Read The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family Online
Authors: Susan Higginbotham
With the bethrothal of Anne St Leger and Dorset’s heir in view, the parliament of 1483 settled the Holland estates upon Anne St Leger, save for lands totalling 500 marks per year, which were set aside for Richard Grey. This arrangement, for which the queen paid the king 5,000 marks, was at the expense of Ralph Neville, the heir to the Holland estates. Neville was technically barred from inheriting because of Exeter’s attainder but could have petitioned for the reversal of the attainder, as heirs often did. Whether he would have succeeded in the absence of any Woodville interest in Anne St Leger’s estates is far from certain, though, as Anne St Leger was the king’s niece and the daughter of a favoured servant.
Anthony’s care about obtaining his patents, and Dorset’s wedding plans, were all for naught. On 9 April 1483, Edward IV died, of causes that remain uncertain. The Crowland Chronicler wrote that he had not been ‘affected by old age nor by any known type of disease which would not have seemed easy to cure in a lesser person’, while Dominic Mancini, an Italian observer who happened to be in England at the time, reported that the king had died after a boating trip in which he allowed a ‘damp cold to strike his vitals’. The Burgundian chronicler, Commynes, variously named apoplexy, grief occasioned by the Treaty of Arras, and a catarrh, while Thomas Basin attributed the king’s death to an overindulgence of fruit and vegetables on Good Friday. Polydor Vergil, writing his history of England in the sixteenth century, suggested poison, while Edmund Hall proposed an ague, contracted in France in 1475, that ‘turned to an incurable quarten’.
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Given the state of fifteenth-century medicine, Mancini’s explanation seems as plausible as any.
Whatever the cause of death, the demise of Edward, just a few weeks shy of his 41st birthday, must have been a shock. At Christmas, the king had been resplendent in costly robes of a novel design which displayed the king ‘like a new and incomparable spectacle set before the onlookers’;
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nothing indicates that that he was suffering from ill health at the time his parliament convened in January.
His illness allowed him time either to make a new will or to add codicils to his 1475 one, although only the 1475 will itself has survived. According to Mancini, it was said that the king had named his only surviving brother, Gloucester, as protector of the realm during the minority of Prince Edward, now Edward V.
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Neither Edward V nor Gloucester was at Edward’s deathbed. Edward V was at Ludlow with Anthony Woodville; Gloucester was at his estates in the north, where he may have learned of the premature report of the king’s death that reached the city of York on 6 April.
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It is at this point where the first of several myths surrounding the Woodvilles and the death of Edward IV creeps in: the story that the Woodvilles concealed Edward IV’s death from Gloucester. The myth originates in Paul Murray Kendall’s florid biography of Richard III, which informs us that Gloucester received no formal notification of the king’s death until William, Lord Hastings, took it upon himself to break the news and to inform Gloucester that he had appointed a protector.
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In fact, neither Mancini nor Crowland, the chief primary sources for this period, indicates that there was anything irregular in the way in which Gloucester was informed of the king’s death or any unusual delay. Neither, in fact, has anything to say about when or how Gloucester was first told of his brother’s death: Crowland is silent on the subject, other than to note that Gloucester was sending ‘pleasant letters’ to the widowed queen, while Mancini simply reports that Hastings kept Gloucester informed of the council’s deliberations.
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While Polydor Vergil, writing in the sixteenth century, does state that it was Hastings who informed Gloucester of Edward IV’s death, he does not indicate that anything was amiss about the way in which Gloucester was informed. Indeed, if anyone had to complain of delay, it was Edward V, the new king, who did not receive the news until 14 April – four days after it was current in Calais.
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Meanwhile, the king’s council, as Hastings informed Gloucester, was deliberating. As Charles Ross points out, contrary to Kendall’s claim, there was nothing illegal about the council sitting without having been convened by Gloucester: in keeping the government running until a new council could be appointed, they were following the examples set during the royal minorities of Richard II in 1377 and Henry VI in 1422.
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The council’s main concern was how much power the king’s Woodville relations would wield in the new government. At this stage, the Woodvilles’ leading opponent was not Gloucester but Hastings.
Hastings, who was about 43 in 1483, had been on close terms with the king from the very beginning of his reign; the measure of their friendship can be found in Hastings’s will, in which he stated, proudly and poignantly, that the king, ‘for the true service that I have done and at the least intended to have done to his grace hath willed and offered me to be buried in the college or chapel of St George at Windsor in a place by his grace assigned, in the which college his highness is disposed to be buried’.
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But his friendship with the king did not extend to the Woodvilles. Crowland reports that ‘much ill-will’ had long existed between them and Hastings, while Mancini claimed that Dorset and Hastings had a ‘deadly feud’ based on the mistresses they had attempted to steal from each other.
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Thomas More, on the other hand, writing in the sixteenth century (but perhaps basing his account on information gained from people who were in a position to remember the events of 1483), claimed that Anthony bore a grudge against Hastings for the latter having been made Lieutenant of Calais and that Anthony had once made an accusation against Hastings that got the latter into temporary disgrace with the king.
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Eric Ives has suggested that the rivalry between Anthony and Hastings might be behind a confession by a John Edwards that he had slandered Dorset, Rivers, and Robert Ratcliffe before the king’s council at Calais ‘for fear of his life and putting him in the brake at Calais’.
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Whatever the reason for the bad blood between Hastings and the Woodvilles, Hastings (as reported by the Crowland Chronicler) insisted that the escort accompanying the young king to London for his coronation be of a modest size, so as to prevent the king’s Woodville brothers and uncles from seizing control of him. He threatened to withdraw to Calais if the matter of the escort could not be settled to his satisfaction. ‘The benevolent queen, desirous of extinguishing every spark of murmurring and unrest’, bowed to Hastings’s argument and wrote to Ludlow to tell her son that his escort should be limited to no more than 2,000 men, a number that was satisfactory to Hastings. Meanwhile, Gloucester wrote the ‘pleasant letters’ mentioned above, swearing allegiance to Edward V, and staged a memorial service for the deceased king at York.
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While Gloucester, Anthony Woodville, and the new king remained in their respective locations, the council was also debating the shape the minority government would take – without, according to Mancini, waiting for the arrival of Gloucester, who would surely have an opinion on the matter. Dorset is said to have brushed off his fellow councillors’ concerns with the contemptuous reply of, ‘We are so important, that even without the king’s uncle we can make and enforce these decisions’. After the council debated whether Gloucester would govern alone during Edward V’s minority, or be the chief among his fellow councillors, the latter opinion carried the day.
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A coronation date, 4 May, was set.
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The implications of when Edward V was to be crowned, and how the realm was to be governed, have been widely discussed. Under the precedent of 1429, when the 7-year-old Henry VI was crowned, the protectorate would end upon Edward V’s coronation, leaving the council to govern until the king came of age.
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Under the assumption that any such council would be dominated by the Woodvilles, Michael Hicks has argued that the plans for an early coronation, combined with the cavalier dismissal of the need to consult Gloucester, are evidence of an attempted Woodville
coup d’état
.
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This is possible, but the ease with which Hastings prevailed on the matter of the king’s escort suggests considerably less organisation on the Woodvilles’ part – and also casts doubt on whether the Woodvilles could have taken their domination of a council for granted. In any case, if there was a concerted grasp for power on the Woodvilles’ part, events would soon prove them to have been singularly inept about it.
According to Mancini, Hastings had been writing to Gloucester, keeping him informed of the council’s deliberations and, more important, urging him to ‘hasten to the capital with a strong force, and avenge the insult done him by his enemies’. To accomplish this, Hastings advised Gloucester to take Edward V under his protection and to seize his followers before the king’s entourage reached London. Gloucester, meanwhile, was writing to Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, ‘complaining to the latter of the insult done him by the ignoble family of the queen’, whom Buckingham himself had supposedly detested since being made as a child to marry her youngest sister, Katherine Woodville.
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Buckingham had enjoyed little more than a ceremonial role at Edward IV’s court, where he played his part at the grand events of Edward IV’s reign, such as the welcoming of Louis de Bruges to England in 1472 and the marriage of Edward IV’s younger son, the Duke of York, to little Anne Mowbray in 1478. He accompanied Edward to France in 1475, when the Treaty of Picquigny was signed, but is recorded as having gone home prematurely, for unknown reasons.
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Michael Jones has speculated that he may have shared Gloucester’s distaste for the treaty and that he remonstrated with Edward IV about it, thereby consigning himself to oblivion for the rest of that king’s reign.
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Other explanations for Edward IV’s apparently aloof behaviour toward Buckingham abound. Some argue that Buckingham was squeezed out by the Woodvilles, while others suggest that Edward IV disliked him personally, regarded him as unstable or untrustworthy or incompetent, or distrusted him because of his Lancastrian connections or because of his royal ancestry. For his own part, Buckingham must have bitterly resented Edward IV’s refusal to hand over his share of the Bohun inheritance, to which Buckingham had a claim after the deaths of Henry VI and Edward of Lancaster in 1471. As Carole Rawcliffe points out, doing so would have not only cost Edward IV over £1,000 per year in lost income but would have emphasised Buckingham’s claim to the throne through the House of Lancaster.
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In this respect, it probably did not help that Buckingham in 1474 had sought and received permission to use the arms of his ancestor Thomas of Woodstock.
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Whatever the reason the Crown had kept Buckingham at a distance, he must have seen a chance for a fresh start with Gloucester. The men would have had chances to encounter each other over the years; one of the occasions when they can be found together at court is when they, along with Rivers, Dorset, and other noblemen, had paid homage to young Prince Edward on 9 November 1477.
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Whether they were previously close, or whether their newfound alliance was born of opportunism, is unknown.
Meanwhile, England was laying its Yorkist king to rest. On 17 April, the body was taken to Westminster Abbey. Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury was one of the ecclesiastics present. Among the lords following the coffin were Dorset, Edward Woodville, and Richard Woodville, the latter making one of his rare recorded public appearances. Early the next day, the mourners left for Windsor, where Edward IV was laid to rest on 19 April.
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Finally, Edward V and his entourage, including Rivers, Richard Grey, and Thomas Vaughan, left Ludlow on 24 April, having observed St George’s Day the day before.
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By 29 April, the king was at Stony Stratford, 52 miles from London. Buckingham and Gloucester arrived at Northampton, 11 miles south of Stony Stratford.
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Rivers, accompanied by Richard Grey, either rode from Stony Stratford to Northampton to meet Gloucester or remained at Northampton to meet him while the king moved on to Stony Stratford. In any case, he paid his respects to Gloucester and Buckingham, and the men enjoyed a convivial evening before going to bed.
Then Gloucester struck. On the morning of 30 April, either before the company had left Northampton or as they were riding together toward Stony Stratford, he and Buckingham arrested Rivers and Richard Grey. At Stony Stratford, they seized Thomas Vaughan, who had been by Edward’s side since the king’s infancy, and informed the shocked young king that the they had acted out of necessity. According to Mancini, the king made a spirited reply to the two dukes, telling them that he had seen ‘nothing evil’ in the three men ‘and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil’. His protests were to no avail, however, and Gloucester soon dispatched the men toward his castles in the north: Rivers to Sheriff Hutton, Richard Grey to Middleham, and Thomas Vaughan possibly to Pontefract.
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