Speaking of the Stanleys and other traitors: Thomas Lord Stanley was quickly made Earl of Derby and loaded with rewards; but I wonder how far his stepson trusts him? Doctor Morton flourished, of course: Bishop of Ely and Tudor’s closest adviser. The Earl of Northumberland won little trust from Tudor by his betrayal of Richard, and in 1489 Tudor sent him north to gather taxes (could the man possibly have a sense of humour?) The men of the north have not forgotten their good lord Richard, nor would they forgive the man who betrayed him. Northumberland was set upon and murdered.
The sweating sickness Tudor’s men brought to England claimed many victims. One was Richard’s daughter Katherine. She outlived her father by barely a month.
George’s son the Earl of Warwick was kept a prisoner in the Tower since Tudor’s accession. In ’99 Tudor executed him, allegedly for supporting ‘Warbeck’. His sister Lady Margaret is married to Sir Richard Pole, a friend of Tudor’s and a man of no account. At least she is safe.
Duchess Elizabeth of Suffolk also died in 1503; odd, that the last women of Richard’s family, his sisters and his niece, should die in the same year. Elizabeth’s sons do their best to keep the White Rose alive, but it will come to nothing. Too much has changed, and like Tudor in his time they live on sufferance, useful pawns to the monarchs of Europe.
The Duchess of York died in 1495. She was eighty. Anne’s mother Lady Warwick died in 1492.
And my own family? Innogen still owns her cloth business in Burgundy, and is famous for a rich, exquisite type of cloth. She bought a ship, too, and trades all over the Mediterranean. She sailed to Venice once, and on to Cyprus and even Turkey. My two elder children are married, and I have five grandchildren. Richard took his degree from the Sorbonne at sixteen and is a Doctor of Laws; or was, for he seems to do little here in Scotland but hang around the Court. His twin, Alison, is almost as learned, and was Duchess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting and protégé. Against my will, she is a nun now. Philippa married one of Innogen’s Shaxper connections, the nephew of her first husband. Widowed now, Philippa lives in Warwickshire, and we hear little from her. William inherited Innogen’s stomach, not mine, and went to sea at twelve. He has his own ship now.
My stepson John also went to sea, but not so willingly. He turned intractable and hard to manage – who can blame him – resenting the promises that bound him to stay out of trouble; resenting too the bastardy that prevented him raising his father’s banner as the true heir to England. In the end we indentured him to a ship’s master and bundled him off on a year’s trading journey around the Mediterranean. He jumped ship at Alexandria and we heard nothing for three years, then one day he strode into the house, brown, grown-up, with an earring and stories that grow taller with every telling. He says he fought as a mercenary for the Emperor, was the lover of the Doge’s wife, sailed down the Nile, made money trading in Ireland. Certainly he has money, and certainly he is again the dear, gentle boy I loved. My informants in England wrote that Tudor had Richard’s illegitimate son imprisoned in the Tower, and executed him for some part in the Prince’s invasion. But the story is muddled; if there is any truth to it, perhaps there was another son, born perhaps to some girl in the north or over on the Welsh border. I don’t know. But John is downstairs as I write this; he is safe.
~~~
So there you are. I was a boy of little account until friendship, and fate, raised me high. Now I am of no account again, a tired old English exile. Sometimes I hardly remember that I am an Earl, a Knight of the Bath and of the Garter, and was the friend of two kings. To my heart’s sorrow I have outlived most of the people I have written about in this chronicle; although I am luckier than most in that I still have my beloved Innogen and our children. May God protect them.
I miss Richard so much. He was my friend and I loved him. So did others. I had word from a man of York, who wrote quoting, for my comfort, the words the York City Council entered in their records when they heard of Richard’s death:
King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City.
They valued him and they do not forget. But I wonder if in fifty years anyone outside Yorkshire will remember him?
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Author’s Note
(updated for 2013 re-release of Treason)
Treason is fiction, but it is firmly based on fact. Readers have the right to know which is which.
My narrator Martin and his family are fictional, but all the other characters existed. (‘Innogen’ was the form of the name until Shakespeare or his typesetters made it ‘Imogen’ in Cymbeline.) Dialogue, private incidents, and characters’ motivations are, of course, my own invention although wherever possible I have based conversation on recorded fragments (for example, von Poppelau’s record of his meeting with King Richard.) The main incidents are a matter of record, although I have had to omit a great deal. The letters quoted in this novel are genuine, except for those to and from fictional characters and Edward’s of 1461 and Hastings’ of 1483. The document with Edward V’s signature above Gloucester’s and Buckingham’s is extant (BL MS Cotton, Vespasian F XIII, fo. 123.)
No one knows what became of Richard III’s son John. There is a vague reference to a ‘base-born son of Richard III’ being executed in the Warbeck rebellion, but there is no definite record. In fiction, of course, the author can keep John alive. Similarly, no one knows precisely when Richard’s daughter, Katherine, died, but by the time of Elizabeth of York’s coronation, Katherine’s husband was recorded as a widower. It seems a reasonable supposition that Katherine died of the sweating sickness brought to England by Henry VII’s army.
Even among the nobility, dates of birth and death were often only recorded incidentally; at other times such records have been lost. The Rous Roll gives 1476 as the year Richard III’s son, Edward, was born, and the Croyland Chronicle tells us he died in April of 1484. No other details are known. Nor is there any information about Richard’s illegitimate children, John and Katherine, except that they existed; that Katherine was old enough to be married in 1484 (which tells us little since child marriages were not uncommon), and that John was knighted and made Captain of Calais in 1483 (which again tells us little, for children could be knighted and given honorary positions.) Since Richard III’s private life after his marriage was approvingly noted as a model of decorum I have assumed his bastard children were conceived before that marriage. Their mothers are my own invention, since nothing is known of them.
The story of Lady Anne being hidden away as a servant sounds like the wildest romance, yet the Croyland Chronicle refers to it.
No one would dare invent the eclipse of the sun when Anne died. It happened.
The English of the fifteenth century were a xenophobic, insular lot who believed they were better than the rest of the world put together. My narrator Martin is a cynical, partisan man of his times, and his views on England’s neighbours, and on other characters, are not always my own.
For the sake of clarity I used the most well-known modern spellings of names, for example, Tudor not Tidder or Tydr; Woodville not Wydeville. I have used a plain, modern vernacular throughout the novel, because once you start being ‘medieval’ where do you stop? Moreover, the real speech and writings of the fifteenth century would be all but incomprehensible to the average modern reader. Also, for clarity I have treated dates as if the medieval year began, like ours, on 1 January.
Battle details are as correct as I can make them. I am not entering into controversy about whether Richard III’s final battle took place at Bosworth or Dadlington or somewhere entirely different: I have stuck to Bosworth, which is familiar to everyone and at least has alliteration in its favour. King Richard’s dead body really was maltreated as I ha
ve described in this novel.
No one knows with certainty what became of Francis, Lord Lovell. He fought in the battle of Stoke in 1487, and later was given a safe conduct by the King of Scotland, but his eventual fate is unknown.
Lady Margaret Pole, Clarence’s daughter, was for a long time about the only Plantagenet to escape the Tudors’ policy of removing anyone with a better claim by birth to the throne. She survived to become one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies in waiting and her friend and staunch supporter, and was created Countess of Salisbury in her own right. In 1541, when she was 67, Henry VIII had her executed for alleged treason.
The two things everyone ‘knows’ about Richard III, thanks to Shakespeare, are that he was a hunchback with a withered arm, and that he murdered his nephews, ‘the Princes in the Tower’. Despite the efforts of unbiased historians over the past five hundred years, it is still necessary to emphasise that neither ‘fact’ is proven or even very likely. Except for a drunk’s reference to ‘crook-back Dick’, no one in Richard III’s own time recorded that he had any deformity (particularly Nicholas Von Poppelau, who as a foreigner writing in his own country had no need to be flattering.) Richard was a warrior from the time he was seventeen, and a half-paralysed cripple could not have fought in medieval conditions, although some condition like mild scoliosis is possible.
No one knows what happened to ‘the Princes’. Rumour is all. And for every rumour that Richard had them killed, or that they died during his reign, there is another that they survived and were taken abroad. Nicholas Von Poppelau, whose reminiscences of his visit to England are included in Armstrong’s translation of Dominic Mancini’s The Usurpation of Richard III, heard but didn’t believe the rumours of their death; he also recorded hearing that they were alive and kept in some safe hiding place. And if all England had been ringing with the scandal of the boys’ known murder at their uncle’s behest, Von Poppelau would surely have recorded the fact. Instead, he chats about his pleasant visit to a king he clearly admired.
After five hundred years it is still a mystery, and a subject that seems to make some people lose all grip on reality. But unless any proof ever turns up, we must at the very least say that Richard is innocent until proven guilty. Cui bono? – who benefits? – is as valid a question when dealing with history as with present-day events. Murdering his nephews would have been an outstandingly foolish thing to do, and there is no evidence that Richard was a fool. One currently popular theory is that the Duke of Buckingham killed the boys to further his rebellion, and handed Richard the fait accompli. Many people at the time, apparently including King James of Scotland, who would surely have been loath to give his kinswoman in marriage to a nobody, believed that ‘Perkin Warbeck’, whose ‘confession’ is patently rubbish, truly was Richard Duke of York. No one knows. My version of the boys’ fate is of course fictional, but it is as good as any.
Henry VII soon realised that he would face rebellions (as indeed he did, right through his reign) and had set a dangerous precedent by backdating his reign and attainting Richard III’s followers as traitors. Most of the attainders were reversed, and Parliament rapped their new king over the knuckles by passing legislation to protect men who fought for the ruling monarch. Henry VII did eventually cough up ten pounds for a tomb for his predecessor. It was despoiled during the Dissolution.
~~~
When this book was written and published ten years ago, no one dared hope that we would ever know what became of Richard III’s body. However, the recent (2012) archaeological dig at the site of the Grey Friars in Leicester has revealed remains that may well be those of King Richard. DNA tests will tell us. But if the remains are those of Richard III, where will they be re-interred? As I had my fictional narrator say in this novel, ‘But he was King! He must be buried in the Abbey or at Windsor, there must be the proper rites... ’
Meredith Whitford
Adelaide, South Australia
2012.
[email protected]
About the author
Meredith Whitford lives in Adelaide, South Australia. She is an editor and writer, and since 1998 director of Between Us Manuscript Assessment Service (www.betweenusmanuscripts.com). She has a BA from the University of Adelaide and a Masters in Creative Arts (Creative Writing) from Flinders University, where in 2012 she began a Ph.D.
Her interests are reading, history, sleeping, cryptic crosswords and being pedantic. She is married, with two children, two grandchildren and two cats.
Treason was her first published novel, and it won the 2002 international Eppie Award for historical fiction. Her second novel, Shakespeare’s Will, was published in 2010. Her biography of Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly, Sir Winston Churchill’s nephew, is to be published in 2013 by Endeavour Press.
She can be contacted at [email protected]
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following people for reading Treason in manuscript, making helpful suggestions, and encouraging me by liking it.
In New Zealand: Frances Grattan, who read it first. In Australia: Kevin Clarke, Darry Fraser, Nick Grant. In Great Britain: Lorraine Pickering, Geoffrey Richardson. In the USA: Ellen Ekstrom, Rania Melhem, Trace Edward Zaber (who published an excerpt in ‘Of Ages Past’), and Barbara Zuchegna.
Thanks also to everyone on the (sadly, now defunct) Later-Medieval-Britain email list for information, help and advice, and some wonderful differences of opinion. And my most grateful thanks to all the people who have told me how much they liked Treason.
Meredith Whitford
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