Richard III Read Online Free PDF

build a power base on the estates of the Duchy of Lancaster, centred on such strongholds as Kenilworth. She was preparing for civil war.
    By 1459 she was ready. A council of the realm was formally summoned to Coventry in June – York and his supporters were ostentatiously uninvited. Anxiously they assembled at Ludlow, collecting an army with which they hoped to force their way through to King Henry to justify themselves. Duchess Cicely joined her husband, bringing Margaret, George and Richard with her. Everything went wrong for the Yorkists. On the way to Ludlow, Salisbury fought an indecisive battle at Bloreheath and had two of his sons taken prisoner. Then most of Warwick’s troops deserted when the royal army finally marched on Ludlow in October. York lost his nerve and fled to Ireland. Salisbury and Warwick took refuge in Calais, where the latter was captain, taking with them the Duke’s eldest son Edward, Earl of March. The younger children stayed behind at Ludlow with their mother, where they were captured in the town on 13 October.
    Cicely and her children were escorted to Coventry, where Parliament was in session. It attainted York and confiscated all his lands, the Duchess being left with a pittance for her support. She and her children were confined at a manor house belonging to her brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, which has not been identified. This may well have been when Richard first began to know his mother.
    Meanwhile, York and his kinsmen were not idle. The Duke was welcomed ecstatically in Ireland by both Anglo-Irish lords and ‘wild Irish’ chieftains. An emissary from Somerset’s son and successor who tried to serve a writ on him was hanged, drawn and quartered. The Duke was visited early in 1460 by Warwick, who planned a joint invasion with him before sailing back to Calais, which he had made a centre of Yorkist intrigue. From there the exiled Earls waged a pirate war on royal ships, besides sending a stream of propaganda into England where they were already regarded with considerable sympathy.The court party’s administration was as venal and unsatisfactory as ever. At last in June, Salisbury, Warwick and March landed in Kent and advanced on London, gathering support all the way. The following month they defeated the royal army near Northampton – one of the few casualties was little Richard’s gaoler, Buckingham – and captured Henry VI. Parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster in October, to reverse the attainders against York and the Earls. But even the latter had no intention of deposing King Henry.
    John Paston’s man in London wrote that on the Monday after Lady Day (15 September) ‘my master Bowser, Sir Harry Ratford, John Clay and the harbinger of my Lord of March’ had come ‘desiring that my Lady of York might lie here until the coming of my Lord of York, and her two sons, my Lord George and my Lord Richard and my Lady Margaret her daughter, which I granted them in your name’. This was at Fastolf Place, Sir John Fastolf’s mansion inherited by Paston; it was in Southwark, near Tooley Street, on the south bank of the Thames opposite the Tower, a great moated and walled house with a large tree-filled garden and its own wharf. 7 However, the Duchess
    had not lain here two days but she had tidings of the landing of my Lord at Chester. The Tuesday next after, my Lord sent for her, that she would come to him to Hereford and thither she is gone. And she hath left here both the sons and the daughter, and my Lord of March cometh here every day to see them.
    Cicely travelled in a wagon roofed with blue velvet and drawn by eight horses – one wonders if Richard saw her set off. Soon the Duke and Duchess were marching to London with 500 troops, who bore banners with the Royal Arms of England.
    When they reached London, Duke Richard went to Westminster Hall. He walked arrogantly through the assembled House of Lords, with a sword of state borne before him as though he were King,