I, Richard - Elizabeth George [81]
He held it in life as a proven and victorious battle commander. He would hold it in death as the single force who could destroy the usurper.
“Goodness me,” someone murmured appreciatively. Yes, Malcolm's listeners were fully atuned to the Romance of the Moment. Thank God.
Richard, he told them, wasn't oblivious of the scheming that had been going on between Henry Tudor and Elizabeth Woodville— widow of his brother Edward IV and mother of the two young Princes whom he had earlier placed in the Tower of London.
“The Princes in the Tower,” another voice remarked. “That's the two little boys who—”
“The very ones,” Malcolm said solemnly. “Richard's own nephews.”
The King would have known that, holding true to her propensity for buttering her bread not only on both sides but along the crust as well, Elizabeth Woodville had promised the hand of her eldest daughter to Tudor should he obtain the crown of England. But should Tudor obtain the crown of England on the morrow, Richard also knew that every man, woman, and child with a drop of York blood stood in grave danger of being eliminated— permanently—as a claimant to the throne. And this included Elizabeth Woodville's children.
He himself ruled by right of succession and by law. Descended directly—and more important legitimately—from Edward III he had come to the throne after the death of his brother Edward IV, upon the revelation of the licentious Edward's secret pledge of marriage to another woman long before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. This pledged contract of marriage had been made before a bishop of the church. As such, it was as good as a marriage performed with pomp and circumstance before a thousand onlookers, and it effectively made Edward's later marriage to Elizabeth Woodville bigamous at the same time as it bastardised all of their children.
Henry Tudor would have known that the children had been declared illegitimate by an Act of Parliament. He would also have known that, should he be victorious in his confrontation with Richard III, his tenuous claim to the throne of England would not be shored up by marriage to the bastard daughter of a dead King. So he would have to do something about her illegitimacy.
King Richard would have concluded this once he heard the news that Tudor had pledged to marry the girl. He would also have known that to legitimatise Elizabeth of York was also to legitima-tise all her sisters… and her brothers. One could not declare the eldest child of a dead King legitimate while simultaneously claiming her siblings were not.
Malcolm paused meaningfully in his narrative. He waited to see if the eager Romantics gathered round him would twig the implication. They smiled and nodded and looked at him fondly, but no one said anything. So Malcolm did their twigging for them.
“Her brothers,” he said patiently, and slowly to make sure they absorbed each Romantic detail. “If Henry Tudor legitima-tised Elizabeth of York prior to marrying her, he would have been legitimatising her brothers as well. And if he did that, the elder of the boys—”
“Gracious me,” one of the group sang out. “He would've been the true King once Richard died.”
Bless you, my child, Malcolm thought. “That,” he cried, “is exactly spot on.”
“See here, mate,” Sludgecur interrupted, some sort of light dawning in the cobwebbed reaches of her brain. “I've heard this story, and Richard killed those little blighters himself while they were in the Tower.”
Another fish biting the Tudor bait, Malcolm realised. Five hundred years later and that scheming Welsh upstart was still successfully reeling them in. He could hardly wait until the day when his book came out, when his history of Richard was heralded as the triumph of truth over Tudor casuistry.
He was Patience itself as he explained. The Princes in the Tower—Edward IV's two sons—had indeed been long reputed by tradition to have been murdered by their uncle Richard III to shore up his position as King. But there were no witnesses to any murder and as Richard was King through an Act of Parliament,