The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (54 page)

Harry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Stafford, is a curiously obscure figure for a woman of her rank. Even her death date is uncertain, though we know that her second husband, Richard Darell, remarried in 1481. A record of a lawsuit shows that in 1463, Darell boarded Margaret with his mother, to whom he paid a certain sum each week for the countess’s “diets” before Darell’s mother died in 1464. From that entry the editor of
The Collections for a History of Staffordshire
has surmised that Margaret was an “imbecile,” and it does sound as if Margaret was being made the responsibility of her motherin-law rather than staying with her as an ordinary guest. Whether Margaret was actually incapacitated, mentally

3 7 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m or physically, is not clear from this one record, but as there is a recorded instance where an insane widow, that of the rebel James Tuchet, was placed in her motherin-law’s care, it seems likely this might have been the situation with Margaret.

As is most often the case with medieval women, little is known about Katherine Woodville’s life and personal qualities. Katherine and Harry were indeed carried on squires’ shoulders during Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation, and Katherine is recorded as sitting beside the Duchess of Norfolk at the feast following the Duke of York’s wedding. The Duchess of Buckingham was conspicuously absent from Richard III’s coronation ceremonies and was not among the noblewomen who received robes on that occasion, but whether she was barred from attending or refused to attend is unknown.

It is generally assumed that the Buckinghams’ marriage was a miserable one, but that assumption is largely based upon one remark: Dominic Mancini, an Italian observer visiting England during the fateful summer of 1483, wrote that Buckingham detested the Woodvilles “for, when he was younger, he had been forced to marry the queen’s sister, whom he scorned to wed on account of her humble origin.” With no axe to grind on behalf of either Richard or his enemies, Mancini is one of the main and most valuable contemporary sources for the events of 1483. Nonetheless, his remarks about Buckingham’s attitude toward the Woodvilles and Katherine are likely to be heavily colored by the gossip he was hearing in 1483, and must be read with that caveat in mind. Buckingham certainly cooperated with Katherine’s brothers during the rebellion of 1483, and he took Katherine with him to Weobley before making his fatal flight to Wem. There is no evidence that his relations with the Woodvilles before Edward IV’s death were hostile.

Part of the belief that Harry was unhappy in his marriage from the beginning lies in a misapprehension of Katherine’s age that has been perpetu-ated by a number of modern authors, most of them partisans of Richard III. These writers depict Katherine as being much older than her young

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husband, thereby giving the impression that she was a sexually frustrated spinster pawned off by the vile Woodvilles on the hapless little Harry. One Ricardian novel even depicts the twenty-something Katherine as sexually molesting the twelve-year-old Harry! Primary sources, however, including a postmortem inquisition of Richard Woodville, the contemporary description of Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation, and Elizabeth’s household records, all indicate that Katherine was a child at the time she married Harry and as such had no more say in the marriage than did her husband.

According to the postmortem inquisition, her birthdate was about 1458, making her about three years younger than Harry, who was born on September 4, 1455.

An account by Elizabeth de la Bere found among Edward Stafford’s family papers indicates that Katherine was brought to the king from Weobley following her husband’s execution and that Edward himself was dressed as a little girl and hidden from Richard III’s officials during this time. It is sometimes said by modern writers that Katherine joined her sister Elizabeth in sanctuary at Westminster following her husband’s death, but I have not seen any documentation or citation to support this claim. In December 1483, however, Richard III allowed Katherine to bring her children and servants to London; whether she was living on her own, imprisoned, or living under supervision in London at the time is unknown. It seems most likely that after she was brought from Weobley, she was boarded at a convent, a genteel way of confining troublesome ladies, but her whereabouts after December 1483 through the remainder of Richard’s reign are unrecorded.

Elizabeth Woodville left sanctuary in March 1484. She was placed under the supervision of Nesfield, who was the constable of Hertford Castle. As there is no record of where Elizabeth stayed after she left sanctuary, I took the liberty of placing both her and her sister Katherine at Hertford, a location that was convenient for both the ladies and for my own purposes.

Richard III publicly pledged to provide for Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters if they would come out of sanctuary; interestingly, he also swore

3 7 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m that they would be in surety of their lives and would not be imprisoned in the Tower or in any other place. Richard also was obliged to publicly deny poisoning his queen and planning to marry his niece.

William Catesby did indeed leave Katherine a bequest of a hundred pounds in his will “to help herr children and that she will se my lordes dettes paid and his will executed.” The 1485 Act of Parliament assigning Katherine a jointure of a thousand marks also refers to Buckingham’s will, which apparently has not survived.

Harry Buckingham’s burial place is uncertain. The
Chronicle of the Grey
Friars of London
states that he was buried at the Grey Friars in Salisbury, but other writers claim that a tomb at the Church of St. Peter in Britford was erected in his memory, although there is some question about whether it contains any remains. To complicate matters further, in 1838, renovations at the Saracen’s Head Inn in Salisbury, on the site where the Blue Boar Inn stood, uncovered a headless skeleton that was also missing its right arm. The skeleton underwent an extremely unscientific examination by the locals, with the inn’s landlord measuring a rib against his own and concluding that the deceased was of “large dimensions,” before the remains were knocked around and merged in with the surrounding clay. Nineteenth-century antiquarians suggested that these could have been the remains of Harry.

Colorful as this story is, I opted for Grey Friars, which was in accordance with Richard III’s general habit of allowing his enemies an honorable burial. Whatever the location of Harry’s body, Harry’s ghost is said to haunt the Debenhams department store in Salisbury, which stands on the site of the Blue Boar Inn. Katherine’s burial place is unknown.

The quotations from
The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers
, translated by Anthony Woodville, are taken from William Caxton’s original edition, a facsimile of which is available through the Internet Archive. In connection with Caxton, I should mention that when Katherine refers to reading “romances,” she is referring not to what we call “bodice rippers” but to a broad variety of narratives dealing with such themes as adventure, love, chivalry, and honor.

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Edward IV’s most famous paramour, Mistress Shore, bore the first name of “Elizabeth”; it was not until the late sixteenth century that she was christened “Jane” by a dramatist, Thomas Heywood. I have accordingly called her by her given name, Elizabeth Shore.

There are three great mysteries surrounding this period of history: Was Edward IV secretly married to Eleanor Butler? What happened to the princes in the Tower? Why did Buckingham rebel against Richard? Pages upon pages have been devoted to each of these subjects, and one can do no better than to read the sources—both those favorable and unfavorable to Richard III—and decide for oneself, as I have. There are a few comments I would like to make about my own choices, however.

I have not overlooked the story that Bishop Stillington himself officiated at the marriage of Edward IV and Eleanor Butler; rather, I have rejected it. Only one source, the Burgundian chronicler Philippe de Commines, states that Stillington presided at the ceremony; no English chronicler makes such a claim. A yearbook entry in 1488, on the other hand, states that Stillington drafted the petition urging Richard to take the crown, while Eustace Chapuys, ambassador to Henry VIII’s court, wrote to Charles V in 1534 that Richard III “declared by definitive sentence of the bishop of Bath [Stillington] that the daughters of King Edward were bastards.” Both the yearbook entry and Chapuys’s comment suggest that Stillington played the role not of a witness to the marriage but of Richard’s mouthpiece.

Stillington was arrested in 1478, following the execution of Clarence, and Paul Murray Kendall and other defenders of Richard have taken this as evidence that Stillington had told Clarence of the precontract. But Stillington spent only a brief time in the Tower and continued to serve Edward IV after his release. He was even sent in 1479 to treat with a French ambassador. To me it beggars belief that Edward, knowing that Stillington was in possession of information that could threaten the succession, would allow him to see the light of day, much less be placed in a position where he could gossip to the French.

3 7 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m Henry VII himself arrested Stillington after the battle of Bosworth.

Yet Stillington was again imprisoned only briefly, and was pardoned that November. Only in 1487, when Stillington lent his support to a rebellion against Henry, was he imprisoned once more. Even then, he spent some time at his episcopal manor of Dogmerfeld in 1489 and 1491 before dying in the spring of 1491, aged eighty or so. This relatively lax treatment of Stillington suggests that although Henry VII might have regarded him as a political enemy, he did not regard him as possessing dangerous information.

What happened to Edward V and his brother, the Duke of York? No trace of them exists after the summer of 1483, and contemporary rumor, never denied by the king, accused Richard and/or Harry of their murders.

It has been said in Richard’s defense that he had no motive to kill his nephews, having declared them to be bastards, but this holds true only if bastardy was regarded as being an insurmountable barrier to kingship, which does not seem to have been the case, and if the allegations of the precontract were widely accepted. Mancini and the Crowland chronicler, the main sources for this period, were skeptical of the allegations, as were the men who died trying to restore Edward V to the throne just weeks after Richard was crowned. It has also been said that Richard’s failure to exhibit the boys’

bodies is proof that he did not kill his brother’s sons, but Richard, already facing suspicion from his new subjects, might well have chosen not to risk outraging the public with such a display. Most telling of his guilt, however, is the fact that he never produced the boys alive after they disappeared into the Tower, even when doing so would have aided his reputation and hurt Henry Tudor’s cause.

As for Harry Buckingham, I do not think he can be ruled out as a suspect in the princes’ deaths (assuming, of course, that they were murdered), although I believe him innocent. If he did indeed have a hand in the deaths, it was most likely in collusion with Richard. Only if he himself aspired to the throne could he gain more from arranging their deaths on his own than he had already gained through Richard. While the possibility that he fancied himself king cannot be discounted entirely, it is notable that neither

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Richard’s proclamations against him nor Buckingham’s attainder mentions such an ambition. It is also significant that Henry VII, a famously wary man, allowed Buckingham’s son Edward to recover his dukedom and his lands, something that he might not have risked had he believed that Edward’s father was aiming at the crown in 1483.

This brings us to the final question: why did Buckingham rebel? No one knows, though one possibility mentioned by Tudor chroniclers— that Richard denied him his coveted Bohun lands—has been long since discounted by evidence to the contrary. Besides royal ambition, various other scenarios—that Harry was mentally unstable, that he was pathologi-cally greedy, that he had some sort of falling-out with Richard III, or that he joined the rebellion to avoid reprisals should it succeed—have been put forth. Yet it may well be, as the Crowland chronicler wrote, that Harry was simply “repentant of what had been done” and that it was his conscience that ultimately led to his destruction. In the end we shall probably never know what was in Buckingham’s mind in 1483—but one wonders what, if Richard had granted his former ally the audience he sought before his execution, Harry would have said to the king.

Further Reading

C. A. J. Armstrong, trans.,
The Usurpation of Richard the Third.
(Dominic Mancini) Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969.

David Baldwin,
Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower.

Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004 (paperback edition).

Mary Clive,
This Son of York: A Biography of Edward IV
. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Anne Crawford,
The Yorkists: The History of a Dynasty.
London and New York: Hambledon, 2007.

Louise Gill,
Richard III and Buckingham’s Rebellion.
Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000.

John Gillingham,
The Wars of the Roses.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.