Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, from a later engraving. He looks a lot older than the twenty-eight years he had reached when died!
While trawling through the archives of the Duchy of Lancaster the other day, I came across a reference that immediately connected me with the high politics of the late fifteenth century. It was a grant of the office of Steward of Tutbury, one of the chief honours of the Duchy, to Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham.
That entry led me to reflect on a comment I saw recently on a YouTube video “Richard III and the Princes in the Tower”: “Has anyone else noticed that whenever there is a Duke trying to mess with the English Monarchy, that half the time it’s a Buckingham?” (comment by kellyfarrar6639). When I first read this comment, I immediately knew which other Buckingham she was referring to: George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the great favourite of James I and Charles I during the early seventeenth century. As a person who currently spends his weeks shifting between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, I thought a deep dive into these favourites to compare them might be welcome. Both had baleful effects on the monarchy in their day, but only one of them seems to have been a genuinely reprehensible personality. I will let the readers decide which one that is, though I do believe there is a right answer.
Part I will cover the career and reputation of Henry Stafford. Part II will do the same for George Villiers. I will then offer a conclusion about what the lives of both men suggests about power and intrigue at royal courts in the late medieval and early modern period.
Part 1: Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1455-83)
If Henry Stafford is remembered by anyone other than historians, it is through the prism of Shakespeare. Duke Henry is a leading secondary character in one the Bard’s greatest works (and my own personal favourite) Richard III. If Richard III is a far more complex historical character than the caricature villain in Shakespeare’s play, the same cannot be said for Buckingham. The slippery and devious magnate who appears on stage reflects the character who occupied English high politics. Professor Christine Carpenter, interviewed in the abovementioned BBC program “Richard III and the Princes in the Tower,” described Buckingham as the “archetypal appalling medieval nobleman: greedy, ambitious, lacking in judgement, unstable…he’s got a very good eye to the main chance.” Dan Jones socked him another blow: “He was a feckless character who was drawn to intrigue.”[1] Buckingham possessed what Ian Mortimer referred to as the “fluid versatility of a schemer.”[2] There is no doubt that if a supporter of Richard III is looking for an alternative villain for the events of summer 1483, then Buckingham fits the bill. And even those, like me, more ready to criticize Richard’s actions that year need to give due account to the baleful behaviour of Buckingham in these months. If there was one individual who had only his interests in mind at the time, it was Buckingham.
Ralph Richardson as Buckingham in Laurence Olivier’s famed film adaption of Shakespeare’s Richard III (1955).
Yet it is important to investigate why this might be the case. I think the reason lies in Buckingham’s adolescence and young adult life. Henry Stafford, as he was born, became heir to the duchy of Buckingham as a young child. His father died when he was young and his grandfather, Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, was cut down in the Second Battle of St Albans in 1460 during the first phase of the Wars of the Roses. At the age of five, the young Henry found himself as a ward of the English crown. In 1466, still only eleven, he was married to Katherine Woodville, sister of Edward IV’s new queen, Elizabeth. It may have been here that Buckingham’s malice against Edward IV and his family began to grow. The Woodvilles were upstarts and their marriages to the highest echelons of the English nobility were considered crass and unbecoming. The earl of Warwick, Edward IV’s mentor and chief lieutenant, was certainly miffed, given that he may have harbored wishes to marry Buckingham to one of his two daughters. Later in life, Buckingham heartily complained at having been disparaged in the matter of his marriage.[3]
Buckingham’s later career under Edward IV was no improvement. In 1473, at the age of eighteen, he was allowed to come into his majority and fully inherit his estates. But beyond this he was limited to what one historian referred to as walk on parts. He contracted to go on Edward IV’s grand campaign to France in 1475, but he ended up not participating. During the trial of Edward IV’s brother, the duke of Clarence, the king appointed Buckingham as steward of England to oversee the trial. In the same year, the king acted as godfather at the christening of the duke’s son and heir and granted him a manor. But this was it. Throughout the last five years of Edward IV’s reign, the king and the court cold shouldered him. He was even denied political influence in the areas dominated by his estates. Buckingham was left with effectively no role either in national or local politics. For a man of royal blood born to aid the crown in governing the realm, this was a mortal slight. Add to this Buckingham’s snobbish character and you have the recipe for a dangerously disaffected political actor.[4]
Edward IV’s sudden death in April 1483 changed the situation dramatically. The Yorkist dynasty now found itself in the most significant moment for any new political regime: the accession of a new leader. A second, successful Yorkist king would give political ballast to what had been merely the personal achievements of one individual. Unfortunately, Edward’s heir was his twelve-year-old son, Edward, prince of Wales. Though by no means the youngest king England was ever to have, the new Edward V was not yet old enough to take the helm of the ship of state. Even more fatally, his dynasty was divided against itself. His maternal family, the Woodvilles, were viewed with contempt by certain Yorkists loyal to the dead king, such as William, Lord Hastings. Edward IV had likely intended to rectify this by having Yorkist insiders such as Hastings and his brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, take control of the young king’s government while the personal custody of the king himself was confined to the Woodvilles. Unfortunately, a dead king’s will is not enforceable in law. The Woodvilles grasped at the power behind the new throne, which provoked a counterstrike by Richard and Hastings. Fanning the flames was Buckingham.
Buckingham joined Richard of Gloucester on his way south to meet the cavalcade escorting Edward V from Wales to London for the latter’s coronation. He “popped out of nowhere” according to historian David Hipshon. After rendezvousing with the king’s uncle, Richard and Buckingham had dinner together with him. The following morning, the uncle and several other key figures of Edward V’s household were arrested and taken north to Richard’s strongholds. Queen Elizabeth Woodville fled into Westminster Abbey with the rest of her immediate family. Richard and Buckingham escorted the new king to London. For a few weeks, the new regime continued unremarkably. Then in June 1483, at a council meeting in the Tower of London to plan young Edward’s coronation, Lord Hastings, hitherto one of Richard and Buckingham’s chief supporters, was arrested and summarily executed with no semblance of trial. Within two weeks of this, a rumour mill started accusing Edward V and his younger brother of illegitimacy based on Edward IV’s admittedly notorious lustful appetites. The rumour mill resulted in the two young boys being declared bastards by parliament. Parliament and the mayor and aldermen of London petitioned Richard to accept the crown. Buckingham stage managed this entire process for Richard and was beside him as steward of England when Richard was crowned as King Richard III.[5]
What happened over these ten weeks? That is in the sense the million-dollar question for historians of Yorkist England. The older view popularized by St Thomas More and Shakespeare is that Richard deliberately dissembled his true purpose of becoming king until matters were too far advanced for anyone to stop him.[6] A more believable account advanced by modern historians is that Richard repeatedly blundered into bigger and bigger crises until taking the throne was the only option left to him due to the number of enemies he had made. However, there is another account via Christine Carpenter. This sees Richard as less the masterful manipulator and more the honest soldier lieutenant of his brother. He had been so loyal and dependent on the dead monarch that when left alone and facing uncertain prospects, he repeatedly panicked and was susceptible to bad advice. The wicked advisor, in this view, was Buckingham.[7] Buckingham worked on Richard to move against the Woodvilles, then Hastings, and finally to take the crown. More shocking still, according to evidence uncovered in the 1980s, Buckingham may well have been a proponent of the most shocking crime associated with Richard: the murder of the Princes in the Tower.[8] Yes, I believe Richard III ordered their deaths in the late summer of 1483. The evidence leads overwhelmingly to that conclusion. But if Richard did it, I believe he was encouraged by Buckingham. The evidence found in a College of Arms document suggested that the order was given on the “vice” of Buckingham, meaning either Buckingham’s advice or perhaps on his own initiative.
Why did Buckingham do this? The conclusion is not hard to see. Cold-shouldered by Edward IV, Buckingham was angry and resentful. Married to a Woodville bride, his snobbish pride was pricked. He wanted power and patronage and saw Richard III as the best way of achieving it. If Richard could be played upon, he could get what he sought. Richard rewarded Buckingham exponentially. The duke was made the chief man of affairs in the English Midlands and all royal power in Wales was devolved onto him. Richard was even prepared to award him with a grant of an English earldom without waiting for parliamentary approval to do so. He was the second man of the realm by the early summer of 1483.
Yet even this may not have been enough for Buckingham. In September 1483, he betrayed the king he had helped to make and joined a rebellion first to put Edward V back on the throne and then, when confronted by rumours of the princes’ fate, switched his support to Henry Tudor, the last claimant of the deposed house of Lancaster. The rebellion was a damp squib. In October, Buckingham’s army fell apart, and he was later captured. Refused a last interview by Richard III, he was beheaded at Salisbury in early November. However, I am inclined to believe that Buckingham’s prime goal in rebelling against Richard was his own ambition to be king. He had a passible claim as member of the blood royal and having helped engineer the deaths of several other claimants in his way, he might have made sure something “happened” to Henry Tudor after Richard III was defeated. If such were his ambitions, then he had delusions of grandeur on a scale not often witnessed even in medieval England.[9]
Buckingham on reflection seems to have been a shallow, snobbish, and self-interested individual with an overdeveloped sense of his own talents and rights, and little empathy for others. He may be fairly described as an overgrown teenager in a twenty-eight-year-old’s body. His influence in 1483, however, is less remarked upon than it should be. This is not to exculpate Richard III from his own decisions any more than it would be in the cases of other kings with wicked advisors such as Edward II or Richard II. But given Richard’s loyal actions before 1483 and his dedication to proving his worth as king afterwards, it does make one think about whether all the inspiration for some of his decisions in the turbulent summer of 1483 were coming from. I suggest many were coming from Buckingham. I heartily endorse Christine Carpenter’s parting shots at the manipulative duke: “He was a worthless man and probably few lamented his passing.”[10]
In Part II, I will discuss the career of a less baleful, more exotic duke of Buckingham in the personage of George Villiers, favourite of James I and Charles I of England.
[1] D. Jones, The Wars of The Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors (New York, 2014), 282.
[2] I. Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation (London, 2006), 399.
[3] K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related Studies (Oxford, 1973), 206-7; C. Ross, Edward IV (London, 1974), 93-5.
[4] Ross, Edward IV, 335.
[5] C. Ross, Richard III (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1981), 38-9, 71-4, 93, and 95.
[6] St Thomas More, The History of Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems, ed. R. S. Sylvester (London and New Haven, 1976), 90-1.
[7] C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the constitution in England, c. 1437-1509 (Cambridge, 1997), 208-10.
[8] Ross, Richard III, 102-3.
[9] Ibid, 114-7; K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England, 206 and 212.
[10] Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, 212.