The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (26 page)

Richard III laid out 46 shillings and fourpence (£2 6
s
4
d
) for Richard Grey’s burial; probably he paid for the other men’s as well.
⁹³
As Anthony’s headless body was stripped, his executioners found next to his bare skin a hairshirt, a garment which, Rous tells us, he had long been in the habit of wearing. It came into the possession of the Carmelite friars at Doncaster, where for years after the earl’s death, it hung before the image of the Blessed Mary the Virgin.

Before donning his hairshirt for the last time, Rivers had sought consolation in a time-honoured secular manner: writing poetry. Caxton tells us that Anthony had once made ‘divers ballads against the seven deadly sins’, but the last verses he wrote, printed in part by John Rous and later in full by Thomas Percy, are the only ones of his known to have survived:
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            Somewhat musing

            And more mourning

            In remembering

            The unsteadfastness;

            This world being

            Of such wheeling

            Me contrarying

            What may I guess?

            I fear doubtless

            Remediless

            Is now to seize

            My woeful chance;

            For unkindness

            Without the less,

            And no redress

            Me doth advance.

            With displeasure

            To my grievance

            And no ‘surance

            Of remedy;

            Lo! In this trance

            Now in substance

            Such is my dance

            Willing to die.

            Methinks truly

            Bounden am I

            And that greatly

            To be content;

            Seeing plainly

            That fortune doth wry

            All contrary

            From mine intent.

            My life was lent

            Me to one intent

            It is nigh spent;

            Welcome Fortune!

            But I ne’er went

            Thus to be shent

            But so it meant

            Such is her won[t].

Because Richard III was a married man when he became king, his wife, Anne, would be crowned queen consort alongside him. She was not a well-known figure in London, so the crowd would have been especially interested to catch a glimpse of her on 6 July 1483 as she proceeded from Westminster Hall into Westminster Abbey. Few of those jostling for the best view would have wasted much time looking at the lady who was bearing the queen’s train: Margaret, Countess of Richmond. Undersized and well past her youth at age 40, the stern-looking countess would have caught the eye not because of her person but because of her attire: a long gown of crimson velvet bordered with white cloth of gold.
¹

Eighteen years before, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, had followed her daughter Elizabeth Woodville as she prepared to be crowned queen in this same abbey. Much had changed since then.

The nobility, many of whom were playing their parts in the coronation, either in the king’s train or the queen’s, might well have thought of that day in 1465. Others might have thought of the coronation that had never taken place, that of Edward V. That boy’s mother, still in sanctuary elsewhere in the abbey, would have certainly heard the sounds of the coronation – the music and the cheers of the crowd – as she and her five daughters wondered what would become of them now that Elizabeth had been branded Edward IV’s concubine and her children his bastards.

There were some conspicuous absences at the coronation. The king’s mother, Cecily, Duchess of York, was not present. She had not attended Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation either, so perhaps she simply preferred to avoid such events, or perhaps at her age she preferred not to travel beyond her castle of Berkhamsted. Then again, if her son had indeed impugned her honour, she might have chosen to stay away. The queen’s mother, Anne, Countess of Warwick, was also absent. Perhaps she too chose not to make the long trip from the north, or perhaps, as one who had been declared by Parliament for the benefit of her sons-in-law to have the status of one naturally dead, her presence was considered rather awkward. And although Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, was very much at the coronation – as the king’s great chamberlain, he carried the king’s train in one hand and his white staff of office in the other – his duchess was nowhere to be seen. As she was a Woodville, there is no need to wonder at her absence; the only question is whether she was ordered to stay away or chose of her own volition not to attend. Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury, was also missing, as were all of Queen Elizabeth’s other surviving siblings.

The new king was a few months short of his 31st birthday and was, it seems, in excellent health. For Elizabeth Woodville, her siblings, and her children – some in hiding, some in sanctuary, some in exile, some sitting on their estates far from court, some locked in the Tower – it must have seemed that Richard would be on the throne for many years.

They reckoned without the lady carrying Queen Anne’s train.

Born in 1443, Margaret Beaufort was the daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who had returned to England in disgrace after an ill-managed campaign in France.
²
A possible suicide, he had hardly known his only daughter, who had been an infant when he died in 1444. After a brief, unconsummated child marriage to John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, Margaret had married Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, Henry VI’s half-brother, in 1455. Probably anxious to father a child on Margaret so that he could have her estates in the event of her death, Richmond had wasted no time in consummating his marriage to Margaret, but it was he who died in 1456, leaving a pregnant young widow behind. Margaret bore her only child, Henry Tudor, in January 1457, when she was not yet 14.

Taken under the protection of her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, Margaret married Henry Stafford, a younger son of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, in 1458. Despite the couple’s Lancastrian ties – Buckingham, a supporter of Henry VI, died at Northampton, while Margaret’s male Beaufort cousins all were either beheaded or killed in battle for their support of that king – Stafford supported Edward IV at Barnet, but was wounded and died later that year. Margaret had then married Thomas Stanley, the king’s steward.

Her son, Henry, had had a precarious youth. He had been made the ward of William, Lord Herbert, in 1462. Like Richard, Earl Rivers, Herbert, made Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV in 1469, had been targeted by the Earl of Warwick as a royal favourite to be eliminated. When Warwick rebelled in 1469, Herbert was accompanied to the Battle of Edgecote by his young ward, whose first experience of war ended disastrously when his guardian was captured and led off to execution. Sir Richard Corbet took Henry from the battlefield to the home of Herbert’s brother-in-law, Lord Ferrers.
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Margaret’s negotiations to recover her son’s wardship were interrupted by the turmoil over the next few months, but when Henry VI’s restoration to the throne brought the exiled Jasper Tudor back to England, Henry Tudor was reunited with his uncle and then his mother in October 1470. It was a brief reunion between mother and son: after a meeting with Henry VI, who supposedly prophesised that the boy would become king, Henry, in Jasper’s care, departed for Wales in November. Holed up at Pembroke Castle after Edward IV’s victories at Barnet and Tewkesbury, Jasper and Henry escaped to Brittany in September 1471 and had remained there in exile ever since.

Margaret had come near to restoring her son to his country and to his inheritance. In 1482, she and Edward IV agreed that Henry Tudor would return from exile and receive a portion of the estates of Margaret’s recently deceased mother. A pardon was drafted, and there was even talk of Henry’s marrying Edward’s oldest daughter. Before the scheme could reach fruition, however, Edward IV died, leaving Margaret having to start over with a new king. Undaunted, she opened negotiations with Richard, using her kinsman Buckingham as an intermediary, to allow Henry to return to England and marry one of Richard’s newly bastardised nieces. Soon, however, Margaret’s plans changed radically.

Shortly after his coronation, Richard left on a royal progress, allowing his new subjects, many of whom in the hinterlands must have been bewildered at having had three kings in three months, to get a look at the latest wearer of the crown. One of his stops, on 26 July, was at Oxford. The chancellor who greeted him was likely not Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury, but Master William Harford, described as chancellor in a commission of the peace for Oxford dated 26 August.
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For the bishop to have to exchange pleasantries with the man who had ordered his brother’s and nephew’s execution would have been an awkward business indeed.

Meanwhile, the Londoners were bestirring themselves at last. On 29 July at Minster Lovell, Richard III wrote a letter to his chancellor, John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, in which he ordered him to take action against ‘certain persons’ who had been engaged in what is described only as an ‘enterprise’.
⁵
As Rosemary Horrox has suggested, this probably refers to a plot, described by John Stow, to set fires around the city and to rescue Edward V and his brother from the Tower under cover of the resulting confusion. Robert Russe, a sergeant of London, William Davy, a pardoner, John Smith, Edward IV’s groom of the stirrup, and Stephen Ireland, a wardrober in the Tower, were sentenced to death at Westminster and beheaded on Tower Hill, after which their heads were placed on London Bridge. The French chronicler, Basin, believed that fifty Londoners joined the conspiracy. The men were also accused of having written to Jasper Tudor and to Henry Tudor, as well as to other lords – the first hint of trouble from this quarter for Richard. The names of Jasper and Henry also suggest, as pointed out by Horrox, that Margaret Beaufort might have been involved, probably with the hope that Edward V would restore her son to his inheritance.