Richard III and the Murder in the Tower (19 page)

Again, by tradition, this unnamed author has been assumed to be Stillington. It is my contention that the individual ‘who was in London all the time’ was Catesby, and not Stillington. As we have seen, the traditional sources which name Stillington refer to him as having made the bill. Like Wood, I see these references emanating from his role in the Act of Parliament. The ‘parchment roll’ of 26 June is a creation I believe it possible to attribute to Catesby’s hand.

Given this timetable of events, a very pertinent question arises here, and I shall use Mowat’s words, who put it so succinctly:

Given the traditional story, let us take for the moment the premise that Stillington was the source of the pre-contract revelation. Although I will again conclude by disputing this premise, for the sake of the argument here let us say temporarily that this is so. The question then naturally arises, as Mowat indicates, when did the actual revelation take place? In this, one relatively modern historian, Sir Clements Markham, offers what appears to be a candidate date which he identifies as the Council meeting of 8 June 1483. Again, it is important to hear Markham in his own words.
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He says:

I can find no source earlier than Markham which identifies this as the crucial day on which the pre-contract was revealed. But it is worth noting that Markham is only saying ‘apparently’ here, and states no evidentiary basis for his speculation at this point, other, presumably, than his own intuition as to the timing of events. However, Markham’s immediate intuition is directly countered by Kendall’s observation, which, in contrast, is backed up by fact. Kendall reports: ‘Writing on June 9th to an acquaintance in the country, Simon Stallworth, a servant of the Lord Chancellor’s reports that there is nothing new since he has last written, sometime before May 19th.’ Now we must weigh in the balance here Markham’s intuition against the null evidence implied in the Stallworth letter. In my view, the preponderance of the evidence that we have must argue against Markham’s speculation. One further point also militates against the Markham proposition. The 8th was a Sunday and in other citations the Council meeting is purported to have occurred a day later, on Monday 9th.
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This interpretation might actually strengthen Markham’s proposition, but again the Stallworth letter is somewhat against it. There is, however, the small point of the cessation of the writs of the Privy Seal that again may be indicative here. We cannot thus rule out the possibility of the revelation taking place on the 9th out of hand. However, we must say that case for the 8th is doubtful and, similarly, the case for the 9th at present can at best be considered unproven. However, there is more.

A little further into Markham’s text we read what appears to be the definitive passage. It reads: ‘There was a prolonged sitting of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in the Council Chamber at Westminster, on June 9th Bishop Stillington brought in instruments, authentic doctors, proctors, and notaries of the law with depositions and diverse witnesses.’
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The authority that Markham cites for this observation is Grafton.
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At first blush this would seem to put paid to all that I have espoused in the present text. For if Stillington revealed the pre-contract to the Council meeting on the 9th, there can be no way that it was actually Catesby performing this self-same function on the 13th. However, when we delve a little deeper here we find an instance of one of the most frustrating aspects of Ricardian research. For it turns out that the original passage in Grafton’s
Chronicle
is some form of fictionalised account of a conversation between the Duke of Buckingham and Bishop Morton wherein, parenthetically, the duke is highly eulogistic of the bishop and his abilities. Upon closer reading, we find that the ‘he’ referred to in the passage cited by Markham is actually Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and not Stillington at all. Also, Grafton provides no dating of this meeting. Thus Markham transposes the individual involved and derives the dating from his own unsupported interpretation. This form of unbound speculation, if not outright misidentification, makes subsequent interpretation more than difficult,
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especially if one accepts Markham’s statements at face value. I find in light of these facts that I am justified in rejecting what Markham has suggested. I fail to find any creditable evidence here that Stillington presented anything to the Council on that date, or indeed at any other time. I have thus proposed here that the revelation actually took place on the morning of the 13th, some four or five days later, and that the informer involved was not Stillington at all but Catesby. I have further suggested that Catesby benefitted enormously from his act. However, supposing the traditional account to be correct and that Richard owed his throne to Stillington, let us see how the bishop was rewarded for this signal and indeed unique service to his new king.

If Stillington was actually the original source of Richard’s information concerning the pre-contract and its crucial implications, he received precious little reward for effectively elevating the Duke of Gloucester to the throne. For example, even Kendall notes that ‘Resentment against Edward for the loss of high office, a desire for revenge upon the Woodvilles may have urged him (Stillington) to make his declaration. No discernible reward did he receive from Richard …’
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Stillington did take part in the coronation of Richard III, where he was noted as performing the ceremony of hallowing the king and queen.
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Again, interpretation of this participation very much depends upon how one sees Stillington. If he did confirm the pre-contract then he would have understood that Richard was the rightful king. If he did not, or in actuality the pre-contract was only confabulation, then his actions at the coronation must have been of the highest order of hypocrisy.
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As is evident from the tenor of the present text, I tend toward the former interpretation.
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Thus, I believe he must have seen Richard as his rightful king, but, again, we see very little evidence of any tangible reward for Stillington in the short years of Richard’s reign up to the time of Bosworth.
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However, if Richard did not reward him, on the up side, Henry did not punish him to any significant extent either.

Regime change is an unsettling event and the days following the unexpected victory of Henry VII at Bosworth must have been quite dramatic for those who lived through them. Often the immediate actions of the new regime betray their most critical fears and some of the dictates of the new monarch can be viewed with this perspective in mind. It seems Henry was very anxious to secure at least two individuals who very much concern us here. Although we do not know where Stillington was on 22 August 1485, we do know that a warrant was issued for his arrest the next day in Leicester.
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It must have been pursued with some dispatch by Rawdon and his colleagues who were sent after the Bishop, since we understand that five days later Stillington was detained in prison in York and was ‘sore crased by reason of his trouble.’
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He certainly should have been. Not only had he taken part in efforts to extradite the one-time Earl of Richmond, now Henry VII, he was also the putative source of information on the pre-contract which bastardised Elizabeth of York, whom Henry was sworn to marry in an attempt to unify the country and solidify his own very shaky claim to the crown. We know that Henry took great pains to suppress the
Titulus Regius
, the central concern of which must have been the notation of the the pre-contract.
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All this would militate strongly against the continued health and well-being of Robert Stillington who, at the very best, seemed to be looking at a long term of imprisonment. After all, as the reputed author of the bill and the source of the revelation of the pre-contract to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, he must have surely been viewed as a very dangerous individual indeed to the new monarch. Yet where do we next meet Stillington? Puzzlingly, he is officiating at the coronation of Henry VII. This indeed is one of the central mysteries of Robert Stillington’s story. Why was he treated so leniently by an individual who would earn a reputation for exactly the opposite sort of behaviour?

In respect of Henry’s actions following Bosworth, we can compare his respective treatment of Catesby and Stillington. Here we find eminent differences. Catesby was executed even before Stillington was detained. If the reason were jealously on behalf of others in Richard’s realm it is difficult to see how Catesby had so offended the new King Henry VII if all he had done was work assiduously for the former king. Many had done so and even fought for Richard that day at Bosworth; these individuals were not beheaded, and some were not even punished. It may be that their noble birth and high station saved them, for Henry would need the nobility as all of his predecessors had. However, if Stillington was truly the source of the revelation of the pre-contract, surely he would have seen a much harsher punishment. The contrasting harshness to Catesby and the relative leniency to Stillington suggest that the culpability of the former (at least in the new regime’s eyes) was much greater. For me, it argues that Catesby was the source and Stillington the confirmation, and their respective levels of punishment reflected this. Of course, Stillington’s clerical status may also have been instrumental in him avoiding execution, but it is hard to see how it could act as a shield against a harsh sentence. From the perspective I have created, Stillington’s plea to Henry would have been that he was acting as a neutral churchman, answering to the then king as his duty dictated. I believe Henry accepted this explanation and excused Stillington any greater punishment on the promise of the same degree of loyalty to his own monarchy.
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Despite this degree of reconciliation, I do not argue that Stillington became either favoured by, or friends with, the new king. I believe that he had earned and suffered at least a degree of Henry’s disapprobation and, of course, Stillington was Yorkist to the last.

Some authors argue that Stillington’s exclusion from Henry VII’s first Parliament signifies the disgrace that he was in, yet we find that on 22 November 1485, just two months after Bosworth, Stillington was granted a full pardon.
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The only material penalty that he suffered was the deprivation of the deanery of St Martin. In the act repealing the
Titulus Regius
, Stillington was indeed accused of ‘horrible and haneous offences ymagined and doune by him against the King.’ Despite this rhetoric, very little in the way of real punishment was visited upon the good bishop. One would think that given this history of close shaves with the power of the throne, Stillington would have suspended his political activities and, at the age of at least sixty-five, retired to his religious calling. Yet this was not the case. He was directly involved with the Lambert Simnel rebellion. It was Stillington who himself had at least confirmed the existence and effect of the precontract, so presumably in 1487, in supporting Simnel, he understood that his previous actions had invalidated the claim of the pretender, whether he was purported to be Edward V or his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York. Was it because as a Yorkshireman he was loyal to the Yorkist party from first to last and sought to support what he wished or knew to be the last viable remaining male heir of the House of York? Even today, Yorkshiremen in general are known for their stubbornness and indeed their loyalty. Was this the last act of a faithful servant who must have known that he had little time left? Until we discover further evidence, this will remain just one of the many mysteries of the long-lived bishop.

After the defeat at the Battle of Stoke on 16 June 1487, four years to the day after the young Richard, Duke of York had been escorted from Westminster Abbey to the Tower, Stillington took refuge within the University of Oxford. At first the university authorities refused to give up the bishop, but eventually, under pressure from the king, he was delivered up, and imprisoned at Windsor in October 1487. Some three and a half years later, in May 1491, Stillington died, still a prisoner.
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His body was taken for burial at Wells Cathedral in a chapel which he himself had had caused to be built. By all accounts it was a splendid structure,
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but sadly it no longer stands today, having been pulled down some time early in the reign of Edward VI.