The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Mancini didn’t know England and couldn’t speak much of the language. His sources were mostly people like him: members of London’s Italian mercantile community, and cosmopolitan, internationally educated Latinists like Argentine and the itinerant scholar Pietro Carmeliano, who, unknown to his new employers the English government, was also a Venetian spy. But though reliant on hearsay and at times ill-informed speculation – in which he was hardly alone – Mancini was an inquisitive, investigative sort. As he moved around London prompting, questioning and listening, he was concerned to get his facts straight as far as he could and to report the truth of what he experienced. Returning to Paris shortly after Richard’s coronation, Mancini would write a vivid account of the revolution he witnessed – the first and only immediate, first-hand account of Richard’s seizure of power.

  Shortly before he left England in July 1483, Mancini picked up on the widespread concern over Edward V’s disappearance. Mention of the young king’s name, he found, elicited a common – and to him, frustratingly incoherent – response: people ‘burst forth into tears and lamentations’.64 In place of words, they simply grew distressed.

  19

  No Long Time in Rest

  A fortnight after his coronation, Richard’s travelling household left Windsor Castle and rode west up the Thames valley on the first stage of his summer progress, a journey which would take in a swathe of the west country before curving back on itself, heading through the midlands and northeast towards its final destination – York. It was an ambitious itinerary, particularly in the context of Edward IV’s torpid parades of recent years, and one with a set of traditional aims in mind: for Richard to see as much of his new kingdom as possible, and for him to display those kingly qualities to which he had publicly committed himself in his coronation oaths. The royal cavalcade was boosted by the presence of Buckingham, Richard’s partner in power, and Lord Stanley, whom Richard had reconfirmed in his role as steward of the king’s household and, for good measure, made a knight of the Garter. But as Richard knew, he had to watch his back. Talk of Woodville plots continued to bubble. The royal absence from London would provide perfect conditions for conspiracy to breed.1

  Earlier that July Richard had dispatched his trusted chaplain and envoy Thomas Hutton to Brittany, to reassure Duke Francis of his commitment to tackling the English pirates that had plagued the western reaches of the Channel since Edward IV’s death. Hutton was also given another set of instructions. Having sailed over the horizon two months previously, Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Sir Edward and his men had resurfaced at the Breton court, which was also home to another political refugee. This was the twenty-six-year-old Lancastrian Henry Tudor, only son of Lady Margaret Beaufort, who – despite various attempts at reconciliation and extradition – had been in Brittany for the past twelve years. But that July it was Sir Edward Woodville, not Tudor, who occupied Richard’s mind. As Hutton moved about the Breton court, Richard told him, he was to ‘feel and understand’ Duke Francis’s attitude to the Yorkist fugitive. In particular, Hutton should find out ‘by all means to him possible’ whether there were any Breton plans to send Woodville into England to stir up insurgency, to carry out some manner of ‘enterprise’. He was to update Richard ‘with all diligence’.2

  Richard wasn’t inclined to let grass grow under his feet. As one chronicler, a man in government circles, put it, he ‘never acted sleepily’ but ‘incisively and with the utmost vigilance’. In any case, Richard himself hardly needed reminding of the real danger of plots by foreign-backed English exiles. Back in 1470, he had fled England with Edward as a result of Warwick and Clarence’s French-backed plot and, six months later, had taken part in Edward’s vengeful return. Now, as Richard set out from Windsor, his right-hand man John Howard turned back towards London: the newly created duke of Norfolk had been handed exclusive power to muster troops throughout southeast England in the king’s name. With plenty of business to attend to in his native East Anglia, Howard was well positioned to keep an eye out for disturbances.3

  The first days of the royal progress passed sedately enough. At Reading on 23 July, Richard granted Hastings’ family lands to his widow, Katherine, along with custody of their son and heir – the kind of conciliatory gesture for which the new king was gaining a reputation and which, he perhaps hoped, would help dispel any lingering tensions provoked by his summary beheading of Edward IV’s close friend.4 A short stay at Oxford followed, offering Richard the chance to display his credentials as a patron of learning. At Magdalen College, he sat through a day of scholarly disputations in the great hall, presenting the celebrated humanist scholar William Grocyn with a deer and 5 marks for his performance. Then after a tour of the university, dispensing largesse as he went, Richard left for the crumbling royal manor of Woodstock, where he spent a couple of days hunting. On the 29th, he made the ten-mile journey west to Minster Lovell where, in a mark of special favour, he planned to lodge with his friend and chamberlain, Francis Lovell. That day, as the royal household’s carts and carriages rumbled through the Oxfordshire lanes, a messenger from London, riding frantically up the Thames valley, caught up with Richard’s slow-moving cavalcade.

  Amid widespread anxiety over the ‘human fate’ of Edward V and his brother, a group of conspirators had been arrested in London for plotting an ‘enterprise’, an attempt to break the two princes out of the Tower, which was to involve starting decoy fires in various locations in the city to distract officials. With around fifty conspirators involved, the plot had sprung leaks: the ringleaders had been detained before they could act. Reaching Minster Lovell, Richard wrote to his chancellor John Russell with orders to put them on trial.5

  Soon after, four men were convicted and executed. Two of them had been royal servants: Stephen Ireland, a wardrober in the Tower and John Smith, a groom in Edward IV’s stable. Their involvement was especially worrying. It suggested both that bigger, more powerful forces lurked behind the conspirators – John Smith’s former boss was John Cheyne, Edward IV’s master of the horse – and that, for all the apparent willingness of the late king’s servants to turn out for Richard’s coronation, loyalties had not transferred so smoothly to him after all. Moreover, the condemned men had been found guilty of planning to send letters to the English fugitives in Brittany. These messages were addressed not to Sir Edward Woodville, but to the long-exiled Henry Tudor and his uncle Jasper earl of Pembroke, the diehard Lancastrian who was a constant presence at his nephew’s side.6

  A few weeks before, Richard had sent Hutton to Brittany to unearth details of a possible Woodville-led plot. But the situation was changing fast. The charges against the London conspirators now made clear that they were seeking to bring on board the exiled Tudors in a move to restore Edward V to the throne of England. And the initiative for this new Woodville–Tudor partnership had come from Henry Tudor’s mother, wife to Richard’s steward Lord Stanley: Margaret Beaufort.

  Over the years, Margaret had worked hard to bring her exiled son in from the cold. Her most recent attempt, in June 1482, had seen Edward IV approve terms for Henry Tudor’s restoration to the king’s ‘grace and favour’. But, advised by his uncle Jasper – a man deeply sceptical of Yorkist gestures of conciliation – Tudor had stayed put in Brittany and the plans were shelved. After Richard seized the throne, Margaret revived them.

  Approaching the new king, Margaret proposed an idea that had been mooted some years previously: that her son should marry one of Edward IV’s daughters. Richard, it seemed, made equivocal noises.7 In any case, Margaret and Stanley, though willingly aligning themselves with Richard’s regime, were experienced political operators and used to hedging against all possible outcomes. Accordingly, Margaret also engaged with the other, disaffected, side of the newly fractured house of York, opening secret talks regarding the same marriage proposal with the girls’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville.

  Quite when the two noblewomen started talking was unclear, though Margaret may well have waited until Rich
ard was safely on progress before making contact with Elizabeth, who was still hunkered down in Westminster sanctuary. Their go-between was an eminent Welsh astrologer–mathematician named Lewis Caerleon, who, physician to both Margaret and Elizabeth, had the perfect cover, walking gravely past the unsuspecting guards Richard had posted around the sanctuary perimeter.

  That summer, communication between the two women blossomed into something more ambitious: regime change and the possibility of restoring Edward V to the throne and his mother’s family to power. Margaret had much to offer – if, that was, she could persuade her notoriously inscrutable husband to swing the might of his north-western forces behind a Woodville-led uprising, and if the exiled Tudors could exploit their contacts at the Breton court to raise funds and men for an invasion. For Margaret, too, the stakes were high. Henry Tudor’s marriage to one of Elizabeth Woodville’s daughters would tie him to the house of York. If that marriage produced children, they would then take their place in the Yorkist line of succession. It was an agreement rich in historical irony. In previous decades Lady Margaret’s cousins, the dukes of Somerset, finding themselves unable to live with Edward IV, had done their utmost to destroy him before being destroyed in turn. Now, the Beauforts promised to secure the future of Edward’s family line.

  In late July and early August, Margaret was a flickering presence in Woodville insurgency, in the plotters’ attempts to contact Henry Tudor and in the flight of her half-brother John Welles, who was apparently among the conspirators. Evading arrest, Welles eventually resurfaced among the exiles in Brittany.8 At this point, Margaret’s aim still seemed to be the restoration of her son to his earldom of Richmond – whose title and lands now belonged to Richard, a crucial node in his northern hegemony – and as a key figure in the restored regime of Edward V. But, in the following weeks, things changed.

  As Richard continued westward, he displayed the open-handed liberality and ostentatious piety demanded of a good prince. Determined to define himself against his late brother’s reign, with its increasingly creative and grasping efforts at fundraising, he graciously declined the customary corporate gifts of cash from the communities, towns and cities that he passed through. He left a trail of regal largesse in his wake: from Woodstock, where he regranted to the local community lands previously annexed by Edward; to the city of Gloucester, which he granted various liberties, with all the political and financial benefits they entailed; to Tewkesbury, where he repaid a long-standing debt of £310 owed by his brother Clarence to the abbey there.9 Meanwhile, he continued watchful. And the situation continued to escalate.

  By mid-August, events were tumbling over themselves. Amid reports of a desperate bid to smuggle Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s daughters out of Westminster sanctuary and out of the country – so that, as one chronicler put it, if anything happened to the princes in the Tower, the kingdom might ‘some day return to its rightful heirs’ – Richard reinforced security around the sanctuary’s perimeter, saturating the abbey and its precincts with troops under the command of one of his trusted northern servants, the Yorkshireman John Nesfield. The whole neighbourhood, said the same chronicler, ‘took on the appearance of a castle’.10

  In addition, Richard sent an urgent request for reinforcements. His demand for two thousand Welsh troops, to be dispatched to him ‘in all haste’, echoed his frantic summons to his northern supporters back in June. Shortly after, Richard sent orders to Buckingham – who had peeled off from the royal progress, to return to his own lands in Wales – to head a commission into treasons throughout southeast England. The threat of insurgency in support of Edward V seemed to be spreading outwards from London, leaching into the surrounding home counties as far afield as Kent and Oxfordshire: regions dominated by the late king’s household servants.11

  As the threat intensified, so too did the pressure on Richard. Since his brother’s death four months previously, he had responded to the newly uncertain world with a savage decision, fuelled by his craving for order and predictability, and his instinctive tendency to reach for extreme methods to impose it. That summer, as a nebulous opposition coalesced around the blameless figure of Edward V, Richard was perhaps reminded of his own formative years: of a time when there had been two kings of England, and of the chaos and bloodletting begotten by this divided royal authority. Now, with history set to repeat itself, it was hardly surprising if Richard just wanted the problem to go away.12

  During these last weeks of summer, as Richard’s household progressed regally through the east midlands, stopping off at Nottingham Castle, and on into south Yorkshire, talk spread that the young princes had been murdered. If, during the last couple of months, there had been whispers about the boys’ killing, now the rumours came in a torrent. In the absence of concrete information, stories proliferated. Buckingham, so one report had it, had egged Richard on, just as he had done from the moment Richard seized power at Stony Stratford. Later, Thomas More’s elaborate retelling had the constable of the Tower, Robert Brackenbury, refusing to carry out the orders, and Richard’s sidekick Sir James Tyrell – a man to whom he had for years delegated the most sensitive tasks – ordering two of the princes’ guards to kill them. These men were Miles Forest, a wardrobe keeper from Richard’s Durham fortress of Barnard Castle, who had probably made his way south with the king’s entourage and taken up a post in the Tower, and Tyrell’s own household servant John Dighton. Likewise, opinions varied as to how the princes had been murdered: smothered between feather mattresses, or drowned in malmsey (an echo, this, of Clarence’s killing), or injected with a ‘venomous poison’. Whatever the details, one dominant narrative soon established itself. The boys had been killed, and on Richard’s watch: ‘the people’, wrote one chronicler, ‘laid the blame only on him’.13

  As commentators acknowledged, whatever Richard had – or had not – actually done soon came to be irrelevant. It was the story, ‘common report’, which mattered; ‘hard it is to alter the natural disposition of one’s mind’, the same chronicler reflected, ‘and suddenly to extirp the thing therein settled by daily conversation’. Once people had made up their mind to believe something, in other words, it was all but impossible to make them change it. Unable to offer any positive proof of the princes’ continued survival, Richard lost control of the narrative.

  In Westminster sanctuary, an uncomprehending grief descended on the small Woodville establishment. Elizabeth Woodville’s misery was absolute. She passed out, then, when revived, was frenzied in her distress: crying, tearing her hair, her shouts of pain echoing throughout her lodgings, calling out the names of her disappeared sons. Finally, ‘after long lamentation’, her pain began to congeal into anger. She besought God for revenge.14

  Having lived through the violent upheavals of recent years, people weren’t easily shocked. But if, following Richard’s brutal assumption of power that spring, many in the Yorkist establishment had shuffled hesitatingly into line, widespread reports that the two blameless royal children had been killed while in his care convinced them that their initial misgivings had been right. Among the former household servants of Edward IV there remained a fierce allegiance to the memory of the late king and his two sons. That allegiance now acquired a new sharpness.

  Late that summer, Sir George Brown wrote a brief message to his nephew John Paston the younger. Brown was a Yorkist loyalist; his stepfather was the late king’s recently executed chamber treasurer Sir Thomas Vaughan. One of Edward IV’s close chamber servants, Brown had been knighted on the battlefield at Tewkesbury back in 1471; following the king’s death that April, he had carried the banner of St George at his funeral and was among the household men keeping watch over his body the night before its burial. Now, Brown’s message to Paston read, simply, ‘Loyalté Aymé. It shall never come out for me.’ Scrawling a variation on Richard III’s new royal motto, Brown dismissed it out of hand. There was no way that Richard’s idea of loyalty would work for Brown: he didn’t trust the new king an inch.15


  When rumours of the princes’ deaths reached Margaret Beaufort, still at her husband’s London house, she saw a new possibility. She made a fresh proposal to Elizabeth Woodville through the indefatigable Lewis Caerleon, who continued to carry messages between the two women ‘without any suspicion’. Now that Edward IV’s sons were assumed to be dead, a marriage between Henry Tudor and the widowed queen’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, offered both a new focus for the loyalties of disaffected Yorkists, and a different way for the heirs of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville to regain power.

  In his secret talks with Elizabeth Woodville, Caerleon spoke fluently and persuasively and, presumably, with exceptional sensitivity; going off script, he talked ‘off his own head’. Soon after, he walked unassumingly out of Westminster sanctuary having extracted a promise from the widowed queen that she would do everything she could ‘to procure all her husband King Edward’s friends’ to join forces in a conspiracy with Henry Tudor to ‘obtain the kingdom’ and, having done so, to make her daughter Elizabeth of York his queen.16 In the privacy of Westminster sanctuary, these two noblewomen and their Welsh middleman concocted an astonishing plan. In place of the missing princes, Henry Tudor, the fugitive Lancastrian son of Lady Margaret Beaufort, would become the heir to Edward IV and his dynastic line. The question now was whether those loyal to Edward IV and his heirs would accept it.

  The plotters moved fast, Margaret sending a messenger to Brittany to update Tudor. Meanwhile an intermediary, a ‘chief dealer’ between Margaret and the pro-Woodville Yorkists, was agreed on: Margaret’s receiver-general Reynold Bray, a nerveless, blunt-speaking midlander. Within a few days, Bray had made contact with sympathetic plotters across southern England: former servants of Edward IV including John Cheyne, George Brown and the Somerset knight Giles Daubeney, and friends of the Woodvilles like the Kentish Guildford family. Not long after, Bray received a message from the duke of Buckingham, now at his castle of Brecon in south Wales. Buckingham knew Bray, who had worked for the duke’s late uncle, Sir Henry Stafford – who had himself been Lady Margaret Beaufort’s third husband (before his death in 1471 and her marriage to Lord Stanley). It wasn’t, however, Buckingham who had instigated contact with Bray, but the man who was now the duke’s prisoner: John Morton.17