The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds (17 page)

Stallworth’s letter gives us a window on the political landscape of the time. Richard’s administrative diligence was clear. It may have been a masquerade; it may also have been genuine. The Tudors believed Richard had by this time prepared a coup that would enable him to usurp the throne; yet he may also have been overtaken by events beyond his control. For things were now to change rapidly.

On 10 June Richard sent a dramatic letter to York. Further letters were dispatched to his principal northern followers the next day. In them, he made a powerful appeal for help, asking for men to be sent to his aid in London: ‘to assist us against the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which have intended, and daily doth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin, the duke of Buckingham, and the old royal blood of the realm, as it is openly known, and by their subtle damnable ways forecasted the same, the final destruction and disinheritance of you and all other inheritors and men of honour, as well of the north parties as other countries [regions] that belongen us.’

We are reminded of the oppressive menace Richard felt after the arrest and execution of his brother George, Duke of Clarence, powerfully described by Mancini, and the call for assistance Richard put out to his northern followers in the weeks following Clarence’s arrest. The mass retaining of supporters among the tenants of the bishopric of Durham in July 1477, and the oath of loyalty Richard demanded from them, was proof that he felt in real danger. Here Mancini was forthright: Richard believed that the Woodvilles were behind the arrest of his brother, and were looking for an opportunity to engineer his own downfall.

Now that threat was once more in the ascendancy. Beneath the day-to-day activities of the Protectorate Richard’s position remained alarmingly insecure. With the coronation planned for 22 June, his tenure of power would last only a matter of weeks. For once Edward V had been crowned, precedent dictated that a Protectorate be replaced by a ruling council. And this council – within which the king would exercise a greater say – could authorize the release of the Woodvilles Richard held in captivity and a restoration of their influence. If Richard believed he had been in deadly peril at Northampton on 29 April, he would soon be in deadly peril again.

If Richard’s political future was insecure, so too were his northern landed estates – and the income and support he drew from them – which he had built up with such care in the reign of his brother, Edward IV. These estates – and the affinity he had created around them – formed Richard’s heartland and the source of his power. Yet Richard’s right to pass down his Neville lands to his son and heir, Edward of Middleham, was dependent on the survival of a nephew of Warwick the Kingmaker, George Neville, Duke of Bedford. But on 4 May 1483, the day of Richard’s entry into the capital, Neville had suddenly died without marriage or children. To secure his Neville legacy, and avoid the ‘disinheritance … of the north parties’, the eventual dispersal of his northern estates that he evoked in his letter, new legislation would have to be pushed through parliament to protect his title to his lands. And were the Woodvilles to regain their influence, they would strongly oppose this.

These concerns must have weighed heavily on Richard’s mind. There is evidence that he sought a solution through a break with precedent, and an extension of the term of his Protectorate beyond Edward V’s coronation. But such an extension would have to be ratified by parliament and the royal council. The council was ready to support Richard in the days leading up to the coronation; it was unclear whether it would continue to back his mandate in the weeks and months after it. This matter may have been raised – perhaps unsuccessfully – in the unusually long, four-hour council meeting that Stallworth referred to in his letter on 9 June.

However, the power of Richard’s language on 10 June – its sheer emotional force – is striking. The sense of threat is tangible, with fear of the Woodvilles paramount, who ‘intended, and daily doth intend, to murder us’. Once more the events of 29 April 1483 were rehearsed, showing again Richard’s belief that on this occasion the Woodvilles intended to ambush, arrest or even kill him. But the phrase ‘daily doth intend’ is more puzzling. What was this present danger? Rivers, Grey and Vaughan had been arrested, the queen had fled to sanctuary and Woodville power, for the time being at least, had been dispersed. The lack of immediate threat makes the letter seem suspicious, a ploy or false justification for bringing an army of supporters down to London. And news of a northern army bearing down on the capital would be enough to intimidate any opposition, if Richard was now considering whether to seize the throne.

The crucial phrase in the letter was ‘forecasted the same’, which had a very particular meaning in the fifteenth century, that of conspiring to bring about someone’s death through astrological divination or prediction, seen as a form of witchcraft. In the late Middle Ages it was a treasonable offence to draw up, without authorization, the horoscopes or birth charts of a member of the English royal family. Such sensitivity may seem quite extraordinary to a modern audience, yet belief in the power of such acts was very real to a medieval one, and had already featured prominently in a number of high-profile trials, the most notorious being that of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, who was convicted in 1441 of using astrological forecasting to bring about the death of King Henry VI, and condemned to imprisonment as a witch. Richard was now accusing the Woodvilles, and particularly the queen, of using witchcraft in an attempt to bring about his own death.

Fear of the Woodvilles and witchcraft was not a sudden invention of Richard’s; rather it stemmed from the mysterious circumstances of Edward IV’s marriage and Elizabeth Woodville’s maternal lineage. For her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, could trace an ancestry back to the first Count of Luxembourg, who – as legend had it – had married a magical being, the water goddess Melusina. Jacquetta knew of this legend, which was stated in her own family tree, and she owned a copy of a rare manuscript of the history of Melusina. Melusina may have been a theme at her daughter Elizabeth’s marriage and at royal jousts. The legend took on a more sinister meaning in July 1469, when the Earl of Warwick, allied with George, Duke of Clarence, went into rebellion against Edward IV, executed Jacquetta’s husband and one of her sons, and then put Jacquetta herself on trial for witchcraft. Witnesses were called, claiming that Jacquetta had brought about the marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, five years earlier, through sorcery, though the trial was never brought to a conclusion. Its memory lingered on, and Richard was later to make a similar claim about the marriage in the
Titulus Regius
that justified his own claim to the throne: that it was enacted by witchcraft. His fear of the Woodvilles practising witchcraft against him – however implausible it may seem to a modern audience – could have been quite real.

A near-contemporary London chronicle also claimed that Richard’s opponents were using ‘divination’ against him. Even if Richard’s fear of witchcraft was genuine, he could still have circulated this information in June 1483 to disguise his real intentions. But another reference is tellingly found among a personal archive rather than being intended for public consumption. Lewis Caerleon had been employed as an astrologer for Elizabeth Woodville and was subsequently arrested by Richard, and imprisoned in the Tower. In 1485, in the margins of astronomical material in his possession, Caerleon noted: ‘after the composition of these tables [of eclipses],
which I lost through the plundering of King Richard
[my italics], I, being imprisoned in the Tower of London, composed other tables.’ Richard had taken this issue seriously enough to confiscate and search through Caerleon’s private papers.

Matters came to a head in the remarkable and quite terrifying council meeting of 13 June. According to both Polydore Vergil and Thomas More, Richard charged the queen and Edward IV’s mistress Elizabeth [ Jane] Shore with witchcraft, and then involved Lord Hastings in this accusation. Polydore Vergil said that the sorcery had produced in Richard ‘a deep bodily feebleness’, preventing him from resting, eating or drinking over the last few days, in other words from the time he wrote his letter to York, which first mentioned his fear of witchcraft. More, by contrast, used dramatic embellishment, such as appealed to Shakespeare, with his baring of a newly withered arm. Both writers made it clear that they thought Richard’s belief in a conspiracy against him was no more than his own invention.

More vividly portrayed the councillors’ amazement at such a charge, particularly as it linked both the queen and the king’s mistress in the plot. As More put it, with all his lawyer’s reasonableness, ‘she [Elizabeth Woodville], of all people would least make Shore’s wife of her counsel, whom of all women she most hated, as that concubine the king her husband had most loved.’ For More and Vergil believed that Richard and Buckingham planned the arrest of Hastings with the same ruthless opportunism that had been employed against Rivers at Northampton.

The immediate execution of Hastings, without trial, was a shocking act, whatever the reason for it. And it was most convenient for Richard, if he had already decided to take the throne himself, to have the leading moderate in the council out of the way, a man who had strongly supported him as Protector but was unflinchingly loyal to the sons of Edward IV. Hastings’s death removed the focal point for any opposition to Richard – and would have intimidated or cowed the doubters into submission. And yet there was a terrible spontaneity to this event, as if some highly charged emotional secret had startlingly been revealed. For if Richard had planned and calculated it in advance, giving Jane Shore a starring role in the conspiracy – the point made much of by More – the supposed master of dissimulation was adopting a quite bizarre strategy. It was almost as if Richard were inviting disbelief. The charge against Shore was so odd it might actually have been genuine.

After Edward IV’s death there was a quarrel over Elizabeth [Jane] Shore – the king’s favourite mistress – between the Marquis of Dorset and Lord Hastings, with both men competing for her favour. Richard’s distaste for the sexual immorality of his brother’s courtiers would only have been heightened when he learned of this; and if Hastings, perhaps fearing Richard might delay Edward V’s coronation, had begun a desperate effort to make contact with the queen in sanctuary, it is not impossible that Shore could have been used as an intermediary. We will never know. But whatever the reason for it, Hastings’s execution was a dreadful moment. He was a popular and well-liked figure, and his death universally regretted. As the
Great Chronicle of London
remarked: ‘and thus was this noble man murdered for the truth and fidelity he bore unto his master [Edward V].’ Richard may have planned to dispose of Hastings, and – once this obstacle to his ambition was removed – deliberately sought out the throne. Alternatively, he may have ordered the execution on the spur of the moment, and then realized, after undertaking it, that only the power and prestige of kingship would now protect his position. Or finally, he may indeed have uncovered evidence that Hastings was now plotting against him, as both Richard and Buckingham were subsequently to claim.

On 16 June a deputation was sent to the queen, still in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, led by the ageing Archbishop of Canterbury, and she was now persuaded to release her younger son Richard, Duke of York into Richard’s keeping. After the escape of Thomas, Marquis of Dorset from sanctuary, Richard had surrounded the abbey with troops. Edward V and his brother were now moved to the inner apartments of the Tower. They were occasionally seen playing in the Tower gardens, but more usually glimpsed behind barred windows. Preparations for the coronation of the young king were abandoned, and the writs that were to summon the first parliament of his reign cancelled. Orders were sent north for the execution of Rivers, Grey and Vaughan. Events were developing a terrible momentum.

On 21 June 1483 Simon Stallworth wrote a second letter to his master Sir William Stonor. His tone had now changed completely. There was no mention of private business matters; Stallworth was entirely focused on what was happening in the capital and how things might unfold there. He began by saying Stonor was lucky to be away from it all: ‘with us there is much trouble and every man doubts another.’ He described the sudden execution of Hastings, ‘beheaded soon upon noon’, and how, in its aftermath, two other councillors, Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, and John Morton, Bishop of Ely, had been imprisoned. He related details of the surrender of young Richard, Duke of York from sanctuary, the abbey being surrounded by ‘harnessed men’ [soldiers in body armour]. Richard and Buckingham had received the prince with ‘many loving words’; he was then sent to the Tower to join his brother there. Stallworth hoped he would be ‘merry’ at this reunion without fully believing what he was saying; ‘blessed be Jesus’, he added uneasily. News was spreading in London of the approach of Richard’s army of northern supporters; some – in the grip of panic – imagined it might be 20,000 strong. Stallworth recorded that Eliabeth [Jane] Shore was also in prison: ‘what shall happen to her I know not.’ And then, whether as a result of illness or sheer distress, Stallworth was unable to carry on. ‘I pray you pardon me of more writing,’ he concluded, ‘I am so sick that I may not well hold my pen.’

Stallworth did not say it outright, but he clearly suspected that Richard was now aiming for the throne. Revelations abounded. One repeated the slur that Edward IV had in fact been illegitimate, a rumour first spread by Warwick and Clarence in 1469, but now – according to Dominic Mancini – sensationally confirmed by Richard’s own mother, Cecily, Duchess of York, who had flown into a ‘frenzy’ [a bout of hysteria], claiming that Edward was conceived out of an adulterous affair, and that Richard, Duke of York was not his real father. And then there was the disclosure that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid, because Edward had been pre-contracted to marry someone else, Lady Eleanor Talbot, the daughter of John, Earl of Shrewsbury. This startling information meant that under Church law the children of Edward and Elizabeth were illegitimate, and could not inherit the throne.