Richard III in the North Read online

  RICHARD III IN THE NORTH

  To Arthur and Edward, historians of the future!

  Our princes in the Brackenbury Tower.

  RICHARD III IN THE NORTH

  M.J. TROW

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

  PEN AND SWORD HISTORY

  An imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  Yorkshire – Philadelphia

  Copyright © M.J. Trow, 2020

  ISBN 978 1 52677 717 1

  ePUB ISBN 978 1 52677 718 8

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 52677 719 5

  The right of M.J. Trow to be identified as Author of

  this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: Looking for Richard

  Chronology

  Chapter 1: Conisbrough

  Chapter 2: Raby

  Chapter 3: Ludlow

  Chapter 4: Wakefield

  Chapter 5: Towton

  Chapter 6: Middleham and Sheriff Hutton

  Chapter 7: Barnet and Tewkesbury

  Chapter 8: Lord of the North

  Chapter 9: Scotland

  Chapter 10: Pontefract

  Chapter 11: The Black Deeps

  Chapter 12: Royal Progress

  Chapter 13: Bosworth

  Chapter 14: Beneath Swaledale

  Epilogue: The Angel of the North?

  Appendix I: Richard’s Places in the North

  Appendix II: The Murders of Richard III

  Select Bibliography

  Author’s Note

  The North

  Geographical terms are relative and in a book like this, charting the life of Richard Plantagenet, the story inevitably travels all over the place. In the fifteenth century, the North meant anywhere north of the River Trent which rises in Biddulph Moor, Staffordshire and flows in a broad crescent shape to Alkborough, where it joins the Humber on its way to Hull and the North Sea.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank everyone who has helped in the creation of this book, from those who have granted permission to use photographs to those who have been unfailing in their kindness, providing coffee and cake at numerous Richard sites across the North and elsewhere.

  I must say thank you to Heather Williams and everyone at Pen and Sword – this is a book which I have wanted to write for so long and her enthusiasm on being presented with the project was wonderful.

  Above all, and, as always, I want to record my thanks to my wife, Carol. She has always helped with useful critiques of my texts in her capacity as a professional editor, but in this instance has also provided first rate photographs and diagrams and has traipsed with me over some pretty rough terrains in less than kind weather.

  Except where otherwise credited, the photographs are copyright Carol Trow. Diagrams of castles and battlefields, maps and heraldic designs are copyright M.J. Trow.

  Prologue

  Looking for Richard

  ‘Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are all entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality.’

  Sir Ranulph Crow 1625

  I first met Richard III when I was six. It was in the old Majestic cinema in Mill Street, Macclesfield and he was played on screen by Laurence Olivier, complete with hunched back, gammy leg, deformed hand, withered arm and black wig. My mother was a huge Shakespeare fan and when Olivier’s Richard was released, we had to go. I can remember the central white tower of the Majestic (still standing) although most of the building has gone, leaving the place in a more ruined state than many of Richard’s actual castles in the North!

  At six, I did not understand much of the storyline. I knew Richard was evil. He hobbled noiselessly around the sets, throwing long, twisted shadows onto doors and walls. His mood changed from gushing sentimentality to ice-cold psychopathy at the turn of a groat. The most terrifying moment came when, lit from below, he turned with hatred on his little nephew (Richard of York, whom he will later kill). The loud discordant crash of music made me jump out of my skin.

  I also knew that Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond was the good guy. He was played by Stanley Baker, whom my mother knew and was, like me, a Welshman. A halo seemed to surround him in all his scenes on the screen. Other than that, I didn’t know who anybody was. Thomas Stanley, one of two brothers who ultimately betrayed Richard, was played by Laurence Naismith who, because he was bald, I took for a bishop!

  Re-watching the film now, as I have several times over the years, I am struck by how old everybody was. Richard was dead at thirty-three, yet Olivier was fortyeight when he played him. And how could anybody be surprised at the supposedly untimely death of Edward IV when he was played by Cedric Hardwicke, sixtytwo? Of all the credited cast, only Stanley Baker, Claire Bloom, as Anne Neville, Richard’s queen, and the boys playing the princes in the Tower were the correct ages for the characters they were portraying.

  Back in 1956, however, nothing could have prepared me for Richard’s death at the battle of Bosworth. The setting suddenly changed, from surreal pseudoMedieval sets at Baynard’s Castle and elsewhere, to rural Leicestershire. This was actually shot in Spain and the harsh sunlight looks hopelessly artificial for England. Having had nightmares in his tent before the battle, Richard regains his sangfroid, muttering the un-Shakespearean ‘Richard’s himself again’, and wheels his white horse to charge against Henry Tudor’s line. The camera pans with him and Olivier’s thunderous ‘Victory sits on our helms!’ over the galloping hoofs says it all. Music to the ears of a little boy of six!

  Then, it all goes horribly wrong. There is a lull in the fighting. Richard yells his completely unhistorical ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ and then he is alone in a hollow, the only sound his breathing as he watches his enemies close in on him. He clashes with Stanley, driving him back with sword and dagger before the Lancastrians surround him, striking and slashing, ripping off his black armour. Then they move back and Olivier, bleeding and in agony, writhes on the ground, that terrible discordant music in effect his death knell.

  Rather cornily it seems to me now, the camera focuses on the ribbon of the Garter below his left knee as his body is slung over the back of a horse – Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (evil to him who evil thinks) – and the crown, which moments before is seen rolling away under horses’ hoofs, is retrieved in a hawthorn bush and raised to be placed on the head of Henry Richmond. The Tudors ha
ve arrived.

  Today’s filmography provides details a six-year-old would not have been interested in. Olivier directed (he had already played Shakespeare’s best known villain on stage several times), but he was assisted by an uncredited Alexander Korda, the Hungarian who was more British than the British and made innumerable Empire epics, like The Drum and The Four Feathers. The music was written by William Walton, who also wrote for Olivier’s Henry V. Richard III was the first film to be premiered simultaneously in theatres and on television in the States, although British audiences had to go ‘to the pictures’ for the privilege.

  For purists, Olivier came in for criticism because he uses large chunks of Henry VI for the dialogue, as well as bits from the eighteenth-century rewrites of Colley Cibber and the actor David Garrick. He wanted the redoubtable Orson Welles to play ‘princely Buckingham’, but in the end, Ralph Richardson insisted on the part. Vivien Leigh wanted to play Anne Neville, but Claire Bloom got that one and apparently, Olivier had an affair with her in the process.

  Olivier’s makeup took three hours to complete and no doubt the withered fingers idea was taken from the most famous painting of the king (now in the Royal Collection) in which the middle fingers of his right hand, curled around his collar, look as if they have lost their tips. Filming took seventeen weeks and the armies at Bosworth were extras from the Spanish army. There were 500 of them in those nostalgic, halcyon days before CGI!

  The film is awash with heraldry that not only resembles a Medieval Book of Hours (Richard’s own personal copy has survived), but is surprisingly accurate. That is because one of the cast – Douglas Wilmer, who plays Lord Dorset – was a heraldry buff and Olivier kept pestering him for more information on that score. The fight arranger was the actor Bernard Hepton who went on to become a stalwart of 1980s/’90s television; there is a brief close-up of him as he stabs Richard in the final moments at Bosworth.

  The jury is still out on Olivier. Was he the finest actor of his generation? Or a self-centred ‘luvvie’ who put the ‘ham’ into Buckingham? Two things are certain. In 1956, he scared a six-year-old boy witless. And, in extending even Shakespeare’s villainous nonsense, he put the cause of the real Richard back by centuries.

  Fast forward to 1967. The six-year-old boy is now seventeen and he has just passed his driving test (the first time, I am placing it on record!). Richard was part of the A level History course I was undergoing and I had never forgotten my two hours in the Majestic cinema. I wanted to carry out further research into the battle of Bosworth (I still have the artwork to this day) and, since Warwickshire, where I lived, was only a stone’s throw from Leicestershire, where Richard died, what could be easier?

  I borrowed my father’s car, and with a friend set off for Bosworth. There was no visitors’ centre then, just anonymous farmland and I realized at once how difficult it is to find your way around an area that held centre stage for only a couple of hours 500 years ago. In true public schoolboy tradition, my friend and I knocked on the door of the farmhouse on Ambion Hill, explained our presence and asked permission to walk the fields.

  Public school or not, by the age of seventeen, I had picked up some of the more colourful aspects of the English language, but nothing could have prepared me for the barrage of abuse we got from that farmer. The air turned blue and he frogmarched us to a trough of foul-smelling chemicals where we had to wash our wellies. Why? Because 1967 saw one of the worst outbreaks of Foot and Mouth disease the country has seen. There had been others, in the 1920s and 1950s and this one had begun in Shropshire. A quarantine was set up as standard procedure and all animal movement was banned. Altogether, despite the precautions, 2,364 outbreaks were reported across the UK resulting in the slaughter of 430,000 cows from 2,300 farms. And here were we, completely ignorant, traipsing from one county to another, possibly bringing death and destruction with us. So I did not get to walk the battlefield of Bosworth until I was researching for this book. And when I did, I discovered a little more about the farmer of Ambion Hill. He was not of a naturally friendly disposition, they told me at the battlefield’s visitors’ centre – to the extent that he used to stand near Dickon’s Well with a shotgun under his arm, watching any would-be trespassers. Perhaps my friend and I got off lightly!

  Fast forward again, this time to 2008. By that time, I had been teaching History and, latterly, Politics, for thirty-six years and it was time to hang up my chalk. The last school trip I undertook was with a Year Nine (thirteen-year-olds) group to the Richard III Experience at the Tower of London, site of the murder of Henry VI, the execution of William, Lord Hastings and the supposed crime scene of the murders of the princes, Richard’s nephews.

  I had taught the princes’ story as a Medieval whodunnit, using such CSI techniques as were appropriate, a mish-mash of FBI-style offender profiling and, of course, the historical record. But now, we had the chance to meet the king in person and grill him.

  We were ushered into an education room somewhere in the White Tower, shown how to bow to the king when he arrived and told to address him as ‘Your Grace’, not ‘Your Majesty’, which was a Tudor convention. I was impressed.

  The king duly arrived – a tall, broad, good-looking actor in excellent, accurate costume. We bowed and he sat down. The questions started.

  ‘Where are the princes?’

  ‘At their studies,’ said the king.

  ‘Can we see them?’

  ‘No, we cannot interrupt their work.’

  He waved his hands casually as if they were just across the way. I had already primed the brightest lad in the class to ask the king about Jane Shore, the mistress of Edward IV, Lord Hastings and the Marquis of Dorset. This he did.

  ‘She was a friend of my late brother’s,’ the king said.

  My cleverest lad was not to be fobbed off

  ‘Is she a prostitute?’

  Gasps and stifled giggles.

  ‘Yes,’ the king said flatly and prepared to move on.

  Suddenly, he rounded on the boy, à la Olivier all those years ago.

  ‘Why are you asking me about Jane Shore?’ he wanted to know.

  My cleverest lad’s composure deserted him. He pointed to me and said, ‘Mr Trow told me to say it.’

  All eyes turned to me, the kids holding their breath, my colleagues trying not to laugh.

  ‘Yes,’ said Richard thoughtfully. ‘He looks like someone who would know all about Mistress Shore!’

  Twelve years before the Tower experience, the Hollywood star Al Pacino made an odd little movie called Looking For Richard. He had intended to make a straight film of the play, but realized, having seen Olivier’s version, that he could not better it and make a profit, which is, of course, an essential element of film-making today. So, over four years and working around his busy schedule, Pacino produced the movie that has snippets of Shakespeare, re-enactments and chats with the famous and the unknown, probing Richard’s character. Pacino eventually produced eighty hours of footage which had to be cut to theatrical length by no less than six editors. The only actor to be paid was Kevin Spacey (as Buckingham), but he ploughed his salary back into the movie to make it work.

  Pacino’s effort is laudable, though I am not sure about its commercial viability and it illustrates the problem that all historians/researchers have. How do we sweep away 500 years of bias, dogma, bigotry and downright lies to expose the reality of a man who became England’s king all that time ago? Perhaps we could start with a bit of luck and a lot of tenacity; we could find Richard’s body.

  Philippa Langley’s own Looking for Richard project made everybody else’s search look like child’s play. Working against the odds, in the teeth of the grim recession post-2008 and wheeling and dealing with a huge variety of powers that be, she organized the impossible, the archaeologist’s shibboleth – the search for, and discovery of, a single, named individual. The phrase that went out from the international members of the Richard III Society was as tall an order as it was simple – ‘Sea
rch for him. Find him. Honour him.’

  Philippa is a screen writer who, like many of us, became fascinated by Richard III from an early age. She grew up in Darlington, a less than two-hour horse ride from Richard’s fortress of Barnard Castle and his church of St Mary’s. When she was a girl, there were no school trips there or to Richard’s even greater castle at Middleham. The book that turned her on to Richard was Paul Murray Kendall’s biography, published in the year of Olivier’s film (I still have my copy which I was given for my eighteenth birthday). Some historians today scoff at Kendall, because he was not, technically, an historian, but his exquisitely written book has stood the test. Kendall made one mistake, however, along with almost everyone else at the time – ‘At the dissolution of the monasteries, the “Grey Friars” was plundered; Richard’s tomb was destroyed, his body thrown into the River Soar.’

  The historian John Ashdown-Hill did not believe that and Philippa liaised with him and a number of key people to set up an archaeological dig in the centre of Leicester, to find the site of the Grey Friars and, more especially, Richard’s grave.

  The obstacles were huge. A serious financial recession meant that funds usually available were not on the table. The University of Leicester cooperated, however, providing archaeological expertise and an osteo (bone) specialist. Leicester City Council had to be brought on board, so did the owners of the car park underneath which, Philippa believed and various obscure old maps hinted, the body might lie. Philippa herself had something of a Damascus moment when she visited the car park belonging to Leicester Social Services, a tingling, unreal sensation near what may have been the Grey Friars’ wall. She wisely kept this to herself – money men are rarely impressed by anything spiritual. The Church had to be brought in too and the deal was that should the bones be found and turn out to be Richard’s, they should be re-interred in Leicester Cathedral. As things turned out, there would be serious opposition to that.