MARGARET BEAUFORT AND THOMAS, LORD STANLEY WERE AN effective partnership. At Lathom Castle in Lincolnshire Margaret assisted her husband in local arbitration awards. At court she helped him manage the below-stairs household concerned with mundane daily necessities such as providing food, drink, lighting and fuel, and which was part of his role as steward. He, in turn, ensured she took part in ceremonial occasions, even attending the christening of Edward IV’s children. Over the years their mutual respect and affection grew. Stanley liked to give her expensive fabrics and gowns in rich greens and elegant striped black damasks.1 She, in turn, would buy Stanley valuable books, such as the one with special prayers to protect him in battle and from plague, the deaths that had taken her previous husbands. But the chief purpose of the marriage for Margaret was that it opened up the possibility of the king’s favour for her son. Progress towards the pardon she longed for proved agonisingly slow, however.
It cannot have helped Margaret’s cause that the gentle, mad, Henry VI had come back to haunt King Edward in the guise of a popular saint. Edward IV had promulgated a belief that the defunct House of Lancaster had been cursed by their usurpation of Richard II, and that was why they were no more. But the dead king had come to be venerated, with rich and poor alike judging him to have been an innocent whose troubles gave him some insight into the difficulties of their own lives. Miracles were reported at the site of his modest grave in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey. A peasant claimed that Henry VI had even deigned to help him when he had a bean trapped in his ear, which popped out after he had prayed to the late king. People scribbled prayers to Henry VI in their Books of Hours, and painted images of him in their churches, while Edward tried, and failed, to put a halt to the growing cult.
Edward’s court was often an uncomfortable place for Margaret in other respects too. Once described as ‘the most splendid court . . . in all Christendom’, it was growing decadent.2 The strikingly handsome, young King Edward was now fat, and it was later claimed he not only ate vast amounts, he also liked to ‘take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more’. The same (hostile) source claims Edward showed similar incontinence when it came to sex, acquiring mistresses, married and unmarried, with ‘no discrimination’.3 Certainly there were mistresses, and vicious quarrels broke out between courtiers (sometimes over women), while Edward’s murderous streak took its toll within the royal family.
In 1475, Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, a descendant of Henry IV’s sister, ‘fell’ off an English ship in the Channel and drowned, reputedly on the king’s orders.4 The following year Edward IV almost succeeded in persuading Francis, Duke of Brittany, to return Henry Tudor to him, pretending he hoped to arrange a royal marriage for him. It was only because a Breton friend managed to convince Duke Francis that Henry still needed his protection, and remained a useful pawn, that his life was saved. The most shocking event came in 1478, when the king ordered the death of his own brother, George, Duke of Clarence, who had married Warwick the Kingmaker’s elder daughter. Later immortalised by Shakespeare as ‘false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence’, the silver-tongued duke had reconciled with Edward before the Battle of Barnet, but the brothers had begun quarrelling again. After a farcical trial for treason Clarence was executed in the Tower. The hard-drinking king may have thought the method a kindly one – he had Clarence drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine.5
It was a further four years, and Henry Tudor had already turned twenty-five, before Margaret’s determined efforts to appease Edward at last achieved a draft pardon for her son.6 Whether it would ever be signed was another matter. His stepfather, Stanley, later claimed that Edward IV had grown genuinely interested in arranging a marriage for Henry with one of his daughters. But there is no contemporary evidence for this. On the contrary, Edward offered Duke Francis of Brittany 4,000 archers in exchange for Henry and Jasper Tudor that same year.
Henry’s future remained very uncertain therefore, when, on 9 April 1483, the king died, aged only forty. He had suffered regular bouts of ‘an ague’, and his carousing had also taken its toll. In this weakened state he had succumbed to a cold he caught when out fishing.7 Margaret Beaufort’s efforts to cultivate the House of York would have to begin anew. But after the frustrations of the previous dozen years it was possible a genuine opportunity to help her son might appear and Margaret was determined that, if it did, she would seize it, whatever quarter it came from.
The day after the king’s death, Stanley and Edward IV’s other councillors acknowledged his twelve-year-old elder son as Edward V. The new king was at Ludlow with his maternal uncle, Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, when he received the news and learned he would be crowned on 4 May. Since Edward V was a minor, some had expected a Protector would rule England in the king’s name until he reached his majority. The immediate coronation meant that Edward V would instead rule alone, with the guidance of a council. His mother’s Woodville relatives, with whom he lived, were likely to be highly influential in deciding who those councillors were, a fact that was immediately resented by the Woodville family’s enemies.
Happily for the Woodvilles, the leading choice for Protector, Edward IV’s surviving brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, accepted the decision to crown Edward instead. A pious man who had always been loyal to the late king, he swore an oath of loyalty to his nephew promptly at York, where he was based. He also agreed to meet Edward V on his journey to London and accompany him on his formal entrance into the city. Richard was already expected, therefore, when he arrived at the meeting point at Stony Stratford on 30 April, his horse still sweating from the gallop.8
There was no sign in Richard of his brother’s decadent style of living. Thirty years old, he was a soldier, about five feet eight, with a wiry build, slender limbs, fine bones and dark features.9 It was claimed later in the century that his right shoulder was notably higher than his left, and indeed the body of Richard excavated in Leicester in 2012 has severe scoliosis (an S-shaped spine.) The Shakespearean legend of Richard’s hump may have originated in this, and certainly it would have reduced his height considerably, but it is worth recording that the sixteenth-century Tudor king Edward VI also had one shoulder higher than another, which was not perceived as a gross deformity.10
Riding with Richard and his substantial force of retainers was also the large, imposing figure of Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. He was a descendant of Thomas Woodstock, the younger brother of John of Gaunt, and the only other adult royal male in the kingdom.11 Edward V knew his maternal uncle, Lord Rivers, had left to have dinner with Richard and Buckingham at Northampton the night before, and it was surprising to see that he wasn’t with them. But an explanation would surely soon be forthcoming.
Richard and Buckingham dismounted and fell to their knees before the golden-haired boy, greeting the twelve-year-old with ‘mournful’ looks. They expressed profound sorrow at his father’s death. But then, to the boy’s astonishment, they began to speak angrily of corrupt councillors who had overthrown his father’s will, which they said had named Richard as Protector. They accused the same councillors of being responsible for his father’s death, in having encouraged him in his vices, and finally they warned the young king that both his life and Richard’s were in danger.
Edward V, described by one of his bishops as having ‘a ripe understanding, far passing the nature of his youth’, insisted vigorously his father had appointed his councillors for him, and that he had complete confidence in them, as well as ‘the peers of the realm and the queen’. At this mention of Elizabeth Woodville, Buckingham exploded: ‘it was not the business of women but of men to govern kingdoms, and so if he cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it’.12
Buckingham was said to have resented being married off aged eleven to one of Elizabeth Woodville’s low-born sisters, and he made it clear he viewed the Woodvilles as upstarts. He had been one of the first to contact Richard with his concerns about the power they were about to wield – but he was not alone. Another contact had been Edward IV’s best friend William, Lord Hastings, who had quarrelled previously with members of the Woodville family. Their letters to Richard have not survived, but it is possible they had suggested to Richard his life was in danger, as he claimed. History had seen Edward IV, Henry VI and Richard II all face dangers at the hands of their adult male heirs. The Woodvilles had reason to see Richard also as a possible threat to Edward V, while Richard had the death of his brother Clarence to consider. If one royal duke was easily disposed of, so might another be. At the very least his standing as a royal duke was threatened by a Woodville monopoly of power. It made sense, therefore, for Richard to take the role of Protector long enough to destroy the Woodvilles and gain the king’s trust.
There was shock in London when the news arrived that Richard had seized control of Edward V and that Lord Rivers had been arrested on charges of treason. Richard’s action appeared, however, to be directed only against the Woodvilles and people were given no reason to suppose that Edward V’s coronation would not go ahead. On 4 May, 400 citizens in mulberry gowns greeted the king on his official entry, and, dressed in blue velvet, he was escorted to the luxury of the Bishop’s Palace in St Paul’s Churchyard, where he was lodged. Richard, dressed in ‘coarse black cloth’ as a mark of mourning for his brother, was to stay nearby in Bishopsgate Street.13
With Elizabeth Woodville in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey along with her youngest son and five daughters, the situation remained tense, nevertheless. Richard issued a reassuring statement, rescheduling the coronation for Sunday 22 June. Events were, however, taking on a momentum that Richard may not have anticipated before he had seized the king. It was clear that Edward V did not accept that he was being rescued from evil councillors. The Woodvilles now had scores to settle with Richard, and when the king grew up, they would get their opportunity. How safe even was the future of Richard’s nine-year-old son? It was also valid to wonder if England might not be better off in the hands of an experienced, adult royal, than a child puppet of the upstart Woodvilles. But if Edward V was to be deposed Richard had first to overawe, or dispose of any diehard Edwardian loyalists.
On 10 June Richard wrote secretly to the City of York, summoning his northern supporters. He warned that the queen and her adherents planned to ‘murder and utterly destroy’ him and Buckingham, ‘the old Royal blood of this realm’.14 He then called a council meeting to take place at the Tower on Friday the 13th, ostensibly to discuss the coronation. Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Lord Stanley, and Edward IV’s former intimate, Lord Hastings, were amongst those present. According to a Tudor account, Stanley had slept badly. He told Hastings he had had a nightmare in which they were being gored in the face by a boar and blood was pouring over their shoulders. As everyone knew, Richard’s badge was the white boar. Hastings advised him to dismiss his fears.15 But barely had the meeting begun when it descended into violence. Hastings – who had been completely loyal to Edward – was arrested by Richard’s men, taken outside and beheaded on Tower Green. Stanley, who cut his forehead as he ducked under the table, was also arrested, but quickly released.
As a shaken Stanley returned home to Margaret, Richard ordered Elizabeth Woodville to hand over Edward V’s little brother, the Duke of York. He claimed the boy was needed to accompany the king for the coronation, which he still insisted was scheduled to go ahead. With the abbey surrounded, Elizabeth Woodville had little choice but to capitulate, and on 16 June the two princes were lodged in the royal apartments at the Tower. This was not imprisonment – at least not officially so. The Tower was a royal palace as well as a fortress, and this was where monarchs traditionally awaited their coronations. But the prospects for Edward V and his younger brother looked increasingly grim. Richard was now courting popularity riding through the capital dressed in regal purple and entertaining significant citizens to dinner.
There was no coronation on Sunday 22 June.16 Instead on the 25th the young king’s uncle, Lord Rivers, and his half-brother Richard Grey (a son of Elizabeth Woodville’s first marriage to a Lancastrian knight) were executed. The following day an assembly of lords and other notables, led by Buckingham, presented Richard with a petition urging him to accept the throne. The Bishop of Bath had come forward as a witness to claim that Edward IV had been contracted in marriage to another woman at the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville.17 Following this bigamous marriage, it was argued that Edward IV had fallen into further sin, ‘the order of all politic rule was perverted, the laws of God, and God’s Church, and also the laws of nature and of England’.18
With the ‘truth’ revealed about Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville his children were dismissed as illegitimate. The next in line was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the eight-year-old son of Richard’s elder brother, the executed Duke of Clarence.19 Here it was argued the boy was excluded from the line of succession by his father’s treason, since attainder or ‘corruption of blood’ deprived any traitor’s descendants of the right to inherit property from or through him. With some display of reluctance Richard accepted the petition and was proclaimed Richard III.20 Edward V’s coronation was cancelled indefinitely and his servants dismissed.
The deposed king’s doctor, who was amongst the last of his servants to leave his service, reported that Edward V was now ‘like a victim prepared for sacrifice . . . because he believed that death was facing him’.21 The fates of those monarchs deposed previously that century – Richard II and Henry VI – did not bode well for the princes. Nevertheless, the nine-year-old Duke of York remained innocent of the mortal danger they faced. A story related in Burgundy described him as ‘very joyous and witty’, ready for ‘frolics and dance’.22 It may have been the little duke who persuaded his older brother to play with him in the gardens of the Tower where they were spotted firing bows and arrows. In the streets men wept for them as ‘day by day they began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows till at length they ceased to appear altogether’.23
With the new coronation date set for 6 July no one moved against Richard. The men from the north had answered his summons and thousands were camped on Finsbury Field just outside London.24 But fear would not be enough to keep Richard on the throne. He needed support from the political elite – amongst them the powerful Lord Stanley, who was invited to an audience with the king on the eve of his coronation, along with his wife, Margaret Beaufort. She was anxious to resolve a financial dispute inherited from her mother. Richard was equally anxious to please the wife of a man who controlled large areas of the north. Tellingly, however, nothing was said of Henry Tudor.
According to a slightly later account, Margaret had approached Buckingham about a pardon for her son, reminding him that his father and grandfathers had fought in the Lancastrian cause. She had known Buckingham for years: her late husband, Sir Henry Stafford, had been his uncle. He had even met Henry Tudor as a small child. She hoped his friendship with Richard would enable him to persuade the king to bring Henry into the fold at last. But if that account is true, her hopes were disappointed and other later claims that Margaret had also hoped to persuade Richard to marry Henry off to one of Edward IV’s now illegitimate daughters are nonsensical. Why on earth would Richard have wished to ally them to the remnants of the Lancastrian house, and thereby empower both? There was no advantage to him in that, as Margaret would have known.
Margaret played a leading role at the coronation the following day, as she had in earlier Edwardian ceremonies. Dressed in six yards of scarlet velvet bordered with cloth of gold, she carried the train of Richard’s queen, Anne Neville, the widow of Edward of Lancaster, who was crowned alongside her husband.25 That night Margaret changed for the coronation banquet into blue velvet and crimson cloth of gold, and arrived with six attendants dressed in scarlet cloth. A great feast was produced, with delicacies brought from every corner of England: pheasant dressed with tail feathers trailing, sturgeon with fennel, exotic baked oranges and fritters flavoured with rose and jasmine. The dishes may well have been ordered earlier for the expected coronation of Edward V and, for many who attended, this feast was difficult to stomach. Although Richard had kept most of Edward IV’s former servants in their posts, there was tremendous anger over his usurpation of Edward V’s throne. Soon Margaret would find there was enough even to turn the powerless exile Henry Tudor into a leader, and revive the moribund Lancastrian cause.