by Ann Wroe
Now, as he sat for his portrait, every detail cried the latest look. The angle of his hat was exactly judged; it was not last year’s. The neck-opening of his surcoat, one side pleated, the other plain, was unquestionably ‘the new guise’, or ‘the new jet’, as he himself would have put it. Cloth-of-gold was the fabric of choice among the tiny elite who qualified to wear it. Silver and gold robes together, as this young man wore them, were the ‘royalest’ advertisement of nobility. Gold chains, the more the better, were so important that in 1491 the Milanese ambassador in France described those worn by the Scottish envoys before he mentioned their horses or their robes. A chain worth £1,000 or more was not uncommon among a king’s chief officers. Their value was known and flaunted. Richard Plantagenet wore two long chains carefully arranged in a pattern; the longer one seemed to cross on his chest and may have fallen as far as his waist. Cross-bracing of this sort, like cross-lacing, was almost aggressively up to date.
Just as fashionably, his blond hair had been brushed to fall in full regular waves to his shoulders. In John Skelton’s poem ‘Magnificence’, Courtly Abusion (a hopeless dandy, speaking doggerel French and Flemish) had done this, twirling alone on stage and hoping somebody was watching him:
My hair busheth
So pleasantly,
My robe rusheth
So ruttingly [dashingly],
Meseem I fly,
I am so light
To dance delight.
‘Nesh’ was the word for hair like this. A physiognomist, skilled in the science of looking at faces, would tell you that it meant timidity, like the soft-furred hare that started and ran in the field. Soft skin, too, like a woman’s, meant a man who was changeable and fickle, susceptible to movement because the denser vapours did not settle in him. The neshness of a man’s heart, though possibly good soil for God to work in, was more often a feather-bed in which the devil lay, tempting him to delicacy and luxury. It was of course unwise, as Aristotle had told the Emperor Alexander, to read too much into one or two signs. But the tenth sign of timidity was also suggested by the pose Plantagenet had struck: ‘overlightly moving of colour and semblant, and have semblant to be pensive, and full of thoughts’.
As a final decorative touch, the prince’s hair had been curled into two quiffs, one on either side of his face. It was not a practical design; if he had tried to do anything active, they would have fallen into his eyes. Some skill would have been needed to achieve this effect. On his first rising, as recommended for princes, his servants would have vigorously washed and rubbed his hair, dispelling the vapours gathered during sleep and unlocking the shutters of the brain. They would next have stretched his hair with hot tongs as he sat by the fire, stiffening it with a sticky paste of resin, egg-white and sulphur, arranging the curls with comb and brush. The freshest gallants fixed them up at night with nets or little presses. Sebastian Brant described the techniques that year in his chapter on Innovations in The Ship of Fools, accompanying the printed text with a woodcut of the curled fop, also in wildly cross-laced underwear, gazing at himself in a hand-mirror. Playing with your hair, washing it, trussing and combing it, making it stand out and seem curly, then looking in the glass, were all chief sins of the body that had to be confessed, if you could find a priest handy.
The two fashion-foibles of the age, curling and pleating, were thus exquisitely represented in Richard Plantagenet as he sat there. Such a passion for ‘curiosities’, in Brant’s view, drew the soul away from God. Just as dangerously, it led towards that ‘intricacy of thought’ that tried to construct, like a piece of Flemish needlework, a reasoned explanation for the mysteries of the Incarnation or the Sacrament. Plantagenet may never have considered such questions, but his precious curls were quite enough to raise this suspicion about him. He sat still enough not to disturb them; but had you got close to him, as close as the artist was, you might have sniffed – above the herb-and-rosewater perfumes of his recent bath – a more workaday smell, of scorched hair and sulphur.
The pose he had chosen, too, was deliberate. He held his head at the king’s angle, slightly dipped to the left, as if attending kindly to someone lower than himself. He had possibly assumed this pose quite naturally, as soon as he sat down. But possibly, too, it had been suggested to him. The look would have been familiar from countless representations, as indeed from his own performances in councils, on balustrades and at formal receptions. It suggested piety, nobility, humility, the benign goodness of the ruling class. The angels, too, had this expression as they gazed on the earth and blessed it in a slightly distant way. It was the ideal look of the age, both in heaven and on earth.
You could call him handsome; most people did, though his bearing impressed them even more. Molinet thought him ‘really good-looking’, fort gorgias, using a word that meant he outshone those around him. The Venetian ambassador to London in 1497 called him zentil, ‘noble’, in manners as in looks. Later chroniclers went further. After the off-hand remark of Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s historian, that the young man was forma non ineleganti (probably gleaned from people who had seen him) came the assertions of Hall and his followers that he was ‘of visage beautiful, of countenance demure’: like the fifteen-year-old Galahad before his knighting, demure as a dove. Beyond this, Bacon wrote, he had ‘such a crafty and bewitching fashion both to move pity and to induce belief, as was like a kind of fascination and enchantment to those that saw him or heard him’. The looks and manner together made him amabilis, lovely and worthy to be loved.
Taken feature by feature, his face was almost a pastiche of what contemporaries admired. The jaw was strongly moulded, with a cleft in the chin. The mouth was delicate and petulant, absurdly fashionable: the lower lip full, with a slight dinted divide at the centre, the upper lip modelled in a perfect bow, even to the little rise at the edges that suggested the suppression of a smile. The nose was well-shaped and in proportion: a nose like this, ‘rather long and turned up a little’, was exactly what Louis XI wanted on his tomb effigy, ‘the handsomest countenance you can make him’, rather than the big hooked article he had in life. Plantagenet’s forehead was high, the brows well shaped, the whole face (smooth and scarcely touched by the razor) regular and open. A sanguine temperament, the physiognomist would have told you: a young man’s natural heat fuelled with excess of blood and disposed, especially after wine, to laugh, dance and tumble women. In medical treatises the sanguine man was often drawn in court clothes, for courts were the element in which he thrived. He was associated, too, with air, which gave him, like the butterfly, his vitality and levity.
But there was a flaw. It was noticed in October 1497 by Henry VII’s envoy Richmond Herald (‘a wise man who noticed everything’, according to a colleague). Richmond remarked to the Milanese ambassador that the young man had a defective left eye que manca un poco da strambre, which lacked a little brightness. For this reason, he was ‘not handsome’, whatever the assumptions that had gone before. Like his beauty, this defect too passed into the folk memory of him. Bacon’s description of his last debacle, when he began to ‘squint one eye upon the crown and another upon the sanctuary’, suggested that the strangeness of his left eye was widely known, though only Richmond’s observation preserves it in writing.
That eye would have been the next thing the artist noticed, once the general impression of brilliance had settled. Neither the shape nor the colour of this eye resembled the other, and the gaze was slightly misdirected. The upper lid was creased above it, and under the lower lid, near the nose, was a mark that might have been a scar. Some accident, perhaps, had caused these things, or else he had been born with them. The eye did not seem blind, but its opacity suggested that his vision was dulled. Richmond was right to notice the lack of brightness in it. The artist too, as he drew, could do little to invest it with life. Plantagenet had turned his good side towards him, naturally enough, but the light from the window therefore fell on the most unsettling thing about him.
When faced with c
ontradictory signs in a man, you judged him by his eyes, ‘for they be most true and provable’. Strange eyes were dangerous, and could not be trusted. When a maiden of India with speckled eyes was sent once to Alexander, he found she had been suckled on poison that had invisibly envenomed her. A film upon the eye could imply blindness that was spiritual rather than physical: an insufficient knowledge of the Creed, or a poor appreciation that the beauties of the world were not lasting.
Eyes of two different lights or colours were even more disturbing. They accounted perhaps for the veneficium, the powers of hazardous bewitchment, that Bacon attributed to this young man. Philosophers taught that understanding and affection were represented by the right eye and the left respectively. If these were not in balance, ‘due and beauteous proportion’ was offended. When the body politic was thus disordered, the right eye drew up statutes and the left perverted their meaning; the right offered justice, but the left accepted false information; the right made sincere and eloquent promises, while the left did nothing to fulfil them. A look that was ‘single and not turned to doubleness’ made the body ‘fair and light’. A double look led to darkness.
You might ask, then (if it was your place to ask), whether this young man was bound for the light or the dark. For the moment, evidently, he was enthroned in hope, but it might not last. Fortune clearly favoured him, but her favour was ever likely to be withdrawn again. In fact it was possible to think, as you looked at him, that Fortune herself had dressed him in his exquisite clothes. She had put on him these stiff, heavy, shining robes in which his natural lightness was weighed down with splendour. She had hung about his neck the chains of a status he might have been happier without; and the heavier the chains, the greater the danger that their sheer weight might crush the life from him. She had placed his hat on his head, giving it a nudge until it was at the very angle worn by Pride, ‘bonet on side’, as he danced in Hell. Then, as a final touch, she had pinned to the brim a brooch so rich that it clearly bore the burden of some sponsor’s expectations. She had him then – until, changing her mind like any pretty girl, she began as teasingly to unbuckle him again.
The original of this portrait has long since vanished. It was copied in the 1560s by Jacques le Boucq, a French herald who was making a collection, for a gentleman of Lille, of portraits of notable people. He made his copies in red chalk or pencil; this was one of his red-chalk sketches, à la sanguine in French, as if he sought to reproduce the tints of the living flesh. It was done with great care for detail, as not all his drawings were, and with the colour-notes in full. The result was another version, in effect, of the first sketch done by the artist.
This counterfeit was well done; yet, in the deepest sense, it was not true. Like the mirror-image, it was not the person it represented but was somehow dim, removed and secondary. A counterfeit could thus begin to mismatch life, becoming ill-done and crooked. The word contained both meanings. The counterfeit Excalibur given by Morgan le Fay, the enchantress, to King Arthur looked exactly like his sword, but it was brittle and could not bite steel as Excalibur could. Battle revealed its falseness. Caxton used the word ‘counterfeit’ both for broken walls and bodies curved with age, fine and straight things fallen out of line. In the poetry of Skelton lurked a character, Counterfeit Countenance, who presided over a whole skewed world of false smiles, gestures, documents and claims. In fact, Skelton implied, this was the real world.
Within five years, Skelton was also to size up this prince who now sat so still and dazzling before the artist. He judged him to be barnyard shit, though dressed up like a peacock. Others were less sure. In 1542, Hall, who had never seen him, used ‘counterfeit’ in both its meanings to describe him. This young man, he wrote, ‘kept such a princely countenance, and so counterfeit a majesty royal, that all men in manner did firmly believe that he was extracted of the noble house and family of the dukes of York’. ‘All men’ was Hall’s exaggeration. Yet plenty did believe, or simply did not question; and among them was the artist who was now involved in the task of drawing him.
As he drew, there was a possibility he might uncover the truth of the man before him. He might catch some sense of Plantagenet’s soul, his real and eternal self, in his face. The soul was in essence a miniature of him, from the hairs on his head to the nails on his toes; yet it was also divine, God’s image in him. However lowly a man was, his soul gave him that nobility. Artists showed it innocent, defenceless and naked as a child, ‘his right clearness colour of flowers, brightness of sun, figure of man, pleasant as precious stones’. St Bernard saw it as a white lily-flower, delicate and shining, among the thorns and corruption of the world. It was the motivating part and deep nature of bad men as well as good, and its sensitivity to humours made men what they were. In most men the ‘little soul’ lived closed in the breast, but philosophers taught that it dwelt within the brain, spilling out its fiery virtue sometimes to the heart.
Could this reality be caught in a man as he lived? The best artists of the time tried hard to do so. The body, after all, could not obscure the soul entirely. Gross flesh was not opaque, but like a cloud-filled sky or a dark horn lantern through which the brightness of the soul could flicker just a little. In the eyes especially, as through windows, a glimpse of the soul could sometimes be seen. In his Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Guillaume Deguileville described the effect:
For of the body trust me
The eyes no very eyen be
But like to glass I dare well say
Where through the clear soul is seen
And outward with his beams bright
Giveth thereto clearness and light . . .
The soul might also be snared by catching the sitter in some gesture, some semi-private moment in which he revealed himself. The artist might paint him turning, writing, removing a ring, fiddling with a button, so that the face was off-guard and open or, on the contrary, in communion with inward things. Many artists draped curtains behind their sitters, suggesting that they had been suddenly discovered in the private closets where they prayed in church. In the finished portrait Richard Plantagenet was probably meant to hold a white rose, the symbol of his house, which would thus appear to be the substance of his dreams.
Yet Plantagenet’s soul remained mysterious. When all was said, the artist had not succeeded in drawing back the curtain. Those eyes, with their long girlish lashes, were fixed on something that was far away. They looked softly, without seeing. At some sudden noise (a shout in the corridor, the window-shutter slamming), you would expect this young man to be startled, even frightened, as his physiognomy suggested. Folk memory made much of this. He was Margaret of York’s ‘dear darling’, a timorous creature who often ran away and who, in Thomas Gainsford’s favourite phrase, was ‘exanimated’ time and again by the setbacks he encountered. Bacon, too, filled his story with metaphors that suggested both blazing and fading fire and, finally, lack of substance.
Time passed. He heard it by bells striking and calling to terce, prime or evensong. It was the year 1494 of human salvation; and he knew what feast it was, whether St Gregory or St John or the Finding of the Cross, more readily than he knew whether it was Monday or Thursday. Even the shortest periods of time were measured by prayers: an Ave Maria, half a Pater Noster, the regular slipping of beads through the fingers. Yet pressure of time was constant and acute. Contemporary letters made it clear: ‘I had no leisure’, ‘with you right shortly’, ‘as soon as I may’, ‘written in haste’.
An hour, perhaps, had gone by now. Richard Plantagenet’s likeness in pencil or chalk had been faithfully committed to paper. The last quick strokes of the fur trim on his robe could be approximations. He had sat a long time at the beck and call of a workman. It was a relief to stand, move and re-establish his authority. A nod would bring the artist close to him, the lord’s nod of gentle condescension; and the artist, kneeling again to him, would show him what he had done.
The prince looked on the counterfeit. Or, you might also say, the counte
rfeit looked on the prince.
1
Into adventure
The beginnings of his story, as he told it, lay deep in the turmoil of the recent history of England. For three decades, to the astonishment of foreigners, the crown had been wrestled back and forth between the Houses of Lancaster and York. Henry V, the glory of Lancaster and the victor of Agincourt, had been followed in 1422 by a child-king, Henry VI, who grew into a saintly fool at the mercy of his scheming lords. England quickly descended into factional warfare, with extraordinary slaughter of the nobility on both sides. In 1460 Richard, Duke of York, claiming descent from Edward III, tried to proclaim himself king but was rebuffed and, in short order, killed. The next year, his son defeated Henry in battle and was crowned as Edward IV at Westminster.
The claims of Lancaster had been blurred by bastardy in the fourteenth century; but those of York, too, were not secure. Edward was king de facto but not de jure. In recent history, the Yorkist line had passed twice through women; and Henry, besides, still lived. In 1470 Edward IV’s great rival, the Earl of Warwick, forced the king into exile in Flanders and brought the befuddled Henry out of prison. The restoration was short-lived. Edward was back within months, gathered supporters in the north, and early in 1471 recovered the crown. For some years afterwards, comforted by this epitome of glorious kingship, the country calmed down. But Edward died in 1483 at the age of forty, leaving in the balance the fate of both England and his two child-sons, Edward and Richard, whose story this young man gave as his own.
