by Ann Wroe
At that point, however, Maximilian had not even met ‘the boy’. There is no sign of those early ambassadors that Richard boasted of. As Maximilian remembered it later, in the years when he had made his peace with Henry, he had not been especially enthusiastic to meet him anyway. ‘The son of King Edward came to the White King,’ he wrote (using his customary poetic persona), ‘and asked for help. He told him that he wanted to inherit his father’s kingdom and reminded the White King of the alliance that the White King had had with his father concerning him and his children, of whom he was one. The White King complied with this request.’ Maximilian said that he took up ‘the young boy’ because he and Henry, for the moment, were not getting on. ‘The White King was not very keen on this,’ he added, ‘as he was well aware that the matter was not very solidly founded. For he knew well that the New King [Henry] was highly agreeable to his people.’ The contemporary report of their first meeting in Vienna substantiated that, of course; Maximilian had said he would ‘think it over’.
Yet he warmed to the young man quickly, and as quickly made him part of his plans. By December 12th 1493, two weeks after their first meeting, the Milanese ambassador reported that Maximilian was already working on a ‘compromise’ between Edward’s son and Henry, ‘but the King of England remains mistrustful’ – unsurprisingly. The King of the Romans had a natural sympathy for Yorkist causes, stemming from his affection for Margaret (‘the old lady’) and his gratitude for friendship shown to him in his struggling days by Edward IV and Richard III. He once explained that he recognised no obligation to Henry, only to the Duke of York, and felt himself obliged ‘for his honour and that of the Empire’ to maintain him for a time, ‘principally because of the friendship he had with King Edward his father’. After a while, however, his reasons shifted to the usefulness of having an English prince at his beck and call, both against France and in general. In any case, he liked this fair-haired boy with his extraordinary tales. Increasingly, full of enthusiasm for his ‘new king’, he called him his kinsman.
Henry found it impossible to believe that Maximilian aided and favoured ‘such a deception’ with any sincerity. It was ‘derogatory to the honour of any honourable prince’, he thought, to encourage the garçon in Flanders. Such a course would add nothing to his reputation and bring him ‘even less profit’. ‘And the king is very sure that the King of the Romans and the people of standing [gens de facon] over there know all about the deception, and that what he does is because of the displeasure he felt, and still feels, at the treaty and agreement made by the king with [the King of France].’ That was certainly a part of it. Another part was Maximilian’s wish, mentioned as a secret aside by Henry to Richmond Herald in March 1496, for ‘another king in England whom he can use to help himself and put in [our] place to help him succeed in his business’. These malevolent attitudes, Henry thought, were very different from a conviction that he was backing someone genuine.
In fact, Maximilian never knew for certain who the ‘young boy’ was, but it would not have been in his character to admit it. He was convinced that he knew matters hidden from others, including the true inward nature of the men he met. He called this ‘the secret knowledge of experience’. As his father had dabbled in the innermost composition of things, leaving behind a treasury of alchemical books and (people said) two chests full of lumps of gold from his experiments, so he himself had laboured to understand perfectly the secret nature of mankind. He had even presupposed the existence of hidden stars, ‘as yet undiscovered and unknown’, that might have effects on human beings. If anyone came to him with some request, as Edward’s son had come, he never refused him without looking first into his life and character. He would wait, too, for the favourable moment to help him as laid out in the stars. His Master of Secret Instruction said that, on these occasions of high decision-making, he did not call Maximilian a man; he called him ‘Time’, for his pupil had gone so far beyond the limits of ordinary men that his master had nothing more to teach him.
But still Maximilian looked at the fair-haired boy he had decided to favour, and wondered. In September 1494, two months after Garter Herald had spread around Malines his stories of Richard’s past, the King of the Romans began to make enquiries of his own. He was still in Malines, in the thick of the rumours. He did not appear to check in Tournai, but he asked Philip of Nassau – a member of Philip’s council – and the Provost of Utrecht to find out from designated Englishmen, and from merchants doing business in England, ‘what people in England think about the Duke of York, the late King Edward’s son, and what people are saying’. The request was scrawled wildly on a small piece of paper with more scribbles in the margin: ‘those doing business in England’, ‘whatever others they may best find in England’, as the enquiry widened in Maximilian’s mind. When they found out, they were to write him a detailed report. Perhaps he meant mostly to test whether sympathy was running in Richard’s direction before the planned invasion; but their brief was clearly also to find out who people thought he was. Even Maximilian in his note made a mess of it, writing what looked like ‘the Duke of Charles’ before crossing ‘Charles’ out and putting ‘York’ above it.
Maximilian’s firmest statement of belief came in September of the following year, when he wrote to Pope Alexander VI in support of Margaret’s appeal, made four months before, for the reversal of the sentence of excommunication passed on Richard and his supporters. Her plea had evidently gone unheard, and it seems that new condemnations had been issued. These were ‘surreptitious and frivolous’, said Maximilian. Richard was ‘the born son of Edward, the legitimate and true deceased king, and it is evident that he has an excellent right [optimum ius] to that kingdom’. The prince and Margaret were both ‘violently injured and aggrieved’ by the excommunication; justice and conscience demanded its reversal. Firm enough. Yet Pope Alexander might have noticed that no tag of courtesy, such as the usual ‘most illustrious’, was applied to the Duke of York, whereas it always was to Margaret; her nephew floated curiously free from the weight of royal etiquette. The words ‘legitimate and true’ were also applied to King Edward, rather than to Richard. On the first mention of the duke, Maximilian threw in a potted version of his story: ‘who, lest he should be put to death by the occupiers of the kingdom, has hitherto often hidden himself, wandering over the world as an unknown exile’. Yet the Aragonese chronicler Zurita said he also gave out a different version: that Richard was ‘the son of King Edward, who had taken shelter in the land of Flanders’, with no wandering to speak of.
He also retailed a third, completely different, story. According to Erasmo Brascha, the Milanese ambassador to the court of Burgundy, Maximilian told him in February 1495 that Robert Clifford (Richard’s ‘chief man’, as Brascha put it) had ‘divulged’ that ‘this Duke of York was not the son of King Edward, but is the son of the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy and the Bishop of Cambrai’.
Brascha had been close to Maximilian for a while, handling the transfer of Bianca Maria’s dowry, and was thus in a position to hear confidences. This one was almost certainly untrue, though when Brascha wrote next to Ludovico Sforza he thought it worthy of a letter by itself. A child born to Margaret in 1473 or 1474 – apparently the years in question – would have been assumed as Charles’s, despite the dead state of their marriage, not hidden away as an embarrassment. There is no sign, moreover, that Margaret ever gave birth to a child that lived. Yet rumours that she had had love affairs, and a bastard son, had been current before her wedding: most of them coming from the court of France, where Brascha had recently been an ambassador.
As for the Bishop of Cambrai, it is not clear which one was meant. The old one, John of Burgundy, who had died in 1480, was a noted rogue whose funeral had been attended by thirty-six of his illegitimate children. The present one, Henri de Berghes, was the chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece and a councillor of the Burgundian court: a man of unimpeachable virtue, who had been Margaret’s court chaplain and confessor for
more than a decade. She and he led lives of such shining chastity, to all appearances, that there was a delicious irony in the idea that they had sinned carnally together. Yet something – a sense, perhaps, of unusual closeness between Margaret, Cambrai and the boy – also gave the rumour wings, and had unloosed the gossiping tongues of the Burgundian court.
Maximilian did not say that he believed the story. But he was happy to repeat it with no disclaimer, as if it scarcely mattered whether York was authentic or not. And it did not matter. Maximilian knew all about the doubts, and sponsored him despite them. Brascha continued his report of their conversation: ‘His Majesty also told me that the said duke will proceed for the present to Ireland, where he has strong connections.’
The King of the Romans had taken a chance on Richard, and was determined to cling on. He seems to have done so out of enjoyment of the dare – the thrill it gave him, and the annoyance it caused others – as much as anything else. In his chaotic life, crammed with personal administration of a sprawling empire from dozens of different places, there was little time to think or to live with the customary grandeur of princes. Many of his memoranda were scribbled on writing desks set up in bare rooms in his hunting lodges, and his meals might be mouthfuls of bread and cheese taken in the open air. In one year, 1493, he was levying troops to take on the Turks in Inner Austria; in the next, he was trying to organise his protégé’s invasion of England. He lived frenetically, on impulse, and his Prinzen von York was one of those impulses: alluring to some people, senseless to others. Sport, too: a prince hunting for a throne while his enemies, far better armed, hunted him.
Maximilian’s greatest joy was the chase, in all conditions and all weathers. Molinet described him once hunting in Lombardy, ‘dressed like a poacher . . . his [councillors] in damask and satin, carrying halberds, his courtiers carrying pikes, clothed in three colours of silk, really well turned out’. Up in the mountains, hunting for chamois and wild boar, Maximilian enjoyed the contrast even more: himself, the emperor, with crampons on his shoes and a haversack on his back, balancing a nine-foot javelin in one hand, exposing himself to every danger while his soft servants ran back home. In the Teuerdank, his imaginary romance of his journey from Styria in 1477 to marry Mary of Burgundy, he fell into scrape after scrape and, by a hair’s breadth, survived. He chased the chamois to a sharp peak never reached by men before; then he slipped, bending all his shoe-spikes save one, but that one held and saved him. He hunted wild pigs over thin ice, and the ice broke, but he scrambled free. A wild stag ran at him; he caught his spurs in the brush and fell, discharging his crossbow, but it killed the stag rather than himself. Rocks were thrown at him, and missed; guns exploded, but he had leaned back in time; boats tried to ram him, but he swung away nimbly on a rope. Small wonder that he liked the idea of a prince who had slid away from murderers, been spirited from fortresses, disguised himself in rough clothes, wandered among awful dangers and, more than once, evaded betrayal by his own friends.
Richard of York was also, like him, an umbzotler (the slang word was his own), a traipser around from place to place. In the early summer months of 1494 they were travelling for a while together, living on sauerkraut and sharp cheap wine as they wended their way from castle to castle between Vienna and Brabant. Once there, they hunted together in grand style. In late August 1494 Molinet described a hunting party of Maximilian, Bianca Maria, Philip and Margaret ‘taking their solace’ in the wooded groves around Malines, Antwerp and Brussels. Richard was by then so close to all of them that he is certain to have been included. By Maximilian’s standards, this was soft and relaxing stuff, so easy that the women were with them; and his prince, too, was soft, wonderfully pliable to work with. If he succeeded, Maximilian had a ready-made alliance with England. (‘He can then order York about exactly as he likes,’ in the words of the Venetian ambassadors to Germany.) If his protégé, having succeeded, died childless, Maximilian stood to gain the English throne himself; in a matter of months, the papers would be signed and sealed. If he failed, Maximilian could drop him as easily, and with as little compunction, as a trail that had gone cold in the woods around Malines. This was the theory. In practice, having accepted Richard’s claim, there was a tie through Margaret, his children’s godmother, that became a bond of honour. Fondness, too, got strangely in the way.
Maximilian, famously impecunious, never gave York much money; hunting was said to absorb what little cash he had. But he lent him some of his best military captains; provided him with a knot of highly placed imperial supporters such as Ludovico Bruno, his Latin secretary, who had first declared York’s cause to him in Vienna; and put pressure on both Philip and Albrecht of Saxony to support him with men and ships. Uncle Albrecht was a trusted lieutenant, who had fought for Maximilian both in Burgundy and against the Hungarians. Philip was, for the moment, a dutiful son, accepting the destruction of his country’s trade on the understanding that his father’s new king would win England. His household was so enmeshed with his father’s, with many officers shared between them, that he had little choice but to follow wherever the wild schemes led.
With a mixture of nagging, encouragement and procrastination, Maximilian kept Richard Plantagenet in play on the European stage. In 1494, Charles VIII invaded Italy; the outrageous adventure united Europe against him, but it could not unite effectively while Maximilian and Henry were enemies. To get England into the Holy League that was forming against France, Maximilian had to be made to drop his Prince of York. He refused, and his first reason was disarmingly simple. York was doing well, he said. He was going to win England. Maximilian’s impatience to pit his prince against Henry was so intense that his spokesman was already saying in May 1495, two months before an invasion was attempted, that the Duke of York had taken the field against him.
From the point of view of Realpolitik, the risk Maximilian was taking was bizarre. Many rulers of Europe thought him flighty, silly, exasperating, irresponsible, and never more so than in his championing of Richard, Duke of York. Perhaps he was just a fool as his father had suspected, finding him so doltish and silent as a child that he thought he might be a mute. Maximilian was surely just allowing himself to be beguiled and enchanted, as princes often were by the flattering liars they attracted to their courts. ‘He is very fickle,’ Machiavelli wrote of him later: ‘he takes counsel from nobody, and yet believes everybody. He desires what he cannot have, and leaves that which he can readily obtain; therefore he always takes contrary resolutions, and lives in a constant state of agitation.’ ‘Why should we deal with him?’ sighed the King of Hungary; ‘he is so inconstant, starting so many things and finishing nothing.’ And his trademark was so often trickery: a puppet-prince one year, then ‘counterfeit and new-forged strange coins . . . called Roman groats . . . far of less value than men take them for’, with which, Henry complained, Maximilian deceived and damaged Englishmen a few years later. ‘How I wish,’ Henry once sighed, ‘that the emperor would not undertake any enterprise except after mature consideration.’
Beyond Henry, it was the Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, who found Maximilian hardest to deal with. His scattiness was the reverse of their own practicality and clarity of purpose. Ever since their marriage in 1469 and their respective successions to their kingdoms (Isabella to Castile in 1474, Ferdinand to Aragon in 1479), these two had worked tirelessly to create in Spain the sort of peaceable, modern, centralised state that Henry was striving to build in England. By 1494, the Jews had been expelled or converted and the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, had been conquered by Ferdinand for Christ. With the voyages of Columbus, Spain’s horizons were opening to untold riches over the western ocean. Yet sharp irritations had sprung up closer to home.
Charles VIII was the chief of these. When he invaded Italy in 1494, Ferdinand and Isabella were appalled. They were desperate to keep French ambitions in check (those ambitions threatening, in particular, disputed territories on their own northern border) by organising the Holy League wi
th Maximilian and Henry both inside it. To make that possible, they needed to detach Maximilian from the Duke of York; but they did not know how. They had had a plan to win over Philip and silence Margaret by proposing that the archduke should marry their daughter Juana; with Juana as the new archduchess, Margaret’s place at court would be diminished and she would lose her influence. Henry, sceptical at first, grew to love this idea, urging it again and again on Ferdinand and Isabella until they had brought it to conclusion. They had fewer good ideas for dealing with Philip’s father – though, with typical self-confidence, they thought they knew him well enough to effect a reconciliation with Henry, and often offered to do so.
In the Spanish sovereigns’ view, as in Henry’s, it was scarcely credible that Maximilian should support ‘him’. (Ferdinand and Isabella could seldom quite say what ‘he’ was: not a duke, not really a man, but a sort of roving pronoun.) The King of the Romans was giving ‘him’ not only favour but also autoridad, as Zurita pointed out, from his very interest in him. This was so clearly a ruse on Maximilian’s part that it had to collapse as soon as it looked unprofitable; when he clung on, they were dumbfounded. This business was just a joke, Isabella wrote to de Puebla in London. The word was burla, one of her favourites: gibe, taunt, hoax, mockery. She often applied that word to ‘him’, though his claim was not quite the biggest burla in the world; that, she told de Puebla in 1496, was the story that she and Ferdinand had lately sent an ambassador to talk to the King of France. They would never talk to the King of France. Nor, for that matter, would they have anything to do with ‘him’. A letter to de Puebla of July 20th 1495 made that last point more than clear.
