Josephine Tey - The Daughter of Time

‘It was neat of him to mop up Rivers’ two thousand without any open clash.’

‘I expect they preferred the King’s brother to the Queen’s brother, if they were faced with it.’

‘Yes. And of course a fighting man has a better chance with troops than a man who writes books.’

‘Did Rivers write books?’

‘He wrote the first book printed in England. Very cultured, he was.’

‘Huh. It doesn’t seem to have taught him not to try conclusions with a man who was a brigadier at eighteen and a general before he was twenty-five. That’s one thing that has surprised me, you know.’

‘Richard’s qualities as a soldier?’

‘No, his youth. I’d always thought of him as a middle-aged grouch. He was only thirty-two when he was killed at Bosworth.’

‘Tell me: when Richard took over the boy’s guardianship, at Stoney Stratford, did he make a clean sweep of the Ludlow crowd? I mean, was the boy separated from all the people he had been growing up with?’

‘Oh, no. His tutor, Dr Alcock, came on to London with him, for one.’

‘So there was no panic clearing-out of everyone who might be on the Woodville side; everyone who might influence the boy against him.’

‘Seems not. Just the four arrests.’

‘Yes. A very neat, discriminating operation altogether. I felicitate Richard Plantagenet.’

‘I’m positively beginning to like the guy. Well, I’m going along now to look at Crosby Place. I’m tickled pink at the thought of actually looking at a place he lived in. And tomorrow I’ll have that copy of Comines, and let you know what he says about events in England in 1483, and what Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath, told the Council in June of that year.’

What Stillington told the Council on that summer day in 1483 was, Grant learned, that he had married Richard IV to Lady Eleanor Butler, a daughter of the first Earl of Shrewsbury, before Edward married Elizabeth Woodville. ‘Why had he kept it to himself so long?’ he asked when he had digested the news.

‘Edward had commanded him to keep it secret. Naturally.’

‘Edward seems to have made a habit of secret marriages,’ Grant said dryly.

‘Well, it must have been difficult for him, you know, when he came up against unassailable virtue. There was nothing for it but marriage. And he was so used to getting his own way with women – what with his looks and his crown – that he couldn’t have taken very resignedly to frustration.’

‘Yes. That was the pattern of the Woodville marriage. The indestructibly virtuous beauty with the gilt hair, and the secret wedding. So Edward had used the same formula on a previous occasion, if Stillington’s story was true. Was it true?’

‘Well, in Edward’s time, it seems, he was in turn both Privy Seal and Lord Chancellor, and he had been an ambassador to Brittany. So Edward either owed him something or liked him. And he, on his part, had no reason to cook up anything against Edward. Supposing he was the cooking sort.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Anyway, the thing was put to Parliament so we don’t have to take just Stillington’s word for it.’

‘To Parliament!’

‘Sure. Everything was open and above board. There was a very long meeting of the Lords at Westminster on the 9th. Stillington brought in his evidence and his witnesses, and a report was prepared to put before Parliament when it assembled on the 25th. On the 10th Richard sent a letter to the city of York asking for troops to protect and support him.’

‘Ha! Trouble at last.’

‘Yes. On the 11th he sent a similar letter to his cousin Lord Nevill. So the danger was real.’

‘It must have been real. A man who dealt so economically with that unexpected and very nasty situation at Northampton wouldn’t be one to lose his head at a threat.’

‘On the 20th he went with a small body of retainers to the Tower – did you know that the Tower was the royal residence in London, and not a prison at all?’

‘Yes, I knew that. It got its prison meaning only because nowadays being sent to the Tower has one meaning only. And of course because, being the royal castle in London, and the only strong keep, offenders were sent there for safe keeping in the days before we had His Majesty’s Prisons. What did Richard go to the Tower for?’

‘He went to interrupt a meeting of the conspirators, and arrested Lord Hastings, Lord Stanley, and one John Morton, Bishop of Ely.’

‘I thought we would arrive at John Morton sooner or later!’

‘A proclamation was issued, giving details of the plot to murder Richard, but apparently no copy now exists. Only one of the conspirators was beheaded, and that one, oddly enough, seems to have been an old friend of both Edward and Richard. Lord Hastings.’

‘Yes, according to the sainted More he was rushed down to the courtyard and beheaded on the nearest log.’

‘Rushed nothing,’ said Carradine disgustedly. ‘He was beheaded a week later. There’s a contemporary letter about it that gives the date. Moreover, Richard couldn’t have done it out of sheer vindictiveness, because he granted Hastings’ forfeited estates to his widow, and restored the children’s right of succession to them – which they had automatically lost.’

‘No, the death of Hastings must have been inevitable,’ said Grant, who was thumbing through More’s Richard III . ‘Even the sainted More says: “Undoubtedly the Protector loved him well, and was loth to have lost him”. What happened to Stanley and to John Morton?’

‘Stanley was pardoned – What are you groaning about?’

‘Poor Richard. That was his death warrant.’

‘Death warrant? How could pardoning Stanley be his death warrant?’

‘Because it was Stanley’s sudden decision to go over to the other side that lost Richard the battle of Bosworth.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘Odd to think that if Richard had seen to it that Stanley went to the block like his much-loved Hastings he would have won the battle of Bosworth, there would never have been any Tudors, and the hunchbacked monster that appears in Tudor tradition would never have been invented. On his previous showing he would probably have had the best and most enlightened reign in history. What was done to Morton?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Another mistake.’

‘Or at least nothing to signify. He was put into gentlemanly detention under the care of Buckingham. The people who did go to the block were the heads of the conspiracy that Richard had arrested at Northampton: Rivers and Co. And Jane Shore was sentenced to do penance.’

‘Jane Shore? What on earth has she got to do with the case? I thought she was Edward’s mistress?’

‘So she was. But Hastings inherited her from Edward, it seems. Or rather – let me see – Dorset did. And she was go-between between the Hastings side of the conspiracy and the Woodville side. One of Richard’s letters existing today is about her. About Jane Shore.’

‘What about her?’

‘His Solicitor-General wanted to marry her; when he was King, I mean.’

‘And he agreed?’

‘He agreed. It’s a lovely letter. More in sorrow than in anger – With a kind of twinkle in it.’

‘“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”’

‘That’s it exactly.’

‘No vindictiveness there, either, it seems.’

‘No. Quite the opposite. You know, I know it isn’t my business to think or draw deductions – I’m just the Research Worker – but it does strike me that Richard’s ambition was to put an end to the York-Lancaster fight once and for all.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Well, I’ve been looking at his coronation lists. It was the best-attended coronation on record, incidentally. You can’t help being struck by the fact that practically nobody stayed away. Lancaster or York.’