The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - an afterword

As the captains and the kings depart Fotheringhay it is reasonable to ask what happened subsequently.

The interior of the nave at Fotheringhay church

Image: jamesparsons.org

In 1482-3 King Edward IV assigned £100 to build his father’s tomb in the choir of the collegiate church, but nothing survives of that. In 1495 Duchess Cicely died at Berkhamstead Castle having outlived all but two of her children, and was taken to lie beside her husband at Fotheringhay. 

The pulpit in the church given by King Edward IV

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The Royal Arms in the pulpit 

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In 1548 the college was dissolved and the choir abandoned, the parishioners just using the nave. A surviving inventory list remains of the hearse from 1476, and items such as altar frontals of white sarcenet with garters, of white sarcenet with fleur de lys and of red sarcenet with the Yorkist fetterlock badge together with a herald’s tabard of velvet with gold embroidery 

 Which probably were made from the fabric offered at the funeral or in the case of the tabard for the occasion.

In 1566 Queen Elizabeth I visited and was shocked at the state of her ancestors’ graves and arranged for their removal to the sides of the parochial altar where the bodies remain in their matching monuments.

A commission appointed by the Queen arranged for the demolition of the remains of the eastern portion of the church in 1573.

Fifteen years later the castle witnessed the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots and thereafter the castle was left to decay. It was demolished in the 1620s and 1630s, leaving only the earthworks of the motte and ditches and one small fragment of exposed walling.

 

The Elizabethan monument to Duke Richard and Duchess Cicely in Fotheringhay Church

Image: warmingtonbenedice.org.uk

If the reburial had been a celebration of the Yorkist dynasty then it was really almost the last opportunity for such an event.

Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy appears nowhere in the records of the reburial - not in person, or proxy, and with no Burgundian ambassador. Her husband Duke Charles, the erstwhile ally of her brother, was busy, and unsuccessfully, fighting the Swiss, being defeated by them at Grandson and Morat, in 1476, and was finally slain by them in the snow at Nancy in January 1477. Much of the remainder of Margaret’s life was to revolve around supporting her stepdaughter Mary and her husband Maximilian in their struggles with the French and with rebellious Burgundians, when she was not supporting or encouraging Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. Whoever we may think they were, at Fotheringhay in the summer of 1476 such a scenario would have been unthinkable.

In December 1476 the Duchess of Clarence died and the loss of Isabel appears to have tipped George into increasingly irrational and indeed criminal and then treasonous behaviour. In consequence the King had him arrested, tried in Parliament and sentenced to death - according to legend by drowning in a butt of malmsey wine.

King Edward, now guilty of fratricide, remained ever self-indulgent, and angered when King Louis abrogated the deal they had struck in 1475. When King Edward died suddenly early in April 1483 the Yorkist house turned out to be one of cards. Amongst those at Fotheringhay Earl Rivers and Lord Hastings were beheaded as was the Queen’ second son, Richard Grey. One person whom one might have expected at Fotheringhay, the Queen’s almost twenty one year old brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham was not present. By background his family were Lancastrian rather than Yorkist, but by the mid 1470s as he achieved adulthood he would have seemed to have accommodated to the new dispensation. He too did not survive 1483.

 

Of those at Fotheringhay who not only survived but prospered there was only really the Countess of Richmond and her husband Lord Stanley.

  

At the centre of all the events we have followed were whatever earthly remained of Richard Duke of York and his second son. The Duke has had some academic and some more popular biographers in recent years, but he remains enigmatic.

The epitaph on his hearse is given in Hammond, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs’ splendid compilation, and as a statement of the Yorkist claim and of filial piety is what one would expect. 

  

 The opposite view might be that he was a blundering and not very bright magnate who pitched the country into what we now usually call the Wars of the Roses for his own selfish ends, and that the consequent bloodshed - and there was a lot on battlefields and scaffolds - could well be laid very firmly at his feet. All those requiem masses may well have been very necessary for his eternal salvation.