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

by Leslie Carroll

  Richard managed to quash the rebellion in only a fortnight, beheading a total of ten traitors and attainting ninety-six others. On October 15, 1483, Richard formally proclaimed Buckingham a rebel. He was convicted of high treason on November 2 and beheaded in the Salisbury marketplace.

  In late July 1483, while Richard was on progress, he’d gotten wind of an attempt to free the two young princes from the Tower. After his two nephews disappeared from view sometime later that summer, there was widespread belief not only throughout England, but abroad, that the princes had been murdered and that Richard was complicit in their deaths.

  Not the way to win hearts and minds. But he tried. The Tudor-era chronicler Polydore Vergil explained how Richard tried to reverse his subjects’ negative opinion of him: “Because he could not now reform the thing that was past, he determined to abolish the note of infamy wherewith his honour was stained, and to give such hope of his good government that henceforth no man should be able to lay any calamity that might happen to the commonwealth to his charge. . . . He began to take on hand a certain new form of life, and to give the show and countenance of a good man, whereby he could be accounted more righteous, more mild, better affected to the commonalty . . . and so might first merit pardon at God’s hands.”

  However, the bad press never abated, no matter how greatly the members of Parliament and others, including Elizabeth Woodville, lived in fear of Richard’s reprisals. On March 1, 1484, he managed to coax the dowager queen and her daughters out of sanctuary and bring them to court, only after publicly swearing an oath to protect them from harm and to ensure that all five daughters made good marriages. But Elizabeth would never forget that Richard had ordered the execution of her brother and one of her oldest sons, and she certainly blamed him for the young princes’ disappearance from the Tower.

  Vengeance makes bedfellows as strange as politics does; and after an unsuccessful attempt to raise an army against Richard, the former queen formed an alliance with the Yorkists’ age-old enemies, the Lancastrian claimants to the throne. She brokered a deal with Henry Tudor, who was living in exile on the Continent. Henry was the grandson of Catherine de Valois—daughter of King Charles VI of France, and the first wife of England’s Henry V. If Henry would agree to a precontract to wed Elizabeth of York (the eldest daughter of Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV), then the dowager queen vowed to place whatever might and influence she had behind his claim to England’s throne. So, on Christmas morning, 1483, Henry Tudor knelt in the cathedral of Rennes and promised to wed Elizabeth of York.

  It stands to reason that Elizabeth Woodville never would have entered such a bargain, agreeing to support someone else’s plans to seize the throne, if she believed that her sons were still alive. After all, each of them had a greater claim to their father’s throne, being boys, than any of their sisters had.

  Aware that the Woodville faction was conspiring with Henry Tudor to topple him from the throne, Richard began to shore up his support. He could still count on aid from the north because the nobles remembered him as a capable and magnanimous steward of the region.

  But there was one thing that remained beyond Richard’s control: death. On April 9, 1484, his only son, Edward, who had been invested in a grand ceremony the previous summer as Prince of Wales, died at the age of eleven. Richard and Anne were distraught. Not only was the boy gone, but with him all hope of Richard’s creating a dynasty. A contemporary chronicler, describing the effect of the child’s death on his parents, wrote, “You might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness by reason of their sudden grief.”

  Queen Anne died at the age of twenty-eight the following March, having wasted away from heartache and consumption after the death of her son. Contrary to Shakespeare’s plot, Richard did not have her murdered. He was genuinely grief stricken at her loss, although rumors did persist that he had poisoned her in order to be able to wed his own niece, Elizabeth of York, as a way of further cementing his claim to the throne.

  But those rumors seem baseless. Richard had declared the children of Edward IV illegitimate, so it’s unlikely he would turn around in the space of a few months and marry a girl he had officially declared a bastard and therefore ineligible to sit on the throne (as would be her progeny). Additionally, Richard was fully aware of the precontract of marriage between Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York, which in the fifteenth century was as valid as a marriage itself. Therefore for Richard to snatch Elizabeth from her betrothed only to wed her himself would have been viewed as bigamy. And considering that it was within his purview to bestow his nieces’ hands in marriage, it’s also notable that Richard didn’t give Elizabeth of York to one of his own supporters: additional proof that he acknowledged and respected the girl’s precontract.

  How ironic that what Richard had so willfully endeavored to destroy—the legality of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage based upon a prior precontract—would be what came back to bite him. But it certainly established his acceptance of the premarital understanding between Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York.

  So, absent an heir and all out of ruses to bolster any legitimate claim to the throne, Richard went about the business of governing and prepared for Henry Tudor’s inevitable invasion. Both sides spent the winter of 1484-1485 shoring up support.

  On Sunday, August 7, 1485, Henry Tudor landed a few miles west of Milford Haven in Wales and began his march eastward, prepared to confront Richard wherever their armies intersected. Three weeks later, on August 22, in the Battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire, as the opposing forces clashed for two hours on Ambien Hill and Redmore Plain, Richard met his bloody end, the last English king to die in battle. He was thirty-two years old and had reigned for two years, one month, and twenty-eight days.

  Henry snatched the crown from the dead king’s crested helm (some sources say it was dislodged by his stepfather, the first earl of Derby, Thomas Stanley, who placed it on Henry’s head), proclaiming himself Henry VII. The age of the Tudors had begun.

  Richard’s naked corpse, his neck encircled with a felon’s noose, was tossed unceremoniously over the back of a packhorse and brought to Greyfriars Chapel in Leicestershire for interment. Good riddance to a brat, brute, and bad seed, say most historians, but staunch members of the Richard III Society are quick to assert that even in death, Richard remained a hero to the citizens of York who remembered his wise and astute governance. They mourned him sincerely, attesting in the city’s civil records, “King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was . . . piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.”

  His twentieth- and twenty-first-century apologists cite certain accomplishments as evidence that he wasn’t such a baddie after all. Some scholars, particularly the Ricardians, who often seek to sanitize the awful reputation Richard has retained over the past five centuries, seem to agree that Richard was a loyal husband. As proof, they point to his outsize prudery vis-à-vis his brother Edward’s massive libido, and his opinion of the courtiers who helped the king procure and enjoy his paramours. Of course, Richard was hardly a monk, having fathered two children out of wedlock when he was still a randy teen: his son, John Pomfret (also known as John of Gloucester); and his daughter, Katherine Plantagenet, born before his marriage to Anne.

  Another Ricardian argument is that while the Duke of Clarence was always a thorn in Edward IV’s side, both personally and politically, during Edward’s reign Richard was a stalwart, capable steward. Although both younger brothers had been made dukes and received substantial land grants after Edward became king, despite Clarence’s seniority as the middle brother, it was Richard whom Edward trusted as a military commander and as an administrator. And it was Richard, not Clarence, whom Edward made his viceroy in the north of England. There, the young Duke of Gloucester proved himself a most favored son of York. The more time Richard spent in the north, the more renowned he became for his good governance, forgiving tax payments and suppressing the illegal building of f
ishing weirs—a system of wicker nets known as “fish garths.”

  So, is Richard III’s reputation as a royal pain a deserved one?

  Well! If you can find it in your heart to subtract all of his numerous acts of treachery, you could try to argue that he had in fact been a fairly good king. He was intolerant of corruption, instituted tort reform, and munificently provided for the widows and families of executed traitors. He was kind and generous to his two (pre-Anne) illegitimate children. His daughter, Katherine, married well and his son John was made Captain of Calais in 1485.

  Richard had a happy and, by all accounts, faithful marriage; and he spent substantial sums building chapels and castles and patronizing the arts, particularly musicians and choirs. He did, however, award the lion’s share of royal preferment to his trusty northerners, which left the southern nobles seething with enough resentment to foment a rebellion within weeks of his coronation. To the detriment of his reign, he never did secure their support.

  Thomas More, the Italian-born Polydore Vergil, and other writers of the Tudor era, including William Shakespeare, had their own agendas, and these have largely shaped our perception of the deeds and personality of Richard III. It is a skewed image, because Richard proved himself a well-liked and exceptionally competent and fair administrator during his years in Yorkshire. But the Ricardians of recent centuries do protest too much. Richard was neither hero nor saint. In a bloody and violent age, at best, he was no less and perhaps only a bit more brutal than many of his brethren.

  But—and there’s always a “but.”

  There are simply too many strikes against Richard III to absolve or exonerate him.

  In addition to the other crimes he is well known to have committed, it’s hard to ignore the heartrending mystery regarding the fate of the princes in the Tower, which has continued to puzzle and fascinate us for more than five centuries.

  Members of the Richard III Society and other Ricardians seek to acquit their hero by suggesting that others, most specifically the Duke of Buckingham and the exiled Henry Tudor, had motive (and Buckingham also had opportunity) to dispose of the princes. But none of their arguments, while intriguing, hold water; and because Richard had the most to gain from the princes’ demise, he remains the primary suspect. Surely, with all the rumors of their deaths swirling about during the summer of 1483, if the children had been alive, Richard would have taken pains to produce them, in order to burnish his tarnished reputation. And if the boys had, as some Ricardians believe, been secretly smuggled to safety elsewhere in the kingdom, undoubtedly some loyal adherent to their mother would have informed her.

  Dominic Mancini, the Italian-born chronicler, departed the English court just days before Richard’s July 6 coronation. He surmised that the princes were already dead by then. “After Hastings was removed, all the attendants who had waited upon the king were debarred access to him. He and his brother were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether. A Strasbourg doctor, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the young king, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him. . . . I have seen many men burst forth into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight; and already there was a suspicion that he had been done away with. . . .”

  And in January 1484 the chancellor of France, Guillaume de Rochefort, proclaimed at a meeting of the Estates-General, “Regardez, je vous prie, les événements qui après la mort du Roi Édouard sont arrivés dans ce pays. Contemplez ses enfants, déjà grands et braves, massacrés impunément, et la couronne transportée à l’assassin par la faveur des peuples.” In other words, de Rochefort said (possibly with a soupçon of schadenfreude), “Look, I beg you, at the events that occurred in this country after the death of King Edward. Consider his children, already big and brave, massacred with impunity, and the crown passed to their assassin by popular acclaim.”

  Although France was England’s age-old nemesis and invariably gained political mileage from the faux pas of the Anglos, the chancellor had “a learned and rather staid personality.” He was not a propagandist, and historians contend that he would not have made such a declaration had he not been privy to certain specific, and reliable, information about the princes’ deaths. Guillaume de Rochefort’s source may very well have been Dominic Mancini.

  What amounted to regicide (because the older prince was rightfully King Edward V) was the talk of Europe, and medieval historians were quick to condemn Richard for the boys’ deaths. The Great Chronicle, a contemporary document, states that “[S]ome say they were murdered atween two feather beds, some say they were drowned in Malvesey [Malmsey], and some say that they were sticked with a venomous potion.” All of those scenarios are very dramatic, but perhaps the importance of the assertion is not how the princes were murdered, but simply that they were murdered.

  Shakespeare drew his research from the writing of Sir Thomas More, who was only five years old when Richard III died at Bosworth. In Richard III, one of the assassins hired to dispose of the princes is named James Tyrell. While Shakespeare’s play is comprised of one part invention, two parts imagination, and a heady dose of propaganda, there really was a James Tyrell who served in Richard’s court, and who eventually committed treason against Henry VII after serving him for a few years. On the scaffold, Tyrell confessed to killing the princes. Most modern historians don’t believe him, maintaining that he was more than likely covering up for the actual murderer, and his admission would conveniently end the search for the killer(s). Nevertheless, Tyrell’s deathbed confession serves only to deepen the mystery.

  Ricardians like to refer to the dowager queen’s willingness to quit the sanctuary of Westminster and come to Richard’s court as an exoneration of any complicity he might have had in her sons’ deaths. But records indicate she hardly did so eagerly. On the contrary: Richard’s men arrived at Westminster and threatened Elizabeth Woodville with violence (as they had previously done when Richard had demanded custody of the little Duke of York) if she and her daughters refused to come forth of their own volition. And if the dowager queen believed Richard capable of killing her little boys, surely she’d fear him enough to comply with his wishes, especially as he had promised in the presence of the privy council to protect her and her daughters and to arrange good marriages for the girls.

  Although his reign was brief, Richard’s shadow upon the stage of history looms larger than those of many monarchs who wore the crown far longer. The controversy over whether he was responsible for the death of his nephews may continue to rage for another five hundred years, but Richard was most assuredly a usurper and a murderer; and he circumvented the laws of the land on multiple occasions as Duke of Gloucester, as Protector, and as king of England. Even if Richard’s conduct can be explained, or clarified, as a product of his time (after all, both Edward IV and Henry VII were usurpers and murderers as well), on balance, his murderous misdeeds far outweigh his fish garths!

  IVAN IV

  “Ivan the Terrible”

  1530-1584

  RULED RUSSIA: 1533-1584

  IF IVAN IV HAD ENJOYED A HAPPY CHILDHOOD, WOULD he have entered the annals of history as “Ivan the Not So Terrible After All”?

  In Russia the tyrant is known as “Ivan Grozny,” which translates to Ivan the Awe-Inspiring/Awesome/Fearsome/ Terrible (as in “terrible swift sword” from “Battle Hymn of the Republic”). And even today, Russians can be quick to point out that little matter of semantics.

  Ivan the Awesome? Well, not if your definition of “awesome” comes from Funk and Wagnalls, the slacker dude dictionary. Regardless of what may get lost in translation, Ivan’s brutality cannot be dismissed. He did do truly terrible things, not only by our own modern definition but even by the standard of sixteenth-century Rus
sia’s extremely violent culture—in which case, “Ivan the Fearsome” is indeed a well-deserved moniker. And his spectacularly violent career (as both autocrat and royal psychopath) scores him a perfect trifecta within this volume’s subtitled cast of brats, brutes, and bad seeds.

  In Ivan’s day, about a hundred and fifty noble Russian families, known as the boyars, owned most of the land, held most of the government’s highest offices and military posts, and shared power with Moscow’s grand prince. Eight or nine million people paid rent to live and grow crops on the boyars’ vast estates. Ivan’s grandfather, Ivan III, had brought all of the boyars under control; nonetheless, they were accustomed to governing their own lands without interference from the grand prince. Ivan’s father, Vasily III, consulted them on important decisions. But Ivan’s unhappy and brutal childhood forever shaped the way he viewed the boyars. When it was time to grasp the reins of power, he decided that Russia should be an autocracy. His reign changed the course of history.

  After twenty years of marriage, in 1525 Ivan’s father Vasily forcibly shoved his barren first wife, Salomonia, into a convent. Needless to say, she was not terribly pleased with this turn of events, and being a temperamental person herself, she resisted. With all her might. Salomonia kicked and screamed and had to be beaten on the way out the door. To add an odd tidbit of historical context in terms of rulers operating in seemingly parallel universes for even the briefest space of time, Vasily’s banishment of Salomonia occurred right about the time that half a world away England’s Henry VIII had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn and was toying with the idea of putting aside his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, “for the curse of sterility” as his advisers put it.