The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (20 page)

There was a moment’s silence and then he accused Hastings and the two bishops of treason, a dread word. There was shock and fury, shouts of ‘treason’ and armed men rushed into the room. Stanley very sensibly fell to the floor. Hastings was grabbed, held by guards and told he was to be executed immediately.

‘For by St Paul I will not to dinner till I see thy head off,’ said the Protector. It would be interesting to know if he shouted, was matter-of-fact or hissed this terrifying statement.29 The soldiers took Hastings out to the little green by the Tower chapel. As he stood on the grass and watched life for the last time he must have felt foolish and bitter. He had failed to see Gloucester’s brutal ambition and now there was more blood to be shed than ‘from a cut finger’. He was there and then beheaded. More wrote his epitaph: ‘Thus ended this honourable man, a good knight and a gentle, of great authority with his prince, of living somewhat desolate [dissolute]...eth [easy] to beguile...a loving man and passing well beloved; very faithful and trusty enough, trusting too much.’

For their part, the bishops and Lord Stanley were imprisoned in the Tower. The Protector’s attention now turned to the nine-year-old Prince Richard who was with his mother, safe in sanctuary. There had been a debate on the use of sanctuary, with the Protector arguing that it should only be used as a refuge, not for detention. In his view, the Queen was detaining the young prince, who should be free for his brother’s imminent coronation.

It was just a matter of putting things together. Having dealt with Hastings, the Protector took his party of soldiers from the Tower and rowed upriver to Westminster, where he joined the remaining members of the Council in the Star Chamber. Duke Richard’s dominance was total, so it is hardly surprising that the rump of the Council agreed with him. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Howard and the soldiers marched on to the Abbey for a discussion with the Queen.

Soldiers stood guard at the entrances while the Archbishop, the boy’s great-uncle, went in to talk to the Queen, Lord Howard with him. He made a persuasive case and the Queen, swayed by his categorical assurances for the boy’s safety, agreed. She relinquished the prince.

At this point she cannot have known of Hastings’s summary execution and presumably calculated that the best chance for the boy was for the Archbishop to take personal responsibility. She would have had no doubt about the Protector’s determination and probably believed that he would, if necessary, break into sanctuary to get his way, as he had at Tewkesbury.

She said unto the child: ‘Farewell, my own sweet son, God send you good keeping, let me kiss you once yet ere you go, for God knoweth when we shall kiss together again.’ And therewith she kissed him, and blessed him, turned her back and wept and went her way, leaving the child weeping as fast.30

So Prince Richard left sanctuary and was taken for a talk with his uncle Richard before being sent downriver to join his brother at the Tower.

Under the flurry of activity round the Abbey, Dorset chose his moment to slip out of sanctuary and escape. The sentries did not notice but an officer discovered soon after; they thought he was hiding locally so sent for help to ring the nearby cornfields with soldiers and dogs. They beat the fields to catch the fugitive ‘just as hunters do’ but Dorset had eluded them and was clean away.

By this time the Council was little more than a facade for Duke Richard’s ambition.
The Crowland Chronicle
reported, ‘Thus, without justice or trial, the three strongest supporters of the new King had been removed, while his remaining followers were fearing something similar.’ He now felt strong enough to override the Council’s refusal to indict Anthony; he simply decreed the death sentence, including Sir Thomas Vaughan and Sir Richard Grey for good measure. Having physically ambushed both potential rivals – Rivers and Hastings – he then justified his illegal acts by claiming a conspiracy, and finished the job by comprehensively blackening their characters.31

Anthony was informed he was to be executed the next day. Why? Because, he was told, his sister the Queen, had been plotting against the Protector. That night he prayed and wrote his will:

I, Anthony Wodevile, in the castle of Sheriff Hutton,...bequeath my soul unto the great mercy of Jesus Christ...my heart to be buried (if I die south of Trent) before our lady of Pewe [the chapel rebuilt by Anthony at Westminster Abbey]...bequeath all my lands that were my father’s to his right heirs; with my cupp of gold of columbyne...and such lands that were my first wife’s the Lady Scales, and Thomas Lord Scales’s, her brother, to my brother Sir Edward, and his heirs male...before he took possession thereof, to deduct 500 marks to be employed for the souls of the said lady and her brother, and the souls of all the Scales’s blood, &c. and to find a priest for one year to pray for them, his own soul and all Christian souls, at our lady of Pewe; and another priest to sing at the chapel of the Rodes, in Greenwich, for his own soul and all Christian souls.

His wife Mary was left silver plate, silks and feather beds, together with her wedding provision and presents. He instructed that manors and land should be sold to build and endow a hospital at Rochester for 13 poor folk. He directed that his clothes and tournament armour should be sold and the money used to buy shirts and smocks for the poor. He listed various debts to ensure they were paid and gave instructions for the rewarding of his servants and others: ‘my servant James have £10...Tybold my barbo have £3...My gown of tawny cloth of gold I give to the Prior of Royston.’ 32

He appointed several executors including his lawyer, Andrew Dymmock, and Robert Poyntz, who was married to his natural daughter and had been his lieutenant at Carisbrooke. He also composed some wry poetic musings:

Somewhat musing

and more mourning

In remembering

The unsteadfastness;

This world beeing

Of such wheeling,

the contrarying,

What may I guess?

Methinks truly

Bounden am I,

And that greatly,

To be content;

seeing plainly

Fortune doth wry [turn aside]

All contrary

From mine intent.

I fear, doubtless

Remediless

Is now to siege

My woeful chance;

For unkindness

Withoutenless [to speak plainly]

And no redress

Me doth advance

With displeasure

To my grievance

And no surance

Of remedy.

So in this trance

Now in substance

Such is my dance

Willing to die.

My life was lent

Me on intent.

It is nigh spent

Welcom fortune!

But I ne’er went [never thought]

Thus to be shent [cut off]

But so she ment

Such is her won [custom].

The verses are interesting for the strength of voice and the absence of any obvious reference to God. The metre is 3:1:3:1, possibly in honour of the Trinity and the text has assumptions such as
This
world. It helped to while away the night, his last before execution.33

On Tuesday 24 June the young King should have been crowned, but instead his uncle, his tutor and his half-brother were brought together at Pumfret (Pontefract) Castle and there beheaded. After the execution, Anthony was discovered to have been wearing a hair shirt beneath his finery, an uncomfortable garment to remind him of pain and humility; this was later taken to Doncaster church and venerated by generations of worshippers.

He had no children by either of his wives, ‘but by a beloved mistress called Gwentlian, only daughter of Sir William Stradling of Glamorganshire...he had a daughter Margaret’, who married Sir Robert Poyntz, his friend and one of the executors of his will.34 The Stradlings were a distinguished Anglo-Welsh family but this Sir William was the son of a cadet branch.

An early sixteenth-century copy of an entry in the Garter Book shows Earl Rivers’s coat of arms, crested by a man brandishing a scimitar over his head. The left supporter is a fully armoured knight also brandishing a scimitar; on the right is a leopard standing on his hind legs and grinning broadly. The shield is divided into six sections covering the heraldic range, from the silver scallops to a golden griffin. (Fess and quarter gules of Wydeville; Escallops of Scales; Griffin sergeant of Rivers; Lion rampant of Luxembourg: Vair of Beauchamp; Sun rayonny of Baux.) There is also a short biographical note celebrating Anthony’s jousting fame and lamenting that this ‘courageous Knight and gentill’ was ‘piteously put to dethe at Pumfret’.

While these terrible events were unfolding William Caxton was printing
The Canterbury Tales
with 26 cheerful woodcuts, amongst which there is one of a dashing knight on his charger. Might this have been modelled on his patron, or perhaps his patron’s young brother who was presently sailing the Channel wondering what to do?

Duke Richard’s propaganda campaign now turned full strength to legitimizing his position. A sermon was delivered from St Paul’s Cross, the standard place for outlining government policy. The preacher was a Cambridge theologian who denounced Duke Richard’s mother, the Dowager Duchess, as an adulteress and his dead brother, King Edward, as a bastard.35 Apparently the Duchess Cecily had agreed to this and some people take this as legitimizing Richard’s claim. But it is far from proven and still left Edward Plantagenet, Clarence’s son, as senior in line to Richard, although it might be argued that he was disqualified by his father’s attainder.

On the point of legitimacy, it has been argued that Edward’s father was away campaigning at Pontoise when he should have been fathering Edward. Maybe, but the Duchess was at Rouen, and Pontoise is only 60 miles away, no more than a hard day’s ride. The Duke was overseeing the siege, so time was on his hands; why should she not have visited her husband there or he returned for a night or two? (Mary, Queen of Scots once rode 60 hard miles in a day to see Lord Bothwell, and Edward III averaged 55 miles a day from London to York in 1336.) Perhaps the strongest argument for legitimacy is that Duke Richard accepted Edward as his firstborn. A letter written by Edward and his brother to their father starts, ‘as we your trew and natural sons’.36 This expression has been accepted as evidence of legitimacy in other cases. If the Duchess had strayed then her husband had been very accommodating, and that is not how people regarded the Duke. It is all rather far-fetched, a typical exercise in character assassination.

After the sermon from St Paul’s Cross the Protector imposed a curfew in London and instructed its bishop to make the beautiful Jane Shore do penance as a harlot. She walked barefoot through the streets carrying a lighted taper in her hand and wearing only a shirt. This was his dead brother’s favourite mistress, and while some Londoners may have enjoyed the spectacle others sympathized with Jane rather than applauding the Protector, who had two illegitimate children of his own. Life also changed for his little nephews: ‘after the removal of Hastings, the attendants who had previously administered to the young King’s needs were all kept from him. He and his brother were transferred to the inner chambers of the Tower.’

At this opportune moment Bishop Stillington of Bath and Wells suddenly remembered that the marriage between King Edward and Elizabeth Woodville had been illegal because the King had previously been engaged. Actually there was no evidence of any earlier pre-marital arrangement with the lady, who was long since dead; however, the Bishop remembered with absolute certainty. This was a surprise.

There is anecdotal evidence that Bishop Stillington’s memory was helped by inducement: the French had the opportunity of interrogating his son when he was their prisoner. Commines recorded that the Bishop was a ‘courtier’ with an illegitimate son whom ‘he dearly loved’ and that King Richard ‘wished to bestow great benefits on him [the son] and have him marry Elizabeth of York’. That would be an impossible marriage for a bishop’s bastard unless there was a very high price. But the plan came to nothing because the boy, who had been given accelerated promotion with the command of an English warship, was captured off the coast of Normandy. He was ‘imprisoned in the Petit Châtellet in Paris where he died of hunger and deprivation’. Presumably he was interrogated before he died, so Commines would have known all he had to tell.37

In June 1483 the Bishop’s revelation was just what the Protector needed. He may have wrestled with his conscience but concluded that his nephews and nieces were bastards. It is odd that he forgot about the ecclesiastical courts, the correct place to deal with such matters, and decided on his own authority that as a bastard the young King was unable to succeed his father, whose legitimacy was not now in question.38

Apparently Duke Richard was untroubled by his own position. As Clarence had been married to Isabel Neville, his own marriage to her sister, Anne, was consequently between brother and sister-in-law. That was contrary to Leviticus Chapter XVIII. Papal dispensation would be required to permit such a marriage and it was far from certain that it could or would be given. They were also cousins, related in the ‘fourth degree’, although that was not such a problem. There can have been no misunderstanding. But Duke Richard never asked for papal dispensation; his son was thus illegitimate and so he was living the lie.39