by Dan Jones
Margaret’s husband, Stafford, died on 4 October 1471, having endured for six months bouts of illness and infirmity connected to wounds he had received fighting at the battle of Barnet. It was a mark of Margaret’s instinct for survival that she ignored the social protocol suggesting widows ought to observe a year’s mourning before remarriage. There is every sign that she had enjoyed an affectionate partnership with Stafford, but before he was even in the ground she had begun negotiations for a union with another baron of the realm: Thomas, second Lord Stanley, a northern magnate with extensive lands and power in the north-west and, more importantly, extremely good connections to the Yorkist court. When Edward IV formalised the lavish new arrangement of the royal household, he appointed Stanley as steward – the most prestigious post available, with regular access to the king and scope for all sorts of political intrigue. Stanley’s position in the household meant that he developed a close working relationship with the Woodvilles. Over the course of the 1470s, Lord Stanley and Lady Margaret were drawn close into the Yorkist family circle. At a splendid ceremony held in 1476 to rebury old Richard duke of York in the family mausoleum in Fotheringhay, Margaret attended Queen Elizabeth and her daughters. In 1480, when Bridget, the last of Edward IV and Elizabeth’s children, was born at Eltham, Margaret was permitted to carry the baby to the font during the christening. She walked at the head of a procession of one hundred knights and squires, all carrying torches, accompanied by the king’s eldest stepson, Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset.7 Little by little she was making her way into royal favour.
Margaret Beaufort’s slow but steady integration into the royal circle worked precisely as intended. After 1476, when the king had failed to drag Henry Tudor out of Brittany by diplomacy, he began to consider other means of neutralising what small threat the young man could pose. He turned to Stanley and Margaret to establish the grounds on which Henry could be brought home and knitted into the acceptable ranks of English society.
The first impediment to this was removed with the death of George duke of Clarence in the Tower of London. Clarence had held the lands of the earldom of Richmond – Edmund Tudor’s old title – and with this available there was an enticing bait to dangle in front of Henry, who could now be offered a return to England as a nobleman of the first rank. Prompted by the king, Margaret and Stanley began to work on the process by which that might be achieved: at some (unknown) point a royal pardon for Henry was drafted on the back of the letter that had originally created Edmund earl of Richmond in November 1452.8 At around the same time, there were discussions between Margaret and the king about the fact that their children were related within the degrees of kinship that prohibited marriage without papal consent: these were terms of discussion that would theoretically precede a marriage between Henry Tudor and one of the royal princesses. Finally, on 3 June 1482, a document was drawn up at Westminster in which Edward IV made an agreement with Stanley and Margaret concerning the disposal of estates belonging to Margaret’s mother. From these estates, Margaret was permitted to carve out a rich inheritance for Henry. The agreement granted that the young man would be allowed to inherit on condition that he returned to England ‘to be in the grace and favour of the king’s highness’. Edward’s seal was affixed to the document. The stage was set for Henry to come home – albeit to a home that by 1482 the twenty-five-year-old renegade had only known for a few months of his life. Then disaster struck.
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On 9 April 1483 Edward IV died in his bed at Westminster Palace. Although he was ‘neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady’, he had become unwell following a fishing trip during the days leading up to Easter. A short and severe illness carried him from good health to death in less than a fortnight, three weeks before his forty-first birthday. In his youth a tall and a strikingly handsome man, by the time he reached early middle age he had become barrel-chested, fat and louche – facts that were noted by men inside and outside the kingdom. Years of increasingly debauched living had finally caught up with him.9 Feasting and fornication were the prerogative of kings, but even by royal standards, Edward had thrown himself wholeheartedly into excess. He had numerous mistresses (the most famous was Elizabeth Shore, a fast-tongued mercer’s daughter from London whom the king shared with Lord Hastings) and at least two illegitimate children by different mothers: there was a boy called Arthur Plantagenet, born to an obscure lady of the court around 1472 and much later created Lord Lisle, a daughter, Grace, and probably many more. Edward ‘loved to indulge himself in ease and pleasures’, wrote the historian and diplomat Philippe de Commines, who had seen the king in action at first hand during the peace negotiations of 1475.10 Polydore Vergil, who knew and interviewed many of Edward’s associates, observed that the king had been ‘given to bodily lust, whereunto he was of his own disposition inclined’.11 An even more vivid description was penned by the visiting Italian historian Dominic Mancini, who wrote of Edward that ‘in food and drink he was immoderate: it was his habit … to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more … after his recovery of the crown, he had grown fat in the loins, whereas previously he had been not only tall but rather lean and very active.’12 Commines thought that the king had died of an apoplexy – which could mean anything from a stroke to a heart attack. It was said elsewhere in Europe that the cause of death had been eating too many fruits and vegetables on Good Friday, although this was probably more a reflection of Edward’s famous girth than of medical science.13 We can speculate today that in view of his lifestyle, Edward may have been suffering chronic kidney disease, a fatal condition that only manifests itself in the acute final stages. Or perhaps he succumbed to a virus like influenza, which made its first significant appearances in England from the 1480s.14 We will never know.
All his fatness and loose living notwithstanding, Edward IV had been the most capable politician and most talented soldier to wear the English crown since Henry V. He had stamped out the vicious civil wars caused by the prolonged ineptitude of Henry VI, the bullheaded politicking of Edward’s own father, Richard duke of York, and the faithless scheming of Richard earl of Warwick and George duke of Clarence. He did so not merely by winning great victories on the battlefield but thanks to an acute understanding of what lay at the root of good kingship. This was an even more remarkable achievement considering that never in his life did he see another man govern England competently. His instinctive bonhomie had put him at ease in the company of everyone from the lowliest servants to the magnates who made up his natural circle of friends, advisers and counsellors. Although both halves of his reign had experienced turmoil, his second reign had been a marked improvement on the first. Dissenters had either been co-opted or ruthlessly wiped out. A great, if underemployed, army had been mustered for service in France, reminiscent of the hordes raised by his ancestor Edward III in the 1340s and 1350s, and the magnificence of the English court had been raised to a similarly exalted level. ‘After all intestine division appeased, he left a most wealthy realm abounding in all things, which by reason of civil wars he had received almost utterly void as well of able men as money,’ wrote Vergil. And although the coffers were not quite brimming over, on his death he left England a great deal more stable than he had found her.
If England was restored by Edward IV, it was also dealt a massive wrench by his death. For if the travails of the last six decades had taught Englishmen anything, it was that the prosperity of the kingdom was heavily dependent on the good sense of the man who wore the crown. In 1483, however, there was no man waiting, and there were several difficult problems looming. A war had been started with Scotland in 1482, which required careful royal attention and considerable military expenditure, while in the same year relations across the sea had become much more delicate: the treaty of Arras had been signed between Louis XI of France and a new ruler of Burgundy, Archduke Maximilian I of Habsburg – hobbling the traditional English strategy of playing these two great powers off against one another.
These were potentially perilous times, yet Edward’s son and heir was twelve and a half years old, and his brother and heir apparent Richard duke of York not quite ten. Once again, agonisingly, England’s fate depended on a child: or more accurately, on the good service and goodwill of the adults who surrounded him.
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When Edward IV died, his eldest son was at Ludlow, the sumptuous castle in Shropshire which served as the seat of the council over which he presided as prince of Wales. The prince’s council was convened under his authority, but in practice all its business was transacted by the young man’s governor, tutor and uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. For more than ten years Rivers had served as guide and mentor to the prince of Wales, keeping him busy in a life that his father had long ago abandoned. He spent long hours with ‘horses, dogs and other youthful exercises to invigorate his body’.15 The queen’s forty-three-year-old brother was a paragon of chivalry and an enthusiastic patron and practioner of the learned piety of the Renaissance. Reputed to be the finest knight in England, it was Rivers who had been afforded the honour of jousting with the Bastard of Burgundy in the famous tournament of 1467. Since then he had spent much of his life in the role of a knight errant, riding around Europe making war on the infidel while wearing a hair shirt beneath his heavy armour. Rivers had fought the Saracens in Portugal, he had been on pilgrimages to Rome and Santiago de Compostela, he was on good terms with Pope Sixtus IV and he was an enthusiastic man of letters. He collaborated with the pioneering merchant William Caxton, who in 1475–6 had brought a printing press to England for the first time. Rivers made use of Caxton’s new technology to publish English translations of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers and the Proverbs of Christine de Pisan as well as many of his own works of moralising verse. Caxton wrote approvingly of Rivers that he ‘conceiveth well the mutability and the unstableness of this present life, and that he desireth with a great zeal and spiritual love … that we shall abhor and utterly forsake the abominable and damnable sins which commonly be used nowadays; [such] as pride, perjury, terrible swearing, theft, murder and many other’.16 He was, in short, the model tutor for a young king growing up in a time of war and burgeoning knowledge, and his presence at the boy’s elbow had evidently been reassuring to the old king both in life and upon his deathbed. Indeed, Edward had given explicit instructions concerning the education of the prince, demanding that ‘no man sit at his board [i.e. table] but [ … ] by the discretion of [ … ] Earl Rivers’.17
Edward IV’s death, however, made Rivers’s dominant position into a far more complicated matter. The earl’s physical and emotional proximity to the young king now made him, potentially, the most powerful man in the land. For Edward V was at a very sensitive age. Twelve years old was the point at which a king might begin to show a will of his own and to give direction to the government flowing from his crown; yet it was also a childish age at which he remained highly susceptible to direction – or indeed misdirection – by those who were closest to him. Rivers understood this well, for besides being a great knight he was an astute politician. Just six weeks before the king’s death Rivers had requested from his solicitor in London copies of the letters by which he was appointed as the head of the prince’s household, letters which gave him explicit command of the royal person and discretion in moving him from place to place. It would therefore have been fresh and clear in Rivers’s mind just how much political value was attached to his possession of Edward V in April 1483. It was certainly fresh and clear in the minds of those outside the Woodville circle.
Edward IV’s will is now lost, but it seems that on his deathbed he tried to establish a series of compromises by which kingship could have been operated during his son’s early reign. He had made a concerted personal attempt to reconcile those around him who were engaged in longstanding quarrels, bringing Lord Hastings to his bedside and commanding him to make peace with Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, the queen’s eldest son. Although Dorset was married to Hastings’s stepdaughter, the two ‘maintained a deadly feud’: they were territorial rivals in the midlands and, according to the writer Mancini, rivals for the embraces of ‘mistresses whom they had abducted or attempted to entice from one another’.18 Next, to balance the fact that his son would remain comfortably in the care of Rivers and the Woodvilles, the dying king seems to have nominated his faithful brother Richard duke of Gloucester, next in line to the throne after the young duke of York and therefore naturally the greatest man in the realm, to take command of government, effectively in the position of protector. If this was so, then it was almost exactly the same arrangement that Henry V had attempted to make as he lay dying at Vincennes some sixty years previously, when he had nominated Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter to take responsibility for the infant Henry VI’s person, and another duke of Gloucester – Humphrey – to have control of royal government. Splitting command of the new king’s household from command of government was a logical means by which to divide power. Unfortunately, it took absolutely no account of the realities of politics.
As soon as Edward’s death was known, those of his councillors who were in London gathered to debate the best form for the new government to take. Two solutions were suggested. The first was the establishment of a protectorate, which according to Mancini was what the old king had directed in his will. The only plausible candidate for the role of protector was Richard duke of Gloucester, the most senior adult nobleman of the royal blood. Gloucester was away in the north of England, overseeing military efforts against the Scots. As soon as he had heard of Edward’s death he had come to York for a funeral ceremony at which he wept for the loss of his brother. But grief did not distract him from politics: Gloucester found time during his mourning to write to the council, stating his claim to be protector, for which Lord Hastings lobbied hard on his behalf in London. Hastings was motivated by two very obvious factors. He was naturally wary of Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset and the Woodvilles, who bore him ‘extreme ill-will’ and with whom he was so uneasily reconciled.19 Hastings had lost his post as chamberlain of the royal household on Edward’s death; he may well have feared that under a Woodville-led government he would also be deprived of his captaincy of Calais. But more than this, Hastings was motivated by loyalty. No man, save perhaps Gloucester, had been closer or more faithful to Edward IV, and it was therefore a matter of honour that Hastings should defend his late master’s wishes.
Yet the will of a dead king and the protests of his friends counted for nothing. Hastings was voted down by those councillors ‘who favoured the queen’s family’, and it was decided instead that there would be no protectorate: Edward V would begin his reign immediately. He would be crowned on 4 May, and would rule as an adult king, with a council convened to advise and assist him. Gloucester would have a seat on this council, but he would not have pre-eminence. It was a victory for the Woodvilles, and Mancini claims that Dorset gloated that ‘we are so important, that even without the king’s uncle [i.e. Gloucester] we can make and enforce these decisions’.20 On 14 May letters were sent to Ludlow summoning Rivers and Edward V to London, to arrive on 1 May, accompanied by a modest force of no more than two thousand men. In the meantime, the old king was to be buried.
The obsequies for Edward IV were formidable. On the day of his death the king’s broad, bare-chested body had been placed on display for twelve hours to be viewed by all the lords, bishops and aldermen present at Westminster.21 Subsequently Edward lay in state for eight days before being drawn, black-clad, behind horses for burial at St George’s Chapel in Windsor on 20 April. A grand and solemn service was held, and masses were sung for the dead man’s soul. Finally, when the king’s body was placed in the ground, his chief officers of state broke their ceremonial staffs and threw them on top of the coffin, signifying the end of the old reign. Directly they had done this, the royal heralds gave a great cry of ‘Le roy est vive!’ – ‘The king is alive!’ And attention returned to Edward V.
Rivers and the young king set
out from Ludlow for London in the last full week of April. Rather than taking the most direct route, they made a detour through the midlands. Gloucester, returning from the north for the coronation, had been in communication with Rivers and had persuaded him to join forces, the better to make a triumphant entry into London. On Tuesday 29 April the two parties neared one another in Northamptonshire. Gloucester had been met by Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and the two of them lodged that evening in the town of Northampton. Rivers, Edward V and the queen’s son Sir Richard Grey were a couple of miles’ ride away, their men having fanned out to spend the night at the villages and hamlets dotting the countryside – which included the old Woodville seat of Grafton Regis. It had been arranged that Gloucester and Buckingham were to present themselves to their new king on the following day, and in preparation for this important family occasion, Rivers and Richard Grey rode over to Gloucester’s inn on the night of 29 April, to share what turned out to be a convivial meal. They were received with ‘an especially cheerful and joyous countenance, and sitting at supper at the duke’s table, passed the whole time in very pleasant conversation’. Talk may have involved the Scottish campaign, on which Rivers and his brother Sir Edward Woodville had both briefly served under Gloucester’s command, and there may have been some discussion of the property deals that ceaselessly occupied the minds of English magnates: only a month previously Rivers had asked Gloucester to arbitrate a land dispute for him, an act that implied a significant degree of trust and kinship. Whether on these or other matters, the four great men talked late into the night before retiring to bed, agreeing to rise early in the morning.
They rose with the light. The presentation to the new king was to take place in Stony Stratford, eighteen miles south along Watling Street, the old Roman road that cut diagonally across the middle of England. Riding at a gentle pace, it would have taken three hours or so to cover the ground. But the journey was never completed. The magnates were riding together, accompanied by a large body of Gloucester’s soldiers, when the two dukes suddenly drew up, told Rivers and Grey that they were under arrest, ‘and commanded them to be led [as] prisoners to the north of England’.22 Then Gloucester, Buckingham and their armed men kicked their horses and set out at a gallop for the king. They commanded sentries to ride out along the road and prevent the news of their coup from spreading, and the tactic appears to have worked. They reached a startled Edward V in quick time, arrested his chamberlain, Sir Thomas Vaughan, dismissed almost all of the royal attendants with threats to kill anyone who disobeyed, then bent on their knees before their new sovereign, caps in hands, and declared that they had come to safeguard the king’s rule and protect him from the scheming impudence of the Woodvilles.
