The War of the Roses

by Timothy Venning

  Richard of Gloucester and a more adult Edward V: a king at odds with his uncle like Richard II’s and Henry VI’s uncles?

  If Edward IV, apparently in poor health and not campaigning in person by 1482, had died when his elder son was aged over fifteen or so (c. 1486) there would have been no need of a ‘Protector’. A semi-adult Edward V would have succeeded with the Woodvilles as the main power at court. Richard would then have been isolated and unable to secure influence with the King, but with his military power in the north would have been too powerful to be dealt with decisively except by a trick. The messy expense and defeat of his attempts to take over Scotland for a client king could have provided his enemies with an opportunity to undermine him. Like the previous Dukes of Gloucester, Thomas and Humphrey, he would have been vulnerable to a sudden arrest and execution by a distrustful nephew encouraged by his rivals. He would have been very much aware of their fates, and of the fact that they had both been seized by surprise by a ‘treacherous’ King–Thomas arrested in person by a royal-led ‘posse’ at his Essex residence of Pleshy Castle, and Humphrey arrested at Parliament at Bury St Edmunds.

  Richard’s alternative course was to put himself at the head of a coalition of disaffected lords complaining at a monopoly of patronage by the Queen’s kin, in the manner of Simon de Montfort against the Poitevins in the 1250s or Thomas of Lancaster against Gaveston and other royal allies in 1308–22. The chances are that Richard would not have challenged them in his brother’s lifetime, unless Edward IV was seriously ill or ‘senile’ and perceived to be the helpless puppet of a greedy clique as Edward III had been in 1376. Both ambitious nobles such as the Duke of Buckingham (Richard III’s real-life chief assistant and then betrayer in 1483) and a ‘reforming’ Parliament impatient at the abuse of power, as in 1376, could have aided Richard’s ambitions to overturn the power of the King’s current favourites as Edward IV aged and lost control of politics and patronage through the 1490s.

  The dynamics of inter-state relations would have been the same, with England balanced against France and the Empire. Would Edward V or Richard, Duke of York been married off to Catherine of Aragon or a sister of hers–not the oldest, Juana, as heiress to Castile–as part of an alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella against the old enemy, France? (There were no French princesses near their age available.) The sister of Philip I of Burgundy and daughter of Emperor Maximilian, Margaret (born 1480), was an alternative and would have been useful in an anti-French alliance; Edward IV’s sister Margaret (real-life Yorkist pretender-sponsor from 1486 to 1499) was available to negotiate with her stepson-in-law Maximilian. It is possible that the French regency-government would have retaliated for Edward IV’s support for Breton independence from 1488 by smuggling Henry Tudor into France and using him as a Lancastrian pretender–if Edward had not had him extradited from Brittany first. Richard III attempted to get his hands on Tudor in real-life 1483–4, bribing Duke Francis’ chief minister Landois, only for Tudor to flee to Paris; Edward IV could have done this too.

  Until the major rift in the Yorkist regime caused by Edward V’s real-life deposition and disappearance Henry had negligible support in England, as shown by the failure of the Earl of Oxford to win support in his Cornish venture in 1474. If Edward IV had died while the Anglo-French dispute was still underway Henry was no real threat to a (semi?-) adult Edward V. The Woodville alliance with Henry Tudor of Christmas 1483 only followed the disappearance of the deposed Edward V and his brother, and the scale of ex-royal Household men’s involvement in the autumn 1483 revolt showed that many Yorkist stalwarts did not accept Richard. It is unlikely that Richard could have had the backing of many major nobles to depose an adult Edward V. Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI had all been perceived as inadequate, faction-dominated kings for many years (22, 22, and 38) before they were deposed; Edward IV’s deposition in 1470 was a ‘special case’ as his legitimacy as king was more in question and he had a deposed, ‘legitimate’ predecessor to hand for rebels to use. The rebels were led by Edward’s cousin and ex-chief adviser Warwick, who had many clients from the vast Neville estates ready to back him, and included Edward’s next adult male heir Clarence. Richard could only have removed Edward V on the grounds of legality, using the supposed ‘pre-contract’ of Edward IV to marry Eleanor Butler to argue that Edward V was illegitimate; and the story relied on at most one live witness (Stillington?) as of 1483. The question of its believability is obscured by the frantic efforts Henry VII made to ‘airbrush’ the incident out of history after 148534–which themselves argue that Henry feared it was believable. But could Richard have won the Council to his side if he did not have Stillington (who died in 1495) to hand, as the latter was the key figure in the ‘revelations’ made in mid-June 1483?

  If Richard had secured a client on the throne of Scotland (Alexander of Albany or Prince James?) in alliance with rebel Scots nobles around 1488 and/or led a successful expedition to Brittany or Artois, he would have boosted his military reputation. If he also had the manpower of his ‘palatinate’ to call upon against Edward V’s unpopular Woodville relatives’ domination of patronage and had allied nobles such as Buckingham, an attempt to coerce an ageing Edward IV or more likely a young Edward V was possible. But even if the rebels had been as effective against an untried new king as those of 1387–8, yet another royal deposition was an unlikely result. The previous depositions of adult kings–Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward IV–had all been spearheaded by an ambitious rival, or in Edward II’s case the mother of his heir and her lover, after either a period of weak government or the domination of government and patronage by one contentious person or faction. There was a chance that the Queen-Mother and her Woodville relatives could dominate politics and amass lands and titles for themselves in a similar manner under a young Edward V, perhaps from c. 1488 for five to ten years, and that Richard could act as a focus for resentment. Alternatively, the Woodvilles–or the King–could have seen him as a military threat and confiscated his ‘palatinate’, driving him into exile as Roger Mortimer had been imprisoned by Edward II or Henry IV had been exiled by Richard II, and thus caused an invasion. In that case Charles VIII’s regency or Richard’s favourite sister, Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, were possible allies for him; in real life Margaret was to back Richard’s heir Lincoln against Edward IV’s daughter and son-in-law in 1486–7.

  The deposition of an untried young king was unlikely to win support from the great nobility; the removal of his ‘evil ministers’, as the Lords Appellant had done to Richard II in 1387–8, was a more likely precedent. Richard of Gloucester would have found it more difficult to claim the throne from an adult king (and his younger brother Richard of York) by inventing or publicizing the conveniently-discovered story about the illegality of Edward IV’s marriage. But if he had been responsible for having Edward V’s chief ministers and maternal relatives rounded up and killed he would have been in the same position as Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, in the 1390s–facing the hostility of a chastened King determined on revenge at a later date and so with a reason to secure his position by usurpation. A confrontation between Richard of Gloucester and the Woodvilles over control of the young Edward V’s government could have seen a repeat of the 1390s in the 1490s, and much would have depended on the personal capacity and leadership of the King. If Richard did not defend himself he could have shared the fate of Thomas of Gloucester in 1397, arrested and quietly murdered by his vengeful nephew. His extensive lands would have been a powerful inducement for his nephew to remove him and auction them off to royal supporters.

  The Franco-Spanish showdown over Navarre in 1512 would have been a good opportunity for Edward V–or if he was dead, his brother Richard–as king to invade France. The English king, aged 41/2 (Edward V) or 39 (Richard of York), would have been unlikely to have had much military experience unless there had been an Anglo-French clash in the 1490s following the Breton succession-war. Burgundy, and thus their Habsburg allies, would have been
the Yorkist government’s principal Continental ally in 1485–1503, in contrast to real life where Maximilian as well as Duchess Margaret backed the pretender ‘Perkin Warbeck’ against Henry VII (in return for the pretender naming Maximilian as his heir). France would, however, have still had Italy as its priority under Charles VIII and Louis XII, with an invasion of England to back a Lancastrian claimant–Henry Tudor? –a much more risky affair than it was in real-life 1485 when Richard III lacked legitimacy or support.

  James IV, as a French ally even if married to Edward IV’s daughter, would have been likely to invade England if England attacked France. Assuming a war between the two in 1512, he would have been in the same position of aiding Louis XII against the English King as in real life; he could have been killed at Flodden in 1513. His mother, one of Edward IV’s daughters (Cecily?), would then have had a claim to the regency for their son James V if enough nobles backed her. Either Edward V or his brother Richard would have been able to marry and produce heirs to England, with one of the brothers possibly still on the throne into the late 1530s. Born in 1470 and 1473, they would have been a generation older and more experienced than either Charles V or Francis I in the diplomatic conflicts of the 1520s.

  Henry Tudor, left isolated in Brittany or France with no major split in the Yorkist ‘power-base’, would have been an unlikely choice for Edward IV as his eldest daughter’s husband and would have lacked the support to challenge the adult Edward V or his brother. If the Plantagenet male line had continued, would there have been no ‘Break with Rome’ as there was no Henry VIII? There would still have been rising interest in Continental religious affairs and Lutheranism, but without the impetus of Henry’s marital disputes the English state’s attitude would depend on the personal piety and tolerance of the King. A fairly relaxed approach to dissident theology, like that initially in France, could have seen ‘reformers’ active in the major port of London in the 1530s and new ideas seeping into the universities, aided by imported books. There would still have been calls for Erasmian-style reform of clerical ‘abuses’–the crucial choice facing the King would have been whether or not to suppress them.

  Chapter Five

  The Fall of the House of York, 1483–5

  What if Richard III had won at Bosworth and stayed in power?

  The coups of May–June 1483

  As analysed in Charles Ross’ biography, Richard III relied on a far narrower power-base than Edward IV due to the shocking nature of his usurpation in June 1483.1 The surprise announcement of Edward V’s bastardy (on account of his parents’ marriage) on 22 June, initially in Ralph Shaa’s officially-approved sermon on the text ‘Bastard slips shall not take root’, was probably based on the ‘pre-contract’ of Edward IV and Eleanor Butler as stated by the author of the Croyland Chronicle. There is some confusion over the identity of the betrothed woman cited, but not over the legal reason–which would have been more difficult to use if Edward IV had married in public with unbiased witnesses. Did the Woodvilles’ unpopularity with some nobles enable Richard to risk this highly unusual action? The original texts of the sermon and of the Parliamentary Act sanctioning the change in succession, Titulus Regius, have not survived. After August 1485 Henry VII was keen to have them expunged from people’s memories, as he partly based his appeal on his wife’s being Edward IV’s eldest daughter and thus bastardized with her siblings by Richard. Sir Thomas More was confused as to who the ‘pre-contract’ had been with, citing Edward’s known mistress Elizabeth Lucy not Eleanor.2 Was this just a slip, or a genuine sign that the announcement made on 22 June 1483 was not specific as to the name of the late King’s betrothed?

  Eleanor Butler has been traced, and the first biography of her written.3 The original identity given to her in post-1483 literature was accurate, and she was indeed a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Henry VI’s great general killed in 1453, and was buried in the nunnery church of the Carmelite Order in Norwich. Dying in 1468, this young widow was both ‘available’ for Edward to marry in 1462–4 and dead by the time that Edward was arrested and threatened with deposition by Warwick in 1469. Technically, even if Edward had legally ‘married’ her he could have remarried Elizabeth Woodville in time to legitimize his eldest son, born in October 1470–but his daughter Elizabeth of York, Henry VII’s wife, would still have been illegitimate as she was born in 1466. Ironically, canon law provided for Edward and Elizabeth’s 1464 marriage to have been legal not ‘bigamy’ if it had been public and Eleanor had failed to speak up for her rights at the ceremony–but the Woodville marriage was private and poorly-attended. The arguments against the legality of the Woodville marriage in Titulus Regius apparently included that it was not in church and had not been approved of by the peers.4 Under contemporary canon law, the private circumstances invalidated the marriage–whether or not there was a ‘pre-contract’ to anyone else. Thus, the question of who Edward IV’s ‘other wife’ was (and if Richard invented her role) is in a sense irrelevant. The Butler genealogy reveals two interesting facts–Eleanor’s sister Elizabeth, with whom she probably lived at Kenninghall in Norfolk after 1461, was married to the Duke of Norfolk and they were closely related to Warwick. (A rumour c. 1462 did say that Edward was sexually involved with Warwick’s niece.5) This poses two questions about the ‘marriage that might have been’ between Edward and Eleanor and its effects on post-1464 politics. Did Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, and/ or her husband know of the betrothal-ceremony and Edward have to avoid alienating the Duke, e.g. by backing his blatantly illegal attack on the Pastons at Caister Castle? And what if Warwick had found out about the betrothal–could he have administered the coup de grâce to the Woodvilles in 1469 by forcing the Church to examine the evidence and declare Edward a bigamist? His execution of Elizabeth Woodville’s father and husband would then have been followed by annulling Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth, whether or not Edward was deposed too. Either Edward would have had to marry a bride of Warwick’s choosing, or Clarence would have been restored as Edward’s sole legal heir in place of Edward’s illegitimized daughters.

  The promiscuous young Edward IV of the early 1460s was certainly capable of making a promise of marriage in order to seduce a woman and going back on it later. His actual marriage in May 1464, was secret and gave rise to confusion over its legality when he eventually admitted it. The bishop who had seemingly performed the betrothal-ceremony to Eleanor–or else received the confession of the priest who had done so–Robert Stillington, was arrested for unknown reasons by Edward IV when the King’s brother the Duke of Clarence, was laying claim to be Edward’s heir in 1478. This suggests that he may have told Clarence the story and thus inspired the latter’s endeavours to cut Edward’s children out of the succession.6 It makes more sense to suppose that Clarence’s threatening hints about ‘G’ being the rightful heir in 1477 arose from a sense of (justified?) grievance at his brother’s underhand behaviour rather than simple lust for power. The relative paucity of knowledge of or interest in Eleanor in Tudor times may reflect writers’ recognition that it was a dangerous topic to pursue–if Edward IV had been legally contracted to her, Henry VII’s wife had had no claim to the English throne. Thus Henry VIII was not the rightful king, and logically Clarence’s daughter Margaret Pole should have been queen or else have handed over her rights to her son Henry, Lord Montague. Henry VII claimed the throne in his declaration to Parliament in autumn 1485 by his, not his wife’s, descent–though this was presumably partly to avoid making himself legally dependant on her rights and partly out of loyalty to his mother, Margaret Beaufort, whose claim he had inherited.7 Raking up the Eleanor Butler story could be interpreted by the paranoid Henry VIII or Elizabeth I as backing their Plantagenet challengers, so was it suppressed deliberately? There is evidence that the Butler claim was still ‘live’ as a political issue in the 1530s.8

  It also appears that mention was made (probably by Richard’s chief supporter, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham) in a speech on 24 or 25 June 1483 of the
rumour that Edward IV was illegitimate too due to his mother’s affair with the archer Blaybourne in 1441/2. Polydore Vergil claimed he had heard witnesses confirm Duchess Cecily’s anger at this–though there is no evidence of her quarrelling with Richard, who was living at her residence at the time. The story, which Louis XI of France used against Edward in the latter’s lifetime,9 may have been current earlier than 1483 and inspired the clumsy claims to the throne (or the reversion to it) made by Clarence in 1470–1 and 1477–8. Did Warwick think of using it to depose Edward in 1469? It is an alternative explanation for Clarence’s behaviour to his being told about Eleanor Butler. Indeed, recent discovery of evidence about Edward’s father’s itinerary as commander in Normandy in 1441 may indicate that he was not with Edward’s mother, Cecily Neville, at Rouen at the likely time of Edward’s conception and that there may be truth in the claim about Blaybourne.10 At the time, much was made of the fact that the six-foot-four Edward did not resemble his undersized father but Richard did; at the public declaration of Richard’s rights as lawful king in the City on 22 June 1483 he made an appearance before the crowds to remind everyone of this fact.11 No doubt it was carefully arranged so that his partisans in the crowd could ‘spontaneously’ acclaim him as king.