Edward IV died suddenly on April 9, 1483, and though his son and heir was never crowned and never to exercise any power, we date Edward V’s accession (and his very short reign) from the day of his father’s death; Edward V does make the official list of English monarchs. Edward IV had been a large, strapping, handsome man, only 40 at his death, just shy of his 41st birthday. Neither the king himself nor those around him seem to have anticipated his demise. He had made none of those deathbed provisions regarding the future of the realm that some of his predecessors had made, or at least had tried to impose upon their successors when death was imminent and the heir to the crown still a minor.
At his death Edward IV left behind two young sons, a queen, Elizabeth Woodville (who came with the baggage of a large and well-entrenched family), five daughters, and a surviving brother, Richard duke of Gloucester. He also left a mother and some sisters; his sisters played little role in the events that followed, though we cannot be certain whether Cecily Neville, his mother, supported Richard’s moves, or found them deeply offensive, or was content to remain in the background.
The constitutional as well as the political situation during a royal minority was not firmly established. When alive, the crown and the realm were the king’s—being as he was something between the lord of a vast personal domain and God’s steward or vicegerent who would be called upon to answer how well he had carried out his responsibilities. This view of late-medieval kingship was largely as it was accepted by the law and by the estates of the realm, though there was some sort of bottom-line if unspoken idea of a social contract, of limits beyond which a king did not wisely go. But whatever his position while alive, once the king was dead it was now apt to be a case of some unspecified and fluid mix of the power of his nearest kin, of the nobles, of the value or clout of any provisions he had made, and of the age and potential or promise of his heir.
In April 1483, the most obvious need, in terms of stabilizing the new government, was for a single person who could assume the acting headship—a regent, or a protector of the realm—and who could be accepted as the proper person for this office. Monarchy was a system that worked from the idea of a single head of state, and a single person standing in for the underage king was probably accepted as the best alternative, if the factions at court could agree on a choice. Historical precedents and the situation in 1483 underlined that this “if” extended to constitutional uncertainties as well as to personal jealousies and ambitions. Furthermore, the protector would largely set the composition of the Privy Council, the English monarch’s advisory council. Some people were members of this council because they held offices of state, like the chancellor; others were just too important to omit, whatever the value of their advice and their level of loyal service. The role and power of Parliament was harder to gauge. Its approval would be needed; its degree of independence varied depending on personal relationships and on the public confidence about the government’s control of the realm and its sympathy for the sort of economic matters so dear to parliamentary hearts. If the peers and bishops (the House of Lords) largely dabbled in the question of the rule of the realm, the interests of the Commons ran more to such mundane matters as taxes, customs duties, control and oppression of the labor market, and treaties designed to foster trade. As such, the Commons were hard to predict, though their favor was well worth courting.
If these were the stakes of power, who were the major contenders for the exercise of that power on the day that Edward IV died? By virtually any criterion we accept, Gloucester would seem to stand head and shoulders above his rivals. As Edward IV’s only living brother (and third in line for the crown in his own right) he had a claim of blood as well as experience. After him, and with a position resting more on proximity and power than on any accepted or time-honored constitutional claim, or even on any useful precedents, came the Woodvilles: Queen Elizabeth, her four brothers, her two (grown-up) sons by her first marriage, and their partisans. There were also a number of great nobles, not contenders for royal power on their own but of such weight that their support would help tip the balance. These men were more likely to lean toward Richard, or at least to the House of York, than they were toward the Woodvilles, who had been Lancastrians before Elizabeth married Edward IV. However, much of this aristocratic loyalty had to be won over, rather than taken for granted; rewards would be expected. The heavies in the aristocratic ranks were William Lord Hastings, Edward IV’s closest friend; Henry Stafford duke of Buckingham; and a royal cousin, John Howard, whom Richard would elevate to duke of Norfolk, along with his son, soon to be earl of Surrey; plus John de la Pole duke of Suffolk and Thomas Lord Stanley. But the entire parliamentary peerage usually ran to three or four dozen men, and there were also the two archbishops and 15 bishops among the lords of the realm. Moreover, since royal coronations were held at Westminster, the nearby presence of the City of London, with its great economic clout and its proud mayors and aldermen and guilds, all had to be factored in. The support, or at least the nonopposition of London, would be critical if bold moves were contemplated on its doorstep.
This was the situation that confronted Richard of Gloucester when news of his brother’s death reached him in the north of England. As we pick up his trail and follow him from north to south on his way to the throne, we can think of him as poised on the brink of a steep (and dangerous) incline. We know, by hindsight, the path he would follow—to the throne, an early death, and centuries of infamy as the deformed usurper who had two helpless princes put to death after he ruthlessly pushed them aside. Excepting the death of the boys—about which more below—most of the events in this story are tolerably clear (though various details are elusive). The uncertainties center, for the most part, on motives and intentions, and the chroniclers and historians of the day were as problematic and unreliable from the very beginning as they are for us. When did Richard decide to go for broke? Did he feel he was driven to this drastic step for want of safe and acceptable alternatives? Did he simply decide he was the best man, entitled to the throne his family had fought and died for, regardless of the presence of a 12-year-old nephew in front of him? Was there an element of altruism in his actions, or was it just personal ambition? Was there any sincerity in the moral issues he raised and encouraged to be played out regarding Edward IV’s marriage and the princes’ legitimacy? Did he believe that any alternative to his own rule would mean opening the door to the Woodvilles and then, given their unpopularity, to the reopening of civil war? These are the key questions to ponder as we follow Richard in the spring and early summer of 1483.
We can turn the coin over. What choices did Richard have? Could the young Edward V be detached from his mother and her family—with or without bloodshed? And if Richard did not secure the young king and consolidate his own position, what fate might await him? The precedents in English history—and all the parties seem to have taken pains to learn about such matters—indicated that royal uncles and brothers were hardly invulnerable just because of their high birth. Had not one of Edward Ill’s sons, Thomas of Woodstock, and one of Henry V’s brothers, Humphrey of Gloucester, both died in suspicious circumstances after they had been politically marginalized? Contemporaries believed that these men had been murdered; the weight of scholarly evidence supports this. Nor are some earlier examples particularly reassuring. Edmund of Kent, Edward Il’s brother, executed for treason in 1330, and Thomas of Lancaster, Edward Il’s cousin, executed in 1322 (after defeat in battle), both come to mind. Power, rather than constitutional precedents or legalistic determinations, was likely to determine the outcome of the confusion that followed Edward IV’s unexpected death. Moreover, while Lancastrian opposition to the House of York had been scattered and driven out of sight, it was still out there—eager to recruit followers and offer a challenge if divisions at court allowed it to do so. Henry VI and his son might be long dead, but in Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s queen, the cause had a powerful figurehead, and in the person of young Henry Tudor earl of Richmond, it had a claimant to the throne.
How Richard weighted these alternatives is something we can never know. The chroniclers of the day—the sort of authorities whom we would generally go to for firsthand information—mostly are hostile to Richard, a partisan and biased view compounded by the fact that many of them wrote or edited their accounts of 1483 well afterward. They are shaky reeds at best. Was Richard a master strategist of villainy? Or was he an extremely lucky gambler who played long odds, perhaps driven by the lack of acceptable alternatives? One view of his actions is that they were an improvised response to challenging circumstances and hard choices, rather than the implementation of a master plan or a prearranged scenario. This view seems a reasonable one.
When attempting to explain historical events, we dislike the idea of starting with a conspiratorial view of motives, let alone of actions. By the light of this guideline we should open by taking Richard at his word that he really just moved one step at a time and that he did not aim at the throne. We do know that when he learned of his brother’s death he immediately offered the proper and traditional oath of fealty to his nephew, and he had the northern gentry and the York city fathers follow his lead. Were these early words spoken in all sincerity? Were his moves against the Woodvilles and then against Edward V actions that he did not anticipate at first, taken only according to a policy of self-preservation that, once begun, had to be carried to a logical conclusion? Or rather did Richard quickly decide, upon hearing the unexpected news of Edward IV’s death, that there was little space left for him were he not atop the mountain? In some ways it seems naive to accept the early declarations of loyalty and limited ambition at their face value, since we know that whatever was said, within a bit over two months Richard was king of England. Furthermore, he moved with impressive determination and, almost from the start, with a casual regard for law and due process. If he feared a backlash in the loss of popular support, or in the resurrection of a Lancastrian faction, or in the unwillingness of the nobles to go along with him, none of these factors sufficed to turn him aside. Once he decided to go for broke, speed would be of the essence. When Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) had returned from exile in 1399 to challenge Richard II, there was an interval of about 12 weeks between his landing and his installation as king. Richard of Gloucester, closer to the throne and with a minor rather than a crowned king to contend with, needed even less time.
Whenever and however planned, Richard’s assault on the throne, on the line of hereditary descent, on the person of Edward V, was a two-pronged attack. One line was political; remove the Woodvilles and others who stood in the way, replace them with allies, get control of the princes, seize the throne, and be crowned. But it is the other line of attack, launched and conducted simultaneously with the first, that reveals a Richard we can consider to be a man ahead of his time. We refer here to the skillful orchestration of a propaganda campaign that succeeded, in about a month, in selling Richard of Gloucester, not his older brother’s son, as the king-worthy Yorkist and heir of Duke Richard. It was him the people and Parliament would actually ask to take the crown! Because modern political life rests so heavily on spin and misinformation, it is easy to think of these as recent tricks of the media and disingenuous government. Hardly the case. Whether the ideological campaign was a fig leaf to cover a naked grab for power, or whether Richard himself believed what was being said, or whether an important truth about Edward IV and Edward V actually was “outed” in the course of the propaganda campaign is another matter for debate.
Evaluating why Richard acted, and how he planned his moves, is made more difficult because much of what we know comes from his enemies—the dynasty that displaced him after Bosworth and with every reason to darken his memory after his fall. He was easily marked down as the ultimate villain. The story, shaped so as to proclaim Henry Tudor’s battlefield accession as
God’s judgment, magnified Richard’s faults, whether real or fabricated. We now look back and recognize that Henry VII’s accession did not end internal dissent in one fell swoop. Bosworth was not the end of armed conflict, let alone of baronial conspiracies, and support for the House of York was a powerful current in sections of the realm throughout the century. However, Henry’s victory at Bosworth and his clement policy toward most of Richard’s followers did restore the whip hand to the king, and though he had to overcome subsequent crises and threats, and sometimes (as at the battle of Stoke in 1487) only with difficulty, he did pass his crown on to his son (Henry VIII) in a peaceful transition in 1513. The king was back on top. No English monarch would fall again until Charles I in the 1640s, whereas between 1399 and 1485 four of them had failed to live out their natural lifespan.
Let us return to Richard of Gloucester from the time he learned of his brother’s death to his own coronation in early July. His first steps were the proper ones; the oath of allegiance and then the move toward London. Though the purpose of his journey south was to attend or preside over the council and to help arrange the coronation of Edward V, he did happen to be accompanied on his march by 600 armed men, and when he made a rendezvous at Northampton with the duke of Buckingham another 300 were added to their joint force. There, on April 29, the two dukes met the entourage of the young king as he moved from Ludlow in the west toward London. Edward V was being escorted by some of his mother’s family; his uncle, Anthony Woodville, who was earl Rivers, his half-brother Richard Grey, and two highly placed retainers, Thomas Vaughan and Sir Richard Haute. The two dukes and the Woodvilles had what seemed to be a friendly dinner.
The next morning, claiming that there was a plot on his life, Richard ordered the arrest of these four men, though Edward V supposedly told his uncle that he “had seen nothing evil in them.” Unless the allegations of a plot are credible—and this does seem hard to accept, though it cannot be ruled out—this move on Richard’s part was in effect a unilateral declaration of war against the Woodvilles. It came without warning and without judicial procedure. While Buckingham’s prior dealings with the Woodvilles had been adversarial (though his wife was of that family), and this was so for Edward IV’s friend Hastings, Richard himself had been on reasonable terms with his brother’s in-laws. But now he was serving notice that the rules of the game had changed.
As the young king’s paternal uncle, Richard proceeded to take him in charge as they continued toward London. News of the arrests at Northampton had run ahead of them, and when she heard the grim news, Queen Elizabeth, Edward IV’s widow, along with her younger son and her daughters, sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Richard reached London on May 4, the date originally proposed for the new king’s coronation, and he installed Edward V in the bishop of London’s palace by Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Various dignitaries came there to do homage to their young ruler, so there still must have been some semblance of normality, though we can imagine that rumors were beginning to fly. Richard’s arrival marked a period in which the Privy Council was in more or less continual session, serving as the executive arm of government, and his appointment as protector was made official. By May 13, he was acting in this capacity; writs were issued for a Parliament to assemble on June 25, its primary purpose being to accept Edward V as king. Richard was loading the council with loyal supporters, as well as appointing them to offices throughout the kingdom. Then, in a decisive stroke, he raised the level of self-assertion. On May 19, still claiming that the queen and her family were scheming against him, he brought armed levies down from the north and he had Edward V moved from Saint Paul’s to the Tower of London, ostensibly to facilitate preparations for the prince’s coronation (now slated for late June).
The Woodville threat, insofar as it had existed, was now thoroughly overcome. But Richard came to realize that while his ally, Lord Hastings, would stand with him against their common opponents, his loyalty to the dead king meant that he would never countenance moves that would displace Edward IV’s son. To deal with this Richard chose a preemptive strike, and at a council meeting of June 13 he struck—once again—without warning. Richard now claimed a witchcraft plot against him (and that it had withered his arm) and, by some odd leap of logic and political probability, said that it was a plot hatched by Hastings, Queen Elizabeth, and Jane Shore (a Londoner widely held to have been mistress of both Hastings and Edward IV). Leaving the council chamber for a minute, Richard called in soldiers he had posted in advance and ordered the arrest of Hastings and two bishops considered to be in the Woodville camp. Hastings was taken right out and executed on Tower Green. Richard’s power was now such that these orders were obeyed, despite the virtual absence of any due process. Then, “on a roll,” he persuaded the queen and the archbishop of Canterbury, who had reassured her about the inviolable nature of sanctuary, to allow him to take the younger prince from the abbey to the Tower to join his older brother. Whether he got his way because a resort to violence seemed likely or because they still believed his word is unclear, though the latter alternative strains credibility.
Clearly, whatever his original intentions, Richard now had his eye on something beyond being protector of the realm during the royal minority. If there still were doubts, they would have been dispelled as the wheels of his propaganda mill began to turn. The goal was to sell Richard of Gloucester, and the method chosen was to stigmatize the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville as illegitimate. This, by extension, would push Edward V out of his place in the queue and bring Richard to the front, the genuine and legitimate crown-worthy Yorkist, the man to rule the realm and preserve the legacy of his father (who had been reburied with great pomp at Fotheringhay in July 1476). It was openly put about that before Edward IV had married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 he had entered into a contract, or a pre-contract, or perhaps even a marriage with one Eleanor Butler (a daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury?). If so, this would have made the subsequent marriage of
Edward IV and Elizabeth null and void, the children of that marriage bastards. When Dr. Ralph Shaw (or Shaa), a Cambridge theologian and brother of the mayor of London, preached to this effect to a large audience on Sunday, June 22, his text was drawn from the Old Testament injunction “Spuria vitulamina non agent radices altas” (Wisdom 4:3: “Bastard slips shall not take deep root”).
Edward IV had been famous for his womanizing, before and after his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville Grey, a Lancastrian widow whom he married in a clandestine ceremony in 1464. That he had previously made some sort of contract with one as Eleanor Butler does not seem hard to accept, though what was passed off as proof of this seems suspect (or worse). But that no steps had been taken during the 19 years of Edward’s marriage with Elizabeth to have an earlier tie undone seems a bit strange. Everyone knew that the heir to the throne had to be legitimate, born within wedlock—whatever the public tolerance of Edward’s mistresses and his whoring with his buddy Hastings. The church was usually amenable to straightening out the entanglements of royal marriages, and Parliament had the peculiar power to legitimize children (and had done so with the Beauforts, from whom Henry Tudor—Henry VII as he was to be—traced his own claim).
Further fuel was added to the fire as two other lines of doubt were cast upon these waters, though we wonder at Richard’s involvement with the second. Questions were openly aired about the validity of Edward IV’s clandestine marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, apart from whether he had been free to enter into it. Being a secret affair—announced to the court only sometime afterward—there were questions as to whether the banns had been properly read, whether the ceremony had been held in a sanctified place, and so on. Its clandestine nature, plus the fact that the marriage was a peculiar and extremely foolish political move for Edward, fed rumors about witchcraft and women’s wiles that had circulated over the years about the queen and even more so about her mother. Beyond this line of insinuation, other rumors (also circulating for some years and now revived) held that Edward IV himself had not been the son of Richard of York, but that his mother, Cecily Neville, had had an affair and conceived Edward before she conceived her first child by the duke. Thus, if Edward IV himself had been illegitimate, Richard would be the next in line by the true blood of York. Since Richard’s mother was still on the spot (and would be until 1495) and she stood as the revered and tragic matriarch of the House of York, these allegations of infidelity in the 1440s seem astounding. Nevertheless, such rumors did help becloud a case that, a few months before, had seemed to argue with no foreseeable qualifications in favor of Edward V’s right to ascend the throne upon his father’s death.
Shaw’s sermon about sex and the royal family had been preached on June 22, with both Richard and Buckingham in attendance as part of a large crowd. On June 24, Buckingham, now acting pretty openly as Richard’s stage manager, suggested to an assemblage of important Londoners that the way out of the dilemma was to offer the crown to Richard. This indicates that the doubts cast on Edward V’s legitimacy had struck a responsive chord, though we cannot gauge how deeply, nor do we know how freely people may have felt about speaking out against Buckingham’s suggestion. On this same day, or the next, the four men whom Richard had had arrested at Northampton in April were put to death; charged with treason but to die without a proper trial. The Parliament that had been called to validate Edward V’s accession now petitioned his uncle to become king! On June 26, Richard assumed the royal dignity: he was the “verray enheritour” (true inheritor) of the House of York and should accede “according to this election of us the thre Estates of this lande, as by youre true Enheritaunce.”
Who could resist such a call to do his duty? Richard’s coronation, held on July 6, was a traditional, full-fledged affair, every bit as elaborate as though he had been the designated heir for decades. His wife, Anne Neville, was crowned queen beside him, and the usual feasts and processions and oaths of allegiance and acclamation covered the bold fact that a quick and nasty usurpation had been pulled off. That the coronation was such a large affair sounds like an instance of compensation, though Richard presented himself on the idea that he was now bringing continuity and normalcy to the throne. His brother’s reign, he said, had been marked by “sensuality and concupiscence, [and] followed the counsail of personnes insolent, vicious, and of inordinate avarice,” which shameful state of affairs had now been brought to an end. This strange touch of Puritanism may have caught some public sympathy, as Edward IV’s court was both lavish and costly in style and was pretty casual about conventional morality.
The one remaining aspect of this rapid and tough-minded climb to the throne concerns the fate of Edward V and his younger brother. The political importance of their disappearance may not really have been all that we make it out to be; Richard was king, neither nephew was. However, this pragmatic and unsentimental view has always paled when set against the “human interest” side of the story. All that seems certain is that the two princes were seen at play in the precincts of the Tower of London in mid - or late July but that by some point later in the summer they had disappeared from view, never to be seen again. The inevitable conclusion, whether correct and fair or not, was that their uncle had them done away with in some fashion; we will look below at arguments that have been offered to condemn Richard or exonerate him. It was said at the time, whether based on hard knowledge or just gossip and evil-speak, that “he also put to deth the ii children of Kyng Edward for whiche cawse he lost the hertes of the people.” We do know that in 1674 some bones were discovered when a walled-up chamber of the Tower was opened for structural work. A scientific examination of the bones in 1933, before DNA analysis, established that they probably were, or at least might have been, those of two boys who would have been about the age of the princes in the mid-1480s. From this, one draws the conclusion one wishes, though the bones, which remain in their urn in Westminster Abbey, have never been offered for reexamination.
In summarizing this dramatic story of political ambition and reversal, we can take note of how swiftly fortune’s wheel had turned. At the beginning of April 1483, Edward IV was king. In mid-April there was no reason to doubt but that his elder son would accede to the throne; from Edward IV to Edward V, as night follows day. By mid-May Edward V was little more than a pawn, his mother’s family in eclipse, his paternal uncle with a virtual monopoly of power. By mid-June the young king’s legitimacy had been questioned, and he and his brother were prisoners in the Tower. By late June people were talking of Richard as the man who should be king while he was already de facto monarch. By early July he had been crowned and anointed as Richard III. As is said in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, talking of the murder of a king, “if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” What would have been the critical factors at the time (and in which order of magnitude)? The realm needed a king, and a royal adult with a good deal of experience may have seemed a better bet than a minor, especially a minor under the control of his mother’s family. Had Richard been able to quiet misgivings about his accession and to impose strong rule upon the realm, it is possible that the fate of those little boys who had gone missing might never have loomed so large. Older folk could look back on Henry VI—king at nine months old and a long-term failure, easy prey to faction, bad advice, and unpopular policies.
World History
