Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  An alternative version of Vlad’s demise has more credence. According to a remark made on a 2005 British television documentary about Vlad’s life by his twenty-first-century biographer, the Romanian historian Matei Cazacu, the Turks did not decapitate their enemies. The alternate theory regarding the manner of Vlad’s death therefore supposes that he was not beheaded but scalped, most likely via the eastern European and Asian technique of slitting the face and removing the skin, rather than slicing off the top of the head.

  Facts support this method of execution, because what was believed to be Vlad’s corpse (given the lore regarding the location of his burial) was discovered at Snagov by the grandfather of another of the Impaler’s recent biographers, Radu Florescu. However, when the tomb was pried open, and the remains were exposed to fresh air and sunlight, within minutes they began to crumble to dust. The corpse’s face had been covered with a cloth, suggesting that it may indeed have been hiding the grisly results of a scalping. The fact that there was a face at all (or, for that matter, a head) should eliminate the beheading theory. Also found inside the coffin was a woman’s ring that once contained a stone. The jewel may have been stolen during the nineteenth century, when the tombs were vandalized and looted. Florescu surmises that the ring might have been a lady’s favor, bestowed to Dracula before a joust. The remnants of a crown were also discovered beside the skull within the tomb purporting to be that of Vlad Dracula. While there is no conclusive evidence that Florescu did indeed locate Vlad’s remains, enough of the elements tally to make the discovery a plausible one.

  What happened to Vlad’s wife Ilona Szilágy after his death remains lost to history. Since she was a Hungarian countess, presumably she remained at her home in Pest. According to Florescu, some historians believe that she is also buried in the tomb at Snagov. Vlad’s son from his first marriage, Mihnea cel Rău, eventually became the (highly unpopular) voivode of Wallachia from 1508 to 1509; he was assassinated outside the cathedral of Sibiu in Transylvania on March 12, 1510. Vlad Dracula IV, Vlad’s first son by Ilona, was still a boy when he joined the retinue of King Matthias Corvinus. His younger brother had been sent to live with the bishop of Oradea but was returned to his parents when he became terminally ill, and died soon afterward.

  Vlad the Impaler was long dead by the mid-sixteenth century, when the Turks conquered Hungary. And until the late nineteenth century Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldavia were under either Turkish or Russian rule, merging in 1881 to form the independent country of Romania.

  Although Vlad was prince of Wallachia for only seven years, spread over the course of three reigns—1448, 1456 to 1462, and 1476—he may have been responsible for causing the deaths of as many as a hundred thousand people, the equivalent of one-fifth of the population of Wallachia at the time. Even if modern biographers estimate his actual body count at closer to forty thousand, that figure would account for one in twelve Wallachians, though Vlad’s victims also included Turks, Transylvanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Germans.

  And yet, in one corner of the world—the very region where Vlad Dracula perpetrated his bloody atrocities—being a royal pain remains in the eye of the beholder. To many Romanians, as well as to the Russians, despite his vicious cruelty, Vlad was no worse than many medieval rulers, and in many respects, he was somewhat better.

  Vlad was the type of ruler who kept his subjects in line through fear and intimidation rather than through love. Yet the man who so terrorized Wallachia’s aristocracy was a champion of the craftsmen and the laboring classes. A Romanian Robin Hood, he reduced taxes and redistributed the boyars’ property to his poorer subjects, a move that yielded a double benefit: It won Vlad support from the lower social strata while systematically weakening the economic power of the nobility.

  Albeit violently, Vlad swept Wallachia of political corruption. And he was the only leader in the region brave enough to successfully take on the enemy Turks as well as the encroaching Hungarians. To this day he remains a local hero, rather than a villain, even gracing a Romanian postage stamp issued in 1996.

  Ten years later, on a 2006 Romanian TV series broadcast, Vlad Dracula was voted one of the “100 Greatest Romanians.” He didn’t transform himself into a bat, didn’t spend his days sleeping in a coffin, and probably never did drink the blood of his victims (or at least not much of it). Nevertheless, the real Vlad Dracula remains as immortal as his legend.

  GEORGE, DUKE OF CLARENCE

  1449-1478

  and

  RICHARD, DUKE OF

  GLOUCESTER

  Later Richard III

  1452-1485

  KING OF ENGLAND: 1483-1485

  IN THE ANNALS OF ROYAL HISTORY, RICHARD III IS PRESENTED as one of the most rotten of all royals. When many people hear his name, they immediately conjure the image of the misshapen tyrant created with William Shakespeare’s pen—a jealous kid brother and conniving, wicked uncle who had members of his own family assassinated in order to overleap them to the English throne. But Shakespeare’s “history play” is a masterpiece of spin-doctoring for maximum theatrical effect, and he was writing during the reign of the Tudors (the first of whom, Henry VII, had practically snatched the crown from Richard’s corpse in the heat of battle).

  However, this time a good story didn’t get in the way of all the facts. Ricardian Society apologists (and stage depictions) aside, it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that Richard III was not a nice guy. Even if he may not have ordered the deaths of his little nephews, often referred to as the princes in the Tower (of London), Richard did commit several judicial murders, including those of some of his in-laws. And yet his early years provide little foreshadowing of the bastard he became.

  On the other hand, Richard’s next-oldest brother, George, Duke of Clarence, as immortalized by the Bard of Stratfordupon-Avon, is presented as a dope and a hapless dupe. In truth, Clarence, as he is known, was a serial traitor, conspiring a whopping four times against their eldest sibling, Edward IV, to topple him from the throne and place the crown on his own head.

  Few kings have fomented as much controversy during—and long after—their lifetimes as Richard III. In the years that immediately followed his demise on Bosworth Field in 1485, chroniclers like the Tudor historian and statesman Sir Thomas More were quick to assign him myriad abnormalities, so that the body of the vanquished usurper represented the outward manifestation of a sick and twisted soul. “Little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favoured of visage . . .; he was malicious, wrathful, envious, and from afore his birth, ever froward [meaning ‘contrary’ or ‘disobedient’]. It is for truth reported, that the Duchess his mother had so much ado in her travail that she could not be delivered of him uncut: and that he came into the world with the feet forward . . . and (as the fame runneth) also not untoothed. . . . He was close and secret, a deep dissimuler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill; dispiteous and cruel, not for evil will alway[s], but after for ambition, and either for the surety or increase of his estate.”

  This description of Richard can be found in The History of King Richard III, penned by Thomas More around 1513, some twenty-eight years after Richard’s demise. It’s a spot-on lesson in how to play Shakespeare’s villain.

  But precious little of it is true.

  For starters, there is no evidence that Richard III suffered from any physical defect. The most famous portrait of Richard, which depicts him with his right shoulder somewhat higher than his left, was recently revealed through X-ray technology to have been altered; beneath the pigmented deformity is a pair of perfectly aligned shoulders. That said, by all contemporary accounts Richard lacked the physical stature of his handsome, six-foot-four-inch oldest brother Edward IV, and of his other surviving brother, the charismatic George, Duke of Clarence (a royal pain in his own right).

  But just because Richard did not
in fact resemble the “bunch-backed toad” of Shakespeare’s imagination, the revelation of his actual appearance in no way discredits his catalog of misdeeds that began almost as soon as his brother Edward IV breathed his last.

  Without a bit of background on Richard’s predecessors, Henry VI and Edward IV, it’s harder to develop an understanding of how Richard III came to be who he was, and why he and his older brother George, Duke of Clarence, turned sibling rivalry into a battle royal.

  So, who was the real Richard? And how did he become a royal pain?

  He was born at Fotheringhay Castle, the eleventh of twelve children (and the fourth son) born to Richard, Duke of York, and Cicely Neville. Only six of their offspring would survive past childhood. Small and slight with a bit of a dour personality, dark hair, and attractive features, including a strong jawline, Richard was said to have resembled his father. He had entered the world during a violent era, his entire life shaped by an ongoing dispute between the houses of York and Lancaster. Because of the Lancastrian and Yorkist emblems of the red and white rose respectively, this family feud would in the sixteenth century come to be known as the Wars of the Roses, a nickname that has stuck ever since.

  When the future Richard III was born, the orb and scepter of England were nominally in the hands of Henry VI, the monkish and mentally deficient son of Henry V. The power behind the throne was wielded by a cadre of courtiers and by Henry VI’s French-born wife, Margaret of Anjou, a tough termagant who led the king’s forces into battle herself. The Lancastrian Henry VI had yet to father a child; consequently, the kingdom’s future was on shaky ground. Descendants of two of Edward III’s sons, Richard, Duke of York, and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset (a Lancastrian), both expected to be named as Henry’s heir, each man assuming he had the greater claim than his cousin.

  The popular choice, Richard, Duke of York, was the second-largest landowner in the kingdom, after the crown. And the elder Richard was after the crown in other ways as well. He made a grab for it in 1452, the year Richard III was born, but was captured and taken to the Tower. Only the rumor that the duke’s ten-year-old son, Edward, was marching on London at the head of an army ten thousand strong secured his release.

  Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou finally had a son in October 1453, but it didn’t put an end to the family feud. In 1459 the Duke of York’s army was trounced and his family was forced to flee the Welsh city of Ludlow. For their safety, young Richard and his brother George were placed in rather classy foster care (which was more like house arrest), first with their mother’s sister, the Duchess of Buckingham, and then with the archbishop of Canterbury.

  Richard was only eight years old when his father and second-oldest brother, Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on December 30, 1460, after the duke had made another attempt to usurp the crown. The elder Richard’s severed head was displayed as a trophy by his enemies, sporting a mocking coronet made of paper and straw.

  But the duke’s oldest son, Edward, Earl of March, managed to finish the job his father had begun, deposing Henry VI. The pious, half-mad monarch and his tigress of a wife fled, first to Yorkshire and then to Scotland. In 1461 a triumphant Edward proclaimed himself king of England. Is it any wonder, then, that Edward’s youngest brother, Richard, ended up the way he did? Usurpation was the family business.

  Although Edward had forcibly seized the crown, he was welcomed by his new subjects with open arms because he was expected to usher in an era of good government. Edward IV was crowned in June, and at his coronation he made his brother George the Duke of Clarence. Richard was still only nine years old, but Edward made him Duke of Gloucester four months later. And even at such a young age, there was no love lost between Richard and George, who felt his baby brother was far too young to have been entitled to equal preferment. Grumbling and discontented with his lot, no matter how much King Edward awarded him, George would eventually try—four times—to snatch his brother’s crown.

  Until the latter months of 1468, Richard and George lived high on the hog in the north of England, where they had been sent to live with the family of Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick. Known as “the kingmaker” because his strategic and martial acumen enabled first Edward IV and then Henry VI to grab (or reclaim) the throne, Warwick was the Karl Rove of the Wars of the Roses.

  Edward spent the first decade or so of his reign trying to retain the crown and thwart the challenges from Henry VI’s Lancastrian supporters to reinstate the deposed monarch. Edward IV also had to defeat the turncoat Warwick. The earl had defected to Henry’s side soon after Edward secretly married a widowed commoner, the scrumptious blonde Elizabeth Woodville, in 1464. Warwick had been in the midst of negotiating an important dynastic marriage for Edward with Bona, Duchess of Savoy, the sister-in-law of the French king, and didn’t take too kindly to ending up with political egg on his face. Nor (after he’d busted his haunches to put Edward on the throne) did Warwick appreciate having to contend with the vast family of Woodvilles (plus Elizabeth’s two sons from a prior marriage), each of whom now had to be given plum titles, offices, and royal preferment. The earl also resented Edward’s desire to break free from his influence and become his own man.

  The year of 1465 was a banner one for Richard. He was only twelve and a half years old when Edward appointed him Constable of England for life, in addition to awarding him numerous land grants. That July, the man formerly known as Henry VI was captured in Lancashire and brought back to London, where he was imprisoned in the Tower. For the next three years Warwick seethed as Woodvilles garnered the kingdom’s highest honors. In 1468 he turned on the man he’d helped to achieve the throne; he staged a rebellion in concert with the hotheaded George, Duke of Clarence, who didn’t get along with his older brother any better than he did with his younger one and was out only for himself.

  Clarence, as he is most commonly known, was by this time the middle of the three surviving York brothers. Born in Dublin in 1449, he was three years older than Richard and seven years younger than Edward. Although he was good-looking and devilishly charming, his personality was a fatal combination of ambition, greed, envy, and dimwittedness; and he had a terrible case of wanting anything either of his brothers had, including estates, titles, offices, and the crown.

  By the spring of 1468 the kingmaking Earl of Warwick had become so peeved by Edward that he decided to switch horses and make a different king. Clarence, more of a handsome jock than a canny politician, cheerfully allied himself with the earl against his own brother in the vain delusion that Warwick intended to set him on the throne. The following year, after Clarence and Warwick had sneaked across the Channel to continue plotting against Edward, in direct contravention of the king’s wishes the hotheaded Clarence secretly wed Warwick’s older daughter, Isabel.

  Meanwhile, as Constable of England, the now sixteen-year-old Richard was dispatched to quash a Welsh uprising while Edward decided how to handle Warwick and Clarence. From then on, until Edward IV’s death in 1483, Richard was an active principal participant in the governing of the kingdom, as an administrator, adjudicator, and military commander.

  Clarence and his new father-in-law returned to England and took up arms against their sovereign. In what some historians view as a huge public relations gamble, in 1469 Edward allowed himself to be kidnapped by the conspirators. None of the followers of the rebellion wanted anything to do with executing their king, so Warwick and Clarence had no choice but to release Edward and beg to be reconciled to the royal bosom, despite the fact that they had captured and summarily executed the queen’s father, Earl Rivers, and her brother John Woodville.

  Although the mercy they requested was granted, it was immediately exploited: Warwick and Clarence fomented another rebellion the following year. And in the spring of 1470, it was Edward IV who was on the run, taking sanctuary in Burgundy with his sister Margaret of York, wife to the reigning Charles of Burgundy. Charles eventually agreed to help Edward raise an army and return
to England, ostensibly to reclaim his dukedom of York.

  That July, Warwick entered an alliance with Henry VI’s exiled queen, Margaret of Anjou, agreeing to betroth his younger daughter, Anne Neville, to Edward of Lancaster, the once and future prince of Wales. On September 30, an abject Warwick knelt before Henry and begged his forgiveness. The Lancastrian monarch was formally restored to his throne on October 3. And on or around December 13, the fifteen-year-old Anne Neville and Edward of Lancaster, an arrogant and vengeful whelp of seventeen, were wed.

  Henry VI’s brief second reign, which lasted until he was again ousted by Edward IV on May 21, 1471, is known as the “Readeption.” After the victorious Edward IV entered London on that date (it was his second effort in as many years to reclaim the throne), Henry was taken to the Tower, where, in the presence of the highest-ranking nobles in the land, including Richard, he was put to death. It was Richard who had brought the writ of execution to Lord Dudley, the Constable of the Tower. Although Henry VI was personally harmless and politically ineffectual, Edward IV saw no alternative but to have him snuffed out so that no more rebellions could be raised in his name. The fifteenth century was full of sleepless nights.

  The other threats to Edward’s IV’s crown were dead as well. The fair-weather Warwick had fallen on Easter Sunday, 1471, in the Battle of Barnet, where Edward’s forces were commanded by the teenage Richard. Three weeks later, at the decisive Battle of Tewkesbury on May 4, Henry VI’s arrogant teenage son, Edward of Lancaster (husband of Anne Neville), met the business end of several broadswords (one of which was likely in Richard’s hands) when he was stabbed during a melee. With his demise went the Lancastrian hopes of regaining the crown.