Richard The Chird (63 page)

Comedy then gave way to the grim drama of Northumberland's murder and the insurrection that immediately followed it. The rebels stormed into the city of York, where they were joined by the Mayor and several gentlemen, for, says Bacon, the memory of King Richard still "laid like lees at the bottom of men's hearts, and if the vessels were once stirred, it would rise." But, the rest of the country remaining quiet, the Earl of Surrey quickly came north with an armed force and put down the insurrection. The North would continue to stir up rebellions, culminating in the great rising against Henry VIII, the Pilgrimage of Grace. Its motives were religious and economic, but many of the leaders must have remembered King Richard from their childhood and recalled what it had cost their fathers to remain loyal to him.

In the spring of 1491, meanwhile, just two years after they had had serious trouble with King Henry, the city magistrates learned that John Burton, the schoolmaster of St. Leonard's Hospital, was making mischief by saying that one John Payntor had called the Earl of Northumberland a traitor for betraying King Richard. When summoned before them, Burton stuck to his story. However, according to John Payntor, who was then called in, Burton had said that King Richard was a hypocrite and a crouchback and was buried in a ditch like a dog; he, Payntor, had retorted that he lied — adding prudently that the King had buried him like a noble gentleman! Since the exchange had taken place in the house of William Plumer in the presence of three clerics of importance, they were then asked to give testimony. All stoutly denied that Payntor had said anything treasonable, Richard Flint, a chaplain, deposing that Burton had

called Richard "caitiff" and used other "unfitting language." The most important of the ecclesiastics, Christopher Wood, the Prior of Bolton Abbey in Craven, was absent at this time from the city, but he made haste to send his deposition by messenger. According to the Prior, Burton had said of King Richard that "he loved him never, and was buried in a dike. John Payntor

said it made little matter neither of his love nor his and as

for burial, it pleased the King's grace to bury him in a worshipful place." Payntor, declared the Prior, had uttered nothing treasonable. He added that it was his opinion at the time that the schoolmaster was the worse for drink. The Mayor ended the affair by commanding both men to keep the King's peace on pain of forfeiture of a hundred marks. However pleasing they might be to the King's ears, slurs upon Richard did not pass unchallenged in the city of York.

Thus did he remain alive in many men's memories. But memories are mute and the written word was dangerous. Henry had the writers, and what Henry's court said was all that counted. King Richard, such as he was in life—confused and diligent and erring and earnest—was buried beneath the black alluvial deposits of the Tudor historians, who created in his stead a simulacrum—an ogre, atop which King Henry was displayed, rampant, rescuing England.

APPENDIX I

Who Murdered the Princes?*

Say that I slew them not?

THE FATE of the "Little Princes" is the most famous mystery in the annals of England, and it has been acrimoniously debated for more than two centuries. Down to the present day the "traditionalists" have maintained that King Richard the Third stands convicted of the crime, as asserted by the Tudor historians and blazoned to the world in Shakespeare's fine, bustling melodrama. The "revisionists," insisting that the case against Richard is fraudulent, have either declared that the problem remains an enigma or fastened the guilt on other shoulders.

It will perhaps come as a surprise to the reader accustomed to the absolute assurance of history texts and guidebooks that there is no proof that King Richard murdered the two sons of King Edward IV. If we take "evidence" to mean testimony that would secure a verdict in a court of law, there is no evidence that he murdered the Princes. Upon what materials, then, must an investigation be based?—upon rumors and hearsay, assertion from sources of demonstrable unreliability and inaccuracy, facts of disputed relevance, and inferences insusceptible to test, drawn from events and acts. This is all that we have in the way of "evidence," and it is a knotty, baffling, often contradictory complex of uncertainties.

The chief reason for the bitter disagreements that have raged around the problem of the Princes 7 murder is that the traditionalists have ignored one or more of these disabilities inherent in the "evidence," whereas the revisionists have tended to assume that these disabilities somehow give them the license to put forward a melange of speculation and wishful thinking at least as dubious as the traditional sources they scorn. On the one hand we have scholars clinging to "evidence" which no jurist would

dream of crediting—and no scholar either, in any other context except the heated dispute over the fate of the Princes—while in refutation we behold writers unleashing as final revelation a farrago of conjecture. A plague o* both your houses! My purpose here is to present for the reader's judgment the materials which are available to elucidate the deaths of King Edward's sons, along with a commentary upon their ascertainable reliability and relevance.

This much can be advanced as a working hypothesis: the Princes were murdered at the instigation of one of three men. It is very possible that King Richard is guilty of the crime. If he is innocent, then it is w T ell-nigh inevitable that either King Henry the Seventh or Henry Stafford, second Duke of Buckingham, is guilty.

What is the case against King Richard?

Mancini, who left England at the time of Richard's coronation, July 6, 1483, has this to say:

. . . after Hastings was removed, all the attendants who had waited upon the king were debarred access to him. He and his brother were withdrawn into 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. A Strasbourg doctor, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the young 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. ... I have seen many men burst forth into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men's sight; and already there was a suspicion that he had been done away with. Whether, however, he has been done away with [Mancini is writing in December of 1483], and by what manner of death, so far I have not at all discovered.

The Great Chronicle^ compiled some three decades later from London municipal records, echoes one part of Mancini's observations: "And after this [death of Hastings] was the prince and duke of York holdyn more straight, and there was privy talk that the lord protector should be king." This chronicle further reports that "during this mayor's year [Edmund Shaa's], the children of

king Edward were seen shooting and playing in the garden of the Tower by sundry times." Since Shaa's year of office lasted from October 29, 1482, to October 28, 1483, this reference is too vague to be helpful. This same source records, however, that the first widespread rumor of the Princes 7 death did not come until after the following Easter (1484).

According to a recent discovery, which will be examined later, it appears that young Edward was suffering from a bone disease which had attacked his lower jaw. The boy's fears — as reported by Mancini— may have sprung as much from melancholia and ill-health as from any accurate apprehension of danger, beyond the realization that the lot of a deposed monarch is precarious.

It is not surprising that even before Richard's coronation some men suspected that the Princes might soon be killed. What, at that time, was the accustomed fate of deposed monarchs, even of men who had a measure of the blood royal in their veins? Edward the Second was murdered, perhaps by a red-hot spit thrust up his bowel. Richard the Second was starved, poisoned, or hacked by steel in his cell at Pontefract Castle. As recently as 1471 the feeble-witted Henry the Sixth had been put to silence. Henry the Seventh trumped up a charge in order to murder Clarence's son because he was of royal blood; and for the same reason Henry the Eighth executed Clarence's daughter, the Earl of Suffolk, the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquess of Exeter, and Lord Montagu. In this context of political practice it was inevitable that the moment Richard assumed the throne, there should be fears expressed for the future safety of the Princes.

The suspicions recorded by Mancini, however, have small bearing upon the problem of the fate of the Princes. Whatever intentions Richard had regarding them, then or afterward, considerations of policy dictated that they must be separated from their attendants — some of whom doubtless owed their appointments to the Woodvilles or to Hastings, all of whom had served Edward when he was King, and some of whom might well be willing to undertake his escape — and that they must be withdrawn from sight lest their seeming accessibility stir men's minds to conspiracy. Mancini's statement about the replacement of the

Princes' servants appears to be confirmed by a royal warrant of July 18, 1483, which authorizes payment of wages to thirteen men for their services to King Edward IV and "Edward bastard, late caUed King Edward V" (Harleian MS. 433).

Closest in time—and in more than time—to Mancini's testimony is a remarkable declaration by Guillaume de Rochefort, Chancellor of France, to the Estates-General assembled in Tours in January of 1484: "Regardez, je vous prie, les evenements qui apres la mort du Roi Edouard sont arrives dans ce pays. Con-templez ses enfants, deja grands et braves, massacres impune-ment, et la couronne transportee a Passassin par la faveur des peuples"—the sons of King Edward butchered!—their assassin crowned by the people's will!

On what grounds the Chancellor based his declaration has long puzzled historians; Mancini has at last supplied the answer, as convincingly elucidated by his editor, C. A. J. Armstrong. Before he came to England, Mancini had addressed three poems to the French Chancellor, who had probably befriended him. "It is remarkable that in the early days of December, 1483, when Mancini had just completed at Beaugency the De Occupatione Regni Anglie, the Chancellor was in the same neighbourhood presiding over the royal councils. . . . There was hardly an easier way for the Chancellor to have obtained the ... information [concerning the murder of the Princes] than from the lips of Mancini" (Usurpation, p. 15). The Chancellor, then, knew only what Mancini could tell him: that at the tune of the coronation in July some suspected that King Richard would soon kill the Princes.

It is not surprising that de Rochefort transformed the report of a suspicion into a fiery declaration of fact. England was the ancient adversary. In holding England up to scorn, the Chancellor could be sure of pleasing his audience, and at no risk, since she was now obviously incapable of going to war with France. Besides, Richard had been specially disliked by the French since 1475, when he had pressed King Edward to reject Louis XI's peace terms. Gairdner and others have pointed out that Richard was identified with the war party which for generations had made

APPENDIX I

France bleed. The harsher the things said of Richard, the better. In the early months of 1483 the French had pointedly arrested a servant of the Duke of Gloucester's at Tours, as Louis XI was unleashing his corsairs in the Channel. But de Rochefort had a much more urgent and positive motive than these. France was now experiencing the perils of a minority reign. One of the principal purposes for the assembling of the Estates-General which the Chancellor was addressing was to persuade the ambitious and quarrelsome princes to accept the government of the Regent, Charles VHFs sister, the Lady of Beaujeu. By transmuting the mere suspicions reported by Mancini into a certainty, the Chancellor secured just what he needed: a horrible example to the restless French nobles, a vivid warning of the direction their disaffection was tending, a plea not to follow the same reprehensible path taken by the hated English. ^ Next in time comes the evidence of the "Second Continuation" of the Croylmd Chronicle, compiled in the spring of 1486 from information in a large measure supplied, probably, by John Russell, Richard's Chancellor. Soon after Richard's coronation, this chronicle records, the people around London and in the southern and southwestern counties began to conspire to free the Princes. Then "public proclamation was made, that Henry, Duke of Buckingham . . . had repented of his former conduct, and would be the chief mover in this attempt, while a rumour was spread that the sons of King Edward had died a violent death, but it was uncertain how" ("vulgatum est, dictos Regis Edwardi pueros, quo genere violenti interitus ignoratur, decessisse in fata"). The chronicler nowhere eke refers to the Princes, nor does he make any comment upon the rumor which would suggest that he believed it to be true. On the contrary, as Gairdner himself points out, the release of the rumor was part of a prearranged plan. The revolt "was not a spontaneous result of popular indignation; it had been carefully preconcerted several weeks before." The rumor was deliberately employed to divert the purposes of the rising to the ends of Buckingham and Henry Tudor. Either the chronicler did not believe Richard guilty of the murder, or he did not wish to accuse him, a possibility

that seems very unlikely. This much is certainly true: if it was indeed Richard's Chancellor who supplied, early in the reign of Henry VII, the material for this part of the chronicle, he did not choose to reveal what he knew, or conjectured, concerning the Princes' fate. 1

This is all the evidence furnished fay the source materials most nearly contemporaneous with Richard's reign: that as soon as he assumed the scepter some people began to suspect that he would make away with his nephews (Mancini) and that a rumor of their deaths was loosed for a special purpose by the chieftains of Buckingham j s rebellion.

Between these sources and the Tudor historians, there are three intermediate sources of some interest here. Two of these, Fabyan's New Chronicles and the Great Chronicle, were compiled from London municipal records about the same time that Vergil and More were writing but are for the most part independent of them; the third, John Rous' Historia Regum Anglme was composed a few years earlier. Rous' flat statement, in a work dedicated to Henry VII, that Richard was born with teeth and with hair streaming to his shoulders reveals the valuelessness of his equally flat statements that Richard poisoned his wife and killed the little Princes by means unknown; his testimony, which is in general of little worth, seems to rest here upon no more than rumor, Fabyan appears to record the hearsay of the early years of the sixteenth century: "As the common fame went, King Richard had, within the Tower, put unto secret death the two sons of his brother Edward IV." The Great Chronicle, however, specifies, as we have seen, that after Easter of 1484 "much whispering was among the people that tKe King had put the children ... to death/' Why "after Easter"? It is possible that since Richard's little son died less than a week following Easter Sunday, some folk saw in the boy's death a judgment of Heaven which proved that the King had killed his nephews. This chronicle has no more to add except for a catalogue of opinions of the possible ways in which the Princes might have been dispatched—opinions which it seems to relate to the year 1485 but which more probably reflect the speculations of two decades later, historical per-