Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (23 page)

Clarence’s wilfulness was now shading into instability that threatened national security. This time there would be no second chances. In April 1477 Clarence sent a posse to abduct a harmless old woman, Ankarette Twynhoe, on charges of poisoning his wife, Isabel Neville (who had actually died in childbirth). Along with one John Thursby, who was accused of poisoning the duke’s son, Ankarette was condemned and hanged. Clarence next turned his paranoia on his brother Edward. The king, he told anyone who would listen, was a warlock ruling by witchcraft. He had used sorcery to cause fog to fall on the battlefield of Barnet, and conjured up the storms that had delayed Margaret of Anjou’s invasion. Now, claimed a clearly delusional Clarence, his brother was employing the black arts to kill him slowly, ‘consuming [me] in likewise as a candle is consumed by burning’.

King Edward moved to warn Clarence off. On the evidence of John Stacey – an astronomer and fellow of Merton College, Oxford, who had been accused of sorcery and tortured – a member of Clarence’s affinity, Thomas Burdet, was implicated in ‘imagining’ (i.e. attempting to bring about by magic) the deaths of King Edward and his young son Edward, Prince of Wales. Stacey and Burdet were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

Foolishly, Clarence ignored this clear shot across his bows. He burst into a meeting of the Privy Council at Westminster with a Lancastrian cleric, John Goddard, and made a voluble protest at the execution of his friend. Edward’s patience had run out. Clarence was not only a loose, but an out-of-control cannon, firing in every direction and attracting every malcontent in the land. In July, after being berated by his brother in person, he was taken to the Tower.

Imprisoned in the Bowyer Tower in the fortress’s northern ward, Clarence waited for six months before learning his fate. In January 1478, Edward put his signature to a bill of attainder accusing Clarence of the most heinous crimes. He was charged not only with plotting to usurp the throne, but of planning to destroy his brother and the king’s children. As the bill described it, ‘A much higher, much more malicious, more
unnatural and loathely treason than at any time heretofore hath been compassed, comported or conspired’.

Edward threw the book at his treacherous brother, openly charging him with spreading stories that Edward had been born a bastard, and that he, Clarence, was the Duke of York’s legitimate son and heir. As a final piece of evidence, Edward had laid his hands on the agreement – carefully preserved by Clarence – made with Margaret of Anjou in 1469 in which Clarence was recognised as heir to Henry VI’s son Edward, should he die without issue. The bill was a damning – and deadly – indictment.

Edward summoned Parliament specifically to condemn his brother. He carefully packed both the Commons and the Lords to make sure that the bill passed. A new royal favourite, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, made the keynote speech in the Lords demanding Clarence’s death. The news of his condemnation was brought to Clarence in the Tower. But as a special brotherly favour, he was told, the king was leaving the choice of the method of execution up to him. Either because of his mental instability, or as a last gesture of bravado and contempt, Clarence plumped for the extraordinary exit of being dunked in a butt or pipe of his favourite Malmsey wine. (A pipe would normally contain over 470 litres of the sweet liquor, more than enough to drown even a tall man like Clarence.) The messy and long-drawn-out self-sentence was carried out in the Bowyer Tower on 18 February 1478.

Because of the outlandish nature of Clarence’s death, many have assumed that it was a dramatic invention of Shakespeare in
Richard III
. But the Bard was reflecting contemporary sources. The chroniclers Mancini and Commines both unequivocally report the liquid facts, and perhaps most significantly of all, the duke’s daughter, Margaret, Duchess of Salisbury – later herself to die violently and bizarrely in the Tower because of her Yorkist blood – wore on a bracelet a tiny silver wine barrel in memory of her father’s end. Clarence was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey – the scene of his and his brother’s final battle – beside his wife Isabel Neville. Modern examination of the bones also lends support to a death by drowning, since Clarence’s skull bears no trace of decapitation – the usual method of execution for high-born traitors.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE PRINCES, THE PROTECTOR AND THE PRETENDERS

THE HOUSE OF
York had destroyed its deadly rival the House of Lancaster. But in making sure that the beaten enemy was truly dead, it managed to destroy itself. The death of Clarence opened rifts in the ruling family that ultimately brought about its downfall. The old dowager Cicely, Duchess of York, ‘proud Cis’, had pleaded in vain for the life of her favourite son. She never forgave Edward for the fratricide. And young Richard, Duke of Gloucester, too, it was rumoured, despite his rivalry with Clarence and forgetting for once his slavish loyalty to Edward, had publicly sworn to avenge his brother’s death. Richard’s rage was focused in particular on the queen and her Woodville brood, whom he darkly suspected of poisoning Edward’s mind against Clarence with sorcery. These bitter family rifts would culminate after Edward’s death with deadly effect, leading to more dark deeds in the Tower. As the philosopher and lawyer Sir Francis Bacon observed, the Yorks were ‘a race often dipped in their own blood’.

In the second half of his truncated reign, Edward IV let himself go. His natural greed and lasciviousness ran riot. Food and fornication continued to be his favourite vices. He fathered ten legitimate children with Elizabeth – one, Richard, Duke of York, born in 1473, a spare to go with his heir Edward, Prince of Wales – and at least half a dozen bastards with a succession of mistresses, mostly casual one-night stands. No woman, it was said, was safe when the king was around, and he didn’t much mind whether they were married or maids. Edward’s self-indulgence shortened his life. The once magnificent master of the battlefield had, aged just forty, become a corpulent hulk. Even so, few can have expected the sudden end. After boating on the Thames brought on an apparent
chill (according to Mancini) or apoplexy (Commines) in March 1483 Edward took to his bed in Westminster. He never rose from it, and after dictating his will, died on 9 April. Edward’s premature death was a disaster for England. The king who had vanquished his enemies, restoring stability and solvency, was gone – leaving his kingdom to a twelve-year-old child. A minor on the throne surrounded by ambitious and ruthless men had often proved a recipe for catastrophe in the past, and was to do so once again now.

In his deathbed will, Edward named his surviving brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as protector while his son and heir, the new King Edward V, was a minor. Richard had always shown Edward IV exemplary loyalty, and proved himself an able administrator. As the king’s lieutenant in the north, he had been virtual monarch of the region – a competent and courageous soldier. Most of all, he was family. What reason should there be not to trust him to hold the kingdom in stewardship for his own flesh and blood?

Yet Richard had already demonstrated ruthlessness, rapacity and downright sadistic cruelty. Apart from the killing of King Henry and his son, he had imprisoned the Earl of Warwick’s widow, Anne (his own mother-in-law), in his castle of Middleham in an effort to get his hands on the extensive Neville estates. The Countess of Warwick was not the only Lancastrian lady to have suffered at his hands. He had also abducted, harried and bullied the elderly dowager Lady Oxford, mother of Lord Oxford, into signing over her estates to him on her deathbed. In the Middle Ages chivalry was usually extended to women of rank, even when they were the wives and widows of enemies. In trusting Richard to treat his widow and children well after he had gone, Edward doomed the House of York.

So who was the thirty-year-old Richard, Duke of Gloucester? In peering through the mists of time at the true face of this remarkable man, we have to clear away first of all the distorting accretions of dust sprinkled over his portrait by Shakespeare, and by so-called ‘Tudor propagandists’ like Sir Thomas More, who caricatured ‘crook-back Dick’ as a misshapen villain, born with teeth and shoulder-length hair, who had but to breathe on a flower for it to wilt. Even more misleading are the modern efforts of Ricardian apologists to paint their hero as ‘Good King Richard’, a near saintly figure, vilely slandered and innocent of the foul crimes of which he is accused. The prime crime, of course, being the murder of his two
nephews in the Tower, an atrocity without parallel even in the bloody annals of the English monarchy, combining infanticide, regicide and the slaughter of Richard’s blood relatives in one gruesome package. The evidence – both contemporary and more recent – points overwhelmingly to Richard’s guilt.

Born on 2 October 1452 at his father’s Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, Richard was a frail child; though not a hunchback, he may have had one shoulder higher than the other, and a withered arm. He overcame any such physical disadvantages to become proficient in the martial qualities expected in a male of his exalted rank. He resembled his father in his slight build and sharp, narrow features rather than his giant elder brothers Edward and Clarence. Brought up largely at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, owned by the Earl of Warwick, Richard’s childhood was overshadowed by the murderous Wars of the Roses. He came into his own after his prominent role in the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and his less publicised part in the killings of Prince Edward and King Henry.

With such a disturbed background, it is not surprising that Richard’s character was twisted by his experience of murder, battle, betrayal, treason, exile, and the violent deaths of his nearest and dearest. By the time he reached maturity he had seen his father, two of his brothers, and his childhood guardian, Warwick, killed. The bloody experience of his first eighteen years had hardened and coarsened him, producing a man mistrustful of others and suspicious to the point of paranoia. If childhood circumstances make the man, it is hardly surprising that Richard became a monster.

As soon as he learned of his brother’s death, Richard hastened south from York with a retinue of 300 followers. Having set out along the road to usurpation and murder he did not deviate, and one step led inexorably to the next. At first he had allies: the Duke of Buckingham and his brother’s closest friend Lord William Hastings. But it speaks volumes for Richard’s terrifying character that one, Hastings, was eliminated by the ‘protector’ within weeks, while the other, Buckingham – Richard’s closest confidant in the conspiracy to seize power – turned on his partner in crime to revolt against him.

Buckingham brought 300 men to join Richard at Northampton on his journey south. Their immediate objective was to intercept the young King
Edward V, whose accession had already been proclaimed in London. Edward himself had been at his father’s castle at Ludlow in the care of his Woodville uncle, Anthony, Lord Rivers, when news of the king’s death arrived. Inexplicably, they had lingered in Ludlow for a fortnight before setting out on the journey to London. The delay would prove fatal.

In the capital, the Woodvilles had taken charge, hastily fixing the new king’s coronation for 4 May. The Tower was the vital piece on the chessboard of power. To keep it safely in their hands, just a month before the king’s death, the Woodvilles had appointed one of their own, the queen’s eldest son, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, to succeed another, her brother Anthony, Lord Rivers, as constable. The queen’s family, justly fearing that the power, titles and wealth they had so greedily acquired would be stripped from them if Richard became protector, intended to circumvent Edward’s will, keep Richard from power, and rule using young King Edward V as their puppet. But in Richard the Woodvilles were up against a player even more ruthless and power hungry than themselves.

Richard had an important ally on the Royal Council who distrusted the Woodvilles. William, Lord Hastings, was determined that the will of his dead friend the king should be carried out to the letter. Suspicious that the Woodvilles were keeping Richard in the dark until they had consolidated their power, it was Hastings who sent word to York to inform Richard of his brother’s passing. Hastings also insisted that the escort accompanying the young king to London should be limited to 2,000 men, rather than the army which the Woodvilles had wanted. To lull the Woodvilles into a false sense of security while he gathered his forces, Richard wrote to the council, fulsomely proclaiming his loyalty to the new king and his heirs. Then he set off for the south.

After celebrating St George’s Day in Ludlow on 23 April, Edward and his uncle Lord Rivers had belatedly left for London the next day with their ‘sober company’ of 2,000 escorts. When they reached Northampton, Richard had rendezvoused with the Duke of Buckingham north of the town. Sir Richard Grey, the queen’s second son, arrived hotfoot from London and urged his uncle Rivers to bring his royal charge to the capital without further delay. They rode on, reaching Stony Stratford, fourteen miles south of Northampton, that night. Here they lodged young King Edward at the Rose and Crown inn, before returning to Northampton to mollify Richard who, with Buckingham, had settled into lodgings in the town.

Continuing his policy of lulling the Woodvilles into a false sense of security, Richard, accompanied by Buckingham, entertained Rivers and Grey to supper that night with every appearance of friendliness. When the two Woodvilles had retired to bed, however, the two dukes stayed up plotting the first of the two coups that would bring Richard to the throne. Having posted their 600 troops on the roads out of town and surrounded the inn where the Woodvilles were sleeping, Richard struck at dawn. He stormed in on the Woodvilles, accusing them of denying him the protectorate and making the king their prisoner. Locking up a stunned Rivers, and taking Grey along as a hostage, Richard and Buckingham then galloped to Stony Stratford and took possession of the boy king.

Since possession is nine tenths of the law, with Edward in his hands Richard had, at a stroke, effectively made himself master of the state. When the dramatic news reached London on the night of 1 May, the ever pragmatic Queen Elizabeth realised that she had lost the power game. She immediately fled to the familiar surroundings of the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey – where she had taken refuge during her husband’s exile thirteen years before – along with her daughters and her younger son, the nine-year-old Richard, Duke of York. With the acute political antennae that saw her survive the bloodletting that consumed most of the male members of her extended family, Elizabeth sensed the deadly danger she was in. Assured that Lord Hastings had promised that she had nothing to fear, the queen burst out, ‘Ah, woe worth him, for he is one of them that labour to destroy me and my blood.’