Richard III Read online

  In the meantime Henry Tudor had sailed from Paimpol in Brittany, apparently in late October. The same storm which ruined the rising inland struck his little fleet at sea and left him with only two ships – he must have had to run before the wind. When he sailed into a West Country port, either Poole or Plymouth, he saw that the harbour was ringed with troops and sent a boat to investigate. The armed men on shore – who were Richard’s – shouted that they were a detachment of Buckingham’s army. Henry was too wary to be caught, and realized that there had been a disaster. Wisely he set sail for Brittany. He was forced to land in Normandy, but after three days received French permission to march back to Brittany. Here he was told of Buckingham’s death, though also that Dorset and others were at Vannes. He summoned them to meet him at Rennes, the ducal capital.

  At Exeter, the King executed Sir Thomas St Leger, among others, on 12 November. He was Richard’s brother-in-law, having been the second husband of his sister Anne, and offered a large sum of money in return for his life – to no avail. (There was a familiar moralizing note in the subsequent Act of Attainder; St Leger had ‘by seditious means married Anne, Duchess of Exeter, late wife of the said Duke, he being then living’.) We do not know how many conspirators perished. Vergil names several besides St Leger whom the King executed together with ‘divers others, even of his own household’. Some were taken to London to suffer. They included four former Yeomen of the Crown to Edward IV, who were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Sir George Browne and another leading rebel were beheaded on Tower Hill in December.

  Half a century afterwards Sir Thomas Wyatt – the poet and lover of Anne Boleyn – boasted of the fidelity of his father, Henry Wyatt, to the Earl of Richmond. Richard had imprisoned the elder Wyatt in the Tower for nearly two years, presumably for involvement in the rising of 1483. According to his son, Richard had him racked in his presence. ‘Wyatt, why art thou such a fool?’ asked the King. ‘Henry of Richmond is a beggarly pretender; forsake him and become mine. Thou servest him for moonshine in water.’ The tale is supposedly supported by a fanciful Wyatt family legend of later date:

  King Richard, in a rage, had him confined in a low and narrow cell, where he had not clothes sufficient to warm him and was a hungered. A cat came into the cell, he caressed her for company, laid her in his bosom and won her love. And so she came to him every day and brought him a pigeon when she could catch one.

  Wyatt, one is told, persuaded the gaoler to cook the birds for him, surviving to be released by Henry VII and given high office. The legend adds that for the rest of his life Henry Wyatt, ‘would ever make much of cats’. After allowing for poetic exaggeration, there may be a basis of truth in the story of Henry Wyatt’s imprisonment. Wyatt had land in Surrey near Camberwell and could have been recruited for Buckingham by the neighbouring Gaisfords of Carshalton. He was extremely able (to judge from his future career under Henry VII) and the King may indeed have thought that he would make a useful servant.9

  Richard spent mid-November marching from Devon to London. He went by way of Salisbury, Winchester, Farnham and Guildford. He returned to his capital in the last week of November, receiving the customary welcome from the leading citizens who rode out to meet him at Kennington.

  He had put down an extremely dangerous rebellion without meeting a sword drawn in anger. Yet he was sowing dragon’s teeth. First by confiscating southern estates on a scale which had not been seen for centuries; as Machiavelli might have told him, ‘Men forget the death of their fathers sooner than the loss of their patrimony.’ Moreover, he did not wait for such formalities as Acts of Attainder and confiscated them illegally. Second by giving the estates to northern henchmen like Scrope, Assheton and Ratcliff – the last picked up manors worth nearly £700 a year, the income of a minor peer – or to the greatest in the land, whose loyalty would always be dubious. At least a hundred other Northerners profited. He should have brought in support from other regions as well instead of alienating them by his obvious preference for the North. He simply did not know how to use the vast patronage which had fallen into his hands.

  The King’s ineptitude was especially apparent in his treatment of the Stanleys. Although the head of that wily family had first to suffer interrogation by the Council to make quite sure, he had given a show of loyalty which delighted Richard. Lord Stanley received Buckingham’s office of Constable of England together with large grants of land, while his brother Sir William – one of fifteenth-century England’s shiftiest personalities – obtained key posts in Wales and valuable estates. Lord Stanley’s wife Margaret Beaufort, a principal architect of the conspiracy, had the penalties of attainder ‘which she deserves’ remitted; her lands were merely taken from her and transferred to her husband ‘for the good love and trust that the King has in him’.

  Yet Richard took away with one hand what he gave with the other, appointing their enemies to positions of influence in the North West, in areas adjoining Stanley country. These were the Harringtons from whom the Stanleys had stolen Hornby Castle in Lancashire during an inheritance dispute, and their kindred. Richard Ratcliff, related to the Harringtons by marriage, was made Sheriff of Westmorland. another relative Sheriff of Cumberland and a third a royal chamberlain. There was every likelihood the King might restore Hornby to James Harrington, who had become a particularly useful henchman. (James may have carried the royal standard at Bosworth.) That people like this were key members of the royal household added to the Stanleys’ sense of injury.

  The Earl of Northumberland, quite as treacherous as any Stanley, was given Buckingham’s great office, that of Lord Great Chamberlain of England – which had been held by Richard himself when he was Duke of Gloucester and even when he was Protector. Many of Buckingham’s manors also went to the Percy. The regime’s four main props had become three and two of them were far from sound – only Norfolk was genuinely loyal.

  However much the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion might have failed, it had secured the long-term objective of Dr Morton and Margaret Beaufort. The hitherto almost unknown Henry Tudor was transformed into the acknowledged Lancastrian Pretender – a Pretender too for those Yorkists who were horrified by the realization that Edward V had been murdered. As Dr Rowse observes, the Earl of Richmond ‘would never have been brought forward if Richard had been content to remain Protector and done his duty by his nephews’. Moreover, Henry now had something very like a court in exile, which included several extremely experienced and talented soldiers and prelates – besides an incomparable party manager in the Bishop of Ely, even if the latter preferred to remain in Flanders. Astonishingly the King’s proclamation of 23 October against Buckingham, Dorset and all the other ‘traitors, adulterers and bawds’ had not even bothered to mention Henry Tudor.

  Yet at this time Richard must have seemed unassailable. He had demonstrated triumphantly that he could survive a very widespread, very well-supported and very well-organized revolt. He kept Christmas 1483 with notable magnificence at Westminster. Large quantities of silver plate were purchased for the festivities, even though various royal treasures had to be pawned to pay for them. (These treasures included a gold-plated helmet which had belonged to Edward IV.) He bought exceptionally rich robes for himself and his Queen – spending the staggering sum of £1,200 – as well as buying costly gems from a Genoese dealer. There is a hint of overdressing here, like that by some insecure nouveau riche. Nevertheless, Commynes was sufficiently impressed by what he heard to note that Richard was reigning with greater splendour than any King of England ‘these last hundred years’.

  Such exuberant magnificence befitted a monarch who is sometimes described as a Renaissance Prince. To apply the word Renaissance to a North-western European at this date may perhaps seem anachronistic; Gothic art and architecture were still flourishing in England. Yet the humanist revolution was crossing the Alps, even if the English Renaissance was a very slow process, which developed at a different pace and in a different way to the Renaissance in Italy. Undoubted
ly there was cultural contact – the very presence in London of an Italian man of letters like Mancini indicates an exchange of ideas. In fact, Richard’s court poet, Pietro Carmeliano, was a humanist from Brescia while the court clerics included men who had studied Greek in Italy and collected manuscripts. Moreover, the decline of Christianity into the popular ritual observances and mechanistic superstitions favoured by the King himself produced the same moral vacuum in England as in Italy which was so opportune for the self-conscious rise of Renaissance Realpolitik. It is surely significant that a humanist like Sir Thomas More could believe that he understood Richard – who was his near-contemporary – so well. In more ways than one the King anticipated his great-nephew, Henry VIII. For the new Yorkist monarchy was no less a manifestation of the Renaissance than the Tudor monarchy which grew out of it. Richard III may have known nothing of Italian statecraft, and was born too early to be acquainted with the works of Machiavelli (his junior by seventeen years), yet in his lack of scruple and ferocity he was very much a Renaissance tyrant.

  When speaking of Richard, Commynes uses the word ‘proud’ more than once. Plainly he employs it in the sense of vainglory or self-delusion. Had he known the word ‘hubris’ he would have used that too. For the King was defying fate. Despite his ostentatious splendour, his regime was under constant threat, with growing opposition everywhere – at home and abroad.

  In Rennes Cathedral at dawn on Christmas morning 1483 Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took a solemn oath that he would marry Elizabeth of York. At the same time his fellow exiles, Lancastrian and Yorkist alike, swore loyalty to each other. Then they knelt before the Earl and did him homage, as though he had already been crowned and anointed King Henry VII. They also swore to return to England and overthrow the tyrant.

  King Richard nevertheless remained England’s all-powerful sovereign. But although, that Christmas, he had much to celebrate, he also had many immediate worries.

  Understandably relations between the English government and the Duchy of Brittany had become strained. They were made worse by the increasing activities of West Country pirates. Although it was winter, a fleet of Breton privateers harried English shipping in turn, very nearly capturing the precious Calais wool fleet, which only escaped by fleeing back to England. In December a squadron of King’s Ships commanded by Thomas Wentworth was sent out to destroy the Breton fleet; Wentworth was unsuccessful, though several enemy vessels were captured. Meanwhile, the authorities in London and the West Country confiscated all Breton ships and goods they could lay their hands on. Richard saw the futility of such a conflict, which would only infuriate English merchants, and soon tried diplomacy. Yet he did not make a really serious effort to persuade the Bretons to hand over Henry Tudor until summer 1484 – he still did not take him seriously enough.

  Despite the dreadful winter roads of the period, in January 1484 the King went on progress through that notoriously turbulent and disaffected county, Kent. Medieval Kentishmen had a name for pugnacity and lawlessness, besides a lingering loyalty to the House of Lancaster. When Richard visited Canterbury during the progress, the Mayor and Corporation offered him a somewhat meagre purse of gold (£33. 6s. 8d.), which he declined. Bishop Langton took it instead. No doubt the King prayed edifyingly at the shrine of St Thomas.

  Kent had not been exactly idle during the recent rebellion and Richard clearly expected more trouble. He had already set up a command centre at Buckingham’s princely house of Penshurst Place, installing a northern gauleiter – Sir Marmaduke Constable from Flam-borough in Yorkshire. A Knight of the Body, Constable was plainly a key man in the ‘mafia’, even if he had begun his career as a Percy retainer; probably he transferred his service before Richard became King – he is known to have distinguished himself at the siege of Berwick.10 On 16 December 1483 Sir Marmaduke had been appointed Steward of the Manors of Penshurst, Tonbridge and Brasted, his job being principally to stop ‘livery and retaining’ – to put an end in Kent to private armies – and also to see that every Kentishman of substance took a comprehensive oath of allegiance. Since he spent only a few months in the county, it is likely that he had some success; the Kentishmen remained untypically quiet for the rest of the reign. He was soon moved up to the Midlands, to perform the same task there from Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire. Constable received very substantial rewards, in the form of offices, annuities and estates (among the latter was a certain manor in Leicestershire, Market Bosworth). About the same age as Richard, he was popularly known as ‘little Sir Marmaduke’, and perhaps his small size helped recommend him to the King; little men tend to like other little men.

  Shortly afterwards the King issued a proclamation which states that ‘His Grace is utterly determined that all his subjects shall live in rest and quiet, and peaceably enjoy their lands, livelihoods and goods, according to the laws of this his land.’ He was determined to win popularity by an ostentatious display of benevolence and by showing himself to be an efficient ruler concerned with justice before all else. Indeed, in December he had already deputed some of his Council to sit at Westminster in the White Hall to hear ‘the bills, requests and supplications of poor persons’ – an innovation which later grew into the Court of Requests.

  Richard’s obsession with what would nowadays be termed his image was obviously only too apparent to his court poet. As a needy sycophant with all his countrymen’s talent for insinuating flattery, Pietro Carmeliano knew just what was required. In the introduction to a manuscript copy of his Life of St Catherine of Egypt, produced between 1483 and 1485 and dedicated to Sir Robert Brackenbury, he inserted some Latin lines which refer to Richard:

  If we look for devout religion first and foremost, can any Prince show more piety? If we wish for justice, whom in the entire world may be placed before him? If we contemplate his prudent conduct both in peace and war, whom shall be considered his equal? If we seek for a soul of truth, for highmindedness joined with wisdom, who is there to take precedence of our King?

  Brackenbury would certainly have recognized this as his master’s ideal picture of himself. (In 1486 Carmeliano, essentially a professional, was to write of Richard as having been an evil and ferocious monster.)

  A desperate anxiety to demonstrate that he was a worthy, a devoted King, is evident in Richard’s conciliatory attitude during his one and only Parliament. It met on 23 January 1484.11 Summoned for the previous November, it had had to be postponed because of Buckingham’s rebellion. Among Members of the House of Commons were William Catesby, Humphrey Stafford, Walter Hopton, Thomas Pilkington and John Harrington, together with at least a dozen others from the Household – probably including Ralph Assheton the Vice-Constable and James Tyrell, by now promoted to Master of the Horse. The King made a conscious attempt to use the Parliament to enlist national support, which may be why its proceedings were recorded in English instead of Law French for the first time. The Lord Chancellor preached an eloquent and learned opening address, skilfully adapted from the one he had prepared for the abortive Parliament of the murdered Edward V. He took as his text the words from Scripture: ‘We have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office.’ Bishop Russell then launched into an appeal for unity, with frequent references to the ‘commonweal’, claiming that the recent revolt against Richard had violated God’s Commandments – he gracefully labelled the late Duke of Buckingham as ‘a rotten member’. After this Catesby was elected Speaker of the House of Commons, and spokesman for its knights and burgesses.

  The first Bill passed confirms the new King’s title to the throne, in an attempt to use Parliament to persuade a sceptical England that his claim was valid. It declares Richard III to be the true King of the realm by inheritance, election, consecration and coronation, and acknowledges his son as heir apparent by settling the succession on the heirs of Richard’s body. What in fact was being enacted was the Petition presented to the Protector in the previous June, though now slightly amended. The avowed purpose of the Act (later to be referred t
o as Titulus Regius) is that by ‘quieting men’s minds’ it ‘removeth the occasion of all doubts and seditious language’. As Alison Hanham observes, ‘When a legal parliament finally gave its authority to this remarkable document, disquiet and sedition had indeed shaken the country.’12

  The Lords and Commons – the two Houses were meeting together in the Painted Chamber at Westminster – then passed the various Bills of Attainder. A hundred persons are named – among them thirty-three from Wiltshire, twenty-eight from Kent and Surrey, eighteen from Exeter and fourteen from Berkshire. (This was a quarter of all people attainted between 1459 and 1509.) The attainders confirm that their lives are forfeit, save for the Bishops’, and that their estates have been confiscated. Richard, behaving with calculated magnanimity, later pardoned over a third of those concerned – this was standard practice during the Wars of the Roses, while many of the others were in any case safe in Brittany. The King even gave a pardon to Sir John Fogge, whom he had pardoned once already; here his motive must surely have been showmanship – a display of unheard of generosity. One again recalls what More says of Richard – ‘with large gifts he got him unsteadfast friendship’. Gairdner emphasizes that these ‘concessions granted in the hour of danger to those who had given him the most annoyance, could have done little either to win or strengthen the attachment of the people to his throne’. Indeed, although pardoned, Sir Richard Edgecombe refused to leave Brittany and abandon Henry Tudor.