Kirby Muxloe Castle – a moment in history
Roy Loveday, an honorary research fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Leicester University, believes that a particular historical viewpoint is obscuring the public interest in a curious castle:
Archaeology and history often seem like the parallel lines of a railway track: running together over the same course but never meeting. That’s perhaps not surprising, since one deals with material evidence for people and the other with a written record of pivotal human interactions that rarely produced physical residues. Beyond battlefield remains and plague pits it is rare for archaeology to record a specific historical event. That is what set apart the remarkable discovery in 2012 of Richard iii’s body in the Grey Friars in Leicester (feature May/Jun 2013/130). But there is another site in the county that bridges the archaeological-historical gulf, and by chance it’s tied into the same story – Kirby Muxloe Castle. Yet while Richard’s new tomb in Leicester Cathedral and the attendant Richard iii Centre receive a flood of visitors (feature Mar/Apr 2015/141), the castle attracts very few. When a famous portrait of Richard iii was recently displayed in the city’s New Walk Museum, an accompanying leaflet suggesting places to visit (13 in the city and the Bosworth Battlefield Centre 16 miles away) omitted the castle just five miles away. Why?
Made of brick and with only one tower surviving to battlement height, it’s not the most exciting ruined castle. But that is to miss the point. It is not a ruin. It’s a medieval building site effectively frozen at a particular point in time – June 16 1483, the date when its builder, William, Lord Hastings, was dragged from a council meeting in the Tower of London for immediate execution on the order of Richard, Duke of Gloucester. This isn’t surmise: remarkably the castle’s building records survive and tell of an abrupt halt as soon as the devastating news arrived. The physical evidence supports the picture. Toothing bricks projecting from the west tower stand ready for the attachment of walls and battlements that were never built. The gatehouse remained unfinished at first floor level.
The castle (or building site) at Kirby Muxloe then furnishes rare physical evidence of an historical event. But how important was that nationally? Executions were far from unusual during the Wars of the Roses. This one, however, was particularly callous – carried out without trial and within minutes of the accusation, by soldiers apparently primed for the task. It might appear to be given context by Richard’s struggle for control of the young king Edward v, with the parvenu Woodville-Grey family of Edward iv’s widow. But Hastings was not of that clan. Quite the opposite, he and the Greys were old Leicestershire enemies. In fact, according to Dominic Mancini (an Italian priest visiting England) it was Hastings who wrote to Richard in York urging him to “hasten to the capital with a strong force” for fear the Woodvilles would grab power. Other sources tell the same story.
So, far from opposing Richard, Hastings – a noble noted by all sources for his loyalty and trustworthiness – supported and encouraged him. Yet within six weeks of Richard’s arrival in London he had been summarily executed. Why?
Almost certainly because he realised Richard was planning not just to neutralise the Woodvilles but to take
the throne for himself. Hastings’ unswerving loyalty to Edward iv, and hence his young son, meant he could support Richard as protector but not as king, and he paid the price. This powerful obstacle removed, Richard took the throne just 13 days later. As Dominic Mancini says: “Thus fell Hastings, killed not by those enemies he always feared, but by a friend whom he never doubted.”
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it’s this fact, uncomfortable for the strong body of Richard apologists, that keeps the castle off the visitor trail. Information boards in the portrait exhibition took a consistently “good” Richard position (“taking the boy-king into protective custody… suppressing a coup… lodging the princes in the Tower which was then a luxurious royal residence… establishing a fairer criminal justice system”). Is this a new orthodoxy in which Hastings’ summary execution – omitted from the time-line – is an embarrassment? This is worrying. Dispassionate archaeological investigation established the truth of statements, so long disputed by Ricardians, that Richard would indeed have had “one shoulder higher than the other” and that he had been unceremoniously buried without a coffin. Yet the special pleading continues and now, it seems, is deflecting attention from an important site that happens also to be structural witness to his ruthlessness.
Last of the line
Enough of the castle was completed to demonstrate the considerable impact it was intended to have. Recorded visits to Tattershall by master mason John Cowper reveal Hastings’ model for Kirby Muxloe, and the large size of the unfinished gatehouse, the intended site of his great tower. Its squat, unfinished form implies a design akin to the almost identically sized, contemporary example in the Bishop of Lincoln’s Palace at Buckden, Cambridgeshire.
The real distinctiveness of Kirby Muxloe, though, lies in its exceptional provision for artillery defence – a planned 40 gunports to judge from the pattern of completed work. In the turbulent world of the late 15th century, the fact that Hastings’ fortune arose in considerable measure from sequestrated Lancastrian estates would have reinforced the need for effective defence. That need evaporated just four years later when Henry Tudor severely restricted livery and maintenance.
The patched up building work at Kirby Muxloe marks the final high water mark of defensive domestic architecture in lowland England, and stands striking witness to a pivotal event that shook Yorkist loyalists: “with all the rest of [Edward v’s] faithful men expecting something similar… [Gloucester and Buckingham] did thereafter whatever they wanted” ( Croyland Chronicle).
On both counts it deserves attention that is currently being denied by lack of evidential balance.