by Dan Jones
Edward V was only twelve years old, but he saw quickly through his uncle Gloucester’s fine words. According to Mancini, the youth replied, ‘saying that he merely had those ministers whom his father had given him … he had seen nothing evil in them and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved … As for the government of the kingdom, he had complete confidence in the peers of the realm and the queen.’ At the mention of Elizabeth Woodville’s name, Buckingham snapped back that it was ‘not the business of women but of men to govern kingdoms and so if [the king] cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it’. At this point, Edward realised that the dukes were ‘demanding rather than supplicating’. He was as much at their mercy as the men they had arrested: the victim of an unforecast and bewilderingly swift coup. Helpless, Edward went along with them. His last day of real freedom had come abruptly to an end.
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Richard duke of Gloucester trotted Edward V into London on Sunday 4 May, the king dressed in blue velvet and his uncle clad head to toe in black. They were met by the mayor, aldermen and a delegation of five hundred citizens wearing robes of violet. It had escaped none of these well-apparelled gentlemen that 4 May was the date that had been scheduled for the king’s coronation. This, Gloucester announced, would now be postponed for seven weeks, to take place instead on Sunday 22 June, immediately followed by the opening of parliament on Tuesday 24 June. This would allow for ‘the coronation and all that pertained to the solemnity [to] be more splendidly performed’.23 In the meantime, on 8 May Gloucester secured from the council the right to act as protector of the kingdom – an office, it struck contemporaries, that echoed the office wielded by another duke of Gloucester, Henry VI’s uncle Humphrey. But whereas old Humphrey had been frustrated throughout his career by the careful impositions laid upon him by his peers, Richard duke of Gloucester now appeared to have the ‘power to order and forbid in every matter, just like another king’.24
The Woodvilles had been cut out with extraordinary rapidity. Rivers and Sir Richard Grey were locked up in the earl of Warwick’s former castle at Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, a huge, square fortress that had been one of Gloucester’s chief residences when he had been sent to keep order in the north during his brother’s reign. The horrified queen, meanwhile, had fled on 1 May for sanctuary to Westminster, ‘in like condition’, noted one chronicler, ‘as she had done before the field of Barnet’.25 She took with her her daughters, her nine-year-old son Prince Richard, duke of York and her eldest son, Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset; they would soon be joined there by Lionel Woodville, another of the queen’s brothers. Sir John Woodville, who was the queen’s youngest brother, was at sea with a fleet detailed to defend the English coasts against French piracy. When he heard about the moves against his family he fled English waters and landed in Brittany. On 9 May, the day after Richard’s appointment as protector, the young king was sent to the Tower of London, supposedly for his own security – although security was scarcely what previous royal inhabitants had found there.
Richard, meanwhile, moved into Crosby Place on Bishopsgate, one of the most stunning and modern mansions in the whole of the city, a luxurious stone-and-timber home that towered above every other residential property in London. From here he ordered a steady anti-Woodville propaganda drive: producing wagons piled high with weapons which he claimed the queen’s family had intended to use against him, and accusing them of having pilfered from the royal treasure. He was ably assisted by Hastings, confirmed in his position as chamberlain of the new king’s household. According to one well-informed writer, Hastings was ‘elated … and was in the habit of saying that nothing whatever had been done except the transferring of the government of the kingdom from two of the queen’s blood to two more powerful persons of the king’s … causing as much blood to be shed as would be produced by a cut finger’.26 But it was not quite as simple as all that.
In acting ruthlessly to overthrow the Woodvilles, Richard had on one level demonstrated much the same instinct for swift, bold leadership that had marked his late brother Edward’s finest hours. His motivation for staging a coup against the family is not hard to deduce. Prestige alone demanded that he should have full control of government during his nephew’s minority, and his whole life’s experience suggested that direct and decisive action against potential rivals was essential in a time of political uncertainty. The house of York was acutely aware of its own tribulations; it would have been a profound betrayal of the family’s own history to have allowed parvenus like Rivers and Dorset to step in and control the kingdom while the only duke of the blood royal stood by and did nothing.
Yet having imprisoned the king and partially scattered his enemies, Richard found himself in a somewhat awkward position. His bullish actions echoed those of his father during Henry VI’s reign rather too closely: seizing control of England by means of a coup was in a sense the easy part; building a long and stable royal government on the back of a factional power-grab was a rather more difficult task. On 22 June the king was due to be crowned, and at that point Richard’s powers as protector would evaporate. There was every chance that the boy Edward V, who had seemed so astonished and aggrieved at being forcibly removed from the family and servants he loved and trusted, would seek to be revenged upon his presumptuous thirty-year-old uncle. At the very least, Richard could expect to be forced to release Rivers and Grey, and to see the rest of the Woodvilles emerge from their various boltholes.
It was a mark of his desperation that during the brief weeks he served as protector, Richard attempted to secure a legal judgement that would allow him to have Rivers, Grey and Vaughan condemned for treason and beheaded. Worryingly for him, the council refused to countenance it, pointing out that since Rivers and the rest had not actually committed any treasonable acts, there was no legal grounds upon which their heads could justifiably be cut off. All that came of Richard’s attempts to neutralise those he saw as his rivals was to increase their alienation. When a council meeting was held in early June at Westminster, and the queen emerged briefly from sanctuary to attend, she sat in silence, spoken to by no one throughout the entire two-hour meeting.27
Late spring ticked by into early summer. Richard’s concerns mounted. It was almost as though he was become his father. Loyalty had been his defining characteristic in his whole career to date. Yet actions taken in defence of what he believed was his brother’s legacy – although begun in the genuine spirit of protecting the realm – were leading him into a corner. The minute he should lose his grip on the power he had taken, he would be potentially as vulnerable as those whom he had displaced. Somehow, loyalty had now to be balanced against the purest form of self-preservation.
Although the daily business of government progressed unremarkably, with the coronation approaching Richard became increasingly paranoid. On 10 and 11 June letters were sent to loyal servants in Yorkshire, requesting urgent military support in the capital, and warning that ‘the Queen, her blood, adherents and affinity … have intended and daily do intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin the duke of Buckingham and the old royal blood of this our realm’. If such a plot existed outside Richard’s mind, it went unnoticed by other writers. However, it would appear that the strategy of summoning what amounted to an army to London was too much for some of those who had hitherto been closest to the protector. If the business of the coup had been in part to protect the legacy of Edward IV, then Gloucester was now running dangerously close to shredding the very thing he claimed to stand for.
Some time around the period when Gloucester was summoning his northern faithful ‘in fearful and unheard of numbers’ to tramp down the ancient straight road from York to London, Lord Hastings appears to have begun losing his confidence in the regime he had done so much to enable. He shared his concerns with two other former loyalists, Thomas Rotherham, archbishop of York, and John Morton, bishop of Ely.28 Whether or not he had fully worked out Gloucester’s ultimate ambition, this is the only really plausible
explanation for what occurred on Friday 13 June. Hastings, Rotherham and Morton all assembled for a routine council meeting at the Tower at ten o’clock in the morning, ‘as was their custom’. According to Mancini, they had walked straight into a trap.
When they had been admitted to the innermost quarters, the protector, as prearranged, cried out that an ambush had been prepared for him, and they had come with hidden arms, that they might be the first to open the attack. Thereupon the soldiers, who had been stationed there by their lord, rushed in with the duke of Buckingham, and cut down Hastings on the false pretext of treason; they arrested the others, whose life, it was presumed, was spared out of respect for religion and holy orders.
It was a summary execution of the most breathtaking ruthlessness, and the writers of the time marvelled.29 ‘Whom will insane lust for power spare, if it dares violate the ties of king and friendship?’ wondered one. Cornered and desperate, it was now clear that Gloucester was prepared to countenance any move whatever that would help him cling to power. At any point of wavering he was supported by the duke of Buckingham, who was probably motivated by more obviously selfish desires to see the Woodvilles and Hastings discomfited and himself advanced to the position that he believed his Plantagenet blood merited, and which he had too long been denied.
With Hastings dead and London trembling in confusion and fear, a slide to murderous madness now began. On Monday 16 June the archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Bourchier, went to Westminster and cajoled the queen into releasing from her custody her second royal son, Richard duke of York, on the understanding that he was absolutely required to play a prominent role in the forthcoming coronation. He met his elder brother Edward V in the Tower; they were joined there by the late duke of Clarence’s young son Edward, known as earl of Warwick, who was then only eight years old. The following day it was announced that the coronation was cancelled, likewise the parliament that was due to follow.
On Sunday 22 June the theologian Dr Ralph Shaa appeared at St Paul’s Cross to preach the extraordinary – and wholly specious – message that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been undertaken while Edward was already contracted to marry someone else: Lady Eleanor Butler, the daughter of the great Lancastrian soldier John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. On these grounds, Shaa argued, Edward V and Richard duke of York were illegitimate and therefore the former could not be allowed to take the throne. Instead, Richard duke of Gloucester, who was said to bear an unmistakeable physical resemblance to his father, the duke of York, should take the throne in the place of his nephews.30 Three days later, the duke of Buckingham appeared at the Guildhall, and subsequently at Baynard’s Castle, to proclaim that since Edward V and Richard duke of York were tainted with bastardy, and since Clarence’s son Edward earl of Warwick was ruined by his father’s attainder, Richard, duke of Gloucester was ‘the only survivor of royal stock … legally entitled to the crown and could bear its responsibilities thanks to his proficiency. His previous career and blameless morals would be a sure guarantee of his good government.’31 As Buckingham spoke, far away in the north at Pontefract Castle Earl Rivers, Sir Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan were being subjected to a cursory trial for treason in front of the earl of Northumberland. The blood of all three was soon congealing on the ground.
The following day Richard duke of Gloucester formally took the crown as Richard III, elected by a group of hastily assembled noblemen, bishops and Londoners, led by his right-hand man, the duke of Buckingham. They meekly accepted his ridiculous claim that the young princes were bastards, and he accepted their acclamation as king of England before sitting upon the carved marble throne in Westminster Hall in a ceremony that evoked – probably intentionally – that by which his brother had taken power in 1461. ‘Seditious and disgraceful’, was the judgement of the Crowland continuator.32 A sense of helplessness descended on a capital that had witnessed more upheaval, regime change and reversal of fortune in the previous thirty years than in all the three hundred that preceded them. Thousands of northern troops continued to march on London, swords, bows and polished breastplates clattering as they approached. Tongues wagged in the streets of London, and gossips noted that a popular prophecy – to the effect that three kings would hold the crown in three months – had come true.33
The coronation of a new king, which had proven so difficult for Gloucester to organise for his poor, imprisoned nephew, was now arranged with almost indecent haste. On Sunday 6 July 1483 Gloucester and his wife, Anne Neville, celebrated mass at Westminster and were crowned, and a feast was celebrated with ‘all circumstances thereunto belonging’. The new king sat enthroned on a chair with cushions of cloth of gold. When the ritual demanded, he grovelled before the high altar in comfort, his knees protected by crimson damask and velvet and white damask embroidered with little golden flowers. His ears rang with the rich sound of trumpets and the playing of minstrels, some of them brought to England from as far away as Rome. Following the service in the abbey, the new king dined on forty-six different dishes, including beef and mutton, roast crane and peacock, oranges and quinces.34 And when the solemnities and the feasting were finished, Richard held an audience with the nobles whom he had summoned to witness his usurpation, commanding them to go back to their shires and see that order was kept and no extortions committed against his subjects. As a public morality display, he had his brother’s and Lord Hastings’s former mistress Elizabeth Shore clapped in London’s stocks and put to open penance as punishment for the iniquity of her life. ‘And thus’, wrote one chronicler tartly, ‘he taught other[s] to exercise just and good which he would not do himself.’35
18 : Judge Me, O Lord
The last recorded sightings of the Princes in the Tower (as they are now popularly known) were in the late summer and early autumn of 1483, in the month that followed their uncle’s seizure of the crown.1 After Hastings’s murder, all the regular servants who had been on hand for Edward V and his brother Richard were removed from the boys’ presence; they were paid their last wage on 9 July.2 It was reported in London’s Great Chronicle that the boys were spotted ‘playing and shooting in the garden of the Tower’, perhaps as late as 29 September.3 But Dominic Mancini wrote that they ‘were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether’.4
Edward V was twelve and he had been well educated. He presumably knew enough either of English history or of human nature – or both – to anticipate his fate. Deposed kings did not live. ‘The physician Argentine, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the young king, like a victim prepared for a sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.’5 Indeed it was. By the time the summer’s blaze had ceased to bake the whitewashed walls of the Tower of London, Edward, who ‘had such dignity in his whole person, and in his face such charm’, had vanished, along with his little brother. ‘I have seen many men burst into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight,’ wrote Mancini.6 By November 1483 the assumption driving English politics was that the Princes in the Tower would never be seen alive again.7
We still do not know for certain how the boys died. In later years rumours would hold that they had been smothered with a feather-bed, or drowned in a butt of malmsey, or poisoned – but these were no more than rumours. It is possible that bones and teeth discovered roughly buried in a wooden box beneath the chapel stairs in the White Tower are those of the Princes, but these have not been tested adequately enough to say for certain.8 All we can be sure of is that the boys were first disinherited, then deprived of their liberty and servants, and that they then disappeared, presumed dead by contemporaries across Europe. And the person who benefited most from their disappearance was Richard III.
Almost as soon as his reign began, Richard had gone on progress about his new realm,
travelling up along the Thames, through Windsor and Reading to Oxford and Woodstock, swinging west to his ducal town of Gloucester and then moving back across to the midlands, York and the north. All of these were areas where his noble power had been strongest, and where he wished – or felt compelled – to demonstrate his fullest gratitude for their support. Richard pointedly avoided going into Wales, the west country or any of the other territories that had been most closely associated with the Woodvilles and the prince’s council through which they had exercised their power. He showered grants and offices in these areas on his hitherto most loyal crony and supporter, Henry duke of Buckingham.9 The south-east and East Anglia were largely entrusted to his loyal ally Lord Howard, newly promoted to the position of duke of Norfolk.
As Richard travelled he attempted to demonstrate that he was a king capable of dispensing good governance and justice, whereas his brother’s reign had descended into lust and neglect. He would later argue that Edward IV’s rule had been ruined because he delighted in ‘adulation and flattery’ and that, ‘led by sensuality and concupiscence’, he had ‘followed the counsel of insolent, vicious people of inordinate avarice, despising the counsel of good, virtuous and prudent people’. Richard’s appeal to the country was much the same as his father’s had been in 1460: he claimed to stand for ‘prudence, justice, princely courage and excellent virtue’.10 Everywhere he went he was greeted with pageants and ceremony, and he responded by holding court with truly royal splendour and munificence.
