The Life and Times of Richard III (3 page)

The affair was, of course, carefully staged according to custom with an eye to its propaganda value. The real decision had already been taken by an inner circle of Yorkist leaders meeting at Baynard’s Castle. The events leading to Edward’s election were described by the City draper Robert Fabyan:

...the said earl [of Warwick] caused to be mustered his people in St John’s Field, where unto that host were proclaimed and shewed certain articles and points that King Henry had offended in, whereupon it was demanded of the said people whether the said Henry were worthy to reign as king any longer or no. Whereunto the people cried hugely and said, Nay, Nay. And after it was asked of them whether they would have th’earl of March for their king and they cried with one voice, Yea, Yea. After the which admission thus by the commons assented, certain captains were assigned to bear report thereof unto the said earl of March, then being lodged at his place called Baynard’s Castle. Of the which when he was by them ascertained he thanked God and them. And how be it that like a wise prince he shewed by a convenient style that he was insufficient to occupy that great charge for sundry considerations by him then shewed, yet he lastly by the exhortation of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Exeter and other noble men then present took upon him that charge, and granted to their petition.... Then th’earl of March thus as is abovesaid being elected and admitted for king upon the morrow next ensuing rode unto Paul’s and there rode in procession and offered, and there had Te Deum sungen with all solemnity. After which solemnisation finished he was with great royalty conveyed unto Westminster and there in the hall set in the king’s see with St Edward’s sceptre in his hand.

Edward was, however, careful to postpone his full coronation until he had dealt with Queen Margaret’s army, still at large in Yorkshire. He did not want to owe his Crown entirely to the enthusiasm of the Londoners and the backing of the powerful Neville family. The Earl of Warwick, his uncle Lord Fauconberg and John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, left the capital first to muster recruits. Edward followed on 13 March. Two weeks later, on Palm Sunday, he led his army onto the field of Towton in a blinding snowstorm. In the longest and bloodiest engagement of the Wars of the Roses the Lancastrian army was completely destroyed. Warwick’s brother, George Neville, Bishop of Exeter, reported that the battle ‘began with the rising of the sun, and lasted until the tenth hour of the night’. The routed Lancastrians were ruthlessly hunted down and hacked to death until ‘so many dead bodies were seen as to cover an area six miles long by three broad and about four furlongs... some 28,000 persons perished on one side and the other’.

‘Our puppet’, King Henry, accompanied by his wife and son, escaped the slaughter and was granted asylum by the Scots, in exchange for the surrender of the great frontier fortress of Berwick. After resting up for a few days at York, Edward returned to London to claim the Crown, already his by acclamation and by right of conquest.

News of Edward’s great victory reached the Duchess of York and her younger sons two weeks later at Utrecht. While the fate of the House of York was in doubt, their welcome had been polite but reserved. Now Duke Philip of Burgundy visited the refugees in person and arranged for a magnificent send-off for them at Bruges. A few days later Richard and George were back in England at the royal manor of Sheen in Surrey.

Since he was only eight years old, it is unlikely that Richard was fully aware of the dizzying changes in his fortunes over the past two and a half years. The débâcle at Ludlow in 1460 left him in the custody of the House of Lancaster, the youngest son of an attainted rebel. A year later his father was Lord Protector and Richard stood fifth in line to the throne. At Wakefield he had lost a father, a brother and an uncle, and had to be smuggled abroad for his safety. Now he was back in England for the crowning of his universally popular brother. An Italian observer recorded that ‘words fail me to relate how well the commons love and adore him, as if he were their God. The entire kingdom keeps holiday for the event’.

It was not long before Richard shared in his brother’s good fortune. On the eve of Edward’s coronation in June Richard and George acted out the elaborate ritual of induction as Knights of the Bath. Four months later, after George had been created Duke of Clarence, Richard in his turn became Duke of Gloucester, and was elected a Knight of the Garter. These titles had little bearing on his immediate future. It was the custom of the time that the sons of the nobility should be boarded out in the household of a family of equivalent rank, where they were known as henchmen. Foreign observers attributed this to the meanness of the English and their lack of affection; and it is probably true that the upper classes in the fifteenth century regarded their children as pawns to their social advancement. There was only one Yorkist lord in the England of 1461 of sufficient rank to take in the King’s brother, and that was his cousin Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.

The pre-eminence of the House of Neville was the supreme example of what inspired matchmaking could do for a family. Warwick’s grandfather, Ralph Neville, married Joan Beaufort, bastard daughter of John of Gaunt. His father acquired the earldom of Salisbury through his marriage to the former Earl’s daughter, Alice. But the best catch of all was reserved for Warwick himself. He married Anne, the daughter of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, owner of a vast inheritance in Wales, the West Country and the Midlands. When the senior branch of the Beauchamps became extinct in 1449 all this, along with the earldom of Warwick, was conferred in his wife’s right on the twenty-one-year-old Richard Neville, whose possessions far exceeded those of his father and very nearly equalled those of York himself. The two families – Neville and York – were already closely linked. Richard, Duke of York had grown up in the household of Warwick’s grandfather, Ralph, and had later married Ralph’s youngest daughter, Cicely. Marriage thus supplied the sinews of the tripartite alliance of Warwick, Salisbury and York which enabled those two Houses to take on the King and most of the older aristocracy.

Like all great landowners of the time Warwick had no permanent residence: but his favourite castle, and the home of his Countess, was at Middleham, capital of Wensleydale in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The massive keep, built by Robert Fitzralf in the 1170s and acquired by the Nevilles in the thirteenth century, still stands today, along with the gatehouse and the chapel. Here Richard was to spend the better part of the next four years.

He and his fellow protégés were committed to the care of Warwick’s ‘Master of Henxmen’, a household official whose duty it was to instil in Richard the rudiments of knightly conduct, described in the Household Book of Edward IV as ‘the schools of urbanity and nurture of England’. He taught the henchmen to ‘ride cleanly and surely; to draw them also to jousts; to learn them to wear their harness and to have all courtesy in words, deeds, and degrees’ and ‘diligently to keep them in the rules of goings and sittings’. The martial arts and good conduct in the company of his peers formed the basis of Richard’s education but, like the traditional English public school education, it was also tempered with book learning and other liberal accomplishments. The Master of Henxmen would teach his pupils ‘sundry languages and other learning virtuous; to harp, to pipe, sing, dance with other temperate behaving’. The favourite popular reading of the time, prized for their moral as well as entertainment value, were the traditional tales of medieval chivalry. As William Caxton wrote later, ‘read the noble volumes of Saint Grail, of Lancelot, of Galahad, of Tristram, of Perceforest, of Parseval, of Gawain and many more. There ye shall see manhood, courtesy, gentleness.’ Richard never had the opportunity to read the greatest of all these epics: Sir Thomas Mallory’s
Morte d’ Arthur
was published three weeks before Bosworth.

When he was not out hunting with hawks and hounds in the Yorkshire dales or practising with sword and lance in the tilt yard, Richard’s life centred around the communal routine of the Great Hall, presided over by the Countess and supervised by the Steward of the Household. Having risen shortly after dawn, he would repair here for dinner, the main meal of the day, at eleven. The whole of the ‘standing’ household – some two hundred persons in the case of a great earl like Warwick – would be present, seated at tables according to rank, and would gnaw their way through six whole oxen in a single day. Richard would again be on his best behaviour for ‘this master [of Henchmen] sitteth in the Hall, next unto these henchmen, to have his respects unto their demeanings, how mannerly they eat and drink and to their communication and other forms curial [courtly], after the book of urbanity’. Supper was at five, followed by a couple of hours of relaxation and then bed. In the winter months the servants would distribute a livery of candles and firewood to heat the upper chambers.

In common with most castles erected before the fifteenth century, Middleham was a cold and draughty place, built to withstand siege rather than to offer domestic comforts. Newly wealthy knights and barons might rebuild in brick or timber as at Hurstmonceux and Tattershall, Crowhurst Place and Ockwells, but the blue-blooded had to make do with modern improvements – painted glass in the windows, and tapestries richly emblazoned with hunting scenes or heraldic devices on the walls – to brighten the stone relics of their ancestors.

Richard’s companions at this time included some who were to play important roles in his future. Two fellow henchmen – Francis Lovell and Robert Percy – would remain his friends for life. About the same age as Richard was the Countess’s elder daughter, Isabel, who would marry his brother George of Clarence. The younger daughter, Anne, would one day sit at Richard’s side as Queen of England.

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During these four years of Richard’s schooling the great Earl of Warwick was too busy fighting on the King’s behalf to spend much time at Middleham. Steel-willed in adversity, Queen Margaret and her Scottish allies hammered repeatedly at Edward’s northern frontiers. Warwick, with his brother John, Lord Montagu, was equally tireless in defence. Three times the Lancastrians invaded Northumberland and three times they were beaten back with heavy losses. The differences in character which finally destroyed the partnership between the Earl and the young King were already apparent in their methods. Where Warwick proffered a mailed fist, Edward held out a velvet glove. His willingness to forgive and forget, his attempts to charm his enemies into submission, were a powerful boost to his popularity. But the men who returned his generosity with treason paid for it with their lives. In February 1462 John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford and his eldest son, Aubrey, were executed after the discovery of a plot to assassinate the King.

A more potent menace was Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset – the eldest son and heir of York’s great enemy – whom Edward singled out as a special target for his charm. In the autumn of 1463 Edward planned a visit to Yorkshire to ‘see and understand the disposition of the people of the North’. He took with him the Duke of Somerset and a bodyguard of two hundred of Somerset’s men ‘well horsed and well harnessed’. On the way the citizens of Northampton, horrified to see their King apparently at the mercy of his hereditary foe, ‘arose upon that false traitor the Duke of Somerset, and would have slain him within the King’s palace. And then the King with fair speech and great difficulty saved his life for that time.... And the King full lovingly gave the Commons of Northampton a tun of wine that they should drink and make merry.’ But the instincts of Edward’s would-be rescuers proved correct. At the end of the year the Duke slipped away and organised a last ditch Lancastrian resistance from the Northumberland castle of Bamburgh. Again it was the Neville family who bailed Edward out from the consequences of his leniency. Outside Hexham on 14 May 1464, the Lancastrian rebels were soundly trounced by Lord Montagu. Somerset and his supporters were beheaded.

This battle virtually put an end to Lancastrian resistance. Shortly afterwards the Nevilles negotiated a fifteen-year-truce with the Scots and sealed the back door to Edward’s kingdom. Warwick recaptured the three border strongholds of Alnwick, Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh – which had changed hands four times in as many years. Even Queen Margaret was momentarily subdued by this string of disasters; she retired at last to her father, René of Anjou’s provincial Court at St Michel-sur-Bar. Sir John Fortescue described her little circle eking out a bitter Christmas in 1464: ‘we beeth all in great poverty, but yet the Queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so as we beeth not in extreme necessity... spend sparcely such money as ye have, for when ye come hither, ye shall have need of it’. Finally, in July 1465, Henry VI was tracked down to a Lancashire manor house and taken prisoner. With his feet tied to the stirrups, he rode through London as Warwick’s captive to take up residence in the Tower.

If Edward’s throne was now secure, he owed a heavy debt to his two cousins, the Earl of Warwick and his brother John, Lord Montagu. The victor of Mortimer’s Cross and Towton had already shown signs of preferring the pleasures of food and drink and pretty girls to the rigours of a campaign in the saddle. The Bishop of St Andrews rightly referred to the all-powerful Earl as the ‘conductor of the kingdom under King Edward’. While Edward was content to take the advice of his mentor, Warwick had no reason to complain. After his victory at Hexham Lord Montagu was invested with the rich earldom of Northumberland and Warwick’s clerical brother George, already Chancellor of England, was elevated to the archbishopric of York.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester was taught the rudiments of knightly conduct in the Kingmaker’s household at Middleham. Warwick’s ‘Master of Henxman’ taught Richard and his friends to ride, to joust and to fight, and also supervised their book learning and reading.

However, by the time the twelve-year-old Richard had been reunited with his brother at Court in the spring of 1465, the seeds of discord had been sown. In the previous autumn, at a Great Council convened at Reading, Edward confronted a stunned assembly with the
fait accompli
of his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. The circumstances in which this marriage took place were later recorded by Robert Fabyan: