Читать книгу Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity - David Starkey - Страница 13

After the unexpected death of King Edward IV, all eyes turned west, towards Ludlow in the Welsh Marches, where Edward’s son, heir and namesake – Prince Edward – was being brought up. But at twelve, was the boy old enough to rule in his own name? Much of the Yorkist clique, particularly the queen’s family, who had become powerful after the secret marriage, staked their future on the premise that the child could reign in his own right. They had been responsible for his education and upbringing; they had much to gain in the new reign. But a faction emerged in favour of appointing the prince’s uncle Richard as ‘Protector’ or regent until the boy was old enough to exercise power himself.

Queen Elizabeth, sensing danger, was determined to get her son crowned quickly, and the council agreed that the coronation should take place without delay. On 23 April, following the council’s decision, Edward left Ludlow for London, his coronation and his reign. His escort, as his council insisted, was limited to 2000 men. It was enough to put on a fine show as the young king took possession of his kingdom. But the great lords of the kingdom were able to muster as many men or more. And unbeknown to the boy or his mother, Richard was summoning his own troops. He too was heading south.

Late on the night of 2 May, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, waiting in London for the arrival of her eldest son, received alarming news. Edward’s cavalcade had been intercepted by his uncle, Richard, who had taken possession of his young nephew. The duke professed loyalty to the late king’s son and heir, his own nephew after all. But Elizabeth, immediately suspicious of Richard’s motives, fled that night with her younger son into the safe sanctuary of the abbey at Westminster. Richard entered London with his nephew a few days later. The council quickly ratified Richard’s role as ‘Protector’. Young Edward’s coronation was ‘postponed’ until late June, and he was placed in ‘lodgings’ in the Tower.

What was Richard doing and why? Hitherto, he had had a reputation, in contrast to the flighty Clarence, for rock-solid loyalty to his brother Edward, who had rewarded him with the government of the whole of the north of England. There he had won golden opinions as a fine soldier and a fair judge, and the model of a king’s younger brother. Nevertheless, his portrait suggests a man not entirely at ease with himself – or others. He is tight lipped, and he is fiddling nervously with the rings on his fingers; he also had the tic of biting hard on his lower lip and constantly pushing and pulling his dagger in and out of its sheath. Was he repressed, paranoid? A hypocrite with an iron grip on himself ? Or did he genuinely believe, in view of Edward’s tangled marital history, that he, Richard, was now rightful King of England?

On 10 June Richard, an over-mighty subject indeed, summoned his troops to London. His bid for the crown had begun in earnest. A week later, Queen Elizabeth was compelled to give up her younger son Richard into his uncle’s charge. The young prince now joined his brother in the Tower.

Their uncle Richard now had both boys, first and second in line to the throne, under lock and key. On 22 June a compliant parliament decreed that King Edward’s marriage to Queen Elizabeth was invalid, and the princes bastards. Richard had succeeded where his brother Clarence had failed. He had robbed his nephews of their right to the crown and cleared his own path to the throne. He was crowned King Richard III at Westminster on 6 July, with the full blessing of Parliament.

During those frantic weeks, the two princes had been seen less and less around the Tower. Now they seemed to have disappeared altogether. By the late summer of 1483 everybody, including the princes’ own mother, Elizabeth Woodville, took for granted that they were dead. They also took it as read that the responsibility for their deaths rested with Richard. For only Richard had the power, opportunity and above all the motive.

To this day, their exact fate remains a mystery. Writing thirty years later, Thomas More claimed that the Constable of the Tower was ordered to do them to death, but refused. Others, however, proved willing, and the two boys, More says, were smothered to death in their sleep with pillows, on the orders of their uncle.

His elder brothers were dead, the princes gone. The crown was his. But apparently doing away with the rightful heirs to the throne was a step too far, and opposition to Richard was now growing. Richard had been popular and might in theory have been a suitable king. But his sudden and bloody means of gaining power were seen as bringing a curse on England and perverting the sacred rule of succession. Soon he would be fighting to the death for the crown he had taken by fraud and force.

Opposition came to centre on a plot hatched between two powerful and aggrieved mothers: Queen Elizabeth Woodville, whose sons were lost, and Margaret Beaufort – whose son Henry Tudor was in exile. Their machinations would prove Richard’s undoing, and decide England’s fate.

Some time in the late summer of 1483 Queen Elizabeth Woodville, still in sanctuary in the abbot’s lodgings at Westminster, received a visit from a singular Welshman, Dr Lewis Caerleon. Dr Caerleon was a scientific jack-of-all-trades – mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and physician – and, unlike many polymaths, he was a master of all of them. The sanctuary, of course, was heavily guarded by the king’s men, but Dr Caerleon was waved through because he was the queen’s physician. He was also, not coincidentally, physician to Lady Margaret Beaufort, and in his doctor’s bag he carried, on Lady Margaret’s behalf, a remarkable proposal. The queen’s eldest daughter – also called Elizabeth – should marry Margaret’s son Henry. Thus the bloodlines would converge, and York, Woodville and Tudor should join together against the usurping Richard III. That Elizabeth accepted the proposal confirms that she was convinced that her sons were dead.

That Margaret made it shows that she had realized that Richard’s murderous ambition had opened the way for her son to gain the throne of England. Margaret had been nursing her ambitions for her exiled son, Henry Tudor, for years. Now, thanks to Richard’s murderous path to the throne, she could put them into practice.

His mother’s plot under way, the thirty-year-old Henry set sail from Brittany, where he had lived in exile for the fifteen years of impregnable Yorkist rule, to make his bid for England’s throne. On 7 August 1485, at Milford Haven, just a few miles from his birthplace at Pembroke, Henry Tudor’s army made landfall in the evening. His years of exile were at an end.

As soon as he stepped ashore Henry knelt, overcome with emotion at his seemingly miraculous return, and began to recite the psalm ‘Judge me Lord and fight my cause’. Then he kissed the sand and, making the sign of the cross, called on his troops in a loud voice to follow him in the name of God and St George. It was a magnificent beginning for a would-be King of England.

But only 400 of Henry’s men were English. Most of the rest of his little army of 2000 or 3000 were French, and they had come in French ships with the aid of French money and the blessing of the French king. Indeed, most of Henry’s own ideas about kingship were probably French as well. So just what kind of King of England would he be? That question was not asked for the moment. First, he had to wrench the crown from Richard’s powerful grasp.

The two sides came face to face at Bosworth in the Midlands, where the fate of England’s monarchy would be decided. The battle began when the vanguard of Richard’s army, thinking to overwhelm Henry’s much smaller force, charged down the hill. But instead of breaking and running, Henry’s front line smartly reformed themselves into a dense wedge-shaped formation. Against this, the attack crumbled.

Richard, high up on Ambian Hill, now caught sight of Henry with only a small detachment of troops at the rear of his army. With courage or desperation, Richard decided that the battle would be settled by single combat – Richard against Henry, York against Lancaster. Wearing his battle crown, with a light robe with royal symbols over his armour, Richard led a charge with his heavily armed household knights down the hill. With magnificent courage he cut down Henry’s standard-bearer and came within an inch of Henry himself. But once again, Henry’s foot soldiers proved capable of assuming an effective defensive position. And Richard, isolated and unhorsed, was run through by an unknown Welsh pikeman, mutilated and stripped naked, more like a dishonoured outlaw than a vanquished King of England.

The third and last of the brothers of the house of York was dead. By his reckless ambition Richard had split the Yorkist party and handed victory and the crown to Henry Tudor. The symbolic union of York and Lancaster was made flesh in January 1486, when Henry Tudor married Elizabeth of York, just as their respective mothers had planned. A new iconography of union was created, merging the two once warring roses, red and white, into one – the Tudor Rose. A new dynasty was born.

But two years after the wedding, Henry ordered a new, ostentatious crown to be made, one that hinted at political ambitions that went well beyond Fortescue’s limited monarchy. The crown was soon known as the Crown Imperial. Its unusual size, weight and splendour symbolized the recovery of the monarchy from the degradation of the Wars of the Roses and the expurgation of the foul crimes of Richard, which had brought down a curse upon the kingdom. The French fleur-de-lis, alternating with the traditional English cross round the band of the crown, looked back nostalgically to England’s lost conquests in France. But might there be more to it than that? Henry had witnessed at first hand the powers of the absolute monarchy in France and, some said, he had liked what he had seen. Might the Crown Imperial be the means by which these ideas could, as Fortescue had feared, be smuggled back into England?