Chapter Seven
‘Free was he called of spending and somewhat above his power liberal; with large gifts he got him unsteadfast friendship.’
Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third
‘He kept to his own domains and strove to make himself popular with the people round about by granting favours and in his administration of justice.’
Dominic Mancini, De Occupatione Regni
Anglie per Riccardum Tercium
In the North Richard Gloucester became the mightiest subject that any English King has ever had. By the end of his time there, not even John of Gaunt or the King-maker had possessed more power or independence. It was not just because of his wide lands and many offices. It was a considerable achievement, since Northcountrymen were not easy to govern and the region held ancient loyalties to strongly entrenched families. Yet one may detect shortcomings.
Beyond question the Duke’s overall administration was brilliantly successful. It laid the foundation of the Council of the North, which he set up when he was King and which lasted until Charles I’s time. This enabled Northerners’ problems to be taken care of on the spot instead of being referred to London. Always suspicious of Southerners, the Northcountry people must none the less have been flattered that Richard so seldom left them, not even to go to court which – Mancini heard – ‘he rarely visited’. There is no evidence that he graced Gloucester with his presence before he became King, nor that he ever went to his enormous estates in South Wales. As Anne’s husband, the Nevill’s clan, with their countless retainers, accepted him as a kinsman and gave him their loyalty. He strove consciously to be worthy of it. Like his Nevill grandfather, he immersed himself in Border politics, guarding his folk against Scots raiders. One may guess that he took on Northcountry qualities, perhaps mannerisms; conceivably a Yorkshire accent was among them. He was always on ceaseless progress throughout the region. It is indisputable that his firm hand and employment of northern officials won him golden opinions and devoted servants among the townsmen and among some of the gentry. But in the end Gloucester’s dependence on the North and, above all, his omnipresence there were to help contribute to his downfall.
The North – England north of the river Trent – was a bleak, often rugged country. West of the Pennine Chain, the Lakeland hills of Cumberland and Westmorland and the sandy wastes and moors of Lancashire were generally poor and sparsely populated, though with pockets of good farmland. East of the Pennines, it was much more varied, rich wolds alternating with vast tracts of desolate moorland – even Derbyshire had its moors. York, the northern capital, was large, rich and prosperous, but the other two principal cities, Durham of the Prince Bishops and Carlisle, were comparatively small – Carlisle’s walls being ‘in compass scant a mile’, according to Leland.
As a race the Northerners were all but intractable – in 1489 a mob lynched the Earl of Northumberland for failing to cut their taxes. They were hard men, harsh and dour. They grew rougher and more warlike still towards the Border, Shaftoes and Fenwicks being a byword for ferocity, a society organized for war. Their squires lived in fortified ‘peel’ towers, not just to defend themselves from the Scots but as protection against their neighbours. Robbery, rustling, arson and manslaughter were endemic. The South dreaded them. A proverb ran:
Out of the North
All ill comes forth.
Gloucester was of course supreme in Cumberland, Westmorland and West Yorkshire, where the bulk of his estates lay. (A local speciality there was the ‘Carlisle axe’, a peculiarly vicious form of halberd.) In addition, although Warden of only the West Marches against Scotland, he had tacit authority over Lord Northumberland, who was the Warden of the East and Middle Marches. And, as Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster, Richard was all powerful in much of Lancashire as well. In substance, therefore, he was more or less viceroy of England north of Trent. Yet before he became King he would strengthen his position even further.
The Duke was interested in every aspect of his new domain, down to its mineral wealth. He fell victim to the sales patter of some enterprising German miners – though one source says it was a certain George Willarby – who convinced him that silver would be found next to local deposits of copper. In 1475 he obtained the custody of mines in Westmorland from Edward IV, and he appears to have had copper mines operating at Keswick and Alston in Cumberland and also in Northumberland (jointly with the Earl). Ten per cent of the silver was to go to the King. There is no record of any being found.1
Understandably Gloucester was frequently at York, an easy ride from his castle of Sheriff Hutton. The city boasted 12,000 inhabitants and sixty churches – with nine more outside the walls – as evidence of its prosperity. It contained countless artisans and tradesmen and still more merchants who, via the River Ouse and Kingston-upon-Hull, traded with the Low Countries, Germany and the Baltic. The Duke took calculated pains to flatter them all, dealing with such petty matters as the removing of illegal fish traps from the local rivers, and intervening in a disputed election for Mayor. Sometimes he managed to have them exempted from taxes. In 1476 when the King wanted to punish the city for riots, he persuaded him to relent. On one occasion he even sent a member of his household to be tried by the Mayor and Corporation for insulting a citizen of York.
Richard also made a point of being present at the chief event in the city’s year. This was the Mystery Plays, which were performed by the guilds on Corpus Christi – a feast falling between late May and June. As many as 600 players took part in fifty or more scenes staged on wagons in the streets around the Minster.2 In 1477 the Duke and his Duchess tactfully joined the Corpus Christi Guild, one of the richest in York, since it had close connections with the wealthy Merchant Adventurers Company. Graciously they walked in the guild’s procession when it escorted the Host in its silver and beryl pyx to the great cathedral, led by priests in gorgeous vestments and acolytes carrying candles and burning incense as they chanted. Richard was never averse to a procession of this sort, having a marked taste for formal piety.
His modern defenders make much of his popularity in York. But however rich its citizens may have been, they were politically negligible even though they paid good taxes and supplied soldiers. It is a cliché among historians of the Wars of the Roses that the cities took little part in the struggle. The Duke should have concentrated his energies on winning more friends among the magnates.
Durham had considerable status as the capital of what was almost an independent country, a palatine bishopric comprising Co. Durham itself together with parts of Northumberland and some places in Yorkshire. It was a buffer state between England and Scotland over which the Prince Bishop ruled like a king, striking his own money. It was frequently attacked by the Scots and, if he had little say in its administration, Gloucester had cause to be concerned about its military situation.
For one of the Duke’s problems was that his fief was a frontier land. Every so often Scots raiders struck deep into it, killing, plundering, burning, driving off cattle, in hit-and-run attacks. While York was too far south for them, Durham and Carlisle had always to be prepared for such irruptions, the people round about depending on fortified peel towers and bastles (i.e. bastilles) for protection. Richard had to be constantly on progress, not just to dispense justice among his violently quarrelsome subjects, but in order to organize the defences against invasion.
Carlisle, in Cumberland and only a few miles from the Border, was unmistakably a frontier town. Built of red sandstone, it possessed an imposing cathedral and a prosperous market, but was dominated by the huge castle on its bluff which was intended – perhaps unrealistically – to strike fear into Scots. The latter, popularly known as ‘Moss Troopers’, terrorized the local countryside, sallying forth from hidden fastnesses in the ‘Debatable Land’, as the wild moors and marshes of the Solway Moss were called. The Duke had to pay many visits to Carlisle.
A little town which he also visited on a number of occasions was Scarborough in Yorkshire. Like York it had once been controlled by the Earl of Northumberland, but Richard exchanged it for some of his wife’s estates. He developed close links with it and may even have had a house there instead of using the great castle on the cliffs over the North Sea. It was the nearest port to Sheriff Hutton, and a fast horseman could reach it in a few hours. When he became King, Gloucester made it into a county of its own, an extraordinary distinction. The reason for his interest was undoubtedly privateering. The Scots raided by sea as well as by land, even in peacetime, chiefly from Leith, and the English retaliated. The Duke took his office of Lord High Admiral very seriously indeed. In the South he delegated his legal work to a Dr William Godyer, who heard cases appertaining to the sea on a Thames-side quay in Southwark. Here in the North Richard was able to play an active role and fitted out his own ships – in 1474 one of them, the May Flower, captured a vessel called The Yellow Carvel, which belonged to the King of Scots, and an embassy had to be sent to James III to apologize. Privateering was a nasty, cruel business, captured crews being generally thrown overboard without mercy. There is no record of the Duke sailing on any of these expeditions.
Most warfare waged by Richard was on land. In April 1474 the Duke of Albany, brother to the Scots King, prepared to repulse the Duke of Gloucester, who was rumoured to be about to raid either the West or the Middle Marches of Scotland. This particular raid does not seem to have taken place. (A few years later Richard was to meet Albany in very different circumstances.) But hostilities between English and Scots were perennial.
No great northern lord can have liked having a Royal Duke, and an unusually formidable one, on his doorstep. Not only was Gloucester the King’s brother, but through his mother and wife he was a Nevill as well, and if he had acquired Nevill lands, he had also inherited Nevill feuds – something which he may not have quite understood. Even minor gentry must have been unsettled by so brutal a transference of loyalties as that which took place after the Yorkist triumph. Richard’s presence constituted nothing less than a revolution – social and administrative as well as dynastic. It is logical to suspect that conservative northern magnates were only too anxious to be rid of this meddlesome interloper, but because of the fear he inspired they hid their resentment under a mask of friendship and co-operation. The fact that he trusted them until the very last indicates a serious inability to judge his fellow men.
Above all, Gloucester misjudged the Percys. Until the rise of the Nevills they had been paramount in northern England. As Lancastrians they had lost their Earldom of Northumberland with the third Earl, who fell at Towton; many other members of the family had also died fighting against the House of York in the recent wars. Henry, the fourth Earl – six years older than Richard – had seen the inside of both the Fleet prison and the Tower before being restored to his lands and honours in 1469. Timid and indecisive, Lord Northumberland was quite ready to co-operate with Edward IV’s all-powerful brother. But it was surely unrealistic to expect him, a genuine, canny Northcountryman, to be unshakeably loyal to someone who, apart from everything else, was a self-made, imitation Northerner, and who must have had irritating southern ways. Furthermore, Gloucester was regarded as an ally by his wife’s Nevill kindred – the very last association to recommend him to a Percy. Yet the Duke obviously trusted the Earl. It surely needed excessive self-confidence to do so. Henry Percy was almost as supreme in the North East as Gloucester was in the North West and in addition commanded a deep, traditional respect throughout the North as a whole. The Duke took the greatest pains to be tactful, acting jointly with him whenever possible. But even if there was a species of condominium and if he was accorded a second-in-command’s rank, it was inevitable that Henry of Northumberland should resent Richard’s primacy. It is plain that he particularly resented the Duke’s influence in York, where once his forebears’ wishes had always been respected; nowadays the citizens took every opportunity to appeal against him to Richard, who invariably supported them. Gloucester and Northumberland were always vying with one another, though perhaps they did not admit it to themselves. Foreseeably – though not foreseen by the Duke – the Earl would eventually betray his rival.
Richard showed still more baseless sang-froid about another magnate, who was what would today be termed an outstanding security risk. Thomas, second Lord Stanley, born in 1435, belonged to a comparatively new great family which was still rising. During recent years it had acquired large estates in Cheshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire. Its present head, once Warwick’s brother-in-law, had twice switched his allegiance from York to Lancaster and then back again. As if that were not enough, his new wife was one of the last surviving Beauforts – Margaret, Countess of Richmond and mother to Henry Tudor. Yet, however obviously a natural traitor, the ‘wily fox’ was always too clever for Gloucester. In the end Thomas Stanley would kill him, or see that someone else did.3
Henry, fourth Lord Scrope of Bolton, was one of the rare northern magnates who might reasonably have been expected to be faithful to Gloucester. Born the same year as Stanley, he had an impeccably Yorkist background; not only had he fought with the King at Towton, but his grandfather had been executed in 1415 with Richard’s grandfather for plotting against Henry V. Admittedly he had compromised briefly with Warwick in 1470, but he had quickly returned to being Edward IV’s loyal and useful servant. Nevertheless, he bore a grudge; he resented the failure to give him back the Lordship of Man, confiscated from his family at the beginning of the century and now held by the Stanleys – doubtless Gloucester often heard about this when visiting Scrope at his splendid stronghold of Bolton. As with Northumberland, the Duke clearly had complete trust in him.4
Another important magnate was Lord Greystoke, whose lands were scattered all over Cumberland and Northumberland. Apparently he was helpful enough. However, having been born the year before Agincourt, Ralph Greystoke had reached what was then considered a great age by the time Richard arrived in the North.
However, it was not only the great families who retained their power which constituted a potential danger. The Cliffords, who had once held sway throughout the Lake District and in much of western Yorkshire, were old enemies of the House of York, long dispossessed. The tenth Lord Clifford had fallen in the battle against Gloucester’s father, while the thirteenth – known as the ‘black’ or the ‘butcher’ – slaughtered the Duke’s brother Rutland on the bridge at Wakefield, before being killed and attainted himself. Clifford’s son Henry, only three years younger than Gloucester, was brought up secretly in remote Yorkshire or Lakeland farmhouses, so humbly that he could neither read nor write; the ‘shepherd lord’ would not recover his inheritance until after Bosworth. Meanwhile, Richard occupied the Clifford Barony of Westmorland, the Clifford hereditary Sheriffdom of Cumberland and the Clifford family home at Skipton-in-Craven in the Pennines. Privately many north-western gentry must have resented such a usurpation and being forced to abandon their traditional loyalties. And rumours circulated widely that there was still a Clifford heir in hiding.
The North was in fact full of danger. Over large areas nobility and gentry were unhappy, seriously unsettled, and they were the people who did the fighting. But, judging from his behaviour when King, Richard trusted almost implicitly anyone who came from the North. His administration there is cited by most historians, hostile or friendly, as evidence that he would have made an excellent monarch had he survived. Nevertheless, his failure to inspire loyalty among its magnates indicates a disastrous incapacity to make good friends.
The men who worked most closely with Richard in the North were Lords Northumberland, Stanley, Scrope, Greystoke and Lovell, Sir Richard Ratcliff, Sir Ralph Assheton, Sir James Tyrell, Sir Thomas Makenfield, Sir Thomas Everingham, Sir John Conyers, Sir John Savile and Messrs Fairfax, Kendall, Harrington, Metcalfe and Pygott. These, with various unknown lawyers, were his administration’s principal officers. Not all came from the North. Lovell was from Northamptonshire and Tyrell from Suffolk, while Kendall, a ‘household man’ of the House of York, may possibly have originated from the West Country. But despite these exceptions it is clear that Gloucester had a predilection for Northerners – it was to become increasingly apparent after he became King.
Naturally the Duke had as many dealings with the Lords Spiritual as with the Lords Temporal. Senior clerics were no less professional administrators than churchmen. Among the Archbishops of York, George Nevill – the King-maker’s brother and Richard’s near kinsman – was completely broken when he was released from imprisonment, and died in 1476; ‘such goods as were gathered with sin were lost with sorrow’, his very mitre being broken up and its jewels set in a crown. Despite being a former Chancellor of Queen Margaret’s household and tutor to Prince Edward, and having once been suspended for Lancastrian sympathies, his successor Lawrence Booth gave no trouble. The humbly born Thomas Rotherham, who succeeded Booth in 1480, gave useful assistance, although Lord Chancellor of England and more often in London than in York; one day Richard would put him in prison. At Durham William Dudley, a former Dean of Windsor, was to send his troops to fight for the Duke against the Scots on three occasions. At Carlisle John Story was a gifted administrator and well thought of at court, being appointed an executor of Edward IV’s will; he acted as envoy to the Scots in 1471. Among the Bishops of Lincoln was John Russell, who was to be Richard’s Lord Chancellor and (almost certainly) would write the continuation to the Croyland Chronicle.
Gloucester made a point of being on very amiable terms with religious houses. In particular he gave offerings to Our Lady of Jervaulx and to shrines at Fountains Abbey and at Coverham Abbey. (Leland notes that ‘there was good singing in Coverham’ – perhaps it was the same in Richard’s time.) The Duke presented £20 to the Abbot and Canons of Coverham to help them rebuild their church. All three were mitred Abbots and men of considerable influence, even if they did not sit in the House of Lords.
The Duke was an ostentatiously munificent benefactor of the clergy. He paid for repairs at churches near his Yorkshire houses, among them Skipton-in-Craven and Sheriff Hutton, where he built a new chapel. He did still more at Middleham, where he converted the parish church into a ‘college’ with a dean, six chaplains, four clerks and six choristers; their function was to celebrate Masses for the King and Queen and their children, for himself and his wife and son, his mother and sisters – for their ‘good estate’ when alive and for their souls when dead. The Masses were also for the souls of his dead father, brothers and sisters. There was an altar for each of Gloucester’s favourite saints at this time, a fairly conventional selection – the Blessed Virgin, St George, St Catherine, St Cuthbert and St Barbara – apart from St Ninian.5 He intended to found a similar but larger college at Barnard Castle, though this does not seem to have materialized; it was to have been dedicated to St Margaret and St Ninian. (His devotion to the latter was perhaps a souvenir of some raid into Dumfriesshire.)
It has long been suggested – and almost equally long denied – that there may be significance in the fact that the licences for these foundations were both obtained on 21 February 1478. This was precisely three days after Clarence’s killing, and also the same day that Gloucester acquired Clarence’s office of Great Chamberlain. Whether there is any connection between the two events, Richard certainly believed that it was not just ‘an holy and wholesome thing to pray for the dead’, but a means of buying forgiveness for sins.
The Duke built on a large scale at his many residences. He had a string of mighty houses in his vast northern territories, to serve as centres of local influence and to facilitate his constant journeying – not only he, but his large retinue as well, had to be accommodated and provided with fresh horses – and he was constantly improving his residences. For a time he also possessed a house in the South, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, to which he added a superb great hall lit by huge Perpendicular windows with delicate tracery, though there is no evidence that he ever visited it. His real home, in so far as he had one at all, was divided between Middleham and Sheriff Hutton.
Middleham has already been described. Its rival, Sheriff Hutton, was closer to York and Scarborough. Only a few fragments remain of this once palatial house and a farm has been built inside its walls. Not even seventeenth-century prints preserve a glimpse of its splendours. Fortunately it was visited by Leland fifty years after Richard’s death. He tells us:
The castle of Sheriff Hutton, as I learned there, was builded by Ralph of Raby, the first Earl of Westmorland of the Nevills [Gloucester’s grandfather] … I marked in the forefront of the first area of the castle [it]self three great and high towers of which the gatehouse was the middle. In the second area there be a five or six towers, and the stately stair up to the hall is very magnificent, and so is the hall itself, and all the residue of the house, in so much that I saw no house in the North so like a princely lodgings.
Sheriff Hutton was the nexus of a group of princely manors which all belonged to Richard.
Another castle of which the Duke seems to have been fond was Pontefract in the West Riding, the southernmost of his northern residences. He was also partial to Skipton-in-Craven, and to Barnard Castle in the extreme south-west of Co. Durham. Built on a steep bank a hundred feet above the River Tees, the latter was almost as palatial as Sheriff Hutton, with two inner courtyards and, according to Leland, towers of ‘great lodging’. With its outbuildings it was reputed to cover almost seven acres. Barnard Castle was at the foot of the Pennines and a useful staging place on the long ride from Middleham to Penrith. Constructed of red sandstone like Carlisle, eighteen miles away, Penrith was yet another of Warwick’s former castles to which Richard grew attached. Here too he repaired the local church. Even today its windows preserve portraits said dubiously to be of his father and mother and of himself as King, and an inn in the town is still called The Gloucester Arms.
In addition the Duke must frequently have stayed with his subjects, whether at the mansions of great Lords, at Bishops’ palaces or at abbeys. When he visited York, he usually seems to have been the guest of the Augustinian friars at Lendal. We know that he was not above sleeping at ordinary inns. Yet undoubtedly he preferred splendour, demanding magnificence in his own dwellings. Although he seldom came to London, sometime after 1475 he purchased Crosby Place in Bishopsgate, which had been recently built by a rich woolman, Sir John Crosby. ‘Very large and beautiful and the highest at that time in London’, the Elizabethan antiquary John Stow informs us. (Forty years later it was bought by Thomas More – perhaps its ownership had something to do with his fascination with Richard.)
As Mancini says, Gloucester rarely went to court. The Italian believed that this absence was deliberate, to ‘avoid the Queen’s jealousy’, which sounds likely enough. The Woodvilles were steadily increasing their already substantial power and influence. They consisted of Elizabeth’s two sons, the Marquess of Dorset and Richard Grey – generally known as ‘Lord Richard’ – together with her brothers, Anthony, Earl Rivers, Sir Edward Woodville, Richard Woodville and Lionel Woodville, who was Bishop of Salisbury. In addition some, though not all, of her brothers-in-law belonged to the party, which had acquired such useful recruits as Sir Thomas Vaughan, tutor to the Prince of Wales. Dorset and Sir Edward were reasonably formidable, but the real leader was Rivers.
3. Crosby Place, Richard’s London town-house (or ‘inn’) when he was Duke of Gloucester – from here he organized his seizure of the throne in 1483. The great hall was moved from Bishopsgate to Chelsea in 1910. The hall is now being extended on its new site by the Thames.
Lord Rivers was an undeniably attractive figure, chivalrous, cultivated and travelled, a patron of letters, something of a mystic, and even a poet. Mancini gathered that ‘Rivers was always thought of as a generous, sensible and fair minded man, who had shown his quality throughout every possible change of fortune. However successful, he had never harmed anyone but indeed had done many kind actions.’ All these virtues did not stop Lord Rivers from being both ambitious and ruthless, and in the right circumstances he would obviously make the most of having ‘the care and direction of the King’s son’. In contrast to the Earl, the other three brothers were hated by everybody, not simply for their greed and lack of scruple but for being upstarts. The ‘old nobility’ in particular detested them. Moreover, according to Mancini, the whole of England blamed them for the destruction of Clarence.
The Woodvilles and Greys were not the only people with influence at court. There were two much-respected prelates. One was Richard’s neighbour, the Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor, Thomas Rotherham. The other was the even more formidable John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who was More’s future patron. And above all there was Hastings, Chamberlain of the Royal Household.
William, Lord Hastings, was Edward IV’s oldest and closest friend. Probably that alone was enough to make Elizabeth Woodville his enemy. ‘Hastings against whom the Queen especially grudged for the favour the King bare him,’ explains More. She also suspected he was a bad influence on her husband, ‘familiar with the King in wanton company’. (She may well have been right; after his death Richard’s propagandists would claim that the Chamberlain encouraged Edward ‘by his evil company and sinister procuring … in vicious living and inordinate abusing of his body’.) Furthermore he had been a firm friend of Clarence; it was he who persuaded the Duke to come over from Warwick in 1471. He thought of himself as no less of a friend of Gloucester, his old comrade in arms – we know from More that Richard had a very high opinion of him. On the other hand, there was venomously bad blood between Hastings and Dorset, if Mancini is to be believed. ‘He maintained a deadly feud with the Queen’s son,’ we are told, ‘on account of the mistresses they were always trying to steal or seduce from each other.’ To cap everything, he was Governor of Calais, a post of vital importance which the Woodvilles coveted. While aware of how much his wife loathed the man, Edward IV was unwilling to throw him over after a friendship of twenty years. It is true that on one occasion Rivers managed to slander him so convincingly that the Chamberlain found himself ‘far fallen into the King’s indignation and stood in great fear of himself’ but ‘it lasted not long’. (We only know of this incident from More.)
In 1480 Lord Hastings was fifty – approaching old age by fifteenth-century reckoning – a soldierly mixture of bravery, bluffness and frivolity, not very intelligent. But for all his failings he was deeply respected for his honesty and shining loyalty to the House of York, and was one of the most influential men in England. Everyone except the Woodvilles liked Hastings. He was especially popular with the ‘old nobility’ who regarded him as their spokesman at court against the Queen and her kin.6 (The phrase ‘old nobility’ was really a party label and simply meant those noblemen who disliked the Woodvilles and Greys. Far from being old, an entire new Yorkist peerage had been created; during his reign Edward made four Dukes, two Marquesses, eleven Earls, two Viscounts and six Barons – endowing them with the estates of peers who had backed the losing side.)
By the early 1480s it must have been obvious that Edward IV was going to pieces. At Picquigny Commynes had noticed that the King was putting on weight. Mancini, writing of his lastyears, tells us how Edward
was most immoderate with his food and drink. I have heard that he used to take purges just for the pleasure of being able to stuff his stomach again. Because of his indulgence and because of the idleness to which he became so prone after regaining the Crown, he developed a huge stomach – although previously he had not only been tall but lean as well and led a strenuous life.
His womanizing was equally out of control. Mancini also informs us that the King
was lustful to an extreme degree and most insulting to the many women he seduced. As soon as he had satisfied his lust he abandoned them, handing them over to other courtiers, much against their will. Married and unmarried, noblewomen and wenches, he made no distinction, though at least he never raped anyone. He got them all through money or promises and having had them said goodbye to them.
The Duke of Gloucester’s devotion to the North Country can in part be explained by the fact that he saw it as a refuge. It is easy to believe that not only did he fear the Woodvilles, but he was worried how he might be treated during his nephew’s reign. It could be very dangerous to be the King’s uncle, as the two previous Dukes of Gloucester had discovered, and, as has already been suggested, Richard may have shared Clarence’s paranoia. He must also have seen the North as a power base. More knew many contemporaries who suspected that Richard had made plans to seize the throne should his nephews still be children on the death of Edward IV – ‘whose life he looked that evil diet should shorten’.
This possibility did not occur to the King. In the final years of his reign he was devoting what remained of his energy to the situation in Scotland. Here the incompetence of James III offered considerable opportunities to the English. James had been seduced from the policy of friendship towards England by the ever-industrious Louis XI and was turning a blind eye on large-scale raids over the Border by his subjects, despite Edward’s complaints. By the spring of 1480 Scots raiding had become intolerable. On 12 May the Duke of Gloucester was appointed Lieutenant-General in the North with powers to raise troops. Nevertheless, the Earl of Angus – the redoubtable Archibald ‘Bell-the-Cat’ – overran and sacked Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast. Gloucester retaliated in September with a counter-raid, presumably killing, burning and laying waste as the custom was. For the moment this quieted matters, but in November Edward decided that he would have to invade Scotland the following summer – ‘to make against the Scots rigorous and cruel war’.7 During the winter of 1480–81 the Duke strengthened the walls of Carlisle, reinforced every garrison on the Border and called out levies for the coming campaign. He also assembled ships. In March 1481 he went down to London to discuss invasion plans.
Naval operations, based on both Scarborough and Newcastle, were entrusted to Lord Howard – the King’s ‘Lieutenant and Captain at Sea’. The future Duke of Norfolk, who was already over sixty and a veteran of the last campaigns of the Hundred Years War, had been an unwavering Yorkist from the very beginning. Knighted by Edward at Towton, he had remained uncompromisingly faithful during Henry VI’s second reign, joining Edward as soon as he returned in 1471. He was one of the King’s most useful servants, though violent-tempered and overbearing. Gloucester’s association as Admiral with old ‘Jockey’ – or ‘Jacky’ – Howard plainly made for an enduring friendship which would have important consequences. Despite his age Howard was still ruthlessly ambitious, still an up-and-coming man. (He features, sometimes unpleasantly, in the Paston Letters.)8A very experienced sailor who had already fought and won several naval battles, on this occasion he proved a devastatingly effective ‘Captain at Sea’. He had an excellent fleet crewed by 3,000 men, some of whom were equipped with brass hand-guns specially brought over from the Calais arsenal. In May 1482, in his flagship Mary Howard, he took his ships openly into the Firth of Forth, appearing off Pittenweem and then off Leith. As soon as he located it, he sailed straight at the enemy fleet which he routed completely, capturing eight of its largest vessels and sinking the rest. Before sailing for home, he destroyed the little Port of Blackness on the north coast of the Firth. However, he had much less success on a second voyage into the Firth later that summer – by now the Scots knew better than to engage Lord Howard at sea.
4. Scarborough, from where Richard directed naval operations against the Scots. When he became King he made the town a county of its own. From S. and N. Buck, A Collection of Engravings of Castles, Abbeys, etc.
It is likely that Gloucester personally directed naval operations on the west coast, in his capacity as Admiral. Here his trusted servant Sir Richard Ratcliff commanded a flotilla, which kept guard against Scots warships and privateers.
By contrast, the campaign on land was disappointing, even though Richard had the assistance of Lords Northumberland and Stanley. Edward was unexpectedly detained in the South by alarming disturbances and riots, which were caused by the savage taxes he was levying to pay for the war. Fat, overweight, jaded and tired, the King postponed the invasion. Meanwhile, his brother besieged Berwick, which controlled the main road over the eastern Border, but although it had only a small garrison it was defended by Archibald ‘Bell-the-Cat’. Despite being invested by land and sea for the rest of the year and throughout the winter by Stanley, Archibald managed to hold the town – by the spring of 1482 merely the outer wall had fallen. At the same time James III had raised a large army in readiness for the English onslaught and during 1481 launched three separate attacks over the Border, burning some small towns and taking many English prisoners. They appear to have been intercepted and beaten back into Scotland by Gloucester and Northumberland, who followed them to burn and lay waste a wide area before retreating.
During the hard winter of 1481–2 the Duke was occupied in putting down riots all over the North in protest against the crushing war taxation. The Scots kept up their usual hit-and-run raids. However, in May 1482 Gloucester again swept over the Border, to storm and sack the not insignificant town of Dumfries.
If the main business was the continuing siege of Berwick, it was interrupted by countless little battles and skirmishes. While few details have survived, it seems that so much fighting gave the Duke a considerable military reputation. One long-forgotten battle, Hutton Field near Berwick, may have been a last Scots effort to relieve the town. Here old Sir Ralph Assheton – ‘The Black Knight of Ashton’ – did such excellent service that Richard created him a Banneret on the spot. The Black Knight would do him even better service the following year.9
However, the entire situation on the Border had been changed by the arrival in England of James III’s brother at the end of 1482. The King of Scots was despised by his nobility, on account of excessively artistic tastes and low-born favourites, and was therefore vulnerable. At the same time his brother Alexander, Duke of Albany, was consumed by ambition and suffered from a classic ‘second-son’ complex – Kendall’s amusing phrase ‘Clarence in a kilt’ is probably very near the mark. And Albany was a much tougher and more resourceful character than King James. When imprisoned in 1479 in a high tower, he persuaded a ‘chamber child’ (valet) to help him kill the guards and escape; the boy fell from the tower, breaking his leg, so the Duke reached a ship to France and safety carrying him in his arms. He came to England at the invitation of Edward IV, who promised to help him if he would annul his marriage to the girl he had just wed in France at Louis XI’s behest and marry Edward’s daughter Cecily. In June 1482, in a treaty at Fotheringay, Albany pledged himself to surrender Berwick and other Border lands, to recognize English overlordship of Scotland, to abandon the ‘auld alliance’ with France and to marry Princess Cecily. In return the English recognized him as ‘Alexander IV’ and promised to help him oust James. There began a brief but fascinating partnership between the two ruthless brothers of two reigning monarchs. Richard Gloucester’s ambition could well have been fuelled by that of Alexander Albany.
On 12 June 1482 Richard was again appointed Lieutenant-General in the North. By July the new hammer of the Scots and ‘King Alexander’ were ready to invade Scotland with 20,000 men, including Northumberland and Stanley.10 They marched over the Border, devastating Berwickshire and Roxburghshire as they went. At Berwick the townsmen surrendered as soon as they saw the vast host, only the citadel holding out. By an extraordinary piece of luck, the invasion coincided with the Scots lords’ decision to arrest James III on 22 July and imprison him in Edinburgh Castle. In consequence Gloucester was able to occupy the city of Edinburgh, without striking a blow, at the end of the month.
Richard’s object was not so much to defeat the Scots – who in any case were already in total disarray – but to install ‘Alexander IV’ as a client King. However, the latter needed time in which to build up support for his usurpation; accordingly, just like Edward IV in 1471, Albany denied any designs on the Scots Crown and announced that he had merely come to reclaim his Duchy. He also asked Gloucester to leave Edinburgh. The Scots nobles then sued for peace with England. While emphasizing that he had no full authority, Richard insisted on the immediate surrender of Berwick and on repayment of the dowry of Princess Cecily, who had once been betrothed to James III’s son and heir as well as to Albany. The Scots quickly agreed to everything, even to the marriage of James’s sister to Lord Rivers, one concession which no doubt did not exactly delight the Duke of Gloucester. After barely a fortnight’s occupation at most, he retreated from Edinburgh and marched back to Berwick, whose citadel surrendered to him on 24 August. Even before the surrender he disbanded all save 1,700 men of his army in confident anticipation.
In the event, the Duke of Albany became briefly Lieutenant-General [Regent] of Scotland, but was ousted by King James before the year was out. Instead of the subservient Scots regime for which he hoped, Gloucester had merely obtained Berwick and a short truce. He had thrown away the chance of obtaining what could have been far more advantageous terms – and the occupation of Edinburgh had been made possible only because of a rare moment of Scots weakness. He had in fact misjudged Albany’s ability and the whole political situation in Scotland.
The Croyland chronicler thought that Edward IV was privately furious at such an opportunity being lost. ‘What he [Richard] achieved by this expedition … he needlessly squandered.’ He adds that to keep and defend Berwick was a ruinously costly business. Beyond question Gloucester had shown remarkably poor political judgement – perhaps he was carried away by a megalomaniac chimera of subduing all Scotland. However, English joy at having occupied the enemy capital and at what appeared superficially to be a great victory no doubt mollified his brother to some extent. All over England there were salvoes from cannons and bonfires in celebration.
For the war with Scotland of 1480–83 was seen as much more than a mere Border skirmish, even if there had been no pitched battles. Englishmen regarded it as a full-scale conflict with a foreign power. They had been driven out of France by Charles VII and then tricked out of it at Picquigny by Louis XI, and Richard had won the first English victory over foreigners since the days of Old Talbot’s triumphs – if anything, they hated the Scots more than the French. In the autumn of 1482 most Englishmen considered the Duke of Gloucester a national hero.
A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to explain away Richard’s deformity, The irregularity of his shoulders has sometimes been ascribed to the effect of too much swordsmanship on a delicate physique, while even Charles Ross rejected their unevenness, blaming Sir Thomas More for stamping on Tudor imagination a mistaken belief that he was a crookback. Now, however, the skeleton has shown that More was only telling the truth and that, as Shakespeare says, the King was ‘not made to court an amorous looking-glass.’
At thirty Richard was a slightly built, very short and thin man with slender limbs. He bore a striking resemblance to his ‘most dread and dear father’ the Duke of York; if More is to be believed, Richard’s propagandist Dr Sha saw in him ‘the sure undoubted image, the plain express likeness of the noble Duke, whose remembrance can never die while he lives’. To judge from a comparison between the Society of Antiquaries’ portrait of him and a series of contemporary miniatures of Margaret of York, he also had some resemblance to his sister – a small woman with sharp, peaked features. Almost all contemporary descriptions save Nicholas von Poppelau’s (see p. 205) testify that Gloucester was unusually small, and that physically it was his most noticeable characteristic. Rous speaks of ‘his little body and feeble strength” while Vergil says he was ‘little of stature’. We know from his skeleton that although he was five feet eight inches tall the scoliosis that crooked his back made him much shorter - it may also have given him a small hump. However, these deformities were no doubt largely disguised by a good tailor. He had undeniably good features even if, judging from copies of portraits done in his lifetime, they wore an oddly restless look. More, who had spoken to many people who remembered the Duke, tells us he was ‘hard favoured of visage and such as in princes is called warlike, in other men otherwise’. Vergil is more specific – he had a ‘short and sour countenance’. (A figure in a Flemish miniature of about 1470, tentatively identified as Gloucester, shows a strangely sharp and acid face.) The Croyland writer, describing his appearance at Bosworth, speaks of ‘a countenance which, always attenuated, was on this occasion more livid and ghastly than usual’. Making allowances for partisan exaggeration, it is reasonable to deduce from this eyewitness testimony that Richard’s face was oddly thin and pale with almost feverishly bright eyes perhaps due to the pain he suffered from his deformed spine. Vergil adds that when the Duke was thinking he would constantly bite his lip and toy with the dagger at his belt – drawing it half out of the sheath and then thrusting it back again.
One has then the impression of a tense, highly strung – perhaps neurotic – little creature, wiry, full of energy and quick in his movements, with a harsh, aggressive expression. It is probable that he was impatient, easily irritated. More pictures him in a rage ‘with a wonderfully sour angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning, and fretting and gnawing on his lip’. However, he also makes it clear that Richard had plenty of charm if he cared to use it, with an amiable and unassuming manner – on occasion he could be ‘merry’ and ‘companionable’. Even Rous admits that he had ‘a smooth front’. But since More describes him as ‘close and secret’, and Mancini confirms that he was renowned for concealing his real thoughts, one may guess that normally he was reserved and uncommunicative. It is obvious that the Duke of Gloucester was an alarmingly forceful personality – Vergil describes him as ‘a man much to be feared for circumspection and celerity’ while the Croyland chronicler says that he was swift and alert, with an ‘overweening mind’.11
We know almost nothing of his personal tastes. As with his houses, a love of ostentation is discernible in his indulgence in fine clothes. This is by no means invariably the case among great lords of his time – Louis XI was renowned for his shabbiness – though admittedly Edward IV always dressed with the utmost splendour. It is reasonable to speculate that the Duke may have been trying to compensate for his unimpressive physique. Like Edward, he was a keen hunting man, though he does not seem to have shared his brother’s weakness for whoring. He also had a passion for hawking, that most dramatic and savage of field sports; when he became King he bought goshawks, peregrines and lanner falcons all over England and Wales and sent a man ‘beyond seas’ to purchase birds of prey – presumably the magnificent gerfalcons. Entertainments listed in his household accounts indicate that he was not unconvivial. Probably he was one of those men who are happiest when working – in his case at politics, administration and soldiering.
His reading, as with most noblemen of the age, is likely to have been very limited. (Almost certainly he read aloud to himself, since this was then the custom.) Apart from religious works, few books which belonged to Richard have been identified. Among them are Aegidius on statecraft, aTristan, William of Worcester’s collection of documents about Normandy, and the so-called Chronicle of John of Brompton; the last was a history of Britain supposedly written by an Abbot of Jervaulx, a monastery known to the Duke since childhood and where he maintained a stable of horses. Two others were clearly favourites. A book of tales, including two by Chaucer, bears the inscription ‘tant le desiree R. Gloucestre’ in his own hand, while an English translation of Vegetius’s De Re Militari– the standard treatise on war for medieval man – is the only illuminated manuscript which is known to have been commissioned by him.
Yet it is not too fanciful to discern an enthusiasm for the fashionable literature of the day. To some extent – in his own eyes at any rate – Richard seems to have modelled himself on the heroes of the knightly romance. Indeed, his own death can be seen as positively Arthurian; it is ironical that the Morte d’Arthur was printed during the last weeks of his life. His motto and badge, his interest in heraldry, all reveal the obsession with chivalry displayed by most great princes at that time.
By now the Duke of Gloucester had clearly acquired a considerable reputation as a military commander. ‘A courageous and most daring prince’, the Croyland chronicler calls him. ‘In warfare such was his renown that any difficult or dangerous task necessary for the safety of the realm was entrusted to his direction and generalship,’ says Mancini. ‘No evil captain was he in the war, as to which his disposition was more meat than for peace,’ comments More, who adds that the Duke had both defeats and victories but never for want of bravery or ability. Yet while contemporary Englishmen hailed Richard as a hero for his exploits on the Border, he never actually commanded an army in a pitched battle until Bosworth. All his experience was of raiding and guerrilla warfare, and ultimately it failed him. Professor Charles Ross, the most authoritative historian of the Wars of the Roses, admits that the Duke’s gifts as a soldier have been inflated – ‘His military ability remains an open question.’
Perhaps Richard reveals a little of himself in the pattern of his religious life, which has never been properly examined. He must have absorbed something of his mother’s piety to judge from his spiritual reading. Some years ago a manuscript English Bible, Wycliff’s translation, was discovered in a New York library. Its history is unknown but the name ‘Richard Gloucester’ is written in it in his hand. If one is going too far in ascribing his desire to read a forbidden work – forbidden in the vernacular – to fear of personal damnation, it at least shows intense curiosity in the meaning of his religion. He was certainly no Lollard, and impeccably Catholic in believing in penance and atonement, in the efficacy of good works and the intercession of saints. He venerated relics, and was constantly going on pilgrimage, visiting shrines barefoot, taking part in religious processions and endowing chantries to pray for the souls of his dead kindred. Plainly the next world was very real to him. The fact that none of this inhibited a complete lack of scruple indicates a certain ability to lose touch with reality and a weakness for self-deception. But Milton (in Eikonoklastes) was very wide of the mark in discerning in Richard ‘a deep dissembler, not of his affections only, but of his religion’.
At the end of 1482 the Duke of Gloucester rode down to London to receive a hero’s welcome and to spend Christmas with his brother and attend the forthcoming Parliament. It is more than likely that during his stay at court he was unpleasantly reminded yet again of just how dangerous were the Queen and the Woodvilles, and that he tried to strengthen his links with the anti-Woodville faction. More says specifically that ‘he was well aware of, and helped to maintain a long-continued grudge and heart-burning between the Queen’s kindred and the King’s blood’ – the latter being Hastings and the ‘old nobility’.
When Parliament met in January 1483, it was full of praise for the Duke’s conduct of the war with Scotland. At the King’s request it passed legislation to give him the hereditary Wardenship of the West Marches, a hereditary right to the office of Constable of Carlisle (together with the castle and to all Crown lands in Cumberland), besides virtually regal powers over the county and also over the thirty miles of Scots Border country he now controlled – with the same powers over any more Scots territory he might overrun. He was even authorized to naturalize Scots as Englishmen under his own seal, receiving exactly the same palatine powers as the Prince Bishop of Durham. He had been given, in fact if not name, an independent principality of his own in the North West.
For the Earl of Northumberland all this must have been very bitter news indeed. It looked as though the Percys had finally – and permanently – lost their position as the leading family of the North of England.
It was typical of Gloucester that he should ask Parliament to exempt the northern counties from the latest round of taxation. As More discerned, he was prodigal in buying unreliable support. It was not a realistic policy, could not be continued when he became King, and would end only in disappointed expectations and unpopularity.
In the last days of February he said a no doubt grateful goodbye to Edward IV, who must have been failing visibly. He never saw him again. There may be some truth in stories of the King’s dejection at his setbacks in foreign policy, the opportunity missed in Scotland and the realization that Louis XI had acquired half of Burgundy by betrothing the Dauphin to its heiress, and by his reconciliation to the titular Habsburg Duke at the Treaty of Arras. In any case gluttony and whoring had ruined his once magnificent constitution. The Croyland writer refers to him at this time as ‘a man of such corpulence and so fond of boon companionship, vanities, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyments’.
The French chronicler Basin records that on Good Friday 1483 Edward suffered a terrible fit of indigestion, from stuffing himself with fruit and vegetables. Mancini, who was then in London, recounts how just after Easter the King went in a small boat to watch some fishing, presumably on the Thames: ‘Being a tall and very fat man, though not exactly misshapen, he let the damp cold chill his guts … and caught a sickness from which he never recovered.’ Shortly after the fishing expedition he seems to have had a stroke – Commynes says it was an apoplexy – but his doctors could not diagnose what was wrong. Nevertheless, Edward himself soon ‘perceived his natural strength so sore enfeebled that he despaired all recovery’. Not long before he died, he summoned Hastings and the Woodvilles to his bedside, begging them to be reconciled – he was so weak that he could not stay sitting up and finished his plea lying on his side. Everyone shed tears and shook hands, even Dorset. Edward IV died on 9 April 1483. ‘I was the King and kept you from your foe,’ wrote the poet laureate Skelton in his funeral elegy.
The news reached Richard, apparently at Middleham, two days later. It was brought by one of Hastings’s men, who must have ridden like the wind. Having seen a good deal of his brother in recent months, the Duke cannot have been entirely surprised.12
More tells of an ominous incident:
[The] same night that King Edward died, one called Mistlebrook, long ere the day sprung, came in great haste to the house of one Pottyer dwelling in Redcross Street without Cripplegate; and when he was with hasty rapping quickly let in, the said Mistlebrook showed unto Pottyer that King Edward was departed. ‘By my troth, man,’ quoth Pottyer, ‘then will my master the Duke of Gloucester be King.’
Sir Thomas adds (in his Latin version of the History) that he heard this story from his father, who was then living in Milk Street in the same ward as Redcross Street. William Mistlebrook and Richard Pottyer undoubtedly existed and have been identified by modern historians; shortly after Gloucester had indeed become King, the latter was appointed an attorney of the Duchy of Lancaster in Chancery – hitherto he may have been the Duke’s attorney in Chancery. Plainly Pottyer knew his master only too well.