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Richard
III Society
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Richard
III and the Stanleys
By Sandra Worth
(Printed in Ricardian Register Autumn 1999--Copyright © Sandra
Worth,: used with permission)
When Lord Thomas Stanley came to Richard requesting
permission to retire to his estates that fateful summer of 1485,
Richard could have refused. With a motion of the hand he could have
sent the ‘Wily Fox’ into custody and eliminated the
threat
Stanley posed to the security of his throne and to his life. Yet he
chose to grant permission, knowing full well the danger inherent in
that decision and what it might cost him. Why?
Since the solution facing Richard was both simple
and obvious, the answer to this question could not be more complex. It
embraces both the character of Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William
and the very essence of who Richard really was, his life’s
experience and how he saw himself, his view of his kingship and his
relationship not only with the Stanleys, but with all his nobles, his
people, and with God. Like rivers pouring into a sea, these all fed
into Richard’s psyche to culminate in that last, ultimately
fatal, decision before Bosworth.
Richard had to be as aware as everyone else how
Thomas Stanley had earned his nickname ‘Wily Fox’.
The
Stanleys were survivors. They deserted their allies time and again, yet
always managed to wiggle back into favor in time to ride at the
winner’s side. Marguerite D’Anjou, the Duke of
York, the
Earl of Warwick, King Edward and even Richard himself had all shared
the dubious honor of having been betrayed by the Stanleys, not once,
but several times. Each time, the Stanleys were not only forgiven, but
rewarded. About the Stanleys, Paul Murray Kendall writes:
"In a century of civil strife, fierce partisanship, broken causes, in
which many of the lords and gentry had been brought to ruin and
extinction, Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William had thrived. They
thrived by daring to make politics their trade, by sloughing off the
encumbrances of loyalty and honor, by developing an ambiguity of
attitude which enabled them to join the winning side, and by exploiting
the relative ease with which treason in this age might be lived down,
provided it were neither too passionate, too overt, nor too
damaging."
Richard’s first personal encounter with
Thomas Stanley’s treason came during the troubles with
Warwick in
the early spring of 1469, when he was seventeen. On his way north from
Wales to Edward’s side during the Robin of Redesdale
rebellion,
he had a confrontation with Lord Stanley’s men who blocked
his
path. Unknown to him, Lord Stanley, who was married to
Warwick’s
sister, had sent Warwick assurances of his support. After Warwick lost
the Battle of Lose-Coat Field, he fled west to Stanley for the succor
he had been promised, but Stanley, as a result of the skirmish with
Richard, had lost his nerve and “hastily deciding that the
Earl’s chances were dim,” changed his
mind. Warwick
was forced to flee England. On Warwick’s triumph against
Edward
the following October, however, Stanley rode into London at his side,
somehow managing to excuse his previous desertion, a testimony to his
glib tongue and powers of persuasion.
Lord Stanley’s artful way with words and the
success of his unique ‘divide and conquer’ strategy
whereby
each member of the family would, on cue, take a different side, had
saved their lives and their fortunes many a time and would do so again
on at least three other occasions: Tewkesbury; Hasting’s
conspiracy; and Buckingham’s revolt. One can imagine Lord
Stanley’s explanation after the destruction of the
Lancastrian
cause at Tewkesbury: . . . He had been forced into taking
King
Henry’s side… His heart had always been Yorkist. .
.
He had avoided the battle, hadn’t he? . . .And his brother
had
remained true to Edward. Not only did Edward forgive Stanley the
betrayal of his oath—canceled by the betrayal of his oath to
Henry—but he drew him into his intimate circle and made him
Steward of his Household.
Despite Lord Stanley’s slippery tongue, one
cannot imagine how he managed to extricate himself from
Hastings’
plot in which he was caught red-handed. But manage, he did, and when
his new wife, Henry Tudor’s mother, became the prime mover of
Buckingham’s revolt and lost her estates, Richard gave them
to
him, along with additional grants of lands and an appointment as
Constable of England. Paul Murray Kendall observes:
“Granted his smooth pliancy, his shrewd and wary maneuvering,
his
wonderful capacity to inspire confidence, still, at a remove of five
centuries, it remains puzzling that he so often escaped the
consequences of his betrayals.”
Indeed it does, and it also remains baffling why a
man who had proved himself a traitor at every opportunity would then be
heaped with honors that would augment his powers so dangerously. If
Richard had been a fool or stupid, one could understand, but that was
certainly not the case. At this point we must examine Richard, the man.
It was as obvious to Richard as to everyone else
that if Henry Tudor triumphed, Lord Stanley would be step-father to a
King; that if Buckingham’s rebellion had prospered, Stanley
would
have betrayed him; that he had, indeed, betrayed him with Hastings.
Richard lost no time executing Hastings, a man with whom he had shared
Edward’s love and many perils, yet he pardoned Stanley and
then
permitted him to carry the mace at his coronation, an ancestral honor
belonging to the dukes of Norfolk. Kendall, a scholar of Shakespeare
and human nature, affords us the clearest explanation of these
seemingly incomprehensible actions:
“To forgive Stanley was a kind of twisted expiation for the
execution of a better and a dearer man. Besides, Stanley was a
timeserver. With Stanley Richard felt no competition in
loyalties.”
Loyalty, Richard’s strongest trait, is
reflected in his motto Loyaulte Me Lie. When faced with the critical
choice between his love for Anne and loyalty to his king, unlike
Lancelot, he chose loyalty. No doubt the decision cost him dear since
from that point on, when faced with disloyalty in those he loved and
had trusted implicitly—Hastings, St. Leger,
Buckingham—his
reaction was swift, violent, deadly. He could pardon Stanley because
Stanley meant nothing to him and, therefore, he expected nothing from
him. Hastings, however, had been friend, kin, and ally. His sin was too
great to be borne.
Perhaps it was during the break with Warwick that
Richard chose his motto of loyalty. Seventeen years old, alone among
the Woodvilles he hated, bereft of the girl he loved and the family who
had meant home and hearth to him, he must have suffered greatly before
reaching his agonizing decision that loyalty bound him to his King.
This loyalty to his brother the King continued to define him, not only
in the eyes of the world, but in his own eyes—until the very
moment when he assumed the throne.
In taking that throne, Richard was forced to set
aside Edward’s sons. The fact that he did so to save the
realm
from civil war and his own family from destruction by the machinations
of an evil queen could have brought little comfort to a man in conflict
with himself. For Richard, a pious and gallant knight who placed
loyalty above all else and saw himself as one who had betrayed his
brother, there could be but one path of atonement. That path lay in
good works for his people and in resting his crown not on force, but on
loyalty. Only then could he expiate himself from what he saw as his
great sin. Just as he had once “kept himself within his own
lands
and set out to acquire the loyalty of his people through favors and
justice,” he now set out to do the same with his realm:
“He had to rule by merit because such rule was good in the
judgment of Heaven and because it might even be good enough to mitigate
his transgressions.”
Richard’s first and only parliament which
gave us bail, the presumption of innocence, the statue of limitations,
and the protections against tainted jury verdicts and corrupt jurors is
unprecedented and unparalleled. During Richard’s progress
through
the realm in 1484 he was offered money to defray his expenses by the
various town he visited, but he declined all their offers,
“affirming that he would rather have their hearts than their
treasure.” An observer, Dr. Thomas Langton, Bishop
of St.
David’s and later of Salisbury, records this verdict:
“He
contents the people wherever he goes best that ever did prince; for
many a poor man that hath suffered wrong many days have been relieved
and helped by him…God hath sent him to us for the weal of us
all.” Clearly, by the justice and goodness of his
rule
Richard sought to satisfy himself, his subjects, and God. As Kendall
notes:
“Seldom has a rule so brief been so impregnated by the
character
of the ruler; seldom has a ruler spoken with so personal an accent.
Both the government and those it governed he conceived in intimate
terms. He wore the function of the Crown like a coat of his own making:
it contained and represented him. Thus, he was unusually sensitive of
his self-imposed duties to his subjects, but he was also unusually
vulnerable to the attacks of his conscience.”
Richard’s efforts met with great initial
success; his subjects were content. Buckingham’s revolt
collapsed
almost before it began; relative peace and order wrapped the kingdom;
and his enemies had difficulty finding charges to bring against
him. Philipe de Commynes, a French statesman and friend to
Louis
XI and Henry Tudor, noted that the beneficence of Richard’s
rule
was acknowledged by the mass of the people. Then, in April, 1484, Fate
intervened and everything changed.
Before Richard and Anne could reach Middleham,
their only child, ten-year old Edward, died. His death at Easter came
almost exactly a year to the date of King Edward’s own death.
This tragedy was followed within the year by the death of
Richard’s queen, Anne.
It is impossible to comprehend the magnitude of
Richard’s loss. Anne was bound to him by blood as well as by
marriage. She had been his companion since the tender years of their
childhood. She was his helpmate and the grand passion of his life. Her
father had been his own surrogate father, and she had shared his
greatest joys, and the burden of his greatest sorrows. Now Anne, whom
Richard had loved as long as he could remember, was dead. All were
dead: his Neville family; his brothers; his son; his daughter,
Katherine; and now his beloved wife. He stood alone; the last of his
line.
If his nephews had been murdered—by
Buckingham or Margaret Beaufort or John Morton—he must have
held
himself responsible and wondered whether the Hand of God had dealt him
divine retribution. What else could explain these tragedies, the
coincidental timing of young Edward’s death with King
Edward’s, and the darkening of the sun at the hour
of
Anne’s death—the sun, which had been his
brother’s
proud symbol?
As Richard left for Nottingham to await Henry Tudor
that summer he had to have been filled with an agony of doubt over the
righteousness of his course. He had taken the crown, and the crown had
cost him all whom he’d held dear:
“He had recreated Clarence in Buckingham, and Buckingham had
promptly fulfilled the recreation by betraying him. He had taken the
throne from Edward’s son, and Heaven had soon after taken his
own
son from him. The woman to whom he had given the life of his heart had
sunk into the grave, stricken by despair as much as by disease. His
efforts to rule well had been mocked by rumor; the quiet of the realm
and his own peace poisoned by conspiracy. His courage had not
diminished; his will to pursue the path he had marked out did not
falter. But he could not sink the man in the King.”
Assailed by these doubts, facing a bleak
future, no longer able to trust himself to make the right
choices, shattered by grief and brooding on his losses, Richard no
doubt turned to a higher authority for guidance. Let God decide his
destiny; he would do nothing to help himself. In this state of mind, as
he waited at the “Castle of His Care” in Nottingham
on the
eve of invasion, came the Wily Fox to request permission to retire to
Cheshire to tend the business of his estates. Kendall notes
that
from the day Richard took Lord Stanley into his favor after the
execution of Hastings, there is no record that Lord Stanley had ever
left his side. Stanley’s excuse was transparent and Richard
knew
it. Yet he allowed Lord Stanley to ride away because his allegiance had
to be freely given, or in the critical hour Richard would be evading
the test he had set for himself and his rule. Commander and captain
though he was, Richard listened to another language than strategy and
he was moved by a deeper compulsion than reason.
Richard’s councilors must have been stunned.
In the end, aware of his duty to his men whose lives he was
risking—and perhaps, caring more for theirs than for his
own—Richard set a condition, though it meant blunting the
edge of
his test: Lord Stanley was to be replaced by his son, Lord Strange.
Stanley complied, knowing full well that his son’s life was
surety for his own good behavior:
“Like his father before him, who had groped for the throne so
awkwardly because he was playing a role alien to his nature, Richard
had persuaded himself to assume the scepter; but he could not wield it
comfortably because he could not assume with it the double conviction
that he had done what he ought and that his one object must be to keep
what he had got.”
Stanley’s betrayal could have held no
surprise for Richard. Yet there was one last surprise in store for him.
At Bosworth, in response to his demand that Lord Stanley join the royal
army or his son would die, Stanley sent back the
reply—perhaps
because he knew Richard would never take an innocent
life—“I have other sons.” To a devoted
and loving
father in the depths of emotional despair over the loss of his boy,
this had to have come as a bewildering, shattering revelation. The
‘Wily Fox’ had proven himself more repulsive and
reprehensible than Richard could ever have imagined. At that moment the
world that was inhabited by creatures such as Stanley—and
Henry
Tudor—must have seemed to Richard an unbearably hideous
place.
Moments after he received Stanley’s reply, he made his
suicidal
decision to charge behind enemy lines—and pass directly in
front
of Stanley’s position.
After Richard’s death, Sir William Stanley
crowned Henry Tudor with Richard’s battered crown which he
retrieved from a thorn bush. Despite this grand gesture, he was later
executed by Tudor for treason. At least, for one Stanley, luck had
finally run out.
References
i.
Richard The Third, New York, 1954, pp. 403-404
ii.
Paul Murray Kendall, Ibid, p.404
iii.Ibid,
p.405
iv.Ibid,
p.405
v.Ibid,p.250
vi.Anthony
Cheetham, The Life and Times of Richard III, Shooting Star Press, New
York, 1995; p. 91
vii.
Kendall, op.cit., p. 379
viii.
Harl. 433, f.
110; John Rous, Historia Regum Angliae. Rous, a Warwickshire monk,
compiled the history of the Earls of Warwick in the Rous Rolls. After
Richard’s death he attempted to win Henry Tudor’s
favor by
inventing the tale that Richard was born after two years in the womb
with talons and a full set of gnashing teeth.
ix.
Anthony Cheetham, op.cit.; pp. 215-216
x.
Kendall op.cit., p. 370
xi.
Kendall, op. cit. p. 385
xii.
Poison was
rumored at the time and may indeed have been a possibility. If so,
Prince Edward’s death came as a direct result of Henry
Tudor’s thirst for Richard’s crown. This horrific
possibility no doubt occurred to Richard, further fracturing his
fragile emotional health.
xiii.
Kendall, op.cit., p. 403
xiv.
The prospect
of a marriage with Johanna of Portugal—who wished to be a nun
and
was nothing like Anne— could have offered little hope of
personal
happiness for Richard. Moreover, he had evidently come to recognize the
need to rest his rule on force instead of loyalty in the future and
could not have relished this notion. Witness his address to his men
just before the Battle of Bosworth where, according to the Croyland
chonicler, the king, in rather weary fashion, told his men that
whichever side won the victory, it would prove the utter destruction of
England, for he was determined to crush his opponents once and for all,
while his enemies doubtless planned to wreak vengeance on his own men.
xv.
Richard called
Nottingham Castle the "Castle of his Care" from a poem by Piers
Plowman, since it was at Nottingham that he received the news of his
son’s death.
xvi.Kendall,
op.cit., p. 407
xvii.Ibid,
p. 419
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