4

“The Whole Design of This Plot”

On July 6, 1483, the new King and Queen were crowned in Westminster Abbey. Cecily Neville was not there to witness her son’s consecration; maybe she was furious with him for having publicly impugned her honor. Confined in the abbot’s house, Elizabeth and her sisters must have been aware of the bells ringing in celebration—the three Westminster sanctuary bells were customarily rung whenever a monarch was crowned—and they may have heard the crowds outside and even the music in the abbey. Their thoughts would surely have turned to their brother Edward, whose day of triumph this was to have been. It was a bitter reminder of all they had lost, one more trial coming fast upon the others they had endured.

After the coronation, Richard III went on a progress through the kingdom. Already there were disturbing reports of agitation and confederacies in the South and West in favor of liberating Edward V. People had begun to “murmur greatly, to form assemblies and to organize associations; many things were going on in secret for the purpose of promoting this object, others quite openly. There was also a report that it had been recommended by those men who had taken refuge in the sanctuaries that some of the King’s daughters should leave Westminster, and go in disguise to parts beyond the sea, in order that, if any fatal mishap should befall the male children of the King [Edward IV] in the Tower, the kingdom might still, in consequence of the safety of the daughters, someday fall again into the hands of the rightful heirs.”¹

Possibly Elizabeth Wydeville was behind what has become known as the “sanctuary plot.” Elizabeth and her sisters could not have left sanctuary without their mother’s collusion, and the former queen had good reason to resort to desperate measures. Already her brother and one of her sons had been executed without trial. Her royal sons had disappeared into the Tower, and she and others were probably so fearful for their safety that she was prepared to risk the perils attendant on her daughters escaping abroad in order to ensure the survival of the legitimate royal line.

But the plot was discovered, and when Richard III was informed, he ordered that the abbey be placed under siege, whereupon “the noble church of Westminster assumed the appearance of a castle and fortress, while men of the greatest austerity were appointed by King Richard to act as the keepers thereof; the captain and head of these was one John Nesfield, esquire, who set a watch upon all the inlets and outlets of the monastery.”²

Nesfield, a Yorkshireman, was also responsible for guarding the Queen and her children while they were in sanctuary. He would have been a constant, perhaps menacing presence in Elizabeth’s life. A soldier who is first mentioned in 1470, when Edward IV appointed him “riding forester of the forest of Galtres” in Yorkshire, Nesfield had pursued Lancastrian adherents on the King’s behalf. In 1480 he had been serving in Calais, where he helped to recapture an English ship seized by the French.³ He was now a staunch supporter of Richard III, and saw that his men-at-arms kept strict guard over the Queen Dowager and her daughters. “Not one of the persons there shut up could go forth, and no one could enter, without his permission.”⁴ Clearly Richard took seriously the threat of the princesses being spirited abroad, for until now escape by boat along the nearby Thames would have been easy. There is no doubt that he regarded Elizabeth and her sisters as threats to his security, and feared that the older ones were as capable of conspiring against him as the mother with whom they were immured.

Although these conspiracies were so vigorously suppressed that most of the evidence documenting them was destroyed, the fact that they had occurred at all probably convinced Richard he would never be secure on his throne while his nephews lived. In a few years’ time Edward V would be of an age to fight for his rights, and it was evident he would not lack for supporters; Edward IV had been popular, and the boy was loved for his father’s sake. It would have made poor political sense not to have considered eliminating the princes at this juncture.

Disapproval of Richard’s usurpation was widespread in the south of England. Before the summer was out, “people in the vicinity of London, throughout the counties of Kent, Essex, Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, Devonshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Berkshire, as well as some others of the southern counties of the kingdom,” were determined “to avenge their grievances.”⁵ Indeed, by September even Buckingham, Richard’s close ally, had turned on him.

It is strange that a man who had profited so “spectacularly”⁶ from his association with the King should suddenly have abandoned him, especially when he had so much to lose. Only weeks before, Richard had appointed Buckingham the Constable of England, and granted him the government of Wales and the Marches and control of all the royal estates in Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire, an unprecedented delegation of royal power. So Buckingham must have had a compelling reason to decide he could support Richard no longer.

On August 2 he left the progress and rode west to his castle at Brecknock, Brecon, where he took charge of John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who had been arrested with Hastings and sent to Wales to be held “under house arrest.” It was apparently during conversations with the formidable bishop—a dedicated Lancastrian who was Margaret Beaufort’s chaplain but had nevertheless served Edward IV devotedly and was present at his deathbed—that Buckingham decided to rise in rebellion against the King.⁷

Some writers have suggested that Buckingham’s initial plan was to seize power for himself, for he was descended from Edward III and had a claim to the throne, albeit a weak one. Morton, an astute politician of great integrity, “resource, and daring,”⁸ is supposed to have told Buckingham that he had “excellent virtues meet for the rule of a realm.”⁹ There is a tale that, having “suddenly remembered” that he himself was descended from Edward III, Buckingham had then met Margaret Beaufort on the road to Brecon, and realized that her claim was far superior, although this does not sound very likely. But although he did not at any time press his own claim, one might wonder what he hoped to gain from risking supporting the exiled Henry Tudor, when he was already doing so well for himself under Richard III.

Vergil and More report a story that Buckingham turned against Richard III after the King failed to give him lands he had promised, which in fact were granted on July 13.¹⁰ It has been suggested that Buckingham, having heard how rumors that Richard had the Princes in the Tower murdered were provoking a backlash against the King, was fearful that it would rebound on him also, as Richard’s greatest supporter.¹¹ But such rumors did not surface until late September, and what Buckingham was initially plotting was the rescue and restoration of Edward V.

The likeliest explanation for Buckingham’s disaffection is that, prior to leaving the progress, Richard had confided to this man whom he believed he could trust that his intention was to do away with the princes, and that for Buckingham this was a step too far, in which he wanted no part. This was the opinion of the author of the Great Chronicle of London: “The common fame went that King Richard had within the Tower put unto secret death the two sons of his brother Edward, for the which, and other causes, the Duke of Buckingham conspired against him.” It may be that Morton’s propaganda took root in fertile ground—or Buckingham took the bishop into his confidence, and Morton, appalled, concluded that Richard should be brought down as a matter of urgency.

It is clear that initially Morton was urging the restoration of Edward V, for on September 24, Buckingham wrote appealing for support from Henry Tudor in the “liberation” of the princes.¹² But around that time “a rumor was spread that the sons of King Edward had died a violent death, but it was uncertain how.”¹³

Despite imaginative theories to the contrary, put forward from 1483 to the present day, the weight of evidence¹⁴ overwhelmingly points to the princes having been murdered on the orders of Richard III, the man who had the strongest motive and the best opportunity; and that, on the night of September 3, 1483, they were suffocated with pillows by assassins hired by one of his trusted retainers, Sir James Tyrell, acting on the King’s behalf,¹⁵ as Thomas More describes in his book, The History of King Richard III(ca. 1513).

Sir John Harington, in The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), and Sir George Buck both mention a history of Richard III written by John Morton, later a cardinal and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Harington wrote that More’s book had been “written, as I have heard, by Morton.” Buck was Master of the Revels to James I and author of a well-documented History of King Richard III, written in 1619 and based on careful research from original sources in Sir Robert Cotton’s library at Ashburnham House, Westminster,¹⁶and other places, the recently rediscovered Croyland Chronicle being one of them.¹⁷ Buck describes this history in a marginal note in his copy of Francis Godwin’s A Catalogue of the Bishops of England: “This Morton wrote in Latin the life of K.R.3 which goeth in Sir Thomas More’s name—as Sir Edward Hoby saith, and that Sir W[illiam] Roper hath the original.”¹⁸ No source before Harington connects Morton with More’s history, which was written several years after Morton’s death and includes information he could not have imparted, so if there was such a tract—and neither Harington nor Buck say they actually saw it—then it could only have been one of several sources used by More. Even that theory has been challenged by Raymond Chambers, More’s biographer and an authority on his literary works, who states that “the attribution is impossible, equally from the point of view of chronology, literary history, bibliography, language, style, and common sense,” and that Harington’s assertion should be “treated with the contempt it deserves.”¹⁹

Tyrell had been knighted after Tewkesbury, and was appointed Master of the Henchmen and Master of the Horse in 1483. Later he was made Knight of the Body and given various offices, including those of Steward of the Duchy of Cornwall, Chamberlain of the Exchequer, and appointed to the council. According to More, whose account was based in part on Tyrell’s later confession and the probable firsthand testimony of John Dighton, one of the murderers—those “that much knew and little cause had to lie”—he was prepared to do much to rise high. We know that Tyrell was delegated to ride to the Royal Wardrobe at the Tower of London to fetch necessities for the investiture of Edward of Middleham, the new Prince of Wales, which was to take place on September 8, in York Minster, and it was probably during this trip that the deed was carried out. Other evidence fits with this account, and certainly the princes were never seen alive again. In England most people seemed to believe that Richard had them killed, possibly on the advice of Buckingham, and speculation focused mainly on how the deed had been done.

Until the 1950s that opinion generally held, with only a few writers disputing Richard III’s guilt; since then, in the wake of Josephine Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time (1951), and Paul Murray Kendall’s sympathetic biography of Richard (1955),²⁰ the mystery of the princes’ fate has been endlessly debated, and is still controversial. Nevertheless, wishful theories evolved by revisionists lack credibility in the face of the weight of evidence, both written and circumstantial, against Richard, and the realities of fifteenth-century realpolitik. The facts remain: the princes disappeared from view shortly after his usurpation; he had a compelling motive for doing away with them, and the means; they were never seen again; public opinion at the time was that he had murdered them; there is no credible evidence for their survival, nor did Richard ever produce them alive to counteract the rumors of their murder, which were eroding his support. But as Michael Hicks has so perspicaciously said, the weight of evidence “cannot convince those who do not wish to believe.”²¹ As far as Elizabeth of York is concerned, what matters is what she came to believe had become of her brothers—and later evidence strongly suggests she was convinced that they had been murdered.

Rumors of the murders irrevocably damaged the King’s reputation. It was said in London that he had “put to death the children of King Edward, for which cause he lost the hearts of the people. And thereupon many gentlemen intended his destruction.”²²Ruthlessness in war and politics was tolerated: child murder was a step too far. The Tudor royal historian, Bernard André, wrote that, in the wake of the rumors, “the entire land was convulsed with sobbing and anguish. The nobles of the kingdom, fearful of their lives, wondered what might be done against the danger. Faithful to the tyrant in word, they remained distant in heart.” We must allow for a degree of exaggeration from a partisan observer, but this was written less than twenty years later, when many people would have remembered the events of 1483. The rumors were believed as far away as Danzig, as Caspar Weinreich’s contemporary chronicle recorded that year: “Later this summer, Richard, the King’s brother, had himself put in power and crowned King of England; and he had his brother’s children killed.” Certainly Buckingham—who may have had good cause—and Morton took the rumors seriously.

Richard had written to Buckingham several times after the duke left the progress, but it is unlikely he revealed that the princes actually had been murdered, for Margaret Beaufort (who was soon to be involved in the conspiracy) would certainly have come to hear of it from Buckingham and passed on the information to Henry Tudor. Yet the evidence strongly suggests that Henry Tudor did not know for certain that they had been killed—at least, probably, until 1502. So the likelihood is that Buckingham and his associates just assumed they were dead, which was a reasonable conclusion, given the rumors and how ruthlessly Richard had eliminated everyone else who stood in the way of his ambitions.

The conspirators had now been joined by large numbers of alienated Yorkists. They realized that they must find a new candidate to replace the usurper. If the princes were indeed dead, Elizabeth of York was the next heir to Edward IV’s throne, but there was no question of an eighteen-year-old girl ruling as sovereign, especially with the realm so unstable and troubled. No one even suggested it, and of course there was a prevalent belief that no woman could rule successfully.

Buckingham and Morton now began seriously to consider the claim of Henry Tudor, the only realistic choice. “Seeing that if they could find no one to take the lead in their designs, the ruin of all would speedily ensue, all those who had set on foot this insurrection turned their thoughts to Henry, Earl of Richmond, who had been for many years living in exile in Brittany.”²³ Buckingham’s alliance with Henry Tudor’s supporters in support of the Lancastrian pretender was perhaps Morton’s doing. Morton may have reminded Buckingham that the latter’s father and grandfather had died fighting for Henry VI and the Lancastrian cause,²⁴ and that his true loyalty should lie with the only viable Lancastrian heir—although Buckingham may not have needed much convincing. Morton seems to have worked covertly to bring together the Lancastrian party, the Wydevilles, and Yorkist dissidents, with the objective of overthrowing Richard III. Possibly he was working on behalf of another interested party.

Margaret Beaufort was prominent at Richard III’s court, and had even carried Queen Anne’s train at the coronation, but she remained a Lancastrian at heart. She was a formidable woman of strong character and steely resolve, and all her ambitions were for her son, Henry Tudor. She had continued to correspond with him, and perhaps secretly cherished hopes that one day he would be able to pursue his claim to the throne. Should the time ever be opportune, her husband, the pragmatic Lord Stanley, could command a private army in Henry’s support. In the meantime, Margaret is said to have pressed Richard III—as soon as he came to the throne—to restore her son to the earldom of Richmond and marry him to one of the daughters of Edward IV with his “favor.”²⁵

It may be that Margaret soon realized that Richard would do nothing for Henry; or Henry had made it clear to her that he would never return to England while Richard was on the throne. Whatever the reason, she was soon working against the King, and it has been suggested that she was even involved in a plot to rescue the Princes from the Tower;²⁶ how that would have furthered her son’s cause is hard to see, unless she thought that Edward V would be less of a threat to Henry than Richard, and that Henry might consequently be induced to return to England.

Vergil asserted that, at the same time Morton and Buckingham were plotting at Brecknock, “a new conspiracy was laid in London” between Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Wydeville. But possibly Margaret Beaufort was already in league with Buckingham, and in contact with him through the good offices of Morton, her chaplain, and her servant, Reginald Bray, who was “the chief dealer in this conspiracy” and may have traveled to Brecon on her behalf.

Probably Margaret, perhaps briefed by Buckingham, believed that Richard had done away with the princes. And “she, being a wise woman, after the slaughter of King Edward’s children was known, began to hope well of her son’s fortune.”²⁷

According to Vergil, it was Margaret who first conceived the momentous idea of uniting the rival houses of Lancaster and York through a marriage between her son and Elizabeth of York, who was now—in the eyes of many—the Yorkist heiress to the throne. Margaret is said to have realized “that that deed would without doubt prove for the profit of the commonwealth, if it might chance the blood of King Henry VI and King Edward to be mingled by affinity, and so two most pernicious factions should be at once, by conjoining of both houses, utterly taken away.”

It is possible that Vergil overstated the role of the mother of the King he served, but certainly Margaret was active in the conspiracy once its objectives embraced her son, and it was probably true that she had cherished for years the idea of marrying him to Elizabeth of York. In 1486, Lord Stanley would depose that during Edward IV’s reign he had often heard his wife and others discussing the consanguinity that existed between Henry and Elizabeth,²⁸ proof that the possibility of them marrying had long been under discussion. But now, in the eyes of legitimists, Elizabeth was an even greater prize, for marriage with her would immeasurably bolster Henry’s dubious claim to the throne and win hearts to his cause; and it would unite the Houses of Lancaster and York and be a means of ending the bloody conflict between them.

The success of the plan depended, of course, on the princes being dead. There was no point in Henry Tudor marrying Elizabeth and claiming the crown through her if Edward V or York remained alive to challenge that claim. Clearly, Buckingham, Margaret Beaufort, and Henry Tudor all believed that they were no longer alive. There have been theories that any one of them might have arranged the murder of the boys, which would have been as advantageous to them as to Richard III. But while a handful of contemporaries suggested that Buckingham was involved, none of them—even Margaret of Burgundy, his mortal enemy—ever accused Henry Tudor of the deed, still less Margaret Beaufort.

Apart from the lack of evidence there are insurmountable obstacles to these revisionist views: the princes disappeared while they were being securely held in the Tower as the King’s chief prisoners of state. If someone—Buckingham, for example, who, even as Constable of England, would have needed the King’s permission to breach security at the Tower—had murdered them, Richard would quickly have heard about it, and it would have been in his interests to make political capital against his enemies, thus giving the lie to the rumors about his own involvement; indeed, he was adept at using the tool of character assassination most effectively. More pertinently, even though the rumors about him murdering the princes continued to damn Richard’s reputation and undermine his security as King, he took no measures at all to counteract them, when it was crucially in his interests to do so. Had someone else murdered his nephews, especially one of his enemies, it would have served him well, and retrieved his reputation, to be able to accuse them—and he was soon to have an ideal opportunity to do that, of which he did not take advantage. It would also have been in his interests to make it known if the princes had died natural deaths. Claims that one or both of them survived are fascinating but unconvincing, and cannot be substantiated by good evidence.

Enlisting Buckingham to her son’s cause was a great coup for Margaret Beaufort. All that was needed now was to win over Elizabeth Wydeville. But first she had to be told about the tragic fate of her sons.

Dr. Lewis Caerleon, “a Welshman born,” was Margaret Beaufort’s physician, and because he was “a grave man and of no small experience, she was wont oftentimes to confer freely with him to lament her adversity.” It was during one of their talks that she prayed him to lay the conspirators’ plan before the Queen Dowager, who also consulted him, “for he was a very learned physician.” Margaret told him that “the time was now come when 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.” In September, “after the slaughter of King Edward’s children was known,”²⁹ Dr. Caerleon braved Nesfield’s soldiers and visited Elizabeth Wydeville in sanctuary in his official capacity, his real purpose being to break the dread news that her sons were believed to have been murdered on the King’s orders.

The impact on the Queen Dowager—and on her daughters—must have been dreadful. The likelihood that the princes had been killed was devastating enough, but not knowing exactly what had happened to them, or being able to lay them decently to rest, would surely have caused more anguish than learning for certain how they had died. There would always have been room for imagining so many dreadful scenarios—and for doubt, even hope.

Vergil gives an account of Elizabeth Wydeville’s reaction to the news, which he may have embroidered to underline the dreadful import of the moment, yet it is easy to imagine her responding dramatically to news that any mother would dread to hear, and highly likely that there was a scene of this sort. She “fell in a swoon and lay lifeless a good while. After coming to herself, she wept, she cried aloud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring. She struck her breast, tore and pulled out her hair and, overcome with dolor, prayed also for 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 by his enemy.” After long lamentation, says More, “she kneeled down and cried to God to take vengeance, who, she said, she nothing doubted would remember it.”

Elizabeth and her sisters were probably shocked witnesses to their mother’s grief. Given Elizabeth’s love for her siblings, the news would have hit her hard too. And soon would come the startling realization that she was now—or should have been—the rightful Queen of England.

To mitigate the dreadful tidings, and bring the Queen over to the side of Margaret Beaufort and Buckingham, Dr. Caerleon came to the real point of his visit, reminding her that her daughter Elizabeth was now the rightful inheritor of the crown. “If you could now agree and invent the means to couple your eldest daughter with the young Earl of Richmond in matrimony, no doubt the usurper of the realm should be shortly deposed, and your heir again to her right restored.”

Very likely Caerleon, primed by Margaret Beaufort, gave a flattering account of the putative bridegroom, but at this point Henry Tudor was not much of a catch for a young woman whom many regarded as the Yorkist heiress. He was not even de facto Earl of Richmond, having been deprived of that title; he was a mere landless exile. But Elizabeth Wydeville saw in him her only hope of revenge on the man whom she was convinced had killed her sons and brought her to her present sorry condition, and readily gave her consent. “The Queen was so well pleased with this device that she commanded Caerleon to repair to the countess, who remained in her husband’s house in London, and to promise that she would do her endeavor to procure all her husband King Edward’s friends to take part with Henry, her son, so that he might be sworn to take in marriage Elizabeth, her daughter, after he should have gotten the realm; or else Cecily the younger if the other should die before he enjoyed the same.”³⁰ Her agreement to the plan—which was not without considerable risk—is proof she truly believed that her sons had been murdered.

While the two aspiring mothers-in-law covertly planned for the future, with Dr. Caerleon acting “as a messenger between them, without any suspicion,”³¹ Buckingham sent word to Henry, “by advice of the lord Bishop of Ely, inviting him to hasten into the kingdom of England as fast as he could reach the shore, to marry Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of the late King; and with her, at the same time, take possession of the whole kingdom,” implying that they should reign jointly. He informed Henry that his supporters would rise on St. Luke’s Day, October 18, and that he himself would raise the men of Wales. A proclamation was then made to the confederacies that Buckingham “had repented of his former conduct and would be the chief mover” in the planned risings.³² Henry Tudor entered enthusiastically into the conspiracy. Francis II, Duke of Brittany, had offered him his daughter and heiress Anne, who could have brought him a duchy, but now Henry “decided to yield to Edward IV’s wishes to marry Elizabeth,”³³ who might just bring him a kingdom.

Margaret Beaufort dispatched Reginald Bray “to draw unto her party such noble and worshipful men” as were prepared to risk joining them. She also sent Hugh Conway to Henry with “a good great sum of money” and instructions to join Buckingham in Wales. Word of the proposed marriage between Henry and Elizabeth rapidly won the conspirators the loyalty of Yorkists who had been outraged at Richard’s disinheriting of Edward IV’s children.

Elizabeth’s own views on marrying this exiled pretender whom she had never met are unrecorded, but she probably felt that Henry Tudor represented her best chance of ridding herself of the stain of bastardy and attaining what was rightfully hers: the crown of England. She too seems to have accepted that her brothers were dead, and may have believed—in the words of the chronicler Holinshed—that her “fortune and grace was to be queen.”

In 1489, Margaret Beaufort was to ask William Caxton to translate and print the text of a thirteenth-century French romance entitled “Blanchardin and Eglantine,” which she had acquired in 1483. It was a highly appropriate romance, for Eglantine’s story resonated with Elizabeth’s own situation at the time of Buckingham’s rebellion. Blanchardin, son of the King of Phrygia, falls in love with Princess Eglantine of Tormadei. While he fights the infidel, she makes the stations of the Cross, garrisons the city, and plans for their marriage, which is her heart’s desire. Eventually Blanchardin passes unscathed through a series of adventures, disasters, and escapes, and claims her as his wife. No doubt Elizabeth, and those in sanctuary with her in 1483, would have appreciated the parallels between the story and the alliance between herself and Henry Tudor. It is not beyond the bounds of probability that Margaret Beaufort sent her the book by the hands of Dr. Caerleon, to raise her morale and help while away the tedious hours in sanctuary.³⁴

Bishop Morton, meanwhile, had pressed Buckingham to allow him to leave Brecknock for Ely, to raise men in his diocese. The duke showed himself doubtful about releasing the man who was supposed to be his prisoner, but Morton escaped one night and fled to Ely,³⁵ a move that may have been planned by both men.

The rebels were supposed to rise on October 18, but their various groups were poorly coordinated, and on October 10 the Hautes orchestrated premature risings at Maidstone and Ightham Mote, only to be repelled by John Howard, now Duke of Norfolk. Dorset emerged from hiding to rouse the men of Exeter, and Lionel Wydeville stirred the men of Salisbury, his See. The Queen’s younger brothers, Sir Edward and Sir Richard Wydeville, were involved, and there were planned risings in Guildford and Newbury, while Buckingham was to raise Brecon and south Wales. In the wake of the rumors about the murder of the princes, many former members of Edward IV’s household had joined the rebels.

Already, though, “the whole design of this plot had, by means of spies, become perfectly well known to King Richard, who, as ever, did not act sleepily, but swiftly, and with the greatest vigilance.”³⁶ On October 15, Richard had Buckingham proclaimed a rebel and offered free pardons to any who surrendered. He “contrived that, throughout Wales, armed men should be set in readiness around the said duke as soon as ever he had set a foot from his home.”³⁷

Unsuspecting, Buckingham left Brecon on October 18, as planned, and advanced through the Wye Valley, making for Hereford. But storms and flooding wrecked his plans, his army deserted him, and he was forced to flee to Shropshire, where he sought shelter in the cottage of a poor retainer, who betrayed him for a handsome reward. On arrest, he was led to the city of Salisbury, “to which place the King had come with a very large army, on the day of the commemoration of All Souls; and [on November 2], notwithstanding the fact that it was the Lord’s day, the duke suffered capital punishment in the public marketplace of that city.”³⁸

If, as has been suggested, Buckingham had murdered the princes, with Richard’s approval and therefore on his behalf,³⁹ Richard now had the perfect opportunity to lay the blame at his door and so give the lie to rumor. He did not seize it.

On October 31, unaware that the rebellion had collapsed, Henry Tudor set sail from Brittany with the intention of invading England, but was blown off course by the foul weather. He was stationed off Plymouth harbor when “news of the current situation reached him, both of the death of the Duke of Buckingham and the flight of his own faction,” and realizing that his cause was hopeless, “hoisted his sails and put out to sea again,”⁴⁰ fleeing back to Brittany.

Richard III was remarkably lenient with Margaret Beaufort, despite her having treasonably conspired against him; she was lucky to escape being attainted by Parliament. He contented himself with giving her estates to her husband (who had rallied to his king), depriving her of the title Countess of Richmond, and ordering Stanley—who claimed he had known nothing of her subversive activities—to keep his wife a virtual prisoner “in some secret place” apart from her household. He also extended clemency, and the offer of a pardon, to Dorset and Morton, but they, Lionel Wydeville, and other rebels had already fled the kingdom to join Henry Tudor.⁴¹

What of Elizabeth? André, in a passage that may relate to this time, later wrote that, before the summer of 1485, after Henry Tudor had decided to yield to Edward IV’s wishes and marry her, a “grievous situation nearly brought her noble life to an untimely end. And indeed, as the outcome of the matter later showed, by the pleasure of Edward, his noble and wise daughter was preserved in all her virtue for Henry.”

The context of this passage is unclear, as is André’s meaning. It reads as if it was due to her father’s pleasure that Elizabeth survived this crisis, but it is more likely that the passage refers to Edward’s willing the marriage to take place, rather than to his being responsible for Elizabeth’s survival. The “grievous situation” to which André refers is probably the collapse of Buckingham’s rebellion. He may be implying that Elizabeth too could have been penalized for treason, although Richard’s leniency with Margaret Beaufort, who had been far more deeply involved, precluded Elizabeth from suffering the death penalty. Or André could have meant that she was so distressed at the dashing of her hopes of freedom and a crown that it severely affected her health.

“The Hours of Our Lady,” which bears the signature “Elizabeth Plantagenet” on the flyleaf, has traces of an inscription containing the name “Henry” at the top of that page, which someone has evidently tried to erase. Maybe it was Elizabeth herself, realizing that her hopes of marrying Henry Tudor were now in the dust, and that it was wiser to delete this evidence of them.⁴²

The rebellion had collapsed, but it demonstrated that Henry Tudor was now a serious contender for the crown. In his native Wales the bards were claiming that he should rule as the rightful descendant of the near legendary Cadwaladr, the seventh-century King of Gwynned, and Brutus of Troy, to whom legend attributed the founding of the kingdom of Britain. The support of a growing body of Yorkist dissidents in Brittany—about four hundred fled to his base at the Château of l’Hermine after the rebellion failed—had strengthened Henry’s cause to the extent that he was now ready to throw down the gauntlet to King Richard. At dawn on Christmas Day 1483, Henry went to Rennes Cathedral and, in the presence of about five hundred of his supporters, publicly, “upon his oath, promised that, as soon as he should be King, he would marry Elizabeth, King Edward’s daughter,”⁴³ thus uniting the rival Houses of Lancaster and York.

In so doing he acknowledged Elizabeth as the rightful heiress to the crown—but she could only be that if her brothers were dead; again Henry and all his adherents must have had good reason to believe that they were before announcing his intention of marrying her. In fact Henry described Richard as a homicide in letters he sent to potential allies in England.⁴⁴ Effectively, Henry’s oath was also a public acknowledgment that the sons of Edward IV were dead. Had they been living, Richard III surely would have produced them to scupper the Tudor’s ambitions, but—incomprehensibly, if he had not had them killed—he did not.

The oath, optimistic though it was, turned out to be a brilliant masterstroke because it united Lancastrian and Yorkist supporters and again made Henry a rallying point for disaffected Yorkists, many of whom swore homage to him in Rennes Cathedral on that Christmas morning “as though he had been already created King.”⁴⁵ No doubt there were those who did so in the hope that, if he won the crown, he would restore their property. Until now, few had taken Henry’s claim to be the Lancastrian claimant seriously, but his vow to wed Elizabeth was a deciding factor for many. It also turned the powerless Elizabeth into one of the most important political figures in England, because marriage would from now on be seen by an increasing number as the key to holding legitimate sovereign power in the realm.

After what must have been a mournful Christmas, compared with the splendid celebrations of the previous year, when her father was alive, and before so many close to her had died or disappeared, Elizabeth and her mother and sisters now suffered another blow. In January 1484, in Richard III’s first Parliament, the act entitled “Titulus Regius” was passed, confirming the King’s title to the throne and setting forth the grounds of his claim. It declared how, thanks to “the ungracious pretended marriage” of Edward IV, “the order of all politic rule was perverted,” and went on to state:

We consider how the pretended marriage between King Edward and Elizabeth Grey was made of great presumption, without the knowledge and assent of the lords of this land, and also by sorcery and witchcraft committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford; and also we consider how that the said pretended marriage was made privily and secretly, without edition of banns, in a private chamber [which was untrue], a profane place, and not openly in the face of the Church after the law of God’s Church; and how also, that at the time of the contract of the said pretended marriage, and before and long after, King Edward was and stood troth-plight to one Dame Eleanor Butler, daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury, with whom King Edward had made a precontract of matrimony long time before he made the said pretensed marriage with Elizabeth Grey. Which premises being true, as in very truth they had been true, it appeareth and followeth evidently that King Edward and Elizabeth lived together sinfully and damnably in adultery, against the law of God and His Church, [and] also it followeth that all th’issue and children of the said King Edward had been bastards and unable to inherit or to claim any thing by inheritance.⁴⁶

Croyland fulminated, correctly, that Parliament, being a lay court, had no jurisdiction to pronounce on the validity of a marriage, but “it presumed to do so, and did do so, because of the great fear [of Richard] that had struck the hearts of even the most resolute.” Elizabeth and her siblings were now legally bastards; the act had stripped them of their titles and property and barred them from inheriting anything from their parents.

In February, Elizabeth turned eighteen, the average age for marriage for upper-class girls at that period.⁴⁷ She must have felt that time was passing her by while she was immured in sanctuary, and wondered what the future held for her. Her brothers were dead, her Wydeville relatives murdered or in exile, her mother powerless. It would not be surprising if she was still hoping against hope that Henry Tudor would somehow be able to fulfill his vow and marry her, although the prospect of that probably seemed remote.

Richard III was taking no chances, though. He needed to neutralize the threat posed by the proposed marriage between Elizabeth and Henry Tudor, who was now styling himself King of England, and would, on March 27, obtain a papal dispensation sanctioning the union of “Henry Richmond, layman of the York diocese, and Elizabeth Plantagenet, woman of the London diocese.”⁴⁸

Richard wanted Elizabeth in his power. He could not continue to allow the Queen Dowager and her daughters to go on hiding in sanctuary, as if they were in danger from him; it did not do his already tarnished reputation any good. The rumors had proved highly damaging. Early in 1484 the Chancellor of France had publicly accused him of “murdering with impunity” his nephews, and Commines records that Louis XI believed Richard to be “extremely cruel and evil” for having had “the two sons of his brother put to death.” In December 1483, Mancini (who had been recalled to France in July) had written unquestioningly that Richard had “destroyed his brother’s children.” But if the King could secure the persons of Elizabeth and her sisters, he could show the world he had no evil intent toward them and marry them off to men of his own choosing, thus preventing Henry Tudor from claiming the throne through marriage to any of them.

He knew he faced a struggle to persuade Queen Elizabeth to let her daughters leave sanctuary. He sent “grave men promising mountains to her” and “frequent entreaties as well as threats,”⁴⁹ possibly of removing the girls by force. The ring of steel still surrounding the abbey was a constant, intimidating reminder that Richard had the means to carry out such threats. But there was perhaps talk that he was thinking of marrying Elizabeth to his son, Edward of Middleham, who was her cousin and could not have been much above ten years old.⁵⁰ Vergil says his emissaries to Elizabeth Wydeville prejudiced their arguments at the outset by referring to “the slaughter of her sons,” after which she would not be comforted; if this is true, it amounted to an admission that Richard had the boys killed. Certainly he had been responsible for the judicial murder of another of her sons, Sir Richard Grey, and had given abundant proof of his hatred of the Wydevilles. The former Queen had good cause to be afraid of him.

She made her fears so plain that on March 1 the King felt obliged to make an “oath and promise” in the presence of the lords of the council and the Lord Mayor and aldermen that, if she would agree to her daughters leaving sanctuary, he would offer them all his protection. This he confirmed in writing, declaring:

I, Richard, by the grace of God, King of England [etc.], in the presence of you my lords spiritual and temporal, and you, Mayor and aldermen of my City of London, promise and swear on the word of a king, and upon these holy evangelies [Gospels] of God, by me personally touched, that if the daughters of Dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England, that is, Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Katherine, and Bridget, will come unto me out of the sanctuary of Westminster, and be guided, ruled, and demeaned after me, then I shall see that they shall be in surety of their lives, and also not suffer any manner hurt in their body by any manner [of] person or persons to them, or any of them in their bodies and persons by way of ravishment or de-fouling contrary to their wills, not them or any of them imprison within the Tower of London or other prison; but that I shall put them in honest places of good name and fame, and them honestly and courteously shall see to be founden and entreated, and to have all things requisite and necessary for their exhibitions [display] and findings [domestic arrangements] as my kinswomen; and that I shall marry such of them as now be marriable to gentlemen born, and every of them give in marriage lands and tenements by the yearly value of 200 marks [about £34,000] for term of their lives, and in like wise to the other daughters when they come to lawful age of marriage if they live. And such gentlemen as shall hap to marry with them I shall straitly charge from time to time lovingly to love and entreat them, as wives and my kinswomen, as they will avoid and eschew my displeasure … And moreover, I promise to them that if any surmise or evil report be made to me of them by any person or persons, that I shall not give thereunto faith ne credence, nor therefore put them to any manner punishment, before that they or any of them so accused may be at their lawful defence and answer. In witness whereof to this writing of my oath and promise aforesaid in your said presences made, I have set my sign manual the first day of March, the first year of my reign.⁵¹

While he may have offended his sister-in-law by calling her “Dame Elizabeth Grey,” Richard had at least very publicly guaranteed the future safety and welfare of her daughters. His promises—and his oath made on the Gospels—reflect widespread concerns that he had done away with her sons, for whose safety, as opposed to that of her daughters, there are no reassurances in the document.⁵² This strongly suggests that they were dead, while the specific mention of the Tower, and Richard’s willingness to give such a public guarantee, amounts to a tacit admittance that she had good cause for concern.

Clearly Elizabeth Wydeville had feared—especially in the wake of the sanctuary plot—that a pretext might be sought to find her daughters guilty of treason and worthy of punishment. But for Elizabeth of York, the King’s promises can only have emphasized the shame of her bastardy. He was contemplating marrying her to some gentleman, when, if her brothers really were dead, she was the rightful Queen of England, and might yet be queen consort, if Henry Tudor realized his ambitions. And the dowry Richard was offering was paltry compared with the 10,000 marks [£1.5 million] willed her by Edward IV, and a cruel reminder of her reduced status.

In the circumstances, though, this was a pragmatic way of securing the girls’ futures, and Elizabeth Wydeville, “being strongly solicited to do so,” agreed to release them. On March 1, 1484, the same day her brother-in-law made his public declaration, she “sent her daughters from the sanctuary at Westminster to King Richard.”⁵³

The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall castigated Elizabeth Wydeville for surrendering her daughters to her enemy: “Putting in oblivion the murder of her innocent children, the infamy and dishonor spoken by the King her husband, the living in adultery laid to her charge, the bastardizing of her daughters, forgetting also the faithful prayers and open oath made to the Countess of Richmond, mother of the Earl Henry, blinded by avaricious affection and seduced by flattering words, [she] delivered into King Richard’s hands her five daughters as lambs once again committed to the custody of the ravenous wolf.”

Yet what choice did she really have? There were pressing practical realities to be taken into account. Richard III was thirty-one, and might be in power for a very long time. She could not stay in sanctuary forever, especially in the face of the King’s guarantees; her continuing presence there might compromise the abbot’s standing with his monarch, and she had already been dependent on his kindness and charity for nearly a year. Furthermore, the abbey was still under siege on her account. If she refused to let her daughters leave, then Richard might well take them away, as he had young York, and on the same pretext. Her capitulation does not necessarily mean that she did not believe the King had murdered the princes. He had already judicially murdered another of her sons, on the flimsiest of pretexts, yet still she came to terms with him, doubtless hoping she had done the best she could for her remaining children.

Vergil states that “King Richard received all his brother’s daughters out of sanctuary into the court.” Hall follows Vergil, saying that the King caused them “to be conveyed into his palace [of Westminster] with solemn receiving; as though, with his new, familiar, loving entertainment they should forget, and in their minds obliterate, the old committed injury and late perpetrated tyranny.” Buck also says that Elizabeth Wydeville sent the girls “to the court,” where they were “very honorably entertained and with all princely kindness.” Even so, it may have been a bitter experience for Elizabeth and her sisters to return to the palace where, just a year before, they were honored as royal princesses. Possibly resentment against their uncle, and anxiety about their mother, warred with pleasure and relief at being out of sanctuary and able to enjoy worldly pleasures and freedoms again. They were, after all, only young.

It is likely that they were received into the Queen’s household; as unmarried girls of royal birth, it was the only suitable place for them in a court dominated by men. But it seems that as soon as Elizabeth Wydeville left sanctuary, sometime after her daughters, they joined her. It is clear she did not return to court, as Croyland records that “the Lady Elizabeth was, with her four younger sisters, sent by her mother to attend the Queen at court” the following Christmas, so obviously they were not lodging there then. If she sent them to court, they must have been living with her.

All that is known of Elizabeth Wydeville’s whereabouts after she left sanctuary is that she was residing at Sheen in August 1485. The late Audrey Williamson wrote about an eighteenth-century tradition in which the Queen Dowager and her sons had once lived at Gipping Hall near Stowmarket, Suffolk, by permission of “the uncle,” presumably Richard III. Gipping Hall, which was demolished in the 1850s, was the seat of Sir James Tyrell, the man who as noted earlier probably arranged the murder of the princes, and it was rebuilt by him in 1474. From this late tradition, for which no earlier corroborating evidence exists, Williamson inferred that the boys had not been murdered at all, but sent here in secrecy with their mother by the King. If so, their sisters were with them.

There are obvious problems with this theory, not least the discovery, in 1674 in the Tower of London, of the bones of two children approximately the age of the princes at the time of their disappearance in 1483. But if they had survived, and were taken to Gipping Hall, someone would surely have gotten to know about it. Late medieval royal and noble households were teeming places peopled with servants and officials, and privacy would not become a priority until the reign of Henry VIII. It is likely that several of those who served the Queen could have recognized her sons. Thus it would have been virtually impossible to keep the existence of the princes a secret, especially in the face of rumors of their deaths.

It is inconceivable that Richard, knowing that Elizabeth Wydeville had not hesitated to plot his overthrow, would have entrusted the princes to her care anyway, let alone in a house less than twenty miles from the coast, whence their escape to the Continent could easily have been arranged, even if that house did belong to one of his trusted retainers. The River Gipping flowed nearby, and was navigable all the way down to Ipswich and then, as the River Orwell, to the sea. Many disaffected Yorkists were just across the Channel with Henry Tudor; had it come to their knowledge that the sons of Edward IV still lived, and were at liberty on the Continent, they would surely have switched their allegiance instantly.

Some traditions may have a basis in fact, but even if this one originated with Elizabeth Wydeville retiring to Gipping Hall with her daughters, rather than her sons, it was still near the coast, and the chief objective of the sanctuary plot the previous year had been to spirit the Yorkist heiresses abroad. And it is highly unlikely that, in the wake of his undertaking to Elizabeth Wydeville, Richard would have entrusted her and her daughters to the custody of the man who’d had her sons killed.

Elizabeth Wydeville had been deprived of her property by Parliament, which had assigned her a life annuity of 700 marks [£117,750], which Richard had confirmed in his public undertaking. Both he and Parliament had stipulated that it was to be paid, not to her, but to John Nesfield, Squire of the Body to the King, “for the finding, exhibition, and attendance of Dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England.”⁵⁴ Nesfield was to continue as the former Queen’s “attendant,” or rather, custodian.⁵⁵ Historian David Baldwin has offered the compelling theory that she was sent to live in his charge, possibly at Heytesbury, a Wiltshire manor near Devizes, which he had been granted on April 5 by Richard III after helping to suppress Buckingham’s rebellion the previous year.⁵⁶The manor had been confiscated from the Hungerfords after they supported the Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses and were attainted.

At Heytesbury, Elizabeth would have resided at East Court, a medieval manor house dating from the fourteenth century, the erstwhile seat of the Hungerfords. It was rebuilt in the sixteenth century and may have occupied the site of Heytesbury House, home of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, which still stands and probably incorporates some fragments of the medieval building.⁵⁷

Nesfield held other properties in the north riding of Yorkshire, where his forebears had been landowners since the fourteenth century: the manors of Amotherby, near Malton, and Broughton. Both had a “capital messuage”—the chief residence of a lord of the manor, with outbuildings, possibly a courtyard, and a garden—in the thirteenth century,⁵⁸ but there is no other record of them, and by 1484 they may not have been suitable residences for the former Queen and her daughters. It is more likely, therefore, that Elizabeth and her daughters went to stay at Heytesbury. Many years later Elizabeth would make a point of visiting this small village, which suggests she had some link to it.⁵⁹

Maybe it was Nesfield who made certain that Elizabeth Wydeville kept her word and sent messages to Dorset in Brittany, urging him to abandon Henry Tudor and put an end to any idea of a marriage between Henry and her daughter Elizabeth. Her decision struck a blow to the hopes of the pretender, and provoked consternation and censure among his supporters, but it had been both wise and necessary—and she really had no choice in the matter. In January, Parliament had attainted Henry Tudor as a traitor, which meant that if he ever returned to England, he would be arrested and summarily executed. Elizabeth Wydeville must have realized that anyone supporting the mooted marriage between Henry Tudor and her daughter could be deemed guilty of misprision of treason.

We next hear of Nesfield in the summer of 1484, when he was captured while in naval combat with French and Scottish ships off Scarborough, and had to be ransomed by Richard III.⁶⁰ David Baldwin suggests that, because of his absence, Elizabeth Wydeville was placed in the custody of someone else and moved elsewhere, but it is also possible that Nesfield left someone trustworthy to keep an eye on her in his absence.⁶¹

Elizabeth’s cousin, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, had recently been appointed King’s Lieutenant in the North. The son of Richard’s sister Elizabeth and John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Lincoln’s loyalty had never been in doubt, and he now presided over the Council of the North, set up by Edward IV in 1472 to govern the region in the King’s name. In July 1484, Richard drew up ordinances for a new royal household—the King’s Household of the North—which was to be based at Sandal Castle, Yorkshire, Lincoln’s official headquarters. In September, Lincoln was also entrusted with responsibility for another royal household, at Sheriff Hutton Castle, fifty miles away, where the King was establishing a nursery for children of the House of York, notably Clarence’s son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, now aged nine, and his own bastard son, John of Gloucester, who was probably about the same age as Warwick. Richard had high hopes for this boy, whose “quickness of mind, agility of body, and inclination to all good customs” he warmly praised.⁶² Henry Lovell, Lord Morley, aged eighteen, Lincoln’s brother-in-law, also lived in the household. Some historians⁶³ have conjectured that Elizabeth’s brothers were among the children at Sheriff Hutton, having been secretly conveyed there from the Tower, but apart from a reference to “the Lord Bastard” in the household ordinances,⁶⁴ which probably refers to John of Gloucester, there is no evidence for this.

The ordinances laid down for the regulation of the establishment at Sheriff Hutton provided for “my lord of Lincoln and my Lord Morley to be at one breakfast, [and] the children together at one breakfast. My lord and the children” received the most generous allowances of food and drink. No other boys were to be allowed in the household apart from those sanctioned by Lincoln and the Council of the North,⁶⁵ from which we might infer that at least one daughter of the House of York was living there, probably Warwick’s sister Margaret, aged eleven.⁶⁶ It is unlikely that Richard III’s bastard daughter, Katherine Plantagenet, was present,⁶⁷ as she was now married to William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon.

It has been suggested by some historians⁶⁸ that Elizabeth and her sisters were sent to reside at Sheriff Hutton in 1484; certainly Elizabeth was staying there in the summer of 1485. But because she and her sisters were sent by their mother to court at Christmas 1484, and there is no record of Elizabeth Wydeville living at Sheriff Hutton, it is more likely that they were living with her, probably at Heytesbury. Moreover, there is no record of her younger daughters ever being at Sheriff Hutton, and Elizabeth, now eighteen, was too old to be one of the children described in the ordinances.⁶⁹

In 1484, according to Commines, the King offered Elizabeth Bishop Stillington’s bastard son, William, in marriage, which would have seemed a mighty insult, especially if she had come to regard Stillington as the archenemy of her family and the architect of its ruin. But the young man was shipwrecked off the coast of France, taken prisoner in Paris and “by mistake” starved to death.⁷⁰ No English source mentions this proposed marriage, and it would have contravened the terms of the King’s undertaking to Elizabeth Wydeville, so the tale was probably an invention or garbled gossip.

Anne of York’s betrothal to Philip of Burgundy had been broken off after her father’s death. In 1484, Richard arranged for her to be affianced to Lord Thomas Howard, the eldest grandson of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk,⁷¹ a good match in the circumstances. But Cecily had to endure the humiliation of her cousin, Anne de la Pole, being betrothed by King Richard to Prince James of Scots, her own former fiancé. Hall, the Tudor chronicler, observed: “Here may well be noted the disordered affection which this kind [king] showed to his blood; for he, not remembering the tyranny that he had executed against his brother’s sons, the wrong and manifest injury he had done to his brother’s daughters, both in taking from them their dignity, possessions, and living, thought it would greatly redound to his honor and fame if he promoted his sister’s child to the dignity of a queen, rather than to prefer his brother’s daughter, whom he had disinherited.”

Soon after Elizabeth left sanctuary, observed Croyland, “it was fully seen how vain are the thoughts of a man who desires to establish his interests without the aid of God.” On April 9, 1484, Richard’s only son, Edward of Middleham, the hope of his line, died at Middleham Castle “after an illness of but short duration.”⁷² When the news came, “you might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness by reason of their sudden grief.”⁷³ In the wake of the young Edward’s death, “after Easter” (which fell on April 18), rumors of the murder of the princes resurfaced (if they had ever gone away), and “much whispering was among the people that the King had the childer [sic] of King Edward put to death,” with much speculation as to how,⁷⁴ prompting More to write, years later, that “Englishmen declared that the imprecations of [the princes’] agonized mother” and her appeal for divine vengeance “had been heard.”

The death of Edward of Middleham strengthened Elizabeth’s own position as the rightful Yorkist heir.⁷⁵ “Still yet the King, [Richard] looked to the defense of his territory, for there was then a report that the exiles and those who had been proscribed would soon reach England with their leader, Henry Tudor, to whom all these exiles had sworn allegiance as if to their King, in the hope that a marriage could be arranged with King Edward’s daughter. King Richard was better prepared to resist that year than he would be at any time subsequently.”⁷⁶ How Elizabeth must have held her breath. But Henry Tudor did not come that year.