The Princes in the Tower, page 6
On Sunday, 4 May, the day that had previously been arranged for Edward’s coronation, the royal party set off on the short journey to London.
London
What had transpired in London during this short period, however, was extraordinary. By the late evening of Tuesday, 30 April, and following morning, news had reached the capital alerting the Queen Mother to the events at Northampton and Stony Stratford, probably brought by a returning member of Sir Richard Grey’s contingent. It’s also possible that Gloucester sent a messenger. So, what had taken place in London that was so extraordinary?
On 1 May, the Queen Mother fled with her children and other family members into sanctuary at Cheneygates Mansion at Westminster Abbey. Mancini records that she was accompanied by the king’s other half-brother, the Marquess of Dorset (aged 28) and her brother, Lionel Woodville, Bishop of Salisbury.71 So what had caused a queen of England (and a bishop) to flee to sanctuary in a time of peace?
The previous day, she and Dorset had attempted to raise an army against Gloucester but had failed signally. Mancini reports:
But when they had incited certain nobles who had come to the city, along with others, to take up arms, they perceived that all men’s hearts were not only irresolute but deeply inimical to themselves. Several even said publicly that it was more just and beneficial for the boy-king to be with his paternal uncle than with his maternal uncles and uterine brothers.72
At face value, this action seems to support the theory that Elizabeth Woodville feared for her life, but if we drill down into the moment, we see that there was unrest in London with the Queen Mother’s party and the followers of Lord Hastings openly squaring up against each other.
Elizabeth Woodville had taken sanctuary before, in the dangerous times when Edward IV had been forced out of his kingdom, and it seems to have been her first instinct to take herself and her immediate family into sanctuary again. Her actions at this time, and those of her menfolk, including her brother Rivers, are examined in Chapter 16.
On Tuesday, 29 April, the Queen Mother’s youngest brother, Sir Edward Woodville had officially been given command of the English fleet by the Interim Council in the absence of England’s Lord High Admiral, Richard of Gloucester. Woodville led twenty vessels to face an apparent threat posed by marauding French ships, but ‘piracy in the channel was nothing new’ and was regularly settled via diplomacy.73 An amount of £3,670 was taken from the Treasury by Woodville and Dorset to provision the fleet with men and equipment, and Woodville himself would go on to abscond with two royal ships that included 200–300 soldiers and archers. He also requisitioned £10,250 in gold coin from an unnamed vessel in harbour, confiscated in the name of the Crown. This figure amounted to 15 per cent of royal revenues with a similar figure having financed 22,500 soldiers and the invasion of Scotland the previous year.74 As Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, headed to sanctuary, Mancini reports that the Treasury ‘is believed to have been divided between the queen, the marquess [Dorset] and Edward [her brother]’.75
On Sunday, 4 May 1483, Edward V entered London and received a royal welcome from the city’s Mayor, Council, civic dignitaries, prelates and nobility. The king was accompanied by two royal uncles, his household and an escort of ‘no more than’ 500 men. Mancini describes the escort as ‘soldiers’, but it would be highly unlikely that the gentlemen of the north had returned home. It is therefore probable that Mancini’s soldiers were mainly part of Buckingham’s contingent.76
The entourage entered the outskirts of the city accompanied by four cartloads of weapons ‘bearing the devices of the queen’s brothers and sons’, while proclamations were made describing how they were to have been used against the king’s uncle.77 Edward V was conveyed in triumph through the city and safely ensconced at the Bishop of London’s Palace in (medieval) St Paul’s churchyard.78 In all likelihood, the young king received an equally warm welcome from the citizens of London and was cheered enthusiastically through the streets.
From Monday, 5 May, to Saturday, 10 May, a lengthy Council was held over several days. This confirmed Gloucester in his role of Protector. Gloucester and Buckingham now ‘compelled all the lords spiritual and temporal and mayor and aldermen of the city of London to take the oath of fealty to the king … it was performed with pride and joy by all’. The Council also decided upon the new date of the coronation. This would now take place on Sunday, 22 June, with Edward V’s first Parliament the following Wednesday, 25 June.
It was also decided that the king be moved to a more spacious residence. Several places were suggested. Buckingham proposed the Tower, and this was agreed upon.79 Mancini asserts that Gloucester now attempted to obtain the Council’s consent to punish Rivers and Grey for treason, but this was denied. However, Gloucester, as we have seen, could have arraigned and punished them himself as Constable of England and had no need to apply to the Council, who had no authority to determine such a matter. Mancini was clearly unaware of the Council’s position in this regard or Gloucester’s judicial powers as Constable and Admiral, claiming that he held ‘no public office’. As Carson records, ‘Their incarceration was doubtless an item of business that he [Gloucester] brought to the Council’s attention, but not as a supplicant.’80
On Saturday, 10 May, the Council gave orders for Sir Thomas Fulford to take control of the English fleet from Sir Edward Woodville.81 With all Council business completed, on 9–10 May, John Howard now sent thirty-eight of his men home.82 It seems likely that these were the men who had set off for London with Howard a month earlier, following Howard’s receipt of King Edward’s letter immediately prior to his death.
All was now well. On 14 May, Howard was made Chief Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster (south of the Trent) and further orders were issued against Edward Woodville, directing several naval commanders and ship’s captains to put to sea to arrest him and return the fleet.
The rest of the month followed customary procedure and protocol. On Monday, 19 May, Edward V and his household were moved to the Royal Apartments at the Tower of London.83 On the same day, Gloucester signed a letter from ‘Richard Duke of Gloucester, brother and uncle of kings, protector and defensor, great Chamberlain, Constable and Admiral of England’.84 On Friday, 23 May, the King’s Council offered the wording of an oath of safety to Elizabeth Woodville if she would agree to leave sanctuary. The declaration was led by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, with the Royal Dukes of Gloucester and Buckingham and various other lords.85 The Queen Mother preferred to remain.86
By early June 1483, plans for the coronation and Parliament were well advanced. Calls to attend had been sent to the country’s nobility, prelates and civic leaders. Howard’s wife had arrived, as had Gloucester’s. On Monday, 9 June, an extended Council meeting took place from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon with the coronation discussed and preparations proceeding at pace.87
On the following day, however, Gloucester wrote to the city of York to prepare and send armed men to London. The cause of the alarm was the queen, her kin and affinity, who ‘daily intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin, the duke of Buckingham, and the old royal blood of this realm’. Gloucester issued the request in the same terms as the letter instanced above, from the ‘brother and uncle of kings, protector and defensor, great Chamberlain, Constable and Admiral of England’.88
So, what had prompted this unexpected request? Taken as read, it tells us that some form of plot had apparently been uncovered at around this time, coinciding with Dorset having secretly quit the Westminster sanctuary.89 Sir Edward Woodville was also still at large with two vessels of the English fleet and well over £10,000 in gold coin.
By the following day, Gloucester had sent another letter north requesting aid. As we have seen, an armed force takes time to assemble and provision. To travel to London from the north would take about four days for a company of horse and longer with infantry. The city of York would assemble 200 men at Pontefract Castle to ‘attend on my lord of Northumberland to go to my said lord of Gloucester good grace’.90 It would, therefore, be up to ten days or more before the northern arrays could arrive in the capital. This would certainly be in time for peace-keeping at the coronation and Parliament, but not for any immediate peril.
It’s likely that the men of the north who were already with Gloucester in London would have been on hand for any localised and immediate threat, but whatever future fears he had are difficult, at this remove, to comprehend. Perhaps he did not yet know much more than to raise the level of alarm to severe: as a seasoned general and battle commander, this response would be in keeping with any level of perceived threat. The duke, as Protector of the Realm, could not afford to be caught unprepared. Presumably, some information had come to light that propelled him to take action. Though some commentators, looking at events from hindsight, have viewed Gloucester’s appeals for assistance as predatory, other, more objective, assessments see them as precautionary.
Meanwhile, plans for the coronation and Parliament continued unabated. The only significant political move at this time was a change to the governance of the realm made by the King’s Council, which may have formed part of the Council’s business on 9 June.
By this date, the Council had reached a decision which is recorded in the draft sermon (which has survived) to be given by the Lord Chancellor at the opening of Edward V’s Parliament: a speech which set out government policy for parliamentary approval. Should we need any confirmation that Richard’s Chancellor and Council were wholly in accord, it will be found in the text by Chancellor John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, who goes out of his way to make pointed remarks regarding the queen’s family, specifically, the ambitions of Earl Rivers, and possibly referring to his former influence on the young king – ‘great waters and tempestuous Rivers’ that ‘by breaches and inundations the firm land and isles may be oftentimes lost and annihilated, or at the least greatly diminished’.91
The Council’s decision was to formalise the protectorate in an enactment that would set its term to continue until Edward V came of age on his fourteenth birthday, in eighteen months’ time.92 With the 12-year-old king an unknown quantity, it made sense, as the speech emphasised, to ensure he received tutelage for the demanding responsibilities of sovereignty.
On Friday, 13 June, an event occurred that logic suggests was not unconnected with Gloucester’s alarmed letters two or three days earlier. At a Council meeting at the Tower of London (where the young king resided in the Royal Apartments), Lord Hastings was accused of plotting against the Protector’s life and summarily executed.93
Domenico Mancini, writing about five months later and having been in London to hear (and/or read) the explanatory proclamation, wrote as follows:
The Protector by prearrangement called out that a trap had been set for him, and that these men had come with concealed weapons so that they could be the first to unleash a violent attack. At that, soldiers who had been stationed there by their lord came running in with the Duke of Buckingham and beheaded Hastings by the sword under the false name of treason; the others they detained, out of respect for their lives, it is supposed, for reasons of religion and holy orders.94
Among those present, Mancini names two prominent figures, the Archbishop of York, Thomas Rotherham (arrested, later released), and the Bishop of Ely, John Morton (arrested, later turned rebel), being co-conspirators known to have been meeting with Hastings privately, ‘and several others’. To set his account against the historical record, we do know the names of some others present, including Buckingham and John Howard – John Howard’s son, Sir Thomas Howard, Sir Charles Pilkington and Sir Robert Harrington, ‘men of knightly rank with a number of their followers’, who were nearby.95 Others known to have been rounded up in connection with the same plot included the king’s secretary, Oliver King, and, on the following day, John Forster, a leading official of Elizabeth Woodville and close associate of Hastings and Morton, who was arrested at his country house in Hertfordshire and committed to the Tower (both were later released).96 Forster had been Elizabeth Woodville’s Receiver-General since 1466.
Concealed weapons had no place in the council chamber, and Mancini was clearly aware of reports that hidden arms had been brought to the meeting, the accusation being that this was an attempt on the life of the Protector (as announced in the subsequent public proclamation).97 Mancini’s report, in hindsight – the alleged trap and false charge – is attributable to his task of constructing a coherent narrative for readers in France explaining what he knew of how Richard III came to be king. The drama would have likely given rise to stories in the streets of London, and it is questionable whether Mancini was intimate enough with events in the Tower to have had positive knowledge that a trap had been laid.
Unfortunately, like so much of the documentation that survives, his account is both flawed and biased. ‘Beheaded by the sword’ is discounted by historians and may simply have been conjecture, perhaps arising from the French method of execution at this time for the nobility in France. It is generally agreed that Hastings alone suffered execution, while the number of those arrested would seem to confirm that Hastings was not singled out as the only target, as later narratives (Thomas More and Shakespeare) have taught us to believe.
In a thronged palace like the Tower of London there were certainly enough people present or in the vicinity to have known the truth of the matter. Inferences may be drawn from the fact that although there must have been considerable alarm, contemporary correspondence reports no unrest in the capital. Readers who recall Gloucester’s powers as High Constable of England will appreciate that he would have been able to form a tribunal from among those present and conduct a summary trial.98
In chronicles and stories written after the death of Richard III, the execution of Hastings is portrayed as illegal. In particular, there is considerable distortion by Henry VII’s historian, Polydore Vergil, who in his original manuscript records the actual names of the knights of the realm who were close by these events, but would later remove these details from the texts of his history that went into print, describing them anonymously as ‘a sort right ready to do a mischief ’.99 As a result, modern historians have described these knights as ‘guards’, and the execution as murder. Hastings’ younger brother, Richard, Lord Welles, attended King Richard’s coronation and fought for him at Bosworth.100 Though not attainted (received judgement of death or outlawry), he was pardoned by Henry VII on 18 September 1485. He lost the Welles title but was compensated by a land grant. He was never summoned to Parliament under Henry VII and died without issue in 1503.
In contemporary accounts, there is no mention of the presence or arrest of Thomas, Lord Stanley, which is an addition attributable to Vergil.101 Vergil also changes the chronological sequence of events to follow an error originally made by Mancini, in which both sons of Edward IV had been taken to reside in the Tower prior to Hastings’ execution.
Amid the swirl of misreporting, both ancient and modern, around the developments of mid-June, it is the Crowland account that stands out in recording the correct sequence of events – i.e., that the execution of Lord Hastings occurred on 13 June, while the Woodville contingent, including the Duke of York and his mother, were still occupying the Westminster sanctuary. The widespread error in chronology has a significance to which we will return shortly.102
Meanwhile, we now arrive at the events of Monday, 16 June, described at the beginning of this chapter, when Richard, Duke of York, left sanctuary to join his elder brother in the Royal Apartments at the Tower of London. Mancini reports that ‘it became of concern to the Council that it would be seen as unseemly for the king to be crowned in the absence of his brother’. He adds an apparent report attributed to Gloucester that it was ‘the wish of the boy himself to be with his brother’. His account then continues, ‘with the consent of the Council’, Gloucester ‘blockaded the sanctuary with soldiers’.103
There had been guards around those parts of the Abbey being occupied by the Woodvilles for some time, since the Council had been concerned that those menfolk who refused to reconcile, like Lionel Woodville and the Marquess of Dorset, should not be allowed to abscond with the wherewithal to foment trouble (which, as events would prove, they eventually did). Crowland adds:
The following Monday they came by boat to Westminster with a great crowd, with swords and clubs and compelled the Lord Cardinal of Canterbury to enter the sanctuary, with many others, to call upon the queen, in her kindness, to allow her son Richard, duke of York, to leave and come to the Tower for the comfort of his brother, the king. She willingly agreed to the proposal and sent out the boy who was taken by the Lord Cardinal to the king in the Tower of London.104
That the king’s younger brother was apparently happy to join his elder brother comes from a contemporary letter written by Canon Stallworth, a priest in the service of the Lord Chancellor, Bishop Russell. Stallworth may have been an eyewitness to the events, or in receipt of a first-hand account, possibly from the Lord Chancellor himself, who was present:
On Monday last was at Westminster great plenty of harnest men: there was the deliverance of the Duke of York to my lord Cardinal, my lord Chancellor, and other many lords Temporal and with him met my lord of Buckingham in the middle of the hall of Westminster: my lord protector receiving him at the Star Chamber Door with many loving words and so departed with my lord Cardinal to the tower, where he is, blessed be Jesus, merry. [21 June 1483]105
This witness testimony contradicts the later accounts of Mancini and Crowland, who imply that Elizabeth Woodville was compelled by the threat of force to release the boy and the Archbishop of Canterbury was similarly compelled to remove him. To remove a child from sanctuary by force, in the full view of innumerable onlookers, would have been wholly unprecedented and a major misjudgement, particularly given the presence of two of the country’s most respected elders of the Church and leading Councillors.106
