The Daughter of Time

‘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.’

‘Including the weather-cock Stanley, I suppose.’

‘I suppose so. I don’t know them well enough to remember them individually.’

‘Perhaps you’re right about his wanting a final end to the York-Lancaster feud. Perhaps his lenience with Stanley was due to that very thing.’

‘Was Stanley a Lancastrian, then?’

‘No, but he was married to an abnormally rabid one. His wife was Margaret Beaufort, and the Beauforts were the reverse side, so to speak – the illegitimate side – of the Lancaster family. Not that her by-blow side worried her. Or her son.’

‘Who was her son?’

‘Henry VII.’

Carradine whistled, long and low.

‘You actually mean to say that Lady Stanley was Henry’s mother.’

‘She was. By her first husband Edmund Tudor.’

‘But – but Lady Stanley had a place of honour at Richard’s coronation. She carried the Queen’s train. I noticed that because I thought it quaint. Carrying the train, I mean. In our country we don’t carry trains. It’s an honour, I take it.’

‘It’s a thundering great honour. Poor Richard. Poor Richard. It didn’t work.’

‘What didn’t?’

‘Magnanimity.’ He lay thinking about it while Carradine shuffled through his notes. ‘So Parliament accepted the evidence of Stillington.’

‘They did more. They incorporated it into an Act, giving Richard the title to the crown. It was called Titulus Regius.’

‘For a holy man of God, Stillington wasn’t cutting a very glorious figure. But I suppose that to have talked sooner would have been to compass his own ruin.’

‘You’re a bit hard on him, aren’t you? There wasn’t any need to talk sooner. No harm was being done anyone.’

‘What about Lady Eleanor Butler?’

‘She had died in a convent. She’s buried in the Church of the White Carmelites at Norwich, in case you’re interested. As long as Edward was alive no wrong was being done anyone. But when it came to the question of succession, then he had to talk, whatever kind of figure he cut.’