PART FOUR
FIFTEEN
For my daughters, Richard,
They shall be praying nuns, not weeping queens
Richard III, 4.4
The marriage of Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV had been one of the great royal love stories, combining physical passion with warm domesticity; it rewrote the rules of royal romance, with all the implications that would have in the next century. There can be little doubt that under normal circumstances Elizabeth would have allowed herself to mourn most sincerely. But the circumstances were far from normal: she was a queen fighting for position, given her son’s minority. Edward IV’s death left a twelve-year-old boy as king – a difficult situation in any but the most stable country. The problem of competing factions within English court circles could only have been resolved by the accession of a strong and adult ruler.
Christine de Pizan took special pains to advise the princess in a war-torn land, widowed while her son was still a minor, that she should ‘employ all her prudence and her wisdom to reconcile the antagonistic factions’. Richard of Gloucester was riding high: the parliament of January 1483 had acknowledged and rewarded his efforts against the Scots. Perhaps it had been in response to his high profile that in the same month Anthony, Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, seemed to be trying to recruit the Woodville interest. In February and March he had been making sure that his appointment as Prince Edward’s governor was renewed, and requesting confirmation of his right as such to raise troops in Wales. Ever since, the question of who took the aggressive initiative – or who was merely getting their retaliation in first – has been argued endlessly.
The events which followed the death of Edward IV are still controversial. The main protagonists brought with them the memory of experiences that would make anyone wary. Elizabeth’s were of the downturn in fortune that had followed the death of her first, Grey, husband; and of the moment when her second husband’s crown had been snatched back from him in 1470. Richard, Duke of Gloucester must have remembered that the last two dukes of Gloucester, Henry VI’s uncle Humfrey and Richard II’s uncle Thomas Woodstock, both holders of the reins during a royal minority, had both died imprisoned. Moreover, he would have recalled all too clearly the time of Henry VI’s insanity, when Marguerite of Anjou attempted to take over in her infant son’s name. With Elizabeth Woodville manoeuvring in London, it must have seemed a most alarming precedent.
Richard, as the only royal uncle of the new boy king Edward V, had recent custom on his side. It was his uncles who had governed for the infant Henry VI. What is more, Richard was aligned with the ‘king’s men’ led by Lord Hastings, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Suffolk and the Earl of Lincoln (the latter two being respectively brother-in-law and nephew of Edward IV through his sister Elizabeth). Buckingham had reputedly never forgiven Elizabeth Woodville for marrying him, as a child, to another Woodville sister whom he considered beneath him; and he may have felt that the Woodvilles had deprived him of the influence in Wales that his landholdings on the Welsh border should have allowed him to enjoy. Hastings and the queen had a different quarrel, says More: she was not only resentful of ‘the great favour the King bare him [but] also for that she thought him secretly familiar with the King in wanton company’.
More describes a deathbed scene, with Hastings, like the queen and her eldest Grey son, among the leading players. He gives Edward a moving speech: ‘in these last words that ever I look to speak with you: I exhort you and require you all, for the love that you have ever born to me, for the love that I have ever born to you, for the love that our lord beareth to us all, for this time forward, all griefs forgotten, each of you love other.’ (‘If you among your selves in a child’s reign fall at debate, many a good man shall perish and haply he, too, and you, too, ere this land find peace again’, More has him add prophetically.) They all agreed – but whether they would keep their agreement once Edward had died was another story.
The council met immediately, and Elizabeth Woodville met with them. There was, however, no question of her having an actual regency; nor of her having even the measure of influence she had been given when her husband went to France in 1475, or the generous measure of control handed to her when her son’s council as Prince of Wales had been set up. Her husband was dead, his wishes no longer paramount.1
Perhaps there was never any question of a regency as such. What Henry VI’s senior uncle had held in the king’s infancy was a protectorate, which allowed the incumbent to ‘protect’ prince and state but without assuming regal powers. Some said that Edward IV had wanted his brother Richard to occupy such a position. But Richard was not in London to make any claim: he must have felt that events had overtaken him, just as Elizabeth must have felt herself cast adrift by the sudden loss of the man from whom all her influence had derived. But for the Woodvilles in general this looked like an opportunity to grasp even greater power. It was, after all, they in whose company and under whose guidance the new young king had been brought up.
In the event the council took a decision which they hoped would neatly evade these problems. Edward V could become a legal adult at his coronation – he was, after all, twelve, and Henry VI had been declared adult when not much older; this was a device which would allow the council to govern under the boy king’s nominal rule. It looked like a balanced and viable decision, but it ignored one thing. A twelve-year-old was inevitably going to fall under somebody’s sway, and he would have ever more opportunity to be influenced by it as he neared maturity and exercised more actual governance. That somebody was likely to come from the mother’s family who had surrounded him since infancy.
Dominic Mancini, the commentator who dismissed Edward’s daughters, was, ironically, the one who described how Richard (incited by Hastings) wrote to the council on hearing the news of his brother’s death, emphasising his rights and his long tradition of loyalty. ‘He had been loyal to his brother Edward, at home and abroad, in peace and war, and would be, if only permitted, equally loyal to his brother’s issue, even female …2 if perchance, which God forbid, the youth should die.’
On 14 April Prince Edward was told of his father’s death; two days later a letter declares his intention of setting out from Ludlow ‘in all convenient haste’. There was considerable debate as to the number of men who should accompany him on his journey: some ‘suggested more, some less’. All who were present, Mancini says, keenly desired that this prince should succeed his father in all his glory; but feared if the Woodvilles were allowed to escort young Edward to his coronation ‘with an immoderate number of horse’ it would be impossible subsequently to get rid of them. Hastings in particular (between whom and the Woodvilles there was ‘much ill-will’) warned that an army would send the wrong signal; and Elizabeth took the point. Indeed, Crowland describes how ‘The Queen most beneficently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance, and wrote to her son, requesting him on his road to London, not to exceed an escort of two thousand men.’
It was 24 April before the king, his escort headed by his uncle Anthony Woodville and his half-brother Richard Grey, finally left Ludlow. Richard of Gloucester was also on the move, leaving his wife Anne Neville behind in the north. It may seem strange – or significant – that Anne herself was not on the way down to take part in her nephew’s coronation, scheduled for less than a week away. But it is unknown how far, at this stage, Richard’s own plans went – let alone how much he had confided to his wife.3
When the young king and his entourage diverted to meet his uncle Richard on the 29th at Stony Stratford in Northamptonshire, there was no apparent reason to fear. Richard, after all, had already ‘wrote unto the King [Edward V] so reverently, and to the Queen’s friends, there so lovingly’, says More, that they ‘nothing earthly’ mistrusted. He had moreover himself sworn, and required all northerners to swear likewise, an oath to Edward V.
While the king remained at Stony Stratford for the evening Richard, and Buckingham who had joined him, invited Anthony Woodville (Lord Rivers) to dine where they were staying at Northampton, some 11 miles away. The party made ‘much friendly cheer’, and parted for the night with ‘great courtesy’. But next morning when Woodville came to leave he found he was locked in, arrested by Richard’s men. Meanwhile Buckingham rode to Stony Stratford to inform Edward that his uncle Anthony and both his half-brothers, among others, stood accused of attempting to rule the king and to cause dissension in the realm. Edward, if Mancini is to be believed, answered courageously and to the point: that these were the ministers his father had given him, and he trusted his father’s judgement; that concerning the government of the kingdom ‘he had complete confidence in the peers of the realm and the queen’. Then, ‘On hearing the queen’s name, the duke of Buckingham, who loathed her race … answered, “It was not the business of women but of men to govern kingdoms, and so if he cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it.”’ Anthony Woodville and Richard Grey were sent north, to be held in one of Richard’s castles.
On hearing what had taken place, Elizabeth’s first reaction was to strike back. ‘When this news was announced in London the unexpectedness of the event horrified every one,’ Mancini reported. Elizabeth and her elder Grey son, Dorset, ‘began collecting an army, to defend themselves, and to set free the young king from the clutches of the dukes. But when they had exhorted certain nobles who had come to the city, and other, to take up arms, they perceived that men’s minds were not only irresolute, but altogether hostile to themselves. Some even said openly that it was more just and profitable that the youthful sovereign should be with his paternal uncle than with his maternal uncles and uterine brothers.’ Other sources suggest that Elizabeth fled with her children into sanctuary the minute she heard the news; whatever the order of events, flee she certainly did.
Elizabeth surely cannot be blamed for fleeing into sanctuary; though it has often been seen as hysterical and unnecessary, a move designed to wrongfoot Richard, the man she saw as her enemy. More describes how ‘the Queen in great flight and heaviness, bewailing her child’s ruin, her friends’ mischance, and her own infortune, damning the time that ever she dissuaded the gathering of power about the king, got herself in all the haste possible with her younger son and her daughters out of the Palace of Westminster in which she then lay, into the Sanctuary’. Dorset and her brother Lionel, the bishop, were to join her there. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England, went to see Elizabeth in the midst of the crisis and described a scene of chaos: ‘much heaviness, rumble, haste and business, carriage and conveyance of her stuff into sanctuary, chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trusses, all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some loading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down the walls to bring in the next way …’. The queen herself, as More reports Rotherham’s finding, ‘sat alone low on the rushes all desolate and dismayed’.
He comforted her in the best manner he could and gave into her custody the Privy Seal, of which he was keeper. It showed there was still a game to play. But the archbishop regretted his impetuous move and next day sent to ask for his seal back. After all, Richard had not moved against the crown as such. Hastings (who, in Crowland’s words, was congratulating himself that the whole affair had been accomplished with no more bloodshed than ‘might have come from a cut finger’) was reassuring those in London that Richard was still faithful to Edward’s wishes and that nothing whatsoever had been done save a transfer of power from one to another side of the new king’s family.
On 4 May the young Edward entered London, riding in blue in a splendid procession, obsequiously attended by Richard who had technically done nothing to breach his oath of loyalty. This should have been the day of Edward’s coronation, which was now postponed to the end of June. On the 7th a meeting was held at Baynard’s Castle, Cecily Neville’s London residence, at which the most powerful lords of the country, spiritual and temporal – Richard among them – officially took possession of Edward IV’s goods, seals and jewels on the grounds that they were executors of his will. In the will of 1475, of course, Elizabeth had been among the executors. Richard, says Mancini, had arrived in London preceded by four wagons bearing the Woodville emblems and loaded with arms, which he claimed were designed to be used against him. The excuse was obviously trumped up – Mancini says everyone knew the weapons had really been collected to use against the Scots – but Richard’s move must have seemed another ominous sign to Elizabeth in sanctuary.
At a council meeting on 27 May Richard was declared the man ‘thought most meet to be the Protector of the King and his realm’. He would hold the post, however, only until Edward was crowned and declared of age just four weeks later, which opened up the prospect of fresh dispute and may have helped push Richard to seek a more definitive solution.
Some time in the first few weeks after his arrival the young king was moved, at Buckingham’s suggestion, from the Bishop of London’s palace (too small for a full royal retinue) to the Tower. There was nothing sinister in that, necessarily – the Tower was a conventional royal residence, traditionally used by monarchs preceding their coronation. Moreover, it is hard to think where better Edward could have gone: the out-of-town palaces like Sheen and Eltham were too distant, and the nearer Westminster was ineligible because his mother was self-immured close by.
There seems to have been a tentative plan for Richard to continue his role at head of government beyond the coronation – there must also have been a fear that the king, once declared of age, would recall his mother and her family to his side. Elizabeth’s brother Edward had been commanding a fleet in the Channel to guard against the French, but now his soldiers were ordered to desert while he himself was to be seized; in fact, he escaped with two ships and made his way to Henry Tudor in Brittany.
Richard was possibly already taking steps towards claiming the throne for himself. It has been suggested that, in the early days of June, Bishop Stillington (who some sources said had married Edward IV to Eleanor Butler before he married Elizabeth Woodville) told the council what he knew. One chronicle describes doctors, proctors and depositions being brought in to the lords. A case was being prepared.
A letter from Simon Stallworthe to Sir William Stonor on 9 June reports that the Queen ‘keeps still at Westminster’. ‘My Lord Protector, My Lord of Buckingham with all other lords as well temporal as spiritual were at Westminster in the Council Chamber from 10 to 2, but there was none that spoke with the Queen.’ There was, he says, ‘great business’ about the young king’s coronation which was due to take place just a fortnight later; and when he adds that ‘My Lady of Gloucester’ – Anne Neville – came to London ‘on Thursday last’, the assumption must still have been that it was to attend this function. The parliament which always followed a coronation had been called; government was working normally. But there is a hint that even outside the Protector’s rooms other possibilities were being mooted, when Stallworthe urges Stonor to come to town ‘and then shall you know all the world’.
On the 10th and 11th June Richard wrote respectively to the city of York and to Lord Neville of Raby (his mother’s family, whatever divisions there had been in it), asking them to bring troops from the north with all diligence ‘to aid and assist us against the Queen, her bloody adherents and affinity; which have intended and daily doth intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin the Duke of Buckingham and the old royal blood of the realm’. It is a reasonable assumption that Elizabeth was still hoping – plotting – to overthrow him, although her Grey son and her brother, hostages in Richard’s custody, may have given her pause. But it is hard to believe Richard really feared she still had the means to put her hopes into effect; the more so because of what happened on 13 June.
The exact circumstances of the story, as described by Thomas More, have reinforced the legend of Richard’s villainy. He arrived smiling at a council meeting, praising the strawberries from the Bishop of Ely’s garden. This was Bishop Morton, Margaret Beaufort’s ally.4 But after Richard left the room, he returned with a frowning face and accusation on his lips. More’s account has Richard pulling up his sleeve to show a withered arm. ‘See in what wise that sorceress [Queen Elizabeth] and others of her counsel, as Shore’s wife with her affinity, have by their sorcery and witchcraft thus washed my body’, Richard said. ‘Jane’ Shore, once Edward IV’s ‘merriest harlot’, was now the lover of Lord Hastings; and More shows his scepticism about that part of the story in particular. ‘The Queen was too wise to go about any such folly. And also if she would, yet would she of all folk least make Shore’s wife of counsel, whom of all women she most hated, as that concubine whom the King her husband had most loved.’ But Hastings and Morton were both arrested, also on the charge of having plotted to destroy Richard, and Hastings, hitherto Richard’s ally, was (so the dramatic tale goes) unceremoniously beheaded the same day.
This looks like the first indisputable evidence that Richard now sought the crown. Hastings, Edward IV’s loyal friend, may well have believed the country would be better governed in Edward V’s minority by his father’s loyal and able brother than by the queen and her family, but he would surely have baulked at what was to follow.
After this, events moved swiftly. At the next meeting of the council Richard insisted that his namesake, Elizabeth Woodville’s second son, be brought out of sanctuary – nominally, to attend his brother’s coronation. On 16 June a delegation was sent,5 and More details their arguments at length. Some were technical: that an innocent child could have no reason to claim – could have no reason to be given – sanctuary, which was for those who had done wrong or who had reason to hide; that it was as reasonable for the council to fear to leave the prince in the queen’s hands as for her to fear to hand him over, since he might be spirited away. Other arguments were political: that the queen’s evident refusal to trust the council was causing division in the realm and distrust outside it. One objection was directly gender-related: that her refusal sprang from what the senior cleric present charitably called ‘womanish fear’ but the Duke of Buckingham called ‘womanish frowardness [perversity]’.fn7
Other points were designed to appeal directly to a mother’s heart. Elizabeth was, the delegation accused her in a shrewd blow, like Medea avenging herself at the expense of her own children by keeping her son mewed up in sanctuary. The lords asserted it was no place for a child, being full of ‘a rabble of thieves, murderers, and malicious heinous traitors’. Young Edward V needed his brother’s company, they insisted, and a life without play was unsuited to ‘their both ages and estates’. The saga of argument and counter-argument runs on for pages.
More has Elizabeth answering fluently and bravely. If the young King Edward needed company, why should not both her royal sons be placed in her care – the more so since the younger boy had been ill and needed his mother’s attention? It was, of course, the last thing to which the councillors were likely to agree. Why not find other peers’ sons for him to play with, rather than his still ailing brother? She replied that the law made her as his mother his guardian (‘as my learned counsel shows me’) in the absence of any other knightly ties. ‘You may not take hence my horse from me; and may you take my child from me?’ she asked. It was another telling point. She added that the imprisonment of her brother and Grey son Richard hardly inspired confidence; that protection for herself or her other children could not be assured in a time of ‘greedy’ men; and that yes, her son did have the right to claim sanctuary: Richard had come up with ‘a goodly glose’ – a clever misinterpretation – to claim that ‘a place that may defend a thief may not save an innocent’.
But the real point, of course, was the unspoken one: the fear that if Elizabeth refused to hand over her boy he would simply be snatched away. Sanctuary was a moral rather than a physical concept; this was the middle of Westminster, with the Protector himself waiting in another part of the palace only a few hundred yards away; and Mancini says that ‘with the consent of the council [Richard] surrounded the sanctuary with troops’.
As More tells it, the question of taking the boy by force was a matter of some dissent among the lords themselves, some of the lords spiritual holding back, but the majority agreeing to do whatever was necessary. In the end it was Thomas Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and a relative of the York brothers through their father’s sister), who broke the deadlock, telling Elizabeth that if she sent the boy now he himself would guarantee the prince’s safety, but that if she refused he would have nothing more to do with a woman who seemed to think that ‘all others save herself lacked either wit or truth’. More adds: ‘The Queen with these words stood a good while in a great study.’
More’s pages need some decoding,6 for Elizabeth’s words were surely polished afterwards: ‘And at the last she took the young duke by the hand, and said to the lords, “my Lord”, quod she, “and all my lords, I am neither so unwise [as] to mistrust your wits, nor so suspicious to mistrust your troths.”’ It may have been More’s hindsight that makes her add: ‘We have also had experience that the desire of a kingdom knows no kindred. The brother has been the brother’s bane. And may the nephews be sure of their uncle?’ But these are considerations of which everyone must, in any case, have been aware.
As her son prepared to depart, ‘And therewithal she said to the child, “Farewell my own sweet son, God send you good keeping. Let me kiss you once yet before you go, for God knows when we shall kiss together again.” And therewith she kissed him, and blessed him, turned her back and wept and went her way, leaving the child weeping as fast.’ When the lords brought the little boy through the palace to his uncle, waiting in Star Chamber, Richard received him kindly, welcoming him ‘with all my very heart’. The Stonor letters report confidently that the child had gone with the archbishop to the Tower ‘where he is blessed be Jesu merry’. But his uncle’s hands were now free. Immediately, both coronation and parliament were deferred until November.
On 21 June Simon Stallworthe, who had previously urged Sir William Stonor to come to London, was writing: ‘I hold you happy that you are out of the press, for with us is much trouble and every man doubts other.’ The Archbishop of York and Morton, the Bishop of Ely, were in the Tower but he hoped ‘they shall come out nevertheless’; Mistress Shore was in prison and ‘what shall happen her I know not’; twenty thousand of Richard’s and Buckingham’s men were expected in the city, ‘to what intent I know not but to keep the peace’. Crowland too wrote of armed men ‘in frightening and unheard of numbers’. The detention of Edward V’s servants and relatives, he added, had been causing widespread concern, ‘besides the fact that the Protector did not, with a sufficient degree of considerateness, take measure for the preservation of the dignity and safety of the Queen’.
The dignity of Elizabeth Woodville was about to suffer a far worse insult. On Sunday, 22 June a Dr Ralph Shaa delivered at St Paul’s Cross a sermon to the effect that ‘Bastard Slips Shall Never Take Deep Root’. Other sermons on the same theme were preached around the city that day. The most serious – because more plausible – of the various allegations made was the spectre raised by Clarence during his rebellion: that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid, because he was already contracted to another lady. The debate still runs today as to whether there was any truth in the accusation; or, indeed, whether invalidity in his parents’ marriage would necessarily have debarred Edward V from the throne.
On the 24th the Duke of Buckingham addressed a Guildhall convocation with a secular version of the story: the tale of a prior contract, along with the old slur that Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was in any case ‘not well made’ since her blood ‘was full unmeetly to be match with his’ and a general deprecation of Edward’s sexual appetite. There was, More represents him as saying, no woman who caught Edward’s eye ‘but without fear of God, or respect of his honour, murmur or grudge of the world, he would importunately pursue his appetite’ so that ‘more suit was in his days to Shore’s wife, a vile and abominable strumpet, than to all the Lords in England’. Commynes declares it was Bishop Stillington who told Richard the truth about his brother’s marriage; it has been suggested, by those who believe the allegation, that he now displayed his proof.
There was another allegation in the air, too; one on which (More said) Buckingham touched only lightly, since Richard had asked him to avoid it because ‘nature requireth a filial reverence to the Duchess his mother’. The allegation was that other spectre Clarence had once raised: that Edward (and indeed, it was now hinted, also Clarence himself) were the bastard fruits of Cecily’s adultery.
More has the preacher Shaa declaring that neither Edward IV nor Clarence was ‘reckoned very surely’ as the Duke of York’s children, since they more closely resembled other men. Vergil says Shaa simply stated that their bastardy ‘was manifest enough, and that by apparent argument’. Both More and Vergil were writing some years later; and it has been suggested that the whole notion of Richard’s having raised the issue – of, as Vergil puts it, the ‘madness’ of his ‘wicked mind’ – was simply a Tudor slander. The Tudors, of course, did need to find alternative grounds for Richard’s complaint, since the allegation about Edward’s own marriage touched Elizabeth of York too nearly. But Mancini does say that ‘corrupted preachers’ declared Edward ‘was conceived in adultery’, no way resembling his supposed father, and Mancini was writing within months of the event.
On the question of the adultery itself, there is no real evidence from Cecily’s time at Rouen on which to judge. But a decade later, on the edge of eternity, she would declare herself in her will ‘wife unto the right noble prince Richard late Duke of York, father unto the most Christian prince my Lord and son King Edward the iiiith’. Cecily did not so boast of Richard of Gloucester; but then to do so in Henry VII’s reign would have lacked tact. But she made no bequests to Clarence’s children as she did to her other grandchildren, which possibly militates against the idea that she herself had originated the claim he had made.
Vergil states that Cecily, ‘being falsely accused of adultery, complained afterwards in sundry places to right many noble men, whereof some yet live, of that great injury which her son Richard had done her’. Another view,7 however, holds that she was entirely supportive of Richard’s takeover, if not actually the orchestrator of it – even to the extent of letting her reputation be sullied. But evidence is wanting.
Richard based himself at Baynard’s Castle, his mother’s house, for some of this time, but it is not known whether she was actually there. The Archbishop of Canterbury recorded that the first, early May, meeting, at which it was agreed to take possession of Edward’s seals, was held at the ‘solite’ (accustomed, wonted) residence of the duchess. But the London house was not Cecily’s only regular residence, and the list of those present at the meeting – senior clerics and officials, all male – does not mention her name.
It is conceivable that Cecily’s animosity towards Elizabeth Woodville extended to her sons – but there is no reason to assume that at the time it would have been clear beforehand that the deposition of the boys would be followed by their deaths. Arguably, the simple substitution of an adult for an under-aged male to ensure the York family maintained the power it had only recently attained might not have seemed so outrageous in an earlier era. The right of inheritance to the throne8 was not too clearly defined in the fifteenth century – witness the comparative flexibility in the matter of choice that had allowed one ruler to depose another with comparative impunity. In such a climate, to replace a juvenile member of the family by a more viable candidate from the same house might seem a simple matter of practicality when its status was seen as dependent not on the safety and welfare of its individual members but on the progress of the family as an entity. Moreover, if Cecily did indeed collaborate with Richard to any degree she may have seen her function as that of a mediator or intercessionary, since part of the duties of a medieval lady was to prevent the men in her family going far too far.
Cecily must have given a measure of acquiescence, since she did not cut off contact with Richard (the next spring, the grant of her manors and lands,9 and of Berkhamsted, were confirmed); but possibly no more than that. If she were indeed by now living largely retired from the world, she may have taken refuge in her solitude and distance. And if she were anything less than totally committed to Richard’s plan, then Vergil’s report that she ‘complained afterwards’ about the slur on her virtue has a certain ring of probability. It would surely have been easier for Shaa to preach that sermon if Cecily and Cecily’s servants weren’t in London to hear it? By the time report of it spread it could be softened or explained slightly … And on one significant occasion at the end of these few weeks, we do have at least negative evidence as to Cecily’s movements. When her son Richard was crowned king Cecily would not be there. That is far from conclusive: the widow of a deceased monarch did not normally attend the coronation of his successor, and some such prohibition may have inhibited Cecily.fn8 Margaret Beaufort would be recorded as observing, rather than playing an active part in, her son’s coronation ceremony. But Cecily is not mentioned at any point during the extensive records of Richard’s lengthy festivities.
Whatever Cecily’s role, on 25 June in the north of England, Anthony Woodville was executed, as was Elizabeth Woodville’s son Richard Grey. On the same day Buckingham, with a deputation of London officials, went to Baynard’s Castle to beg Richard to assume the throne.