(Dominic Mancini) believed that Edward IV had designated his brother Gloucester as Protector – a statement – a statement which he first introduces with a cautious ‘as they say’, but which then becomes the cornerstone of his argument. In the absence of formal evidence, this claim cannot be checked, but it has always been recognized that the choice of Gloucester to head the government was an obvious possibility for the dying king. If Edward wanted a protector, the duke was, indeed, the inevitable candidate. Gloucester’s position as sole surviving brother of the king, coupled with his outstanding record of service to the crown, would have made it impossible to pass him over, even in a society aware of the dangers which guardianship by a paternal uncle posed to the interests of the heir. But Mancini does not leave the story there. He claims that the council chose to ignore Edward’s wishes, preferring the immediate coronation of the young king to a formal minority. This decision was prompted by fears that a protector might usurp the throne, although Mancini adds that it was supported by the queen’s family, who wanted to prevent power passing to Gloucester. Having carried this initial point, the Woodvilles then proceeded to dig in militarily and financially. The picture is thus one of overt factions, with the Woodvilles manipulating the majority of the council against Gloucester and a small group of councillors who supported the idea of a Protectorate – an element usually identified with the dead king’s friend and chamberlain William Hastings.

…Mancini’s account, for all its overt criticism of the duke, may be based on a version of events originating in the circle around Gloucester. It casts the Woodvilles as the aggressors and Gloucester as the victim of circumstance. [According to this interpretation], the duke was virtually forced into some sort of counter-offensive to protect his own interests, and his seizure of Edward [V] at the end of April could even be justified, although Mancini does not say so, as a return to Edward’s original wishes.

This raises the interesting possibility that Mancini’s insistence that Edward IV wanted his brother to be protector also derives from a version of events put forth by the duke after he had seized the prince and was seeking recognition as protector. Certainly one of the shakiest parts of Mancini’s account is his attempt to explain why, if Edward wanted a protector, the council sought to overturn his wishes. His suggestion that the council feared an usurpation displays the hindsight to be expected from someone writing after June 1483, when Gloucester had indeed used the protectorship as a stepping-stone to the throne. It is difficult to believe that anyone in April seriously feared that Gloucester had designs on the crown. The duke had a record of close cooperation with the Yorkist establishment, something at least as important in the context of 1483 as his much-emphasized loyalty to his brother. He was not an alien, northern magnate from whom anything might be expected, but a key figure in the reconstructed royal authority which now needed to be preserved for the young king.

This weakness in Mancini’s argument has, however, gone unremarked, largely because most commentators have chosen to emphasize Mancini’s second point and argue that the real reason for what happened was Woodville hostility to Gloucester. Mancini himself is clear that there was a long-standing rivalry between the duke and the queen’s family, and this has been accepted by almost every subsequent writer. A clash of interest was therefor inevitable once Gloucester had been chosen protector. But Mancini is here guilty of reading back into Edward IV’s reign the tensions which he observed after the king’s death. There is no contemporary evidence of hostility earlier than the end of April 1483. Although the personal attitudes of the protagonists are unknown, it is clear that their working relationship was one of co-operation.

This does not prelude the possibility that the Woodvilles turned against their former ally and in 1483 and cynically excluded Gloucester from the Protectorship in order to seize more power for themselves. But this would make nonsense of the events at the end of April, when Gloucester was able to seize possession of the (king) from an unsuspecting earl Rivers. The earl, who had apparently dispersed his men before meeting the duke, clearly expected no trouble from Gloucester – confidence which would be incredible if Gloucester had just been the victim of a Woodville coup.

Doubts about Mancini’s version are reinforced when it is compared with the account produced early in 1469 by the anonymous continuator of the Croyland Chronicle. The author was councillor of Edward IV and is in general a far more reliable source than Mancini. His facts (although not always his glosses) cannot be faulted, and he was ideally placed to give the definite account of events after Edward’s death. Although he evidently knew what the king had planned, he nowhere states it explicitly, and his silence has left the field to Mancini’s version. But this very silence casts doubt on Mancini’s central point that the council actually voted down the king’s expressed wishes. As a councillor himself, the author would have surely drawn attention to such a reversal. Instead he allows it to be assumed that the council’s plans for the coronation were in line with the king’s sagax disposito as embodied in the codils of his will. This makes it unlikely that Edward sought a protectorate. The implication instead seems to be that Edward’s ‘wise ordering’ did not envisage a formal protectorate at all, but entailed the immediate succession of his heir for which there was precedent in 1377, when the eleven-year-old Richard II had succeeded his grandfather. This is perhaps also implied by the chronicler’s comment that all the councillors were ‘fully desired the prince to succeed his father in all his glory’.

-Rosemary Horrox, "Richard III: A Study of Service"

*I just want to add that in 1475, when his son was only four years old, Edward IV's extant will did not desire a Protectorate (or regency, or lieutenancy); instead, he named his son 'Keeper of the Realm', placed him under the protection and control of the Queen, and appointed a Great Council to administer the realm. That should be kept in mind when discussing his potentially modified 1483 will, made when his son was twelve.

Simply put: Edward IV's 1483 will has not survived, we do not know what it says, we don't know what his codicils were or if they were even relevant to his son's minority (it could have been related to his children's marriages, for example). The Croyland Continuator mentions that he added codicils yet never claims or emphasizes that he appointed anyone Protector, and strongly implied that moat of his 1475 will remained at full force. We can speculate, but we cannot state anything for certain, and insistent claims to the contrary (almost always to Richard III's benefit and Elizabeth Woodville's denigration) must necessarily be viewed as biased and shallow. Saying that Edward IV could have potentially named his brother Lord Protector is very different from looking at contemporary accounts and evidence to judge whether he actually did - which we ultimately don't know and won't know unless we find the actual will or another contemporary source. Nor does it actually matter on a practical level because neither his council nor his queen were obligated to follow his wishes, which in turn makes Mancini's insistence on the contrary (ie: claiming Rixhard was 'entitled' to the position as per law and his brother's alleged order, which is distinctly untrue: Richard was not entitled to anything on the basis of either of those things) all the more suspect and reinforces Horrox's point about him potentially being influenced by propaganda. I'm just putting this here for the sake of the argument.