For leading landowning families ready to commit themselves to one side or the other, the Wars of the Roses offered both hazard and opportunity. In terms of the latter, that commitment needed to be whole-hearted, but not necessarily consistent. So frequent were the turns of the political tide, consistency was hard to reconcile with self-interest. Family connexions across the divides of national political division facilitated changes of allegiance, as did the readiness of the ascendant party to reconcile with all but the intractable. At certain moments there were significant shifts, notably in the wake of the attainder of the Yorkist lords in 1459 and the usurpation of Richard III in 1483. Some families, however, were consistent in their loyalty. One such was the Devereuxs of Weobley, who energetically supported the house of York from the 1430s until the death of Richard III at Bosworth.

Their service to York began well before the outbreak of civil war when one young man entered the service of another. In 1435 Richard, duke of York, recently come of age, appointed Walter Devereux as steward of his Welsh estates, perhaps on the recommendation of Walter’s father-in-law, the influential John Merbury, formerly justiciar of South Wales. Walter quickly became one of the duke’s most trusted servants, serving under him in France in the early 1440s, and he took plentiful advantage of the enhanced status that came with so close a connexion to so great man. He contracted two important marriages for his young children. Materially, the most important of these was that of his son and heir, another Walter, to Anne, the young daughter of Sir William Ferrers of Chartley in Staffordshire, in 1446. When Ferrers died in 1450, Anne was left sole heiress to an estate worth some £500 p.a., enough (at least when it fell into their hands in its entirety on the death of her mother in 1471) to raise the family to the ranks of the greatest gentry. Politically more important, however, was the marriage, in 1449, of his own daughter within the ducal network, to a Welsh esquire, William Herbert of Raglan, then at the beginning of a career that culminated in his elevation to the earldom of Pembroke.

In the 1450s Devereux and Herbert were the duke’s principal lieutenants in the marches as he moved into active opposition to the Crown.  Devereux led the Herefordshire part of York’s failed rising in 1452 and was accordingly indicted for treason. He was pardoned on personal supplication to the King, but four years later his Yorkist allegiance led him into greater difficulties. After a resurgent court party had once more driven York into the political wilderness, Devereux joined Herbert in an orgy of violence in the marches. Most seriously, on 10 August 1456, some 2,000 men, with Devereux and Herbert at their head, took Carmarthen castle, imprisoning its keeper, the King’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond. Devereux was imprisoned for seven months but eventually, in February 1458, he was acquitted of treason. 

Sir Walter’s death in the spring of 1459, when in his early fifties, spared him further trouble.  That lot fell to his son.  He was in the duke’s ranks at the rout at Ludford Bridge in the following October, and, although he escaped attainder, he was fined 500 marks and was among those Yorkist partisans forced to abase themselves, in ‘schyrtys and halters’, before the King. Not surprisingly, he rallied to York when the duke returned from exile early in September 1460. On 4 October he and Herbert were elected to Parliament in which the duke dramatically claimed the throne, and he went on to fight at the battles of Mortimer’s Cross and Towton, where he was knighted.  With York’s son, Edward IV, now King, this loyalty brought him substantial rewards.  On 26 July 1461 he and Herbert were among the five new peers created in the interests of the new regime, and, to support his new rank, Devereux was granted forfeited Lancastrian estates worth over £250 p.a.

In the great crisis of the reign, although he appears not to have gone into exile with Edward IV, Devereux fought for him at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in the spring of 1471. His military value was recognised a year later when he was accorded the singular honour of admission to the Order of the Garter. Fittingly, he fought on the French campaign of 1475 and then played a prominent role in the elaborate chivalric ritual that attended the reburial of the duke of York in the collegiate church at Fotheringhay in July 1476.  

This simple pattern of loyal service to the ruling house was to be complicated by events following Edward IV’s death in April 1483. However much Devereux may have disapproved of the deposition of the prince of Wales, upon whose council of the marches he had served, his gains from royal patronage depended on the continuation of Yorkist rule. Yet, on the other hand, he had, by a fortuitous route, personal connexions with Richard’s would-be supplanter, Henry Tudor.  In the wake of the battle of Edgecote in July 1469, the young Tudor, who had come to the field in the company of his guardian, the Herbert earl of Pembroke, was brought safely away by Devereux’s own former ward, Richard Corbet, who took the boy to Weobley and the custody of Devereux’s sister, the newly-widowed countess of Pembroke. Henry remained there until the Readeption.  Perhaps it was knowledge of this personal connexion that led Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, ready to rebel in Tudor’s favour in October 1483, to come to Devereux’s house at Weobley to rally aid.

If, however, Devereux was wavering in his support for Richard III, the duke’s endeavour was too desperate to attract his support, and soon afterwards he was given a new reason to support Richard.  Early in 1484 his nephew, the Herbert earl of Huntingdon, married the King’s bastard daughter, Katherine. This family connexion, combined with his family’s long-standing loyalty to the house of York, led him to fight for it one last time. While Corbet, now his son-in-law, was one of the first to join Tudor on his landing in early August 1485, Sir Walter was among those killed on the Ricardian side at Bosworth. Instructively, however, although he was duly attainted in the first Parliament of the new reign, the new King, perhaps because of his youthful experience at Weobley, allowed the family speedy rehabilitation. After Devereux’s son and heir, John, had proved his loyalty by fighting for him at the battle of Stoke in June 1487, the attainder was reversed.  The family won further promotion in Tudor England.  John’s great-grandson, another Walter, was made earl of Essex in 1572 and was the father of Elizabeth I’s ill-fated favourite, Robert. 

SJP

Further reading

For detailed discussions of the careers of the two Sir Walters, see: The Commons, 1422-61, iv. 121-39.  For those of Sir Walter (d.1402) and John Merbury (d.1438), see: The Commons, 1386-1421,  ii. 783-4; iii. 716-20; 1422-61, v. 448-50.

On 9 August 1485 Henry Tudor, titular earl of Richmond, landed on the Welsh coast near Milford Haven with a small flotilla equipped with the aid of the French king, Charles VIII. In the days that followed, Henry’s small force gradually made its way inland, and on 15 August reached the English border near Shrewsbury. The invasion was not unexpected. Earlier in the summer King Richard III had established his headquarters at Nottingham, and at the end of July he had instructed the Chancellor, John Russell, bishop of Lincoln, who remained at Westminster, to send him the great seal of England, one of the principal tools of government which alone gave a written instrument the full authority of the Crown. Richard received the seal on 1 August, and entrusted it to the keeping of the master of the rolls, Thomas Barowe, a senior administrator whom he kept by his side throughout the dramatic days of that summer.

Confirmed news of Henry Tudor’s landing reached the King at Nottingham within two days of the event, on 11 August. Richard at once sprang into action and in the following days sent urgent messages summoning his supporters. Little of what else occupied the King in the final ten days of his reign is known: the final letter under the great seal was recorded on the patent roll on 9 August and concerned the confirmation to the priory of Lenton of a grant of Edward IV. And then, on 16 August, with Henry Tudor’s army already on English soil, Richard issued an elaborate pardon to an old adversary, John Morton, bishop of Ely.

Morton was a die-hard Lancastrian loyalist, who served as chancellor to the young prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster in the second half of the 1450s, and subsequently followed first Henry VI and later his queen, Margaret of Anjou, into their respective exiles. Following the extermination of the male line of the house of Lancaster after the battle of Tewkesbury, Morton accepted a pardon from Edward IV, who recognised his administrative skills, and in 1472 appointed him master of the rolls. Frequently employed on diplomatic missions, Morton was among the envoys who in 1475 negotiated the profitable treaty of Picquigny with the French, and he received his reward four years later, when he was elevated to the bishopric of Ely. 

By the end of Edward IV’s reign, he was perceived to be among the most influential of the King’s councillors, and as a consequence on 13 June 1483 he was arrested during a dramatic council meeting (immortalised by Shakespeare) alongside William, Lord Hastings, and Archbishop Thomas Rotherham of York. Hastings was summarily executed without delay, but the two prelates were placed in the Tower. Handed over into the custody of Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Morton regained his freedom and played his part in the duke’s rebellion in the autumn of 1483, and on the failure of that rising made good his escape into exile in Flanders. As might be expected, Morton was attainted in Richard III’s delayed Parliament in early 1484, but remained at liberty on the continent. Unable to lay hands on his eloquent and well-connected opponent, Richard III tried in vain to bring him to submission with the offer of a general pardon in December 1484. This, Morton rejected.

In the spring of 1485, Morton was at the papal curia in Rome, and he may still have been there when the events that would lead up to Richard’s death at Bosworth began to unfold. It may, however, be a measure of how far from a foregone conclusion Henry Tudor’s victory was, that Morton was apparently in contact with the nuclear court at Nottingham. While it is possible that the pardon of 16 August represented a final attempt by the King to drive a wedge between the earl of Richmond and his supporters, it is also possible that it had been prepared for some time. As C.S.L. Davies has pointed out, on 2 August, in one of the first acts after taking direct control of the great seal, Richard had issued pardons to a group of known associates of Morton’s, at least one of whom had acted as a go-between at the time of the earlier, abortive, offer of a pardon the previous December. Then, Morton had rejected the King’s offer. In July 1485, he may have accepted it. Certainly, he seems to have taken delivery of the letters of pardon, and would a few years later plead them in court.

Strikingly, the pardon offered to Morton in July 1485 went further than other general pardons. While, like them, it covered a broad range of offences, it placed particular emphasis on Morton’s legal rehabilitation and restoration following his attainder in the Parliament of January 1484. This restitution technically required a fresh act of Parliament, but in the absence of such an act, the King’s pardon simply set aside the provisions of the attainder. This, in turn, may hint at a degree of desperation on King Richard’s part: Morton was a problem that needed to be solved. It could not wait for a future Parliament.   

H.W.K.

Further reading:

C.S.L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See, and the Accession of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, cii (1987), 2-30.

Richard’s pardon to Morton is printed in Pardon Rolls of Richard III, 1484-85 ed. by Hannes Kleineke (List and Index Society 365, 2023)

In his account of the accession of Richard III, written in the 1510s, Sir Thomas More assigned a pivotal role to an unlikely candidate, William Catesby, a lawyer educated at Inner Temple.  Although Catesby, for one of gentry rank, was wealthy and well-connected, he was hardly the sort of man who might have been expected to take a central part in great events. None the less, More seems sure of his ground.

He sets the scene by describing his subject’s personal attributes, drawing on the testimony of men who had known him: ‘besides his excellent knowledge of British law, he was a man of dignified bearing, handsomely featured, and of excellent appearance, not only suitable for carrying out assignments but capable also of handling matters of grave consequence’. These qualities were, however, balanced by a fatal flaw. The description ends with a telling phrase: ‘Indeed you would not wish that a man of so much wit should be of so little faith’.

More goes on to illustrate this lack of faith by giving a damning account of Catesby’s part in the events that led to Edward V’s deposition. The future Richard III, he tells us, entrusted Catesby with the task of persuading William, Lord Hastings, a central figure in the Yorkist regime, to support the setting aside of the young King. Richard did so advisedly, for Hastings numbered Catesby among his ‘nere secret counsail’ and ‘in his most weighty matters put no man in so special trust’. This sets the scene for the climax of the story, namely Catesby’s wicked betrayal of his master. 

More leaves open the matter of whether Catesby actually broached the question of deposition with his old lord; yet he is certain of the answer he gave to his new one. Catesby reported back to Richard that he found Hastings so opposed to any thought of deposing the young King that he dared not press the matter. He advised Richard that, if he would make himself King, he must dispose of the powerful Hastings. Richard followed his advice, having Hastings executed without trial on 13 June 1483. More ends by assigning to the faithless Catesby a central role in the crisis of 1483: ‘it was the dissimulation of this one man that stirred up that whole plague of evils which followed’.

How much credence can be placed on this vivid account? Given how close More’s sources were to the events described, it demands a certain degree of belief. Parts of the story, or at least of the background to it, find support in the contemporary record: Catesby’s closeness to Hastings tallies with what is known from other sources, and the analysis of Catesby’s character, both in its positive and negative aspects, is consistent with what else is known of his career.

On the other hand, Dominic Mancini, a chronicler more contemporary than More to the events of 1483, makes Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, not Catesby, responsible for inquiring into Hastings’s attitude to the proposed deposition. This suggests a different gloss on More’s story. Catesby’s connexions with the duke were as close as those with Hastings, and, if one accepts the general outline of More’s account, Catesby’s conduct represented not simply the betrayal of an old master, but the choice of one master over another. He followed Buckingham into support for the deposition rather than the other into opposition. This does not render his conduct any more morally acceptable, but, if he is seen as acting as Buckingham’s servant, it makes he himself less central to events than More would have us believe.

None the less, although we may doubt whether Catesby played the central role in the events of 1483 assigned to him by More, he benefited materially, in terms of both land and office, from Richard III’s accession to a degree broadly consistent with him having done so. His closeness to the new King found further expression on 26 January 1484 when the Commons presented him as their Speaker in what was to prove Richard III’s only Parliament. In a short session of barely four weeks he served the King well, seeing through bills confirming Richard’s title to the Crown, attainting those who had risen against him and granting him customs for life.

This prosperity was, however, soon brought to an abrupt end. When Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven on 7 Aug. 1485, Catesby could have had few thoughts of standing aside from the campaign to come. For one thing he was too wholly committed to the Ricardian regime, on the continuance of which depended his part in national politics. For another, he had every reason to hope and expect that the invading army would be repulsed. But this was not to be. 

The battle of Bosworth on 22 August was a close run thing, but victory was Henry’s. Many of the leading Ricardians fell with their master on the field. Unfortunately for Catesby he was not one of them. He was captured and had the agony of waiting three days in the knowledge that only the most unlikely eventuality would save him from execution. The terms of his will, made just before his death, imply that he had invested some hope in this unlikely reprieve. One of its concluding passages is the following: ‘My lordis Stanley, Strange and all that blod help and pray for my soule for ye have not for my body as I trusted in you’. The implication is clear. He and his father before him had been on close terms with Thomas, Lord Stanley, the husband of Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, and, as he awaited execution, he thus had grounds to hope that Stanley, who had decisively abandoned Richard III at Bosworth, and Stanley’s son (by an earlier wife), George, Lord Strange, might intervene to help him. Their apparent failure to do so, in Catesby’s mind at least, sealed his fate.

When he wrote his will he could only trust that his now-inevitable fate would not damage his children: to this end he included a rather curious line, ‘I doute not the king wilbe good and gracious Lord to them for he is callid a full gracious prince. And I never offended hym by my good and Free Will; for god I take to my juge I have ever lovid hym’. Taking up arms at Bosworth was a strange manifestation of this love, and the implication that he did so unwillingly – not of his ‘good and Free will’ – is scarcely credible.

He was duly executed on 25 August. The Croyland chronicler sardonically remarked that he, pre-eminent among the counsellors of the dead King, ‘as a final reward for excellent service’ had his head cut off at Leicester. The fact that he was the only man of importance to suffer death among those captured at Bosworth might imply a contemporary perception that he had played a particularly dishonourable part in Richard’s accession.

Catesby’s body was brought back to the church of Ashby St. Ledgers for burial, but the making of a suitable memorial had to wait for more than 20 years. In 1505 his son, George, provided him with a fine brass, one of the most elaborate of the early 16th century.

S J P

Further reading

The Catesby Family and Their Brasses at Ashby St. Ledgers, ed. J. Bertram (2006)

The biography of Catesby, and many others, will feature in our Commons 1461-1504 project, currently being researched. Follow the work of our medieval section via the Commons in the Wars of the Roses blog page.

By the time Henry VII overcame Richard III at the battle of Bosworth and claimed the English throne, changes of dynasty or even ruler followed an established pattern. Having successfully asserted a claim to the throne and secured some form of possession of the crown, frequently by armed might or an exhibition thereof, the new ruler summoned a Parliament to affirm his claim and negate those of any potential rivals. In this, the autumn of 1485 was no exception. On 15 September, less than a month after Bosworth, writs were issued summoning a Parliament to meet at Westminster on 7 November.

Clearly, it was imperative that the new King should have friends in this assembly: no previous 15th-century usurper had quite so flimsy a royal lineage as Henry VII, and by inference quite so tenuous a claim to the English throne. Moreover, England had suffered more than a quarter of a century of intermittent dynastic strife, and while some former adherents of Edward IV had been antagonised by Richard III and had thrown in their lot with Henry Tudor, it was far from clear how far he could rely on the full support of the Yorkist clientele, or even of what little remained of die-hard partisans of the defeated, depleted, and fragmented Lancastrian line. The House of Lords could be managed by denying summons to those peers too closely associated with Richard III, but the Commons were a different matter. The loss of the election returns for the Parliament of 1485 makes it impossible to be certain about the composition of more than a fraction of the membership of the Commons, but some inferences may be drawn from what is known. The lengths to which Henry and his advisers went to try and secure a compliant House of Commons are perhaps best demonstrated by the election as Speaker of the chancellor of the Exchequer, the King’s councillor Sir Thomas Lovell, a man who should have been technically disqualified from office by his attainder in the Parliament of 1485. Even so, the proceedings were to be characterised by arguments and disagreement, as the MPs for Colchester reported to their constituents.

One part of England where Henry VII enjoyed considerable support was the far south-west. Devon and Cornwall had only grudgingly come to terms with the accession of the house of York. Many of the leading gentry of the two counties had risen in arms for Henry VI during his brief Readeption in 1470-71, and many had also played their part in the duke of Buckingham’s rebellion against Richard III in 1483. Once the earl of Richmond had asserted himself as the focal point of the opposition to Richard III, a number of important south-westerners had joined him in exile on the continent. Among the most eminent of them was Sir Thomas Arundell of Lanherne. In a county which was almost unique in late medieval England in its lack of resident magnates, the Arundells of Lanherne stood out among their neighbours in wealth and status.

After the failure of the main line of the house of Lancaster, the Arundells had grudgingly come to terms with Edward IV’s rule, but even though Sir Thomas was among the men knighted on the eve of Richard III’s coronation, he joined Buckingham’s rising and before the end of the year had gone into exile. He was attainted by Parliament in 1484, and stripped of his lands which were granted to the King’s favourite Sir James Tyrell. Arundell returned with Henry VII two years later, and fought alongside him at Bosworth. As one of two leading Cornishmen in Henry’s inner circle, and a member of one of the great historic families of the county, Arundell would have been an obvious choice to seek election to Parliament in the autumn of 1485 as one of the knights of the shire for Cornwall.

It was not to be. By the second week of October, probably even before parliamentary elections could be held in Cornwall, Arundell was dead. It is possible that he had succumbed to wounds sustained in the fighting at Bosworth, but there may also be another explanation. In the weeks after Bosworth, England experienced the first outbreak of a new and frightening epidemic, the ‘Sweating Sickness’ or ‘English Sweat’ (sudor anglicus). Thought by some to have been a highly contagious viral infection (medical opinion remains divided), the sweating sickness, the symptoms of which included violent cold shivers, joint pains, a fever, accompanied by the characteristic intense sweating that gave the disease its name, and severe exhaustion, could kill a sufferer within a matter of hours.

The epidemic broke out in London in mid-September, and in a matter of weeks caused several thousand fatalities, many of them from the upper echelons of civic society. In October, the outbreak ended as suddenly as it had begun, although there would be repeated epidemics of the disease until the mid-16th century. Before his death, Arundell found time to make a will and asked to be buried initially in the parish church of Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire, before having his body transferred to the Franciscan friary at Dorchester in Dorset at a later date. It is possible that this provision was merely intended to give his executors time to make the requisite preparations for a suitably grand memorial in the friary, but it is equally possible that it owed everything to the need for a rapid burial of his body at a time of epidemic disease sweeping across the land.

Arundell was by no means an old man, and could have expected to play an important part in the politics of Henry VII’s reign, much as, and perhaps even more than, his ancestors and descendants had done and would do under earlier and later kings. As it was, not for the first and certainly not for the last time, a career full of promise was cut prematurely short by an epidemic. Southern England, but not his native Cornwall, was to have one last glimpse of Arundell as, some time after his death, his mother-in-law, the formidable Lady Joan Dynham, arranged for the transfer of his body to Dorchester in a splendid cortège decked out with a hundred shields of arms, and in an overland procession that lasted six days.

H.W.K.

Further reading:

J. R. Carlson and P.W. Hammond, ‘The English Sweating Sickness (1485-c.1551): A New Perspective on Disease Etiology’. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, liv (1999), 23–54.

H. Kleineke, ‘The Reburial Expenses of Sri Thomas Arundell’, The Ricardian, xi (June 1998), 288-96.

For more on the impact of disease and epidemics on Parliament, head to the ‘Health and Medicine‘ link on our page. Follow the research of our 1461-1504 project at the ‘Commons in the Wars of the Roses‘ section of our blog.

As the bones of King Richard III are laid to rest at Leicester this week, there has been much renewed debate over the kind of King he might have been, had he reigned for longer. Richard’s apologists in particular have pored over the records of Richard’s only Parliament in search of evidence in support of their hero. But what really happened?

Richard’s only Parliament opened at Westminster on 23 January 1484 and sat for less than a month before being dissolved again on 20 February. But this was only part of the story.

A Parliament had originally been summoned to Westminster to meet on 25 June 1483, three days after the date set for the young Edward V’s coronation. Although the Parliament was never cancelled, it was to the acclamation of an informal gathering of his subjects that Richard turned on 26 June to justify his assumption of the Crown: in this he was following a precedent set by his brother, Edward IV, in 1461. In late September Richard finally summoned a Parliament of his own to meet at Westminster on 6 November. Within a matter of weeks, the King was faced with the rebellion of his erstwhile ally, the duke of Buckingham, supported a large number of former servants of Edward IV. Nevertheless, Richard delayed until 2 November before he had the Parliament cancelled. Fresh writs were issued on 9 November. For the country, this repeated prevarication was nothing less than a costly nuisance. Parliamentary elections could at the best of times provide a focus for local disorder, and the cost of sending representatives to the Commons could be equally burdensome. Indeed, in frequently unruly Norfolk there was a dispute over the election of the Norwich Members, and both in June and November a number of MPs travelled to Westminster and charged their constituents for their abortive journeys.

When Parliament finally met, there were a number of notable absentees. In the Lords, the crisis of 1483 had claimed the lives of the duke of Buckingham, earl Rivers and Lord Hastings. The young duke of York’s whereabouts were uncertain, his half-brother, the marquess of Dorset and the bishops of Ely, Salisbury and Exeter had taken refuge in France. In the Commons, many leading members of the county communities who had regularly represented their neighbours during Edward IV’s reign had become implicated in Buckingham’s rising and had to be replaced by newcomers.

Central to the Parliament’s proceedings was a single item of business, the Titulus Regius, Richard III’s justification of his usurpation on the grounds of his brother’s bigamy and the consequent bastardy of his nephews. There was by now nothing unusual in placing such a document before the Lords and Commons. In both 1399 and 1461 Parliament had been invited to sanction the fait accompli of Henry IV’s and Edward IV’s respective usurpations, although in 1461 at least the new King had at least been able to base his claim on a decision reached in Parliament a year earlier.

Royal housekeeping did not stop here. The declaration of the King’s title was followed by several acts of attainder, the equally customary means of placing the King’s opponents outside the law, and of confiscating their estates, that had been used effectively in 1459, 1461 and 1472. These measures were unpopular, and like other similar bills, Richard III’s occasioned much debate. Yet, the measures of 1484 also went further than previous acts. In a highly unusual step three bishops, John Morton, bishop of Ely, Lionel Woodville, bishop of Salisbury, and Peter Courtenay, bishop of Exeter were included among those attainted. The dowager queen, Elizabeth Woodville, while not attainted, was stripped of the lands settled on her by her late husband and suffered the added indignity of being styled ‘late the wyf of Sir John Grey, knyght, and late callyng her selfe quene of Englond’ in the act.

Next, the King’s principal supporters needed to be rewarded. Francis, Viscount Lovell, gained part of the estates of the dukedom of Exeter, while Sir James Tyrell saw a dispute with his wife’s family, the Arundells from Cornish Lanherne, over her inheritance settled in his favour.

The King’s other immediate need was money. Edward IV had left the treasury all but empty, and Richard needed a secure stream of revenue. To this end, Parliament was prevailed upon to allow him to raise customs and subsidies on imports and exports of goods for his life time in the same way as Edward IV had done before him.

Yet, in return for their financial support the parliamentary Commons expected the King to address some of their concerns. Richard obliged. In the first instance, he made an eye-catching, but in the immediate term cost-free concession: he agreed to abolish for good the benevolence, an unpopular form of levy that Edward IV had raised repeatedly without the express consent of Parliament on the spurious grounds that it constituted a ‘free gift’ from his subjects, rather than an actual tax. The King also responded favourably to his subject’s petitions in two areas that had long been of concern to the Commons: the maintenance of law and order, and the regulation and protection of English merchants and their trade.

None of the small number of measures designed to improve the upholding of the law contained an earth shattering innovation, although one measure at least sought to plug the difficult legal loophole of landholding to the use of another individual. Several measures simply reaffirmed earlier legislation. New measures provided that henceforth juries taking inquiries should be made up of men with an annual income of at least £1 (half the sum required to qualify a man to vote in a parliamentary election). And far from introducing as a complete innovation, as has been claimed in recent days, the release of a defendant on bail, Richard’s act merely extended the power to grant bail to the justices of the peace, thus extending this power which had previously been the preserve of the professional judges to the well-born amateurs who sat on the county benches.

The importance of the merchant community in providing ready loans to King in anticipation of future taxation found its reflection in a rather more substantial portfolio of measures designed to curry their favour. It is hard to see as anything but blatantly populist a measure designed to curb the commercial activities of Italian merchants. In terms all too familiar from 21st-century political debate it complained about the proliferation of illegal immigrants, and their habits of bringing their large families and only employing their countrymen, thus taking away Englishmen’s jobs. Foreigners were also blamed for the excessive cost and poor quality of imported bowstaves, the subject of another act.

Hand in hand with this went several protectionist measures – a confirmation and extension of existing prohibitions of the import of silk and laces, and a new prohibition of the import of a wide range of goods manufactured by cloth- leather- and metal-workers of a variety of trades and other artisans, as well as regulations governing the manufacture and dying of cloth and the sale of wine. In this commercial legislation at least we may see the personal intervention of the king who – himself a known bibliophile – insisted that booksellers and printers be exempted from the restrictions on the Italians.

Taken as a whole, Richard III’s Parliament was unexceptional: it was a workmanlike and pragmatic affair. There were no important legislative initiatives comparable to those seen in, for example, the Parliaments of Henry VI in 1429 or Henry VII in 1495. In 1484, Parliament transacted the business the King wished to see transacted, and just enough business of concern to the Lords and Commons to keep them pliant. There is no suggestion of open hostility to the King on the part of Parliament, but nor is there a sense that they were being cowed into submission by an overbearing monarch. The balance of business benefitting King, Lords and Commons respectively was comparatively even, and suggests negotiation, rather than confrontation: it may be assumed that the Commons’ Speaker, William Catesby (the ‘Cat’ of the notorious trinity of ‘Cat, Rat and Dog’) played his part. When the King had achieved all he wished to achieve, parliament was dissolved: it was not prorogued and kept in existence, as had been the case with several of Edward IV’s Parliaments with a view to returning to outstanding business. Of the King himself, the proceedings of the parliament tell us little, beyond his taste for imported books. One thing, though, is clear: Richard III had no more inclination to rule through Parliament than his predecessors or successor, unless he needed to.

HK

At the battle of Bosworth the last Plantagenet King, Richard III, met his death. For some leading parliamentarians who had taken up arms on his behalf it also marked the end, either immediately through death on the field, or in the days and months that followed Henry Tudor’s victory. For others, it proved a very serious setback from which recovery was nevertheless possible. For others who took the field for Tudor and survived, Bosworth saved or made their careers.

Apart from Richard himself, the foremost victim of Bosworth was his leading supporter among the nobility, John Howard, duke of Norfolk. Created duke by Richard in 1483, Howard had previously sat as an MP and attended the Lords after his elevation to the peerage in 1470. A lesser lord who fell fighting for Richard was Walter Devereux, Lords Ferrers of Chartley, a long-term supporter of the House of York. One of the knights of the shire for Herefordshire in the Parliament of 1460, he had the rare distinction of having also fought at Towton, the bloody battle by which the first Yorkist King, Edward IV, secured his newly-won throne. Like Howard, he suffered a posthumous loss of lands and title in the first Parliament of Henry VII’s reign. Fortunately for his family, his son John Devereux had known Henry since boyhood and was willing to accept the new King. Summoned to the Lords in 1487, John secured the reversal of his father’s attainder in the following Parliament of 1489.

Among those taken prisoner at Bosworth were the duke of Norfolk’s son, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, and William Catesby. Before becoming earl, Thomas had twice sat in the Commons. Wounded at the battle, he spent three years in the Tower of London and forfeited his lands and title in Henry VII’s first Parliament. The recovery of the Howards was a good deal more tortuous than that of Devereux but Thomas was the ultimate survivor and, upon his release, dedicated himself to regaining lands and status through loyal service to the Tudors. Henry VIII made him duke of Norfolk – a new creation – following his famous defeat of the Scots at the battle of Flodden in 1513. His fellow prisoner, Catesby, the Speaker in Richard III’s only Parliament (1484), was not so fortunate. The only important figure to suffer death among those captured at Bosworth, he was beheaded three days later at Leicester and was attainted in the following Parliament. His son and heir George had managed to recover most of the Catesby estates by his own death in 1505, although the far greater prospects that his family might have hoped for had Richard III kept this throne were gone for ever.

Among Richard’s supporters who escaped the field was the diehard Humphrey Stafford, an MP for Worcestershire on several occasions in the mid-fifteenth century.. Stafford fled Bosworth with the chamberlain of Richard’s household, Francis, Viscount Lovell, with whom he found sanctuary in Colchester abbey. Eight months later, they broke out of sanctuary to raise rebellion against the Tudor monarch. Following the failure of this uprising, Stafford again managed to find sanctuary, this time in the abbot of Abingdon’s liberty at Culham, Oxfordshire. Here his luck ran out. Just two days later, on the night of 13 May 1486, a pursuing force dragged from his refuge and, in due course, he suffered death on the scaffold at Tyburn. Like the Howards, Devereux and Catesby, Stafford was attainted in Henry VII’s first Parliament, and his manors of Grafton and Upton Warren in Worcestershire were granted away to Sir Gilbert Talbot, one of their adversaries at Bosworth.

A younger son of the 2nd earl of Shrewsbury, Talbot had commanded Tudor’s right wing at Bosworth. He sat in three of Henry’s Parliaments before becoming the King’s lieutenant of Calais. He died possessed of a substantial landed estate in 1517. Among Talbot’s comrades in arms at Bosworth were Sir James Blount, Walter Hungerford and Humphrey Stanley. A former member of the Yorkist Household, Blount had already sat in the Commons for Derbyshire over a decade before the battle. Attainted in the Parliament of 1484 after deserting Richard III, he fled to France to join Tudor, who knighted him at Milford Haven when they returned in the following year. Like Talbot, he later sat in Henry’s Parliament of 1491.

The story of Hungerford, the youngest son of Robert, 3rd Lord Hungerford, and a member of a firmly Lancastrian family, is as dramatic as Stafford’s. Lord Robert was among those diehards who held out against Edward IV in northern England until his capture and execution in 1464, and Walter’s elder brother, Sir Thomas Hungerford, suffered death at the scaffold for treason in 1469. Notwithstanding these events, Walter subsequently entered the Commons while Edward was on the throne, although he found it necessary to obtain a general pardon at the accession of Richard III, who later ordered his arrest. Yet he managed to escape and make his way to Tudor. At Bosworth, he killed Sir Robert Brackenbury, lieutenant of the Tower of London, receiving a knighthood on field from Henry for his exploits. He returned to the Commons, again as an MP for Wiltshire, and served the first two Tudor monarchs as a councillor and diplomat.

Stanley, a younger son of a Staffordshire landowner, was likewise knighted at Bosworth by Tudor. Thereafter he joined the King’s household and, like his father before him, he was elected as a knight of the shire for Staffordshire in at least two Parliaments. No paragon of virtue, he gained election in 1495 even though he had procured the murder of his neighbour and fellow household man, William Chetwynd, in the previous year. In spite of such behaviour, he was awarded the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey following his death in 1505.

CM