November 1456. Three years later she was married to Sir Henry Stafford, son of Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham —just when civil war in England was breaking out afresh. The little Henry of Richmond's uncle by the father's side, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, was a fierce Lancastrian, and when that cause was overthrown, both of them fled to France, whence the nephew was to return one day to gain the battle of Bosworth and ascend the throne of England. Margaret was a woman of forty when in 1481 she lost her second husband, Sir Henry Stafford. By her marriage with Lord Stanley, the great nobleman whom the Yorkist Edward IV. delighted to honour became the step-father of the Lancastrian Pretender. The match seems to have been one of convenience on her side, probably it was so on both sides. It gave Lord Stanley a wife with great possessions, and her only child was an attainted exile-a half-prisoner of the Duke of Brittany. Margaret herself gained by it a powerful protector high in the favour of the King. Her piety was of the ascetic kind, and she passed part if not all of her married life with her third husband in a way not unusual in those days for wedded dames of great devoutness. "Long time before that he died," says her father-confessor, Fisher, Bishop of Rochester-the "he" being, of course, Lord Stanley-" she obtained of him licence, and promised to live chaste, in the hands of the reverend father my Lord of London, which promise she renewed, after her husband's death, into my hands again." Her influence over Lord Stanley must, nevertheless, have been very considerable, and to it in all probability was due the accession of the Tudor dynasty to the throne of England. Lord Stanley returned from the North before Richard Crookback, and was present at the funeral of Edward IV. After the King's death there were three parties ready to struggle for supremacy. One was that of the Queen-Mother, Elizabeth Woodville, whose marriage to Edward, and still more the honours heaped by him on her kindred, had provoked the ire of some of his best friends among the nobles.1 The most notable member of the Queen-Mother's party was her brother, the gallant and accomplished Lord Rivers, whose translation from the French, "The Dictes or Sayings of Philosophers," was one of the earliest books issued from the press of William Caxton (1477). At the time of Edward's death Lord Rivers was at Ludlow, as governor of South Wales, having under his care his young nephew, Edward V. There, too, as Steward of the boy-King's Household, a significant fact, was Sir William Stanley. Lord Stanley himself seems to have belonged to a second party, one loyal to the young King and distrustful of his uncle, Richard of Gloucester, but hostile to the pretensions of the Queen-Mother and her kindred. This party was headed by the brilliant Lord Hastings, Edward's companion in danger, in triumph, and in pleasure, and who became the most trusted of his councillors. He, too, like Lord Stanley, had married a sister of Warwick, the king-maker. Last not least there was the party of Richard of Gloucester, already aspiring to be Protector, if not King, and about to secure the co-operation of the powerful and prominent but foolish 1 Shakespeare, with his knowledge of human nature, but seemingly without any historical or biographical authority for the suggestion, represents the high-born Margaret of Richmond as scorning the parvenue, Elizabeth Woodville : Q. Eliz. The Countess Richmond, good my Lord of Derby, I hate not you for her proud arrogance. King Richard III.-Act i. scene 3. In this passage, as often throughout the play, by a pardonable anachronism, Lord Stanley is styled Lord Derby, though he was not made Earl of Derby until after the battle of Bosworth. Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham, whose uncle, Sir Henry Stafford, had been the first husband of Lord Stanley's second wife, Margaret of Richmond. The first blow was struck by Richard, a very few weeks after Edward's death. With the assent and approval of Hastings, who disliked them as chief among the QueenMother's relations and friends, and as old personal enemies of his own, Rivers and his nephew Grey were arrested by Richard's orders; their execution followed not long afterwards. The turn of Hastings himself came next. On the 13th of June occurred the scene in the Tower (the fourth of the third act of Shakespeare's Richard III.), when, at a signal from Gloucester, armed men rushed into the council-room, seized Hastings and carried him off to immediate execution. Hastings and Stanley were on the friendliest terms, and according to tradition Stanley had warned Hastings of his fate and advised him to fly. If so, he ought himself to have fled, since, according to the same 1" Before Lord Hastings' House. Mess. What, ho! my Lord. Hast. [within]. Who knocks at the door? Enter Lord Hastings. Hast. What is't o'clock? Mess. Upon the stroke of four. Hast. Cannot thy master sleep these tedious nights? Mess. So it should seem by that I have to say. First he commends him to your noble Lordship. Hast. And then? Mess. And then he sends you word He dreamt to-night the boar had rased his helm, Which may make you and him to rue at th' other. And with all speed post with him toward the North, King Richard III.-Act iii. scene 2. A white boar, it need scarcely be added, was Richard's cognizance. tradition, he was nearly involved in the destruction which befell Hastings. "In this bustle," says Sir Thomas More, the circumstantiality of whose narrative is unique, whatever doubts there may be as to its accuracy, "in this bustle," of the armed men rushing in, when Richard struck his hand upon the Council-table, "which was all before contrived, a certain person struck at the Lord Stanley with a pole-axe, and had certainly cleft him down, had he not been aware of the blow and sunk under the table. Yet he was wounded on the head that the blood ran about his ears." This was on the 13th of June: on the 26th Richard, already Protector, was proclaimed King. If the story of the pole-axe and the ducking under the table be true, it, or its sequel, but affords another proof of Lord Stanley's wonderful dexterity and good luck. His friend Hastings was beheaded, but he himself escaped. A fortnight after the scene in the Tower, and the day after Richard was proclaimed King, Stanley emerges a trusted counsellor of the "usurper," witnessing with Buckingham the new King's formal delivery of the Great Seal to his Chancellor, John Bishop of London. On the 6th of July came Richard's coronation, when "the Lord Stanley bare the mace before the King, and my Lady of Richmond bare the Queen's train." Before the end of the year this most dexterous and fortunate of noblemen was appointed "Constable of England for life." He had been already restored to the office near the King's person, that of Steward of the Household, which he filled under Edward IV. Whatever happened to kings or to dynasties, it was the fate of Lord Stanley to flourish and increase. 1 A delivery by not "to the usurper," as Jesse puts it (Memoirs of King Richard III., p. 340), misled probably by Miss Strickland (Queens of England, ii. 400, note), who also gives a wrong reference to Rymer's Fœdera--xii. 189, instead of xii. 132. B In Richard's triumphant progresses northward and westward, after the coronation, he was accompanied by Lord Stanley. During their course-if really ever enacted precisely as the time-honoured traditions represent it to have beenwas enacted the dark tragedy of the Children in the Tower. Just before the date assigned to this event, Buckingham is spoken of as aggrieved by Richard's treatment of him, and as having in dudgeon left the King at Gloucester for his own castle of Brecknock. To his care and custody at Brecknock had been entrusted the person of Morton Bishop of Ely (afterwards Cardinal and Archbishop of Canterbury), who, as a member of the Hastings party, had been arrested 1 when its chief was not only arrested but executed, and as Sir Thomas More was, in his youth, a page in Morton's household, it is sometimes fondly fancied that he received from Morton's lips the materials for his history of Richard III., which became the groundwork of much of Shakespeare's tragedy, and of the traditional version of Richard's character and earlier career as King. According to More, Buckingham in his wrath conceived a notion of setting himself up for King, descended as he was from a seventh son of Edward III. But as he rode on his homeward way, he met, between Worcester and Bridgenorth, his uncle's widow, Lord Stanley's wife, Margaret of Richmond. In the course of their conversation-Sir Thomas More is the authority for all this-she besought him, as powerful with the King, to use his influence on behalf of her son, Henry of Richmond, then an exile in Brittany. If Richard would permit him to return to England and marry "Glouc. My Lord of Ely! Ely. My Lord. Glouc. When I was last in Holborn I saw good strawberries in your garden there: I do beseech you send for some of them. Ely. Marry, and will, my lord, with all my heart," &c., &c. King Richard III.—Act iii. scene 4. |