Biography of Ralph Shaa -1484

Polydore Vergil. [22nd June 1483] He [Richard] had a private conversation with Ralph Shaa, a priest of the time who enjoyed great popular esteem, and explained to him that his father's heritage was his by right, being the eldest of all the children whom his father Duke Richard of Gloucester had sired by his mother Cecily. For it was a well known fact that Edward, who had reigned previously, was a bastard, that is, that he was not born of a legal and legitimate wife, and that this was shown by well-known evidence. And he asked Shaa to consent to deliver a sermon from St. Paul's pulpit instructing the people in this thing, so that at length they would acknowledge their true sovereign. And he said he was asking this so urgently because he thought it better to slight his mother's dignity and honor than to allow the realm to be dishonored by such a royal line any longer. Either stricken by fear or seized by folly, Ralph undertook to humor him. And when the day was at hand, Richard, who had made himself more powerful under the pretext of attending to some other item of business, came to St. Paul's cathedral with an armed escort, in royal style, and there attended the sermon with ears pricked up. With him in the audience, Ralph (who was a learned man) took this occasion to speak, not of some divine matter, but of a tragic one, and produced many arguments to show that Edward was not fathered by Richard Duke of York, but rather by someone else, who had seduced his mother by stealth. And was shown by certain proofs: that Edward resembled his father Richard neither in face nor in form, since he was tall while Richard was a small man, and had a large face, whereas Richard's was small and compact. But no man could doubt, if he considered such things, that Richard was the duke's genuine son, who should possess his father's throne, which was rightfully his. And he particularly urged the lords, seeing that they lacked a king at present, to choose Richard, the true royal offspring, as their sovereign, repudiating others, who were base-born. When the people heard these words, they were wonderfully distraught, for, angry at the indignity of the thing, with all their hearts they cursed the preacher's temerity, boldness, uncouthness, and the error of Richard's criminal mind. For he failed to see how much shame, how much disgrace, how much of a blot he was casting on both his family and the entire realm by publicly condemning his mother, a most chaste woman, as an adulteress, by branding his brother, who had deserved well of him, with a lasting mark of infamy, and by covering his most innocent nephews with an enduring reproach. So at one and the time you could see some men standing as amazed as madmen by the novelty and strangeness of the thing, others frightened for themselves because they were friends of the royal boys, and yet others grieving for the boys themselves, for they believed that by now they were ruined. There is a popular story that in that sermon it was Edward's sons who were called bastards, not Edward himself, which is far from the truth, since Edward's mother Cecily, as I have said, was falsely accused of adultery and afterwards complained to a number of lords, some of whom are still living, of this insult she received at the hands of her son. But after his mother had thus been slandered in public and his brother Edward covered with shame, Richard was affected by happiness that this thing had been made public, which he had arranged so as to make plain to all men that the throne belonged him as a matter of right, rather than by the shame he should have felt. And he returned to the Tower with his royal escort, as if he had already been proclaimed king by parliament. But Ralph Shaa, the preacher of such a disgraceful thing, was soon thereafter chastised by his friends, embarrassed by his infamy, and returned to his sanity, and he so greatly repented what he had done that he soon died of a broken heart and paid the deserved penalty for his silliness.