The War of the Roses (22 page)

By Christmas 1483 Henry could make a public promise at Rennes Cathedral to marry the Princes' sister Elizabeth as if she was now the ‘legitimist' heiress, apparently by co-ordination (perhaps via his mother Margaret Beaufort, Stanley's wife, and her physician Dr Lewis) with Elizabeth Woodville in sanctuary in London. Queen Elizabeth thus had reason to suspect that the boys were dead and seek Tudor's alliance rather than come to terms quickly with Richard. In the New Year the French Chancellor made a public accusation against Richard of infanticide in the Estates-General, though as early as August Louis XI may have heard a rumour of it as he then turned against Richard according to Commignes. In March 1484 the Queen finally reached terms with Richard on her leaving sanctuary. Her insistence that he take public oaths to protect her and her daughters suggests that she did not trust him,
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though her daughter Elizabeth may have been of a different opinion as she was rumoured to have favoured the bizarre plan made on (or before) the death of Richard's wife Anne in spring 1485 that she should marry her uncle. The contemporary ballad, the ‘Song of the Lady Bessy', indicates her favourable attitude to her uncle at this time. Elizabeth Woodville's eldest son, the Marquis of Dorset, attempted to abandon Henry's cause and return to England in spring 1485, which suggests that he had strong hopes of a pardon (perhaps via his mother or half-sister).Dorset did not think that Richard was the losing cause at the time.

Even the Princes' disappearance in Richard's custody has not stopped claims being made that he was not a killer. One theory is that he allowed them to leave the Tower to join his illegitimate children in obscurity at Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire, based on a claim that Edward V, not Richard's son John, was the ‘Lord Bastard' referred to in the household accounts. Alternatively, a family tradition connected to Sir James Tyrrell (the murderer according to More's version) has them being smuggled out to live quietly with the Queen and her daughters at Tyrrell's home, Gipping Hall in Essex, and then leaving the country. This was first discovered by Audrey Williamson (
The Mystery of the Princes
, Alan Sutton, 1981).
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Supposedly, Richard baulked at murder, but required them to reside abroad away from plotters who could restore them (or ‘Tudor agents' intent on murdering them to make their sister's would-be fiancé the only legitimate claimant to the throne). Was Tyrrell's apparent mission to Flanders in 1484 to arrange a refuge for the boys there, or even to escort them? And what of the large sum of money that Tyrrell was granted by Richard in 1484
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–a fund to set up a safe hiding-place for the boys? Or just money to bribe spies in the Low Countries for normal intelligence information?

The fact that Tyrrell was pardoned twice early in Henry VII's reign could be interpreted as meaning that he had either done some illegal deed for Henry between the two occasions (royal murder according to Markham), or that Henry had found out about something he had done for Richard. He was required to reside abroad in command of Guisnes Castle near Calais, and when he was arrested for apparent Yorkist plotting in 1502 and brought back to London for execution his supposed ‘confession' to killing the Princes was not public or widely circulated.
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Either he was being used as a scapegoat, or Henry was unwilling to make a detailed public statement of the ‘truth' about the killings until he had located the Princes' bodies, which he never did. The confusion over Henry's reasons for arresting Tyrrell is increased by the escape of Richard's nephew Edmund de la Pole to the Continent shortly before Tyrrell's ‘plot' and arrest. This Yorkist pretender was a major threat to Henry, whose eldest son, Arthur, had just died leaving him with only one underage son, so Henry may have feared Tyrell was working for the Pole cause rather than wanting him disposed of to provide ‘proof' that the Princes were Richard III's victims. Edmund, incidentally, was not a ‘diehard' Yorkist motivated by a violent grudge against Henry for ‘cheating' the de la Poles of the Crown, though his elder brother, the Earl of Lincoln, may have been recognized by Richard III as his heir. When Edmund had the chance to desert Henry and put himself at the head of a large army of rebellious Cornish tax-protesters in their march on London in 1497, he obeyed Henry's summons to assist him instead. Indeed, he ignored his Neville relation Lord Bergavenny's specific suggestion to join the rebels, and stole the latter's breeches and saddle so he could not ride off and join them either.
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The mysterious ‘Perkin Warbeck' from Flanders, the pretender with Yorkist family looks who surfaced in 1490 as a protégé of Richard's sister Margaret of Burgundy and asserted that he was the younger Prince, claimed that he had been smuggled abroad by an unknown magnate in 1483 and warned to stay hidden because of an unidentified threat to murder him.
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He did not name the man or provide one coherent story of what had happened to him or to the missing Edward V, but the unnamed ‘rescuer' could have been Buckingham. He was the boys' uncle, and had his own reasons for not wanting them on the throne if he aimed for it himself. The Portuguese-born adventurer Sir Edward Brampton (Duarte Brandao), who had long connections to Edward IV and other links to ‘Warbeck's home town of Tournai and 1490 employer Pregent Meno, could have taken him abroad on behalf of Richard or of Richard's enemies. Brampton was also responsible for bringing ‘Warbeck' to Portugal at the start of his adventures c. 1489, as a page to his wife–though he alleged that ‘Warbeck' was a Flemish boy in search of adventure who could not even speak English. (He made this claim in 1496, before it was clear ‘Warbeck' would fail to overthrow Henry, so it probably was not forced to secure the victors' favour.
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) If Brampton was not merely seeking Henry's favour, it would appear that ‘Warbeck' was not an English boy who had left England at the age of ten in 1483–as a rescued ‘Richard of York' would have done. A ten-year-old would not have forgotten his native language so easily. Nor would ‘Richard of York' have had reasons to hide the fact that he could speak English well from Brampton around 1489–90; the latter was a trusted ex-follower of Edward IV, not someone who if he knew ‘Richard' was really English could hand him over to Henry VII.

Tyrrell was another candidate for the ‘lord' who had smuggled the boys abroad. He was close to Richard, and was sent by him from his touring court at York in late August or early September 1483 to London on a private mission–according to More, to take over the Tower of London for a night and murder the Princes for Richard. In any case it was possible that ‘Warbeck' could not explain what had happened to Edward V because he did not know; the boys had been separated for security. There was a garbled story that Edward had drowned, possibly while being smuggled to a ship on the Thames to sail abroad, or had been thrown into the sea. (One version had it that the boys had both been drowned–to excuse the lack of bodies?) It may also be significant that in his confused ‘confession' after capture by Henry, the pretender made much of an irrelevant detail that he had been ‘ill' for a long time around 1483.
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Was this a hint that he had replaced the ‘real' Perkin Warbeck in the family household in Tournai at this time, with the boy kept out of view? The inconsistencies in the confession of ‘Warbeck' to Henry in 1497, as published and sent abroad to his patrons, may suggest that he made deliberate mistakes to show the latter he was not speaking freely. Why did the captured pretender not correct Henry's men about the mother of ‘Warbeck' being called Catherine, not Nicaise de Faro?
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Did Henry's interrogators present him with a prepared statement to sign, based on their (inaccurate) research in Flanders, and did he let their mistakes go uncorrected? And why did Henry claim that the most dangerous plotter was the fairly (socially) insignificant John Taylor, a former member of the Duke of Clarence's household? This man's arrest in France was greeted with delight,
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and we know that he had been mixed-up in the pretender's first appearance in Cork in 1490.Taylor's importance was surely not just his early role in the plot and thus knowledge of where the ‘feigned lad' had sprung from; it was Sir Edward Brampton (a former employee of Edward IV) who had provided that information to Henry. Taylor, if anyone, knew the truth as well as many names of ‘high-level' plotters. But when ‘Warbeck' had first appeared in his company at Cork, he had not been identified definitively by him as Richard of York. And was it just ambition that made senior court figures such as Sir William Stanley, Lord Chamberlain and brother of Henry's stepfather Lord Stanley (now Earl of Derby), promise aid to ‘Warbeck' in 1493–4? Did they think him genuine, as Stanley claimed? The extent of the Yorkist conspiracy at the time was large enough to suggest that the pretender was seen as potentially genuine, with statements being made that if ‘Richard of York' was really who he claimed his father's ex-loyalists would back him against the Tudors. There was also a network of Church supporters,
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as previously seen for the ‘legitimate' would-be ‘Richard IIs' and Edmund Mortimer against Henry IV in the 1400s. The extent and identity of the plotters suggest a genuine belief that a legitimate claimant was at large and that the current King was a usurper, as seen under Henry–and neither Henry IV nor Henry VII could be accused of misrule.

But even if ‘Warbeck' was really a Plantagenet he need not have been Edward IV's son; there is also the mysterious case of a plot in 1477 to smuggle Clarence's son abroad as a potential threat to Edward. The man who had masterminded this, the later ‘Warbeck' plotter John Taylor, could have taken an apparent illegitimate son of Clarence abroad in 1477 and then used him as ‘Warbeck' to challenge the Tudors in 1490. It was Taylor who first prompted pro-Yorkist Irishmen to recognize ‘Warbeck' as a Plantagenet when he sailed to Cork on Pregent Meno's ship in 1490.
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Could ‘Warbeck' not speak English as he had left England as a baby?

The boy may have been the unknown lad who Margaret of Burgundy appeared to be fostering in the early 1480s, subsequently claimed by Tudor propaganda to be her illegitimate son. But Margaret of Burgundy need not have been convinced of Warbeck's truthfulness about being ‘Prince Richard of York' in order to use him to overthrow Henry, and the same applies to his other patrons Maximilian of Habsburg and James III of Scotland. Maximilian shamelessly forced Warbeck to nominate him as his heir, so if he was killed invading England Maximilian had a claim on the throne. (Henry's supporters spread a story that Warbeck was the illegitimate son of Margaret and the Bishop of Cambrai.
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) The sceptical Spanish sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella notably referred to Warbeck in the special diplomatic code that they used for legitimate sovereigns.
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It has been claimed that even if the boys were killed in August or September 1483 Richard may not have been responsible or have approved of it. There were contemporary claims that they were put to death by the ‘vise' –means, or advice?–of Buckingham, as recorded in the anonymous ‘Historical Notes' of the period 1483–8 by one or more Londoners (published in the
English Historical Review
, vol. 96).
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By extension it could be argued that the Duke killed them to do Richard a service, or in order to remove them ahead of his own bid for the throne. Could he have carried out the murder as part of a plan to have Richard blamed for it and ease his own way to power? In practical terms, it is difficult to see how Buckingham's agents could have gained access to the royal apartments in the Tower without being stopped by Richard's own men, particularly Constable Sir Robert Brackenbury. It is not impossible, however, that if the Duke had arranged the killing without informing Richard, the King would have baulked at announcing it; public opinion would conclude that he himself was behind the convenient murders and was using Buckingham as a scapegoat.

 

The 1483 rebellion: a sign of Richard's precarious position?

Whether or not Richard was the guilty party, his usurpation proved a fatal split in the Yorkist power-structure. A number of Edward IV's household officials and other loyalists took part in the abortive risings across southern England in the late summer of 1483, suggesting a deep-seated disgust that overcame their loyalty to the regime, with revolts as far scattered as Kent, Surrey, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Devon. The geographical extent of the revolts and their ‘low-status' leadership were unusual for a revolt aimed at ‘regime change' in that period. The ‘Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the Cade revolt in 1450 had had wider social and economic aims, as well as protesting against governmental corruption and injustice, and had been aimed at the entire governmental leadership; the rebels of 1381 had protested loyalty to their King, although in 1450 there had been rumours that ‘Cade' or his backers were Mortimer agents aiming to remove Henry VI. Other revolts had had more in common with 1483, being led by ‘higher-status' personnel with narrow political aims. The endemic revolts since York defied Henry VI in 1451, as with the 1387–8 and abortive 1400 and 1415 plots, had been aimed at removing the sovereign or his close advisers, and usually had been led by great magnates; the involvement of members of the northern gentry in the disturbances against Edward IV in 1469–70 had camouflaged secret backing by Warwick. Usually figures excluded from influence at court, or fearing for their power there, had been the ringleaders–as with York in 1451–5, the exiled Yorkist leadership in 1460, and Warwick in 1469–70. (In 1459 York was forced into defiance of a ‘counter-coup' against his influence at court by the Queen's party.) Sometimes a prominent exile invaded to reclaim his rights, and was joined by sympathizers within the country–Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399, Warwick and Edward (IV) in 1460, Warwick in 1470, and Edward IV in 1471. The exiled Henry Tudor did sail to England to join in the 1483 revolt, but he was hardly in the same league as these men –he had never had influence at court to regain, or held a senior peerage (as opposed to claiming one, i.e. his father's Earldom of Richmond).