by Ann Wroe
Yet, as Richard complained to Isabella, all this rich regard did not translate in the end into active French help for him. Charles would not help him against evil Henry ‘at all’. That realisation came brutally in November 1492, when England and France made peace. Henry had decided, after all, not to go to war to defend the autonomy of Brittany. In October, having crossed the Channel with his army, his minstrels and his Spanish fool, he laid siege to Boulogne, but he did not mean it. The two kings pledged their skin-deep amity in a treaty at Etaples on November 3rd. Richard Plantagenet’s presence at Charles’s court was not acknowledged in the main body of the treaty. Instead it was implied in a separate codicil of December 13th, in which each side promised not to help or shelter the rebels or traitors of the other. Vergil felt sure, however, that it was Henry’s ‘sniffing’ of Edward’s resurrected son that had caused him to sue for peace.
So Richard left Paris. Hall said he sneaked away by night, giving Monypeny the slip and taking advantage of the darkness, because he feared that the French king would give him up to Henry. Among those who signed the codicil for Charles was d’Aubigny, who had first greeted and protected him when he arrived from Ireland. But the king probably gave Plantagenet the nod directly, for his delivery had never been part of the peace talks, and Bernard André thought his cause was safely thriving there. Charles saw to it that everywhere he stayed had a means of escape, a specially constructed staircase leading from his chamber window to the garden or the street. Richard may well have gone by such a way. He may also have needed to disguise himself: perhaps in a long black gaberdine of Catalan leather, of the sort Charles was seen wearing in the rains of the year before. Thus hidden, somehow, he made his way east to the Burgundian lands and to Margaret.
There, the crises that had followed the deaths of Charles the Bold and his daughter, Mary, were six or seven years in the past. The burghers of Ghent and Bruges, having resisted and even imprisoned Maximilian, had come to accept him as their regent. Prosperity and peace were returning, and with them a genuine enthusiasm for Maximilian’s young son, Philip the Fair, about to enter his Burgundian inheritance. With the duchy now governed, in effect, by Philip’s council, Margaret could more often turn her attention to other things: to her own estates, to reading, to praying, and to working with proper diligence to restore the House of York to the throne of England. Her best chance was approaching.
ii
On all sides, by this time, there was an interest in looking at Richard Plantagenet. But it was not always easy to see him. This was not just because he himself was elusive, slipping from country to country, but because it was often hard to get a good light on the subject. People longed to see almost everything more closely and more clearly. Their greatest desire, after peace, was for brightness, something better than the hazy and secondary illumination of the world.
Artists increasingly filled their paintings with the effects of light on faces, objects, walls and water, on metal vessels and the folds of clothes. Light softened, rippled, chiselled and burnished. The best poets, too, described it with the intricacy of jewellers. William Dunbar, at the Scottish court, wrote of roses touched by the morning sun until they sparkled like rubies, each bud scattered with brilliant beryl-drops of dew. These were no longer flowers, but gems crystallised into fiery brightness by the effect of ordinary light. Above them, the shining heaven was scaled in silver like the iridescent side of a fish, and gold light outlined every leaf and branch of the overhanging trees. Both Chastellain and John Lydgate made the centrepieces of their dream-stories pavilions of glass or temples of ‘celestial clearness’, as bright, Chastellain wrote, as if divine light had been infused in them.
When dreams and imaginings could be so sharply illuminated, it did not matter that Bernard André, who wrote the boy’s story for Henry, was blind and never saw him. He carried him in his head, lit by remembered sunlight that was gaudier than life. André, describing himself explicitly as another Homer who would ‘clarify and resist the darkness’, wrote his history as scenes from classical mythology performed against the rocks and seas of a half-infernal world. Long before he encountered the young man who called himself Plantagenet, he saw him on that well-lit stage, part-monster and part-moth.
The subtle machinery of the eye itself was often apt to go wrong, and babies were carefully born into darkened rooms, as obscure as the world itself, to stop them squinting in the light. But defects of sight went uncorrected for the most part. Though spectacles were in use, their lenses of quartz or white beryl distorted as much as they clarified. The Venetian ambassador Contarini, who visited Charles VIII in June 1492 when Richard Plantagenet was about to appear, remarked that the king’s large white eyes evidently made him see badly, but he seemed to take no measures to help himself. The letters he snatched from Contarini could be inspected well enough, if he held them close; so too could Plantagenet, if he went nose-to-nose with him.
The poor-sighted accepted, therefore, that the world was unclear. If they read a lot, and as old age ‘bade them good morrow’, it would become cloudier still. William Caxton complained that his eyes were dimmed from looking too much at white paper, and in 1473 Thomas Betson, still young, complained that writing letters by candlelight made his eyes ache. At the age of forty, at just the moment when he was required to appraise the ‘feigned lad’ in person, Henry VII himself could sense that his eyes were failing. ‘I beseech you to pardon me,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘for verily, madam, my sight is nothing so perfect as it has been, and I know well it will impair daily . . .’
Starved of light, you took your book or your letters to the window. The building projects of princes often included reglazing, in an attempt to bring in modernity in the form of brightness. When Edward IV made repairs to the Prince’s Wardrobe in Old Jewry, most of his improvements were the mending or replacing of glass. Glass windows like these, heavy and beautiful when compared with the horn or oiled linen in the windows of the poor, were so valuable that they were moved, in their wooden casements, from house to house. The effect of sun shining through them was still new and extraordinary. The rooms of Paradise itself were ‘clarified and depured’ with glass. Lydgate’s poem ‘The Life of Our Lady’ gave as a metaphor of the Incarnation the sunlight piercing brightly, but without harm, through panes of beryl or crystal. It was possibly only in those years that a poem of star-crossed young love could reach its climax in the line ‘Through the glass window shines the sun’.
Yet the brightness these windows supplied was merely relative. People still longed to see ‘without coverture or without glass’: that is, clearly. Windows were mullioned or diamond-leaded, divided into small panes of thumb-thick greenish glass that were pocked with imperfections. Even glass that was plain and functional admitted a light that was usually dim, as if filtered through veils of water. In Flemish portraits of the time the windows were often opened – first the box-like shutters, then the full panes – or else dispensed with completely, in favour of the light of day.
The hankering to see more clearly did not end when night fell. Poets still tried to describe what they saw. Lydgate wrote of the face of a slovenly servant shining ‘like barked leather’ in the light of a candle. If matters were important enough, you could make yourself discern the tiniest details by torchlight, as when Charles VIII examined a night delivery of forty-nine falcons and had each one described to him. Beaks and talons, cuffs and pinnons, the lie and shade of feathers, were inspected under light as fretful and alive as the birds themselves. Charles sent two back as unsatisfactory.
In royal palaces, interior lighting had become more and more elaborate: sconces on the walls, sixty-light candelabras hanging low from the roof-beams, massed candles on the tables. At the grandest ceremonies, candelabras were combined with mirrors to double the effect, astonishing the crowd as they saw their own faces, reflected small, high up among the flames. Some ‘disguisings’ or masked dances were held in giant lanterns where, behind ‘panes’ of white lawn, hundreds of lights
illuminated the scene. A small army of men with ladders was employed to light and extinguish them.
The night lighting for Margaret of York’s wedding had been especially elaborate, and by day too she showed the contemporary fervour for seeing clearly. In 1491 and 1492 she had been paying particular attention to the light in her palaces. At Binche, her favourite retreat in the hills of Hainault, windows were made ‘to look out on the garden’, ‘to look towards the fields’, ‘to give light in la grande salle’, and proper glass-makers were employed for the first time to glaze them. In her palace at Malines, the reception hall was now lit by a long wall of windows installed on her orders.
By this light, with the eyes of a woman no longer considered young, she could indulge a passion for illuminated books of exquisite detail and beauty. In the margins of her prayer-books, small wild flowers – pimpernels, pansies, violets, forget-me-nots – were painted as if they had been plucked from the stalk and laid on the paper, casting a shadow. Flies and butterflies visited them, their wings overlapping the borders of the pictures as if, with the flick of a finger, they might fly off again. To portray nature with such fidelity was a sort of magic, like the act of creation itself. Skelton called such images ‘envived pictures well touched and quickly’, so real that they appeared alive. The daisy in particular – the marguerite, Margaret’s own flower, the symbol of womanly virtue and constancy – featured in the margins of her books, growing in little blue-and-white pots or laid fresh-picked on the page. Though she might be childless, her flowers flourished everywhere, touched quickly from paper into life.
Her books also included, in the same minute detail, pictures of her as she saw herself and wished others to see her. Almost invariably, she was praying: in the square before the church of St Michael and St Gudule in Brussels, in her chamber at Malines, or in her private oratory where, in the background, one of her many greyhounds scampered down the hall. In one book she was pictured, in cloth-of-gold and helped by her attendants, performing the seven corporal works of mercy in the streets of Malines. She placed bread in the hands of an orphan boy and of a cripple on crutches, who tried to raise his hat to her. She gave water to a pilgrim from a silver flagon, lifting the bowl to his lips herself and looking on gently as he drank. She proffered shirts, money and comfort to the imprisoned and the sick. As she did so, her subjects barely noticed her, walking past or loitering in the distance with their eyes on the sky. Margaret was doing these things not just for show, but for Jesus, who stood beside her and, at the last, would come to judge her, gazing intently at her from His shining throne in the clouds, as the smoke rose that would consume the world. In that last conflagration, all the illusions of the world would disappear: her rich clothes, her books, her palaces, the vanities she craved and the curiosities she pursued, reduced to the dust and nothingness they truly were, if she could see them clearly.
In a book that was written at her request soon after her marriage, the risen Jesus came to visit her in her chamber. Margaret saw this ‘beatific and uncovered vision’ quite suddenly, as she prayed. All was otherwise as normal: the stone floors neatly swept, the scarlet covers drawn up on the nuptial bed, the morning light streaming through the latticed windows. A greyhound in a gold collar slept at her feet, nose on paws. Margaret herself, in a black steepled head-dress and black-figured cloth-of-gold, knelt on a prayer cushion. And there was Jesus before her. He had just risen from the dead, naked under a crimson cloak, still carrying the triumph-banner of the Cross, red on white, with which He had climbed from the tomb. The banner fluttered in the breeze of His arrival, and rays of golden light shone from Him.
By these signs she would have known Him; but He was showing her the marks of His wounds, to make her sure. His left hand, held out towards her, bore the print of the nails, still fresh and welling with red blood; she looked at it in rapture, knowing this was the evidence that counted. The disciple Thomas had said he would not believe ‘until I see the marks of the nails in his hands, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into the hole in his side’. A week later, the disciples again behind locked doors, Jesus appeared and commanded Thomas to touch Him in just that way. Thomas, doing so, immediately declared: ‘My Lord and my God.’
Now that Jesus was before her, Margaret was unsure how best to welcome Him. She wished only to gaze on Him in contemplation; but the court was pressing and she was too busy, among ‘the curiosities of the world’, quietly to enclose herself with Him. All she wished was that He might ‘illumine my interior eyes, that is, the faith and reason and consideration of my soul’. So He instructed her. She was to lay out for Him the table of her heart, spread with the meat of understanding, the bread of pain and the wine of tears. That done, she was to make ready the bed of her heart in which she was to lie with Him, ‘in purest chastity and pure charity’, receptive under the scarlet covers to everything He was to say to her.
She should look, Jesus told her, at the glory of God, ‘who has imprinted such sweetness and loveliness in precious stones and grass and flowers, and who has put in a little part of the body of man, that is, in the faces of some, such great beauty’. She was to gaze on the torments of Hell (yes, Margaret told Him nervously, she already understood that the fires there ‘are as different from worldly fire as worldly fire is from a fire painted on a wall’). Most especially, she was to contemplate Jesus Himself on the Cross, and the wounds He had suffered for her sake. The lance-wound in particular – which Jesus also showed her, the crimson cloak slipping down around His waist – was a sign so deep and important that it led on, in Margaret’s devotions, into seven other signs of the love of Jesus. It was a bleeding Lure to draw her heart, a Treasure to redeem her, a Well of grace, a Tavern to slake her thirst at the rim of His opened flesh, a Bed in which to rest, a Shield to defend her, and a Tree of Life in which she could enter, frail as she was, to burrow deep into the red sap of Jesus’s love and let the bark grow over her.
Jesus had risen from the dead to walk into her chamber with all the signs of His Passion, which was her redemption, visible upon Him. He had come in so softly that Margaret’s dog had continued to sleep in the middle of the polished floor. The tiny details of His wounds and His face were so precious that she was careful to avoid them as, at the beginning of her prayers, she kissed the painted page. Instead she kissed the blue hangings of the bed until, after a time, the colour was worn away. She had seen the signs, as Thomas had; and she had believed, as anyone would who had been so close to the very Son of God.
When Richard Plantagenet came to her court in the winter of 1492, that same deep contemplation of proofs was turned, she claimed, on him. It was in that newly glazed reception room at Malines, as the December light lay dully on the fields and woods of Brabant, that she saw a young man who called her ‘aunt’ as he knelt to her, the mud of his travels still on him.
The next August, when he sent his letter to Isabella of Spain, Margaret sent one too, a step-by-step description of how she had come to know him for who he was. Her letter was passionate, almost to the point of disturbance. Vergil described her as ‘scarcely of sound mind’ for joy when she thought her nephew had returned. The letter, dictated eight months later, showed that the emotion had not faded.
What she told Isabella was not necessarily true. She had a vital argument to make, which she would not have hesitated to bolster with lies. God would understand and forgive the imperative, as He did (in His great mercy) daily and hourly around the courts of Europe. Yet the letter, truthful or not, still laid out the sort of authentication that was expected in such cases. Though she herself may never have examined Richard – knowing all along who he was – Margaret had to prove she had been sceptical, as Isabella herself would have been. The two women were much the same age, Isabella just five years younger. Both presented themselves as competent, strong and not easily fooled, the antithesis of what most men expected.
Like her nephew that same day, sitting at the same table in the palace of Dendermonde, Margare
t wasted less than a line on greetings and preliminaries. She came straight to the point:
Last year, the Earls of Desmond and Kildare, the chief lords of Ireland . . . wrote to me that the second son of Edward, late King of England, my most beloved brother, by name Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York – whom everyone thought was dead – was still alive, and was with those earls in Ireland, safe and held in great honour. They affirmed this with letters reinforced with their seals and with a sacred oath. They prayed that I might be willing to bring help and assistance to this same Duke of York by the law of necessity and blood, and promised that they would also help him themselves. These things seemed to me to be ravings and dreams.
Deliramenta et sompnio similia. Not just a joke or a dream, as so many people were to describe it, but delirium, of the sort that made sufferers from the sweating sickness throw off their stinking sheets and cry for cold water, though it killed them. The news from Ireland could not possibly be true. Margaret, too, had thought Richard Plantagenet was dead, as ‘everyone’ else did. Her busy contacts with London in 1484, when her chaplain, her commercial agent and her envoys had all been there, had not informed her otherwise, or so she implied. Ravings and dreams.
Nonetheless, Desmond and Kildare had affirmed this with letters sent under their seals. Although this seemed obvious, it was worth reporting. Seals identified the senders and bound them to their words, as clearly as if their owners had appeared and spoken. Princes who had emerged from nowhere, with no seals of their own, depended on those of others to authenticate them. That was why Plantagenet’s first letters to James IV of Scotland had been written jointly with Desmond, and why, according to Margaret, he did not write to her himself, but let Desmond and Kildare do so for him. From a distance he had no way of proving who he was, save through their seals and their words.
