Richard III and the Young Princes

Even now, it was assumed that, having dealt with these difficulties at court, Richard would serve as a loyal protector to his nephew, King Edward V, whose coronation was postponed to 22 June. Instead, on 13 June, Richard ordered the arrest and summary execution of Lord Hastings, the King’s chamberlain, former manager of the royal household, loyal servant of the house of York, almost certainly because Hastings refused to cooperate with Richard in a plot to seize the throne. Obtaining custody of Edward V’s younger brother, Richard of Woodstock, who had fled with his mother to the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, Richard now committed both of his nephews to the Tower of London. They were never seen again. Whether or not they can be identified with the skeletons of two adolescent boys discovered in the Tower in 1674, by the end of June 1483, the two princes were either dead or awaiting their murderer’s knock at the door. On 22 June, the date to which the coronation of Edward V had in theory been postponed, instead of a twelve-year-old King, the Londoners were confronted by Dr Ralph Shaw, one of Richard of Gloucester’s tame clergyman, who at St Paul’s Cross proclaimed Richard’s own titles to be recognized as King, arguing that the princes in the Tower were bastards, the marriage of Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville having been contracted against the spirit of canon law. There was a sound legal argument that might have been made here. In practice, it drew only the flimsiest of veils across usurpation and murder. By the time that Richard of Gloucester was crowned King on 6 July, the princes were probably already dead. If not, then they died in August, when an unsuccessful plot was unearthed to rescue them from the Tower.

It remains one of the more remarkable aspects of this story that Richard, potentially a loyal servant of the crown and protector to his royal nephews, should have preferred to seize their throne and, in the outcome, to die a hated usurper rather than a beloved uncle. Perhaps there was some kink in the Yorkist family DNA sufficient to explain the treachery first of Clarence, now of Richard, the younger brother. Perhaps Richard’s morality was fiercer and more sincere than historians have been inclined to suppose; his sense of puritanism simply revolted at the spectacle of Edward V, son of a corrupt Woodville marriage, ascending the throne. Like many puritans, Richard perhaps found it easy to disguise his own self-interest as an act of public duty. After 1483, he did his best to popularize the cult of Henry VI, allowing for the removal of the late King’s relics from Chertsey to Windsor Castle as a means of yet further blackening the moral reputation of his brother, Edward IV. Edward IV’s mistress was forced to do public penance in the streets of London as if she were a common whore. Henry VI was reburied next to the effigy of Edward IV, whose late government was publicly declared to have been motivated by concupiscence with ‘every good maiden and woman standing in dread to be ravished and defouled’. Richard emerged as neither the first nor the last in a series of self-consciously ‘northern’ politicians whose personal austerity and probity seemed to promise a return to core moral values.