Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (20 page)

Rivers had little reason to decline Richard’s request; he certainly had
no reason to suspect the duke, whom only several weeks before he had accepted as an arbitrator in a dispute he was having with his Norfolk neighbours. On 24 April the young king and Rivers set off from Ludlow with no more than the 2,000 soldiers that the council had agreed should accompany him.

Richard had departed from York on 23 April with a retinue of 600 ‘gentlemen of the north’. Encouraged by Hastings’ messages, the duke had left the north knowing that he was not alone in his determination to face down the Woodvilles. In the weeks since Edward’s death, he had sought support from members of the nobility who might be considered hostile or threatened by their takeover. In doing so, the duke had ‘allied himself’ with Henry Stafford, the second Duke of Buckingham, ‘uniting their resources’. Buckingham had never forgotten how he had been forced to marry one of the queen’s sisters as an eleven-year-old boy; embittered that he had gained nothing from the marriage which he had ‘scorned’ on account of its ‘humble origin’, he hoped to take his own revenge on ‘the queen’s kin’.

By 29 April both Richard and Buckingham had reached Northampton, where they received news that Rivers and Prince Edward were fourteen miles away at Stony Stratford. On the evening of 29 April, leaving the new king and his household at Stony Stratford, it was arranged for Rivers and Sir Richard Grey to ride to Northampton, where they were greeted by Richard ‘with a particularly cheerful and merry face, and sitting at the duke’s table for dinner, they passed the whole time in very pleasant conversation’. After dinner, they were joined by the Duke of Buckingham, and they continued their conversation late into the night.

The following morning, they set out to rejoin the young king. Just outside the town, Richard and Buckingham struck. Rivers and Grey were arrested and sent under close guard ominously to Pontefract Castle, in the heart of Richard’s northern estates. Both dukes now hurried to intercept the king, who had remained at Stony Stratford and was unaware of Rivers’ arrest. When Richard arrived he ordered the arrest of his servants and his chamberlain, the aged Thomas Vaughan. Orders were sent out for the rest of the household to depart ‘at once, and that they should not come near any places where the king might go, upon pain of death’.

Richard approached the young king with a ‘mournful countenance’, explaining to him why he had been forced to arrest Rivers and Grey and dismiss his household, claiming these ‘puny men’ had been responsible in part for his father’s death, encouraging the debauchery that had ruined his health. Richard further claimed that he had discovered plans to ambush him on the road to the capital, and that it was ‘common knowledge that they had attempted to deprive him of the office of regent conferred on him by his brother’. For the sake of the young king’s security, Rivers and the entire household needed to be ‘utterly removed’ since they were prepared, Richard believed, to ‘dare anything’.

Edward, who in spite of his young age was already displaying signs of ‘talent and remarkable learning’, was not convinced. Refusing to believe his uncle, he defended Rivers and his servants, telling Richard that they had been appointed by his father, ‘and relying on his father’s prudence, he believed that good and faithful ones had been given him’. He had seen ‘nothing evil’ in them himself, and wished to keep them. Edward’s independence of mind must have been disturbing for Richard. It was clear that while the king might be too young to govern by himself, he was certainly no child, with the force of character to express his own opinions. Bishop John Russell believed that the king possessed a ‘gentle wit and ripe understanding, far passing the nature of his youth’. To hear him defending his Woodville relations, Richard must have recognised that he could hardly rely upon the king’s support; though his uncle, Richard must have been a remote and unknown figure to Edward, in contrast to his mother’s family, with whom the king had grown up and whose influence was evidently already deep set. The king continued to argue with his uncle, declaring that he had ‘complete confidence in the peers of the realm and the queen’ to make arrangements for his minority, yet he eventually agreed to submit himself to his uncle’s authority, realising that he was powerless to refuse Richard’s demands.

When rumour of what had taken place at Stony Stratford reached London, Queen Elizabeth fled in the night with her children into sanctuary at Westminster. By the morning, confusion reigned as the capital began to take sides. ‘You might have seen the partisans of one side and of the other, some sincerely, others dissimulating because of the
confusing events, taking this side or that’. A rumour began to spread that Richard had brought his nephew ‘not under his care, but into his power, so as to gain for himself the crown’.

In this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, Richard knew that his entrance into the capital would need to be carefully stage-managed. To counter the rumours that he intended to claim the crown as his own, Richard made full use of letters, sent to the council and the city authorities, to repeat what he had told Edward, that ‘he had rescued him and the realm from perdition, since the young man would have fallen into the hands of those who, since they had not spared either the honour or life of the father, could not be expected to have more regard for the youthfulness of the son’. In contrast, ‘no one save only him had such solicitude for the welfare of King Edward and the preservation of the state’.

The self-appointed saviour of the nation, when Richard entered London with Edward on 4 May ‘in regal style’, with a force of 500 men, each solemnly dressed in black, he brought with him cartloads of weapons, stamped with the Woodville arms, that were supposedly to have been used in an armed takeover that the duke now claimed he had thwarted. Playing the role of the loyal uncle of the king, determined to do what was in his nephew’s best interest, Richard ordered that every nobleman in the capital together with the mayor and aldermen of the city of London ‘take the oath of fealty’ to the king; it was taken that ‘this promised best for future prosperity’ and was ‘performed with pride and joy by all’.

Richard’s entrance into London had seen him effectively acclaimed as the king’s official Protector. Richard himself was confident that he could act as the king’s regent ‘on account of his popularity’, while it was reported that members of the nobility ‘even said openly that it was more just and profitable that the youthful sovereign should be with his paternal uncle’.

At the next meeting of the council on 10 May, Richard was appointed Lord Protector, with the appointment scheduled to last until at least the king’s coronation, which was now set for 22 June. Everyone ‘now hoped for and awaited peace and prosperity in the kingdom’. Hastings, having himself helped to engineer the transfer of power, was ‘bursting
with joy over this new world’, grateful that it had taken place ‘without any killing and with only so much bloodshed in the affair as might have come from a cut finger’.

In spite of his new authority, ‘commanding and forbidding in everything like another king’, it soon became clear to Richard that power was not quite what it seemed. He would soon feel bridled by the council; as the Crowland Chronicler remarked, he might only govern ‘with the consent and the good will of all the lords’. When Richard attempted to have Rivers and Grey condemned as guilty of treason for planning to ambush him and conspiring his death, he was blocked, with the council refusing to do so, casting doubt on the evidence that any ambushes had been planned and arguing that even if they had been planned, since Richard was not Protector then, no treason had been committed.

The decision must have prompted Richard to reassess the vulnerability of his own position. He had been granted the protectorship for a period of six weeks only, until the coronation, when the decision would be reviewed. By that time, the tables might have once again turned in favour of the Woodvilles. With Rivers and Grey now potentially soon to be freed, it would not be long before they would seek revenge for their treatment. He had wrested control of the king from the Woodvilles, preventing their immediate dominance in the vacuum of power following Edward IV’s death, but they remained far from crushed, and their presence in London was acutely felt. Before fleeing into sanctuary, after hearing news of Richard’s capture of the king, they had attempted to assemble an army; this had ultimately been in vain, since the noblemen they approached ‘were not only irresolute, but altogether hostile to themselves’, but the city remained divided along factional lines, with men loyal to the Woodville party flocking to the queen’s side at Westminster. Queen Elizabeth’s flight into sanctuary had taken the king’s younger brother Richard, Duke of York, out of Richard’s grasp, and left a potential alternative power base within the capital. ‘A great cause of anxiety which was growing,’ the Crowland Chronicler wrote, ‘was the detention in prison of the king’s relatives and servants and the fact that the Protector did not show sufficient consideration for the dignity and peace of mind of the queen.’ Sir Edward Woodville also remained at large, having escaped from the
capital the day before Richard’s arrival, setting sail with the royal fleet.

Richard had immediately set about strengthening his own position and dismantling the Woodvilles’, replacing Archbishop Rotherham, a friend of the queen’s, with John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, as chancellor. He also ordered the Woodville lands to be seized, even though there were no legal grounds for the forfeiture. It was the first sign that Richard was prepared to flout the law for his own advantage.

Learning that Sir Edward Woodville’s fleet still lay at anchor in the Downs, Richard sent troops to defend Sandwich and Dover, as well as giving the vital control of the castles of Porchester in Hampshire and Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight, previously held by the Woodvilles, to his own supporters. He offered a free pardon to all men that would desert the fleet, though Woodville had countered any prospect of desertions by placing armed guards on each ship. Two Genoese carracks were placed in a particularly awkward position; they had no intention of becoming involved in internecine civil war, but only to remain on good terms with whomever happened to be in power. Plying their guards with drink, having overcome them, they managed to escape, setting sail under a blast of trumpets for London. In the confusion, the rest of the fleet scattered. Still Woodville managed to escape with two ships; more significantly he had managed to take with him £10,250 in English gold coin that he had seized from a carrack docking in Southampton water, using his position as ‘uncle unto our said sovereign lord and great captain of his navy’ to persuade the unsuspecting ship owner to hand over the money on the condition that it had been forfeit to the crown with a promise that an equivalent value in English merchandise would be offered in compensation. Sailing across the Channel, Woodville’s chosen destination was Brittany, where he not only intended to find solace at Duke Francis II’s court; he hoped to form a remarkable reconciliation with Henry Tudor.

Sir Edward Woodville’s escape was not the only problem Richard had to countenance; discovering ‘from his spies’ that Thomas, Marquess of Dorset had escaped from sanctuary at Westminster, believing that he was ‘hiding in the adjacent neighbourhood’ the duke ordered his men to hunt him out with dogs, searching the crop fields and woods around the capital, though despite this ‘very close encirclement’ Dorset was nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile Richard continued to shore up his own support by rewarding those who had colluded with him in seizing the protectorate. John, Lord Howard, for instance, was appointed chief steward of the Duchy of Lancaster south of the Trent; the day after, on 15 May, he presented Richard with a gold cup weighing 65 ounces. Many rewards went to men who had been loyal supporters of Edward IV himself, a recognition of Richard’s desire to retain a continuity between his regime and the old, hoping that he might be able to keep a stable balance of power. Of seventy grants that he made in the following month, only five of the sixty-four recipients had any definite links with the duke himself before his protectorate; in contrast, fifteen grants went to men who had been in Edward IV’s household, while many existing positions were probably retained by the former king’s men.

Yet it proved impossible to recognise the vital support that Buckingham had given the duke, without granting him an extraordinary share of royal patronage. On 10 May, as a sign of Richard’s dependence upon the duke, Buckingham was appointed chief justice of both North and South Wales, in addition to being made constable and steward of all fifty-three castles and lordships in Wales and the Marches and being given supervision of the king’s subjects in Shropshire, Hereford, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, with the power to raise both armies and revenue in these areas.

In contrast, Hastings’ only reward came in the office of master of the Mint. Perhaps aggrieved by his paltry share of patronage, his ‘extreme joy’ at Richard’s appointment as Protector had within ‘a very few days’ turned ‘into sadness’. If Hastings’ doubts about Richard’s true intentions had begun to grow, he seems finally to have spoken out on 9 June, when the council met to discuss the details of the coronation. It seems that during the meeting Richard broached the issue of the king’s younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, remaining in sanctuary at Westminster. As the date of the coronation neared, Richard argued that York should attend the ceremony as next in line to the throne. It would be ‘improper’ for the king’s brother not to be there, but this would mean his removal from his mother Queen Elizabeth in sanctuary. Hastings seems to have offered resistance to either forcing the duke to be removed from Westminster, or breaking the rights of sanctuary; perhaps he felt by now that Richard’s motives were highly suspect. Though the details of
the council discussions remain obscure, they were evidently protracted, with the meeting lasting for four hours.

It seems that the council meeting was to prove the final straw for Richard. Not only did he feel his power was being been tempered, but it seemed that, with just two weeks before the coronation, there was a real chance that the Woodvilles might be able to re-establish their authority after his temporary protectorship had ended. It was hard to forget that, aged twelve, Edward was himself only three years away from attaining his majority; already he had shown his independence of mind, daring to disagree with Richard to his face. Once he had acceded to the throne, free to make his own decisions, would he forgive his uncle for arresting Rivers and his own household? If Richard were to secure his own future, he would need to act fast; it was obvious that as matters stood, that future would soon be in doubt.