Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (21 page)

He decided to strike first. The day after the council meeting, Richard wrote to the mayor and city of York, urging them to send as many men ‘as ye can make defensibly arrayed’ in order to

Letters were also sent to the Earl of Northumberland, who began to raise men in the East Riding the day after the letter had reached York. For what purpose Richard intended this large army to march on London was yet to become apparent. Only the duke himself knew what his next moves were to be; within days, they would leave a kingdom stunned.

It was a sunny morning on 13 June when the council met at the Tower of London at nine o’clock. The day before, Richard had chosen to divide the council that morning, so that ‘part met at Westminster, part in the
Tower of London where the king was’; later, his reasons for doing so would become brutally apparent. Arriving at the council chamber, the duke seemed in a good mood. He even asked John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, to fetch him a ‘mess’ of strawberries from the walled garden of the bishop’s house across the city. Richard’s purpose for getting Morton out of the way would soon become clear.

Once the meeting began, Richard excused himself and left the room. When he returned, his mood had changed. Appearing with ‘a sour and angry countenance’, he sat down at the council table. Suddenly he banged his fists on the table. Someone outside hearing the noise took it as a signal, and began to shout ‘Treason!’ Before the council members could understand what was happening, the room was filled with men ‘in harness, as many as the chamber might hold’. Hastings, Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, and Oliver King, the king’s secretary, were seized in the struggle, which saw Thomas, Lord Stanley struck across the face.

Before anyone could challenge the duke or his armed men, Hastings was led out into the courtyard, where after ‘scarce leisure’ to make a confession, he was summarily executed, beheaded with a sword ‘on the stock of a tree’. He had been killed, Mancini mused, ‘not by those enemies he had always feared, but by a friend whom he had never doubted’. The Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Ely were spared execution ‘out of respect for their order’, but instead were led from the capital to be imprisoned in Wales.

As soon as Hasting’s dead body was carted away to be buried, Richard explained to the council he had uncovered yet another conspiracy against him. Involving Queen Elizabeth, witchcraft and Edward’s former mistress Elizabeth Shore, its highly improbable combination of authors meant that few believed it, with many suspecting that ‘the plot had been feigned by the duke so as to escape the odium of such a crime’.

‘All men generally lamented the death of that man’, one observer reported; nevertheless, no one dared to speak out. ‘All praised the Duke of Gloucester for his dutifulness towards his nephews and for his intention to punish their enemies. Some, however, who understood his ambition and deceit, always suspected whither his enterprises might lead’. Hasting’s execution had cowed men into silence, ‘expecting something
similar’ if they dared to demonstrate any resistance, so that Richard and Buckingham ‘thereafter did whatever they wanted’.

The method of Richard’s sudden attack on Hastings, followed by accusations of a conspiracy, was almost identical to his treatment of Rivers and Grey several weeks before. This time, however, Richard had learnt the lesson of dispatching his rival as soon as he could. Yet even if the implausible details of any conspiracy related by Richard can be discounted, it was clear that the duke himself sincerely believed that some kind of conflict would soon arise, compromising his ability to rule as Protector. The timing of Richard’s decision to arrest and execute Hastings itself must be questioned: if the attack had been pre-planned, why did Richard not wait until his northern troops had arrived in the capital, leaving him in a much stronger position, or until he had the Duke of York in his possession? It seems that, far from being carefully orchestrated, Richard had been forced into acting before it was too late. Perhaps Hastings had discovered Richard’s plans to assemble a force to march on London; or that at the lengthy council meeting on 9 June, he had expressed enough resistance to Richard’s plans to have the Duke of York removed from sanctuary that Richard realised that Hastings’ loyalties lay not with him but with the princes. Hastings had agreed to Richard’s seizure of the protectorship since he considered it in their best interests to be brought up with their uncle instead of his enemies the Woodvilles; he did not, it seems, consider that interest went as far as to forcibly remove one of the children from the holy protections offered by sanctuary. For his resistance, Hastings had to go. ‘And thus was this nobleman murdered,’ the author of the Great Chronicle remarked, ‘for his troth and fidelity which he bare his master’, Edward V.

Hastings had been at the head of a court party that had defended the young king’s interest above all other; he had been, Polydore Vergil remarked, the person in whom ‘the nobles who favoured King Edward’s children had reposed their whole hope and confidence’. Now, ‘without justice or judgement, the three strongest supports of the new king were removed’, the Crowland Chronicler observed. In destroying Hastings, Richard had evidently not acted alone, but in concert with several noblemen. Mancini relates that it was Buckingham who had alerted Richard to secret meetings between Hastings, Morton and Thomas Rotherham in each other’s houses. The armed men who seized Hastings had been
placed in charge of John, Lord Howard’s son, Thomas Howard. With their continued support, Richard was now in complete control. There was to be no turning back.

With the king already in his possession in the Tower, two days later Richard now moved to seize his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York from sanctuary at Westminster. Already he had also sought to secure the possession of Clarence’s young son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, fearing that ‘this child, who was also of royal blood, would still embarrass him’.

On the morning of 16 June, the sanctuary was surrounded by troops, described as ‘a great crowd, with swords and clubs’. As the head of a delegation to Queen Elizabeth, Richard sent the eighty-year-old Thomas Bourgchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury, accompanied ‘with many others’, who remonstrated with the queen to give up her younger son into his care, promising that York would be returned to her after the coronation. She had heard the arguments over and over for the past few weeks, but the elderly prelate’s pleading, ‘in order to prevent a violation of the sanctuary’, suggested that she realised that if she did not give up her son voluntarily, he would be taken from her by force. In the end, seeing herself ‘besieged’ and the ‘preparation for violence’, she gave up her son.

With both the princes now in his hands, Richard did not hesitate to show his real intentions, ‘not in private but openly’. Later the same day, Richard issued writs cancelling the Parliament that had been summoned for 25 June; quietly, as the day neared to the appointed coronation date, Richard postponed the coronation to 9 November, as business in the exchequer and the chancery effectively ceased. Simon Stallworth wrote to Sir William Stonor on 21 June, barely containing his nervousness at the situation, ‘for with us is much trouble and every man doubts everyone else’. With a ‘great plenty of harnessed men’ surrounding Westminster Abbey, reports continued to spread that 20,000 armed men that had mustered at Pontefract on 18 June were now heading to the capital from the north, ‘in frightening and unheard of numbers’. As the day neared to the originally appointed coronation date of 22 June, instead there was ‘privy talking in London that the Lord Protector should be king’.

Two days before the original coronation date, orders were issued by
the mayor that every man was to observe a night-time curfew, with a watch carefully appointed. When the date of the coronation arrived, the only spectacle was provided by Dr Ralph Shaa, who preached a sermon from St Paul’s cross outside the cathedral, declaring Edward V and his brother illegitimate on the grounds that Edward IV had not been validly married to Elizabeth Woodville due to a pre-contract he had apparently previously entered into with a lady at court, Elizabeth Butler. Shaa even went so far as to cast doubt upon the former king’s own legitimacy, suggesting that he had been born out of an affair, though this charge was swiftly dropped. The arguments themselves were irrelevant. The purpose of the sermon was to give backing to what had already been decided: that Richard should instead claim the throne as his own. When Buckingham repeated the same charges in an eloquent speech at the Guildhall on 25 June to the city authorities, for a ‘good half hour’, only a small number of men could bring themselves to cry out ‘yea, yea’ and even then they had done so ‘more for fear than love’. But with armed men stationed outside the building, the Londoners felt that they had little choice but to support Richard’s claim.

As Richard was being petitioned to take the throne, several hundred miles away at Pontefract Castle an altogether different spectacle was taking place. Acting as judge, the Earl of Northumberland presided over the trial of Earl Rivers, Thomas Grey and Thomas Vaughan, reaching a verdict that they were all guilty of treason. Rivers had suspected that his own end was near, and had made his will two days earlier. All three were executed the same day, their bodies thrown into a common grave.

On 26 June, together with the mayor, Buckingham led a delegation of noblemen and aldermen to Richard’s mother’s residence at Baynard’s Castle where they requested that Richard accept the crown. After a symbolic hesitation, Richard agreed, and ‘attended by well near all the lords spiritual and temporal of this realm’ rode to Westminster Hall where, in a ceremony conspicuously modelled on his brother’s accession back in 1461, he ‘thrust himself into the marble chair’ of the king’s throne and was declared king. With his coronation fixed for 6 July, Richard wrote to the Calais garrison informing them of the decision, explaining simply that although Edward V had been recognised as the rightful heir, this had only taken place since men were ‘then ignorant of
the very sure and true title which our sovereign lord that now is, King Richard III, hath and had the same time to the crown of England’.

The change in Richard’s appearance could hardly have been starker. Previously dressed for months in mourning black, he now clothed himself in the royal purple, riding through the capital surrounded by a thousand attendants. Richard III took instantly to the trappings of majesty, acting every part a king. When, six days before his planned coronation his ‘northern men’, numbering between five and six thousand men, had finally arrived in the capital, camping on Finsbury Fields, Richard ‘himself went out to meet the soldiers before they entered the city; and, when they were drawn up in a circle on a very great field, he passed them with bared head around their ranks and thanked them’. Stationed at intervals on every street in London, they were to provide a menacing reminder of Richard’s formidable strength and supreme authority.

The coronation on 6 July was no less an impressive occasion, with Richard dressed in a gold and blue doublet, covered by a purple gown trimmed with ermine. His new queen, Anne, was carried in a litter with five ladies in waiting. Buckingham’s pre-eminence as kingmaker was underlined by his role as master of ceremonies at the coronation, having the ‘chief rule and devising’ of the ceremony, carrying the white wand of high steward. John, Lord Howard had stood at Richard’s right hand when he had assumed the throne on 26 June. Two days later the price of his collusion was paid in the form of political reward when he was created Duke of Norfolk, together with his son who became Earl of Surrey, while William, Viscount Berkeley was raised to the Earldom of Nottingham.

The creations were the first in a series of appointments designed to bolster the new king’s authority. No longer dependent upon the pretence of maintaining the status quo of his dead brother’s household, Richard began to refashion the court and council to his own making. His close friend Francis, Viscount Lovell was appointed chief butler and Lord Chamberlain, William Catesby, who may have played a part in the downfall of his former master Hastings, became Chancellor of the Exchequer, while Sir Robert Brackenbury became Master of the King’s Moneys and constable of the council. The council was packed with Richard’s own supporters, including Lovell, Brackenbury, Lord
Scrope of Bolton, Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Scrope’s brother-in-law, Sir James Tyrell and Sir Richard Fitzhugh.

Despite being ‘wounded, seized and imprisoned’ during Hastings’ arrest, Thomas Stanley had managed to regain the king’s favour, being appointed steward of the household, attending the coronation where his wife Margaret Beaufort bore the queen’s train in the procession to Westminster Abbey. According to Polydore Vergil, Richard had decided it was best to come to terms with Stanley, fearing that his son George, Lord Strange ‘soon should have stirred up the people to arms somewhere against him’. It seems that Richard was also intending to try and heal old wounds, or at least to neutralise the threat that he believed Henry Tudor, still in exile in Brittany, posed.

Evidence of this attempt at reconciliation came the day before the coronation, on 5 July, when Margaret and Stanley had been invited to court to an audience with Richard and his chief justice William Hussey at Westminster, where Richard gave his support to Margaret’s claim to a ransom debt due to her that she was attempting to obtain from the Orleans family in the courts in Paris. Margaret had arrived at court with the intention of not merely resolving her financial affairs; according to the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, she had taken the opportunity of approaching the Duke of Buckingham shortly after Richard’s accession, asking him to intercede with Richard on her behalf for Henry’s return to the English court. In order to aid the chances that the king might accept Henry’s return and subordination to the Yorkist regime, she proposed that Henry might take one of the Woodville daughters in marriage, the arrangement of which she would leave to the king, ‘without any thing to be taken or demanded for the same espousals but only the king’s favour’. The prospect of Henry’s marriage with Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York seems to have been keenly discussed as a means by which to bring the exiled Tudor home. Thomas Stanley himself later recalled how he had heard his wife and ‘divers and other noble and illustrious persons’ discussing a possible marriage for Henry Tudor with Elizabeth of York, while others remembered that it had been discussed by the Duchess of Buckingham, the Bishop of Worcester and the Bishop of Ely.