Richard III: A Ruler and his Reputation

Richard III

A Ruler and His

Reputation

David Horspool

In memory of Christopher Horspool (1940–2013)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Son of the ‘high and mighty Prince’

‘His wit and reson wt drawen’

‘Infants, who have not offended against the king’

At Fastolf’s Place

‘Into the parties of Flanders’

Duke of Gloucester, Squire of Warwick

‘Little body and feeble strength’

2 Exile and Recovery

Richard of Wales

‘My lord of Gloucester travelled to Holland’

‘Ledyng the vaward of Kyng Edward’

3 Warwick’s Heir

A Bride for a Prince

A Bridge on the River Somme

Family Business

Lord of the North

‘To fight against James, King of Scotland’

4 ‘To Catch the English Crown’

Uncle and Protector

Friday the Thirteenth

‘Ordeigned to Reigne upon the people’

5 ‘Her comyth Richard the third’

‘The Princes in the Tower’

‘To shine as a king’

‘The most untrewe creature lyvyng’

6 ‘In one body there are many members’

Castle of Care

‘All Engeland, undyr an hogge’

Evil Reports

7 ‘Tant le desieree’

8 ‘My shadow as I pass’

‘By broken faith’

‘To secure a reassessment’

Richard at Rest

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

1 The Falcon and Fetterlock badge of the Yorks from Heraldry for Craftsmen and Designers by William St John Hope (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

2 The seal of Richard of Gloucester as Admiral of England from Heraldry for Craftsmen and Designers by William St John Hope (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

3 The Middleham Jewel. Image courtesy of York Museums Trust: http://yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk/: Public Domain.

4 A facsimile of Richard’s own addition to a letter to the Lord Chancellor, 12 October 1483 from The Handwriting of the Kings and Queens of England by W. J. Hardy (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1893).

5 A replica of the ‘Bosworth Boar’ badge. Photograph: Thea Lenarduzzi.

Introduction

A famous portrait: a man gazes distractedly off to the left, his hands held lightly together in front of his chest. The eye is drawn to those hands. In a nervous gesture, the left thumb and forefinger pinch off, or on, the ring on the little finger of the right hand, one of three rings he is wearing. The man is sumptuously dressed and ornamented, his sleeves lined with fur, a ruby and pearl jewel in his hat, and a rich collar in which fourteen more rubies and twenty-four more pearls are visible. These are the trappings of very high status, but the sitter has none of the placid self-assurance associated with the wearers of such finery. His eyes seem those of a youngish man, perhaps in his early thirties. They are bright and keen, if mournful, while his skin is pale and his features are drawn. The lines on his brow and around the eyes age the face. Here is a picture of nervous energy, and of gnawing conscience.

This painting, hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London, a detail of which is reproduced on the cover of this book, remains the most familiar of all images of Richard III, though it is not the oldest. It was painted long after its subject’s death in 1485, probably around a hundred years later. It is based, like dozens of others that once decorated the corridors of great houses throughout the country, on a portrait in the Royal Collection, which was painted between 1504 and 1520 – that is, also not from life. Intriguingly, despite the hints of troubled conscience, the National Portrait Gallery version is far more sympathetic than the earlier Royal Collection one. That portrait was touched up fairly soon after it was first done, to thin the lips and set the mouth in a hard line, and to raise the right shoulder – only very slightly elevated in the National Portrait Gallery version – rather more acutely. The skin in the Royal Collection portrait is sickly pale, almost yellowing, and the eyes are harder, while the thumb on the right hand, which is bent in the National Portrait Gallery version, seems to have sharpened into a point. This picture, recorded in the collections of Henry VIII and Edward VI, son and grandson respectively of the man who replaced Richard III on the throne, seems to have been painted to capture the classic ‘Tudor’ view of Richard, as an incarnation of evil, a usurper and mass murderer, deformed in mind as in body. Here is the wicked uncle, killer of the Princes in the Tower (among others), awaiting his deserved comeuppance in battle against the rightful king.

The fact that the Tudors themselves kept a deliberately exaggerated version of ‘bad King Richard’ on their walls is less puzzling than the fact that, towards the end of the sixteenth century – by which time Shakespeare’s monster had probably already appeared onstage and the material on which he based his version was certainly well established – somebody should have commissioned a portrait that turned out to be so broadly sympathetic. The Richard in the National Portrait Gallery doesn’t look like a bad man: he looks like a man with a lot on his mind. The portrait prompted similar reactions in Richard’s most famous (fictional) advocate, Inspector Grant, hero of Josephine Tey’s extraordinarily successful pro-Richard detective novel The Daughter of Time (1951). This is, Grant thinks, a painting of ‘Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist’. It is emphatically not an image of villainy. For Grant, the painter, whoever he was, turns out to be on to something, after the policeman has conducted an investigation into Richard from his sickbed. The last words of the novel, spoken by a nurse, are: ‘When you look at it for a little it’s really quite a nice face isn’t it?’

What neither the nurse nor Inspector Grant reflect on is that this ‘nice face’ was as much a work of imagination as any of the nastier faces of Richard made by painters or conjured by chroniclers or playwrights. The National Portrait Gallery painting reminds us that there has very rarely been a settled opinion about Richard III, even in the supposedly propaganda-filled Tudor years. But it also cautions us that all our efforts, like those of the anonymous artist who decided to give back to Richard a little humanity, are prey to some form of wishful thinking. The National Portrait Gallery describes its picture of Richard as using ‘the pattern from an original likeness’, and art historians think that the very earliest surviving portrait of Richard, now in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries, was based on one ‘painted from life’.¹ But we are still at one remove, at the very least, from Richard himself. There is no contemporary portrait of Richard, no record of his sitting for one. Here, in visual form, is the problem for anyone approaching a life of Richard III. For a king who spent just over two years on the throne, he has received an extraordinary, perhaps even an unsustainable, level of attention and range of opinion. Some of that material was contemporary, but the most powerful, the bits that have stuck in the public imagination longest, like Richard’s portrait, are not. Reconstructing Richard is often an exercise in admitting our ignorance – in stark contrast to the confidence of those who wrote about him shortly after, or even long after, his death – and deciding on the balance of probabilities. We can demonstrate how Tudor ‘propaganda’ or Ricardian advocacy has, in the past, overstated its case, but being sure what isn’t right is not the same as knowing what is.

The confirmation that Richard’s remains had been discovered in Leicester in 2012 offered the hope that in some areas, science could replace speculation about him. But most of the problems with understanding Richard have not been solved by the discovery. These can be summed up as too little to go on, and too much. Too little, because the evidence for Richard’s life, particularly his life before he became king in 1483, is not exactly super-abundant. He features in royal grants and parliamentary rolls, and is mentioned in near-contemporary chronicles of the period, though the tradition of monastic chronicle-writing was in terminal decline, and the town chronicles that survive are mostly terse records of events, with little embellishment. There are mentions of Richard or things to do with him in the chance survivals of private family correspondence, chiefly that of the Pastons of Norfolk, whose business just happened to overlap with his on occasion. There are a few letters dictated, and fewer lines still actually handwritten, by Richard. The great majority of this material is available in printed editions, of which this book will make copious use. We know about some of Richard’s own books, though for most of them we can’t be sure he read them, let alone what he thought about them. In almost all his earlier appearances on the historical stage, Richard is not the protagonist. As a child he is often invisible, and, even in his ‘formative years’ as Duke of Gloucester, he is frequently missing from the record. For much of his life we don’t know precisely where Richard was at specific times, nor when some very major personal events happened. We don’t know, for example, exactly when he got married, nor when his legitimate son or (at least) two illegitimate children were born.

But those gaps are nothing compared to the difficulty of reconstructing Richard’s personality. Overwhelmingly, the imprint that Richard left on his time was impersonal. It is a record of acquisitions, of political and judicial decisions, of hiring and firing, of public building and foundation, and military planning. The personality that lay behind those acts is thus ripe for speculation. For centuries, Richard has tended to be characterized as a puzzling bundle of contrasts: loyal yet treacherous, pious yet ruthless, courageous yet paranoid. It will be part of the contention of this book that many of these contradictions are more explicable than at first appears. One way of doing that is by trying to stick closely to chronology. The order in which things happened can often go a long way towards explaining why they happened. In the case of Richard, he seems to have been able to adapt to change in an often changeable world. It may seem strange to argue that a man who was killed before he reached his thirty-third birthday was a born survivor, but given the circumstances of his upbringing and the fact that two of his older brothers had died violently, he must have learned to be one. As for the remaining contradictions, they may be due to lack of evidence, or to a Walt Whitman-like multitudinous character. Nobody is consistent throughout their life, and acting in ways that seem to contradict a perceived personality trait is hardly unique. To take an example from Richard’s own family, his brother, Edward IV, is often characterized (including by contemporaries) as indolent and given to sensuality rather than vigour. Yet he was undoubtedly the greatest military leader of the Wars of the Roses, and despite years of relative peace, was apparently gearing up for a renewed assault on France when he died in 1483. Richard is often categorized, some might say dismissed, as a ‘man of his time’. One eminent historian of the Tudors went further, calling him a ‘bore’.² He lived at the heart of one of the most dramatic periods in English history, and it would be strange if those experiences had not shaped him. But the fact that he could be so unpredictable makes him more than a typical fifteenth-century aristocrat, and very far from boring. Of course, Richard was a man of his time and class. But he was also an individual, and one who has constantly attracted attention over the centuries.

This leads us to the problem of too much to go on. In the century or so after 1485 a picture began to emerge that read back the drama of Richard’s brief reign into the life that preceded it, in some ways taking advantage of the lack of contemporary accounts of Richard to create a villain in the making. This was also the beginning of an age of national historiography, a tradition begun by Polydore Vergil and carried on through the writings of Edward Hall (1548), Richard Grafton (1568) and Raphael Holinshed (1578). The influence of Shakespeare, who drew on this tradition, is naturally the most powerful in the construction of a myth of Richard that makes uncovering the reality so difficult. But the later development of a counter-myth, if not as dazzling as Shakespeare’s monster, has been almost as influential. The pattern was set for a debate over Richard’s merits very early. As the National Portrait Gallery painting reminds us, this was not a case of an unchallenged version of history holding sway for hundreds of years before finally being swept away in more enlightened times. Richard has had historical defenders from the early seventeenth century to the present day. But on the other side, he has continued to be attacked. His great Victorian biographer James Gairdner, for example, after a thorough immersion in contemporary sources, was still convinced of the ‘general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been made familiar by Shakespeare and Thomas More’.³ More recently, at least since Paul Murray Kendall’s sympathetic account published in 1955, a more charitable view has taken hold. Subsequent academic historians, including the author of what remains the authoritative biography of Richard III, Charles Ross (1981), have tried to move beyond the study of Richard as being a matter of taking sides. Most continue to find Richard guilty of the murder of his nephews, for example, but are sanguine rather than censorious about it. This book aims at neutrality, too, taking account of the latest historical and archaeological arguments and discoveries to present a comprehensible Richard, without keeping a foot in either pro- or anti-Ricardian camps. Readers will learn my conclusions about the perennial Ricardian mysteries, but they will also read that there is a lot more to him than whodunnits, and that making moral judgements about medieval monarchs, while perfectly legitimate, is a very small part of any attempt at historical biography. I am also interested in the reasons why, more than five hundred years after the event, there are still people apparently keen to fight the Wars of the Roses.

Biographers and historians often write about ‘stripping away’ the myths created by later writers, but it is probably worth admitting that, for Richard, this is an almost impossible task. Part of the fascination of Richard is that he has become a myth, a model of evil or of wronged righteousness, depending on the storyteller. The task of anyone trying to reconstruct the life of Richard III is to be alert to the temptations that these myths and counter-myths offer, and to make use of them to understand how we have ended up with the composite figure who is at once so familiar and so alien. In most of this book, consequently, while I tell Richard’s story based on contemporary or near-contemporary accounts, I also discuss later versions where those have come to dominate the received view of events. In the last, ‘posthumous’ section of the book, I focus more closely on the constructors of Richard’s reputation, as well as following his final journey to reinterment in Leicester Cathedral. The sustained excitement following the discovery of his remains in Leicester in 2012, culminating in the burial of the king with full royal honours in March 2015, shows how much Richard continues to matter to contemporary Britons. The debates occasioned by the discovery show that his reputation is still by no means a settled argument. The same pattern of competing narratives – and even, despite the fact that Richard has been dead for over five centuries, of competing loyalties – has re-emerged. Our continuing fascination with Richard III offers a reflection of what British history means to us, and how we interpret it.

***

On 2 March 2013 all 485 seats in the Peter Williams Lecture Theatre at Leicester University were taken. The occasion was the first big meeting of the Richard III Society since the confirmation that the bones discovered at the Grey Friars dig the previous year were, indeed, those of the missing king. There was something of the air of a party conference about the event, though it would be beyond the fantasies of the most authoritarian of mainstream political party leaders to have followers of such loyalty and broad agreement. And there was, too, a sense of celebration, as if a minority party had, against all the odds, won a general election.

The Society had attracted many new members in the wake of the discovery, we learnt, but a fair number of those in attendance were old hands. Some wore their allegiance proudly. Here was a lady in a home-knitted cardigan featuring the Yorkist Sun in Splendour, and men and women of all ages sported white-boar T-shirts and badges – Richard’s own device. Others were more discreet, and claimed no great expertise, but could point to more than thirty years of membership, and quietly revealed an intimate knowledge of fifteenth-century dynastic politics. There were more women than men, and while the best known of them, the newly famous Philippa Langley, the screenwriter who had pushed the project to dig for Richard forward, laughed off suggestions that she was ‘in love’ with a man who had lived and died so long ago, other attendants were less shy. I spoke to one woman who admitted that, yes, she was ‘a little bit in love’ with Richard, a man who fought for what he believed in – went down fighting, too.

The stall that opened between sessions was typical of the day’s combination of scholarly antiquarianism and outright fandom. Facsimiles of the Beauchamp Pageant and volumes of the Society-sponsored scholarly edition of a vital British Library manuscript source sat alongside Richard III headscarves and white-boar pendants. The father and son that I sat next to, both new members with a passion for medieval history, proudly showed me their new lapel badges from the stall.

The discovery of the ‘king in the car park’ is undeniably an extraordinarily unlikely thing to have happened. Who could blame the backers of the project for exuding an atmosphere of festivity, even of triumph? The keynote speaker, Chris Skidmore, a historian who also happens to be a Member of Parliament, duly sounded a note of caution, like a new minister warning the party faithful not to expect miracles in the first year of office. But the theme of the conference, ‘A New Richard III?’, even with that concessionary interrogative, was more in keeping with the mood. What had been the ‘Looking for Richard Project’ could move into a new phase now that the king had been found.

Speakers who had been involved with the dig, with the tracing of genealogical evidence, with the reconstruction of Richard’s face based on the bone structure of his skull, all addressed the conference. The discovery was proof that the efforts of devoted amateurs and professionals with open minds could bear fruit. These men and women had set out their case, carefully, doggedly, at times even obsessively, and been proved right. For a Society that is habituated to outside scepticism, such spectacular success must be all the more gratifying.

But can his bones help us find a new Richard? The pervasive influence of myth on the subject of Richard III was in evidence again from the moment his bones were uncovered. The most obvious thing about them was, at first, the hardest to assimilate to the pro-Richard, ‘Ricardian’ view. As the pictures of the newly laid out spinal column made very clear, Richard suffered from scoliosis. It was pointed out that this is very different from kyphosis, which results in the classic ‘hunchback’ of the Shakespearean Richard. Nevertheless, it had been an axiom of Ricardian discourse that the ‘venomous hunchback’ was a Tudor fabrication, and that contemporary witnesses left no impression of any deformity whatsoever. Scoliosis, even of the severe type evident in Richard’s case, is not always visible on a clothed body. But Richard’s body was not always clothed. He would have been dressed and undressed by others throughout his life (the affliction is estimated to have begun around the age of ten); and even if his body servants never gossiped about their master’s unusual shape, the public display of his naked corpse, thrown across a packhorse on the battlefield at Bosworth, and laid out for all to see before its final interment at Grey Friars church in Leicester, would have revealed the truth.

Of course, Richard’s defenders as early as Clements Markham at the turn of the last century have pointed out that it is ‘an unreasoning prejudice against Richard’ to associate ‘his alleged crimes’ with ‘his personal repulsiveness’.⁴ But here we run up against the peculiarity of Richard’s case, as posterity treats it; while his defenders are scrupulously keen to base their defence on research and evidence, to counteract Tudor ‘propaganda’ and its later disseminators, there is still an emotional resonance to Ricardianism. At the Peter Williams theatre, this was nowhere more in evidence than when the wax reconstruction of Richard’s head was unexpectedly revealed to be in the room. As it was unveiled, the contents of the glass case were greeted with a gasp, not of astonishment – the bust was familiar from television and newspaper reproductions by now – but of admiration. Here was the ‘bonny lad’, as a TV presenter had described him, if not in the flesh, then the next best thing. When Dr Caroline Wilkinson, Professor of Craniofacial Identification at the University of Dundee, finished her description of the extraordinary lengths to which she had gone to reconstruct Richard’s face, one of the first questions from the floor was whether his body could be reconstructed as well. The scientific or historical benefits of such reconstruction, even if it could be afforded, were not immediately apparent. The potential emotional payoff was clear.

At the very least, the testimony of Richard’s body and the numerous insults and blows it received, peri- and post-mortem, will expand our knowledge of the king’s last stand. It must be admitted, however, that even his harshest critics never alleged that he had ended in any other way than ‘fighting manfully in the press of his enemies’, as the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil put it.⁵ Even Thomas More – another of the king’s earliest and most eloquent critical historians, and indirect inspiration for his most eloquent critic sine rivale, Shakespeare – conceded Richard’s soldierly qualities in his unfinished History of King Richard III (printed in 1543, though, like Vergil’s History, it was written in the decade after 1510). In this instance, the discovery would seem likely only to confirm what few disputed, that Richard died violently at Bosworth. Earlier archaeological investigations, such as those at the site of the greatest battle of the Wars of the Roses (and probably of any war on English soil), Towton in Yorkshire (1461), had already shown the extreme violence perpetrated, and how the blows focused on the faces of the victims, in some cases splitting the skull almost in two, causing ‘injuries that are far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death’.⁶

Other contributions to the conference raised the prospect of new insights, without truly delivering them. The discipline of modern experimental psychology, for example, might be applicable to Richard. However, Professor Mark Lansdale’s decision to base his findings, or suggestions, not on contemporary evidence but on ‘reliable biographies’ such as the (stirring, persuasive, deeply researched but frequently rather imaginative) work of Paul Murray Kendall, meant that, while thought-provoking, those findings could hardly be historically convincing. Richard, Lansdale argued, was not a psychopath, but may have suffered from ‘intolerance to uncertainty syndrome’. For a man surrounded by (never mind responsible for) premature death from his first years, a man who had had to run for his life in childhood and later, uncertainty must have been an almost everyday experience. Medieval life was uncertain at the best of times: hence the attractions of living sub specie eternitatis. But how could someone unable to tolerate uncertainty take such big risks, including putting himself on the throne, and deciding to gamble everything on defending his position? We are more likely to get close to Richard’s psyche by considering the alternatives open to him and the choices he made than by seeing his psychological make-up as predetermining those choices.

The conference was on more familiar ground with the contributions that provided first impressions of how Richard’s injuries might be used to reconstruct the course of his last battle. An expert on medieval armour also showed how the calibre of armourers Richard is likely to have drawn upon would have ensured that any evidence of his scoliosis was cunningly concealed, without restricting his movements or disadvantaging him in battle.

So this New Richard looked rather a lot like the Old (Ricardian) Richard, for all the unexpectedly ‘bonny’ facial features. He was brave, tough, no-nonsense (intolerant of uncertainty) and loyal. In a way, the most revealing talk was that of Philippa Langley and Annette Carson (author of Richard III: The Maligned King), which, as well as detailing the heroic lengths to which the former went to persuade archaeologists to dig in the now famous car park of Leicester social services, set out a view of the king that would not have been unfamiliar to any of Richard’s staunchest posthumous defenders – from Horace Walpole, whose Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III was published in 1768, to Josephine Tey in the twentieth century. We were returned to a world of bad Tudors and good Yorkists, of a blameless king who took power for the reasons he said he did (his brother Edward’s children had, on his death, turned out to be illegitimate). As for the Princes in the Tower, well, this crowd didn’t really need persuading that he ‘didn’t do it’.

The stated aim of the Richard III Society is ‘to secure a more balanced assessment of the king’. Over the years since its foundation in 1924, this has led to the publication of editions of primary sources, to hundreds of scholarly articles, to a reconsideration of all aspects of Richard’s life and reign – and of course, to the discovery of the king’s body itself. No reputable historian now would perpetuate the ‘black legend’ of Richard, the one that Thomas More and Shakespeare give us. But to prosper as a popular organization, rather than a dependable, but somewhat dry, sponsor of scholarly debate, the Society needs the black legend. Shakespeare may have given us a monstrous Richard for all time, but the most popular modern versions of the king have all been ‘revisionist’. The fact that Richard is a monster only onstage cannot be allowed to stop Ricardians from ‘fighting against’ a Tudor picture that has long since become a straw man.

If we are to find a new Richard, it is unlikely to come in any great measure from his bones. As we will see, the diligent work of scientists since the excavation has led to some fascinating conclusions about Richard’s lifestyle, his health and his last hours. But it would be too much to expect that his bones would be eloquent enough to answer the most profound and persistent questions about the last Plantagenet king. What led him to take the momentous steps he did in 1483, by which in a matter of weeks he put aside his nephew, Edward V, and replaced him on the throne, violently clearing away opposition; what sort of a noble was he before he became a king, what sort of a king was he, and what sort of king might he have been if he had survived the Battle of Bosworth; what effect did the violent times and spectacular elevations and demotions all around him have on Richard; how do we square the evidence of piety, loyalty and pragmatism with the apparent record of murderous violence, ruthless lack of scruple and risk-taking? All these questions remain as urgent today as they have for centuries. And we might add some newer ones. Was Richard’s a uniquely English experience, or should we view it in the context of power struggles across continental Europe? Was Richard a typical magnate when he was Duke of Gloucester, or did he take a unique approach to his position? As king, was he an innovator, or did he not have time to do more than try to hold on to what he had?

In some ways the discovery has told us far more about the way modern Britons view history, or about the importance of accessibility to modern academic research, than about Richard. (The University of Leicester’s ability to involve almost every department in the find is remarkable; I remarked to a Leicester lecturer that De Montfort University, the city’s other higher-education institution, must envy its neighbour, whose discovery threatens to remove entirely from the popular imagination the name of another medieval celebrity from association with Leicester. ‘Yes,’ she replied, with only the barest hint of embarrassment, ‘and De Montfort is so much closer than our University to the site of the dig.’) Almost immediately, there was an outbreak of controversy about Richard’s new final resting place: Leicester, where he was found; York, his ‘spiritual home’ (according to some); London, where his wife Queen Anne is buried in Westminster Abbey; Fotheringhay, where he was born? This controversy was played out in the media, the House of Commons and the law courts. This was a reflection of modern Britain. It offered few insights into the life of a fifteenth-century king.

The discovery can, nonetheless, be seized as an opportunity to bring to public attention the more comprehensive picture of the king and the age in which he lived that has been emerging for the past thirty years. Richard lived through and fashioned pivotal moments in British history. His character will always remain a puzzle and a source of fascination. Of all the waxworks in the popular pageant of the country’s past, fashioned and refashioned in the public imagination by the competing influences of historians, dramatists, novelists, enthusiasts, fantasists, and now of scientists and archaeologists, he remains the most controversial. Looking for Richard is not a quest that ended in a Leicester car park. The discovery of the physical remains of the king only encourages us to keep on looking for Richard in different ways.

The Falcon and Fetterlock badge of the Yorks, as seen on the bronze gates of Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey. Henry VII’s wife Elizabeth of York was Richard’s niece.

1

Son of the ‘high and mighty Prince’

Fotheringhay Castle, by the banks of the River Nene in Northamptonshire, was a statement in stone made by one of the most powerful families in England. It was granted in 1377 to the first Duke of York, Edmund of Langley, one of Edward III’s many sons. Over the next two decades, Edmund rebuilt the motte and bailey fortification into a fine aristocratic residence as well as a military stronghold. At its centre, raised up on earthworks and surrounded by a moat, was the irregular octagonal shell keep, known as the ‘Fetter lock’ (like a modern ‘D’-lock) after the heraldic device that the Yorks adopted. That would have been the redoubt if the castle was under attack, but the residential buildings were in the rectangular upper courtyard, beside the keep. From here Mary, Queen of Scots was taken to her execution in 1587. Here, too, a woman who was the mother and grandmother of kings, but who never became queen consort herself, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, gave birth to a son on 2 October 1452. He was named after his father, Richard, the third Duke of York.

The church in which Richard was probably baptized can still be visited at Fotheringhay. But the castle where he was born has all but vanished, ‘slighted’ by the son of the Scottish queen who was killed there, and dismantled not long afterwards. What remains are only earthworks and a small section of stone now reserved behind railings. There are two plaques on the railings to commemorate the castle’s most famous residents. The ruin is a reminder right at the beginning of Richard’s story of how much is lost, how much can only be put back in the imagination.¹

Children – even the children of senior noblemen such as Richard, Duke of York – did not make much of an impression on the historical record in medieval England. The exceptions were the eldest sons of nobles and royalty, whose futures as bearers of great titles and holders of great patrimonies meant that onlookers took an interest in them from birth. But when Richard, the future Duke of Gloucester – and king – was born to Richard and Cecily, Duke and Duchess of York, he was the couple’s eleventh child, and their fourth son (of those who had survived infancy). To inherit his father’s title he would have to outlive his brothers Edward, Edmund and George – and their future heirs. Even in the turbulent age into which Richard was born, and the ordinary perils of disease and accident notwithstanding, this must have seemed a very unlikely fate. That he eventually assumed, not his father’s title, but the throne, despite the fact that his brothers’ heirs did survive their fathers, is testimony to the sheer unpredictability, not to mention the force of personality, that became the most distinguishing feature of Richard’s life almost from the start. The role of chance, the sense that nine times out of ten, events would have taken a different course, is perhaps the main element in the ‘mystery’ of Richard III. As much as disputes over facts or interpretations of motive, it is chance that makes his life so inexhaustibly intriguing.

Richard’s physical odds of survival were the long ones dictated by the age, only compounded by the dangers of the political world of mid-fifteenth-century England. As his own parents could attest, surviving childhood, even for the most privileged in society, was an achievement in itself in the Middle Ages. Five of Richard’s siblings did not see adulthood, and we now know that, from some point in his childhood or adolescence, he lived with the effects of a curvature of the spine. One of the most significant points of the discovery of Richard’s skeleton at Grey Friars in Leicester was evidence of this spinal abnormality. This was, of course, not confirmation that the future king was ‘rudely stamped’ from birth, let alone ‘deformed, half finished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world, scarce half made up’.² But did the condition of his spine affect Richard’s chances as a child, especially given the state of medical knowledge at the time? The short answer is ‘no’. The team who discovered the remains have concluded that Richard ‘had severe idiopathic adolescent-onset scoliosis’.³ That is, at birth and through early childhood at least, Richard’s body would have shown no signs of the later condition.

We may discount the views of the chronicler John Rous, who rewrote his previously sympathetic account of Richard’s reign after the king’s death to reflect that his later ‘crimes’ were foretold in the circumstances of his birth. Where Shakespeare made Richard a premature delivery (‘sent before my time’), Rous pictured him as cursedly (and fantastically) overdue. Richard, Rous wrote, was ‘retained in his mother’s womb for two years and emerged with teeth and hair to his shoulders’.⁴ But there is one other fleeting glimpse of the infant Richard in contemporary records. It comes in a poetic dialogue written by an Augustinian friar, Osbern Bokenham, in Clare Priory, Suffolk. The ‘Dialogue at the Grave of Dame Johan of Acres’, better known today by the name of the manuscript in which it is preserved, the Clare Roll, ends with an encomium to Richard of York’s family. It was written in May 1456, when Richard was three. In a list of the third duke’s family, living and dead, including his youngest son’s elder brothers Edward, Edmund and George, as well as other children who ‘had passed to God’s grace’, Osbern mentions Richard, who ‘liveth yet’. It is indicative of just how little survives about Richard’s childhood that these two words should have occasioned the amount of debate that they have. By the time that James Gairdner, the first ‘modern’ biographer of Richard III, writing in 1898, considered this ‘honest rhymester’s’ evidence, it was in the light of at least two previous discussions of it, as potentially indicating that Richard was ‘slender and sick’ and had ‘serious illness as a child’.⁵ More recently, the lines in context have merely been taken to mean that Richard was alive, by contrast to five of his siblings. That view is made more convincing when it is observed that earlier in the same poem Osbern refers to Richard’s father, Richard, Duke of York, ‘which yet liveth’.⁶ As the duke was a fully grown, vigorous (and fecund) man, it would seem obvious that the poet meant no comment on his subject’s state of health when he used the expression.

Richard, then, was no less robust than any other fifteenth-century child, but his world was a dangerous one. It was also one that his own father, in the years just before Richard’s birth and of his childhood, began to shape for decades to come. To begin to understand Richard, whose path was so often laid out by the actions or precedents of his father and his elder brothers, it is necessary to see the world they made. The effects of the decisions taken by Richard’s immediate family would reverberate for centuries; naturally, they had their most forceful impact on those, like Richard, who were closest to them. Not only that, but it seems clear that he took the examples given by his close family as models – to be followed or avoided, but in either case, the best guide as to