy over the Percies. In 1457 the French launched a raid on Sandwich and burned it to the ground.

  Early in 1459, York’s youngest son, Richard, then in his seventh year, first felt the impact of war. With the Queen’s party openly preparing for an armed challenge, Richard’s father no longer considered Fotheringhay a safe refuge for his two younger sons, George and Richard. He therefore decided to move them to the greater isolation and superior defences of his great castle at Ludlow, where they joined his two older boys, the seventeen-year-old Edward, Earl of March, and his sixteen-year-old brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland. As it turned out, this was a most unfortunate decision. By early autumn the Queen’s army was gathered at Coventry, poised to march on Ludlow. Despite the arrival of Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and his son Warwick, the Duke of York was heavily outnumbered. On the night of 13 October, with the royal army encamped only a mile from Ludlow, he heard that Warwick’s most experienced troops – a contingent of the Calais garrison – had defected to seek the King’s pardon. The news broke his nerve. The Yorkist leaders took to their heels and made for the Welsh coast. The Duke, who took with him only his elder sons, left his army, his wife and the rest of his family to fend for themselves. He and Edmund sailed for Ireland: Warwick and the others took refuge in Calais.

  The Duchess Cicely and her two younger sons were not harshly treated. They were put into the custody of Richard’s aunt, the Duchess of Buckingham, and lived on one of Buckingham’s manors. In the following year the two boys were attached to the household of Thomas Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Late in June 1460 they heard the welcome news that their brother Edward had landed at Sandwich with Salisbury and Warwick. On 2 July the three Earls were welcomed in London, where only the Tower held out for King Henry. Then the Yorkists marched north: once again the Lancastrians were inadequately prepared. When the two armies clashed on 10 July, south of Northampton, the Yorkists carried the day in less than an hour. The Queen had wisely remained in Coventry during the battle and fled with Prince Edward, first to Harlech Castle in Wales, then to Scotland. King Henry was taken in his tent. For a second time he suffered the indignity of being rescued from his councillors in a pitched battle, and was taken back to London to sanction a Yorkist government.