The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (32 page)

The Woodvilles had been cut out with extraordinary rapidity. Rivers and Sir Richard Grey were locked up in the earl of Warwick’s former castle at Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, a huge, square fortress that had been one of Gloucester’s chief residences when he had been sent to keep order in the north during his brother’s reign. The horrified queen, meanwhile, had fled on 1 May for sanctuary to Westminster, ‘in like condition’, noted one chronicler, ‘as she had done before the field of Barnet’.
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She took with her her daughters, her nine-year-old son Prince Richard, duke of York and her eldest son, Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset; they would soon be joined there by Lionel Woodville, another of the queen’s brothers. Sir John Woodville, who was the queen’s youngest brother, was at sea with a fleet detailed to defend the English coasts against French piracy. When he heard about the moves against his family he fled English waters and landed in Brittany. On 9 May, the day after Richard’s appointment as protector, the young king was sent to the Tower of London, supposedly for his own security – although security was scarcely what previous royal inhabitants had found there.

Richard, meanwhile, moved into Crosby Place on Bishopsgate,
one of the most stunning and modern mansions in the whole of the city, a luxurious stone-and-timber home that towered above every other residential property in London. From here he ordered a steady anti-Woodville propaganda drive: producing wagons piled high with weapons which he claimed the queen’s family had intended to use against him, and accusing them of having pilfered from the royal treasure. He was ably assisted by Hastings, confirmed in his position as chamberlain of the new king’s household. According to one well-informed writer, Hastings was ‘elated … and was in the habit of saying that nothing whatever had been done except the transferring of the government of the kingdom from two of the queen’s blood to two more powerful persons of the king’s … causing as much blood to be shed as would be produced by a cut finger’.
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But it was not quite as simple as all that.

In acting ruthlessly to overthrow the Woodvilles, Richard had on one level demonstrated much the same instinct for swift, bold leadership that had marked his late brother Edward’s finest hours. His motivation for staging a coup against the family is not hard to deduce. Prestige alone demanded that he should have full control of government during his nephew’s minority, and his whole life’s experience suggested that direct and decisive action against potential rivals was essential in a time of political uncertainty. The house of York was acutely aware of its own tribulations; it would have been a profound betrayal of the family’s own history to have allowed parvenus like Rivers and Dorset to step in and control the kingdom while the only duke of the blood royal stood by and did nothing.

Yet having imprisoned the king and partially scattered his enemies, Richard found himself in a somewhat awkward position. His bullish actions echoed those of his father during Henry VI’s reign rather too closely: seizing control of England by means of a coup was in a sense the easy part; building a long and stable
royal government on the back of a factional power-grab was a rather more difficult task. On 22 June the king was due to be crowned, and at that point Richard’s powers as protector would evaporate. There was every chance that the boy Edward V, who had seemed so astonished and aggrieved at being forcibly removed from the family and servants he loved and trusted, would seek to be revenged upon his presumptuous thirty-year-old uncle. At the very least, Richard could expect to be forced to release Rivers and Grey, and to see the rest of the Woodvilles emerge from their various boltholes.

It was a mark of his desperation that during the brief weeks he served as protector, Richard attempted to secure a legal judgement that would allow him to have Rivers, Grey and Vaughan condemned for treason and beheaded. Worryingly for him, the council refused to countenance it, pointing out that since Rivers and the rest had not actually committed any treasonable acts, there was no legal grounds upon which their heads could justifiably be cut off. All that came of Richard’s attempts to neutralise those he saw as his rivals was to increase their alienation. When a council meeting was held in early June at Westminster, and the queen emerged briefly from sanctuary to attend, she sat in silence, spoken to by no one throughout the entire two-hour meeting.
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Late spring ticked by into early summer. Richard’s concerns mounted. It was almost as though he was become his father. Loyalty had been his defining characteristic in his whole career to date. Yet actions taken in defence of what he believed was his brother’s legacy – although begun in the genuine spirit of protecting the realm – were leading him into a corner. The minute he should lose his grip on the power he had taken, he would be potentially as vulnerable as those whom he had displaced. Somehow, loyalty had now to be balanced against the purest form of self-preservation.

Although the daily business of government progressed
unremarkably, with the coronation approaching Richard became increasingly paranoid. On 10 and 11 June letters were sent to loyal servants in Yorkshire, requesting urgent military support in the capital, and warning that ‘the Queen, her blood, adherents and affinity … have intended and daily do intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin the duke of Buckingham and the old royal blood of this our realm’. If such a plot existed outside Richard’s mind, it went unnoticed by other writers. However, it would appear that the strategy of summoning what amounted to an army to London was too much for some of those who had hitherto been closest to the protector. If the business of the coup had been in part to protect the legacy of Edward IV, then Gloucester was now running dangerously close to shredding the very thing he claimed to stand for.

Some time around the period when Gloucester was summoning his northern faithful ‘in fearful and unheard of numbers’ to tramp down the ancient straight road from York to London, Lord Hastings appears to have begun losing his confidence in the regime he had done so much to enable. He shared his concerns with two other former loyalists, Thomas Rotherham, archbishop of York, and John Morton, bishop of Ely.
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Whether or not he had fully worked out Gloucester’s ultimate ambition, this is the only really plausible explanation for what occurred on Friday 13 June. Hastings, Rotherham and Morton all assembled for a routine council meeting at the Tower at ten o’clock in the morning, ‘as was their custom’. According to Mancini, they had walked straight into a trap.

It was a summary execution of the most breathtaking ruthlessness, and the writers of the time marvelled.
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‘Whom will insane lust for power spare, if it dares violate the ties of king and friendship?’ wondered one. Cornered and desperate, it was now clear that Gloucester was prepared to countenance any move whatever that would help him cling to power. At any point of wavering he was supported by the duke of Buckingham, who was probably motivated by more obviously selfish desires to see the Woodvilles and Hastings discomfited and himself advanced to the position that he believed his Plantagenet blood merited, and which he had too long been denied.

With Hastings dead and London trembling in confusion and fear, a slide to murderous madness now began. On Monday 16 June the archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Bourchier, went to Westminster and cajoled the queen into releasing from her custody her second royal son, Richard duke of York, on the understanding that he was absolutely required to play a prominent role in the forthcoming coronation. He met his elder brother Edward V in the Tower; they were joined there by the late duke of Clarence’s young son Edward, known as earl of Warwick, who was then only eight years old. The following day it was announced that the coronation was cancelled, likewise the parliament that was due to follow.

On Sunday 22 June the theologian Dr Ralph Shaa appeared at St Paul’s Cross to preach the extraordinary – and wholly specious – message that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been undertaken while Edward was already contracted to marry someone else: Lady Eleanor Butler, the daughter of
the great Lancastrian soldier John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. On these grounds, Shaa argued, Edward V and Richard duke of York were illegitimate and therefore the former could not be allowed to take the throne. Instead, Richard duke of Gloucester, who was said to bear an unmistakeable physical resemblance to his father, the duke of York, should take the throne in the place of his nephews.
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Three days later, the duke of Buckingham appeared at the Guildhall, and subsequently at Baynard’s Castle, to proclaim that since Edward V and Richard duke of York were tainted with bastardy, and since Clarence’s son Edward earl of Warwick was ruined by his father’s attainder, Richard, duke of Gloucester was ‘the only survivor of royal stock … legally entitled to the crown and could bear its responsibilities thanks to his proficiency. His previous career and blameless morals would be a sure guarantee of his good government.’
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As Buckingham spoke, far away in the north at Pontefract Castle Earl Rivers, Sir Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan were being subjected to a cursory trial for treason in front of the earl of Northumberland. The blood of all three was soon congealing on the ground.

The following day Richard duke of Gloucester formally took the crown as Richard III, elected by a group of hastily assembled noblemen, bishops and Londoners, led by his right-hand man, the duke of Buckingham. They meekly accepted his ridiculous claim that the young princes were bastards, and he accepted their acclamation as king of England before sitting upon the carved marble throne in Westminster Hall in a ceremony that evoked – probably intentionally – that by which his brother had taken power in 1461. ‘Seditious and disgraceful’, was the judgement of the Crowland continuator.
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A sense of helplessness descended on a capital that had witnessed more upheaval, regime change and reversal of fortune in the previous thirty years than in all the three hundred that preceded them. Thousands of northern troops continued to march on London, swords, bows and polished
breastplates clattering as they approached. Tongues wagged in the streets of London, and gossips noted that a popular prophecy – to the effect that three kings would hold the crown in three months – had come true.
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The coronation of a new king, which had proven so difficult for Gloucester to organise for his poor, imprisoned nephew, was now arranged with almost indecent haste. On Sunday 6 July 1483 Gloucester and his wife, Anne Neville, celebrated mass at Westminster and were crowned, and a feast was celebrated with ‘all circumstances thereunto belonging’. The new king sat enthroned on a chair with cushions of cloth of gold. When the ritual demanded, he grovelled before the high altar in comfort, his knees protected by crimson damask and velvet and white damask embroidered with little golden flowers. His ears rang with the rich sound of trumpets and the playing of minstrels, some of them brought to England from as far away as Rome. Following the service in the abbey, the new king dined on forty-six different dishes, including beef and mutton, roast crane and peacock, oranges and quinces.
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And when the solemnities and the feasting were finished, Richard held an audience with the nobles whom he had summoned to witness his usurpation, commanding them to go back to their shires and see that order was kept and no extortions committed against his subjects. As a public morality display, he had his brother’s and Lord Hastings’s former mistress Elizabeth Shore clapped in London’s stocks and put to open penance as punishment for the iniquity of her life. ‘And thus’, wrote one chronicler tartly, ‘he taught other[s] to exercise just and good which he would not do himself.’
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The last recorded sightings of the Princes in the Tower (as they are now popularly known) were in the late summer and early autumn of 1483, in the month that followed their uncle’s seizure of the crown.
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After Hastings’s murder, all the regular servants who had been on hand for Edward V and his brother Richard were removed from the boys’ presence; they were paid their last wage on 9 July.
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It was reported in London’s Great Chronicle that the boys were spotted ‘playing and shooting in the garden of the Tower’, perhaps as late as 29 September.
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But Dominic Mancini wrote that they ‘were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether’.
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Edward V was twelve and he had been well educated. He presumably knew enough either of English history or of human nature – or both – to anticipate his fate. Deposed kings did not live. ‘The physician Argentine, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the young king, like a victim prepared for a sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.’
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Indeed it was. By the time the summer’s blaze had ceased to bake the whitewashed walls of the Tower of London, Edward, who ‘had such dignity in his whole person, and in his face such charm’, had vanished, along with his little brother. ‘I have seen many men burst into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight,’ wrote Mancini.
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By November 1483 the assumption driving
English politics was that the Princes in the Tower would never be seen alive again.
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We still do not know for certain how the boys died. In later years rumours would hold that they had been smothered with a feather-bed, or drowned in a butt of malmsey, or poisoned – but these were no more than rumours. It is possible that bones and teeth discovered roughly buried in a wooden box beneath the chapel stairs in the White Tower are those of the Princes, but these have not been tested adequately enough to say for certain.
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All we can be sure of is that the boys were first disinherited, then deprived of their liberty and servants, and that they then disappeared, presumed dead by contemporaries across Europe. And the person who benefited most from their disappearance was Richard III.

Almost as soon as his reign began, Richard had gone on progress about his new realm, travelling up along the Thames, through Windsor and Reading to Oxford and Woodstock, swinging west to his ducal town of Gloucester and then moving back across to the midlands, York and the north. All of these were areas where his noble power had been strongest, and where he wished – or felt compelled – to demonstrate his fullest gratitude for their support. Richard pointedly avoided going into Wales, the west country or any of the other territories that had been most closely associated with the Woodvilles and the prince’s council through which they had exercised their power. He showered grants and offices in these areas on his hitherto most loyal crony and supporter, Henry duke of Buckingham.
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The south-east and East Anglia were largely entrusted to his loyal ally Lord Howard, newly promoted to the position of duke of Norfolk.

As Richard travelled he attempted to demonstrate that he was a king capable of dispensing good governance and justice, whereas his brother’s reign had descended into lust and neglect. He would later argue that Edward IV’s rule had been ruined
because he delighted in ‘adulation and flattery’ and that, ‘led by sensuality and concupiscence’, he had ‘followed the counsel of insolent, vicious people of inordinate avarice, despising the counsel of good, virtuous and prudent people’. Richard’s appeal to the country was much the same as his father’s had been in 1460: he claimed to stand for ‘prudence, justice, princely courage and excellent virtue’.
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Everywhere he went he was greeted with pageants and ceremony, and he responded by holding court with truly royal splendour and munificence.

Richard III was not exactly physically imposing. He had been born with his father’s dark looks but without his brothers’ extraordinary height, and although only thirty years old he had by this stage fully developed the crooked spine that must have caused him extreme physical discomfort and caused him to walk with one shoulder raised higher than the other. He had nervous tics: he ground his teeth, which the historian Polydore Vergil described, noting that ‘while he was thinking of any matter he did continually bite his nether lip’. Vergil, writing later and with some prejudice, also wrote that the king ‘was wont to be ever with his right hand pulling out of the sheath to the midst, and putting in again, the dagger which he did always wear’. Nevertheless, he said, not even Richard’s detractors could deny that he had proven himself over his relatively short life to have ‘a sharp wit, provident and subtle’ and to possess ‘courage … high and fierce’. Most notably of all, he was bright and decisive, ‘a man much to be feared for circumspection and celerity’.
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Thus, despite his diminished bodily appearance, Richard could still project majesty. On his northern progress he travelled with a massive retinue, including numerous bishops, earls and barons, a Spanish diplomatic embassy, his wife, his nine-year-old son Edward of Middleham (who as heir apparent was now styled prince of Wales and earl of Chester) and his captive nephew, Clarence’s son, Edward earl of Warwick. Richard granted charters of
privileges to the towns that he visited, allowing some of them the new right to appoint mayors and aldermen. He generously refused to take the customary gifts of money that he was offered by each town: rather, he paid for repairs to castles and settled old debts including a large sum outstanding for Clarence’s tomb at Tewkesbury Abbey. ‘He gave the most gorgeous and sumptuous feasts and banquets, for the purpose of gaining the affections of the people,’ wrote one chronicler.
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At York he feasted in stately splendour, wearing his crown. During his long stay in the city he promised to bestow vast riches and liberties on the citizens, the minster and the people of the local area. Everywhere he went he gave out his personal insignia: little badges in the shape of a boar, thirteen thousand of which were distributed. The boar was a visual pun on Eboracum – the ancient Roman name for York, which was usually shortened to Ebor, and in handing it out Richard was making a very particular statement: he was a king of the north. The people of the north, in their turn, showed their admiration. The Warwick-based historian John Rous, who was at least in his sixties at the time of Richard’s visit, and an expert in the long and varied past of the house of Plantagenet, described the new king as ‘by true matrimony without discontinuance or any defiling of the law by heir male lineally descending from King Henry II’. Given the tumult and confusion of Rous’s own lifetime, this extravagant statement smacked rather more of flattery than accuracy. But it was testament to the open-handed energy with which Richard went about selling his kingship to the realm.

In setting out his stall as a northern king, Richard dangerously underestimated the power of the south. At the end of July, disturbing news reached the travelling court: a plot had been uncovered to remove the Princes from the Tower. Buildings in the city of London were to be set alight, causing enough panic and pandemonium to distract the Tower’s guards, at which point the Princes would be broken out of their jail. Richard responded
by sending orders south commanding the plotters, at least one of whom was a former member of Edward IV’s household and another of whom was a senior official in the Tower, to be tried and executed. He ordered soldiers to surround Westminster Abbey, to prevent the escape of the Woodville women who were sheltering in sanctuary there. It is extremely likely that at this point he also gave the instructions that led to the death of the Princes in the Tower. The actual murderer’s name was never discovered (although Richard’s servant Sir James Tyrell gave a dubious confession many years later). Philippe de Commines, writing from the French court, heard that the deed had been orchestrated by the duke of Buckingham, although this too is unlikely.
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If Buckingham were responsible for carrying out Richard’s orders to kill the Princes, then it would have been the last loyal act that he carried out. In October 1483 he turned against the king whom he had helped to create, joined a rebellion of former associates of the old king Edward IV, and switched his allegiance to the only candidate for kingship still alive and even vaguely plausible: Henry Tudor.

It was a sure sign of the woe that had befallen the English crown that anyone should ever have considered Henry Tudor as a potential king. His father Edmund had been a half-brother of Henry VI, and his mother Margaret Beaufort had a small measure of Plantagenet blood in her veins. In ordinary circumstances these facts would hardly have amounted to a strong dynastic claim to kingship. In 1483 Henry was essentially the heir to a disgraced and minor Welsh Lancastrian family, who had lived the majority of his life in the castles of south Wales and western Brittany and was unknown to most of the people of England, whether great or small. But Richard III’s usurpation of the crown had broken every rule of political propriety, and with it opened up
new and previously unthinkable possibilities. Whereas in the long distant past adult kings such as Edward II and Richard II had been forced from the throne as punishment for long and tyrannous misrule, and while Henry VI’s inanity had eventually led the English polity into a civil war which cost him his crown, Edward V had done nothing whatever to deserve his fate. He was a blameless king whose only fault was to accede at the age of twelve. It was inevitable that many members of the Woodville family and the old king’s affinity would never accept Richard III as their king, and would strive immediately for his replacement. More generally, Richard’s violent and unprincipled coup, snatching office on entirely specious grounds and by murderous means, dealt a severe blow to the fragile dignity of a crown that had been fought over and grabbed back and forth for nearly thirty years. Not since the dark days of the 1140s, when King Stephen and Empress Matilda had carved up the realm in a civil war that contemporaries had called the Shipwreck, had kings of England been so vulnerable to assaults. If Richard could seize the crown, why should it not in turn be seized from him?

The rebels who plotted to burn London over the summer and turn the Princes loose from the Tower had attempted to make contact with Henry Tudor before they were discovered. Since they believed that Edward V was alive, they did not contact Henry with a view to making him king, but he was now ‘at his own liberty’ in Brittany and was therefore looked upon by dissidents as a possible ally in the struggle against the usurper Richard III.
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Ferment was bubbling among Edwardian loyalists, and by early August a series of conspiracies and rebellions had begun, which drew Henry Tudor ever closer to their heart. All across the southern counties of England, men were preparing to rise up against the new regime. At the end of August Richard III was concerned enough to command the duke of Buckingham to lead treason commissions into counties across the south-east,
from Kent, Sussex, Surrey and London to the Home Counties. A month or so later, on 22 September, the king sacked his master of the rolls, Robert Morton, evidently fearing that treason was spreading to the ranks of the royal administration. In fact, it had already penetrated far deeper into the royal circle. By the end of September, it was spoken of openly that the Princes were dead.

On 24 September Buckingham, Richard’s most exalted and lavishly rewarded noble ally, defected. He wrote from his Welsh castle of Brecon to Henry Tudor in Brittany, asking him, according to one account, ‘to assemble a great fleet and bring an army and a great number of foreigners from Brittany with them over the sea, and to land in this realm to destroy [ Richard’s] most royal person’.
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Although Buckingham had been the most ardent follower and facilitator of Richard’s usurpation, and the man who had profited most handsomely from the ousting of the Woodvilles, he was now persuaded that his fortunes would be increased even further by turning coat once again. In the years that followed it was suggested that he did so because Richard had been slow to grant him a portion of the earldom of Hereford, which he felt he was owed as the result of a marriage made by one of his ancestors in the fourteenth century.
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More likely it was simply because he was a feckless character who was drawn to intrigue. Buckingham appears to have calculated in September 1483 that the rebellious spirit swelling across the south would be sufficient to push Richard off the throne, and that his own political survival and advancement therefore depended on backing the rebels. He was sorely mistaken.

It is telling that Edward IV never considered Buckingham a suitable figure either for a substantial landed endowment or for significant involvement in government. Like the duke of Clarence, Buckingham appears to have been essentially vain and short-sighted.
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All the same, his defection was a serious problem for Richard III. There had already been covert communication
between the circles of Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, and Edward’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville, hidden away in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey: the women were determined to proceed with marrying Henry to Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. This alliance would formally unite the rump of Lancastrian support in England with what remained of the Woodville faction.
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In the autumn of 1483 their plans became entwined with both the general rebelliousness of the south and the self-serving machinations of Buckingham. Despite Richard III’s attempts to earn his realm’s loyalty and trust, he was now faced with the first serious challenge to his rule, less than four months after he had seized the crown.