There is no indication that Richard was given a specific role in the coronation itself, though as the king rode into London on 26 June, he was met by both his brothers at the Tower, along with thirty others who were formally dubbed knights of the Bath, the second-highest order of chivalry, that evening. The heralds were paid an additional twenty marks ‘for the gift and largesse of our dearest beloved brethren at the same place made knights’.37
The following morning, Edward rode in procession to Westminster, preceded by his brothers and the other knights, all wearing blue gowns trimmed with white fur and white hoods, with tokens of white silk lace on their left shoulders. On Sunday, 28 June, Edward was crowned at Westminster. Richard and George watched as the archbishops of Canterbury and York placed St Edward’s crown on their brother’s head. In the banqueting and celebrations that followed over the next two days, both brothers were once again in attendance, while their elder brother, the king, wore his crown constantly as if to continually remind everyone that he really was their monarch. Barely six months before, the house of York had seemed doomed, destroyed by their father’s death: now, with their lives transformed, it seemed as if fortune smiled upon them.
The accession of the nineteen-year-old Edward brought joy in the capital, which Yorkist balladeers would swiftly capitalise on, with one poet exhorting: ‘let us walk in a new vineyard, and let us make a gay garden in the month of March with this fair white rose and herb, the Earl of March’.38 ‘I am unable to declare how well the commons love and adore him, as if he were their God’, an Italian merchant in London wrote to a friend in Bruges that April. ‘The entire kingdom keeps holiday for the event, which seems a boon from above.’ 39 Over six foot three inches tall and with a strong warrior-like physique, Edward appeared the very opposite of the mentally frail and weak Henry VI, who had reigned, a king in name only, for more than thirty-eight years. After decades of decline, during which England had lost most of its territory in France, a new world seemed on the horizon.
Henry VI had managed to flee to Scotland with his wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, arguably the power behind the Lancastrian throne, yet a succession of smaller battles eventually ground down any resistance, until, in July 1465, Henry VI was captured and taken to the Tower. Edward’s victory against his enemies appeared complete: the long period of civil war and political upheaval was finally at an end, or so it seemed. The reversal in the brothers’ fortunes had been remarkable, but also demonstrated how fragile political life could be, or might become. Fortune’s wheel might turn at any time. For now, they were in the ascendant; whatever the future held for them, they remained confident that God was on their side. In an illustrated manuscript produced shortly after his coronation, there is an image that depicts Edward, wearing the crown and his royal regalia, at the top of Fortune’s wheel, while Henry VI is being crushed beneath it. Clarence and Richard are on the left-hand side, ascending, being watched by the bishops and the nobility in their plate armour. A small cloaked figure depicting Reason has stopped the wheel by driving a spoke into it. With the wheel prevented from turning once more, the illustrator evidently hoped that Edward, sitting securely at the top, would long remain as king.
2
THE WHEEL TURNS
The day after the coronation, on Monday, 29 June, Edward created his brother and heir, George, the duke of Clarence. The choice of the title of Clarence was significant. First created for Lionel of Antwerp, son of Edward III, it was now a symbol that the Yorkist claim to the throne descended directly from Edward III, a claim that was far stronger than that of their Lancastrian predecessors. The speed at which Clarence was elevated to his dukedom highlighted that he was to be considered Edward’s heir presumptive and honoured as such; as the youngest of the king’s brothers, Richard would have to wait several months until he was finally elevated to the higher ranks of the peerage: on 1 November he was finally created duke of Gloucester, with an annuity of £40 attached to the title that would be paid by the county whose name Richard bore.1
Still only nine years old, Richard was to remain under his brother’s watch at court. Richard and Clarence seem to have lodged at the royal palace at Greenwich, known as Placentia, ‘the pleasant place’, which had been built in 200 acres of grounds by Duke Humphrey in 1427. During the summer of 1461, the two boys may have been briefly housed together in a tower at Greenwich, whose rooms included a hall, parlour and six chambers, each furnished with hangings made of worsted.2 The wardrobe accounts of Robert Cousin, the Keeper of the Great Wardrobe, indicate that he conveyed clothes and furniture to Richard at Greenwich: the account, dated 30 September 1462, lists ‘diverse robes, mantels, gowns, tunics, caps, hose, and other diverse ornaments, things and material necessary for the duke’s rank’, along with several hundred marten furs, forty pelts of black lambskin, hats, over seventy pairs of shoes, boots, twelve bowstrings, ‘one saddle of antique fashion with a harness, one saddle gilt, one sword with a belt and white scabbard, and one harness’.3 Clarence had four henchmen, a herald and two footmen in his own small household, while Richard only had unspecified ‘servants’ with him; the large number of shoes (seventy-six pairs), bonnets (ninety-one) and over fifty-two yards of frise suggest that the supplies were not for Richard alone.
The wardrobe account is an unusual survival for the amount of information it reveals about the duke’s existence at a time when only infrequent mention of Richard can be found. Within two weeks of his creation as duke of Gloucester, on 13 November 1461, Richard is listed among those given commissions of array to raise troops for the king’s defence against his enemies in Scotland.4 On 4 February 1462, Edward ordered that his ‘right entirely beloved brother’ Gloucester should receive a helmet, a crest and a sword, which should be set in the chapel of the college of St George at Windsor, ‘according for him to the honour and order of the Garter’.5
While residing at court, young Richard continued training to become a knight, following the traditional form of education reserved for members of the nobility. Sir John Fortescue praised the royal household as a ‘supreme academy for the nobles of the realm, and a school of vigour, probity and manners’. Education was focused on military training, vital for men who would be tasked with protecting the realm, but royal princes should also have a knowledge of law to be inspired with a love of justice, though learning should be only ‘in general terms’. Scripture should be studied, but not ‘profoundly’.6 Richard’s day-to-day routine probably followed that set down by royal household ordinances under Edward IV several years later. After being awakened, Richard would have attended matins before hearing mass in his chapel or closet. Breakfast would follow, before being ‘occupied in such virtuous learning as his age shall now suffice to receive’. At dinner, which Richard would himself later suggest should be observed no later than eleven o’clock in the morning, he would take ‘meat’ while listening to noble stories that would be read to him, encouraging the practice of virtue and honour and ‘acts of worship’. The afternoon was taken up with ‘disports and exercises as behoveth his estate to have experience in’ before attending evensong and supper.7 Part of Richard’s training in his later youth would have included jousting and horse-riding. In his Chronicle, John Hardyng noted that ‘at fourteen year they shall to field I sure, at hunt the deer, and catch a hardiness … at sixteen year to array and to wage, to joust and ride, and castles to assail’.8 The wardrobe accounts attest to the fact that riding gear was purchased for both Richard and his brother George, while in March 1465 the fletcher William Love was paid £20 6s 1d ‘for divers sheaves of arrows and other chattels’ that had been delivered to John Younge, yeoman of the king’s bows, for ‘the use of our brethren the duke of Clarence and Gloucester’.9
Richard and Clarence seem to have been looked after by other leading figures in the realm during their visits across the country. On 12 September 1462, Edward granted Thomas, Lord Stanley, an annuity in recognition of his services done to the king and his brothers Clarence and Gloucester10 while Thom
as Bourchier, the archbishop of Canterbury, would later be rewarded because he had ‘at the king’s request … supported the king’s brothers … for a long time at great charges’.11 In late August 1463, Richard attended mass at Canterbury Cathedral with his brother Clarence, who as heir presumptive, ordered that a sword be carried before him with its point raised upwards. As for Richard, his presence went unremarked. The chronicler John Stone noted the arrival of the dukes at Canterbury, ‘the lord George Duke of Clarence with his brother’. Richard remained very much in the shadow of his elder brother.12
As heir presumptive, Clarence was also given the lion’s share of royal grants; in contrast, Edward’s grants to Richard were considerably less generous. In September 1461, there had been rumours that Richard was to receive lands in Norfolk, though this came to nothing.13 On 12 August 1462, he was granted a sizeable number of lands; however, unlike Clarence’s landed estate, none of these amounted to any specific territorial affinity: the grant included the lordships of Richmond in Yorkshire, Pembroke in West Wales and a scattering of lands from the forfeited de Vere estates in Cambridgeshire, Essex and Suffolk, confiscated from the earl of Oxford. Two months later, on 2 October, Richard was appointed Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine, to complement his constableship of Corfe Castle in Dorset.14
Since Richard had yet to obtain his majority, any grants that were made by the king were provisional, with the king free to revise his arrangements as he chose. As soon as the lordship of Richmond had been granted to Richard, it was to be taken away, for it seems that Clarence, who already held the Honour of Richmond, wanted the lands for himself; after Clarence had protested, Edward duly complied.15 Though Richard was eventually compensated for this, the process was characterised by hesitation and contradiction, with no guarantee that he would be given an estate that would not only secure his income as a royal duke, but more importantly would allow him the opportunity to build up a territory that he might call his own. In the absence of stability over his own future, Richard must have learnt from an early age that, in contrast to his elder brother Clarence, the heir to the throne, his life was set to be very different, a life in which he would need to seize every opportunity that presented itself to him.
Richard, earl of Warwick, was the greatest nobleman of his age. The earl was second in the realm only to Edward himself, though some would say Warwick regarded himself as more important than the king. One Italian visitor observed how Warwick ‘seems to be everything in this kingdom’, while others joked how ‘there are at present two chiefs in England, of which Monsieur de Warwick is one, and they forget the name of the other’.16
As Richard approached his teenage years, it was time to be sent into the household of a nobleman to complete his military training and to learn what was expected from a royal member of the nobility. There could be no better place to discover this than in the magnificence of Warwick’s household, one of the greatest of its day, which in 1465 Richard duly entered. He is likely to have first journeyed to the Midlands, to the earl’s principal castle, at Warwick: later that year one account roll notes payment of £1,000, ‘to Richard Earl of Warwick, for costs and expenses incurred by him for the Duke of Gloucester, the King’s brother’.17 That same year Richard was to be found at the Collegiate Church of St Mary in Warwick, making an offering at the high altar in the presence of the earl and countess of Warwick, Lord Fitzhugh and Lord Hastings. By now Richard’s household also included minstrels, who were present at Stratford upon Avon with the earl of Warwick’s minstrels in 1465.18 The surviving wardrobe account for Richard, dated 20 March 1465, indicates that the king still paid for his brother’s ‘diverse robes, gowns, tunics, caps, hose, shoes and other diverse ornaments, things and material the same as necessary for the duke’s rank’,19 with additional luxuries including two covers of tapestry work, two pairs of falconry gloves, four dozen bowstrings, twelve arrowheads, a bowcase, two standing basins and a significant amount of riding equipment.20
Warwick’s landed wealth was unsurpassed, making him the most powerful nobleman since John of Gaunt. Through his Neville ancestors, the earl had inherited vast estates in the north of England, particularly in Yorkshire, where Warwick held the strongholds of Middleham and Sheriff Hutton castles, lying north of York. Warwick also held the wardenship of the West March, with his base at Carlisle. Through his mother, the dowager duchess of Salisbury, Warwick had inherited the estates of the Montagu earldom of Salisbury, while his marriage to the heiress Anne Beauchamp, the daughter of Richard Beauchamp, the original earl of Warwick, had given the earl his title and the family’s lands in the Midlands and the south, as well as the lordship of Glamorgan in south Wales. Following his accession, Edward IV granted the earl a number of lucrative offices north of the Trent confiscated from Lancastrian supporters. Warwick’s Neville family members were equally well rewarded, with his youngest brother, John, being created earl of Northumberland and granted the estates of their rivals, the Percy family, in the county, while another brother, George, was appointed Chancellor of England.
With his wealth and power, Warwick was able to ensure that his household was one of the largest and most renowned outside of the royal court. The earl’s northern household at Middleham and Sheriff Hutton would also have allowed Richard to become familiar with the large interconnecting circle of northern noblemen and gentry who were associated with the Neville patrimony, including the Scropes, the Fitzhughs, the Greystokes and the Dacres. Another ward in Warwick’s guardianship was Francis, Lord Lovell, who would remain a life-long friend and supporter of Richard’s.
As a royal duke, Richard would have spent most of his time among Warwick’s close family within the inner chambers of his castles at Warwick, Middleham and Sheriff Hutton. The earl’s countess, Anne, was described as a ‘full devout lady in God’s service’ who was ‘free of her speech to every person familiarly according to her and their degree’.21 The couple had two daughters, Isabel, born in 1452, and Anne, born in 1456, whom the earl had yet to marry off. For while the earl had his youngest sister, Margaret, married to John, earl of Oxford, in 1462, and his niece Alice, daughter of his sister Lady Fitzhugh, wed to Lord Lovell, Warwick clearly expected a much greater match for his two daughters.
The Neville family influence and wealth can be glimpsed at a feast held in September 1465, at the archbishop’s palace at York, to celebrate the promotion of Warwick’s brother, George Neville, as archbishop of York. Over 2,000 people were in attendance including bishops, eighteen heads of religious houses, two dukes, six earls, seven barons, eighteen knights, sixty-nine esquires, as well as thirty-three judges, sergeants and lawyers, the mayor of Calais, and the mayor and aldermen of York. The feast was nothing less than a northern coronation, the celebration itself a demonstration of the apogee of Neville power and their dominance in the region. Over 500 stags, bucks and deer were prepared by sixty-two cooks, along with 1,500 hot venison pasties, 500 partridge, 400 woodcocks, 1,000 egrets, 2,000 pikes and breams, and twelve porpoises and seals. Other cold dishes included 4,000 cold venison pasties, 4,000 ‘dishes of jelly’ and 3,000 cold baked tarts and cold custards, together with ‘spices, sugared delicates and wafers plenty’.22 Like a royal coronation, roles were given to the nobility serving at the high table, with Warwick as head steward, his brother Northumberland treasurer, and William, Lord Hastings, the controller. Other members of the nobility played out their roles dutifully: Lord Willoughby acted as carver, the late duke of Buckingham’s son, John Stafford, was cupbearer. Warwick’s four sisters were also present with their husbands, the earl of Oxford, Lord Fitzhugh and Thomas, Lord Stanley; other members of the northern peerage were in attendance, represented by the earl of Westmorland and Lords Scrope, Dacre and Ogle. In all, thirteen tables were crammed into the main hall and second chamber with 412 men fed in the lower hall and 400 servants in the gallery.
For Richard, on the cusp of turning thirteen, sitting in the ‘chief chamber’ witnessing this spectacle must have made a significant imp
ression. Yet, for the moment, the young duke would be excluded from the company of the male members of the household; still considered too young to be a part of the high tables occupied by Warwick and the northern nobles, Richard sat among the women of the Neville court that night. On his right-hand side sat his sister, Elizabeth, the duchess of Suffolk, while on his left hand sat the countesses of Westmorland and Northumberland, ‘and two of the Lord of Warwick’s daughters’, Isabel and Anne Neville.23
The feast may have reflected the splendour of the Nevilles’ regional power and their glittering northern connections, but it hid the fact that at the royal court Warwick’s formidable authority and command over the king had begun to wane.
The cracks had first begun to appear only four years after his accession, when Edward, thought of as the most eligible bachelor in the whole of Christendom, suddenly declared that he was already married. His choice of bride stunned the world. Elizabeth Grey was the widow of a Lancastrian knight who had died fighting the Yorkists at the battle of St Albans in 1461, and by whom she already had two young sons. On Edwards announcement it must have seemed as if the world had been turned on its head. Edward had already developed a reputation as a playboy, linked to several women at court, yet his promiscuity was hardly considered an issue while the king remained a young and headstrong single man. Matrimony might wait, but still the king was expected to choose carefully the mother of the nation’s royal heirs. Edward’s marriage broke all the accepted rules. Elizabeth was not a virgin, while their marriage, having taken place in secret, with no banns and no public demonstration of the ceremony, ran the risk of accusations of illegitimacy. Politically, the marriage could not have been more disastrous. While it may have been clear that the king both loved and was physically enamoured of his new wife, in marriage neither love nor passion mattered; what did was land, money and power, of which Elizabeth had nothing to offer. The Burgundian chronicler Jean de Waurin described the king’s council’s reaction to the news of the king’s secret marriage: ‘they answered that she was not his match, however good and however fair she might be, and he must know well that she was no wife for a prince such as himself; for she was not the daughter of a duke or earl, but her mother, the Duchess of Bedford, had married a simple knight, so that though she was the child of a duchess … still she was no wife for him’.24
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