The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (23 page)

It would be a few hours before the news hit London. In the meantime, Edward Woodville set off to sea to deal with the French, on whose behalf Philippe de Crèvecoeur, also known as Lord Cordes, had been staging raids on English ships since the death of Edward IV. The council had appointed Edward to deal with this situation and put 2,000 men under his command. As he probably embarked from Porchester, and possibly had left on 29 April rather than 30 April, he likely had no idea, as he sailed out of the harbour, of the storm he was leaving behind.
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By the evening of 30 April, the queen heard the horrifying news that her brother Anthony and her son Richard Grey had been arrested and that the king was in the power of Gloucester, an uncle he hardly knew. Taking her remaining royal children with her, she fled into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. Mancini reports that the queen and Dorset tried first to raise troops, whereas Crowland tells us that unnamed supporters of the queen stood by the queen at Westminster while supporters of Hastings collected in London.
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Lionel Woodville, who had been at Oxford on 26 April, had joined his sister in sanctuary by 9 June, as reported by a private letter from Simon Stallworth to Sir William Stonor. Mancini thought Dorset to have accompanied his mother into sanctuary, although Gloucester himself appeared to have believed he was at large.
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This is a good time to pause to ask, was there a Woodville plot against Gloucester? We have only Gloucester’s word for it, and on balance, it seems unlikely. Mancini, a foreigner with no reason to cover up evidence of such a plot if he believed in one, clearly was sceptical, and Crowland explicitly described Rivers and the rest as innocent.
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Furthermore, Anthony’s unguarded actions belie such a plot. Had he been planning to destroy Gloucester, it hardly seems logical that he would have taken no precautions when he met the duke at Northampton – indeed, there was no reason why he should have gone to Northampton at all when he could have been making his way with his charge to London, and to the rest of the Woodvilles, instead. His men at Stony Stratford were equally unprepared for trouble, and surrendered Edward V to Gloucester with no resistance. As for the queen, while her flight into sanctuary has been taken by some as consciousness of guilt, flight can be indicative of fear as well. Having lived through the events of 1469 to 1471, which included her husband’s exile and the murders of her father and her brother, Elizabeth had every reason to fear for her future once she heard of the events in Northampton and Stony Stratford.

Why, then, did Gloucester move against the Woodvilles on the night of 30 April? He and the Woodvilles were not natural enemies, for there is no evidence predating April 1483 of ill-will between them and Richard. If Richard held them responsible for the death of Clarence, as claimed by Mancini, there are no signs of it at the time of Clarence’s death, nor are there signs that Gloucester, who had been squabbling over the Warwick inheritance with Clarence in the 1470s, was particularly close to his brother. If Gloucester had any opinions about his brother’s marriage to Elizabeth – as he was a youngster in 1464, his opinion hardly counted at the time – he kept them to himself, and he sided with his brother throughout the period of 1469 to 1471. Kendall’s musings that the queen ‘would have known how to show her haughtiness to the undersized lad from Yorkshire’ and that she viewed him and his brother ‘only as rivals of her family for the favors of her lord’ are pure fantasy; no source suggests that the queen or her relatives treated the young Gloucester with disrespect.
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The Woodvilles were no threat to his power and influence in the north, nor is there any evidence that they drove a wedge between Gloucester and the king. Two members of the family, Edward Woodville and the Marquis of Dorset, served under him in Scotland, and the former was made a knight banneret at Gloucester’s hands. Just a few weeks before his arrest, Anthony Woodville named Richard as arbitrator of a dispute. In 1469, the queen had appointed Gloucester steward of certain of her estates at £100 per year.
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None of Edward IV’s deathbed worries centred around Gloucester’s getting on with the Woodvilles. Though it is common for Richard’s modern-day admirers to claim that Gloucester would have been eliminated by the Woodvilles if they had been given the chance, there is in reality no reason to believe that had Rivers and his entourage been allowed to bring Edward V to London undisturbed, they and Gloucester could not have cooperated during a royal minority. That there might have been some friction is inevitable, but it need not have been fatal.

With the dearth of any convincing evidence that the Woodvilles were plotting against Gloucester – and the fact that Rivers and the others were never given a proper trial, where such evidence could have been presented, is suggestive in itself – we are left with several alternatives. One is that Gloucester genuinely believed that there was a plot against him, which is not impossible given the hysterical tone of his later propaganda. Another is that Gloucester was determined to have no rivals for power in his role as protector and was prepared to take whatever drastic measures were required to achieve this goal. Yet another is that Gloucester had already decided to seize the throne.
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But for the time being, the 12-year-old Edward V seemed destined to reign, and to someday rule. On 4 May – what would have been his coronation – Edward V rode into town, escorted with all due respect by Gloucester and Buckingham. Before the king arrived in the city, Gloucester and Buckingham sent cartloads of goods bearing the arms of the queen’s brothers and sons, which criers claimed had been stored up at various spots outside the capital in readiness for the Woodvilles to ambush and kill Gloucester as he passed through the countryside. Mancini reported, however, that ‘many knew these charges to be false, because the arms in question had been placed there […] when war was being waged against the Scots’. Gloucester was equally unsuccessful at persuading the council to condemn the prisoners on grounds of preparing ambushes and of being guilty of treason. The councillors found that there was ‘no certain case as regards the ambushes’; even if there had been, they pointed out, it could not be treason because Gloucester did not hold the regency or any other public office.
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While Mancini was incorrect in his assumption that the council could itself condemn (or not condemn) Rivers and the others to death, and in his statement that Gloucester held no public office, there is no reason to doubt the gist of his statement – that the council was not willing to countenance bringing treason charges against the men.

His coronation now postponed to 22 June, Edward V lodged at the Bishop’s Palace at St Paul’s, where he remained a few days until the council decided to move him to more spacious lodgings. Buckingham suggested the Tower, to which the rest of the council (now presided over by Gloucester as protector), agreed. Nonetheless, Crowland reports, some were troubled about the detention of Rivers and the rest in prison, while others believed that Gloucester was not showing sufficient respect for the queen’s ‘dignity and peace of mind’.
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Far from reassuring the queen, Gloucester had turned his attentions to her brother Edward Woodville. On 9 May, he ordered that Porchester Castle, which had been put into Edward’s keeping on 1 March 1480, be delivered to William Ovedale; he gave a similar order with respect to Carisbrooke Castle, of which Anthony had been constable. The next day, he ordered men to ‘go to the Downs among Sir Edward and his company’. On 14 May, Gloucester issued a more explicit instruction: Edward Brampton, John Welles, Thomas Grey, and others were to go to the sea (‘with ships’, the order specified) to arrest Edward. The men were authorised to receive all who would come except for Dorset, Edward Woodville, and Robert Ratcliffe, an associate of Anthony’s.
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Most likely, Gloucester intended for Dorset and Edward Woodville to share the fate of Anthony and Richard Grey.

Edward, meanwhile, had been busy harassing French ships, evidently capturing some, as a later agreement between Gloucester and Lord Cordes referred to French ships being held at Sandwich and Plymouth as well as ‘other prizes and takings’.
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On 14 May, the very day that Gloucester ordered his arrest, Edward seized £10,250 in English gold coins from a vessel at Southampton as forfeit to the Crown. There is no reason to doubt that Edward, apparently unaware of events on shore, was acting in good faith. Edward gave an indenture in which he bound himself to repay the sum in English merchandise should the gold not be found to be forfeit; if the gold was found to be forfeit, he bound himself to answer to the king for this sum.
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Once word got out that Edward was a wanted man, according to Mancini, the Genoese captains of two of his ships, fearing reprisals against their countrymen in England if they disobeyed Gloucester’s orders, encouraged the English soldiers on board to drink heavily (‘for the tedium of navigation should be banished by joyous potations’), then bound the befuddled men with ropes and chains. With the Englishmen immobilised, the Genoese announced their intent to return to England, and all but two of the ships, those under the command of Edward Woodville himself, followed suit. Horrox, however, suggests more prosaically that this vinous tale aside, the majority of Edward’s captains simply recognised Gloucester’s authority as protector and obeyed his orders accordingly.
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Edward Woodville – perhaps with his gold coins seized at Southampton, unless he had been so unlucky as to have placed them on one of the deserting ships – sailed on to Brittany, where he joined the exiled Henry Tudor. There, he received a pension of 100 livres a month from Duke Francis of Brittany.
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Having failed to capture Edward Woodville, Gloucester contented himself with seizing Woodville possessions. Although nothing indicates that Richard Woodville, obscure as ever, had been accused of anything, the fact that he was a Woodville sufficed for Gloucester to seize his manor of Wymington in Bedfordshire on 19 May. Two days later, Gloucester’s ally Francis, Viscount Lovell, received Richard Grey’s manor of Thorpe Waterville in Northamptonshire. Even young Anne St Leger, who had been slated to marry Dorset’s son, was handed over to the Duke of Buckingham, in preference to her own father, Thomas St Leger. Richard Haute, the queen’s cousin, who had been arrested along with Rivers, Grey, and Vaughen, was relieved of his manor of Ightham Mote on 14 May on Gloucester’s orders.
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As Rosemary Horrox points out, these moves were of dubious legality, which contrasts poorly with the reputation for fair dealing that Richard III has acquired in the eyes of his admirers.

The question of the Woodvilles’ goods and property leads to another question in a time period that brims with them: Had the Woodvilles – or at least three of them – made off with the royal treasury? This story, often reported as an established fact, comes from a single contemporary source: Mancini, who tells us that at about the time Edward Woodville put off to sea, ‘it was commonly believed that the late king’s treasure, which had taken such years and such pains to gather, was divided between the queen, the marquess, and Edward’.
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In looking at this statement, it should first be noted that Mancini is not giving an eyewitness account, but merely reporting that the story of the treasury raid was ‘commonly believed’. Thus, Mancini’s statement may merely reflect the current gossip – or propaganda – about the Woodvilles’ doings. Mancini himself gives no indication of whether he shared the common belief or whether he thought it to be well founded.

Even more important, Rosemary Horrox in her examination of the financial memoranda of Edward V’s reign has concluded that there was very little treasure to be divided. She writes that the measures against the French, costing £3,670, had depleted the cash reserves left by Edward IV and that these expenditures likely were the source of Mancini’s tale of a Woodville treasury raid.
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Moreover, as Horrox notes, Edward IV’s cash reserves were low to begin with, thanks to two years of war with Scotland.
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If there was any treasure to be divided up, there is no evidence that Elizabeth Woodville had any share of it. Certainly, Gloucester took no steps, either as Edward V’s protector or after he became King Richard III, to recover any treasure from Elizabeth. Had there been any in her possession, he would have certainly required her to disgorge it either on 7 May 1483, when the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered the sequestration of Edward IV’s goods, jewels, and seals,
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on 16 June 1483, when Gloucester sent numerous armed men to Westminster Abbey to help persuade Elizabeth to surrender her youngest son to Gloucester’s custody,
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or no later than 1 March 1484, when Elizabeth agreed to leave sanctuary and was given a pension by Richard III.
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It is hardly comprehensible that Richard III, who as we have seen was actively seizing Woodville lands as early as mid-May of 1483, would have sat back passively and allowed Elizabeth to keep treasure to which she had no legal right.