Thanks, the readonly field does not affect the link field. I went ahead and wrote this jQuery to get rid of the buttons and make link load on the same window:
function hideEditRemoveLinkButtons($) {
$('.link-wrap > .-pencil').remove();
$('.link-wrap > .-cancel').remove();
}
function changeLinkTargetToSelf($) {
$('.link-url').attr('target','_self')
}