Blood Sisters (25 page)

Despite her royal surcoat and train of crimson velvet, it would have been shoeless that Anne followed the king into the Abbey, flanked by two bishops and followed by two duchesses, her ladies, knights and esquires. Prostrating herself on ground carefully carpeted and cushioned, she was anointed after her husband (the
Little Device
specified that her surcoat should be made ‘opened before unto her waist fastened with a lace for the holy unction’), ringed, crowned and invested with a sceptre and rod. Her ceremony, however, deliberately fell slightly short of Richard’s. The couple then celebrated mass and drank from the same chalice in ‘a sign of unity’, says the
Liber Regalis
which had made provision for this rare event, because in Christ they were one flesh by bond of marriage. Anne was now consecrated to her country’s service and must surely have felt a dizzying, almost terrifying mix of grandeur, responsibility and sheer fatigue.

By St Edward’s shrine king and queen were taken to separate closets and allowed to break their fast, and there the queen ‘shall be changed by her gentlewomen of her Chamber into new garments’ – a surcoat and long-trained mantle of purple velvet this time – before resuming their thrones and their regalia; and thence back to Westminster Hall and to their chambers.

The menu for the banquet that afternoon in Westminster Hall included pheasant in train (with its tail feathers); roasted cygnet, egrets and green geese; roe deer ‘reversed in purple’ (literally turned inside out and the meat dyed); glazed kid; baked oranges; fresh sturgeon with fennel; and fritters flavoured with rose and jasmine. As many as three thousand guests may have been fed, and the proceedings lasted so long that the third course could not be served. Everyone who was anyone was in town for the parliament that had been summoned to greet not this king but Edward V.

Almost everyone, anyway. Not only was Cecily Neville not there, nor was the Duke of Buckingham’s Woodville-born wife – despite his own prominence in the ceremony. Richard’s sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, however, walked behind the queen leading Anne’s ladies. Archbishop Bourchier, who had promised Elizabeth Woodville her younger son’s safety, had officiated but, says Mancini, unwillingly – and apparently he abstained from the banquet. Margaret Beaufort, by contrast, carried the new queen’s crimson train.

Before the coronation, Margaret’s husband Stanley had been in trouble with the new regime: Thomas More describes him as having been attacked by the same men who arrested Hastings at the council meeting, and Vergil has him being placed under arrest. But Richard quickly changed tactics with the great landowner: when Richard arrived at the Tower before his coronation, he appointed Stanley steward of his household. Margaret’s own intentions at this point seem to have been merely to come to an accord with Richard and get her son Henry Tudor home from Brittany, on the terms agreed with Edward IV the previous year. She had opened negotiations in June through Buckingham; again the possibility of a marriage between Henry and one of Edward IV’s daughters had been mooted; this was, however, to be subject entirely to Richard, ‘without any thing to be taken or demanded for the same espousals but only the king’s favour’.

On 5 July she and her husband met Richard and his chief justice at Westminster. Margaret might even then have been two-faced in her approach – just as Richard was simultaneously conducting his own less well-intentioned negotiations with Brittany to get Henry handed back to him. The events of the next few months would force these players to reveal their hand.

A month before Richard and Anne’s coronation, that of Edward V was still assumed a certainty; three months earlier Edward IV had still been alive, the future of his dynasty apparently assured. All the same, Richard’s speedy takeover seemed to be accepted not only by Margaret Beaufort but also by Margaret of Burgundy – who probably saw this as a simple transfer of power without contemplating any fatal con-sequences. In any case, the Burgundian Margaret had matters of her own to attend to. By the terms of the treaty of Arras of December 1482 the Dauphin was to marry the deceased Mary of Burgundy’s daughter in place of Elizabeth of York: the infant had been handed over to the French on the same day, 24 April, as the putative Edward V left Ludlow. Mary’s young son and heir Philip was in Ghent, whose authorities refused to give him up. As his father Maximilian struggled to regain control of the duchy and the motherless child, Margaret was preoccupied by the need to help and then to care for the little boy. She appealed to her brother for aid.

Richard, however, was more concerned with establishing himself in his own kingdom. Soon after the coronation, the new king and queen set out on progress. On 19 July they travelled from Greenwich to Windsor, where Anne stayed while Richard made a diversion westwards, to meet up with the queen again in Warwick in the second week of August. Anne seems not to have taken part in the whole of Richard’s exhausting programme. But on 15 August she joined him for the rest of the progress north to York, where they stayed for three weeks.

The highlight of their visit to York was to be the investiture of their son Edward as Prince of Wales. Young as he was – perhaps no more than seven – he would still be the figurehead representing his father’s rule in the north. Such ceremonies were all the more important for a regime still trying to demonstrate its legitimacy – and besides, the city had always been faithful to Richard. The citizens of York deserved to see their new, their own, king and queen, wearing their crowns and walking through the streets, holding the hands of their newly honoured son.

On their arrival in York from Pontefract the city dignitaries escorted them past a series of pageants to the archbishop’s palace. On 8 September, a celebratory mass, at which the Minster’s relics were displayed, was followed by the knighting of the prince, along with Richard’s nephew Warwick and his own bastard son, and Edward’s investiture. In due course the couple escorted their son back to Pontefract before moving on to Lincoln on 11 October. At Lincoln, however, news of a fresh crisis greeted them.

As Richard (and Anne) consolidated his rule, Elizabeth Woodville’s young sons had presumably remained in the Tower. Mancini wrote that ‘after Hastings was removed’ – in the second half of June – ‘all the attendants who had waited upon the king [Edward V] were debarred access to him. He and his brother were withdrawn in the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether.’ He adds that ‘the physician Argentine, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the twelve year old king, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him’. Fabian’s report of the boys seen ‘shooting and playing in the gardens of the Tower by sundry times’ might seem to run on into late summer or early autumn; but More embroiders Mancini’s story and relates how after some time in captivity the elder boy ‘never tied his points, nor ought wrought of himself’ – which sounds very much like a state of depression. The continental chronicler Jean Molinet who had replaced Georges Chastellain at the Burgundian court gives a dramatic description of the younger boy urging his brother to learn how to dance, and the elder replying that they should rather learn how to die ‘because I believe I know well that we will not be in this world much longer’.

Polydore Vergil – that unabashed Tudor apologist, writing well after the event – was very sure he knew just what had happened since the first days of August. He has Richard arriving in Gloucester on progress, and there ‘the heinous guilt of wicked conscience’ so tormented him that he decided to free himself of his anxieties once and for all. It was from there, Vergil says, that he sent word the princes were to be killed. But the Lieutenant of the Tower, Robert Brackenbury, refused to obey such wicked instructions, so Richard was forced to find another instrument.

Vergil’s timing cannot be presumed accurate. Crowland suggests only that, while Richard was on his progress, rumours began to spread – adding that in those same months it was advised ‘that some of the king’s daughters should leave Westminster in disguise and go in disguise to the parts beyond sea; in order that, if any fatal mishap should befall the said male children of the late king in the Tower, the kingdom might still, in consequence of the safety of the daughters, one day fall again into the hands of the rightful heirs’. Richard responded by ordering a blockade of the Tower. All the same, there is a reason Richard’s attitudes towards the princes might indeed have been hardening in late July. There had been a rescue attempt.

Around that time a number of men were arrested because ‘they were purposed to have set on fire diverse parts of London, which fire, while men had been staunching, they would have stole out of the Tower, the prince Edward, & his brother the Duke of York’. The report comes from the antiquarian John Stow a century later, but the contemporary Thomas Basin confirms it. Interestingly, the men also ‘should have sent writings to the earls of Richmond and Pembroke’ – Henry and Jasper Tudor. In early August Margaret Beaufort’s half-brother John Welles led a rising at her childhood home of Maxey. From this, many commentators have deduced that Margaret Beaufort gave her support to the plot: the seventeenth-century antiquary George Buck believed the negotiations with Richard had been a feint on the part of the ‘cunning countess’ – though it is not easy to see just where her advantage lay in freeing the princes. It is easier to imagine Richard – when the news had reached him, in the west – deciding that the boys were not, as he had hoped, altogether neutralised by the declaration of bastardy.

Vergil’s account, written in the sixteenth century, can no longer be distinguished from information or disinformation put out in the interim: it is likely he had been fed a version of events that suited the Tudors. But as Vergil points out, it is interesting that at York Richard founded a college of a hundred priests, which might have been a huge gesture of expiation or reparation. Vergil says also that Richard purposely let it slip out that the boys were dead, ‘[so] that after the people understood no issue male of king Edward to be now left alive, they might with better mind and good will bear and sustain his government’. He describes, moreover, the reception of the news by ‘the unfortunate mother’ Elizabeth Woodville, to whom it was ‘the very stroke of death’:

for as soon as she had intelligence how her sons were bereft this life, at the very first motion thereof, the outrageousness of the thing drove her into such passion as for fear forthwith she fell into a swoon, and lay lifeless a good while; after coming to her self, she weepeth, she cryeth out aloud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair, and, overcome in fine with dolour, prayeth also her own death, calling by name now and then among her most dear children, and condemning herself for a mad woman, for that (being deceived by false promises) she had delivered her younger son out of sanctuary, to be murdered of his enemy.

Her only resource was to beg God for revenge.

It may have been now that Margaret Beaufort recast her hopes for her son Henry. (In 1483 she purchased from William Caxton a copy of a French romance called
Blanchardin and Eglantine
, about a lover exiled from his intended bride, who was herself shut up in a citadel, surrounded by her enemies.) And if it were now that Elizabeth Woodville – possibly influenced by Margaret’s agents – became convinced her sons were dead, it is no wonder she gave her consent to a joint conspiracy.

The go-between keeping the two ladies in touch was Margaret Beaufort’s physician, the Welshman Lewis Caerleon – ‘a grave man and of no small experience’, says Vergil, with whom ‘she was wont oftentimes to confer freely’. Cambridge-educated, also an astronomer and mathematician, he would still be in the records as employed by Elizabeth of York a decade later.

And she [Margaret], being a wise woman, after the slaughter of king Edward’s children was known, began to hope well of her son’s fortune … Wherefor forthwith not neglecting so great an opportunity, as they were consulting together, she uttered to Lewis that the time was now come when as king Edward’s eldest daughter might be given in marriage to her son Henry … and therefore prayed him to deal secretly with the queen of such affair; for the queen also used his head, because he was a very learned physician.

Vergil says Lewis, presumably on Margaret’s instruction, pretended this idea was ‘devised of his own head’.

Elizabeth Woodville, Vergil reports, was ‘so well pleased with this device’
¹¹
that she sent Caerleon back to Margaret promising to recruit all Edward IV’s supporters, if Henry would be sworn to take Elizabeth of York in marriage as soon as he had the realm (or else Cecily, the younger daughter, ‘if th’other should die before he enjoyed the same’). Margaret sent out her man Reginald Bray to gather her friends; Elizabeth Woodville sent word to hers. Margaret was on the point of sending a protégé of Caerleon’s, a young priest called Christopher Urswick
¹²
whom she had taken into her household, to her son Henry in Brittany when she had news that halted her in her tracks. Hers was not the only conspiracy afoot.

The Duke of Buckingham had played a leading part in placing Richard on the throne but had since become disaffected. When Buckingham left Richard at Gloucester in early August, and returned to his own home of Brecon Castle, that discontent had been purposefully fostered by the man he had been asked to hold in custody there: Margaret’s old associate John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Morton urged Buckingham to take the crown ‘if you love God, your lineage, or your native country’.

Buckingham responded that only recently he had indeed ‘suddenly remembered’ his own lineage through the Beaufort line: on his way home to Brecon, however, he had happened to meet Margaret Beaufort on the road, which reminded him of her superior claim (superior if the legitimacy question is ignored). This image of a chance meeting is likely to be disingenuous; but at some stage the conspirators must have decided to pool their resources. In the seventeenth century George Buck declared that Margaret’s was the brain behind the final plans ‘for she was entered far into them, and none better plunged in them and deeply acquainted with them. And she was a politic and subtle lady.’