Authors: Sarah Gristwood
Of the three main conspirators it was inevitably Buckingham, the man, who took charge of the armed rebellion launched on 18 October. Leading his men from Wales, he was to have joined up with the other military leaders – Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset among them – but freak weather conditions made it impossible for his forces to cross the swollen river Severn. His men began to desert and – probably contrary to expectations – Margaret Beaufort’s husband Stanley remained loyal to the king.
Henry Tudor’s attempts to sail from Brittany with a fleet provided by the Breton duke had likewise repeatedly been thwarted by the weather; and by the time he saw the English coast, it was evident that his only option was to sail back across the Channel. Buckingham was captured – betrayed by his servant for the reward – and summarily executed. Others, including Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset, fled abroad to join Henry. But as so often with women’s stories, that clear and simply told version is not the whole tale. Each conspirator had different aims.
It is often said that Elizabeth Woodville must have known the princes were dead or she would never have gone along with this plan. But against that is the fact that her late husband Edward IV had, at the end of his life, promoted the idea of bringing Henry Tudor safely into the fold. It is, moreover, possible that she had originally agreed to throw her weight behind the rebellion in the belief that it would place her living son on the throne. Crowland certainly suggests that the rebels first contemplated arms in the prince’s name and then, after ‘a rumour arose that King Edward’s sons, by some unknown manner of violent destruction, had met their fate’, turned to Henry Tudor in their need for ‘someone new at their head’.
It is Margaret Beaufort’s position that is more equivocal. If her sole aim were to bring her son safely home she might simply have continued negotiating with Richard – unless she mistrusted him and feared treachery. If, however, by the time she committed herself to the rebellion she knew or believed the princes were dead, the situation would have changed significantly. Henry Tudor’s chances were better; and Elizabeth of York more important. If she did believe this, she must have considered whether to share that belief with Elizabeth Woodville or to conceal it.
Buckingham’s position is yet more puzzling. Most commentators now dismiss Vergil’s idea that he had quarrelled with Richard over lands promised but not granted. He may have been belatedly defending the rights of princes he believed to be still living. No manifesto for the rebels survives, but it seems that the rebellion (or, at least some of the minor risings) were indeed popular ventures aimed at freeing the princes. Crowland reports that ‘in order to deliver them from this captivity, the people of the southern and western parts of the kingdom began to murmur greatly, and to form meetings and confederacies’. But as word of the princes’ deaths filtered out, Buckingham’s involvement became anomalous. He may have been genuinely disinterested enough to wish, while avenging the princes, to elevate Henry Tudor to the crown. But from everything that is known of him it seems unlikely.
Buckingham may well have been an opportunist, taking advantage of the princes’ deaths to promote his own claim. If so, he probably hoped to dupe Margaret Beaufort into believing he supported her son’s claim – striking a deal with her to get the Tudor and Woodville supporters as allies, while planning to take Henry Tudor’s place himself. But it is just conceivable that he was himself the dupe – that Margaret (his aunt, through her marriage to Stafford) invited him to join a rebellion nominally in support of the princes, while actually interested only in her own son.
There is yet another possibility – that Buckingham had the best of all reasons to know that a rebellion could safely be raised in the princes’ name, without in the end placing an Edward V on the throne. He was to some contemporaries, and remains today, an outside candidate for villain of the story
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– the murderer of the princes. On the failure of his rebellion, Buckingham was executed by Richard on 2 November. But that, perhaps, just makes him even more convenient a scapegoat.
The majority of historians from Vergil and More onwards
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have believed that Richard III murdered his nephews; and thanks largely to Shakespeare, it has become the accepted view among many who care nothing for history. A vocal minority are utterly convinced he was not guilty, while propounding various alternative versions of the boys’ fate. Others again believe it is virtually impossible to be certain, which makes it wrong to declare Richard guilty. In that uncertainty the writer’s most honourable option is simply to present both the few known facts, and the relevant theories.
If Richard did not kill the boys, we have to ask why he did not simply produce them when rumours of their murder began to spread. One conceivable reason he did not is that he knew they had died – by someone else’s hand, or indeed from natural causes – and that he would be blamed for their deaths anyway.
While both Richard and Buckingham certainly had both motive and opportunity, so too did others – such as the adherents of the man who would become Henry VII. Candidates suggested include Margaret Beaufort’s ally Bishop Morton; her husband Lord Stanley; and Margaret Beaufort herself.
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Assumptions about her gender may have insulated Margaret from suspicion, but the early seventeenth-century antiquary George Buck claimed to have read ‘in an old manuscript book’ that it ‘was held for certain that Dr Morton and a certain countess, [conspirin]g the deaths of the sons of King Edward and some others, resolved that these treacheries should be executed by poison and by sorcery’.
Henry Tudor, of course, was out of the country; some dismiss him for that reason, but he had a highly able and totally committed representative in the person of his mother. None of the leading candidates was in London for the whole of the relevant period, but it is unreasonable to claim that any grandee would necessarily have done the deed themselves. The Tudor party had plenty of motive. For Richard to rule, it was technically necessary only that the boys should be declared illegitimate, and this he had arranged soon after his brother’s death. If Henry were to bolster his own genealogically weak claim with that of Elizabeth of York, he needed the princes dead. If the whole family were declared illegitimate, then Elizabeth had no claim. If they were legitimate, her brothers’ claim would take precedence over hers for as long as they lived. What is more, while the assumption of Richard’s guilt depends on a posthumous reputation for savagery it was Henry VII (and later Henry VIII) who would, one by one, eliminate all the rival Yorkist line with chilling efficiency.
If track record is anything to go by, practically any ruler of the era could have done the deed. Edward IV, after all, had had his own brother Clarence executed, and had possibly had Henry VI and Henry’s son murdered. The fact that the princes were under age makes all the difference to modern minds, but it may not have done so in the fifteenth century. Childhood ended early in those days: if Edward V did die soon after his uncle’s accession, he was not much younger than Margaret Beaufort had been at the time of her pregnancy. The twenty-first-century image of the boys is much influenced by Victorian painting, showing them in flaxen-haired innocence.
There was certainly a mounting body of rumour. Weinreich’s
Danzig Chronicle
of 1483 claimed that ‘Later this summer Richard the king’s brother seized power and had his brother’s children killed, and the queen secretly put away’. The French chancellor Guillaume de Rochefort warned the States General in a speech on 15 January the following year: ‘Look what has happened in [England] since the death of King Edward: how his children, already big and courageous, have been put to death with impunity, and the royal crown transferred to their murderer by the favour of the people.’ Not every accusatory finger, however, was pointed at Richard. The
Historical notes of a London citizen
declared that: ‘King Edward the Vth, late called Prince of Wales and Richard Duke of York, his brother … were put to death in the Tower of London by the vise [advice] of the Duke of Buckingham.’
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Other contemporaries heard different stories that did not speak of murder at all. The Silesian visitor Nicolaus von Popplau reported hearing the rumours in 1484 but added: ‘Many people say – and I agree with them – that they are still alive and kept in a very dark cellar.’ Even Vergil reported whisperings that they had been sent to ‘some secret land’. The usually reliable Crowland does not actually say Richard killed the boys, mentioning only the rumour.
What everyone thought, of course, is not evidence, which is in short supply.
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Over the centuries many have taken as conclusive the dubious confession to the murders supposedly made in 1502 by Sir James Tyrell – but that is something that could not have been known in 1483. The princes’ mother and sisters may not have known what to believe; they may have had to persuade themselves to believe what was necessary.
Stanley, look to your wife. If she convey
Letters to Richmond, you shall answer it.
Richard III
, 4.2
When, following the October rebellion, Richard III called a parliament, Henry Tudor was inevitably among those attainted but was beyond reach of punishment, back in Brittany. His connections in England, however, were in less safe a position.
Margaret Beaufort was attainted at the end of 1483: ‘Forasmuch as Margaret Countess of Richmond, Mother to the king’s great Rebel and Traitor, Henry Earl of Richmond, hath of late conspired, “confedered”, and committed high Treason against our sovereign lord the king Richard the Third, in diverse and sundry wises.’ But in the end, as so often with women, the full lethal penalties were not enacted. ‘Yet nevertheless, our said Sovereign lord, of his grace especial, remembering the good and faithful service that Thomas lord Stanley hath done … and for his sake, remitteth and will forbear the great punishment of attainder of the said countess, that she or any other so doing hath deserved.’
Her goods were to be taken away from her, but given over to her husband for the term of his life. Richard, like Edward before him, hesitated altogether to alienate such a powerful and chancy magnate as Stanley. Margaret had chosen her latest husband well. She was, however, to be held in Stanley’s charge and deprived of ‘any servant or company’. The instructions made it clear that this was less a punitive measure, more a means of preventing her from taking further action: Vergil reports that ‘she should not be able from thenceforth to send any messages neither to her son, nor friends, nor practise anything at all against the king’. Her immediate future lay in the north, probably (since it was there that Stanley later asked leave to retire) in his residences of Lathom and Knowsley.
Henry Parker, a member of Margaret’s household towards the end of her life, wrote that ‘neither prosperity made her proud, nor adversity overthrew her constant mind, for albeit that in king Richard’s days, she was often in jeopardy of her life, yet she bare patiently all trouble in such wise, that it is wonder to think it’. That is later hagiography: at the time even she must have been in a tumult of regret and fear. But the very fact of an uprising in her son’s name must have underlined his present closeness to the throne, and she continued to exert herself on his behalf. There is some evidence, too, that Stanley secretly but actively continued to support her in this.
On Christmas Day 1483, in Rennes Cathedral in Brittany, Henry Tudor made a public declaration of his intention to marry Princess Elizabeth, now nearing her eighteenth birthday. He was aiming to catch the disaffected elements from the now-divided Yorkist party, and his existing supporters swore homage to him as if he were already king. Elizabeth of York, however, was still with her mother, increasingly isolated in sanctuary where Buckingham’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville’s sister, had now joined the family of women.
On 23 January 1484 Richard’s parliament enacted the bill of Titulus Regius, starting that ‘the said pretended marriage betwixt the above named King Edward and Elizabeth Grey, was made of great presumption, without the knowing and assent of the Lords of this Land’. More to the point, it declared also that at the time of that marriage ‘and before and long time after, the said King Edward was and stood troth plighted to one Dame Eleanor Butler’; and that because of this Edward and Elizabeth had ‘lived together sinfully and damnably in adultery’. It went on to assert that, because their children were thus bastards, they were ‘unable to inherit or to claim anything by inheritance, by the Law and Custom of England’.
The marriage, according to the bill, had been made ‘by Sorcery and Witchcraft, committed by the said Elizabeth, and her Mother Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford’. Jacquetta of course was dead, as were her accusers at that time too, so the sorcery allegation was credited as ‘the common opinion of the people and the publique voice and fame is through all this land’. Any allegations of the living Cecily’s adultery were not repeated, unless something is implied in Richard’s description of himself as ‘the undoubted son’ of York. But the allegation against Elizabeth Woodville stood, apparently uncontested; and if her brothers were by now dead, the real point of Titulus Regius must have been the political disabling of Elizabeth of York. Crowland wrote simply that parliament ‘confirmed the title, by which the king had in the preceding summer, ascended the throne’ – even though, as the clerical author sniffily pointed out, the lay court was hardly empowered to determine the validity of a marriage (a matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction) and only reluctantly ‘presumed’ to do so.