11

‘King Richard’s Tombe’¹

As has just been noted, the one slightly unusual feature which we encounter in the upgrading of the burial of Richard III, is the fact that he did not have to wait quite so long for his royal tomb as his dethroned predecessors. We shall explore possible reasons for this shortly.

As a matter of fact, although it has usually been assumed that Richard’s burial place was initially left unmarked, we actually have no surviving evidence on this point. It is possible that, once the earth had settled and it was possible to reinstate the paving at the western end of their choir, the friars themselves marked King Richard’s burial site in some way. In any case, the lapse of time was relatively short, so that knowledge of the precise burial location would certainly not have been lost when the time came to install the new royal monument.

It seems to have been in about the summer of 1494, nine years after the Battle of Bosworth, that King Henry VII initiated the creation of a fitting tomb for his erstwhile rival.² The king delegated the responsibility for this project to Sir Reynold Bray and Sir Thomas Lovell, committed ‘Tudor’ adherents and well-established servants of the new king. Nevertheless, Richard III’s mother, Cecily Neville, dowager Duchess of York, seems to have considered both men trustworthy, since in April–May 1495 – within a year of their being charged by Henry VII with supervising the construction of her son’s tomb – she named them amongst the executors of her will.³ Since one of Cecily’s motives was a wish to ensure her own proper entombment at Fotheringhaye, it is reasonable to suppose that Bray and Lovell had dutifully fulfilled their task in respect of Richard III and had commemorated him in a fitting manner.

In fact, they commissioned a Nottingham alabaster man, Walter Hylton, to erect a monument ‘in the Church of Friers in the town of leycestr where the bonys of Kyng Richard the iij^de reste’.⁴ This was probably that same Walter Hylton who served as Mayor of Nottingham in 1489/90 and again in 1496/97.⁵ We are aware of his commission only because it subsequently gave rise to a legal dispute. The case was presented to the chancellor, Cardinal Morton (though it was not, of course, heard by him in person), at some date between 1493 and 1500, and the plea is dated on the reverse 1 July 11 Henry VII [1496]. Following Hylton’s commission, an alabaster tomb monument for Richard III was made in Nottingham and subsequently installed at the Greyfriars church in Leicester. As we shall see, Richard’s epitaph appears to date the commissioning of this monument to 1494. The sum paid to Hylton for his work on the tomb is usually reported to have been £50, though in fact the reading of this figure is problematic.⁶

It is virtually certain that the payment to Hylton (whatever the sum involved) did not represent Henry VII’s total expenditure on Richard’s tomb. BL, Add. MS 7099 contains extracts from the household accounts of Henry VII in the form of manuscript copies in the handwriting of the antiquarian Craven Ord (c. 1755–1832).⁷ On folio 126 Ord notes that the original documents which he transcribed were then ‘in the Exchequer, every leaf signed by the king’. However, those original fifteenth-century records are now lost. Ord’s surviving copies in the British Library contain tentative attempts at regnal year dating, although these have been subsequently erased, and appear to have been in error. We shall return to the question of dating presently.

Folio 129 (in the modern, pencil enumeration) includes the entry ‘11 Sept. – to James Keyley for King Rich. Tombe – £10. 0s. 12d.’. Superficially the sum specified may appear odd, but the extracts contain other entries where the figure in the pence column is 12 or above, or where the figure in the shillings column is 20 or above. Presumably, therefore, the sum paid to James Keyley was in fact £10. 1s. 0d.

The unequivocal use of the title of king in relation to Richard in both the Hylton and Keyley texts is interesting, since it appears to confirm that there was absolutely no question as to his status. The Keyley reference includes no royal numeral, but it could not possibly relate to Richard I (who lay buried in France). Some might wish to argue that Keyley’s payment could refer to some repair to the tomb of Richard II in Westminster Abbey. In that case, the fact that the date of the payment corresponds with the period at which Henry VII is known to have been arranging a tomb for Richard III would be a remarkable coincidence – for although the payment to James Keyley mentions no year, the precise date can be ascertained. The preceding folio records the payment of £10 to Sir William Stanley ‘at his execution’. This entry is dated 20 February, and Stanley was executed in February 1495. Thus the payment to Keyley was clearly made on 11 September 1495. This, in turn, suggests that the inauguration of Richard III’s new tomb may well have taken place on the tenth anniversary either of Richard’s death or his burial (22 or 25 August 1495). Moreover, the occasion might perhaps have been marked by some royal ceremonial, since this would have been in Henry VII’s interest at that time, as we shall see.

It is not stated what exactly Keyley did in respect of Richard III’s tomb, but one possible clue is provided by another entry dated 20 January [1501?] recording the payment of £10 to Master Estfield ‘for conveying of the King’s [Henry VII’s] Toumbe from Windesor to Westmr’. In a similar way Richard III’s tomb may have been made in Nottingham in Walter Hylton’s workshop, and then transported to (and set up in?) Leicester by James Keyley. Certainly the payment of £10. 1s. 0d. cannot possibly refer to Richard III’s actual burial. First, the date is far too late, and second, the Add. MS 7099 accounts also record a payment ‘for burying of a man that was slayn in my Lady Grey’s chamber’ on 27 May 1495, and the sum involved on that occasion was merely one gold angel (6s. 8d.).

Assuming that the money paid to Keyley was not part of the sum of ?£50 mentioned in connection with Walter Hylton’s indenture, but was additional to it, this would bring the total cost of the tomb to not less than (perhaps) £60. Nor can we assume that these two payments to Hylton and Keyley represent the total cost of the tomb. The records which have come down to us, mentioning Hylton and Keyley and their connection with Richard’s monument, survived by chance. Had there been no litigation in respect of the Hylton contract, and had Craven Ord not transcribed the reference to the Keyley payment, we should have no knowledge of either. There may well have been other payments of which nothing is now known. No other records referring to Richard III’s tomb in Leicester and dating from the period 1490–1500 are currently extant, either at The National Archives or at any other English repository. The total sum expended by Henry VII on Richard III’s tomb, therefore, remains unknown.

For the purposes of comparison, we may note that in the 1450s an alabaster retable for an altar (roughly the equivalent in size of one side of a table tomb) cost £1. 17s. 3d., while in 1462 an alabaster image of the Virgin Mary (size unspecified) could be purchased for £2.⁸ A contract, drawn up in 1508, for a fine alabaster table tomb for Henry Foljambe of Chesterfield, Derbyshire, survives. This specifies a cost of £10 for the tomb table, decorated with small effigies and shields bearing arms on the side panels. In this case the table was to be topped off with gilt copper effigies which are presumed not to have been included in the price of £10.⁹ By comparison, a tomb costing in total more than ?£60 for Richard III – even given that this sum may have included an alabaster recumbant figure of the king – should therefore have been a magnificent specimen of the alabaster men’s craft. Tombs made of harder stone, and with bronze gilt effigies, were a good deal more costly of course. Thus the tomb of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (d. 1439), had cost £715. Yet the only recorded expenditure for the original tomb of Cecily Neville, Richard III’s mother, was 100 marks (roughly £66).¹⁰

No detailed description of Richard III’s tomb exists, but it was made by workers in alabaster, and although Richard’s epitaph describes its stone as ‘marble’, this was a very common late medieval synonym for alabaster. The tomb was surmounted by an effigy or image of Richard, which was certainly of alabaster. In the words of Holinshed, ‘King Henry the Seventh caused a tomb to be made and set up over the place where he [Richard] was buried, with a picture of alabaster representing his person’. The word ‘picture’ in sixteenth-century texts can mean ‘statue’. Whether Richard’s alabaster ‘picture’ actually comprised a statue or a flat engraved slab is uncertain, but alabaster tomb effigies were two-a-penny at this period, and were almost mass-produced. Surviving incised alabaster slabs from the end of the fifteenth century are much rarer – though not unknown.¹¹ On balance, a recumbent alabaster effigy seems the more likely alternative.

Richard III’s new tomb remained in place in the Greyfriars church for the next forty-three years. During this period, at least seven times a day, as they entered and left their choir for the ‘Hours’ of their daily Office, the Franciscan friars of Leicester would have passed by Richard’s tomb as they made their way to their choirstalls.

For an idea of the possible appearance of the tomb, see figure 25. Near-contemporary English tombs of members of the royal family, such as the bronze gilt tomb of Henry VII himself in Westminster Abbey, or the alabaster tombs of Richard’s sister, Elizabeth of York, Duchess of Suffolk, and her husband, John de la Pole, at Wingfield Church, provide possible guidance as to the likely design of Richard’s monument. Both are also table tombs topped by recumbent effigies, lying with their feet towards the east end of the sanctuary. In the case of Henry VII the tomb is centrally placed in the specially built new Lady Chapel, which bears his name. Likewise, Richard’s tomb was centrally located in the choir of the priory church, with his feet towards the high altar – not placed against one of the side walls of the choir, like that of his sister and brother-in-law at Wingfield Church. However, Richard’s burial was towards the western end of the choir, presumably for the simple reason that all the available sites closer to the high altar were already occupied by earlier tombs.

The text of an epitaph associated with Richard III’s tomb in Leicester has been preserved. This first appeared in print in the seventeenth century as an appendix to the posthumously published life of Richard III by George Buck. Until recently this epitaph had been little studied. Moreover, discussion of it focused on a seventeenth-century English ‘translation’ (possibly by Buck himself) rather than on the original Latin text – leading to a tendency to dismiss the epitaph as a seventeenth-century invention. However, even a glance at the Latin text is sufficient to disprove this notion. The currently available Latin versions of the epitaph, together with the seventeenth-century English translation, are supplied below in Appendix 6. A modern English translation by the present writer will be given presently.

The epitaph displays overt connections with the monument erected for Richard III in Leicester in the 1490s. Clearly the writer was aware of Henry VII’s commemorative arrangements, for the wording refers to the honours paid by Henry to Richard’s corpse and (apparently) to 1494. The epitaph must have been written after Richard’s death in 1485, and before 1619, when it was reproduced by Buck. On religious grounds it is unlikely to have been written later than about 1535, since it concludes with a request for prayers for Richard’s soul: something unlikely to have been written after the Reformation had begun.

As for the style and structure of the epitaph, very close parallels, both in verse form and in length, are to be found among the recorded memorials of medieval English royalty. Among the closest parallel inscriptions are the epitaphs of Queen Catherine (widow of Henry V, mother of Henry VI and grandmother of Henry VII), and one of the epitaphs from the tomb of Henry VII himself.¹² Thus, stylistically, Richard III’s epitaph could easily have been written in about 1495.

Another important factor in favour of the authenticity of the epitaph is the fact that there are two independent seventeenth-century published sources for it: Buck and Sandford. The text was first reported by Sir George Buck in 1619 at the end of his History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third (published posthumously by his nephew in 1647). But it was printed again, in a slightly different version, by Francis Sandford in his Genealogical History of the Kings of England (London, 1677). Sandford was aware of the 1647 publication of Buck’s History, and he noted specifically that its version of Richard’s epitaph differed in minor respects from his own text. Clearly, therefore, Sandford’s source for the epitaph was different from that of Buck – and possibly closer to the original inscription.

Francis Sandford was Lancaster Herald, and derived his text from a manuscript at the College of Arms (figure 27). This manuscript is in the handwriting of Thomas Hawley, who became a herald in 1509 and died in 1557. Hawley’s text of the epitaph and the compilation in which it figures comprise copies of reference material, made by Hawley for his own use. The existence of this manuscript in Hawley’s hand proves conclusively that the epitaph must have been written before 1557.

The whole of the Hawley MS, in which Richard’s epitaph figures, was copied from an earlier compilation in the handwriting of Sir Thomas Wriothesley (d. 1534). Wriothesley’s manuscript is now at the British Library (figure 26). Thomas Wriothesley was one of the sons of John Wrythe, who was a herald during the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII. Thomas became a pursuivant in the private service of Arthur ‘Tudor’, Prince of Wales (1489), and subsequently (1503) Garter King of Arms. In the days of Thomas Wriothesley, the heralds kept their own libraries of reference material. The inclusion of a copy of Richard’s epitaph in Wriothesley’s collection securely dates the epitaph before 1534. Indeed, its context within the collection suggests a date for Wriothesley’s copy prior to 1531, and possibly much earlier. It is, therefore, absolutely certain that Wriothesley’s text of the epitaph was written down at a time when Richard III’s tomb in Leicester was still extant and undamaged. Although no record of a visit by Thomas Wriothesley to Leicester now survives, such a visit, either by Thomas himself or by one of his colleagues, may well have taken place. Wriothesley’s version of the epitaph could thus have been copied directly from the tomb. The fact that the writer changed his mind about some of the readings suggests that he might well have been working directly from an inscription.

As for Buck’s text, that apparently belongs to a separate line of transmission, distinct from the Wriothesley–Hawley–Sandford tradition. Buck gave his source for the epitaph as a manuscript at the Guildhall in London. Small differences in the texts show that Buck’s Guildhall source was not identical with Sandford’s source at the College of Arms.

Buck not only recorded his interpretation of the original Latin inscription, but seems also to have produced the versified English ‘translation’ from which most previous commentators have worked. This was the only version of the epitaph available in English until now, and the fact that its English verse forms are clearly of the seventeenth century was the major factor that encouraged earlier writers to dismiss the epitaph as a fabrication. This latter judgement was certainly incorrect. The epitaph was unquestionably written at about the time when Henry VII commissioned a tomb for Richard, and it may well have been inscribed upon the tomb itself, though we shall return to that point presently.

First, however, we should also note that Buck’s English version is an approximate – and sometimes inaccurate – rendering of the rather complex Latin of the original. Here is a new, more direct and literal translation of Buck’s Latin text:

I, here, whom the earth encloses under various coloured marble,¹³
Was justly called Richard the Third.¹⁴
I was Protector of my country, an uncle ruling on behalf of his nephew.
I held the British kingdoms in trust, [although] they were disunited.
Then for just¹⁵ sixty days less two,
And two summers, I held my sceptres.
Fighting bravely in war, deserted by the English,
I succumbed to you, King Henry VII.
But you yourself, piously, at your expense, thus honoured my bones
And caused a former king to be revered with the honour of a king¹⁶
When [in] twice five years less four¹⁷
Three hundred five-year periods of our salvation had passed.¹⁸
And eleven days before the Kalends of September¹⁹
I surrendered to the red rose the power it desired.²⁰
Whoever you are, pray for my offences,
That my punishment may be lessened by your prayers.

While the manuscript texts and Sandford’s publication contain slightly different readings at some points, the major part of the text is identical in all the currently extant versions.

So was this epitaph actually inscribed on the tomb of c. 1494? This point cannot be absolutely proved either way, since there was a well-authenticated fifteenth-century tradition of epitaphs inscribed on tablets of wood, or on parchment, and hung by admirers around the tombs of the famous. It is therefore possible that Richard III’s epitaph was not directly inscribed on the tomb, but hung up nearby. Even so, the text remains interesting. It is generally favourable to Richard, and certainly not overtly hostile. It seems highly improbable that any writer of the ‘Tudor’ period would have dared to pen a valedictory text on Richard III without the authorisation of the reigning monarch. Thus we must assume that the text reflects the ‘official viewpoint’ of Henry VII’s regime on Richard III in about 1494.

If the epitaph may be regarded as an ‘official statement’ by the government of Henry VII on Richard III, it is certainly of interest. Unsurprisingly, perhaps – for this is a theme encountered in other ‘Tudor’ sources – it pays tribute to Richard’s bravery. The final couplet has sometimes been seen as implying that Richard was evil (and Buck’s verse translation, which employs the word ‘crimes’, certainly carries that flavour). In fact, however, the closing lines merely reflect the standard late medieval preoccupation with purgatory, common to all believers at the time when Richard’s tomb was erected. It was normal in tomb inscriptions to request prayers for the deceased, and the fact that this epitaph does so need not imply that Richard III was more in need of such prayers than other people.

The text of the epitaph, together with the fact that it is not overtly hostile to Richard, raises a broader question. Why did Henry VII decide, nine or ten years after Richard’s death, to create a monument for him? Had Henry simply mellowed as time passed? Did he come to feel sorry for Richard? Was it that sufficient time had elapsed for him to feel that a memorial to Richard would now be safe?

Early in 1493, having already survived an attempt on his crown by the Earl of Lincoln and the young pretender generally known as ‘Lambert Simnel’,²¹ Henry had become aware of a new Yorkist conspiracy against him. He knew that Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, had under her wing a young man reputed to be his brother-in-law, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York.²² During 1493 and 1494, Yorkists at home in England were known to be plotting against Henry, and in the interests of Margaret’s protégé. This was the background against which Henry took the decision to erect a tomb for Richard III, and it is interesting to note in passing that 1494 (the year apparently mentioned in the epitaph text as the date of the tomb’s commissioning) was also the year in which Henry VII issued a silver medallic token possibly intended to contest the claims of the new Yorkist pretender.²³ Was the commissioning of Richard III’s tomb a calculated move on Henry’s part, designed to curry favour with Yorkist opinion? The epitaph rather cleverly exploited Yorkist divisions. Logic decreed that the sons of Edward IV on the one hand, and Richard III on the other, could not both simultaneously have legitimate Yorkist claims to the throne. Their claims were mutually exclusive: if Edward V was a legitimate king, then Richard III was a usurper, and vice versa. Previously it had suited Henry to treat Edward IV’s sons as legitimate claimants. However, now that one of those sons was reputedly moving against him, it may have seemed preferable to reassert Richard III’s claim. After all, King Richard was safely dead.