Richard III (3 page)

Just what York had to fear may be seen from the destruction of the Duke of Gloucester during the previous decade. In 1441 the court party had ruthlessly exploited the scandal when his silly Duchess, Eleanor Cobham, was found guilty of dabbling in sorcery – to find out if she would ever be Queen – and was made to walk barefoot through London for three days carrying a lighted taper before being imprisoned for life. Her husband was totally discredited. When the government finally arrested him in 1447, he quickly expired from a stroke, probably brought on by rage – at fifty-seven, a ripe old age for the time, he had already suffered attacks of ‘palsy’. Nevertheless, public opinion believed that ‘the good Duke Humphrey’ had been murdered.

When Duke Richard came to London, he demanded that the King should put on trial the ministers responsible for the disasters afflicting the realm. Henry made vague promises, summoning a Parliament. When it met in October 1450, the Commons was strong in support of York, but very few of the Lords were. None of his wishes was met. By the end of 1451 he was gathering an army and preparing to march
on London. In the event, he was arrested the following year and by 1453, although set at liberty, had been humiliated and isolated – he lost his Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland and his allies deserted him.

Then, in August 1453, Henry VI went mad from a ‘sudden fright’, unable to speak or move. (Catatonic schizophrenia has been suggested.)
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But two months later Margaret of Anjou bore a son, Edward of Lancaster, and demanded the regency. However, a number of peers had begun to support Duke Richard, notably his Nevill in-laws – Salisbury and his son Warwick – largely because they were waging a private war on the Percy family in the North. In March 1454 York was made Protector. He ruled with surprising moderation. Most unfortunately King Henry recovered his wits at the end of 1454, and with the Queen’s assistance Somerset and the court party had regained control of the government by the following spring. Given their refusal to compromise and the availability of private armies and of veteran commanders from the Hundred Years War, bloodshed was inevitable. Admittedly there can have been no more than 5,000 front-line troops in England who had served in the French campaigns; yet even so, most leaders in the first battles of the Wars of the Roses had fought in France and all of them must have possessed a nucleus of experienced men-at-arms.

Somerset and the Queen soon overplayed their hand. York, Salisbury and Warwick were summoned to appear at a council at Leicester on 21 May 1455. Plainly they were to be destroyed. They gathered an army and marched south. Somerset also assembled troops and, taking the King with him, went to meet them at St Albans on 22 May. In what was scarcely more than an armed affray Henry was wounded in the neck by an arrow; there were only a few hundred casualties – but among these was Somerset. However, there would be no more fighting for another four years. The court party had lost its leader and was not yet ready to accept Margaret in his place.

It is unlikely that little Richard ever saw much of his father. We may guess that his childhood was as painful as his birth; towards the end of the 1450s a doggerel poem about the Duke of York’s family comments, with apparent surprise, ‘Richard liveth yit’ – he must have had difficulty even to survive. We know that he spent a good part of
his early years at Fotheringay with his sister Margaret, who had been born in 1446, and his brother George, who had been born in 1449 (in Dublin). It had been fancifully suggested that Margaret ‘played mother to him’, but it is more likely that nurses performed this role.

The Tudor antiquary John Leland, who visited it about 1538, informs us that the town of Fotheringay was ‘but one street, all of stone building’. The castle was demolished long ago and only a grassy mound now remains, on a pleasant site amid lush meadows and rich cornfields by the banks of the beautiful River Nene. To the east it is not far from fenland, to the west from the Forest of Rockingham. We know that it was then very splendid and imposing, a double-moated castle with an unusually tall gatehouse. It had been largely rebuilt in the late fourteenth century in the shape of a fetterlock (a closed semi-oblong), an instrument for tethering horses which formed part of one of the badges of the House of York – the ‘Falcon and Fetterlock’. Leland, who saw it when it was still standing, says that it was ‘strong with double dykes and hath a keep very ancient and strong’ and that ‘there be very fair lodgings’.
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However, Leland also tells us that ‘the glory’ of Fotheringay ‘standeth by the parish church’. This was the mighty Perpendicular church of St Mary the Virgin and All Saints, built by the Dukes of York and only completed just before Richard’s birth. In those days it was a college of priests and choristers and as big as a cathedral – half pulled down at the Reformation – its walls a mass of eighty-eight stained-glass windows and its soaring, fan-vaulted tower crowned by a striking octagon lantern. To the north of the church were the conventual buildings, which housed a community of some thirty clerks – a cloister with a library and carrels, dormitories, a dining hall and a kitchen, a chapter house and the Master’s lodging.
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No doubt the children attended many imposing and gloriously sung services in St Mary’s. (Alas, today the tower is in a condition which makes it impossible to ring the bells.)

By 1456 the Queen and the court party had again regained control – causing Duke Richard ‘to stink in the King’s nostrils even unto death, as they insisted that he was trying to take the Kingdom into his own hands,’ says the
Croyland Chronicle
. There was an attempt at
reconciliation, the ‘Loveday’ of 24 March 1458 when the Yorkish lords and the sons of those killed at St Albans walked arm-in-arm to St Paul’s. But despite efforts by prelates, the political climate grew steadily more poisoned and more menacing. Margaret of Anjou took the court to the Midlands and began to build a power base on the estates of the Duchy of Lancaster, centred on such strongholds as Kenilworth. She was preparing for civil war.

By 1459 she was ready. A council of the realm was formally summoned to Coventry in June – York and his supporters were ostentatiously uninvited. Anxiously they assembled at Ludlow, collecting an army with which they hoped to force their way through to King Henry to justify themselves. Duchess Cicely joined her husband, bringing Margaret, George and Richard with her. Everything went wrong for the Yorkists. On the way to Ludlow, Salisbury fought an indecisive battle at Bloreheath and had two of his sons taken prisoner. Then most of Warwick’s troops deserted when the royal army finally marched on Ludlow in October. York lost his nerve and fled to Ireland. Salisbury and Warwick took refuge in Calais, where the latter was captain, taking with them the Duke’s eldest son Edward, Earl of March. The younger children stayed behind at Ludlow with their mother, where they were captured in the town on 13 October.

Cicely and her children were escorted to Coventry, where Parliament was in session. It attainted York and confiscated all his lands, the Duchess being left with a pittance for her support. She and her children were confined at a manor house belonging to her brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, which has not been identified. This may well have been when Richard first began to know his mother.

Meanwhile, York and his kinsmen were not idle. The Duke was welcomed ecstatically in Ireland by both Anglo-Irish lords and ‘wild Irish’ chieftains. An emissary from Somerset’s son and successor who tried to serve a writ on him was hanged, drawn and quartered. The Duke was visited early in 1460 by Warwick, who planned a joint invasion with him before sailing back to Calais, which he had made a centre of Yorkist intrigue. From there the exiled Earls waged a pirate war on royal ships, besides sending a stream of propaganda into England where they were already regarded with considerable sympathy.
The court party’s administration was as venal and unsatisfactory as ever. At last in June, Salisbury, Warwick and March landed in Kent and advanced on London, gathering support all the way. The following month they defeated the royal army near Northampton – one of the few casualties was little Richard’s gaoler, Buckingham – and captured Henry VI. Parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster in October, to reverse the attainders against York and the Earls. But even the latter had no intention of deposing King Henry.

John Paston’s man in London wrote that on the Monday after Lady Day (15 September) ‘my master Bowser, Sir Harry Ratford, John Clay and the harbinger of my Lord of March’ had come ‘desiring that my Lady of York might lie here until the coming of my Lord of York, and her two sons, my Lord George and my Lord Richard and my Lady Margaret her daughter, which I granted them in your name’. This was at Fastolf Place, Sir John Fastolf’s mansion inherited by Paston; it was in Southwark, near Tooley Street, on the south bank of the Thames opposite the Tower, a great moated and walled house with a large tree-filled garden and its own wharf.
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However, the Duchess

Cicely travelled in a wagon roofed with blue velvet and drawn by eight horses – one wonders if Richard saw her set off. Soon the Duke and Duchess were marching to London with 500 troops, who bore banners with the Royal Arms of England.

When they reached London, Duke Richard went to Westminster Hall. He walked arrogantly through the assembled House of Lords, with a sword of state borne before him as though he were King, and, going up to the throne, clapped his hand on it. There was a long, embarrassed silence. Then his kinsman Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury (and his wife’s brother-in-law) asked York if he wished to have an audience of King Henry. The Duke replied, ‘I know
of no person in this realm which oweth not to wait on me, rather than I on him.’ Even Salisbury and Warwick were taken aback. York moved into the royal apartments, sword in hand, ordering his men to break open the doors. A week later he formally claimed the throne as senior descendant of Edward III. (For the first time he took the surname Plantagenet – there is no evidence that it was ever used by his son Richard.) Asked why he had not made his claim before, he replied proudly, ‘Though right for a time rest and be put to silence, yet it rotteth not nor shall it perish.’ The Lords insisted on a compromise. Henry VI would keep the crown so long as he lived, but Duke Richard was to be Protector, receiving the Principality of Wales and Earldom of Chester and the Duchy of Cornwall; on Henry’s death he would become King and the succession would pass to his children. The helpless Henry gave his assent, disinheriting his own son.

Unfortunately for York the Lancastrians quickly recovered their strength, mustering troops in the North. They began to lay waste his own estates in Yorkshire, so in December he went up to deal with them. He did not realize that he would face a great army, and when he and Salisbury decided to spend Christmas at Sandal Castle near Wakefield, they found themselves cut off. Duke Richard sent a message to Edward of March to come and relieve him – strongly fortified, the castle could have held out for months. But York was too impatient. Commanded by the young Duke of Somerset – his old enemy’s son – the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford, the Lancastrians challenged him to give battle. Although his force was hopelessly inferior, on 30 December 1460 Duke Richard galloped out to charge his enemies. He was taken in flank by a shattering countercharge and killed, while his army was routed. (A quarter of a century later his youngest boy would behave in a very similar way at Bosworth.) His seventeen-year-old son, Edmund of Rutland, was caught on Wakefield bridge by Lord Clifford, who shouted, ‘By God’s blood thy father slew mine and so will I do thee’, and stabbed him to death despite his begging for mercy. Salisbury was captured and speedily beheaded. His head, together with those of Rutland and York, was stuck over the main gate into York, the Duke’s being crowned in derision with a paper coronet.

Margaret of Anjou and her army now marched south, while the Tudor family raised Wales for her. Warwick waited for her in London, Edward of March setting off to stop the Welsh, whom he soon broke at Mortimer’s Cross near Wigmore – heartened by the uncanny spectacle of three suns in the sky which became one (a parhelion). The Queen’s northern troops advanced, plundering, burning and raping, like ‘pagans or Saracens,’ says the
Croyland Chronicle
. Although they won a considerable victory at the bloody second battle of St Albans, London refused to admit the Queen, instead letting in Warwick and Edward of March, who had joined forces. When the latter proclaimed himself King Edward IV in March 1461, Londoners cheered him rapturously.

After the fresh disaster at St Albans, the mourning Duchess of York – still presumably lodged at Fastolf Place – hastily sent George and Richard across the sea to the Low Countries with a few trusted servants, to find refuge with the Duke of Burgundy. The Burgundian lands – modern Holland and Belgium together with a large block of eastern France – were almost an independent kingdom under Duke Philip the Good, who was England’s natural if faithless ally against the French (just as the King of Scots was the latter’s traditional ally against the English). At first he took ostentatiously small notice of these embarrassing refugees, who were sent to obscure lodgings at Utrecht. But on 12 April news reached the Duke that Edward had won a decisive victory and must henceforward be regarded as undoubted King of England. Philip at once gave orders for the two boys to be treated as royal princes and brought to his glittering court at Bruges. When they arrived, he was flatteringly attentive – the Milanese envoy reported that, ‘The Duke, who is kind in every way, has visited them at their lodgings where he showed the utmost respect.’

On the bitterly cold Palm Sunday (29 March) of 1461 Edward had engaged the Lancastrian army at Towton, about eight miles from York. He had taken a fortnight to march up from the capital, gathering recruits as he came. Twenty-eight lords (nearly half the peerage) and possibly as many as 50,000 troops took part in the battle. It snowed all day, the flakes blowing uphill with Yorkist arrows into the Lancastrians’ faces. The latter’s arrows fell short, but they charged downhill blindly
and, after several hours of hacking and stabbing, their superior numbers had nearly broken Edward’s army. Then his ally the Duke of Norfolk arrived with fresh troops and the Lancastrians ran. Terrible slaughter ensued. The River Wharfe ran with blood while the snow on the ground was crimson over an area six miles long and half a mile wide. Later the heralds claimed to have counted 28,000 corpses. Among them was that of Rutland’s butcher, Lord Clifford. Every captured nobleman and gentleman was beheaded, including forty-two knights. Margaret escaped to Scotland, taking Henry VI and their son with her.