George told Richard about Edward IV’s illegitimacy (?)
Many people (including myself, lol) questioned Richard’s sudden change in loyalty when it came to him declaring Edward IV’s ascension to the throne, as his sons, as illegitimate.
George of Clarence actually made the same claim as Richard, but shortly died after that accusation. Allegedly, this was due to a Woodville conspiracy. Richard tried to bargain for his brother’s life, but that failed.
After George’s death, Richard scarcely visited the court again.
First of all, this entire thing is VERY confusing to me. All of my sources are mainly from Kendall’s book, and while there are a ton of implications between the text, this is so odd to me. Even if it wasn’t true that Richard tried to argue against George’s sentence, a dozen of other sources in union state that: Richard was very loyal towards his brother Edward IV, George tried to conspire against Edward (again) and made those claims, George was sentenced to death, Richard secluded himself from court after that.
Reasons why I find this sequence of happenings odd:
- Richard not only fought against George beforehands (2 times? I’m sorry, quite new to all of this material--), but...
- ... had his own quarrels with George as well: Richard intended to marry Anne Neville but George wouldn’t let him due to her rich dowry (several claims on land from her mother’s side). This led to such a huge revolt, so much so that Edward had to intervene two times, in the first basically telling George off and the second with the right of parliament to split the titles between the brother’s as if Lady Neville (anne’s mother) was dead.
Especially the second thing might have been enough reason to personally not even care about George’s fate. This guy was onision-level resilient - conpsiring with warwick against Edward for the longest time, being excused just as many and eventually going against his younger brother when it came to his marriage.
This guy tried to demolish his brother’s life so much at any given opportunity that I don’t see any reason why to not hate him and even to plead for his life. I even find Edward’s action during that time mind-boggling - he CONTEMPLATED on the death sentence quite some time up until someone else, allegedly, stepped in.The more strange I find Richard’s reasoning to go against this case, someone who has the literal motto of “loyalty binds me”. Someone, who would later on made the very same claim.
If this isn’t a clown’s circus the only reason of all of this I could see/get behind is that both brothers knew from their mother that edward was a bastard or george told him so. You wouldn’t believe someone who backstabbed you so many times, Thus, the only reliable source in that case would be their mother.
I’m not quite sure what to make out of this, whether Richard only came to know about this during George’s case (which would explain why he’d refrained from appearing in court afterwards) or he was aware of it and decided not to act upon it.
Nowadays, we actually know that Edward IV was a bastard and those claims were legit.
I’m a very strong believer that RIII was behind the murders of the princes, but his ambition seems to be so convoluted before that.
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