The Life and Times of Richard III (12 page)

This interpretation would help to explain the agreement which Richard reached with the Queen Dowager in February 1484. In return for a guarantee of her daughters’ safety, Elizabeth agreed that they should leave the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey and place themselves in Richard’s care. This would seem to be an extraordinary stupid thing to do if she knew – or even suspected – that Richard had already murdered her two sons.

However, the Buckingham theory is snagged by one fatal flaw. If Buckingham was guilty, Richard could have saved himself a lot of trouble by saying so. ‘The most untrue creature living’ had a lot of crimes laid at his door, but never the murder of the Princes. At the risk of complicating the issue still further, we could go on to ask, why did Richard not avail himself of the opportunity to accuse Buckingham, even if he was guilty himself? The simplest answer would be that they were still alive when the Woodville daughters emerged from Sanctuary and met their death shortly afterwards. This would be within an acceptable margin of error as far as medical evidence on the skeletons is concerned. It would also tally with the statement in the Great Chronicle of London that the rumours of the Princes’ deaths were current after Easter 1484.

On balance this too is improbable, for there are more powerful reasons to support the conclusion that the Princes were already dead when Richard heard the news of Buckingham’s treachery. First of all, the marriage between Elizabeth of York and Henry Tudor, which was negotiated in September 1483, would not have gained the Queen Dowager’s assent if she still had reasonable hopes of seeing her two boys alive. Secondly, Richard never made any attempt to quash the rumours circulating in the autumn of 1483 by parading Edward and Richard in public. Finally, there is no mention of any guarantees for their safety in the pact which brought their sisters out of Sanctuary on 1 March 1484.

As the alternative suspects are eliminated and the time-scale of the murders narrows, Richard’s defence begins to appear more and more shaky. It is therefore worth taking a second look at the most convincing circumstantial evidence in his favour – the fact that on 1 March 1484, the Queen Dowager permitted her daughters to leave the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth Woodville was no fool. The former widow of a Lancastrian knight, she was canny enough to become the wife of a Yorkist king. She was also hardy enough to have given birth to her elder son twelve years before in the same Sanctuary. If she knowingly delivered her daughters to the man who had done away with her sons, she must have been prompted by something more than naïvety or claustrophobia.

Sanctuary, she knew, was not an inviolable privilege. After the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, Edward IV gave orders for the Lancastrian rebels who had taken refuge in the Abbey to be dragged out and executed. If Richard was determined to get her and her daughters out, she had no reason to suppose his scruples would be any stronger than his brother’s. This much is hinted in Croyland Chronicle: ‘After frequent entreaties
as well as threats
had been used, Queen Elizabeth, being strongly solicited to do so, sent her daughters from the Sanctuary at Westminster to King Richard.’ If Sanctuary was unsafe, was there any greater certainty that Richard would respect his promise not to harm her daughters? The wording of his oath provides the clue:

Memorandum that I, Richard... in the presence of my Lords spiritual and temporal, of you, Mayor and Aldermen of my City of London, promise and swear
verbo regio
and upon these Holy Evangiles of God by me personally touched, that if the daughters of Dame Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England, that is to wit Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Katherine and Bridget, will come out into me of the Sanctuary of Westminster, and be guided, ruled and demeaned after me, I shall see that they be in surety of their lives, and also do not suffer any manner of hurt... in their body and persons by way of ravishment or defouling contrary to their wills....

The terms are what we might expect: it is the witnesses who are the key. Richard’s private word of honour was reinforced by a public undertaking, witnessed by Lords, Bishops, Mayor and Aldermen. If the King broke his oath, the whole kingdom would know of it. Every public act that Richard undertook in 1483 – the heralds announcing the discovery of the Woodville arms caches, the staging of Dr Shaa’s sermon, the royal progress of July and August, the magnificent investiture of the Prince of Wales – witnesses how sensitive he was to public opinion. The Princes might be done away with in secret, but their five sisters would find no safer refuge than in the limelight of Richard’s Court.

We have thus come in a full circle back to Richard as the prime suspect and the early autumn of 1483 as the most likely date. The evidence is not conclusive in a legal sense, and never will be. Richard stands convicted not so much by the evidence against him as by the lack of evidence against anybody else.

The murders leave an ineradicable stain on Richard’s character. Despite the long list of precedents the act was as shocking then as it appears today. But it does not prove that his nature was warped by a vein of deliberate cruelty. His treatment of the vanquished Nevilles and his defence of Clarence show Richard in a kinder light. It is also more than likely that Buckingham egged him on to the murder as persuasively as he propelled him towards the throne.

More important than the moral issue were the political consequences. The murder of the Princes has often been described as a Renaissance solution in the manner later prescribed by Macchiavelli. In fact it was a colossal blunder. Nothing else could have prompted the deflated Woodvilles to hitch themselves to Henry Tudor’s bandwagon. In October Richard was rescued from the consequences by the storm that scattered Henry’s Breton fleet. But the menace remained and would cast its shadow over the brief twilight of Richard’s reign. At the cathedral of Rennes on Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor swore a solemn oath in the presence of the Lancastrian Court in exile that he would marry Elizabeth of York. It was both a promise and a warning.

Returning to his capital on 25 November 1483, Richard received a heartening welcome at Kennington from the Mayor and Aldermen in their scarlet robes, and was escorted to Blackfriars by a troop of horsemen clad in violet. He had survived the first real crisis of his reign with surprisingly little effort. His army had been sent home without striking a blow. The overwhelming majority of the gentry, the cities and even the barons had ignored the rebel call to arms, and signified their consent to his usurpation. The storm clouds gathering in Brittany were not allowed to disturb the magnificent Christmas festivities, which prompted Commynes to declare that Richard ‘was reigning in greater splendour and authority than any king of England for the last hundred years’. With one London mercer alone he ran up a bill for
£
1,200.

Richard was not the sort of man to indulge himself for long in the sybaritic pleasures of the Court. Early in the New Year he was back in the saddle, on a progress through Kent. Unlike the ceremonial tour of the previous summer, this was a strictly business-like affair. During the late rebellion Kent had once again lived up to its reputation as the most troublesome shire in his kingdom. A special oath of allegiance was now administered to the men of Kent by commissioners appointed for that purpose, and one of Richard’s most trusted household knights, Sir Marmaduke Constable, was installed at Penshurst to put down the evils of livery and maintenance. The royal proclamation which followed on the heels of the oath is interesting because it puts Richard’s political philosophy in a nutshell. Any man who found himself ‘grieved, oppressed or unlawfully wronged’ was invited to ‘make a bill of complaint and put it to his highness, for his grace is utterly determined that all his subjects shall live in rest and quiet, and peaceably enjoy their lands, livelihoods and goods, according to the laws of this his land, which they were naturally born to inherit’. It was a clear recognition that a king must earn his subjects’ loyalty with firm, effective government and speedy, impartial justice.

The tragedy of Richard III was that he had so little time to put his good intentions into effect. Nevertheless, at the first and only Parliament of his reign, which opened on 23 January, he made an impressive beginning.

Unlike the tyrant of legend, Richard had a healthy respect for the assembly of Lords and Commons who met together in the Painted Chamber at Westminster to hear the Chancellor’s opening address. Parliament was the highest court of the realm, with a special competence in the larger political issues of the succession, the disinheritance of traitors by act of attainder, the imposition of taxes, the overhaul of the machinery of justice and other great issues touching the welfare of the community as a whole. Over the last two centuries, the knights and burgesses who represented the shires and the towns had won many important privileges, including the right to hold their own deliberations in the refectory of Westminster Abbey under a Speaker of their choice, to put forward collective requests of their own devising, known as common petitions, and to make all Parliamentary legislation conditional on their assent. During the troubled years of Henry VI’s reign the Commons had shown themselves particularly aggressive, forcing on the King’s Council their proposals for the reform of his slipshod finances, and even impeaching Queen Margaret’s favourite minister, the Duke of Suffolk. In Edward IV’s capable hands the situation was quickly reversed. Far from resisting reform, it was the King’s Council which most actively promoted it, and entered into a fruitful partnership with the Commons. This was the precedent that Richard determined to follow.

John Russell’s opening speech was originally intended for Edward V’s first Parliament, but it would serve as well for Richard’s. It was an appeal to the Lords to forget their private quarrels and ‘each amiably hearken upon the other, so that they might attend to the welfare of the body politic’. A postscript on the Duke of Buckingham – ‘a rotten member of the body’ – was added, to drive the lesson home. Business began in earnest on the following Monday, when the Commons paid their King the compliment of choosing his personal confidant, William Catesby, as Speaker. Their first priority was the confirmation of Richard’s title: the Act reiterated the story of Edward’s precontract with Eleanor Butler, accused Elizabeth Woodville of witchcraft and sorcery, and attributed all the subsequent ‘destruction of the noble blood of this land’ to her ‘ungracious pretensed marriage’ to the King. Since Edward’s children were bastards and Clarence’s had been attainted, Richard was king by right of inheritance, as well as by the election of the three estates assembled in Parliament. Prince Edward, his son, was declared heir apparent.

The attainders came next. Ninety-five men had been singled out as the leaders of the rebellion and had their lands confiscated – twenty-eight from Kent and Surrey, fourteen from Berkshire, thirty-three from Wiltshire and eighteen from the Exeter clique. These measures were not unduly harsh: at least a third of the attainders were subsequently revoked and many of those named had already found refuge at Henry’s Court in exile. The two women most closely implicated were treated with generosity. The Duchess of Buckingham,
née
Catherine Woodville, received an annuity. The much more deeply implicated Countess of Richmond suffered no further punishment than having to place her lands in the keeping of her husband, Lord Stanley. Without a doubt, she owed her survival to Stanley who, with his unusually sensitive nose for picking the winner, had remained loyally at Richard’s side throughout the crisis.

The remainder of the session was devoted to more constructive work. The Commons approved a whole sheaf of government-sponsored statutes aimed at stopping legal loop-holes and sharp practices. One ensured that juries should be properly qualified and free from intimidation. Another provided that bail should be allowed to men arrested on suspicion of felony. A third put a stop to fraudulent property transfers which concealed from the buyer that a part of the property in question had already been sold to somebody else. These were clearly aimed at local dignitaries who used their position to exploit less powerful neighbours, and they show that Richard was not afraid of causing offence among his more influential subjects in the name of better justice.

In drafting these reforms Richard employed the help of some of the most able and learned men in the kingdom, for apart from his personal confidants, the backbone of Richard’s Council were the churchmen who traditionally staffed the upper echelons of the civil service in the Middle Ages. All of them were professionals with years of service under Edward IV to their names. The Chancellor, John Russell, was an experienced diplomat, as was Thomas Langton, Bishop of St David’s, whom Richard would shortly send on a mission to the Pope. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York and Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, were both Cambridge academics and former Chancellors. John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester, became the founder of Jesus College, Cambridge. John Gunthorp, Dean of Wells, was Keeper of the Privy Seal and the royal chaplain, Edmund Chatterton, held a key financial post as Treasurer of the Chamber. These men not only brought a wealth of experience to the Council table, but also provided the vital element of continuity with the previous régime.

If the Commons were impressed by Richard’s conscientious programme of legal reforms, they were probably even more gratified by his failure to ask for a Parliamentary subsidy. The military expenses of the previous autumn had proved a heavy drain on his resources and the substantial treasure hoard bequeathed to him by Edward IV was almost depleted. Furthermore, he knew that Henry Tudor would soon try his luck again. To meet the threat more troops would have to be paid, ships fitted out, battlements repaired and garrisons provisioned. His reticence in asking the Commons for money must therefore have been a political gesture. Unless some grandiose chauvinistic venture like the conquest of France was in the offing, the increasingly prosperous middle classes were particularly resentful of direct taxation, and expected the king to maintain his household and meet the day-to-day expenses of government from his own resources. In his earnest effort to win their approval Richard went one step further: he renounced in advance the fund-raising device of voluntary loans or benevolences which had caused so much unfavourable comment during his brother’s reign. On 20 February, the last day of Parliament’s sitting, the Commons granted him in return the customs revenues, known as tonnage and poundage.