SIXTEEN
Rest thy unrest on England’s lawful earth,
Unlawfully made drunk with innocent blood.
Richard III, 4.4
On 26 June Richard proceeded to Westminster Hall to take the royal seat in the court of the King’s Bench. It was from this day that he dated his accession. On 6 July he was crowned and Anne Neville, with whatever different expectation she may have arrived in London, was crowned as his queen in the first double coronation of an already-married king for almost two centuries.
There must have been a particular concern that in these most unusual circumstances everything should be done by the book – literally. A special document, the Little Device, laying down the formalities was drawn up in addition to the more generally applicableLiber Regalis. The list of accounts for, and goods provided by, the Great Wardrobe is in itself an extraordinary document:10 page after page records everything from the commissioning of silk fringe and buttons of Venice gold from two silkwomen, Alice Claver and Cecily Walcote, to ‘slops’ of Spanish leather, banners and saddlery.
Anne first takes centre stage in these records on 3 July, when she and Richard exchanged formal gifts. He gave her 24 yards of purple cloth of gold and seven of purple velvet; in return she offered 20 yards of purple velvet decorated with garters and roses. Next day they travelled to spend a night in the royal apartments at the Tower, as tradition dictated. The hurried nature of the proceedings, the briefness of the journey from Baynard’s Castle and the fact that Anne was not being crowned in a separate ceremony meant that she did not receive the usual pageants not only to honour her queenship and lay down her specific role but to acknowledge her ancestry and her own identity.
Richard, Mancini says, had summoned six thousand men from his estates and Buckingham’s, and now stationed them ‘at suitable points’ in case of ‘any uproar’. When they set out for the Abbey the new queen wore her hair loose under a jewelled circlet in the symbol of virginity which had become linked to the coronation ritual – however inappropriate it might be for the long-married Anne, as it had been for Elizabeth Woodville before her. Seated in a canopied litter of white damask and white cloth of gold, fringed and decorated with ribbon and bells, Anne and her procession followed Richard’s. She was dressed, too, in white cloth of gold, tasselled and furred (in July!) with ermine and miniver. Two of her gentleman ushers and her chamberlain preceded her; her henchmen, her horse of state and three carriages bearing twelve noblewomen came behind.
Despite her royal surcoat and train of crimson velvet, it would have been shoeless that Anne followed the king into the Abbey, flanked by two bishops and followed by two duchesses, her ladies, knights and esquires. Prostrating herself on ground carefully carpeted and cushioned, she was anointed after her husband (the Little Device specified that her surcoat should be made ‘opened before unto her waist fastened with a lace for the holy unction’), ringed, crowned and invested with a sceptre and rod. Her ceremony, however, deliberately fell slightly short of Richard’s. The couple then celebrated mass and drank from the same chalice in ‘a sign of unity’, says the Liber Regalis which had made provision for this rare event, because in Christ they were one flesh by bond of marriage. Anne was now consecrated to her country’s service and must surely have felt a dizzying, almost terrifying mix of grandeur, responsibility and sheer fatigue.
By St Edward’s shrine king and queen were taken to separate closets and allowed to break their fast, and there the queen ‘shall be changed by her gentlewomen of her Chamber into new garments’ – a surcoat and long-trained mantle of purple velvet this time – before resuming their thrones and their regalia; and thence back to Westminster Hall and to their chambers.
The menu for the banquet that afternoon in Westminster Hall included pheasant in train (with its tail feathers); roasted cygnet, egrets and green geese; roe deer ‘reversed in purple’ (literally turned inside out and the meat dyed); glazed kid; baked oranges; fresh sturgeon with fennel; and fritters flavoured with rose and jasmine. As many as three thousand guests may have been fed, and the proceedings lasted so long that the third course could not be served. Everyone who was anyone was in town for the parliament that had been summoned to greet not this king but Edward V.
Almost everyone, anyway. Not only was Cecily Neville not there, nor was the Duke of Buckingham’s Woodville-born wife – despite his own prominence in the ceremony. Richard’s sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, however, walked behind the queen leading Anne’s ladies. Archbishop Bourchier, who had promised Elizabeth Woodville her younger son’s safety, had officiated but, says Mancini, unwillingly – and apparently he abstained from the banquet. Margaret Beaufort, by contrast, carried the new queen’s crimson train.
Before the coronation, Margaret’s husband Stanley had been in trouble with the new regime: Thomas More describes him as having been attacked by the same men who arrested Hastings at the council meeting, and Vergil has him being placed under arrest. But Richard quickly changed tactics with the great landowner: when Richard arrived at the Tower before his coronation, he appointed Stanley steward of his household. Margaret’s own intentions at this point seem to have been merely to come to an accord with Richard and get her son Henry Tudor home from Brittany, on the terms agreed with Edward IV the previous year. She had opened negotiations in June through Buckingham; again the possibility of a marriage between Henry and one of Edward IV’s daughters had been mooted; this was, however, to be subject entirely to Richard, ‘without any thing to be taken or demanded for the same espousals but only the king’s favour’.
On 5 July she and her husband met Richard and his chief justice at Westminster. Margaret might even then have been two-faced in her approach – just as Richard was simultaneously conducting his own less well-intentioned negotiations with Brittany to get Henry handed back to him. The events of the next few months would force these players to reveal their hand.
A month before Richard and Anne’s coronation, that of Edward V was still assumed a certainty; three months earlier Edward IV had still been alive, the future of his dynasty apparently assured. All the same, Richard’s speedy takeover seemed to be accepted not only by Margaret Beaufort but also by Margaret of Burgundy – who probably saw this as a simple transfer of power without contemplating any fatal con-sequences. In any case, the Burgundian Margaret had matters of her own to attend to. By the terms of the treaty of Arras of December 1482 the Dauphin was to marry the deceased Mary of Burgundy’s daughter in place of Elizabeth of York: the infant had been handed over to the French on the same day, 24 April, as the putative Edward V left Ludlow. Mary’s young son and heir Philip was in Ghent, whose authorities refused to give him up. As his father Maximilian struggled to regain control of the duchy and the motherless child, Margaret was preoccupied by the need to help and then to care for the little boy. She appealed to her brother for aid.
Richard, however, was more concerned with establishing himself in his own kingdom. Soon after the coronation, the new king and queen set out on progress. On 19 July they travelled from Greenwich to Windsor, where Anne stayed while Richard made a diversion westwards, to meet up with the queen again in Warwick in the second week of August. Anne seems not to have taken part in the whole of Richard’s exhausting programme. But on 15 August she joined him for the rest of the progress north to York, where they stayed for three weeks.
The highlight of their visit to York was to be the investiture of their son Edward as Prince of Wales. Young as he was – perhaps no more than seven – he would still be the figurehead representing his father’s rule in the north. Such ceremonies were all the more important for a regime still trying to demonstrate its legitimacy – and besides, the city had always been faithful to Richard. The citizens of York deserved to see their new, their own, king and queen, wearing their crowns and walking through the streets, holding the hands of their newly honoured son.
On their arrival in York from Pontefract the city dignitaries escorted them past a series of pageants to the archbishop’s palace. On 8 September, a celebratory mass, at which the Minster’s relics were displayed, was followed by the knighting of the prince, along with Richard’s nephew Warwick and his own bastard son, and Edward’s investiture. In due course the couple escorted their son back to Pontefract before moving on to Lincoln on 11 October. At Lincoln, however, news of a fresh crisis greeted them.
As Richard (and Anne) consolidated his rule, Elizabeth Woodville’s young sons had presumably remained in the Tower. Mancini wrote that ‘after Hastings was removed’ – in the second half of June – ‘all the attendants who had waited upon the king [Edward V] were debarred access to him. He and his brother were withdrawn in the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether.’ He adds that ‘the physician Argentine, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the twelve year old king, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him’. Fabian’s report of the boys seen ‘shooting and playing in the gardens of the Tower by sundry times’ might seem to run on into late summer or early autumn; but More embroiders Mancini’s story and relates how after some time in captivity the elder boy ‘never tied his points, nor ought wrought of himself’ – which sounds very much like a state of depression. The continental chronicler Jean Molinet who had replaced Georges Chastellain at the Burgundian court gives a dramatic description of the younger boy urging his brother to learn how to dance, and the elder replying that they should rather learn how to die ‘because I believe I know well that we will not be in this world much longer’.
Polydore Vergil – that unabashed Tudor apologist, writing well after the event – was very sure he knew just what had happened since the first days of August. He has Richard arriving in Gloucester on progress, and there ‘the heinous guilt of wicked conscience’ so tormented him that he decided to free himself of his anxieties once and for all. It was from there, Vergil says, that he sent word the princes were to be killed. But the Lieutenant of the Tower, Robert Brackenbury, refused to obey such wicked instructions, so Richard was forced to find another instrument.
Vergil’s timing cannot be presumed accurate. Crowland suggests only that, while Richard was on his progress, rumours began to spread – adding that in those same months it was advised ‘that some of the king’s daughters should leave Westminster in disguise and go in disguise to the parts beyond sea; in order that, if any fatal mishap should befall the said male children of the late king in the Tower, the kingdom might still, in consequence of the safety of the daughters, one day fall again into the hands of the rightful heirs’. Richard responded by ordering a blockade of the Tower. All the same, there is a reason Richard’s attitudes towards the princes might indeed have been hardening in late July. There had been a rescue attempt.
Around that time a number of men were arrested because ‘they were purposed to have set on fire diverse parts of London, which fire, while men had been staunching, they would have stole out of the Tower, the prince Edward, & his brother the Duke of York’. The report comes from the antiquarian John Stow a century later, but the contemporary Thomas Basin confirms it. Interestingly, the men also ‘should have sent writings to the earls of Richmond and Pembroke’ – Henry and Jasper Tudor. In early August Margaret Beaufort’s half-brother John Welles led a rising at her childhood home of Maxey. From this, many commentators have deduced that Margaret Beaufort gave her support to the plot: the seventeenth-century antiquary George Buck believed the negotiations with Richard had been a feint on the part of the ‘cunning countess’ – though it is not easy to see just where her advantage lay in freeing the princes. It is easier to imagine Richard – when the news had reached him, in the west – deciding that the boys were not, as he had hoped, altogether neutralised by the declaration of bastardy.
Vergil’s account, written in the sixteenth century, can no longer be distinguished from information or disinformation put out in the interim: it is likely he had been fed a version of events that suited the Tudors. But as Vergil points out, it is interesting that at York Richard founded a college of a hundred priests, which might have been a huge gesture of expiation or reparation. Vergil says also that Richard purposely let it slip out that the boys were dead, ‘[so] that after the people understood no issue male of king Edward to be now left alive, they might with better mind and good will bear and sustain his government’. He describes, moreover, the reception of the news by ‘the unfortunate mother’ Elizabeth Woodville, to whom it was ‘the very stroke of death’:
for as soon as she had intelligence how her sons were bereft this life, at the very first motion thereof, the outrageousness of the thing drove her into such passion as for fear forthwith she fell into a swoon, and lay lifeless a good while; after coming to her self, she weepeth, she cryeth out aloud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair, and, overcome in fine with dolour, prayeth also her own death, calling by name now and then among her most dear children, and condemning herself for a mad woman, for that (being deceived by false promises) she had delivered her younger son out of sanctuary, to be murdered of his enemy.
Her only resource was to beg God for revenge.
It may have been now that Margaret Beaufort recast her hopes for her son Henry. (In 1483 she purchased from William Caxton a copy of a French romance called Blanchardin and Eglantine, about a lover exiled from his intended bride, who was herself shut up in a citadel, surrounded by her enemies.) And if it were now that Elizabeth Woodville – possibly influenced by Margaret’s agents – became convinced her sons were dead, it is no wonder she gave her consent to a joint conspiracy.
The go-between keeping the two ladies in touch was Margaret Beaufort’s physician, the Welshman Lewis Caerleon – ‘a grave man and of no small experience’, says Vergil, with whom ‘she was wont oftentimes to confer freely’. Cambridge-educated, also an astronomer and mathematician, he would still be in the records as employed by Elizabeth of York a decade later.
And she [Margaret], being a wise woman, after the slaughter of king Edward’s children was known, began to hope well of her son’s fortune … Wherefor forthwith not neglecting so great an opportunity, as they were consulting together, she uttered to Lewis that the time was now come when as king Edward’s eldest daughter might be given in marriage to her son Henry … and therefore prayed him to deal secretly with the queen of such affair; for the queen also used his head, because he was a very learned physician.
Vergil says Lewis, presumably on Margaret’s instruction, pretended this idea was ‘devised of his own head’.
Elizabeth Woodville, Vergil reports, was ‘so well pleased with this device’11 that she sent Caerleon back to Margaret promising to recruit all Edward IV’s supporters, if Henry would be sworn to take Elizabeth of York in marriage as soon as he had the realm (or else Cecily, the younger daughter, ‘if th’other should die before he enjoyed the same’). Margaret sent out her man Reginald Bray to gather her friends; Elizabeth Woodville sent word to hers. Margaret was on the point of sending a protégé of Caerleon’s, a young priest called Christopher Urswick12 whom she had taken into her household, to her son Henry in Brittany when she had news that halted her in her tracks. Hers was not the only conspiracy afoot.
The Duke of Buckingham had played a leading part in placing Richard on the throne but had since become disaffected. When Buckingham left Richard at Gloucester in early August, and returned to his own home of Brecon Castle, that discontent had been purposefully fostered by the man he had been asked to hold in custody there: Margaret’s old associate John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Morton urged Buckingham to take the crown ‘if you love God, your lineage, or your native country’.
Buckingham responded that only recently he had indeed ‘suddenly remembered’ his own lineage through the Beaufort line: on his way home to Brecon, however, he had happened to meet Margaret Beaufort on the road, which reminded him of her superior claim (superior if the legitimacy question is ignored). This image of a chance meeting is likely to be disingenuous; but at some stage the conspirators must have decided to pool their resources. In the seventeenth century George Buck declared that Margaret’s was the brain behind the final plans ‘for she was entered far into them, and none better plunged in them and deeply acquainted with them. And she was a politic and subtle lady.’
Of the three main conspirators it was inevitably Buckingham, the man, who took charge of the armed rebellion launched on 18 October. Leading his men from Wales, he was to have joined up with the other military leaders – Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset among them – but freak weather conditions made it impossible for his forces to cross the swollen river Severn. His men began to desert and – probably contrary to expectations – Margaret Beaufort’s husband Stanley remained loyal to the king.
Henry Tudor’s attempts to sail from Brittany with a fleet provided by the Breton duke had likewise repeatedly been thwarted by the weather; and by the time he saw the English coast, it was evident that his only option was to sail back across the Channel. Buckingham was captured – betrayed by his servant for the reward – and summarily executed. Others, including Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset, fled abroad to join Henry. But as so often with women’s stories, that clear and simply told version is not the whole tale. Each conspirator had different aims.
It is often said that Elizabeth Woodville must have known the princes were dead or she would never have gone along with this plan. But against that is the fact that her late husband Edward IV had, at the end of his life, promoted the idea of bringing Henry Tudor safely into the fold. It is, moreover, possible that she had originally agreed to throw her weight behind the rebellion in the belief that it would place her living son on the throne. Crowland certainly suggests that the rebels first contemplated arms in the prince’s name and then, after ‘a rumour arose that King Edward’s sons, by some unknown manner of violent destruction, had met their fate’, turned to Henry Tudor in their need for ‘someone new at their head’.
It is Margaret Beaufort’s position that is more equivocal. If her sole aim were to bring her son safely home she might simply have continued negotiating with Richard – unless she mistrusted him and feared treachery. If, however, by the time she committed herself to the rebellion she knew or believed the princes were dead, the situation would have changed significantly. Henry Tudor’s chances were better; and Elizabeth of York more important. If she did believe this, she must have considered whether to share that belief with Elizabeth Woodville or to conceal it.
Buckingham’s position is yet more puzzling. Most commentators now dismiss Vergil’s idea that he had quarrelled with Richard over lands promised but not granted. He may have been belatedly defending the rights of princes he believed to be still living. No manifesto for the rebels survives, but it seems that the rebellion (or, at least some of the minor risings) were indeed popular ventures aimed at freeing the princes. Crowland reports that ‘in order to deliver them from this captivity, the people of the southern and western parts of the kingdom began to murmur greatly, and to form meetings and confederacies’. But as word of the princes’ deaths filtered out, Buckingham’s involvement became anomalous. He may have been genuinely disinterested enough to wish, while avenging the princes, to elevate Henry Tudor to the crown. But from everything that is known of him it seems unlikely.
Buckingham may well have been an opportunist, taking advantage of the princes’ deaths to promote his own claim. If so, he probably hoped to dupe Margaret Beaufort into believing he supported her son’s claim – striking a deal with her to get the Tudor and Woodville supporters as allies, while planning to take Henry Tudor’s place himself. But it is just conceivable that he was himself the dupe – that Margaret (his aunt, through her marriage to Stafford) invited him to join a rebellion nominally in support of the princes, while actually interested only in her own son.
There is yet another possibility – that Buckingham had the best of all reasons to know that a rebellion could safely be raised in the princes’ name, without in the end placing an Edward V on the throne. He was to some contemporaries, and remains today, an outside candidate for villain of the story13 – the murderer of the princes. On the failure of his rebellion, Buckingham was executed by Richard on 2 November. But that, perhaps, just makes him even more convenient a scapegoat.
The majority of historians from Vergil and More onwards14 have believed that Richard III murdered his nephews; and thanks largely to Shakespeare, it has become the accepted view among many who care nothing for history. A vocal minority are utterly convinced he was not guilty, while propounding various alternative versions of the boys’ fate. Others again believe it is virtually impossible to be certain, which makes it wrong to declare Richard guilty. In that uncertainty the writer’s most honourable option is simply to present both the few known facts, and the relevant theories.
If Richard did not kill the boys, we have to ask why he did not simply produce them when rumours of their murder began to spread. One conceivable reason he did not is that he knew they had died – by someone else’s hand, or indeed from natural causes – and that he would be blamed for their deaths anyway.
While both Richard and Buckingham certainly had both motive and opportunity, so too did others – such as the adherents of the man who would become Henry VII. Candidates suggested include Margaret Beaufort’s ally Bishop Morton; her husband Lord Stanley; and Margaret Beaufort herself.15 Assumptions about her gender may have insulated Margaret from suspicion, but the early seventeenth-century antiquary George Buck claimed to have read ‘in an old manuscript book’ that it ‘was held for certain that Dr Morton and a certain countess, [conspirin]g the deaths of the sons of King Edward and some others, resolved that these treacheries should be executed by poison and by sorcery’.
Henry Tudor, of course, was out of the country; some dismiss him for that reason, but he had a highly able and totally committed representative in the person of his mother. None of the leading candidates was in London for the whole of the relevant period, but it is unreasonable to claim that any grandee would necessarily have done the deed themselves. The Tudor party had plenty of motive. For Richard to rule, it was technically necessary only that the boys should be declared illegitimate, and this he had arranged soon after his brother’s death. If Henry were to bolster his own genealogically weak claim with that of Elizabeth of York, he needed the princes dead. If the whole family were declared illegitimate, then Elizabeth had no claim. If they were legitimate, her brothers’ claim would take precedence over hers for as long as they lived. What is more, while the assumption of Richard’s guilt depends on a posthumous reputation for savagery it was Henry VII (and later Henry VIII) who would, one by one, eliminate all the rival Yorkist line with chilling efficiency.
If track record is anything to go by, practically any ruler of the era could have done the deed. Edward IV, after all, had had his own brother Clarence executed, and had possibly had Henry VI and Henry’s son murdered. The fact that the princes were under age makes all the difference to modern minds, but it may not have done so in the fifteenth century. Childhood ended early in those days: if Edward V did die soon after his uncle’s accession, he was not much younger than Margaret Beaufort had been at the time of her pregnancy. The twenty-first-century image of the boys is much influenced by Victorian painting, showing them in flaxen-haired innocence.
There was certainly a mounting body of rumour. Weinreich’s Danzig Chronicle of 1483 claimed that ‘Later this summer Richard the king’s brother seized power and had his brother’s children killed, and the queen secretly put away’. The French chancellor Guillaume de Rochefort warned the States General in a speech on 15 January the following year: ‘Look what has happened in [England] since the death of King Edward: how his children, already big and courageous, have been put to death with impunity, and the royal crown transferred to their murderer by the favour of the people.’ Not every accusatory finger, however, was pointed at Richard. The Historical notes of a London citizen declared that: ‘King Edward the Vth, late called Prince of Wales and Richard Duke of York, his brother … were put to death in the Tower of London by the vise [advice] of the Duke of Buckingham.’16
Other contemporaries heard different stories that did not speak of murder at all. The Silesian visitor Nicolaus von Popplau reported hearing the rumours in 1484 but added: ‘Many people say – and I agree with them – that they are still alive and kept in a very dark cellar.’ Even Vergil reported whisperings that they had been sent to ‘some secret land’. The usually reliable Crowland does not actually say Richard killed the boys, mentioning only the rumour.
What everyone thought, of course, is not evidence, which is in short supply.17 Over the centuries many have taken as conclusive the dubious confession to the murders supposedly made in 1502 by Sir James Tyrell – but that is something that could not have been known in 1483. The princes’ mother and sisters may not have known what to believe; they may have had to persuade themselves to believe what was necessary.