From sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, Elizabeth heard the pomp and circumstance taking place next door, as the bells rang in joyous pronouncement of Richard III’s coronation. Beyond feelings of despair, she must have raged with anger at the slander sweeping the streets of London. When she learned that her nineteen-year marriage had been invalidated and ten of her children declared bastards in a public sermon delivered at Paul’s Cross, she must have comprehended that Richard III’s coronation annihilated all hopes for her sons’ survival.
The fate of the princes remains shrouded in history. Thomas More states quite simply that Richard III planned ‘the lamentable murder of his innocent nephews, the young King and his tender brother’.21 Copious details, including named perpetrators, confer a compelling credibility on More’s history: Richard III sent ‘one John Green’ to Sir Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower, with a letter ordering him to ‘put the two children to death’. Brackenbury refused. Richard III then commissioned the deed to Sir James Tyrell, a man with ‘high heart, [who] sore longed upward, not rising yet so fast as he had hoped’. A letter from the King commanded Brackenbury to give Tyrell the keys to the Tower for one night.
The thirteen-year-old Edward V and his nine-year-old brother had been shut up in the Tower with only one man, ‘called Black Will or William Slaughter’, to serve them. Tyrell hired two men, Miles Forest and John Dighton, to commit the murder:
This Miles Forest and John Dighton, about midnight (the sely [innocent] children lying in their beds) came into the chamber, and suddenly lapped them up among the clothes so be wrapped them and entangled them keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard unto their mouths, that within a while smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of heaven, leaving to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed.
Which after that the wretches perceived, first by the struggling with the pains of death, and after long lying still, to be thoroughly dead: they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed, and fetched Sir James to see them. Which upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stair foot, meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones.22
This information More ‘learned of them that much knew and little cause had to lie’. More’s account has been corroborated by many contemporary documents.
Letters by Simon Stallworthe record the unrest in England as early as 9 June 1483. A second letter, on 21 June, recounts the delivery of Prince Richard from sanctuary in an atmosphere of general distrust:
I hold you happy that you are out of the press, for with us is much trouble and every man doubts other. As on Friday last was the Lord Chamberlain headed soon upon noon. On Monday last was at Westminster great plenty of harnessed [armed] men. There was the deliverance of the Duke of York to my Lord Cardinal, my Lord Chancellor, and other many lords temporal. And with him met my Lord of Buckingham in the midst of the hall of Westminster. My Lord Protector receiving him at the Star Chamber door with many loving words and so departed with my Lord Cardinal to the Tower.23
Twenty thousand of Gloucester and Buckingham’s men were expected in the city, ‘to what intent I know not but to keep the peace’. Stallworthe comments on the imprisonment of the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Ely in the Tower, and supposes ‘they shall come out nevertheless’. He is less certain about the fate of Mistress Shore, who is also in prison: ‘what shall happen her I know not’.
Croyland describes similar discontent and worry:
A circumstance which caused the greatest doubts was the detention of the King’s relatives and servants in prison; besides the fact that the Protector did not, with a sufficient degree of considerateness, take measure for the preservation of the dignity and safety of the Queen.24
A cryptic document among the Cely Papers, written between the death of Hastings on 13 June and Richard III’s assumption of power on 26 June, reiterates Stallworthe’s feelings of unrest and cautiously expresses fear for the safety of Edward V and Prince Richard. Mancini records information collected before he left London, sometime after 6 July 1483:
But after Hastings was removed, all the attendants who had waited upon the king [Edward V] were debarred access to him. He and his brother were withdrawn in 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.
The physician Argentine, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the young king, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.25
At that point, Mancini cannot resist describing ‘the talent of the youth’:
In word and deed he gave so many proofs of his liberal education, of polite, nay rather scholarly, attainments far beyond his age; all of these should be recounted, but require such labour, that I shall lawfully excuse myself the effort. There is one thing I shall not omit, and that is, his special knowledge of literature, which enabled him to discourse elegantly, to understand fully, and to declaim most excellently from any work whether in verse or prose that came into his hands, unless it were from among the more abstruse authors. He had such dignity in his whole person, and in his face such charm, that however much they might gaze he never wearied the eyes of beholders. I have seen many men burst forth into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight; and already there was a suspicion that he had been done away with. Whether, however, he has been done away with, and by what manner of death, so far I have not at all discovered.26
Mancini thus corroborates Croyland’s boast about the family that ‘excelled all others’, especially in its ‘most sweet and beautiful children, the issue of his marriage… with Queen Elizabeth’.27 The Wydeville influence – especially Anthony’s service as Edward V’s governor – had achieved its goal of educating an enlightened and knowledgeable prince. All for naught.
Rumours of the princes’ deaths were widespread throughout Europe by the end of 1483, some blaming Richard by name. Weinreich’s Danzig Chronicle records in 1483: ‘Item later this summer Richard, the King’s brother, had himself put in power and crowned in England and he had his brother’s children killed, and the Queen put away secretly also.’28 Guillaume de Rochefort, the French chancellor, reported the deaths of the boys in a speech before the States General at Tours on 15 January 1484:
Regard the events which have occurred in that land since the death of King Edward. See how his children already quite old and brave have been murdered with impunity and the crown has been transferred to their assassin by the consent of the people.29
In England, The Croyland Chronicle reports that the boys were held in the Tower while Richard III made a post-coronation progress through Windsor, Reading, Oxford, Gloucester and Coventry to York, where he invested his own son Edward as Prince of Wales on 8 September 1483. By the time rebellion broke out in late September, Croyland states ‘a rumour was spread that the sons of king Edward before-named had died a violent death, but it was uncertain how’.30 Another chronicle, recorded in Vitellis A XVI manuscript, states:
Anon as the said King Richard had put to death the Lord Chamberlain and other Gentlemen, as before is said, he also put to death the two children of King Edward, for which cause he lost the hearts of the people.31
The Great Chronicle reports in 1484 that ‘after Easter much whispering was among the people that the King had put the children of King Edward to death…’. By 1485, public anger at Richard III had reached the point where the author of The Great Chronicle felt sufficiently safe to return to the fate of the princes:
Considering the death of King Edward’s children, of whom as then men feared not openly to say that they were rid out of this world, but of their deaths’ manner was many opinions, for some said they were murdered between two feather beds, some said they were drowned in Malvesy, and some said they were stic
ked with a venomous potion. But how so ever they were put to death, certain it was that before that day they were departed from this world, of which cruel deed Sir James Tyrell was reported to be the doer, but others put that blame upon an old servant of King Richard’s named, __________
[no name fills in the blank].32
In 1489, when Philippe de Commynes was writing his Memoirs, he had not the slightest doubt: ‘On the death of Edward, his second brother the Duke of Gloucester killed Edward’s two sons.’33 Polydore Vergil states that Richard III ordered the boys’ death on his way to Gloucester, sometime in late July or early August 1483.
The princes were popular in the kingdom, particularly with the Welsh who favoured Edward V because his ten years of residency at Ludlow had brought order and prosperity to that region. As the summer of 1483 progressed and the boys were no longer seen by the many visitors to the Tower, Croyland tells us that ‘in order to deliver them from… captivity, the people of the southern and western parts of the kingdom began to murmur greatly, and to form meetings and confederacies’.34 Plots began to develop opposing Richard III, especially ‘on the part of those who, through fear, had availed themselves of the privilege of sanctuary and franchise’.
When she entered sanctuary on 1 May 1483, the Queen had been accompanied by her son Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, and her brothers Lionel and Richard. It is unclear when Dorset left sanctuary, but Mancini dates his departure at around the time of Hastings’s execution and reports that Gloucester sent troops and dogs to search around Westminster through ‘the already grown crops and the cultivated and woody places’, confirming a mid- to late June departure.35 Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury, protected by his clerical status, left to participate in the commission of the peace during June and July 1483. Sir Richard Wydeville, now the third Earl Rivers, also left sanctuary at an unknown time. Sir Edward Wydeville remained in Brittany with his two ships.
Croyland describes an early plot to spirit the daughters out of sanctuary, so that they could
…go in disguise to the parts beyond the seas; in order that, if any fatal mishap should befall the said male children of the late king in the Tower, the kingdom might still, in consequence of the safety of his daughters, some day fall again into the hands of the rightful heirs.36
Richard’s spies discovered that plan, however, and Westminster Abbey was immediately surrounded by ‘men of the greatest austerity’, under the leadership of Captain John Nesfeld, Esquire. A watch was set up at ‘all the inlets and outlets of the monastery, so that not one of the persons there shut up could go forth, and no one could enter, without his permission’. The girls remained in sanctuary.
It is unclear when Elizabeth learned of the boys’ deaths, but Polydore Vergil graphically describes her response:
She fell in a swoon and lay lifeless a good while; after coming to herself, she wept, she cried out aloud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring. She struck her breast, tore and cut her hair, and overcome in fine with dolour, prayed also her own death, calling by name now and then among her most dear children and condemning herself for a madwoman for that (being deceived by false promises) she had delivered her younger son out of sanctuary to be murdered by his enemy.37
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Woman Alone
Plotting to overthrow Richard III now began in earnest. Whether Queen Elizabeth or Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, first suggested marrying Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond to the Lady Princess Elizabeth hardly matters. The blood relationship between Richmond and Princess Elizabeth had been frequently discussed, as revealed in subsequent depositions to Pope Innocent VIII, certifying that Henry and Princess Elizabeth were related in the fourth and fourth degrees of kindred: Master Christopher Urswyke, the King’s almoner, testified that ‘he heard the aforesaid degrees lineally recited and declared by the archbishop of York and the bishop of Worcester and Master Richard Lessy, a chamberlain of the pope’.1 The fact that many witnesses testified that husband and wife were ‘related in the double fourth degree of kindred’ suggests that their marriage may even have been contemplated prior to Edward’s death.
Elizabeth Wydeville and Margaret Beaufort had been friends for years. During the reign of Henry VI, they were loyal Lancastrians. Both had subsequently married powerful Yorkists and had survived the fluctuations of power as the cousins battled for dominance. The Countess of Richmond attended Queen Elizabeth and her daughters at the reburial of Richard, Duke of York at Fotheringhay in 1476.2 She was prominent at the wedding of Prince Richard to Anne Mowbray in 1478, and she was distinctly honoured when she carried the royal Princess Bridget at her baptism in 1480. Margaret’s stepson George (Lord Stanley’s heir who was later held hostage at Bosworth) was married to the Queen’s niece Joan, daughter of Lord Strange and Jacquetta Wydeville.
Margaret Beaufort was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, by his third wife, Katherine Swynford. The children of that liaison were born well before Gaunt married Katherine, although they were legitimised by Pope Boniface IX in 1396. King Richard II and Parliament added secular legitimisation in 1397, but the Beaufort descendants were excluded from the throne by Henry IV’s patent, issued on 10 February 1407 (the legality of which has been questioned). Their royal blood, combined with astute marriages, had made the Beauforts one of the richest and most powerful families in England.
In 1455, Margaret Beaufort, at the age of twelve, married the half-brother of Henry VI, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond. When Richmond died within the year while imprisoned by the Yorkists at Carmarthen Castle, Margaret was already pregnant. She gave birth to Henry on 28 January 1457, when she was thirteen years old. The young widow soon married Sir Henry Stafford, another prominent Lancastrian who saved his property after the battle of Towton by switching his loyalty to Edward IV. Stafford died in 1471, and Margaret subsequently married the staunch Yorkist, Thomas, Lord Stanley, who served Edward IV as Steward of the Household.
Henry Tudor, Margaret’s only child, spent his first eleven years living under the protection of his uncle, Jasper Tudor, at the family estate of Pembroke in Wales. When Jasper’s continuing opposition to Edward IV forced him into exile, the King made the young Henry a ward of William, Lord Herbert, a loyal Yorkist. The brief restoration of Henry VI in 1470 brought Jasper back to England, where he introduced his nephew at the Lancastrian court. Edward IV’s triumph at Tewkesbury, however, forced both Jasper and Henry Tudor to flee to Brittany, where they had lived in exile since 1471. After the deaths of Henry VI and his son Edward, Henry Tudor was next in the Lancastrian line for the crown of England. Yorkist domination, however, made his chances of sitting on the throne remote.
Richmond had other royal blood in his veins as well. His father, Edmund Tudor, was the son of Katherine of Valois, Dowager Queen of Henry V, who had scandalised English royalty after the death of the King by marrying Owen Tudor, a mere Welsh knight who had been Clerk of the Wardrobe. If his father was disparaged as a mere knight, Henry Tudor was, nevertheless, the great-grandson of Charles VI of France.
The fact that Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Lord Stanley, was a highranking and trusted advisor to Richard III did not deter her from promoting the interest of her son Henry. She sent her Welsh physician, Lewis Caerleon, ‘a grave man and of no small experience’, to visit Queen Elizabeth in sanctuary at Westminster.3 Polydore Vergil states that this visit occurred ‘after the slaughter of King Edward’s children was known’, and perhaps the best evidence that the two princes were dead lies in Elizabeth’s complicity in this particular plot.4 Elizabeth agreed to the proposal that Princess Elizabeth, Yorkist heir if the boys were dead, should marry Henry Tudor, Lancastrian claimant to the throne:
…she would do her endeavour to procure all her husband King Edward’s friends to take part with Henry [Margaret’s] son, so that he might be sworn to take in marriage Elizabeth her daughter after he shall have gotten the realm, or else Cicely the younger if the other should die before he enjoyed the
same.5
Messengers sent to Brittany informed Richmond of the plan and solicited financial support for invading England.
Meanwhile, Buckingham left Richard III’s retinue and returned to his Brecknock estate in Wales, where he held in custody John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who had been released from the Tower at the petition of Oxford University. Buckingham was becoming increasingly alienated from Richard III. Some say that Richard’s failure to deliver the promised Hereford inheritance caused the break. The Great Chronicle blames the death of the princes:
The common fame went that King Richard had within the Tower put unto secret death the two sons of his brother Edward IV for the which, and other causes had within the breast of the Duke of Buckingham, the said Duke, in secret manner, conspired against him…6
Others claim that Buckingham himself was aiming at the throne, and some even blame him for the princes’ deaths. Everyone credits Buckingham’s prisoner Morton with considerable influence in persuading him to oppose the King, perhaps provoked by Margaret Beaufort, whom the Bishop served as chaplain. In fact, Margaret may have influenced Buckingham directly, since she was his aunt through her earlier marriage to Sir Henry Stafford. Whatever his reasons, Buckingham soon headed up a group of rebels who openly challenged King Richard. Once more, he embraced the relatives of his Wydeville wife, Katherine.
Among Buckingham’s troops were the Queen’s son, Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, along with ‘Thomas his son, a very child’, and the Queen’s brother, Edward Wydeville, ‘a valiant man of war’.7 Lionel Wydeville had left sanctuary and was living in Buckingham’s manor of Thornbury, twelve miles north of Bristol and close to the action in Wales, from where he continued to conduct his ecclesiastical duties as Bishop of Salisbury.8 Sir Richard Wydeville, too, joined the rebellion that broke out in October 1483.
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