Richard III Read Online Free PDF Page A

have been no more than 5,000 front-line troops in England who had served in the French campaigns; yet even so, most leaders in the first battles of the Wars of the Roses had fought in France and all of them must have possessed a nucleus of experienced men-at-arms.
    Somerset and the Queen soon overplayed their hand. York, Salisbury and Warwick were summoned to appear at a council at Leicester on 21 May 1455. Plainly they were to be destroyed. They gathered an army and marched south. Somerset also assembled troops and, taking the King with him, went to meet them at St Albans on 22 May. In what was scarcely more than an armed affray Henry was wounded in the neck by an arrow; there were only a few hundred casualties – but among these was Somerset. However, there would be no more fighting for another four years. The court party had lost its leader and was not yet ready to accept Margaret in his place.
    It is unlikely that little Richard ever saw much of his father. We may guess that his childhood was as painful as his birth; towards the end of the 1450s a doggerel poem about the Duke of York’s family comments, with apparent surprise, ‘Richard liveth yit’ – he must have had difficulty even to survive. We know that he spent a good part ofhis early years at Fotheringay with his sister Margaret, who had been born in 1446, and his brother George, who had been born in 1449 (in Dublin). It had been fancifully suggested that Margaret ‘played mother to him’, but it is more likely that nurses performed this role.
    The Tudor antiquary John Leland, who visited it about 1538, informs us that the town of Fotheringay was ‘but one street, all of stone building’. The castle was demolished long ago and only a grassy mound now remains, on a pleasant site amid lush meadows and rich cornfields by the banks of the beautiful River Nene. To the east it is not far from fenland, to the west from the Forest of Rockingham. We know that it was then very splendid and imposing, a double-moated castle with an unusually tall gatehouse. It had been largely rebuilt in the late fourteenth century in the shape of a fetterlock (a closed semi-oblong), an instrument for tethering horses which formed part of one of the badges of the House of York – the ‘Falcon and Fetterlock’. Leland, who saw it when it was still standing, says that it was ‘strong with double dykes and hath a keep very ancient and strong’ and that ‘there be very fair lodgings’. 5
    However, Leland also tells us that ‘the glory’ of Fotheringay ‘standeth by the parish church’. This was the mighty Perpendicular church of St Mary the Virgin and All Saints, built by the Dukes of York and only completed just before Richard’s birth. In those days it was a college of priests and choristers and as big as a cathedral – half pulled down at the Reformation – its walls a mass of eighty-eight stained-glass windows and its soaring, fan-vaulted tower crowned by a striking octagon lantern. To the north of the church were the conventual buildings, which housed a community of some thirty clerks – a cloister with a library and carrels, dormitories, a dining hall and a kitchen, a chapter house and the Master’s lodging. 6 No doubt the children attended many imposing and gloriously sung services in St Mary’s. (Alas, today the tower is in a condition which makes it impossible to ring the bells.)
    By 1456 the Queen and the court party had again regained control – causing Duke Richard ‘to stink in the King’s nostrils even unto death, as they insisted that he was trying to take the Kingdom into his own hands,’ says the
Croyland Chronicle
. There was an attempt atreconciliation, the ‘Loveday’ of 24 March 1458 when the Yorkish lords and the sons of those killed at St Albans walked arm-in-arm to St Paul’s. But despite efforts by prelates, the political climate grew steadily more poisoned and more menacing. Margaret of Anjou took the court to the Midlands and began to