Richard III (19 page)

Nevertheless, Harry Buckingham had been richly rewarded, as indeed had everyone else who had helped with the usurpation. Already he possessed half the Bohun inheritance and now the King gave him the remainder – estates worth over £700 a year – with the promise that the gift would be ratified by Parliament as soon as it met. He also received Richard’s former office of Lord Great Chamberlain, besides being appointed Constable of England – in modern terms, Commander-in-Chief. He was supreme in Wales and the West Country.

John Howard received another of the King’s former posts, that of Lord High Admiral. Moreover, on 28 June, only two days after his master’s seizure of the throne, he had received his real reward and had been made Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal and Earl of Surrey – the latter title being borne by his son, Sir Thomas. The new Duke had carried the crown itself at the Coronation. He was also presented
with nearly as many manors as Buckingham, besides other revenues. His domain was East Anglia.

The Earl of Northumberland, who had marched into London with some 5,000 northern troops on 3 July – Richard reviewed and thanked them in Moorfields – received the King’s old offices and privileges in the North West, becoming the new Warden of the entire Scots Marches. He was also appointed to many other great northern offices and likewise received a vast grant of manors. However, most unwisely, he had only been given many of his posts for a limited tenure and his determination to restore Percy dominance in the North remained a dream. Even so, he was none the less the most powerful magnate in the North.

Lord Stanley, who had been forgiven, seems to have been allowed to retain his office of Steward of the Household. Presumably this was thought sufficient to secure his friendship – a gross miscalculation. He too controlled large blocks of territory, in the north Midlands.

Buckingham, Norfolk, Northumberland and Stanley, these were the four props of the new regime. They formed an alarmingly narrow power base. All were ‘over mighty’, with large private armies. The desertion of any one of them could place Richard in grave peril.

Yet very few people were happy about the new regime. It is likely that, with most Englishmen, the majority of peers regarded the King as an usurper for all his crowning and anointing. Robert Fabyan’s
New Chronicles of England and France
makes this very clear. (The author was fully adult in 1483 and living in London.) Because Richard had stolen the throne, he

Plainly he sensed an undercurrent of disloyalty; there are indications that he suffered from the paranoia which afflicted his brother Clarence. This might well explain why he was always clutching his dagger and wore a mail shirt.

However, Richard had henchmen, household men, upon whom he could rely. They appear to have worked as a team and included, to name only a few, Francis, Viscount Lovell (Lord Chamberlain), Lord Scrope of Bolton, Sir Richard Ratcliff and William Catesby (Chancellor of the Exchequer), together with Sir Robert Brackenbury (Constable of the Tower), Sir Robert Percy (Comptroller of the Household), Sir Ralph Assheton (Vice-Constable), Sir James Tyrell (Master of the Henchmen and Master of the Horse), John Harrington (Clerk of the Council), John Kendall (the King’s Secretary), Walter Hopton (Treasurer of the Household), Sir Thomas Burgh, Sir Marmaduke Constable, Sir Humphrey Stafford, Sir Thomas Pilkington, Sir Gervase Clifton and John Nesfield. Nearly all were Knights or Esquires of the Body. Edward IV had run a similar team – household men and estate managers used in central government or for security purposes – but was never sufficiently isolated to rely on it in the way that his brother did. Richard’s team was a general staff, a bodyguard and an administrative élite. It was a general staff, a bodyguard (from whom today’s Gentlemen-at-Arms are descended) and an administrative élite. Its military functions were especially important: Dynham was at Calais, while Brackenbury, as Constable of the Tower, was in control of the chief arsenal and arms depot; Brackenbury was also keeper of castles in Kent, as Tyrell was in Cornwall; Assheton would take over most of Buckingham’s military duties; and many other members served as castellans or commissioners of array. The ‘mafia’ contained some very tough men indeed, as became increasingly evident during their master’s short reign.

It is possible that Lord Lovell had been a boyhood companion of Richard at Middleham but there is no proof that he was, as Kendall maintains, the King’s ‘oldest and dearest friend’. Nor was he a Northerner, even if he possessed estates in the North. His real home was a beautiful Oxfordshire mansion, Minster Lovell, which his master visited on at least one occasion and whose ruins are still elegant. Even so he was plainly close to Richard, who made him Lord Chamberlain (Hastings’s old place) and therefore the man responsible for organizing and administering his household. At the Coronation he had the honour of carrying one of the Swords of Justice. He was also appointed Chief
Butler of England – a position formerly occupied by Rivers – and was later created a Knight of the Garter. Undoubtedly he was deeply committed to the King, which may well be why two years after Bosworth he was one of the leaders of a revolt against Henry VII.

Richard Ratcliff was the team’s hit man. A Northerner and one of the King’s three principal lieutenants, Ratcliff belonged to a well-established family of minor gentry of Lancashire and Westmorland squires; in London he had lodgings in the suburb of Stepney. He was a younger son and a typical career ‘household man’; his maternal grandfather, Sir William Parr, had been Comptroller to Edward IV, while his Parr uncles may have fought by Richard’s side at both Barnet and Tewkesbury, one of them being killed. Ratcliff himself had been knighted after Tewkesbury, and then created a Knight Banneret during the siege of Berwick – no doubt for his services against the Scots at sea, off the Cumberland and Galloway coast. He could even claim distant kinship with the King, through being Lord Scrope of Bolton’s son-in-law. Richard had the utmost respect for his opinion, consulting him on matters of special importance. More says specifically that Ratcliff was employed by the King in carrying out ‘lawless enterprises’, being ‘a man that had long been secret with him, having experience of the world and a shrewd wit, short and rude in speech, rough and boisterous of behaviour, bold in mischief, as far from pity as from all fear of God’. Richard heaped honours on him and made him a Knight of the Garter together with Lord Lovell in 1484.
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With a certain exaggeration, Catesby may be described as the intellectual of the team. The Croyland chronicler places him among the King’s leading advisers, and states that Richard hardly ever dared oppose his views. The same writer comments, with uncharacteristic savagery, that he was executed after Bosworth ‘as a final reward for such excellent services’. We know little of his background save that he was a Northamptonshire squire, born about 1450, the son of Sir William Catesby of Ashby St Ledgers (of the same family as the Gunpowder Plot conspirator). His London residence was an apartment in The Harbour, Warwick’s former mansion in the City. He also appears to have had country retreats, rooms at Woburn Abbey as well as at Ashby. As for his personality, the betrayal of Hastings indicates
ruthless ambition and a total lack of scruples; he was probably no more loyal to his new master – it is likely that before Bosworth he tried to arrange a secret bargain with the Stanleys to save his skin. He may also have had an odd streak of vanity; judging from an inventory of his belongings, he possessed a peacock – and most unlawyerlike – taste in clothes, wearing garments which included white or green satin doublets, scarlet hose and purple satin gowns. The Croyland chronicler plainly disapproved of him intensely. Yet his will, dictated just after Bosworth, shows that Catesby was deeply religious; it makes obviously sincere requests for prayers from family and friends, besides telling his wife that he has ‘ever been true of my body’ to her. This curious contrast between unprincipled self-seeking and compulsive piety reflects the dichotomy of Richard’s own nature. A lawyer and administrator by profession, he was almost certainly the King’s principal legal and financial as well as political adviser. He worked very closely with Ratcliff; together, they are known to have overruled Richard on at least one occasion. Both were identified with their master in the public eye – and were detested with him. Although he served the King so industriously, Catesby never received honours like Ratcliff; he was not knighted, but merely made an Esquire of the Body; perhaps he was too much of a lawyer and too little of a soldier to be thought altogether a gentleman, even if his father-in-law was Lord Zouche. In many ways he was a forerunner of the powerful bureaucrats to whom the Tudor monarchy would owe so much. Beyond question, he, Ratcliff and Lovell were the three most influential men in the realm.
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What was remarkable about Richard’s chosen servants is that so many came from the North, to a quite extraordinary extent. Of the fifteen barons known to have been members of the Council eight were Northerners as were a large proportion of the other members. Only one among seven Garter Knights created by the King was not a Northerner. Of the thirty-two Knights of the Body who have been identified at least fifteen came from Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland or Lancashire, as did at least thirteen of thirty-four Esquires of the Body. This bias in favour of men from the North was no less apparent in his ecclesiastical appointments. It is important to realize
that, as Professor Ross reminds us, ‘In southern England men from the North were still regarded with fear and mistrust, as wild, warlike, fearless and licentious … At best they were aliens, men largely unfamiliar with court and capital.’ This northern predominance is something unique in English history. At the time it caused much bitter feeling in the South.

While Richard ruled largely through his household and professional henchmen, most of whom owed their careers to him, he had, of course, a Council. Nothing could have been more decorous, even though some of the henchmen belonged to it. Besides Lord Chancellor Russell there were several other churchmen. Among them were Archbishop Rotherham, restored to favour; the invaluable Stillington of Bath and Wells; and Alcock of Worcester, who had been Edward V’s tutor. Another was an old friend from the North, Richard Redman, Abbot of the White Canons at Shap in Cumberland and now in addition Bishop of St Asaphs; if a noted pluralist, he was devout enough and rebuilt his ruinous Welsh cathedral in the form in which we know it today. Undoubtedly the King consulted these prelates frequently, especially in the drafting of statutes. It helped him, so he hoped, give the impression of being a diligent, conscientious and, in particular, pious ruler.

One may be sure, however, that Richard did not ask their advice about the matter which was most in his mind at the beginning of his reign – the future of his nephews. He must have realized that popular feeling still recognized Edward V as the true King and York as his heir, that it had not swallowed all the chicanery about Eleanor Butler. While the boys lived, he was at risk. During the following reign Henry VII was to dispose of Warwick, the last surviving Plantagenet male, for much the same reasons, but would use legal murder (after trapping the youth into a technically treasonable plot). It is a measure of Richard’s neurotic insecurity that he could not wait for the Princes to reach a more acceptable age and use the same method.

For the deposition of Edward V by the Petition was obviously invalid to those who knew anything about legal matters. If Edward IV’s marriage really had been null and void, then it was up to the Church to prove it, an investigation which could easily have been
conducted discreetly and thoroughly under the Protectorate. Problems of troth-plight, annulment and bastardy were familiar to Englishmen of that time, since they frequently provided an excuse for a tacit divorce (a loophole only tidied up by the Council of Trent). It is quite possible that Richard and his secret advisers were certain that the canon lawyers would discover that Edward IV’s children were legitimate after all. The prelates might have protested, but the Archbishop of Canterbury was nearly senile, while, though Russell must have been only too well aware that it was a matter for the Church, the usurpation was a
fait accompli
; his embarrassment may perhaps be reflected in the Croyland chronicler’s scant treatment of events during these months.

The decision to kill the Princes may even have been taken before Richard seized the throne. Mancini informs us that immediately after Hastings had been eliminated on 20 June, all the little King’s servants were forbidden to go to him. ‘He and his brother were taken into the innermost rooms of the Tower and as the days went by began to be seen more and more rarely behind the bars and windows, until at length they ceased to appear altogether.’ More heard of more sinister rumours. As soon as Edward was told that his uncle had seized the throne he was ‘sore abashed, began to sigh and said: “Alas, I would my uncle would let me have my life yet, though I lose my Kingdom.” ’ According to Mancini, his friend Dr Argentine (the royal physician and future physician to Prince Arthur, who would end his own life as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge), who was brought in to attend Edward – probably for toothache, to judge from his skull – seems to have been the last member of his household to visit him.
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Argentine reported that the boy was going to confession daily and doing penance ‘because he believed that death was facing him’. The French chronicler Molinet apparently heard a similar story. This confirms what More has to say. ‘But forthwith were the Prince and his brother both shut up and all others removed from them only one, called Black Will or William Slaughter, was set to serve them and see them sure.’ More adds that Edward stopped washing and dressing properly and, with his brother, was sunk in listless gloom. Mancini, who left England just after Richard’s Coronation on 6 July, says that even then there were already suspicions that the little King had been murdered. ‘Whether in fact he has been done away with, and how he was killed, I have so far been unable to discover.’