The Demon's Brood (39 page)

We know nothing of Richard's relations with his wife, except that in the end he saw her as an encumbrance. He was an indulgent father to their sickly only son Edward of Middleham, providing him with a chariot so he could follow the hunt. He also
ensured that his two bastards (born before his marriage) were well provided for: Katherine became Countess of Huntingdon while John of Gloucester was made Captain of Calais. There are hints of womanizing after he became king.

Richard preferred falconry to hunting, while he took particular pleasure in bear-baiting (during which mastiffs savaged the animal to death) and appointed a royal ‘bear-herd' in 1484. He also had a special bear-pit built at Warwick Castle
¹¹
. Among his books were the
Chronicle of John of Brompton
, Aegidius on statecraft,
Of the Rule of Princes
by Giles of Bologna and William of Worcester's Norman documents. He commissioned only one illuminated manuscript, a translation of Vegetius on war. Lighter reading consisted of a volume of tales (including two by Chaucer.) He owned a Lollard bible, indicating an inability to read Latin or French in which the scriptures were freely available. A love of heraldry is revealed by his founding the College of Arms. Fond of music, he employed minstrels and choirs. He enjoyed building, notably a great hall at Middleham Castle and a new chapel at Sheriff Hutton, while during his reign he added towers and a range of lodgings to Warwick Castle, as well as palatial apartments to Nottingham Castle, which became a frequent residence.

He converted Middleham parish church into a college of priests, who daily said Mass for him, his wife and his dead kindred. When he became king, he planned to add a huge chantry chapel to York Minster, with six altars served by a hundred priests, which in size would have rivalled the great chapel that Henry Tudor later built on to Westminster Abbey. Clearly, he intended it to be his burial place.

Constantly on pilgrimage and visiting shrines, Richard developed a cult for St Julian the Hospitaller, a parricide who killed his father and mother but was pardoned by God. (A prayer to Julian by ‘thy servant King Richard' in his Book of Hours has a paranoiac quality.) He was prone to moralize, denouncing enemies as fornicators and adulterers – giving substance to More's gibe that he posed ‘as a goodly continent prince, clean
and continent of himself, sent out of heaven into this vicious world for the amendment of men's manners'.
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Whatever Gloucester's plans may have been, Edward IV's death took him by surprise and he found himself threatened by the Wydevilles, who formed a majority on the council. They denied his right to be more than a titular Protector, insisting the council as a whole must rule. But the Wydevilles had enemies, the most prominent being Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, with whom Richard immediately forged an alliance. Another ally was Edward IV's treasurer, Lord Howard – later rewarded with the duchy of Norfolk.

He then mounted two coups d'état in quick succession. The young king's governor, Earl Rivers, who was the queen's brother and the Wydevilles' leader, had gone to Ludlow to bring him to London for his coronation on 4 May. Richard and Buckingham met the earl in the most amiable way at Stony Stratford on 29 April, spending the evening carousing together. Next morning, however, despite Edward's tearful protests, their men seized Rivers and his key lieutenants, eventually executing them without trial. The Wydevilles were unpopular, so the Londoners cheered Gloucester when he rode in with the king. Lord Hastings, an old enemy of the Wydevilles, was overjoyed. Terrified, Queen Elizabeth fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, taking her younger son, the Duke of York. As Lord Protector, Richard chose a new date for his nephew's coronation, amid general approval. This was his first coup.

The second coup followed after he had persuaded the queen to give him custody of York, who was sent to join his brother at the Tower of London – still a palace as well as a fortress. Having discreetly summoned troops from the North, at a council meeting on 20 June he suddenly called armed guards into the room and arrested the unsuspecting Lord Hastings, whom he accused
of plotting with the Wydevilles and then had beheaded in the yard outside.

Now that Hastings, the one man who might have stopped Richard, had been eliminated, a friar announced at St Paul's that the young king and his brother were bastards because of a marriage contract between Edward IV and Lady Eleanor Butler which predated the Wydeville marriage – he even alleged that the late king had himself been a bastard. Buckingham then made a speech at Guildhall, asking everyone to petition the Protector to take the throne, an invitation repeated by a delegation of peers and gentlemen. On 26 June Richard graciously accepted.

On 6 July, Richard III and Anne Neville were crowned at Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Bourchier of Canterbury, and every effort was made to make the occasion joyful, with pageants in the London streets. At the end of July, the new king went on progress, visiting the West Country, the Midlands and the North. He spent over a fortnight at York, whose citizens vied in producing displays and tableaux, the corporation giving sumptuous banquets for the royal party. On 8 September the ten-year-old Edward of Middleham was invested in the minster as Prince of Wales, with splendour worthy of a coronation.

‘He contents the people where he goes best that ever did prince', wrote Dr Thomas Langton, Bishop of St David's, who accompanied Richard. ‘For many a poor man that hath suffered wrong many days have been relieved and helped by him and his commands now in his progress. And in many great cities and towns were great sums of money give to him, which all he hath refused. On my troth, I never liked the condition of any prince so well as his. God hath sent him to us for the weal of us all.' Breaking into Latin, the bishop marred this paean a little by adding, ‘I do not take exception to the fact that his sensuality [
voluptas
] seems to be increasing.'
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Meanwhile the boy now known as ‘Edward Bastard, late called King Edward V' and his brother were taken into the inner rooms of the Tower itself, and seen less and less until they disappeared altogether. They may have been murdered after an attempt to release them in July. The London chronicles suggest they were dead before the end of the year, while across the Channel Louis XI, who died on 30 August 1483, believed that Richard had killed the boys. During an address to the Estates General in January 1484 the chancellor of France referred to the English king having done away with his nephews.

Sir Thomas More has been accused of writing his biography of Richard as Tudor propaganda. Yet Mancini, in London at the time, bears out More. ‘The importance of Mancini's narrative lies in the fact that he provides direct contemporary evidence that Richard's ruthless progress to the throne aroused widespread mistrust and dislike, to the extent that at least some of his subjects were willing to believe, within a fortnight of his accession, that Richard had disposed of his nephews by violence.'
¹⁴

Richard was still in the North when he learned on 11 October that a rebellion had broken out, led by Buckingham. Writing to his chancellor, he described the duke as ‘the most untrue creature living: whom with God's grace we shall not be long till that we be in those parts and subdue his malice. We assure you there was never traitor better purveyed for'.
¹⁵

The plot's originators were the former queen and Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lord Stanley's wife, who used Dr John Morton to turn ‘Harry Buckingham' against the king. Aghast at Richard's unpopularity, the duke did not wish to share his downfall. Mainly former members of Edward IV's household, but including the Wydevilles and their friends, most of those involved were leading gentry from all over the southern counties, who at first hoped to restore Edward V. The Yorkist
establishment had ‘imploded'.
¹⁶
Suspecting that Edward and his brother were dead, they now planned to replace Richard with Henry Tudor, the son of Margaret Beaufort who was the last heir of the left-handed line of Lancaster. To strengthen his claim, Henry must marry Elizabeth of York, the young king's eldest sister and heiress.

The weather was on Richard's side. Heavy rain prevented Buckingham from joining the rebels in the southern counties, his Welsh retainers deserted him and the rising collapsed almost as soon as it began, while the duke was quickly caught and beheaded. Henry Tudor, who arrived too late, sailed back to Brittany without setting foot on English soil. Many of those involved fled the country.

However, Buckingham's revolt turned the unknown Tudor into a serious pretender, who was soon joined in exile by a substantial number of rebels. At the same time, Richard's narrow political power base became even narrower, restricted to three magnates – the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Stanley. Placed under house arrest, Margaret Beaufort set about turning her husband Stanley against him.

When parliament met at Westminster in January 1484, the Lord Chancellor, Bishop Russell, claimed the rebellion violated the laws of God, and a hundred men who had taken part were attainted. Another bill confirmed Richard's right to the Crown. There were legal and economic measures, one particularly appreciated being to abolish benevolences – the arbitrary ‘gifts' from wealthy men introduced by Edward IV. Richard was presenting himself to his subjects as a good lawmaker who looked after the common people.

On 9 April his only son Edward died unexpectedly at Middleham after a short illness. ‘On hearing the news at Nottingham where they were staying, you could have seen his father and mother in a state bordering on madness, from shock and grief', says the Croyland author.
¹⁷
The king's loss looked like divine judgement, while the lack of an obvious successor
increased his insecurity. He thought of making Clarence's son Warwick heir presumptive, but this meant reversing Clarence's attainder, which would give the boy a better claim to the throne than his own. Instead, he chose his sister Elizabeth's son, John de la Pole.

A Wiltshire gentleman called William Colyngbourne wrote secretly to Henry, inviting him to invade, and then posted a famous couplet on the door of St Paul's in July 1484:

The Cat, the Rat and Lovell our Dog

Ruleth all England under a Hog.

The Cat was Catesby and the Rat Ratcliffe – Richard's principal henchmen – while the Dog alluded to his chamberlain's crest and the Hog to his Boar emblem. The king grew paranoiac. ‘When he went abroad, his eyes whirled about; his body privily fenced [secretly armoured], his hand ever on his dagger, his countenance and manner like one always ready to strike again', is what More was told. ‘He took ill rest a nights, lay long waking and musing, rather slumbered than slept, troubled with fearful dreams.'
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Richard worked feverishly to persuade Duke Francis of Brittany to hand over Henry Tudor, to whom fellow exiles had sworn allegiance as king in Rennes Cathedral at Christmas 1483. Henry had also taken an oath to marry Elizabeth of York. Francis's chief minister, Pierre Landois, agreed to send him to England, but – probably alerted by Lord Stanley – Dr Morton heard of it and warned Henry, who in September 1484 fled to France.

Early in November 1484, the Earl of Oxford was freed by his gaoler at Hammes (a fortress guarding Calais), the pair going off to join Henry in France, followed by members of the Calais garrison. At the same time Sir William Brandon and his sons started a rising at Colchester, escaping to join Henry by boat when it failed. There was trouble in Hertfordshire, part of the
same plot.
¹⁹
France recognized Tudor as Henry VI's heir, promising 4,000 troops.

Nevertheless, the Twelve Days of Christmas 1484–5 were celebrated at court with dancing and gaiety, according to the Croyland writer. He says that Queen Anne and Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's eldest daughter, wore each other's clothes, as the two ‘were of similar colour and form'.
²⁰
This is the only clue to Anne's appearance: she must have been a considerable beauty if she resembled her cousin Elizabeth, who had fine features and an English rose complexion. Richard was presiding over the Twelfth Night revels, wearing his crown, when spies informed him that Henry Tudor would invade England the next summer.

He paid such attention to Elizabeth that it was clear he meant to marry her. Conveniently, Queen Anne died of tuberculosis on 16 March (during an eclipse of the sun) and his far from unwilling niece could give him an heir, removing a key part of Henry's strategy. Her mother encouraged the match, while canon lawyers assured him they could obtain a dispensation for an uncle–niece marriage. However, Ratcliffe and Catesby told him ‘to his face' that if he did not publicly deny the plan even the northerners would accuse him of murdering the queen to indulge his incestuous lust.
²¹
On 30 March 1485 the Mayor and Corporation of London were summoned to the Priory of the Knights of St John at Clerkenwell with many others, to hear the king tell them, ‘It never came in his thought or mind to marry in such manner-wise [his niece], nor willing or glad of the death of his queen, but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be.' He complained of rumours, presumably of his having poisoned Anne.
²²
The speech gives us an idea of what the Londoners thought of him. Henry sent letters to England, asking supporters to join in ‘the just depriving of that homicide and unnatural tyrant that now unjustly bears dominion over you'.
²³
Increasingly alarmed, Richard spent the spring and most of the summer waiting for an invasion after learning that Tudor would
be supplied with funds by the French, who feared the king might intervene in Brittany and try to reconquer Normandy. Yet by midsummer it looked as if Richard was safe. Pierre Landois was ousted by pro-French Bretons and hanged from the ramparts of Nantes. Now there was no longer a threat that Richard might intervene in the duchy, France lost interest in Henry, withdrawing their offer to help.