by Thomas Penn
Meanwhile, both Richard and Buckingham were in touch with the new king at Ludlow. Edward V and his advisers were happy to accept Richard’s proposal of a rendezvous on the way to London, so that they, together with Buckingham, could escort the king into the city together, a picture of the new regime’s unity. While Northampton, on Watling Street, was on Richard’s route south, for the king’s retinues it represented a substantial detour through the midlands. For them, the more direct way to London was down the Thames valley, the road Edward and his Marcher men had taken after Mortimer’s Cross over twenty years before. Reflecting the prevailing spirit of compromise, however, they agreed to the meeting point.59
As a fretful Hastings waited in London, raising his own men – ‘I will and desire you’, he wrote urgently to John Paston the younger in the Pale fortress of Guisnes, ‘to come over in all goodly haste’ – Richard rode south out of York, still in mourning black, at the head of six hundred horsemen, recruiting more as he went. On the other side of the country, the young king’s household left Ludlow on 24 April; shortly after, Buckingham rode out of the west country. The three retinues would converge at Northampton on the 29th, to enable them to stick to the council’s planned date for the king’s arrival in London: May Day.60
Part Five
* * *
The Gaze of Our Inward Eye
Spring 1483 – Summer 1485
‘How much pureness in heart is needed by one who is both king and general, how much self-control in all situations, how much good faith, how much liberality, how much intelligence, how much humanity … nor can he be strict in passing judgement, if he fails to allow that others should be strict judges in his own case.’
Archibald Whitelaw, ‘Address to King Richard III’, 12 September 1484
‘O most sweet lord Jesus Christ, deign to release me from the affliction, temptation, grief, sickness, need and danger in which I stand … deign to free me, your servant king Richard, from every tribulation, sorrow, and from the plots of my enemies; and to bring to nothing their evil plans that they are making or wish to make against me.’
The prayer of Richard III
‘Wales shall be armed, and to Albion go.’
Streets of London prophecy
18
Old Royal Blood
On the evening of 30 April 1483, London was in holiday mood. The next day, it would erupt in the city-wide street party that was the ‘maying’, which, with its associations of anarchy and sex, was one of the more eagerly anticipated feast days. In the early morning, Londoners would walk through the city gates out into the surrounding countryside, bathe their faces in dew, and return with garlands to adorn houses, doorways and churches in preparation for the day’s junketing. In the heart of the city, outside St Andrew Undershaft, stood the great corporate-sponsored maypole from which the church took its name. Each parish, too, had prepared its maypole, its feasts, bonfires, stages and ‘warlike shows’ of archery and gunfire, its batteries of drummers and its pageants that would sway through the streets. At the heart of each pageant were the ‘lord and lady of May’, the young May king and queen. Their procession, a triumph of ‘honour and glory’, marked spring’s conquest over winter, whose discord and duplicity, ‘heaviness and trouble’, was replaced by universal peace, the spring flowers of ‘perfect charity’ and the buds of ‘truth and unity’. That year, London’s preparations acquired a particular intensity. Amid the festivities, the city was due to welcome a real May king, the twelve-year-old boy whose choreographed arrival would promise a new start for both the city and the country – Edward V.1
Late that evening a rider dismounted at the Tower, where Elizabeth Woodville, her second son and her four daughters were in residence. He brought shattering news. Earlier that day the young king, who had set out from Ludlow six days before, had been detained barely fifty miles outside London, along with his uncle Anthony Woodville, Sir Richard Grey – the queen’s son by her first marriage – and other close servants. Now Edward V was in the town of Northampton, in the custody of his other uncle, Richard duke of Gloucester.
Clustered around its hulking Norman fortress, Northampton, with its crumbling walls, tumbledown houses and abandoned plots, had seen better days. But its strategic position at the heart of England, at the intersection of main routes west and north from London, had kept it at the centre of national events. People still remembered how, back in the summer of 1460, the eighteen-year-old Edward and the earl of Warwick had fought through the mud to take control of the hapless Henry VI, and with him the kingdom; how, three years later, the commons of Northampton had rioted in protest at the exceptional favour shown by Edward to the renegade Lancastrian duke of Somerset; and how in 1469 Warwick and Clarence, based in the town following the battle of Edgecote, had had Edward’s right-hand man William Herbert unceremoniously executed there. Northampton, indeed, had close links to the Yorkist regime: the town’s dominant figure was Edward IV’s great friend William Lord Hastings. Hastings’ reach stretched through the northern half of the county into the east midlands, his influence sustained by the assortment of local big men, business managers and lawyers who managed his affairs during his prolonged absences at court or in Calais.2
Earlier that April, he agreed to Richard’s proposed rendezvous in Northampton, Anthony Woodville was doubtless mindful of Hastings’ influence in the area – an awareness sharpened by the bad blood between Hastings and the queen’s family, and the recent testy exchanges in the council chamber. When, some four days after its departure from Ludlow, the young king’s household approached Northampton, it neatly swerved the town and continued south for fifteen miles, finally halting at the base Woodville had chosen for it: Stony Stratford.
It was a practical choice. There was hardly room in Northampton to billet the royal retinue as well as Richard’s and Buckingham’s men; besides which, it was always as well to keep rival retinues apart. The small town of Stony Stratford, clustered either side of Watling Street, the main road out of London to the midlands, was used to hosting royalty. But Woodville’s decision was also strategic. To him, this was reassuringly familiar territory. A few miles to the north lay Grafton, the queen’s childhood home: at Stony Stratford, almost two decades before, Edward IV had gone out hunting one May morning and had come back married. And in the event of any trouble, the king and his Woodville uncle would be fifteen miles closer to London, on a fast road.
Trouble, however, seemed highly unlikely. Conciliation was in the air: Edward V in particular was anxious to ‘deserve well’ of his paternal uncle, to acknowledge his central place in the new regime. He now wanted to run all the council’s plans past Richard, ‘to submit everything that had to be done’ to his judgement – though as the council had already taken the key decisions in Richard’s absence, it had to be said that this was little more than a nice gesture.
With the coronation scheduled for 4 May and the king due to arrive in London on May Day, the clock was ticking.3 The king’s party were already settled into their Stony Stratford lodgings, their men billeted in the scattering of surrounding villages, when on 29 April news came of Richard’s arrival in Northampton. Buckingham still hadn’t turned up. With barely two days to conclude discussions with Richard and ride the seventy-odd miles to London, the young king sent Anthony Woodville, Sir Richard Grey and a group of attendants over to Northampton for talks over dinner. A deferential gesture, it was also an impatient one.4
The royal delegation rode into Northampton that evening to find Richard awaiting them, so one account put it, ‘with a particularly cheerful and merry face’. Over a convivial meal, they talked through plans for the new regime – plans which Richard, to their relief, seemed to accept without demur. Late into the evening the duke of Buckingham finally arrived. It was night before the party broke up, the guests escorted back to their respective lodgings. Richard and Buckingham stayed up.5
If William Hastings owed everything he had to Edward IV, so too, in his own way, did Richard. It was Edward wh
o had built him up in the north; who had backed him in his dispute with Clarence over the Warwick inheritance and facilitated his marriage to Warwick’s daughter Anne; who, after Clarence’s killing, had made Richard into England’s greatest nobleman; and whose indulgence of his youngest brother had helped reinforce in Richard the sense of entitlement and impunity that came with royal blood. If, as part of the royal establishment, the queen’s family had been instrumental in Clarence’s death, so too had Richard, who had been a direct beneficiary of it. And if there had previously been hints of a coolness between Richard and those around the queen, it had seemed no more than the usual court manoeuvrings. Now, however, Richard felt his pre-eminence challenged. The council’s decision to hold an early coronation, taken in his absence, suited the queen’s family rather better than it did Richard, whose newly bestowed protectorate would end the instant the crown was placed on the boy-king’s head.6 If Richard feared that the Woodvilles were ordering the new regime to suit themselves, both Hastings and Buckingham – each nursing their own resentments – now fed those anxieties and the ambitions that shadowed them. Later, some commentators were convinced that Richard was already preparing to make the ultimate move, to ‘usurp the kingdom’; perhaps this was the direction in which Richard’s steps were taking him, even if he hadn’t consciously admitted it to himself. Whatever the case, Richard knew perfectly well the impossibility of controlling power without controlling the person of the king – a lesson that had been driven home to him during his ineffectual attempt at regime change in Scotland the previous summer. That night, as the two dukes talked, Buckingham held up a mirror to Richard’s desires, urging him on. The groundwork, though, had already been prepared – by Hastings.7
For while Hastings may have been absent, away in London, his men weren’t. One of his councillors in particular had been central to the communications with Richard and Buckingham. This was the Northamptonshire lawyer William Catesby, Hastings’ deputy in the county, whose expertise and discretion he prized. According to Thomas More – who knew a thing or two about lawyers – Catesby dealt with Hastings’ most ‘weighty matters’ and was in his most ‘special trust’. It helped, too, that Catesby had the confidence of Buckingham, another of his clients. Apart from the power he wielded as Hastings’ representative, Catesby had exceptional local influence on his own account. His father had been three times sheriff of Northamptonshire, head of the county’s law enforcement and security; so too, only the year previously, had his brother-in-law. Catesby also had cosy ties with the current sheriff, his son-in-law Roger Wake. Close to Hastings, the Wakes were no strangers to national politics; what was more, they harboured an abiding grudge against their Woodville neighbours.
Back in 1463 it had been Roger Wake’s father, Thomas – a client of both Warwick and Hastings – who, as sheriff, had turned a blind eye as Northampton’s citizens rioted in protest against Edward IV’s closeness to the duke of Somerset. It was Thomas Wake, too, who in 1469 had helped hunt down the queen’s father Lord Rivers after Edgecote, a battle in which his own son had been killed fighting for Warwick and Clarence. Thomas Wake had also produced the lead figurines that – discovered at Stoke Bruerne, equidistant between the Woodville seat of Grafton and the Wakes’ adjacent manor of Blisworth – had provided the fuel for Warwick’s incendiary allegations of sorcery against Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta, leaving a stain that the Woodville family had never quite eradicated. After 1471, the Wakes’ close links to Hastings had aided their political rehabilitation. When Thomas died, his son and heir Roger had stepped into his shoes. An effective networker, he served on royal commissions alongside Hastings and his brother Ralph, and another up-and-coming lawyer named Richard Empson. On one of these panels, after Clarence’s murder, Roger Wake and his half-brother John worked alongside Catesby to appropriate the duke’s vast estates on the king’s behalf. After making an advantageous marriage to William Catesby’s daughter Elizabeth, it was hardly a surprise when, in March 1483, Roger Wake was appointed sheriff of the county. By this time, the mutual loathing between the Wakes and the Woodvilles had subsided to a smouldering suspicion. It merely needed some fresh fuel to reignite.8
Quietly, efficiently, in the weeks since Edward IV’s death, Catesby had been busy stitching together an understanding between Hastings, Richard and Buckingham and secretly mobilizing local networks, at their heart the Wake family. If, that April, Anthony Woodville felt that he had taken adequate precautions, he had been hopelessly outmanoeuvred. In riding over to Northampton that evening, he had been lured into a carefully prepared trap.
In the early hours of 30 April, as he chewed over the situation with Buckingham, Richard knew that everything was prepared. Hastings and Catesby had provided the ammunition. In firing it, Richard triggered the sequence of events that, as one appalled supporter of Edward IV later put it, would lead to the ‘extreme detriment’ of the kingdom and ‘utter subversion of his own house’: the destruction of the house of York.9
At daybreak, Richard made his move. In the spring half-light his men, billeted in lodgings around Northampton, armed themselves quietly and harnessed their horses. Woodville, Grey and their companions woke to find their inns surrounded. Trying to leave, they were arrested and imprisoned. Northampton itself was sealed off, all the roads out of town watched – with the connivance of sheriff Roger Wake and his men, whose local knowledge would have been invaluable in preventing the king from being tipped off. Anybody attempting to head south out of Northampton was stopped and turned back.
Richard and Buckingham rode fast to Stony Stratford. There, they entered the royal lodgings and detained the king’s close servants, foremost among them his veteran chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan. Finding the king in his apartments, both noblemen removed their hats and knelt. One eyewitness, possibly the royal physician John Argentine, recalled how a sombre Richard addressed the boy. Expressing ‘profound grief’ at the death of Edward IV, he placed responsibility for the late king’s untimely demise firmly at the door of the ‘companions and servants of his vices’ – the queen’s son the marquis of Dorset, her youngest brother Sir Edward Woodville, and their hangers-on. These same men, Richard continued emphatically, could not be allowed near the young king. An echo of the objections raised in the council meeting, it also modulated them. In Richard’s argument, the question of the protectorship hinged not so much on issues of protocol, precedent and political balance, but of morality.
By encouraging the late king’s ‘vices’, so Richard’s argument went, the Woodvilles had destroyed his health and, by extension, that of the country. Their own excessive sexual appetites, moreover, had rendered them ‘puny’: men utterly unfit to participate in government. There was more. It was ‘common knowledge’ that they planned to deprive Richard of the protectorship that his late brother had promised him. Worse still, Richard had intelligence that they were plotting to kill him: to ambush him before they reached London or, failing that, in the capital itself. For all these reasons the Woodvilles had to be removed. Richard would take on the role of protector in their place. Besides the late king’s approval, he had the experience and, he added, the popularity: the people loved him.10
If Richard expected the young king to accept his reasoning without demur, he was disappointed. With the poise for which he was acquiring a reputation, Edward V replied that he had ‘complete confidence’ in the servants his father had chosen for him; they had served him faithfully, and he saw no reason to dismiss them. As far as the government was concerned, he was equally confident in the council and his mother Queen Elizabeth, whose decisions he thoroughly endorsed. Effectively, the twelve-year-old told Richard he was getting ahead of himself.
The king’s self-possession infuriated Buckingham, who spat that women had no business governing kingdoms and that the boy’s confidence in his mother was mistaken. Richard was self-contained, cooler, more dangerous. His deference acquired an edge. He repeated the explanations ‘insistently’. This was not a matter for debate. It wa
s how things were going to be.
Outside the king’s lodgings, a proclamation was read out. Edward V’s Marcher men were ordered to disperse, and not to come near him on pain of death. Anthony Woodville, Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan were sent north under armed guard to Pontefract Castle. The rest of the royal household was dismissed, with the exception of a few close servants, among them the physician John Argentine, whom the boy was allowed to retain.11 Escorted back to Northampton, Edward V put his signature to a letter placed in front of him by Richard, ordering the aged archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, to take possession of the great seal, the Tower of London and its treasury. In Richard’s eyes, the current chancellor and keeper of the great seal, the archbishop of York Thomas Rotherham – possibly one of the councillors vocal in opposing his claims – was not to be trusted. The aged Bourchier, a man of unimpeachable integrity, was a safe pair of hands.
Early on May morning, news rippled through London’s streets that Elizabeth, her younger son and her daughters had, along with Dorset, left the Tower and had made their way upriver to Westminster, where they were now in sanctuary. Elizabeth, of course, had been here before, in 1470, as Warwick and Clarence had advanced on London in the name of Henry VI. For one commentator, the panic on the streets felt horribly familiar, ‘like Barnet’ all over again. As the day wore on, there were reports of armed men assembling in Westminster in the queen’s name: an attempt, perhaps, to hold the city against Richard. If so, this resistance quickly evaporated in the face of a formidable display of armed force by William Hastings, who had for weeks been preparing for this moment, urgently summoning men to the capital from Calais. Meanwhile London’s corporation, in receipt of a letter from Richard justifying his actions, reacted to the changed circumstances with a practised efficiency. After all, compared with the agonizing over whether or not to open the city’s gates to Edward in 1460 and 1471, this was straightforward. The steadfast presence of Hastings, a long-time friend to the city’s business communities, assuaged their concerns – and besides, even if he was now in the care of his uncle Richard, the king was still the king.12
