My Kingdom for a Horse

In game theory, the term ‘Hobbesian Trap’ is applied to a situation in which two groups, out of a fear that the other will attack them, begin a spiral of preventive violence that becomes self-fulfilling. Named after miserable seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, its most famous example is World War I. It is also what happened in 1483, following Edward’s death.

Thanks to Shakespeare, Richard III has gone down in history as one of the great villains of all time; besides perhaps King John, he is English history’s greatest monster. As the play recalls, Edward IV was succeeded by his son, Edward V, who was just twelve, but on his way to London his party was met by his uncle Richard, who insisted on taking the boy into his care, had him declared illegitimate, and made himself king. Edward and his ten-year-old brother Richard were then placed in the Tower of London for their [Dr. Evil quote-marks] ‘safekeeping’ and never seen again, presumably murdered.

Shakespeare was writing under the patronage of Elizabeth I, whose grandfather Henry VII overthrew Richard, so the Tudors wished to portray the last Plantagenet as a monster. And Shakespeare was not alone; one chronicler, John Rous, wrote during Henry VII’s reign that ‘Richard spent two whole years in his mother’s womb and came out with a full set of teeth and hair streaming to his shoulders.’ However, when Richard was alive, the same John Rous was writing glowing stuff about him, reporting that ‘at Woodstock … Richard graciously eased the sore hearts of the inhabitants’ by giving back common lands that had been taken by his brother and the king, offered money, and said he would rather have their hearts, reported Rous. Then, after Richard’s death, Rous wrote of the old king: ‘monster and tyrant, born under a hostile star and perishing like Antichrist.’

Shakespeare also implicates Richard in the killing of Somerset at St. Albans, when he was only two and a half. The playwright has him telling his father: ‘Heart, be wrathful still: Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill.’ So unless he was a real-life Stewie from Family Guy, we can assume this is not true.

Later, Richard, now aged seven, is seen persuading his father that it wouldn’t be wrong to attack Henry VI. He says:

I cannot rest

Until the white rose that I wear be dyed

Even in the lukewarm blood of Henry’s heart.

The real Richard was a sickly child who was not expected to survive into his second decade; one chronicler remarked on the York children that ‘Richard liveth yet.’ He was the twelfth of thirteen children born to Richard of York and Cecily, and the fourth and youngest son to reach adulthood; he strongly resembled his father in looks and, although not tall and athletic like his brothers, some say he was attractive: Katherine, ‘the old Countess of Desmond,’ who apparently lived to the age of 140 early in James I’s reign in the seventeenth century, claimed that as a girl she had danced with the Duke of Gloucester and ‘he was the handsomest man in the room except his brother Edward, and was very well made.’ Considering no one with modern health standards has lived anywhere near that age, she may possibly have been lying, just a bit.

And we now know that he did indeed have a curvature of the spine, which fitted in with Shakespeare’s idea of him as a hunchback. Although five feet, eight inches, slightly above average height, the abnormality would have meant a reduction of a foot when standing, with his right shoulder higher than his left.68 He also probably had a dry rasping cough because of roundworm, and a paranoid, uncomfortable manner; he fidgeted with his ring or the dagger on his belt, and chewed his lower lip when thinking. However, Thomas More said he could be merry and companionable.

Before 1483, Richard had been unwaveringly diligent and loyal to his brother, and as a result had become de facto ruler of the North. As a loyal administrator, he was so impressive that Edward named him lord protector in his will to look after the country until the new king was of age. Until his brother’s death, he was popular, but this may have given him a fatal overconfidence, which, added to his burning hatred of the Woodville family, proved disastrous. Richard III had quite a few good points, although these tend to be overshadowed by the murdering-his-nephews business; he was a good soldier and administrator, very courageous, bright, and decisive, and his lawmaking was generally very sensible. He was highly religious, and had a particular devotion to St. Julian the Hospitaller, a first-century saint who killed his parents; he had a prayer to Julian in his Book of Hours that ‘has a paranoiac quality,’ in the words of one historian;69 he was obsessed with the idea of disloyalty being all around him, and his motto was Loyaute me lie (loyalty binds me). Of Richard, being somewhat of the religious fanatic, More writes he posed ‘as a goodly continent prince, clean and continent of himself, sent out of heaven into this vicious world for the amendment of men’s mannes.’

Richard had spent some of his childhood in Yorkshire, and the Earl of Warwick was something of a father figure to him; he then married Warwick’s daughter Anne, gaining much of Warwick’s estate, and then, while aged nineteen, Richard had his widowed mother-in-law imprisoned in Middleham Castle, where she remained for the rest of her life. Richard and Anne had one son, born in 1476, called Edward, obviously. (Clarence also had a son called Edward and the stillborn boy whose death triggered his eventual insanity was called Richard.) The match said something of the incest of the time—as well as being brought up together, Richard was descended from Edward III through three different sons, his wife descended from him twice over.

When Edward IV died, the Woodville clan didn’t tell anyone for nine days, giving them time to put together their plans. The Woodvilles created a council, and Elizabeth’s brother Edward raised a fleet that people feared could be used against domestic enemies. Rivers had been put in charge of Prince Edward’s education, an obvious choice to help run the kingdom, being a scholar and sort-of mystic. References in declarations were made to the ‘uterine brother’ and ‘uterine uncle,’ while Richard of Gloucester was omitted. The coronation was set for May 4, after which the protector’s authority ended; once that happened, the Woodvilles were in charge, which could be bad for their enemies, of whom the family had many; chief of them was Hastings.

Edward IV’s will had demanded that Hastings make peace with the Marquess of Dorset, who was also married to Hastings’s stepdaughter, but they ‘maintained a deadly feud’ over mistresses and land, being rivals in the midlands. Hastings had already lost his post as chamberlain and was worried that the Woodvilles would get rid of him if and when they took power; their mutual antagonism would be their mutual downfall. And so Hastings contacted Gloucester and urged him to come to London to prevent a Woodville coup, informing him of the whereabouts of Rivers.

Richard was now also approached by Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, who had a deep grudge against the Woodvilles and who turned out to be one of the least attractive characters of the entire conflict. Buckingham’s father had been killed at St. Albans fighting for the king, and at the age of twelve he had become a ward of Elizabeth Woodville who married him to one of her numerous sisters, Catherine. Buckingham was therefore hugely resentful of the family.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester persuaded Rivers to wait for him so they could enter London together. They met on April 29 in Northamptonshire, where Gloucester, Buckingham, and Rivers had dinner in an inn, in a spirit of ‘cheerful and joyous countenance.’ However, the next day they were riding when Gloucester and Buckingham drew up and told Rivers and the queen’s son Richard Grey they were under arrest; they were sent north and locked up in Warwick’s old castle of Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire.

When he caught up with the king, Richard explained to his nephew that he had arrested them to protect him; the boy did not believe him and although aged only twelve, knew what he was up to, but he could do nothing. And so Edward V entered London with Richard and Buckingham on May 4, the date he was supposed to have been crowned by the Woodvilles. Croyland wrote: ‘With the consent and goodwill of all the lords, [Richard] was invested with power to order and forbid in every matter, just like another king. The king’s name now appeared on charters: ‘by the advise of oure derest oncle the duc of Gloucester, protectour and defensour of this our royalme during our yongage.’

Realizing the nightmare that was unfolding, Elizabeth Woodville fled to sanctuary in London with her younger son Richard, Duke of York, as well as her son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, and a brother, Lionel Woodville. Another sibling, Edward Woodville, escaped to Brittany.

However, the lord protector, as Richard had been styled, intended to go further than Hastings had planned. Lord Stanley had a terrifying nightmare on June 12 that a savage boar slashed his and Hastings’s heads with its tusks—a boar being Richard of Gloucester’s badge. Badly shaken, he sent a message to his friend saying they should escape from the city. Hastings wasn’t impressed, and replied: ‘Tell him it is plain witchcraft to believe in such dreams.’

On Friday, June 13, Hastings, Archbishop of York Thomas Rotherham, and John Morton, bishop of Ely, were summoned for a council meeting at the Tower of London. Sir Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s son, went to Hastings’s house to accompany him to the meeting, seemingly in a friendly, casual way; in fact, he had been sent by Richard to ensure Hastings went to his trap.

Richard joined the meeting at 9 a.m. then left and came back at 10:30 ‘with a sour and angry countenance’ demanding to know what the penalty should be for anyone planning ‘the destruction of me, being so near of blood to the king, and protector of this royal realm.’ Hastings replied that this would, of course, be treason. Richard then showed everyone his arm, which was deformed and withered, and which he blamed on Elizabeth Woodville, and armed men came running into the room. Mancini wrote: ‘Thereupon the soldiers, who had been stationed there by their lord, rushed in with the Duke of Buckingham, and cut down Hastings on the false pretext of treason; they arrested the others, whose life, it was presumed, was spared out of respect for religion and holy orders.’ Richard shouted ‘I arrest thee traitor’ at Hastings, a soldier attacked Stanley and he, Morton, and Rotherham were taken off. Hastings was immediately beheaded. ‘Thus fell Hastings, killed not by those enemies he had always feared, but by a friend whom he had never doubted,’ Mancini reflected.

After the execution, Richard did not attain Hastings’s widow or children, and none of them suffered financially, as was usually the case with traitors; he killed Hastings simply because he knew he would never back the next stage of his coup. Morton was imprisoned by Buckingham, while for some reason Stanley managed to escape punishment.

In another fateful move, on June 16 the archbishop of Canterbury convinced the queen to hand over her younger son Richard for the coronation ceremony. The following day the coronation was canceled.

Richard had maneuvered to have the king proclaimed illegitimate and instead claimed the throne for himself. A supportive theologian, Ralph Shaw, brother of the mayor of London, gave a sermon at St. Paul’s on June 22 in which he declared that Edward’s marriage to Woodville was illegal because he had been engaged to Lady Eleanor Butler, so making his children illegitimate. Richard’s sidekick Buckingham went even further by proclaiming that Edward IV was actually illegitimate because his mother had had an affair with an archer; Richard wasn’t so keen on that one, and the allegation was quickly dropped. A legal document was drawn up, Titulus Regius, justifying Gloucester’s claim to the throne on account of the Butler engagement; soon a group of leading men came to offer the crown to Richard who made a token objection before quickly accepting.

Richard’s coronation was a grand affair in which king and queen walked barefoot to Westminster Abbey, where they stood naked from the waist up as they were anointed, with crowns placed on their heads. Richard, it was noticed by a witness, had a ‘short and sour countenance’—a common theme—and looked around nervously during the ceremony. After forty-six courses were consumed at the banquet, the moralizing king had Edward’s former mistress Jane Shore clapped in irons for her iniquity and forced to make a walk of atonement through London, although it backfired as the mostly male crowd felt sorry for her. Shore, as a Freewoman of London, was also able to choose her prison—she went for Ludgate Gaol as it had nice big windows and friends were allowed to bring food.

Buckingham claimed in a speech that the late king had paid more attention to ‘Shore’s wife, a vile and abominable strumpet, than to all the lords in England except unto those that made her their protector.’ But everyone laughed at the authorities now being morally outraged by Edward’s infidelities, and More wrote sardonically: ‘And for this cause (as a goodly, continent prince, clean and faultless of himself, sent out of heaven into this vicious world for the amendment of men’s manners), he caused the bishop of London to put her to open penance.’ Richard, he wrote, ‘taught others to exercise just and good which he would not do himself.’70 As for Edward’s womanizing, ‘This fault not greatly grieved his people,’ it was recorded.

Richard III had, in fact, fathered two or three children outside of marriage, most precious being John of Pontefract, whom he knighted in 1483 and acknowledged as ‘our dear bastard son.’ The poor bastard was beheaded in 1499.71 Another, Katherine Plantagenet, married William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, one of Richard’s supporters. But they were conceived when Richard was a young bachelor and it was assumed a young aristocratic man would get a few women pregnant.

Richard now had Rivers executed, as well as several other leading nobles. In his final days, Anthony Woodville, the renaissance man, wore a hair shirt and wrote a poem, ‘a ‘death day ballad,’ which was ‘Somewhat musing, And more mourning.’ Mancini wrote of him: ‘However much he prospered, he never harmed anyone, while doing good to many. Lord Rivers was always considered a kind, serious and just man, and tested by every vicissitude of life.’

Later in the summer, King Richard committed the most monstrous crime, for which he is still best known, although much of it remains a mystery. Following the coronation, Edward, twelve, and his ten-year-old brother Richard were placed in the Tower and seen less and less; from July, they were spotted only occasionally and, after September 28, when they were once witnessed playing in the Tower, they were never seen again. At some point, they were moved to the inner Tower, and an Italian visitor noted that many thought they were dead and were too upset to talk about it. People clearly believed Richard to be responsible. In the fall, there was a plot to free the boys involving up to fifty London men; the conspirators were from humble backgrounds, and it seems to have been a spontaneous movement by ordinary Londoners in response to popular outrage at what Richard was doing. Four men were beheaded.

At an address to the Paris Estates General in January 1484, the chancellor of France mentioned that the English king had ‘done away with his nephews,’ and the French had denounced Richard taking the throne as ‘orgies of crime.’ This was certainly widely believed in England and Richard was hated as a result. The fact that he could not produce the boys when it was in his interest to do so suggests his guilt.

Yet despite this, various people still believe Richard to be innocent; in fact, of all historical figures, he has probably the largest personal following. The Richard III Society is bigger than that attached to any other individual monarch and has members as far away as Japan—even though he almost certainly did murder his young nephews. The Ricardian movement began in the early twentieth century, but its peak came after World War II with a biography by Paul Murray Kendall, and the 1951 detective novel, The Daughter of Time, in which a policeman manages to prove the king’s innocence; in fact, in 1984, Richard was tried by a TV show, which found him not guilty, and if history has taught us anything, it’s that trial by television works. Kendall suggested it was Buckingham, who had full access to the Tower, who was likely responsible and that he framed Richard. He also pointed to the fact that Henry VII made almost no effort to blame his predecessor for the princes’ deaths even though he had every incentive to do so.

Ricardians are especially popular in the North of England, where Richard was well liked throughout his reign. He was the only king to have been raised in the region and to have spoken with a northern English accent; by 1484, two-thirds of sheriffs south of the Thames and Severn were Northerners, perhaps the only time in English history they have ruled over the South.

One of the only intimates of Richard to survive his downfall was his henchman James Tyrell; he was literally a ‘henchman,’ which was then a particular title for someone who looked after horses, rather than a thick-skulled hoodlum with a Brooklyn accent who says ‘yeah boss.’ Tyrell was executed for treason in 1502, and before his death he confessed to the killings, so booking himself a place as a Shakespearean villain. Whether he actually did it, we’ll never know.

In 1674, workmen at the Tower dug up the skeletons of two children, and it was concluded they were those of the two princes; in July 1933, the urn was opened and dentists looked at their teeth, estimating that they were twelve to thirteen and ten, which would be consistent with their being murdered in 1483.

Dr. Morton had been placed in the custody of Buckingham, but in a strange twist, he now persuaded the Duke to rebel against the king. Buckingham was vain and foolish, and had dubious motives for turning against Richard; most likely he was stunned by how unpopular the new regime was and didn’t want to go down with it. Buckingham, aided by Dorset, aimed to launch simultaneous uprisings in Wales, East Anglia, and the Southeast, and there were numerous people involved in the plot, as Richard was by now widely hated, among them a previously obscure Lancastrian nobleman, Henry Tudor, and Thomas Nandike, ‘a ‘necromancer of Cambridge.’

The king was furious when he found out, and in his proclamation from Lincoln on October 11 he called Buckingham ‘the most untrue creature living whom with god’s grace we shall not be long till we will be in that part and subdue his malice.’ He denounced his enemies as ‘traitors, sorcerers, lechers, misers, and evil councillors.’ The proclamation against Dorset read that he ‘hath many and sundry maids, widows, and wives damnably and without shame devoured, deflowered and defiled’ while rebels were guilty of ‘the damnable maintenance of vices and sin as they had in times past, as to great displeasure of God and evil example of all Christian people.’

However, if Richard was a hated tyrant, then Buckingham was not exactly a national darling either, and he failed to get support from his own tenants because he was a ‘sore and hard-dealing man.’ After Richard proclaimed a pardon for any of the common soldiers who laid down their arms, it’s a sign of how unpopular Buckingham was that afterwards there were no Welsh names listed among those attained. The Duke of Buckingham’s army disappeared, and one of his men betrayed him when he pretended to be a laborer.

In fairness, it was also ruined by the weather, especially the rain, in a typically British way. He went from Brecon to Herefordshire, but rainstorms flooded the road and river crossings, making progress impossible. Buckingham anyway failed to rouse the people of Herefordshire and so fled to Shropshire to his servant Ralph Bannister, an old friend since childhood. Bannister, however, almost immediately sold him out, and the Duke was captured and taken to Salisbury. There, he confessed ‘without torture,’ begging for his life and losing all dignity in his terror-stricken last few days; he was beheaded on November 2, and his skeleton was later found under a pub called the Saracen’s Head many years later (in fact, it’s one of three places to claim his burial site).

The rebels were hunted down although many escaped, among them one Cornish knight, Sir Richard Edgcumbe, who made a dramatic escape; he was chased through woods near his home of Cotehele in the Tamar gorge, with Richard’s men close behind, ‘fast at his heels,’ when he found a big stone and put his cap on top, then rolled it over into the sea. With a big splash, his pursuers ‘looking down after the noise and seeing his cap swimming, thereon supposed that he had desperately drowned himself, gave over their further hunting.’72 Morton also managed to escape to the coast where he fled to the continent; Henry Tudor, having sailed from Brittany to Plymouth, spotted men on the coast who claimed to be Buckingham’s troops, but being suspicious, sailed off; wisely, as it was a trap.

In January 1484, there were Attainders against Richard’s growing list of enemies—Thomas Grey, Morton, Lionel Woodville, Peter Courtenay, bishop of Exeter, and Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort. Beaufort escaped too much trouble from Richard III because, as Vergil says, ‘the working of a woman’s wit was thought of small account’; she was also married to Lord Stanley, who was too powerful to alienate. Her income and estates were therefore given to her husband and he was ordered to keep her isolated somewhere secret where her son could not contact her.

Most of those captured were beheaded, although Sir Ralph Ashton, nicknamed ‘the Black Knight’ for his armor and ruthlessness, supposedly condemned his victims to be rolled down hills in barrels with spikes inside. Worst still awaited Sir William Collingbourne, who was arrested for writing a ditty that went: ‘The Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.’ Richard’s banner was a boar and the people of London called him ‘the Hog’ behind his back, and his cronies Francis Lovell, William Catesby, and Richard Ratcliffe were nicknamed the Dog, the Cat, and the Rat. Collingbourne, unfortunately, was also discovered to have been passing messages on behalf of Henry Tudor and so, unlike the other Buckingham rebels, was hanged, drawn, and quartered. He was almost dead from hanging, when he was hauled to his feet and thrown onto a table where his body was ‘straight cut down and ripped’ and castrated. The Great Chronicle of London wrote that the ‘torment … was so speedily done’ that he could look down as his executioner put his hand into his chest and pulled out his heart, at which point Collingbourne said the rather appropriate last words: ‘Jesus, Yet more trouble!’

However, with his enemies defeated, Richard enjoyed a brief moment of peaceful rule; he was a very moral man personally, apart from the various murders obviously, and devoted to both the Church and his wife; incredibly for this period, he didn’t even cheat on her. Despite—or perhaps because of—his huge unpopularity, Richard III was a sensible lawmaker, even if this was forced on him by his lack of legitimacy. Under his rule, he allowed each justice of the peace to grant bail to any felony. He outlawed forced loans. He exempted books from import duties, and ruled that every writer, printer, and bookbinder could do business ‘of whatever nation or country he may or shall be.’ There were laws protecting innocent men from predatory neighbors using perverted legal forms. Indictments brought by unqualified juries were declared void. In 1484, Parliament passed acts preventing an accused person’s goods being forfeit before they were convicted and banning the benevolences introduced by Edward IV.

However, he remained an unpopular tyrant and over 1484–5 Richard was issuing pardons freely in the desperate hope of winning over his enemies, among them John Morton, which was ignored. In total, five hundred men had fled to the continent after the Buckingham rebellion, where Henry Tudor now hosted a growing court of exiles around him, both Yorkists and Lancastrians. And so, in order to shore up his claim and unite this disparate group, on Christmas Day 1483 at Vannes Cathedral, Tudor swore to marry Edward’s daughter Elizabeth of York and end the war between Lancaster and York.