Richard III Page 26
Considerable sums were spent on building up a large arsenal of field artillery and hand-guns at the Tower. Much of it consisted of ‘serpentines’. These were long, light cannon, which were mounted on pivots and fired a four-pound ball, and were the latest thing in the period’s weaponry. The King imported Flemish gunsmiths to manufacture them, presumably at great expense.
All the indications are that Richard was obsessed by the Pretender threatening his throne. Henry’s anonymity may have made him seem more formidable than he really was. During the 1939–45 War, Field Marshal Montgomery had photographs of the German army commanders confronting him hung in his battle caravan to help him guess what was in their minds. The King can have had no idea of what the Tudor even looked like. At Barnet he had known Warwick, Montagu and Exeter very well, and it is likely that at Tewkesbury he could say he had at least met the Beauforts. But if Richard had even heard the name Henry Tudor before 1483, it was merely as that of an obscure by-blow of the Beauforts; indeed, he was not even a Beaufort, let alone a Plantagenet of the ‘Old Royal Blood of England’. The name is misspelt ‘Tydder’ in all proclamations against him. The proclamations also describe his parentage and descent, pointing to some sort of official investigation. Although the ‘spies across the seas’ were almost certainly at Henry’s little court – not so little now – to judge from his secrecy and reserve after he had become King, they would scarcely have been able to tell Richard much about the man himself or about what he was thinking. The sixteenth-century chronicler may have been using his imagination when he makes Richard tell his captains, before Bosworth, that the Tudor was a ‘Welsh milksop’, but he is certainly near the truth in making the King say additionally that ‘the Devil, the disturber of concord and sower of sedition, hath entered into the heart of an unknown Welshman whose father I never knew, nor him personally saw’. One is tempted to wonder whether Richard thought it was a vengeful God rather than the Devil. Devoured by guilt and superstition as he was, the King may sometimes have suspected, like Commynes, that ‘God had raised up an enemy against him.’
Throughout his reign Richard III seems to have taken refuge in the undeniable fact that although a usurper he was none the less the legal, anointed and crowned – and therefore divinely appointed – King of England. Hence his excessive wearing of the royal diadem, like some sort of talisman. Hence too his constant, and emphatic, references to treason – plainly a word which obsessed him. ‘Treason’ was embodied by one man, Henry. The Welshman’s use of the royal style, ‘Henricus Rex’, must have infuriated him.
Both the Croyland writer and Polydore Vergil tell us that on the night before Bosworth Richard had nightmares. Vergil says that this was a frequent occurrence. As has been already said, More claims to have heard from the King’s attendants that almost every night of his reign he was troubled by ‘fearsome dreams’. This is the origin of the lines which Shakespeare gives Queen Anne:
For never yet one hour in his bed
Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep,
But with his timorous dreams was still awak’d.
That Richard suffered from remorse, or at least from an uneasy conscience, seems to be indicated by his quite remarkably intense care for the repose of the souls of dead kindred. It is of course true that, before and after his usurpation, his foundations for chantry priests were to celebrate Masses for all members of his family and not just his victims. He could scarcely single out Edward V and little York (which may lend substance to Sir Thomas’s stories about a secret reburial, or perhaps a secret Requiem).
In the fifteenth century Requiems and prayers for the dead were considered a duty to an exaggerated degree. All over Western Europe countless chantries – or endowments to say Masses for them – were being founded. But Richard set up chantries on a truly extraordinary scale. Even Rous praises him for it. It is likely that only a handful, such as the collegiate chapels at Middleham, Barnard Castle and Barking or the thousand Masses for Edward IV by the friars of Richmond have been identified. He must have presented York Minster with many vestments, a common practice by the great at that time because of the high cost of silk and velvet, yet it is curiously fitting that the only one of which the Minster archives give us any detail was black.
Most peculiar of all was the huge chantry Richard planned for York Minster, where he clearly meant to be buried. Presumably he intended to build a chapel – anticipating Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster. What made this one so unusual was that there would be six altars served by a hundred priests saying Mass for the Dead without a break, with a staff of two or three hundred clerks, choristers and servants, for whom an enormous endowment was needed. Probably no one in Christendom has ever contemplated praying for the dead on such an exaggerated scale. Richard’s motive here must have been the same as that stated in his foundation charter for Middleham – the Masses were to be ‘in part satisfaction for such things as at the dreadful day of judgement I shall answer for.’ He also wanted to make quite sure that the souls of the dead should rest in peace.
An urge for atonement and propitiation is also evident in Richard’s treatment of his enemies’ wives and children. His partisans ascribe it to unusual magnanimity, but he was no more merciful than Edward IV in providing such casualties with pensions. Both Kings seem to have set store by an ostentatious show of mercy. In the case of Hastings’s family, Richard was undeniably lavish in allowing the son to inherit his father’s estate, as though there had been no charge of treason, and the widow to have the wardship. Yet again, one discerns an uncomfortable conscience.
The King’s personal spiritual life, in so far as we know anything about it, conveys an even stronger sense of desolation. His Book of Hours – his principal prayer book – has fortunately survived. Illuminated between 1430 and 1450, it had at least one previous owner – probably a member of the Warwick family. What makes it so interesting is the addition in a different hand of a long prayer for the King’s use. It is in Latin, headed ‘De beato Juliano’. ‘As you wish to relieve those burdened with sore affliction,’ it opens, ‘release me from the affliction, temptation, grief, infirmity, poverty and peril in which I am trapped and give me aid.’ Appeals for protection are repeated over and over again. It begs, ‘Make peace between me and my enemies … lessen, turn aside, extinguish, bring to nothing, the hatred they bear me.’ After citing the mercies of the Old Testament and the Passion of Christ, it pleads, ‘Son of the living God, deign to free me, thy servant King Richard, from all the tribulation, sorrow and anguish in which I am and from all my enemies’ snares, and deign to send Blessed Michael the Archangel to aid me against them and the evil they are planning.’ Undeniably the prayer is deeply moving. Yet it is not over-fanciful to detect a note of almost hysterical fear, of paranoia. It gives a unique glimpse of the King’s innermost feelings.
Professor Lander stresses that one simply cannot write off as propaganda a highly personal and specially composed prayer which reads ‘like the incantation of a litany, fraught with notes of the deepest gloom, oppression and danger, in which the highly charged reference to Susannah, de falso criminere et testimonio, so prominently stands out’. Lander continues,
Considering the accusations against him, the knowledge that he slandered his brother’s memory, the probability that he impugned his mother’s chastity, that he authorized judicial murder, that he was prepared to contemplate incest, that he cheated his nephews out of their inheritance if not far worse, the prayer must indicate that either Richard thought he was innocent of the charges or that towards the end of his life he had become in the highest degree schizophrenic, a criminal self-righteously invoking the protection of the Almighty.
The words ‘De beato Juliano’, overlooked even by Lander, are the key to the prayer. They indicate that it was intended to invoke the intercession of this obscure saint, who enjoyed a widespread popular cult during the later Middle Ages. Little is known of Julian the Hospitaller save that according to medieval hagiographers he killed his own father and m
other, and that after doing penance for many years it was revealed to him that God had pardoned him. It is almost certain that Richard was familiar with the tale since it appears in the version of The Golden Legend which Caxton printed at Westminster towards the end of 1483. A parricide was a fitting intercessor for an infanticide, let alone a man who had murdered a saint.5
Richard would have become still more uneasy about his enemies if a certain letter from Henry Tudor had fallen into his hands. Dating from the first months of 1485, it probably circulated widely. Addressed to Henry’s ‘Right trusty, worshipful and honourable good friends’, it reads:
Being given to understand your good devoir and entreaty to advance me to the furtherance of my rightful claim, due and lineal inheritance of that Crown, and for the just depriving of that homicide and unnatural tyrant which now unjustly bears dominion over you, I give you to understand that no Christian heart can be more full of joy and gladness than the heart of me, your poor exiled friend, who will, upon the instant of your sure advertising what power you will make ready and what captains and leaders you get to conduct, be prepared to pass over the sea with such force as my friends here are preparing for me. And if I have such good speed and success as I wish, according to your desire, I shall ever be most forward to remember and wholly to requite this your great and most loving kindness in my just quarrel. Given under our signet.
H.R.
It is likely that Northumberland and the Stanleys, among others, received such letters.6
By the spring Henry was at Rouen, looking for ships. No doubt Richard’s spies reported his activities to their master, who may not have been unduly alarmed. For the French seem to have been in two minds about the Earl of Richmond. They must have remembered the English King’s opposition to the treaty of Picquigny – Commynes certainly did – and may also have seen copies of his proclamations against Henry, in which the Tudor was accused of promising the French King to ‘dissever the arms of France from the arms of England for ever’, and to abandon all claims to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Gascony and Guyenne. Obviously if ever Richard felt strong enough, he would invade France and try to reconquer the territories once governed by his father. There was therefore a good case for sending Henry to topple him while he was still weak. There was also a case for keeping Henry in reserve, as a threat. Both options would cost money, but especially the first. It is likely that the King understood this and felt that there was a reasonable chance of his enemy being unable to raise sufficient funds for a proper invasion fleet.
17. Sir Humphrey Stanley (1455–1505) of Pipe, Staffordshire, who fought so gallantly for Henry Tudor at Bosworth that he was knighted on the battlefield. One of Henry VII’s Knights of the Body, he later took a prominent part in defeating the Yorkists at Stoke and the Cornish at Blackheath. In 1495 Henry apparently saved him from the consequences of a murder. From a brass at Westminster Abbey.
He had an informer among the exiled rebels, Sir Robert Clifford from Aspenden in Hertfordshire (where there is a stained glass portrait of him in the parish church). A former Lancastrian, whose father had been killed at first St Alban’s and whose brother – the murderer of Richard’s brother Rutland – had fallen on the Towton campaign – and who had then joined Brandon’s abortive rising, his credentials seemed impeccable to the Tudor. Yet he was back in England by spring 1485 with a pardon after informing the council of anything he could learn. (Clifford was a talented spy - later Henry VII used him as a double agent, to penetrate the circle around Perkin Warbeck.
Nevertheless, Richard was not taking any chances. In April 1485 Sir George Nevill was given a flotilla to patrol the Kentish coast and in May Lovell was ordered to keep a fleet in readiness at Southampton. The King expected Henry would try to land in southern England, the most disaffected part of the country. His agents had learnt that the Tudor intended to make for ‘Milford’, and there was a tiny port of that name in Hampshire which would be excellent for a secret landing, and apparently a soothsayer confirmed that this was the danger spot. No one realized that Richmond’s ‘Milford’ was Milford Haven in Wales. Sir Ralph Assheton and Lord Scrope of Bolton, now Constable of Exeter Castle, were guarding the West Country. Assheton was reappointed Vice-Constable of England and given a deputy. In June Richard returned to his command centre at Nottingham.
Meanwhile, the Earl of Richmond had not been idle. Fortunately for him, he was not a procrastinator. The French government were still alarmed that the English King might support Breton separatists should Duke Francis die; indeed, by his encouragement of them, he had given the impression that he intended to invade France as soon as possible – by a more placatory attitude he could easily have won French friendship. As it was, French policy suddenly altered in the autumn and Henry would then have received no help. In any case what he did receive was very inadequate. Commynes says it consisted only of a ‘little money from the King [Charles VIII] and some 3,000 of the most unruly men that could be found and enlisted in Normandy’.7 In reality Charles gave nothing and it was a courtier, Philippe Lullier (Captain of the Bastille), who from his own private resources lent Henry just enough to hire a thousand mercenaries and half a dozen small ships, which was very different from the 4,000 troops that had been promised by the French government. It was Lullier, not Charles, who provided a few cannon.8
Nevertheless, we can safely guess that Henry Tudor made the most of what was available. Lullier’s loan was undoubtedly supplemented by contributions from supporters in England, while Henry also borrowed from Parisian goldsmiths – he was not without humour – leaving the untrustworthy Dorset behind him as security. Moreover, historians have accepted Commynes too uncritically and tend to underestimate the fighting potential of Henry’s expedition. While the xenophobic Hall may dismiss them as ‘beggarly Bretons and faint-hearted Frenchmen,’ Henry’s mercenaries were crack troops equipped with the latest weaponry, mostly pikemen trained to fight in formation like the Swiss, using the eighteen foot long Swiss pike which at that time was unknown in England. They also included arquebusiers, whose new guns, lighter than the earlier hand cannon but with a larger bore and a matchlock, fired armour piercing bullets that were devastatingly effective against mounted men-arms. Led by several hundred exiled English gentry, what might be termed the officer/man ratio was unusually high. And when it landed the little army would be reinforced by formidable recruits.
Furthermore, while Richmond had never even seen a full-scale battle – he himself called Bosworth ‘our first field’ – he possessed superlative commanders. The Earl of Oxford had smashed the Yorkist left at Barnet in 1471 (just as he would destroy the last Yorkist army at Stoke in 1487), while the Savoyard Philibert de Chandée, who commanded the French troops, clearly knew how to handle them, however ‘meschantz’ (worthless). Jasper Tudor’s experience of campaigning in Wales would be very useful in the early stages – he understood the management of that valiant but touchy race. And the expedition included an even greater warrior than Oxford. This was Bernard Stewart, Seigneur d’Aubigny, one of the French King’s Scots Archers. Although he was nearly forty, his real triumphs lay ahead; he was to be Captain of the Archers, a Marshal of France and a hero of the French invasions of Italy; in 1508 James IV would proudly refer to him as ‘the Father of War’. Aubigny had been French Ambassador to Scotland in 1484 and may well have helped persuade the French to aid Henry, perhaps to avenge that humiliating occupation of Edinburgh. Undoubtedly he brought a small Scots contingent; it is improbable that many came from the French King’s indispensable bodyguard, though one or two may have been spared – a laird present, possibly an archer, whose name we do know was Sir Alexander Bruce of Earlshall.9
Henry assembled his men and his few ships, perhaps at Rouen, and sailed up the Seine. No doubt with unhappy memories of his stormy journey of two years before, he seems to have waited for fine weather at Harfleur on the Norman coast before putting out to sea. His little fleet had a longer voyage ahead than the vast majority of those on board realized. On
Monday 1 August a soft wind was blowing from the south, which was what the shipmasters wanted. The Earl of Richmond set sail.
As soon as Richard had reached Nottingham in June, his spies brought him reliable information that the long-awaited invasion was about to begin. On 22 June he reissued his proclamation of the previous December against ‘Henry Tydder’ and his band of rebels and traitors ‘of whom many be known for open-murderers, adulterers and extortioners’, who had been chased out of Brittany for making proposals ‘too greatly unnatural and abominable’; they intended to commit ‘the most cruel murders, slaughters and robberies and disherisons that ever were seen in any Christian realm’ and to steal everyone’s estates and offices, even the bishoprics. Either Richard dictated this proclamation himself or it was someone who knew the workings of his mind. The following day he sent out Commissions of Array, ordering the commissioners, ‘upon peril of losing their lives, lands and goods’, to ensure that their men were properly ‘horsed and harnessed’ and ready to march at an hour’s notice.
Lord Stanley came to the King and asked permission to return to his estates in the North West to raise his tenantry. Richard plainly distrusted the man but dared not antagonize a subject whom he had made one of the three principal props of his regime. He compromised, insisting that Stanley leave his son, the 25-year-old Lord Strange, in his place. Stanley, according to Vergil, did not leave Nottingham until Strange had come, to be in fact if not name an unofficial hostage for his wily father’s good behaviour.
In July the King received confirmation that Henry’s fleet was about to sail. On the 24th of the month he sent for the Great Seal. Five days after sending for the seal, in yet another outburst of suspicion, Richard dismissed Bishop Russell from his post as its Keeper. Without the Seal it was impossible to issue Commissions of Array and raise an army. Predictably Russell was replaced by a Northerner – or at least a man whom the King had known in the North – Dr Thomas Barowe, Master of the Rolls. A product of Cambridge, he had been the King’s Chancellor when Richard was Duke of Gloucester and was obviously a reassuringly familiar figure. (On Barowe’s appointment to the Rolls two years before, Richard had sent him two pipes of wine.)