With the ‘truth’ revealed about Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville his children were dismissed as illegitimate. The next in line was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the eight-year-old son of Richard’s elder brother, the executed Duke of Clarence.19 Here it was argued the boy was excluded from the line of succession by his father’s treason, since attainder or ‘corruption of blood’ deprived any traitor’s descendants of the right to inherit property from or through him. With some display of reluctance Richard accepted the petition and was proclaimed Richard III.20 Edward V’s coronation was cancelled indefinitely and his servants dismissed.
The deposed king’s doctor, who was amongst the last of his servants to leave his service, reported that Edward V was now ‘like a victim prepared for sacrifice . . . because he believed that death was facing him’.21 The fates of those monarchs deposed previously that century – Richard II and Henry VI – did not bode well for the princes. Nevertheless, the nine-year-old Duke of York remained innocent of the mortal danger they faced. A story related in Burgundy described him as ‘very joyous and witty’, ready for ‘frolics and dance’.22 It may have been the little duke who persuaded his older brother to play with him in the gardens of the Tower where they were spotted firing bows and arrows. In the streets men wept for them as ‘day by day they began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows till at length they ceased to appear altogether’.23
With the new coronation date set for 6 July no one moved against Richard. The men from the north had answered his summons and thousands were camped on Finsbury Field just outside London.24 But fear would not be enough to keep Richard on the throne. He needed support from the political elite – amongst them the powerful Lord Stanley, who was invited to an audience with the king on the eve of his coronation, along with his wife, Margaret Beaufort. She was anxious to resolve a financial dispute inherited from her mother. Richard was equally anxious to please the wife of a man who controlled large areas of the north. Tellingly, however, nothing was said of Henry Tudor.
According to a slightly later account, Margaret had approached Buckingham about a pardon for her son, reminding him that his father and grandfathers had fought in the Lancastrian cause. She had known Buckingham for years: her late husband, Sir Henry Stafford, had been his uncle. He had even met Henry Tudor as a small child. She hoped his friendship with Richard would enable him to persuade the king to bring Henry into the fold at last. But if that account is true, her hopes were disappointed and other later claims that Margaret had also hoped to persuade Richard to marry Henry off to one of Edward IV’s now illegitimate daughters are nonsensical. Why on earth would Richard have wished to ally them to the remnants of the Lancastrian house, and thereby empower both? There was no advantage to him in that, as Margaret would have known.
Margaret played a leading role at the coronation the following day, as she had in earlier Edwardian ceremonies. Dressed in six yards of scarlet velvet bordered with cloth of gold, she carried the train of Richard’s queen, Anne Neville, the widow of Edward of Lancaster, who was crowned alongside her husband.25 That night Margaret changed for the coronation banquet into blue velvet and crimson cloth of gold, and arrived with six attendants dressed in scarlet cloth. A great feast was produced, with delicacies brought from every corner of England: pheasant dressed with tail feathers trailing, sturgeon with fennel, exotic baked oranges and fritters flavoured with rose and jasmine. The dishes may well have been ordered earlier for the expected coronation of Edward V and, for many who attended, this feast was difficult to stomach. Although Richard had kept most of Edward IV’s former servants in their posts, there was tremendous anger over his usurpation of Edward V’s throne. Soon Margaret would find there was enough even to turn the powerless exile Henry Tudor into a leader, and revive the moribund Lancastrian cause.
6
THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER
FLUENT IN FRENCH, SLIM AND ABOVE AVERAGE HEIGHT, WITH LONG, wavy brown hair and an animated face, Henry Tudor was regarded at Duke Francis’ court as a most ‘pleasant and elegant person’.1 But the twenty-six-year-old had learned to mask his true feelings behind a veneer of charm. Edward IV had hunted him since he was fourteen and for twelve years he had lived with the constant fear that, one day, the feckless Duke Francis would turn him over to his death. Henry was desperate for an opportunity to end his penniless, powerless, exile. It was brought by a fair wind in June 1483, when two English ships, painted vermilion, gold and sky blue, and captained by Elizabeth Woodville’s brother, Sir Edward Woodville, arrived off the coast of Brittany.2 If Henry Tudor had not yet learned of the dramatic events in England, he would soon do so.
The following month further ships from England reached Brittany, standards and streamers flying, carrying Sir Edward Woodville’s pursuers, the envoys of the newly crowned Richard III. If their primary orders were to persuade Duke Francis to hand over Sir Edward with his men, Henry and Jasper Tudor were also targets.3 In this, at least, Richard was to follow his brother’s policy. It seemed Henry’s best chance of changing his desperate situation was to help the Woodvilles to restore Edward V to the throne, for a pardon and royal favour would surely follow. Henry was already in correspondence with his mother and according to the Elizabethan antiquary, Stow, before long he was in contact with men who were planning to rescue the princes from the Tower. What information we have suggests the rescue attempt was made sometime near the end of July, but something went wrong. The men were caught and executed.
At the time, Richard III was on a royal progress that took him through Windsor, Oxford and Gloucester, before travelling on to Warwick and then York. Progresses were punctuated by pomp and pageantry and intended to boost public support for a king. The petition in June asking Richard to accept the crown had complained that under Edward IV, England had been ‘ruled by self will and pleasure, fear and dread . . . all manner of equity and laws despised’.4 This was Richard’s opportunity to demonstrate that he offered a return to good kingship, and he did so in spades. Richard was ‘worshipfully received with pageants’ and had ‘his lords and judges sitting in every place, determining the complaints of poor folk with due punishments of offenders against his laws’.5 13,000 livery devices bearing his badge of the white boar were distributed as he passed through the various towns, while behind the scenes he also dealt firmly with opponents of his rule.6
On 29 July, Richard III wrote to his chancellor concerning the punishment of the perpetrators of an ‘enterprise’, possibly the attempt to rescue the princes.7 In any event it was evident that having them declared illegitimate had not neutralised the danger they posed, any more than Edward IV having Henry VI declared a false king had made him so.8 According to an early sixteenth-century account it was only four days later, at Gloucester on 2 August, that Richard decided the princes in the Tower had to die.9 All we know of the princes’ fate, however, is that they vanished that summer.10
The question of who killed the royal children, if indeed they were murdered, remains one of history’s great whodunits.11 Richard III’s personal piety and his qualities as a king have led many to assume he would never have ordered his nephews to be killed. But the opposite may be true. The rule of law, maintaining peace and harmony in reflection of the divine order, was Richard’s sacred duty and the vital responsibility of any monarch. It is said that Richard had been in the Tower when Henry VI had met his death on the orders of Edward IV – and it is very possible that someone close to Richard now helped encourage him to believe that the deaths of the princes were also for the greater good.
A short manuscript dating to around 1512, and preserved in the College of Arms, asserts that the princes ‘were put to death in the Tower of London by the vise [advice or device] of the Duke of Buckingham’.12 This is supported by another source, the memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, a valued councillor at Louis XI’s court in Richard’s reign. He records how Richard ‘had his two nephews murdered and made himself king’, but later asserts, ‘King Richard did not
last long; nor did the Duke of Buckingham, who had put the two children to death.’13 It is unlikely that Buckingham would have taken matters into his own hands. The Lieutenant of the Tower, Richard Brackenbury, answered to the king alone for his royal prisoners, and he remained loyal to Richard until his death. But Buckingham, described by Polydore Vergil as ‘a sore and hard-dealing man’, had been at Gloucester with Richard.
As Richard’s progress now continued on towards Warwick and York, Buckingham headed for his castle at Brecon in mid-Wales. Remarkably, however, Buckingham was soon to display a dramatic change of direction in his loyalties. Vergil indicates that despite the appearance that all was well between Buckingham and Richard, something triggered a change of heart in the duke, and he was soon plotting to betray the king. If Buckingham believed the princes were still alive it is possible he hoped to pose as one of their rescuers. Yet he had no reason to suppose Edward V would reward his loyalty more fulsomely than Richard III. After all, Buckingham was associated with the arrest, and subsequent death, of Edward V’s half-brother, Richard Grey. If, on the other hand, he believed the princes were dead – or would soon be so – something else must have brought about this volte-face. The answer surely lies in motives played out so often before and during the Wars of the Roses: ambition and revenge.
As Margaret Beaufort had reminded Buckingham, his family had been Lancastrians until Edward IV had obliterated that royal house. If the princes in the Tower were killed, the House of York would be left vulnerable to a similar fate, with Richard III the last adult male. Killing him would avenge Buckingham’s grandfathers, both killed in the Lancastrian cause, and his father, who had died a lingering death from wounds. It could also clear the way for either a ‘Lancastrian’ restoration under Henry Tudor – or for Buckingham to become king. He was, after all, the senior descendant of Thomas of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward III in the male line, and his mother was a Beaufort (although from a slightly junior line to that of Henry Tudor).
At Brecon, Buckingham drew into his plans a prisoner he had under his care, a former Lancastrian and one of Edward IV’s servants: John Morton, Bishop of Ely.14 A man ‘of great resource and daring’, Morton understood immediately that Buckingham had little support either from Lancastrians – who preferred the claims of Henry Tudor – or Yorkists, who would not easily forget the role Buckingham had played in making Richard king.15 But if Buckingham did not have the makings of a king himself, he could certainly be a kingmaker, giving powerful support to Henry Tudor’s cause. Buckingham duly made contact with Margaret Beaufort who responded immediately to his approach. Her half-brother John Welles had been declared a rebel against Richard by mid-August and had fled to Brittany, while she was using a Welsh physician to communicate secretly with Elizabeth Woodville in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.16
While Margaret had assumed the princes were alive she had hoped only to see Henry’s rights as Earl of Richmond returned to him. But if the princes were dead, then she saw as well as anyone that a ‘Lancastrian’ restoration was possible and Margaret was determined to grasp this opportunity for her son. It was his best chance for survival. She intended now to change the focus of her communications and negotiate with Elizabeth Woodville for Henry’s marriage to Woodville’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. Such a marriage would gain Henry Yorkist loyalties in addition to his Lancastrian support, and greatly strengthen his position. This, in turn, would allow Elizabeth Woodville to see her sons avenged. It is, perhaps, sensitivity to the fact that Elizabeth Woodville would only have considered such a marriage if her sons were dead, that explains the later claims emanating from the Tudor camp that Edward IV had once considered such a marriage, or that Margaret had attempted to negotiate such a marriage with Richard III.17 But it also begs the question: why and how was Elizabeth Woodville convinced that her sons were dead? Edward IV had publicised Henry VI’s death by displaying his body. Richard III made no such announcements concerning the princes and they were to be given no funeral or public burial. Indeed the most interesting mystery about the disappearance of the princes is why were they disappeared? Why the divergence from the successful modus operandi of earlier usurpers? That is, kill the deposed monarch, and then claim death resulted from natural causes or emotional breakdown.
Although historians have not yet offered a satisfactory explanation for the princes’ disappearance the answer may be a simple one: Richard feared a public burial would see a cult grow up around the princes similar to that which surrounded Henry VI. Richard was highly aware of the tremendous power of this cult, which had a strong following in his home city of York, where a statue of ‘Henry the saint’ had been built on the choir screen at York Minster.18 He would not have wanted such religious enthusiasm attached to the dead princes and there was a high risk it could happen. In the princes the religious qualities attached to royalty were combined with the purity and innocence of youth. If there were to be any suggestion of foul play, matters would be still more dangerous for Richard.
In the twelfth century a famous cult had sprung up after an ordinary local boy was murdered near Norwich. An image of this ‘little St William’ survives today in the village church of Eye in Suffolk, alongside one of Henry VI. The child’s death was blamed on local Jews in an early example of the medieval ‘blood libel’, with claims that his killing was part of a religious ritual. The Jews had since been expelled from England, but the murder of children retained a particular biblical resonance. The annual mystery plays (a series of biblical stories acted out around the time of the feast of Corpus Christi, performed with great extravagance in York) included the story of the slaughter of the innocents by King Herod – a role for which King Richard was the obvious candidate.19 The disappearance of the princes was, for Richard, a case of least said, soonest mended, for without a grave there could be no focus for a cult, and without a body or items belonging to the dead placed on display, there would be no relics either.
Nevertheless Richard III needed Elizabeth Woodville – and others – to know her sons were dead, since the entire point of their deaths was to forestall plots raised in their name. Believing Buckingham was entirely trustworthy he may have chosen the duke as his messenger. Buckingham was appointed on 28 August to a commission to investigate treason in the London area, and so would have been in the capital soon after. Buckingham’s wife, Katherine Woodville, certainly believed Richard was capable of ordering the killing of the children. She would go to considerable lengths to hide her own young sons from Richard after her husband’s treason emerged.20 And if it was Buckingham who gave his sister-in-law Elizabeth Woodville the details of the killings, then no wonder he was said to have been involved, for how could he have known them if he were not?
The stories – or myths – that later emerged concerning the deaths of the princes were horrible. It was claimed variously that they were thrown in the moat, poisoned, or bled to death. In several accounts they were suffocated with their feather bedding. One such told how the Duke of York had hidden under their bed while his elder brother was being stifled, only then to be hauled out to have his throat cut. But the most telling claim was that they were drowned in Malmsey wine, in revenge for the death of their father’s brother Clarence. To the fifteenth-century mind there were no coincidences: their universe was ordered, rational, and one thing led to another. Something had caused the princes to suffer so terrible an end, and the Bible offered a possible explanation in the tale of Cain, killer of his brother Abel, who was cursed by God, his heirs wiped out in the great flood.21
According to Polydore Vergil, Elizabeth Woodville fainted when she was told her sons were dead. As she came round, ‘she wept, she cryed out loud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair’. She also called for vengeance. Margaret was informed that she was willing to promise her daughter Elizabeth of York to be married to Henry Tudor. She further agreed to invite Edward IV’s friends and former servants to support Henry’s cause. Margaret Bea
ufort was now able to send a servant south to raise support for the enterprise amongst Edwardian Yorkists, and anyone else who resented Richard’s northern-dominated establishment. Another of her messengers carried letters to Brittany along with large sums of money she had raised in loans from the City. Margaret advised Henry to gather together an army as soon as possible. He was then to sail to Wales to raise Jasper Tudor’s former estates, and join forces with Buckingham.22
Henry, in Brittany, realised that at last he was a player rather than a pawn, and leapt at the opportunity, ‘rejoicing wondrously’. Duke Francis was angry with Richard over piracy against Breton ships, and when Henry convinced him that he had ‘an assured hope of obtaining the realm of England’ he promised to back Henry with money and men. Back in England plans were laid for risings to take place across the south-east on 18 October. At the same time there was to be a mock attack on London from Kent. This, it was hoped, would keep the king distracted while Buckingham brought forces from Wales to the west of England. It was there that Buckingham was to meet up with Henry and the Breton soldiers Duke Francis had provided. But on 8 October Richard, travelling south from Lincolnshire, already knew something was up, and Buckingham was summoned. Buckingham responded by claiming he had a stomach upset. Richard insisted. Buckingham ignored him.
Rumours of the murders of the princes in the Tower were now spreading like wildfire in London and the Edwardian heartlands of the south.23 A contemporary Londoner later recalled people were ‘so sore against the king for the death of the innocents that as gladly would they have been French, as be under his subjection’ – and no Englishman could imagine a fate more horrible than being French.24 On 10 October violence broke out in Kent. The next day Richard learned that Buckingham was assembling his main force in Wales around Brecon Castle. Raising men proved harder than Buckingham had expected, however. He was an unpopular landlord, and as torrential rain drenched his army over the following ten days the men he had recruited lost heart. By the time Henry set sale for England in late October Buckingham’s army was disintegrating. Henry remained ignorant of this as he struggled for his own survival, the storms buffeting his flotilla of around fifteen ships as they sailed towards England. The English joined the Bretons in praying to St Armel, a Breton prince who had killed a dragon, while some of the ships were driven to Normandy, and others back to Brittany. When Henry’s ship, and a few others, at last dropped anchor off Plymouth his men were so relieved they would later dedicate shrines to St Armel in England.
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