Richard III Page 24
His bewilderment, possibly remorse and fear, is evident during the time he spent in the North from May to July 1484. The Grey Friars of Richmond were engaged to say a thousand Masses for the repose of Edward IV’s soul. The Austin Friars of Tickhill were given an annuity and the Trinitarian Friars of Knaresborough also had a benefaction. His gift to his old acquaintance Prior Bell and the Austin Canons of Carlisle Cathedral was an undeniably agreeable way of asking them to drink the King and Queen’s spiritual health – two tuns of claret annually in return for saying Mass for their well-being. Yet, curiously enough, there is no evidence that Richard ever visited or endowed the Carthusian hermits of Mount Grace, whose charterhouse was within easy reach of Sheriff Hutton. This is most surprising in view of their widespread reputation for extraordinary holiness. It may be that he was afraid of them.
His grim side was again in evidence in the autumn of 1484, when Mr William Colyngbourne was caught at last. Colyngbourne had immortalized himself on 18 July by posting his famous couplet on the door of St Paul’s:
The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our Dog,
Ruleth all England under a Hog.
The Cat was of course Catesby, the Rat was Ratcliff, and the Dog referred to Lovell’s crest,8 while Hog expressed what all too many Englishmen thought of Richard and his boar. A gentleman from Wiltshire of handsome and impressive appearance, once Sergeant of the Pantry to Edward IV, Colyngbourne had been active in raising his county for Buckingham. Moreover, there had been some sort of trouble in the West Country during the summer of 1484 – armed disturbances, rumours that men were waiting eagerly for a second invasion by Henry Tudor. Colyngbourne’s real crime – one which deprived him of any hope of mercy – was to have offered a certain Thomas Yate £8 to go to Brittany and persuade the Earl of Richmond to invade England; he had also suggested that Henry should tell the French government that the King was about to attack France. He was tried at Guildhall in the City by an imposing tribunal which comprised two Dukes and seven other Peers, besides five Justices of the King’s Bench, so seriously were his offences regarded. Found guilty of high treason, after a new pair of gallows had been specially built, he was half hanged, then castrated, disembowelled and quartered on Tower Hill; during the torments which followed the formal pretence at strangulation he showed remarkable fortitude, but, when his testicles and entrails had been burnt before him and the executioner began to pluck out his heart, he screamed, ‘O lord Jesu, yet more trouble!’ The London draper Robert Fabyan says that Colyngbourne was ‘cast for sundry treasons and for a rhyme which was laid to his charge’, adding that he died ‘to the great compassion of many people’. Despite all the battles, the statutory penalty for treason had been witnessed comparatively rarely in recent years. Early Tudor London had reason to remember the reign of Richard III.
Another to suffer for his opposition to the King was Sir Roger Clifford. A member of the great Lancastrian family, he too had been implicated in Buckingham’s rebellion. He was caught outside Southampton, probably while trying to find a ship to take him abroad to safety, and brought back to London to be tried and executed. Fabyan, perhaps an eyewitness, tells us that as he was being dragged on the customary hurdle to Tower Hill through the City, the priest attending him untied his bonds and when he passed the church of St Martin-le-Grand, his servants tried to pull him into the sanctuary. But the Sheriff’s officers threw themselves on him and held him down till he could be secured again. Clifford was at least spared the agonies of Colyngbourne and died by the axe.
Colyngbourne had been a household man of the old Duchess of York. His replacement, probably long before his execution, was the occasion of Richard’s one surviving letter to his mother:
Madam, I recommend me to you as heartily as is to me possible. Beseeching you in my most humble and effectuous wise of your daily blessing, to my singular comfort and defence in my need. And, Madam, I heartily beseech you that I may often hear from you to my comfort. And such news as be here my servant Thomas Bryan, this bearer, shall show you; to whom please it you to give credence unto. And Madam, I beseech you to be good and gracious Lady to my Lord my Chamberlain, to be your officer in Wiltshire in such as Colyngbourne had. I trust he shall therein do you service. And that it please you that by this bearer I may understand your pleasure in this behalf. And I pray God to send you the accomplishment of your noble desires. Written at Pontefract the 3rd day of June with the hand of your most humble son.
Ricardus Rex9
One can only wonder what the pious dowager thought of a son who had directed his usurpation from her own house, who had murdered her grandsons, after branding them as bastards together with her granddaughters, who had reviled her triumphant Edward’s memory, and who had had her accused publicly of being an adulteress. Since 1480 Cecily Nevill had been living the life of a Benedictine nun – or rather of a Benedictine abbess – at her castle of Berkhamsted, which she had transformed into something very like a convent. She was to survive all her sons, dying in 1494, only a few years before Vergil’s arrival in England. He tells us that the Duchess, ‘being falsely accused of adultery, complained afterwards in sundry places to right many noble men, whereof some yet live of that great injury which her son, Richard, had done her’.
In August 1484 Richard briefly abandoned his central command post at Nottingham to return to London for what he obviously regarded as a very important occasion indeed. This was the ostentatiously magnificent reburial of one of his earliest victims, Henry VI. During the thirteen years that the Lancastrian King’s remains had lain at Chertsey Abbey, his grave had become a place of popular pilgrimage, multitudes flocking to it to pray for his intercession – some claiming not only that their prayers had been answered but that miracles were performed. Even his murderer may have visited Chertsey, ‘And wet his grave with my repentant tears’ – to quote Shakespeare’s Richard III.
15. A reconstruction of Nottingham Castle as it was during Richard’s reign, based on a ground plan of 1617. The tower in the centre background has associations with the King. This was his strategic command post in the Midlands, where in 1485 he waited for news of Henry Tudor’s invasion.
No one was more credulously superstitious than Richard, more anxious to placate a saint. According to Rous, who is clearly reporting widely believed gossip of the time,
That holy body was pleasantly scented [a certain sign of a corpse’s sanctity to medieval man] and surely not from spices, since he had been buried by enemies and butchers. And for the most part it was uncorrupted, the hair and beard in place, and the face much as it had been, except a little more sunken, with a more emaciated appearance.
If the King himself credited these edifying reports, as seems extremely likely, he must have been seriously alarmed at being reminded of killing anyone quite so holy. It cannot be too much emphasized that by then all England considered Henry VI a saint. Richard saw that Henry’s body was re-interred in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on the south side of the high altar in a place of the utmost honour, which at once became a shrine; the fan vaulting above was painted with his personal emblems and badges, and his helmet was hung over his grave; relics were displayed next to it, such as sheets from his death bed and his red velvet cap (which, if worn, cured headaches). Rous tells us how immediately after the re-interment, which had been accompanied by solemn and splendid ceremonies, ‘at once miracles abundantly attested the King’s sanctity’. He appeared to a wounded sailor dressed as a pilgrim, in a vision, to reassure him; stemmed the flow from some poor carter’s broken wine casks; and healed a hernia caused by a misdirected kick during a football match. No doubt such manifestations, widely reported, made Richard still more uneasy.
The King went back to Nottingham – his ‘castle of care’, as he is supposed to have named it – the same month, after only a few days in the South. However, early in November he returned to his capital, going first to a long-forgotten palace – the Wardrobe on Ludgate Hill, so called because all monarchs from Edward III to James I kep
t their clothes there. The Scots question had been settled and there was no danger on the Border, while a lasting peace had been concluded with Brittany. It was scarcely likely that Henry Tudor would invade so late in the year.
Nevertheless, at the end of October Sir William Brandon and his two sons had tried to start a rising at Colchester, expecting an invasion – fleeing to France by boat when it did not come. Disturbances by armed men in Hertfordshire were linked with the Brandons’ rebellion.
Just after Richard’s return to London, news came from Calais of a damaging blow to his prestige. John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the most distinguished Lancastrian commander to survive, had escaped from Hammes after ten years’ imprisonment. (He had tried to escape before, unsuccessfully, jumping into the moat where he would have drowned but for the water coming only up to his chin.) He was not merely Premier Earl of England and a former Lord High Constable, but a very brave man and a very fine soldier – the Croyland chronicler calls him ‘miles valentissimus’ (a most doughty knight). He had personal reasons for hating the King: in 1473 Richard had reduced his mother to beggary, forcing her to hand over her entire estate to him – ‘by heinous menace of loss of life and imprisonment,’ her son afterwards complained. He had at once gone to the French court, then at Montargis, to join the English exiles. Nor did he come alone, bringing with him his gaoler James Blount, the Captain of Hammes, and Sir John Fortescue, the Gentleman Porter of Calais. Vergil says that Henry was ‘ravished with joy’.
Moreover, Blount had given the garrison at Hammes (one of the fortresses defending Calais) orders to hold it against Richard. He had also left his wife in command of the men, probably about thirty in number. Lord Dynham, the Captain of Calais, immediately moved up troops to retake the castle. But Mistress Blount resisted stoutly, sending to Henry for help. He dispatched Thomas Brandon with thirty more men-at-arms, who entered Hammes by a secret path through a marsh and prolonged the siege into the New Year. The King only recovered the fortress at the end of January 1485, at the cost of a free pardon to the Blounts, Brandon and the entire garrison – the Blounts and Brandon joining Henry at the French court. Richard hastily replaced Lord Mountjoy, Blount’s brother, as Captain of Guisnes (the other castle defending Calais) by Sir James Tyrell.
In November Brackenbury was reappointed Sheriff of Kent. The King’s agitation during the Hammes affair is very evident. On 6 December the Mayor of Windsor was ordered to take action against anyone found spreading rumours intended to cause unrest, which were being circulated by ‘our ancient enemies of France’; such persons were to be imprisoned and severely punished. Next day Richard issued his first proclamation against his rival. It lists various rebels, who have ‘chosen to be their Captain one, Henry Tydder’; from ‘insatiable covetousness’ the latter ‘usurpeth upon him the name and title of royal estate of this realm’, and has promised his supporters all the possessions of the King’s subjects, even bishoprics. On 8 December Commissions of Array were issued on a very large scale indeed. On 18 December commissioners in counties immediately adjacent to London were ordered to report how many reliable men-at-arms they could produce at twelve hours’ notice. Richard took very seriously a report that Harwich was threatened by attack from the sea. A rising in Essex and Hertfordshire was forestalled just in time; it was connected in some way with the trouble at Calais and was apparently waiting for an invasion to land on the east coast. What made it so alarming was the involvement of two members of the household, John Fortescue and John Risley, both Esquires of the Body.10
The atmosphere at court that Christmas, which the King kept at Westminster, cannot have been pleasant. The dancing and revelry during the Twelve Days were noticeably frenetic, the splendour excessive. No doubt there were all the entertainments we hear of in the Paston letters – singing, lute playing, cards, dicing and backgammon – with fools, jugglers and tumblers and blind man’s bluff. Surrounded as he was by hidden disaffection, Richard can be compared with the blind man. For the spectres of invasion and renewed civil war would have been in his courtiers’ minds, making them forget momentarily the terrible cold, dampness and darkness of a medieval English winter; in the dimly lit palace all too many noblemen were asking themselves whether they would succeed in choosing the winning side. This overcast, doom-laden mood was scarcely dispelled by the fact that Queen Anne was obviously dying; no doubt she had the hectic flush and glittering eyes symptomatic of tuberculosis of the lungs. She was very much in evidence throughout the celebrations and with the King when he presided over the Twelfth Night revels in Westminster Hall. He wore the crown of St Edward, just as he had on the day of his Coronation. In the midst of the revels, so the Croyland chronicler tells us, ‘his spies from beyond sea’ brought him an urgent dispatch – ‘notwithstanding the potency and splendour of his royal state, his adversaries would without doubt invade the Kingdom during the following summer’. Richard commented that nothing could give him greater pleasure, a response which perhaps indicates not so much confidence as self-command at breaking point. Moreover, there were sinister whispers not only of impending battles but of incest.
What shocked the court, if the Croyland writer is to be believed, were the peculiarly personal attentions which the King paid his niece, Elizabeth of York, during that grim winter. In the circumstances she was the last person one might have expected to see there. Although officially a bastard, his brother’s eldest daughter had been given dresses of exactly the same fashion and rich material as those of the Queen; indeed, they seem to have worn them in turn, ‘exchanging apparel’. (These dresses would have been very narrow-waisted, full-skirted gowns with remarkably low necks – a small bosom was fashionable – with tight sleeves down to the knuckles, under great ‘butterfly’ head-dresses of wired veils which swept back from the forehead.) Plainly Elizabeth gave the impression of being a second consort. The chronicler refers to ‘many other matters as well, which are not written down here for shame’; taken in conjunction with Bishop Langton’s discreet mention of ‘sensual pleasure’ increasingly apparent in Richard’s behaviour, this hints that some courtiers had little respect for his morals despite his pious exhortations. The prominence of the former Princess Elizabeth ‘horrified’ prelates. ‘It became common gossip that the King was bent on marrying Elizabeth, whatever the cost, either because he expected the Queen would soon die or that he would obtain a divorce for which he thought he could find adequate grounds.’
Shortly after the exertions of Christmas, Anne Nevill fell very ill. Probably she had never recovered from her son’s death – perhaps it was he who infected her. It took her a month to die. If her illness was a galloping consumption, as seems likely, the symptoms would have been terrifying: drenching sweats, a constant racking cough and copious vomits of blood. One shudders at the medicine her age prescribed for the disease – potions of arsenic, garlic and mercury. Richard ‘shunned his wife’s bed entirely. He declared that it was on his doctors’ advice.’ This may well have been the case and quite justified, since tuberculosis of the lungs can be virulently contagious. However, he appears to have used their advice with a deliberate callousness to hasten the poor woman’s end, if one is to credit the Croyland chronicler, who comments, ‘Need one say more?’ His absence in itself was bad enough; in the fifteenth century the marital bed was an object of symbolical fidelity, as with European peasants until the early 1900s – it was shared regardless of illness. But the Queen had reason to suspect that he wanted her to die.
The King had complained to Archbishop Rotherham and various noblemen of Anne’s barrenness and inability to give him children. Dynastically she was an encumbrance. Several days before her death a rumour circulated that she was already dead – allegedly put about by Richard to frighten her and make her condition worse. She was terrified when she heard it and went to her husband in tears, asking if she had done anything which made him think she deserved to die. Both Polydore Vergil and the Croyland writer are convinced that the King tried to finish her off by psychological me
thods.11
There were also tales that Richard was poisoning the Queen. It is possible that, what with her spouse’s obvious desire to be rid of her, and the miseries of her medicine and a Lenten diet – no meat, game or poultry, only salt fish – Anne may really have feared this was happening. Alison Hanham is inclined to attribute Rous’s changed attitude towards Richard III not so much to a desire to curry favour with the new regime as to a genuine conviction that the King had murdered a member of the beloved family to whose patronage he owed his career – his words are: ‘And Lady Anne, his Queen, daughter to the Earl of Warwick, he poisoned.’ Dr Hanham also cites Rous as evidence that rumours of the Queen having been poisoned were circulating soon after she died, and were not invented by ‘Tudor chroniclers’. As will be seen, even firmer evidence of such rumours exists – given by no less a witness than Richard himself.
Anne Nevill died on 16 March 1485 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the King’s presence, with all the pomp fitting for one of her rank. She cannot have been more than twenty-seven years old. Apart from the bare fact of her existence, she had made little impression on history – though the Great Chronicle of London does at least call her ‘a woman of gracious fame’. Her death took place on a day when there was a total eclipse of the sun. In that superstitious age such a coincidence did not help her husband’s reputation.
Chapter Twelve
‘OUR GREAT HEAVINESS’