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CHAPTER 1
Poisoned?
In the spring of 1483, King Edward IV of England was no longer the man he had been. His figure, once magnificent, was now corpulent – so much so that he could no longer ride at the head of his troops.
An outstanding military leader in his youth, he had intended personally to command a great campaign against the Scots in the summer of 1481, but when the time came to lead his army northwards, his fitness failed him. He then resolved to command an invasion in 1482. Eventually he abandoned the effort.
Edward had become a glutton, a drinker and a carouser in wanton company. In the censorious words of the chronicler of Crowland Abbey, he was 'a gross man', 'addicted to conviviality, vanity, drunkenness, extravagance and passion', 'thought to have indulged too intemperately his own passions and desire for luxury'.
However, although unfit and overweight, Edward was not a sick man. Historians were led to believe his health was deteriorating by an apparently contemporaneous report to the city fathers of Canterbury in 1482, but this has been identified as an editorial interpolation. Indeed, the Crowland chronicler's observations of Court revelry that last Christmas, with the king cutting a dash in clothes of a brand new fashion, indicate nothing of any sickness.
In a recent parliamentary session he had also committed himself to a war of retribution against France: not the action of someone who felt his health was failing. In this context the Crowland chronicler describes him as a 'spirited prince' and 'bold king'.
Yet soon after Easter, on 9 April 1483, Edward suddenly died nineteen days short of his 41st birthday. We hear details of his death from a wide variety of writers, few of whom are reluctant to offer ideas as to the cause. Those writing after about 1500 are unlikely to be reliable; some of their wilder suggestions include over-indulgence in wine, an excess of vegetables, an ague brought back from France, and an attack of melancholy or chagrin.
According to the Crowland chronicler, mentioned above, the king took to his bed about Easter. He was affected 'neither by old age nor by any known kind of disease which would not have seemed easy to cure in a lesser person'.
This cleric, writing in 1485–6, is the most authoritative source we have, being an official who was involved in Edward's government. Good Friday fell on 28 March, and Easter Sunday on 30 March; therefore we can take it that the period of illness was some 10–12 days.
The Italian cleric Dominic Mancini, a visitor to London in 1483, said the king died from catching a chill while in a boat on a fishing trip. Mancini did not enjoy the Crowland chronicler's inside knowledge, nor, presumably, did he speak English. He had been sent to report on events in England by his patron, Archbishop Angelo Cato, a man of influence in the Court of Louis XI of France.
A different opinion was offered by another of Louis's courtiers, Philippe de Commynes, writing probably in the 1490s: Edward fell ill and died soon afterwards, he said, 'some say of a stroke'.
With these and a multitude of other theories to choose from, no one was sure what caused the death of this bloated but otherwise healthy king.
Then in 1996 Richard Collins of the University of Cambridge published a short treatise outlining his suspicions that Edward IV might have been poisoned.
In his view, Edward's death had been too easily accepted as inexplicable. Writing from a substantial medical background, Collins considered the cause of Edward's death ought to be recoverable: 'I take it as self-evident that death occurs invariably through an assault on a mechanical organism with predictable results; and that, after it has happened, the cause of death may be deduced from that pattern of results.' He therefore set about investigating what was known about the patient, and the manner and circumstance of his demise.
Examining the story of the chill while boating, Collins observed: 'since the king certainly couldn't have indulged in such frivolity during Holy Week, the latest this trip could have taken place was 22 March ... If true, it means he hung around in a fever for ten days, without treatment, which is a very unlikely state of affairs. Edward did not die of Mancini's chill.'
There is no reason to suppose Philippe de Commynes was better informed than anyone else, being a foreigner who would have relied on hearsay, but his idea of a stroke seems feasible at first glance. However, he was writing soon after his own king died of a stroke, so he might easily have made a subconscious connection.
Collins notes that if a person dies of a single stroke (apoplexy or CVA), he will do so within a matter of minutes. Or, having survived it, he may die from a second stroke, which might indeed occur some 10–12 days later. But strokes were events that would have been well known to mediæval physicians. By contrast, given the reactions of the people at the time, Edward's death seems to have come as a complete surprise – and Collins finds it quite impossible to believe that no one anticipated Edward might succumb to a second stroke if he had already suffered a first.
That people were taken by surprise is underlined by the fact that well over a week elapsed without the Court seeing fit to notify the heir apparent of his father's illness, or to prepare him to come to Westminster, or to make any contingency arrangements for administration of the realm.
Collins finds the bewilderment over Edward's death in itself indicative in an age when no doctor was at a loss for a diagnosis, however far-fetched. The Crowland chronicler is assumed to be a learned cleric and high-ranking government official and, Collins suggests, probably had some education in medicine as part of his background training; yet despite his knowledge and likely access to the physicians attending the king, he was unable to venture a guess at what the fatal disease might have been.
Even Polydore Vergil, the historian favoured by Henry VII, writing his Anglica Historia some twenty-five years later but having full access to most of the State papers of the time, could not be more specific than to say he 'fell sicke of an unknowen disease'; though Vergil also reported 'ther was a great rumor that he was poysonyd'.
This is often discounted on the grounds that by the time Vergil was writing, sudden deaths in noble or princely families often gave rise to suspicions of poisoning. However, this scarcely seems a convincing argument. Poisoning was not, after all, a sixteenth-century invention.
Edward was not immune to assassination attempts. One at least is recorded, from which he escaped thanks to a warning given at supper by Sir John Ratcliffe, later Lord Fitzwalter. Whatever the source of the poisoning rumour, Vergil himself did not leap to it as a conclusion: his view was that the cause of death was unknown.
Yet another writer from France, Jean de Roy or Troye, whose date of death (c. 1495) suggests that he was commenting on contemporaneous events, believed that Edward died of 'une apoplexie' or perhaps, as some people said, he was 'empoisonné du bon vin', given to him by Louis XI. We encounter the poisoning theme again in the writings of the English Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, published in the mid-sixteenth century, which contained an agglomeration of material mostly culled from other writers. Hall ran through a number of possibilities: Edward's sickness was due either to melancholy, anger at the French King, a surfeit, a fever, a 'continuall cold' or, as some suspected, poisoning.
In his examination of the few known facts, Richard Collins takes into account this surprise and general bewilderment. Thus he rules out slow-building effects such as those of debauchery (e.g. venereal disease), or drink or obesity, to which the chroniclers make reference. Edward was still a very active and hard-working king, and although his fitness was beginning to be over-taxed by his habits of excess, he appears to have shown no characteristic signs of gradual mental or bodily degeneration. Mancini describes him as 'a tall man and very fat, though not to the point of deformity', so there is no suggestion that he was morbidly obese. Indeed, Mancini adds that he was fond of 'revealing his fine stature' to onlookers.
An illness lasting ten–twelve days also eliminates other drawn-out and insidious conditions including ulcerative colitis, uncomplicated cancer, etc., as well as those which are entirely sudden and catastrophic such as a massive coronary, pulmonary embolism, or a perforated ulcer causing haemorrhage.
We know that, in accordance with tradition, his body was displayed in an almost naked state to the view of the nobles and clergy. Since nothing untoward was noted, Collins eliminates violence or infectious diseases that would have left outward signs, any non-infectious conditions that also mark the body, and diseases that cause noticeable wasting of tissue. Appendicitis is also dismissed: given the diet of the time, this is 'so remote as to be almost impossible'.
One suggestion that crops up regularly is pneumonia, whether in its common or more exotic forms, or as an attendant illness or complication. The problem with pneumonia is that this lung infection, with its tell-tale signs of congestion, fever, and coughing up of characteristic sputum, would have been recognized from long experience and given cause for severe alarm. It does not square with the Crowland chronicler's comment about 'no known disease'.
In the course of eliciting opinions from some thirty colleagues in the large provincial hospital where he worked at the time, Richard Collins was careful to disguise the identity of the patient. He received no suggestions that fitted the case, except one: poisoning by arsenic, dispensed not as a series of small doses over time, but as an isolated dose or possibly two (arsenic is tasteless and odourless). This was put forward by no fewer than three highly experienced individuals. Collins found the theory convincing:
Heavy metals such as arsenic, antimony and mercury when administered cause death either slowly or quickly, according to the dose. They leave no signs that would be obvious to the men of 1483; and you would, of course, be perfectly healthy up to the time you swallowed the first dose. Poisoning fits; and I would suggest that, out of all the possible causes of Edward IV's death, it is the only one that fits all the known facts.
As soon as one has a poisoning theory, of course, one needs a murder suspect or conspiracy. Most people would not immediately leap to suspect Edward's consort, Queen Elizabeth (née Woodville): it would appear foolhardy in the extreme for a queen to do away with a powerful and successful king, especially when he had been her family's principal meal-ticket for nineteen years. However, there are two considerations that work in favour of the hypothesis.
First, after nearly twenty years of marriage (and being already five years older than Edward), Elizabeth would undoubtedly have lost many of her charms for the king. Her place in the lustful Edward's bed was frequently supplanted by mistresses, and as a mediæval forty-five-yearold having survived ten pregnancies, it would not be surprising for her to fear being relegated to a position of obscurity. Her latest matrimonial humiliation had come at the hands of Elizabeth Lambert (Mistress Shore, later erroneously named 'Jane'), who occupied a position of particular favour at Court. For a neglected and probably disgruntled wife, the end of her influence with the king might have been staring her in the face.
Although there is sweetness in revenge, a more practical motive on Elizabeth's part might have been to remove the crown from the head of a dangerously bored husband and place it on that of a doting son. The twelve-year-old Prince of Wales, Edward, had been brought up as a Woodville, surrounded by Woodville handlers at his residence of Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches, and governed and educated by his mother's brother Anthony, Earl Rivers. Elizabeth was a woman of character who had built an empire for herself and her family since marrying the king: she certainly had the prescience to instil in her son the right attitude of family loyalty. By precedent, government by a protectorate and council would be expected while he was too young to rule; but during these last years of his minority he might, at a stretch, start participating in his own reign, in which the queen and her family could look forward to considerable influence.
Though evidence is lacking, unsurprisingly, for a relationship grown cool, Paul Murray Kendall suggests that in Edward's deathbed codicils he replaced Elizabeth as an executor of his will. By contrast, in 1475 he had loaded this in her favour, appointing her his foremost executor and not only ensuring that her personal property remained at her own disposal, but also giving her powers to divide his chattels between herself and their sons. In 1483, far from being foremost, she was not even mentioned on the list of executors who met to prove the king's will.
There is other evidence that things in early 1483 were not proceeding in a way that would benefit Elizabeth's best interests. There was the threat of more expensive and distracting wars with Scotland, for example; a bottomless pit into which the royal treasury was being emptied. Not for nothing was she one of the leading opponents of the Scottish campaigns. And now, in his latest Parliament, Edward had announced his intention to embark upon an even more expensive war against France, for which the entire kingdom would bear a heavy financial burden.
Meanwhile, the successful outcome of the Scottish military actions had established Edward's younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester as the man of the hour, bringing him closer to the king's heart and heaping on him ever more rewards and powers. These would certainly increase as he assumed control of the French campaign. There was a danger here for the Woodville menfolk, since their intimacy with the king relied on consorting in his pursuits of the flesh from which Richard's influence would divert him.
Edward was doubtless proud of his two little boys, but at the ages of nine and twelve they were clearly too young to be his companions or equals. Nor could they be outstanding military commanders, as was Richard of Gloucester, who could be relied upon to carry out the king's orders and wishes with absolute loyalty and, it would seem, conspicuous success.
Born on 2 October 1452, the youngest of the late Duke of York's sons, Richard was Edward's last living brother. He would later ascend the throne as Richard III, and it is about this Richard that our story revolves.
Their father had successfully claimed the throne as his rightful inheritance during the civil unrest under the Lancastrian King Henry VI which came to be known as the Wars of the Roses, but had not lived to be crowned. There had been two other sons who reached adulthood: after Edward came Edmund, Earl of Rutland, killed in battle as a teenager; and after him came George, Duke of Clarence, done to death in the Tower of London five years ago after being convicted of treason. Popular Edward, the eldest, was seemingly endowed with all the necessary gifts to make him the strong and successful ruler that England needed when he ascended the throne in 1461.
Twenty-two years on, Edward IV no longer possessed the astonishing strength and virility that had impressed the world during the first dozen or so years of his reign. Young and vibrant, and over 6 ft 2 in in height, he had been described as the most handsome prince of his generation.
Richard, ten years younger, was shorter of stature, brown of hair and lean of face. In 1484 two visitors actually described him in writing: the Scottish ambassador complimented him on 'so great a mind in so small a body', and the visiting Silesian Niclas von Popplau observed that he was 'three fingers taller than himself, a little slimmer and not so thickset, much more lightly built and with quite slender limbs'. Niclas's own physique is unknown, but we may perhaps conclude that Richard was sinewy rather than strapping.
The recent dramatic discovery of his grave reveals that he was strong and well muscled, with good teeth. He could have stood 5 ft 81/2in but for the uncertain effects produced by what we now know was a lateral curvature of the spine (scoliosis) which made his right shoulder higher than his left – giving the lie to Thomas More who said the opposite. Developing after puberty, it would have become visible only gradually, and could scarcely have been striking when clothed or Niclas would surely have noted it. The curvature of scoliosis would manifest as uneven shoulders but not a hunched back (kyphosis). Nor, evidently, did it affect Richard's famed prowess as a fighting soldier. These realities, together with his sound and straight limbs, must once and for all debunk Shakespeare's monstrous shambling creature with hunched back and withered arm.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Richard III"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Annette Carson.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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