The Life and Times of Richard III Read online

  The man who benefited most from Richard’s martial exploits was undoubtedly ‘the universal spider’, Louis XI. For, shortly after Christmas, the Court learned that Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy had signed a treaty with the King of France. Their daughter Margaret was to marry the Dauphin, in flagrant disregard of the Dauphin’s previous betrothal to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth.

  The collapse of Edward’s diplomacy abroad did not touch Richard’s reputation. In recognition of ten years and more of service in the North, capped by the subjection of Edinburgh and the recapture of Berwick, Parliament bestowed on him in February 1483 the permanent and hereditary wardenship of the West Marches towards Scotland. This plum was sugared with a further grant of the castle and city of Carlisle, and all the King’s manors and revenues in the county of Cumberland. To these would be added any further conquests won from the Scots. At the age of thirty Richard could look forward to the undisputed possession of his own palatinate, and many years of active service in which to give rein to his proven talents.

  4

  The Usurper

  April–July

  1483

  Richard’s sojourn as Lieutenant of the North was brought to an abrupt end by the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483. Overweight and oversexed, his indulgence of these two appetites had undermined his health, but it was a chill caught on a fishing trip which was reported to have killed him. He left his kingdom and his Crown to his twelve-year-old son Edward, Prince of Wales, who kept his own Court at Ludlow Castle under the care of his uncle Anthony, Earl Rivers.

  England had known relative peace for twelve years; but a royal minority threatened to unleash all the tensions created by Edward’s patronage of the Woodville family and inflamed by Clarence’s execution. On his deathbed Edward had foreseen the worst, and striven to prevent it. He entrusted his son not to the Queen but to his brother Richard, who was named Protector. Richard could command the obedience of older nobility who despised the Queen and the swarm of relatives whom the King had endowed with high office, titled husbands and wealthy heiresses. As a further insurance he persuaded two particular rivals, Lord Hastings and the Queen’s eldest son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, to shake hands in a formal gesture of reconciliation.

  But these hatreds were more than skin deep. While preparations were still in hand for Edward’s lavish funeral, the Queen’s party took action to protect themselves against the reprisals they considered inevitable if the King’s will were allowed to take effect. Their principal asset was time. Until Richard and the rest of the peers of the realm reached London, they commanded a slender majority in the Council. Besides her son Dorset and her two brothers Lionel and Edward, the Queen could count on the support of two important clerics – Thomas Rotherham, Chancellor and Archbishop of York, and John Morton, Bishop of Ely. With these allies, the Woodvilles passed a resolution that Richard’s protectorship should be replaced by a Regency Council headed, but not dominated, by the Duke of Gloucester. ‘By this means’, Mancini later reported with the benefit of hindsight, ‘the Duke would be given due honour and the royal authority greater security.... If the government were committed to one man he might easily usurp the sovereignty.’ Mancini also reminds us of the Woodvilles’ motives when he adds that ‘all who favoured the Queen’s family voted for this proposal, as they were afraid that if Richard took the crown, or even governed alone, they who bore the blame of Clarence’s death would suffer death or at least be ejected from their high estate’.

  To give legal and military sanction to their coup the Woodvilles further proposed to bring the young King to Westminster for his coronation as soon as possible with as many armed men as Earl Rivers could summon on the road from Ludlow. Under the dire precedent of Henry VI’s reign, Edward’s minority would end with his crowning and the boy would be free to choose his own advisers. But the thought of Edward arriving with a Woodville army at his back alarmed even the Queen’s supporters. The majority bowed to Lord Hastings’s threat to retire like Warwick to Calais, of which he was Governor. The size of Edward’s escort was fixed at two thousand men.

  * * *

  St George’s Chapel, Windsor

  The magnificent Perpendicular Chapel dedicated to St George in Windsor Castle was begun by Edward IV, and work progressed constantly up to Richard III’s death. On Edward’s death in April 1483, his body was taken first to Westminster Abbey for the funeral service. It was then buried at Windsor. Richard erected a two-storeyed chantry chapel to his brother in the north choir aisle. The chapel remains very much a monument to Edward, as it is full of his personal badges on the stonework and carved in wood.

  * * *

  Richard was kept fully informed of these developments by couriers from Lord Hastings, who urged the Protector to put himself at the head of an army and race to London before Rivers arrived from Ludlow. But Richard was unwilling to risk a head-on collision with the Woodvilles. For the moment he contented himself with a polite but firm letter to the Council, stressing his devotion to his nephews and warning them not to enact anything contrary to his brother’s will.

  He then proceeded to York, according to the Croyland Chronicler, ‘with a becoming retinue, each person being arrayed in mourning’. Here, ‘he performed a solemn funeral service for the King, the same being accompanied with plenteous tears. Constraining all the nobility of these parts to take the oath of fealty to the late King’s son, he himself was the first to take the oath.’ Richard’s letter made a favourable impression in London, and won over a number of waverers to his cause. Nevertheless the Council fixed the coronation date for 4 May, and instructed Rivers to make sure that the King arrived not later than 1 May. Overriding all objections with calculated arrogance, the Marquess of Dorset is said to have told Lord Hastings and his supporters, ‘We are so important that even without the King’s uncle we can make and enforce these decisions.’

  Shortly after Edward IV had been laid to rest in St George’s Chapel at Windsor on 20 April, Richard left York for Northampton with a retinue of about six hundred men. At Northampton he was to join Rivers and the King for the final stage of their progress to London. Clearly neither party expected violence from the other, since Richard arrived with a retinue he knew to be outnumbered, and Rivers was under no compulsion to consent to the meeting in the first place. When Richard arrived on 29 April, as arranged, he learned that the King’s escort had already passed through the town and were now quartered twelve miles closer to London at Stony Stratford. Shortly before supper Earl Rivers rode back to Northampton with a small following and presented Edward’s greetings to his uncle. He explained the King’s removal to Stony Stratford by pointing out that Northampton was too small for both their retinues. Richard politely invited the Earl to stay to supper. They could ride together to join the King in the morning.

  During the meal Richard received a second visitor in the person of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. ‘Harre Bokingham’, as he signed himself, was the joker in the royal pack who played out the tragedy of Richard III. Lineal descendant of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, fifth son of Edward III, he ranked as the first peer of England after Richard and the King’s nine-year-old brother Richard Duke of York. He also harboured a deep-seated grudge against the Queen, for after his father was killed fighting for the House of Lancaster in 1455, he became a royal ward and was saddled with a Woodville wife. Ever anxious to feather the family nest, Queen Elizabeth had bestowed on him the hand of her younger sister Catherine ‘whom’, according to Mancini, ‘he scorned to wed on account of her humble origins’. No doubt he saw in Richard the instrument of his revenge.

  When Rivers and his companions had retired to bed, Buckingham, Richard and their advisers settled down to a midnight conference. Clearly they had met at Northampton by design: but it is doubtful whether they could have arranged in advance the plan that was now proposed for the following morning. Buckingham’s later career will show that he was ambitious, conceited and reckless. He was also
an accomplished and persuasive speaker. He must now have pointed out to Richard the danger of pursuing the prudent course he had so far undertaken. Once Rivers had delivered the King to his mother in London and set a crown on his head, only a civil war could unseat the Woodvilles. They were outnumbered – even with the three hundred men that Buckingham had brought from London – but in London the odds would be even longer. If they were to act, it must be now.

  At dawn on 30 April Richard ordered the arrest of Rivers, and posted guards on the road to prevent the news from reaching Stony Stratford. Accompanied by a troop of soldiers, the two Dukes galloped the twelve miles to Stratford and requested an audience with the King. The interview was brief and rather stilted. Richard began by offering his condolences on the death of the King’s father, which he blamed on his ministers and their encouragement of his vices. The same men were guilty of conspiring to ambush the Protector on the road to London. Edward objected that he had every confidence in his father’s ministers and intended to entrust the government to the peers of the realm and the Queen, upon which Buckingham broke in to say that women had no business in the government of a kingdom. If Mancini’s account is to be believed, Edward must have been a precocious child and well-rehearsed in his role – an important point in the light of later events. Nevertheless, the interview ended, in Thomas More’s account, with the King in tears. His half-brother Lord Richard Grey and his Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Vaughan, were placed under arrest. The King’s Welsh escort, with no word from its leaders, was told to go home, and the Dukes returned to Northampton with their captives.

  The news reached London at midnight and sent the Queen scurrying with her remaining children to take Sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. By the morning of 1 May the city was in uproar. The Marquess of Dorset tried to raise an army to recapture the King, but gave up to join the Queen in Sanctuary when he saw that public opinion sided with the Protector. The Thames was swarming with boatloads of Richard’s supporters who had come out to cut the Queen’s communications with the city. Archbishop Rotherham of York, who had rashly delivered the Chancellor’s seal to the Queen, now sent a messenger to reclaim it. Lord Hastings did his best to lower the political temperature by calling a meeting of the remaining lords at St Paul’s and explaining, in Thomas More’s words, that ‘the Duke of Gloucester was sure and fastly faithful to his prince and that the Lord Rivers and Lord Richard [Grey] were, for matters attempted by them against the Dukes of Gloucester and Buckingham, put under arrest for their surety, not for the King’s jeopardy’. The city authorities were also soothed by a letter from Richard, promising an early date for the coronation.

  The King and the two Dukes made their entry into London on 4 May. As proof of the villainy of the Queen’s family, the procession was headed by four horse-drawn cartloads of weapons embellished with the Woodville insignia, and a group of street-criers who proclaimed that these arms had been placed in secret caches on the city outskirts. This gambit rather backfired since a number of the onlookers knew that the armouries had been established by Edward IV for use against the Scots. The procession made its way to the Bishop of London’s Palace at St Paul’s, where the King was safely lodged. On the same day the Lords, Bishops, Mayor and Aldermen were invited to take the oath of allegiance.

  For the moment the future seemed secure. The non-aligned members of the Council, whose prime concern was not to side with Richard or the Queen but to prevent an outbreak of violence, were relieved to find that the transfer of power had been achieved without bloodshed. ‘With the consent and goodwill of all the Lords’, the Croyland Chonicle reports, ‘the Duke of Gloucester was invested with power to order and forbid in every matter, just like another king.’ The coronation was now to take place on 24 June, and on the following day the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament would be asked to ratify the protectorate. At Buckingham’s suggestion the King was moved to the more spacious royal apartments in the Tower.

  Richard was happy to leave the membership of the Council virtually unchanged. Even Rotherham kept his seat, although his indiscretion with the seal lost him the chancellorship. The new Chancellor was John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln – an appointment which earned the approval even of Richard’s enemies. If the absence of Woodvilles left a vacuum, it was filled by the Duke of Buckingham who was also rewarded with wide grants of authority in Wales and the West Country.

  The Woodvilles were not forgotten. One member of the family – Sir Edward Woodville – was still at large in the Channel with a fleet that had sailed on 29 April to clear the seas of French and Breton pirates. To persuade the sailors to return to port, Richard offered a free pardon to all but the leaders. Thanks to the ingenuity of two Genoese sea-captains who persuaded Sir Edward’s men to drink themselves insensible and then tied them up, the ruse was successful. Sir Edward himself managed to escape to Brittany with only two ships.

  Although Rivers, Grey and Vaughan were safely in custody in Richard’s northern strongholds, the Protector felt the need to justify his actions at Stony Stratford by bringing charges of treason against them. In this instance the bishops – civil servants who formed the backbone of the neutral peace party in the Council – overrode him. Clearly the tale of the intended ambush cut little ice in government circles. The Council were also keen to reach some arrangement with the Queen who was still cooped up in Sanctuary. If she could be persuaded to come out with her children and accept an honourable retirement as Queen Dowager, all rifts would be healed. Negotiations dragged on until the first week in June, but Elizabeth made no move, reluctant either to accept defeat or to trust her brother-in-law’s assurances.

  Shortly after 5 June, when Anne arrived from Middleham to join her husband, a new crisis erupted suddenly. On 10 and 11 June Richard fired off a series of letters to his friends and supporters in the North. ‘We heartily pray you’, he wrote to the Corporation of York, ‘to come unto us to London in all the diligence ye can possible... with as many as ye can make defensibly arrayed, there to aid and assist us against the Queen, her bloody adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doth intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin the Duke of Buckingham and the royal blood of this realm.’

  The urgency of the letters makes little sense unless the ranks of the Queen’s ‘bloody adherents’ had been swelled by a new recruit of some importance. This was none other than Lord Hastings. Towards the end of May, apparently, he and Archbishop Rotherham, Lord Stanley and Bishop Morton had fallen into the habit of holding their own informal meetings in the Tower while Richard’s intimates gathered around him at his house of Crosby’s Place. The grouping of these four was in itself a danger signal, since it signified a rift between the Protector’s personal supporters and the men who had formed the inner circle of Edward IV’s advisers. But Richard did not feel unduly threatened until he caught wind of a rapprochement between Hastings and the Queen.

  What could have persuaded Hastings to turn against the man whose interests he had defended so vigorously in the weeks of crisis following the death of Edward IV? Sir Thomas More and Tudor historians readily persuaded themselves that Hastings bitterly regretted his support when he learned of Richard’s intention to usurp the Crown. It was his loyalty to Edward V and the memory of his father that caused Hastings to repent.

  This notion cannot be disproved, but it seems unlikely on two counts. Family loyalty is hardly the dominant motif of the Wars of the Roses: uncles, cousins and brothers had been fighting and killing each other since 1455 and traded their allegiance whenever it suited their interests. Hastings had never turned his coat on Edward IV but there is no reason to suppose that he would have risked his life for Edward V and the hated Woodvilles unless loyalty was cemented with self-interest. In the second place, there is no evidence that at this time Richard had made up his mind to disinherit his nephews. The draft of Chancellor Russell’s speech for the opening of Parliament has survived, and it states clearly that the first business of the Parliament was to confirm Richard’s ti
tle as Protector.

  Hastings turned to the Woodvilles in June for precisely the same reason as he turned to Richard in April – because his interests were threatened from another quarter. By upholding Richard’s claims during the Protector’s absence in the North, he doubtless hoped to be rewarded with the lion’s share of the spoils and the most important voice in his Council. However, he soon realised that it was Buckingham who had adopted the role of Kingmaker. Buckingham rode beside Richard when the Protector entered London, and Buckingham was rewarded with almost vice-regal powers in Wales and the West. As Lord Chamberlain to Edward V, Hastings could still hope to recoup his position after the coronation. But here again he was disappointed, when Richard proposed to extend his authority until the King came of age.

  The remedy that Richard applied to Hastings’s disaffection was drastic and quick. On 13 June he struck, without waiting for his reinforcements from Yorkshire. While the official side of the Council was in session at Westminster, Richard summoned the four offenders, Buckingham, Howard and a number of his personal staff to a meeting at the Tower. What followed is vividly described by Sir Thomas More, who derived his information from one of those present – John Morton, Bishop of Ely. The Protector entered the Council Chamber at nine o’clock, ‘excusing himself that he had been from them so long, saying merely that he had been asleep that day. And after a little talking unto them, he said unto the Bishop of Ely: “My Lord, you have very good strawberries at your garden in Holborn, I require you let us have a mess of them.”’ Shortly after opening the meeting Richard asked the Councillors to excuse him for a moment and left the room. Between 10 and 11 am, ‘he returned into the chamber among them, all changed, with a wonderfully sour angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and fretting and gnawing on his lips’. The Council sat stunned by this sudden change. Then Richard asked them, ‘“What were they worthy to have, that compass and imagine the destruction of me, being so near of blood unto the King and Protector of his royal person and realm?”’ To this Hastings replied ‘“that they were worthy to be punished as heinous traitors, whatsoever they were”. “That is yonder sorceress, my brother’s wife”, cried Richard, “and others with her.”’