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

by Leslie Carroll

  Edward IV was as beloved as Henry had been despised for turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the corruption that had bankrupted England’s treasury. He’d spent the 1460s trying to keep the crown he had usurped, and he devoted the balance of his kingship (after the Readeption ended and Henry was killed) to stabilizing the realm in the wake of more than a decade of violence and uncertainty. At least, that was what Edward IV was up to when he wasn’t wenching, gourmandizing, and keeping the queen almost perpetually pregnant.

  Meanwhile, brother Richard continued to move onward and upward. After the Yorkist victory at Tewkesbury, he prepared to set off to secure the north for his brother. But before his departure he also secured Edward’s permission to wed the now-widowed Anne Neville. The young couple’s relationship began as a star-crossed one, with the villain of the story being none other than Richard’s grasping older brother Clarence, who did everything in his power to thwart it.

  Although it’s one of the most compelling “love” scenes in Shakespeare’s canon, Richard did not seduce Anne in the middle of the street over the corpse of her late father-in-law. But the real story of their courtship does rival the fictional one for juiciness. On his return from the north, Richard came to claim his betrothed, who was ostensibly living with her sister, Isabel, and Isabel’s husband—the Duke of Clarence. But the wily Clarence, vengeful and manipulative, insisted that Anne was no longer in his household.

  Richard then embarked on an exhaustive search for Anne, and as the story goes, he found her disguised as a kitchen maid in the London home of one of Clarence’s supporters. Clarence had placed her there to hide her from Richard, with the expectation of controlling the girl’s portion of the inheritance left by Anne and Isabel’s father, the late Earl of Warwick. Upon liberating Anne from the scullery, Richard brought her to sanctuary at St. Martin le Grand in order to shield her from any efforts by Clarence or his adherents to harm or nab her.

  According to Richard’s mid-twentieth-century biographer, the sympathetically inclined Paul Murray Kendall, Anne’s rescue from the kitchen carried no quid pro quo. Kendall views it as an act of chivalry for which Richard did not expect Anne to be beholden to him. She was still free to sunder their precontract of marriage if she’d changed her mind.

  So, if Richard and Anne’s relationship was not the product of a reptilian seduction in the middle of a London street, was it the opposite—a love match? That may be reading too much into it. In the fifteenth century, even people who’d known each other all their lives could not afford to marry for love. Marriage was a political and economic arrangement. In this case, Anne was an heiress and Richard was the favorite brother of the king.

  Richard and Anne were kin—cousins through the Neville line, but more important, they had been childhood playmates and had spent many years in each other’s company. Yet if there was no love at first, there was surely a bond of affection, as well as a new one of shared affliction—victims of Clarence’s scheme to keep Anne under his thumb and deprive his brother of his intended bride. Of course, as the other brother of the king, Richard was the only man with enough clout to save Anne from Clarence’s machinations.

  Edward did not appreciate ending up in the middle of a fraternal spat and sought an equitable solution that each of his younger brothers could live with. Clarence ultimately relented, agreeing to let Anne wed Richard on the condition that Richard inherit none of her estates. Richard consented, and the king finagled a bit by redistributing some of Warwick’s property that had reverted to the crown, so that Richard would receive the late earl’s Yorkshire demesnes.

  As cousins, Richard and Anne required a papal dispensation permitting them to wed. Until recently, scholars assumed that the pair was too impatient to wait for its arrival, that after finally obtaining Clarence’s permission to marry Anne, Richard fetched her out of St. Martin le Grand and they were married on the spot. However, according to an article by Peter D. Clarke titled “English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penetentiary in the Fifteenth Century,” published in 2005 by the Oxford University Press in the English Historical Review, the necessary papal paperwork indeed exists.

  Unfortunately, their wedding date is unknown, although it is believed to have been sometime around March 1472. Richard was nineteen, and Anne, about as young a widow as they come, was a couple of weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.

  Early in 1473, Richard and Anne had a son whom they named Edward; but he was a sickly boy (as some biographers believe Richard himself had been), and was to be the couple’s only child.

  Around the same time, the treasonous Clarence, who still retained visions of usurping the throne, allied himself with the archbishop of York, George Neville, the brother of the slain Earl of Warwick. Edward IV had the archbishop arrested toward the end of April 1473. During the Readeption in 1470, when Henry VI had briefly regained the throne, Parliament declared Clarence to be his heir if Henry’s son, Edward of Lancaster, and Anne Neville had no issue. Since Henry VI’s son was slain at Tewkesbury before he and Anne had the chance to propagate, did Clarence, somewhere in the dim recesses of his even dimmer brain, believe that he should be wearing the crown?

  Shallow and small-minded, and dissatisfied with his lot, no matter how much he had, the man seemed congenitally incapable of not committing treason. Even after his cohort, Warwick, had gone to his heavenly (or hellish) reward, Clarence, not at all the clueless victim of Shakespeare’s drama, was still plotting and scheming against his older brother. He became a widower in 1477 after Isabel Neville died (most probably of consumption), and began to look for a new wife. Having ideas above his station, he was keen to wed his niece Mary, the daughter of the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy (his favorite sister, Margaret). Marriage to Mary would also have placed Clarence in a better position to secure the English throne for himself. Unsurprisingly, Edward refused to grant permission for such a union.

  Clarence by now avoided the court, blamed younger brother Richard for all his ills, and began extorting money from fellow nobles to fund his own war chest, neither too shy nor too proud to bully them into submission.

  He lashed out at everyone and everything, leveling a charge against Ankarette Twynho, a former maidservant to his late wife, Isabel, accusing the woman of poisoning her, and using his royal status to intimidate a panel of jurors. Ankarette was found guilty and hanged, along with a man named John Thuresby of Warwick, who had been accused of poisoning Clarence and Isabel’s newborn son. Clarence had convinced himself that the pair had been planted in his household by Edward IV and the Woodvilles for the express purpose of destroying his family. However, historians feel fairly certain that both Ankarette and John were innocent.

  It appears to have been a season for witch trials. After two Oxford clerks were accused of sorcery, they pointed the finger at Thomas Burdett, a prominent member of Clarence’s household. Burdett was arrested for disseminating treasonous documents and for using necromancy to plot Edward’s death. Maintaining his innocence, he was nonetheless tried and hanged on May 19, 1477. But Clarence himself failed to heed the warning. Remarkably, his treason escalated.

  Intent on bringing down his older brother, he crashed a privy council meeting with a priest in tow who in 1470 had affirmed Henry VI’s claim to the throne. Clarence insisted that the priest read aloud Thomas Burdett’s avowal of innocence.

  After amassing a group of supporters, Clarence then dispatched them to proclaim throughout the kingdom that Edward IV was a practitioner of the dark arts who had bewitched his subjects into following him—and in a superstitious age, this was not such a far-fetched accusation. The duke maintained that he was Edward’s next victim and that his older brother intended to destroy him “as a candle consumeth in burning, whereof he would in brief time quyte [requite] him.”

  Frustrated that his accusations weren’t catching fire, and his rage to rule so great that he had no scruples about tarnishing the pious and respectable image of their own mother, Clarence began spreading the rumor that Edward was il
legitimate (a charge that Richard would conveniently employ once he became Protector of the realm). Clarence also leveled another charge—which Richard would eventually adopt as well. He insisted that Edward IV’s union with Elizabeth Woodville was invalid (and as a consequence, their children were illegitimate, and therefore ineligible to inherit the crown). Clarence insisted that at the time of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth, he had already been precontracted to wed another woman, Eleanor Butler (née Talbot). Never mind that Lady Eleanor had died nine years earlier, in 1468; by this time Clarence was desperate.

  And when his arsenal of accusations failed to topple Edward from his throne, Clarence committed the ultimate act of treason: He ordered his followers to take up arms against their sovereign, “to be ready in harness within an hour warning . . . to levy war against the king.”

  If Clarence hadn’t been the king’s kid brother, he surely would have been executed after his first attempt to stage a rebellion against the crown. Edward had been magnanimous in giving the duke every possible chance to mend his ways. But Clarence had twice joined forces with his late father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick, to dethrone Edward, in addition to conspiring against the king with Warwick’s brother, the archbishop of Canterbury; now, for the fourth time, he was openly preparing to depose him.

  Consequently, Edward had no alternative but to have his brother arrested and charged with high treason. Clarence was tried by Parliament in the fall of 1477 and found guilty. He spent the Christmas holidays in the Tower; and on January 16, 1478, Parliament met to consider the matter of attainting him, which meant that Clarence would be stripped of his title and property. However, his son, the developmentally disabled Edward Plantagenet, was permitted to remain the 17th Earl of Warwick, the title that was held by his executed maternal grandfather.

  On February 7, in his office as high steward speaking on behalf of Parliament, the charismatic Duke of Buckingham—the second-highest peer in the realm, after Richard—pronounced the death sentence against Clarence. Although the Parliamentarians encouraged Edward to proceed with the former duke’s execution, the king hesitated to shed his own brother’s blood.

  On February 18, 1478, the speaker of the Commons approached the bar of the Lords (they were not termed “house of . . .” until the sixteenth century) and demanded that it was time to act: Now or never, they insisted.

  And so that day, as he languished in the Tower, the twenty-eight-year-old Clarence was liquidated. Literally. Although it’s one of William Shakespeare’s most memorable death scenes, most scholars believe that Clarence really was drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine (his favorite beverage), perhaps as a perverse last request. His daughter Margaret (later Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury) always wore a wine cock (the faucet or spigot from a wine cask) about her wrist, and this unusual bracelet was accepted by her contemporaries as a tribute to her father, giving credence to the supposition.

  Most historians believe that it was a difficult decision for Edward to execute his brother, despite the fact that Clarence had committed numerous acts of treason, including leading a rebel army against the crown and frequently attempting to depose him by violent means. Yet the queen undoubtedly urged her husband to abandon any ideas of clemency. After all, Clarence had been instrumental in the pitiless executions of her father and brother. In the words of a contemporary chronicler, Elizabeth Woodville believed “that her offspring by the king would never come to the throne unless the Duke of Clarence were removed.” Little could she know that it was the king’s other younger brother she should have feared as well.

  Richard was among the realm’s highest-ranking nobles to witness his brother’s execution. His reaction is lost to posterity; although the pro-Ricardian biographers such as Paul Murray Kendall view Richard’s obtaining of a license to set up two religious foundations, or chantries, soon thereafter as an example of his deep-seated grief. But the Ricardians tend to find what they want to see. Richard never specifically named Clarence as one of the York family members for whom prayers should regularly be offered at the chantries. Additionally, the cost of such a bequest was so considerable that it was more likely that Richard had been saving up the money for quite some time in order to afford to make such a gift. And while he might not have cackled with glee (nor copiously wept) at Clarence’s untimely demise, Richard was the one who most benefited from his death. Edward restored the office of Great Chamberlain of England to him (having previously rescinded it and given it to Clarence, who had griped about his perceived lack of preferment). Richard received some of Clarence’s estates as well.

  Soon after Clarence’s death, Richard returned to the north, absenting himself from court for several months. According to Dominic Mancini, an Italian chronicler who visited England during 1482-1483, and who therefore had no home-turf ax to grind whether for or against Richard, “[T]henceforth Richard came very rarely to court. He kept himself within his own lands and set out to acquire the loyalty of his people through favors and justice. The good reputation of his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers [foreigners]. . . . Such was his renown in warfare, that whenever a difficult and dangerous policy had to be undertaken, it would be entrusted to his discretion and generalship. By these arts Richard acquired the favor of the people, and avoided the jealousy of the Queen, from whom he lived far separated.”

  Richard and Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s queen, never got along. Of course, his brother Clarence’s role in the summary execution of members of her family, and the possibility that in return Elizabeth encouraged her husband to carry out the judicial murder of Clarence, might have had something to do with it! Historians also believe that Richard felt shunted aside by all of the preferment showered upon the queen’s vast family, favors that did indeed provoke his envy. However, no contemporary administrator or chronicler ever claimed that the Woodvilles didn’t capably fulfill the obligations with which Edward IV entrusted them; and Richard received more honors and titles from his brother than did anyone else in the kingdom.

  If the Duke of Gloucester was chewing on sour grapes over the perks awarded to his sister-in-law’s relations, biding his time as he seethed with bitterness and jealousy, he hardly had anything to complain about. Nonetheless, once he’d secured the throne for himself, his revenge against the Woodvilles was extremely thorough. Clarence was not the only son of York to assassinate relatives of the queen. Richard would eventually murder Elizabeth’s brother, as well as her younger son from her first marriage. He also tormented Elizabeth and her daughters, and may also have murdered her sons by Edward.

  On April 9, 1483, Edward IV, so morbidly obese he could barely move, died of a fever at the age of forty. Because his oldest son (now Edward V) was only twelve, he named Richard, Duke of Gloucester, temporary Protector of the realm.

  According to the terms of Edward’s will, Richard was to fill the role of Protector until the coronation of Edward V; and the fifteenth-century Croyland Chronicler seemed to believe that it had been Edward IV’s intention to see his son crowned as soon as possible after his death. Following the boy’s coronation, the kingdom was to be governed by a regency council until Edward V reached his majority.

  But the Woodville family had no intention of honoring the late king’s wish, one that also had no legal force or authority. Worst-case scenario for the Woodvilles: They would quickly cobble together a regency council in which Richard would be allowed an equal role with others. Bestcase scenario for them: His participation would be eliminated altogether.

  We now come to the point in time when Richard truly revealed himself to be an arch royal pain. Having been named Protector, he was now so close to the throne, he could taste it. Why stop at being regent when with a bit of political sleight of hand he could reign in his own right?

  Thus, it was in Richard’s best interests to forestall little Edward’s coronation for as long as possible, without letting on that he was doing so. Plans for the grand event proceeded apace, even as the d
ate itself was continually postponed. Yet historian Rosemary Horrox contends that the boy’s coronation did not take place as soon as possible after his father’s death because the late king had left the kingdom’s coffers empty on his demise and Richard, as Protector, had no money to spend on a lavish coronation.

  Richard was in the north when Edward died, and consequently missed his brother’s funeral. The Woodvilles took advantage of his absence from London to see a resolution passed by the privy council that would from the start replace Richard’s protectorate with a regency council that would undoubtedly be packed with Woodvilles and their supporters. According to the contemporary chronicler Dominic Mancini, “[T]hey were afraid that if Richard took the crown, or even governed alone, they who bore the blame for Clarence’s death would suffer death or at least be ejected from their high estate.” Yet it’s disingenuous to imply that the Woodvilles had been the impetus behind Clarence’s execution. The duke had committed treason—four times; Parliament had judged him and found him guilty; the sentence for treason was death.

  Resolution or not, a race against time was under way to see who could move first and with the greatest show of force behind them. It was a real-life game of chess to capture and control the barely adolescent king before the opposing faction could reach him. Edward V was living at Ludlow, where as Prince of Wales he had enjoyed his own household since he was a toddler. His governor was Elizabeth Woodville’s oldest brother, the dashing and erudite courtier who had inherited his father’s title, Earl Rivers.

  Richard believed in the preemptive strike, sticking it to his adversaries before they had the chance to stick it to him. He moved swiftly, beating the Woodville faction to the punch—and then some.