‘God never gave this world a more notable example, neither in what unsurety stands this worldly state, or what mischief works the proud enterprise of a high heart, or finally what wretched end ensues from such pitiless cruelty.’
Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third
‘One should avoid being despised and hated.’
Machiavelli, Il Principe
Henry VII later erected a very modest tombstone over his rival in the Grey Friars’ church at Leicester. Made of coloured stone, it cost a mere £10. 1s. 0d. This disappeared at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when the friary was demolished. Some sources said that Richard’s bones had been dug up and thrown into the River Soar, while his coffin was supposed to have been used as a horses’ drinking trough. Scholars were therefore astonished when the skeleton was found under a car park in September 2012.
Much has been made of the dismay shown by the Mayor and Corporation of York at the news of Bosworth. Yet there is no other record whatever of any regret throughout the entire Kingdom. Everywhere King Henry was accepted without demur. So marked a lack of opposition is surely significant.
Some of the Household were attainted, and a few were executed. Most made their peace with Henry, like Sir Ralph Assheton, who lived until 1489 when – according to tradition – he was murdered by his tenantry. Another who did so was Sir James Tyrell. Sir Marmaduke Constable survived to command the left wing at Flodden and contribute to the terrible defeat of the Scots in 1513. (A lengthy and somewhat boastful list of Little Sir Marmaduke’s military exploits, on a brass plate over his tomb, tactfully omits his campaigns with Richard.)
21. Roger Wake (c. 1452–1503) of Blisworth, Northamptonshire – a direct descendant of Hereward the Wake. Catesby’s brother-in-law, he fought for Richard at Bosworth but survived the battle and was pardoned by Henry VII. From a brass at Blisworth.
After allowing a decent interval to elapse, emphasizing that he owed nothing to her claims, the new King married Elizabeth of York. Bacon, Henry Tudor’s first biographer, says that ‘he shewed himself no very indulgent husband towards her, though she was beautiful, gentle and fruitful. But his aversion towards the House of York was so predominant in him, as it found place not only in his wars and councils, but in his chamber and bed.’ She bore him several sons, of whom the future Henry VIII alone survived her, and died in childbirth in 1503. Her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, had quickly fallen out with her son-in-law; deprived of her briefly restored estates, she led ‘a wretched and miserable life’ in poverty at Bermondsey Abbey until her death in 1492.
Richard’s sister, Margaret of York – the dowager Duchess of Burgundy – lived on in the Low Countries as a childless widow till 1503. King Henry confiscated her English lands, but she possessed rich estates abroad from where ‘mine old lady of Burgundy’ plotted ceaselessly if unavailingly against her brother’s supplanter until her dying day.
However, some of the dead King’s men refused to accept the new regime. In 1486 Sir Humphrey Stafford tried to raise Worcestershire, but failed and was beheaded. Although it was a long time before the Yorkist cause was finally extinguished, it was crippled by a lack of acceptable Pretenders. In 1487 an Oxford baker’s boy, Lambert Simnel, was transformed into Clarence’s son, Warwick – although the Earl was still alive, a prisoner in the Tower of London – with Margaret of York’s money and the support of the Earl of Lincoln, of Francis Lovell and of various Irish magnates; he was crowned in Dublin as ‘Edward VI’. An army of Yorkist die-hards, of Irish kerne and German mercenaries then invaded England. The battle of Stoke ended this extremely dangerous challenge the same year, Henry being once again indebted to Oxford’s superlative generalship.
The new dynasty was then menaced by a young Flemish adventurer, Perkin Warbeck, who posed as the Duke of York, Edward V’s brother, and styled himself ‘Richard IV’. Perhaps fittingly, in 1495 the arch-traitor Sir William Stanley was executed for intriguing with Warbeck; as Bacon puts it, Henry had recalled ‘that Stanley at Bosworth-field, though he came time enough to save his life, yet he stayed long enough to endanger it’. The wretched Warwick was later to be another casualty of Warbeck’s ambition.
Lincoln’s brothers took up the claim, and it was for harbouring one of them that Tyrell lost his life. In 1525 Henry VIII was beside himself with joy when Richard de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk – the ‘White Rose’, briefly recognized by the French as King of England – was killed at Pavia. In 1541 Henry beheaded the last living Plantagenet, Clarence’s daughter, the aged Countess of Salisbury, together with many of her kinsmen, largely because of their Yorkist blood. The ultimate Yorkist victim was Clarence’s great-grandson Sir Arthur Pole, who had approached Mary, Queen of Scots, offering to forego his right to the English throne if she would create him Duke of Clarence and was found guilty of treason – however Elizabeth spared his life because of his royal blood and he died a prisoner at the Tower in 1570.
‘Neo-Yorkism’, and attempts to rehabilitate Richard III, began with the eccentric antiquarianism of the early seventeenth century. It was made fashionable in the eighteenth by Horace Walpole and his taste for perversity and Gothic fantasy. Fuelled by Victorian romanticism, it reached its apogee in 1906 with the publication of Sir Clements Markham’s impassioned defence of the King, a wildly romantic book which inspired Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time, but whose very special pleading has been increasingly refuted by new discoveries – not least by that from the skeleton at Leicester.
Nevertheless, the White Legend continues to appeal to every Anglo-Saxon lover of a lost cause and, in particular, to lady novelists. All these latter-day champions of Richard share a marked characteristic of their hero, an invincible reluctance to face facts. They cannot accept the stark reality, the tragic grandeur, of the Black Legend.