The three men who betrayed Richard and thus gained Tudor the crown did not prosper as they had hoped. Thomas Stanley fared best, was made Earl of Derby; but he was never entrusted with the political power he had wielded as Richard’s Lord Constable. William Stanley was accused of treason, on rather dubious grounds, and beheaded in 1495. The Earl of Northumberland was murdered by a vengeful Yorkshire mob four years after Redmore Plain.
After his release from the Tower in 1487, Thomas Grey made sure he did nothing to incur Tudor’s displeasure again. He died in 1501; the ill-fated Jane Grey, the Nine-day Queen, was his great-granddaughter. Katherine Woodville Stafford wed Henry Tudor’s uncle, Jasper Tudor, in November 1485. After his death in 1495, she married a third time, choosing a husband some fifteen years younger than she, Sir Richard Wingfield. She died two years later. Her eldest son by the Duke of Buckingham was put to death by Tudor’s son, Henry VIII, in 1521.
In December 1487, Tudor restored to Anne Neville’s mother her Beauchamp estates so she could then legally turn them over to him. He allowed her to retain the manor of Erdington, where she lived until her death in 1492, at age sixty-six.
Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, died at Berkhampsted Castle between May 31 and August 27, 1495, at age eighty. She was buried, at her own request, at Fotheringhay beside her husband and son Edmund.
Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, turned her court into a haven for disaffected Yorkists. She supported Francis Lovell in 1487, gave refuge to Sir John Egremont, the man responsible for the Earl of Northumberland’s murder, and later backed the prolonged impersonation of a young Fleming named Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Edward’s second son. She died at Mechlinia on November 28, 1503, at age fifty-seven.
Bess’s married life was marred by tragedy. She bore Tudor seven children; three died in early childhood, and her eldest son Arthur died at age fourteen. She died on her thirty-seventh birthday, February 11, 1503, nine days after giving birth to her seventh child. Her son Henry assumed the crown in 1509 as Henry VIII.
Cecily was wed to Tudor’s half uncle in 1487–88; they had two daughters who died in infancy. After his death, she made a love match with a man of no rank, left the court in disgrace, and went to live with her husband on the Isle of Wight. They had two children, Richard and Margaret, before her death on August 14, 1507; she was thirty-eight.
Their youngest sister Bridget became a nun, and their sisters Katherine and Anne made what were considered good marriages. Their Plantagenet blood proved to be a dangerous legacy, however, and Katherine’s son was later executed by Henry VIII, as was Edmund, a younger brother of Jack de la Pole; a third brother, William de la Pole, died in the Tower after a lengthy imprisonment. History has not recorded the fate of Edward’s illegitimate daughter Grace.
Margaret, George of Clarence’s daughter, survived into the reign of Henry VIII, but when her son fell into disfavor, he took his revenge upon the mother. Margaret refused to submit tamely, saying she was not guilty of treason and would not lay her head meekly on a traitor’s block. She had to be dragged to the block by force, was beheaded in May 1541; she was not quite sixty-eight. She was later beatified as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
Richard’s daughter Kathryn seems to have died before November 1487. His son Johnny was later arrested by Tudor and put to death within the Tower. “There was a base son of King Richard the Third made away, having beene kept long before in prison. The occasion, as it seemeth, was the attempt of certain Irishmen of the west and south parts, who would have got him into their power and made him their cheife, being strongly affected to any of the House of York were they legitimate or naturall.”
Edward, Earl of Warwick, George’s tragic son, was held in the Tower from 1485 until 1499, at which time Tudor had him beheaded. He was twenty-four.
Author’s Note
While imagination is the heart of any novel, historical fiction needs a strong factual foundation, especially a novel revolving around a man as controversial as Richard III. Therefore, I tried to be as accurate as possible, not placing a scene at Windsor unless my characters were known to be at Windsor on that day, making sure that a Wednesday actually was a Wednesday, that details of medieval life were corroborated by more than one source. I sought first to draw upon those facts not in dispute, to rely upon contemporary chroniclers wherever I could, and when dealing with conflicting accounts, to choose the one most in accord with what we know of the people involved.
It’s never easy to piece together the past. That’s even more true when history was rewritten by the victor. In attempting to distinguish between Tudor “tradition” and the truth, I gave greatest weight to those chronicles written during Richard’s lifetime or immediately thereafter, relying as little as possible upon purely Tudor sources, for obvious reasons.
I don’t mean to imply, however, that all Tudor historians were paid “hacks,” deliberately falsifying the facts to please their Tudor patrons. It is true that those chroniclers writing in the early years of Henry Tudor’s reign must have known when they crossed over into the realm of creative fiction, as when Tudor’s official historian, Polydore Vergil, flatly denied that Richard ever alleged his nephews to be illegitimate, contending that Richard based his claim to the crown upon his brother Edward’s illegitimacy. This was, of course, an out-and-out lie. So, too, was Sir Thomas More’s contention that Richard claimed the plight-troth was with Elizabeth Lucy, one of Edward’s more publicized mistresses. More then proceeded to prove Elizabeth Lucy was never plight-trothed to Edward; of course no one except More had ever said she was. But as time faded memories of Richard’s reign, subsequent historians had only these biased accounts to draw upon, and such chroniclers as Hall and Holinshed, the major sources for Shakespeare’s play, knew no more than what they culled from the Vergils and the Mores.
Complicating matters, historians of the Middle Ages shared one singular trait, a tendency to embellish and to exaggerate. Nowhere is their penchant for embroidering the truth better illustrated than in the development of the myth of Richard’s deformity, which, to be fully understood, must be considered in light of medieval ignorance and superstition, their belief in deformity as the outward manifestation of inner evil, as physical proof of moral depravity. None of the chroniclers contemporary with Richard—the Croyland Chronicle, the “Arrivall,” Warkworth, Mancini—make mention of a deformity. Nor does Philippe de Commynes, who knew Richard personally. And a physical description of Richard, given by a German nobleman who met him in 1484, does not speak of any deformity. The first seeds were not sown until after Richard’s death; it was John Rous who contended that Richard’s right shoulder was higher than the left. (But then, he also claimed that Richard was two years in his mother’s womb.) The next major contribution to the myth came from Thomas More. He mentioned the unequal shoulders, but he reversed Rous and made the left shoulder the higher; he also gave Richard a withered arm, which would have been a remarkable handicap for Richard to overcome, given his proven prowess on the battlefield. Hall picked up the refrain in 1548, declaring that Richard was “of body greatly deformed.” And Shakespeare rounded out the myth by providing his Richard with a hunchback, a withered arm, and a limp.
I once came upon a definition of history as “the process by which complex truths are transformed into simplified falsehoods.” That is particularly true in the case of Richard III, where the normal medieval proclivity for moralizing and partisanship was further complicated by deliberate distortion to serve Tudor political needs. In researching this book, I had to bear in mind the individual bias of each writer, bias that could strengthen as well as diminish a chronicler’s credibility; for example, the fact that a Lancastrian historian reported that Édouard of Lancaster died on the field at Tewkesbury is more persuasive than the fact that a Yorkist chronicler commissioned by Edward said likewise.
In writing of people five hundred years dead, I had to exercise a certain amount of imagination. But I did not knowingly tamper with basic truths, though
I occasionally had to stray from the facts. For example, my confrontation scene between Edward and Warwick in Chapter 10 of Book I is set at Middleham, whereas Edward had actually been moved from Middleham to Pontefract Castle sometime in September; here I can only plead dramatic license. And from time to time, I needed to “fill in the blanks.” Medieval historians could be thoroughly indifferent to the needs of twentieth-century novelists, not bothering to note where Elizabeth Woodville lived after departing sanctuary, or not thinking to jot down the precise date of birth for Richard and Anne’s son. When confronted with these “sins of omission,” I had to come up with the answers they’d neglected to provide.
I took the liberty of creating only one fictional character of importance, Véronique de Crécy. Richard did find Anne disguised as a serving maid and conveyed her to sanctuary at St Martin le Grand. But we know nothing of the details of her disappearance, and I conjured up the Brownells to fill this void. With these exceptions, all other major characters in the book actually lived. So, too, did the various abbots, sheriffs, mayors, servants, et cetera, named in the novel.
Wherever possible, I tried to portray my characters in accordance with their historical counterparts. This was relatively easy for Richard, Edward, and so forth. But other characters, especially women, were not “captured” by any medieval pen; we know nothing about them beyond the stark outline of their lives, and I had to rely upon my imagination to give them dimension. With the women who bore Richard’s two illegitimate children, Kathryn and Johnny, I had to fill in virtually all the blanks; nothing whatsoever is known of these women, not even their names.
One disadvantage in writing of people who really existed is that the blueprints of their lives are already laid out. As a result, I occasionally found it necessary to “interpret” behavior that only a man or woman long since dead could properly explain; e.g., why Edward tolerated George’s tantrums and treacheries and allowed George to block Richard and Anne’s marriage plans. And, now and then, I had to deal with an occurrence so unlikely as to transcend fiction. What novelist would dare invent an eclipse of the sun on the day of Anne’s death? And yet it happened, and was, to Londoners, divine proof that Richard had sinned in taking the crown.
As to the central mystery of Richard’s life, the fate of his brother’s sons, we do not know what became of the boys. Tudor historians contended that they were murdered at Richard’s command. A prominent Victorian historian made a deceptively persuasive case for Henry Tudor’s guilt. And there have always been those who saw that the Duke of Buckingham was the most logical and likely suspect, that if Richard had opportunity but no motive and Tudor had motive but no opportunity, Buckingham had both. My case against Buckingham is founded upon fact, but there is no evidence that would stand up today in a court of law; we cannot even conclusively prove that the boys were murdered. Lacking hard “legal” evidence, we can only fall back upon circumstance and common sense. To me, the most convincing evidence that the boys died in Richard’s reign is that no one seems to have seen them alive after 1483. And while Buckingham’s guilt can never be proven, so many of the puzzle pieces fall into place if we assume the crime to be his. Lastly, no one has ever been able to explain why, if Richard were guilty, that he would have chosen to commit the murders so as to do himself the greatest possible harm. Nor has it ever been explained why Elizabeth would then have been willing to give her daughters over to the man responsible for her sons’ deaths, why Thomas Grey would gamble his life on Richard’s word, or why Henry Tudor, who did all he could to discredit Richard’s memory, refrained from making the most damning accusation, never formally charged Richard with the murder of his nephews. These are questions historians have rarely bothered to address. And yet they go to the heart of the matter…and the mystery.
S.K.P.
February 1982
THE SUNNE IN SPLENDOUR. Copyright © 1982 by Sharon Kay Penman. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Penman, Sharon Kay.
The sunne in splendour / by Sharon Kay Penman.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-312-37593-5
1. Richard III, King of England, 1452–1485—Fiction. 2. Kings and rulers—Fiction. 3. Great Britain—History—Wars of the Roses, 1455–1485—Fiction. 4. Great Britain—History—Henry VII, 1485–1509—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.E474 S9 1982
813′.54—dc19
81020149
First published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
*Phenomenon known as a parhelion, generally caused by the formation of ice crystals in the upper air.
*English name for the German cities which comprised the Hanseatic League.
The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III Page 125
