FINDING RICHARD III IN TWO AMAZING CASTLES

FINDING RICHARD III IN TWO AMAZING CASTLES

One late afternoon at the end of the summer of 1485, the body of the last English King to die in battle was flung over the back of a mule. Stripped of its armor and tied in place, its head must have banged and flopped, making it both ghoulish and pathetic as it was processed into the city of Leicester and eventually to the church of The Grey Friars. There, it was unceremoniously handed over and hastily buried in an east corner of the grounds. Where it it lay, for 527 years until it was discovered underneath a car park.

Long before those bones were found, back when they were thought to have vanished, The Times of London was delivered every morning along with the milk to the house in England where I grew up. I had no particular interest in the newspaper, except on August 22nd.. That morning every year, I annoyed the entire family by ambushing the milkman. Even before he reached our back door, I would snatch The Times and scurry away, if it wasn’t raining into the garden, where I would open the paper to the obituary page. The first entry always read, For A Man Who Died Fighting For His Country.

Sitting on the damp grass, I ran my fingers over those nine words as if they were braille. As if, by touching them, I could summon the past. Smell the sweat of horses, hear the rattle of arms, and sense the inner stillness of men preparing for battle. Closing my eyes and pressing down, I conjured the crown, nothing but a thin, gold circlet that dissolved in the summer air.

This annual ceremony was not complete until I pulled out my nail scissors and clipped Richard’s obituary. Then, after returning the cannibalized paper to its rightful place on the breakfast table, I would slink off to my room and file this piece of the past I somehow imagined I had stolen into the collection of other treasures that filled my top bureau drawer.

I don’t know how many years I did this for, probably quite a few. The envelope containing those slivers of news print is probably still somewhere in the bottom of a box, nine words commanding memory that have become memory themselves. And yet, despite this, I knew almost nothing about Richard III.

Except for Shakespeare’s play. By the time I saw that, I had stopped cutting up newspapers and transferred my affections to Anne Boleyn, who, of course, I was sure I was the reincarnation of. Even so, I figured the play for a hatchet job. A lying, traitorous, brother-hating, child and wife murderer consumed by jealousy – and a hunch back to boot? Either this was the worst person ever to sit on the throne, or the pudding had been over-egged, and not a little. The question was, Why? So, when I learned to drive and bought my first car – alright, it was really my boyfriend’s car, a joint enterprise red MG called Samantha that had no heating and a bad habit of breaking down in the middle of nowhere – Richard was the first person I set out to find.

It would still be years before they dug up that car park. But there were traces of him, places you could stand where he had stood. Stones you could put your hand on. Country you could look out over and imagine that in half a century it had not changed much.

For me that is the magic of place and history. Photographs, screens, video. None of them substitute for the alchemy of travel – the dark art of standing in the spot where something happened that allows you to touch the past. To reach back and run your fingers across the story of the lives that unfurled there.
There is a unique excitement to journeys that bring the past into the present. Which is the point of this website. It is designed to be a guide to ‘then’ and ‘now’ – a map to a past that is hiding in the present, just sitting there for the finding, if you know where to look.

For centuries, England’s last Plantagenet King was uniquely ‘lost’. His bones lay in an unmarked grave, a city piled on top of them. His character and reputation had been blackened and twisted by the world’s greatest playwright. Certainly, locating him is easier now. He’s in Leicester cathedral, more or less dead center, hard to miss. Or, at least, his death is there. But his life wasn’t. Richard’s private life, the family life that formed and lay at the core of him, was lived mostly in the border country and the North, where it can still be found in two extraordinary castles.

 PART I: LUDLOW

THEN

Just below the point where two rivers meet in what is now the county of Shropshire, a promontory towers above an elbow of water. It’s a strategic place, and an excellent defensive position, since one side is sheer cliff. To the west, is Offa’s Dyke, the ancient defensive work that separated England, or Mercia as it was then, from Wales. To the north, south, and east, woods and fields blanket a series of rising hills. Sometime shortly after 1066, a Norman lord called de Lacy, who had been given most of the land ‘round about, decided he needed a fortress to keep an eye on the unruly Welsh. The result was Ludlow.

It was one of the first castles in England to be built entirely of stone, and it was built to last. From the start, Ludlow saw its fair share of action. It was attacked and sacked. Prisoners kept there were daringly rescued. Probably boiling oil was poured. Certainly cross-bows were fired, and siege engines lined up. In the course of the next three centuries, it inevitably changed hands and was enlarged, and updated. By the 1450s as The Wars of Roses – England’s long, complicated, internecine struggle between the Houses of York and Lancaster – got into full swing, Ludlow was an important power base.

Richard III was not born there. He was born at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire – which is nothing now but a stump of stones and a warren of earthen mounds – on October 2, 1452. The youngest of four surviving sons of Richard, Duke of York, who was a main contender for the throne, and his wife, the formidable Cecily Neville, Richard was not thought to be particularly important. He came into the world without fanfare. The only mention of his birth reads merely, He survives.

                                                                                                        ***

Most of Richard’s first six years were spent where he was born. Cecily, who lived to be 80, bore 13 children, 7 of whom got to adulthood. As the youngest son and second to last, Richard spent his earliest years half ignored in a pack of siblings. He became a formidable soldier, and even at five and six, would have begun to play at war, thrashing about with wooden swords. He learned to ride, and developed a life long love of dogs, the long rangy lurchers that look like woolly greyhounds and that you can still see in the North and East of England.

Fotheringhay might have been a safe haven. But beyond – and increasingly not very far beyond – its massive walls, the country was tilting towards civil war. At issue was who had the strongest line of succession from Edward III, who had died some 80 years earlier. Since then the inheritance had been unstable, and England fractious. By the late 1450s, what had been a prolonged squabble turned seriously nasty.

Sometime in the early spring of 1459, Cecily Neville and the Duke of York decided that their children were no longer safe in Northamptonshire. Surrounded by an armed guard, 6 year old Richard, his 8 year old brother, George, and their sisters were sent west across the country to the family stronghold of Ludlow.

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With its 5 acre keep, moat, cliff edge, ramparts, towers, and swarm of buildings within the walls, Ludlow must have been an extraordinary sight. The children arrived in the spring, riding through surrounding countryside with hedgerows in bloom and trees blossoming. Crossing the river Teme on the stone bridge that is still there and was old even then, they would have seen above the higgle piggle roofs of the town, the Yorkist banner flying above the castle, bright with the family’s motto, The Sun In Splendour.

Most splendid of all, though, to a little boy would have been his two older brother’s Edward and Edmund. In their late teens, they were already men, their father’s right hands. Ludlow had been their headquarters for some time. To Richard – who probably could not clearly remember them, but certainly would have heard all about them – they would have been magnificent. Riding out to hunt, hawks on their wrists and swarmed with hounds, sparring with axes and practicing archery on the castle grounds, Edward, the heir, and Edmund, next in line, must have seemed to a little boy almost God-like, something closer to archangels with their swords, than ordinary humans. He had been primed to love them, and he did. From that summer on, his adoration, especially for Edward, became the center of his life.

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Nowhere in England could have been ‘tucked away from the world’ in 1459. Still, that summer must have been  idyllic for a small child. Although Richard would have been aware of the rising tension in the country, in this new place, surrounded by his family, at six he was mostly busy being a boy.

On his pony with his hound and steward, Richard would have ridden through the summer fields that still spread around Ludlow, and explored the ancient woodlands canopied with oak and beech. Probably, he dabbled the river Teme, building dams and collecting pebbles. Setting nets in the shallows under the old stone bridge, he would have heard the town coming and going above him – wagons and messengers, peddlers, monks, pilgrims and vagabonds coming down the road from Richard’s Castle, an ancient place even then whose name had nothing to do with him, although he probably pretended it did.

As June turned to July, bringing days so long the nights never seemed to be completely dark, a curious child creeping downstairs would have overheard his father and mother and older brothers, their voices hushed with the excitement of war. The Duke of York had once been allied, at least superficially, with Henry VI. But Henry was weak, and his French wife was hated, and many felt that Richard’s father’s claim to the throne was both purer and stronger than the king’s. Little boys with big ears would have heard mutterings that soon turned to outright discussion of arms and strategies and battles, and would have understood, however dimly, that what hovered above it all was the crown.

The sense of destiny that built and swirled around his father and oldest brother – the sense, as the summer wore on, that that spendid sun was shining down on them – would have seemed natural to Richard. His mother Cecily Neville’s family, one of the most powerful in the country, was split right down the middle, and she was as engaged in the struggle, and as certain of the Yorkist claim as her husband. What was at stake was who would walk into Westminster abbey and sit upon the throne. Who would hold the orb, feeling the weight of it in his hand as he waited for the slick of holy oil on his forehead affirming that he was the chosen of God.

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By 1459, Henry VI and Margaret, his hated French queen, had gathered a large army. As the days grew shorter, Richard’s building of dams and pitching of pebbles would have been regularly interrupted by the clatter of hooves on the bridge as messengers came in with news. His father and two older brothers were often away. Up in the castle, his mother, Cecily, stood over maps and plans and waited for dispatches to hear if she would be queen, or if her sons and husband were dead.

Ten days before Richard’s 7th birthday, Ludlow erupted. Beer casks opened in the market place and flares were lit on the ramparts as news came in that the Yorkists had won a great battle at Blore Heath. To a little boy, it must have seemed like a birthday present, an exciting celebration, just for him. He could not have known it was the last time the family would be together, That his world was about to be shattered, and his childhood about to come to an abrupt end.

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October is one of Shropshire’s most beautiful months. The leaves turn golden and the hedgerows are heavy with berries. The days are still and flushed as the harvest comes in, while at night the bark of a fox can be heard for miles. By early morning the air holds the promise of frost.

On the morning of October 12, 1459, the war came to Ludlow. Richard may have felt a tremor of fear at the news that the king’s army was approaching fast from the south. But it would only have been a wiggle. Caught up in the shouts of stewards and clangs of the armorers, in the hoof beats and yelling and wagons as the town streamed across the market square gathering itself into the castle for safety while the Yorkists prepared for battle, Richard and his brother George were more likely beside themselves with excitement.

By noon, they would have watched their father and older brothers mount and ride out through the gates. From the ramparts standing with their mother and sisters, they would have had a clear view of the horses and the pikes and the glinting armor, and of the Yorkist banner, The Sun In Splendour, held high and glittering as their father’s army crossed the stone bridge.

Perhaps, as she watched them go, thinking she would be able to hear, if not see, the coming battle from where she stood, Cecily Neville, who had once been called The Rose of Raby, allowed herself, just for a moment, to envision  coronations. To consider London, and Westminster abbey, and crowns and the drip of that holy oil, instead of escape routes. Or perhaps, even as she watched the troops clattering away towards battle a part of her extraordinary mind ticked like a clock in a darkened room. Planning routes. Thinking about where money could be found and boats  procured. Reminding herself who could, and could not, be trusted. Just in case. Just on the off chance that the wheel of fortune turned, and not in the right direction.

Which is exactly what it did.

As twilight fell on October 12^th Henry VI sent messengers into the Yorkist camp. Slipping through the lines, they reminded any who would listen that the king had issued a royal amnesty – that he had promised those who refused to fight against him would be pardoned, and allowed to go home. As night came down and the reality of the next day’s fight and the promise of clemency threaded through the troops, men began to melt away. Then, an entire faction defected. Realizing they had been betrayed, Richard’s father and his brothers made for their horses and slipped back across the bridge and into the castle.

                    In the unlikely even that they were asleep, the two little boys, Richard and George, would have been woken by the clatter of hooves. As the dwindling army’s fires lit the opposite shore of the river, they would have crept down stairs and lingered unnoticed in corners, watching their mother huddle with their father and brothers. If they had not been afraid before, the tension in their parents and brothers’ voices, the whisper of ‘betrayal’ – the sense of the world turned upside down and all the archangels tumbled suddenly to earth – must have terrified them.

          After much discussion, and knowing that the King’s mercy would not extend to them – that there was no army left to defend Ludlow and that nothing waited but the certainly of their heads on pikes if they did not act – the Duke of York and his two elder sons decided to make a run for it.

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Their survival depended on the cover of dark, and dawn was coming. There may have been time for good-byes, or not, in the sudden flurry of activity as saddle packs were stuffed and horses’ feet were tied in sacks to muffle them. Wearing strange clothes, and with their faces blackened, Richard’s father and his brothers would have mounted and instead of riding out in splendor, slipped through the gates and across the deserted market place before taking back alleys down the hill to the bridge.

Perhaps Cecily and the children climbed the tower, ran to the ramparts where they had watched just hours earlier, and now watched again, for one last glimpse that this time would not be splendid at all, but little more than shadows vanishing into the cover of woodland. Once they were safely across the river and beyond the enemy lines, Richard’s father and brothers would split to increase their chances. The Duke of York and Edmund would flee west, making for Ireland, while Edward, the Sun of York, would ride hard for the coast, and France. In the emptiness they left behind, Cecily Neville had nothing to do but gather her daughters and two little boys around her, and wait.

As the sky lightened they may have seen Henry’s army coming out of the wood, streaming up the road from Richard’s Castle. Certainly they would have heard them. Men denied a fight and anticipating plunder are noisy. As much of the town as could fit was packed into the castle keep. So, Cecily Neville would have had to pick her way around wagons and cook fires and cages of chickens, around huddled, terrified women and children and dogs, to reach the gates. The townspeople would have watched in silence as she approached, and ordered them opened.

Ahead of her, the market square, usually full and bustling even at this early hour, was empty. Above the ominous noise at the bottom of the hill, a stillness had fallen over Ludlow as the town braced itself, waiting to be sacked.

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Following their mother who had locked up her daughters, Richard and George would have heard the no longer so distant rattle of arms and sound of men on the bridge. If they heard anything at all over the sound of their own hearts – and the slow whine of the great castle gates swinging closed behind them as they stepped out of their childhoods and in to the morning of October 13, 1459.

Obeying as they had been raised to, the little boys would have followed her, glancing sideways, whispering, feeling their clammy palms, and wondering if this was a good idea after all, or if they should run, or try to hide, instead. Not that Cecily Neville gave them time to do either.

As the gates clanged closed behind her, she reached back and took each of them by the hand. Then The Rose of Raby walked alone with her two small sons into the deserted market place. When she reached the market cross, she climbed the steps, and turned to face the oncoming army.

NOW

That is the picture that quivers in my mind. Of that woman, all her men fled, her township locked behind the castle gates, the noise of running feet and shouts and the rattle of arms rising like a tide as she waited at the foot of Ludlow’s market cross, holding her 7 and 9 year old sons by the hands. I see that, and one of the little boys beside her. Feeling her grip, Richard must have looked up and found her towering above him, no longer quite so familiar – his mother turned suddenly again into the Rose of Raby, standing with a cross at her back, ready to face down an army.

Ludlow castle is a ruin, it’s true. But it is a big, and very well preserved ruin, and it still stands at the top of the town. Because it is stone, and built for the ages, much of it survives. The great gates still opens on to the marketplace. A market is still held six mornings a week. The town is largely Georgian now, and it is beautiful.

The first time I went there, Samantha, of course, broke down. So we arrived late, and were bad tempered and cold and got lost on the way to the pub where we’d booked rooms, which was not the glorious half-timbered Feathers, but somewhere cheap at the bottom of the hill. Nevertheless, I had insisted that we come on October 12, and on the morning of the 13^th, I got up early, and walked up through Ludlow by myself so I could stand in the market square and look for the ghost of Cecily Neville, and for the little boy standing beside her.

Years later, on our honeymoon, I dragged my husband to Ludlow. Although there wasn’t much dragging, since his grandparents had lived nearby and he had spent almost all his childhood summers there. This time, we could afford The Feathers, and it was summer. The castle was open, and that afternoon they were flying falcons from the keep. Later, after poking into the round chapel, and picking our way up crumbling stairs to stand in stone rooms imagining fires burning and snow falling outside, after climbing towers and looking out over the ramparts, we walked down through the town and across the stone bridge that is still there.

Richard’s mother did face down the King’s forces, more or less. Or at least, she and her children survived. Her husband and sons returned, in something like glory – although for Richard’s father, it was brief. He ended up with nothing but a paper crown. Edward, the Sun of York, wore the real one and became Edward IV. For Richard, the summer of 1459 in Ludlow was at once his first and his last as a boy. In the echo of the castle keep, or under the canopy of oaks so old they might be the same ones he rode and played under, it isn’t hard to find the echo of him. The river Teme is clear and fast flowing as it sweeps around the castle base and under the bridge. Like those stones and many of the views it passes, it won’t have changed much.

That summer day more than half a century later, we looked back and saw the hawks, circling above Ludlow like black specks in the summer sky. Then we walked all the way to Richard’s Castle, which I wanted to be named for Richard III, too, but isn’t. It was named for another Richard who built it as early as 1055. Unlike Ludlow, it isn’t even a ruin anymore. A ditch and faint echo of walls are all that survive – nothing but a memory, sinking into the land. On the afternoon we were there, they were covered in meadow flowers and nettles. We climbed over them anyway, because my husband had climbed over them when he was a boy. And as we did, I imagined another boy, his pony snipping grass, his hounds pointing for hares and running after them in circles as he climbed over these same memories, and wondered about the lost Richard they had been named for.

LOGISTICS

I have been to Ludlow periodically over the years, and it never disappoints. It is always as magic as it was on that first visit, as if there is a sort of bubble around it that allows you, without too much trouble, to glide from one century to the next. Ludlow is a place where time slides.

The castle is still the main attraction. It is open every day, except for a few months in the winter, when it is week-ends only. Having climbed over a lot of castles, I think this is one of the best. It has been restored only as much as it needs to be to keep it safe, and still has a truly medieval feel. Imagining is not hard here. There is a ‘castle-kitchen’ cafe, a good shop, and an art gallery. And, should you truly fall in love and want to stay ‘within the walls’, three self-catering apartments have recently been restored and opened in an adjoining building. I have not stayed in them, but they look very nice. They all have full kitchens. Two have 2 have 2 bedrooms, and one is larger. The minimum stay is 3 nights. Given all of the truly excellent food literally on your door step, finding supplies is not a challenge.

Check the castle website for rental details, exact opening hours, and for any special events – like the falcons – that they might have going on: www.ludlowcastle.com

If you don’t feel up to self-catering, or are only planning a visit of a night or two – and Ludlow is worth at least two nights – there are a number of nice, and even very nice hotels both in the general area, and in the town. For my money, it is worth staying in town, since wandering about is part of the joy of the place. The Feathers, which is an absolutely stunning half-timbered building, fell on hard times, and for a while its future looked uncertain. It has now been bought, and is being completely refurbished and is due to re-open in the spring of 2019.

The streets at the top of the town are Georgian now, elegant and an opportunity for time-slippage in themselves. Victorian cottages and newer buildings huddle on the lower stretches of the hill. These days, Ludlow has a reputation as a serious ‘foodie’ heaven. There are any number of restaurants. At least one of them usually has a Michelin Star. The town maintains an excellent website that lists all of them: www.ludlow.org.uk/eat

The town website also lists hotel options and ‘things to do’.

For my money, the market is the main draw, after the castle. At the top of the town where it has always been, it’s packed with local producers and happens four mornings a week – Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. It has its own website: www.ludlowmarket.co.uk

Although there are other things, it’s mostly a proper food market. If the weather is good, you can find any and everything you might want for a picnic. (I always travel with a corkscrew and a knife – if you don’t you can buy one there, or very close by.) If it’s not picnic weather, or you don’t have the energy, you can console yourself with a vast array of baked goods, excellent cheeses and other treats to eat in the car, or when and wherever.

Standing looking at the castle, about where Cecily probably stood, you will spot an excellent wine shop called Bentley’s. It is on the right and has a red door.

Should you arrive too late for the market, all is not lost. You can hop in the car and turn north towards Bromfield and Craven Arms on the A49 where, just out of town, near the racecourse on the right hand side, you will find the Ludlow Farm Shop. A local food mecca – but one that’s inside and open all day seven days a week, only 10-4 on Sundays- it has everything you could possibly want, and eight more things, including an excellent wine shop and an in-house kitchen that makes a huge variety of the meat pies the British do better than anyone else on earth. There are picnic tables outside.

www.ludlowfarmshop.co.uk

Transport-wise: It is possible to get to Ludlow by train from London ( or Manchester, or Birmingham, or Bristol, or most other places.) But it’s not direct, and Ludlow really needs, or at least deserves, a car.

This is an ancient part of the country, or rather a part of the country where the ancient is still intact. It is also stunningly beautiful, at any time of the year.

If you have time, and a good map, which you will need, try to visit Croft Castle, a National Trust property about 20 minutes down the road to the south.

In and of itself, the ‘castle’ is not really a castle anymore, having been thoroughly ‘restored’ by the Victorians. The same family has lived there for several hundred years. There is a lovely walled garden, and an avenue of chestnuts, planted to celebrate the victory of the Armada. This is one of the best places in whole country to see really ancient trees. But to my mind, the real draw is the beautiful, if muddy, walks, all of which are detailed on the website. Bring boots or walking shoes, and if it’s not summer, at least a sweater.

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/croft-castle-and-parkland/lists/walks-at-croft-castle-and-parkland

One of the walks leads up to Croft Ambrey, a spectacular and little visited iron age fort. Fortifications are still there and visible, ridges on top of a high ridge. If the day is clear, you can look west all the way into Wales. And perhaps imagine a young boy and his hounds, standing on the same ridge, or see the echoes of two men in disguise.

They ride to the top and stop in the early morning light and listen. When they are certain they are not followed, the younger dismounts, and unwinds the muffling from the horses’ feet. As he lifts each hoof to cut away the sacking, his father looks back, scanning the horizon for the faint outline of the castle that rises above the river where he raised his family. The younger man balls the sacking and throws it in to the frost-tipped bushes. Then he swings into the saddle, almost jauntily, despite everything – because he is young, and maybe, after all, they will survive this. They look at each other and risk a smile, father and son, before they spur their horses on, down the steep slope and into the October day, towards Wales and Ireland and the shimmering image of a crown, leaving you alone again, with the long blue horizon and the wind.