The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (24 page)

There is no evidence that Edward Woodville took stolen royal treasure with him, although royal funds would have certainly been expended in fitting him and his ships out for his mission against the French. Notably, at around the time of his coronation in July, Richard instructed Doctor Thomas Huton to inform the Duke of Brittany that debts owed to his subjects by Edward IV would be paid once his goods had been administered. In the same letter, he charged Huton to inquire about the duke’s intentions toward Edward Woodville; had Edward been in possession of royal treasure, Richard would surely have said so, as it would have given the duke an incentive to hand him over to Richard so that his subjects could more speedily collect their debts.
⁵⁶

As for Dorset, Simon Stallworth wrote a letter on 9 June 1483, stating, ‘Where so ever can be found any goods of my lord Marquis it is taken. The Prior of Westminster was and yet is in a great trouble for certain goods delivered to him by my Lord Marquis’. Armstrong has interpreted this letter to mean that Gloucester, as protector, was attempting to recover Dorset’s share of the treasure, but it is noteworthy that the reference is to ‘goods of my lord marquis’, i.e. to the marquis’s own goods, not to goods in his possession belonging to the Crown. It seems more likely, then, that Gloucester’s agents were simply rounding up property belonging to the marquis, as part of the seizure of Woodville property in which Gloucester then was engaged. The ‘certain goods’ delivered to the Prior of Westminster could refer to stolen treasure, but it could also simply mean that Dorset was attempting to conceal or safeguard his own property by leaving it with the prior. Thus, all Stallworth’s letter tells us is that there was official interest in Dorset’s goods, but it furnishes no clue as to their nature.

On 7 May, the king’s executors met to discuss the king’s funeral, and the supervisor of the king’s will, the Archbishop of Canterbury, ordered the sequestration of the king’s goods. Elizabeth was not among those at the meeting. Although some writers, such as Kendall, have asserted that her absence meant that the king had stricken her from the list of executors before his death, there is no evidence of this, given that only the king’s 1475 will, not a subsequent will or codicils, has survived. As Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs note, the list of executors meeting on 7 May does not purport to be a list of all those named as executors, and Elizabeth, being in sanctuary, had an obvious reason for not attending.
⁵⁷

Elizabeth’s continuance in sanctuary, however, remained a concern. On 23 May, two oaths were read before the Common Council of London: the first being the oath that Gloucester, Buckingham, and others had sworn to Edward V; the second being the oath these same people were prepared to swear to Elizabeth if she wished to come out of sanctuary.
⁵⁸
Whether Elizabeth herself was approached is unclear; if she was, she apparently was not reassured for her safety or that of her children. Perhaps she was waiting to see what would become of her brother and her son, still languishing in northern strongholds with no formal charges or indictments having been brought against them.

It may be that Elizabeth was also waiting for her son’s coronation to determine her next move. In the first days of June, preparations were moving along briskly, leading Simon Stallworth to report to Sir William Stonor on 9 June that there was ‘great business against [i.e. in preparation for] the coronation’, which was to take place in a fortnight. Stallworth added, however, that although Gloucester, Buckingham, and other lords had met in council from ten to two, no one had spoken to the queen.
⁵⁹

Behind the scenes, something else entirely was going on. The next day, Gloucester wrote a letter to the mayor of York demanding that the city send forces:

    to aid and assist us against the queen, her blood adherents and affinity, which have intended and daily doth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin, the duke of Buckingham, and the old royal blood of this realm, and it is now openly known, by their subtle and damnable ways forecasted the same, and also the final destruction and [disinheritance] of you and all other the inheritors and men of honour, as well of the north parts as other counties, that belong unto us.

On 11 June, Gloucester wrote to Lord Neville, a northern lord, asking that he send men defensibly arrayed ‘in all the haste that was possible’.
⁶⁰

Was this a real crisis, or one manufactured by Gloucester? Because Elizabeth, her sons, and her brothers at this point were either in prison, in sanctuary, in hiding, or out of the country, they were hardly in a position to do Gloucester physical harm, much less his entire affinity. Gloucester did, however, lay a second charge against the Woodvilles, that they ‘by their subtle and damnable ways forecasted the same’ – a reference to making astrological predictions. At first glance, this charge is not implausible. There is no evidence that any of the Woodvilles possessed astrological skills, but as John Leland points out, there were astrologers with connections to the queen or to other opponents of Gloucester who could have been employed. Even if the Woodvilles were not using astrology against Gloucester, they might well have found a pressing need to determine what the future held.
⁶¹
The problem with this argument, however, is that none of the men suggested as candidates by Leland – Thomas Nandyke, Lewis Caerleon, and John Argentine – were accused by Gloucester of aiding the queen, nor did they suffer imprisonment or other penalties at the time. Argentine, Edward V’s physician, remained with his charge until being dismissed sometime after the young king was deposed. Nandyken, who was associated with the Duke of Buckingham, and Lewis Caerleon, who was associated with Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, were at large to plot against Gloucester after he became king.
⁶²
No one else is known to have been accused of practising astrology against Gloucester at this time. It defies reason that if Gloucester genuinely believed that astrology was being employed against him in his capacity as protector – which could be regarded as treason – he would do nothing to investigate or punish the astrologers responsible.

Whatever the plausibility of Gloucester’s accusations against the Woodvilles in his requests for troops, the request themselves were certainly genuine. Was Gloucester simply taking precautions to make sure the coronation, and his continuance as protector, would go smoothly? Was he genuinely worried about a Woodville threat to destroy him and all of his followers? Or had he determined on another course of action? We can only guess at what might have been in Gloucester’s mind, but the next two weeks would change the course of English history and ultimately lead to the destruction of an entire dynasty.

Since the coup at Stony Stratford, Crowland tells us, William, Lord Hastings, had been in the best of moods: ‘bursting with joy over this new world’ and ‘asserting that nothing had so far been done except to transfer the government of the kingdom from two blood-relatives of the queen to two nobles of the blood royal […] with only so much bloodshed in the affair as might have come from a cut finger’. Then, on Friday 13 June, he arrived for a council meeting at the Tower.

There are numerous versions of what happened next, some more embroidered than others, but all agree in substance: Gloucester accused Hastings of treason, then ordered his beheading without giving him anything faintly resembling a trial. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, and John Morton, Bishop of Ely were also arrested, as were several others, including Oliver King, secretary to Edward V. The next day, John Forster, who had been an official of the queen, was arrested at his home in Hertfordshire, while in the coming days, Mancini, who believed the charges against Hastings were fabricated, nonetheless noted that Gloucester had used Buckingham to sound the loyalty of him, Rotherham, and York and that he had learned that they foregathered in each other’s houses.

There are broadly two schools of thought as to Hastings’s arrest and murder – under the circumstances, ‘execution’ hardly seems adequate. One is that Gloucester killed Hastings purely as a preemptive strike, having determined at that point to seize the crown and knowing that Edward IV’s close friend would stand in the way of his ambitions to supplant the late king’s heir. The other, naturally, is that Hastings had begun to plot against Gloucester, either out of suspicion as to his intentions toward Edward V or for nefarious reasons of his own.
⁶³

Members of the second school of thought generally implicate Elizabeth Woodville in Hastings’s supposed plotting, although the link between her and Hastings at this point is tenuous at best. Neither Crowland nor Mancini, both of whom view Hastings as innocent, mention the Woodvilles in connection with Hastings. It is only in the Tudor era that Elizabeth Woodville comes into the picture, most famously in the account of Thomas More, who claims that in the moments before accusing Hastings, Gloucester displayed his withered arm and accused the queen and Hastings’s mistress, ‘Shore’s wife’, of having used sorcery to waste his body.
⁶⁴
Polydor Vergil tells us that Gloucester, having twice declared in front of his council that he was being destroyed by Elizabeth’s sorcery, then accused Hastings himself of working to destroy him before ordering his summary execution.
⁶⁵
From this scant evidence, it has been posited that Hastings, having thought better of his support of Gloucester, made common cause with Elizabeth Woodville in his scheming.

This scenario seems unlikely. While it could be argued that Gloucester’s letters of 10 and 11 June could refer to a Hastings–Woodville plot, they do not mention Hastings. Furthermore, if Gloucester did have suspicions of Hastings at that point that were serious enough to justify calling for troops, it follows that these same suspicions would have justified the arrest of Hastings then, instead of two or three days later.
⁶⁶
As for the Vergil and More claims: while they may be correct in reporting that Gloucester linked the queen and Hastings in his accusations – his claim about the queen’s sorcery echoes his 10 June letter – neither of them gave them credence. More scoffed, ‘well they wist that the queen was too wise to go about any such folly’, while Vergil spoke of Gloucester setting a trap for Hastings with his accusations.
⁶⁷

The notion of a Hastings–Woodville conspiracy has been further embroidered by modern conjecture that Mistress Shore – supposedly a former mistress of Edward IV, and in some accounts that of Hastings as well – was the go-between for Hastings and the queen.
⁶⁸
This, though a beguiling theory, seems unlikely. Gloucester himself never linked Mistress Shore to Hastings, only to Dorset, whom he later accused of holding ‘the unshameable and mischievous woman called Shore’s wife’ in adultery.
⁶⁹
While Mistress Shore was indeed in prison as of 21 June, the cause of her incarceration is not recorded.
⁷⁰
It seems likely that her crime was not in helping the queen and Hastings plot treason, but was connected with Dorset, whose goods, as we recall, were of great interest to the protector earlier in June. Notably, it is around this time that, according to Mancini, Dorset left sanctuary and was subject to a royal manhunt, which makes it all the more likely that Mistress Shore’s arrest was connected with him.
⁷¹
Nor was Mistress Shore ideally placed to be a liaison between Hastings and the queen: visitors to Elizabeth in sanctuary would have doubtlessly been closely monitored by royal authorities, and as Dorset’s mistress, Mistress Shore’s visits to the queen would have aroused suspicion from the very beginning.

Hastings’s killing was a turning point for Gloucester, after which, as Crowland puts it, he and Buckingham ‘did whatever they wanted’. What they wanted to do next became apparent on 16 June, when, accompanied by a ‘great crowd, with swords and clubs’, they came by boat to Westminster and dragooned the old Archbishop of Canterbury to lead a delegation to persuade the queen to allow her younger son, the Duke of York, to leave sanctuary and join his brother Edward V in the Tower. Faced with the authority of the Church and the power of a group of armed men, Elizabeth, who may not have even known of Hastings’s death the previous Friday, agreed. As Mancini put it, ‘When the queen saw herself besieged and preparation for violence, she surrendered her son, trusting in the word of the cardinal of Canterbury that the boy should be restored after the coronation’.
⁷²
In hindsight, it was the worst mistake of Elizabeth Woodville’s life, but the queen could have hardly guessed what would happen next. She would never see her sons by Edward IV again.

With both Edward V and his younger brother lodged in the Tower, Gloucester postponed the coronation yet again, this time to 9 November. The mood in London was growing increasingly jittery: on 21 June, Simon Stallworth, reporting the departure of the Duke of York from sanctuary and the arrest of Mistress Shore, among other titbits, wrote to Sir William Stonor in the country, ‘For tidings I hold you happy that you are out of the press, for with us is much trouble, and every man doubts other’. He added that 20,000 men belonging to Gloucester and Buckingham were expected: ‘to what intent I know not but to keep the peace’.
⁷³