The War of the Roses (16 page)

Rivers and the new King's escort were not in a hurry to ride to London, but according to Richard's version of events Rivers did not inform him of his intentions. Worse, Rivers had been plotting with his sister the Queen to ‘hurry' Edward V to London for an early coronation so that Richard's authority as Protector would lapse, giving full political power to the Woodville-led Council not Richard. Only the late King's Chamberlain and personal friend William, Lord Hastings, prevented this; alarmed at the Woodville ‘plot', he wrote to inform Richard (then in Yorkshire) and advise him to hasten to London to take up his Protectorship before he was outmanoeuvred and the late King's will sidestepped. Richard decided to intercept the royal party en route from Ludlow, and was offered help by his distant cousin, Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (married to the Queen's sister but kept from influence at court for years and out for revenge). Richard and Buckingham met up and closed in on the royal party, and Rivers blithely rode into a trap at Stony Stratford when they intercepted him and the new King en route to London at the beginning of May 1483. Evidently not expecting treachery, he rode over from his nephew's lodgings to dine with Richard, retired to bed in the inn rather than insisting on returning to the King, and woke up next morning to find Richard's men surrounding his lodging.
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He would not have been so careless had the aggrieved royal brother out to intercept him been Clarence, a man with a long record of deceit and desertion of his allies, not to mention violence. If Edward had died leaving Clarence as his next adult male heir, the unstable Duke would have had every legal right to demand the ‘governorship' of the new King and senior place on the regency Council, as had gone to the next adult male heir in 1327 and the next adult male heir in England in 1422.

We have only Richard's subsequent word for it that Rivers and his escort intended to bring Edward V quickly to London before Richard arrived so that they could crown the boy and declare a Protectorship unnecessary. It is far from clear that a coronation ended the requirement for an under-age king to have a ‘Protector'; the legal tutelage of Edward III had continued beyond his coronation (1 February 1327) and that of Henry VI beyond his English coronation (6 February 1429). Edward had been crowned soon after accession, without any change to his status; Henry had been too young at accession and had had to wait for seven years. At the most, crowning Edward V would have been the occasion to legally ‘fix' arrangements for the governance of England until his adulthood. Given that Edward IV had died on 9 April 1483 and news must have reached Ludlow within a few days (probably on the 14th),
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Rivers does not seem to have acted with much haste to be as far from London as Northamptonshire on 29 April. The likelihood is that he had no intention of denying Richard his rights, whatever Queen Elizabeth intended to do, and that he was ‘framed' by Richard to justify removing him; he was kept away from London so he could not defend himself before his peers and was quietly executed in Yorkshire in June. At best he faced a short trial, before a tribunal hand-picked by Richard within the precincts of his place of captivity.
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The nature of his disposal was unprecedented for peacetime since the 1390s, though similar politically dangerous peers had been executed without a public trial (if any) in the recent political disturbances since 1455. Even Richard II had held full royal power when he disposed peremptorily of his enemies the ‘Appellants' in 1397–9; Richard was not yet king and thus showed his contempt for traditional legal practice. His equally sudden and ruthless arrest and beheading of Hastings on 13 June 1483 was to be even more blatant, and both events led to panic in London. One recent suggestion is that Richard had found (circumstantial and unprovable?) evidence by mid-June that Rivers and the Queen's son Dorset had poisoned Edward IV so they could run a regency for Edward V–but this can only be a guess.
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Had Clarence been the potential threat to the alleged ‘Woodville plot' to seize control of the regency, or the Queen and Rivers quite reasonably feared his potential given his past record, Edward V would have been likely to be brought to London far more quickly. The new King's escort would not have trusted Clarence as they evidently did Richard, and if Richard was seeking enhanced power (or the throne) this early he was not certain to have backed his long-term rival Clarence against the Woodvilles. We cannot be certain if Richard backed, opposed, or cold-bloodedly stood aside from Clarence's disgrace in 1477–8, or if he blamed the Woodvilles for it. Much has been made of contemporary Mancini stating this–but was it only gossip?
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But had both brothers been alive and in charge of large armed affinities in April–May 1483, as would have seemed probable until 1477, the struggle for control of Edward V's person would have taken a different course from real events–and Richard could have linked up with Rivers to deny Clarence control of the new King's person and government. Clarence, like Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in 1422, would have faced implacable hostility from elements of the Council.

 

Was Edward V doomed in 1483? The disputed evidence of the More account and the bodies

The older Edward V was at succession the less likely he was to be overthrown, and it is apparent that even in May 1483 he was able to express disquiet at Richard's allegations about his Woodville relatives' motives.
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He was supposed to be healthy in May/June 1483, but the incipient illness (and/or morbidity) that affected him after his deposition, when he had need of the royal physician, Dr Argentine, and according to Dominic Mancini said he feared for his life,
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was linked to the signs of osteomyelitis found in 1933 in the jawbone of the elder body found in 1674. The latter evidence, however, has since been interpreted by other medical experts to point out that the osteomyelitis in this case was advanced enough to indicate long-term serious ill-health, which was not the case with what is known of Edward V–so was the body his after all?
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In 1933, it was not proveable that the body in queston was male–unlike an autopsy today. The probable source of Mancini's story was Dr Argentine, given that the latter was one of the few visitors that the deposed King was allowed to receive in the Tower.

If the bones discovered then were those of the Princes–they were certainly approximately the right age–Edward could easily have died before his accession or as a young adult king. Due to the lack of a DNA test, however, it cannot be said that the bones were genuine; the age of victim was approximately correct but some post-1485 sources denied the bodies had been hidden in the White Tower. More to the point, was the site–a staircase leading from the original structure of the White Tower to a later, lower annex built alongside its south wall–correct? If Sir Thomas More's story of c. 1510 was correct a priest had dug the remains up after the initial burial and put them somewhere more fitting, in consecrated ground–though possibly the site of the 1674 discovery was close enough to St John's Chapel in the Tower to count as ‘consecrated'. There had been other children's bones discovered earlier in the seventeenth century somewhere hidden in the White Tower. Or was More's account really feasible? How could the murderers dig under a stone staircase at night in an inhabited part of the royal palace in the Tower without someone hearing them and coming to investigate, or at least telling Henry VII where to look after Richard's overthrow?
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Are the 1674 bodies evidence of anything?

If Edward V had died his next brother Richard, Duke of York, aged ten in 1483, would thus have succeeded as ‘King Richard III' with another struggle over the next regency a possibility. He had been married off by Edward IV as a small child to the equally young Anne Mowbray, heiress of the Dukes of Norfolk, and when the girl died in 1481 the King shamelessly defied the law by keeping the vast inheritance for himself in Richard's name rather than passing it on to Anne's relatives. The claims of the latter were ignored until Richard of Gloucester seized power, when he gave the Norfolk title and most of the lands to one claimant–conveniently his own henchman, John Howard. A loyal Yorkist veteran in his early sixties, this minor Norfolk nobleman of semi-royal descent was one of the few men not of a northern background who Richard could trust and was to lead his vanguard at Bosworth in 1485. If Richard of York had succeeded to the throne on Edward V's death as still the nominal possessor of the Dukedom of Norfolk, it is uncertain if he or his regents would have merged the latter with the Crown (which already held the dukedoms of Lancaster and York) or handed it to a claimant like Howard in return for political support.

 

1483: An unexpectedly early succession

The succession of either of Edward IV's sons to the throne could have been as late as the 1500s if Edward IV had lived into his 60s–among his ancestors Henry III had lived to 65, Edward I to 68, Edward III to 64, John ‘of Gaunt' to 59, and his great-grandfather Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, to 60. His mother, Cecily Neville, lived to around 80. Edward IV's death on 9 April 1483, a few weeks short of his 41st birthday, was unexpected despite his apparent sluggishness in recent years. The contemporary writer of the continuation of the ‘Croyland (Abbey) Chronicle'–possibly Bishop John Russell–and the slightly later Polydore Vergil, neither with a patron to please with biased writing about Edward, reported that Edward's court in its later years was notable for gluttony, licentiousness, and exhaustive high living, which logically would have undermined the King's health. Edward's close friend and Chamberlain William, Lord Hastings, and his stepson Thomas Grey (Marquis of Dorset) were named as the King's principal encouragers in dissipation.
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Mancini stated that the King's death followed a chill caught on the Thames at Windsor in the aftermath of one session of gluttony. Vergil said the cause was unknown and hinted at poison; by 1548 Hall believed it was fever (malaria?) caught in France in 1475, exacerbated by gluttony. The caustic evidence of the French chronicler Philip de Commignes states that when he saw the King at his ‘summit meeting' with Louis XI on the fortified bridge at Picquigny in 1475 he had developed a serious weight-problem since their last encounter a few years before,
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and Edward's willingness to be bought off during that campaign has been attributed to laziness as much as prudence.

Richard III's propaganda, such as the petition calling on him to assume the throne on 25/6 June 1483, undoubtedly made much of the excessive gluttony and debauchery at Edward's court,
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and exaggerated that as in its lurid claims about witchcraft by Elizabeth Woodville and her mother to ensnare Edward into marriage in 1464. The written accounts of Edward's court bear similarities to stock writings about such behaviour, traceable back to the biographies of the more unrestrained Roman emperors such as Nero and Elagabalus. This is not to deny their essential truth, only that their recorders resorted to stock phraseology in describing them and some details may have been invented. Logically it is arguable that a sustained programme of over-indulgence could have undermined Edward's health so that a chill could carry him off at the age of 40, and Richard's subsequent attacks on Edward's boon companions–Lord Hastings and the Marquis of Dorset in particular–for leading the King astray have exaggerated rather than invented their role. The Italian observer Dominic Mancini, written off by his detractors for not understanding English adequately so not a trustable witness, was, however, a uniquely valuable ‘outsider' with no patron to please in his account of what he saw and heard in London in May–July 1483. He also states that Edward IV was well known for making free with his subjects' wives, including middle-class Londoners–in which category ‘Jane Shore' can be placed. (The Shore ‘legend' unfortunately owes much to later plays, not traceable fifteenth century facts; her real name was ‘Elizabeth'.
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)

Compared to his vigour in the 1460s, Edward had not shown much of an interest in campaigning or in visiting the north since the mid-1470s. Even in the earlier period, he had allowed himself to be taken by surprise by the 1469 rising and had no agents spying on the Earl of Warwick whose discontent could have been anticipated by a shrewder king. As noted earlier, he had unexpectedly refrained from using his Parliamentary grant and fleet or raised an army for a Scottish campaign in 1463. Nor did he hasten to link up with Herbert and Devon to confront the rebels in 1469.The grip of his government on the country in 1482–3, as analysed by Charles Ross, showed no sign of weakness or a loss of control despite his reduced itinerary and his careful and determined build-up of royal wealth to outmatch his magnates was noted by the Croyland Chronicler.
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His delegation of authority over a large part of his realm to his brother Richard then was not new–he had given similar power to the equally trusted Duke of Somerset in the north in 1462–4, Warwick in the north in 1462–8, Montague in the north-east in 1464–70, and Herbert (created Earl of Pembroke) in Wales in 1461–8. Three of the four had played him false, but he did not learn his lesson and use more men with less power given to each. Henry VII, by contrast, was a master of ‘divide and rule' and did not trust the northern frontier to its traditional magnates (after 1489) or lavish grants on his nobles.

Edward showed no interest in personal involvement with the Scots crisis of 1480–2 compared to the northern revolts of 1464 and 1468, not responding to the major raids on Northumberland in person, staying in southern England, and leaving the planned invasion of Scotland to Richard. The serious magnate discontent in Scotland as a result of James III's reliance on ‘low-born' favourites, coupled with the apparent mixture of fear and greed for power shown by James' surviving brother Duke Alexander of Albany, was a major opportunity for the English King to intervene. It would have provided Edward with a bonus for his military reputation after the anticlimax of the French campaign of 1475, even if he marched all the way to Edinburgh and back without much to show for it or–as happened to Richard–Albany and his faction linked up with the English to coerce James but turned against them once they had gone home. He did not avoid war on account of the cost or the futility as he arguably did in 1463, when Scotland was no major threat once Henry VI's northern English allies had been driven out, or Richard would not have been sent to invade Scotland. Edward had been more careful of his reputation as an active hero in the 1460s, sponsoring the propagandist claims that he was the ‘Son of Prophecy' of Welsh legend (as a descendant of the Princes of Gwynedd via the Mortimers) and having been linked to a revival of the ‘Arthurian' chivalric cult. (The extent of his active involvement via his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville with Sir Thomas Malory's commission to write the
Morte d'Arthur
is more uncertain.) Even in the 1470s his miraculous return to power had been quickly ‘written up' and cast in a heroic light in the
Historie of the Arrivall of Edward the Fourth
, apparently composed by one of his followers and distributed abroad.
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The ‘spin' placed on his achievement conveniently avoided asking why he had been overthrown in the first place if he was such a great leader. So why was he not quick to head north in 1482, even if he left the fighting to Richard?