The Life and Times of Richard III (10 page)

Yet this portrait is too glib to be convincing. It does not mesh with what is known of Richard in previous years – the years of service as a soldier and an administrator with a distaste for courtly intrigues and political in-fighting. The portrait makes better sense if Richard is seen as a man whose eyes were only by degrees opened to the logical consequences of his own actions. His reaction to each succeeding crisis bears the mark of an impulsive man of action taking the short cut to his immediate objective without pausing to work out the long-term effects. If Richard is to be judged, then he must be accused not of too much guile, but of too little.

Lord Hastings dead, the Queen Dowager in Sanctuary, the boy King in the Tower, the capital invaded by wild northerners, the Duke of Gloucester King.… News travelled slowly in fifteenth-century England, and the revolutionary events of the past two months had set the whole country buzzing with wild rumours and unsubstantiated gossip. The new King must therefore show himself to his subjects, dispense justice and favours with an open hand, and promise to be every man’s good lord. Two weeks after his coronation Richard set out on a royal progress through the West Country and the Midlands to Yorkshire and the North.

But first the three men who had made his usurpation possible received their rewards. Buckingham had the lion’s share: he was appointed Constable and Great Chamberlain of England. In addition Richard recognised his long-standing claim to a huge part of the de Bohun inheritance, with an annual income of over
£
700. To the Earl of Northumberland went the wardenship of the West March and Richard’s palatinate in Cumberland. John Howard, the newly-created Duke of Norfolk, received Crown lands worth about £1,000 a year in Suffolk, Essex, Kent and Cambridgeshire. The princely extent of these grants, which virtually created three principalities in Wales and the West Country, in the North, and in East Anglia, show how desperately narrow had become the clique on which Richard’s power rested.

On about 20 July the royal cortège set out from Windsor. Anxious to impress on his subjects that he ruled not by force but by consent, Richard dispensed with an armed escort and was accompanied instead by a magnificent retinue of the principal officers, lay and clerical, of his kingdom. By 23 July they were at Reading. At Oxford the King was entertained by Magdalen’s founder, William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, and attended two scholarly debates on moral philosophy and theology. At nearby Woodstock he restored to the inhabitants some lands which Edward had annexed to the forest of Whichwood. To the city of Gloucester he granted a new charter of liberties. The abbot of Tewkesbury, whose abbey housed the bones of Clarence and of Henry VI’s son, Prince Edward, received a donation of
£
300. At Warwick early in August, Richard was joined by his Queen. And so, by way of Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham, the procession came to Pontefract where Richard paused to prepare for the climax of his triumphant progress – the State entry into York and the investiture of his son Edward as Prince of Wales.

The King’s secretary, John Kendal, had written in advance to the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen and Sheriffs of York instructing them ‘to receive His Highness and the Queen as laudably as their wisdom can imagine’. The city streets were to be hung ‘with cloth of arras, tapestry-work and other; for that there come many southern Lords and men of worship with them which will mark greatly your receiving Their Graces’. On 29 August the Mayor and other local dignitaries duly turned out in scarlet and red gowns to greet their Sovereign outside the city walls. His retinue included six bishops; five earls; Lord Stanley, the Steward of the Household; Viscount Lovell, the Lord Chamberlain; Sir William Hussey, the Chief Justice; Alexander, Duke of Albany; the Spanish Ambassador, de Sasiola; and a great train of royal household officials.

An even more magnificent spectacle took place on Sunday, 7 September, after a week of plays, banquets, speeches and pageants. This was the day selected for the ten-year-old Earl of Salisbury’s investiture as Prince of Wales. The survival of a letter dated 30 August to the Master of King’s Wardrobe, requisitioning large quantities of satins, silks, velvet and cloth-of-gold, suggests that the investiture may have been a last-minute addition to Richard’s programme. The order included no less than thirteen thousand fustian badges emblazoned with his device of the silver boar and ‘three coats of arms beaten with fine gold for our own person’. Forty trumpeters heralded the arrival of the royal party at York Minster, where the Prince was invested with a plain gold coronet and a golden rod. In honour of the occasion de Sasiola was knighted and received a collar of gold. It was, as Henry VII’s official historian, Polydore Vergil, testified, ‘a day of great state for York... there being three princes wearing crowns – the King, the Queen and the Prince of Wales’.

While Richard was busy impressing his subjects with the majesty of his office, powerful forces were conspiring in the South to deprive him of it. Once the initial shock of the usurpation had worn off, some form of reaction on the part of the dispossessed was only to be expected. Most prominent among the dispossessed were, of course, the Woodvilles. The ex-Queen’s relatives – the Marquess of Dorset, Sir Richard Woodville and Lionel Woodville, Bishop of Salisbury – formed the sinews of a plot which bound together the chronic discontent of the Kentishmen, the outrage felt by the old guard of Edward IV’s personal friends and retainers, and the traditional outposts of Lancastrian loyalism in the south-west. The Wars of the Roses had a habit of uniting strange bed-fellows in a common aim: to these was now added the alliance of Woodville and Lancaster, created by the pervasive rumour that Edward IV’s sons had been quietly murdered in the Tower, or spirited away to some northern fortress whence they would never emerge.

These rumours transformed the prospects of a penniless young exile at the Court of Francis, Duke of Brittany. For Henry Tudor, now in his twenty-seventh year, was the sole surviving heir to the claims of the House of Lancaster. On the side of his mother, Margaret Beaufort, he traced his descent from John of Gaunt’s extra-marital liaison with Catherine Swynford. The four children of this union, who took the name of Beaufort, were later declared legitimate through the favour of their half-brother, Henry IV, although barred from the royal succession by Act of Parliament. But Acts of Parliament could be repealed as readily as they were made. On his father’s side Henry’s lineage was equally distinguished and equally tainted with the bar sinister of bastardy. Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond was the son of an obscure Welsh gentleman, Owen Tudor, who had found his way into the bed of Henry V’s widow, Queen Catherine. Owen claimed to have married the Queen, but the only proof that was ever forthcoming was the three children she bore him. Henry’s double illegitimacy offered him some protection during the early years of Yorkist rule and until 1470 he grew up quietly in the household of the Yorkist Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert. But after the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 had put paid to Lancastrian hopes and to the last two legitimate Lancastrian claimants, the fourteen-year-old boy became a valuable dynastic chess piece and was smuggled to Duke Francis’s Court in Brittany by his uncle, Jasper Tudor. But with the disaffection of the Woodvilles and the old guard of Edward’s supporters, the pawn began to assume the stature of a king.

The chief danger to Richard’s régime lay in the possibility of a marriage alliance between Henry and one of Edward IV’s daughters. In his absence, Richard’s Council had already taken steps to guard against this unwelcome prospect by making sure that Edward’s daughters remained cooped up at Westminster. The Croyland Chronicle tells us that ‘the noble Church of the monks at Westminster, and all the neighbouring parts, assumed the character of a castle and fortress while men of the greatest austerity were appointed to act as keepers thereof’. But the actual link between the rebels at home and the Lancastrian Court in exile was supplied by a new defector who now ranked as the second man in the kingdom.

The King was at Lincoln on 11 October when he heard the astounding news that Buckingham had joined the other conspirators already identified by his informers. Buckingham’s rebellion makes no sense unless it is assumed that his earlier support of Richard’s cause was, all along, part of a grand design to clear his own path to the throne. Tudor historians later concocted a variety of fables to account for this breathtaking
volte-face –
a quarrel over the de Bohun lands, remorse over the death of the Princes, the pervasive wiles of Buckingham’s prisoner Bishop Morton – but only Polydore Vergil plumbs the Duke’s motives when he reports the rumour that ‘the Duke did the less dissuade King Richard from usurping the kingdom by means of so many mischievous deeds that he afterward, being hated both of God and man, might be expelled from the same, and so himself called by the commons to that dignity’. The scheme was not as hare-brained as its ultimate failure made it appear. For Buckingham bore the unquartered arms of Thomas of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward III, and his lineage was untainted by the bastardy that blemished Henry Tudor’s Beaufort claims. Certainly the Yorkists, who had killed his father at St Albans in 1455 and his grandfather at Northampton in 1460, had no claims on his loyalty. Having used Richard to eliminate the senior branch of the Yorkist line he now planned to use the Lancastrian Tudor to unseat the junior branch. The tale of his repentance would in the meantime reconcile the Woodville rebels to co-operating with the late instrument of their downfall.

John Morton, Bishop of Ely, a prisoner at Brecon Castle since Hastings’s execution, put Buckingham in touch with Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, and she in turn contacted her son in Brittany. Other couriers linked the Brecon conspirators with the Woodvilles. By these covert means the substance of a tripartite agreement between Henry, Buckingham and the Woodvilles was hammered out. Buckingham pledged his support to Henry’s claims; Henry promised to marry the Queen Dowager’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. By the end of September all the rebel groups had co-ordinated their plans for a simultaneous rising on 18 October, and Henry Tudor had secured the Duke of Brittany’s financial backing for an invasion by sea. Morton was doubtless astute enough to realise that Buckingham the Kingmaker had himself in mind for the throne rather than Henry Tudor, but that was an issue which could wait on Richard’s destruction.

In the event Richard was saved by good intelligence, prompt action and foul weather. With so many different factions involved in the plot, it comes as no surprise that a few stool pigeons came to roost in Richard’s camp. Within twenty-four hours of hearing the news, the King had sent out the summonses for a royal army to assemble at Leicester by 21 October. Here is the letter he addressed to the Mayor of York:

BY
THE
KING

Trusty and well-beloved: we greet you well, and let ye wit that the Duke of Buckingham traitorously has turned upon us, contrary to the duty of his allegiance, and entendeth the utter destruction of us, you and all other our true subjects that have taken our part; whose traitorous intent we with God’s grace intend briefly to resist and subdue. We desire and pray you in our hearty wise that ye will send unto us as many men defensibly arrayed on horseback as ye may goodly make to our town of Leicester the 21st day of this present month without fail as ye will tender our honour and your own weal, and we will see you so paid for your reward as ye shall hold ye well content. Give further credence to our trusty pursuivant this bearer. Given under our signet at our city of Lincoln the 11th day of October.

By the time that he and Northumberland were reviewing their troops at Leicester on the 21st, Richard was cheered to hear of the swift measures taken by his lieutenant in the South, the Duke of Norfolk, for the defence of London. Finding their way to the capital blocked by Norfolk’s men at Gravesend, the Kent and Surrey rebels led by Sir John and Richard Guildford were compelled to withdraw and await the promised arrival of the Duke of Buckingham.

Thanks to the King’s effective early warning system and to an exceptional bout of heavy rains which deluged Wales at this moment, the rebel Duke had sufficient troubles of his own.

In no drowsy manner [reports the Croyland Chronicle] King Richard contrived that, throughout Wales, as well as in all parts of the marches thereof, armed men should be set in readiness around the said Duke, as soon as ever he had set a foot from his home, to pounce upon all his property; who, accordingly, encouraged by the prospect of the Duke’s wealth, which the King had, for that purpose, bestowed upon them were in every way to obstruct his progress. The result was, that, on the side of the castle of Brecknock [Brecon], which looks towards the interior of Wales, Thomas, the son of the late Sir Roger Vaughan, with the aid of his brethren and kinsmen, most carefully watched the whole of the surrounding country; while Humphrey Stafford partly destroyed the bridges and passes by which England was entered, and kept the other part closed by means of a strong force set there to guard the same.

Drenched by the rains and harassed by the guerillas, Buckingham’s retainers lost heart and melted away as they struggled across the Welsh borders into Herefordshire. At Lord Ferrers’s manor of Webley the Duke was abandoned even by Bishop Morton, who fled first to the Fen Country, then to Flanders. Sick with fear, the Duke himself deserted what was left of his following. He disguised himself as a commoner and took refuge in the Shropshire cottage of one of his servants, Ralph Bannaster of Wem. For Master Ralph the chief attraction of his guest lay in the
£
1,000 reward the King had set on his head, and he promptly betrayed the Duke to the local sheriff.

With London in safe hands and Buckingham washed out, Richard was able to concentrate his entire army on the western rebels – Sir Richard Woodville at Newbury, Bishop Lionel Woodville, Sir John Cheyncy and Walter Hungerford at Salisbury, and Dorset, the Courtenays and Thomas St Leger at Exeter – whose only hope now lay in Henry Tudor’s fleet. But Henry did not even set out until 31 October, and as Richard’s army marched south into Wiltshire, the rebels scattered into Sanctuary or sought shelter abroad. When the King entered Salisbury unopposed on 28 October, the great rebellion was over. Buckingham, tried and sentenced by the Vice-Constable, Sir Ralph Assheton, was beheaded in Salisbury market place on Sunday, 2 November.