The Life and Times of Richard III Read Free Page B

charge for sundry considerations by him then shewed, yet he lastly by the exhortation of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Exeter and other noble men then present took upon him that charge, and granted to their petition.... Then th’earl of March thus as is abovesaid being elected and admitted for king upon the morrow next ensuing rode unto Paul’s and there rode in procession and offered, and there had Te Deum sungen with all solemnity. After which solemnisation finished he was with great royalty conveyed unto Westminster and there in the hall set in the king’s see with St Edward’s sceptre in his hand.
    Edward was, however, careful to postpone his full coronation until he had dealt with Queen Margaret’s army, still at large in Yorkshire. He did not want to owe his Crown entirely to the enthusiasm of the Londoners and the backing of the powerful Neville family. The Earl of Warwick, his uncle Lord Fauconberg and John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, left the capital first to muster recruits. Edward followed on 13 March. Two weeks later, on Palm Sunday, he led his army onto the field of Towton in a blinding snowstorm. In the longest and bloodiest engagement of the Wars of the Roses the Lancastrian army was completely destroyed. Warwick’s brother, George Neville, Bishop of Exeter, reported that the battle ‘began with the rising of the sun, and lasted until the tenth hour of the night’. The routed Lancastrians were ruthlessly hunted down and hacked to death until ‘so many dead bodies were seen as to cover an area six miles long by three broad and about four furlongs... some 28,000 persons perished on one side and the other’.
    ‘Our puppet’, King Henry, accompanied by his wife and son, escaped the slaughter and was granted asylum by the Scots, in exchange for the surrender of the great frontier fortress of Berwick. After resting up for a few days at York, Edward returned to London to claim the Crown, already his by acclamation and by right of conquest.

2
The Kingmaker
1461–71

News of Edward’s great victory reached the Duchess of York and her younger sons two weeks later at Utrecht. While the fate of the House of York was in doubt, their welcome had been polite but reserved. Now Duke Philip of Burgundy visited the refugees in person and arranged for a magnificent send-off for them at Bruges. A few days later Richard and George were back in England at the royal manor of Sheen in Surrey.
    Since he was only eight years old, it is unlikely that Richard was fully aware of the dizzying changes in his fortunes over the past two and a half years. The débâcle at Ludlow in 1460 left him in the custody of the House of Lancaster, the youngest son of an attainted rebel. A year later his father was Lord Protector and Richard stood fifth in line to the throne. At Wakefield he had lost a father, a brother and an uncle, and had to be smuggled abroad for his safety. Now he was back in England for the crowning of his universally popular brother. An Italian observer recorded that ‘words fail me to relate how well the commons love and adore him, as if he were their God. The entire kingdom keeps holiday for the event’.
    It was not long before Richard shared in his brother’s good fortune. On the eve of Edward’s coronation in June Richard and George acted out the elaborate ritual of induction as Knights of the Bath. Four months later, after George had been created Duke of Clarence, Richard in his turn became Duke of Gloucester, and was elected a Knight of the Garter. These titles had little bearing on his immediate future. It was the custom of the time that the sons of the nobility should be boarded out in the household of a family of equivalent rank, where they were known as henchmen. Foreign observers attributed this to the meanness of the English and their lack of affection; and it is probably true that the upper classes in the fifteenth century regarded their children as pawns to their social advancement.