The Life and Times of Richard III (9 page)

Hastings turned to the Woodvilles in June for precisely the same reason as he turned to Richard in April – because his interests were threatened from another quarter. By upholding Richard’s claims during the Protector’s absence in the North, he doubtless hoped to be rewarded with the lion’s share of the spoils and the most important voice in his Council. However, he soon realised that it was Buckingham who had adopted the role of Kingmaker. Buckingham rode beside Richard when the Protector entered London, and Buckingham was rewarded with almost vice-regal powers in Wales and the West. As Lord Chamberlain to Edward V, Hastings could still hope to recoup his position after the coronation. But here again he was disappointed, when Richard proposed to extend his authority until the King came of age.

The remedy that Richard applied to Hastings’s disaffection was drastic and quick. On 13 June he struck, without waiting for his reinforcements from Yorkshire. While the official side of the Council was in session at Westminster, Richard summoned the four offenders, Buckingham, Howard and a number of his personal staff to a meeting at the Tower. What followed is vividly described by Sir Thomas More, who derived his information from one of those present – John Morton, Bishop of Ely. The Protector entered the Council Chamber at nine o’clock, ‘excusing himself that he had been from them so long, saying merely that he had been asleep that day. And after a little talking unto them, he said unto the Bishop of Ely: “My Lord, you have very good strawberries at your garden in Holborn, I require you let us have a mess of them.”’ Shortly after opening the meeting Richard asked the Councillors to excuse him for a moment and left the room. Between 10 and 11 am, ‘he returned into the chamber among them, all changed, with a wonderfully sour angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and fretting and gnawing on his lips’. The Council sat stunned by this sudden change. Then Richard asked them, ‘“What were they worthy to have, that compass and imagine the destruction of me, being so near of blood unto the King and Protector of his royal person and realm?”’ To this Hastings replied ‘“that they were worthy to be punished as heinous traitors, whatsoever they were”. “That is yonder sorceress, my brother’s wife”, cried Richard, “and others with her.”’

Still unaware of what lay in store for him, Hastings was relieved to hear that Richard had cast those familiar bogeymen, the Woodvilles, as the villains of his little drama. But the alarm was clearly sounded when the Protector went on to accuse Jane Shore of abetting the Queen in her sorcery. For Jane, once Edward’s favourite mistress, now shared the Lord Chamberlain’s bed. Nevertheless Hastings repeated that any such traitors deserved punishment, if they could be proved guilty. ‘“What,” exclaimed Richard, “thou servest me, I wean, with ifs and with ands, I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor.” And therewith as in a great anger, he clapped his fist upon the board a great rap. At which token given, someone cried “Treason!” without. Therewith a door clapped, and in come there rushing men in harness, as many as the chamber might hold.’ Hastings, Stanley, Rotherham and Morton were promptly arrested. A priest was brought so that Hastings could make his peace with God. Minutes later he was ‘brought forth into the green beside the Chapel within the Tower, and his head laid down upon a log of timber and there striken off’.

Richard promptly sent for a number of important citizens, dressed himself up in rusty armour and explained to them that his strange attire was due to the discovery that Hastings and others had planned to assassinate himself and Buckingham at the Council table. A proclamation to this effect was immediately published to forestall another panic in the city.

Hastings’s execution was characteristic of Richard’s response to a crisis. The remedy was impulsive, direct and quick. If More’s narrative is at least half-way accurate, it was also badly staged and politically inept. By taking the short cut, without regard for legal forms, and dressing the affair in a cloak of crude melodrama, he can only have undermined the confidence of the great men on whom his political future depended. The Woodvilles could be roughly dealt with because the baronial class were only too glad to be rid of them; but Hastings was one of them, a popular man and important office-holder, and long a close friend of the late King.

With Hastings dead, Richard felt he had little to fear from the other three conspirators. Perhaps as a gesture to quiet the fears of the nobility, Lord Stanley was restored to the Council almost immediately. Rotherham, who had once before given proof of his ineffectiveness as an opponent, was released after a short imprisonment. Only John Morton, an altogether more subtle and dangerous enemy, was to be kept out of circulation under Buckingham’s custody in the Welsh stronghold of Brecon Castle.

Hastings’s conspiracy now led Richard to make the most important decision of his life. Hastings’s death had narrowed the base of his support to a point where not even the office of Protector, extended until Edward V’s majority, seemed a sufficient guarantee for the future. To survive, he must rule, and to rule he must be King. Perhaps the decisive factor, after Hastings’s removal, was the personality of the young King. Already at Stony Stratford Edward had shown he was capable of standing up to his uncle in defence of his mother and her family. Dominic Mancini gives further evidence of his precocity: ‘In word and deed he gave so many proofs of his liberal education, of polite, nay rather scholarly, attainments far beyond his age.’ Most remarkable was ‘his special knowledge of literature which enabled him to discourse elegantly, to understand fully, and to declaim most excellently from any work, verse or prose, that came into his hands, unless it were from among the more abstruse authors’. With his character and intellect already cast to this degree, Edward could hardly be expected to cherish the man who had imprisoned his favourite uncle, Earl Rivers, sent his mother and brother into Sanctuary and now beheaded his Lord Chamberlain not a stone’s throw from the royal apartments.

Any doubts that Richard was now committed to obtaining the Crown for himself were dispelled three days later on Monday, 16 June when the Council met to discuss the removal of Edward’s younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, from the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey to the Tower. The two Dukes, accompanied by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Bourchier, and a retinue of armed men, proceeded to Westminster by barge. Richard was prepared to use force if necessary, but in order to avoid a violation of Sanctuary the Archbishop went in to persuade the Queen to surrender her son voluntarily. Elizabeth was probably not deceived by Bourchier’s promise that the boy would be restored after his brother’s coronation, but she bowed to the threat of force. The Protector embraced his nephew affectionately at the door of the Painted Chamber and accompanied him to the Tower.

With the Princes in his power and his northern followers expected in London within the week, Richard lacked only a legal fiction to justify his claim to the throne. For this purpose he dredged up the story of Edward’s marriage contract with Lady Eleanor Butler – a daughter of Old Talbot, the ‘Terror of the French’. If true, this story is another example of Edward’s disastrous passion for older women. Lady Eleanor was the widow of Sir Thomas Butler and died in 1468. Had the engagement taken place, it would have invalidated his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and made bastards of her children. There is in fact no reason to suppose that the story was not true; Edward could never resist a pretty face and troth plight was a common device for coaxing reluctant virgins into bed. Clarence had cast the same aspersions on Edward’s marriage six years before, and Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, claimed to have acted as Edward’s go-between in the affair. The news was broken to the people of London on 22 June in a carefully staged sermon at Paul’s Cross. Richard selected as his mouthpiece the Lord Mayor’s brother, Dr Ralph Shaa, who took as his text the Old Testament quotation
‘Spuria vitulamina non agent radices alias’
– ‘Bastard slips shall not take deep root’.

In the meantime, the Lords and Commons, originally summoned in May to ratify Richard’s protectorate in Parliament, were beginning to arrive in London. Richard, Buckingham and their agents were kept feverishly busy, sounding out opinions and canvassing for support. Richard exchanged the black cloth of mourning he had worn since his brother’s death for an outfit of purple velvet, and paraded through the streets of the capital with an army of retainers. The great hall at Crosby’s Place was thronged every day at dinner-time with the Protector’s guests. On 24 June the Duke of Buckingham enlarged on the theme of Dr Shaa’s sermon with an appeal to the Mayor and leading citizens at the Guildhall. He laid great stress on the abuses of government and the financial exactions which had marked the Woodville ascendancy. Under Richard’s rule he offered them, ‘the surety of your own bodies, the quiet of your wives and your daughters, the safeguard of your goods; of all which things in times past ye stood evermore in need’. Who had been able to count himself master of his own possessions ‘amoung so much pilling and polling, amoung so many taxes and tallages, of which there was never end and often time no need?’. Reiterating Richard’s rightful claim to the throne ‘which ye well remember substantially declared unto you at Paul’s Cross on Sunday’, Buckingham reminded them that the title of King was no child’s office. ‘And that great wise man well perceived when he said: woe is that Realm, that hath a child to their King.’ The Duke, according to Sir Thomas More, was ‘marvellously well spoken’; and one eye witness was much impressed by the fact that he did not even pause to spit between sentences. Nevertheless, the speech had a cool reception until the Duke’s servants, at the back of the Hall, threw their caps into the air with shouts of ‘King Richard, King Richard’.

Even if the people of London still had their reservations, the Parliament which met at Westminster on Wednesday, 25 June, was not disposed to argue. The majority were probably content with any arrangement that promised an end to civil strife. Others who still nursed private grudges against the Woodvilles gladly assented to a measure which ensured their eclipse. And Richard’s opponents were prepared to bide their time, cowed for the moment by Hastings’s fate and the presence in the capital of so many northerners. Unanimously, the Parliament assented to a document which followed much the same lines as Buckingham’s speech in the Guildhall and was couched in the form of a petition to the Duke of Gloucester to take the Crown. On the following day a deputation, headed by none other than the Duke of Buckingham, made its way to the Protector at Baynard’s Castle and presented their petition. In keeping with his taste for amateur dramatics, Richard feigned surprise and reluctance before he acceded to more shouts of ‘King Richard, King Richard’. The nobility pressed forward to take the oath of allegiance, and King Richard rode in state to Westminster Hall. Here he laid formal claim to his title by seating himself on the marble chair of King’s Bench.

While the Lords and Commons were listening to the petition at Westminster, a more melancholy scene was enacted in Yorkshire. Under the supervision of the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Anthony Earl Rivers, Lord Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan were executed at Pontefract. Witnesses were surprised to learn that the magnificent and talented Earl wore a hair shirt next to his body. Thus Richard signified his triumph over the Woodvilles by killing the one member of the family whose talents and popularity might have redeemed the greed and cruelty of his kin and threatened the ascendancy of his executioner.

In London arrangements were in hand for the most magnificent coronation of the century. Rich ermines, velvets and cloth-of-gold, so lately intended for Edward V’s enthronement were made to serve the occasion of Richard’s. While the Master of the Wardrobe laboured to fulfill his contract, Lord John Howard prevailed on the King to confer on him the dukedom of Norfolk and the right to bear the crown to Westminster Abbey as High Steward of England. At the beginning of July, the King held a review of the five thousand men of Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Westmorland who had at last arrived under the command of the Earl of Northumberland. The review took place at Moor Fields and provoked some disparaging comments from Londoners who noted their rusty gear and bedraggled appearance.

On the 6 July 1483, the King and Queen, preceded by heralds and trumpeters, walked barefoot in procession to the Abbey. Behind the bishops and Cardinal Bourchier came Northumberland with the Sword of Mercy, Lord Stanley with the Constable’s mace, Richard’s brother-in-law John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk with the sceptre and Suffolk’s eldest son John, Earl of Lincoln with the orb. These were followed by the newly-created Duke of Norfolk who carried the crown, and his son, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, with the Sword of State. The King himself was flanked by Viscount Lovell and the Earl of Kent bearing the Swords of Justice. Buckingham held Richard’s train, and behind him walked the remaining earls and barons of the realm. After the King’s procession came the Queen’s, her regalia borne by two earls and a viscount. At the high altar Richard and Anne stripped to the waist and were anointed with the chrism. They then changed into cloth-of-gold and Cardinal Bourchier set the crowns on their heads. A
Te Deum
was sung and the royal couple received communion, before they returned to the dais at Westminster Hall for the coronation banquet.

For King Richard III the coronation was a triumph. Not only had it set a new precedent in splendour, but it had also been attended by virtually the entire peerage of England, including Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, who had carried Anne’s train, and the Queen Dowager’s brother-in-law, Viscount Lisle. And all this had been achieved at the cost of only four lives.

Looking back over the crowded months of April, May and June 1483, it is easy to see how the Tudor historians, reading history backwards, came to the conclusion that Richard’s path to the throne was carefully planned from the moment he left York. The clockwork sequence of events from the seizing of Edward V, the execution of Hastings, the abduction of the Duke of York, Dr Shaa’s sermon, to the mummery of the petition – hint at a cold-blooded and cynical intelligence systematically removing the obstacles that lay between Richard and the inheritance of his nephew. Even Dominic Mancini, who wrote his account only six months later and drew no pension from the Tudors, saw Richard’s usurpation in this light.