DOMESTIC TROUBLES.
A.D. 1483-1484
Plots formed against Richard.--Situation of Elizabeth
Woodville.--Plans of the conspirators.--Queen Elizabeth's
agony.--Retribution.--Elizabeth visits the grave.--The Duke of
Buckingham.--Richmond.--Elizabeth.--Plans formed for a
marriage.--Richmond plans an invasion.--Buckingham's attempt to
co-operate.--Failure of the plan.--Death of Buckingham.--Richmond
retreats.--Unhappy situation of Elizabeth.--The princess.--He seeks to
get possession of Richmond.--Parliament.--New policy.--The plan
succeeds.--Excuses for the queen.--Her situation still unhappy.--The
marriage countermanded.--Richard's plan for the princess.--Elizabeth's
views on the subject.--Death of Richard's son.--Sickness of Queen
Anne.--Sufferings of the queen--Suspicions.--Elizabeth's eagerness to
marry the king.--Death of the queen.--Remonstrance of Richard's
counselors.--Richard gives up the plan.--Disappointment of Elizabeth.
While Richard was making his triumphal tour through the north of
England, apparently receiving a confirmation of his right to the crown
by the voice of the whole population of the country, the leaders of
the Lancaster party were secretly beginning, in London, to form their
schemes for liberating the young princes from the Tower, and restoring
Edward to the kingdom.
Queen Elizabeth, who still remained, with the Princess Elizabeth, her
oldest daughter, and some of her other children, in the sanctuary at
Westminster, was the centre of this movement. She communicated
privately with the nobles who were disposed to espouse her cause. The
nobles had secret meetings among themselves to form their plans. At
these meetings they drank to the health of the king in the Tower, and
of his brother, the little Duke of York, and pledged themselves to do
every thing in their power to restore the king to his throne. They
little knew that the unhappy princes were at that very time lying
together in a corner of the court-yard of the prison in an ignoble
grave.
At length the conspirators' plans were matured, and the insurrection
broke out. Richard immediately prepared to leave York, at the head of
a strong force, to go toward London. At the same time, he allowed the
tidings to be spread abroad that the two princes were dead. This news
greatly disconcerted the conspirators and deranged their plans; and
when the dreadful intelligence was communicated to the queen in the
sanctuary, she was stunned, and almost killed by it, as by a blow.
"She swooned away, and fell to the ground, where she lay in great
agony, like a corpse;" and when at length she was restored to
consciousness again, she broke forth in shrieks and cries of anguish
so loud, that they resounded through the whole Abbey, and were most
pitiful to hear. She beat her breast and tore her hair, calling all
the time to her children by their names, and bitterly reproaching
herself for her madness in giving up the youngest into his enemies'
hands. After exhausting herself with these cries and lamentations, she
sank into a state of calm despair, and, kneeling down upon the floor,
she began, with dreadful earnestness and solemnity, to call upon
Almighty God, imploring him to avenge the death of her children,
and invoking the bitterest curses upon the head of their ruthless
murderer.
[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH AT THE GRAVE OF HER CHILDREN.]
It was but a short time after this that Richard's child died at
Middleham Castle, as stated in the last chapter. Many persons believed
that this calamity was a judgment of heaven, brought upon the king in
answer to the bereaved mother's imprecations.
It is said that when Queen Elizabeth had recovered a little from the
first shock of her grief, she demanded to be taken to her children's
grave. So they conducted her to the Tower, and showed her the place in
the corner of the court-yard where they had first been buried.
One of the principal leaders of the conspiracy which had been formed
against Richard was the Duke of Buckingham--the same that had taken so
active a part in bringing Richard to the throne. What induced him to
change sides so suddenly is not certainly known. It is supposed that
he was dissatisfied with the rewards which Richard bestowed upon him.
At any rate, he now turned against the king, and became the leader of
the conspirators that were plotting against him.
When the conspirators heard of the death of the princes, they were at
first at a loss to know what to do. They looked about among the
branches of the York and Lancaster families for some one to make their
candidate for the crown. At last they decided upon a certain Henry
Tudor, Earl of Richmond. This Henry, or Richmond, as he was generally
called, was descended indirectly from the Lancaster line. The proposal
of the conspirators, however, was, that he should marry the Princess
Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth Woodville's daughter, who has already been
mentioned among those who fled with their mother to the sanctuary. Now
that both the sons of Elizabeth were dead, this daughter was, of
course, King Edward's next heir, and by her marriage with Richmond the
claims of the houses of York and Lancaster would be, in a measure,
combined.
When this plan was proposed to Queen Elizabeth, she acceded to it at
once, and promised that she would give her daughter in marriage to
Richmond, and acknowledge him as king, provided he would first conquer
and depose King Richard, the common enemy.
The plan was accordingly all arranged. Richmond was in France at this
time, having fled there some time previous, after a battle, in which
his party had been defeated. They wrote to him, explaining the plan.
He immediately fell in with it. He raised a small force--all that he
could procure at that time--and set sail, with a few ships, from the
port of St. Malo, intending to land on the coast of Devonshire, which
is in the southwestern part of England.
In the mean time, the several leaders of the rebellion had gone to
different parts of the kingdom, in order to raise troops, and form
centres of action against Richard. Buckingham went into Wales. His
plan was to march down, with all the forces that he could raise there,
to the coast of Devonshire, to meet Richmond on his landing.
This Richard resolved to prevent. He raised an army, and marched to
intercept Buckingham. He first, however, issued a proclamation in
which he denounced the leaders of the rebellion as criminals and
outlaws, and set a price upon their heads.
Buckingham did not succeed in reaching the coast in time to join
Richmond. He was stopped by the River Severn, which you will see, by
looking on a map of England, came directly in his way. He tried to get
across the river, but the people destroyed the bridges and the boats,
and he could not get over. He marched up to where the stream was
small, in hopes of finding a fording place, but the waters were so
swollen with the fall rains that he failed in this attempt as well as
the others. The result was, that Richard came up while Buckingham was
entangled among the intricacies of the ground produced by the
inundations. Buckingham's soldiers, seeing that they were likely to be
surrounded, abandoned him and fled. At last Buckingham fled too, and
hid himself; but one of his servants came and told Richard where he
was. Richard ordered him to be seized. Buckingham sent an imploring
message to Richard, begging that Richard would see him, and, before
condemning him, hear what he had to say; but Richard, in the place of
any reply, gave orders to the soldiers to take the prisoner at once
out into the public square of the town, and cut off his head. The
order was immediately obeyed.
When Richmond reached the coast of Devonshire, and found that
Buckingham was not there to meet him, he was afraid to land with the
small force that he had under his command, and so he sailed back to
France.
Thus the first attempt made to organize a forcible resistance to
Richard's power totally failed.
The unhappy queen, when she heard these tidings, was once more
overwhelmed with grief. Her situation in the sanctuary was becoming
every day more and more painful. She had long since exhausted all her
own means, and she imagined that the monks began to think that she was
availing herself of their hospitality too long. Her friends without
would gladly have supplied her wants, but this Richard would not
permit. He set a guard around the sanctuary, and would not allow any
one to come or go. He would starve her out, he said, if he could not
compel her to surrender herself in any other way.
It was, however, not the queen herself, but her daughter Elizabeth,
who was now the heir of whatever claims to the throne were possessed
by the family, that Richard was most anxious to secure. If he could
once get Elizabeth into his power, he thought, he could easily devise
some plan to prevent her marriage with Henry of Richmond, and so
defeat the plans of his enemies in the most effectual manner. He would
have liked still better to have secured Henry himself; but Henry was
in Brittany, on the other side of the Channel, beyond his reach.
He, however, formed a secret plan to get possession of Henry. He
offered privately a large reward to the Duke of Brittany if he would
seize Henry and deliver him into his, Richard's hands. This the duke
engaged to do. But Henry gained intelligence of the plot before it was
executed, and made his escape from Brittany into France. He was
received kindly at Paris by the French king. The king even promised to
aid him in deposing Richard, and making himself King of England
instead. This alarmed Richard more than ever.
In the mean time, the summer passed away and the autumn came on. In
November Richard convened Parliament, and caused very severe laws to
be passed against those who had been engaged in the rebellion. Many
were executed under these laws, some were banished, and others shut up
in prison. Richard attempted, by these and similar measures, to break
down the spirit of his enemies, and prevent the possibility of their
forming any new organizations against him. Still, notwithstanding all
that he could do, he felt very ill at ease so long as Henry and
Elizabeth were at liberty.
At last, in the course of the winter, he conceived the idea of trying
what pretended kindness could do in enticing the queen and her family
out of sanctuary. So he sent a messenger to her, to make fair and
friendly proposals to her in case she would give up her place of
refuge and place herself under his protection. He said that he felt no
animosity or ill will against her, but that, if she and her daughters
would trust to him, he would receive them at court, provide for them
fully in a manner suited to their rank, and treat them in all respects
with the highest consideration. She herself should be recognized as
the queen dowager of England, and her daughters as princesses of the
royal family; and he would take proper measures to arrange marriages
for the young ladies, such as should comport with the exalted station
which they were entitled to hold.
The queen was at last persuaded to yield to these solicitations. She
left the sanctuary, and gave herself and her daughters up to Richard's
control. Many persons have censured her very strongly for doing this;
but her friends and defenders allege that there was nothing else that
she could do. She might have remained in the Abbey herself to starve
if she had been alone, but she could not see her children perish of
destitution and distress when a word from her could restore them to
the world, and raise them at once to a condition of the highest
prosperity and honor. So she yielded. She left the Abbey, and was
established by Richard in one of his palaces, and her daughters were
received at court, and treated, especially the eldest, with the utmost
consideration.
But, notwithstanding this outward change in her condition, the real
situation of the queen herself, after leaving the Abbey, was extremely
forlorn. The apartments which Richard assigned to her were very
retired and obscure. He required her, moreover, to dismiss all her own
attendants, and he appointed servants and agents of his own to wait
upon and guard her. The queen soon found that she was under a very
strict surveillance, and not much less a prisoner, in fact, than she
was before.
While in this situation, she wrote to her son Dorset,[R] at Paris,
commanding him to put an end to the proposed marriage of her daughter
Elizabeth to Henry of Richmond, "as she had given up," she said, "the
plan of that alliance, and had formed other designs for the princess."
Henry and his friends and partisans in Paris were indignant at
receiving this letter, and the queen has been by many persons much
blamed for having thus broken the engagement which she had so solemnly
made. Others say that this letter to Paris was not her free act, but
that it was extorted from her by Richard, who had her now completely
in his power, and could, of course, easily find means to procure from
her any writing that he might desire.
[Footnote R: The Earl of Dorset, you will recollect, was Queen
Elizabeth's son by her first marriage; he, consequently, had no claim
to the crown.]
Whether the queen acted freely or not in this case can not certainly
be known. At all events, Henry, and those who were acting with him at
Paris, determined to regard the letter as written under constraint,
and to go on with the maturing of their plans just as if it had never
been written.
Richard's plan was, so it was said, to marry the Princess Elizabeth to
his own son; for the death of his child, though it has been already
once or twice alluded to, had not yet taken place. Richard's son was
very young, being at that time about eleven years old; but the
princess might be affianced to him, and the marriage consummated when
he grew up. Elizabeth herself seems to have fallen in with this
proposed arrangement very readily. The prospect that Henry of Richmond
would ever succeed in making himself king, and claiming her for his
bride, was very remote and uncertain, while Richard was already in
full possession of power; and she, by taking his side, and becoming
the affianced wife of his son, became at once the first lady in the
kingdom, next to Queen Anne, with an apparently certain prospect of
becoming queen herself in due time.
But all these fine plans were abruptly brought to an end by the death
of the young prince, which occurred about this time, at Middleham
Castle, as has been stated before. The death of the poor boy took
place in a very sudden and mysterious manner. Some persons supposed
that he died by a judgment from heaven, in answer to the awful curses
which Queen Elizabeth Woodville imprecated upon the head of the
murderer of her children; others thought he was destroyed by poison.
Not very long after the death of the prince, his mother fell very
seriously sick. She was broken-hearted at the death of her son, and
pining away, she fell into a slow decline. Her sufferings were greatly
aggravated by Richard's harsh and cruel treatment of her. He was
continually uttering expressions of impatience against her on account
of her sickness and uselessness, and making fretful complaints of her
various disagreeable qualities. Some of these sayings were reported to
Anne, and also a rumor came to her ears one day, while she was at her
toilet, that Richard was intending to put her to death. She was
dreadfully alarmed at hearing this, and she immediately ran, half
dressed as she was, and with her hair disheveled, into the presence of
her husband, and, with piteous sobs and bitter tears, asked him what
she had done to deserve death. Richard tried to quiet and calm her,
assuring her that she had no cause to fear.
She, however, continued to decline; and not long afterward her
distress and anguish of mind were greatly increased by hearing that
Richard was impatient for her death, in order that he might himself
marry the Princess Elizabeth, to whom every one said he was now, since
the death of his son, devoting himself personally with great
attention. In this state of suffering the poor queen lingered on
through the months of the winter, very evidently, though slowly,
approaching her end. The universal belief was that Richard had formed
the plan of making the Princess Elizabeth his wife, and that the
decline and subsequent death of Anne were owing to a slow poison which
he caused to be administered to her. There is no proof that this
charge was true, but the general belief in the truth of it shows what
was the estimate placed, in those times, on Richard's character.
It is very certain, however, that he contemplated this new marriage,
and that the princess herself acceded to the proposed plan, and was
very deeply interested in the accomplishment of it. It is said that
while the queen still lived she wrote to one of her friends--a certain
noble duke of high standing and influence--in which she implored him
to aid in forwarding her marriage with the king, whom she called "her
master and her joy in this world--the master of her heart and
thoughts." In this letter, too, she expressed her impatience at the
queen's being so long in dying. "Only think," said she, "the better
part of February is past, and the queen is still alive. Will she
_never_ die?"
But the patience of the princess was not destined to be taxed much
longer. The queen sank rapidly after this, and in March she died.
The heart of Elizabeth was now filled with exultation and delight. The
great obstacle to her marriage with her uncle was now removed, and the
way was open before her to become a queen. It is true that the
relationship which existed between her and Richard, that of uncle and
niece, was such as to make the marriage utterly illegal. But Richard
had a plan of obtaining a dispensation from the Pope, which he had no
doubt that he could easily do, and a dispensation from the Pope,
according to the ideas of those times, would legalize any thing. So
Richard cautiously proposed his plan to some of his confidential
counselors.
His counselors told him that the execution of such a plan would be
dangerous in the highest degree. The people of England, they said, had
for some time been led to think that the king had that design in
contemplation, and that the idea had awakened a great deal of
indignation throughout the country. The land was full of rumors and
murmurings, they said, and those of a very threatening character. The
marriage would be considered incestuous both by the clergy and the
people, and would be looked upon with abhorrence. Besides, they said,
there were a great many dark suspicions in the minds of the people
that Richard had been himself the cause of the death of his former
wife Anne, in order to open the way for this marriage, and now, if the
marriage were really to take place, all these suspicions would be
confirmed. They could judge somewhat, they added, by the depth of the
excitement which had been produced by the bare suspicion that such
things were contemplated, how great would be the violence of the
outbreak of public indignation if the design were carried into effect.
Richard would be in the utmost danger of losing his kingdom.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH.]
So Richard determined at once to abandon the plan. He caused it to be
announced in the most public manner that he had never contemplated
such a marriage, and that all the rumors attributing such a design to
him were malicious and false. He also sent orders abroad throughout
the kingdom requiring that all persons who had circulated such rumors
should be arrested and sent to London to be punished.
Elizabeth's hopes were, of course, suddenly blasted, and the splendid
castle which her imagination had built fell to the ground. It was only
a temporary disappointment, however, for she became Queen of England
in the end, after all.