The War of the Roses (21 page)

 

How ruthless was Richard? The case of the disappearance of the Princes

The question of the murder of Edward V and his brother has long exercised historians, novelists, and others and remains one of the most written-about historical mysteries. It is, of course, the central problem in the question of whether Richard was a potential success as king had he not been overthrown in 1485–and the charge by his defenders that his reputation has been maligned. What did contemporaries think of him before all their writers had a vested interest in denouncing him, to please his overthrower after 1485? And need proof of his ruthlessness mean that he was going to be an unpopular ruler, easily attracting plotters to replace him–or was it potentially to his advantage? As Shakespeare (his most influential ‘blackener') reminds us, treason is a matter of dates–‘if treason prosper, none dare call it treason'. Would Richard have gone down in history as no more ruthless than Edward I or John had he fought off his challengers successfully? John murdered Welsh hostages and starved baronial captives to death, and Edward conducted mass-executions in Scotland and paraded his female Bruce and Buchan captives in cages for ‘treason' to him as its king. Both men reportedly committed crimes in rages, John killing his nephew Arthur and Edward assaulting his son and tearing out his hair. Henry II memorably made wild calls for Archbishop Becket's destruction for breaking an agreement about their terms of political truce on the latter's return in 1170, which was acted upon by his servants.
¹⁵
Were any of them worse than Richard? Would his alleged murders of his nephews been brushed aside had he had a long and successful reign thereafter–or was the story (true or not) a symptom of why he failed to secure his throne in the first place?

The ‘Richard III Society', a unique society of supporters devoted to the memory of a divisive English king over 500 years after his death, have long argued that he had no reason to kill the Princes after they had been bastardized by Parliament–although such Acts could be and were frequently reversed in the fifteenth century after a change of regime. Supposedly Richard, the loyal ally of his brother in the struggle to regain the Crown in 1471 and the trusted viceroy of the north in succession to Warwick, would never have abrogated his personal motto of
Loyauté me lie
or, as a deeply religious man whose reign was marked by acts of public piety –including towards the cult of Henry VI, the king who had been murdered at his brother Edward IV's orders–would never commit the serious sin of murdering his nephews. (But what then of his interest in early 1485 towards marrying his niece Elizabeth, also regarded as a sin by the Church and apparently unpopular among lay opinion too when it was rumoured?) All his other victims were adults who were a political threat, and the ‘Tudor myth' of his wickedness (of which More's biography was the main vehicle) that Shakespeare took up was full of falsehoods and relied on rumour. The playwright was, of course, writing literature not history, but his account of Richard follows the ‘historical' (though polemical) Hall chronicle of 1547 closely–and both ‘covered up' such circumstances as the fact that if Richard did personally kill Henry VI in May 1471 it would have been on Edward IV's orders. The killing of Henry's son Prince Edward after the battle of Tewkesbury a few days earlier was also a ‘collective' act by the Yorkist leaders, if he was captured alive at all rather than being killed in the rout as the Lancastrians were fleeing the battlefield.
¹⁶
Certainly, Richard did not have a withered arm, which casts doubt on the accuracy of at least one of the scenes in More's biography where he supposedly exposed his arm at the Council meeting on 13 June 1483 and accused his enemies of causing it. (Was Bishop Morton More's source?) He could not have fought so successfully at Barnet, Tewkesbury, and Bosworth had he been so hampered, and no contemporary mentions it. The circumstantial minor details in More's account–e.g. Richard asking Morton to send him some strawberries from his garden a few minutes before suddenly turning violent–suggests that More relied on an eye-witness account. One recent suggestion has been that Richard really meant that his ‘arms'–his heraldic escutcheon–had been ‘withered' by Woodville treachery, probably by the Queen covering up her illegal marriage to deny Richard the throne.
¹⁷
What is apparent is that Richard chose to portray the ‘plot' against himself as ‘treason', which was the war-cry of his retainers as they burst into the Council chamber to seize Hastings, Stanley, Rotherham, and Morton.
¹⁸
It was also his cry as he was surrounded by the defector Lord Stanley's men and hacked down at Bosworth; it seems to have become an obsession with him. The most famous portrait with the ‘withered arm' attribute, one in the royal collection at Windsor dated by the dendrochronological evidence to c. 1520, was ‘doctored' at a later date to add the deformity, and it was also shown in the original version of the Royal Society of Antiquaries' portrait of c. 1540.
¹⁹
Apart from one mention of Richard as having a ‘crook back' in recorded abuse of the late King in York c. 1489, there is no evidence of it from contemporaries who met him–including foreign visitors with no interest in praising or abusing him, such as the 1484 Court visitor Nicolas von Poppelau from Silesia.
²⁰
The Italian source of much information on events in London in 1483, Dominic Mancini, makes no mention of it, and when the former Yorkist propagandist John Rous re-wrote his ‘Rous Roll' under Henry VII to condemn Richard (and altered his flattering portraits of the royal family) he did not put in any deformity.
²¹
The discovery in 2012 of the bones matching Richard's description at the site of the Greyfriars church in Leicester, where he is recorded as being buried, adds confirmation to the ‘crook back' story. DNA confirms that the body is Richard's and he did have curvature of the spine–so that story is not ‘Tudor propaganda'. Did his disability add to Richard's religious fervour, or to his sense of alienation from his brother's court? Hall and Shakespeare are also wrong about his involvement in the removal of Clarence, as far as the evidence stands–though he and the Duke had quarrelled bitterly over Clarence seeking to prevent him marrying Anne Neville in 1471–2.
²²
If Richard was a major foe of the ‘Woodville faction' in 1478–83 as ‘back-dated' from the way the Queen plotted against his Protectorship in April 1483, it made no sense for him to remove his brother Clarence to the Woodvilles' benefit.

Some claims of the ‘Ricardians' are, however, equally unlikely. Importantly, they were made in an era of less brutal politics than the fifteenth century and seem to have forgotten the ‘norms' of behaviour by Richard and his contemporaries. The
Historical Doubts on the Reign of Richard III
, Horace Walpole's reasoned reassessment of Richard's reign and crimes, started the ball rolling in 1768, and by 1906 the extreme Ricardian Sir Clements Markham was claiming that Henry VII had murdered the Princes in 1486.
²³
(This is very unlikely, given that someone among their captors in the Tower over this long period would surely have managed to reveal the story.) Paul Murray Kendall's biography of 1955 is the main mid-twentieth century ‘defence' of Richard. His sympathetic portrayal of Richard's energetic actions to improve justice for ordinary citizens–e.g. by having legal business done in English not Latin–and his public proclamations of his desire for just government argue for the King's good qualities as a ruler, if ignoring the value of this stand to an insecure regime.
²⁴
But Kendall's view of Richard's marriage to Anne Neville as a love-match has no contemporary evidence; Richard had sound practical reasons to seek her as his wife in 1471–2 to add her half of the Warwick inheritance to his lands. If they were so much in love, why did rumours spread that he had poisoned her even before the battle of Bosworth made this allegation congenial to the current authorities? The attention that he paid to his niece at Christmas 1484, while his wife was dying, Richard's seeking of Church advice on the possibility of divorcing Anne early in 1485, and the warning that his henchmen Ratcliffe and Catesby gave him about a revolt if he dared to marry Elizabeth of York cannot be dismissed as post-Bosworth calumny.
²⁵
Nor was it necessary for him to execute Rivers, Haute, and Vaughan in June 1483 once they had been placed in secure custody and were no threat. It is clear that he deployed terror as an instrument of intimidation in 1483.

Any consideration of Richard's character and chances of long-term survival must centre on the most notorious allegation against him, that of killing the deposed king and his brother. Admittedly, the ‘Princes in the Tower' were not placed there as part of a move to have them isolated and then quietly killed off; the Tower was the normal place of residence for a monarch before his coronation. It was prudent for Richard to keep Edward V there and have his brother join him–under the guard of Richard's own attendants rather than those selected pre-1483 by their parents–in case the boys were carried off by the Woodvilles as figureheads of the rebellion that did, in fact, break out late that summer. Thus the boys' ‘sinister' withdrawal into the inner apartments of the Tower and increasingly infrequent sightings, attested to in July by the Italian observer Dominic Mancini, were only a security-measure. Indeed, recent new evidence shows that there was a plot in London to rescue them in late July or early August 1483, with secret legal investigations held at Crosby Hall.
²⁶
Removing their attendants implied that Richard feared the latter would spirit them out of the Tower to serve as figureheads for a revolt, not a move to surround them with his own ‘trusties' ready for murder. It was undeniable that they had then disappeared, sometime between late June and early September 1483, and Richard was not able to produce them for a public parade to show that they were alive in the way that in 1487 Henry VII paraded Clarence's son Edward in London (to show that he was not leading the ‘Lambert Simnel' revolt and that Simnel was an impersonator). The deaths of the boys were rumoured at the time of the rebellions that autumn, which had started out in the name of Edward V but shifted focus to the cause of the obscure Lancastrian claimant Henry Tudor.
²⁷
Mancini provides evidence that a rumour to the effect that the boys were dead arose in the late summer, though not who was spreading it (perhaps Elizabeth Woodville's agents), and the revised version of Rous' originally pro-Yorkist account dates the murder to three months after Richard seized the elder Prince in early May. At best, recent evidence found in the Colchester records shows that the rumour of their killing had not reached there by September.
²⁸
Murder by Richard was openly claimed by the French government in January 1484. The
Croyland Chronicle
–written at a Fenland monastery some way from London–dated the rumours of their disappearance to Easter 1484, and stated that Richard was believed to have ‘suppressed' his nephews (the original Latin may or may not encompass the notion of ‘smothered', as in More's story).
²⁹
The author of this part of the text may have had connections to the regime, but was critical on occasion and is now thought less likely to be Bishop Russell (Richard's Chancellor). Louis XI of France had apparently heard the rumour before his death on 30 August 1483.
³⁰

When the Duke of Buckingham shockingly betrayed Richard and joined in the widespread revolt in October he did so in Tudor's name, though it has been speculated that that was merely to gain more support from the Tudor and Woodville alliance and he ultimately wanted the throne himself (he was the senior male descendant of Edward III's youngest son). Presumably his captive at Brecon, Bishop Morton who Richard had seized at the Council table in the coup of 13 June and put in his custody, had persuaded him to link up with the Tudor/Lancastrian cause that Morton had been supporting as late as 1471.
³¹
Logically, if the ex-King was believed to be still alive Buckingham would have been more likely to rise in his name than that of an unknown Welsh-French fugitive with no popular English support. Buckingham was married to the ex-King's aunt, Catherine Woodville, and thus would have had a claim to be his guardian or chief minister as his ‘uncle' on the maternal side. Buckingham, if anyone, would have been able to know if the boys were alive in secure custody in the Tower as of September 1483–though his apparent failure to rise in rebellion in their name has been interpreted as implying that he had a motive for killing them.
³²
It would have taken a very Machiavellian character to kill the boys and spread rumours that Richard was to blame for it, thus improving his chances of a successful revolt, and to only pretend to back Tudor when he wanted the throne for himself all along. It is not impossible, but it can only be speculation. The claim that the boys were murdered by the ‘advice' of Buckingham can be interpreted in different ways depending on the meaning of the word in the late fifteenth century.
³³
It may indicate that he advised Richard to do it, in the modern sense, or that he was the ‘means' i.e. he carried out the King's orders. But his urgent request to see Richard as he was awaiting execution at Salisbury after his failed revolt may mean that he wanted to bargain for his life and had some important news to use–the location of the disappeared Princes? This may be linked to the claim made by the pretended ‘Prince Richard', Perkin Warbeck, in 1499 that an unnamed lord rescued him from the Tower but sent him abroad and warned him to keep his identity secret or else.
³⁴
Logically, Buckingham could have wanted his wife Catherine Woodville 's nephew(s) safe from potential killers but not able to interfere with his own bid for the throne, being planned at the time of his ‘rescue' (July or August 1483?).