The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III's Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds (31 page)

One of the saints Richard venerated was St Anthony, who, exiled in the wilderness, had been protected by a boar. This boar drove off threatening animals, kept demons and evil spirits at bay and protected Anthony from sexual temptation. Here we can see a different man, the one caught in Dominic Mancini’s portrayal, alienated from the sexual debauchery of Edward IV’s court, and forging his own morality – and the religious and chivalric values that overlaid it – largely in isolation from it.

Richard III’s brief reign was mired in controversy. The hostility of Thomas More – which so influenced Shakespeare – was in turn inspired by the real-life enmity of John Morton towards Richard. Morton was Bishop of Ely at the beginning of Richard’s reign, and subsequently a political exile and strong supporter of Henry Tudor, rising to Archbishop of Canterbury under the new Tudor dynasty. Morton witnessed – and never forgot – the terrifying council meeting of 13 June 1483, and was imprisoned after it. Morton’s view was slanted by the allegiances he subsequently chose, but there is no doubt that he hated Richard III.

However, others were as positive as Morton was negative. Thomas Barowe, who got to know Richard during his patronage of Cambridge University, and afterwards served him as duke and king, was a valued member of his legal counsel and rose to become Richard’s master of the rolls. Barowe was still prepared to honour Richard’s memory – and the battle in which he had died – in a grant to the university in the reign of Henry VII. In an indenture of 19 January 1495 Barowe asked that the name of Richard III be remembered and masses said for his soul on 21 and 22 August each year, the eve of Bosworth and the anniversary of the battle itself.

There are no winners and losers in a vicious civil war. All suffer. If Richard genuinely believed in the legitimacy of his right to rule, and killed to enforce it, so did the Tudors. Henry VII locked up the young Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of the Duke of Clarence, and then executed him on trumped-up charges. Warwick’s ‘crime’ was to have a better claim to the throne than Henry VII. The likely fate of this innocent prince was a cause of concern throughout the first half of Henry’s reign, although we hear little about this third Prince in the Tower, and much about the two sons of Edward IV.

Yet the injustice of Warwick’s imprisonment by Henry VII featured regularly in the newsletters of the time, even though the Tudor regime discouraged speculation about him. On 29 November 1486 Sir Thomas Bateson reported that in London ‘there is little speech of the Earl of Warwick, but after Christmas they say there will be more of this’. There was not. On 17 December 1489 Edward Plumpton witnessed four royal servants hanged on Tower Hill for an attempt to rescue him, organizing a plot ‘to take out of the king’s ward [custody] the Earl of Warwick’. Warwick remained incarcerated in the Tower. And on 21 November 1499 John Pullen bluntly noted that the earl had now ‘confessed of treason’, and had been tried and executed.

That left Clarence’s daughter, Margaret, who married into the Pole family. In 1539 Henry VIII decided they were all a dynastic threat, and executed Margaret’s son. He also arrested Margaret and her twelve-year-old grandson. On 27 May 1541 this sixty-eight-year-old woman, now frail and ill, was led to her execution still roundly protesting her innocence. She was dragged to the block, and as she refused to lay her head upon it, was forced down. When she struggled, the inexperienced executioner mistimed his blow, making a gash on her shoulder instead. Ten additional blows were required to complete the execution. One account stated that she leapt from the block after the first clumsy blow and ran, being pursued by the executioner, and was struck eleven times before she died.

Contemporaries expected that her fourteen-year-old grandson, Henry Pole, would be executed at the same time. Instead, in a sequence eerily reminiscent of the possible fate of Edward V, he was withdrawn into the recesses of the Tower, deprived of his tutor and other servants, and then vanished completely. It was rumoured that he had been starved to death some time in 1542.

Today, we know little of this last prince of the House of York. Our ruling dynasties were quite ruthless in protecting their own survival – by our standards, horrifyingly so. Richard III, whatever the fate of the two sons of Edward IV, must be put firmly back into the context of his times.

It was all too convenient for the Tudor writers who followed Thomas More to blame Richard for the death of his brother, George, Duke of Clarence, although no contemporary source ever made that accusation. It was Clarence and his lineage that the Tudors were most worried about. Richard’s designated successors, the de la Pole family, also gave them a run for their money. John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, made heir presumptive by Richard in 1484, died fighting against Henry VII at the Battle of Stoke, two years after Bosworth, in 1487. Two of his brothers were subsequently imprisoned by Henry VII in the Tower of London. And even forty years later, the death of the youngest of them, the exiled Richard de la Pole, the ‘White Rose’, who on a number of occasions had threatened to lead a foreign invasion against the Tudors, was greeted with relief and celebration by Henry VIII and his court.

A genealogy drawn up for the de la Pole family early in the reign of Henry VII diverged sharply from the official Tudor view. The pedigree was dominated by a fine portrait roundel of Richard III in the centre of the roll. The sons of Edward IV were dealt with in perfunctory fashion, no title being accorded to Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower, who was said simply ‘to have died without heirs in his youth’. The accession of Henry VII received scant respect, accommodated by the addition of a thick black line in the right-hand margin, thus appearing peripheral to the roll’s content.

The purpose of the pedigree was to extol Richard III’s legitimate right to rule – a remarkable statement to make in the early Tudor period. His coronation was described, and his subsequent nomination – after the death of his son, Edward of Middleham – of John de la Pole as his heir presumptive. It was emphasized that this had been done with the consent of all the nobility of the land. The male de la Pole offspring were clustered around Richard III; Henry VII had been pushed to the margins.

The issue did not die away. Late in the reign of Henry VIII – in March 1541 – an insulting tale was recounted about Henry Tudor’s ancestry. Richard Fox of Colchester was charged with making slanderous statements about the House of Tudor and its right to rule, in which Katherine of Valois’s liaison with Owen Tudor, Henry VII’s grandfather, was described in less than flattering terms. Fox told how Katherine (Henry V’s widow) took Owen to bed, ‘baying like a very drunken whore’, and through this conceived a child, Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor. Henry’s own career was then given an unenthusiastic résumé, described as a little-known exile, brought up largely outside the country, who invaded England in 1485 and only secured the throne by killing the reigning king, Richard III, in battle. He had ‘no right to it’, Fox concluded bluntly.

Fox’s tale was embarrassing for the Tudors, one of a number of skeletons in their genealogical cupboard. Once again, the spectre of the belated Valois-Tudor marriage had been raised. A secret marriage had probably taken place between Katherine and Owen Tudor some time in late 1431, probably after the dowager queen had borne her first child. The couple subsequently had four children – three sons and a daughter. But remarkably the English council remained blissfully unaware of developments, although Katherine had been forbidden by statute to marry anyone of such low rank as Tudor. The council only found out about the relationship in 1437, after Katherine of Valois’s death. Owen was subsequently arrested, but pardoned and released in 1440. His two oldest sons, Edmund and Jasper, were placed under the care of the crown. This secret and scandalous marriage bore an unhappy resemblance to Edward IV’s own union to Elizabeth Woodville. Richard III’s attack on the validity of this match in the
Titulus Regius
was thus doubly painful for the Tudor dynasty that supplanted him.

Speculation about the relationship between Henry VII’s grandfather and Katherine of Valois was common currency in the early Yorkist period. One Welsh poem mockingly said that Owen, ‘once on a holiday, clapped his ardent, humble affection on the daughter of the king of the land of wine’. This cryptic statement contained the seed of a story current in the sixteenth century that Owen caught Katherine’s attention at a ball, when he was so unsteady on his feet that he fell into her lap.

At the time of Fox’s table-talk, a more elevated but equally worrying conversation was taking place within the walls of Dublin Castle. The king’s master of the rolls, Sir Anthony St Leger, stated that prior to his marriage to Elizabeth of York, Henry VII had only the most slender title to the throne, passing over Henry’s Tudor lineage completely. When a companion pointed out that Henry had a title of sorts through his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, St Leger was unimpressed. Henry had no rightful title, he emphasized, and that was why his supporters had urged him to marry Elizabeth of York without further delay.

Early Tudor sources were reticent about Henry VII’s personal background, and details of his exile, first in Brittany and then in France, were scarcely alluded to. There was a similar reticence over his family background – unsurprising given that his mother’s Beaufort lineage was tainted by bastardy and his father’s by a clandestine marriage. The issue of legitimacy was the shadow over the Tudors’ right to rule, and it fuelled their attacks on Richard III. By relentlessly pointing up his villainy, they hoped to distract the political community from the weakness of their own dynastic position.

To remember the legacy of Richard positively in the Tudor period took real courage. In around 1525 Jane Sacheverell decided to erect a memorial brass to her first husband, Sir John Sacheverell of Morley in Derbyshire, on which she specifically stated that he had died in Richard’s service at Bosworth Field; Sacheverell had almost certainly fallen in that last brave cavalry charge against Tudor. It was the only memorial of its kind in existence.

And the widowed Jane Sacheverell showed further mettle, for in the aftermath of Bosworth she was abducted and forced to marry against her will. In a bill of complaint she later brought, Jane described the awful occasion, on 11 November 1485, when she and her party were ambushed by Richard Willoughby of Wollaton with a band of over a hundred followers ‘riotously arrayed, as if for war’. Jane was assaulted, robbed and bound, and then carried off by Willoughby, ‘there to do his own pleasure with her, at his own will, without her consenting or being agreeable’. But Jane Sacheverell was a survivor. In May 1486 she obtained a divorce from Willoughby, and went on to marry another. In 1485 the forcible abduction of a woman was a mere trespass under the law; in 1487, in response to a petition Sacheverell brought to parliament, Henry VII made it a felony, passing an act ‘against the taking away of women against their wills’.

In his proclamation against the rebels of 1483, and in the
Titulus Regius
the following year, Richard III had spoken out in favour of the sanctity of marriage and against sexual immorality and the mistreatment of women. It was fitting that the sole existing Tudor memorial brass to name a king scarred by seeing his mother assaulted and raped was put in place by a woman who had suffered exactly the same experience.

Our history books are full of heroes and villains. But real-life experience sometimes defies such convenient generalizations. People, then and now, are complex – and in a violent age genuine concern for justice and deeply felt morality can coexist alongside political ruthlessness. For Shakespeare, Richard’s book of hours, his personal prayer book, was a prop in a theatre of deceit, and Richard’s reading from it a clever ruse to assist his seizure of the crown. Richard – in this version – was acting a false part of modesty and piety to cloak his naked ambition for the throne. Yet Richard’s piety was genuine and deeply felt, and his prayer book, carried with him to the battle where he fought and died, was later found in his war tent at Bosworth Field.

Richard III had a cause that he believed in. Some were repulsed by the way he took the throne; others remained loyal to him to the very end. When we finally lay Richard to rest we do not seek to make him ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Rather, we put a stop to the stigmatizing and vilification and allow for complexity. We also grant him the dignity of resting in peace, a dignity that 500 years of history have denied him.

Social Services car park: looking east towards the former Grammar School car park over the wall. Letter ‘R’ is directly ahead, just before the wall in first parking bay to the left. Philippa had her intuitive feeling in second parking bay to right of letter ‘R’ where remains were discovered