Unruly, p.32
Unruly, page 32
The most prominent Ricardian group is the Richard III Society, which helped to get what turned out to be the king’s remains exhumed on television from under a car park in Leicester in 2012. The skeleton, DNA analysis of which confirmed was Richard’s, caused a sensation and a legal battle between the authorities in Leicester, who wanted to reinter the remains in their cathedral, and another Ricardian organization of descendants from the Yorkist line, called the Plantagenet Alliance, who wanted him to be reburied in York on the basis that apparently it was what he would have wanted.
I find all this a bit daft. It’s nice to take an active interest in history – I’ve already admitted to supporting Harold of Hastings as if he were a football team. But we don’t and can’t really know these people. The only meaningful respect we can pay them is to acknowledge that unknowability. The truth is lost under centuries of propaganda and then centuries of contrarian rejection of it. It seems, though, from his skeleton, that Richard suffered from severe scoliosis, so he may have been a hunchback after all.
Richard’s nasty little reign
Apart from seizing the throne and having his nephews murdered, Richard seems comparatively nice. I realize that ‘apart from’ clause is doing a lot of work, but the Ricardians are right that, if they could only pin the whole nephew murder on to someone else, they’re a long way towards rehabilitating their hero. The usurpation is vanilla next to child murder. Several English kings started their reigns nicking the throne and yet comfortably evaded pariah status.
Richard still had a fair few other people killed, mind you. But that was mainly for treachery, which is par for the course for a king at the time. They all had traitors killed and you could even argue that, in a medieval context, that sort of firmness in leadership can save lives in the long run. Henry I wasted traitors at the drop of a hat and presided over a nice peaceful reign as a result. Meanwhile King Stephen could be a bit of a soft touch and his reign turned into an absolute car crash.
Before Edward IV died, Richard seemed like a decent, reliable sort. He was devoted to his brother the king and a capable lieutenant. In this he contrasted strongly with his elder (and Edward’s younger) sibling, the truculent Duke of Clarence, who caused so much trouble for Edward that finally the king had him attainted by parliament and discreetly executed in 1478. It’s said that this was done by drowning him in ‘a butt of Malmsey’ (a barrel of sweet wine, a bit like Madeira) but it’s probably just a tasty rumour.
Richard, in contrast, was loyal and militarily effective. He might have been the person responsible for murdering Henry VI – he was certainly in the Tower of London at the time – but, that aside, any aura of darkness is retrospectively imposed. He was exactly the kind of dependable member of the family whom Edward would have wanted to hold the fort during his son’s minority, just as the Duke of Bedford had done after Henry V shat his last.
Then, when Edward actually died, things changed. The family of Edward’s widow, the Woodvilles, had become very influential and her brother, Earl Rivers, was in charge of little Edward V. Richard, along with other influential magnates such as Lord Hastings and the Duke of Buckingham, were worried that the Woodvilles would use their control of the young king to control the government. So, three weeks after Edward IV’s death, Richard and Buckingham staged a coup and had Rivers and his nephew Sir Richard Grey, the queen’s son by her first marriage, arrested and executed. That’s when the young prince/king was taken to the Tower.
It wasn’t clear at that stage that Richard meant to make himself king, and maybe he hadn’t decided to yet. Moving swiftly against a rival faction was how you survived and succeeded during the Wars of the Roses. But Richard’s paranoia grew and, having dealt with the Woodville faction, and with the dowager queen seeking sanctuary in Westminster Abbey in fear of her safety, his allies started to drop away. Hastings was suddenly arrested and executed in June and, by October, even Buckingham had deserted him, joining a rebellion in favour of Henry Tudor. It failed, so Buckingham too was dead by the end of the year.
Richard’s initial ruthlessness may have been what he felt was necessary for his own safety. He may have been convinced that, in a Woodville-led government, he would have been an unwelcome overmighty subject whom they would take the first opportunity to dispose of. Hence his pre-emptive strike. Having done that, though, he needed to establish leadership that brought in all the other major factions within the kingdom. But he failed to do this, largely because his regime looked like it was founded on child murder, and probably was. The magnates were reluctant to trust anyone who could do that. Executing someone who betrays you was regal and ruthless and, as long as they weren’t minded to be treacherous themselves, could actually make the magnates feel safe. It was harsh but fair. Killing two innocent children in order to steal power was far too harsh and not at all fair. It destroyed trust.
Without trust, powerful people started to defect from the regime, which then became too narrowly centred on old retainers of Richard’s from his power base in the north. He couldn’t take the whole realm with him. Most of the stalwarts of his brother’s government were losing confidence in him. As trust diminished so his paranoia grew, and grew more justified. Gradually Henry Tudor, with his absurd remnant of a Lancastrian claim, a man who had been living in Brittany for years and barely knew England or spoke English, began to pick up support – Yorkish support as well as Lancastrian. Buckingham was an early example, and he failed and got beheaded, but events were moving in Henry’s favour.
Meanwhile, for Richard, life got worse and worse. In April 1484 his only legitimate son, Edward Prince of Wales, died at the age of ten. In March 1485 his wife, Anne Neville, died at the age of twenty-eight. Rumours then started to spread that he had poisoned her and was limbering up to marry his niece Elizabeth of York, whom Henry Tudor had already pledged to marry if he became king in order to unite the Yorkist and Lancastrian lines. Even by the standards of medieval royal weddings, Richard marrying his niece was far too incestuous and, to get a dispensation for that, he’d have to catch the pope drunk after a big win on the horses. It was fine for Henry Tudor to marry her though, because he was only marginally more closely related to the royal family than Josh Widdicombe.
The general sense of revulsion was such that Richard ended up publicly denying that he had ever had any intention of marrying his niece. Meanwhile he was making overtures to Francis II, Duke of Brittany, to get Henry turfed out of his long-term place of asylum – but this backfired when Henry fled to Paris and garnered the support of the new French king, Charles VIII.
It was Charles who lent Henry the money to assemble an invasion force in the summer of 1485. Henry and his uncle Jasper set sail from Normandy with a small fleet and 4,000 men and landed near Milford Haven on 7 August. They marched through Wales and into England, picking up some support on the way. The most significant support they picked up, however, was at the actual battle that Henry fought against Richard, at Bosworth in Leicestershire on 22 August. This was from the Stanleys – Sir William Stanley and Lord Stanley, the latter being married to Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort.
They had turned up at Bosworth with thousands of troops but undecided as to which side to support. The fact that they plumped for the Tudors at the eleventh hour made all the difference, as did the fact that Henry Percy, (still 4th) Earl of Northumberland, who had arrived with a large force to support Richard, decided not to join in the fighting at all. The confidence in the House of York that Edward IV had earned from the magnates had been wiped out by his brother in little more than two years, so that even those who rode to battle with him were willing to change sides, or abandon him, in the happy event that he looked like losing.
Henry, or rather his general John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, won the day and Richard was killed. The dead king was then stripped naked, his crown plonked on Henry’s head, and taken to Leicester where he was buried in the church of Greyfriars which, in 1538, closed down to be replaced by something which was replaced by something which was [insert 500 years of town planning here] replaced by something which was replaced by a car park. He lay there for centuries until he was discovered by Channel 4, only about ten years after I was.
34. King Henry VII
It’s the end of the middle ages! I expect you know that that’s simplistic. The middle ages aren’t something that ended on a specific date. Still, they have ended and they did happen. So, at some point, the latter state was supplanted by the former. And if you had to pick a year somewhere in that gradual process, 1485 is a reasonable one to go for but for the disadvantage of having been traditionally cited as the end of the middle ages and so attracting a queue of historians keen to say why that’s wrong, which isn’t the case with other years that might be far less reasonably suggested, such as 112 BC or 1978.
We should enjoy it. Change is in the air – there’s a Renaissance already under way down on the Med where it’s always nicer, then as now. The paintings are starting to look less wonky. The famous one of Henry VII is quite realistic, though it’s strange that he’s depicted in a sort of booth with his hands over the edge, rather like a celebrity on Blankety Blank. In 1476 William Caxton set up the first printing press in England so more books are becoming available to a more literate populace.
Most of the change, though, is yet to come, which is the problem with declaring the middle ages over. It wouldn’t have felt like they were over at the time. The next century would see the growth of towns and huge expansion in trade, industry and population. Items such as glass and chairs, the preserve of the mega-rich up to this point, would become affordable by the merely affluent. Feudalism is fading away and the bourgeoisie is coming. But you couldn’t necessarily feel the approach of that change if you were collecting body parts in the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth.
However, something fundamental had changed about the nature of kingship. That’s what gradually became clear once the Wars of the Roses ended. It was weakened. People didn’t believe in it in the same way. That has nice long-term consequences like freedom and democracy, but not so great short-term ones.
Emerging as it did from the Dark Ages, the lawless chasm that opened up as the Roman Empire contracted, the concept of kingship turned into something that felt eternal and solid and godly. There simply was a king and that was that. For a long time it was his coronation and anointing that mainly made him a king. Then the notion morphed a bit and a man’s place in a line of succession based on primogeniture came to feel more significant than an archbishop’s deployment of a metal hat and blob of goo. Either way, there was a strong sense that a king wasn’t just a normal person. He possessed an ineffable specialness.
But the filthy habit of usurping rightful kings that the English royal family slipped into during the fourteenth century started to erode that sense of specialness. Everyone knew Henry Tudor was a bit of a random king – including Henry himself. He was the least qualified by blood of any ruler since Harold Godwinson, and he didn’t have Harold’s knowledge or experience to mitigate the flimsiness of his claim. He might do the job of king perfectly well – that was what everyone was hoping after Bosworth – but, if he did, that would weaken the institution further. It would make a mockery of centuries of assumptions about who can rule whom. If Henry Tudor can have a go, anyone can.
A few years ago, in an episode of QI that I appeared in, Stephen Fry explained that almost everyone in western Europe is a direct descendant of Charlemagne, and almost everyone in the UK a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. These were facts based on overwhelming statistical likelihood: someone of English ancestry living today will have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. Spin this back ten centuries and their number of ancestors hits about eight billion, many times the total number of humans alive on earth at that time, let alone in England and Normandy. So, a person living now must be descended from a person living then by many many different routes, not just one. That makes the chances of any given person with any English ancestry at all not descending from William by at least one of those routes so vanishingly small as to be, in practical terms, impossible.
Royal blood gets everywhere, basically. Just ask Richard III after a clean-up at the Tower. As soon as the principle of a line of succession is gone, and kingship is discussed in Henry Tudorish terms of having a bit of royal blood, then the concept of royalty starts to become meaningless. Kings are reduced to what they started out as: dictators. People don’t think the kings are legitimate and the kings don’t feel legitimate themselves. Governmental self-confidence and confidence in government are both undermined. People are governed not with their consent but through fear. It’s not as nice.
It feels strange to be saying this about the beginning of the Tudor age, perhaps the most famous era of English kingship. A lot of that fame, though, is because of the paintings and the palaces they left. The Renaissance blasted the image of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I on to the night sky like the bat signal. But that projection of regal magnificence, of strength, is a technique for concealing weakness. They weren’t Plantagenets and they knew it. By reigning as successfully as they did, they proved that being a Plantagenet had never really meant anything anyway.
Anyone can say they’re the king
The most interesting consequence of this creeping sense that kingship wasn’t really a thing was the advent of a new sort of rival claimant to the throne: normal members of the public. There were two of these in the first half of Henry’s reign. They didn’t admit they were normal members of the public, they said they were members of the House of York. But they were lying.
The first said he was Edward Earl of Warwick, but he couldn’t have been because Edward Earl of Warwick was still living in the Tower of London. The second said he was Richard Duke of York, Edward V’s younger brother, but he couldn’t have been either because Richard was also still in the Tower of London, but not living. Their real names were Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck and they both caused a lot of trouble.
Simnel, who had been schooled in his deception by a priest in Oxford, emerged in Ireland where everyone seemed to believe his story. He was crowned King Edward VI at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin with a gold headband that they’d pinched off a statue of Mary. His key sponsor/puppet master was John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, grandson of the de la Pole who was a favourite of Henry VI but, more relevantly, nephew of both Edward IV and Richard III (his mother was their sister).
They invaded with a reasonable-sized army in June 1487 which Henry VII defeated with a bigger army at the Battle of Stoke Field. Lincoln was killed and the king then pardoned Simnel, giving him a job in the royal kitchens which, at that point, he was very grateful for. What is weird, though, is how the fact that Simnel wasn’t really a member of the House of York didn’t seem to matter to those supporting him, some of whom were members of that House themselves. They were very happy to have a pop at making him king, even though he had no right to it at all. In practical terms, this didn’t disqualify him for the role. They were coming perilously close to concluding that a king is just a guy with a gold hat.
Warbeck’s attempts to gain the throne caused even more trouble for Henry, though he didn’t have to fight a battle on English soil this time. Throughout the 1490s, Warbeck was pottering round the continent, gaining support at various times from the King of France, Margaret dowager Countess of Burgundy, who was Richard III’s sister and the aunt of the person Warbeck was claiming to be, Maximilian, the Habsburg who was soon to be Holy Roman emperor, and James IV of Scotland. A very posh bunch. Henry actually invaded France in 1492 to stop Charles VIII from supporting Warbeck and, much like Edward IV seventeen years earlier, ended up being bought off with a nice treaty and pension.
But still the Warbeck threat persisted – wherever he went people called him Richard IV. Like all conspiracy theories, it started to grow simply because it couldn’t be snuffed out. Members of Henry’s court, including Sir William Stanley, were revealed as secret Yorkist sympathizers and were beheaded. But Warbeck wasn’t a Yorkist really – he was just a guy. Many people must have realized that. Where had this Richard of York been during Richard III’s reign if he was still alive? How did he manage to pop up on the international scene eight years after he had disappeared? None of it made sense, except in the context of Henry VII’s slender claims to royalty: if Henry Tudor can say he’s king, why can’t anybody?
Warbeck was finally captured in the autumn of 1497 after trying to start a Cornish uprising. He was taken to the Tower where he was treated reasonably and held alongside the Earl of Warwick, the very person Lambert Simnel had tried to impersonate. Warwick and Warbeck formed a sort of mad bond and resolved to escape together. Their failed attempt to do this in 1499 led to them both being executed. Warwick, as genuine royalty, was beheaded at Tower Hill but Warbeck, who had long since confessed his true identity as a chancer from the Low Countries, had to travel standard class: he was hanged at Tyburn.
A centrist rose
Henry Tudor was crowned in some majesty in October 1485. He did this before he married Elizabeth of York in order to make clear that he had the legitimate Lancastrian claim to the throne and didn’t need her permission or bloodline to be king. This was all the more important to emphasize because it wasn’t true.
He adopted the red rose to symbolize the House of Lancaster. It’s a badge that had hardly been used before, though the white one had become a symbol of the House of York. But Henry adopted it on his accession because he was getting ready to launch a new rose, in the wake of his marriage to Elizabeth of York and her coronation as queen in 1486. This was the Tudor rose and it was red and white. That was how Henry intended to spin the House of Tudor: the joining of the two rival sides of the old House of Plantagenet into a new royal dynasty that drew its legitimacy from both of them. By emphasizing this truth, he obscured the fact that it also didn’t draw quite enough legitimacy from either of them.
