Richard III (5 page)

In September 1464 the great Council of the realm had met at Reading Abbey. It was expected that matters of some importance would be discussed, and, indeed, the King announced the introduction of an entirely new gold coinage (including the famous angel of six shillings and eightpence, the most beautiful of all English coins). It was expected that the topic of Edward’s marriage would be raised; Warwick was already negotiating for the hand of Louis XI’s sister-in-law, Bona of Savoy, immortalized as ‘Lady Bone’ by English chroniclers. To the assembly’s amazement, the King suddenly announced that he was already married, to ‘Dame Elizabeth Grey’, the young widow of a Lancastrian knight.

In fact, Edward had married her five months earlier, on May Day, in secret at her mother’s manor house of Grafton in Northamptonshire.
A compulsive womanizer, the King had been pursuing her for some months, but, according to Mancini, she had held out for marriage even when he held a dagger at her throat.
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Another popular tale says that she had lain in wait for him when he was hunting in the forest near Grafton, to solicit the return of her husband’s confiscated estates. She was twenty-seven, five years older than Edward, and clearly most attractive.

We have a better idea of what she looked like than of any other medieval English Queen – from a portrait at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and from a picture of her with her husband and children in a stained-glass window at Canterbury Cathedral. The portrait shows a face of delicacy and elegance, while the window depicts long, flowing golden hair and heavy, hooded eyes. The Tudor chronicler Hall probably reports an accurate tradition when he speaks of ‘her lovely looking and feminine smiling (neither too wanton nor too humble)’.

Unfortunately her social and political background were not so enamouring. Admittedly her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, was sister to the Burgundian Count of Saint-Pol and the widow of the Duke of Bedford, Henry V’s brother. But Jacquetta had married a second husband beneath her. Elizabeth’s father, Richard Woodville – one of the handsomest men of his day – had been made Lord Rivers in 1448, but was always despised as an upstart by his peers. Salisbury once called him ‘a knave’s son’ while Warwick told him his ‘father was but a little squire’ and that he had ‘made himself by marriage’. Old Rivers and his sons were Lancastrians. So was Elizabeth’s late spouse, Lord Ferrers of Groby, who had been killed at the second battle of St Albans. She herself had been woman of the bedchamber to Margaret of Anjou – ‘in service with Queen Margaret’, as More puts it.

When she heard of the marriage, the Duchess of York threatened to denounce the King as a bastard. (Richard always remembered the threat.) She told him that a monarch must be all but priestlike and could not be ‘defiled with bigamy’. According to Thomas More, Edward answered that being a widow was an advantage since she ‘hath many children. By God’s Blessed Lady, I am a bachelor and have some too. And so each of us has a proof that neither of us is like to be barren.’

The King compensated for Elizabeth’s unsuitable origins by giving her a truly regal Coronation on Whit Sunday 1465. When she processed into Westminster Abbey under a canopy of cloth of gold, with a sceptre in each hand, she was preceded by Clarence and followed by her royal sisters-in-law. Her mother was with her, supporting the crown with her hands when it proved too heavy for her daughter. Jacquetta was amply recompensed for many humiliations. Writing twenty years afterwards, Mancini says both Richard and Clarence were ‘sorely displeased’ by the marriage and that the latter’s anger was publicized by ‘his bitter denunciation of the Queen’s obscure family’. Yet George was forced to play a prominent part in the Coronation, even having to hold her wash basin.

The new Queen was not a woman to worry about upsetting the King’s brothers, let alone his friends. Thrusting and grasping, she had inherited her father’s avarice with her mother’s determination not to be slighted. Elizabeth was insatiably greedy for herself and her vast kindred – two sons by her first marriage and a whole tribe of needy brothers and sisters. She also behaved with repellent haughtiness, insisting on being treated with more respect than Margaret of Anjou.

Edward made things worse by heaping favours on the entire Woodville clan. Old Rivers, now an Earl, was made Lord Treasurer of England, enabling him to divert large sums of money into his own pocket. The Queen’s eldest brother Anthony, who in the family tradition had already married his heiress to become Lord Scales, received the Governorship of the Isle of Wight. A younger brother, John, only twenty, was also provided with a rich heiress – the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who was nearer eighty than seventy. The Queen even tried – unsuccessfully – to have her youngest brother Richard made Grand Prior of the English Knights of Rhodes, although he was still a boy and not even a member of their Order. Her penniless sisters were married to the heirs of the Earls of Arundel, Essex and Kent and of the Lords Herbert and Strange of Knockyn and, greatest catch of all, to the eleven-year-old Duke of Buckingham. Her eldest son, Thomas Grey, obtained the hand of the heiress of the banished Lancastrian Duke of Exeter. All this was done before the end of 1467.

She caused much popular indignation and made her husband some
very dangerous enemies. A contemporary chronicler describes the marriage of the aged Duchess of Norfolk as ‘diabolical’. Moreover, the old lady was a Nevill by birth and Warwick’s aunt. The Earl was also angered by Thomas Grey’s marriage, since the Duke of Exeter’s daughter had been betrothed to his nephew. The boy Duke of Buckingham hated his Woodville bride and never forgave her or her family – one day Queen Elizabeth would have to pay a dreadful reckoning to her unwilling brother-in-law.

If Edward IV’s rashness in marrying her may be attributed to the lust of an exceptionally self-indulgent man, it is none the less difficult to understand why he apparently did not realize that he had mortally offended Warwick. He made no effort to placate the Earl. Perhaps his resentment of Warwick’s domination had reached the point where he could no longer control it. By his marriage he had humiliated him, especially abroad and in particular in France. It demonstrated all too clearly that the Earl was not all powerful in England, as he pretended, and that he certainly did not enjoy the full confidence of the King.

Furious though Warwick must have been at the advancement of such upstarts as the Woodvilles, he was far more angry at the implications for his foreign policy. It seems that he had been ensnared by the spidery wiles of Louis XI of France, who addressed him flatteringly as ‘cousin’ in his letters and who promised rich rewards for his help. At the end of 1465 the Earl was still pretending to Louis that he was in complete control of English foreign policy and promising that Edward would not support the French king’s rebellious brother. In June the following year he sailed from his stronghold at Calais up the Seine to meet Louis, who enchanted him by his attentions and expensive presents.

However, in July 1468 Edward’s sister Margaret married Charles of Charolais, the eldest son of Philip, Duke of Burgundy. This was the one match which Louis XI was most anxious to prevent, since he dreaded a revival of the Anglo-Burgundian axis, which had once ruled half of France and all but destroyed the Valois monarchy. In any case Charolais and Warwick had disliked each other on sight on the only occasion when they met. The Croyland chronicler, a contemporary and a professional diplomatist, believed that the marriage of Margaret of York rather than the King’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was
the real reason for the conflict which now broke out between Warwick and Edward IV. Soon England was allying with Burgundy and Brittany against Louis XI, and Parliament voted a substantial sum for an invasion of France. The frantic Louis stepped up his efforts to set Warwick against Edward, even offering him a principality to be created out of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland.

As he was still only a boy, Richard could not hope to have much influence on events. Nevertheless, he was at court and sometimes an obviously angry spectator. Mancini heard that, like Clarence, he had been very displeased by the Woodville marriage, but that, unlike his brother, he tried to conceal his resentment. He accompanied the court to Greenwich – now a manor of the Queen – so presumably he was at her Coronation, even if he does not seem to have been made to play a prominent part in that distasteful ceremony. He cannot have relished watching his mother and sisters kneel in front of Elizabeth Woodville, according to the etiquette of the period, when she ate in public. There was further irritating pomp at the birth of the Queen’s first child by Edward in February 1466, a daughter who was named Elizabeth like her mother.

Warwick had lost the King, but he still hoped to control the two Princes of the Blood. In the autumn of 1464, after Edward’s announcement of his marriage, he had lured them to Cambridge where he suggested that Clarence should marry his elder daughter and become heir to half his vast possessions. It is likely that he offered the younger girl to Gloucester on the same terms. The King heard what had taken place and at once summoned the boys to his presence.
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Edward IV was perhaps the most impressive monarch England has ever known. Golden-headed and strikingly handsome, he was six foot three-and-a-half inches tall and broad in proportion, though in these early days he was lean and without an ounce of surplus fat on his soldier’s body. ‘Very princely to behold,’ comments More, ‘of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and clean made.’
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A very young man, who was still only twenty-two in 1464 and who lived life to excess, devoted to pageantry and feasting and – despite his marriage – to hunting and whoring, normally he was unfailingly cheerful and amiable in manner. But, Mancini tells us, ‘should he assume an angry face he
could appear very terrible’, as no doubt he did on this occasion. The chronicler Wavrin reports that he gave his brothers a ferocious reprimand and then had them arrested.

Even at fifteen, George felt himself as good a man as the King. After all, he was still heir presumptive and for some years to come remained the next senior male of the House of York. Unimpressed by the outburst, he ignored the order to stay away from Warwick’s daughters.

But puny little Richard, only twelve, took the warning to heart. It is significant that Edward had no qualms about making him Warwick’s henchman. At his tallest, when full grown, Gloucester was probably almost ten inches shorter than his royal brother; in 1464 the King must have seemed a giant, as would Clarence later, both of them big, blond men. (There is some indication that Richard took great pride in the fact that he alone of the brothers bore some resemblance to their father the Duke of York, who, like him, was small and dark.) This terrifying interview was surely vital to his development. He never grew out of his awe, and very likely resentment, of Edward IV, never overcame his fear of him. Which does not necessarily mean that he held him in deep affection.

Chapter Three

WARWICK TRIES TO UNMAKE A KING

By the end of 1468 Warwick was able to inform the King of France that he had ‘drawn over’ Clarence. Indeed, he had achieved an extraordinary influence over the Duke, having all but bewitched him, so seductive were his arguments.
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For the Earl was maturing a plan to depose Edward and replace him by his more amenable brother, whom he intended to secure by making him his son-in-law. However, he was not yet quite ready, still uneasy about taking such a desperate step. Nor did the King suspect him. That summer a Lancastrian agent had been captured and, after being ‘burnt in the feet’, had accused several people of corresponding with Margaret of Anjou. Among them was Lord Wenlock, well known to be a firm friend of Warwick. Still confident of the Earl, Edward commissioned him to investigate the matter.

The business dwindled into insignificance in the light of the latest piece of scandalous Woodville greed. A distinguished City merchant and former Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Cook, had been implicated with Wenlock. The Queen’s father persuaded Edward to arrest Sir Thomas and then plundered his house, stealing all his plate and movables – including some gold-thread tapestries which the
Queen’s mother was well known to have tried to buy in vain. When the Lord Chief Justice acquitted Cook, old Rivers still contrived to have him fined in such a way that his daughter got £800 of ‘Queen’s Gold’ out of it. Soon afterwards the Lord Chief Justice was dismissed.

The Woodvilles were almost certainly responsible for an even more vicious crime in Ireland. In 1465 the Lord Deputy, Thomas FitzGerald, seventh Earl of Desmond, had visited England and during his stay had told the King that he would have done better to marry a princess of some great foreign house. Two years later, on being replaced as Deputy by the Earl of Worcester, Lord Desmond was promptly arrested, arraigned on frivolous charges and beheaded, while two of his young children were murdered in prison. Nearly two decades after, when he was King, Richard wrote to the then Earl of Desmond to say that his father and brothers had been killed by the same people who had destroyed his own brother Clarence – the Woodvilles.
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What with Woodville crimes and Warwick’s intrigues, ‘many murmerous tales ran in the City [of London]’ and indeed throughout the country. The atmosphere was explosive. The crisis burst early the following year, 1469, in the North. A certain ‘Robin of Redesdale’ – in reality Sir John Conyers, a kinsman of Warwick – rose in revolt, together with ‘Robin of Holderness’ and ‘John Amend-all’. In their manifestos they complained of pointed grievances, and in particular of Lord Rivers and all the Queen’s kindred. Still more suspiciously a rumour began to circulate, and to circulate very widely, that Edward IV was a bastard and that the rightful King was the Duke of Clarence. One rising was promptly and apparently zealously repressed by Warwick’s brother, the Nevill Earl of Northumberland, yet almost immediately another broke out in Lancashire.

King Edward did not appreciate the seriousness of the situation, nor did he detect the sophisticated organization behind the risings. Above all, he did not understand that he had failed to give England the peace and prosperity which it had expected from him when he replaced Henry VI. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently worried to go north himself with a small army. Richard accompanied him. Not realizing how grave was his danger, Edward moved slowly enough.
En route
he passed through Norwich, where the Paston family presented
themselves to the royal brothers and complained of the depredations of the Duke of Suffolk, their brother-in-law.

While Richard was in Norfolk, he found himself so short of money that he wrote – or rather dictated – an anxious letter to one of his retainers to borrow ‘an hundred pound of money until Easter next coming’ because ‘I am so suddenly called’. The letter, from Castle Rising, is dated 24 June. He and his brother spent the night of 26 June at Croyland Abbey, for whose monks Bishop Russell would write a damning account of Richard’s reign nearly twenty years later. They continued by boat up the River Nene to his childhood home of Fotheringay to stay with their mother, who was in residence.

Duchess Cecily no doubt gave them disturbing news of their brother George. She had recently seen him at Warwick’s castle of Sandwich in Kent, where a threateningly large contingent of Nevills were gathering, including the Archbishop of York. Clarence had gone there on 7 June. He must have been painfully embarrassed by the unexpected arrival of his mother a week later – clearly she had learnt of a plot and hoped to dissuade him from taking part in it. Probably she guessed that she had been unsuccessful and hastened to the Midlands to warn Edward.

In the event Clarence and Warwick crossed to Calais shortly after her departure. On 11 July George married the Earl’s sixteen-year-old daughter Isabel, the service being performed by the bride’s uncle, the Archbishop. Within another week Clarence and Warwick were on their way back to England with fresh troops from the Calais garrison. They landed on 20 July and marched north.

Meanwhile, Edward had suddenly realized that he was in grave danger. Not only was he outnumbered by ‘Robin of Redesdale’, but he now knew that Warwick was behind the rising. The King and Richard took refuge in Nottingham Castle, waiting to be relieved by the Earl of Pembroke and his Welshmen. Then Robin and Warwick joined forces and routed Pembroke at Edgecote near Banbury, capturing and beheading him, together with other leading supporters of the King.

Edward IV, as strong-nerved as he was cunning, now adopted a policy of totally passive resistance. He disbanded his outnumbered
troops and then waited for Warwick to take him prisoner. It was a calculated gamble – everyone remembered how Richard II had been dethroned and murdered in similar circumstances. Certainly the rebels were in no very merciful mood. Old Rivers and his son John – the aged Duchess of Norfolk’s youthful husband – were quickly caught and executed. There was a general massacre of Woodville supporters. The Queen’s mother was accused of trying to bewitch Edward by means of ‘an image of lead made like a man-at-arms, being the length of a man’s finger and broken in the middle and made fast with wire’. However, Warwick was not quite brave enough to take the only step which might have ensured victory – to kill the King, as had been done with Richard II. Edward was placed in honourable confinement, first at Warwick Castle, then at Middleham, then at Pontefract. He showed the utmost amiability, graciously co-operating with his captors and signing documents drafted by them without demur. Warwick appointed a new Lord Treasurer and appeared to be in complete control of the realm. In reality all he had achieved was to plunge it into anarchy without eliminating the captive King’s supporters.

It seems that the young Duke of Gloucester had not been arrested with his brother. We know that Edward’s chamberlain, his cousin and friend Lord Hastings, was busy raising troops in Lancashire while the King was being held, and it is likely that Richard was doing the same somewhere else in the North Country. It is also known that when Edward suddenly summoned his lords to come to him at Pontefract at the end of September, Gloucester and Hastings rode there together at the head of a very strong force. The King’s unofficial gaoler, the Archbishop of York, could do nothing when in October Edward announced he was going to London. In the capital he was welcomed with unfeigned relief. Warwick watched helplessly from the North as the King reasserted his authority. The Earl and Clarence finally dared to go down to London in December, where they were received with apparent forgiveness.

The Duke of Clarence had gained less than nothing from his treachery. By contrast, Richard was magnificently rewarded, being made Constable of England and receiving many other great honours
and estates, among them the beautiful castle of Sudeley in Gloucestershire. He was also appointed Chief Steward and Surveyor of the Principality of Wales and Earldom of March, Chief Justice of North Wales and – until the majority of the boy Earl of Pembroke – Chief Justice and Chamberlain of South Wales. The Welsh were inveterate Lancastrians. Shortly after Edward’s return to London, Henry ap Thomas ap Griffith and Morgan ap Thomas ap Griffith seized the castles of Cardigan and Carmarthen as bases for a full-scale rebellion. The seventeen-year-old Chief Justice dealt with them with impressive speed, recapturing both castles before Christmas.

But Warwick and Clarence remained an insoluble problem. They knew that their very existence threatened the King, while they could not forget a most unforgiving Queen. Even had they wished, they were unable to hold back their supporters – a strange mixture of personal followers, secret and not so secret Lancastrians, and energetic opportunists. By March 1470 risings were again breaking out in the North. On 10 March Sir John Conyers, Lord Fitzwalter and Lord Scrope of Bolton were up in arms. The outbreak was recognized as very serious. After an apparently puny affray by Lord Welles and Sir Thomas Dymmock in Lincolnshire the previous month, on 4 March Welles’s son Sir Robert had had a proclamation read in all the churches of that county – every man must rally against the King in the names of the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of Warwick.

This time Edward moved much more quickly, smashing the risings and summarily beheading their leaders. Before he died Sir Robert confessed that Clarence and Warwick had been behind him. These two ‘great rebels’ refused to obey the King’s summons without a safe conduct. Having got as far north as Manchester, they then fled down to Devon and embarked for Calais with their wives. At Calais, although the Lieutenant Lord Wenlock was secretly Warwick’s friend, they were met with gunfire. The poor young Duchess of Clarence was in labour and miscarried as a result, her stillborn son being buried at sea. The miserable party finally landed at Honfleur, where King Louis was only too pleased to give them refuge.

Edward was prepared to use any means to prevent their return. At the suggestion of the sinister John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, twenty of Warwick’s men were publicly impaled at Southampton for an example (though the victims seem to have been hanged beforehand). Yet Warwick was far from beaten.

By now he had decided that Clarence would make an impossible King. But there was still a Lancastrian Pretender available – together, Lancastrian faithful and Yorkist disaffected might well restore Henry VI. Louis was enchanted by the prospect and forced Margaret of Anjou to forgive the Earl and ally with him. On 22 July 1470 in Angers Cathedral, Warwick knelt on the stone floor before her for a good quarter of an hour, first begging her forgiveness and then swearing loyalty to King Henry. She even consented to her only son, Prince Edward, marrying his younger daughter Anne. The boy was already all too like his ferocious mother, alarmingly haughty and talking of nothing but war and beheading his enemies. However, the Earl must subdue England before she and the boy returned – an ultimately fatal miscalculation. Clarence was left with nothing but the right to inherit the throne, should Edward of Lancaster fail to beget children.

Meanwhile, in northern England still more small risings were breaking out once again. They were not especially dangerous, but important enough to keep Edward IV there. Richard was with him, a precociously mature eighteen-year-old who in August 1470 was appointed Warden of the West Marches against Scotland. But the real danger lay in the South.

The King was at York when he was suddenly informed that on the evening of 13 September the Earl of Warwick, together with the Duke of Clarence and such Lancastrian exiles as the Earls of Oxford and Shrewsbury, had landed in Devon and were making for London. Edward started out for the South. But he had only reached Doncaster when in the middle of the night his minstrels burst into his bedchamber to warn him that the Marquess Montagu – Warwick’s brother, formerly Earl of Northumberland – was advancing with a large body of troops to capture him.

The King reacted with his usual decisiveness. Together with Richard, Hastings, his brother-in-law the new Earl Rivers, and a few hundred devoted followers, he galloped to King’s Lynn in Norfolk. There he commandeered two flat-bottomed merchantmen from Holland
to supplement the single small royal ship which he found in the port. Then, still in his armour, he set sail for the Low Countries. Commynes observes, ‘They did not have a penny between them and scarcely knew where they were going.’