The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA (9 page)

There were also royal authorisations for the obtaining of hawks for hunting, which we shall consider in greater detail later (see below,
chapter 6
).

Incidentally, of the game mentioned as being hunted by the inhabitants of Ware in 1485 (all of which will have been familiar to Richard III), partridges and hares were native species. It has been suggested by some authorities that the bronze pheasant (
Phasianus colchicus
) was also a native species,
⁶⁵
though others have argued that this large game bird was introduced to England by the Romans. It was unquestionably the Romans who brought the rabbit to these islands. Unfortunately, the English (or Grey) partridge (
Perdix perdix
) which Richard knew, and probably hunted and on occasions ate, is now by no means common. Those lucky enough to see a partridge in England nowadays will be much more likely to encounter the French (Red-legged) partridge (
Alectoris rufa
), first introduced to England only in the seventeenth century. Even the modern English pheasant is not quite the bird which Richard III will have known, as the possibly native bronze pheasant has been almost swamped by much more recent importations of the ring-necked pheasant (
Phasianus torquatus
) from China. While the latter species very closely resembles the traditional English bronze pheasant, it is easily distinguished from it by the white ring which encircles the neck of the cock bird, hence its name.

4
Tombs of Saints and Queens

According to the rather muddled and incomplete account of the events of 1485 given by the Crowland Chronicle, it was somewhere around the octave of Easter (Sunday 3 April–Sunday 10 April) that rumours of an impending rebellion reached the ears of the king.
¹
The Crowland chronicler also reports that as early as the Feast of the Epiphany (6 January 1484/85) Richard had already received the news that an invasion on the part of his second cousin once removed, Henry ‘Tudor',
soi-disant
‘Earl of Richmond', was likely to take place in 1485.
²

On his mother's side, this Henry ‘Tudor' (the future King Henry VII) was a descendant in a legitimised (but originally bastard) line from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. On his father's side he happened also to be a nephew of Henry VI – although his descent from Henry VI's mother had brought him no English royal blood whatsoever. It has also been suggested that Henry ‘Tudor''s father, Edmund, was not really the son of Owen Tudor. Edmund ‘Tudor''s real father may well have been Edmund Beaufort, first (second) Duke of Somerset, another of the legitimised Beaufort descendants of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
³
If so, this descent might possibly have reinforced Henry Tudor's claim to the Crown of England, though it would undermine his right to the surname Tudor (a surname, which, in practice, he and his descendants rarely used).

In point of fact, in putting forward his royal claim Henry never mentioned details of any of his real lines of descent. In 1484–85 his claim as advanced in France was founded upon the transparent lie that he was a younger son of the late Henry VI.
⁴
Previously, Henry had tried another ploy. In 1483 he had sought unsuccessfully to advance a claim to the throne on the strength of a proposed future marriage with Elizabeth of York. Subsequently, he would claim the throne on the vaguely worded grounds of Lancastrian blood (with the details carefully left unspecified) coupled with the right of conquest. Interestingly, Henry VII was never to publicly proclaim his genuine but tenuous blood ties to the Plantagenet royal family. It was left to Richard III to attempt to explain those.

Far from being cowed and defeatist at the news of the forthcoming invasion, Richard was reportedly delighted. He believed that the coming of Henry ‘Tudor' (as modern writers generally call him) against him would finally settle this matter, and that thereafter he would be able to reign in peace.
⁵

It was doubtless in response to the latest intelligence regarding the threatened invasion (and the machinations of the King of France, which Richard certainly knew to lie behind it) that during the month of April a royal fleet was stationed in the Channel, under the command of Sir George Neville.
⁶
Richard III had himself served as Admiral of England during the reign of his elder brother, and had enjoyed a long and close association with Sir John Howard (later Lord Howard, and ultimately Duke of Norfolk) who had held office under Richard as Admiral of the Northern Seas, and who, in the summer of 1483, had succeeded him as Admiral of England. One may therefore assert with some confidence that Richard possessed a clear notion of the importance of the navy to the defence of the realm. Indeed, previous writers have acknowledged that he took care to maintain and augment the navy left to him by Edward IV.
⁷
Under its flagship, the carvel
Edward
, this fleet had been assiduously built up by the late king – a fact of which little account has hitherto been taken.
⁸

However, Richard was embarrassed by a lack of ready money – a problem exacerbated by the fact that in the summer of 1483 Sir Edward Woodville had made off with a substantial portion of the royal treasury. King Richard himself had condemned in Parliament the so-called ‘benevolences', or forced gifts, which his elder brother and preceding sovereigns had used as a form of taxation. Now, finding himself in a similar quandary to many of his predecessors, he was more or less compelled to adopt a not dissimilar solution. Instead of ‘benevolences', however, he now introduced a system of forced loans. The difference between Richard's expediency and the system of ‘benevolences' was that Richard III now issued receipts for the money he obtained from his subjects, accompanied by an undertaking to repay it. Given his subsequent defeat, it is impossible to know whether or not the money would ultimately have been repaid. It is nevertheless clear that Richard was trying, for no one had even pretended that the earlier ‘benevolences' would ever be paid back!

Although he had been at Windsor from 18–20 April, Richard III was in London on St George's Day (23 April) 1485, and therefore did not attend the annual Garter Feast at St George's Chapel in person. Instead, as we saw in the last chapter, ‘a commission under the privy seal, 22 April 1485, empowered lord Maltravers to keep the feast in the Sovereign's absence'.
⁹
This very late appointment of Maltravers (Richard III's first cousin once removed on his mother's side, and the son and heir of the Earl of Arundel) as the king's deputy for the occasion suggests a rather hurried and last-minute change of plans. This may in some way have been connected with the execution of Sir Roger Clifford, for reasons unknown, on 2 May 1485.

On Thursday 12 May (the Feast of the Ascension) the king rode out of Westminster to return to Windsor Castle. He was never to see London or Westminster again. There may perhaps have been a particular reason why Richard III chose to return to Windsor Castle at this time. The anniversary of the death of the last Lancastrian king, Henry VI, was fast approaching. Henry VI was already popularly regarded as a saint and martyr, and the feast days of martyred saints are normally celebrated on the anniversaries of their deaths.

King Henry is usually said to have died, or been killed, on the night of 21 May 1471.
¹⁰
This date is derived from John Warkworth's account, which states that Henry ‘was putt to dethe the xxj day of Maij, on a tywesday night, betwyx xj and xij of the cloke'.
¹¹
This date has, however, been questioned. Betram Wolffe, in his biography of Henry VI, suggested that the death may actually have occurred early on the morning of Wednesday 22 May,
¹²
and Vergil's account, while giving no specific date, assigns Henry's demise to the period
after
Edward IV had pacified Kent and dealt with Fauconberg, which would suggest very late May or possibly even early June.
¹³
Sir Clements Markham ‘made use of the Exchequer
Issue Rolls
(detailing expenditure during Henry's final days in residence in the Tower), to demonstrate that the deposed king was still alive up to 24 May at least',
¹⁴
though other writers have suggested that this merely represents a convenient date at which to end the accounting period. But the
Arrival of Edward IV
gives the date of Henry's demise as Thursday ‘the xxiij day of the monithe of May' and claims he died from natural causes.
¹⁵
There is also the poem of Dafydd Llwyd of Mathafarn, apparently written shortly after Bosworth and rejoicing at the death of Richard III, which likewise implies that Thursday 23 May was the day on which Henry VI died.
¹⁶
Therefore, although most modern accounts continue to state baldly that Henry died on 21 May, it is possible that the real date was slightly later. However, apart from drawing attention to that fact that divergent accounts exist, we need not dwell upon this point here, other than to observe that even in 1485 there may possibly have been some doubt as to the precise date of Henry VI's death. Nevertheless, it must have been well known that he had died towards the end of May, and some date in that vicinity – possibly 21 May – had probably already begun to be thought of as representing ‘the Feast of St Henry VI'.

The saintly cult of Henry VI must have begun very soon after his demise, and certainly within a year or so of his death, for as early as 1473 ‘Richard Latoner was paid for his work in writing the testimonies of certain persons offering at the image of Henry VI in the Cathedral of York'.
¹⁷
It may also have been at about the same time that the wild spinach plant, also known as ‘Mercury', or ‘Poor Man's Asparagus' (
Chenopodium bonus-henricus
), acquired in England its now usual name of ‘Good King Henry' – presumably in honour of the last Lancastrian monarch.
¹⁸

Curiously, while later ages – on the basis of no evidence whatever – would see fit to impute Henry VI's martyrdom to Richard himself,
¹⁹
the reality is that if the last Lancastrian monarch had died from unnatural causes, it must have been King Edward IV who ordered his death. Indeed, his younger brother Richard may well have disapproved of this action, as he certainly did in the case of the subsequent execution of his own brother, the Duke of Clarence. At all events, Richard III seems to have regretted Henry VI's death, and to have evinced a curious personal devotion to Henry's cause as a putative saint. Thus it is an interesting fact that in 1484, Richard himself had ordered and paid for the translation of the remains of this erstwhile Lancastrian king and budding saint from the obscure grave at Chertsey Abbey, to which Edward IV had originally consigned them, to a royal tomb in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, on the opposite side of the sanctuary from the burial site of Edward IV himself.

There may have been practical motives underlying Richard III's action, and Griffiths, for one, considers that he ‘was wise to harness the dead king's reputation rather than try to suppress it as his brother had done, in view of the growing popular veneration and the miracles associated with Henry's name which are recorded from 1481'.
²⁰
On the other hand, it is also perfectly possible that Richard's decision is attributable to a genuinely religious motive. He was a sincerely religious man, and human beings are not invariably motivated solely by cynical self-interest, whatever historians may say.

The choice of the chapel royal at Windsor as the site for the new tomb may have been in part determined by practical considerations. The traditional royal burial area around the shrine of King St Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey was more or less full. King Henry VII would later find himself obliged to construct a large new Lady Chapel at the eastern end of the abbey to accommodate his own burial and that of Elizabeth of York. Richard III must have been well aware of the shortage of space at Westminster, since his brother, Edward IV, had been interred at Windsor, while Queen Anne Neville's tomb at Westminster had been squeezed into a site in front of the sedilia, to the right of the high altar, where no funeral monument was possible other than a brass set into the pavement.

‘In the absence of known copies of Richard III's will his intentions concerning his own burial remain unknown … [but] Richard may have shared Edward [IV]'s concept of the new foundation [of St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle] as the mausoleum of the Yorkist dynasty … The suggestion has been made that he had Henry [VI] interred in the second bay of the south choir aisle because he had reserved the first bay as his own place of burial.'
²¹
The fact that Richard chose to bury Queen Anne Neville at Westminster rather than at Windsor is probably not significant. We have already seen that Richard was well aware of the fact that he would have to marry again and produce new heirs. If he did intend his own burial to be in St George's Chapel, no doubt it would have been his second queen – the mother of the new Prince of Wales – who would have shared this tomb.