by Ann Wroe
As for Clifford, he was rewarded yet again by being appointed master of the king’s ordnance in August 1495, backdated to Easter, on 2 shillings a day and a salary of £100 a year, the same sum Stanley had enjoyed. Subsequent records show that he was not paid very regularly, and neither were his gunners, but tardy payments were a hazard of working for this king, and Clifford was soon so busy that he was scarcely to notice. Vergil may have been right that he was never quite in grace again; but, as with Pregent Meno, Henry had once more performed the trick of transforming a close acquaintance of the feigned lad into a bastion of his own defences, well-mortared with rewards. In this strong state, having bought off, hanged or beheaded any Englishman who threatened him, he awaited whatever the boy and his promoters would try to do next.
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News of Clifford’s betrayal crossed the Channel early in January 1495. From the 3rd onwards, warning letters were going from Malines to Bergen-op-Zoom and Zeeland, on the coast, where forces had begun to gather for the invasion of England. The urgency, almost panic, behind these messages (sometimes sent a toute extreme diligence) sounded like Margaret, though the messengers were sent from Philip’s household. Everything was secret. On the 8th, news came of an English ambassador in Brussels; on the 16th, Philip sent a messenger to his father ‘with certain letters that the King of England had recently written to various towns round here’. On later occasions, Henry took pleasure in marking his triumphs against the feigned lad with flurries of propaganda across the Channel. One of those letters of January doubtless reached his rival, like a personal blow to the heart.
It would have taken time for Margaret’s White Rose to grasp what had happened to his hopes in England. When the news sank in, Vergil said, he was devastated with grief. Yet he may have tried not to show it or believe it, all the same. In a defiant phrase in his 1496 proclamation, Richard declared that his friends had been murdered because Henry ‘stood in dread’ of them. Other friends, who had been scattered or had fled to sanctuary, were possibly still waiting to help him if he invaded. Besides, Maximilian, Philip and Margaret were still firmly behind him. ‘He determined,’ Hall wrote, ‘not to leave the hope and trust that he had conceived in his mad head to obtain the crown and realm of England.’
Yet the executions of early 1495 put his plans back sharply. Originally, his invasion of England had been set for February 22nd, which explained why his ‘will’ was drawn up in January. The collapse of his network in England spoiled those calculations. Richard’s preparations for victory or death, ‘given the uncertainty of human destiny’, had to be shelved until the summer, together with the expectations of his backers.
The invasion plans were treated by Maximilian and Philip as ‘secret affairs’ or, more graphically, ‘certain secret affairs of our own pleasing of which we do not wish to make further declaration here’. Money borrowed for Richard by Maximilian from Simon Longin, his treasurer, was to be laundered secretly through the treasury at Lille, ‘for this time only’, as he said each time, though ‘without any counterfeit or dissimulation’. The largest loans, of £6,800 (for a ship), £4,000 and £2,000 tournois, were authenticated not just with Maximilian’s signature but with a secret code that looked half Greek and half Egyptian. The ship-loan warrant had a long line of twenty-four such characters, so random in their appearance that it is hard to believe they meant anything. They were written in a hand smaller and more careful than Maximilian’s, though in the same ink and clearly at the same time. Since Maximilian had already signed, he had no need for code. It may well have been the Secret Project himself who took the pen afterwards and drew, like a schoolboy, squiggles, loops, thetas, double-crossed crosses and musical notes, until he could not think what crazy sign to draw next.
In answer to outside enquiries that spring, Maximilian was either indifferent or coy. His envoy Naturelli told the Venetian ambassadors in May that he was ‘not involved in it at all’, but that the Duke of York ‘had taken the field against the king under the favour of the archduke’. A month later, in June 1495 (the invasion force still far from ready), Maximilian let drop that ‘he was informed of the proceedings of the Duke of York’, who was already attacking England, and intended to send him reinforcements. By July 11th he had to admit that he could not get to the imperial Diet he had called at Worms, let alone help the Venetians against the Turks, ‘because he was impeded by the burden of much expenditure, and by having to dispatch the Prince of York, the new King of England, for the defence of his right’. Years later, in the Weisskunig, Maximilian continued to hedge. ‘[The White King] sent some of his people, but in small numbers,’ ran the text. The gloss (also by Maximilian) said that, on the contrary, ‘the White King’s men then came to his comfort in great numbers’.
The imperial estates knew better than most that Maximilian had been driving the enterprise for months. In early 1494, he had instructed the government of Tyrol to find 16,000 florins as counter-security for a loan to be raised through George Gossenbrot, his financial agent in Antwerp, ‘for the young King of England for the conquest of the kingdom’. A fleet and troops were mentioned, but the Tyrolers refused. Their report of the following November, courteous but firm, explained why:
We asked Gossenbrot . . . to come to us and describe [the situation], and we assessed with greatest care whether we could find some way to comply with your wishes as we have always been willing to do before. And we find that George Gossenbrot cannot underwrite the amount your Majesty demanded . . . Also we feel that your Imperial Majesty had this project put into your imagination with little reason, and that something has been demanded of you that will bring damage to yourself and the whole German nation. Therefore your Majesty should not go deeper into this matter, as we cannot help you any further.
In March 1495 Maximilian tried to sell the cause in a slightly different way to the Diet at Worms, telling them that since Richard’s claim to England was much more valid than Henry’s, he would make a better ally in the essential war against France. These words, too, left his listeners unmoved.
Money proved hard to raise generally. Margaret gave 8,000 crowns intended, as both Richard and Maximilian said, to cover the provisioning of the whole invasion force. More money was found by Guilhem de Noyon and the Kendal circle, perhaps working on Margaret’s behalf, through Daniel Beauviure, a Catalan, in Bruges. Beauviure advanced 9,000–10,000 francs. John Kendal and his agents tried to amass their own ‘stones’ for the enterprise. James Keating, the most committed to York’s cause, was accused by Kendal that year of selling or pawning a piece of the Holy Cross and various other relics and jewels from his priory in Ireland, probably to float Richard’s fleet. Richard also raised money on his own account, apparently on the surety of nothing more than his name and his seal, from Paul Zachtlevant of Amsterdam. Zachtlevant, looking at the young man as he signed and sealed the papers before him, thought this signature was a good enough guarantee.
In the end, despite the Tyrolers, Maximilian contributed a fair amount of money. The total borrowed from Simon Longin by himself and Philip for ‘secret affairs’ in the early months of 1495 alone was around £15,000 tournois. Not all of that would have gone for the invasion, but much of it would. He also ordered Philip to supply four cannon from the Burgundian arsenal. The document in which this request was contained told its own story. Maximilian passed on to Philip on June 17th a list of twenty-one things to do, including stationing troops on the border with France, helping his father ‘finish off’ the war with the Duke of Guelders, getting new seals made and employing a few messengers who could speak German, ‘including Topping van Loo and Perequin Fontaine, whom the king knows’. Number nineteen on the list was the only order touching the invasion. ‘Concerning Monsieur d’York, who wants to make his journey, the king desires that [the archduke] shall deliver to him four pieces of artillery to make the said voyage in case this is required.’ It was York who was pushing for this invasion; Maximilian already had plenty on his plate.
Nevertheless, he
spread the net wide to raise funds for him. Philippe de Commines, in Venice as an envoy in April 1495, was shown letters sent from Bruges and Worms to Flemish and Florentine merchants, asking for loans ‘for the going into England of him who calls himself the Duke of York’ (Commines’s wording). Most especially, month after month, Maximilian nagged Albrecht of Saxony by letter to get the money together and organise the ships. To despatch the Duke of York was Albrecht’s ‘mission’, Maximilian told him, and he particularly wanted to get the finance tied up before Passiontide and Easter. ‘I realise there’s a bit of a lack concerning York’s business,’ he wrote early that spring:
firstly that you apparently haven’t found any money in the several places we told you about. We ask you to note that we’ve written to you . . . with further instructions about which merchants should give this money, as doubts seem to have assailed you . . .
You now tell us that the Zeeland tax-collector doesn’t want to give you the tax money that had been agreed. We entreat you in all earnestness not to get dazzled or misled by his supposed reasons and delays, but to negotiate with him anew with the greatest diligence . . . And in case the tax-collector pretends that Zeeland can’t afford to provide the money, see to it that he negotiates with the Diet to lend the 10,000 guilden . . .
We urge you to employ all your diligence to get 5,000 guilden, or whatever you can, and use this money for [York’s] journey from Malines . . .
Concerning the money from the Hanseatic tax-collector, Sigmund Gossenbrot’s agent recently sent us a letter addressed to the collector in which he asked him to pay us the money, so we ask you with all urgency to send someone to the collector to get it . . .
About the 20,000 guilden that our curator in Ermberg was supposed to get from George Gossenbrot in Antwerp and Malines . . . he is coming here to Worms in two or three days, and we’ll negotiate this deal with him . . .
You say you are still waiting for some 2,000 guilden from the Dutch. We shall write herewith to our dear son the Archduke Philip, so that from now on he can take over and see that the payment is made without delay . . .
As you will need all this money for York’s expedition, we seriously entreat you to let all other matters go.
The loan from George Gossenbrot was so large that Maximilian seems to have left his wife, Bianca Maria, and her court servants as a human pledge for it. Albrecht was asked to proceed to Hertzogenbosch with the tax-collector’s money, ‘redeem’ Bianca Maria from the Gossenbrot loan, and take her in great secrecy to the Duke of Cleves, who would then accompany her to Cologne. Meanwhile, out of ‘all that remains of the money after the release of our dear wife’, Albrecht was to give the Duke of York 1,000 guilden directly and distribute the rest to ‘our chamberlain . . . and the other gentlemen round Malines who have further orders to deal with it’. Presumably Bianca Maria understood what these dealings were that required her to be passed from hand to hand across Germany. It is harder to imagine that she would have been happy, no matter how charming the prince she was assisting.
On April 3rd came a sudden scare: news of ‘the descente of the English in Zeeland’, evidently to destroy the force that was assembling for the invasion. Henry had planned this in the first week of March, spending almost £500 ‘for the victualling, waging, and rigging forth of five [of] the king’s ships’. Philip sent desperate messages to Albrecht, who was in Holland, and set a watch in the coastal towns to see that no men-at-arms were concealed there. The third part of his strategy was to check on the continuing validity of the Treaty of Senlis with France, and to talk to French envoys ‘to see what remains to be done’. Philip, in York’s cause, was on the very brink of war with England, but he dared not start without watching his back. As it happened, the English attack was no more than a show of defiance and a proof that Henry knew what was up. The ships and their soldiers seemed to fade very quickly into the mists of the plat pays and the flat sea, even as Philip was summoning his nobles to be ready ‘at any moment’ to resist them.
At length Philip and Albrecht got a small fleet together, some fourteen ships, among the low sand-bars at Vlissingen in Zeeland. By June 27th Philip, obedient to his father, had ordered stocks of gunpowder from his master of artillery and had summoned his chief gun-keeper to see him. A force of mercenaries was assembled: 6,000 of them, said Maximilian in the Weisskunig, ‘1,500 of them foot-soldiers, the rest sailors’, and he promised to top it up with 800 more. The receiver-general of Zeeland and the burghermeisters of various local towns were pumped for funds. There were disappointments: Maximilian’s hunt-master raised only 400 ‘serfs’ for the enterprise, having promised 1,500, and in June Albrecht told Maximilian that not only the ‘conscripted peasants’, but the crews too, were refusing to stay with the ships. A Milanese envoy, writing to Ludovico Sforza in mid-May on rose-tinted information that had been ‘heard’ from somewhere, thought the number of troops was closer to 10,000, supplemented by ‘a number of ships with many troops sent by the King of Scotland’.
The men themselves were a mixed crew of Flemings, Germans, Dutchmen and the yeomen recruited from England, armed with the usual assortment of bills, bows, swords, lances and pikes. Many were troops discharged from Maximilian’s recent war with the Duke of Guelders, and still owed pay. Vergil described them as criminals and scavengers. A better-class contingent went also, however, and Molinet mentioned ‘nobles’ in Richard’s company. Roderick de Lalaing, one of Philip and Maximilian’s best captains, of bastard noble blood from Hainault, was on board, besides other compaignons de la garde forts experimentez de la guerre. De Puebla, gathering snippets in London, heard that there were two Spanish captains, Diego el Coxo (‘the lame’) and Don ‘Fulano’ (‘So-and-so’) de Guevara. Both were officers of Philip’s household and also seasoned fighters; Diego’s jousting motto was ‘Out of the Reckoning’, while Pedro (the ‘So-and-so’) was a squire of the carvery, acquainted with knife-work. Of Richard’s closer circle, Keating was there with George Neville, the most eminent of his exile-supporters, and Richard Harliston, who had served Edward IV in several naval commands.
The fleet hung around for a while at Vlissingen, awaiting a favourable wind. Ferdinand and Isabella were ‘astonished’ that the ships had been assembled at all, ‘because we had always written to the King of the Romans and to our ambassadors at his court to prevent such a thing’. They had also written to the Duke of Milan, Maximilian’s father-in-law, since they had heard he might be a good man to put a stop to it, and they trusted that he had written to his son-in-law, ‘though we do not know exactly what his opinion was’. Of course, Ferdinand and Isabella explained, Maximilian really wanted to free himself of York, and that was why he had pushed him off to the ‘island’ where he was now preparing to embark. But he had not managed to do so yet. ‘He was in such a poor state,’ they went on, ‘and had so few soldiers, that he did not sail. In fact, all our subjects who are in Flanders . . . believe the whole fleet will soon vanish away for want of money and men. If the King of the Romans does not help any more, the whole affair seems like nothing to us.’
Molinet made it all sound more hopeful. Despite the disaster in England, and despite the ‘subtle spirits’ who continued to attack him, Richard had not given up the enterprise. He had got his ships, men and guns together ‘and finally went to sea in the hope of conquering England, full of trust and great confidence in his supporters and his friends’. At Worms, the Scottish ambassadors picked up talk of ‘certain victory’, apparently coming from the prince himself. Zurita caught an echo in a boast from Maximilian: ‘He was going to try to overthrow [Henry] with a powerful army and, with just one battle, win the war.’ Where was that powerful army to come from? A Yarmouth sailor, talking later to some of the ‘Dutchmen’, was told that ‘they trusted on one man should help them with many men’, hopeful and vague as ever.
In England meanwhile John Kendal, almost the only conspirator left standing, was getting ready. At the priory of Milborne, in Bedfordshire, he was having jackets ma
de for his attendants. They were parti-coloured green and red, with a narrow section like a scarf on both front and back on which to place a red rose. But Kendal also had a tunic made for each jacket, in the same colours, ‘and ordered that each of his men should carry it in the bow of his saddle . . . and this was done with no other intent than to place a white rose on each jacket’. For Henry, or for Richard: as the news came from the coast they would decide, snapping the right livery from the saddle-bow. Commines had seen the same instant switch of badges at Guisnes in 1470, when he found the lieutenant of Calais and his men, within a quarter of an hour of the arrival of the news that Edward IV had fled into exile, already wearing the ragged-staff badge of the Earl of Warwick, Edward’s rival, on their hats. ‘This was the first time,’ he wrote, ‘that I had ever seen or considered such an instance of the instability of human affairs.’
Kendal’s men, in their reversible jackets, sounded less like soldiers than like the liveried retainers kept up and down England, against the law, to stake claims and rough up debtors on some lord’s behalf. Nor did Kendal seem to be using them to swell the invasion force. Instead, the fighters-for-Richard, now on board the ships that rode in the sea off Zeeland, had come from elsewhere. Among them was Maurice Seles, the London goldsmith. For some reason, despite the clearing-out of the London conspirators, Seles had gone to Plantagenet in Flanders, abandoning his work with the purest metal to assay a young man who was perhaps all artifice, as far as he knew; and who, when tested, was more than likely to break.
