The War of the Roses (25 page)

After Bosworth he would have been unwise to have dared to carry out the marriage even to consolidate his links with the ‘legitimist' cause represented by his nieces and to prevent more Edwardian Household loyalists plotting to raise a pretender against him as Elizabeth of York's next fiancé. Any foreign prince who was married to Elizabeth could now be a target for plotters seeking to use him to depose Richard. All of Edward IV's daughters could not be removed as political threats by putting them in nunneries; logically, the best solution was to marry Elizabeth to Richard's own chosen heir John, Earl of Lincoln (about two years her senior). Richard, like Henry after 1485, would have been marrying off Edward IV's daughters to his own loyal supporters as they became old enough–probably mostly northern magnates. The Duke of Norfolk's grandson Thomas Howard (born c. 1478), married to Elizabeth of York's sister Anne in real life, would have been one obvious candidate. The girls would have made better matches than they did under Henry VII, though foreign marital agreements would have been more difficult than under Edward IV as the issue of their ‘bastardy' had now come into the open, which would have made foreign suitors conscious of rank wary of marrying them.

The English Crown, unlike the Scottish, had not passed by female descent since the twelfth century (1135, aborted by a challenger, and 1154), although Edward IV could claim descent from Edward III in female as well as male lines. When Richard II had named his heir as Edmund Mortimer in 1398–9 that had legitimized female descent, as Edmund was the grandson of the daughter of Edward III's second surviving son Lionel; but Henry IV's accession had overturned this. Edward IV's father Richard of York had returned to the Mortimer claim as his excuse for usurpation in 1460–and been opposed in the House of Lords by most of the nobility. Once Richard III's son Edward died in 1484 he was left with the choice for heir of his attainted brother Clarence's young son Edward, born in 1475–who may or may not have been weak-minded–or his sister Elizabeth de la Pole's eldest son John, born around 1464, and chose the latter. Indeed, it has been argued recently that Richard's marriage in (?) 1472 to Anne Neville, within the proscribed degrees of dynastic affinity, did not have an adequate legal permit so his son's succession could have been challenged if the latter had lived. Is it possible that if Prince Edward had not died in 1484 and Richard III had died in the 1490s or 1500s, the new King would have been open to challenges about his legitimacy? Richard III's actions in dragging up obscure legal claims to justify a naked ‘power-grab' in 1483 would then have come to haunt his dynasty as his son faced a challenge on similar grounds–perhaps by John, Earl of Lincoln.

Richard III would need to re-marry as soon as possible to produce his own heirs, and would be advised to choose a foreign princess, which would mean a long delay during diplomatic arrangements. In the meantime John, Earl of Lincoln, would succeed if he died suddenly. The succession of John as King John II would have been unusual though as ‘legitimate' as the Yorkists claiming the throne in 1460–1 by female descent from Edward III's second son Lionel or as Richard II naming Lionel's great-grandson as his heir in 1398. It was possibly capable of touching off a revolt by a rival who could also claim royal descent, such as a member of the Stafford and Bourchier families (descendants of Edward III's younger sons) or a supporter of Clarence's son.

 

Rival heirs: Clarence's son and Edward IV's daughters

Edward Earl of Warwick, born in 1475, was the focus of the initial Yorkist plots against Henry VIII and was to be kept in the Tower for twenty-four years and finally executed on a trumped-up charge of plotting to escape with Perkin Warbeck in 1499. The execution may have troubled Henry and was widely seen as unjust; in terms of ‘realpolitik' it halted Yorkist threats on Warwick's behalf and may have been secretly insisted on by the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, as part of their marital alliance with Henry. It is unclear if Warwick was really feeble-minded in 1499 or only naïve from long incarceration in the Tower, but as an inexperienced youth lacking military experience he could not have been a serious threat to the veteran Richard in the 1490s–or even to Lincoln as the new king–except as the puppet of disgruntled nobles. It is unclear if Richard had ever seriously considered Warwick as an heir in 1484, the sources being contradictory, and in practical terms Lincoln was older and thus more able to succeed securely if Richard died before any new royal offspring of a second marriage reached maturity. Lincoln had already had some administrative experience as head of the Council in the north, and would have continued to acquire titles and offices into the 1490s–possibly in the role of chief supporter in the north that Richard had held under Edward IV. In due course similar powers could be given to his younger brothers Edmund and Richard, born around 1466–70, and other royal stalwarts should have included Norfolk's son Thomas, Earl of Surrey (born c. 1445).

There is the possibility that the question of Edward IV's marriage would have continued to hang over the English Crown, with Elizabeth of York's husband a potential threat to Richard or his heir unless she had been sent abroad to an allied prince. The Yorkist ally Maximilian of Habsburg, stepson of Richard's sister Margaret of Burgundy, had a son (Philip, born 1478), but he was twelve years younger than Elizabeth and is unlikely to have been a candidate given his father's prior concern with a Spanish alliance. Her original engagement to Charles VIII of France had already been broken by his father, and a cordial Franco-English rapprochement is unlikely given their probable clashes over Brittany around 1488. Elizabeth Woodville could have continued to intrigue against Richard unless she had been found to have encouraged Henry Tudor in 1485 and been pensioned off minus her income to Bermondsey Abbey as in real-life 1487. Even if her eldest daughter had been married to Lincoln or some accommodating foreign prince, Elizabeth Woodville could have encouraged another daughter's husband to depose Richard and take the Crown–or overcome her probable enmity to Clarence's family to attempt to marry one of her daughters to Warwick. Any forced reconciliation between a politic Richard and a chastened Elizabeth Woodville after 1485, with her son the Marquis of Dorset recalled (if not killed fighting for Henry Tudor) and an attempt to win back Edward IV's disgruntled ex-Household men, might have led to attempts to press for the legitimization of Edward IV's daughters–who foreign princes would be reluctant to accept as wives if they were illegitimate. The King could then have legitimated them as personal concessions rather than by having to cancel his contentious law
Titulus Regius
that had bastardized them, while making it clear that they had no legal claim on the Crown–as the Beauforts were legitimated in 1396 but barred from the succession. The death of Lincoln preceding Richard's cannot be ruled out, possibly in battle on Richard's behalf against the Scots or French, and in that case Richard would have had to make a choice between Lincoln's next brother Edmund de la Pole and the younger Warwick, Clarence's son, as his heir. Reinstating Warwick would have necessitated reversing his father's attainder of 1478.

 

Would Richard marry again after 1485?

Richard was only thirty-two in August 1485, and had plenty of time to marry again and father heirs who could be adult before he died. Assuming that he did not dare to solve the conundrum of Edward IV's delegitimized daughters by marrying Elizabeth of York himself, he would have been looking for a foreign princess to cement an alliance after the diplomatic isolation that had afflicted England since the rapprochement between Louis XI and Maximilian of Burgundy (Habsburg).There were no Scots princesses available, quite apart from James III's hostility towards Richard for the 1482 invasion, and the young Charles VIII of France's sisters were married. The daughters of Ferdinand and Isabella were too young (the eldest, born in 1470, was ear-marked for the more important King of Portugal), as was Margaret, the daughter of Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, born in 1480. As of summer 1485, a marriage between Richard and the Portuguese princess Juana (b. 1452) was being explored as part of the ‘deal' that would have married off Elizabeth of York to Prince Manuel–with the ubiquitous Sir Edward Brampton as the ‘go-between'. The devout Juana, later to be known as ‘the ‘Holy Princess', would have shared Richard's strong and ostentatious morality.
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One possible solution was the heiress of Brittany, Francis II's daughter Anne (born in 1476), the Duke's chief minister Landois having obligingly tried to aid Richard in 1484 by handing over Henry Tudor who had to flee to France. (The Breton ducal house was descended from Edward I.) This would entail a long wait for children, but England had been a long-term ally of Breton independence from France (involving a civil war in the 1350s) and Brittany was strategically vital. Unlike in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there was no multitude of sovereign ducal houses in the Low Countries that England could use for a marital alliance–the territories had been united under the House of Burgundy and had then passed via Richard's sister Margaret's stepdaughter (Mary) to the Habsburgs.

Marrying Anne would end the current French attempts to secure Anne for King Charles and unite Brittany with France, though it would have entailed a war with France over control of the Duchy. The real-life Breton succession-crisis erupted in 1488, long enough after Bosworth for Richard to be looking around for a foreign war to bolster his regime and soon enough for him to have still been unmarried. In addition, Richard had been a rare critic of Edward IV for allowing Louis XI to buy him off during the invasion of France in 1475, and had refused a generous ‘present' from Louis for his acquiescence; he had been noted for past hostility to French power and to a peaceful settlement with the country. In 1488/9 France was a credible target for a Continental expedition, quite apart from having sheltered and funded Henry Tudor. Richard was capable of leading an expedition to France himself, either to Brittany to secure the borders from French invasion or to Picardy to link up with Maximilian for a more successful version of the 1475 invasion. Ultimately, an expedition to Picardy was most likely to end up bogged down in sieges with the Habsburg prince losing his enthusiasm for the war, though Richard was likelier than the less martial Henry VII in 1492 to have fought a long war and have taken one or two towns (Boulogne or Tournai?). The logical course of a war in Artois was to extend the English ‘Pale', as Henry VIII was to attempt in 1513–14 and 1544.

It would need a long English commitment, as in the early 1350s, to secure Brittany against a determined French attack backed by some local nobles and force the French King, an inexperienced teenager at this time, to accept any ‘union of crowns' between Ricardian England and Brittany. In real life Henry VII sent a small force to assist Brittany in 1488, commanded by the rehabilitated Sir Edward Woodville, and had to abandon the project; but the vigorous and determined Richard could have fought a war with France lasting several years and with luck have secured Anne's person and hand (had the pro-French faction not kidnapped her and carried her off to be married to Charles VIII). English troops could then have remained in Brittany to ensure that the French did not invade, and Richard had the prestige of success against the national enemy without the expense of a long war. The Bretons being noted for their independent spirit, it would have had to be agreed by Richard and the Breton Estates that the two countries would be governed separately. Presumably if Richard and Anne had had two or more children, one would succeed to England and one to Brittany.

 

Other aspects of foreign policy and the succession

The deposition of James III of Scotland by a magnate revolt on his son's behalf would have been likely to take England by surprise under Richard as it did under Henry. Richard had had long personal experience of fighting in southern Scotland, though also of Scots nobles and princes going back on their promises. Concentrating on France and Brittany in 1488–9, he would have been unable to take advantage of the situation but could subsequently have threatened invasion and induced the new King to marry an English princess (possibly one of Edward IV's daughters as the late King had planned, possibly Clarence's daughter Margaret). Richard had a valuable resource for international diplomacy in his nieces, provided that their illegitimacy (or not) was not an insuperable bar for status-conscious foreign princes. Given that the Princes were still missing and any reversal of
Titulus Regius
on the girls' behalf would imply that Richard had been wrong to declare them all bastards and might have had the Princes killed as well, it would be easier for a special Parliamentary Act to declare the Princesses legitimated without rights on the succession. If Richard was still childless and his heir Warwick or Lincoln was intended to marry Elizabeth of York, this sort of resolution would aid their union as a reconciliation with partisans of Edward IV's children. Whether Richard would have felt confident enough to grant more southern sheriffdoms, keeperships of royal estates, and other positions of local power to the local gentry instead of key northerners is uncertain and would probably have depended on the risks of new revolts. Without such conciliatory gestures the chances of revolt would have been higher, particularly if Henry Tudor had still been at large and had been backed by France in retaliation for Richard's ‘interference' in Brittany. Richard would have needed to build up loyal magnates to control the south of England from the threat of revolt or invasion (East Anglia would have been under the control of John Howard's son Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk, disgraced in real life by Henry VII.) But granting extensive lands and titles to newcomers not of ancient–or local–birth would have run the same risks of abuse for the ‘parvenus' as Richard II faced for his ‘duketti' in 1397–9.