Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (25 page)

The following Sunday, 22 June, two days before Edward V’s now cancelled coronation, a public sermon was preached by a prominent cleric, Dr Ralph Shaw, the brother of London’s lord mayor Edmund Shaw, at St Paul’s Cross outside the cathedral, on the text ‘Bastard slips should not take root’. Such a central location – a fifteenth-century equivalent of a national news broadcast – meant that the sermon was officially inspired by Richard. Heavily underscoring the topical parallel to the biblical theme, Dr Shaw proclaimed that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid because the late king had promised marriage to Lady Elizabeth Butler, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Therefore, he said, the two princes in the Tower – King Edward V and the Duke of York – were both illegitimate ‘bastard slips’ and barred from succeeding to the throne.

Warming to his theme, the preacher went further. Not only were the two boys illegitimate, but both their father Edward IV, and his brother Clarence (both conveniently dead) were bastards too – the products of an adulterous affair carried out by Richard’s mother, ‘Proud Cis’, the dowager Duchess of York. Although the duchess herself was still alive,
there is no record of her feelings about being smeared as a double adulteress by her only surviving son. Dr Shaw concluded his sermon by proclaiming that only the protector was the rightful king.

Right on cue, Richard himself, with Buckingham, proudly rode past the open-air congregation – who, according to Sir Thomas More, ‘stood as if turned to stones for wonder of this shameful sermon’. Doubtless the London crowd were left to reflect that Edward and Clarence were abnormally tall for their time, while Richard resembled in his slight build and sharp face, his late father, Richard, Duke of York. Public opinion was being thoroughly prepared for someone other than Edward V to take the crown, and there were no prizes for guessing who that someone would be.

Two days later, Lord Mayor Edmund Shaw, following up his brother’s sermon, convened a meeting of leading Londoners at the Guildhall to rubber-stamp Richard’s coup. The meeting was packed with Buckingham’s affinity. The duke asked the assembled citizens to demand that Richard accept the crown. But this request was met with stony silence, so in desperation Buckingham signalled his retainers, who promptly cast their caps into the air, crying, ‘King Richard!’ The coup’s choreography was proceeding according to plan; the only thing missing was any enthusiasm from Londoners for their new, usurping ruler.

Richard’s assumption of power was made formal the next day, 25 June, when a parliamentary delegation led by Buckingham waited on Richard and asked him to take the crown. Their demand was backed by a petition from Parliament castigating the late King Edward for his lax and licentious rule, ‘so that no man was sure of his life, land nor livelihood, nor of his wife, daughter nor servant, every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’. It seems that Richard felt compelled to spit on his brother’s memory, libelling him as the realm’s leading rapist, to justify his seizure of power. The next day the protector was formally proclaimed and enthroned in Westminster Hall as King Richard III, while ‘Edward Bastard, late called King Edward V’ was dethroned.

From then on, things moved quickly. Richard rapidly fixed his coronation for 6 July, and spent the traditional pre-ceremony period in the Tower. Once in the fortress, Richard released the Woodville partisan Archbishop Rotherham of York from the cell where he had languished since Hastings’ murder. But Richard’s paranoia was as acute as ever. Fearing resistance to his usurpation, he had policed the city with the 6,000 northern soldiers
his henchman Ratcliffe had brought from Yorkshire. And he placed Londoners under a 10 p.m. curfew over the three nights that the coronation celebrations lasted, forbidding them either to wear swords or to carry arms. On 4 July, Richard and his queen, Anne Neville – second daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker – were rowed downriver from Westminster to the Tower in a stately barge rather than risking riding through the sullen streets. It was repression not seen since the conquest, and the fact that it was enforced by northerners regarded by Londoners as foreign savages was an unfortunate harbinger of the coming reign.

As if to compensate for the hideous crime he was about to commit, Richard did not stint on the magnificence of his coronation ceremonies. No expense was spared for the two days of pageantry at the Tower that preceded the coronation. On the day itself, the new king wore a doublet and stomacher of blue cloth of gold, embroidered with a pattern of nets and pineapples, and an eight-foot-long gown of purple trimmed with ermine. The queen was similarly splendidly attired in sixteen yards of Venetian lace. The royal pair rode out of the Tower, the king on horseback and the queen in a litter, and, guarded by 4,000 rough northern soldiers, journeyed through largely silent streets to Westminster. Once in the crowded abbey, they divested themselves of their heavy robes in the sweltering summer heat and stood, both naked from the waist up, to be anointed with holy oil before the crowns were placed on their heads by Archbishop Bourchier. But even in his moment of triumph, Richard was not content. A witness observed Richard during the ceremony and was struck by his restless nervousness as he continually looked around and behind him, compulsively biting his lips and – a characteristic and highly significant obsessive gesture – constantly half-drawing his dagger from its sheath and sliding it back. As soon as the coronation was over, Richard left his hostile capital and began a royal progress around his new realm. Left in the Tower were the two princes. Neither was seen alive again.

The only reference to a public sighting of the princes after they were reunited in the Tower on 16 June comes in the
Great Chronicle
which mentioned that ‘the children of King Edward’ were ‘seen shooting [arrows] and playing in the garden of the Tower sundry times’. According to the Italian chronicler Dominic Mancini, who left England immediately after Richard’s coronation, by that date they had been deprived of their servants and ‘withdrawn to the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and
day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows’. The reference to the ‘inner apartments of the Tower proper’ and ‘bars’ suggests that Richard may have moved the boys from the Garden Tower to the heart of the fortress – the White Tower, traditional prison for royal captives. The
Great Chronicle
states that the boys were now subject to stricter confinement, being ‘holden more straight’; and the London chronicler Robert Fabyan confirms that they were under more ‘sure keeping’.

Our only detailed guide as to what happened next is Richard’s earliest biographer Sir Thomas More, writing in the reign of Henry VIII. More has been damned by Ricardians for writing a piece of mendacious ‘Tudor propaganda’ as the new dynasty clearly had an interest in blackening their predecessor’s name and heaping all possible crimes on Richard’s head. The inconvenient fact remains, however, that More was informed by surviving eye witnesses from Richard’s reign, principally his old employer John Morton, a cardinal and Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been in the Council Chamber when Hastings was dragged to his death and had himself been confined in the Tower on Richard’s orders. A hostile witness certainly, but a witness nonetheless.

Other contemporary chronicles – Mancini, Fabyan, the
Great Chronicle
, the
Croyland Chronicle
and Polydore Vergil – all bear out More’s account. And – literally the killer fact – Sir Thomas’s version of how the princes met their death was confirmed over a century after More’s own execution on 6 July 1535 (ironically the anniversary of Richard’s coronation) following his own confinement in the Tower, when in 1674 the skeletons of two boys of the princes’ ages when they vanished were discovered – in the exact place and manner that More had described. Given all this, together with Richard’s proven paranoid character, his carefully calculated coup, and his ruthless destruction of all those who stood in his way, one would have to be very naive indeed not to believe that he ordered the snuffing out of the princes’ lives. Almost all serious modern historians who have studied the facts – principally Michael Hicks, A. J. Pollard, Alison Weir and Desmond Seward – have reached the same conclusion: that Richard
was
guilty of ordering the boys’ deaths just as More wrote, and as Shakespeare – admittedly with suitable theatrical embroidery – dramatised.

The dethroned King Edward knew very well what fate lay in store at the hands of his implacable uncle. Told that he was no longer king, and that Richard had taken his throne, More tells us that Edward ‘was sore
abashed, began to sigh, and said, “Alas, I would my uncle would let me have my life yet, though I lose my Kingdom.”’ Though the young Duke of York was apparently a bright, healthy and spirited boy, his elder brother was in a pitiful state of physical prostration as well as mental agony. An examination of his presumed skull in the 1930s showed advanced tooth decay which had spread to both jawbones, had become the bone disease osteomyelitis, and must have caused the prince severe pain to add to his mental woes.

Chronic toothache was probably the reason that a royal physician, Dr John Argentine, a friend and informant of Dominic Mancini, was summoned to the Tower to treat Edward. Dr Argentine, the last person apart from their one remaining attendant, the aptly named ‘Black Will’ Slaughter, and their killers, to see the princes alive, told Mancini that he had found his patient listless and depressed. He added that Edward was going to confession (probably in the White Tower’s St John’s Chapel) and doing constant penance ‘because he believed that death was facing him’. More adds the telling detail that the prince’s depression was so deep that he had ceased to wash and take care of himself. He knew his death was fast approaching.

When Richard departed on his royal progress on 20 July he left London, and the Tower, secure in the hands of his loyal henchmen. The newly appointed Lord High Constable – Buckingham – was in overall military command of the capital, while the lieutenant of the Tower itself was Lord Howard. Howard’s subordinate – the man charged with the custody of the princes – was the new constable, Sir Robert Brackenbury, a trusted northern retainer of Richard’s, who took up his duties on 17 July. Within a month of Brackenbury’s appointment, as the king moved west along the Thames Valley and into the Midlands, Richard sent one of his servants, John Green, to the Tower. Green found Brackenbury at his devotions in St John’s Chapel. So urgent was the message that Green was bearing that he interrupted the constable’s prayers. He told Brackenbury that Richard wanted the princes dead, and asked him to carry out the distasteful duty of killing them.

Brackenbury refused outright, telling Green that he would take no part ‘in so mean and bestial a deed’. Richard was furious when Green brought back Brackenbury’s negative reply. He received Green in intimate circumstances suiting the unsavoury mission – seated on his close stool at Warwick
Castle – and angrily demanded, in an echo of his ancestor Henry II calling for Thomas Becket’s head, ‘Ah, whom shall a man trust? Those that I have brought up myself fail me, and at my commandment will do nothing for me.’ Richard decided that someone more ruthless than Brackenbury was needed. He turned to Sir James Tyrell, his Keeper of Horse.

Tyrell, a fervent Yorkist, had been knighted for his valour at the battle of Tewkesbury and had been Richard’s faithful man ever since. He had already carried out at least two dirty jobs for his master. He had lured the Dowager Duchess of Warwick out of sanctuary and escorted her to Richard’s castle at Middleham where she had spent the rest of her life in captivity while Richard stole her vast estates. More recently, he had arrested and guarded Archbishop Rotherham in the Tower on the day of Hastings’ execution. Now he was asked to undertake a still more dubious mission in the fortress. It is a macabre coincidence, but nonetheless highly symbolic, that Tyrell shares his surname with the last man accused of killing an English king – Sir Walter Tyrell, the suspected slayer of William Rufus in the New Forest in 1100.

According to More, Richard was so eager for the deed to be done that he went straight from his stool to awaken Tyrell in the middle of the night. Sleepily, Tyrell agreed to take the job, and recruited two hit men to carry out the gruesome task. One was an experienced professional assassin named Miles Forest, ‘a fellow’, says More, ‘flushed in murder beforetime’. The other was John Dighton, one of Tyrell’s own burly ostlers, ‘a big, broad, strong, square knave’. In August or September, pretending to buy cloth in the capital, Tyrell and his hit men went to London. At the Tower, they persuaded the frightened Brackenbury to turn a blind eye to what was afoot, give them the keys to the Tower for one night, and make sure that the sentries guarding the princes were otherwise engaged. This alone suggests Richard’s involvement, since only he or Buckingham would have had the authority to order the guards’ removal – and contrary to the efforts of some Ricardians to brand the duke as the killer, Buckingham was absent in Wales, and beginning to regret his support for Richard.

Sometime in September, the killers entered the White Tower at night and stole into the room where the princes slept. Here, says More:

They suddenly lapped them up among the [bed]clothes – so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows
hard into their mouths, that within a while, smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls into the joys of Heaven, leaving to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed.

More’s vivid description of the murder is borne out by the earlier
Great Chronicle
which reports, ‘Some said they were murdered atween two feather mattresses.’ When the two killers were satisfied that their victims’ lives were extinct, More goes on:

[They] laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James [Tyrell] to see them. Who, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stairfoot, meetly deep in the ground under a great pile of stones.