Royal Murder Page 13

  O, call back yesterday, bid time return,

  And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men!

  To-day, to-day, unhappy day, too late,

  O’erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state;

  For all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead,

  Are gone to Bolingbroke, dispers’d, and fled.

  It seems that at this point Richard realised he had lost and he sent his half brothers to Henry Bolingbroke at Chester to ask what were his intentions. Apart from anything else this gave Bolingbroke the location of the king and he sent the Duke of Northumberland to capture him. When he arrived at Conway with only four attendants he was quickly taken to Richard who appeared to be in a state of nervous tension over the fate of his brothers and their mission. Northumberland told him that they were well at Chester, and he produced a letter written by John Holland stating that the king could put his full confidence in the offer to be made by Northumberland. This was that the king’s brothers, the Earl of Salisbury, the Bishop of Carlisle and the king’s chaplain should take their trial for having advised the murder of Gloucester, that Henry Bolingbroke should be made the Justiciar of England and these terms being conceded, Bolingbroke should wait for the king at Flint “to implore his pardon” and accompany him to London.

  After consultation with the few followers who remained with him — and secretly assuring those implicated that he would stand by them steadfastly at their trial — Richard agreed, though first he insisted on Northumberland swearing on behalf of Henry Bolingbroke to the strict observance of the articles.

  “Like Judas,” wrote an old chronicler, “he perjured himself on the body of our Lord.” Which means he swore on the Host.

  They then set out together and on coming to a corner of the road Richard suddenly exclaimed, “God of Paradise assist me, I am betrayed. Do you not see pens and barriers in the valley? Earl of Northumberland, if I thought you capable of betraying me it is not too late to return.”

  Seizing Richard’s bridle Northumberland said, “You cannot return. I have promised to conduct you to the Duke of Lancaster.” At that a body of lancers hastened up and Richard, seeing that any chance of escape had gone, exclaimed, “May the god on whom you laid your hands reward you and your accomplices at this last day.”

  The king was then taken to Flint Castle where he was left alone for the evening with his friends. Wearing a red gown with a black hood, he met Henry Bolingbroke in the courtyard of Flint Castle the next day. The duke shone in full armour as he knelt before the king and the scene would have delighted all the exponents of chivalry as the enemies conversed politely.

  “Fair cousin of Lancaster you are right welcome,” greeted Richard.

  Bolingbroke replied, “I am come sooner than you sent for me, the reason I will tell you. The common report of the people is that for two and twenty years you have governed them badly and most harshly, and therefore they are not well contented with you but if it please our Lord, I will help you govern them better than they have been governed in time past.”

  “Fair cousin,” replied Richard, “if it pleases you it pleases us well.”

  A fortnight later Richard was escorted to the Tower through the streets of London where the citizens greeted him with jeers of “Bastard”. Character assassination was already at work. Froissart relates that while Richard spoke with Henry Bolingbroke at Flint his favourite greyhound, Mathe, which would never take notice of anyone else, suddenly left Richard’s side and fawned upon Bolingbroke and ever afterwards followed him.

  “And in all this the Londoners rejoiced,” wrote Froissart, “only they were discontented that Richard was kept out of their sight and reach for behold the opinion of the common people when they be up against their prince or lord, and especially in England. Among them is no remedy, for they are the most dangerous people in the world, and most outrageous, if they be up, and especially Londoners.”

  On September 29, 1399, representatives of the Lords and Commons — prelates, barons, knights and lawyers — visited Richard in the Tower for his official abdication and to sign a document naming Henry Bolingbroke as his successor. After complying he said he hoped “his cousin would be a good lord to him.”

  It is recorded that Richard was quite cheerful at the ceremony and at its conclusion slipped his royal signet ring on Bolingbroke’s finger, though it must be remembered that history is written by the victors.

  The act of resignation was read to Parliament and accepted with shouts of delight. It has been pointed out that if Richard had thus voluntarily abdicated there would have been no necessity for what immediately followed — a series of thirty-three articles of impeachment. The chief charges were violation of his coronation oath, the murder of the Duke of Gloucester and his despotic and unconstitutional conduct.

  Next day Henry Bolingbroke became King Henry IV of England and the Council ordered Richard to be placed in a secret prison where he was to be served by people who did not know him and where he could not receive or send letters. Dressed as a forester but stubbornly wearing the golden spurs of a knight he was taken first to Leeds Castle and then, as in the case of Edward II, to various other prisons.

  When Richard was in the Tower of London Adam of Usk visited him and wrote: “I was present while he dined and I marked his mood and bearing having been taken thither for that purpose. And there and then the king discoursed sorrowfully these words: ‘My God, a wonderful land is this and a fickle: which has exiled, slain, destroyed and ruined so many kings, rulers and great men, and is ever tainted with strife and variance and envy’.”

  Now the mystery surrounding Richard’s end deepens. While he was imprisoned Charles VI of France threatened to make war on England on behalf of the rights of his daughter Isabella. To try to avert this threat Henry IV suggested various alliances between the royal families but the French king replied that he knew no king of England but Richard. Then he received news that Richard had died and he simply demanded that his daughter should be restored to him with her jewels and dowry according to the marriage settlement. But from that moment, when news of Richard’s death was made public by Charles VI, popular interest grew as to his fate.

  Soon afterwards the corpse of the deposed monarch was brought, at a cost of £80, from Pontefract Castle and shown publicly in St Paul’s for two days where twenty thousand people filed past the coffin to see Richard’s emaciated face, the rest of the body being covered by a shroud. It was then taken to Langley but thirteen years later it was buried with pomp hi Westminster Abbey. The dead king’s little queen went back to France where she later married Charles, the poet duke of Orleans, to die in childbirth at the age of twenty.

  All we know definitely is that in January, 1400, Richard’s half brothers the Hollands plotted to assassinate the new king but were caught and executed. The news of this was said to throw Richard into a state of melancholia while Henry said publicly at table “Richard’s life was his death and his death his life.” On January 29 the King of France spoke of him as being already dead, and a report circulated that Richard had been so grief-stricken he had starved himself to death.

  There is no doubt that he was murdered and tradition states this took place on St Valentine’s Day when the ex-king was seated at dinner in his cell. Sir Piers Exton with seven other men grimly entered and Richard guessed by their numbers and expression their purpose. Up he seized a stool to defend himself. It was said that he felled three of them but Exton got behind him, knocked him down and then slew him.

  Probably the reason that we know so little about his murder is that his death caused no regret. It was written of him “that only the men of Bordeaux mourned for him for he had ever been a good lord to them.”

  Contents

  CHAPTER SIX - The Murder of Henry VI

  “Forsothe and forsothe ye do fouly to smyte a kynge anoynted so.”

  HENRY VI SHOULD have been pictured with a halo rather than a crown. If Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, had lived longer it is alm
ost certain that his efforts to get his predecessor canonised would have been rewarded, though it must be added that these endeavours were not so much t6 honour a holy king as to discredit Richard III, whom he had usurped, by the suggestion that he was the murderer of a saint.

  One thing that the tortuous medieval mind had in common with the Roman was its untiring quest for reassuring portents and holy signs. Thus there was great satisfaction for those who managed to extract significance from the most trivial incidents when the baby Henry, already a king, made his public debut for the opening of Parliament. When he was brought out before his subjects he “schriked and cryed” so much that his mother hastened him indoors in case he “had been diseased”. But the next day — a Monday — his behaviour was impeccable as he sat on the queen’s lap while being borne through the tumultuous crowds. Then it was realised that the little fellow had been distressed the day before because of breaking the Sabbath.

  Those responsible for his upbringing were determined that the child should not deviate from such an auspicious start, even if they had to be harsh to be kind. His nurse Alice Botillor was given an indemnity which was noted in the proceedings of the Privy Council, being permitted “to chasten us from time to time as the case shall require, so that you shall not be molested, hurt, or injured for this cause in future time.”

  Another guardian who required a guarantee against royal retribution was Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who later asked the boy-king’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and the Council to “assure him they shall firmly and truly, assist him in the exercise of the charge and occupation that he hath about the King’s person, namely, in chastening him of his defaults, and support the said earl therein; and if the King at any time will conceive for that cause indignation against the said earl, my said Lord of Gloucester and lords shall do all their true diligence and power to remove the King therefrom.”

  The effect of chastening the youth of his “defaults” coupled with his naturally pious nature, produced a king who was to be both venerated and despised but who in his darkest hours never lost his spiritual faith, remarking once in the midst of his troubles, “For this kingdom which is transitory I do not greatly care — our kinsman of March thrusts himself into it as is his pleasure.”

  John Blakman, a fellow of Eton and king’s confessor, left us this pen portrait: “The King was a man simple and upright, without any crook or craft of untruth. With none did he deal craftily nor ever would say an untrue word to any. With sedulous devotion he was a diligent worshipper of God, more given to prayer or the reading of scriptures or chronicles than to temporal things or vain sports. These he despised as trifling. In church he was never pleased to sit upon a seat or walk to and fro, but always with bared head kneeled before his book. When riding on a journey he would let his royal cap drop to the ground, and he preferred the Holy Gross to be set in his crown rather than flowers . . . He was chaste and pure from the beginning of his days, in word and deed. With the Queen he kept his marriage vows sincerely, even in the absences of that lady which were sometimes very long, and he made a covenant with his eyes never to look unchastely upon any woman. It happened once at Christmas time that a certain great lord brought before him a dance or show of young ladies with bared bosoms who were to dance in that guise before the King. But he angrily averted his eyes and went out to his chamber saying, ‘Fy, fy for shame, for-sothe ye be to blame.’ At another time riding by Bath where are warm baths, the King saw in them men wholly naked with every garment cast off; at which he was displeased and went away quickly. He took great precautions to secure not only his own chastity but also that of his servants. For he kept careful watch through hidden windows of his chambers lest any woman should cause the fall of any of his household.”

  From this description it can be seen how untypical the king was of his Plantagenet forebears who gave their names to spectacular conquests or equally spectacular defeats, men. with lusty appetites for power and the flesh who believed the blood of a devil was in their veins. Henry’s father will be remembered, as long as history books are printed, for the victory of Agincourt; Henry’s monument is King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College.

  Against the Fifteenth Century background of intrigue, ruthless ambition and blood feud he appears as one born out of his time — a predestined victim.

  * * *

  The son of heroic Henry V and Catherine of Valois, Henry was born on December 6, 1421, at Windsor. Nine months later he was proclaimed King of England on the death of his father, and two months after that the death of his grandfather Charles VI of France made him sovereign of that country under the Treaty of Troyes.

  Henry was crowned at Westminster — “where he beheld the people sadly and wisely with humility and devotion” — in November, 1429, the year that Joan of Arc’s army forced the English to raise the siege at Orleans. The following year the young king was taken to Rouen where, it was said, he attended the trial of The Maid. In December of that year the Plantagenet dream came true when Henry was crowned at Notre Dame in Paris. By all accounts the ceremony was a disaster, the king’s French grandmother stayed away, as did the nobility; the Archbishop of Paris took umbrage at the officiating English bishops and there was no public celebration — not even a Lollard was burned at the stake. Henry was hustled home to his friendlier kingdom, never to venture from its shores again.

  Ironically the realisation of the Plantagenet ambition heralded the collapse of English influence on the Continent. Apart from Calais, Normandy and the other territories which Henry V had wrested from the French were lost by 1453.

  On his sixteenth birthday Henry became king in effect though he did very little ruling; his main occupation seems to have been the giving away of charters and pardons. His Council frequently complained of his unworldly generosity, on one occasion pointing out that he had freely bestowed a stewardship on someone when the going rate for this office was a thousand marks. For a medieval monarch his indifference to money was extraordinary. When his uncle Cardinal Beaufort bequeathed him two thousand pounds he refused to accept the legacy at first, explaining to the bewildered executors that the cardinal had been so good to him when he had been alive that he felt he could take nothing more from him posthumously. It was only after it was suggested that the money could be spent on Eton and King’s Colleges that Henry changed his mind. No wonder his contemporaries, regarding royal greed as part of the natural order of things, suspected insanity and darkly reminded each other that both of the king’s grandfathers, Henry IV of England and Charles VI of France, had suffered mental and physical infirmities. Henry IV was subject to fits and “an itching of the flesh, a drying up of the eyes and a rupture of the intestines with such a growth of lice on his head that he could not have it uncovered” — Charles of France had been known as “The Foolish”, and had died insane.

  Apart from his devotions and charitable works the king had to act as a peacemaker between his uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and Cardinal Beaufort, a descendant of John of Gaunt, in their contest to control the kingdom. The basic difference between the Gloucester and Beaufort factions was that the former was dedicated to continuing the war across the Channel while the latter wanted to end what they saw as a hopeless conflict, and planned to do so by arranging a political marriage for the king. This would have the added advantage for Beaufort’s Lancastrian party in that as soon as Henry had an heir it would put his uncle Gloucester and the Duke of York, his second cousin, out of the immediate succession.

  The viciousness of this power struggle became apparent when Gloucester’s wife Eleanor was accused of practising black magic, a charge which was engineered by the Beaufort family. The terrified lady sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey but was turned away — the Church had little sympathy for witches but presumably a lot for the cardinal.

  At the trial it was stated that Eleanor had carved an image of the king out of wax and had then melted it. Gloucester was too afraid to defend her, knowing that he was the real target of the
Beauforts who hoped to implicate him in the most heinous of medieval crimes.

  Eleanor was found guilty and condemned to life imprisonment after having been made to do a barefoot walk of penance through the streets of London carrying a lighted taper. Her two accomplices did not receive such merciful sentences; the man was hanged, drawn and quartered and the woman burnt alive.

  Following this attack on Gloucester, the Lancastrians were able to proceed with the plan to get a suitable bride for the king. Henry was certainly eager to marry. Although prudish, he saw nothing wrong with sex provided it was lawful, and he went to great pains to ensure that the appearance of his future wife would be up to his requirements. When it was thought that one of the Count of Armagnac’s three daughters might be appropriate, he asked for a. portrait of each of the sisters and ordered the artist to “portray the three daughters in their kirtles simple, and their visages, like as ye see, their stature and their beauty and colour of skin and their countenances, with all manner of features; and that one be delivered in all haste with the said portrait to bring it unto the King, and he to appoint and assign which him liketh.” Perhaps the painter was too honest, for nothing came of this.

  In 1443 William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk - and a prominent member of the Lancastrian “peace” party — went to France to negotiate the marriage of Henry and Margaret, the daughter of the cultured but impecunious Duke Rene of Anjou, titular King of Sicily. Cardinal Beaufort believed that the political connotation of this alliance would halt the Hundred Years’ War and at the same time preserve English territory in Calais, Normandy and Guyenne. Inevitably Gloucester, who led the Yorkist party, opposed the match with Margaret of Anjou and it was only natural that when the new queen arrived in England she should favour the Lancastrians, and influence her royal husband to do likewise. Rumours were soon to spread — enthusiastically encouraged by the Yorkists and later perpetuated by Shakespeare — that before she crossed the Channel this spirited princess had fallen in love with Suffolk who, despite the fact he was three times her age, was a paragon of chivalry with all its virtues and vices.