by Ann Wroe
Certainly his health was by now less fragile than his father’s. Edward IV’s licentiousness had caught up with him. The loud, vigorous, gorgeously clad figure at the centre of Richard’s life – hunting, dancing, clapping men’s shoulders, fondling women’s waists – had become corpulent and slow. His lovely face had grown puffy and sometimes apoplectic. To mount a horse was now an effort. He ate, often alone at the board, with a physician in attendance and an array of dietary powders, including emetics, spread out in front of him.
One day the king came back to Windsor, went to bed and did not get up again. No one was sure what was wrong with him. His water gave no clues. Some said he was furious at various diplomatic disappointments, including the implosion of his marriage plans for his eldest daughter, or overcome with melancholy. Others said he had acute indigestion from eating too much fruit on Good Friday. Possibly, thought Dominic Mancini, an Italian observer, he had caught cold while fishing on the river. Edward loved the water: but there was to be no more boating.
Soon the king could not sit up, or keep any position save lying on his right side. Mounds of pillows and cushions supported him: pillows of finest holland or linen from Rennes, bolsters stuffed with duck-down, cushions of figured velvet of every dark colour, crimson and viridian and night-blue, tasselled with gold. In the Wardrobe these were kept, as his clothes were, with little fustian bags of aniseed and spices. He would have smelt of these, as also – to the small boy nervously seeking his blessing by the great curtained bed – of the sticky perfumes that shaped his hair, and sickness, and sweat.
Within a few days, on April 9th 1483, the image of the dying king on his pillows was replaced by others. First his body was laid out on a board in the palace at Westminster, naked save for a cloth from the navel to the knees, while the lords spiritual and temporal and the mayor and aldermen of London came to view it. The body was bowelled, balmed, sered, or wrapped tightly in waxed cloth, wrapped again in Rennes cloth secured with silk cords, wrapped again in tartryne tied tightly, wrapped again in cloth-of-gold, and taken away to St Stephen’s Chapel, where it lay in state for eight days. This was presumably where Richard would have seen it, disconcertingly still, the corruption working underneath the wax.
The body was then placed in a coffin covered with black cloth-of-gold worked with a white cross; above it was a canopy of cloth imperial fringed with gold and blue silk. Alongside the coffin, inside the hearse, ‘there was a personage like to the similitude of the king in habit royal crowned with the crown on his head, holding in the one hand a sceptre, and in the other hand a ball of silver and gilt with a cross-pate’. This personage, its face carved in wood and then painted with open eyes, went in procession with the corpse to Windsor, in a royal carriage covered with black velvet. The habit royal it wore was a surcoat and mantle of estate, ‘the laces lying goodly on his belly’, just as, within the coffin under the layers of tartryne and linen, the great clumsy lacing showed where the king had been cut open and eviscerated.
Another image of him was left. Above his tomb, on the north side of the altar in his glorious unfinished chapel of St George at Windsor, his coat of mail was hung. It was gilded and covered with crimson velvet embroidered with the arms of England and France, on which the lions were picked out in pure gold and the fleurs-de-lis in pearls. The coat hung, alongside his banner, still suggesting the bulk of the man who had worn it, as though the gorgeous king had left his carapace behind.
At his tomb, the most obvious prayer for a son to make was the first and simplest:
Pater noster
qui es in caelis
(but his soul was not yet in Heaven, only in Purgatory, where he needed every earthly prayer possible to keep him from the claw-fingered devils who would try to drag him down)
sanctificetur nomen tuum
adveniat regnum tuum
Edward’s will – at least in the version drawn up in 1475, when Richard was about two – envisaged his second son at the age of sixteen enfeoffed with the castle and manors of Fotheringhay, Stanford, Grantham and Bolyngbroke. His inexorable improvement and enrichment continued, but Edward had already imagined too far. Whatever he hoped his son would be had died with him, as the idealising soul stepped away from the laggard, struggling body. His will existed on paper; he had spent his last conscious hours, it seems, trying to revise it. John Russell, the Bishop of Lincoln, mentioned with pity ‘the inextricable cures, pensivenesses, thoughts and charges wherewith [the king’s] wise and forecasting mind was hugely occupied and encumbered, afore his decease’. But the sense of uncertainty that hovered over every will had deepened and darkened. From now on Richard, Duke of York, carefully constructed for more than nine years, began to disappear.
ii
After Edward’s death, his eldest son was supposed to become king. The date of his coronation as Edward V had been fixed for June 22nd 1483. On that understanding, food for the banquet was ordered in and lengths of blue velvet and crimson cloth-of-gold were purchased for the new king’s riding robes and those of his retainers. On June 5th, dozens of letters were sent out under the young king’s seal to the men he intended to make knights. In all the ceremonial, the king’s younger brother Richard was expected to be important.
Yet on April 30th Edward had been intercepted on his way to London and taken to the Tower by his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry, Duke of Buckingham, in a manner that showed they were assuming control. Edward’s escorts, Lord Richard Grey and his governor, Earl Rivers, both of them from his mother’s Woodville side, were arrested on grounds of plotting ‘to subdue and destroy the noble blood of the realm’. At the beginning of May, Queen Elizabeth, understanding that the tide was turning against her and her family, fled into sanctuary at Westminster with Richard and his five sisters. There, surrounded by the furniture she had managed to bring with her, the queen sat ‘alone alow on the rushes all desolate and dismayed’, and wept.
If these images were true – they were More’s, darkly imagined – they would have left their mark on Richard. Yet he stayed no more than six weeks in this exile-household before the Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, came on June 16th to take him, too, to the Tower. The archbishop argued that Edward was missing his brother and that the boys should be together. Richard was also needed for the coronation, assuming it was still to happen. His mother, More wrote, refused to let him go because he had been ill. Bourchier insisted, saying that by keeping him in sanctuary his mother was implying that he had committed a criminal offence.
Throughout speech and counter-speech, in More’s version of the story, Richard stood silently beside his mother, at one point holding her hand. It seemed that the queen would never give in; but then, quite suddenly, she capitulated. They could take ‘this gentleman’. She kissed him, blessed him and, in tears, delivered him to the archbishop and his officers. Richard, too, was crying. He was escorted through the corridors as far as the door of the Star Chamber, where his uncle Gloucester, now Lord Protector of the kingdom, took him in his arms, kissed him, welcomed him ‘with all my very heart’ and seemed to comfort him.
From there, Bourchier and Sir Thomas Howard conveyed Richard downriver to the Tower. He was in a squadron of eight barges, paid for by the Howards; More said that the Thames was full of boats. These, and the press of armed men round Westminster – thousands of them, by one estimate made that week – might have excited a nine-year-old as much as frightened him. At any event, a contemporary description of Richard’s journey ended on a brighter note, as if a small hand had been placed confidently in a larger one: ‘and so [he] departed with my lord cardinal to the Tower where he is blessed be Jesu merry’.
Perhaps he was. The word ‘merry’ meant mostly to be in good health, mental and physical; that remark may have meant no more than ‘he is all right’. Yet Richard seemed, on the rare sightings of contemporaries, to be a lively child who liked playing and singing. That was why Edward needed him. The elder prince, in striking contrast, was portraye
d as mired in sadness that seemed to sap his well-being: ‘heaviness’ against Richard’s lightness, the token of good health. Dr John Argentine, who was with him in the Tower, allegedly told Mancini that Edward, ‘like a victim preparing for sacrifice’, was getting ready for death by daily confession and penance for his sins. More repeated the story: after a little while in the Tower, ‘the prince never tied his points, nor aught wrought of himself, but with that young babe his brother, lingered in thought and heaviness’. The doctor would have recognised this as the influence of black bile and bad angels, terrors dwelt on so obsessively that they were almost bound to take shape in the world, as well as in the mind.
Dr Argentine was possibly also the source of a heartbreaking scene described by Jean Molinet, writing at the court of Burgundy. The elder boy, he wrote,
was unsophisticated and very melancholy, aware only of the ill-will of his uncle, and the second son was very joyous and witty [spirituel], suited and ready for dances and frolics, and he said to his brother, wearing the Order of the Garter, ‘My brother, learn to dance.’ And his brother answered: ‘It would be better if you and I learned to die, because I believe I know well that we will not be in this world much longer.’
Such stories could well have been apocryphal. The princes were easily sentimentalised in their captivity, and those who retailed their fate round Europe often barely knew their names. In distant Malines, Molinet called Richard ‘George’, confusing him with an uncle or a brother who were already dead. Yet the clear thread of their characters persisted, sombre and debonair. It was Richard who made Edward happy, to the extent he could be happy. Because he was in the Tower too, all was not books and devotions. He put on his Garter of gold and silk, and danced.
The boys were also outside playing. The London chronicler Robert Fabyan, writing some time later, reported that in the late summer or early autumn of 1483 ‘the childer of King Edward’ had been seen ‘shooting and playing in the gardens of the Tower by sundry times’. As far as he was concerned, they were never seen again. Richard, Duke of York was caught in that moment, in the sunshine, aiming his bow, running to the target, plucking out the arrows, running back, aiming again, shouting, jumping. His bow was possibly strung with silk and kept in a velvet case of murrey (dark crimson) and blue, York’s colours, with his badge on it; his father had given bows like this to guests when they went hunting, together with arrows tipped with gold. These ‘convenient disports and exercises’ had once been part of his progress towards ideal princeliness, between the noble and improving stories and the first antiphon of evensong. Now they were the last sure glimpse of him, any nine-or-ten-year-old, running on a lawn and aiming at nothing beyond a butt of straw.
Less than a week after he had been taken to the Tower, Richard had been removed from the legitimate blood-line of Yorkist princes. The occasion was a sermon preached by a friar, Dr Shaw, under the great canopy outside St Paul’s, at the instigation of Richard of Gloucester as Lord Protector. A few days later, Parliament enshrined the arguments in law. Edward IV, it appeared, had been contracted to marry Eleanor Butler before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. That union was therefore invalid, and the children bastards.
No evidence was offered by Dr Shaw. Eleanor herself was dead, and could neither confirm nor refute the story. But such things were readily believed of Edward. He had apparently promised to marry Eleanor so that he could immediately bed her; that sounded in character. Dr Shaw also suggested, for good measure, that Edward himself had been a bastard, the result of an affair between Cecily of York and a common soldier of Rouen called Blaybourne. This seemed preposterous, but George, Duke of Clarence, Edward’s wayward brother, was also said to have put such a story about; and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Edward’s brother-in-law, often called him ‘Blaybourne’, in fits of rage, long before Dr Shaw preached his sermon. According to either line of argument – Edward’s dalliance or Cecily’s – Richard of Gloucester, Edward’s only surviving brother, was now the rightful king.
He took charge, as Richard III, on June 26th. From that date, Richard of York and his brother had no official standing. Their bastardy meant that they could inherit nothing from their father; it involved, therefore, the removal of the titles he had given them and their distribution to others. On June 28th John Howard, a Mowbray heir and a kinsman and friend of the new king, was given the titles of Earl Marshal and Duke of Norfolk. On July 19th Richard III’s son, Edward, was made Lieutenant of Ireland. By March 1484 ‘the king’s kinsman William’, another Mowbray heir, had received the family title of Earl of Nottingham.
No reference was made in the patent rolls, even in passing, to the boy who had held these honours immediately before. Although bastardy was often openly acknowledged, and although the deposed child-king Edward was referred to occasionally in the rolls as ‘Edward the Bastard’, or ‘Edward, Bastard, late king’, his brother Richard vanished. Even the appointment of one of his servants, Thomas Galmole, to another post contained no mention of the little duke he had once served. All that remained unaltered was that in Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, the chantry and guild of the Most Sweet Name of Jesus continued for a while to pray for Richard as though he were a prince.
Little of this dissolution would have been noticed at the time. Richard had carried out none of the official duties attached to his titles, acting always through deputies; so when Howard appeared as Duke of Norfolk at Richard III’s coronation on July 6th, carrying the crown, this seemed suitable and unremarkable. The Norfolk title, a dream attached to a child, was now in legitimate adult hands, just as the gorgeous silks and velvet half-gowns ordered for Edward V’s crowning had now been altered for broader adult backs.
None of this meant for certain that Richard was dead. He was nobody worth mentioning, and could presumably have stayed in that empty quarter for a while. But the silent record strongly suggested that the boy, as well as the prince, was no longer in play. Mancini reported that summer that the princes were seen day by day ‘more rarely behind the bars and windows [of the Tower], until at length they ceased to appear altogether’. The patent rolls followed the small fading faces. In 1489 another entry, revising the Howard claims to the Norfolk estates, stated unequivocally that Richard had died.
This was less than firm proof. Possibly the Howards were expressing their impatience with the prevailing uncertainty about the prince’s fate. A large land claim was at stake and, as it happened, Richard’s bastardy had by then been reversed on Henry VII’s order and by Act of Parliament. Although there was no word or sight of the little prince, he could not be counted out of the picture unless he was dead. His death was therefore declared, whether true or not. It had been recorded too, in general terms but explicitly enough, in the Act of Attainder (conviction for treason) passed against Richard III by Henry in 1485, after Richard had been killed at Bosworth. In that act, Richard was accused of ‘shedding of infants’ blood’. There was no need, by this stage, to say who those infants were.
From the summer of 1483 many commentators, not all with favours to seek or axes to grind, were freely imagining the princes’ deaths. Mancini (who implied that the princes had disappeared before he left London in mid-July) reported that he had seen men break into tears when Edward’s name was mentioned, already suspecting that he had been killed. The Chancellor of France, addressing the Estates General in January 1484, emphasised the horror of murdering boys who were already long-limbed and strong. The Croyland chronicler mentioned a rumour, current in August and September 1483, that they had died ‘by some unknown manner of violent destruction’. In Bristol, the town clerk simply noted in the margin that ‘this year [September 1483–September 1484] the two sons of King E. were put to silence in the Tower of London’.
The further the story travelled, the more bizarre the deaths became. A Castilian visitor to England, Diego de Valera, thought the princes had been killed with herbs while their father was away in Scotland. In France, there was a rumour that they had fallen into the moat of the To
wer and been washed out to sea. In Portugal, Rui de Sousa heard that once the boys had been imprisoned, ‘they bled them, and they died from the forced bleeding’. Fabyan’s Great Chronicle mentioned London whisperings, after Easter 1484, that they had been poisoned, drowned in malmsey, smothered with feather-beds.
Hindsight or ignorance coloured many of these stories. But the consensus at the time, in so far as consensus can be plucked from what survives, was that the boys were dead, though it was not clear how. Margaret of York, the princes’ aunt, maintained that ‘everyone’ thought so. Brampton called their murder ‘the worst evil in the world’, as though the world knew. As to who had done it, the strongest motivation plainly belonged to Richard of Gloucester, the man who was now king. He shared, with his brother, a family trait of ruthless efficiency. Yorkist kings did not leave their rivals to inconvenience them. They hunted them down, as Edward IV after his victory at Tewkesbury had sent soldiers from Wales to hunt down the Earl of Pembroke and his nephew Henry Tudor before they could slip across the Channel; or they killed them, as Henry VI had been murdered in the Tower, quite probably, some thought, by Gloucester, his wounds bleeding afresh as he was laid on the pavement at St Paul’s for all to see.
Yet Richard’s guilt was not entirely clear. Against it, there were the ties of blood and loyalty and the loving words at the door of the Star Chamber; besides the fact that the princes, once bastards, were already put aside by Act of Parliament. Perhaps the murderer, or at least the motivator, was not Gloucester but Buckingham, who had been so thick with the Protector at the time of Edward’s kidnapping. The Croyland chronicler hinted at it, noting that it was Buckingham who had first suggested putting Edward in the Tower. Several European chroniclers suggested it, Philippe de Commines writing that Buckingham had done the deed himself on Richard’s orders. The ‘Historical notes of a London citizen’ stated it flatly, saying that ‘this year [October 1482–October 1483] King Edward the Vth, late called Prince Wales [sic] and Richard Duke of York, his brother . . . were put to death in the Tower of London by the vise [advice] of the Duke of Buckingham’.
