Richard III
Page 21
Richard, too, admired Hastings; however, the latter’s continued presence in the council posed too great a danger to the duke’s own survival. Hastings had been a crucial ally in informing Richard about the Woodvilles’ plans to secure the protectorship for themselves; without him, it is unlikely that Richard would have secured the king’s person in time at Stony Stratford. Yet Richard had increasingly come to realise that Hastings’s loyalties lay not with him, but with King Edward himself. Now Hastings, as much as the Woodvilles, sought to ensure that Edward V would be crowned as an adult king, dispensing with the need for Richard as Protector. Once he had realised that Richard’s ambitions stretched beyond the confines of his own duty towards the Yorkist dynasty, it seems that Hastings had demonstrated his concern over the Protector’s plans. Richard owed his success to Hastings, yet now he could no longer be sure of his future support. If Hastings could not be part of the solution, then he, too, Richard concluded, would need to go. ‘Whether he feared his power or despaired indeed of being able to draw him to his opinion’, Vergil concluded, ‘he determined first to remove the man from the midst of the rest.’8 ‘Therefore the protector rushed headlong into crime’, Mancini mused, ‘for fear that the ability and authority of these men might be detrimental to him.’9
Richard must have known that, in removing Hastings, he would be crossing a divide, making a breach in the social and political order that could not be repaired. Yet he had no time to consider the consequences of his actions; he just had to act, and act fast. Already his letters to York and Lord Neville were travelling on horseback northwards; within days they would be read out, committing the duke to public warfare against the Woodvilles. Any delay in securing his position now might be fatal; faced with the possibility of Hastings turning back towards the Woodvilles in any oncoming civil war, Richard’s own choices were narrowing by the day. No matter how illegal his future actions might be, the duke considered that he had no other option but to use his most convincing weapon, that of sudden surprise, paralysing his enemies before they might have the chance to take action against him.
First the trap would need to be laid. The Crowland chronicler reported how, on 12 June, Richard had ordered that the next day’s council meeting would take place in two separate locations, dividing the council ‘so that one part met in the morning at Westminster, and the other at the Tower of London, where the king was’.10 The first meeting was to be chaired by the Chancellor, John Russell, while Richard would officiate over the second, which was to convene at around ten o’clock in the morning. Those invited included Archbishop Rotherham of York, Bishop Morton of Ely, Buckingham, Thomas, Lord Stanley, William, Lord Hastings, John, Lord Howard, ‘and many others, whom he trusted to be faithful to him either by fear or favour’.
Polydore Vergil’s manuscript version of his Anglica Historica provides the most detailed account of events, including the names of those who took part in Richard’s coup, names which were later removed from the official printed version of the Italian’s history. The day before the council meeting due to take place at the Tower, Richard ordered that Charles Pilkington, Robert Harrington and Thomas Howard, John, Lord Howard’s son, and several other attendants should be placed secretly in the adjoining room to the council chamber, ‘and ordered them, so that at a given signal, suddenly appearing they should surround him, who would sit with him, and should seize, from amongst the others, the lord Hastings and then should cut his throat’.11
No sooner had the council meeting begun than Richard struck. The earliest account of what occurred at the meeting comes from Dominic Mancini:
One day these three [Hastings, Thomas Rotherham and John Morton] and several others came to the Tower about ten o’clock to salute the protector, as was their custom. When they had been admitted to the innermost quarters, the protector, as prearranged, cried out that an ambush had been prepared for him, and they had come with hidden arms, that they might be the first to open the attack. Thereupon the soldiers, who had been stationed there by their lord, rushed in with the duke of Buckingham, and cut down Hastings on the false pretext of treason; they arrested the others, whose life, it was presumed, was spared out of respect for religion and holy orders. Thus fell Hastings, killed not by those enemies he had always feared, but by a friend whom he had never doubted.12
Over time, a fuller picture of what had occurred behind the closed doors of the council emerged. Polydore Vergil described how:
with only God as witness, they meant to discuss serious matters between them. Richard, who was turning over in his mind another sadder business, addressed them thus: ‘My lords, I have called you here today in this court solely in order to show you in what danger I stand. For I rest neither by night nor by day neither able to drink nor to take food, wherefore gradually my blood and strength leave me, and likewise now all limbs are made thin as you see (he extended an arm) which evil certainly came to me from that woman Queen Elizabeth who poisoned me with her magic charms, by which malice I am dissolved.’ To these words, as making little to the matter, when no-one gave answer, William Hastings, who loved Richard, and who was used to speak freely with him, answered that the queen deserved both to be accused and punished if it was found by the use of magic arts she had in any way harmed him. To this Richard said: ‘I am lost, I say, by this woman’s magic charms’, to which William answered as formerly, namely that the queen should be punished if she had poisoned him with that evil. Then Richard, as he gave a sign for attacking to those who were lying in wait, said in a high voice: ‘What then, William, if I am brought to ruin by your zealous reckonings?’ Scarcely was this done when Charles Pilkington, Robert Harrington and Thomas Howard, who were lying in wait in the next chamber, immediately appeared and attacked on all sides, taking hold of William Lord Hastings and each presiding priest, York and Ely, and Lord Stanley.13
Hastings had no time to confess his sins. Immediately, ‘without process of any law or lawful examination’, he was taken outside, ‘unto the green beside the chapel, and there, upon an end of squared piece of timber, without any long confession or other space of remembrance’ was executed, with his head cut off. ‘And thus was this noble man murdered for his truth and fidelity which he firmly bare unto his master’, the Great Chronicle noted.14
The author of the Great Chronicle believed that Thomas Stanley too would have been killed, ‘as the fame after went’, if it were not for the fear that Stanley’s son, Lord Strange, would raise troops in Lancashire against Richard. Set at liberty, Stanley escaped unhurt, except a cut to his face, which had been ‘rased with some weapon’.15 Bishop Morton of Ely was placed in the custody of Buckingham at his residence at Brecon Castle, while Archbishop Rotherham of York was given over to the keeping of James Tyrell.
After Hastings’s beheading, Vergil reported, ‘all in the Tower shouted “Treason! Treason!” This shout went also throughout the city, the citizens and general populace believing the first words to be true and at the same time ignorant of that done within, began to repeat the shout.’ Dominic Mancini may have even been present on the streets of London when, he wrote, ‘the townsmen, who had heard the uproar but were uncertain of the cause, became panic stricken, and each one seized his weapons’. To calm the crowds, ‘the duke instantly sent a herald to proclaim that a plot had been detected in the citadel, and Hastings, the originator of the plot, had paid the penalty; wherefore he bad them all be reassured. At first the ignorant crowd believed, although the real truth was on the lips of many, namely that the plot had been feigned by the duke so as to escape the odium of such a crime.’ The proclamation, the text of which does not survive, contained the charge that Hastings, along with his accomplices, had planned to kill Richard and Buckingham at the council meeting, taking the king into their possession. Issued just two hours after Hastings’s death, it was written on parchment in such a fine calligraphic hand that, according to Thomas More, ‘every child might well perceive that it was prepared before’.16
Richard’s actions against H
astings were almost an exact replica of those he had taken to secure the protectorship: an unexpected attack on his political rival, followed by a subsequent justification that claimed a conspiracy against the Yorkist state. Both were so unexpected because they went beyond the accepted political behaviour of the day. But was there any justification behind his sudden execution of Hastings? The traditional interpretation of events is that Richard had every reason to fabricate a charge against Hastings: if there really had been a conspiracy against Richard, his actions could be taken as self-defence; the duke could be the victim of circumstances thrust upon him, rather than the manipulator of events. Richard’s attack on Hastings, and his claims of another plot against his life, was not only sufficient to justify Hastings’s removal: now that the council had been persuaded, or cowed, into believing in a conspiracy against the Protector, they were prepared to back the duke’s leadership in what seemed a full-blown political crisis. As the Crowland chronicler noted, ‘with the rest of the faithful men expecting something similar these two dukes thereafter did what they wanted’. If Hastings had been planning a conspiracy against Richard, then it seems unlikely that he would have been taken completely by surprise at the council meeting. Still, in the absence of any official charges against Hastings, it is worth considering the evidence for a conspiracy against Richard, to understand whether other members of the council believed it to be true. Could there be more to the Hastings conspiracy than a trumped-up charge based on Richard’s fear that Hastings had met with Morton and Rotherham in secret?
The charges of a conspiracy were believed by some at least. Whether persuaded by Richard’s proclamation or not, one contemporary chronicle was confident enough to record how ‘in the meantime there was divers imagined the death of the duke of Gloucester, and it was aspied and the Lord Hastings was taken in the Tower and beheaded forthwith.’ 17 There were others who had been considered complicit in Hastings’s manoeuvrings who were also immediately arrested. The king’s secretary, Oliver King, later described how he had been arrested and ‘grievously prisoned in the Tower by Richard … and put in jeopardy of his life’.18 Meanwhile, his own property, which had included silver plate worth 500 marks, was seized by Richard’s commandment and delivered to the London alderman Thomas Hill.19
Nor was King the only other person to be implicated in charges of a conspiracy. Archbishop John Morton had been arrested and placed in the Tower, though at a later date he was removed from the capital altogether and placed as far out of harm’s way as possible, under house arrest at the duke of Buckingham’s residence at Weobley on the Welsh border. A letter from his own university of Oxford, dated from late July, to Richard, urging his release, indicates that Morton’s guilt went unchallenged. The university had hesitated to write to Richard, while ‘we had any doubts about his future attitude towards your government and about what he was going to do’. Yet they were convinced, however, that Morton had erred ‘through a human mistake, not through obstinacy, and has always sought your forgiveness for his fault’. Although Morton had already been punished, ‘lightly in view of his faults’, the university now prayed that Richard might ‘change your mind and consider the man again and accord him the gift of your mercy’. There was no doubt that Morton had committed a wrong, but falling back upon classical allusions, the university argued that ‘Sallust testifies that the Romans also considered it praise that they were more inclined to forgive than take revenge for injuries. If you wish to receive such great praise and glory, you will obtain it with ease if you are willing to embrace this man. By this excellent deed you will outdo and defeat the Romans themselves.’20
The case of John Forster is equally intriguing. In the Register of the Abbot of St Albans there is a note describing how ‘William Lord Hastings suffered capital punishment, as his offences demanded (as it was stated) within the Tower of London’; on the following day, the register records, ‘John Forster was committed to the Tower.’21 John Forster later petitioned Parliament that on Saturday, 14 June, he ‘suddenly was taken at Welde Hall’ in Hertfordshire, ‘by the servants and commandment’ of Richard, ‘and from thence with force and arms riotously was conveyed unto the Tower of London, and there kept and imprisoned as a prisoner in irons and fetters by the space of 40 weeks and more, having no meat neither drink for his sustenance from the said Saturday of his first bringing to the Tower till the Monday then next following … whereby’, Forster recalled, he ‘was like to have perished, saving by God’s preservation’.22 Once again the hand of William Catesby is detectable in Forster’s arrest; once more, self-interest seems to have played an important part in Catesby’s motivations. According to the Register at St Albans, Forster released the office of steward of St Albans to William Catesby, ‘in the hope of obtaining remission of his punishment’ just two days after his arrest. The stewardship of the abbey, which had been held jointly by Forster and Hastings, had only been signed in February, but the new grant drawn up suggests that Hastings’s share was to be ignored entirely, with Forster free to grant the office away. Catesby moved fast to secure the legal documentation for confirming the office, for the formal grant of the stewardship was made by the abbot on 1 August, while Forster was still imprisoned.23 Forster remembered the occasion rather differently: as forty weeks in which he was ‘menaced and threatened to be beheaded, attainted of high treason and also to forfeit and lose all his lands and goods’ unless he paid Richard a thousand marks in money and jewels.24
But why was Forster arrested in the first place? And what role could he possibly have played in any conspiracy imagined by William, Lord Hastings? The link between John Forster and William, Lord Hastings, as joint stewards of St Albans Abbey is an important one, for it provides a link between Hastings and Elizabeth Woodville. Forster had been receiver-general of the queen’s household since 1466. Though his position was now presumably defunct, this did not prevent him from maintaining contact with the queen when she was in sanctuary. A surviving account of Queen Elizabeth’s expenses while she was in sanctuary reveal that, amongst other payments, including forty shillings for ‘the king’s coming’, perhaps a reference to her son Edward V’s arrival in the capital, and £4 to ‘doctor Wrixham’, possibly William Wrixham, canon of Hereford, and 13s 3d for ‘the poor of chicksand’, Elizabeth intriguingly made payment of £13 6s 8d to ‘master forster’.25 Could this be the same John Forster? If so, it suggests that Forster could have been a linking point between Hastings and the queen.
There were other ties between Hastings and the Woodvilles that would have raised Richard’s suspicions. Hastings’ stepdaughter, Cecily Bonville, the daughter of his wife Katherine Neville’s first marriage, had married the queen’s son from her first marriage, Thomas, marquess of Dorset, in 1474. It seems, however, that a shared mistress between the two men may provide the crucial link.
Thomas More’s version of the events of 13 June makes an important addition to the tenor of Vergil’s account, with Richard further accusing the queen of making ‘counsel’ with Edward IV’s mistress Elizabeth Shore. King Edward, More related, would ‘say that he had three concubines, which in three divers properties diversely excelled: one the merriest, another the wiliest, the third the holiest harlot in this realm, as one whom no man could get out of church lightly, but it were to his bed’. The merriest, however, ‘was this Shore’s wife, in whom the king therefore took special pleasure. For many he had, but her he loved.’26
Few in the council believed the fact that Queen Elizabeth would ‘of all folk … make Shore’s wife of counsel, whom of all women she most hated, as that concubine whom the king her husband had most loved’. More believed that Elizabeth Shore had struck up a new friendship, not with the queen, but with Hastings, describing how when Edward IV died, Hastings ‘took her, which in the king’s days, albeit he was sore enamoured upon her, yet he forbade her’.27
Shore’s house was searched, and ransacked of all its goods worth over 3,000 marks. She was thrown into prison, while attempts were made to bring cha
rges that she ‘went about to bewitch him and that she was of counsel with the lord chamberlain to destroy him’. When these charges failed to convince, only then did Richard accuse her of sexual immorality, ‘the thing that herself could not deny, that all the world wist was true, and that nevertheless every man laughed at to hear it then so suddenly so highly taken’.
Richard ordered Thomas Kemp, the bishop of London, to subject Shore to ‘open penance, going before the cross in procession upon a Sunday, with a taper in her hand’. This she did, More later reported, with a countenance and pace so demure and womanly, that despite being stripped down to just her kirtle, she appeared ‘so fair and lovely’, blushing through the embarrassment of the spectacle, ‘that her great shame won her much praise among those that were more amorous of her body than curious of her soul’.
Several months later, however, Richard would accuse Thomas, the marquess of Dorset, of ‘holding the unshameful and mischievous woman called Shore’s wife, in adultery’. This link between Hastings, Shore and Dorset is intriguing, and worth considering: immediately after reporting news of Hastings’s execution, Mancini noted how Dorset had eluded the concerted manhunt by Richard’s men. ‘The duke learned from his spies’, Mancini wrote, ‘that the marquess had left the sanctuary, and, supposing that he was hiding in the adjacent neighbourhood, he surrounded with troops and dogs the already grown crops and the cultivated and woody places, and sought after him, after the manner of huntsmen, by a very close encirclement: but he was never found’.28