3

“This Act of Usurpation”

On April 9, 1483, when she was just seventeen, Elizabeth was plunged into “a tempestuous world.”¹ After a short illness, her father King Edward died at Westminster, aged just forty-one. He was “neither worn out with old age, nor seized with any known kind of malady,” but he “took to his bed”² and succumbed to “an unknown disease.”³ Mancini says he had caught a chill at the end of March while out in a small boat fishing at Windsor. “Being a tall and very fat man, he let the damp cold chill his guts and caught a sickness from which he never recovered.” Possibly it was pneumonia or typhoid, but Edward then suffered an apoplexy, which Commines believed “was caused by Louis XI rejecting the Princess Royal Elizabeth as a wife for his little Dauphin Charles.” It could also have resulted from Edward being overweight and having high blood pressure. After the stroke he “perceived his natural strength so sore enfeebled that he despaired all recovery.”⁴

Edward was succeeded by his twelve-year-old son, now Edward V, who was proclaimed king on April 11. Mancini writes dismissively that the King “also left behind daughters, but they do not concern us”—a typical medieval view. In his will of 1475, Edward had decreed “that our daughter Elizabeth have 10,000 marks [£1.5 million] toward her marriage, so that [she] be governed and ruled by our dearest wife the Queen” and the young King. If Elizabeth did “marry without such advice and assent, so as [she] be thereby disparaged (which God forbid), then she so marrying herself have no payment of her 10,000 marks.”⁵ The loss of her father and chief protector was, for Elizabeth, the beginning of two of the most traumatic years of her life.

According to “The Song of Lady Bessy,” on his deathbed Edward commended his daughter Elizabeth—who is incorrectly described as “a little child”—to the governance, guidance, and keeping of Thomas, Lord Stanley. A prominent member of the King’s Council, Steward of the Household, husband of Margaret Beaufort, and the owner of vast estates in Cheshire and north Wales, Stanley was then forty-eight. He was one of the King’s trusted officers, despite his having earlier switched allegiance from York to Lancaster and back again. He has aptly been described as a “wily fox” who could “seemingly extricate himself from the most precarious situations,”⁶ and he was at the forefront of political affairs and intrigues through five reigns. In January 1486, Stanley was to depose that he had known Elizabeth for fifteen years,⁷ from about 1470, when she was five. It is not inconceivable therefore that Edward asked him to look to her welfare and act as her mentor, but there is no corroborating evidence to show that Stanley ever had her person in his keeping.

A bidding prayer was read in churches at the beginning of the new reign, enjoining all to pray for “our dread King Edward V, the lady Queen Elizabeth his mother [and] all the royal offspring.”⁸

The Wydevilles were then in a strong position. They controlled the young King, the court, the council, the Tower of London, the fleet, the royal treasure, and the late King’s other children. Mancini wrote of the hatred in which Rivers, Dorset, and Sir Richard Grey were held “on account of their morals, but mostly because of a certain inherent jealousy. They were certainly detested by the nobles because they, who were ignoble and newly made men, were advanced beyond those who far excelled them in breeding and wisdom.” They still “had to endure the imputation of causing the death of the Duke of Clarence.”

Mancini heard “men say” that, in his will or the codicils he added on his deathbed, none of which have survived, Edward IV had expressed the wish that his brother, Richard of Gloucester, should act as Lord Protector during the minority of the young King.⁹ For many years now, Richard had been ruling the north loyally on Edward’s behalf, and enjoying almost sovereign power there as the King’s trusted lieutenant. He was the obvious choice. As events would prove, he was also one of the nobles who detested the parvenu Wydevilles and deeply resented the influence they enjoyed. He also apparently held them responsible for the death of his brother Clarence.

The Wydevilles had no intention of allowing Gloucester to seize power; they clearly foresaw the continuance and flowering of their supremacy under Edward V. The late King’s councilors were with the Queen at Westminster, and it was agreed that the council should govern for the young King, with Gloucester being accorded a leading role rather than an autonomous one, “because it had been found that no regent ever laid down his office, save reluctantly. Moreover, if the entire government were committed to one man, he might easily usurp the sovereignty. All who favored the Queen’s family voted for this proposal, as they were afraid that, if Gloucester took unto himself the crown, or even governed alone, they, who bore the blame of Clarence’s death, would suffer death, or at least be ejected from their high estate.”¹⁰ This suggests that the Wydevilles had good reason to believe that Gloucester would vent his hatred on them for contriving his brother’s execution.

Speedily the councilors named a day—May 4—for the young King’s coronation, to preempt Gloucester assuming the regency.¹¹ It is sometimes asserted that Edward V would have come of age by the time of his coronation, so there would have been no need for a regency, but he would have been too young. Henry VI, the last king to succeed as a minor, was crowned at eight years old and had not assumed personal rule until he was declared of age at nearly sixteen. Upon his coronation in 1429, the office of protector had lapsed and devolved upon the council—which was what the Wydevilles clearly envisaged happening in 1483. It was the Parliament that would be called in Edward V’s name, after his crowning, which would have the authority finally to determine who should wield power during his minority; any appointment made now would cease with the coronation, hence the haste to have the boy crowned. Influence over the council was therefore crucial, but while some councilors seem to have been concerned to maintain a balance of power, the Wydevilles were determined to prevent Gloucester from taking control. “We are so important that, even without the King’s uncle, we can make and enforce these decisions,” boasted Dorset.¹²

Mancini believed, probably correctly, that there was already little love lost between Gloucester and the Queen and her faction, and the events that would now unfold gave him no cause to doubt that. Edward IV, though he strengthened the monarchy and restored its prestige, was fatally unable to unite the two power centers he had created—Gloucester and the Wydevilles. There was enmity too between the Queen’s son, Dorset, and William, Lord Hastings, of which Edward had been aware. “At the command and entreaty of the King, who loved each of them, they had been reconciled two days before he died, yet there still survived a latent jealousy.”¹³ That jealousy was fueled by Hastings taking Elizabeth Shore as his mistress as soon as Edward IV was dead. During Edward’s lifetime he had been “sore enamored” of her, yet held back, “either for reverence or for a certain friendly faithfulness” to his master.¹⁴ Dorset had wanted her too; now he was even more incensed against Hastings.

It was inevitable therefore that Edward IV’s death would spark a struggle for control of the government and the young King. Edward V, having been under the influence of his mother’s faction from infancy, was unlikely to be well disposed toward anyone who opposed them, and he would come of age in three years’ time, so his wishes would be influential.

Significantly, the Wydevilles did not send to inform Gloucester of his brother’s death, no doubt because of their intention to exclude him from the regency government; he learned of it from Lord Hastings, Edward IV’s loyal councilor and friend, who “was hostile to the entire kin of the Queen, on account of [his rivalry with] the Marquess [of Dorset].” He advised the Duke that the late King, on his deathbed, had “committed to him only [his] wife, children, goods, and all that ever he had,”¹⁵ and urged him to hasten to the capital “with a strong force,” and to take the young king “under his protection and authority” on the way.¹⁶

Gloucester was unwilling to tolerate rule by the hated Wydevilles, and he may have feared the consequences to himself if they remained in control.¹⁷ He immediately took Hastings’s advice and rode south to meet his kinsman, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who was his natural ally. Like Hastings, “Harre Bokenham” (as he signed himself) hated the Queen’s party,¹⁸ and with good cause: brought up in Elizabeth Wydeville’s household, he had been forced against his will and aristocratic instincts to marry her sister Katherine.¹⁹ The young Elizabeth probably knew Buckingham quite well; he was her kinsman and her uncle by marriage, and she had danced with him at court. With Gloucester, Hastings, and Buckingham allied in a coalition to bring down the unpopular Wydevilles, the stage was set for a fatal power struggle.

One of the chief sources for the events that unfolded next was Dominic Mancini. Some recent historians have questioned his credibility as an objective source, asserting that he was swayed by anti-Wydeville propaganda. Yet he was clearly aware of the existence of such propaganda, and he also warmly praised Earl Rivers, the most influential of the Queen’s kin. An astute eyewitness, writing in December 1483 at the latest, he was close to the events of that year, even though his account of what happened before his arrival in England is flawed in places. John Argentine, Edward V’s physician, was one of Mancini’s sources, and he would hardly have conveyed a negative view of the Wydevilles, so his testimony could have counterbalanced the propaganda of Gloucester and others. Moreover, Mancini took a dim view of Gloucester, and so it is unlikely he accepted the duke’s propaganda at face value. He was not hampered by the political constraints imposed on English commentators,²⁰ and thus less likely to be biased.

Mancini believed that the Wydevilles and Gloucester went in fear of each other. That the Wydevilles did fear the duke, and with cause, is borne out by subsequent events and the Queen’s response to them. If we reject Mancini’s rationale—that genuine fear of the Wydevilles drove Gloucester to act as he did next—then we might conclude that he was spurred by hatred or resentment, and the need to overthrow an unpopular faction bent on staying in power. Had Gloucester liked and approved of the Wydevilles, and had no cause to fear them, there was no reason he could not have shared power with them. But as a prince of the blood royal and the second-highest-ranking duke in the realm (after Edward V’s younger brother, the Duke of York), he clearly agreed with Hastings, Buckingham, and others that the Wydevilles were not fit to have control of the King and the government of the realm.

All Gloucester’s acts, from the time he learned of his brother’s death, display a strength and consistency of purpose at odds with any theory that he was responding to events rather than driving them.²¹ In light of that, we must also consider a far darker scenario: that he was driven by hatred, and by ambition that had either surfaced or been born when an opportune moment presented itself. Mancini says that from the first “there were those who were not unaware of [Gloucester’s] ambition and cunning, and who had misgivings about where they would lead.” The Queen certainly shared these misgivings. If Gloucester hated her and her faction sufficiently to seek their overthrow, it is possible that his enmity extended to her son, the young king.

He now wrote to the council, reminding them “he had been loyal to his brother Edward” and assuring them “he would be equally loyal to his brother’s son, and to all his brother’s issue, even female, if, which God forfend, the youth should die. He would expose his life to every danger that the children might endure in their father’s realm.”²² Already eventualities had occurred to him. He also wrote “most loving letters” to the Queen, to console her in her loss, declaring “his carefulness and natural affection toward his brother’s children.”²³ But his letter did not allay her fears, or divert her and her faction from their determination to bar Gloucester from taking power.

On April 18, after lying in state at Westminster, Edward IV’s body was conveyed up the Thames to Windsor, and there, two days later, buried in the new St. George’s Chapel, “which he had reverently founded and built.”²⁴ Elizabeth was not present. The funerals of kings were not attended by their female relations, who by custom mourned in privacy.

Meanwhile, Gloucester had hastened south. Although he had not yet been confirmed as Lord Protector and had no legal mandate to act as he did, he was determined to seize the person of the young king as he was taken to London by his uncle, Earl Rivers; his half brother, Sir Richard Grey; Sir Thomas Vaughan, his chamberlain; and Sir Richard Haute, the Queen’s kinsman, with an escort of two thousand men. On April 29, with his forces bolstered by those of his ally, Buckingham, Gloucester intercepted the King’s party at Stony Stratford. The next day at dawn, after sharing a convivial meal with them, he suddenly seized Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, and Haute, who were afterward conveyed north and imprisoned at Sheriff Hutton Castle and Pontefract Castle. It was clear that this was the prelude to the overthrow of Wydeville rule. The lack of any outcry in response to Gloucester’s coup shows that he and his allies had calculated correctly that hatred of the Queen’s faction was widespread and deeply rooted. Evidently, many nobles approved of his decisiveness.²⁵

Edward V was staunch in his defense of Rivers and the others, but he was overruled by Gloucester, who now saw firsthand that the King’s loyalty lay with his mother and her kin. That did not bode well for the future. The boy insisted that the government be entrusted to the Queen and the lords of the realm, doubtless meaning those of the Wydeville faction, but Buckingham answered “that it was not women’s place to govern the kingdom, but men’s, [and] if he hoped for anything from her, he should abandon it.”²⁶

Elizabeth must have known about the political maneuvering going on around her; she may have known that her mother’s kin were not popular or liked by Gloucester, but her focus would probably have been on the imminent arrival of her brother in London and the coming coronation. It was a terrible shock, therefore, when news of Gloucester’s coup reached London “a little before midnight” on April 30.²⁷ “The unexpectedness of the event horrified everyone.”²⁸

Elizabeth would have seen how appalled the Queen was to hear that “the King her son was taken, her brother, her son, and her other friends arrested and sent no man knows wist whither, to be done with God wot what.”²⁹ At a stroke, Gloucester had undermined the power of the Wydevilles, whom he apparently seemed bent on destroying. He would soon be in London, and what would happen to them all then?

There was a flurry of panicked activity at Westminster. Immediately, the Queen and her remaining 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 consulted certain nobles and others 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.”³⁰

Elizabeth Wydeville, “fearing the sequel of this business,”³¹ decided there was one course of action open to her—one she had taken before in a crisis. That same night,³² she resolved to take sanctuary at Westminster, “to the intent she might deliver her other children from the present danger.”³³ Thus, “in great fright 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, she got herself with all haste possible, with her daughters and her younger son, out of the Palace of Westminster, in which she then lay,”³⁴ and fled into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. Her youngest child, two-year-old Bridget, was not well, and may have been brought to Westminster from the royal chambers in the Royal Wardrobe near Baynard’s Castle, for after her father’s death she had been “sick in the said Wardrobe.”³⁵

The Queen and “all her children and company were registered as sanctuary persons.”³⁶ John Eastney, Abbot of Westminster since 1474 and a patron of Caxton, had stood godfather to Prince Edward back in 1470; he took them under his protection, and did not demur at the Queen once more “lodging herself and her company in the abbot’s palace,” Cheyneygates,³⁷ where the little Elizabeth had stayed in sanctuary with her mother and sisters in 1470–71. They were joined in the sanctuary by Dorset and Lionel Wydeville, Bishop of Salisbury.³⁸ Dorset, who had forsaken his post as Constable of the Tower, escaped from sanctuary some weeks later, evading the soldiers and dogs that were after him, and went into hiding.³⁹

This must have been a traumatic and frightening time for Elizabeth, with her father so lately dead and her mother and kinsmen convinced that Richard of Gloucester intended harm to them all. Helpless herself, she must have known that, in his eyes, she was inextricably linked to her mother’s party, and therefore an enemy. Maybe she hated him for what he had done to her family.

Her mother was in a state of near collapse. She had fled the palace precipitately, leaving orders for her stuff to be conveyed across to the abbey after her. When Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, arrived at the sanctuary in the small hours of that morning, bringing the Great Seal of England to the Queen, he found “much heaviness, rumble, haste, and busyness” surrounding her, for “the carriage and conveyance of her stuff” was already in hand. The Archbishop was astounded to see “chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trussed all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some loading, some coming, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some carrying more than they ought the wrong way, and some breaking down the walls to bring in the next way.” The scene was total chaos, but amid all the flurry “the Queen sat alone, a-low on the rushes, all desolate and dismayed,” knowing that there would be no Edward IV to rescue her and her children from sanctuary this time. “The Archbishop comforted [her] in the best manner he could, showing her that he trusted the matter was nothing so sore as she took it for,” and saying he had been reassured by a message sent to him by Lord Hastings.

“Ah, woe worth him,” the Queen cried, “for he is one of those that laboreth to destroy me and my blood.”

“Madam,” Rotherham replied, “be ye of good cheer, for I assure you, if they crown any other king than your son, we shall on the morrow crown his brother.” And he handed her the Great Seal, to hold on behalf of Edward V.⁴⁰

But when the Archbishop left at dawn, and returned to York Place, his London residence, he saw through “his chamber window all the Thames full of boats of the Duke of Gloucester’s servants, watching that no man should go into sanctuary, nor none pass unsearched.”⁴¹ Elizabeth would soon realize that she was now a virtual prisoner, unable to leave the abbey. And this was only the beginning of her misfortunes.

On May 4 a black-clad Gloucester rode into London with the young King, who was wearing royal mourning of “blue velvet” for his father, and it was noted with approval by the people that the duke showed his sovereign much respect and honor. But he and Buckingham “were seeking at every turn to arouse hatred against the Queen’s kin, and to estrange public opinion from her relatives,” and “they took especial pains to do so the day they entered the City. For ahead of the procession they sent four wagons loaded with weapons bearing the devices of the Queen’s brothers and sons, besides criers to make generally known that these arms had been collected by the duke’s enemies so as to attack and slay [him].”⁴² The weapons had, in fact, been stored against war with the Scots.

Elizabeth, who cherished “unbounded love” for her siblings,⁴³ must have been sad not to be reunited with her brother, Edward V. She may have had fears for him. But he was effortlessly winning the love of his subjects. Mancini, who may well have seen the young king at this time, says that “in word and deed, he gave so many proofs of his liberal education, of polite, nay, rather scholarly attainments far beyond his age. He had such dignity in his whole person, and in his face such charm that, however much they might gaze, he never wearied the eyes of beholders.”

Outwardly, all seemed propitious for the new reign, and it might have appeared that the Queen’s flight into sanctuary had been too precipitate. Gloucester saw to it that the laws of the realm were enforced in Edward V’s name; coins were struck bearing the boy’s image, “and all royal honors were paid to him.”⁴⁴ Given that the duke was now firmly in control of the young king, the council had no choice but to recognize him as protector, although they refused to proceed against Rivers, Grey, and the rest because Gloucester had not—at the time—had the authority to arrest them; nevertheless, the men remained in prison. A new date, June 24,⁴⁵ was set for the coronation. Everyone, says Croyland, “was looking forward to the peace and prosperity of the kingdom,” and Lord Hastings “was overjoyed at this new world, saying that nothing more had happened than the transfer of the rule of the kingdom from two of the Queen’s relatives to two of the King’s.” His jubilation was premature, for the council had made it clear that the office of Lord Protector would still lapse with the coronation, and Gloucester knew that the days of his power might be numbered.

Hastings must have been a man of limited imagination to so glibly pass over the tragedies that had overtaken Elizabeth and her family. Whether Gloucester was a threat or not, her mother had compelling reasons to believe that he was, and the atmosphere in sanctuary must have been heavy with grief and anxiety, with no end to it in view. It must have been poignant living in such close proximity to the palace where they had spent so much time in former years, heedless of the events that were to overtake them. And although they were housed in some luxury, as guests of the abbot, they were dependent on him for their security, and before long for the very necessities of life. On May 7, Edward IV’s executors declined to administer his will, on the grounds that while the Queen held his daughters in sanctuary, his bequests to them could not be carried out. Accordingly, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the late king’s goods under sequestration. Elizabeth had been deprived not only of her freedom, but of her dowry, and the Queen and her children had been rendered penniless.⁴⁶

The contemporary Paston Letters contain a complaint about the “great cost” of living in sanctuary. There is no mention of a butcher like John Gould supplying meat during this second sojourn, and any store of money that Elizabeth Wydeville had brought with her would rapidly have dwindled, because the merchants who came to sell to sanctuary dwellers often charged “right unreasonable” prices.⁴⁷ It must have been a humbling experience for the Queen and her daughters to be obliged to presume upon the abbot’s charity.

They dared not leave Cheyneygates, even though the boundaries of the Westminster sanctuary extended farther, for fear of being seized; yet anyone could enter to see them, which must have been a further source of anxiety. Although sanctuaries were regarded as holy places to be treated with reverence, there were notorious examples of their being breached, as had happened in 1471, when Edward IV, brandishing his sword, entered the Abbey of Tewkesbury and dragged out the Lancastrians who had sought sanctuary there.⁴⁸ The sanctuary at Westminster had long enjoyed the patronage and protection of English kings, who regarded it as an outward symbol of royal power and mercy, but Mancini observed that things had declined since the Queen sought sanctuary under Henry VI, and that “sanctuaries are of little avail against the royal authority.”

Little is recorded about the lives of those in sanctuary. Elizabeth was effectively a guest in a monastery, her life governed by bells and prayer. It cannot have been a happy existence for a bereaved girl of seventeen—indeed it was perhaps a constant ordeal—but the presence of her younger siblings would have enlivened her days and kept her occupied.

Among the luggage the Queen had brought with her was at least one book—a devotional manuscript, “Letters and Collects for Vigils of Saturday before Easter and Pentecost,” dating from around 1300, with later additions. In the margin of the first folio it is inscribed: “Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth dei gratia. To my good friend Mortimer.” In the fourth folio is the dedication: “To the victorious and triumphant King Henry,” which must have been written after August 1485. The last folio bears the words “Westminster Abbey.” It is a reasonable assumption that the book was owned and annotated by Elizabeth Wydeville when she was in sanctuary, and that the said Mortimer—who was perhaps Sir John Mortimer of Kyre⁴⁹—supported her in some way while she was there. Tradition has it that she gave the book to her daughter Elizabeth, for either could have written the dedication “To the victorious and triumphous King Henry [VII].”⁵⁰

The council felt that it was not suitable for the young king to stay at the Palace of Westminster because of the proximity of the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, where his mother and sisters were staying. Instead it was decided, at Buckingham’s suggestion (possibly prompted by Gloucester), that Edward should lodge in the palace of the Tower of London, where monarchs traditionally stayed before their coronations. The Tower had not yet acquired the sinister reputation it was to gain under the Tudors; on the contrary, it had been one of Edward IV’s favorite residences, and so would have held happy associations for Edward V. But it was also a strong and secure fortress.

By May the council was becoming uneasy about Elizabeth Wydeville remaining in sanctuary, and the continuing imprisonment of her kinsmen, and concerns were expressed that “the protector did not, with a sufficient degree of considerateness, take fitting care for the preservation of the dignity and safety of the Queen.”⁵¹ Gloucester responded to this by making efforts to persuade his sister-in-law to leave sanctuary with her children, appointing a committee to negotiate with her, and sending councilors with assurances of her and the children’s safety, but all were met with a barrage of scorn, tears, and indignation.⁵² In the first week of June, the council tried again to persuade the Queen to leave sanctuary with her children and go into honorable retirement, but again she refused.

Her obduracy gave Gloucester grounds for treating the Wydeville faction as aggressors. On June 10 he sent a letter to the civic council of York for the muster of troops to march on London against “the Queen, her blood 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 this realm”⁵³—proof, if any were now needed, of how deeply he hated the Wydevilles. But the latter’s wings had been well and truly clipped: the Queen was in sanctuary, powerless, and her kinsmen were scattered, either in prison or in hiding, so clearly Gloucester’s accusations were merely an excuse to bolster his power with military force.

Lord Hastings, resentful that Buckingham had usurped his prominence on the council, and mistrusting Gloucester’s intentions, now switched sides to the Queen, although his prime loyalty remained to Edward IV’s son. But on June 13, Gloucester found out that Hastings had confided his concerns about the protector’s ambitions to Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York; John Morton, Bishop of Ely; and Lord Stanley. Within hours Hastings’s “joy gave way entirely to grief,”⁵⁴ for Gloucester responded by staging a second illegal coup. It was another preemptive strike, a ruthless exercise to eliminate or neutralize his opponents, and with it he embarked on a reign of tyranny in order to silence all those who stood in the way of his ambitions. And his ambitions, as many had suspected, and as would now become clear, focused on the crown. His much vaunted loyalty to his brother now counted for nothing.

Immediately, that same morning, he summoned Hastings and others to a council meeting in the Tower, and there—in a dramatic scene later immortalized by Shakespeare—accused him of treason and had Hastings summarily executed, “without judgment or justice.” Likewise, Stanley, Morton, and Rotherham were also arrested, but spared execution “out of respect for their status” and—again without trial—sent to Wales to be imprisoned in separate castles. In this way “the three strongest supporters of the new King had been removed, and—all the rest of his faithful subjects fearing the like treatment—the two dukes did thenceforth just as they pleased.” This was achieved in part by the strong presence of Gloucester’s northern troops, “in fearful and unheard-of numbers,” in the capital.⁵⁵

Gloucester knew that Stanley was too rich and influential to be alienated, and that his loyalty must be bought. Soon he would restore him to the council and grant him new lands and high offices. It might have seemed to Elizabeth that “father Stanley”—as she called him in “The Song of Lady Bessy”—had abandoned her at this frightening time. But Stanley’s first loyalty was to himself.

Even in sanctuary Elizabeth must have heard about Elizabeth Shore doing public penance at St. Paul’s for her harlotry, clad only in a sheet, before being committed to Ludgate Prison, all on Gloucester’s orders. In fact, Mistress Shore had been arrested for her connection with Hastings, and her very public punishment was probably intended to discredit them both and give weight to Gloucester’s summary sentence on Hastings. It also proclaimed that the duke, unlike his late brother, would not tolerate immorality.

Gloucester knew it was not enough to have the young king in his power. He “foresaw that the Duke of York would by legal right succeed to the throne if his brother were removed.” As the day of the coronation approached, “he went to the Star Chamber at Westminster and submitted to the council how improper it seemed that the King should be crowned in the absence of his brother, who ought to play an important part in the ceremony. Wherefore he said that, since this boy was held by his mother against his will in sanctuary, he should be liberated, because the sanctuary had been founded by their ancestors as a place of refuge, not of detention, and this boy wanted to be with his brother.”⁵⁶ How true this was is not known; but many lively nine-year-old boys would have chafed against the restrictions imposed by being in sanctuary, and resented being cooped up in a household of women; and maybe young York was eager to join the brother he barely knew, but who must have represented power and glory and freedom, and the chance of some excitement.

Gloucester was prepared to use force to remove York from his mother. On June 16, “with the consent of the council, he surrounded the sanctuary with his household troops” armed with swords and staves, and sent the elderly Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, to persuade Elizabeth Wydeville to give up the young duke. “When the Queen saw herself besieged, and preparation for violence, she surrendered her son, trusting in the word of the Cardinal of Canterbury that the boy should be restored after the coronation.” But “the cardinal was suspecting no guile, and had persuaded the Queen to do this, seeking as much to prevent a violation of the sanctuary as to mitigate by his good services the fierce resolve of the duke.”⁵⁷ Elizabeth Wydeville’s parting from her younger son was later touchingly portrayed in many narrative paintings of the romantic era. “But the Queen, for all the fair promises to her made, kept her and her daughters within the sanctuary.”⁵⁸ Clearly she did not think that any of them would be safe if they left it, so her fears for her sons might have been imagined.

Elizabeth was a witness to these events, and they must have caused her great distress, as “the love she bore her brothers and sisters was unheard of, and almost incredible.”⁵⁹ Thereafter, she must have fretted—even agonized—over her absent brothers, and if she heard what was being reported, she would soon have had even more cause for concern. For “after Hastings was removed, all the attendants who had waited upon the King were debarred access to him. He and his brother were withdrawn into 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.”⁶⁰

This all happened between mid-June and Mancini’s recall from England shortly after July 6. Some of his information came from Dr. John Argentine. His account suggests that the boys were now being held in the White Tower—the keep, or “Tower proper”—and the mention of bars indicates that they were securely confined as prisoners of state. Dr. Argentine, who was “the last of his attendants whose services the King enjoyed,” reported “that the young 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.” Mancini saw “many men burst forth into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight; and already there was a suspicion that he had been done away with. Whether, however, he has been done away with, and by what manner of death, so far I have not at all discovered.”

Mancini’s evidence is corroborated by the anonymous Croyland chronicler, a privy councilor and canon lawyer—probably John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln,⁶¹ “a man of great learning and piety.”⁶² As Lord Chancellor and a member of the council, he was in a good position to know what was going on. He too states that after Hastings’s execution “was the prince and the Duke of York holden more straight, and there was privy talk that the Lord Protector should be King.” He also mentions that “during this mayor’s year, the children of King Edward were seen shooting and playing in the garden of the Tower by sundry times.” But soon, as Mancini corroborates, they would be seen no more. And after June 8 no more grants were made in the name of Edward V.

Indeed, from the day York was removed from sanctuary, Gloucester and Buckingham “no longer acted in secret but openly manifested their intentions”⁶³—and their intentions boded no good for Elizabeth and her family.

Richard was clearly determined to prevent the Wydeville-dominated boy king from reigning. He later alleged that on June 8, someone—Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, according to Commines—had “discovered to the Duke of Gloucester” that before Edward IV married Elizabeth Wydeville in 1464, he “had been formerly in love with a beautiful young lady and had promised her marriage, on condition that he might lie with her. The lady consented and, as the bishop affirmed, he married them when nobody was present but they two and himself. His fortune depending on the court, he did not discover it, and persuaded the lady likewise to conceal it, which she did, and the matter remained a secret.”⁶⁴

Any bishop or cleric would have known that a ceremony of marriage conducted without any witnesses present was invalid, but even if Stillington had officiated, it seems strange that it had taken him nearly twenty years to speak out, for the existence of a previous secret marriage rendered the second union bigamous, with serious implications for the legitimacy of the children born of it and the royal succession; and there were implications too for the safety of the King’s immortal soul,⁶⁵ which should have exercised the bishop’s mind. But Stillington was no saint—he had fathered bastards, rarely visited his diocese, and switched loyalties like a weathercock, according to which king was ruling, acquiring pardon after pardon along the way. What’s more, in 1472 he had sworn allegiance to Edward, Prince of Wales, as Edward IV’s “very and undoubted heir”—a strange thing to do if he knew the boy was not legitimate.⁶⁶ He was therefore not a reliable witness.

The lady Edward was said to have married was Eleanor Butler, daughter of the great John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, a military hero of the Hundred Years War. She had married Thomas Butler, heir to Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, but was widowed before 1461, and died in a Norwich convent before June 30, 1468. It is highly unlikely that Edward ever did go through any ceremony of marriage with her. English sources mention only a precontract, a promise before witnesses to marry; once it was cemented by sexual intercourse, it became as binding in the eyes of the Church as a marriage. By the fourteenth century the Church had reluctantly allowed that such clandestine marriages—with no calling of banns or blessing by a priest at the church door—were valid, but only if the promise had been made before two witnesses, which the law required. In practice, many couples considered themselves married on the basis of a promise alone,⁶⁷ but there is no good evidence that Edward IV made any promises to Eleanor Butler, or considered himself precontracted to her. Only after his death did Gloucester assert that he “stood married and troth-plight” to the lady, “with whom [he] had made a precontract of matrimony.”⁶⁸

Significantly, Eleanor Butler, a member of a powerful aristocratic family, never joined the chorus of protest when the news broke that the King had married Elizabeth Wydeville, who was of lower rank than herself; nor did her family ever defend her honor when the alleged precontract was made public or later confirmed in Parliament. People were not afraid to speak out against the Wydeville marriage, so there is no reason why she and her kin could not have taken advantage of that and enlisted the support of Warwick, who was affronted by the King’s marriage. Moreover, as a notably pious lady,⁶⁹ she surely would not have allowed a situation in which her husband was putting his immortal soul at risk to continue. Finally her nephew, Gilbert Talbot, was to fight for Henry Tudor, who had vowed to marry Elizabeth of York—which Talbot surely would not have done if he believed Elizabeth were illegitimate.

Furthermore, if Elizabeth Wydeville had married Edward IV in good faith, not knowing that he was already under contract to another lady, her children could have been declared legitimate, and her marriage regularized, on Eleanor Butler’s death in 1468; then the legitimacy of her sons, who were born later, would never have been in doubt. It seems inconceivable that Edward IV, who lived in an age in which lawful title to the crown was bloodily disputed, would knowingly have made a bigamous marriage, or would not have taken steps to ensure that his heirs’ legitimacy could never be disputed. But Gloucester apparently accepted this new evidence as sufficient to render his brother’s marriage invalid and his nephews and nieces bastards and unfit to inherit the crown or anything else.⁷⁰

Commines is the only source to name Stillington as Gloucester’s informant: he is not mentioned by English writers, so Commines may have been reporting speculation or gossip from diplomatic circles abroad. If Edward IV had indeed married Eleanor Butler in secret, he is hardly likely to have chosen his Keeper of the Privy Seal to perform the ceremony,⁷¹ but an obscure priest such as the one who had married him to Elizabeth Wydeville. And as Commines reports that the bishop had officiated at an actual marriage, rather than a precontract, and without witnesses present, the rest of his story must be called into question.

Nevertheless, Stillington’s possible involvement has been the subject of much debate. It was he who had persuaded Clarence to submit to Edward IV in 1471.⁷² In 1475, after being dismissed as Chancellor of England, he had retired to his diocese of Wells, which bordered on Clarence’s lands in Somerset. In 1478, shortly after Clarence’s execution, Stillington had been sent to the Tower for uttering words “prejudicial to the King and his estate,” but was released three months later after paying a fine.⁷³ What he had said to give offense is not recorded, but if it impugned the legitimacy of the King or his children, then the punishment was lenient. Furthermore, he defended himself, and it was recorded that he had “done nothing contrary to his oath of fealty, as he has shown before the King and certain lords.”

From such fragmentary evidence it has sometimes been conjectured that Stillington had entered into a secret alliance with Clarence and confided to him the tale of the precontract. That would have been political dynamite, of course, whether true or not. But Clarence never used the precontract story against Edward IV. He was ready to make wild and subversive claims, such as the one about Elizabeth Wydeville having poisoned his wife, and he had been quick to impugn Edward’s own legitimacy, so it follows that he would not have hesitated to act on explosive evidence such as this.

If there were allegations about a precontract in 1478, it would have been remarkable for Gloucester not to have heard of them. If he did, they did not undermine his loyalty to his brother, nor did he attempt to have the matter clarified. He had not used them against the Wydevilles back in April and May, even when fabricating evidence against them, notably falsely accusing the Wydevilles of stockpiling arms to use against him. Now, facing the likelihood of retribution from the young Edward V when the King achieved his majority, and determined at all costs to prevent the Wydevilles from returning to power, Gloucester probably fabricated the whole story, in all likelihood with Stillington’s assistance; Commines’s mention of him (out of all the bishops of England) and his later prosecution by Henry VII suggests he was involved in some way. A yearbook of 1488 asserts it was Stillington who later drew up the petition in which the lords and commons beseeched Richard to accept the crown of England.⁷⁴ However, he received no tangible rewards from Richard.

Given Edward IV’s reputation with women, the precontract tale may have sounded sufficiently convincing—at least to Gloucester’s supporters. But the sudden emergence of this information, surfacing at a crucially convenient time for the duke, is not only suspicious but also astonishing. Clearly many regarded it merely as “the color for” his seizing the throne—“this act of usurpation,” as the Croyland chronicler scathingly put it—or what More calls a “convenient pretext”; and it is obvious that many continued to regard Edward IV’s children as the rightful heirs of the House of York. Croyland, for one, insisted that the whole precontract story was false: “there was not a person but what knew very well who was the sole mover of such seditious and disgraceful proceedings.” And, of course, both Edward IV and Eleanor Butler were dead, and could not confirm or deny the allegations.

Gloucester’s informant was said to have produced “instruments, authentic doctors, proctors and notaries of the law” as well as the “depositions of divers witnesses,” none of which survive or were publicly produced at the time. If this evidence had been as compelling as Gloucester claimed, it is odd that he did not immediately act upon it, or refer it to an ecclesiastical court, as the law required, for no secular court had jurisdiction over such cases. Probably he realized that the story would not stand up, and knew that proof of it did not exist. Initially he ordered Dr. Ralph Shaa, the Lord Mayor’s brother, to preach at Paul’s Cross on the text “Bastard slips shall not take root,” and had him rake up Clarence and Warwick’s stale propaganda about Edward IV being “conceived in adultery.”⁷⁵ Elsewhere in London, other clerics, similarly primed, were repeating the same thing.

A shocked Mancini wrote that Gloucester “had so corrupted the preachers of God’s word that they did not blush to say in their sermons to the people, without the slightest regard for decency or religion, King Edward IV’s offspring should be disposed of at once, since he had no right to be King, and no more had they. For they claimed that Edward was conceived in adultery and bore no resemblance to the late Duke of York, although he had been passed off as his son. Rather, Gloucester, who looked just like his father, should come to the throne as the rightful successor.” That was no more believed in 1483 than it had been in 1469, and Shaa found his homily falling on deaf ears. The Londoners were unconvinced: “such as favored ye matter were few in number.”⁷⁶

Worse was to come. The council had refused to sanction the executions of Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, and Haute, so Gloucester, “of his own authority as protector,” had sent orders to Pontefract for them to suffer execution,⁷⁷ on the patently false charge that they had plotted the death of the protector.⁷⁸ There was “more of will than justice” involved,⁷⁹ for they were beheaded on June 25 “without any form of trial being observed”—another act of tyranny, theirs being “the second innocent blood that was shed” as a result of Gloucester’s coups.⁸⁰ These executions prompted a rising in Kent by Elizabeth Wydeville’s outraged kinsmen, the Hautes, and although abortive, it was sufficient to prove to Gloucester that the Wydevilles were still a force to be reckoned with, even though their teeth had been drawn. Tidings of the deaths of her uncle and half brother must have impacted badly on Elizabeth in sanctuary. She would have had to deal with her mother’s fresh grief and her new fears for the future.

Influenced probably by the incredulous reaction to Shaa’s sermon, or perhaps by his mother’s protests, only now did Gloucester publicly proclaim the illegitimacy of his brother’s children. On June 25, 1483, at the Guildhall, in the presence of the lords (who had been summoned to Parliament), the Lord Mayor, and the citizens of London, Buckingham presented an address to the protector “in a certain roll of parchment,” asserting for the first time “that the sons of King Edward were bastards,”⁸¹ on the grounds that Edward had been “legally contracted to another wife” at the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville.⁸² At this, a low whispering broke out, “as of a swarm of bees.” As the next in line of succession, and the only “certain and uncorrupted blood of Richard, Duke of York”—Clarence’s heir Warwick barred because of his father’s attainder—Gloucester was “entreated” to accept the crown.⁸³ The lords, who had been ordered to bring only small escorts to London, found themselves intimidated by the presence of “unheard of terrible numbers” (estimated at four to five thousand) of Gloucester’s and Buckingham’s armed retainers in the City, and they and the commons unanimously signaled their approval. Some might have regarded a grown man with a proven record of service in government and in the field of battle as preferable to a child ruler anway.⁸⁴ Even so, unsupported allegations about Edward V’s legitimacy and an address made before an assembly of nobles were no substitute for a ruling by an ecclesiastical court, and were a very shaky foundation on which to base a claim to the throne.⁸⁵ All the same, the next day, at Baynard’s Castle, Gloucester was entreated to bow to the lords’ petition; with a show of reluctance, he agreed and was proclaimed King Richard III.

What was so striking, and probably shocking, about Richard’s usurpation was that where previous kings—Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI—had been deposed because of their bad government, Edward V did not even have a chance to prove his ability, while the speed of Gloucester’s two coups and his ascent to the throne strongly suggested that he had all along meant to oust his nephew. Moreover, Edward had been deposed, and he and his siblings branded bastards, on highly dubious grounds. These rapidly unfolding events must have been horrifying to Elizabeth and her mother and sisters. In an age in which the illegitimacy rate may have been as low as 2 percent,⁸⁶ and bastards were legally barred from inheriting property, the loss of her status would have been a terrible blow, coming so soon after the death of her father and the curtailment of her freedom. And now the man whom her mother feared most was king, and they were all at his mercy.