Richard III (17 page)

It seems that Gloucester was genuinely sorry to be forced to destroy Hastings. ‘And undoubtedly the Protector loved him well, and loath was he to have lost him.’ But Richard was never a man to be deflected by sentiment, even if, as will be seen, he may have been uneasy about
his prospective victim’s soul – after he had murdered him. He struck with the same carefully calculated timing he had employed at Northampton.

More’s account of the Council meeting at the Tower on Friday 13 June is almost certainly based on information obtained from Cardinal Morton, who was actually there. He could also have heard something from Rotherham, who did not die until 1500. (The traditional date of Friday 13 June has been shown to be correct and is not a mistake for the following Friday, as was recently argued by Dr Hanham.) The Council had met to discuss the final details of Edward V’s Coronation, and among those present besides Morton and Rotherham were Hastings and Stanley, together with Buckingham and Howard and other supporters of the Protector. Howard’s son, Sir Thomas (whom More may also have spoken to, since he was the father of a friend), had accompanied Hastings to the Tower – perhaps to ensure that he arrived. The Lord Chancellor, Russell, presided over a meeting of the remainder of the Council at Westminster.

Richard himself entered the Council chamber at the Tower at about 9.00 a.m., apparently in a most amiable mood. He apologized for being so late, explaining that he had overslept, and then made his famous request to Morton: ‘My Lord, you have very good strawberries in your garden at Holborn. I require you, let us have a mess of them.’ After setting the discussion in motion again, the Protector left the room. He returned an hour later, at about 10.30 a.m., in a very different temper – ‘frowning and fretting and gnawing on his lips’. Everyone present was taken aback. For a while he sat in silence. He then asked quietly what did men deserve for having plotted ‘the destruction of me, being so near of blood unto the King, and Protector of his royal person and his realm’.

Hastings answered boldly that, whoever they were, they ought to be punished as traitors. At this Richard told him they were ‘yonder sorceress, my brother’s wife, and others with her’. (Clearly he had not forgotten Clarence’s allegations about the Queen.) The Lord Chamberlain, was not particularly disturbed. But then the Protector added, ‘You shall all see in what wise that sorceress and that other witch of her counsel, Shore’s wife, with their affinity have by their
sorcery and witchcraft wasted my body.’ He pulled up the left sleeve of his doublet to show what appeared to be a withered arm (although his skelton shows no sign of this). Hastings, who was Elizabeth Shore’s lover and had spent the previous night with her, began to lose his nerve. He replied that, if it really were true, those who had done it certainly deserved severe punishment.

‘What!’ exclaimed Richard, ‘thou servest me, I ween, with ifs and ans! I tell thee, they have so done! And that, will I make good upon thy body, traitor!’ He banged the table with his fist. At once there was a cry outside of ‘Treason!’ The door burst open and men in armour – including Sir Thomas Howard – rushed into the chamber, filling it almost entirely and brandishing their weapons. One aimed a blow at Lord Stanley, who dived under the tables, though not before receiving a wound which sent the blood running down over his ears; had he not ducked, ‘his head would have been cleft to the teeth’. Amid the confusion the Protector shouted at Hastings, ‘I arrest thee, traitor.’ ‘What, me, my Lord?’ gasped the astonished nobleman. ‘Yea, thee, traitor!’ replied Richard. Rotherham and Morton were hauled off to imprisonment in the Tower cells, while Stanley was taken under guard to confinement in his own house. As for Hastings, the Protector told him to find a priest and confess himself at once. ‘For by St Paul I will not to dinner till I see thy head off.’ (Dr Hanham questions ‘this nasty addition to the story’ since ‘the councillors must have dined about 9.00 a.m. in accordance with the custom at the time’, but this was not invariable; the Duchess of York dined at 11.00 a.m. or at noon on fast days, while Richard’s own household at Sheriff Hutton had to ‘go to dinner at the furthest by eleven of the clock on the flesh days’ – perhaps later on fast or fish days, and both 13 June and 20 June were Fridays.) Within a very few minutes Hastings was brought to the green outside the Tower chapel and beheaded, a log serving for a block.

More says,

His body, reunited to his head, was buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, close to Edward IV as the latter had asked. It is unlikely that this was due to feelings of remorse on Richard’s part – more probably it was from certain fears for the repose of Hastings’s soul.

The public disgrace of Mistress Shore which followed was to substantiate the Protector’s accusations of sorcery. Charges of witchcraft were a recognized method of discrediting political enemies. Sir Thomas Howard arrested her and, after robbing the lady of £1,000 – everything she had – dragged her off to prison. Embarrassingly, no evidence of witchcraft could be found, so instead she was forced to do penance for being a harlot. The Bishop of London sentenced her to walk barefoot through the City streets, clad only in her kirtle and carrying a taper. She blushed so much and looked so pretty that more spectators – ‘more amorous of her body than concerned for her soul’ – were full of admiration.
⁷
Indeed, ‘every man laughed’ at the idea of her harlotry being suddenly taken so seriously and thought that Richard had arranged her humiliation ‘more of a corrupt intent than any virtuous feeling’. In any case, she was very popular for having persuaded Edward IV to pardon a number of people and for other kindnesses. She was still living, a beggar – ‘old, lean, withered, and dried up, nothing left but shrivelled skin and hard bone’ – when More was writing his history.

Immediately after his triumphant dinner the Protector sent for the leading citizens of London. He and Buckingham met them in ostentatiously rusty armour, as though they had been taken by surprise and had had to put on whatever was available. They told them that Hastings had been planning to murder them at the Council meeting, that they had only acted in the nick of time. By now there were wild rumours all over the City, so to restore calm a herald rode through London reading a proclamation which described Hastings’s ‘treason’ – only two hours had elapsed since his death, but the document was so well phrased and neatly drawn up that it had obviously been prepared long beforehand (no doubt by Catesby).

A reign of terror ensued. There were many arrests. Simon Stallworth wrote to his friend Sir William Stonor on the following day, 21 June. He speaks of ‘much trouble’ in London, of Hastings’s death and of the imprisonment of Rotherham and Morton and also Elizabeth Shore, of how 20,000 men belonging to the Protector and the Duke of Buckingham were expected to arrive within the week, though why he couldn’t see, that all Hastings’s men were switching their allegiance to Buckingham, and that ‘every man doubts the other’. It was the unmistakable atmosphere of a
coup d’état
.

About the same time, it was discovered that the Marquess of Dorset had somehow escaped from sanctuary at Westminster. Richard had the surrounding countryside cordoned off by troops, who searched the standing corn and woodlands with dogs ‘after the manner of huntsmen’ but without success. Surviving many dangers, the Marquess eventually reached France.

The
Great Chronicle of London
tells us that after Lord Hastings’s death ‘was the Prince and Duke of York holden more strait and there was privy talk that the Lord Protector should be King’. Now that he had disposed of the Lord Chamberlain and was in possession of both boys, Richard could complete his second
coup
. Edward V’s Coronation was again postponed. Buckingham, grown closer than ever, would play the leading part in trying to persuade the populace to accept the Protector in Edward’s place. As reward, the Duke’s daughter was to marry Richard’s son while he himself would receive the Bohun Earldom of Hereford together with large gifts from the Royal Treasury. The strategy on which they decided was to accuse both the late King and his children of being bastards, even if it meant publicly dishonouring the Protector’s own mother. More says that Richard was anxious for this last point to be touched on as little as possible – not so much to spare his mother’s feelings as to give an impression that he did not want the whole truth to come out. They enlisted the aid of the Mayor, Sir Edmund Sha, of his brother Dr Sha and of Friar Penketh, Provincial of the Augustinians – the two latter being well-known preachers, ‘of more learning than virtue’ – in winning over the Londoners.

On Sunday 22 June – the day when Edward V should have been
crowned – Dr Sha preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross, outside St Paul’s Cathedral, on the text ‘Bastard slips shall not take deep root’. He first explained that the late King’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid since he was already betrothed to Lady Eleanor Butler, the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, upon whom he had fathered a child; in the then Canon Law the ‘troth-plight’ was considered no less binding than a marriage if not dissolved by mutual consent. Curiously enough, there may be some truth in Sha’s story; Eleanor Butler and the child were dead long ago, but the priest before whom the troth-plight had been sworn, Robert Stillington, now Bishop of Bath and Wells and a former Lord Chancellor, came forward to attest it shortly afterwards. Dr Sha had some sort of a case, though scarcely a popular one. He made it still more unpalatable when he went on to speak of the adultery of the Duchess of York, claiming that not only were Edward IV’s children bastards, but so had been the late King himself and Clarence, that the Duke of York’s only legitimate son was the Protector – ‘This is the father’s own figure, this is his own countenance, the very print of his visage, the sure undoubted image, the plain express likeness of that noble Duke!’

Apparently it was intended – if More is to be believed – that at that moment Richard should appear, as though by accident, on a nearby balcony and it was hoped the crowd would shout ‘King Richard! King Richard!’ Unfortunately the preacher spoke so fast that the Protector arrived too late. (As Gairdner says, Richard had ‘a certain Machiavellian cunning which at times overshot the mark’.) When at last he appeared, Sha had gone on to talk of other matters – however, he abruptly broke off to repeat his high-flown comparison of the Protector to the late Duke of York. But instead of shouting ‘King Richard!’, his hearers ‘stood as if they had been turned into stones for wonder of this shameful sermon’. The preacher was so shaken that henceforward he would only go about after dark ‘like an owl’.

Dr Hanham finds this scene particularly hard to accept. ‘Once again, the authenticity of More’s picture is at best unproved.’ She discerns a desire to write comedy, to turn the Protector and Buckingham into ‘sheer figures of farce’. But she does so in order to strengthen her curious hypothesis that Sir Thomas was writing satire instead of
history. None of his contemporaries saw anything satirical or farcical about his account, nor have modern historians, however much irony there may be in it. The most plausible explanation is that More is simply telling the story as he has heard it, even if he tells it rather well.

Elsewhere other preachers delivered similar sermons. They demanded the disinheritance of the children of Edward IV, echoing the allegations at Paul’s Cross of adultery and bastardy, and claiming that he had never been a legitimate King and nor could his sons be. But they had no more success with the public than Dr Sha.

The Protector was undeterred. He exchanged his black clothes for the purple mourning worn by Kings of England and began to ride through the London streets with an escort of a thousand men. Every day he entertained vast numbers to dinner at his houses. Yet when he rode past no one cheered – ‘instead they cursed him with a fate worthy of his crimes, since nobody was in any doubt about his aims,’ Mancini tells us.
⁸
Few rulers have forfeited their popularity so swiftly. The London crowd’s reaction was one of horror at ‘the madness of Richard the Duke’s wicked mind,’ says Vergil.

Buckingham now took a hand. Indeed, he became the instrument of the
coup
’s success. On Tuesday 24 June he went to the Guildhall, escorted by a large group of peers and knights. The Mayor, Aldermen and all the leading citizens of London were gathered in the hall to hear what he had to say. Perhaps More has polished the speech for dramatic effect, but as in other speeches he reports, it is full of references which suggest that it is substantially accurate. Moreover, it reveals a detestation of Edward IV which is very much what one might expect from Buckingham.

The Duke, ‘marvellously well spoken’, addressed his audience in a loud, clear voice. ‘Friends, for the zeal and hearty favour that we bear you, we come to break unto you a matter right great and weighty,’ he began. He told them how in recent years they had suffered the most miserable afflictions under the late King’s misgovernment. There had been cruel taxation and legalized theft – he cited Edward IV’s ‘benevolences’ and the despoiling of Sir Thomas Cook. He blamed the King for shedding so much blood in the recent wars, and for killing
Clarence – ‘Whom spared he that killed his own brother?’ He dwelt at length on Edward’s wenching, claiming that no woman in the City had been safe. And yet the late King of all people should have been grateful for the Londoners’ loyalty to the House of York.

It is truly extraordinary that such a vicious diatribe against Edward should have been countenanced by the brother whose motto was ‘loyalty binds me’, who had recently shed ‘plenteous tears’ at his Requiem.

Then Buckingham went on to refer to the sermon at Paul’s Cross on Sunday, repeating all Sha’s arguments. ‘Woe is that realm that has a child to their King,’ declaimed the Duke. ‘Wherefore so much the more cause have we to thank God that this noble personage, who is so rightfully entitled thereunto, is of so mature age and thereto of so great wisdom joined with so great experience.’ Buckingham continued that though ‘this noble personage’ – the Protector – was extremely reluctant to assume the Crown, he might accept if the citizens of London would join with the peers of the realm in petitioning him to do so. He ended by asking his ‘dear friends’ to speak up and ask for Richard to become their King.