The War of the Roses (20 page)

James IV, as a French ally even if married to Edward IV's daughter, would have been likely to invade England if England attacked France. Assuming a war between the two in 1512, he would have been in the same position of aiding Louis XII against the English King as in real life; he could have been killed at Flodden in 1513. His mother, one of Edward IV's daughters (Cecily?), would then have had a claim to the regency for their son James V if enough nobles backed her. Either Edward V or his brother Richard would have been able to marry and produce heirs to England, with one of the brothers possibly still on the throne into the late 1530s. Born in 1470 and 1473, they would have been a generation older and more experienced than either Charles V or Francis I in the diplomatic conflicts of the 1520s.

Henry Tudor, left isolated in Brittany or France with no major split in the Yorkist ‘power-base', would have been an unlikely choice for Edward IV as his eldest daughter's husband and would have lacked the support to challenge the adult Edward V or his brother. If the Plantagenet male line had continued, would there have been no ‘Break with Rome' as there was no Henry VIII? There would still have been rising interest in Continental religious affairs and Lutheranism, but without the impetus of Henry's marital disputes the English state's attitude would depend on the personal piety and tolerance of the King. A fairly relaxed approach to dissident theology, like that initially in France, could have seen ‘reformers' active in the major port of London in the 1530s and new ideas seeping into the universities, aided by imported books. There would still have been calls for Erasmian-style reform of clerical ‘abuses'–the crucial choice facing the King would have been whether or not to suppress them.

What if Richard III had won at Bosworth and stayed in power?

 

The coups of May–June 1483

A
s analysed in Charles Ross' biography, Richard III relied on a far narrower power-base than Edward IV due to the shocking nature of his usurpation in June 1483.
¹
The surprise announcement of Edward V's bastardy (on account of his parents' marriage) on 22 June, initially in Ralph Shaa's officially-approved sermon on the text ‘Bastard slips shall not take root', was probably based on the ‘pre-contract' of Edward IV and Eleanor Butler as stated by the author of the
Croyland Chronicle
. There is some confusion over the identity of the betrothed woman cited, but not over the legal reason–which would have been more difficult to use if Edward IV had married in public with unbiased witnesses. Did the Woodvilles' unpopularity with some nobles enable Richard to risk this highly unusual action? The original texts of the sermon and of the Parliamentary Act sanctioning the change in succession,
Titulus Regius
, have not survived. After August 1485 Henry VII was keen to have them expunged from people's memories, as he partly based his appeal on his wife's being Edward IV's eldest daughter and thus bastardized with her siblings by Richard. Sir Thomas More was confused as to who the ‘pre-contract' had been with, citing Edward's known mistress Elizabeth Lucy not Eleanor.
²
Was this just a slip, or a genuine sign that the announcement made on 22 June 1483 was not specific as to the name of the late King's betrothed?

Eleanor Butler has been traced, and the first biography of her written.
³
The original identity given to her in post-1483 literature was accurate, and she was indeed a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Henry VI's great general killed in 1453, and was buried in the nunnery church of the Carmelite Order in Norwich. Dying in 1468, this young widow was both ‘available' for Edward to marry in 1462–4 and dead by the time that Edward was arrested and threatened with deposition by Warwick in 1469. Technically, even if Edward had legally ‘married' her he could have remarried Elizabeth Woodville in time to legitimize his eldest son, born in October 1470–but his daughter Elizabeth of York, Henry VII's wife, would still have been illegitimate as she was born in 1466. Ironically, canon law provided for Edward and Elizabeth's 1464 marriage to have been legal not ‘bigamy' if it had been public and Eleanor had failed to speak up for her rights at the ceremony–but the Woodville marriage was private and poorly-attended. The arguments against the legality of the Woodville marriage in
Titulus Regius
apparently included that it was not in church and had not been approved of by the peers.
⁴
Under contemporary canon law, the private circumstances invalidated the marriage–whether or not there was a ‘pre-contract' to anyone else. Thus, the question of who Edward IV's ‘other wife' was (and if Richard invented her role) is in a sense irrelevant. The Butler genealogy reveals two interesting facts–Eleanor's sister Elizabeth, with whom she probably lived at Kenninghall in Norfolk after 1461, was married to the Duke of Norfolk and they were closely related to Warwick. (A rumour c. 1462 did say that Edward was sexually involved with Warwick's niece.
⁵
) This poses two questions about the ‘marriage that might have been' between Edward and Eleanor and its effects on post-1464 politics. Did Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, and/ or her husband know of the betrothal-ceremony and Edward have to avoid alienating the Duke, e.g. by backing his blatantly illegal attack on the Pastons at Caister Castle? And what if Warwick had found out about the betrothal–could he have administered the
coup de grâce
to the Woodvilles in 1469 by forcing the Church to examine the evidence and declare Edward a bigamist? His execution of Elizabeth Woodville's father and husband would then have been followed by annulling Edward's marriage to Elizabeth, whether or not Edward was deposed too. Either Edward would have had to marry a bride of Warwick's choosing, or Clarence would have been restored as Edward's sole legal heir in place of Edward's illegitimized daughters.

The promiscuous young Edward IV of the early 1460s was certainly capable of making a promise of marriage in order to seduce a woman and going back on it later. His actual marriage in May 1464, was secret and gave rise to confusion over its legality when he eventually admitted it. The bishop who had seemingly performed the betrothal-ceremony to Eleanor–or else received the confession of the priest who had done so–Robert Stillington, was arrested for unknown reasons by Edward IV when the King's brother the Duke of Clarence, was laying claim to be Edward's heir in 1478. This suggests that he may have told Clarence the story and thus inspired the latter's endeavours to cut Edward's children out of the succession.
⁶
It makes more sense to suppose that Clarence's threatening hints about ‘G' being the rightful heir in 1477 arose from a sense of (justified?) grievance at his brother's underhand behaviour rather than simple lust for power. The relative paucity of knowledge of or interest in Eleanor in Tudor times may reflect writers' recognition that it was a dangerous topic to pursue–if Edward IV had been legally contracted to her, Henry VII's wife had had no claim to the English throne. Thus Henry VIII was not the rightful king, and logically Clarence's daughter Margaret Pole should have been queen or else have handed over her rights to her son Henry, Lord Montague. Henry VII claimed the throne in his declaration to Parliament in autumn 1485 by his, not his wife's, descent–though this was presumably partly to avoid making himself legally dependant on her rights and partly out of loyalty to his mother, Margaret Beaufort, whose claim he had inherited.
⁷
Raking up the Eleanor Butler story could be interpreted by the paranoid Henry VIII or Elizabeth I as backing their Plantagenet challengers, so was it suppressed deliberately? There is evidence that the Butler claim was still ‘live' as a political issue in the 1530s.
⁸

It also appears that mention was made (probably by Richard's chief supporter, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham) in a speech on 24 or 25 June 1483 of the rumour that Edward IV was illegitimate too due to his mother's affair with the archer Blaybourne in 1441/2. Polydore Vergil claimed he had heard witnesses confirm Duchess Cecily's anger at this–though there is no evidence of her quarrelling with Richard, who was living at her residence at the time. The story, which Louis XI of France used against Edward in the latter's lifetime,
⁹
may have been current earlier than 1483 and inspired the clumsy claims to the throne (or the reversion to it) made by Clarence in 1470–1 and 1477–8. Did Warwick think of using it to depose Edward in 1469? It is an alternative explanation for Clarence's behaviour to his being told about Eleanor Butler. Indeed, recent discovery of evidence about Edward's father's itinerary as commander in Normandy in 1441 may indicate that he was not with Edward's mother, Cecily Neville, at Rouen at the likely time of Edward's conception and that there may be truth in the claim about Blaybourne.
¹⁰
At the time, much was made of the fact that the six-foot-four Edward did not resemble his undersized father but Richard did; at the public declaration of Richard's rights as lawful king in the City on 22 June 1483 he made an appearance before the crowds to remind everyone of this fact.
¹¹
No doubt it was carefully arranged so that his partisans in the crowd could ‘spontaneously' acclaim him as king.

It is far from certain that Richard did not have a legal claim in 1483, provided that the exclusion of Clarence's seven-year-old son Edward (possibly mentally sub-normal) by reason of Clarence's attainder was accepted. The exclusion of an under-age if genealogically closer heir in favour of a more distant, adult claimant had a precedent–in 1399, when Edmund Mortimer had been Richard II's expected heir but was only eight and was ignored by the usurping Henry IV. The political power at the time had lain with Henry, as it did with Richard in June 1483, and nobody dared oppose the new ruler.

Whether or not Richard had any legal claim on the throne, the surprise discovery of his nephews' bastardy was very convenient for his own ambitions and was cynically seen as such by contemporaries. Edward IV had nominated Richard as Protector for the twelve-year-old Edward V, at least until the latter's coronation when a king supposedly attained his majority, and Richard was the senior adult male of the House of York and the greatest magnate in the country (recently awarded a new ‘palatinate' over parts of the north). He was the most experienced war-leader and was more able to lead the Council than the two most senior political magnates resident at court, Edward's friend and Chamberlain William, Lord Hastings, and stepson the Marquis of Dorset, who were at odds at the time of Edward's sudden death on 9 April. But the powerful family of his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, were critical of the measure and possibly tried to keep the contents of the will secret to reduce Richard's authority over the Council. The apparent efforts to hurry Edward V from his residence as Prince of Wales, Ludlow Castle, to London for an early coronation without waiting for Richard's arrival from Yorkshire would indicate a means of preventing the Protectorship–if Richard can be believed. (See previous section.)

The extent of and reasons for Elizabeth Woodville's enmity towards Richard are unclear, though it has been speculated that she bore a grudge against the Neville clan for the ‘Kingmaker' Earl of Warwick's execution of her father and brother in 1469 and had transferred this to Richard as Warwick's son-in-law and principal heir to estates in the north. But she did a land-deal with Richard in 1472–as current rival to her foe Clarence? Her brother Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, showed that
he
was not at odds with Richard (or expecting Richard to interfere in arrangements for the government) in the way that he took no precautions after meeting Richard and Buckingham on the road to London at Stony Stratford on 29 April. He rode back from Edward V's quarters to dine with the Dukes and was arrested in his inn the next morning. It was clearly Richard that was the plotter on that occasion, not Rivers, though he later displayed barrels of weapons that he claimed Rivers had been taking to London to be used in a Woodville coup. Richard certainly claimed to fear the Woodvilles' intentions, sending to York for a large body of his tenants and allies to come armed to London in June to protect him. The semi-hysterical and abusive references to treachery seems to be an obsession of his, implying self-righteous insecurity.
¹²
When news of his seizure of Rivers and others reached London the Queen chose to take sanctuary with her other children and her son Dorset and brother Edward Woodville to flee the country with what men, treasure, and ships they could lay their hands on. Was this due to genuine fear, or to win sympathy? An uneasy impasse followed Richard's arrival in London with his and Buckingham's armed retainers escorting the new King, until sometime in early June the question of the legality of Edward IV's marriage surfaced and Richard began to consider deposing his nephew. The dates of this, the question of who was plotting against whom, and the truth of assorted claims about the ‘pre-contract' are still disputed. But the evidence would seem to indicate that at some date Hastings, formerly an ally of Richard's against his foe Dorset's mother Elizabeth Woodville, became reconciled to the Woodvilles–possibly with Edward IV's mistress ‘Jane' Shore acting as an intermediary–and Richard came to see him as a threat.
¹³
Given that Hastings had been responsible for summoning Richard to London and was an enemy of Dorset, this reversal of alliances was somewhat bizarre and would indicate that Hastings was seriously worried for Edward V's welfare.

On 13 June the Protector, in an act of blatant violence unusual even for fifteenth-century politics, had a Council meeting at the Tower stormed by his retainers and Hastings was dragged outside and beheaded on Tower Green without any attempt at a trial. The nearest parallel was what Richard's father-in-law (and mentor at Middleham Castle in the mid-1460s), Warwick, had done to those male Woodvilles he could lay his hands on in 1469. Warwick had also killed the late Duke of Buckingham, father of Richard's ally, in this manner after the battle of Northampton in 1460 and Edward IV had killed the Duke of Somerset and other captured Lancastrian peers after the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. All these victims had been in arms against their captors, and been arrested and killed after battles; Rivers and Hastings in 1483 were not. Richard also arrested Lord Stanley, Archbishop Rotherham of York, and Bishop Morton, though the first two were soon released and the latter was placed in the custody of Richard's close ally Buckingham at his residence at Brecon (and may have encouraged his later revolt). Hastings' estates were not confiscated, indicating that Richard accepted that he had no legal reason for doing so and needed to make a gesture of reconciliation, but Mistress Shore was required to do penance as a prostitute in a clear act of personal spite and ostentatious criticism of the debauchery at Edward IV's court. Richard's propagandists notably kept returning to this theme of the late King's moral faults, implying Richard's superior qualities; it may well reflect a personal obsession of Richard's.
¹⁴
Richard also executed Rivers and his associates Sir Richard Grey (the Queen's second son by her first marriage) and Haute in custody in Yorkshire in mid-June, possibly after a brief trial. The Queen was required to hand over her youngest son Richard, Duke of York, to join his brother in the Tower, and the deposition of Edward V followed. On 25 June Richard was proclaimed king following a hasty ‘election' by an assembly of magnates, and on 6 July he was crowned in place of Edward V.