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Act Four

• 57. A potential pretender survived in the person of Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, now an obscure and penniless exile in Brittany. For Edward he was a nobody, and certainly not dangerous. Consequently, Edward made only the most half-hearted and sporadic attempts to secure Henry's person, and in the end was content with a promise from the duke of Brittany that he would keep Henry under ward and prevent him from doing anything which might endanger the Yorkist throne. (pg. 192)

• 58. Much more important than any mere detective-story solution to the mystery is the apparent belief of Richard's own contemporaries that he was guilty of his nephews' deaths. In any evaluation of his reign, it is the implications of this fact which are of consequence, whether he was innocent or guilty in fact. (pg. 96)
  In this harsh climate, to keep alive a politically dangerous person, and especially a deposed king, was an act of folly. Now, all that we know about the deaths of such persons whose position compares with that of the princes in 1483 suggests very strongly that they met their ends on the orders of the reigning king or the government of the day. (pg. 98)

  Richard III had both a very strong motive and obvious opportunities for finally disposing of his nephews once he became king. The idea that they were dead within some weeks of his accession to the throne seems to have been widely believed by his contemporaries. Fifteenth-century England was not a police state, in which people might disappear from view for years on end and still remain alive. It was quite possible that the boys were murdered in circumstances which no one, even at the time, was able to discover. Yet it is extremely unlikely that, so long as the princes remained alive, people with the right connections would have been unable to discover that fact. Guards, servants, even officials of the Tower were corruptible. Moreover, while the boys were alive, the fact seems to have been known. They were seen shooting and playing in the gardens of the Tower, presumably some time in July 1483, and were even again observed after they had been withdrawn into its inner apartments. It was their subsequent disappearance which convinced men that they were dead. (pg. 99)
  No one supposes that Richard disposed of his nephews by his own hand, but it is equally little short of a fantasy to suppose that anyone else did so except on his direct command. The risks were far too great. (pg. 103)

• 59. Sir James Tyrell was already established, before the reign began, as Richard's principal lieutenant in Glamorgan and constable of Cardiff Castle, together with other offices in the lordship, brought him fees of £110 a year, but since he was also the chief man of the region, his goodwill was worth buying, and he attracted private fees from the duke of Suffolk, Lord Dudley and several ecclesiastical landowners. Tyrell himself claimed that he was making a clear profit of £100 a year from his position as farmer of the Glamorgan estates of the Abbey of Tewkesbury. After the rebellion of 1483 he acquired the no less valuable and influential office of steward of the Duchy of Cornwall, and was also made steward of the lordship of Newport and of other confiscated possessions of the duke of Buckingham in South Wales. Finally, the parliament of 1484 accepted the rather dubious claim of his wife to the lands of Sir Thomas Arundel in Cornwall. Together with wardships of minors granted to him by Richard III, all this made Tyrell a very wealthy man. If not perhaps quite as rich as Ratcliffe, he too enjoyed an income suitable for a baron. (pg. 157)

• 60. Queen Anne fell ill early in 1485, but so widespread were popular suspicions of Richard's intentions and motives following her death on 16 March 1485 that: 'the king was obliged, having called a council together, to excuse himself with many words and to assert that such a thing [the marriage to Elizabeth] had never entered his mind. There were some persons, however, present at that same council, who very well knew the contrary. Those in especial who were unwilling that this marriage should take place, and to whose opinions the king hardly ever dared offer any opposition, were Sir Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby, esquire of his body. For by these persons the king was told to his face that if he did not abandon his intended purpose, and that, too, before the mayor and commons of the city of London, opposition would not be offered to him merely be verbal warnings; for all the people of the north, in whom he placed the greatest reliance, would rise in rebellion against him, and impute to him the death of his queen, daughter and one of the heirs of the earl of Warwick, through whom he had first gained his present high position, in order that he might, to the extreme abhorrence of the Almighty, gratify an incestuous passion for his said niece. This comment is of extreme interest. Not only does it reflect the apparent belief of Richard's own chancellor, expressed in his usual elliptic way, that the king had serious plans to marry his niece, but it also expresses the conviction of his closest councilors that even Richard's beloved northerners believed him capable of disposing of his wife in order to protect his dynastic future. It does not prove that he murdered his queen, as later Tudor statements loudly implied, but it does very much reflect the mistrust of his subjects about his character and motives. (pg. 145-146)

  It is unlikely that Richard killed his queen, no contemporary source says so, yet his concern over the rumor is indicative of the fragility of his reputation. (pg. xlvii)

• 61. Polydore Vergil claimed that Buckingham quarreled with Richard over the king's refusal to grant him the second moiety of the Bohun earldom of Hereford, but this notion was rejected by Sir Thomas More as politically implausible. In any event, Buckingham's demand had not been refused, for on 13 July 1483 Richard solemnly promised that, so soon as parliament met, he would forthwith procure an act to reverse the arrangement made in parliament by Henry V, which had vested that king's share of the Bohun inheritance in the House of Lancaster as a private heritage. Meanwhile, the duke was to be allowed to take all the revenues from the king's portion as from the previous Easter. This pledge was made in letters issued under the king's signet. (pg. 114)
  The grants to Duke Henry of Buckingham are especially revealing, both of Richard's need of his support and of his own greed and ambition. Long excluded from power, Duke Henry now received from Richard a most spectacular delegation of royal authority, entirely without precedent in the entire annals of the medieval English monarchy - and which was never to be repeated. Appointed chief justice and chamberlain in both North and South Wales for life on 10 May, he was at the same time given the supervision and governance of all the king's subjects there, and was made constable and steward of all the castles and lordships in Wales and the Marches at the disposal of the crown, some fifty-three in all. The effect was to make him virtually viceroy in Wales. He was given supervision of the king's subjects in the English counties of Shropshire, Hereford, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, with power to raise armed levies and keep back royal revenues for appropriate uses in those areas. Perhaps nothing better reveals Richard's sense of his own insecurity in May 1483 than these remarkable grants to Duke Henry. (pg. 77)

• 62. In 1674 a set of bones were discovered. These were declared to be the bones of Edward V and his brother, and were thus ceremonially re-interred in Westminster Abbey on the orders of King Charles II. The tomb at Westminster was opened in 1933, and an examination was conducted by Dr. Tanner, an archivist, and Professor Wright, an anatomist. Their findings led to the conclusion that the bones were indeed likely to have been those of the princes. Access to the remains has since been denied, and the partial disagreements of modern medical experts as to the validity of this conclusion can only rest upon the report published by Tanner and Wright. Probability points strongly towards the bones found in 1674 being those of Edward IV's sons. (pg. 97-98)

• 63. Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, in the autumn of 1483, in order to secure general support for his scheme to replace Richard III by Henry Tudor, it was necessary for people to believe that the princes were already dead, which the rebels in the south appear to have done readily enough. Even if we regard Buckingham and his allies as unprincipled, and quite capable of pretending that the princes were dead to suit their own ends, can we also regard them as wholly foolish? Who, among the many Yorkist loyalists supporting the rebellion, would have accepted Henry Tudor as king had the princes been produced alive and unharmed - something which Richard signally failed to do? The rebels of 1483 included a number of men with close connections with the court and its personnel. It is hard to believe that they would have been duped into supporting Henry Tudor's claim to the throne unless they had established to their own satisfaction that the rightful king, Edward V, was already dead. A body of practical and experienced men, with much to lose by backing a rebellion, would have been unlikely to act on mere rumor. Not all of them were likely to have been mistaken. (pg. 101-102)
  A very recent discovery of new evidence suggests that the princes were put to death in 1483 on the advice or instigation of Duke Henry, and indeed this may well have been true. But this scarcely exonerates King Richard, and, in any event, the notion that any subject of the king, however powerful and eminent, would take the initiative and the responsibility in murdering a deposed king deserves to be treated with full skepticism. (pg. 102-103)

• 64. The rebellion against Richard in 1483 was essentially a rising of the substantial gentry of the counties from Kent to Cornwall, south of a line from the Thames to the Severn. Although Woodville influences and connections were not unimportant, an analysis of the movement reveals a very different picture. The strongest link among the rebels lay in the fact that most were loyal former servants of Edward IV, and amongst these some of the most influential had had close connections with his household. There were three main centers of rebellion, First, there was the south-east which drew support from Kent, a traditionally rebellious county, but also from Surrey and Sussex. Here the leaders were essentially Edward IV's former household servants, although some, not surprisingly, also had connections with the households of the queen and the princess. Apart from the five yeomen of the crown afterwards attainted for their treason, such men were the natural leaders of society in the south-east, an area where magnate or baronial influences were significantly less strong than in most parts of England. As such they could expect to command a considerable personal and popular following. They also belonged to a society tightly connected by intermarriage, and for the most part they were able to call upon the support of their kinsmen when they chose to rebel. The second center of rebellion lay in south-central England, where assemblies were planned at Salisbury in Wiltshire and Newbury in Berkshire. Here too the pattern was much the same, save that several leading rebels had been connected in the past with Duke George of Clarence. Most of them, however, had also been in the service of King Edward. Here again family ties probably played a part in spreading support for the rebellion. As in the south-east, Lancastrian sympathies and connections are noticeably absent. Finally, it is possible that some of the rebels in this region were in the service of the young bishop of Salisbury, Lionel Woodville, the dowager-queen's brother, whose motives for rebellion need no further comment.
  In the south-west, where the rebels were to gather at Exeter on 18 October, leadership of the rising lay with two men who had close ties with each other, and equally strong motives for disaffection. One of these was Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, the other Sir Thomas St. Leger. The latter was first and foremost a servant of King Edward throughout his reign. (pg. 105-109)
  What converted this original movement of Yorkist loyalists into a plan to place Henry Tudor on the throne was the proffered leadership of Duke Henry of Buckingham to achieve that end and the appeal to Yorkist sentiment contained Henry's promise to marry Elizabeth of York. This scheme arose form intrigues between Buckingham himself, the queen-dowager, Henry Tudor in Brittany, and Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond: the master-mind behind the entire plan may well have been the wily John Morton, bishop of Ely. (pg. 113)
  Perhaps Buckingham really hoped to win the throne for himself, using Henry Tudor as a pawn in the game. Polydore Vergil dismissed as unreliable the common rumor that he had encouraged Richard to usurp the throne 'by means of so many mischievous deeds' in the hope that the subsequent wave of reaction against a ruler 'being hated both of God and man' would sweep the duke himself into power. Buckingham seems to have been both a grasping and ambitious man. He had a claim of his own to the royal title. Yet if he were moved by such vaulting ambition, why then did he abandon it in favor of supporting Henry Tudor's candidature? Richard had already given the duke as much as any subject could hope for, and he could scarcely have expected more from Henry Tudor, who was still a largely unknown and unpredictable personality. It is quite possible that he was moved primarily by fear for himself, as he observed the mounting movement of resentment against Richard's seizure of power. This wave of feeling became intensified as men came to believe that Richard had procured the princes' deaths, although we cannot wholly discount the notion that, once determined upon rebellion, Buckingham himself had helped to spread the rumor. If Richard's position seemed already insecure, the duke was likely, as his principal supporter, to be an immediate casualty of his overthrow. These fears may well have been exploited, as Sir Thomas More believed, by Bishop Morton, who persuaded the duke that his safest bet was to back a Henry Tudor married to Elizabeth of York, a combination which could usefully unite Lancastrian die-hards and Yorkist dissidents. (pg. 114-115)

• 65. After the Duke of York had himself declared Henry VI's successor, disinheriting her son, Queen Margaret mobilized her forces and defeated the Duke and his second son, Edmund earl of Rutland at the battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460.

• 66. Princess Elizabeth was born in February 1466. At the time of Buckingham's rebellion of 1483, Elizabeth would have been 17 - fairly far advanced in age for marriage.

• 67. Polydore Vergil tells us Lord Stanley had been under suspicion during the rebellion of 1483, probably because of Richard's justified belief that his wife, Margaret Beaufort, had been a prime mover in the whole affair. Interrogated by the council, Stanley was acknowledged to be free of guilt, but told that he must remove all his wife's servants, and 'keep her so straight with himself that she should not be able from thenceforth to send any messenger neither to her son, nor friends, nor practice anything all against the king'. Independent confirmation that Richard remained wary of Stanley comes form the Croyland Chronicle, which says that when in 1485 Stanley asked permission to leave the court because he had been long separated from home and family, royal permission was given only on condition that he left behind him his eldest son, George, Lord Strange, virtually as a hostage. (pg. 210)

• 68. The Staffords were disliked as harsh and grinding landlords, and such troops as the duke could raise seem to have been reluctant and disaffected recruits. The duke's rebellion gave opportunity for the expression of active hostility by some of his Welsh retainers. Sir Thomas Vaughan of Tretower and his brothers dealt a fatal blow to Buckingham's local prestige by capturing and plundering the duke's own castle at Brecon. At the same time Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton in Worcestershire blocked the immediate exits across the upper Severn from Wales, destroying the bridges. Finally, the eternally uncertain English weather took a hand. On or about 15 October a storm of unusual violence broke over western England, causing the rivers, including the Severn, to flood, preventing Buckingham and his men from crossing. Alone and unattended, the duke made his way to Shropshire and took refuge with one of his servants, Ralph Banaster, who lived at Wem. Whether from fear or greed, Banaster soon betrayed him and he was delivered to the king at Salisbury. Denied any hearing by Richard, he was executed the following day (2 November). (pg. 116-117)

• 69. As Richard moved rapidly south to the Dorset coast at Bridgeport, and then on west to Exeter, where he arrived about 8 November, most of the rebel leaders took flight for France. Meanwhile, Henry Tudor's little fleet from Brittany was scattered by the severe autumn gales, and only one or two ships eventually anchored off the English coast, either near Poole in Dorset or at Plymouth. By this time, it would appear, the king was already in the area and the coast was guarded: Henry prudently withdrew to France. Only in the south-east was there any armed resistance. By 25 November the king was back in London, less than six weeks since he had first heard news of the rebellion. (pg. 117)
  Henry Tudor returned to Brittany and was welcomed back into the domains of the duke of Brittany who also gave asylum to the other English exiles who fled there when the autumn rebellion had collapsed. Some of them, including the marquis of Dorset and that earlier refugee, Sir Edward Woodville, were in receipt of monthly pensions from the duke. Richmond's position was enhanced by this new accession of strength, and was further confirmed by the solemn ceremony which took place in the cathedral of Rennes of Christmas Day 1483, when the whole company of English exiles, former Lancastrians and Yorkist dissidents alike, witnessed his solemn pledge to marry Elizabeth of York once he gained the throne of England. They, in turn, pledged homage to Henry as though he were already king. (pg. 196)

• 70. Elizabeth Woodville was clearly implicated in the plan of autumn 1483 to place Henry Tudor on the throne, on condition that he married her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. It totally passes belief that she would have been willing to support a plan which would automatically disinherit her sons by Edward IV unless she had excellent reasons to believe them already dead (and she was well able to find out). It has been objected, by Richard's defenders, that on 1 March 1484 she proved willing to emerge from her year-long stay in sanctuary at Westminster and deliver not only herself but her daughters into the hands of the man supposed to have done her sons to death only a few months earlier. This argument ignores both the practical realities of her situation and the nature of Richard's public promises to her regarding her own and her daughter's welfare. By the spring of 1484 the rebellion of Yorkist loyalists had been crushed without much difficulty, Henry Tudor's invasion had proved abortive and there was little prospect that Henry Tudor, or anyone else, could effectively challenge Richard's position on the throne. Nor was she even secure in sanctuary at Westminster, for rights of sanctuary had been broken before when political necessity demanded, and Richard had already shown a good deal of patience in allowing her to remain there for so long. Even so, she left sanctuary only in return for the most solemn and public promise Richard could contrive. Placing his hands on the relics of the Holy Evangelists, and pledging the word of a king, he took an oath, in the presence of the lords spiritual and temporal of England and of the mayor and aldermen of London, that he would fully protect her and her daughters and make suitable provision for their marriages. The entire document reeks of the queen-dowager's suspicion, while spelling out her pragmatic acceptance of the likelihood that in the foreseeable future there would be no king of England other than Richard III. (pg. 100-101)

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