by Ann Wroe
Lacking a seal, he might have sent a token of some sort. Small personal objects – a ring or a jewel – would often be slipped inside letters, but this private language could not be understood unless the parties knew each other. ‘I received a token from you,’ wrote Thomas Betson to his beloved, ‘the which was and is to me right heartily welcome, and with glad will I received it.’ He sent another mysterious token to Elizabeth Stonor, ‘the which your ladyship knowth right well’. The person receiving the token had to be able instantly to place it on the sender’s body: the ring warm on the finger, the Agnus Dei medal pinned to a shirt or nestled among the chest hairs. Again, Plantagenet’s exile had presumably deprived him of even such small and precious things. Margaret received no token from Ireland to convince her, save the fact that the boy was held ‘in great honour’ there. The messenger who brought the letters had perhaps said more; letters often begged the recipient to give full faith and credence to the bearer, who would ‘open and declare’ more details. But even if he did, this faint gleam of other people’s recognition was not enough for her.
Desmond and Kildare had also confirmed their letters with ‘a sacred oath’. Since neither man had ever seen the little Duke of York, they had no way of identifying the young man in their care. Oaths were as cheap in Ireland as they were elsewhere. Nonetheless, Margaret claimed that they had brought in God, compellingly and boldly. They had also talked solemnly of ‘necessity and blood’, ties that should have bound her to this young man sight unseen. She refused to be moved by such appeals. But the claims were building steadily round Richard Plantagenet, if that was who he was. And he was moving closer.
Afterwards this Duke of York was received by the King of France, just recently in France, as the son of King Edward and as his cousin. And I sent certain men who would have recognised him as easily as his mother or his nurse, since from their first youth they had been in service and intimate familiarity with King Edward and his children. These men too with a most sacred oath affirmed that this man was the second son of King Edward. They cursed themselves with great oaths if he should turn out otherwise, and were ready to endure every torment and great physical pains of every kind.
Margaret gave no indication who these men were. She could have meant any of the refugees from Edward IV’s household who were now in Europe. The men she had sent, she implied, were as physically close to the subject as it was possible to be. Simply to have seen the little Duke of York, or to have known his father, was not enough this time. The knowledge required was instinctive, mother-love or nurse-love: as deep as the sort that came from carrying and kissing a child, seeing him naked, knowing the smell of him, distinguishing his cry in the dark.
Armed, as Margaret claimed, with knowledge that went this deep, her envoys reported that they had recognised the prince and knew him for certain. As might be expected of old servants and retainers, they offered themselves up to every sort of torture for his sake, clinging wildly and devotedly to the reality of this young man, Edward’s son. The sacred affirmations – most sacred, a notch higher than Margaret had received before – were now multiplying. There were ‘great oaths’ too, not holy but vernacular and emphatic, like the ‘high Oaths’ Piers said he had sworn to the plotters who had pestered him in Ireland. The noise of Richard was dinning in Margaret’s ears. She was on the brink of believing, but still she had not seen him with her own eyes.
More than a year after the first signs in Ireland, Richard Plantagenet came to her palace in Malines. This was how she described his appearance to Isabella, dictating the words – with stops and starts, for translation by the secretary – on that August day, as Richard sat listening beside her. At last, the passage began. Tandem ipse Dux Eboracensis ex Francia ad me venit. After all the rumours and half-proofs, the pitch of excitement was almost audible. Here he was.
At last the Duke of York himself came to me out of France, seeking help and assistance. I recognised him as easily as if I had last seen him yesterday or the day before (for I had seen him once long ago in England). He did not have just one or another sign of resemblance, but so many and so particular that hardly one person in ten, in a hundred or even in a thousand might be found who would have marks of the same kind. Then [I recognised him by] the private conversations and acts between him and me in times past, which undoubtedly no other person would have been able to guess at. Lastly [I recognised him by] the questions and conversations of others, to all of which he responded so aptly and skilfully that it was manifest and notorious that this was he whom they thought had died long ago.
I indeed for my part, when I gazed on this only male Remnant of our family – who had come through so many perils and misfortunes – was deeply moved, and out of this natural affection, into which both necessity and the rights of blood were drawing me, I embraced him as my only nephew and my only son.
Perhaps none of this was true; perhaps all of it was; perhaps it was a seamless mixture of truth and lies. On the one hand lay all the suggestions and rumours that she herself had contrived him: that she had been following his movements in Ireland day by day and hour by hour, as Vergil said, and had been waiting in deep anxiety and grief to receive her creation back from France. On the other hand came this impassioned account of an extraordinary surprise. She had not hidden him from his enemies or played any part in his wanderings, a story she might have told without reproach if she had wanted to. Instead, there was the deep shock of recognition. He had suddenly appeared from nowhere in Ireland and was now, just as suddenly, with her.
If she had made him, it was still some time since she could have last seen him. Five and a half years had passed since he had left Flanders with Brampton, and no firm evidence suggests that he returned. In that time, he had changed from a child to a young man marked by experiences she could only guess at, and latterly by the clear understanding that he was a prince at the head of a cause. Whether or not her account was true, she responded to him with turbulent emotion and love.
Her feeling seemed summed up in that last phrase, my only nephew and my only son. The secretary’s Latin had no linking conjunction: Margaret had embraced him velut unicum nepotem: velut unicum filium, as if she struggled to improve and emphasise the words that tumbled out of her. To call him simply her nephew did not do justice to the closeness of the bond. The ties of necessity and blood that the Irish earls had mentioned were now moving in her, drawing her, as if she could not fight them.
Richard Plantagenet was, of course, an orphan now, the son of no one left living. Elizabeth Woodville had died in June 1492, still in the convent at Bermondsey to which Henry VII had confined her. In that sense, Margaret could present herself as his mother by substitution, as she called herself mother to Mary of Burgundy, to Mary’s children and sometimes to Maximilian. But it went deeper. Margaret intended eundem nutrire atque alere, to bring him up and cherish him, as if this nineteen-year-old was still a little child to be suckled (the literal meaning of nutrire) and held close.
Feelings this strong were acknowledged in the contemporary and near-contemporary tellings of the story. André imagined Margaret calling her nephew ‘my most beloved’; Hall thought she called him her ‘dear darling’, a phrase plucked from a lullaby for a child.
Lullay my liking, my dear son, my sweeting,
Lullay my dear heart, my own dear darling.
She received him, he said, as if he were ‘newly cropen out of his mother’s lap again’, an astonishing newborn suddenly in her arms. Political sponsorship did not need to go so far, and never had in Simnel’s case. Though Henry considered these young men as two of a kind, this one was different.
Margaret had in fact seen the little Duke of York, but during a single visit to England, and long ago. She admitted it: the word olim, in times past, occurred three times in four lines. As it happened she had seen him twelve years before, when she was thirty-four and he was seven. She had been in England for three months, from June to September 1480, staying not at the royal palaces but at the Coldh
arbour in Thames Street, which her brother had refurbished for her with green silk and sarcenet. From time to time, she saw the little prince. On July 20th there was a banquet in her honour, out at Greenwich, to which presumably Richard came. On August 17th he probably celebrated his seventh birthday, appearing a little later in his new green and purple robes and in his Garter regalia. His aunt may well have seen him in that flowing blue cloak, with the blue silk sash and gold buttons.
But she implied she had seen him more often and more intimately than that. They had talked and done things together privately, and these they both remembered. Since Margaret claimed that their shared memories were so vivid, it is odd that both of them agreed, in deeds drawn up in 1494, that the date of Margaret’s visit had been not 1480, but 1481. Dates, once again, went astray in the drama. They had met and talked; that was what was important.
What had passed between them? Perhaps she, or he, could remember or imagine something: a short walk in a garden, a solemn speech of welcome carefully rehearsed, a little greyhound stroked on a lap. They might have looked together through the pages of the Hastings Hours, supposed by some to have been brought by Margaret to London in her luggage, and admired the pictures of Maytime drunkards revelling in boats, or men and women scrambling for sacks of money that were tipped down the margins of the page, or souls being carried up to Heaven like bareback riders by their angels, flying past the deep-blue orb of the world with its dust of golden stars. On the last page, now worn and stained as if much looked at, grey-furred wild men ran down from their caves to fight a knight who was half sea-monster, a helmet and cuirass riding on seaweed. All through the book the painted flies buzzed again, with their gauzy wings and pinpoint eyes, tempting the squashing finger of any small boy.
The resurrected nephew could also bring memories of his own. They might have been of the ship called the Falcon, his own device, in which Margaret had come from Flanders; the ceremonial barge in which she had gone down the Thames, attended by twenty-four officers in jackets of murrey and blue; the new tapestries of Paris and Helen at Coldharbour, the Trojans bristling with arrows and spears as Helen was carried off; or the huge shining horse Aunt Margaret was given by his father, caparisoned with a saddle of blue and purple cloth-of-gold with a fringe of blue and purple silk tipped with Venice gold, on which she had ridden away. And if those sightings were not there – her protégé waiting, like the image crafted by Pygmalion, for her to animate him with the breath of his own life – she could step in, take his hand, and provide them for him.
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Margaret recognised him not only in these fragments of memory, she told Isabella, but by ‘signs’: many, many signs, unique and particular. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she made no attempt to describe what these were. They seemed to be an accumulation of little things attached to him directly: as small, perhaps, as the way he turned his head or expressed irritation. If he was false, Margaret’s vagueness was just as well. If he was real, it could be taken for an overwhelming sense of him she could not describe: that shock of the heart. ‘Sir, what is your name?’ asked Galahad of Lancelot, the father he had never known; ‘for much my heart giveth unto you.’
Yet proper, visible signs were needed also, to point to the truth of who he was. However strongly Margaret or others believed in Richard Plantagenet, these physical proofs needed to be inspected, seen again and again, to sustain the faith of those who followed him. Columbus seeking Cipango had not seen land, but had assured his sailors by signs that it was there: drops of rain that fell without wind, sandpipers in flocks of forty, drifting vegetation that bore ‘something like fruit’. For days, sailing on and on, these sightings sustained them. Christ Himself had left a sign of this sort, His own body in the form of bread as sustenance and life. Men and women could never get enough of this sign as it was elevated by the priest, lifted high and clear and without obstruction, backed by curtains so that its whiteness shone. They believed in Him and in their salvation effected through Him; but to see this truth, in the form of the bread on which angels feasted, was a daily necessity as urgent as bread itself.
For Yorkists who sought such physical proofs, Richard could provide them. He claimed to have three ‘hereditary’ marks on his body that could be recognised by anyone who had known Richard, Duke of York. Maximilian, for one, seems to have been convinced by the trois enseignes naturelz, qu’il a sur le corps. Richard was prepared to show these marks to anyone, Maximilian reported: to the princes of the great houses, to everyone who had known him as a child, even to Henry himself ‘if the opportunity were only given him’, to prove that his claim was true. They were his ‘special’ proofs. He could, of course, prove his authenticity to them in more general terms. Merely by appearing ‘in proper person’ and ‘show[ing] our selves openly unto you’, as he said in his proclamation of 1496 – riding past, perhaps not even dismounting, but glittering – he could confound Henry Tudor ‘and all his false sayings’. But if they demanded more, he had his marks.
It is not entirely clear what they were. Maximilian’s letter, which might have said more, has disappeared. At Setubal the herald Tanjar also mentioned three señas observed on the boy in Portugal: a mark on his face under his eye, an upper lip that was slightly raised or prominent (el beso alto levantado un poco) and another mark sus los pechos, on his breast. From these marks, Tanjar said, ‘people said he was the Duke of York’. Two of them appeared, and were perhaps even emphasised, in the portrait that was done of him. Yet Richard’s own boast suggested that his special marks were not immediately apparent. He had to reveal them by taking off his clothes – unless, at the tennis court, you could catch a glimpse of the breast-mark underneath his open shirt. Nor, by the sound of it, were they acquired or cosmetic features, though sometimes these were accepted when there was nothing else to go by. In 1477, when the body of Margaret’s husband Charles was found at Nancy, dug out of the caked snow after several days, his face was so gnawed by wolves that he was recognised only by his Italian valet, who knew him by his long fingernails, and by his Portuguese doctor, who knew him by his scars.
The Yorkists who joined Richard Plantagenet in France or Flanders needed to test his signs with particular care. Foreigners might accept the bright surface, but Englishmen could not leave it at that. ‘Clear inspection and whole intellection’ were necessary, not least because of the risks they had taken in leaving their country and adhering to this young man. Unlike Charles or Maximilian, they were not so highly placed that they could play political games unpunished. Nor was this a puppet-child, like Simnel, with nobles in his vanguard, whom no one needed to see; he himself was their leader. Charles had required him merely to be plausible as a charming creature round the court. These Englishmen required him to be plausible as their lord and their king.
So they examined him, looking at him with the hard, frank stare that was accepted between people who were about to pledge loyalty to each other or transact some kind of business. Some, if sufficiently close in rank or familiar to dare, might have taken his hand too and held it for a long time, for the true form and shape of things had to be discerned by touch as well as sight. ‘Avising’ was the word for this. It implied deep concentration, as when Charles the Bold had avised Margaret on their first meeting: taking her hand as he scanned her face for ‘a tract of time’, stepping back a little and then forward, thrusting his dark wolfish face into hers. He was informing himself of the full possibilities of this person, as he might have pressed the flanks of a horse or walked the bounds of a piece of property, assessing what advantage they could bring him.
Courtiers and commoners alike wanted and needed to see their kings this close, if they dared. Admitted to the royal presence, envoys sent back the tiniest details of the faces they had observed. Henry VII’s envoys stared keenly enough at the young Queen of Naples to see wisps of brown hair showing through her kerchief and her nose ‘a little rising in the midward, and a little coming or bowing towards the end’; although they could not quite detect, as he com
manded, whether her breath was sour or sweetened with musk and rosewater. Other envoys came close enough to King Ferdinand of Spain to notice that he was ‘somewhat lisping in his speech, the cause thereof we think is of a tooth the which he lacks before’. Henry himself could be identified, it was said, by a tiny red wart, no larger than a pinhead, a little above his chin. To look more minutely than this you would need the eyes of a lynx, peering through all ‘outward accidents’ to the true prince underneath the surface.
Edward IV consciously played to the longing of his subjects to observe him. Often, Mancini wrote,
he called to his side complete strangers, when he thought they had come with the intention of addressing or beholding him more closely. He was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity that the occasion offered of revealing his fine stature more protractedly and more evidently to onlookers. He was so genial in his greeting that if he saw a newcomer bewildered at his appearance and royal magnificence, he would give him courage to speak by laying a kindly hand upon his shoulder.
When Yorkist refugees examined the young man in Malines, therefore, they would have demanded more than the marks that he could show them. Most especially, they wanted him to be like Edward. More gloriously even than most kings, Edward had shone at the centre of his court: ‘the sun, the rose, the lodestar, the sunbeam, the lantern and the light’, as one of his servants wrote inconsolably after he had gone.
Several of the new conspirators had been his servants too, and had got very close to the late king. Sir Robert Chamberlain and Sir Gilbert Debenham had sailed back to England with Edward from exile in 1471; they had seen him not merely in majesty, but queasy, anxious and windswept, in his travelling clothes. Stephen Frion had taken dictation from him; Thomas Ward, a sometime colleague of Frion’s who possibly joined the conspirators at his prompting, had been Edward’s doctor, palping the puffy whitish body under the robes and taking his urine. All these men sought some sense of him again: not vaguely, but keenly and closely.
