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Historical Notes, Act One

1. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III: Born 2 October 1452 the seventh son of his parents (fourth surviving) (pg.3)
   Richard was born into a violent age. At the age of eight, he was to learn that his father, Duke Richard of York, had been killed in battle, and that his elder brother, Edmund of Rutland, then aged seventeen, had been brutally murdered afterwards. Twice he was himself to suffer exile as a consequence of the civil war. Most of the men he had known in youth were either killed in battle or judicially murdered for their alleged treason, among them his mentor, Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick, himself no mean practitioner in the arts of political ruthlessness, and another brother, George duke of Clarence, killed in the Tower in 1478. Warwick had taught Richard Plantagenet lessons in the killing without trial of his political opponents, especially in his illegal dispatch of William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, in 1469. Edward IV himself had little hesitation in disposing of Henry VI once it became convenient to do so, and as he became more high-handed in his later years, had taught Richard further lessons in arbitrary procedures, even in regard to inheritance, which he did not forget. Both the executions of Rivers, Grey and Vaughan at Pontefract without trial in 1483 and Richard's various illegal actions in regard to property committed both during the Protectorate and after the failure of the 1483 rebellion, may appear as a direct legacy of this instruction. To put Richard thus into context of his own violent age is not to make him morally a better man, but at least it makes him more understandable. In the climate of high politics of his own day, his mistakes may then be seen as errors of judgment rather than moral failures. (pg. 228-229)

2. One of Richard's closest friends, Francis Lovell, was, like Richard himself, another accepted outsider in northern society. Made a ward of Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick, and brought up at Middleham, he was married in 1466 to Anne, daughter of Henry, Lord FitzHugh. Their joint sojourn at Middleham in the period of their youth seems to have resulted in a lasting friendship between Richard of Gloucester and Lord Lovell. It may have been Richard's influence with Edward IV which led to Lovell's promotion to a viscountcy in January 1483. But their friendship was to be more fully expressed later by Francis's promotion to the Order of the Garter, and his appointment as chamberlain of the household, an office which implied constant personal contact with the king. Of his ability we know nothing. Of his loyalty there can be no question, and it persisted after Richard's death. The circumstances of his death are even more mysterious than those of the princes in the Tower. (pg.49-50)

3. Richard Ratcliffe was a younger son of a lesser gentry family with lands around Derwentwater in the Lake District, none of whose members was important enough to achieve the office of Justice of the Peace until Sir Richard's promotion under Richard III. Before 1483 he had become a ducal councilor, one of Richard's trustees in the lordship of Richmond and steward of Barnard Castle, and he was created knight and banneret by Richard on the Scottish campaigns. He was to remain one of the king's most trusted confidants. Knight of the Garter, royal councilor, sheriff of Westmorland for life, he also received rewards from forfeited lands on a scale exceptionally lavish even by Richard's own generous standards. (pg. 54-55)

4. Queen Margaret: Died 1482 so her appearance after Act II, scene 1 is historically impossible.

5. Edward was proclaimed king Edward IV on 4 March 1461. During the preparations for his coronation on 28 June, he sent for his younger brothers. Both were created knights of the Bath two days before the coronation. George became Duke of Clarence on 28 June (at 11 years of age). Richard waited until 1 November, one month after his ninth birthday, before he was made duke of Gloucester. On 17 October 1469, at 17 he was created Constable of England.

6. At Barnet on 14 April 1471 Edward IV overwhelmed the forces of the Earl of Warwick and his allies, Warwick and his brother Montagu being left dead on the field. Richard was involved in this battle. At Tewkesbury on 4 May Edward achieved an equally decisive victory over Queen Margaret's Lancastrian army. Her son, Edward prince of Wales, was killed in the battle, and Margaret herself was later taken prisoner. At this battle there is evidence that Richard was entrusted with the vanguard of the king's army. (pg. 21&22)
   Edward IV found it convenient to keep the now decayed Henry VI alive in the Tower as long as his son and heir, Edward, the Lancastrian prince of Wales, was alive and free in France. The official chronicle says that Henry VI died 'of pure displeasure and melancholy' on the very night of Edward IV's return from his mighty triumph at Tewkesbury, where Prince Edward had been killed: the coincidence of these events scarcely commands much credence in the official theory. (pg. 99)

7. Richard was unfortunate in that he did not inherit the great height and powerful build of many of his Plantagenet predecessors, often allied with good looks, as in Edward I, Edward III, Richard II and his own brother, Edward IV, whom Commynes called the handsomest prince he had ever seen, 'a truly regal figure'. Possibly the fact that he was the eleventh surviving child of his mother may account for his comparative lack of physique. There is no reliable evidence for the popular Tudor idea that he was hunchbacked. Not even the hostile Rous, who claims that he was born with teeth and with hair down to his shoulders after the unlikely term of two years in his mother's womb, calls him a crookback: he merely says that his right shoulder was higher than his left. Modern medical inquiry has suggested that he may have suffered from a minor degree of "Sprengel's deformity", but concluded that 'probably Richard had no great degree of bodily abnormality'. Even the idea of uneven shoulders is not supported by the two earliest-known surviving portraits, that in the Society of Antiquaries of London, painted about 1505, probably in the Netherlands, which shows him with straight shoulders, and that in the Royal Collection, which may be of earlier date, and in which, under recent X-ray examination, there was an original straight shoulder-line, later painted over to give the impression of a raised right shoulder, of which so many copies were later to have been made. The first specific reference to Richard's being a hunchback comes from the records of the city of York for the year 1491. In the course of a heated argument with a local schoolmaster, one John Payntour was later accused of having said that Richard had been 'an hypocrite, a crook back and buried in a ditch like a dog'. But it took the reputation and literary ability of Sir Thomas More to stamp upon the Tudor imagination the idea that Richard was 'little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favored of visage', or, as Shakespeare was to put it, 'not made to court an amorous looking glass'. He does not seem ugly of appearance. The more flattering of the two early portraits, that in the Royal Collection, shows a not uncomely man, despite the obvious lines of anxiety on his brow. The Antiquaries' painting, on the other hand, shows a gaunt, bony, tight-lipped face, again with a suggestion of anxiety. It is noticeable that in both he is shown as being much older than his true age. (pg. 138-140)
   In spite of his slender physique, Richard was a tough, hardy and energetic man, who had a proper taste for manly pursuits. He was evidently very fond of hawking, even sending abroad for new hawks as well as combing his own realm. Unlike his lazier brother Edward, he also had an active thirst for warfare. (pg. 142)

8. The play entirely ignores Clarence's turning traitor in 1469 with Warwick. All his guilty reminiscences are about killing King Henry.

9. William, Lord Hastings was the most powerful and prominent of the non-royal nobility who owed his advancement entirely to the favor of Edward IV himself. A life-long friend of the king, with an outstanding record of loyalty to his master, he occupied the influential office of king's chamberlain throughout the reign. This position controlled access to the king's person, and was therefore of key importance in the competition for royal patronage. Despite his considerable worldly success, he enjoyed the respect of his contemporaries as an upright and honorable man. At the same time he commanded considerable power through his great estates and large retinue in the midlands and through his office as captain of Calais, which gave him control of the largest standing garrison maintained by the English crown, Hastings was quite strong enough to protect his own interests, but he too was on bad terms with the Woodville group. According to More, the queen hated him because she resented his influence with Edward, and thought him 'secretly familiar with the king in wanton company', although he seems to have shared this dubious distinction with her son Thomas and Richard Grey, and with one of her brothers, Sir Edward Woodville, who were described as the principal 'promoters and companions of the king's vices'. (pg. 39)

10. We need not take seriously the Tudor back-projection, that Richard was planning to make himself king before the death of Edward IV, for he could not have anticipated that his vigorous, if debauched, brother would die at the age of forty. (pg. 64)

11. On 21 May 1471, Edward returned victorious to London. On the very night of Edward's triumphal entry into the capital, the captive king, Henry VI, died in the Tower of London. At most, Richard may have been the agent, not the director of King Henry's murder, since the decision to murder another king would only have been made by the king personally. (pg. 12 & 22)

12. Anne Nevill, daughter of Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick (quot;The Kingmaker") and Anne Beauchamp. Born 1456. During 1465-1468, Richard was ward of the Earl of Warwick so they were undoubtedly acquainted when he was 13-16 and she was 9-12. Her share of the great Beauchamp-Despenser estates formerly held by the earl of Warwick were worth something of the order of £3,500 yearly. (pg. 7)

13. The Earl of Warwick, in French exile, lost no time in agreeing to King Louis XI's proposal that he should come to terms with his former enemy, the ex-queen Margaret of Anjou, now herself a refugee in France. With French assistance, Warwick was to invade England and restore the imprisoned Henry VI to the throne. This compact was sealed by the marriage of Henry VI's heir, the seventeen-year-old Edward of Lancaster, prince of Wales, to Warwick's younger daughter, Anne Nevill (fourteen) in July 1470. In return, the restored Henry would aid Louis in his invasion of Burgundy. (pg. 18)
    Margaret of Anjou's deal in 1470 with Warwick the Kingmaker, who had done so much to bring about her husband's deposition and the deaths of so many of her friends and kinsmen, permitting her son's marriage to Warwick's daughter was an act of cynical realism which surprised even a hardened contemporary like Philippe de Commynes. (pg. 101)

14. In terms both of birth and wealth, Anne Nevill was the obvious bride for Gloucester. No one had seriously suggested that he might marry abroad. From the bride's standpoint also there was much to be said for the match. Only Gloucester possessed the political muscle to wrest her from the grasp of Clarence, and force him to disgorge her share of the Warwick inheritance, although even this would be at the expense of her unfortunate mother. Probably, therefore, she willingly consented to her abduction by Duke Richard from Clarence's care. In law, their marriage could only be valid with the aid of a papal dispensation, since they were related within the prohibited degree. Political urgency, however, demanded that the marriage should take place as soon as possible without Rome's affidavit. The precise date of the marriage is unknown but it probably did not take place until after Easter 1472. This would put her age at 16, and his at 20. (pg. 28-29)

15. King Henry was interred at the obscure resting place of Chertsey Abbey following his sudden death in May 1471. Richard eventually moved the remains to the splendor of the choir of St. George's Chapel, Windsor. To this day they lie buried there in ironic juxtaposition to the bones of Henry's destroyer, King Edward IV. (pg. 136)

16. Richard seems to have possessed, at least in his public mein, a pronounced taste for personal finery. For his coronation he wore, above a doublet of blue cloth-of-gold 'wrought with nets and pineapples', a long gown of purple velvet, furred with ermine and enriched with no less than 3,300 powderings of bogy-shanks, an ensemble of gaudy richness even by fifteenth-century standards. Later in the day he changed into a long gown of purple cloth-of-gold marked with the insignia of the Order of the Garter and with White Roses of York, and lined with white damask, On the morrow of the coronation, the royal household supplied him with several changes of clothes (in crimson cloth wrought with droops, in crimson cloth checked with gold, and in purple satin and purple velvet), together with a gift from his queen, a long gown of purple cloth-of-gold wrought with garters and roses and lined with no less than eight yards of white damask. (pg. 140-141)

17. Edward IV's secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, the impoverished widow of a Lancastrian, John Grey who had been killed at St. Albans, was the underlying cause of the Earl of Warwick's revolt due to its wider political consequences. She had a large family, including two sons by her first marriage, five brothers and seven unmarried sisters, for all of whom her new husband had to make provision suitable to the dignity of a queen's relatives. (pg. 11)
    Any overt breach between Gloucester and the Woodvilles seems to belong to the last five years of Edward's reign, and was certainly not inspired by any difference of opinion arising from Clarence's death. (pg. 34)

18. The appearance of the numerous and jealous Woodville clan at court seemed to possess an overweening influence with the king and led to a natural alliance between the queen's kin and those members of the aristocracy who had been raised to power by Edward himself, several of whom had married Woodvilles. Among these were William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Humphrey, Lord Stafford Earl of Devon. (pg. 12)

19. The young Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, was head of the wealthiest and most long-established of the English magnate families. His career under Richard of Gloucester proved that he was grasping and ambitious to a degree. He had been denied his claim to enjoy the other half of the inheritance of the De Bohun family, which he regarded as his own when the male line of the house of Lancaster was extinguished in 1471 - a claim later to be conceded by Richard III. He had been shown some favors soon after Edward IV's recovery of power in 1471, being allowed (in 1473) entry to his inheritance while still only sixteen years of age, and, being married to a Woodville, had played his part in the court ceremonies surrounding the marriage of Richard of York and Anne Mowbray in January 1478. He had also been associated in the attack upon Clarence, through his appointment as steward of England for the duke's trial a month later. Thereafter he had been cold-shouldered by king and court. Denied all the offices and responsibilities which a magnate of his rank might expect, he had even been excluded from all commissions of the peace except in the county of Stafford. The grants made to him by Richard of Gloucester during the Protectorate clearly reveal his desire to exercise power and influence in Wales and the Marches, but this too had been denied him while Edward IV lived, since his aspirations ran counter to those of the Woodvilles to dominate in Wales through their control of the prince's person. This, indeed, was probably the main reason for Buckingham's being placed in a political limbo during Edward's later years. (pg. 38-39)

20. How far Richard of Gloucester was an active accomplice in the overthrow and eventual murder of his brother Clarence must remain a matter of argument. No one can seriously deny that the king bore the ultimate responsibility. It was he who launched the charge of impeachment of treason against Clarence in the parliament of 1478. It was Edward also who spoke against Clarence, in a record alive with his overwhelming irritation at his brother's behavior, and it was he who gave final agreement to the demand from a deputation from the commons that, since Clarence had been found guilty, that the mandatory death sentence should be carried out. All this led to the private execution of Clarence in the Tower of London on 18 February 1478, perhaps by drowning in that notorious butt of malmsey wine. Recent research, however, strongly suggests that there is much evidence to support Mancini's stated belief that, at least behind the scenes, the queen and her Woodville relatives provided the main driving-force in bringing about the duke's overthrow. No contemporary source implicates Gloucester himself. The Croyland Chronicler, and indeed Polydore Vergil, lay the blame firmly on the king and do not mention Richard at all. Mancini went so far as to say that Richard was overwhelmed with grief at his brother's death, and vowed to avenge it. More reported the opinion of 'some wise men' that Richard was privately not dissatisfied with the execution of his difficult and jealous brother, and may have welcomed it as removing one barrier between himself and the throne he was already planning to usurp. But, More added cautiously, 'of all this point there is no certainty, and whoso divineth upon conjectures, may as well shoot to far as too short'.

    Yet it is unlikely that Gloucester was not at least an assenting partner in the overthrow of Clarence. Not even the influence of the Woodvilles would have persuaded Edward to take action against Duke George if Richard had actively opposed it, and Gloucester had already shown that he was capable of taking an independent line. He had been present at the council meeting in 1477 at which the assault upon Clarence had obviously been decided; he played a prominent part in the Woodville-dominated ceremonies for the marriage of the king's younger son, Richard duke of York, to Anne Mowbray in January 1478; and he had lent his aid to the systematic packing of the parliament of 1478 which eventually left Clarence isolated before a docile house of commons.

    Nor were Richard's gains from the fall of Clarence by any means negligible. On 15 February 1478, three days before Clarence's murder, Richard's small son Edward was created earl of Salisbury, which had been one of Clarence's titles. Six days later, Richard was re-appointed Great Chamberlain of England, an office he had been forced to surrender to Duke George in 1472. Three parliamentary acts in Richard's favor provide a further indication of the price - or the reward - for his support in 1478. One allowed him to alienate portions of the Warwick inheritance which had been forbidden both to him and Clarence by the act of 1474. A second approved an exchange of lands between the king and himself which enabled him to give up his marcher lordship of Elvell in return for the Duchy of Lancaster lordship of Ogmore, conveniently placed beside his estates in Glamorgan. The third deprived George Nevill, duke of Bedford of his dukedom and disabled him, thereby, from having an effective voice in parliament. Nor does the often repeated claim that the inclusion of Clarence among those for whose souls prayers were to be said in Richard's proposed foundation of a chantry college at Barnard Castle in County Durham represent some sort of conscience payment on his part rest on any foundation of evidence. On balance, therefore, it seems quite inconsistent with what we know of Richard's character, and of his past relations with Clarence, that he had not condoned - to say the least - the carefully orchestrated overthrow of his brother in 1478. (pg. 32-34)

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