On 16 August 1485, King Richard III issued a pardon to an old adversary, John Morton, bishop of Ely. Dr Hannes Kleineke, editor of our Commons 1461-1504 project, explores the issue that Morton posed to Richard and why he felt the need to offer Morton such an elaborate pardon.

On 9 August 1485 Henry Tudor, titular earl of Richmond, landed on the Welsh coast near Milford Haven with a small flotilla equipped with the aid of the French king, Charles VIII. In the days that followed, Henry’s small force gradually made its way inland, and on 15 August reached the English border near Shrewsbury. The invasion was not unexpected. Earlier in the summer King Richard III had established his headquarters at Nottingham, and at the end of July he had instructed the Chancellor, John Russell, bishop of Lincoln, who remained at Westminster, to send him the great seal of England, one of the principal tools of government which alone gave a written instrument the full authority of the Crown. Richard received the seal on 1 August, and entrusted it to the keeping of the master of the rolls, Thomas Barowe, a senior administrator whom he kept by his side throughout the dramatic days of that summer.

Confirmed news of Henry Tudor’s landing reached the King at Nottingham within two days of the event, on 11 August. Richard at once sprang into action and in the following days sent urgent messages summoning his supporters. Little of what else occupied the King in the final ten days of his reign is known: the final letter under the great seal was recorded on the patent roll on 9 August and concerned the confirmation to the priory of Lenton of a grant of Edward IV. And then, on 16 August, with Henry Tudor’s army already on English soil, Richard issued an elaborate pardon to an old adversary, John Morton, bishop of Ely.

Morton was a die-hard Lancastrian loyalist, who served as chancellor to the young prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster in the second half of the 1450s, and subsequently followed first Henry VI and later his queen, Margaret of Anjou, into their respective exiles. Following the extermination of the male line of the house of Lancaster after the battle of Tewkesbury, Morton accepted a pardon from Edward IV, who recognised his administrative skills, and in 1472 appointed him master of the rolls. Frequently employed on diplomatic missions, Morton was among the envoys who in 1475 negotiated the profitable treaty of Picquigny with the French, and he received his reward four years later, when he was elevated to the bishopric of Ely. 

By the end of Edward IV’s reign, he was perceived to be among the most influential of the King’s councillors, and as a consequence on 13 June 1483 he was arrested during a dramatic council meeting (immortalised by Shakespeare) alongside William, Lord Hastings, and Archbishop Thomas Rotherham of York. Hastings was summarily executed without delay, but the two prelates were placed in the Tower. Handed over into the custody of Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Morton regained his freedom and played his part in the duke’s rebellion in the autumn of 1483, and on the failure of that rising made good his escape into exile in Flanders. As might be expected, Morton was attainted in Richard III’s delayed Parliament in early 1484, but remained at liberty on the continent. Unable to lay hands on his eloquent and well-connected opponent, Richard III tried in vain to bring him to submission with the offer of a general pardon in December 1484. This, Morton rejected.

In the spring of 1485, Morton was at the papal curia in Rome, and he may still have been there when the events that would lead up to Richard’s death at Bosworth began to unfold. It may, however, be a measure of how far from a foregone conclusion Henry Tudor’s victory was, that Morton was apparently in contact with the nuclear court at Nottingham. While it is possible that the pardon of 16 August represented a final attempt by the King to drive a wedge between the earl of Richmond and his supporters, it is also possible that it had been prepared for some time. As C.S.L. Davies has pointed out, on 2 August, in one of the first acts after taking direct control of the great seal, Richard had issued pardons to a group of known associates of Morton’s, at least one of whom had acted as a go-between at the time of the earlier, abortive, offer of a pardon the previous December. Then, Morton had rejected the King’s offer. In July 1485, he may have accepted it. Certainly, he seems to have taken delivery of the letters of pardon, and would a few years later plead them in court.

Strikingly, the pardon offered to Morton in July 1485 went further than other general pardons. While, like them, it covered a broad range of offences, it placed particular emphasis on Morton’s legal rehabilitation and restoration following his attainder in the Parliament of January 1484. This restitution technically required a fresh act of Parliament, but in the absence of such an act, the King’s pardon simply set aside the provisions of the attainder. This, in turn, may hint at a degree of desperation on King Richard’s part: Morton was a problem that needed to be solved. It could not wait for a future Parliament.   

H.W.K.

Further reading:

C.S.L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See, and the Accession of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, cii (1987), 2-30.

Richard’s pardon to Morton is printed in Pardon Rolls of Richard III, 1484-85 ed. by Hannes Kleineke (List and Index Society 365, 2023)