The New Murrey and Blue blog

The Duke of Buckingham is rather a ‘dark horse’ figure in the history of Richard III. No one knows for sure why he  aided Richard to take the throne only to turn upon him in rebellion a few months later. Simplistic ideas such as ‘he repented of his ways after the princes were murdered’ don’t stand scrutiny, especially when he was the first one to suggest that Edward V be housed in the Tower, and also  when the number of documents naming him as their potential killer (if indeed they were killed at all) is taken into account. Whatever happened to Edward IV’s sons, no doubt Buckingham knew…

A MAN WHO WOULD BE KING by J.P. Reedman  is a new novel written from Buckingham’s first person perspective. He is certainly no ‘hero’ and the character flaws that appear even in cotemporary accounts are visible, but the addition of wry humour makes the character palatable to the reader, even amusing in his pomposity. His life is covered from his birth at Abergavenny Castle in Wales to his death on the scaffold in Salisbury. Essentially it shows what must have been the life of many a young noble in this period–a childhood full of deaths and seperations and disappointment–which was later reflected in his emerging character.

The ancestry and background of the Staffords was heavily researched for the novel too, and it becomes very clear how ‘Lancastrian’ they were. Not only did Buckingham’s grandfather die attempting to protect Henry VI in his tent as the Battle of Northampton, but his mother was Margaret Beaufort, daughter of Edmund Duke of Somerset who was killed at St Albans. The other Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor’s mother, was Buckingham’s aunt by marriage. Several other uncles on the Beaufort side lost their lives at Tewkesbury, fighting for Lancaster.

Henry, called Harry in the novel, is intensely proud of his heritage, harkening back tiomes and time against to his ancestry from Thomas of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward III–who seems, from the descriptions to be similar in temperament to Buckingham, being named in one popular history as the ‘Bully of Woodstock.’  Buckingham also had a copy of the document legitimising the Beauforts–only it was the early document without the addenda barring them from the throne. Between owning that and applying to wear the Arms of Thomas of Woodstock unquartered, it seemed Harry Stafford was very aware of his royal lineage. (This awareness and the classic ‘Stafford personality’ brought his son Edward to doom in the reign of Henry VIII.)

In the novel, Harry meets Richard  intermittently over the years (I have come to believe they knew each other more than what is sometimes suggested by both fiction and some historians, although they do not appear to have been close friends) and attempts from the start to use him to gain favour with Edward, who never gave Buckingham any high positions save one–High Steward at George of Clarence’s trial. He begins a subtle manipulation, which changes entirely in its focus when Edward dies suddenly in 1483.