Richard III by Desmond Seward Page A

confiscated estates, to woo burgesses with municipal privileges and take good care of mercantile interests. In government too, to manipulate Parliament and the law of the land in the service of one’s interests.
    Edward also showed his young brother the value of murder as a political instrument. Gloucester was an enthusiastic pupil, who speedily made himself useful. If 1471 was the year in which he first saw death in battle, killing and seeing his followers killed at his side, it was also a year when he first sent men to execution without mercy and in which he first committed murder.
    Although Edward had granted them a free pardon on the Saturday that Tewkesbury was fought, the Duke of Somerset and his party were dragged out of the Abbey on the following Monday. The doomed men, who had no doubt kept their weapons, resisted desperately and there was so much bloodshed that the church was afterwardsreconsecrated. They were brought before Richard, in his capacity as Constable of England. 1 Brusquely he condemned them to death. Immediately after he had pronounced sentence they were taken to a block set up in Tewkesbury market-place and beheaded without further ceremony.
    Edward’s and Richard’s admirers argue that Tewkesbury Abbey was not technically a true sanctuary, that they had every right to court-martial ‘traitors’ taken in battle. Nevertheless, among those beheaded was Henry VI’s Lord Treasurer, Fra’ John Langstrother, the Prior of Clerkenwell. As a professed Knight of Rhodes, he was a religious under full vows and therefore canonically immune from the death penalty – he was the only member of his Order to be executed in England until the religious persecution of Henry VIII. 2
    Gloucester has other claims to being his brother’s hatchetman. He has been accused of being personally responsible for the deaths of three kinsmen in 1471 – the Prince of Wales, Henry VI and the Bastard of Fauconberg.
    On the whole, modern opinion is inclined to acquit the young Duke of the murder of Edward of Lancaster after Tewkesbury. At a first glance the contemporary English sources – of which there are very few – seem to provide good grounds for acquittal, agreeing with Commynes that ‘the Prince of Wales was killed on the battlefield’. Dr Warkworth (Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, who wrote about a dozen years later) reports how the boy was overtaken as he fled and slain as ‘he cried for succour to his brother-in-law, the Duke of Clarence’. The latter himself, writing only two days afterwards, claims that ‘Edward, late called Prince’ had been ‘slain in plain battle’. The
Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England
, written at the King’s command by a Yorkist official within three weeks of the battle, also says that ‘Edward, called Prince, was taken, fleeing to the townwards [of Tewkesbury] and slain in the field.’ So too does the
Tewkesbury Chronicle
. His name heads a list, ‘Ded in the Feld’, compiled probably just after the battle – ‘Edward that was called Prynce’. However, the Croyland chronicler is ambiguous, stating that Henry VI’s son hadbeen slain ‘either on the field or after the battle, by the avenging hands of certain persons’.
    Save for Warkworth, while they say where Edward of Lancaster died, none of these sources describes how. Obviously Clarence and the Yorkist author of the
Arrivall of Edward IV
would omit anything embarrassing about his death. There is an alternative and horrific account of what really happened, admittedly by chroniclers who wrote a little later. The gap in time is only a matter of thirty years at most, and James Gairdner points out that if the true facts were ‘preserved only by tradition till the days of Polydore Vergil and of Hall … they are not on that account unworthy of credit’. 3 Dr Hanham (in the course of trying to demolish Gairdner), makes the extremely relevant point that many modern historians who use tape recorders place