Richard III in the North Read online

  As Philippa puts it, ‘I would be searching for the mortal remains of an anointed king of England, an unprecedented goal for which no guidelines existed.’ Philippa wrote these guidelines herself. The result is one of the most remarkable and important archaeological discoveries of all time. It answers one crucial question about Richard – the extent of his ‘deformity’ – and for that, we are all grateful. If nothing else, it renders Shakespeare irrelevant.

  What it does not do, however, is to give us even the slightest hint of Richard’s personality. Christian burials, which Richard’s was, do not provide goods for the afterlife. There is no ‘time capsule’ along with the bare bones to give us clues. We are absolutely no further forward, for example, in the vexed question of Richard’s complicity in the murder of his nephews, the princes in the Tower.

  And in 2019, my wife and I were wandering Barnard Castle with our two grandsons and a thought occurred to me – why not write a book about Richard III in the North?

  Chronology

  1452

  2 October

  Richard born at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire.

  1459

  October

  Richard and his family under siege at Ludlow Castle, Shropshire. ‘Battle’ of Ludford Bridge.

  1460

  30 December

  Battle of Wakefield. Richard’s father, Richard, Duke of York, and brother, Edmund of Rutland, killed.

  1461

  February

  Richard and his brother, George, Duke of Clarence, sent to the court of Philip, Duke of Burgundy.

  4 March

  Edward of York proclaimed King Edward IV in London.

  29 March

  Edward defeats Margaret of Anjou’s Lancastrian army at Towton, Yorkshire.

  12 June

  Richard and George return to England.

  1 November

  Richard created Duke of Gloucester.

  1465

  September

  Richard sent to Warwick the Kingmaker’s castle at Middleham, Yorkshire.

  1469

  17 October

  Richard created Constable of England.

  1470

  2 October

  Richard goes into exile with Edward to Burgundy.

  1471

  March

  Edward and Richard return to England, landing at Ravenspur.

  14 April

  Richard’s first battle at Barnet, Hertfordshire. Warwick the Kingmaker killed.

  4 May

  Richard’s second battle at Tewkesbury, Worcestershire.

  Edward, Prince of Wales killed. Yorkist victory.

  21 May

  Henry VI murdered in the Tower of London, probably on orders from Edward IV.

  1472

  Spring

  Richard marries Anne Neville. Starts to build up a Northern affinity and takes over Neville estates.

  1475

  29 August

  Treaty of Picquiny between Edward and Louis XI of France. Richard disapproves.

  1476

  Probable birth year of Richard’s son, Edward of Middleham.

  1478

  18 February

  George of Clarence convicted of treason by Edward IV’s court. Murdered/executed in the Tower of London.

  1482

  24 August

  Richard, as Lieutenant General of the North, invades Scotland. Capture of Berwick and (briefly) Edinburgh.

  1483

  9 April

  Death of Edward IV. Succession of Edward, Prince of Wales, as Edward V.

  29-30 April

  Richard and Henry, Duke of Buckingham, take possession of the new king at Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire and arrest the boys’ Woodville supporters Rivers, Grey and Vaughan.

  4 May

  Richard, Buckingham and Edward V reach London.

  Coronation postponed. Richard is Lord Protector.

  10 June

  Richard writes to Northern earls asking for military support.

  13 June

  Council meeting ‘coup’ in the Tower of London. Rotherham, Archbishop of York and Morton, Bishop of Ely, arrested along with William, Lord Hastings who is executed on Tower Green.

  22 June

  Sermon preached at St Paul’s Cross, London, claiming Edward IV’s children illegitimate and emphasising Richard’s claim to the throne.

  6 July

  Coronation of Richard III at Westminster Abbey.

  July/August

  Royal progress of Richard and Anne ending in York.

  Probable disappearance of the princes in the Tower.

  10 October

  Buckingham’s rebellion breaks out.

  2 November

  Buckingham executed at Salisbury, Wiltshire.

  1484

  23 January

  Parliament meets at Westminster. Richard’s claim to the throne, Titulus Regius, unanimously agreed.

  April

  Death of Edward of Middleham, possibly from tuberculosis.

  July

  Richard sets up the Council of the North.

  1485

  16 March

  Death of Queen Anne, possibly from tuberculosis.

  7 August

  Henry Tudor lands at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire.

  22 August

  Battle of Bosworth, Leicestershire. Richard III killed.

  Henry VII declared king on the battlefield.

  25 August

  Richard buried in the Grey Friars, Leicester.

  1495

  Canopied tomb placed over Richard’s grave.

  1538

  Grey Friars closed and demolished as part of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.

  2009

  21 February

  Phillipa Langley sets up Looking for Richard project.

  2012

  25 August

  Human remains found under letter ‘R’ in Leicester car park.

  2013

  3 February

  DNA match of living Plantagenets with body in car park.

  2015

  21-29 March

  Re-interment of Richard III’s body in Leicester Cathedral.

  Chapter 1

  Conisbrough

  The falcon and fetterlock crest of Richard of York. The fetterlock is shown open reflecting the fact that Richard was not going to be shackled by convention.

  The odd thing about Richard of York, the future Richard III’s father, is that we do not know where he was born. His father, also Richard, was made Earl of Cambridge in 1414, but the title carried no lands or income and we know he was strapped for cash. His wife was Anne Mortimer and she gave birth to the future Richard of York on 21 September 1411. Both Anne and Richard of Cambridge were descended from the many sons of Edward III, whose descendants jockeyed for power for nearly 100 years, precipitating the overthrow of Richard II, the rise of the usurper Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) and the internecine bloodbath that today we call the Wars of the Roses.

  Since the Earl of Cambridge was originally known as Richard of Conisbrough, I believe it is a reasonable supposition that Richard of York was born in the great castle overlooking the Don.

  In the time of King Edward (tempus regni Edwardi) as the compilers of William the Conqueror’s Domesday survey put it in 1086, Conisbrough was already a royal estate, its twenty-eight wattle and daub settlements belonging to the last Saxon king, Harold Godwinson. In Domesday, it is called Cyningsbrough, the king’s fortress, but we have no idea what the place actually looked like.

  After the Conquest, the ubiquitous William de Warenne was given the fortress and estate by the new king. This was the Norman feudal system, whereby the king ensured loyal support and a plentiful supply of troops by, in effect, renting out parcels of land in exchange for military service. The system had its flaws, but it worked and survived for four centuries. To keep the Saxon population under control, the Normans built castles all over the country, including one at Conisbrough, probably several hundred yards from the earlier Saxon fortress.

  Typically, the Norman Conisbrough was a wooden construction, with a keep, an inner and outer bailey, all protected by ditches and wooden palisades on the existing hill spur of magnesium limestone. The castle was intended to protect – or overawe – the Don Valley between Doncaster and Rotherham. The de Warennes continued to hold Conisbrough for the king until the 1170s when Isabel de Warenne married her second husband, Hamelin Plantagenet. Extensive rebuilding took place under his lordship, the entire structure being rebuilt with stone. The keep is unusual for an English castle (although Barnard Castle, further north, is similar) in that it is circular, like most of the examples in Normandy.

  The castle which the boy Richard of York would have known, was entered through the outer bailey via a rectangular enclosure containing outbuildings such as barns and stables. A drawbridge (now gone) would have linked this to the inner bailey, which was made by scarping and counter-scarping the hill which formed the motte. The thirteenth-century curtain wall originally had six towers (three of which survive), but there were clearly engineering problems in building this. In places, the wall footings are only 2ft deep. To counter this structural defect, the towers had ‘splayed feet’, strengthening the stonework at ground level.

  In the inner bailey was a large hall where the family and servants entertained and worked. This had two storeys, a huge central hearth, kitchen, pantry and cellar. It also had a chapel. Hamelin Plantagenet’s remodelled keep is unique in England. It has six tapering buttresses supporting a hexagonal shape and is 92ft high over four floors. It once had a drawbridge and its own water supply via a well. The place would have been very dark because, unusually, there are no arrow slits in the keep’s walls. This means that the keep was intended as a personal solar or living quarters for Hamelin Plantagenet rather than the more conventional use as a lastresort defence. There would have been brand torches in iron grilles on walls in various chambers and on the narrow spiral stairs. Only in the great chamber is there a large window and in the bedroom above. The general layout of Conisbrough is not dissimilar to another stronghold held by the family, at Sandal near Wakefield, from which Richard of York would ride to his death on St Egwin’s Day, 1460.

  We have no information regarding Richard of York’s birth. All modern historians describe his lineal descent from both parents and then almost immediately plunge into the tortuous politics of the dynastic squabbles that led to the Wars of the Roses. He would have been brought up in whatever passed for a nursery in Hamelin Plantagenet’s keep, suckled by a wet nurse and rocked in his cradle by faithful retainers who either lived in the castle or came from one of the outlying villages.

  Conisbrough Castle at the time of Richard of York.

  His mother, Anne Mortimer, died in that year of natural causes and that, grim as it sounds to a modern readership, would scarcely have impacted on little Richard’s life. He may have been expected to attend the funeral, but, brought up by nursemaids as he was, he is unlikely to have been particularly close to his mother.

  He was not close to his father either, but in the year of Anne’s death, Richard of Cambridge was in trouble. His early life did not change much when Richard was four, but cataclysmic events beyond his control or even knowledge were massing to change the direction of his life forever. As is to be expected, there are no reliable portraits of Richard as a child or even as a man. The contemporary Talbot Shrewsbury Book, an illuminated treatise of 1445, has him as clean-shaven, with collar-length blond or auburn hair. Another portrait shows him with longer hair, a centre parting and a splendid forked beard of a type that was fairly common in the early century. Later queries concerning the parentage of his eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, describe Richard as short and dark whereas Edward was auburn/blond and at 6ft 3in, the tallest king in English history. Twelve years before little Richard was born, the anointed king, Richard II, had been overthrown by a rival, Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, brother of Edward III. Richard had been held prisoner at Pontefract Castle, perhaps in the extended wine cellar there, which we know was used as a prison in the Civil War of the 1640s and is still open to tourists (see Chapter 10). All reports suggest that it took him ten days to die and the most likely cause was not starvation, as some suggest, but poisoning, perhaps by amanita phalloides, death cap mushroom. He was embalmed in Pontefract, wrapped in linen and placed in a lead-lined coffin to be brought by stages south to London.

  Henry IV, the first of the Lancastrian kings, was plagued all his life by the single fact of usurpation. It would, of course, be an accusation levelled at Richard III after 1483, but Henry was much more blatant about it. Richard II may have been a weak king; he may even have been a bad one, but Bolingbroke’s actions seem to have been carried out with no other motive than malice. There were those among the English nobility who were bitterly unhappy about the state of affairs and the brooding discontent simmered until the summer of 1415, when a knot of conspirators decided to act.

  The plot was to replace Henry V, son of the usurper, with Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the brother of Richard’s mother. Mortimer’s descent from Edward III gave him the necessary pedigree, but it is likely that he got cold feet and told the king all about it. Henry was already at Southampton by July 1415, collecting his army to embark on what would become the Agincourt campaign (the city walls around which his men camped are still there). In this situation, the imminent absence of a king, embarking on a venture from which he might not return, was probably grounds enough for the conspirators to move everything forward. Henry acted decisively. Arresting the Earl of Cambridge, Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham and Sir Thomas Grey of Heaton, he tried them in what is today the Red Lion inn and found them guilty of treason. All three were executed a couple of days later on the sloping ground outside Bargate, one of the town’s main thoroughfares, which still stands.

  Ten weeks later, Henry’s bedraggled army, ravaged by dysentery, faced the flower of French chivalry across the muddy fields near Agincourt, a then unknown village near St Pol in the Pas-de-Calais. One of the casualties that day was Edmund, Duke of York, Richard’s uncle, crushed to death, men said, in the desperate, hacking press around the king’s standard. Almost overnight, little Richard was not merely the son of an executed traitor – he would become, in 1425, the new Duke of York.

  Duke or not, the boy was an infant and an orphan and his wardship was bought, as was the custom, by Ralph Neville, first Earl of Westmoreland, for 3,000 marks. The orphan status meant that technically, the boy was a royal ward, in the care of the crown. In practice, Henry V, king of England and marrying into the royal family of France, had little time for these legalities and sold the York inheritance to the highest bidder, in this case Westmoreland. The boy was brought up with all the military and noble training required for a royal duke, which included swordsmanship, riding and handling a lance. His tutor in these matters was Sir Robert Winterton, a staunch supporter of Henry IV, in his fifties, who was made Constable of Pontefract Castle and was, therefore, Richard II’s gaoler at the time of his death. Winterton may have been loyal to the Lancastrian cause, but he was not Henry V’s favourite as he had been his father’s. From 1416 until 1423 when he came of age, Richard of York was the richest nobleman in the country after the king. His mother’s estates alone, from the Mortimer lands of Wales and the Marches, amounted to £3,430 (almost £59 million today).

  As a boy, it is likely that Richard lived not at Conisbrough but at Waterton’s manor house of Methley Hall and the nearby property of Woodhall and would have been brought up alongside Waterton’s own children, Robert and Joan. Before he was eleven, Richard’s surrogate mother, Cicely, died and was buried in St Oswald’s Church in Methley in what is now the Waterton chapel. Waterton married again and Margaret Clavell brought to the marriage and to Methley her own three children, William, John and Eleanor, making quite a sizeable nursery.

  Ralph Neville’s duty was to find young Richard a suitable bride, because such relationships ensured the survival of families in an uncertain age. For that, he did not have to look far. Richard’s future wife, the mother of both Edward IV and Richard III, lived only a few miles north of Conisbrough, at another of the Neville strongholds, Raby.

  Chapter 2

  Raby

  The arms of Cecily Neville of Raby. The lozenge shape as opposed to the conventional shield was used by ladies in the Middle Ages. The saltire (St Andrew’s Cross) was part of the Neville family coat of arms. If only all heraldry were that simple!

  For centuries, it was fashionable for ‘old’ families, as opposed to the nouveaux riches of, say, the Tudors or the Industrial Revolution, to claim that their ancestors had ‘come over with the Conqueror’. The Nevilles had.

  Sources differ over their original home. It was either Calle de Neu Ville or Neuville-sur-Touques, west of Paris. Either way, the name simply meant new town and we find it first recorded in the ninth century. Richard de Novarilla’s family provided forty ships for William of Normandy’s fleet in October 1066 and his four sons fought at Senlac. These Norman invaders were chancers, thugs descended from the Vikings, who saw limitless opportunities in grabbing English land after the outcome of a single battle. Over time, they morphed into the great baronial families of England, but the concept of warfare and the notion of extending wealth and power by force never quite left them. The Wars of the Roses, in which Richard, his brother and his father were killed, devastated the aristocracy, and a similar casualty list among the landed families would not be found again until the trenches of 1914–18.