The War of the Roses (26 page)

The usurpations of Henry IV and Edward IV had been controversial, but armed force and the acquiescence of most of the magnates had kept them on their thrones for their lifetimes (though Edward had had to regain his once). Provided that his health survived better than Henry IV's, Richard would have had the advantage of having seen off his main challengers in 1483 and 1485 and his success would have disconcerted potential opponents. If he had married a princess nearer his age than Anne of Brittany, or even an English relative from among the senior aristocratic families, he could have had several adult sons by the mid-1500s. The husband or sons of Elizabeth of York would have posed a threat to Richard's children, with the question of Edward IV's marriage unresolved whatever the legal fictions that Richard had enacted about it, and some ambitious noble or a foreign power could have sponsored a pretender claiming to be Edward V or his brother in the 1490s. The likeliest offender was France, as the real-life backers of the pretender ‘Warbeck' were Richard's sister Margaret and probable ally Maximilian–who would have been Richard's supporters. If Richard was to be killed in battle or die naturally leaving young children, there was a strong chance of another civil war with Warwick, Lincoln or his brother(s), and a husband of one of Edward IV's daughters involved. But with luck Richard III could have lived into his sixties and died as late as 1515 or 1520, after a long and successful reign that had started no more rockily than Edward III's did in 1327–30, Henry IV's in 1399–1405, or Henry VII's in 1485–7. The convenient death of the King's predecessor had thrown shadows over the reigns of the first two, though at least they had been able to produce the deposed sovereign's bodies (there is a question over the case of Edward II
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) and pretend that they had died naturally.

The question of his nephews' murder would have continued to hang over his dynasty, but there is less likelihood under Richard III's own rule (or that of his son) of any writers in England daring to mention it openly. If the story of Tyrrell being commissioned by Richard to organize the murder during the post-coronation ‘progress' was true, Tyrrell would not have been talking about it as he would have remained a loyal, probably well-bribed supporter of Richard and not been arrested for treason in 1502. He would have hidden his secret and at the most told his family who might have been willing to talk about it after Richard was dead. Richard could hardly have replied to any invasion by a French-backed ‘Edward V' by producing the body of the real ex-King and claiming that he had been killed by Tudor agents, even assuming that Richard knew where the bodies had been buried. As with Henry VII, the problems outweighed the benefits of reminding people about the disappearances. If, on the other hand, Buckingham or Tyrell had smuggled the princes abroad, one of them could have asked for the French aid as an adult–but been unable to prove their authenticity? Even if Richard's death, around 1500 or 1510, led to another civil war no husband of one of the sisters of ‘Princes' (or Warwick) would have wanted to publicize the idea that they might still be alive and available as a rival contender. Nobody (except the French or a surviving Henry Tudor in exile?) would have had a motive to publish stories about the murder as long as Richard was alive and king.

The Ricardian regime might well have outlived those few senior courtiers who knew the truth, and nobody have been left alive with knowledge of events by the time that the matter was considered by some historian–conceivably More himself–once Richard was dead. The King would have had an unsavoury reputation, but the scandal have been as conveniently ignored in English politics as were the mysterious and convenient ‘natural' deaths of Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI. Unlike that trio or the ‘martyred' Thomas of Lancaster, there would have been no shrine to serve as a potentially embarrassing centre for criticism of the current dynasty. Even his successor might well have found the episode too embarrassing to refer to it, unless that ruler–a husband of one of Edward IV's daughters?–had his own reasons to blacken Richard's name. The chances of any bodies being recovered in 1674 would have been minimal, and the mystery would have been even more insoluble than in reality.

August 1485–early 1486: a weaker royal position than 1461 or 1471?

C
ontrary to later simplification, the battle of Bosworth was not the ‘end of the Wars of the Roses'. This was the image presented by Shakespeare, as mooted by the 1548 Tudor chronicler John Hall, with the battle as the end of a cycle of vicious dynastic feuding and Henry VII restoring harmony by marrying Edward IV's eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. It was a neat and logical ending to the thirty years of political instability, but–as mentioned in the previous section–the truth is rather more messy. Bosworth solved nothing, as like Mortimer's Cross and Towton (1461) or Barnet and Tewkesbury (1471) it left one regime deposed by military force but potential rivals for the throne still alive. After 22 August 1485 Henry swiftly had his lieutenant Sir Reginald Bray collect Princess Elizabeth, his promised bride, and Clarence's son the Earl of Warwick from Sheriff Hutton Castle and escort them to London so neither could be used by refugee Yorkists as a pretender; he also had the adherence of Richard III's nephew and presumed heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln.
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Richard's closest ally, Lord Lovell, had disappeared and was clearly intent on escaping to do further mischief, but ended up in sanctuary at Colchester Abbey
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rather than raising a rebel army to hold out in a remote location as Queen Margaret did in Northumberland after Towton and Jasper Tudor did in North Wales after Mortimer's Cross. Of Richard's two senior commanders at Bosworth, the Duke of Norfolk was dead (and his son Thomas, Earl of Surrey, in custody) and the Earl of Northumberland had possibly failed to support Richard in battle and duly swore allegiance to Henry but was given no immediate trust.
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The other two members of Lovell's alleged triumvirate, Ratcliffe and Catesby, were dead–the first killed in the battle and the second executed afterwards. But was this ‘clean sweep' of opponents any more impressive than Edward IV's in 1471? The battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury had also left the defeated faction in disarray minus its existing leadership–Prince Edward, Warwick ‘the Kingmaker', Lord Montague, and Lord Wenlock were killed in or after the battles, Queen Margaret was in custody, the Duke of Somerset was executed, and Henry VI was disposed of and then claimed to have died naturally. The Lancastrian cause had been crushed for twelve years and in 1483 had only been revived when new pretender Henry Tudor (not even of fully legitimate royal blood) allied himself to the revolt of Edward IV's ‘loyalists' against the usurper Richard III. The autumn 1483 revolt had at least started out in the deposed Edward V's name and once he was presumed dead Henry still had to promise to marry his sister and heiress (Elizabeth) to hitch the Lancastrian cause to that of Richard's enemies. Arguably, the Yorkist cause was no worse off in 1485 than their enemies' cause had been in 1471; and it had the bonus of at least one adult male Yorkist claimant, the Earl of Lincoln, pardoned and active at court ready to defect from the (temporary?) winners. He duly did so despite all the rewards Henry had given him and fled to Burgundy early in 1487 as a new Yorkist claimant emerged there.
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The young Earl of Warwick, Clarence's ten-year-old son, was in the Tower but if not executed could be used as a figurehead; on past precedent he could be released by defecting court politicians during an uprising as Archbishop Neville had released Henry VI in the 1470 revolt. Notably Lincoln defected just after Henry had paraded Warwick in public–thus he knew that new pretender Simnel, aka ‘Warwick', was a fake.

Moreover, Henry VII had a far weaker claim to the throne than Edward IV had had in 1461 and 1471–he claimed the throne by right of his Beaufort descent, his mother, Margaret, being the daughter of John, Earl/ Marquis of Somerset (d. 1444), eldest son of the eldest son of the third marriage of John ‘of Gaunt'. As mentioned earlier, the problem with this was that all John's Beaufort children were born illegitimate, in the lifetime of his second wife Catherine of Castile, and were legitimated but excluded from claiming the throne by Act of Parliament in 1396.
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In fact, Margaret should have been proclaimed queen herself by this argument, and her resignation of her claim in her son's favour was never legally confirmed;
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it was presumed that only a man could rule and/ or an adult male war-leader was needed for turbulent times. The only female ruler of England to date had been the disastrously contentious and allegedly arrogant Empress Matilda, Henry I's legal heir who was recognized as such by his vassals at his request but superseded by her cousin Stephen on her father's death in 1135 and only ruled ‘de facto' briefly in 1141 before a successful revolt drove her out of London. Henry could also claim the throne by unofficial ‘right of conquest', i.e. proof of Divine support, as Henry IV had done in 1399 when he superseded the arguably superior legal claim of the under-age Edmund Mortimer.
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Ingeniously, Henry VII dated his reign from 21 August, the day before the battle of Bosworth,
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so he could claim that everyone who had fought for Richard III had committed treason and would therefore forfeit their lands if they did not surrender and swear allegiance to him–his subtle use of legal blackmail was well-established from his accession.

His claim on the loyalties of the remaining Yorkist adherents was centred on his Christmas Day 1483 oath at Rennes Cathedral to marry Elizabeth of York, as heiress of Edward IV, if her brothers were presumed dead. He duly did this as promised, but there were two legal problems–which explain the delay in the marriage from his arrival in London (3 September) to 18 January 1486.
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This was not due to the insecure new King preferring to have himself crowned first (30 October)
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so as to assert the primacy of his personal right to the throne and head off any Yorkist attempt to make him merely a ‘king consort'; for one thing he and his leading adherents had to have their past attainders reversed by Parliament (which met on 7 November) and for another Parliament and the judges had to invalidate Richard III's Act
Titulus Regius
, which had bastardized Elizabeth and her sisters. As seen above, this contentious legal centrepiece of the Ricardian usurpation had exhibited (or invented?) the story of Edward IV's ‘pre-contract' to marry Eleanor Butler, making his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville illegal, and it had to be reversed to make Elizabeth of York legally the heiress of her father and the transmitter of his claims to the throne. But reversing it also restored the rights of Edward V and his brother Richard if they were still alive–and the indications are that Henry had no idea if this was true or not. As a result, the indictment of Richard III as a usurping tyrant referred to him as someone who had committed ‘infanticide' without giving names or dates,
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and if the story that Sir Thomas More was to record c. 1510 about Sir James Tyrrell doing the murders was already current he was not treated as a scapegoat and forced to confess. Instead, he was pardoned–twice in quick succession–for unspecified crimes committed under Richard and removed from the country to serve as commander at Guisnes Castle, near Calais. Indeed, when
Titulus Regius
' was struck from the legal records as invalid its contents were not listed, as would have been normal practice; the judges recommended to Parliament that when they cancelled it by a new Act its scandalous contents were not mentioned. Similarly, everyone possessing a copy of it was required to hand it in by April 1486 or else–a clear attempt at a ‘cover-up'.
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(It is significant that Henry ordered Bishop Stillington, allegedly the witness to Edward and Eleanor's pre-contract and certainly the man cited as such by Richard III, to be arrested as soon as he took the throne.
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) This indicates that Henry feared that the question of the alleged Butler betrothal was unable to be conclusively settled and so suppressed it. The two linked questions of Elizabeth's illegitimacy and the potential survival of her missing brothers made Henry's position far more unstable than Edward IV's had been in 1461 or 1471–the question of whether Edward was illegitimate does not seem to have been raised until later. The matter of Henry and Elizabeth being fourth cousins and so needing a Church court decree of absolution before they could marry–or even a papal ruling, which would take longer to obtain–was also a cause for delay. In fact, the decree was granted just before they married so the King clearly intended to marry as soon as it was legally ‘safe' to do so. There is thus no question of Henry seriously considering abandoning his oath to marry Elizabeth once he was on the throne; if he had done so the chances were that her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and half-brother the Marquis of Dorset would have quickly been plotting to place another Yorkist claimant on the throne as Elizabeth's husband. Lincoln was the obvious choice, Warwick being nine years Elizabeth's junior.

As far as the political situation appeared in early 1486, the battle of Bosworth was merely another reversal of fortunes in the perennially unstable English kingdom–which was almost unique in Europe at this period for coups among its elite and appeared to be in modern parlance a potential ‘failed state'. There was stable dynastic descent from one ruler to another, usually father to son, in France, Burgundy, and the states of the Iberian peninsula; the major and minor sub-states of the Holy Roman Empire were usually inherited by the legal heir, although they could be partitioned among brothers or cousins; and in the British Isles itself the new Stewart dynasty of Scotland from 1371 saw direct succession of father by son, even in a minority (though James III's brother Alexander attempted to subvert this in 1482). A dynasty that ended in female succession could have problems as potential husbands for the heiress or her male relatives tried to seize power, as faced by Hungary and Poland after 1382 and by Naples after 1343 and 1414; and in these circumstances an ‘excluded' royal cousin such as Henry VII could seize the throne. There were also coups against ‘tyrants' or underage rulers in Italy, most notably in Milan in the late fifteenth century –though the Duchy there was a relatively new polity and not as secure as the kingdom of England. ‘Separatism' was also a problem in some multiple dynastic states, particularly in Sweden (where resistance to the 1397 ‘Union of Kalmar' meant that the merger of Denmark, Norway and Sweden was repeatedly challenged) and Poland-Lithuania where the nobles of the latter preferred to be ruled by their own Duke not by the absentee King of Poland. But the repeated dynastic coups in England since 1455 were only matched by the instability of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, where the weak Vassily II (ruled 1425–62) was repeatedly removed by his uncle and then his cousins in the 1430s and 1440s.

 

The first plots and ‘Lambert Simnel', 1486–7

As of 1486, there was no guarantee that the endemic instability in England was over; and indeed even that spring there were abortive plots to raise a Yorkist rebellion in the Midlands, as arranged by the veteran Edwardian loyalist Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton, Warwickshire, and aided by Lord Lovell from sanctuary.
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There was some sort of plot to raise a rebellion in Yorkshire, heartland of Richard III's estates and home of much of his ‘affinity', where his death had been recorded with defiant written declared sorrow in the official records of the city of York.
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Henry's local ‘strongman', the Earl of Northumberland, seems to have been unable to secure the loyalty of his subordinates, possibly out of anger that he had betrayed his King at Bosworth. As a result the new King had to make an unexpected progress north to York, and there was a plan to assassinate him when he arrived in the city–apparently involving Lovell, who had escaped from sanctuary in Colchester without detection and headed north (possibly to Richard III's old home, Middleham Castle). En route Henry was warned by Bray that Lovell was planning to flee sanctuary, but when he received Bray's informant Sir Hugh Conway he discounted the story.
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It is surprising that he had not stationed men around Colchester Abbey to keep Lovell safe, as he was to do to Stafford and his brother Thomas when they fled to sanctuary a few weeks later and to ‘Perkin Warbeck' at Beaulieu Abbey in 1497. Presumably he thought Lovell likelier to flee abroad than to launch a coup.

The murder plot, possibly involving Lovell in person, was prevented at the last minute by the detection of the would-be assassin, either at High Mass in the Minster or later at a banquet in the Archbishop's palace.
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Had the plot succeeded, the plotters apparently intended to proclaim Warwick as king, presumably hoping he would not be killed by the Tudor adherents as soon as the news reached the Tower of London, and the Stafford brothers would raise the tenantry of Warwick's West Midlands estates. (Their home at Grafton was near Warwick Castle so some would have been known to them personally.) If the plan had succeeded there would have been chaos in London as Henry had no son and heir yet and his only male kinsman, his uncle Jasper Tudor (now Duke of Bedford), had no claim to the throne; presumably Margaret Beaufort would have had to defer to Elizabeth of York as the new queen sooner than split the regime's adherents by claiming the throne. The West Midlands rising by Stafford and his brother Thomas went ahead, but was put down; they fled to sanctuary at Abingdon Abbey's ‘cell' at Culham near Oxford but were dragged out and tried for treason. The Abbot, John Sante, dared to speak up for them and claim that the breach of sanctuary was illegal; he was to be involved in a further Yorkist plot so he was clearly not merely defending Church rights. Humphrey was executed on 8 July and his quarters displayed in the Midlands but Thomas was pardoned on the scaffold in the first of the Tudor ‘set-pieces' of State executions.
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The revolt in Yorkshire opened as planned, but soon disintegrated as Henry issued promises of pardon; according to his 1620s biographer Sir Francis Bacon (using the contemporary Polydore Vergil's account) Henry had believed that the rebels were ‘left-overs' from Bosworth and had been surprised to find them a serious threat. A riot, planned to co-ordinate with the date of the murder plot and the Stafford revolt, occurred at the same time in London as a mob displaying the heraldic badges of the Earl of Warwick assembled at Highbury but it was dispersed.
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Lovell now fled north-west to join Sir Thomas Broughton, a Yorkist stalwart, at his isolated house at Broughton-in-Furness. The latter's participation in the Simnel plotters' invasion (which landed nearby) a few months later implies that he and Lovell would have been planning together and that when Lovell soon fled abroad to Burgundy Broughton promised to aid an invasion.
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Lovell now joined Richard III's sister Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who held her court at Malines in the Low Countries. One modern theory has linked Lovell and his ‘hideout' at Colchester Abbey to a presumed ‘son' of Richard III, the later Kent labourer ‘Richard Plantagenet' who was recorded in the 1720s as having claimed to have been brought to see the King at Bosworth by an unnamed ‘lord' (Lovell?), told that Richard was his father and would acknowledge him if he won the battle, and then to have fled into hiding and hidden his identity, training as a bricklayer. This man, who died at Eastwell (ironically, a Victorian royal residence) in 1550, may have been connected to the Abbey and have worked later at its sub-priory, Creake in Norfolk, as ‘Richard Grey'–though he is unlikely to have been Edward IV's son Richard, as David Baldwin suggests.
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But if he was known or available to Lovell as a potential pretender in 1486–he was then about fifteen–he was not used, and the new King was to arrest Richard III's openly acknowledged bastard John of Pontefract and to execute him in 1490.
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