A fortnight after his coronation, Richard’s travelling household left Windsor Castle and rode west up the Thames valley on the first stage of his summer progress, a journey which would take in a swathe of the west country before curving back on itself, heading through the midlands and northeast towards its final destination – York. It was an ambitious itinerary, particularly in the context of Edward IV’s torpid parades of recent years, and one with a set of traditional aims in mind: for Richard to see as much of his new kingdom as possible, and for him to display those kingly qualities to which he had publicly committed himself in his coronation oaths. The royal cavalcade was boosted by the presence of Buckingham, Richard’s partner in power, and Lord Stanley, whom Richard had reconfirmed in his role as steward of the king’s household and, for good measure, made a knight of the Garter. But as Richard knew, he had to watch his back. Talk of Woodville plots continued to bubble. The royal absence from London would provide perfect conditions for conspiracy to breed.1
Earlier that July Richard had dispatched his trusted chaplain and envoy Thomas Hutton to Brittany, to reassure Duke Francis of his commitment to tackling the English pirates that had plagued the western reaches of the Channel since Edward IV’s death. Hutton was also given another set of instructions. Having sailed over the horizon two months previously, Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Sir Edward and his men had resurfaced at the Breton court, which was also home to another political refugee. This was the twenty-six-year-old Lancastrian Henry Tudor, only son of Lady Margaret Beaufort, who – despite various attempts at reconciliation and extradition – had been in Brittany for the past twelve years. But that July it was Sir Edward Woodville, not Tudor, who occupied Richard’s mind. As Hutton moved about the Breton court, Richard told him, he was to ‘feel and understand’ Duke Francis’s attitude to the Yorkist fugitive. In particular, Hutton should find out ‘by all means to him possible’ whether there were any Breton plans to send Woodville into England to stir up insurgency, to carry out some manner of ‘enterprise’. He was to update Richard ‘with all diligence’.2
Richard wasn’t inclined to let grass grow under his feet. As one chronicler, a man in government circles, put it, he ‘never acted sleepily’ but ‘incisively and with the utmost vigilance’. In any case, Richard himself hardly needed reminding of the real danger of plots by foreign-backed English exiles. Back in 1470, he had fled England with Edward as a result of Warwick and Clarence’s French-backed plot and, six months later, had taken part in Edward’s vengeful return. Now, as Richard set out from Windsor, his right-hand man John Howard turned back towards London: the newly created duke of Norfolk had been handed exclusive power to muster troops throughout southeast England in the king’s name. With plenty of business to attend to in his native East Anglia, Howard was well positioned to keep an eye out for disturbances.3
The first days of the royal progress passed sedately enough. At Reading on 23 July, Richard granted Hastings’ family lands to his widow, Katherine, along with custody of their son and heir – the kind of conciliatory gesture for which the new king was gaining a reputation and which, he perhaps hoped, would help dispel any lingering tensions provoked by his summary beheading of Edward IV’s close friend.4 A short stay at Oxford followed, offering Richard the chance to display his credentials as a patron of learning. At Magdalen College, he sat through a day of scholarly disputations in the great hall, presenting the celebrated humanist scholar William Grocyn with a deer and 5 marks for his performance. Then after a tour of the university, dispensing largesse as he went, Richard left for the crumbling royal manor of Woodstock, where he spent a couple of days hunting. On the 29th, he made the ten-mile journey west to Minster Lovell where, in a mark of special favour, he planned to lodge with his friend and chamberlain, Francis Lovell. That day, as the royal household’s carts and carriages rumbled through the Oxfordshire lanes, a messenger from London, riding frantically up the Thames valley, caught up with Richard’s slow-moving cavalcade.
Amid widespread anxiety over the ‘human fate’ of Edward V and his brother, a group of conspirators had been arrested in London for plotting an ‘enterprise’, an attempt to break the two princes out of the Tower, which was to involve starting decoy fires in various locations in the city to distract officials. With around fifty conspirators involved, the plot had sprung leaks: the ringleaders had been detained before they could act. Reaching Minster Lovell, Richard wrote to his chancellor John Russell with orders to put them on trial.5
Soon after, four men were convicted and executed. Two of them had been royal servants: Stephen Ireland, a wardrober in the Tower and John Smith, a groom in Edward IV’s stable. Their involvement was especially worrying. It suggested both that bigger, more powerful forces lurked behind the conspirators – John Smith’s former boss was John Cheyne, Edward IV’s master of the horse – and that, for all the apparent willingness of the late king’s servants to turn out for Richard’s coronation, loyalties had not transferred so smoothly to him after all. Moreover, the condemned men had been found guilty of planning to send letters to the English fugitives in Brittany. These messages were addressed not to Sir Edward Woodville, but to the long-exiled Henry Tudor and his uncle Jasper earl of Pembroke, the diehard Lancastrian who was a constant presence at his nephew’s side.6
A few weeks before, Richard had sent Hutton to Brittany to unearth details of a possible Woodville-led plot. But the situation was changing fast. The charges against the London conspirators now made clear that they were seeking to bring on board the exiled Tudors in a move to restore Edward V to the throne of England. And the initiative for this new Woodville–Tudor partnership had come from Henry Tudor’s mother, wife to Richard’s steward Lord Stanley: Margaret Beaufort.
Over the years, Margaret had worked hard to bring her exiled son in from the cold. Her most recent attempt, in June 1482, had seen Edward IV approve terms for Henry Tudor’s restoration to the king’s ‘grace and favour’. But, advised by his uncle Jasper – a man deeply sceptical of Yorkist gestures of conciliation – Tudor had stayed put in Brittany and the plans were shelved. After Richard seized the throne, Margaret revived them.
Approaching the new king, Margaret proposed an idea that had been mooted some years previously: that her son should marry one of Edward IV’s daughters. Richard, it seemed, made equivocal noises.7 In any case, Margaret and Stanley, though willingly aligning themselves with Richard’s regime, were experienced political operators and used to hedging against all possible outcomes. Accordingly, Margaret also engaged with the other, disaffected, side of the newly fractured house of York, opening secret talks regarding the same marriage proposal with the girls’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville.
Quite when the two noblewomen started talking was unclear, though Margaret may well have waited until Richard was safely on progress before making contact with Elizabeth, who was still hunkered down in Westminster sanctuary. Their go-between was an eminent Welsh astrologer–mathematician named Lewis Caerleon, who, physician to both Margaret and Elizabeth, had the perfect cover, walking gravely past the unsuspecting guards Richard had posted around the sanctuary perimeter.
That summer, communication between the two women blossomed into something more ambitious: regime change and the possibility of restoring Edward V to the throne and his mother’s family to power. Margaret had much to offer – if, that was, she could persuade her notoriously inscrutable husband to swing the might of his north-western forces behind a Woodville-led uprising, and if the exiled Tudors could exploit their contacts at the Breton court to raise funds and men for an invasion. For Margaret, too, the stakes were high. Henry Tudor’s marriage to one of Elizabeth Woodville’s daughters would tie him to the house of York. If that marriage produced children, they would then take their place in the Yorkist line of succession. It was an agreement rich in historical irony. In previous decades Lady Margaret’s cousins, the dukes of Somerset, finding themselves unable to live with Edward IV, had done their utmost to destroy him before being destroyed in turn. Now, the Beauforts promised to secure the future of Edward’s family line.
In late July and early August, Margaret was a flickering presence in Woodville insurgency, in the plotters’ attempts to contact Henry Tudor and in the flight of her half-brother John Welles, who was apparently among the conspirators. Evading arrest, Welles eventually resurfaced among the exiles in Brittany.8 At this point, Margaret’s aim still seemed to be the restoration of her son to his earldom of Richmond – whose title and lands now belonged to Richard, a crucial node in his northern hegemony – and as a key figure in the restored regime of Edward V. But, in the following weeks, things changed.
As Richard continued westward, he displayed the open-handed liberality and ostentatious piety demanded of a good prince. Determined to define himself against his late brother’s reign, with its increasingly creative and grasping efforts at fundraising, he graciously declined the customary corporate gifts of cash from the communities, towns and cities that he passed through. He left a trail of regal largesse in his wake: from Woodstock, where he regranted to the local community lands previously annexed by Edward; to the city of Gloucester, which he granted various liberties, with all the political and financial benefits they entailed; to Tewkesbury, where he repaid a long-standing debt of £310 owed by his brother Clarence to the abbey there.9 Meanwhile, he continued watchful. And the situation continued to escalate.
By mid-August, events were tumbling over themselves. Amid reports of a desperate bid to smuggle Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s daughters out of Westminster sanctuary and out of the country – so that, as one chronicler put it, if anything happened to the princes in the Tower, the kingdom might ‘some day return to its rightful heirs’ – Richard reinforced security around the sanctuary’s perimeter, saturating the abbey and its precincts with troops under the command of one of his trusted northern servants, the Yorkshireman John Nesfield. The whole neighbourhood, said the same chronicler, ‘took on the appearance of a castle’.10
In addition, Richard sent an urgent request for reinforcements. His demand for two thousand Welsh troops, to be dispatched to him ‘in all haste’, echoed his frantic summons to his northern supporters back in June. Shortly after, Richard sent orders to Buckingham – who had peeled off from the royal progress, to return to his own lands in Wales – to head a commission into treasons throughout southeast England. The threat of insurgency in support of Edward V seemed to be spreading outwards from London, leaching into the surrounding home counties as far afield as Kent and Oxfordshire: regions dominated by the late king’s household servants.11
As the threat intensified, so too did the pressure on Richard. Since his brother’s death four months previously, he had responded to the newly uncertain world with a savage decision, fuelled by his craving for order and predictability, and his instinctive tendency to reach for extreme methods to impose it. That summer, as a nebulous opposition coalesced around the blameless figure of Edward V, Richard was perhaps reminded of his own formative years: of a time when there had been two kings of England, and of the chaos and bloodletting begotten by this divided royal authority. Now, with history set to repeat itself, it was hardly surprising if Richard just wanted the problem to go away.12
During these last weeks of summer, as Richard’s household progressed regally through the east midlands, stopping off at Nottingham Castle, and on into south Yorkshire, talk spread that the young princes had been murdered. If, during the last couple of months, there had been whispers about the boys’ killing, now the rumours came in a torrent. In the absence of concrete information, stories proliferated. Buckingham, so one report had it, had egged Richard on, just as he had done from the moment Richard seized power at Stony Stratford. Later, Thomas More’s elaborate retelling had the constable of the Tower, Robert Brackenbury, refusing to carry out the orders, and Richard’s sidekick Sir James Tyrell – a man to whom he had for years delegated the most sensitive tasks – ordering two of the princes’ guards to kill them. These men were Miles Forest, a wardrobe keeper from Richard’s Durham fortress of Barnard Castle, who had probably made his way south with the king’s entourage and taken up a post in the Tower, and Tyrell’s own household servant John Dighton. Likewise, opinions varied as to how the princes had been murdered: smothered between feather mattresses, or drowned in malmsey (an echo, this, of Clarence’s killing), or injected with a ‘venomous poison’. Whatever the details, one dominant narrative soon established itself. The boys had been killed, and on Richard’s watch: ‘the people’, wrote one chronicler, ‘laid the blame only on him’.13
As commentators acknowledged, whatever Richard had – or had not – actually done soon came to be irrelevant. It was the story, ‘common report’, which mattered; ‘hard it is to alter the natural disposition of one’s mind’, the same chronicler reflected, ‘and suddenly to extirp the thing therein settled by daily conversation’. Once people had made up their mind to believe something, in other words, it was all but impossible to make them change it. Unable to offer any positive proof of the princes’ continued survival, Richard lost control of the narrative.
In Westminster sanctuary, an uncomprehending grief descended on the small Woodville establishment. Elizabeth Woodville’s misery was absolute. She passed out, then, when revived, was frenzied in her distress: crying, tearing her hair, her shouts of pain echoing throughout her lodgings, calling out the names of her disappeared sons. Finally, ‘after long lamentation’, her pain began to congeal into anger. She besought God for revenge.14
Having lived through the violent upheavals of recent years, people weren’t easily shocked. But if, following Richard’s brutal assumption of power that spring, many in the Yorkist establishment had shuffled hesitatingly into line, widespread reports that the two blameless royal children had been killed while in his care convinced them that their initial misgivings had been right. Among the former household servants of Edward IV there remained a fierce allegiance to the memory of the late king and his two sons. That allegiance now acquired a new sharpness.
Late that summer, Sir George Brown wrote a brief message to his nephew John Paston the younger. Brown was a Yorkist loyalist; his stepfather was the late king’s recently executed chamber treasurer Sir Thomas Vaughan. One of Edward IV’s close chamber servants, Brown had been knighted on the battlefield at Tewkesbury back in 1471; following the king’s death that April, he had carried the banner of St George at his funeral and was among the household men keeping watch over his body the night before its burial. Now, Brown’s message to Paston read, simply, ‘Loyalté Aymé. It shall never come out for me.’ Scrawling a variation on Richard III’s new royal motto, Brown dismissed it out of hand. There was no way that Richard’s idea of loyalty would work for Brown: he didn’t trust the new king an inch.15
When rumours of the princes’ deaths reached Margaret Beaufort, still at her husband’s London house, she saw a new possibility. She made a fresh proposal to Elizabeth Woodville through the indefatigable Lewis Caerleon, who continued to carry messages between the two women ‘without any suspicion’. Now that Edward IV’s sons were assumed to be dead, a marriage between Henry Tudor and the widowed queen’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, offered both a new focus for the loyalties of disaffected Yorkists, and a different way for the heirs of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville to regain power.
In his secret talks with Elizabeth Woodville, Caerleon spoke fluently and persuasively and, presumably, with exceptional sensitivity; going off script, he talked ‘off his own head’. Soon after, he walked unassumingly out of Westminster sanctuary having extracted a promise from the widowed queen that she would do everything she could ‘to procure all her husband King Edward’s friends’ to join forces in a conspiracy with Henry Tudor to ‘obtain the kingdom’ and, having done so, to make her daughter Elizabeth of York his queen.16 In the privacy of Westminster sanctuary, these two noblewomen and their Welsh middleman concocted an astonishing plan. In place of the missing princes, Henry Tudor, the fugitive Lancastrian son of Lady Margaret Beaufort, would become the heir to Edward IV and his dynastic line. The question now was whether those loyal to Edward IV and his heirs would accept it.
The plotters moved fast, Margaret sending a messenger to Brittany to update Tudor. Meanwhile an intermediary, a ‘chief dealer’ between Margaret and the pro-Woodville Yorkists, was agreed on: Margaret’s receiver-general Reynold Bray, a nerveless, blunt-speaking midlander. Within a few days, Bray had made contact with sympathetic plotters across southern England: former servants of Edward IV including John Cheyne, George Brown and the Somerset knight Giles Daubeney, and friends of the Woodvilles like the Kentish Guildford family. Not long after, Bray received a message from the duke of Buckingham, now at his castle of Brecon in south Wales. Buckingham knew Bray, who had worked for the duke’s late uncle, Sir Henry Stafford – who had himself been Lady Margaret Beaufort’s third husband (before his death in 1471 and her marriage to Lord Stanley). It wasn’t, however, Buckingham who had instigated contact with Bray, but the man who was now the duke’s prisoner: John Morton.17
Now well into his sixties, Morton’s experience of the crises of past decades was practically unrivalled: indeed, he had been at the heart of many of them. From St Albans to Towton, to a decade-long stretch in exile plotting the restoration of the house of Lancaster, to the political conversion after Tewkesbury that saw him become one of Edward IV’s closest advisers, Morton’s extraordinary journey had now brought him, via the devastation of Richard’s fateful council meeting in the Tower that June, to Brecon, where he sat chatting comfortably and confidentially with the proud, greedy young nobleman who was his gaoler.
Earlier that summer, Richard and Buckingham had had a spat. When the duke demanded the grant of some of his ancestral lands now held by the crown, Richard, in a rare display of anger against the ally whom he had already so richly rewarded, slapped him down. Perhaps, the king felt, Buckingham’s persistent grabbiness would carry on unless checked. Whatever the case, the argument summed up a change in their relationship. During Richard’s protectorship, commentators had seen Richard and Buckingham, ‘these dukes’, as two sides of the same coin. Since Richard’s coronation, this balance had, inevitably, tilted. Richard, now, was king; Buckingham, however exalted, was his subject. And the duke didn’t like it.18
In Thomas More’s account, Morton played Buckingham with consummate skill. Teasing out the duke’s envy of Richard, playing on his frustrated royal ambitions as a Lancastrian descendant of Edward III, Morton then introduced an ominous note. Ruminating on the widespread resentment against Richard, he suggested that Buckingham would be far better off, not to mention safer, by distancing himself from the king and aligning himself instead with the Woodville–Beaufort conspiracy. All the while, like the experienced councillor he was, Morton ‘rather seemed to follow’ the duke’s train of thought ‘than to lead him’.
When Morton was done with him, Buckingham had come to believe that rebellion against Richard III was the obvious best step, of ‘infinite benefit’ to the kingdom – and that it was all his own idea. According to Thomas More, Morton even insinuated that Buckingham himself should be king. Gratified, the duke told Morton that he was keen to use his ‘faithful secret advice and counsel’. Reynold Bray shuttled unobtrusively between Brecon and Lady Margaret Beaufort, who adjusted her plans accordingly. By the end of the summer Buckingham had been sucked into a conspiracy against Richard III, the king that he had put on the throne, on behalf of ‘the blood of king Edward’ – the Yorkist line that, only months before, he had helped overthrow and tried to destroy.19
On 29 August 1483, his progress swelled by seventy northern knights and gentlemen that had joined him at Pontefract, Richard entered York in triumph, together with his wife and their ten-year-old son Edward. The boy was in delicate health, brought by chariot the fifty miles south from Middleham Castle, though he had managed to get on a horse for the procession into York. For Richard’s latest, triumphant homecoming, the city corporation had laid on a spectacular welcome. Its plans, as was customary, had been drawn up in close consultation with Richard’s household, the fretful demands of his secretary John Kendall betraying a king who, beneath the expansive exterior, was anxious to make the right impression on his new royal entourage. Richard, wrote Kendall, wanted plenty of pageants, speechifying and spectacular décor, ‘for many southern lords and men of worship are with them’. These southerners, Kendall added, would ‘mark well’ the kind of welcome they got in York: its extravagance would reflect the love northerners had for their lord, now England’s king.20
Richard needn’t have worried. The following days unfolded in a haze of wining, dining and corporate hospitality – York’s mayor spent a ruinous amount hosting two banquets for the king and select members of his retinue – as well as the required pageants and plays. At his lodgings in the archbishop’s palace, Richard graciously received civic notables and their gifts, laying on feasts and entertainments ‘to gain the affections of the people’.21
During those days, one of the king’s advisers, Bishop Thomas Langton, wrote to his friend William Sellyng, one of England’s finest scholars and the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury. Both in their early fifties, the two men were old friends; Langton kept an eye out at court for Sellyng’s interests. Desperate to find a secure way to ship a much-needed consignment of Bordeaux wine back to England – in the Channel, English and French ships continued to attack each other at will – Sellyng wrote anxiously to Langton, who provided reassuring advice and promised to put in a word with the king. He then turned to the subject of Richard himself.
The king’s progress north, Langton wrote, had been an astounding success. Richard had the popular touch: ‘he contents the people wherever he goes, best that ever did prince.’ Open-handed and magnanimous, he went out of his way to redress injustices, especially among the poor and needy who had previously ‘suffered wrong’ and who were ‘relieved and helped by him and his commands’. Truly, Langton pondered, ‘I never liked the conditions of any prince so well as his’ – which, given that he himself was currently luxuriating in the king’s favour, was unsurprising. Only weeks before, Richard had bestowed upon Langton the Welsh bishopric of St Davids; Langton, though, already had his eye on the much richer see of Salisbury, recently vacated by Lionel Woodville – and was expecting to get it. As he put it to Sellyng with a nod and a wink, he hoped soon to be ‘an English man and no more Welsh’, adding, in Latin, ‘sit hoc clam omnes’ – ‘mum’s the word’.
Yet Langton’s assessment of Richard was sincere enough. The king was showing a keen desire to deliver on the sacred oaths he had made at his coronation two months previously. As he watched Richard go about his work, Langton was judging him against those ideals and, implicitly, against the government of his late brother Edward. In short, Richard was a bright new dawn for England: not simply a monarch for a privileged few, as Edward’s reign had increasingly come to be seen, but for the many. ‘God hath sent him to us for the weal of us all.’
If such an encomium might have been made to order by Richard himself, the king would have been less delighted with Langton’s comment on his household, in which ‘sensual pleasure holds sway to an increasing extent’. Richard, apparently, was enjoying the well-stocked royal cellars – though such an observation was not, Langton added hastily, to detract from his words of praise.22
The high point of the royal visit came on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. That day, Richard and Queen Anne processed, crowned, through York’s streets to the Minster, where they celebrated mass in a ceremony that to one observer seemed like a ‘second coronation’: a way, perhaps, of acknowledging the special relationship between Richard and this great northern city. Then, they returned to the archbishop’s palace, where Richard created his son prince of Wales, investing him with the role that Edward IV had once given his own heir, the boy who had become Edward V.23
In a proclamation announcing his plans for his son, Richard set forth his own vision of kingship: the well-worn simile of the king as the sun, bathing the orbiting planets – his noblemen – in his ‘outstanding light’. Despite its ubiquity, there was something distinctive about Richard’s use of the image. For him, kingship combined both power and heavy responsibility. If Richard was all-seeing, training the ‘gaze of our inward eye’ on his kingdom and its subjects, he could also discern the ‘immensity’, the magnitude, of the task that confronted him – the ‘great responsibilities that press upon us’. There was little here of Edward IV’s ‘comfort and joy’. Richard’s was a burdensome power.24
Soon after Richard’s arrival in York, an envoy came from Brittany with a letter from Duke Francis. Expressing profuse gratitude for Richard’s friendship, Francis asked for English military support against Louis XI. Having menaced the duchy’s borders for years, Louis was now putting immense pressure on Francis to hand over Henry Tudor, threatening war unless he did so. With conflict looming, the Breton duke urgently needed Richard to supply and pay for a defence force of four thousand archers. Otherwise, Francis regretted, he might be forced to give Tudor to the French king – something he was ‘very loath’ to do, given the harm Louis was capable of inflicting on Richard and England.25
Richard hardly needed reminding about Louis’ propensity for meddling in English affairs. But over the decades, he had also become familiar with Francis’s wheedling demands for military aid. It was true that the duke was only following up on promises made him by Edward IV – shortly before his death, in his violent fury against Louis XI’s double-crossing, Edward had assured Francis of his support – but to Richard, it looked suspiciously like blackmail.26 Barely had he received Francis’s request, however, before the situation in France changed suddenly and dramatically.
On 30 August Louis XI died, the cumulative impact of multiple strokes finally catching up with him. While sometimes too artful for his own good, this absurdist French king had often run rings round his enemies, and had been a constant, antic presence in the upheavals of Edward IV’s reign. His death brought to the throne his thirteen-year-old heir, Charles VIII. A tantalizing ten months short of his majority, the boy was surrounded by a cluster of predatory French nobles seeking to control him and wield power – a mirror-image of the circumstances that had confronted England on Edward IV’s death five months previously.
With the French crown now gripped by its own internal troubles, the situation seemed turned on its head. For Richard, the international outlook was now rich with promise. During the last years of his brother’s reign he had watched Edward’s increasingly tortuous diplomatic manoeuvrings, his own frustrations barely relieved by the occasional charge across the border into Scotland. Richard yearned to show himself to his subjects as a royal war-leader: now, here was the opportunity. At the very least, he could turn up the pressure on a newly vulnerable France; there was even perhaps the chance of getting Edward’s French pension restarted that, earlier in the year, Louis XI had cut off. By the same token, there seemed no need to respond to Brittany’s nagging pleas for military support: Richard duly ignored them. And, in the meantime, Richard’s expansionist ambitions in Scotland had been given a welcome boost by the return of the Scottish pretender Albany, who had – predictably – fallen out with his brother James III’s regime once more and had again fled south of the border. Determined to dominate his European neighbours, to show that neither he nor England would become entangled in the way his brother had been, Richard started to flex his muscles.
After three weeks in York, Richard started out on the journey back south to Westminster, where Parliament, after two abortive summonses during the recent upheavals, was due to convene on 6 November. He left in a cloud of goodwill, having bestowed on the city a raft of generous tax breaks. Never before, wrote his secretary, had a king done ‘so much’ for the city. For all that, the extent of Richard’s grants was vague: so much so that three representatives of York’s corporation hurried after the royal party to ‘speak with his good grace’ and find out what he had actually given them.27
In the second week of October, the royal household was making its leisurely way from Gainsborough to Lincoln when royal agents, riding across country from Wales, caught up with it. The messengers brought news that Henry duke of Buckingham, Richard’s right-hand man, had raised an army and was marching out of Wales against him.
It was perhaps their altercation that summer that had made Richard suspect something was up. Whatever the case, his agents had been watching Buckingham for weeks. Reluctant to believe ill of the duke, Richard did what kings tended to do in such situations, summoning him with ‘exceeding courtesy’ to court to explain himself. When Buckingham refused, citing a stomach bug, Richard sent another, sharper message, telling him to stop temporizing and come immediately. Buckingham’s response was a declaration of war. By the time his defiant message reached the king, Buckingham had mustered his troops at Brecon and was on the move.28
Whatever the extent of Richard’s suspicions, he was unprepared for this devastating betrayal. Reaching Lincoln, he scrambled to raise troops and wrote to his chancellor John Russell in London, urgently demanding the great seal, the supreme symbol of royal authority that would give added weight to his commands. Alongside the precise formal text of his secretary’s letter, Richard scrawled his own personal postscript. Picking up mid-line where the clerk had finished, he wrote in a neat, crabbed hand whose speed left a trail of smudges and inkblots; when space ran out, he turned the letter ninety degrees, his message crammed perpendicular in the left-hand margin.
Ordering Russell to bring the seal in person immediately, and to send it securely if not – the chancellor was, apparently, ill – Richard then slid into incredulous rage at Buckingham’s treachery. The duke had ‘best cause to be true’, he wrote, yet had proved to be ‘the most untrue creature living’. Why, Richard seemed to be asking himself, should somebody he had loaded with rewards now betray him so completely? Struggling to rationalize Buckingham’s behaviour, Richard was itching to deal with him: ‘never’, he ended his postscript grimly, was ‘false traitor better purveyed for’.29
As Richard mobilized his forces, the full extent of what now faced him became clear. News came in of another rebel front on the other side of the country, in Kent. Following the disturbances that summer, Richard was alert to goings-on in the southeast. The snag was that the nobleman he had appointed to lead the commission into treasonable activity in London and the surrounding counties was Buckingham himself – who, it now transpired, was part of the problem. Luckily for Richard, John Howard also happened to be in the area. In mid-September, touring his new ducal properties in Surrey, Howard had sniffed conspiracy. As he returned to London in early October, reports of uprisings flooded in.
At first, it looked to Howard like the kind of local trouble that had erupted out of Kent for generations – ‘the Kentishmen are up in the Weald’, he remarked, and aimed ‘to come and rob the City’ – though he was also long enough in the tooth to know that apparently spontaneous popular protest was often shaped by bigger political forces. Howard set about raising more troops, secured the Thames crossings and the city, and waited.
Soon, two things were disturbingly apparent. The revolts were more extensive than Howard had at first thought, spreading not just across the Thames into Essex and East Anglia, but throughout southern England. As one insurgency ignited, so another caught, carried like brushfire through the forest and heath of the Weald from Kent, through Sussex, westwards.30 What was more, the uprisings were co-ordinated.
In barely two months, the circle of conspirators around Lady Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville had given fresh impetus and focus to the disaffection against Richard and, in co-ordination with Buckingham’s rebellion in Wales, had stitched together local cells of resistance in a series of armed uprisings. Their ringleaders were men at the heart of the political establishment, former household men of Edward IV, loyal to his two disappeared sons. In Kent the trouble was spearheaded by the local Woodville-supporting Guildford family and their associates, bolstered by men from East Anglia like Sir William Brandon; further west, in Wiltshire, it was driven by men like John Cheyne, Giles Daubeney and Walter Hungerford, all of whom had been coffin-bearers at Edward IV’s funeral. In the southwest, another rebel cell was headed by Thomas St Leger, members of the disgruntled Courtenay family (including the bishop of Exeter, Peter Courtenay) and Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset, who had resurfaced after months on the run, at his side a square-jawed lawyer named Thomas Lovell who had, it was said, saved Dorset’s life. As the uprisings spread, others joined them: men like the Oxfordshire knight, and Dorset’s brother-in-law, William Stonor who, receiving an order to mobilize on Richard’s behalf, ignored it and linked up with the rebels instead.31
Rising up, the rebels attacked royal authority wherever they found it, ripping up the infrastructure and networks of which they had been an integral part, and disrupting Richard’s lines of communication. As the king’s officers moved across the country on routine business, reporting to central government in Westminster, they were stopped, their documents and funds seized. One customs official, John Kymer, travelling from the Dorset port of Poole, realized that men like him were being targeted: there was no way, he wrote, that he could travel to Westminster, as rebels were out ‘in great number’ along his route. He stayed put.32
As further updates came in, Richard seemed torn between marching south to safeguard London, and combating Buckingham’s forces as they marched out of Wales. The rain that autumn was incessant, turning roads to mud, hampering the king’s progress and the mobilization of troops – which, even without the foul weather, was proving problematic. With funds low, Richard was forced to scrape together money from his own advisers and to ask his supporters to fund themselves, with a promise to repay them when he could.33 Besides which, there was widespread hesitancy. Writing from Lancashire, the gentleman Edward Plumpton reported how people were faced with conflicting orders from both Richard and Buckingham, ‘in the king’s name and otherwise’, and froze: ‘they knew not what to do’.
Plumpton’s candid assessment of the situation was coloured by his own context, as secretary to the twenty-three-year-old Lord Strange, son and heir of Lord Stanley. Stanley was now a key figure in Richard’s regime, but the pair had history and Stanley’s reputation for slipperiness preceded him; besides which, his wife Margaret Beaufort was one of the main drivers of the rebellion. From the noises that Plumpton made about the duke of Buckingham’s ‘malice’ – an echo of Richard’s own language – it looked like the Stanleys had decided to throw their weight behind the king: Lord Strange, indeed, was due to march south with ten thousand men. But the note of doubt remained. Where Strange was headed, Plumpton added coyly, ‘we cannot say’.34
At Grantham on 19 October, Richard came to a decision. Howard was pushing back successfully against the southern insurgency, imposing control in Kent. Forced to retreat, the rebels were being forced west through southern England. Richard himself headed southwest. He was aiming for Salisbury, one of the centres of insurgency, where he could trap the rebels, sandwiching them between his army and Howard’s forces to the east. There, too, he could block any attempt by the southern rebels to link up with Buckingham’s forces as they moved out of Wales and into England.35
On the 23rd, as he led his assembled army out of Leicester, Richard issued a proclamation against the rebels. The initial bewilderment of a few days earlier was replaced by an implacable conviction. Richard, the proclamation stated, had gone out of his way to demonstrate his commitment to the regal virtues of mercy and justice, hoping through his personal example to persuade evildoers back to the ‘way of truth and virtue’. But this had not happened. Instead, a group of traitors had plotted his destruction – and Richard had identified precisely what was fuelling their treason.
On seizing power back in April, Richard had loaded his actions with moral justification, portraying his late brother’s court as a pit of iniquity. At his coronation, with most of Edward IV’s men apparently reconciled to his kingship, this narrative had faded from the official discourse, Richard instead presenting himself as his brother’s natural successor. Now, in his October proclamation – or, as it was officially titled, ‘Proclamation for the reform of morals’ – these original accusations acquired a fresh intensity, a sharper internecine edge. Not only Edward and his wife’s Woodville family, but all those loyal to the late king, were tarred with the same brush.
The rebels, the proclamation stated, were ‘oppressors and extortioners’ of the king’s subjects and ‘horrible adulterers and bawds’. It was unsurprising that Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset should have rebelled. Such behaviour was entirely consistent with his rotten morals: his ‘devouring, deflowering and defouling’ of countless ‘maids, widows and wives’, behaviour summed up by his adultery with that ‘unshameful’ and ‘mischievous’ woman, Edward IV’s former mistress Jane Shore. The late king’s former household servants-turned-rebels – all listed by name, from Sir George Brown and John Cheyne to bishops John Morton and Lionel Woodville – were similarly tainted. Their treasonous uprising, evidence of their moral depravity, was nothing less than a war on truth and virtue by the forces of damnable ‘vice and sin’. In this view, the house of York had fractured into black and white. Edward IV’s line was rotten to the core; Richard III’s was the only true way.36
As Richard headed towards Coventry, Buckingham’s rebellion was already beginning to disintegrate. The duke was a notoriously bad landlord, ‘a sore and hard dealing man’; as he belatedly realized, such poor lordship failed to translate into solid support. No sooner had he ridden out of Brecon then the castle was sacked by members of the local Vaughan family – nominally the duke’s own supporters – who abducted his two daughters. The news reached Buckingham at the Herefordshire castle of Weobley, where he was trying unsuccessfully to mobilize the locals. Morale was already plummeting among his forces: Welsh tenant-farmers of Buckingham’s, who hated him at the best of times, had been coerced into mobilizing ‘without any lust to fight for him’. This general reluctance to take up arms was exacerbated by the continued terrible weather, widespread flooding and news of a well-organized royal army that faced them across the Severn – that was, if they could cross at all. Having destroyed all the bridges, Richard’s troops were blocking all the routes into England.37
As Buckingham’s army fragmented, he and John Morton split up. Morton made his undercover way out of the country to Flanders. The duke wasn’t so decisive, or so lucky. He hid in the Shropshire house of one of his childhood servants, Ralph Bannaster, who, enticed by the large royal reward on offer for Buckingham’s capture, promptly handed him over to the authorities in the shape of the ubiquitous Sir James Tyrell. Tyrell then brought him south to Salisbury, where Richard arrived on 1 November. Now, it was Buckingham who begged for a meeting with Richard. Richard refused to see him; he also refused the duke a trial. The following day, All Souls, Buckingham was beheaded.38
The southern uprisings, meanwhile, were already running out of steam; now, following Buckingham’s execution, and confronted by a large royal army, they crumbled. The ringleaders scattered. Many fled headlong into the southwest, in front of the pursuing royal army, trying to link up with the rebels led by Dorset, St Leger and the Courtenay family. They aimed, too, to link up with the leader on whom their hopes were now pinned. In co-ordination with Buckingham’s rebellion and the southern insurgents, Henry Tudor was sailing from Brittany with a large force of men. Tudor, though, was nowhere in sight.39
Communication between the rebels had been poor and Tudor was late. By the end of October, when Tudor set sail from the Breton port of Paimpol with a fleet of fifteen ships and some five thousand troops, Richard’s men had secured all the major ports along the Hampshire and Dorset coast. At dawn the following day, shoreline patrols at Poole Bay spotted two ships limping into harbour. Tudor’s fleet had run into storms and had scattered. Most of his ships had turned back; Tudor had ploughed on. From the strand, royal troops tried to entice him ashore, shouting that they were Buckingham’s men come to rendezvous with him. Wisely, Tudor ignored them.40
As he sailed further west, hoping to link up with the southern insurgents, Tudor was harassed by detachments of seaborne marines off the east Devon port of Exmouth and, further south, at Dartmouth, Saltash and Plymouth. Finally, a boatload of his men managed to get ashore, where they heard the news of Buckingham’s death and the failure of the southern insurgency. An attempt to proclaim Henry Tudor king of England at the Cornish town of Bodmin – involving the bishop of Exeter Peter Courtenay, a handful of Edward IV’s household men, some of Buckingham’s rebels and a few local loyalists – was fruitlessly symbolic.41 By now Richard, based in Exeter, was hunting down the remaining insurgents: in Rougemont Castle he beheaded several, chief among them Thomas St Leger.
Tudor turned back. As he made for Brittany, storms swept him up the Channel as far as the Cotentin Peninsula, adding an extra two hundred weary miles overland back to the Breton court at Vannes. His prospects bleak, he worried that his long-time backer Duke Francis might come to see him as a liability rather than an asset.42 However, as autumn deepened into winter, there was one consolation: the situation had clarified. As a stream of rebels fleeing Richard’s wrath arrived in Brittany to bolster his ranks, it had become evident to anybody opposing Richard that Henry Tudor was now the only game in town.
In just a few weeks Richard had put down a potentially catastrophic challenge with what was, on the face of it, a display of crushing royal authority. Those not executed or in custody were on the run. As the king mopped up resistance in the southwest, his men were already busy at work, moving onto the rebels’ lands and seizing property, assets and goods in the king’s name.43 Where, following his coronation, Richard had a smattering of patronage with which to reward his followers, he now had a flood – not only the lands, but the royal offices held by many of the leading rebels, between a third and a half of whom had been servants of the late king, Edward IV. And that, for Richard, was the problem.
Across the shires of southern England these men, influential figures in their local communities, had been crucial nodes in the network of royal authority: men ‘through whom may be known the disposition of the counties’, imposing justice and security in the king’s name, enforcing the crown’s rights and collecting its income, and when necessary raising cash and troops on the king’s behalf. Just under fifty such men were convicted in their absence as rebels – which, of course, left many more people who weren’t, ostensibly at any rate. Yet for each man that rebelled, there were plenty more who had the same instincts but just chose to keep their heads down. That, at any rate, was how Richard saw it. Dealing with two counties at the heart of the insurgency – Wiltshire and Hampshire – he issued an order to confiscate the lands not just of the rebels involved, but of all significant property-owning gentry. The rebellion had shaken Richard’s trust not simply in certain named insurgents, but in the entire network that he had inherited from his brother and which, he hoped, had transferred its loyalties to him. Now, he realized, he couldn’t rely on it at all.
In the rebellion’s aftermath, Richard’s solution was instinctive. Needing trusted, reliable servants to patch the gaping holes in these torn networks, he reached not for local replacements, but men with whom he was long familiar, who had worked for him as duke of Gloucester and who were – barring one or two exceptions – northerners. No sooner had he annexed rebels’ lands and offices than he regranted them away to his supporters, even transferring the ownership of land before its forfeiture by the rebels concerned had been recognized in law.
In the weeks and months that followed, ‘strangers’ with unfamiliar accents took possession of estates across southern England, stepping into the shoes of local officers and elbowing their way into tight-knit communities. From Devon to Kent, these northerners were transplanted into local society as substantial new landowners. They were men who – as Richard wrote to the town of Tonbridge in Kent regarding the arrival of his household knight Marmaduke Constable – had come ‘to make his abode among you and to have the rule within the honour and town’. These were visible and uncomfortably dominant bearers of royal authority, their presence intended to detect, disrupt and block any further attempts at insurgency and to ensure that Richard’s will and laws were obeyed. It was hardly a move to broaden the base and appeal of Richard’s regime – but in the current climate he prioritized absolute loyalty, even if it meant relying on a smaller pool of tried and trusted servants. These ‘plantations’ were the gaze of Richard’s ‘inward eye’ in action. Property-owning southerners didn’t like it; they found it, as one chronicler put it, a ‘tyranny’.44
The atmosphere was still heavy with coercion when, on 25 November, Richard rode across London Bridge into the capital, accompanied by the usual cluster of corporate representatives. With the south of the country in a state of emergency, and rebels still on the run, the Channel ports were in lockdown; travellers were stopped and searched, and documents of all kinds confiscated. For the last month, wrote the wool merchant William Cely from Calais, nobody travelling to London was prepared to act as a courier. The aggravation wasn’t worth it: ‘no man went that would bear any letters for searching.’45
On Tower Hill there was a further round of beheadings, among them Sir George Brown, the chamber servant of Edward IV who had rejected Richard’s motto and his authority. Driving home his moralistic mission, Richard ordered the public shaming of his late brother’s mistress Jane Shore, whose liaisons with Hastings, Dorset and ‘other great estates’ made her, in Richard’s eyes, the living embodiment of everything that had been wrong with Edward IV’s regime. She was made to walk through London’s streets in her kirtle – which, for the higher ranks at least, was considered underwear – holding a lighted taper. The move backfired, at least according to Thomas More. Londoners, he said, had only sympathy for the exceptional dignity with which she bore her ‘great shame’.
A sense of expansive relief and gratitude pervaded Richard’s rewards to his followers, while the Christmas celebrations that year provided a welcome release of tension. At court, the wine flowed. The invitees to a Twelfth Night banquet included the mayor of London and a select group of citizens. Richard was eager to cultivate the city, whose donations had shored up the early years of his brother’s reign, and whose leading businessmen he now approached in person for fresh loans to cover the ‘great charges’ he had sustained in putting down the rebellion, pledging fine plate from the king’s jewelhouse as collateral. At the festivities, the king presented the mayor with a fine gold cup encrusted with pearls and lapis. Then, in a moment of sozzled largesse, he promised to London the independent borough of Southwark south of the River Thames, together with a £10,000 grant to extend the city walls round it. The corporation didn’t bother following up the offer, made in a moment of festive overindulgence. It was hardly feasible and besides, Richard hardly had £10,000 to give.46
Meanwhile, away in Brittany, another ceremonial was being enacted. On Christmas Day in Rennes Cathedral, Henry Tudor made his group of exiles a solemn promise. His first act, on gaining the crown of England, would be to marry Edward IV’s oldest daughter Elizabeth, currently still in Westminster sanctuary with her sisters and mother. In return, the fugitives swore oaths of loyalty to Tudor ‘as though he had already been created king’.
With this exchange of pledges, Tudor officially became the leader of the Yorkist rebels loyal to Edward IV and his sons. In the absence of Edward’s two heirs – missing, presumed dead – the late king’s servants now preferred to take their chances with a long-exiled Lancastrian of sketchy blood rather than accept the rule of Richard III.47
Following the bloody upheavals of the previous months, an unspoken, unanswered question lingered. It was the question associated with the foundation of Richard’s rule, and with the new stature of Henry Tudor among the Yorkist exiles in Brittany. What had happened to Edward IV’s sons? In France, they thought they knew the answer. In January 1484, the French chancellor went on the record: Richard, he stated, had had the princes killed.48 In England, by contrast, there was a collective omertà at the heart of power. Either people didn’t know what had happened to the boys – or, if they did, they weren’t saying.
The uncertainty affected government departments. Exchequer officials in Westminster, trying to process ongoing business, kept bumping up against the problem of how to refer to Edward V. There were signs of formulas having been written out, then rejected and redrafted. One official wrote up a memorandum in which 9 April was mentioned: the day of Edward IV’s death and, consequently, the first day of his son’s reign. Somebody else had come along and erased the original wording, in its place writing simply ‘the xxiijrd year of King Edward the Fourth’ in a capacious hand, adding a couple of horizontal lines to fill up the space of what had clearly been a longer formula – one perhaps too tellingly revealing of Edward V’s fate. In official documents, the wording eventually settled on was ‘Edward bastard, late called Edward king of England’. ‘Late’, or its Latin equivalent ‘nuper’, was used to refer to people in the past tense. Depending on the context, it meant either ‘former’ or ‘dead’. In the cases of Edward IV and Buckingham, the latter killed and stripped of his title and lands by Parliament, it meant both. In the case of the disappeared Edward V, ‘late called king’ was an ideal hedge.49
Whether or not Richard was anxious about the uncertainty, he redoubled his efforts to establish his rule in the minds of his subjects. Towards the end of January Parliament finally convened at Westminster. Chancellor John Russell got to his feet and delivered the sermon that he had waiting to give since the previous June – though, in the meantime, he had revised his text, now obligingly lingering on the threat presented by the enemy within, from such ‘as ought to have remained the king’s true and faithful subjects’.50 The following day the Commons elected their speaker, a man whose exceptional closeness to the king compensated for his complete lack of previous parliamentary experience: William Catesby. Catesby had some delicate business to see through. First on the agenda was the ratification of Richard’s right to the throne of England, and the invalidation of his late brother’s line.
The parliamentary declaration setting out Richard’s royal title, or titulus regius, laid out in lurid detail the now well-rehearsed reasons for Richard’s claim. First among them was the ‘ungracious feigned marriage’ between Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. A specific reason for the marriage’s invalidity had now been pinpointed. Edward, while sleeping around in the early 1460s, had apparently made a secret marriage, a ‘pre-contract’, to Eleanor Butler, a noblewoman who – perhaps conveniently – was how long dead and unable to tell her side of the story. It was a promise perhaps made, as was Edward’s habit, in a haze of lust, as he tried to get her into bed. The revelations had come, so it was said, from Robert Stillington, bishop of Bath and Wells and Edward’s former chancellor. From Edward’s bigamy had resulted the perversion of all ‘politic rule’ in England, and the bastardy of his children. Given that Parliament had already declared the duke of Clarence’s children ‘barred from all right and claim to the crown’ on account of his treason, there was as a result ‘no other person living’ except Richard, undoubted son and heir of Richard duke of York, who was rightfully entitled to claim the crown ‘by way of inheritance’.51
The titulus regius was not, or so it was claimed, Richard’s declaration of his own title. Rather, it was the ratification of the people’s will, the rubber-stamping of a ceremony which, so the declaration now asserted, had been carried out back in June 1483 at Baynard’s Castle: then, an assembly of the lords and commons had ‘elected’ Richard king, presenting him in person with this very document. Yet as the titulus regius now stated, this informal deputation hadn’t carried with it the weight of parliamentary authority – which, in turn, had made many people doubt Richard’s claim to the throne. Therefore Parliament, whose authority ‘commands before all things most faith and certainty’, would enlighten the people, by putting on record its statement of the king’s title. If anybody was still unsure whether Richard was the lawful king of England, Parliament had pronounced.52
There followed an act of attainder, confirming in law the permanent disinheritance of the rebels. Going out of his way to prove his commitment to the coronation oaths he had sworn, to justice and the common good, Richard also passed a slew of more progressive measures. These included a series of legal reforms in a genuine attempt to address the muddle of legislation on property ownership; the outlawing of his late brother’s deeply unpopular practice of forced loans or ‘benevolences’; and – this time taking a leaf out of Edward’s book – protectionist legislation aimed at guarding domestic workers against the ‘devious and crafty means’ of foreign craftsmen and merchants, with Italians, as usual, the prime target for English xenophobia. An exemption was made for any foreigners involved in the book trade, who were free to import and sell ‘any kind of books, written or printed’: always a keen reader, Richard was perhaps unwilling to deny himself the pleasures of European literature.53 All of which, if the parliamentary record was anything to go by, showed a government in control, listening to the will of the Commons and addressing its concerns; an authoritative display of kingship.
Others saw it differently. One anonymous chronicler was furious that Parliament saw fit to endorse Richard’s title to the throne. The validity of Edward IV’s marriage, he fulminated, was no business of Parliament’s; rather, it was a matter for the church courts, which alone had the authority to adjudicate matrimonial cases. As far as this, admittedly hostile, chronicler was concerned, Richard had intimidated parliamentarians into endorsing his title: mute with fear, they waved the legislation through. The act of attainder, meanwhile, was a travesty: a land grab unprecedented in history, allowing the king to seize ‘great numbers of estates and inheritances’, which he then parcelled out to his northern followers.54
As well as driving home the validity of his rule, Richard intensified his efforts to eliminate resistance to it. Furious at Brittany’s backing of Tudor, he tried to batter the duchy into submission. Ratcheting up the English piracy of recent months, making it official government policy, the king intensified it into an indiscriminate naval war against Breton shipping. Nor was it just Brittany. Determined to pursue the Scottish war he had been forced to abort back in September 1482, Richard ignored the Scottish king’s overtures of friendship and initiated preparations for a fresh invasion. And, following the prescribed policy advice for unifying a divided country, he gave his sea captains licence to attack French vessels wherever they found them (in the process letting England’s current truce with France lapse). One command, on 12 February, summed up the military fronts to which Richard had, almost involuntarily, committed himself. It gave the order to fit out and supply a number of royal ships ‘to resist our enemies the Frenchmen, Bretons and Scots’.55 Richard’s way of proving himself a war-leader, it seemed, was to declare war on everybody at once.
There were some belated signs of conciliation on Richard’s part. One was enforced. If Lady Margaret Beaufort had played a crucial role in the uprisings, her husband Lord Stanley had, after some customary vacillation, turned out for Richard. Taking into account Stanley’s ‘good and faithful service’, Richard spared Lady Margaret ‘for his sake’. However, he tied her hands, transferring all her property and wealth to her husband and others, and extracting a promise from Stanley to keep her in isolated house arrest. At the same time, Richard tried to drive wedges between various elements of the resistance: among those to whom he offered a pardon was Lady Margaret’s fixer Reynold Bray. Bray ignored it.56
Then, Richard scored a coup. After weeks of negotiation with Elizabeth Woodville and her representatives, attempting to detach Edward IV’s queen from association with the rebels, a deal was brokered. With the lords and London’s mayor and aldermen as witnesses, Richard swore on the gospels to protect Elizabeth and her five daughters; to provide for and treat them as his ‘kinswomen’; to find the girls good marriages, and make sure their husbands treated them right. Elizabeth, ‘late calling herself queen of England’, would be given a quarterly stipend of £466 13s 4d to maintain her household, head of which would be Richard’s servant John Nesfield. Elizabeth Woodville’s decision to leave the safety of Westminster sanctuary was driven, very probably, by a mixture of impulses: resignation; a sense of futility; a desire for some sort of security for her and her daughters in the likelihood of Tudor’s rebellion being destroyed – or more likely, as time went on, simply petering out into nothingness. On 1 March, she and her daughters, foremost among them the girl whom Henry Tudor had sworn to marry, emerged cautiously from the cramped sanctuary lodgings where they had passed the previous ten months and gave themselves into Richard’s care.57
Reports of another recent ceremony might also have swayed Elizabeth’s mind. One day in late February, the lords spiritual and temporal, together with a number of the king’s more senior household knights and squires, gathered in ‘a certain downstairs room’ in Westminster Palace. Each in turn added his signature to a written declaration pledging allegiance to Richard’s son, ‘should anything happen to his father’. The oath-taking, however, was not so much about Richard’s fears as his dynastic hopes.
Back in 1471, following Edward IV’s destruction of the Lancastrian cause at Tewkesbury, noblemen and knights loyal to the regime – Richard and Clarence foremost among them – had gathered at Westminster to pledge loyalty to his son and heir, the boy who became Edward V. Now, Richard re-enacted this dynastic statement of intent. News that the lords and commons, or a representative sample of them, had recognized Richard’s ten-year-old son as England’s future king perhaps signalled to Elizabeth Woodville that the door was closing on any prospect of an alternative. Early that spring, after months of conspiracy and rebellion, it seemed as though Richard III had started to lay the foundations of his rule.58