The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA (6 page)

It may also have been some ill-considered, indiscreet remark on the part of Elizabeth of York or some member of her mother's family that led to the leaking out of rumours of marriage plans for both the girl and the king. These rumours were promptly misunderstood. Instead of a dual marriage pact with the house of Avis, what began to be spoken of in England was a single marriage, between Richard III and his niece. Such rumours gave cause for concern, and their circulation was discussed by the royal council. As a result, ‘Sir Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby … told the king to his face that if he did not deny any such purpose' there could be serious consequences.
³²
Convinced of the need for some official statement, the king then acted very quickly to scotch this unfortunate misunderstanding. On the Wednesday of Holy Week (30 March), at the Priory of St John in Clerkenwell, in the presence of the mayor and citizens of London, he publicly and very firmly denied any plans for a marriage between himself and Elizabeth of York, commanding the mayor to arrest and punish anyone found spreading this tale.
³³
A couple of weeks after Easter, on 19 April, he wrote in similar terms to the city of York. Given that his own legitimacy as king depended absolutely upon the bastardy of his late brother's Woodville children, it must have seemed vital to Richard to set the record straight in respect of this unfortunate rumour.
³⁴

In addition to his own illegitimate children, and the prospect of future children as a result of his projected second marriage, Richard III also had other potential Yorkist heirs to hand. It is often stated that when his own son died he named one of his nephews, either Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of the Duke of Clarence) or John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln (son of the Duchess of Suffolk), as heir to the throne.
³⁵
In fact there is no evidence that either nephew was ever formally designated as Richard's heir, and the fact that various authors have given conflicting accounts of their supposed elevation merely serves to underline the lack of proof. Indeed, as affairs stood in April 1485 there was no conceivable reason for precipitate action on the part of the king. As we have seen, in this first full month of the medieval English year of 1485, Richard III was undoubtedly planning to remarry. He thus had every prospect of a legitimate son of his own as heir to the throne. Hence there was no necessity to designate an alternative heir. So far as Richard was aware, many years of his reign still lay before him, offering him ample time and opportunity to train his as yet unborn son for future kingship.
³⁶

However, likely looking Yorkist princes such as his nephews were still an investment for the future. Hopefully both Lincoln and Warwick would become bulwarks supporting and maintaining the royal house of York well into the sixteenth century. Thus there was every reason to train and promote them – not as future monarchs, but as key supporters for the throne. The elder of the two, the Earl of Lincoln, was certainly given some preferment, and this must be seen as part of that same policy which led Richard to give John of Gloucester the Calais post. The king was firming the foundations of his dynasty by promoting its future senior members to important posts, in which they could learn the business of government, while at the same time themselves becoming known to the aristocracy and to the country as a whole.

Lincoln had been born in about 1460. He was the eldest son of Richard's sister, Elizabeth of York, and her husband, John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk. Edward IV had created him Earl of Lincoln on 13 March 1467, and he had subsequently received knighthood, together with Edward's own sons, on 18 April 1475. He had attended Lady Anne Mowbray on the occasion of her marriage to Edward IV's second son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, in January 1478; had borne the salt at the baptism of Edward's daughter Bridget in November 1480, and (in the absence of the future Richard III himself) had acted as the chief mourner at the funeral of King Edward IV in 1483. He then went on to carry the orb at Richard III's own coronation.
³⁷
By 1485 he was already a young adult.

Lincoln supported Richard against the rebels of October 1483 and was rewarded the following April with land worth £157, and the reversion of Beaufort estates worth a further £178 after the death of Thomas, Lord Stanley, who had been granted a life interest in the land which his wife, Margaret Beaufort, had forfeited for her part in the rising. In the following month Lincoln was granted an annuity of £177 13
s
. 4
d
. from the duchy of Cornwall until the reversion materialized.
³⁸

Prior to his early demise, Richard III's own son, Edward of Middleham, Prince of Wales, had briefly held the important post of Lieutenant of Ireland.
³⁹
This post was normally exercised through a deputy, so that the boy's youth would not have been of much significance. It is noteworthy that, following Edward of Middleham's death, Richard appointed his nephew, the Earl of Lincoln, to this post. Given that the Plantagenet dynasty as a whole (and the house of York in particular) had always acknowledged that the right to the Crown could be transmitted through the female line, Lincoln must certainly have been regarded as a potential heir to the throne. Indeed, it is arguable that he automatically became the heir presumptive following Edward of Middleham's death – given that the sons of Edward IV were all illegitimate, and, therefore, excluded, while the Earl of Warwick, son of Richard III's brother, the Duke of Clarence, was ruled out by reason of Edward IV's act of attainder against his father. The king's eldest sister, Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, had given birth to two children, one by each of her two successive husbands. However, both of these had been girls, and while the capacity of female heirs to
transmit
rights to the throne was recognised, the possibility of a female heir actually succeeding to the English throne in person had not yet been conceded. It is, therefore, entirely plausible that after the death of the Prince of Wales, Richard III regarded Lincoln as his interim heir. Nevertheless, no specific statement to that effect was issued – and indeed, none would have been strictly necessary.

In addition to being appointed to the lieutenantship of Ireland (21 August 1484), Lincoln was given further prominence by being granted also the presidency of the council in the north. This was a body established in the summer of 1484 ‘as the successor to the prince's council, which had itself replaced Gloucester's ducal council as a way of maintaining Richard's authority in the north'.
⁴⁰

The other Yorkist princeling in whom Richard III clearly took an interest is Edward, Earl of Warwick (1475–99), the only surviving son of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence, and thus the nephew both of Richard III and of Queen Anne Neville. But for Edward IV's act of attainder against his father, the young Earl of Warwick would actually have ranked higher in terms of the succession to the throne than Richard III himself. However, as things stood in 1485, Edward IV's act of attainder against Clarence ruled Warwick out of the succession entirely. Even so, acts of attainder were not irreversible – though given Warwick's seniority in the royal bloodline, Richard III would have needed to handle with some care any reversal of the attainder which excluded this particular nephew from the throne.

Warwick had been born in February 1475 at Warwick Castle, and was named for his godfather and uncle, Edward IV, who had given him the title ‘Earl of Warwick' at his baptism. In a sometimes puzzling and misleading note on him for the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, Christine Carpenter states that ‘on his father's attainder in February 1478, Edward's lands, consisting essentially of the Warwick earldom as it stood at Clarence's death, were taken into royal custody. This was officially for his minority only, and he was indeed subsequently on occasion referred to as Earl of Warwick. In practice, however, the attainder was never reversed.'
⁴¹
Carpenter's last sentence is nonsensical. Edward's tenure of the earldom of Warwick was incontrovertible, since it was an inheritance derived from his
mother
, not his father. Moreover, he had explicitly and personally been granted this title by Edward IV in 1475. His tenure of it was, therefore, unaffected by his father's attainder. Following his father's execution, in 1481 Warwick was made the ward of Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset. He had attended his uncle Richard III's coronation in July 1483, and been knighted on the occasion of the investiture of his cousin Edward of Middleham, as Prince of Wales, in September the same year. Like his other cousin Lincoln, Warwick was a member of the council in the north.
⁴²
In Warwick's case (given his youth) this membership was probably largely nominal in 1485, but it certainly indicates Richard III's intention that this nephew, too, should be trained to play some role in the politics of the future.

3
‘Tapettes of Verdoures with Crownes and Rooses'
¹

In terms of rising, going to bed and eating meals, Richard III presumably lived out the last five months of his life on a day-to-day basis not dissimilar to that of most of his wealthier subjects. Certain aspects of this fifteenth-century routine would have differed from modern norms. It might, therefore, be helpful at this point to explore the kind of timetable which would have governed Richard's daily existence. At the same time we may also examine such evidence as we possess regarding the physical setting against which those last weeks and months of Richard's life were lived; the attire he wore, and the kind of activities which engaged him.

The obvious essentials of the daily human round of activities have not changed. However, in the fifteenth century Christian religious observance certainly played a greater part in day-to-day life than it appears to do for the majority of English households today. At dawn, when the bells of monastic, conventual, collegiate and cathedral churches rang for the early morning office, it was not necessary for lay people to be up and about, nor were they expected to take any formal part in the worship. Nevertheless, it was expected that if the sound of the bells happened to awaken them, they would utter some of the better-known set prayers, either in Latin or in the vernacular, before pulling up their blankets and going back to sleep.
²
By the 1480s the simple and easily memorised thrice-daily devotion of the
Angelus
had reached England, where its spread had been encouraged by Richard III's erstwhile supposed sister-in-law, Elizabeth Woodville.
³

Attendance at mass certainly was expected, and a late fourteenth-century description of how mass was celebrated indicates that this differed very little from the modern rite. It comprised introit,
Kyrie, Gloria
, prayers, epistle,
Alleluia
, sequence, gospel-reading, offertory,
Sanctus
, prayers of consecration,
Pater noster, Agnus Dei
, post-communion chant, and final prayers.
⁴
However, the main objects of attendance at mass at this period were seen as being ‘to
hear
His blessed mass and to
behold
His blessed sacrament'.
⁵
Actually receiving Holy Communion was much rarer than it is today, but we may suppose that Richard III probably attended mass on a daily basis. As we shall see shortly, there is evidence that his nephew, Edward V, did so as Prince of Wales.

The fact that Richard is known to have possessed a Book of Hours,
⁶
clearly designed for use rather than show, and containing some annotations in his own hand, strongly suggests that one regular feature of the king's waking life was the private recitation in his oratory of the cycle of prayer comprising the ‘Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary'. This simplified version of the full Divine Office (as celebrated by all the regular and secular clergy) had originated in the ninth or tenth century for the use of those members of the educated laity who wished to participate on a regular basis in the
Opus Dei
– the formal prayer of the Church. The daily recitation of the entire Little Office was certainly not compulsory. Nevertheless, it seems probable that Richard III's day would have been punctuated by regular short sessions of prayer.

In addition to this religious timetable (
horarium
), Richard's life was conditioned by the secular timetable of a regular daily routine. It is possible that the passage of time was marked in his palaces by the bells and hour hands of weight-driven clocks. The king's distant cousin, John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, certainly possessed one.
⁷
Five hundred years or more ago there would probably have been some important differences in the hours of rising and going to bed, and also in the matter of mealtimes. In exploring this point, we must remember that, even today, there can be quite significant differences between individuals and households regarding times of rising and going to bed, and in respect of mealtimes – not to mention the names given to different meals, and the kinds of food that compose them. It would not be unreasonable to anticipate that similar variations also existed in the past. Any attempt to impose uniformity upon the fifteenth-century daily routine is, therefore, probably doomed to failure. Modern authorities on late medieval meals and mealtimes have certainly produced quite a variety of different models for the supposedly typical everyday timetable of fifteenth-century England. The apparent discrepancies may well reflect genuine variations in the fifteenth-century source material. There is no reason to suppose that the daily round of a particular individual or family was any more stereotypical in the late Middle Ages than it is today. Yet despite probable individual variations, it is perhaps possible to suggest in broad terms some ways in which the fifteenth-century routine differed from that of the present day.