Richard III Read Online Free

boyhood. She was the twenty-second of the Earl’s twenty-three children, the thirteenth by his second wife, Joan Beaufort. Cicely was herself descended from Edward III since her mother’s father had been John of Gaunt. Ralph was the head of the Nevills, an ambitious and already powerful northern family which, largely by carefully calculated marriages, was fast becoming one of the richest and most influential clans in England. Ralph’s second son was the Earl of Salisbury, whose own son acquired in addition the magnificent Earldom of Warwick – which made him the wealthiest man in the realm after York – while three other of Ralph’s younger sons also obtained peerages for themselves, Lords Fauconberg, Latimer and Abergavenny. 2 Yet another was Prince Bishop of Durham, who ranked among the foremost prelates in England and ruled his great palatinate as though it were an independent state.
    Born in 1415, like her husband, Cecily had spent her childhood at her father’s bleak stronghold of Raby in Co. Durham where she became famed for her beauty, acquiring the name of ‘The Rose of Raby’ – later she was given another name, ‘Proud Cis’. She appears to have begun to live with York as his wife about 1438, bearing him at least ten children though several of these died in infancy. So many brothers and sisters together with such a vast kindred were to meanthat few English Kings have ever been so widely and so closely related to their aristocracy as was Richard III.
    His early life is unknown, but was no doubt uneventful. Yet these years saw the outbreak of the longest period of civil war in English history. To understand Richard and why the Wars of the Roses began, one has to know something of the 1450s. England was in a thoroughly unhappy condition. The government was almost bankrupt under a weak King, Henry VI, whose personal reign has been described as the most calamitous of any of our monarchs and who went mad within a year of the birth of the cousin who would one day murder him. The Lancastrian monarchy – so called because of its descent from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster – was collapsing. Already unpopular, ostensibly because of venal and mediocre ministers, it was discredited even more by the loss of English France. Normandy went in 1450 and Guyenne, English for three centuries, in 1451 – Talbot managed to re-occupy Bordeaux the same October that Richard was born, only to perish with his entire army the following year. At home Kent had risen under Jack Cade in 1450 in an especially vicious revolt.
    Oddly enough, it was an age of prosperity for most people. Ninety per cent of a diminishing population of perhaps as low as three million earned their living on the land – even if they were always pitifully vulnerable to a bad harvest – and for the majority wages had never been higher nor food cheaper, despite the agricultural depression of 1430–60. The mortality caused by the Black Death and recurring visitations of plague had ruined the traditional manorial economy dependent on serf labour; lords of manors switched over to tenant farming, leasing out their land on competitive rents, or, where they still farmed themselves, tried to attract labourers by good wages. At the same time, however, arable land was being turned into sheep runs or going back to forest; there were vast tracts of uncultivated land and huge woods, while many hamlets simply disappeared, their inhabitants moving into the towns. All this made country folk uneasy. In addition, the roads were full of refugees from France, who had become either beggars or brigands. Life in the towns was noticeably affected by the troubles of the cloth and wool trade, which was seriously interrupted by hostilities with France and Burgundy and with the HanseaticLeague. Nevertheless, though there was considerable urban unemployment, the larger English cities remained wealthy enough. Besides cloth and wool, they exported hides, tin, lead and carved alabaster;