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 who 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 was 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
On 4 May, the day of Edward V’s now-postponed coronation, the royal party rode into London, accompanied by the corporation’s reception committee, clad in Yorkist mulberry. Proclamations were shouted to the onlooking crowds. The young king and the nation had been rescued from a terrible fate and, to prove it, four cartloads of weapons were produced, confiscated from Anthony Woodville and his men, seeming proof positive of the intended ambush. As the procession wound through the streets to the bishop of London’s palace opposite St Paul’s, where Edward V would take up temporary residence, people saw that the royal retinues now also wore Richard’s boar badge.
With the young king securely lodged, Richard – who based himself at Crosby Place, a sumptuously modernized merchant’s house on Bishopsgate – convened a meeting of the council who, along with London’s mayor and aldermen, swore oaths of loyalty to Edward V. In the following days, people’s worries subsided. The way forward seemed clear: the young king, with uncle Richard at his side, was an arrangement that ‘promised best for future prosperity’. As Hastings, ‘bursting with joy’, put it to anybody who would listen, the transfer of power had been achieved with no killings and about as much blood spilt ‘as might have come from a cut finger’. This, he said, was how to bring about a ‘new world’. Two blood relatives of the queen – Anthony Woodville and Dorset – had simply been replaced in the king’s administration by ‘two nobles of the blood royal’, Richard and Buckingham.13
The council’s first piece of business was to confirm Richard as protector. As Richard started to govern, he did so with a reassuringly studied observance of protocol, seeking the council’s consent and goodwill in his decision-making. A revised date for Edward V’s coronation was quickly confirmed: it would take place on 22 June, with Parliament convening three days later to ratify the new order. Meanwhile the new order itself, as Hastings was stressing, looked very much like the old.14
There were a few notable exceptions. Head and shoulders above everybody else was Buckingham who, having been denied almost any power by Edward IV, was now deluged with favour by a grateful Richard. He was handed a staggering portfolio of land grants that together amounted to what was, more or less, an independent fiefdom in Wales and the Marches, regions recently controlled by the Woodville-dominated council of the prince of Wales. Indeed, the role of Buckingham – a constant, insistent presence at Richard’s shoulder ‘with his advice and resources’, as one commentator put it – seemed almost a power-sharing one.15 Catesby, meanwhile, was handed the chancellorship of the earldom of March, a powerful post that brought him further within Buckingham’s orbit. Others, from Yorkist veterans like John Howard to Richard’s childhood friend Francis Lovell, received a smattering of patronage; there were, too, a few minor reshuffles. By and large, though, the status quo was preserved. It had been the Woodvilles whose grasping ambitions had endangered the future of the Yorkist dynasty – or so the story now went. They had been neatly removed, no harm done.
To many besides the overjoyed Hastings, the message was clear. Richard was the continuity candidate, the keeper of his late brother’s flame, and clearly the most appropriate protector of his heir Edward V. When the question of the young king’s accommodation was raised, Buckingham’s proposal of the Tower met with a general nodding of heads. After all, it was the traditional pre-coronation venue, and it was secure. On Cheapside, people turned out to watch the boy being escorted to his new residence, enjoying the spectacle with a few drinks.
Nevertheless, there were plenty of loose ends. It quickly became clear that the late king’s finances were in something of a mess. If the general impression was that Edward IV had left a kingdom awash with cash, the reality was rather different: his treasury and coffers were found to contain some £1,200, plus a quantity of silver plate minted into coin and some dodgy currency. Factoring in anticipated incomings from his wool exports, the sale of one of the king’s jewels and some loans, the available liquidity came to around £6,040 2s 8d. None of which should have come as a surprise, given Edward’s two costly campaigns against Scotland and the extra annual expense now involved in the upkeep and garrisoning of Berwick, but for an administration facing immediate security challenges it was not an encouraging picture. Hastings had written immediately to his brother in Guisnes advising him that there was no extra money for reinforcements or wages: he should make do with what he had.16
Blame for the kingdom’s precarious finances was now placed squarely on the Woodvilles. The recent cash payments to Dorset and Sir Edward Woodville for naval protection of England’s southern coastline, authorized by the royal council, were construed as theft, the pair having absconded with Edward’s ‘immense treasure’. Judiciously, Dorset hadn’t hung around to argue his case. Sir Edward was already at sea. Richard monitored the fleet’s progress off the south coast, all the while removing Woodville-appointed officials from key coastal fortresses and replacing them with other men who, having served Edward IV, were happy enough to transfer their loyalties to the new regime. When Sir Edward’s ships materialized in Southampton Water, Richard’s men were waiting. His fleet captured, Woodville himself got away, fleeing with a pair of royal ships.17
After the first cautious days of his protectorship, Richard grew more aggressive, confident of the council’s backing. He ripped up Woodville networks by the roots. Moving onto their lands, Richard’s men turfed out their occupants with the flourish of official letters, confiscating all the moveable goods they could find and riffling through accounts and paperwork: among those annexing Anthony Woodville’s estates was a gratified Roger Wake.18 Nor did the extended Woodville family escape. In Kent, the manor of Ightham Mote was confiscated; its owner Sir Richard Haute, the queen’s cousin and a household official of the young king, had been among those arrested at Stony Stratford and sent north. With Richard’s escalating belligerence, however, came renewed tension. The council may have conceded the fact of his protectorship, but it wasn’t prepared to let him off the leash.
In the following weeks, concerns were raised in the council chamber about the impunity with which Richard was acting. Councillors expressed vocal anxiety about the well-being of his prisoners, currently detained without charge. They pointed out, too, that Richard didn’t seem particularly bothered about the queen’s ‘dignity and peace of mind’: in sanctuary, Elizabeth Woodville was already living hand to mouth.19
In response, an indignant Richard went on the offensive. He told the council that Anthony Woodville and his associates had plotted to murder him. The evidence was damning, and they were clearly guilty. He directed the council to convict them of treason.
The council debated Richard’s appeal at length before rejecting it. There was, it declared, no convincing case to be made – a polite way of saying that Richard had in fact provided no good evidence to support his accusations. Even if there had been evidence of a Woodville plot, the council added, it could not be construed as treason, for at that point the council had not yet invested Richard with the protectorship. It was a clever ruling. While not disputing Richard’s claim that the laws of treason should apply to him as protector, it was an implicit reminder to Richard of the temporary and conditional nature of his role. He was protector by authority of the council, and ultimate power rested with the council, not with him.20
Richard’s insistence on the death penalty for his opponents was the kind of move made all too often in the last few decades: seeking legal endorsement for what was essentially a political settling of scores. Richard was convinced of the Woodvilles’ guilt. But his demand also carried with it a hint of vulnerability and an awareness of the growing unease within the council. For the sake of unity it had been happy to sanction Richard’s initial seizure of power, but with young Edward’s coronation barely weeks away, there was an upswell of sympathy for the new king’s maternal family: it would not do for them to be in prison while he was crowned.
As Richard knew, such sympathy brought with it resentment against his rule. While they were still alive, the Woodvilles remained a threat. They needed to be permanently removed. But the council, packed full of experienced legal minds, had emphatically dismissed Richard’s case. Its judgment was perhaps influenced by the disconcertingly regal way Richard was now going about government. The consensus-driven approach of his first weeks in office had evaporated. Now, he was ‘commanding and forbidding in everything like another king’.21
Around this time the new chancellor John Russell, bishop of Lincoln, promoted by Richard from his post of privy seal, sat down to draft his opening sermon for the Parliament that would follow Edward V’s coronation.22 Typically, such orations set forth a monarch’s vision for government and it was striking quite how much the new king’s aims, as articulated in Russell’s sermon, now suited Richard. A masterpiece of radicalism dressed as conformity, it outlined a continuation and dramatic extension of Richard’s powers as protector – powers that Parliament was expected to endorse.
Russell opened by making all the right noises on political and financial reform. Reaching for an assortment of tried and tested ideas, his speech called for renewal and unity. He praised the nobility as the key to good government – islands of stability in the choppy seas that were the perpetually revolting commons – while at the same time reproving them for the self-interest that had been the source of so much trouble and ordering them to pull together ‘amiably’ for the sake of their new young king and the well-being of the country. There were a few sneery references to recent events. The ‘tempestuous Rivers’, which threatened to overwhelm the islands of the nobility, was a mouldy pun on the monopoly of favour enjoyed by the queen’s father at Edward IV’s court back in the late 1460s. Russell now dusted it off to deploy against the imprisoned Anthony Woodville – the current Earl Rivers – and the queen’s family more widely. It was a cheap gag but, Russell probably reasoned, it would raise a laugh. More crowd-pleasing metaphors followed. Acknowledging the heavy tax burden of recent years with a wry nod to Edward IV’s ballooning weight and greed, Russell noted that the belly of the body politic had ‘waxed great’. The new government would be lean, its fat trimmed. Taxes would be consumed in responsible moderation, and king and council would work hard to digest the ‘great and weighty matters’ with which the kingdom was confronted. All this was predictable and, to a nation concerned about both security and taxes, welcome.
At this point, Russell shifted focus. What great good fortune it was, he stated, that ‘during his years of tenderness’ the young king’s uncle Richard should be at hand to take on the role of his ‘tutor and protector’.
Clearly, Russell continued, Edward V wasn’t yet old enough to rule in person. Until he was, the best arrangement was for Richard to continue to wield power and authority on his behalf. Richard was an exemplary public servant, comparable to the Roman consul Lepidus in his disinterested loyalty to the common good. He possessed that rare combination of virtue and birth inherent in true nobility, as well as wisdom, experience and ‘martial cunning’: attributes from which the young king would benefit immensely as he learned how to rule. Of all the new Parliament’s business, Russell concluded, this confirmation of Richard in his role of protector was the most urgent and should be done immediately. It would bring enormous relief to the king who, in conclusion, Russell now ventriloquized: ‘Uncle’, the boy’s voice said, ‘I am glad to have you confirmed in this place to be my protector.’
The erudite cadences of Russell’s sermon could not conceal a dramatic departure from the plans agreed by the council following the late king’s death. Following Edward V’s coronation, Richard would not only continue in his role as protector; he would do so in an enhanced role. Russell was asking Parliament to vest unprecedented powers in Richard: both the ‘tutele’ or personal control of the king, and the protectorship of the realm. Precisely that combination of roles, in other words, which had been denied to Humphrey of Gloucester some sixty years previously, and which the council had explicitly withheld from Richard in the days after Edward IV’s death.23
There was more. If Richard’s credentials were impeccable, Russell stated, so was his lineage; indeed, he was ‘next in perfect age of the blood royal’. Some weeks before, in his letter to the council laying out his claim to the protectorship, Richard had sworn fealty to Edward V and, in the event of his death, to all his late brother’s offspring. Implicit in Russell’s comment, though, was a rather different definition of Richard’s position: should anything happen to the young king, Richard would be next in line to the throne.24
This was a sermon written under Richard’s close direction. It contained the distinct sense that Richard, increasingly uncomfortable about what would happen after Edward V’s coronation, was redefining his role, not simply as the young king’s protector, but – and here were shades of the Parliament of 1460, which had made his father Richard of York and his heirs next in line to Henry VI – as his successor.
The sermon carried a hint of Russell’s own discomfort. As he put it uneasily, he hoped that his proposals would have ‘such good and brief expedition in this high court of parliament as the ease of the people and the condition and the time requireth’. Very probably, he was expecting the opposite: that, at best, the plans would have a rocky ride through Parliament. In the end, he was spared the trouble. His speech would never be made.
On Monday 9 June, Simon Stallworth, an agent to the Oxfordshire knight Sir William Stonor, wrote from London to his master with an update on the political situation. Stonor, Dorset’s brother-in-law, was anxious for news. Stallworth, however, didn’t have much to tell him. The queen, her second son and their supporters – Dorset among them – continued to sit tight behind the heavily guarded walls of Westminster sanctuary, immune to Richard’s efforts to persuade them out; Dorset’s goods were still being seized wherever they were found. That day, a four-hour-long council meeting, headed by Richard and Buckingham and involving ‘all other lords’, had been held at Westminster – Edward V, still in the Tower, hadn’t been present – but, as usual, nobody had bothered to update Elizabeth Woodville on its business.25
For all that, Stallworth reported, London and Westminster buzzed with the ‘great business’ of preparing for the upcoming festivities: the sense of expectation was palpable. And at that point, he continued, Stonor would be in London himself for Edward V’s coronation, ‘and then shall you know all the world’.
If Russell’s draft sermon stressed that it would be business as usual for Richard’s protectorate following Edward V’s coronation, in public the atmosphere seemed different. Running through Stallworth’s comments was a sense of anticipated catharsis. The boy king would be brought out of the Tower, into the open – and then, things would change. This was what Elizabeth Woodville hoped. And what Richard feared.
The following day a messenger left Richard’s household at Crosby Place, rode out of London through Bishopsgate and headed north fast. A bruising military man from Cumberland in the far northwest, Richard Ratcliffe was one of Richard’s close councillors, his loyalty proven through years of service in the northern borderlands and on campaign in Scotland. Ratcliffe’s uncompromising reputation preceded him: in Thomas More’s pithy character assassination, he was ‘as far from pity as from all fear of God’. The messages Ratcliffe now carried with him, from Richard himself, were urgent, shocking and highly confidential. In them Richard called on his northern supporters, chief among them the earl of Northumberland, to raise an army and head south to London as rapidly as possible. One letter to the mayor and corporation of York, requesting as many armed men as they could provide, explained why.
The queen, her family and followers, Richard stated, were plotting to ‘murder and utterly destroy’ him and Buckingham, and ‘the old royal blood of this realm’. The threat, indeed, was more widespread even than this. The Woodvilles plotted the ‘final destruction and disinheritance’ of all other ‘inheritors and men of honour that belong to us’ – anybody of note, that was, who had any connection with Richard.26 Ratcliffe, the letter concluded, would communicate everything more fully by word of mouth.
These were sweeping allegations. Yet the letter to York’s corporation, at any rate, contained little that was new – or, indeed, concrete. From the outset, Richard’s seizure of power had been based on the threat of Woodville aggression, charges repeated constantly in the six weeks of his protectorate. Something had triggered his sudden, apparently panicked demand for military aid: the question was, what?
The letter mentioned the Woodvilles’ use of the ‘subtle and damnable’ practice of ‘forecasting’ – the use of astrology or witchcraft – to try to bring about the deaths of Richard and Buckingham. A serious charge, though as Richard admitted, it was already ‘openly known’, old news. Indeed, he may have been referring to the allegations of sorcery against Jacquetta and Elizabeth Woodville back in 1469: allegations which, despite having been dismissed by Parliament itself, had lingered in the popular memory.
But with most of the Woodville ringleaders in prison or on the run, the nature of the plot and the question of who was masterminding it remained unclear – at least, in Richard’s letters. Perhaps Ratcliffe, committing the names and details to memory, told the recipients in person.
On the morning of Friday 13 June, three days after Ratcliffe left for the north, several leading councillors made their way to the Tower for a council meeting summoned by Richard the day before. On his orders, the council had been split into two: one group, consisting of the majority of the lords – effectively a working party to discuss the coronation plans – was convening upriver in Westminster under Chancellor Russell; the other, at the Tower, would be chaired by Richard himself. As well as Hastings and Catesby, this second group included councillors who had been associated with the conciliar pushback of the previous weeks: men like Edward IV’s former chancellor Thomas Rotherham, John Morton and, a man who had never been entirely well disposed towards Richard, the late king’s household steward Thomas, Lord Stanley.27
As the councillors arrived at the Tower, Richard greeted them with pleasant small talk, asking Morton for some strawberries from the garden at his Holborn residence, which, Richard had heard, were particularly good. The doors of the council chamber were closed. The attendees took their seats around the council table and waited for Richard to speak.28
At first Richard said nothing but sat in his place looking increasingly agitated and chewing on his bottom lip, his characteristic nervous tic. An uncomfortable silence settled on the chamber. Then he started talking. He had, he told the assembled councillors, called the meeting for one specific reason: he wanted to show them in what ‘great danger of death’ he stood. In the last few days, he had been ill, unable to eat or drink, and had grown weak and short of breath: what was more, some of his body parts had begun to ‘fall away’. By way of proof he held out his arms, straight, in front of him: one was shorter than the other. This was the result of his scoliosis, which made his right shoulder slightly higher than his left – and it was a moment later seized on with relish by Tudor chroniclers. Richard then repeated the accusations he had made a few days before in the letters carried by Ratcliffe: Elizabeth Woodville was plotting, by witchcraft, ‘to destroy me, that am so near of blood unto the king’.29
For some moments, nobody said anything. Hastings broke the silence. If the queen was found guilty, he offered, she should certainly be punished. Richard replied sharply that he knew the queen had done it – evidence enough. Hastings unhesitatingly offered the same reply.
Suddenly Richard rounded on Hastings, shouting at him, banging on the table, accusing him of being a ringleader in the queen’s plot. It was the signal for a group of Richard’s men, stationed secretly in a room next door. They barged in, weapons drawn, and arrested Morton, Rotherham, the late king’s secretary Oliver King, Lord Stanley, who had narrowly avoided a flailing sword – wielded, probably, by his hostile north-western neighbour Robert Harrington in an opportunistic attempt to settle their long-standing feud – and Hastings. The men were marched out of the council chamber and detained separately in the Tower’s many cells. All except Hastings, who was forced outside to Tower Green, hastily shriven by a priest from the Tower chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, pushed to his knees and beheaded.30
In Richard’s eyes, Hastings had transformed from close supporter to existential threat. Over the past weeks, Richard had taken the temperature among certain influential councillors – men like Morton, Rotherham and Hastings – regarding the proposed extension of his protectorate, as laid out in Russell’s parliamentary sermon. These were men loyal to Edward V, the living continuation of Edward IV’s regime; men who, while acquiescing in Richard’s protectorate, had in recent weeks raised concerns about the way he was exercising power. Richard had been alarmed to find that these councillors habitually ‘foregathered together in each other’s houses’. He tried to find out what was being discussed. What apparently did for Hastings were private conversations with the man he regarded as being in his ‘special trust’ – William Catesby. In these conversations, Hastings reiterated his unyielding allegiance to Edward V and revealed his misgivings about Richard’s plans for power; he also gave the names of other councillors with similar concerns. Catesby dutifully reported everything back to Richard and Buckingham.
To Richard, Hastings’ intransigence was a source of extreme frustration. Hastings’ initial endorsement of Richard’s protectorate had been crucial in securing the backing of the old Yorkist establishment. But Hastings now unequivocally wanted Edward V to be crowned – which inevitably meant the ending of Richard’s protectorate and, in practice, some sort of accommodation with the Woodvilles. To Richard, such a scenario was unthinkable. Not only would it leave him open to counter-accusations from the Woodvilles, but the upcoming Parliament – whose business he was trying so hard to dictate – represented the perfect chance for his opponents to move against him. His sense of vulnerability was increased by the recent death of George Neville, the boy whose portion of the Warwick patrimony had been handed to Richard and had become the foundation of his northern power. With his passing, the male Neville line was extinguished – and so too were Richard’s hopes of passing the inheritance on to his own son. As decreed by Parliament back in 1475, when Richard died so too would his family’s ownership of the lands.31
The political situation was now very muddy. Richard, who more than most craved the certainty of a clearly ordered world, found what he perceived to be Hastings’ lack of loyalty confusing and overwhelming: so excruciatingly unbearable that he had to rid himself of Hastings as soon as possible. At Richard’s side, Buckingham was equally concerned. With hungry eyes on a portfolio of north midlands estates currently in Hastings’ possession, lands which he believed were his by right, he was emphatic in his belief that Hastings had to go.32
In attending the council meeting at the Tower that morning Hastings, like Anthony Woodville before him, had walked into a trap. He had, according to Thomas More, ignored the curious nature of the meeting itself, Lord Stanley’s repeated warnings not to attend and, on the way to the Tower, a handful of bad premonitions. But then, Hastings perhaps reasoned he had nothing to fear. After all, as he saw it he was not being disloyal to the protector, but faithful to the family that he had served for almost a quarter of a century.
Richard’s agents quickly arrested a go-between. John Forster, Elizabeth Woodville’s long-standing receiver-general, had been in regular contact with Elizabeth in sanctuary; he was also a close friend and colleague of both Hastings and Morton. Imprisoned in the Tower, Forster was kept without food and water for forty-eight hours until he signed over his profitable stewardship of the abbey of St Albans, held jointly with Hastings, to William Catesby.33
As news of the arrests spread, Richard sent a herald into the city to announce to anxious Londoners that a plot against the regime had been foiled: the conspirators had been arrested and their ringleader Hastings executed. The situation was under control. If there was shock at the murder and what it portended – especially among those who like the goldsmith Hugh Brice and London’s current mayor Edmund Shaw had been closest to Hastings and the old Yorkist establishment – people kept their thoughts to themselves. A city chronicler offered an explanation for Londoners’ subdued response. Despite their misgivings people simply refused to believe what was happening; there was, he wrote, ‘some hope’ that Richard had simply acted as ‘an avenger of treason and old wrongs’, not as a man with ambitions to seize the throne.34 For the next two days, it seemed as though this hope might be borne out. The preparations continued for Edward V’s coronation, now only a week away. Then, on 16 June, everything changed.
At Westminster that Monday morning boats disgorged a mass of Richard’s men, heavily armed, who deployed round the sanctuary, sealing it off. Through the sanctuary gates, heading for Elizabeth Woodville’s lodgings, came a knot of councillors, foremost among them Chancellor John Russell and the elderly figure of Cardinal Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury. Over the weekend, Richard had convinced the council that Edward V’s nine-year-old brother should be present at the coronation. A man practised at smoothing out the knottiest of situations – over two decades before, he had confronted a glowering Richard of York, talking him down from claiming the throne – Bourchier had been deputed to persuade Elizabeth Woodville to hand over her second son. Wisely, Richard and Buckingham had stayed behind in Westminster Palace.
Talking through things with the queen, Bourchier was all persuasive reassurance. It wasn’t right, he told Elizabeth, that the young prince should be absent from Edward V’s coronation. It looked improper and besides, the young king wanted his brother at his side, for comfort. Elizabeth should release the boy: he would play a full and honourable part in the ceremonies and would then be returned to her afterwards. Besides, if Elizabeth refused, Richard’s troops would come and take the prince by force. Elizabeth agreed.35
Bourchier led the boy out of sanctuary and across Westminster Palace Yard to Richard and Buckingham, waiting in the doorway of the council chamber. Greeting his nephew with ‘many loving words’, Richard helped him onto a waiting boat that ferried him downstream to the Tower, now under the command of one of Richard’s household servants, the Durham man Robert Brackenbury.36 With both Edward IV’s sons in his custody, Richard made his move.
Later that day, he ordered Edward V’s coronation to be postponed until 9 November, almost five months distant. Parliament was cancelled. The next day, London’s mayor and aldermen announced the return of monies collected for the king’s coronation gift to their donors; in Westminster, a chancery clerk processed the appointment of three men to provide meat for the king’s household in the Tower. These were to be the last official mentions of Edward V’s reign.
Soon, the workings of government started to betray tell-tale signs of regime change. Officials, uncertain of Edward V’s authority, dated documents by the year of grace rather than the regnal year – or, increasingly, did nothing. Business ground to a halt.37
Across the city at Crosby Place, Richard kept ostentatious open house. In the following days, he issued a proclamation calling men to join him – ‘his highness’, now – in London, and publicly broadcast his accusations against the Woodvilles, who had tried to destroy his ‘royal person’. Replacing his mourning black with purple robes, he went on procession through the London streets with a thousand horsemen. Londoners were unimpressed: he was ‘scarcely watched by anybody’. Anticipating unrest, the city corporation ordered companies of militia onto the streets, detachments stationed on Cheapside and Cornhill.38
The following Saturday, the 21st, Simon Stallworth wrote again to Sir William Stonor, a letter markedly different in tone to the one he had written less than two weeks previously. Running through the sequence of events triggered by Hastings’ beheading, he reported ‘much trouble’ and a general sense of unease: ‘every man doubts other’. Londoners were anxious about the imminent arrival of Richard’s northern armies. There was general uncertainty, too, over the fate of John Morton and the other detained councillors, still in the Tower: ‘I suppose they shall come out nonetheless’, Stallworth wrote, then paused and drew a line through the sentence. He mentioned, too, the arrests of ‘Foster’ – John Forster – and ‘Mistress Shore’, Edward IV’s former mistress Jane Shore, who was also rumoured to have been in relationships with Hastings and his enemy Dorset. Then, Stallworth signed off, shakily: ‘I am so sick I may well not hold my pen.’39
On the morning of Sunday 22 June, Edward V’s cancelled coronation day, a huge crowd comprising Richard, Buckingham, several more lords and their retainers and hangers-on gathered at Paul’s Cross to hear a sermon by the Cambridge theologian Ralph Shaw. Brother to London’s mayor, Ralph was an eloquent and popular speaker; people hung on his words, which was why he had now been chosen to deliver the bombshell that everyone had, consciously or otherwise, been anticipating. Taking as his theme a verse from the Book of Wisdom, Spuria vitulamina non agent radices altas – in Thomas More’s forceful translation, ‘bastard slips shall never take deep root’ – Shaw proclaimed that Edward V was not the real king of England after all.
Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, Shaw elaborated, had been found to be bigamous. When the pair were wed, back in the spring of 1464, Edward had failed to disclose that he had already signed a precontract of marriage with another woman – which meant that Elizabeth was no lawful queen and, consequently, that her children were bastards. There was more. Edward IV himself was illegitimate. Back in 1441, while Richard of York was away at the front, valiantly trying to hold back the French advance through Normandy, his wife Cecily was sleeping around. Edward had been the result. You could tell Edward was a bastard, Shaw explained, because – a strapping, strawberry-blonde six-footer – he looked nothing like his father. Neither, for that matter, did Clarence. Richard, on the other hand, ‘little’ and dark, did.
There was little that was new about Shaw’s sermon. The rumours around Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage, and indeed Edward’s own illegitimacy, stemmed from the bloody summer of 1469: then, on top of his allegations of sorcery against Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta, the earl of Warwick had written to the French king Louis XI declaring Edward a bastard. The letter’s contents had circulated widely, on the international stage at least, and had taken root. Six years later, following Edward’s aborted invasion of France, an irate Charles the Bold had started calling him ‘Blaybourne’, after the name of Cecily’s alleged lover. Clarence had apparently tried to fan the flames in the last fevered year of his quarrel with Edward. Then, with his death, the rumours had gone cold. Now, Richard blew life back into them: blazing up, they acquired a new ferocity, fuelled by Richard’s resolute belief in the illegitimacy of Edward’s offspring.
In churches throughout the city congregations listened agog to their parish priests, relaying Shaw’s allegations in their Sunday sermons. People were equally titillated and appalled. One bystander echoed a prevailing view when he fumed that such preachers were both irresponsible and immoral in equal measure: ‘they should have blushed’. What was more, in alleging Edward IV’s bastardy, the preachers – their words tacitly endorsed by the new regime – were accusing Cecily duchess of York, the family’s matriarch, of adultery. In indulging these stories, Richard seemed perfectly happy to dishonour his own mother.40
Another uncomfortable parallel perhaps occurred to those long enough in the tooth to remember. Back in 1461 Edward IV’s inauguration ceremonies, masterminded by George Neville, had contrasted the ‘unnatural’, illegitimate Lancastrian line with the purity of York. Richard was now doing much the same to define himself against his late brother and his brother’s children.
It was now the height of summer. On St John’s Eve, crowds turned out for the Midsummer Watch, the annual civic display of military might that saw two thousand heavily armed militiamen parading through London’s streets, accompanied by a battery of drummers and fifemen, armour gleaming in the torches and bonfires that illuminated the city – a procession put on for the ‘honour of the king’. Amid the ‘neighbourly drinking’ and the children running loose with wooden spears and blunted swords, people now knew who England’s new king was going to be.41
The following day, the duke of Buckingham arrived at the Guildhall to set out Richard’s right to the throne and reassure the concerned corporation. All sweet reasonableness, his face an ‘angelic mask’, Buckingham again laid out the evidence for the illegitimacy of Edward IV and his children before turning to the truly noble qualities that, besides his untainted royal blood, made Richard undeniably England’s king. First and foremost were his ‘blameless morals’ – here, Buckingham glossed over the fact of Richard’s own bastard children, John, now in his teens, and Katherine – which were a ‘sure guarantee’ of the order and good government he would bring to the realm.42 Then there was Richard’s liberality, which Buckingham was in no doubt would come as a relief to London’s business leaders after years of Edward’s ‘insatiable covetise’. The new regime, Buckingham implied, would be strongly inclined to treat the city’s mercantile and financial affairs with a much lighter touch.
Buckingham’s thirty-minute peroration was a masterpiece in public relations and rhetorical skill: even its pauses, noted one chronicler, were perfectly judged. But when he had finished, there was silence among the assembled Londoners. Then, suddenly uproar. Among the crowd, a group of men led by Richard’s household servant John Nesfield shouted: ‘King Richard, King Richard’, flinging their caps in the air in stage-managed spontaneity in an effort to coax acclamation out of the uncertain corporation.43
Richard now moved against his political opponents. Thomas marquis of Dorset, in Westminster sanctuary with his mother Elizabeth Woodville, knew what was coming. He fled and, eluding a manhunt with ‘troops and dogs’, went to ground. Meanwhile, two hundred miles north at Pontefract Castle, Richard’s urgently summoned forces were ready to march south under the command of Northumberland and Richard Ratcliffe. Before they did so, a brief, vicious ritual took place. Freed from the constraints of Edward V’s council, Richard had sent orders for the immediate execution of Anthony Woodville, Sir Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan.44
Even in the most excessive of Edward IV’s treason trials, there had always been a veneer of due process, a sense that the judgment handed down ‘belongeth after the law’, as John Tiptoft had once put it: a sentiment that found its most extreme expression in the horrifying parody of a trial that was Clarence’s judicial murder. Richard was a man intimately acquainted with the law of treason. Yet as Thomas More put it – and whatever More’s politics, he knew his law – Woodville and his fellow prisoners were condemned ‘hastily, without judgement, process or manner of order’. When it came to ridding himself of knotty problems, Richard was making a habit of putting necessity first and law a distant second. It was a way of operating that resembled not so much Edward IV, but both brothers’ one-time mentor, Richard earl of Warwick.
As they stood in the open air, awaiting their turn to kneel and put their heads on the block, Woodville and his friends were reportedly denied the chance even to say a few last words in their defence. A man whose pious obsession with mortality was more pronounced than most, Woodville had, along with his last will and testament, left behind a poem in which he reconciled himself to what he knew what was coming. ‘Such is my dance’, he shrugged, ‘Willing to die.’45
With Richard’s coronation scheduled for 6 July, the search for legitimation and unity found expression in the inauguration rites that, for all his disavowal of his brother’s reign, Richard had repurposed from Edward IV’s equally confected accession ceremonies of April 1461. On 26 June, at the family’s Thames-side home of Baynard’s Castle, a group of lords, gentlemen and leading London citizens – representatives, so Richard asserted, of the ‘lords spiritual and temporal and the commons of this land’ – looked on as Buckingham presented Richard with a petition setting out his claim to the throne and, on the assembled group’s behalf, formally requested him to take the crown.46 After a dramatic, overlong pause, Richard assented. Next, accompanied by Buckingham and the other petitioners Richard rode in state, sword borne before him, to Westminster Hall. Swathed in royal robes, sceptre in hand, he walked through the crowds, up the half-dozen steps to the marble chair of King’s Bench, where, just as his brother had done, he sat and announced that he would begin to reign, as Richard III.
Following the usual formulas, Richard promised to rule on behalf of all his subjects, and to be a just and impartial lawgiver. To maintain the rule of law, he told the assembled crowd in a ‘pleasant oration’, was the king’s foremost duty. He wanted to heal divisions and unify the country, to which end he would ‘pardon all offences against him’. Following his peroration the long-standing Yorkist servant Sir John Fogge – one of the Woodvilles’ close associates, who had been extracted from his bolthole in Westminster sanctuary – was led in front of the new king. Richard clasped his hand, a public welcome back into the political fold.47
In all this, Richard was at pains to paint himself as Edward IV’s natural successor. The allegations of his brother’s bastardy – so loudly trumpeted in recent days – were now quietly dropped from the official narrative. As quickly as he had been erased from the Yorkist line, Edward IV was painted back in, Richard embracing the memory of ‘our dearest brother, late king of England’. Now that the lineal aberration of Edward’s sons had been excised, his family’s line could continue on its serene, ordained path.48 In turn, all those former servants of Edward IV could be assured of Richard’s favour. If any of these men, who had naturally – but, as it turned out, mistakenly – transferred their loyalties to Edward V, were worried about what Hastings’ execution meant for their own relationship with the new regime, Richard wanted to set those worries at ease. His conciliatory handshake with Fogge spoke volumes. Bygones could now be bygones.
A more than usual sense of his royal mission suffused the new king’s pronouncements and paperwork. Beside him in Westminster Hall sat John Howard, rewarded for his loyalty to Richard with the dukedom of Norfolk that he had quietly craved and which Edward IV had denied him. The royal charter enshrining Howard’s title was exaggeratedly loquacious. God’s eternal radiance shone upon ‘those who share in his goodness’, it pronounced, and Richard III was one of those fortunate creatures. Irradiated by God’s ‘grace and liberality’, he was determined to reward Howard, the most noble and deserving of his subjects.49 Indeed, Richard had been sent by God for the benefit of all England. He would be a perfect king: obedient to the law, he would rule in accordance with all the virtues – or, as the catch-all term had it, to ‘loyaute’. It was a commitment that Richard wore publicly in a new royal motto, ‘loyaute me lie’: ‘loyalty binds me’. His God-given virtues would transmute into a tireless commitment to the common good, and to bringing peace, order, unity and prosperity to England.50
The bewildering reality was rather different. In Calais, Hastings’ erstwhile deputy John, Lord Dinham – a man who, back in 1459, had helped Edward and Warwick, on the run from Lancastrian forces, escape England to Calais and who had remained staunchly loyal ever since – wrote to Richard for clarification of the new order of things. Could he explain, Dinham asked bluntly, how the new oaths he was now being asked to swear to Richard squared with the oaths he had already made to Edward V? Even though they might not have risked Dinham’s tactlessness, across the country people were asking themselves the same question.51
In the following days, the new regime started to take shape. As royal favour was redistributed, Buckingham was naturally first in the queue. To go with the grants Richard had already made him, the duke was handed a slew of high offices, including the constableship of England, an assortment of posts previously held by Hastings, as well as a substantial portfolio of duchy of Lancaster lands, which he had long claimed but had been denied him by Edward IV. Together with his coveted dukedom of Norfolk, John Howard was given a swathe of estates through East Anglia, turning him into Richard’s point man in the region, and made admiral of England; his eldest son Thomas Howard, a pugnacious forty-year-old, was made earl of Surrey.52
That, though, was more or less it. With the emphasis firmly on continuity, there wasn’t a great deal of new patronage to go around. Richard’s childhood friend Francis Lovell was given Hastings’ old post of chamberlain; Richard’s trusted servant Robert Brackenbury was confirmed in the key role of constable of the Tower. Besides that, the changes were minimal – with one further exception.
William Catesby was made chancellor of the Exchequer, an esquire of the body in Richard’s household and a member of the king’s council; along with these posts, he was given offices and lands in his native Northamptonshire, all of which had been held by his former boss, the man he had betrayed, Lord Hastings.53 Catesby’s meteoric rise from mere lawyer to one of the key architects of the new regime spoke volumes for the critical role he had played in the seismic events of previous weeks, one that had earned him both Buckingham’s and Richard’s intimate confidence and trust.
Some way down the food chain of favour, Catesby’s Northamptonshire connections received substantial rewards for their part in the rise of the new regime. Prominent among them were the Wake family. Both Roger and his brother William were given lands from Anthony Woodville’s confiscated estates. It was, though, their half-brother John who did best. He was made a gentleman usher of the king’s chamber, an influential and confidential post that involved him being constantly in Richard’s presence and supervising the smooth functioning of the chamber, from the drawing up of servants’ rotas to the greeting of noblemen and diplomats. What made Richard single out John Wake in this way was unclear, though he was, it seemed, especially close to Catesby. Perhaps it had something to do with John’s parentage.
John Wake had been the product of his father’s second marriage to the earl of Warwick’s troubled young kinswoman Margaret Lucy; his birth, indeed, may well have resulted in her death, aged twenty-eight, in August 1466. During her short chaotic life Margaret, who clearly had something about her, had been constantly harassed by men. After her first husband was killed by her lover at the battle of Northampton, she was stalked for years by an Oxfordshire lawyer, Thomas Danvers. Convinced that he had made a marriage contract with Margaret, which she strongly denied, Danvers had launched legal proceedings against her and, during the notorious court case that followed, spread noxious, defamatory and highly upsetting rumours about her. Around this time, with the intervention of the earl of Warwick, she married his follower Thomas Wake instead.54
Years later, Thomas More wrote that Margaret Lucy had been one of Edward IV’s mistresses and had borne him a child. The story was hazy: More couldn’t even get her name right, calling her ‘Dame Elizabeth Lucy’. But in other circumstantial respects it made sense. A young, attractive, vulnerable widow throwing herself on the king’s mercy, Margaret Lucy was Edward’s type; moreover, she could conceivably have been the young woman in Warwick’s household that Edward, while staying there, had impregnated some two decades previously, to the earl’s fury.
Now, in June 1483, Richard’s claim to the throne had focused on proving the invalidity of Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, and the corresponding bastardy of their children. Various stories of marriage precontracts were floating around and, as Richard sought to build a case against his late brother, it was possible that the identity of John Wake’s mother acquired a fresh significance. Richard’s exceptionally generous treatment of Wake was undoubtedly down to the service he had already done Richard, and his own excellent connections. But it might also have helped that, when need arose, Wake could tell anybody who cared to listen the story of how his mother was once exploited mercilessly by the late king of England.
Under the direction of Buckingham and Howard, the plans for Richard’s coronation were drawn up. On 27 June, the keeper of the Great Wardrobe, Piers Curteys, reconfirmed in his post by the new regime, signed indentures for work to be completed by 3 July – which, even though he was largely repurposing the work done for the cancelled ceremonies of Edward V, still gave him barely six days to deliver his contract. Artists painted flags, trumpet banners and heralds’ coats-of-arms with brightly coloured oils, fabric setting stiff as the paint dried thick; embroiderers fringed, corded and ‘powdered’ jackets, robes, banners and hangings with finely worked motifs and badges. Some of the work was outsourced to suppliers, from the London haberdasher Thomas Sunnyff, who produced thirteen black bonnets, and the merchant William Melbourne, supplying 13,000 cloth boars, Richard’s badge, to be stitched onto uniforms and handed out; to the Lucchese Ludovico Bonvisi, who supplied fine gold-woven damasks and ‘baudekin’, the silk brocade named after Baghdad, its place of origin.55
Also specified in Curteys’ indentures was the customary list of ‘liveries’: the distribution of fine textiles and clothes to all those attending the coronation, guests and servants alike. Compiled by Richard in consultation with ‘the lords of his most honourable council’ and drawn up with acute attention to fine gradations of rank, it also evinced solicitude for Edward IV and Elizabeth’s recently bastardized children. The three-year-old Bridget, sick and unable to attend the ceremony, was supplied with down-stuffed pillows and pillowcases of fine Holland cloth. Another of their offspring, though, was named among the honoured guests: the recently deposed Edward V, now styled ‘lord Edward, son of late King Edward the Fourth’.
The clothes to be supplied to ‘lord Edward’ were opulent and extensive, virtually a new wardrobe in itself: eight gowns, each made of various colours of damask, velvet and satin; and a variety of eye-catching accessories, including thirteen bonnets, five hats, six pairs of gloves and seven pairs of shoes made of the softest Spanish leather. His place in the royal procession was indicated by the two pairs of gold spurs provided, and the nine horse harnesses of velvet and silk, garnished with buttons of Venetian gold. He was to be accompanied by seven henchmen, close servants, dressed in black doublets and gowns of quartered green and white.56
Less than a week before the pre-coronation ceremonies were due to start, Richard and his advisers were working on the assumption that the attendance of ‘lord Edward’ would symbolize the new spirit of unity which the new regime aimed to engender. His presence at the rites would be the most powerful, most persuasive symbol of all. If he was prepared to acknowledge Richard III as king, so too, it was clearly hoped, would all those whose loyalties still lay with Edward IV’s children.
Nevertheless, Richard was taking no chances. Security around the forthcoming ceremonies would be exceptionally tight. In the first days of July, his northern forces, some four thousand men under the command of the earl of Northumberland and Richard Ratcliffe, arrived in the capital: Richard greeted them bareheaded as a sign of respect. The troops’ presence had the desired effect. Helmeted, heavily armed men, they seemed to some to possess superhuman strength, ‘with hands and arms of iron’ – although, muttered one Londoner disparagingly, they were ‘very evil apparelled’, fitted out in rusty and ill-maintained armour. As Richard imposed a 10 p.m. curfew and banned the carrying of unlicensed weapons, his men took up positions throughout the city and its suburbs, detachments stationed at crossroads, gates and other strategic points ‘for safeguard of the king’s person’. If anybody tried anything, Richard was prepared.57
Early on the morning of 6 July Richard and his wife, Anne Neville, emerged from Westminster Hall. Visions in crimson cloth-of-gold, their trains borne respectively by Buckingham and Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond, they walked barefoot along a path of red cloth to the adjacent abbey, their approach heralded by blaring trumpets and a train of clerics, noblemen, knights and civic representatives, the crowds held back by heavy security. Entering the packed abbey, its interior swathed in rich cloth, they climbed the steps to the specially constructed stage where their thrones awaited them. There, they were anointed and crowned, Archbishop Bourchier setting St Edward’s crown on Richard’s head with a murmured ‘coronet te deus’, just as he had done with Edward IV, in the same spot, almost exactly twenty-two years before.58 Richard recited the ancient coronation oaths with fervour. Wanting all his subjects to know what they could expect from him, he had the oaths translated into English, for the first time.59 Characteristically, Richard was obsessed with these ideals of good government: during his reign, he would return to the oaths again and again.
That afternoon, the guests filed through Westminster Yard, its conduits running with red wine, and into the hall for the wedding feast. Running the length of the cavernous space were four tables, the seating plan done, as customary, according to strict precedence. At 4 p.m., England’s new king and queen were announced. Richard and Anne took their places at King’s Bench, now transformed into a banqueting table, on their left a sideboard glinting with gold plate; with servants hovering attentively, the ceremonies were directed from his horse by John Howard, revelling in his new place in the regime. The feast unfolded in a succession of extravagant dishes paraded triumphantly through the hall, the arrival of each course announced by a phalanx of thirty trumpeters. Richard accepted the obeisance of the king’s champion Robert Dymmock and, in response to the heralds’ customary shouts of largesse, tipped them extravagantly. In between courses, as minstrels played, he chatted attentively with guests, a picture of gracious, regal informality. The royal socializing went on late into the evening; a ‘void’ of ‘wafers and hippocras’ – sweet cakes and spiced wine – signalled the end of the feast.
In the gathering darkness, a stream of servants bearing flaming torches processed into the hall. The assembled lords rose and, one by one, filed past Richard making obeisance. Then the party broke up into the July night, guests making their torchlit ways ‘where it liked them best’: Richard and Anne, surrounded by a cluster of lords, into the palace and their apartments; London’s dignitaries through Westminster’s silent streets, following the curve of the river east, back to the silent, curfewed city.60
That evening, in the privacy of his chamber, Richard perhaps reflected that things had gone as well as they possibly could have done. The guest list had been a reflection of the Yorkist unity towards which he aspired. There had been a few obvious absences. Elizabeth Woodville had refused to emerge from sanctuary; her sister Katherine, Buckingham’s long-suffering wife, wasn’t invited – though this was probably more a reflection of their sullen marriage than anything political. Others, like John Morton, sent far from London to Buckingham’s secure Welsh castle of Brecon, were behind bars.61 But more or less all England’s nobles had been present, along with seventy knights. The vast majority of his brother’s men had become Richard’s own: from the late king’s éminence grise Sir Thomas Montgomery, to Sir George Brown and Sir William Parr, Edward’s former master of horse Sir John Cheyne, his chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Thomas Thwaites, and Thomas St Leger, the chamber servant who had married Anne of York and in the process had become Edward’s – and Richard’s – brother-in-law.62 Even Lord Stanley was there, having recovered from the fracas in the council chamber a few weeks before – all smiles, his cut head healed, no harm done. Stanley’s dominance in the northwest made him a crucial node in any English king’s government – and, if not onside, a potential threat. Accordingly, both he and his wife Lady Margaret Beaufort had occupied prominent places in the coronation ceremonial: Stanley walking in front of the king carrying the great mace of state; Margaret bearing Queen Anne’s train.63
Quite how much this reflected loyalty to the new regime was unclear. Most people were in London anyway, having arrived for another coronation entirely. Invited to Richard’s crowning, people were expected to stay. Leaving would have been unwise.
One sign of the new regime’s insecurity was a glaring absence from the coronation guest list. Barely a week before, a delivery of fine clothes had been sent to the Tower for Edward V, ‘lord Edward’, in anticipation of his attendance. But in the meantime, Richard had changed his mind. When it came to the coronation itself, the boy wasn’t there. There were rumours of a plot to break both princes out of the Tower, which in turn prompted a change in their security arrangements: they were, it was said, ‘holden more strength’. It clearly wasn’t a good time for Edward V – a living, breathing rebuke to Richard’s claim to the throne – to be paraded at his uncle’s coronation.
People started to grow anxious about the boys. Where before they could be seen playing in the Tower gardens and doing archery practice, now they no longer appeared outside. Their faces were seen at the barred windows of their apartments with less frequency as the days went on. Finally, they were no longer seen at all.
Around this time, most of the household servants that Edward V had been allowed to keep with him were dismissed. According to one of his remaining attendants, his doctor John Argentine, the boy, increasingly agitated, had developed the habit of confessing his sins daily, ‘like a victim preparing for sacrifice’.
The man to whom Argentine talked was a black-habited Augustinian friar named Domenico Mancini. A cultured man, steeped in fashionable humanist learning, Mancini had moved north from his native Rome to Paris, looking for work. Arriving in England sometime towards the end of 1482 – sent, possibly, by a French government increasingly worried about a vengeful Edward IV’s plans to invade France – he had stayed and, fascinated and appalled by the political upheavals that had followed Edward’s death, tried to make sense of what he was witnessing.
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.