Richard III and the Murder in the Tower (5 page)

We are fortunate in that we have a fairly good idea as to how long messages seem to have taken to travel between the two major cities of London and York. We know that with a more leisurely pace, Brackenbury
⁶³
had taken nine days on this trip, while the more urgent journey of Ratcliffe was completed in about four days. This being so, and given the urgency of the present communication to halt the summons to what appears to have been a parliament of Edward V, it is reasonable to suggest that the present supersedes was sent out some time either late on Monday 16th or a little later on perhaps the morning of Tuesday 17th. If either of these eventualities is correct, and there is every reason to believe that they are,
⁶⁴
then Richard appears to have altered his course of action by the start of the week, following on the events of Friday 13 June.

Our understanding of events of this day and those immediately preceding it are enlightened by another of the letters from Simon Stallworth to Sir William Stonor. Like the previous missive of 9 June, this critical communication is reproduced in full in the Appendix I of this work. Stallworth indicated that he was unwell, which may account for the brevity of his letter, especially so in relation to the many critical events which had occurred since what we assume was his last letter. Stallworth then had much to report. First, he recorded the execution of Hastings. The hiatus in completing his letter (perhaps because of his illness) has helped cause the confusion over the date of the latter’s execution (
see
Appendix II). What we do not know is the exact date on which Stallworth wrote (or had caused to be written) the first section of this present letter which was formally dated 21 June. However, we can infer that the first section was written almost certainly before Friday 20th, since it is his reference to Hastings’ execution ‘As on Fryday last was the lord Chamberleyn hedded sone upone noon’ that caused much of the trouble about dates.

Stallworth further reported that the Duke of York had emerged from sanctuary, so we may also assume that the first part of the letter was written either late on or after Monday 16th. Of this event he reports that a ‘gret plenty of harnest men’ accompanied the cardinal, the Lord Chancellor and the Duke of Buckingham, who received the young prince and accompanied him to Westminster Hall, where Richard received him ‘at the Starre Chamber Dore with many lovynge wordys.’ Following the greetings, the young prince was accompanied by the Cardinal to the Tower of London, where Stallworth reported that he was ‘blesid be Jhesus, mery.’ It appeared to Stallworth that Lord Lisle, the queen’s brother-inlaw, ‘is come to my lord protectour, and awaits upon him,’ suggesting some degree of rapprochement on behalf of the former.
⁶⁵
Stallworth then went on to speculate about the rumour that 20,000 of Gloucester’s and Buckingham’s men would soon be in the capital, presuming their role would be to keep peace and order. He noted that the allegiance of those formerly under the lordship of Hastings had now transferred to Buckingham. Stallworth reported on the fate of the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of Ely, Oliver King, John Forster and Jane Shore, speculating on their eventual fate and current circumstances. He excused himself at the end of the letter, noting that his illness was such that ‘I may not wel holde my penne.’

This and other sources
⁶⁶
suggest that from 16 June onward, after securing the young Richard, Duke of York, the behaviour of the Protector began to change. For example, Kendall suggested that Richard ceased to wear mourning clothes and started to wear purple, which is an evident sign of royalty. Also, he was seen riding through the city with a train of lords and attendants and dividing his time between Baynard’s Castle and Crosby Place. Further, Kendall asserted that Richard now started to talk openly about Stillington’s ‘revelation’ concerning Edward IV’s alleged marriage pre-contract with Eleanor Butler before he married Elizabeth Woodville.
⁶⁷
This change in behaviour is helpful in narrowing the window in which the actions of Richard, Duke of Gloucester seem to deviate from an expected course of events leading to Edward V’s coronation and to his own eventual ascension as king. As we work toward a conclusion of the present sequence, it appears that the critical weekend period is from Friday 13 to Monday 16 June, and Stallworth’s letter is a key piece of evidence for this proposition. As such, it is reproduced in full in the Appendix I. As Kendall concludes, ‘When Stallworthe wrote his agitated letter on Saturday [21 June], Richard had come to his fateful decision.’ In respect of Kendall’s conclusion here, I thoroughly concur.

To the Ricardian scholar, the events which followed on from this crucial interval are vital in order to understand the way in which Richard claimed the throne.
⁶⁸
However, for my present purposes, I shall only give a brief synopsis of these events,
⁶⁹
since I believe that Richard’s critical decision to assume the throne had been taken nine days earlier. What now plays out is the fulfillment of that fundamental decision. It was on this Sunday that the brother of the Mayor of London,
⁷⁰
Ralph Shaa (Shaw) preached a sermon at St Paul’s Cross on the theme that ‘bastard slips shall not take root.’
⁷¹
It was clearly and explicitly directed at the sons of Edward IV, and would have certainly been appreciated by his audience as such. Mancini indicates that it was one of a number of such public announcements.
⁷²
This being so, it must have been part of a concerted effort to lay the groundwork for Richard’s taking of the throne. If Mancini is correct, then such a strategy would have required some form of planning and so fixes Richard’s actions and thus his decision as occurring some time before this Sunday. Parenthetically, Shaa died in the following year and his death was attributed by More to shame and remorse.
⁷³
Shame and remorse seem to have fallen out of favour as modern causes of death, and we can certainly see this as another attempt at
post hoc
condemnation on More’s behalf.

In the days that followed, the path that Richard had created to the throne must have followed to a reasonable degree upon his expectations. One of his primary concerns since Stony Stratford had been the fate of those of the Woodville clan that he had secured there and now his strategy here was completed. On 23 June, Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers made his will while at the Castle of Sheriff Hutton.
⁷⁴
Shortly after, he was moved from Sheriff Hutton to Pontefract (Pomfret) Castle. In his will, he named Russell and Catesby as executors. It is of more than passing interest that he named Catesby here, and it is a point to which I shall return. The campaign to push Richard’s legitimate candidature as king persisted in the capital and was met with some degree of doubt and reticence. However, since the power resided with Richard this was largely a public relations exercise rather than a potential plebiscite. On 24 June, in the north of England, Ratcliffe arrived at Pontefract with the execution orders for Rivers, who had come from Sheriff Hutton, as well as Grey, who was brought from Middleham Castle, and Vaughan, who was at Pontefract already.
⁷⁵
A day later they were executed, and, like Hastings, they received no trial.
⁷⁶
It is just conceivable and barely logistically possible that Ratcliffe could have returned to London after delivering Richard’s letter of 10 June to York and 11 June to Lord Neville. This would, presumably, have involved some very hard riding from the 16th onward to London in a four-day journey and then another four days to return to Pontefract. It appears much more likely that Ratcliffe had the orders of execution with him when he first left London on, presumably, 11 June. This being so, it is certainly possible that Hastings saw the execution warrants as More speculated. As such, Hastings would surely have had occasion to be even more grateful and loyal to Richard, who had now dispatched some of his principal enemies. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that the orders were carried to Ratcliffe by a subsequent messenger,
⁷⁷
but this seems an unlikely task to have entrusted to anyone but a very close and influential associate.

In the days which followed, it appears to have been Buckingham’s role to act as the ‘front-man’ to convince a sufficient number of people to accept Richard’s claim. At a meeting in Westminster, Mancini noted that Buckingham was to present these respective grounds, which later appeared in the
Titulus Regius
of 1484. Among these claims, the issue of the pre-contract stands out. Although not the only objection, it must have been the one with the greatest probability of material provenance. The accusation of the use of witchcraft, especially in relation to Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, might well have been an expected and even required smear. The problem concerning the secrecy of Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, the lack of approval by the lords and the absence of the publication of the banns are hardly crucial reasons, since the alleged marriage with Eleanor Butler was of exactly the same form. Thus we are left with Stillington’s confirmation of the pre-contract.

On 26 June, just one day after the Pontefract executions, the lords gathered at Baynard’s Castle in order to petition Richard to take the throne.
⁷⁸
As the front-man for this enterprise, Buckingham’s activities were nearing fruition. After an evident show of humility, Richard accepted the throne and began to put his own administration in place.
⁷⁹
Of particular interest for the present work, William Catesby was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Later he would be Speaker of the House in the only Parliament held during Richard’s reign. The final outcome of this train of events was that on the 6 July 1483, Richard, Duke of Gloucester was crowned Richard III in Westminster Abbey.
⁸⁰
It was but two years and two months to the Battle of Bosworth Field.

I started this chapter with the central question which acts to bias any assessment of Richard III and his ambitions. If one sees Richard looking for the crown on or before his brother Edward’s death then one is likely to adopt a position reflective of Richard as a long-term, scheming usurper.
⁸¹
The later one places Richard’s decision to assume the throne, the more lenient one is liable to be in one’s viewpoint. In what I have tried to set forth here, I have suggested that the interval around the critical Council meeting on Friday 13 June was the juncture at which Richard made this fateful decision. In fact, although not indispensable to my present argument, I would like to suggest that it was the events of that very morning that proved the pivotal turning point which changed Richard from fairly assiduous Protector to aspiring monarch. Thus, to understand the story of Richard III, we have to understand the events of that critical day: Friday 13th June 1483. It is to the examination of this fateful day that I now turn.

The holiest harlot in his realm.

Any explanation of the events which took place on 13 June 1483 at the Tower of London has to begin some decades earlier and some distance away from London. John Ashdown-Hill, whose recent work has been most informative and influential,
¹
has asserted that the events of that summer have to be viewed in light of the question of the so-called ‘pre-contract,’ since, as he points out, ‘Richard III’s claim to the throne was based chiefly on the presumption that Lady Eleanor Talbot was the legitimate wife of Edward IV.’
²
It is this relationship between Edward IV and his nominal ‘uncrowned queen’
³
which proves to be crucial in respect of the explanation of events that I propose.

Since this issue of the pre-contract is so important, it is fundamental to begin with some of the facts of Eleanor Talbot’s life (
c
. 1436–1468) and her actions and activities before and after the so-called ‘pre-contract’ occurred. Eleanor was the tenth of the eleven children of John Talbot (
c
. 1387–1453), the 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, whose spectacular demise is recorded to have occurred in battle with the French at Castillon on 17 July 1453. The earl himself was the first child of Richard Talbot (4th Baron Talbot of Goodrich) and his wife, Ankaret (Le)Strange. This couple was also blessed with a large family and had nine children, the last of whom, Alice, we shall hear more of presently. John Talbot married twice. The first time was around 1405 to Maud Neville (
c
. 1390–1424), with whom he had five children, two of whom died in early childhood. Talbot’s second marriage occurred sometime around 1424
⁴
to Margaret Beauchamp (1404–1467), by whom he had a further five children, the penultimate child of that marriage being Eleanor herself. We can see painted representations of John Talbot and his second wife in Figures 5 and 6.
⁵

To the best of our knowledge, Eleanor was born probably in either February or March 1436, possibly at the manor house of Blakemere, near Whitchurch in Shropshire.
⁶
Ashdown-Hill argued for this location, as it was a house that her father John had inherited from his mother and was apparently a favourite residence. However, as he also notes, it could equally well have been Goodrich Castle in Herefordshire.
⁷
As will become evident, the latter location is one of potentially great importance and can perhaps serve to render some insight into Eleanor’s subsequent relationships and actions. It is probable that Eleanor would have been brought up in one main location but would almost certainly have visited a number of the family residences, including the likes of Sheffield Castle. Although John Talbot’s favouritism toward Blakemere is suggested by his eventual nearby burial under the porch of St Alkmund’s church in Whitchurch, Shropshire,
⁸
Eleanor may have been bought up in Goodrich Castle, since on the monument which commemorated his first burial at Rouen in Normandy, her father is titled ‘Lord of Goodrich and Orchenfield’.
⁹