The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (32 page)

Since Edward V was not of age, on his father’s death the same factional struggle for power that had marred Henry VI’s reign erupted between the Woodvilles and the older nobility. To Edward’s ministers, the real threat to the government of England was not Richard of Gloucester, whom posterity knows as the murderer of the princes, but the Woodville family. It seemed clear that the Woodvilles were about to mount a
coup d’état
: Queen Elizabeth had removed the king’s treasure into her safekeeping, her brother Sir Edward Woodville had commandeered the Fleet, and her son the Marquis of Dorset started rallying his troops on his estates. Ministers lost no time in urging Richard of Gloucester, Edward IV’s representative in the north who had been named the young king’s guardian by his dying brother, to come south and to take up his position as protector or regent, to which the royal Council had nominated him, as quickly as possible.

The triumph of the Woodvilles at Edward IV’s court had driven many former courtiers out of the King’s Council and back to their estates. Chief among their enemies was the Duke of Buckingham, brother-in-law of the queen. When it became clear that Elizabeth had decided that the new king should be crowned as soon as possible to prevent Gloucester assuming power as protector, Buckingham acted on Gloucester’s behalf to prevent the coronation. The Woodville riding party escorting the new king rapidly into London from the west was ambushed by Gloucester and Buckingham. These two men then proceeded with Edward V into London, which they reached on 4 May 1483.

With 24 June being mentioned as a date for Edward’s coronation there was a real possibility that Richard of Gloucester’s Protectorate might end before it had begun. In considering what happened next it is hard to achieve a completely objective view of Gloucester, his character having been so blackened by Tudor propagandists, including Shakespeare. Even his appearance counted against him. What seems to have been simply one shoulder a little higher than the other has been exaggerated into a hump back–‘crookback Dick’–and equated with moral deformity. Richard of Gloucester was secretive by nature, one of life’s loners. But though he was not personable and charming like his elder brother he was admired for his statesmanlike qualities, and in contrast to his brother Clarence he was always devoted to his brother Edward IV’s interests. His austere religious nature was viewed as a welcome contrast to the frivolity of the queen and indeed of Edward IV himself. In the north, which he had governed for the previous twelve years, he had acquired a reputation for exceptional competence, his dutifulness, his rebuilding of the local administration after the anarchy of war and his rooting out of corruption attracting a great deal of personal loyalty.

Until June 1483 in fact Richard of Gloucester seems to have led an exemplary life. Nevertheless it cannot be disputed that he was the moving spirit in the sinister events of that summer. The facts speak for themselves. By 6 July Gloucester had assumed the throne as Richard III in Edward V’s stead and been crowned in Westminster Abbey. The disinheriting of his nephew had been carefully prepared. An influential preacher Dr Ralph Shaw had given a public sermon at St Paul’s on the theme that ‘bastard slips shall not take root’. Shaw’s argument was that, owing to Edward IV’s pre-contract with another lady before he married Elizabeth Woodville, the marriage was invalid. Edward V and his brother the Duke of York were therefore illegitimate. Two days later Buckingham repeated this theory in a speech to the Mayor of London and important citizens in the Guildhall. Coming from the elder line, Clarence’s son would have taken precedence over Gloucester, but his father’s treachery disqualified him. The real heir to the throne therefore was Richard of Gloucester.

In the meantime any potential opposition had been ruthlessly disposed of by Gloucester. Most importantly, two leading Woodvilles had been executed without trial. Next some 20,000 of Gloucester’s soldiers descended from the north and began encircling London. Their presence and threats of violence persuaded Queen Elizabeth to release the Duke of York from protective sanctuary in Westminster Abbey so that he could be prepared for his brother’s coronation. However, once the eleven-year-old duke had joined his brother in the Tower of London the ceremony was mysteriously postponed until November. Richard was then invited by the Lords in Parliament to accept the crown–they could hardly do otherwise, with his troops surrounding London–and he took over the coronation planned for his nephew. The two little boys vanished into the Tower and after the autumn of 1483 appear never to have been seen again.

Much ink has been expended over whether Richard III had his nephews murdered there. The rumour was first given chapter and verse in the next reign. In the time of Henry VII, Sir James Tyrell–who had been a follower of Richard III and was a well-known conspirator–supposedly confessed to their murder when he was arrested on another charge. He claimed to have been commissioned by Richard III to drug the princes’ jailers in the White Tower and smother the children at night in their beds while they slept. While Sir James waited outside the Tower in the moonlight the murderers crept into their room and then disposed of their bodies by thrusting them under the stairs into the foundations. Certainly in 1674, almost 200 years later, workmen digging beneath the staircase of the White Tower discovered a wooden chest containing the bones of two children, one aged about twelve or thirteen, the other about ten. Pieces of rag and velvet were still sticking to their bones.

It was, however, impossible to sex the bones or really date them and now they are no longer in very good condition. In any case, where the Tower complex stands has been a population centre for at least 2,000 years–it was a fort even in Roman times. A laundry list itemizing children’s clothing and dated September 1485, by which time Richard had been replaced by his Tudor successor Henry VII, is sometimes quoted as evidence that the boys came to their deaths at his hands. Alive the boys were just as much a threat to the Tudor dynasty as they were to Richard III. However, the weight of the evidence points to Richard as their murderer.

In the autumn of 1483 a series of revolts against the new king Richard III by pockets of gentry all over the country seems to have had as one of its objects the rescue of the rest of Edward IV’s children from Westminster Abbey, to prevent them coming to harm. Evidently many believed something had happened to the two princes. Most of the rebels had previously been pillars of the Yorkist establishment and many were ex-sheriffs. Something very heinous must have taken place that summer to turn them against a Yorkist king. Yet Richard made no attempt to disprove the rumours by producing the boys alive. Although the two princes may have been alive until October 1483, round about then they seem to have fallen out of sight. Tradesmen calling at the Tower stopped seeing them practising at archery in the Tower Garden. Their figures were apparently no longer glimpsed even ‘behind the bars and windows’. By then there were definite and damaging rumours that the boys were dead. Richard was evidently seen by many as accursed, the author of royal infanticide. Even by the different standards of the fifteenth century, this was a crime that made men shudder.

One of the most serious rebellions was headed by Richard’s former associate the Duke of Buckingham. His is one of the names mentioned in connection with the deaths of the princes because he was the Constable of the Tower, but some time in the summer of 1483 there was a falling out between him and Richard III–perhaps because of the murders, perhaps because of his own distant claim to the throne. He now claimed it for Henry Tudor, the son of the heiress Lady Margaret Beaufort. After the deaths of Henry VI and the Prince of Wales this part-Welsh nobleman was the last and distant hope of the Lancastrian line. His mother the redoubtable Lady Margaret had attended Richard III’s coronation, but Henry Tudor himself had been smuggled abroad to Brittany in 1471 as his life was believed to be in danger.

Primed by Buckingham, Henry Tudor duly set out with a small fleet from Brittany to claim the throne but had to turn back when it became clear that the uprising had no hope of succeeding. Buckingham, however, was captured, and executed in the market square at Salisbury. But the disaffection aroused against the king was becoming so widespread that the Yorkists and Lancastrians started to plot together. It was agreed between Queen Elizabeth Woodville and Lady Margaret Beaufort that Princess Elizabeth of York should be married to Lady Margaret’s son Henry Tudor.

Henry Tudor’s father Edmund, Earl of Richmond, had been a member of one of the Welsh families closely linked to Owen Glendower’s revolt. They had emerged from obscurity when Henry Tudor’s grandfather Owen Tudor had pursued and married the French queen Catherine after the death of her husband Henry V. Since his father had died before Henry Tudor was born and his mother had then remarried, he had been brought up in Wales at Pembroke Castle by his uncle Jasper Tudor. Much of his early life, he would later remark, had been passed in seclusion or exile.

Exchanging Brittany for France after discovering that the Bretons had planned to betray him for a large ransom, Henry Tudor was soon joined by an increasing number of heads of southern English families who had taken part in rebellion. The confiscation of their property and Richard’s plantation of his friends on their old lands meant they had nothing to lose and everything to gain from a new king. The death of Richard III’s adored only son in April 1484 and of his wife Anne Neville less than a year later gave a doomed air to the regime. An ancient prophecy circulated that in the Year of Three Kings great disaster would come upon the kingdom.

In fact it was the death of Anne Neville that spurred the Lancastrian king-in-waiting and the Yorkist exiles into action. At the end of spring 1485, a rumour reached them that Anne Neville’s death had been no accident. Richard III had poisoned his wife in order to underpin his tottering regime by marrying his niece Elizabeth of York. As the daughter of Edward IV she would lend him the legitimacy he lacked.

But, as we have seen, Elizabeth of York was also the central figure in the plan to put Henry Tudor on the throne. Henry’s claim through his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort had serious weaknesses. Although the Beaufort line had been legitimized, the family had originally been barred from the royal succession. The male line had died out when the Duke of Somerset was killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury, and there was the usual prejudice against descent through the female line–the basis of Henry Tudor’s claim. Marriage to Elizabeth of York would strengthen that claim. The threat that Richard might marry her instead roused the refugees into speeding up their plans.

The haemorrhage out of the country of the very gentry on whose unofficial network English kings traditionally relied ensured that in a civil war Richard III would be almost completely dependent on the great magnates and their men-at-arms. By 1485, if he was to keep the throne he would need the loyal support of the three most important magnates in England, whose armies could turn the tide either way. They were Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, the Duke of Norfolk and the Cheshire magnate Lord Stanley. In the event Norfolk fought on Richard’s side. The other two deserted him. The Percys were in any case usually Lancastrian supporters, and Northumberland had been angered by Richard’s decision to use the Earl of Lincoln and the Council of the North to keep order in the traditional Percy heartlands.

It was one of Richard III’s greatest problems that the third element, Lord Stanley, was an unknown quantity. Stanley was Constable of England but this appointment had only been made to bind him more closely to the Ricardian government. For Stanley was also the third husband of Lady Margaret Beaufort. Richard must have believed that Stanley was aware of his wife’s constant plotting, but he was too frightened of a rebellion in the north-west to imprison him.

Where Lord Stanley’s allegiance lay proved to be the pivot on which Richard’s defences turned. When at the beginning of August Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven in the far west of Wales his path into England lay north-east, close to the Stanley estates in Cheshire. There Lord Stanley controlled perhaps 4,000 men who could have prevented Henry Tudor and his 2,000 troops leaving Wales–but they allowed them through.

By 22 August Henry Tudor’s army was in Leicestershire, the heart of England, at Market Bosworth where the last battle of the Wars of the Roses was fought. He had successfully capitalized on his Welsh roots and Welsh loyalties, and his cause was seen as a Welsh resurgence. As he travelled east towards his destiny at the Battle of Bosworth Field he was hailed by the Welsh bards as a true Prince of Wales whose coming had been foretold by ancient prophecies. His supporters had swelled considerably in the march through Wales and across the midlands. In contrast the allies Richard was counting on were not there. As news spread of the invasion, only Norfolk came up to scratch. Northumberland remained in the north. Richard III had taken the precaution of holding Stanley’s son Lord Strange hostage so that he would not help the rebels.

As a result, although he was plainly responsible for letting Henry Tudor through Cheshire, Lord Stanley continued to give assurances of support to Richard. But there was more than a hint of defeat in the wind for Richard. The night before battle–when the usurper king, apparently haunted by strange phantoms, was unable to sleep–many of his supporters secretly decamped to Henry Tudor’s side. Meanwhile Stanley had positioned himself on a hill midway between the two armies, so that it was not clear whether his army belonged to the royal forces or to the rebels. The cunning Stanley, caught on the horns of a difficult dilemma, would play a waiting game.

Without Northumberland’s troops morale was not good in the king’s camp, and it was lower on the morning of battle after the defections had been discovered. When the despairing Richard personally led a cavalry charge against Henry Tudor, bringing his standard with the red dragon of Wales crashing to the ground, the Stanleys at last threw their weight behind the pretender. The day was Henry Tudor’s.

Shakespeare has Richard III coming off his charger and shouting in vain, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse.’ This was based on fact: the muddiness of the ground was responsible for his not being able to keep his seat. But whatever else Richard was, he was no coward–it took a great many Welsh soldiers piling on top of him to kill him. After the battle his body was stripped naked and flung across a horse to remind all that he was no longer the Lord’s Anointed. Richard had been wearing a thin gold crown around his helmet. When it was found under a hawthorn bush, where it had rolled, the quick-witted Lord Stanley there and then placed it on the head of Henry Tudor and hailed him as King Henry.

Richard III’s naked body was tossed into an unmarked grave at Leicester while the new king Henry VII marched to London. There he later married his distant relation Elizabeth of York. Indicating the depths of suspicion with which the former king was regarded, one chronicler wrote, ‘In the year 1485 on 22nd August the tusks of the Boar were blunted and the red rose, the avenger of the white, shines upon us.’ It was through the red rose of Lancaster, through his Beaufort blood, that Henry Tudor claimed the throne. The union of England through the two families was symbolized by the Tudor rose–the white rose of York superimposed on the larger red rose of Lancaster. It is still to be seen at the Tower of London on the uniform Henry VII designed for his new bodyguard, known today as the Beefeaters.

Henry VII gave his name to a whole new dynasty–the Tudors. For the first time since the sixth century and King Arthur, England was proclaimed to have a king from her most ancient race. Arthurian echoes were to the fore, since Caxton had just published Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
. Henry VII even called his eldest son Arthur after the ancient British king. At the coronation such evocations were exploited by the new king and his supporters. In particular, prophecies were once again cited to establish the new king’s legitimacy. To underline the unity of the realm the queen was carried off to give birth at Winchester, the ancient seat of the West Saxon kings. Meanwhile, to remind everyone of his Yorkshire title as Earl of Richmond, at the river near Sheen Henry built Richmond Palace.

It was not all romance. Henry VII had no intention of ruling as a constitutional Lancastrian monarch limited by Parliament. He was a monarch, and he had himself crowned before Parliament met. Thereafter, like Edward IV, he summoned Parliament as seldom as possible. By the next century under his descendants the Tudor House of Commons had become an instrument of royal power, the so-called Tudor despotism, which saw the growth of the nation state.