Richard III

by Chris Skidmore

  Edward was not prepared to listen to his uncle. In a speech that must have taken Richard aback, the young king, ‘possessing the likeness of his father’s noble spirit besides talent and remarkable learning’, replied that he had merely retained the ministers whom his father had recommended him, ‘and relying on his father’s prudence, he believed that good and faithful ones had been given him’. He himself had seen ‘nothing evil in them’ and instead ‘wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil … As for the government of the kingdom, he had complete confidence in the peers of the realm and the queen.’ On hearing mention of Queen Elizabeth, Buckingham’s patience snapped. ‘It was not the business of women but of men to govern kingdoms’, he is reported to have replied to the young king, adding curtly, ‘if he cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it’. Instead, the king should ‘place all his hope in his barons, who excelled in nobility and power’.51

  Edward sensed he was fighting a losing battle. ‘Perceiving their intention’, the king decided to surrender himself into Richard’s care, recognising that ‘they were demanding rather than supplicating’.

  In arresting Rivers and seizing the king, Richard had transformed the political dynamic for ever. No one could have expected what had taken place at Stony Stratford: Rivers’ arrest had clearly come as a surprise to the earl himself, who only months before had been conducting friendly dealings with Richard. Arriving to dine with Richard and Buckingham, it is clear that Rivers did not suspect a thing. The consequences of the arrest were bound to reverberate across the country, for by his actions Richard had effectively pitched himself directly against the Woodvilles, opening up the potential for a new civil war. Yet it seems that this was a gamble which Richard had calculated he was willing to take. Above all, he believed that he had the dead king’s wishes and right on his side. Loyalty to his brother seems to have extended even beyond the grave.

  If Richard had made a miscalculation, it was that Edward V himself would recognise Richard’s supremacy as his paternal uncle; perhaps he considered that the new king’s loyalty would extend to his father’s brother, just as Edward IV himself had recognised Richard’s own importance as his only surviving brother. Edward V’s defiance had demonstrated to Richard that he was wrong: the new king was himself a product of his Woodville kin; having been raised by Rivers and the queen’s men, his loyalty lay first with them. The king’s opposition to Richard’s arrest of Rivers seems to have come as an equal surprise to Richard, yet it also demonstrated Edward V’s own strength of spirit; he was hardly the vulnerable boy whom Richard had last seen at court in the early 1480s. Still, Richard must have considered, the king would come to be grateful for his efforts in securing his father’s wishes. Richard fully considered it his legitimate responsibility as Protector to ensure that he had possession of the royal person. John Rous later wrote that Richard ‘came upon him with a strong force at Stony Stratford and took the new king his nephew into his governance by right of his protectorship’.52 The question here is whether Edward intended for his brother to be both the Protector of the Realm, and governor of the king’s person, an office that in the past had been exclusively reserved for Rivers. By granting the protectorship to Richard, and the governorship of the king to Rivers, Edward may have considered that he had struck a sensible equilibrium of power that would allow both the paternal and the maternal sides of the new king’s family to have an equal share in the responsibilities of government. Yet, in doing so, Edward had highlighted the weakness in the Woodvilles’ authority: all that they had was the king’s person. Richard also understood that the Woodvilles’ power lay not in their own independent support base, for they had little if none at all, but in their possession of the king. With Edward in their hands, they were all-powerful; without him, they were nothing.

  When news of Richard’s seizure of the king reached the capital, panic ensued. ‘The following night, when rumour of this had reached London’, the Crowland chronicler wrote, ‘Queen Elizabeth transferred herself with all her children into the sanctuary at Westminster.’ ‘In the morning’, the chronicler recalled, ‘you might have seen the partisans of one side and of the other, some sincerely, others dissimulating because of the confusing events, taking this side or that. Some collected their associates and stood by at Westminster in the name of the queen, others at London under the protection of Lord Hastings.’53 The Chancellor, Archbishop Rotherham of York, was one of those willing to instantly take the queen’s side, offering her the Great Seal, the possession of which would have given the Woodvilles the power to credibly raise men under its authority. Rotherham later seems to have had second thoughts about his rash actions, and managed to retain possession of the seal, perhaps when he realised that popular support for the Woodville cause in the capital was not strong enough to mount a challenge to Richard now that he had possession of the king. Mancini observed how when the news of Richard’s and Buckingham’s actions at Stony Stratford was announced, ‘the unexpectedness of the event horrified everyone’, yet when the Woodvilles attempted to raise an army and ‘exhorted certain nobles who had come to the city, and others, to take up arms, they perceived that men’s minds were not only irresolute, but altogether hostile to themselves. Some even said openly that it was more just and profitable that the youthful sovereign should be with his paternal uncle than with his maternal uncles and uterine brothers.’54 Nevertheless, a ‘sinister rumour’ ran through the capital that Richard ‘had brought his nephew not under his care, but into his power, so as to gain for himself the crown’. Richard wrote to both the council and the mayor, assuring them of his loyalty to the king. ‘The contents of both letters were something after this fashion’, Mancini reported:

  He had not confined his nephew the king of England, rather he had rescued him and the realm from perdition, since the young man would have fallen into the hands of those who, since they had not spared either the honour or life of the father, could not be expected to have more regard for the youthfulness of the son. The deed had been necessary for his own safety and to provide for that of the king and kingdom. No one save only him had such solicitude for the welfare of King Edward and the preservation of the state. At an early date he and the boy would come to the city so that the coronation and all that pertained to the solemnity might be more splendidly performed.55

  Richard’s letter was read aloud both in the council chamber and in public. It had the desired effect: ‘all praised the duke of Gloucester for his dutifulness towards his nephews and for his intention to punish their enemies’.56 A surviving letter to Archbishop Bourchier of Canterbury, issued under Edward V’s signet from Northampton though obviously penned under Richard’s instruction, requesting the ‘safeguard and sure keeping of the Great Seal of this our realm unto our coming to our city of London’, indicates just how determined Richard was to reassure the council of his intentions. The tone of the letter was designed to appeal to the council’s desire for unity, placating their fears of a takeover.

  A surviving scrap of paper, upon which the new king, Richard and Buckingham had signed their names, with their accompanying mottoes, probably dates from these early few days, when Richard was attempting to win over the trust and friendship of his nephew. At the top of the parchment, Edward V has ascribed his name, followed by ‘Richard Gloucester’ and the motto, ‘Lotaulte me lie’, which translates as ‘loyalty binds me’. Beneath Richard’s signature, is the lavish signature ‘Harry Buckingham’ with his motto, ‘Souvente me souvenir’.57

  Other measures were taken to reassure the young king that his uncle had his best interests at heart, and was willing to indulge his wishes that some of those closest around him should be rewarded with royal favour. At St Albans, on 3 May, Edward sent letters appointing his chaplain, John Geffrey, to Pembridge parish church.58

  Behind the scenes, however, even before entering the capital, Richard had begun to tighten his grip upon power. While Rivers and Richard Grey remained imprisoned, he was determined to act
fast to weaken the Woodville threat that he must have realised might eventually pose a significant risk to his own position and security for the future. Immediately the illegal confiscation of Woodville lands began. On 2 May, a letter was sent out under the king’s name to the farmers, tenants and inhabitants of lands in Woodham Martin, Essex, ‘as Anthony Earl Rivers late had … and to all other our officers, true liegemen and subjects hearing or seeing these our letters’, that ‘for divers causes and considerations us moving and by the advice of our most entirely beloved Uncle the duke of Gloucester’ the lands had now been granted to Robert Bell, ‘wherefore we will and charge you all and every of you that ye permit and suffer our said servant to occupy and enjoy the same lands and tenements without let or interruption as ye and every of you intend to avoid our grievious displeasure and answer unto us at your perils’.59 The confiscations were being ordered by Richard himself, without the consent of the royal council as he now took matters into his own hands. Richard later observed that he had on 1 May ‘given in commandment by a bill signed by our hand’ to Thomas Stafford to occupy the property of Ludgarsale, ‘and to do and exercise all manner things the same concerning by force of which commandment so given by our said bill’.60

  On 4 May, Richard, Buckingham and Edward V entered London accompanied by 500 soldiers, where they were received with ‘regal pomp’. Edward rode wearing blue velvet, while Richard, riding beside him, one observer noted, was dressed ‘in black cloth, like a mourner’.61 Thirty delegates from the mayor and aldermen of London and the city companies, clothed in murrey liveries, were each paid 13s 4d for the costs of their horses and harnesses to ride to Hornsey Park to meet them; the Drapers’ Company also sent thirty men, the Pewterers only five. Surviving company records reveal that the Goldsmiths spent 4½d on bread and drink at their hall as ‘the riders were gathered to ride forth’, with another 5d spent at Bishopsgate for ‘a potell claret wine at their coming home’.62

  Richard’s determination to destroy the Woodvilles remained at the forefront of his mind even as he entered the capital in procession with the young king. ‘As these two dukes were seeking at every turn to arouse hatred against the queen’s kin, and to estrange public opinion from her relatives’, Mancini recalled, ‘they took especial pains to do so on the day they entered the city. For ahead of the procession they sent four wagons loaded with weapons bearing the devices of the queen’s brothers and sons, beside criers to make generally known throughout the crowded places by whatsoever way they passed, that these arms had been collected by the duke’s enemies and stored at convenient spots outside the capital, so as to attack and slay the duke of Gloucester coming from the country.’63 Many men, Mancini observed, knew the charges to be false, ‘because the arms in question had been placed there long before the late king’s death for an altogether different purpose, when war was being waged against the Scots’. As a result, such mistrust only ‘exceedingly augmented’ the rumours that Richard himself coveted the throne.64 Thomas More later wrote how Richard’s men, as they made their way through the city, ‘showed unto the people all the way as they went: “Lo, here be the barrels of harness that these traitors had privily conveyed in their carriage to destroy the noble lords withal.”‘ Wise men, More wrote, were quick to reason that ‘the intenders of such a purpose would rather have had their harness on their backs than to have bound them up in barrels’, yet many of the ‘common people’ were apparently convinced, and clamoured for them to be hanged.65

  After all the lords and city council, together with Richard and Buckingham, swore allegiance to the new king, Edward V was placed in the bishop of London’s palace in the city, a public venue where the king would be both visible and accessible. John Rous wrote how Edward had his ‘special tutor and diligent mentor in godly ways’, John Alcock, removed from his household, ‘like the rest’, though he escaped imprisonment.66 The young king was himself placed under guard, Mancini wrote, guarded in turn by Richard’s and Buckingham’s men, ‘for they were afraid lest he should escape or be forcibly delivered from their hands’.67 Buckingham was a constant presence. The duke was ‘always at hand ready to assist Gloucester with his advice and resources’, Mancini observed.

  The same day Richard led his young nephew through the streets of the capital, elsewhere, on 4 May, George Neville died, aged just seventeen. His death may not have come as a surprise to Richard, who held the boy’s wardship and probably had arranged for Neville to reside at one of his ducal households at Middleham or Sheriff Hutton. The consequences of the boy’s death remained the same: Richard’s tenure of the Neville estates in the north, essentially the entire power base that he had spent the past twelve years carefully cultivating, and from which the duke’s new palatinate in south-west Scotland and Cumberland would be largely funded, was effectively no longer his. According to the terms set down in the division of the Warwick inheritance agreed by Parliament in 1475, George’s death had reduced Richard’s tenure from a hereditary one to a mere life estate: while Richard would for now be able to hold the lands as if a tenant, his son Edward would be unable to inherit them. Even Richard’s tenure of the lands would not remain the same, for once the next male heir in line to the Neville inheritance, Richard, Lord Latimer, reached his majority in 1489, he would be entitled to reversions on the estates. Richard’s own authority in these lands would be at risk of sharp decline, as his retainers would seek to have their own patents confirmed by Latimer.

  The options available to Richard to address this sudden termination of his inheritance of the Neville estates were equally bleak. Even though the duke had managed to prevent a Woodville-dominated government from seizing the new king, and he himself was likely now to benefit as the king’s maternal uncle and principal guardian, Richard could hardly expect that there would be any major alienations of royal property to the disinheritance of the crown during the young king’s minority. Once the king was crowned, he would be able to form his own council, which was likely to witness the return of the Woodvilles, who would now have perfectly reasonable grounds to regard Richard as their enemy, and to oppose any increase in the duke’s patronage. The marquess of Dorset even held the wardship and marriage of Clarence’s son and heir, Edward, earl of Warwick, and would understandably most likely oppose outright any repartition of the Warwick inheritance. There was nothing, it seemed, that Richard could do to prevent his own life’s work seemingly slip away from him.

  It cannot be known whether Richard, riding into the capital with his nephew the king, understood the precariousness of his own situation. Yet, in less than a month, the duke had been forced to turn against his brother’s own family in sheer desperation. Whether he genuinely believed that his brother had in his dying days chosen to make him Protector or not, Richard had no other option than to seize the only opportunity that could just guarantee his political survival.

  6

  ‘PROTECTOR AND DEFENDER OF THIS OUR REALM’

  The arrival of the new king seems to have stabilised the fraught situation in the capital. By 8 May, John, Lord Howard, paid for men he had requested from his estates to be sent home.1 The business of government under the new monarch continued as if uninterrupted. ‘In his name the laws of the kingdom were enforced at Westminster and throughout the realm in the accustomed way. Coins were struck in his name, and all royal honours were paid to him as usual’, wrote John Rous.2 The mood seemed good; ‘without fail, everyone hoped for and awaited peace and prosperity in the kingdom’. William, Lord Hastings, the Crowland chronicler observed, was ‘bursting with joy over this new world’. Nothing had happened, Hastings asserted, ‘except to transfer the government of the kingdom from two blood relatives of the queen to two nobles of the blood royal’. Moreover, this had been accomplished, ‘without any killing and with only so much bloodshed in the affair as might have come from a cut finger’.3

  Richard’s recent letters to the council, combined with his track record of consistent loyalty to the royal dynasty that had seen the duke swear oath
s of fealty to his nephew in 1471, 1477, and most recently in York and Stony Stratford, provided the reassurance that the duke’s fidelity to his nephew the king and the new regime could hardly be doubted. Richard’s insistence that all the lords and aldermen of the city of London should again take an oath of fealty to the king helped to win over any remaining resistance to his seizure of the young king; ‘because this promised best for future prosperity’, the Crowland chronicler wrote, ‘it was performed with pride and joy by all’. In contrast, the behaviour of the queen and the Woodvilles had come close to the incitement of civil war. Dominic Mancini observed how they ‘began collecting an army, to defend themselves and to set the young King from the clutches of the dukes’, while the Crowland chronicler had noted with some concern how immediately after news of Richard’s arrest of Rivers reached the capital, troops had begun to gather across the city.4 Already the Woodvilles had made clear their attempts to raise armed resistance to protect their own interests; Richard, meanwhile, had provided reassurance, claiming to be acting in the best interests of the nation.

  At a council meeting on 10 May it was decided that Richard would be appointed Protector of the Realm. In his receiving the office, contemporaries viewed Richard’s appointment as being identical to the historical parallel of 1422, when, in the minority of the baby Henry VI, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, had been made Protector. The Crowland chronicler described how Richard now received ‘that solemn office which had once fallen to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester’, indicating that Richard could only exercise ‘this authority with the consent and good will of all the lords, commanding and forbidding in everything like another king, as occasion demanded’.5 Richard may have been appointed Protector, but his role was to be cast almost in the original format as the Woodvilles had intended, as the first among equals on the council, though constrained in his own power by the council’s ultimate authority to take decisions.6 Richard quickly realised how constrained his powers as Protector would be.