Chapter Eleven
‘You might have seen his father and mother in a state bordering almost on madness, by reason of their sudden grief.’
The ‘Second Continuation’ of the Croyland Chronicle
‘A Prince should reckon conspiracies of little account when his people hold him in esteem; but when it is hostile to him and bears hatred towards him, he ought to fear everything and everybody.’
Machiavelli, Il Principe
No one records how Edward of Middleham died. It was clearly a sudden and unexpected death. The Croyland chronicler merely says that it took place after only a very short illness, while Rous calls it ‘a tragic death’. Since his mother was apparently consumptive, the ten-year-old Prince may well have suffered a lung haemorrhage, which could have been both messy and painful. Richard and his Queen were crushed by this cruellest, most hideously ironical of blows. He had been their only son, ‘in whom all the hopes of the royal succession, fortified with so many oaths, were centred,’ the Croyland writer tells us. An eyewitness, he adds ‘You might have seen his father and mother in a state bordering almost of madness, by reason of their sudden grief.’ The boy expired on 9 April, a year to the day after Edward IV, and in an age of omens it seems that many Englishmen saw his death as God’s judgement on Richard – it is quite possible the King did so himself. The chronicler at Croyland observes gloomily, ‘It was fully seen how vain are the thoughts of a man who desires to establish his interests without the aid of God.’ The last Plantagenet Prince of Wales was buried in the parish church at Sheriff Hutton, where his battered, pathetically small, alabaster effigy may still be seen.1 There was now a succession problem, since there was no obvious heir presumptive to the throne. So shaken was Richard that it took him several months to come to a decision.
It may not be over-fanciful to detect a certain deterioration in the King after his son’s death. Admittedly he still tried to be efficient and popular. He negotiated sensible peaces with Scotland and Brittany and found time to deal with Irish affairs. His precautions against Henry Tudor continued to be excellently organized, while he employed a very professional intelligence service – with ‘the aid of spies beyond sea, at whatever price they could be secured, from whom he learned nearly all the movements of the enemy,’ according to the Croyland Chronicle. But plainly he felt crippled by his lack of an heir, as he would show by his sinister treatment of his unfortunate wife. He was increasingly worried about his unpopularity and ‘seditious rumours’. There are signs of vacillation, errors of judgement. Growing short of money, he returned to Edward IV’s forced loans – the ‘benevolences’ so ostentatiously forgone in his Parliament. The threat of invasion became an obsession.
When Richard had usurped the throne, Henry Tudor had not even been a cloud on the horizon – simply a Welsh exile from a lost cause, saved from obscurity only by a dash of questionably royal blood. The Great Chronicle of London preserves the memory of how little he was known to ordinary people, but how soon they became interested in him – ‘word sprang quickly of a gentleman being in the parts of Brittany named Henry and son of the Earl of Richmond’. Thanks to the usurpation and to his mother and John Morton, his star was clearly rising. By 1484 men were following the fugitives of 1483 across the sea to join him, from motives which varied from sheer opportunism to hatred of the present King of England. It was no longer a fight between Yorkist and Lancastrian but simply a struggle between two claimants. Despite his Coronation, his most royal blood and the purity of Plantagenet descent, Richard remained unaccepted by his people. It did not matter that his rival was part Welsh squire, part Valois prince, with a dash of Beaufort in him. Henry Tudor was the sole alternative.
For – as contemporaries, including the King himself, must have realized with bewilderment – the once invincible Yorkist party had broken in pieces. The loyalties which had triumphed at Towton, at Barnet and at Tewkesbury, which had eventually made Edward IV impregnable, no longer existed. The members of Edward’s Order of Our Lady of the White Rose may still have worn their insignia, yet they were ready to abandon their rose. Some former Yorkists had joined Henry Tudor, more would do so, while many who did neither nevertheless detested Richard, and were not going to risk their necks for him in battle. In place of the old Yorkist party the King had only his henchmen and three overmighty subjects – two of them treacherous.
Henry’s supporters were an increasingly formidable band.2 What was beginning to look like a court in exile included Lords Dorset, Pembroke (Jasper Tudor), Rivers (Edward Woodville), Devon (Edward Courtenay) and Welles, and many knights and gentlemen. There was also a briefless barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, Thomas Lovell, who would end his life as Treasurer of the Royal Household. Clerics too were joining the cause, not just the Bishops of Ely and Exeter, but men like Richard Fox, a future Bishop of Winchester. Morton, who for some reason preferred to stay in Flanders, communicated with Henry through Christopher Urswick, Rector of Puttenham in Hertfordshire, Margaret Beaufort’s confessor and one day to be Dean of Windsor. (Perhaps ironically this 36-year-old ‘honest, approved and serviceable priest’ was a Northcountryman from Furness in Lancashire.)3 Henry of Richmond may eventually have had as many as 500 followers with him in Brittany and France. They were certainly not a revived Lancastrian party, whatever Henry may have claimed, but simply an anti-Richard III party – as the King himself must have recognized with some bitterness.
Plainly Richard was by now only too well aware that the Welshman whom he had not even bothered to name in his proclamation against Buckingham the previous year was a danger to be eliminated at all costs. Once Henry Tudor was out of the way Richard would be perfectly secure. There was no other possible Pretender capable of challenging the King with any hope of success. Buckingham was dead; admittedly he had left a son – later to be executed by Henry VIII precisely because of his royal descent – but in 1484 he was only six. Otherwise there was Clarence’s son Warwick, aged eight (and perhaps mentally retarded, though there is no firm evidence), Warwick’s sister – also to be executed by Henry VIII – and the bastardized daughters of Edward IV. The ‘Old Royal Blood of England’ had run very thin indeed.
Since the summer of 1483, Richard had had an envoy at the court of Duke Francis, one Dr Thomas Hutton – ‘a man of pregnant wit’ and presumably of unusual diplomatic skill – and a member of his own Council. Hutton’s first instructions make no mention of Henry, and his main business seems to have been to negotiate a friendly alliance, Brittany standing in relation to France much as Scotland did to England. He was sharp enough to pick up news of Henry’s first expedition and rush back to warn Richard. The difficulty with Francis II of Brittany was the Duke’s fear, admittedly quite understandable, of Louis XI of France – the English King’s refusal to supply troops to defend the Duchy against the French threat explains why Francis had helped the Tudor. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the Duke was suffering from what appear to have been fits of premature senility, and that control over Breton affairs was passing into the hands of his unusually venal minister Pierre Landois.
Landois realized the financial possibilities of the situation. Some time in May 1484 his agents arrived in England and negotiated what was meant to be a lasting peace. At considerable expense Richard signed a treaty at Pontefract on 8 June, a treaty with secret clauses. He would supply a thousand archers, pay the Duke the revenues of the Earldom of Richmond – which had once belonged to the House of Brittany – and pay other large sums. In return Landois, who would be the real pecuniary beneficiary, would ensure that Henry Tudor was kept under strict confinement – probably he had every intention of handing Henry over.
Once again Morton thwarted the King. Somehow he heard of the negotiations with Landois and sent Urswick to warn Henry. Also acting under Morton’s instructions, Urswick – having delivered his message to Henry at Vannes – went on to the French court to beg an asylum in France. The Tudor would plainly be of use to the French as a stick with which to threaten England if necessary, especially in any conflict over Brittany. The actual ruler of France was not of course the boy Charles VIII, but his elder sister Anne de Beaujeu. Although only twenty-two, she was extremely formidable, a true daughter of Louis XI, who controlled the French Council through her husband, the future Duke of Bourbon. Francis II had no male heir and it was more than likely that when he died both Richard and the new Habsburg rulers of Flanders would do their best to stop France from taking over Brittany – the last of the semi-independent appenages within the French Kingdom.
13. Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, another of Richard’s strongholds, where Edward V’s uncle Earl Rivers, half-brother Lord Richard Grey and Chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan were executed. From S. and N. Buck, A Collection of Engravings of Castles and Abbeys, etc.
Urswick found the French court at Angers and had no difficulty in obtaining a passport for Henry. The Tudor then sent a large deputation of his followers from Vannes to plead his cause with Duke Francis, who at that moment was most conveniently in residence near the Anjou border. This was a feint; his uncle Jasper had orders to take the party into France by side roads and bridle paths, which they did successfully. Meanwhile, Henry stayed behind at Vannes with a considerable group, to avoid causing any suspicion. However, two days after Jasper’s departure, escorted by only five servants, he himself left Vannes on the pretext of visiting a friend at a nearby manor. Five miles on, the little group disappeared into a wood, where the Tudor changed clothes with one of his servants. They then rode as hard as possible by a secret route for Anjou, deliberately changing direction several times – so careful was Henry that his followers in Vannes had no idea that he had left them. All went well and he crossed the frontier, rejoining his uncle Jasper’s party at Angers as planned. It was in the nick of time. Troops sent by Landois with instructions to arrest him reached the border only an hour after he had crossed it.
The exact date of this sensational escape is not known, but Henry Tudor undoubtedly received a friendly welcome at the French court. The Council gave instructions on 11 October that he and his supporters were to be treated with honour; it also made financial provision for them. Then Duke Francis suddenly and unexpectedly recovered his wits and was furious with Landois for having harried this useful refugee into escaping. He summoned Sir Edward Woodville and Edward Poynings, the chief among the Tudor followers left behind at Vannes, and gave them and their friends permission, together with travelling expenses, to rejoin their master in France for over a year. Henry and his by now very substantial following were to accompany the peripatetic French court on progress, from Angers to Montargis and then to Paris.
14. Dr Christopher Urswick, Margaret Beaufort’s confessor, who in 1484 travelled secretly to Brittany to warn Henry Tudor that the Bretons were planning to sell him to Richard. Later he was Henry VII’s principal chaplain and Dean of Windsor. From a brass of 1523 in the church of St John, Hackney.
Richard finally decided that he had no hope of repeating the glories of 1482 in Scotland. That summer the Duke of Albany and his fellow exile, the Earl of Douglas, led what may have been a fairly considerable attack into Dumfriesshire; but on 22 July their English troops were cut to pieces at Lochmaben; Douglas was captured and though Albany succeeded in fleeing back across the Border, he was plainly of little future value. It was clear that there would be no more military promenades to an undefended Edinburgh and that Albany would never be ‘Alexander IV’; he died in France the following year, accidentally killed in a joust by the Duke of Orléans (the future Louis XII). The raiding and counter-raiding went on and it is likely that the Scots had the best of it.
At sea it was a different matter. We know that Richard had already had experience of directing naval operations. He returned to his familiar base of Scarborough in June and again in July, staying with Anne in the castle (though a house in the town is traditionally called ‘King Richard’s House’). The first occasion was to organize the large fleet which he had gathered there. To begin with the English ships met with reverses at the hands of the Scots, who were probably reinforced by French privateers, since none other than John Nesfield, Esquire of the Body, was captured by a French vessel – though apparently he was soon ransomed by the King. Nevertheless, it seems that Richard quickly inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scots fleet, after successfully bringing it to battle; it is not impossible that he himself was in command, as the Croyland chronicler attributes the victory to ‘his skill in naval warfare’. Certainly his second visit to Scarborough was of comparatively long duration, since he was there from 30 June to 11 July. At York shortly afterwards he signed a warrant for ‘victualling the King’s Ships at Scarborough’. Plainly he had good reason to be grateful to the men of Scarborough since he erected the town into an independent county of its own.4
But by now Richard knew that it was a futile war. He took advantage of his victory over James III to suggest they make peace. The King of Scots, who had clearly reached the same conclusion, nominated ambassadors to come to Nottingham in September and negotiate. When they came they agreed a three-year truce without difficulty, to be cemented by the marriage of Richard’s niece – Anne de la Pole, daughter of the Duchess of Suffolk and sister of the Earl of Lincoln – to the Duke of Rothesay, James’s heir. From a personal point of view, the most notable aspect of the Scots embassy to Nottingham was the Latin oration delivered before Richard by its leader Archibald Whitelaw, Archdeacon of Lothian. During it the Archdeacon quoted and applied to the English King ‘what was said by the poet of a most renowned Prince of the Thebans, that nature never enclosed within a smaller frame [italics mine] so great a mind or such remarkable powers’.5
Whitelaw’s polite compliment confirms yet again every other contemporary source as to Richard’s size. In addition to Rous, Vergil and More, the Elizabethan antiquary John Stow (born in 1525) had spoken to men who remembered him and who agreed that he was of short stature. There is one exception, however. A certain Nicolas von Poppelau from Silesia visited England as the Ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. It is likely that he was both boastful and an oddity; in his travel diary he says he carried a huge lance with him everywhere, which no one but he could lift – even if they managed to pick it up for a moment, its weight quickly dragged them to the ground. He was given an audience by the King at Pontefract on 1 May and spent ten days at his court. After the customary oration, Richard shook Poppelau’s hand and told an attendant to give him good accommodation. Next day he was present at the King’s Mass (was it yet another Mass for the Dead?), where he was impressed by superb music. Afterwards he watched Richard dine – Kings then dined alone or with their consort, served on bended knee – amid a crowd of courtiers. Richard singled him out, asking him many questions about the Emperor and the Princess of the Empire. He was delighted by Poppelau’s account of the Hungarian King’s victory over the Turks the previous year, exclaiming, ‘I wish my kingdom was on the Turkish border; with my own people alone and without being helped by other Princes, I would so much like to drive out not only Turks but all my other enemies.’
Richard may well have had the fashionable, if impracticable, enthusiasm for the crusade shared by many contemporary noblemen. He expressed more than once a wish to fight the infidel. The ballad ‘Bosworth Feilde’, most convincingly in view of Poppelau’s report, makes the King say, ‘I would I had the great Turk against me to fight.’
The Silesian was fed at the same table as the greatest courtiers for the remainder of his visit, and Richard gave him a gold collar which he ‘took from the neck of a certain lord’. What is baffling is Poppelau’s description of his host: ‘King Richard [was] three fingers taller than I, but a little thinner being not so thickset and much leaner; he also had very thin arms and legs, though a great heart.’6
Poppelau’s fascinating account of his meeting with the King is – in modern terms – the only personal interview which has survived, even though it has to be treated with some caution. Clearly Richard flattered the Silesian; he may well have been much more open with a foreigner than he would have with any Englishman. The overall impression made on Poppelau (who, it must be remembered, had met other monarchs) is undeniably that of a formidable, dignified and intelligent ruler, but it is also that of one with a Sword of Damocles hanging over him. The only puzzling detail is the Silesian’s claim that Richard was three fingers taller, but no doubt Poppelau was a barrel-chested dwarf.
Even if the King could not persuade his English subjects to approve of him, he was much more successful with the Irish lords, as the House of York had never lost the esteem earned by his father’s reign in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant. What authority there was in that turbulent country – or in the part of it supposedly subject to English rule – was exercised by the mighty FitzGerald family, Earls of Kildare and of Desmond. Richard left the Earl of Kildare undisturbed as Lord Deputy, though he seems to have had an excessive estimate of the Earl’s powers; hearing that Kildare’s sister had married the O’Neill, he somewhat optimistically asked the Earl to persuade that peculiarly intractable chieftain to return something of the royal Earldom of Ulster. The King was equally amiable to the Earl of Desmond, declaring he had ‘always had inward compassion of the death of his said father’ (who may indeed have been killed to please the Woodvilles). If certain reports had travelled across St George’s Channel, the Earl would no doubt have been surprised by this sympathy for his parent’s fate, especially when described by Richard as ‘atrociously murdered by colour of the law, against all manhood, reason and sound conscience’, though such moralizing was becoming familiar enough to his English subjects. The ‘Lord of Ireland’ – Richard’s official title – apparently feared that Desmond might go native among ‘the wild Iresshe’ and succumb to Gaelic culture; he asked him to wear English dress – presumably instead of trews and saffron mantle – and presented him with English doublets and hose, together with a robe of velvet and cloth of gold bearing a collar of golden suns and roses and a white boar.7 Polite messages were sent to other Irish magnates, thanking them for their loyalty. He secured it by leaving them alone.
Richard’s most important and lasting work was at home in England. In July 1484 he set up a permanent Council of the North, to be presided over from Sheriff Hutton by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. It was to meet quarterly at York. This body replaced the unofficial condominium exercised by himself when he was Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Northumberland prior to 1483. A genuine administrative achievement, it was to endure for 150 years. But nothing could have been better calculated to anger Henry Percy, one of those three principal props of Richard’s throne. Northumberland must have been still more incensed when, that autumn, Lord Dacre of Gilsland was appointed Warden of the Western Marches.
In August Richard at last brought himself to settle the succession. This too must have irritated Northumberland, since the new heir to the throne was none other than the Earl of Lincoln, President of that most unwelcome Council. Lincoln was the eldest son and heir of Richard’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. He was nineteen, already married, vigorous and intelligent. He received the titular Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, held by all Yorkist heirs apparent. Rous says that the young Earl of Warwick had previously been acknowledged as heir, and ‘in ceremonies at table and chamber was served first after the King and Queen’, but this is unlikely; if his father’s attainder had been reversed, he would have had a better claim to the throne than Richard. Rous adds that then ‘the Earl of Lincoln was preferred’.
Few people took Lincoln seriously as a future King of England. Richard confided to his counsellors that he was worried by his lack of children. He compensated by advancing his bastards. Although still a minor, John of Gloucester, referred to in household documents as ‘My Lord Bastard’, was made titular Captain of Calais. The patent of his appointment, surely dictated by his father, refers to ‘our dear son, our bastard John of Gloucester, whose quickness of mind, agility of body and inclination to all good customs give us great hope of his good service for the future’. ‘Dame Katherine Plantagenet’ was married to the Earl of Huntingdon – Great Chamberlain to her half-brother, the Prince of Wales – in 1484 and given a notably splendid dowry. (She died young like her brother, bearing no heirs.) But the King never contemplated legitimizing them, although he and his wife must have known that they would have no more children by each other.
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 kept 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 methods.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.