“My will is now to be buried before an Image of our blissid Lady Mary, with my lord Richard, in Pomfrete.”
King Richard himself, if you remember, would suffer a similar fate two years later.
On the 23rd June, two days before his execution, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers added the following to his will. “My will is now to be buried before an Image of our blissid Lady Mary, with my lord Richard, in Pomfrete.” Records of 1483 show that Richard III’s receiver allowed the sum of 46s. 4d for the expense of burying Richard Grey, Rivers nephew.
King Richard himself, if you remember, would suffer a similar fate two years later.
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Sunday, 22nd June 1483 was the date originally set for Edward V’s coronation. Ralph Shaa preached at St Paul’s Cross on the theme that “bastard slips shall not take root”. I found the following among my paper on Richard III. I don't know who wrote it (I am sure it wasn't me) but it's rather brilliant.
"Last night I dreamt that I was directing a Hollywood movie about Richard’s life, starring George Peppard. We were shooting one of my favourite scenes. The one where our hero emerges from the throng, walks towards the camera, winks conspiratorially to the viewers, smiles knowingly, chomps on his nine inch Havana and utters that immortal line “I love it when a plan comes together. ” It seems that, as usual, the ‘A-Team’s ’plan was working perfectly. The bad guys had been outwitted effortlessly; all that was needed now was for Richard to be crowned and to live happily ever after. When I awoke from my cheerful slumbers, it was to the grim reality of history. This Sunday in 1483 was a pivotal moment in Richard’s life and in English history. Things would never be the same again for him or the realm. On Sunday 22 June 1483, Dr Ralph Shaa addressed a gathering of good and the great at St Paul's Cross to hear his sermon. His chosen theme was both controversial and regime changing: ‘Bastard slips shall not take root’. St Paul’s Cross was the usual venue for important official announcements, and they don’t come much more important that this one. We can be sure that Dr Shaa was acting on Richard’s behalf. His purpose was to put forward Richards claim to the crown. Given the importance of the occasion it is particularly disappointing that we don’t have any documentary evidence, or an eyewitness account of what the learned doctor actually said. Notwithstanding their proclivity for reporting every piece of royal tittle-tattle, the near-contemporary chronicles’ are unable to give a first-hand account of this meeting. All we have are the second-hand accounts of Mancini, More and Vergil et al. The problem with these is that they are hearsay and in Mancini’s case we are not even sure he understood what he was told. The Tudor writers such as More and Vergil were even further removed from these events and cannot be trusted to be objective. The controversy that has arisen concerns Richard’s true title to the crown. Mancini and Vergil maintain that his claim was on the basis of his brother’s bastardy. There is no mention of the pre-contract with Eleanor Butler being alleged at this meeting. The Great Chronicler declared the Richard’s claim was due to the fact that Edward’s children “were not the rightful inheritors of the crown” and that Edward was illegitimate. Croyland is quite clear: Richard alleged that a pre-contract between his brother and Eleanor Butler disqualified Edward’s children from succeeding to the crown. It is difficult at this distance of time and in the absence of reliable reports to be sure exactly what was said. However, on the balance of probabilities I personally believe that the pre-contract was raised at this meeting. It seems inconceivable to me that Richard would not base his claim to the throne on it at this meeting. It was a problem he had agonised over for two weeks, he had executed a former comrade in arms because of it and he had prepared for it. Why would he not put it forward as a reason now? (NB: To mention the subsequent role of Parliament and Titular Regius now is to anticipate the future, which I want to avoid doing.) The allegation of Edward’s illegitimacy is an old one. However, it is not an issue that Richard had ever raised before; indeed, we don’t even know that he believed the rumours. For me to accept that this was his only grounds for assuming the crown, would be to acknowledge that he did indeed usurp the crown. Richard’s reaction to the Woodville coup in April, his actions as Lord Protector during May and early June are not indicative of a man intent on usurping the crown. In fact, his actions support the opposite: Richard intended to see his young nephew crowned as king by right of succession. He had behaved impeccably according to the law." NB If I ever find out who did write this I will most certainly give you a slap on the back and place your name here. By G.K. Chesterton from “A Short History of England” “But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester, there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the medieval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth, treason. For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same as treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. When his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a new political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithless servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The modern world had begun." The call echoed unanswered down the ages; for since that day no English king has fought after that fashion.
On this day in 1483, William Hastings attended a council meeting at the Tower of London where he was accused of treason by Richard, Duke of Gloucester and later beheaded. So, did Richard execute Hastings without trial?
Here's what author Annette Carson thinks - "First let me run through the factual circumstances of the incident itself. We’ve had far too much smoke and mirrors already. Forget Tudor stories of witchcraft and withered arms; forget the small-talk of strawberries suddenly transmogrified into murderous fury; forget convenient self-incrimination provided by go-betweens. Colourful as these devices are, any creative writer will recognize them as classic misdirection. They’re calculated to distract from the pretence at the heart of the Tudor fabrication: that a Protector of the Realm, a mere five weeks into his appointment, could get away with unprovoked daylight murder of a peer in the middle of London, in front of witnesses, and still retain the complete confidence of the King’s Council and the Three Estates of Parliament who then collectively elected him King of England." I've never got my head around the events of this council meeting or William Hasting's eventually fate. As a Ricardian, I would like to think that Richard had no hand in Hastings death, but we cannot place him on a pedestal and think that he was beyond reproach, that does more harm than good. What we should look at is the situation from Richard's point of view and consider what was going on at this point in time. We should also bear in mind that this was a time when those who lived by the sword, died by the sword. Sadly, I'm afraid to say that, in my case, the jury is still out on this. History uses this event to vilify Richard, as do those in the art world, and no better example of this is the above painting by Victorian artist Sir John Gilbert. You can read a little more about Gilbert's painting in my blog on my website. The 11th June 1456, the birth of Anne Neville, daughter of Richard, Earl of Warwick and Anne Beauchamp and sister of Isabel. On the death of their father at the Battle of Barnet in 1471 they would become heiresses, not only of the Neville inheritance, but of the vast Beauchamp estates.
Despite their childhood friendship and their affection for each other you cannot dismiss the fact that this inheritance played a big part in the marriage arrangements of Richard Duke of Gloucester to Anne and his brother George Duke of Clarence to Isabel. History tells us that the fate of the two young sons of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was death, smothered in their beds by two men on the order of Richard III and their bodies buried at the foot of a set of stairs in the Tower of London. This tale comes from the pen of Thomas More in his History of Richard III. More writes "About midnight (the sely children lying in their beddes) came into the chamber, and sodainly lapped them vp among the clothes so be wrapped them and entangled them keping down by force the fetherbed and pillowes hard vnto their mouthes, that within a while smored and stifled, theyr breath failing, thei gaue vp to god their innocent soules into the ioyes of heauen, leauing to the tormentors their bodyes dead in the bed." and "Whiche after that the wretches parceiued, first by the strugling with the paines of death, and after long lying styll, to be throughly dead: they laide their bodies naked out vppon the bed, and fetched sir Iames to see them. Which vpon the sight of them, caused those murtherers........... to burye them at the stayre foote, metely depe in the grounde vnder a great heape of stones....... Than rode sir Iames in geat haste to king Richarde, and shewed him al the maner of the murther, who gaue hym gret thanks." Thomas More is not only responsible for the fact we consider a set remains, now resting in Westminster Abby, to be those of the two princes, but that their uncle was responsible for their deaths. I don't know what happened to these two boys in the summer of 1483, but what if More was wrong, what happened if they did survive? We are about to find out ...... Matthew Lewis's new book, The Survival of the Princes in the Tower: Murder, Mystery and Myth that is set for release at the beginning of September may tell us.
Richard III and his son Edward of Middleham can be seen below praying in this lovely window of St Mary & St Alkelda Church Middleham in Yorkshire. We can imagine that Richard used the church as a place for contemplation and to give thanks for being blessed with a son. Edward was born at Middleham's Castle, but within ten years the poor child would die there, an event that it is often thought to have occurred on the 9th of April 1484 - a strange date since it was the exact date of the death of his paternal uncle Edward IV the year before, and a date you might consider Richard's troubles began. In 1485 it was written in the Crowland Chronicles ‘In the following April, on a day not far off King Edward’s anniversary, this only son, on whom ... all hope of the royal succession rested, died in Middleham castle after a short illness’. History tells us it was in the second week of April that his parents received the tragic news, while they were in Nottingham, that Edward had died.
Sadly, there is no reference to where Richard had his son laid to rest. I am always a little sad when it comes round to the 16th March, and the anniversary of the death of Anne Neville. This is because it is so difficult to find facts about her other than she was the wife of Richard III, daughter of the King Maker, an heiress to a vast estate and dead at twenty-eight under a solar eclipse so the story goes. If I cannot find the real Anne Neville in words, then I can find her in art, and Edwin Austin Abbey's 1896 painting Richard Duke of Gloucester and Lady Anne does just that. I really love this painting. I love it even though it depicts Richard as the hunchbacked villain we know he wasn't. For me, this painting is all about Anne, see how beautifully she is drawn. Anne looks confident and determined, she is striding and moving fast in a effort to keep her distance from Gloucester, just look at how her black mourning veil covers the whole of her colourful, ermine edged dress. But what I find most interesting is, at first glance it appears that it is Anne who holds the halberd, when it is in fact the guard behind her, she is holding it as if she will do away with Gloucester with one stab of its blade. We know that Anne didn't hate Richard, that was Shakespeare's take on their story. We also know that Richard and Anne were acquainted in childhood, they were two people who were comfortable with one another whose marriage, had it continued, might have been a successful and happy one. In this one moment, perhaps we can see the real Anne Neville, not the mouse of a women we are lead to believe she was. Anne had been married, at just fourteen, to the heir to the throne of England, the son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou for just five months and widowed in the May of 1471. She soon married Richard, Duke of Gloucester and their son Edward, born in the December of 1473 was dead by the age of ten. Like a lot of medieval women, Anne's private life has passed undocumented, only the facts that linked her to the main events of the time are written of, leaving very little of her for us to get to know. At not yet twenty nine, Anne died on the 16th March 1485. According to Oppolzer's Canon of Eclipses on the 16th March 1485, the whole of southern Europe experienced a total solar eclipse. If Anne's death, wasn't devastating enough for Richard, then the blackening of the sun must have filled him with extreme foreboding, after all, the phenomenon of three suns, known as a Parhelion, that appeared at the battle of Mortimer's Cross in 1461 had been an inspiration to the troops and seen by his brother, the future Edward IV, as a good omen on his future reign. How very significant this eclipse must have been for poor Richard.
Anne died probably of tuberculous and is buried at Westminster Abbey by the High Altar, no doubt Richard intended a grand monument in her honour, but because of his tragic death at Bosworth five months later her grave was left unmarked, it was ignored by the new Tudor king, possibly in an effort to wipe her from history as he did with Richard III. The penultimate battle of the Wars of the Roses had ended with the death of Richard III at Bosworth. Henry of Richmond was England's new king, but Henry would have to fight one more major battle to rid himself of the mighty Plantagenet dynasty. One way to secure his claim to the throne of England would be to marry into his rival's family. On the 18th of January 1486, Henry did just that. Elizabeth of York, as the eldest daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, and whose two younger brothers had disappeared, would be a sparkling jewel in Henry's brand new crown. Was Henry's marriage to Elizabeth the consolidating event history leads us to believe, the joining of two warring families to make an united one for the benefit of a nation or was it purely for his own benefit? No, Henry was not playing happy families, he was playing poker, and marrying Elizabeth would put him one step nearer to a Royal Flush. Henry's marriage to Elizabeth closed one loop hole through which the Yorkist faction could reclaim the throne of England, after all, Elizabeth was considered the rightful Yorkist heir to the throne. What Henry didn't want was some noble, with Yorkist blood in his veins, marrying Elizabeth and producing a full blooded York heir.
The union of Henry Tudor to Elizabeth of York was a dynastic marriage, and Henry would not be the first or the last to use such an opportunity, but there were a few issues Henry had to deal with before the marriage could take place, one was Titulus Regius, there was also dispensations to be gained as Henry and Elizabeth were related in the double fourth degree of consanguinity, that is, they were both related to John of Gaunt. Three dispensations would be issued in total, the first was received at the beginning of 1484, the second two days before the wedding. Henry did not wait for the third to arrive, by the 2nd March Elizabeth was already pregnant. The Tudor family tree had finally secured its roots. The Wars of the Roses were a series of battles that took place over a thirty year period. The official start date was the 22nd May 1455 with the Battle of St Albans, but it is my belief that the seeds of this conflict were the issues between York and Somerset that were sown into a country that had real problems following the death of Edward, the Black Prince and the reign of Richard II. The year 1485 saw the death of Richard III at Bosworth, but there was a battle at Stoke near Newark, that is not shown on this map, that took place two years later following an uprising centered around Lambert Simnel, a Yorkist pretender. You can read about my first experience of the re enactment of the Battle of Bosworth here meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/wars-of-the-roses-blog/richard-iii-bosworth-field-and-me And about my visit to Stoke Field last year here:
meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/wars-of-the-roses-blog/battle-of-stoke-the-battlefield-site |
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