Very regal!

A little bit of argy-bargy to end the game…

‘Happy hour’

#WarsoftheRoses OTD in 1483 - a watershed moment occurred in the 1483 power struggle. William, Lord Hastings (whose badge was a manticore - see image) was executed for plotting with the Woodvilles to murder the Protector, Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later #RichardIII.) The Archbishop of York, Thomas Rotherham, & the Bishop of Ely, John Morton, were arrested for complicity in the same conspiracy. The allegation was that Hastings & his supporters had brought concealed weapons into the Tower of London & intended to assassinate Richard & Buckingham during a Privy Council meeting. He was alleged to have been communicating in secret with the Woodvilles using Mistress Shore, a former mistress of #EdwardIV & now shared between Hastings & Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset (eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville) as a go between. Instead, Hastings ended up being executed as part of the Council meeting where he had intended to carry out his own design. In the traditional narrative Hastings is presented as an ‘innocent victim’ of Richard’s desire to seize the crown for himself. Hastings’s closeness to Edward IV is always stressed & we’re told that this explained his willingness to support Richard becoming Protector (in line with Edward’s will) but he then baulked at the idea of Richard becoming king in #EdwardV’s place & Richard therefore invented the murder allegations as an excuse to be rid of Hastings. Hastings’s innocence & its presentation as ‘proof’ of Richard’s own tyranny is a dominant theme of accounts written after 1485, especially in Thomas More, History of Richard III, which presents a hyperbolic dramatisation of the events of 13 June 1483 complete with strawberries, withered arms & allegations of witchcraft. There was one problem with all of this, namely that the real life William Hastings was not the virtuous man of high integrity which he would later be presented as after his death. He was a wily political operator with a history of double dealing. At the August 1475 Treaty of Picquigny Hastings asked the French not to provide receipts for the large pension they were giving him as he didn’t want their enemies the Burgundians to hear of it & halt the pension payments they were already making to him. Mancini described Hastings as the main facilitator of the late Edward IV’s hedonistic lifestyle - the ‘accomplice & participant in his private gratifications’ - & through this he had achieved great power & influence in the previous reign. However, the historian Annette Carson has also traced how even ahead of Edward’s death Hastings had been losing influence with the King becoming frustrated by Hastings paying retainers to make slanderous accusations against Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers in 1482. According to Mancini, Hastings had a ‘longstanding friendship’ with Richard. However, as Annette Carson has pointed out we have no other evidence to corroborate this, quite the reverse. Richard’s own beliefs - his refusal to accept a French pension & his disapproval of Edward’s lifestyle & those who facilitated it - suggests Hastings was not a natural ally. Seen through the lens of his own m behaviour it seems likely to me that Hastings was attempting to play the rival factions in England - Richard & the Woodvilles - off against each other in the spring & summer of 1483 for his own advantage, exactly as he had previously done with the French & Burgundians. This perception is strengthened by the fact that Hastings’s own family do not appear to have greeted his execution for treason & plotting Richard’s death on 13 June 1483 with the same horror, which is present in accounts written after 1485. Instead Hastings’s own brother, Richard Hastings, Lord Welles was present at Richard III’s coronation mere weeks later on 6 July 1483 & became a prominent supporter of the new King. Would he really have done that if he had believed his brother’s death to be judicial murder?

This young’un looks nearly as good on a horse as I do!

Just decorating Middleham ready for Anne’s Birthday party 🎂

"This is fine"