Ralph Shaa's Sermon at Paul's Cross, 22 June 1483: "Bastard Slips Shall Not Take Deep Root"

It was the day Edward V was supposed to be crowned. "Bastard slips shall not take deep root." That was the sermon text chosen for the twenty-second of June 1483.

Ralph Shaa had not been chosen at random. He was Canon of St Paul's Cathedral and his brother Edmund was Lord Mayor of London. Paul's Cross, the open-air pulpit that stood in the churchyard outside the cathedral, was the recognised forum for official government announcements in the city. When those in power wanted something said publicly and given the weight of religious authority, this was where it was said and Shaa was the man positioned to say it.

The crowd that gathered on the morning of June 22 came to a place they associated with official truth. The sermon was the public face of a coordinated campaign whose formal instrument would arrive four days later, when a delegation of lords petitioned Richard to take the throne.

The sermon advanced two claims. The first was that Edward IV had been pre-contracted to marry Lady Eleanor Butler before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. If the pre-contract was valid the Woodville marriage was invalid, and the children of that marriage, Edward the boy in the Tower and his brother Richard, were illegitimate and could not inherit the crown.

While the crowd at Paul's Cross heard her children declared illegitimate, Elizabeth Woodville was in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, unable to respond, unable to reach them, unable to do anything except wait for word of what the city was being told about her sons. The second claim went further, suggesting that Edward IV himself had not been the legitimate son of Richard Duke of York. That second charge was swiftly dropped. Richard's mother, Duchess Cecily of York, was still alive. The sermon was edited around her.

Richard Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of Buckingham were present at Paul's Cross to lend their authority to the moment. The staging had been arranged so that Richard would appear at a specific point in the sermon, his arrival giving the crowd a visible confirmation of everything Shaa was saying. He arrived too late. The moment passed in silence. The crowd, by contemporary account, was largely quiet throughout.

Shaa died within fourteen months. The London Chronicles and Thomas More both attributed his death to shame and remorse, characterising him as a man undone by what he had done. He had delivered the sermon and then had to live inside the city that had heard him give it.

Four days after the sermon, on June 26, a delegation of lords petitioned Richard to take the throne. On July 6 he was crowned Richard III. The coronation that had not happened on June 22 became the coronation of a different king on July 6, in the same city, before many of the same people.

"Bastard slips shall not take deep root."