Authors: Sarah Gristwood
In the event the council took a decision which they hoped would neatly evade these problems. Edward V could become a legal adult at his coronation – he was, after all, twelve, and Henry VI had been declared adult when not much older; this was a device which would allow the council to govern under the boy king’s nominal rule. It looked like a balanced and viable decision, but it ignored one thing. A twelve-year-old was inevitably going to fall under somebody’s sway, and he would have ever more opportunity to be influenced by it as he neared maturity and exercised more actual governance. That somebody was likely to come from the mother’s family who had surrounded him since infancy.
Dominic Mancini, the commentator who dismissed Edward’s daughters, was, ironically, the one who described how Richard (incited by Hastings) wrote to the council on hearing the news of his brother’s death, emphasising his rights and his long tradition of loyalty. ‘He had been loyal to his brother Edward, at home and abroad, in peace and war, and would be, if only permitted, equally loyal to his brother’s issue, even female …
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if perchance, which God forbid, the youth should die.’
On 14 April Prince Edward was told of his father’s death; two days later a letter declares his intention of setting out from Ludlow ‘in all convenient haste’. There was considerable debate as to the number of men who should accompany him on his journey: some ‘suggested more, some less’. All who were present, Mancini says, keenly desired that this prince should succeed his father in all his glory; but feared if the Woodvilles were allowed to escort young Edward to his coronation ‘with an immoderate number of horse’ it would be impossible subsequently to get rid of them. Hastings in particular (between whom and the Woodvilles there was ‘much ill-will’) warned that an army would send the wrong signal; and Elizabeth took the point. Indeed, Crowland describes how ‘The Queen most beneficently tried to extinguish every spark of murmuring and disturbance, and wrote to her son, requesting him on his road to London, not to exceed an escort of two thousand men.’
It was 24 April before the king, his escort headed by his uncle Anthony Woodville and his half-brother Richard Grey, finally left Ludlow. Richard of Gloucester was also on the move, leaving his wife Anne Neville behind in the north. It may seem strange – or significant – that Anne herself was not on the way down to take part in her nephew’s coronation, scheduled for less than a week away. But it is unknown how far, at this stage, Richard’s own plans went – let alone how much he had confided to his wife.
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When the young king and his entourage diverted to meet his uncle Richard on the 29th at Stony Stratford in Northamptonshire, there was no apparent reason to fear. Richard, after all, had already ‘wrote unto the King [Edward V] so reverently, and to the Queen’s friends, there so lovingly’, says More, that they ‘nothing earthly’ mistrusted. He had moreover himself sworn, and required all northerners to swear likewise, an oath to Edward V.
While the king remained at Stony Stratford for the evening Richard, and Buckingham who had joined him, invited Anthony Woodville (Lord Rivers) to dine where they were staying at Northampton, some 11 miles away. The party made ‘much friendly cheer’, and parted for the night with ‘great courtesy’. But next morning when Woodville came to leave he found he was locked in, arrested by Richard’s men. Meanwhile Buckingham rode to Stony Stratford to inform Edward that his uncle Anthony and both his half-brothers, among others, stood accused of attempting to rule the king and to cause dissension in the realm. Edward, if Mancini is to be believed, answered courageously and to the point: that these were the ministers his father had given him, and he trusted his father’s judgement; that concerning the government of the kingdom ‘he had complete confidence in the peers of the realm and the queen’. Then, ‘On hearing the queen’s name, the duke of Buckingham, who loathed her race … answered, “It was not the business of women but of men to govern kingdoms, and so if he cherished any confidence in her he had better relinquish it.”’ Anthony Woodville and Richard Grey were sent north, to be held in one of Richard’s castles.
On hearing what had taken place, Elizabeth’s first reaction was to strike back. ‘When this news was announced in London the unexpectedness of the event horrified every one,’ Mancini reported. Elizabeth and her elder Grey son, Dorset, ‘began collecting an army, to defend themselves, and to set free the young king from the clutches of the dukes. But when they had exhorted certain nobles who had come to the city, and other, to take up arms, they perceived that men’s minds were not only irresolute, but altogether hostile to themselves. Some even said openly that it was more just and profitable that the youthful sovereign should be with his paternal uncle than with his maternal uncles and uterine brothers.’ Other sources suggest that Elizabeth fled with her children into sanctuary the minute she heard the news; whatever the order of events, flee she certainly did.
Elizabeth surely cannot be blamed for fleeing into sanctuary; though it has often been seen as hysterical and unnecessary, a move designed to wrongfoot Richard, the man she saw as her enemy. More describes how ‘the Queen in great flight and heaviness, bewailing her child’s ruin, her friends’ mischance, and her own infortune, damning the time that ever she dissuaded the gathering of power about the king, got herself in all the haste possible with her younger son and her daughters out of the Palace of Westminster in which she then lay, into the Sanctuary’. Dorset and her brother Lionel, the bishop, were to join her there. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England, went to see Elizabeth in the midst of the crisis and described a scene of chaos: ‘much heaviness, rumble, haste and business, carriage and conveyance of her stuff into sanctuary, chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trusses, all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some loading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down the walls to bring in the next way …’. The queen herself, as More reports Rotherham’s finding, ‘sat alone low on the rushes all desolate and dismayed’.
He comforted her in the best manner he could and gave into her custody the Privy Seal, of which he was keeper. It showed there was still a game to play. But the archbishop regretted his impetuous move and next day sent to ask for his seal back. After all, Richard had not moved against the crown as such. Hastings (who, in Crowland’s words, was congratulating himself that the whole affair had been accomplished with no more bloodshed than ‘might have come from a cut finger’) was reassuring those in London that Richard was still faithful to Edward’s wishes and that nothing whatsoever had been done save a transfer of power from one to another side of the new king’s family.
On 4 May the young Edward entered London, riding in blue in a splendid procession, obsequiously attended by Richard who had technically done nothing to breach his oath of loyalty. This should have been the day of Edward’s coronation, which was now postponed to the end of June. On the 7th a meeting was held at Baynard’s Castle, Cecily Neville’s London residence, at which the most powerful lords of the country, spiritual and temporal – Richard among them – officially took possession of Edward IV’s goods, seals and jewels on the grounds that they were executors of his will. In the will of 1475, of course, Elizabeth had been among the executors. Richard, says Mancini, had arrived in London preceded by four wagons bearing the Woodville emblems and loaded with arms, which he claimed were designed to be used against him. The excuse was obviously trumped up – Mancini says everyone knew the weapons had really been collected to use against the Scots – but Richard’s move must have seemed another ominous sign to Elizabeth in sanctuary.
At a council meeting on 27 May Richard was declared the man ‘thought most meet to be the Protector of the King and his realm’. He would hold the post, however, only until Edward was crowned and declared of age just four weeks later, which opened up the prospect of fresh dispute and may have helped push Richard to seek a more definitive solution.
Some time in the first few weeks after his arrival the young king was moved, at Buckingham’s suggestion, from the Bishop of London’s palace (too small for a full royal retinue) to the Tower. There was nothing sinister in that, necessarily – the Tower was a conventional royal residence, traditionally used by monarchs preceding their coronation. Moreover, it is hard to think where better Edward could have gone: the out-of-town palaces like Sheen and Eltham were too distant, and the nearer Westminster was ineligible because his mother was self-immured close by.
There seems to have been a tentative plan for Richard to continue his role at head of government beyond the coronation – there must also have been a fear that the king, once declared of age, would recall his mother and her family to his side. Elizabeth’s brother Edward had been commanding a fleet in the Channel to guard against the French, but now his soldiers were ordered to desert while he himself was to be seized; in fact, he escaped with two ships and made his way to Henry Tudor in Brittany.
Richard was possibly already taking steps towards claiming the throne for himself. It has been suggested that, in the early days of June, Bishop Stillington (who some sources said had married Edward IV to Eleanor Butler before he married Elizabeth Woodville) told the council what he knew. One chronicle describes doctors, proctors and depositions being brought in to the lords. A case was being prepared.
A letter from Simon Stallworthe to Sir William Stonor on 9 June reports that the Queen ‘keeps still at Westminster’. ‘My Lord Protector, My Lord of Buckingham with all other lords as well temporal as spiritual were at Westminster in the Council Chamber from 10 to 2, but there was none that spoke with the Queen.’ There was, he says, ‘great business’ about the young king’s coronation which was due to take place just a fortnight later; and when he adds that ‘My Lady of Gloucester’ – Anne Neville – came to London ‘on Thursday last’, the assumption must still have been that it was to attend this function. The parliament which always followed a coronation had been called; government was working normally. But there is a hint that even outside the Protector’s rooms other possibilities were being mooted, when Stallworthe urges Stonor to come to town ‘and then shall you know all the world’.
On the 10th and 11th June Richard wrote respectively to the city of York and to Lord Neville of Raby (his mother’s family, whatever divisions there had been in it), asking them to bring troops from the north with all diligence ‘to aid and assist us against the Queen, her bloody adherents and affinity; which have intended and daily doth intend to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin the Duke of Buckingham and the old royal blood of the realm’. It is a reasonable assumption that Elizabeth was still hoping – plotting – to overthrow him, although her Grey son and her brother, hostages in Richard’s custody, may have given her pause. But it is hard to believe Richard really feared she still had the means to put her hopes into effect; the more so because of what happened on 13 June.
The exact circumstances of the story, as described by Thomas More, have reinforced the legend of Richard’s villainy. He arrived smiling at a council meeting, praising the strawberries from the Bishop of Ely’s garden. This was Bishop Morton, Margaret Beaufort’s ally.
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But after Richard left the room, he returned with a frowning face and accusation on his lips. More’s account has Richard pulling up his sleeve to show a withered arm. ‘See in what wise that sorceress [Queen Elizabeth] and others of her counsel, as Shore’s wife with her affinity, have by their sorcery and witchcraft thus washed my body’, Richard said. ‘Jane’ Shore, once Edward IV’s ‘merriest harlot’, was now the lover of Lord Hastings; and More shows his scepticism about that part of the story in particular. ‘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.’ But Hastings and Morton were both arrested, also on the charge of having plotted to destroy Richard, and Hastings, hitherto Richard’s ally, was (so the dramatic tale goes) unceremoniously beheaded the same day.
This looks like the first indisputable evidence that Richard now sought the crown. Hastings, Edward IV’s loyal friend, may well have believed the country would be better governed in Edward V’s minority by his father’s loyal and able brother than by the queen and her family, but he would surely have baulked at what was to follow.
After this, events moved swiftly. At the next meeting of the council Richard insisted that his namesake, Elizabeth Woodville’s second son, be brought out of sanctuary – nominally, to attend his brother’s coronation. On 16 June a delegation was sent,
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and More details their arguments at length. Some were technical: that an innocent child could have no reason to claim – could have no reason to be given – sanctuary, which was for those who had done wrong or who had reason to hide; that it was as reasonable for the council to fear to leave the prince in the queen’s hands as for her to fear to hand him over, since he might be spirited away. Other arguments were political: that the queen’s evident refusal to trust the council was causing division in the realm and distrust outside it. One objection was directly gender-related: that her refusal sprang from what the senior cleric present charitably called ‘womanish fear’ but the Duke of Buckingham called ‘womanish frowardness [perversity]’.
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Other points were designed to appeal directly to a mother’s heart. Elizabeth was, the delegation accused her in a shrewd blow, like Medea avenging herself at the expense of her own children by keeping her son mewed up in sanctuary. The lords asserted it was no place for a child, being full of ‘a rabble of thieves, murderers, and malicious heinous traitors’. Young Edward V needed his brother’s company, they insisted, and a life without play was unsuited to ‘their both ages and estates’. The saga of argument and counter-argument runs on for pages.