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• 29. The king entered London 4 May, the date originally appointed for his coronation with Gloucester, Buckingham and a retinue of no more than 500 men. (pg. 74)
  Mancini says that Edward V had charm, dignity and an educational attainment in advance of his years (twelve). This judgment was echoed by Bishop Russell, soon to become Chancellor of England, when he spoke of Edward's 'gentle wit and ripe understanding, far passing the nature of his youth'. But this attractive if precocious youth - a true son of his father - had inevitably absorbed his political attitudes from his mother and her family, and he knew little of his uncle Richard whom he had met only occasionally and ceremonially. (pg. 71)

• 30. The Croyland Chronicler believed that, even among those loyal to Edward IV and the succession of his son, the 'more prudent members' felt that until he (Edward V) 'reached the age of maturity, the boy's maternal uncles and brothers must at all costs be excluded from any controlling positions about him'. King Edward IV could scarcely have been unaware of the unpopularity of the Grey-Woodville connection, yet he had entrenched their power and placed the princes under their control, a position from which they could only be dislodged by force. Richard of Gloucester, as the only adult surviving male of the House of York, was the natural and inevitable choice to be given the custody of the young king, and to act as Protector during his minority. Not to have appointed him, given his power and proximity of blood, would have been a recipe for trouble, since neither he nor many others wished to accept a Woodville-dominated minority. Equally, the Woodvilles could be expected to resist all attempts to deprive them of their control of the princes, on which their power in the future rested, and this, if successful, would expose them to the revenge of the many who hated them. The dilemma was the unavoidable consequence of the contradictions of Edward IV's policies over the previous decade. (pg. 40-41)
  To justify their imprisonment of his uncles, Mancini tells us, the dukes put on a mournful countenance, and first told the king that his Woodville advisers had brought about his father's death, ruining his health through involving him in their debaucheries: this is an authentic and very credible touch, marking the beginning of the virulent and puritanical propaganda campaign by which Richard sought to discredit the Woodvilles by attacking their morals. They also alleged that the young king's friends and familiars had conspired Gloucester's death, and that it was common knowledge that they had sought to deprive him of the regency conferred on him by Edward IV. These were claims which Edward V, not surprisingly, found hard to accept. He bravely defended his advisers, pointing out that they had been given him by his father, in whose prudence he had every confidence, and that 'he had seen nothing evil in them and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil'. He had also, he said, full confidence both in the peers of the realm and in the queen his mother, a remark which called for the an angry retort from Buckingham, 'who loathed her race': men, not women, said the duke, should govern kingdoms, and so, if 'he cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it'. The young king's admirable show of spirit was to no avail, for he perceived clearly that 'although the dukes cajoled him by moderation', they were demanding rather than supplicating. He had no choice but to surrender himself to the care of his uncle. (pg. 72)
  For Richard, the practical problems involved in deposing his nephew may have exercised his mind more than any ethical considerations. The deposition of Edward V did not necessarily involve his murder - Edward IV had kept Henry VI alive for ten years after his usurpation of Henry's throne; and, if Richard did not seize power for himself, he could expect little mercy from his enemies. No one familiar with the Woodvilles could have looked forward to gentle forgiveness. Richard had been born into an age of extreme political ruthlessness. He was a man of his times; and the times were sadly out of joint. (pg. 80)

• 31. The king was met outside the city, in the meadows of Hornsey, by the mayor and aldermen in scarlet, and some 500 citizens, all clad in violet, in contrast with the somber black apparel of Gloucester and his men. Prominently displayed before the eyes of the Londoners were four cart-loads of weapons and armor bearing Woodville devices, which, Gloucester made it known, were clear proof that his enemies had intended to slay him as he came from the country. On entering London, the duke immediately endeavored once more to reassure the many who still doubted his good intentions by causing all the lords spiritual and temporal and the mayor and aldermen of London to swear fealty to the new king. The new date for Edward V's coronation was fixed for Tuesday, 24 June (later modified to Sunday, 22 June). (pg. 74)

• 32. It was clearly unsuitable to stage the coronation of Edward V while his younger brother, and heir apparent, was so blatantly withheld from public view, an argument which must have been convincing to those on the council who still believed in Richard's good intentions. Equally, if by now Richard planned to make himself king, it was essential that he should control the persons of both of Edward IV's sons. Action to remove the young king could not succeed for long if the next legitimate heir were not already in his grasp. (pg. 80) Contrary to the sequence of the play, it was not until Monday 16 June that the aging cardinal of Canterbury was sent to Westminster to persuade the queen to release York into his custody. He appears to have acted in good faith and he promised that the boy should be returned to her care after the coronation. Whether reluctantly or not - for accounts differ - the queen complied with the archbishop's request, but it is worth noticing that she was not prepared to leave sanctuary herself or to release her daughters (who were of no political importance at this stage). As regards Richard of York, she had little choice. Persuasion was backed by force. The sanctuary had been surrounded by numbers of armed men, and it is scarcely possible to doubt that, if the queen had not listened to official reason, Richard would have risked the moral obloquy of forcing the sanctuary. Here again he had violent family precedents to guide him; in 1454 his father, Duke Richard of York, had broken into this same sanctuary to secure the person of the duke of Exeter, and in 1471 his brother, Edward IV, had forced the sanctuary of Tewkesbury Abbey to seize the duke of Somerset and other defeated rebels, whom he then promptly executed. (pg. 87)

• 33. Richard was not formally appointed Protector of England until the council meeting of 4 May. There were clear signs that the council was prepared to back Gloucester only so long as he was seen to be promoting the succession of Edward V, and preserved a proper legality in his actions. Moreover, the all-important question of how long he should retain his position as protector seems not to have been discussed. The most recent and relevant precedent available to the council was the position of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in 1422. His Protectorate had been formally ended when Henry VI, then nine years old, had been crowned, and authority had passed into the hands of a council ruling in the king's name until Henry was declared of age, although provision had been made at the time for the king to terminate the Protectorate before his coronation if he so pleased. This precedent explains why the Woodville group was so anxious to arrange an early coronation. As things stood, with the coronation now planned, Gloucester's tenure of power, limited as it was in terms of real authority, could last only for a few weeks. In these difficult circumstances, Richard's likely plan of action seems to have been to break with precedent and extend the Protectorate beyond the coronation until the king came of age. Politically, to put this plan into practice meant obtaining the support of the strong moderate anti-Woodville group in the council, and later the assent of parliament when it met in late June. (pg. 75)

• 34. Actually Lord Hastings made violent intervention against the Woodville's plan to bring the young king to London with a substantial army at his back. He especially feared Woodville vengeance if that party achieved supreme power, and threatened to flee to his Calais stronghold unless it were accepted that the king should come only with a moderate retinue. When the queen accepted 2,000 as a compromise figure, Hastings agreed, confident in the knowledge that Gloucester and Buckingham could be relied upon to bring at least as many. (pg. 69)

• 35. Edward IV as king had many accomplishments, but caused a great deal of trouble by enriching his wife's family and his children through acts of parliament. He gave offense to a number of powerful private individuals, quite apart from effects upon the sentiments of the land owning class in general; and we cannot altogether discount the cumulative impact of Edward's arbitrary acts upon their attitudes, to which Richard's disinheritance of the princes added a further and major violation. If the highest in the land could be so treated, then what chance did any lesser person stand when confronted by a ruthless king? (pg. 36-37)

• 36. Stanley was the quintessential trimmer, shifty, self-seeking and unreliable. He was also Warwick's brother-in-law. (pg. 17) The Stanleys, as always, had their eye on the main chance, but at least Thomas accepted Richard's usurpation and supported him against the duke of Buckingham (and his own wife, Margaret Beaufort) during the rebellion of 1483, for which he received very substantial rewards. (pg. 56)

• 37. We need not suppose that Hastings and his friends were so politically naive as to walk into the lion's den, for even if Hastings were guileless, Bishop Morton certainly was not. It was probably to conceal his plans to the very end that Richard arranged for two innocent-seeming meetings of the council for 13 June, one at Westminster under the chancellor, with a brief to discuss arrangement for the coronation, the other at the Tower of London - to which Hastings and his supporters were summoned - perhaps officially to discuss more urgent political problems. Perhaps, on the other hand, this circumstance should have given them warning, but they clearly did not expect that Richard would use violence in the comparatively sacred context of a council meeting. (pg. 84)

• 38. Orders were sent north for the execution of Earl Rivers, Richard Grey, Vaughan and Sir William Haute, a command which only someone who meant to be king could have risked dispatching. They were duly beheaded on 25 June 1483 at Pontefract. Most sources say they had no form of trial, but one suggests that some form of tribunal sat upon them before the earl of Northumberland, whom Richard may well have wished to implicate directly in the circumstances of his usurpation. (pg. 87-88)
  According to one authority it was upon Sir Richard Ratcliffe's direct command that Earl Rivers and his associates were executed at Pontefract Castle without due form of trial. (pg. 56)

• 39. Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers has come down to us as a versatile and engaging personality. Experienced as a soldier, sailor and diplomat, he was also an accomplished courtier and the most renowned jouster and knight-errant of the England of his day. He combined with these qualities a strong streak of religious asceticism, which took him on frequent pilgrimages and caused him to wear a hair-shirt beneath the furred and silken garments of a noblemen. His poems, and his translations form the French which Caxton published under his patronage, show serious intellectual and literary interests which set him apart from the somewhat raffish and hedonistic society of the Yorkist court, typified by his nephew, the marquis of Dorset. His gravitas was sufficiently esteemed by Edward IV for him to have been made governor to the heir to the throne. Traditionally, he had been regarded as something of a political lightweight, a chivalrous humanist dilettante, but the recent discovery of some of his business papers suggests that, on the contrary, he was politically highly aware, constantly in search of the latest information from his agent in London, seeking to use the electoral patronage of his royal charge, the prince of Wales, and carefully entrenching himself as controller of the prince's person and as effective ruler of Wales in Prince Edward's name. Sir Thomas More believed that he was 'an honourable man, as valiant of hand as politic in council', and Mancini says that he 'was always considered a kind, serious and just man, and one tested by every vicissitude of life. Whatever his prosperity, he had injured nobody. (pg. 69-70)

• 40. Strawberries are possible in England by 13 June, in a good summer, and especially in a walled garden, as Morton's no doubt was. (pg. 82, note 58)

• 41. Most scholars now tend to connect Richard's final decision to seize the throne with the execution of Hastings on 13 June 1483, 'the first overt act ... which seems to reveal to us his intention to usurp.' (pg. 65)

• 42. Mistress Shore, whose real name was Elizabeth and not Jane, was a woman of charm and character, at least in More's description of her (one of the earliest and most attractive characterizations of a living woman in the English language): 'Proper she was and fair: nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you would have wished her somewhat higher. Thus say they that knew her in her youth ... Yet delighted not men so much in her company, as in her pleasant behaviour. For a proper wit had she, and could both read well and write, merry in company, ready and quick of answer, neither mute nor full of babble, sometimes taunting without displeasure and not without disport ... for many he [Edward IV] had, but her he loved, whose favor to say truth ... she never abused any man's hurt.' Summoned to do public penance as a harlot through the streets of London, clad only in her kirtle and carrying a lighted taper, she bore herself with such demureness and dignity that the sympathies of the spectators went out to her. Soon after, she was imprisoned, and secured her release only because the king's solicitor, Thomas Lynom, fell for her charms and offered his hand in marriage. In doing so he incurred Richard's obvious displeasure. (pg. 137)

• 43. The evidence for any conspiracy between Hastings and the Woodvilles, especially with Mistress Shore - the former mistress of Edward IV and now the mistress of Lord Hastings - as go-between, is slight indeed, and rests entirely on Richard's own allegations. These took two forms. The first was contained in one of two surviving letters (probably part of a series) which he dispatched, by the hand of Sir Richard Ratcliffe, to the north on 10 and 11 June, commanding his northern supporters to come to his aid. Richard's second set of charges for the first time specifically linked Hastings with the queen in treasonable conspiracy. For these we are wholly dependent on the elaborate accounts of the dramatic scene in the council chamber on the morning of 13 June given by Polydore Vergil and Thomas More, when Richard charged the Queen and Jane Shore with sorcery, and involved Hastings therein. Both accounts may have a common source in Bishop Morton, who was present then. Polydore, with his usual supple reasonableness, says merely that the sorcery had produced in Richard a deep bodily feebleness, since he had been unable to rest, drink or eat over the past few days. More, by contrast, adds dramatic embellishments, such as appealed to Shakespeare, like his baring of his newly-withered arm, and his sending out for a 'mess of strawberries' from the Bishop of Ely's nearby garden - here perhaps an authentic note of reminiscence from Bishop Morton himself. But both writers make it perfectly clear that they thought Richard's suggestions of a conspiracy to be no more than his own invention. More, for example, reports that the lords in council were astonished by the Protector's suggestions, and especially by the idea of a plot: "For well they wist, that the queen was too wise to go about any such folly. And also if she would, yet would she of all folk least make Shore's wife of counsel, whom of all women she most hated, as that concubine whom the king her husband had most loved." (pg. 81-82)

• 44. Without Hastings having been given a chance to reply, armed men rushed into the council chamber, at a signal from the Protector, seized Hastings and cut off his head forthwith on Tower Hill without any semblance of trial. The two prelates were arrested and confined to the Tower; so too was Lord Stanley, who seems to have been slightly wounded in the affray. (pg. 85) By what means Lord Stanley extricated himself from this difficulty is not known, but he was soon at large again and basking in the sunshine of royal favor. (pg. 166)

• 45. The idea that in what he may have regarded as a critical situation, Hastings, full of suspicion about Richard's intentions, may have turned to the Woodvilles for help is not implausible. (pg. 82)
  Either Hastings had become suspicious of Richard's ultimate objectives, and had to be removed because of his known and unshakable loyalty to the young king, a point on which all contemporary and early Tudor sources insist, or Richard, knowing in advance that Hastings would not support his own claim to the throne, took surprise action to disarm the most dangerous source of opposition. Hasting's strength lay in his position as leader of the moderate loyalist elements in the council, and a council which had only recently refused to endorse Richard's charges of treason against Rivers and his friends was scarcely even now under the Protector's thumb. The latter alternative was strongly suggested by both immediately contemporary sources. The Croyland Chronicler speaks of Hasting's elation at the success of the dukes in their take-over of power: and remarked on the fact that the transfer of power 'had been effected without any slaughter ... In the course, however, of a very few days after the utterance of these words, his extreme joy turned into sadness.' The 'deluded' satisfaction of Hastings as expressed by Croyland finds a clear echo in Mancini: 'Thus fell Hastings, killed not by those enemies he had always feared, but by a friend whom he had never doubted.' Either way, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Hastings and his friends had to be removed because Richard now planned to usurp the throne for himself. Whether or not they already had well-formed suspicions as to his intentions, they would oppose his scheme to the last. (pg. 83)

• 46. Along with Hastings, the archbishop of York (who had links with the queen and encouraged her to seek sanctuary in Act II, scene 4) and the archbishop of Ely (having procured the strawberries) were arrested on 13 June 1483. (pg. 42)

• 47. Richard had probably eaten dinner three hours before, at 10 am or 11 am, in accord with the custom of the time (pg. xxix)

• 48. Hasting's death was universally regretted, for, in spite of his great wealth and power, he had been much respected as an upright, loyal and honorable man, and his liberality had made him popular. A typical comment on his death was that of the Great Chronicle of London: 'And thus was this noble man murdered for his troth and fidelity which he bare until his master (Edward V).' The unpopularity of Richard's latest move is shown by the fear, dismay and consternation which it immediately produced in the capital, as the news of Hasting's summary end spread through the city. There was general uproar and commotion. Men began to rush to arms, to be quietened only by speedy action by the mayor, and soothing official reassurances that a plot had been discovered against the person of the king, and Hastings, its originator, had paid the penalty. According to Mancini, many people suspected that 'the plot had been feigned by the duke so as to escape the odium of such a crime'. But the dangers of a rising in London were also held in check by reports that many thousands of Richard's northerners and the duke of Buckingham's men were now approaching the capital. (pg. 85)

• 49. According to Mancini, Richard took sufficiently seriously rumors that he had 'brought his nephew not under his care, but into his power, so as to gain the crown for himself', that he wrote both to the council and the mayor of London to deny them: he had rescued the king and the realm from perdition, and the deed had been necessary for his own safety and to provide for that of the king and kingdom. His detractors were not convinced. This episode (admittedly described by a rather hostile source and perhaps distorted by hindsight) underlines both Gloucester's sharp awareness of the need to influence public opinion and his very limited success in doing so. The atmosphere remained one of unease, rumor and suspicion. (pg. 73)

• 50. Thanks largely to Edward IV's promotion of the interests of the highly unpopular queen, the reputation of the entire Grey-Woodville family was such that in 1484 Richard did not even need to identify by name 'the persons insolent, vicious and of inordinate avarice' who had drawn Edward IV from the paths of virtuous government through their adulation and flattery and the temptations of sensuality and concupiscence. (pg. 40)

• 51. Doubts about the paternity of Edward IV had been raised by the earl of Warwick in 1469 and again by Clarence shortly before his downfall in 1478, but no shred of evidence was ever offered to support them. (pg. 89)

• 52. On Sunday 22 June 1483, an interval of only nine days after the execution of Hastings, and six days since the seizure of York, a Cambridge doctor of theology, Ralph Shaw, was commissioned to preach a public sermon from St. Paul's Cross in London, the recognized rostrum for 'official spokesmen' in late-medieval England. Therein he set forth Richard of Gloucester's claim to the throne of England. This claim was again advanced in an eloquent speech to the mayor and aldermen of London by Duke Henry of Buckingham on Tuesday 24 June, and again in his address to an assembly of lords and gentry on the following day. (pg. 88)
  Shaw's sermon, according to the Great Chronicle, was so ill-received that this formerly popular preacher was afterwards held in little repute, and it attributes his death in the following year to chagrin and remorse. Buckingham's speech in the Guildhall was eloquent and well-delivered, made 'without any impediment of spitting or other countenance', but that too met with little favor: only a small number of Londoners present said 'yea, yea', and these 'more for fear than for love'. (pg. 92)

• 53. On the day following York's delivery from the sanctuary at Westminster (Tuesday 17 June), and his dispatch to join Edward V in the Tower of London, writs of supersedeas were issued canceling the meeting of parliament summoned for 25 June, although, in fact, many of these writs arrived too late to prevent the arrival in London of those elected members who had already left their homes. About the same time, preparations for the crowning of Edward V were abandoned, although no official record of its cancellation had survived.
  Within days of Richard of York's being lodged in the Tower, the attendants who had hitherto waited upon the young king were now withdrawn form him, including his physician. Finally, to eliminate any possible rival within the York family, the Protector caused Clarence's son, the unfortunate Edward earl of Warwick (who was to spend almost all his life in the Tower) to be brought to London, where he was placed in charge of his aunt, Anne duchess of Gloucester. (pg. 88)

• 54. Precisely on what grounds Richard justified his claim to the throne in June 1483 has been the subject of lengthy debate. According to the circumstantial account given by Dominic Mancini, the most nearly contemporary observer, he initially alleged that Edward IV had been a bastard, and therefore unfit to rule: a fortiori, his sons could not be legitimate kings of England. 'Edward, said they, was conceived in adultery and in every way was unlike the late duke of York, whose son he was falsely said to be, but Richard duke of Gloucester, who altogether resembled his father, was to come to the throne as his legitimate successor.' If this were true, it represented a ruthless and calculated assault upon the virtue of Richard's own mother, Cecily duchess of York, a lady renowned for her piety. Indeed, Polydore Vergil, picking up the theme later on, remarked that she afterwards complained bitterly 'in sundry places to right many noble men, whereof some yet live' of the great injury which her son Richard had done to her.
  Other sources, however, stress the allegation that Edward's sons were bastards, and hence unfit to rule. According to the Croyland Chronicler, who seems to be quoting (in hindsight) from the petition to parliament in 1484, the grounds for this accusation were that Edward IV's marriage was invalid in canon law, because when he married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 he was already pre-contracted to Lady Eleanor Butler. This alleged pre-contract, which has attracted so much attention from Richard's defenders, is said to have come to light through extraordinarily timely and convenient revelations from Bishop Stillington of Bath and Wells, a careerist political prelate. While it is not impossible that both versions of Richard's claim were in circulation in June 1483, each was inherently weak and implausible. (pg. 88-89)
  The pre-contract story will not stand up to serious scrutiny. Apart from the fact that there was little sense in Richard's well-known wish to marry his niece Elizabeth of York in 1485 if she were indeed the bastard he had proclaimed her to be, the pre-contract formed only one, and not the most important item, in the petition brought before the parliament of 1484 which ratified his title to the throne. The text of this petition, as entered on the parliament roll, provides us with our fullest knowledge of Richard's claim in its considered and developed form. This document is a mixture of the specious moralizing and deliberate deceit which characterize Richard's propagandist effusions. It begins with an immoderate attack on Edward IV's government as influenced by the Woodvilles - 'such as had the rule and governance of this land, delighting in adulation and flattery, and led by sensuality and concupiscence, followed the counsel of persons insolent, vicious and of inordinate avarice, despising the counsel of good, virtuous and prudent persons'. Hence the prosperity of the realm had been decreased, felicity turned into misery, and 'the order of policy, and of the Law of God and Man, confounded'. The laws of the church had been broken and justice set aside, with a consequent growth of murders, extortions and oppressions, so that no man was sure of his life, land and livelihood, nor of his wife, daughter or servant, 'every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defiled'. There had also been inward discords and battles, and destruction of the noble blood of this land. The petition than turned to impugn the validity of Edward IV's marriage on three counts. First, it had been done without the assent of the lords of this land, and through the practice of sorcery and witchcraft by Elizabeth herself and her mother, Jacquetta duchess of Bedford. Secondly, the marriage took place in 'a private chamber, a profane place', rather than publicly in a church, according to 'the laudable custom of the Church of England'. Thirdly, as a kind of afterthought, the pre-contract story is introduced. Edward and Elizabeth had been living in adultery, and it followed that all their children had been bastards. Finally, the children of George duke of Clarence were debarred from any claim to the throne by reason of their father's attainder in 1478.
  All this led to the conclusion that Richard duke of Gloucester was the undoubted son and heir of Richard duke of York (and moreover had been born in this land, a passing reference to Edward IV's supposed bastardy), and he was, therefore, the 'very inheritor of the said Crown and Dignity Royal, and as in right King of England, by way of inheritance'. His claim was further justified because of his personal qualities, his 'great wit, prudence, justice, princely courage, and the memorable and laudable acts in divers battles' which he had performed. This highly tendentious piece of propaganda failed to carry conviction at the time and has not stood up under modern scrutiny. There was just sufficient plausibility in the charges of sensuality at court, Woodville greed and the difficulty of obtaining impartial justice in Edward IV's time to make it worth attempting to grind some political capital from them, but as a general comment on the government of Richard's brother it amounted to a piece of gross misrepresentation. As to the invalidity of Edward IV's marriage, it was not made invalid because the lords had not assented, nor by the fact that it had been celebrated privately, and no evidence was produced to support the far-fetched charge of sorcery and witchcraft. The pre-contract story is equally unconvincing. Again no evidence was produced to prove it; its sudden appearance, apparently on the unsupported statement of Bishop Stillington, is suspicious in itself, and, if it were true, it is curious that the issue had never been mentioned by any of Edward IV's declared enemies, notably Warwick and Clarence, during his life-time. If the marriage were invalid, this was a matter for the ecclesiastical courts, not parliament, which had no jurisdiction over matters of morals. Again, if a pre-contract existed, making the marriage of 1464 invalid, there was nothing to prevent Edward and Elizabeth going through another ceremony of marriage after the death of Eleanor Butler in 1468; the two sons of the marriage, Edward and Richard, were born after that date, in 1470 and 1473 respectively, and the only child of the king and queen who might have been regarded as a bastard was their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1466. Finally, it had been regarded as a valid marriage for twenty years both by church and state, although many people might have been interested in attacking it.
  Nor did the charge that Clarence's heirs were debarred from succession to the throne because of his attainder command much plausibility. His son Edward had been allowed to assume the title of earl of Warwick which descended to him from his mother, and to inherit at least part of her estates; and the sentence of attainder against the duke seems to have extended only to his ducal title and the lands which he held by royal grant. Not only were there precedents for attainted persons assuming the throne, but, at least according to one source, Richard himself recognized Edward of Warwick as heir to the throne, following the death of his own son, Edward prince of Wales, in April 1484. (pg. 90-92)

• 55. There is no good reason to doubt that Richard was a genuinely pious and religious man. A prime influence here may have been the example and precept of his mother, Duchess Cecily of York, whose life of private devotion won for her the reputation of being one of the most saintly laywomen of her generation, and whose religious interests were conspicuously shared by Richard's sister Margaret, dowager duchess of Burgundy. If we had to depend solely on his public acts for evidence of his piety, a skeptic might be moved to doubt its genuineness. Fortunately, there is reliable evidence of a more intimate kind. Among the few surviving books which may safely be identified as Richard's, are several which suggest that he had a strong personal interest in the wave of pietism and mysticism which spread across Europe in the later Middle Ages, and which particularly influenced the laity. (pg. 128)
  In all, he was responsible for ten chantry or collegiate foundations (apart from his patronage of Queens' College, Cambridge), a large number by any contemporary standard. It is also worth noticing that, foundations apart, Richard distributed a continuous stream of largesse to religious houses, parish churches, houses of friars and chapels and chantries. Many of his gifts were on a small scale, made locally during one or other of his royal progresses, and probably as a result of direct petition from the eventual beneficiaries. North-country establishments were conspicuous among the recipients of his charity. Some grants, however, were much more substantial, comparable with the large sums he lavished on King's and Queens' Colleges, Cambridge. (pg. 130)
  The promotion of learned men and of education were clearly matters close to his heart. He loved to surround himself with graduate scholars, to a degree which recalls the remarkably well-educated Henry V rather than his own brother, Edward IV; and he is highly exceptional in his very marked preference for Cambridge rather than Oxford graduates. (pg. 132)

• 56. On 26 June the assembly came together and with the mayor and aldermen and other leading London citizens, waited upon the Protector in his mother's London town-house at Baynard's Castle, and there Buckingham presented the petition. After a token hesitation, Richard agreed to their requests, and, forthwith, 'attended by well near all the lords spiritual and temporal of this realm', he rode to Westminster Hall, and there took his seat upon the marble chair - the King's Bench - in indication of his formal assumption of the throne. The date of his coronation was fixed for Sunday 6 July. (pg. 93)

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