Richard III by David Horspool

Author:David Horspool
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472903006
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-08-19T09:50:21+00:00

‘Ordeigned to Reigne upon the people’

Despite all these signals, when the ailing Simon Stallworth sent his second letter, on 21 June, he was still in the dark, if filled with foreboding: ‘what schall happyne hyr I knowe nott’. The activities of the next day, Sunday 22 June, made plain what was going to happen. At St Paul’s Cross, and throughout the city, sermons were preached alleging either that Edward V and his brother were bastards, because their parents had never been properly married in the eyes of the Church, or that Edward IV had been illegitimate – ‘conceived in adultery and in every way . . . unlike the Duke of York [his father]’.41 There are no contemporary records of the content of the sermons, or who gave them – the identification of Ralph Shaa, or Shaw, the mayor’s brother and a prebendary of St Paul’s, is made by the London chroniclers and More, but no earlier. But the story of Edward IV’s alleged bastardy was an old one. It was used by the Duke of Clarence, according to Edward himself in his parliamentary indictment of his brother in 1478, and even, Mancini says, proffered by Edward and Richard’s own mother, Cecily, apparently because Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had put his mother into a ‘frenzy’.42 The story had been adopted by Charles the Bold, who had begun in 1475 to refer to Edward as ‘Blayborgne’, supposedly the name of the French archer who was his real father.43 This was the kind of persistent tittle-tattle that had lost all force of revelation by being so frequently rehearsed, and openly dismissed. What was new, if it had not already leaked out during the Burdet case around the time of the fall of Clarence, was a credible enough case against Edward’s marriage. If that could be shown to be invalid, then its offspring would be illegitimate, with the added advantage that Richard’s own mother would not have to suffer further assaults on her reputation – something which, even if we are not prepared to grant Richard sensitivities over his mother’s feelings, would hardly do if she were about to resume the role of queen mother.

At the crucial moment, Richard was apparently vouchsafed just such an authority. The Crowland chronicler writes: ‘It was put forward, by means of a supplication contained in a certain parchment, that King Edward’s sons were bastards, by submitting that he had been pre-contracted to a certain Lady Eleanor Boteler [Butler] before he married Elizabeth [Woodville].’44 Mancini had heard the pre-contract story, too, but associated it with a different marriage – one arranged for Edward by the Earl of Warwick (with Bona of Savoy). That contemporaries differed on such crucial details does not add to the credibility of Richard’s case. Nor, on the face of it, does the timing of the announcement. If Edward’s children were illegitimate, why did it emerge only now, when his brother had removed all opposition with violent efficiency? It is the French diplomat Philippe

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