Authors: Lisa Hilton
It is not necessarily correct then, to suppose that Richard’s actions were the result of a longstanding grudge against the Woodvilles. Much has been made of the fact that it was Hastings, rather than the Woodville faction, who informed Richard of Edward’s death, with the implication that the Woodvilles were trying to crown Edward before he had a chance to take up his role as protector, but in Hastings’ capacity as lord chamberlain, it was appropriate that he should break the news, and Richard would have had ample time to reach London for 4 May, if he had intended to accede to the arrangements. Recall that Edward’s death had come as a great surprise. Even Richard’s enemies had to concede that he was an outstanding military commander, as he had so often proved in the service of his brother. He was used to making difficult decisions quickly. One reading of the evidence, then, is that Richard made his choice in the days between receiving Hastings’ letter and setting off for Northampton. This would also explain why Anne Neville came to arrive in London as late as 5 June. If she knew before her husband departed that the coronation would be delayed, it made sense to put off her journey rather than start for the capital at once.
Whatever the case, by 29 April, Richard had concluded that the
Woodvilles had to go. In this he was aided by a magnate who
did
hate the Queen’s family, even though he was her brother-in-law. Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, was the grandson of the Duke of Buckingham who had died fighting for Henry VI at Northampton. He had been married aged eleven to Elizabeth’s sister Katherine and, as a descendant of Edward III through Thomas of Woodstock, his pride smarted under the disparagement. Buckingham loathed the Woodvilles. Like Hastings, he saw Richard as a natural ally now that it appeared the family was poised to take control of the King, and the two men had been in rapid correspondence since hearing of Edward IV’s death.
On 29 April, Richard and Buckingham met at Northampton. Lord Rivers, Elizabeth’s second son Sir Richard Grey and the new King had passed by on their route from Ludlow and were resting at Stony Stratford, fourteen miles closer to London. In a further example of the Woodvilles’ confidence in Richard at this point, Rivers and Grey now rode back to meet Richard and spent a pleasant evening dining and talking with the two dukes. Grey’s presence has been interpreted as Elizabeth’s last, desperate attempt to prevent Richard from assuming the protectorship. ‘Soon after his arrival [at Northampton] the King was joined by Sir Richard Grey, hot-foot from London and probably bearing orders from the Queen to Rivers, urging him to press on to the capital without delay,’ suggests Alison Weir.
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If Grey were carrying any such orders, whether as a warning or in an attempt to rush Edward to London for his coronation, why did he and Rivers turn back after they had conveyed Edward to Stony Stratford? If they feared Richard, and were conspiring to deprive him of the protectorate, why have dinner with him? If their cordiality was a feint, it backfired. In the morning, Richard had Rivers and Grey arrested and imprisoned.
News of the arrests reached London that night. Elizabeth panicked. Her first thought was to attempt to raise an army with her son the Marquis of Dorset, but they found little support, as it was not considered odd or threatening that the King should be in the company of his only uncle, his official protector. Desperate to safeguard herself and her children, Elizabeth decided once more to take sanctuary at Westminster. Thomas More gives an imaginative picture of her flight, of the ‘rumble, haste and busyness, carriage and conveyance of her stuff into sanctuary, chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trusses, all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some loading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more’. Distraught, the Queen herself could do little more than slump to the floor and weep, and when the archbishop of York tried to comfort her with a reassuring
message from Hastings, More has her hissing bitterly, ‘Woe worth him, for he is one of them that labours to destroy me and my blood.’ Elizabeth, her daughters Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Katherine and Bridget, her brother Lionel Woodville and her sons Richard, Duke of York and Thomas Grey were received into sanctuary by the abbot of Westminster, John Easteney, and housed in his own quarters. By morning, the river was ominously full of the patrolling barges of Gloucester’s men, ensuring that no one left or entered the sanctuary’s precincts.
Was Elizabeth’s flight a mistake? Richard’s imprisonment of Rivers and Grey made it clear that he intended to take up the protectorship, but Elizabeth was the Dowager Queen. Had she really so much to fear? Once again, her reaction has been interpreted as evidence that she had been planning to exclude Richard from the government all along, and was now terrified of his discovering this. But such a response could equally have been prompted by the arrests alone. Elizabeth had lived through the Readeption, and she may have believed that it was her decisive action in taking sanctuary then which saved her life and those of her daughters and her unborn child. But now, she too, was effectively a prisoner, cut off from her eldest son and with limited means of communication with the outside world. And in removing herself from Richard’s clutches, she also deprived herself of one of her most powerful weapons: her symbolic presence as queen.
At least Elizabeth’s accommodation in the sanctuary had improved since her first visit. For the eleven months she lived there, she had the use of the abbot’s Great Hall with its minstrels’ gallery, a private chamber and courtyard and for audiences and the grand Jerusalem Chamber, hung with tapestries. Elizabeth was able to receive visitors, and after Richard arrived in the capital with Edward V on 4 May, news began to filter through of his propaganda campaign against her family. When Richard had taken possession of the King, he had claimed that the Woodvilles were plotting to assassinate him to deprive him of the regency, and that he had evidence of ambushes prepared on the London road. He also wrote to the council, explaining that he had rescued Edward and the country from ‘perdition’ and hinting that the Woodvilles had been involved in the death of Edward IV. When the King’s party arrived in London, four carts of weapons were dragged through the streets to demonstrate to the people the ‘proof of the Woodvilles’ evil plans. There is something painfully modern about Richard’s disregard for the truth at this point. He had chosen his lie very effectively, and he stuck to it adamantly By 10 June, he was writing to the representatives of the city of York asking for a muster of men to be sent
south ‘to aid and assist us against the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which hath intended and doth daily intend to murder and utterly destroy us’. The notable aspect of Richard’s request is that it is a public one. The Woodvilles by this stage posed very little threat: the King himself was with Richard, the Queen and Dorset were in sanctuary, Rivers and Grey were being held captive and Elizabeth’s brother Sir Edward Woodville, the commander of the fleet, had been forced to flee. Richard was using the perceived menace of the Woodvilles to raise men for his own purposes.
Officially, his aims were still peaceful. A new date of 22 June had been set for Edward’s coronation, and Richard had already held an oath-swearing at the King’s temporary lodging of the Chapter House of St Paul’s, where lords and citizens gathered to profess their loyalty to the new monarch. On 10 May, Richard had been formally invested as protector until the coronation, after which a regency council was to be selected. Edward was moved to his new lodgings in the royal apartments at the Tower, so recently vacated by his mother. Elizabeth’s continued residence in the sanctuary was now proving an embarrassment to Richard, particularly as some members of the council were expressing concern, according to
Croyland
, that ‘the Protector did not, with a sufficient degree of considerateness, take fitting care for the preservation of the dignity and safety of the Queen’. Richard now began a campaign to persuade Elizabeth to leave the abbot’s quarters, sending members of the council to visit her and reassure her that she and her children had nothing to fear, but Elizabeth remained obdurate.
Richard now grew impatient, and his next act began to reveal his true plans. On 13 June Lord Hastings, the archbishop of York, the bishop of Ely and the King’s secretary were suddenly arrested during a council meeting at the Tower. Hastings was dragged outside and immediately beheaded. Why would Richard so ruthlessly dispose of one of his chief allies? If he was now scheming to seize the crown, then he needed both heirs to the throne in his power. professor Gillingham’s hypothesis is that Hastings had opposed the use of force to remove the Duke of York from sanctuary, but since he was unaware of Richard’s ultimate ambition, would not have realised the significance of his opposition.
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This would explain why Richard needed to eliminate him, and why Hastings was apparently caught unawares. Richard put out a story that Hastings had been plotting against him, and now, with the council silenced, he could move against Elizabeth.
On 16 June, the Queen handed over her son Richard to the protector. Why did she do so, particularly as the news of Hastings’ execution was
now common knowledge? For weeks, Elizabeth had been pressured to deliver the boy. One of Richard’s main advocates was Thomas Bourchier, the cardinal archbishop of Canterbury, the man who had crowned Elizabeth and Edward and who had been for years a trusted friend, not to mention the highest spiritual authority in the country. Bourchier swore to the Queen that he would defend Richard if he was released from sanctuary. Morever, the protector had made it clear that if necessary he would use force. With the sanctuary surrounded by troops and the archbishop’s well-meaning promises in her ear, Elizabeth, sobbing, gave up her child. It was probably the greatest mistake of her life.
Now that he had both princes in his control, Richard no longer troubled to disguise his intentions. He rounded up the last male claimant, Clarence’s son, the eight-year-old Earl of Warwick, and gave him into the keeping of his aunt, Anne Neville. Richard had stayed at his mother’s home, Baynard’s Castle, when he first arrived in London, but on the day Anne arrived they took up residence at Crosby Place, Bishopsgate, so it was here, in the city, that Anne stayed with Warwick. Her own child, Edward, was still at Middleham. The removal from Baynard’s Castle was politic, for the Duchess was in town for the coronation, and Richard’s next step was to accuse her in public of adultery. On Sunday 22 June, the day set for Edward V’s anointing as king, Dr Ralph Shaa, the brother of the mayor of London, preached a sermon at St Paul’s entitled ‘Bastard Slips Shall Never Take Deep Root’. He declared that Edward IV and the Duke of Clarence had been illegitimate, that Edward had therefore never been qualified to rule and that the only true heir to the house of York was now Richard of Gloucester.
Needless to say, the eighty-year-old Duchess of York, whose life was seen as a model of piety and who was well known for her strict religious observance, was less than delighted at her son’s preposterous conduct. Other sermons preached that day declared that the marriage of Elizabeth and Edward had been invalid, as Edward had agreed a pre-contract with one Lady Eleanor Butler (who was conveniently dead), and that therefore Edward V, his brother and all his sisters were illegitimate. On 24 June the Duke of Buckingham addressed prominent citizens at the Guildhall and confirmed the pre-contract accusation.
The fact that no one believed these stories was by now immaterial. Richard had been very clever in choosing to resurrect the memory of Elizabeth’s marriage, even going so far as to have Lady Eleanor’s story mirror Elizabeth’s own. She was described as a young widow who had petitioned Edward IV for the restoration of her lands in 1461. In digging
up the old scandal of the King and the widow, Richard spread doubt and confusion. The arrests of the thirteenth, and Hastings’ execution without trial, had also done their work. Finally, it appeared that Richard had soldiers everywhere. His troops were occupying the houses of his prisoners, parading at Westminster, and Simon Stallworth, one of the chancellor’s clerks, reported in a letter that a fearsome army of 20,000 was expected any day from the north. Richard’s manipulation of the public alarm was very sophisticated. Even before the northern forces arrived, people were afraid that soldiers could be hidden everywhere, so that ‘the possibility … was more fearsome than the fact’.
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On 25 June, the lords who were in London for the aborted coronation gathered at Westminster to hear Buckingham request a modestly hesitant Richard to take the crown. Meanwhile, at Pontefract Castle, Earl Rivers and Sir Richard Grey were beheaded. The next day, Richard III was proclaimed king.
Anne Neville had waited a long time for her crown. She had suffered a good deal, but it would be fascinating to have an insight into the state of her conscience. She knew that she had no right to be queen this time round, in the first place because her marriage was illegitimate in the eyes of the Church. And did she really believe the pre-contract story? Richard had provided an official justification for his usurpation, but it was intellectually barren. What information can be gleaned of Anne’s spiritual life shows that she was a conventionally pious woman. In 1476 she became a member of the sisterhood of Durham Cathedral Priory (the cathedral had strong associations with the Neville family), and the next year she and her husband were admitted to the Guild of Corpus Christi at York, and founded a chantry at the Queens’ College, Cambridge. They also established two colleges, at Barnard Castle, Durham and Middleham, but these activities were as much an appropriate means of enhancing family prestige as reflective of any profound spiritual commitment. As Queen, Anne formed a close relationship with her mother-in-law, Cecily, Duchess of York, who was a national example of piety. Cecily forgave Richard for branding her an adulteress and was a frequent visitor at court, where she and Anne discussed religious books such as
Ghostly Grace
, by the thirteenth-century German mystic Mechtild of Hackeborn, of which they both owned a copy. Such interests aside, Anne left no record of notable acts of more personal dedication and her religious patronage was negligible. If she did entertain private doubts about her new position, she did not feel the need to make public amends.