The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [28]
Meanwhile, the former King Richard was still a prisoner in the Tower in the care of Sir Thomas Rempson. Thomas Walsingham heaps praises on Henry IV for his courteous treatment of Richard at this time, but it would not be long before Adam of Usk was referring to his being held in chains.
On 21 October 1399, the Commons petitioned in Parliament that Richard be called upon to answer the charges laid against him. One magnate suggested he be put to death to ensure the security of Henry’s throne, but Henry strongly objected. On 23 October Parliament sat in secret session and debated what to do, concluding that it would be dangerous to let Richard be seen by the public because he would be a natural focus for rebellion. It was therefore decided, on a majority vote, that the ex-king should be condemned to perpetual imprisonment in a secret place from which no one could rescue him, and this sentence was read out in Parliament four days later. Denied any opportunity of speaking out in his own defence, Richard was made to disguise himself as a forester and on 28 October conveyed secretly by river from the Tower to Gravesend, and thence to Leeds Castle in Kent, a luxurious dower palace of the queens of England. But he was not to remain so comfortably lodged for long, for within a few days he was moved north, first to Pickering Castle in Yorkshire, then to Knaresborough Castle, and finally to Pontefract Castle, where he was placed in the custody of Sir Thomas Swynford, son of the Duchess of Lancaster by her first husband, and a staunch Lancastrian.
Richard still had friends in high places who were determined to restore him to the throne and so regain their former influence. They wore his badge of the ‘white hart’, called themselves ‘Richard’s nurselings’, and even had someone to impersonate him, a priest called Richard Maudelyn. After Christmas, four of these lords, the earls of Salisbury, Gloucester, Exeter and Surrey, made an attempt to assassinate Henry IV and his sons. But Rutland, who had become involved, betrayed their plans to the King, who wasted no time in gathering a great army and tracking down the traitors. Three of the rebel lords were lynched and decapitated by hostile mobs, and twenty-six other persons, including Maudelyn, were executed by process of law. The King returned to Westminster with the heads of the traitors, which were publicly displayed in London as a deterrent to other would-be rebels. Henry had been badly shaken by the rebellion, and was beginning to realise that he would not sit safely on his throne while Richard still lived.
The order for Richard’s murder probably went to Pontefract soon after the executions of his friends in January 1400. Adam of Usk says that death came miserably to the former king as ‘he lay in chains in the castle of Pontefract, tormented by Sir Thomas Swynford with starving fare’. A French source described in graphic detail how, in the agony of starvation, Richard used his teeth to tear strips of flesh from his arms and hands and devoured them. Most of his contemporaries believed he had been deliberately starved to death, although the government claimed that, having learned of the abortive plot to restore him, he was so distraught that he killed himself by voluntary starvation. When it had become too late, he had tried to break his fast, but his throat was too constricted to swallow: thus he could not have been guilty of the mortal sin of suicide. In the seventeenth century, a panel of distinguished antiquarians examined Richard’s skull, which showed no marks of a blow or wound, thus giving the lie to other contemporary tales that he had been bludgeoned to death.
Predictably, there is very little official evidence as to his fate. Even the date of his death is not known. The Council’s minutes for 9 February 1400 state that, if Richard still lived, he should