When Richard had usurped the throne, Henry Tudor had not even been a cloud on the horizon – simply a Welsh exile from a lost cause, saved from obscurity only by a dash of questionably royal blood. The Great Chronicle of London preserves the memory of how little he was known to ordinary people, but how soon they became interested in him – ‘word sprang quickly of a gentleman being in the parts of Brittany named Henry and son of the Earl of Richmond’. Thanks to the usurpation and to his mother and John Morton, his star was clearly rising. By 1484 men were following the fugitives of 1483 across the sea to join him, from motives which varied from sheer opportunism to hatred of the present King of England. It was no longer a fight between Yorkist and Lancastrian but simply a struggle between two claimants. Despite his Coronation, his most royal blood and the purity of Plantagenet descent, Richard remained unaccepted by his people. It did not matter that his rival was part Welsh squire, part Valois prince, with a dash of Beaufort in him. Henry Tudor was the sole alternative.
For – as contemporaries, including the King himself, must have realized with bewilderment – the once invincible Yorkist party had broken in pieces. The loyalties which had triumphed at Towton, at Barnet and at Tewkesbury, which had eventually made Edward IV impregnable, no longer existed. The members of Edward’s Order of Our Lady of the White Rose may still have worn their insignia, yet they were ready to abandon their rose. Some former Yorkists had joined Henry Tudor, more would do so, while many who did neither nevertheless detested Richard, and were not going to risk their necks for him in battle. In place of the old Yorkist party the King had only his henchmen and three overmighty subjects – two of them treacherous.
Henry’s supporters were an increasingly formidable band.2 What was beginning to look like a court in exile included Lords Dorset, Pembroke (Jasper Tudor), Rivers (Edward Woodville), Devon (Edward Courtenay) and Welles, and many knights and gentlemen. There was also a briefless barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, Thomas Lovell, who would end his life as Treasurer of the Royal Household. Clerics too were joining the cause, not just the Bishops of Ely and Exeter, but men like Richard Fox, a future Bishop of Winchester. Morton, who for some reason preferred to stay in Flanders, communicated with Henry through Christopher Urswick, Rector of Puttenham in Hertfordshire, Margaret Beaufort’s confessor and one day to be Dean of Windsor. (Perhaps ironically this 36-year-old ‘honest, approved and serviceable priest’ was a Northcountryman from Furness in Lancashire.)3 Henry of Richmond may eventually have had as many as 500 followers with him in Brittany and France. They were certainly not a revived Lancastrian party, whatever Henry may have claimed, but simply an anti-Richard III party – as the King himself must have recognized with some bitterness.
Plainly Richard was by now only too well aware that the Welshman whom he had not even bothered to name in his proclamation against Buckingham the previous year was a danger to be eliminated at all costs. Once Henry Tudor was out of the way Richard would be perfectly secure. There was no other possible Pretender capable of challenging the King with any hope of success. Buckingham was dead; admittedly he had left a son – later to be executed by Henry VIII precisely because of his royal descent – but in 1484 he was only six. Otherwise there was Clarence’s son Warwick, aged eight (and perhaps mentally retarded, though there is no firm evidence), Warwick’s sister – also to be executed by Henry VIII – and the bastardized daughters of Edward IV. The ‘Old Royal Blood of England’ had run very thin indeed.
Since the summer of 1483, Richard had had an envoy at the court of Duke Francis, one Dr Thomas Hutton – ‘a man of pregnant wit’ and presumably of unusual diplomatic skill – and a member of his own Council. Hutton’s first instructions make no mention of Henry, and his main business seems to have been to negotiate a friendly alliance, Brittany standing in relation to France much as Scotland did to England. He was sharp enough to pick up news of Henry’s first expedition and rush back to warn Richard. The difficulty with Francis II of Brittany was the Duke’s fear, admittedly quite understandable, of Louis XI of France – the English King’s refusal to supply troops to defend the Duchy against the French threat explains why Francis had helped the Tudor. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the Duke was suffering from what appear to have been fits of premature senility, and that control over Breton affairs was passing into the hands of his unusually venal minister Pierre Landois.
Landois realized the financial possibilities of the situation. Some time in May 1484 his agents arrived in England and negotiated what was meant to be a lasting peace. At considerable expense Richard signed a treaty at Pontefract on 8 June, a treaty with secret clauses. He would supply a thousand archers, pay the Duke the revenues of the Earldom of Richmond – which had once belonged to the House of Brittany – and pay other large sums. In return Landois, who would be the real pecuniary beneficiary, would ensure that Henry Tudor was kept under strict confinement – probably he had every intention of handing Henry over.
Once again Morton thwarted the King. Somehow he heard of the negotiations with Landois and sent Urswick to warn Henry. Also acting under Morton’s instructions, Urswick – having delivered his message to Henry at Vannes – went on to the French court to beg an asylum in France. The Tudor would plainly be of use to the French as a stick with which to threaten England if necessary, especially in any conflict over Brittany. The actual ruler of France was not of course the boy Charles VIII, but his elder sister Anne de Beaujeu. Although only twenty-two, she was extremely formidable, a true daughter of Louis XI, who controlled the French Council through her husband, the future Duke of Bourbon. Francis II had no male heir and it was more than likely that when he died both Richard and the new Habsburg rulers of Flanders would do their best to stop France from taking over Brittany – the last of the semi-independent appenages within the French Kingdom.
13. Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, another of Richard’s strongholds, where Edward V’s uncle Earl Rivers, half-brother Lord Richard Grey and Chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan were executed. From S. and N. Buck, A Collection of Engravings of Castles and Abbeys, etc.
Urswick found the French court at Angers and had no difficulty in obtaining a passport for Henry. The Tudor then sent a large deputation of his followers from Vannes to plead his cause with Duke Francis, who at that moment was most conveniently in residence near the Anjou border. This was a feint; his uncle Jasper had orders to take the party into France by side roads and bridle paths, which they did successfully. Meanwhile, Henry stayed behind at Vannes with a considerable group, to avoid causing any suspicion. However, two days after Jasper’s departure, escorted by only five servants, he himself left Vannes on the pretext of visiting a friend at a nearby manor. Five miles on, the little group disappeared into a wood, where the Tudor changed clothes with one of his servants. They then rode as hard as possible by a secret route for Anjou, deliberately changing direction several times – so careful was Henry that his followers in Vannes had no idea that he had left them. All went well and he crossed the frontier, rejoining his uncle Jasper’s party at Angers as planned. It was in the nick of time. Troops sent by Landois with instructions to arrest him reached the border only an hour after he had crossed it.
The exact date of this sensational escape is not known, but Henry Tudor undoubtedly received a friendly welcome at the French court. The Council gave instructions on 11 October that he and his supporters were to be treated with honour; it also made financial provision for them. Then Duke Francis suddenly and unexpectedly recovered his wits and was furious with Landois for having harried this useful refugee into escaping. He summoned Sir Edward Woodville and Edward Poynings, the chief among the Tudor followers left behind at Vannes, and gave them and their friends permission, together with travelling expenses, to rejoin their master in France for over a year. Henry and his by now very substantial following were to accompany the peripatetic French court on progress, from Angers to Montargis and then to Paris.
14. Dr Christopher Urswick, Margaret Beau
fort’s confessor, who in 1484 travelled secretly to Brittany to warn Henry Tudor that the Bretons were planning to sell him to Richard. Later he was Henry VII’s principal chaplain and Dean of Windsor. From a brass of 1523 in the church of St John, Hackney.
Richard finally decided that he had no hope of repeating the glories of 1482 in Scotland. That summer the Duke of Albany and his fellow exile, the Earl of Douglas, led what may have been a fairly considerable attack into Dumfriesshire; but on 22 July their English troops were cut to pieces at Lochmaben; Douglas was captured and though Albany succeeded in fleeing back across the Border, he was plainly of little future value. It was clear that there would be no more military promenades to an undefended Edinburgh and that Albany would never be ‘Alexander IV’; he died in France the following year, accidentally killed in a joust by the Duke of Orléans (the future Louis XII). The raiding and counter-raiding went on and it is likely that the Scots had the best of it.
At sea it was a different matter. We know that Richard had already had experience of directing naval operations. He returned to his familiar base of Scarborough in June and again in July, staying with Anne in the castle (though a house in the town is traditionally called ‘King Richard’s House’). The first occasion was to organize the large fleet which he had gathered there. To begin with the English ships met with reverses at the hands of the Scots, who were probably reinforced by French privateers, since none other than John Nesfield, Esquire of the Body, was captured by a French vessel – though apparently he was soon ransomed by the King. Nevertheless, it seems that Richard quickly inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scots fleet, after successfully bringing it to battle; it is not impossible that he himself was in command, as the Croyland chronicler attributes the victory to ‘his skill in naval warfare’. Certainly his second visit to Scarborough was of comparatively long duration, since he was there from 30 June to 11 July. At York shortly afterwards he signed a warrant for ‘victualling the King’s Ships at Scarborough’. Plainly he had good reason to be grateful to the men of Scarborough since he erected the town into an independent county of its own.4
But by now Richard knew that it was a futile war. He took advantage of his victory over James III to suggest they make peace. The King of Scots, who had clearly reached the same conclusion, nominated ambassadors to come to Nottingham in September and negotiate. When they came they agreed a three-year truce without difficulty, to be cemented by the marriage of Richard’s niece – Anne de la Pole, daughter of the Duchess of Suffolk and sister of the Earl of Lincoln – to the Duke of Rothesay, James’s heir. From a personal point of view, the most notable aspect of the Scots embassy to Nottingham was the Latin oration delivered before Richard by its leader Archibald Whitelaw, Archdeacon of Lothian. During it the Archdeacon quoted and applied to the English King ‘what was said by the poet of a most renowned Prince of the Thebans, that nature never enclosed within a smaller frame [italics mine] so great a mind or such remarkable powers’.5
Whitelaw’s polite compliment confirms yet again every other contemporary source as to Richard’s size. In addition to Rous, Vergil and More, the Elizabethan antiquary John Stow (born in 1525) had spoken to men who remembered him and who agreed that he was of short stature. There is one exception, however. A certain Nicolas von Poppelau from Silesia visited England as the Ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. It is likely that he was both boastful and an oddity; in his travel diary he says he carried a huge lance with him everywhere, which no one but he could lift – even if they managed to pick it up for a moment, its weight quickly dragged them to the ground. He was given an audience by the King at Pontefract on 1 May and spent ten days at his court. After the customary oration, Richard shook Poppelau’s hand and told an attendant to give him good accommodation. Next day he was present at the King’s Mass (was it yet another Mass for the Dead?), where he was impressed by superb music. Afterwards he watched Richard dine – Kings then dined alone or with their consort, served on bended knee – amid a crowd of courtiers. Richard singled him out, asking him many questions about the Emperor and the Princess of the Empire. He was delighted by Poppelau’s account of the Hungarian King’s victory over the Turks the previous year, exclaiming, ‘I wish my kingdom was on the Turkish border; with my own people alone and without being helped by other Princes, I would so much like to drive out not only Turks but all my other enemies.’
Richard may well have had the fashionable, if impracticable, enthusiasm for the crusade shared by many contemporary noblemen. He expressed more than once a wish to fight the infidel. The ballad ‘Bosworth Feilde’, most convincingly in view of Poppelau’s report, makes the King say, ‘I would I had the great Turk against me to fight.’
The Silesian was fed at the same table as the greatest courtiers for the remainder of his visit, and Richard gave him a gold collar which he ‘took from the neck of a certain lord’. What is baffling is Poppelau’s description of his host: ‘King Richard [was] three fingers taller than I, but a little thinner being not so thickset and much leaner; he also had very thin arms and legs, though a great heart.’6
Poppelau’s fascinating account of his meeting with the King is – in modern terms – the only personal interview which has survived, even though it has to be treated with some caution. Clearly Richard flattered the Silesian; he may well have been much more open with a foreigner than he would have with any Englishman. The overall impression made on Poppelau (who, it must be remembered, had met other monarchs) is undeniably that of a formidable, dignified and intelligent ruler, but it is also that of one with a Sword of Damocles hanging over him. The only puzzling detail is the Silesian’s claim that Richard was three fingers taller, but no doubt Poppelau was a barrel-chested dwarf.
Even if the King could not persuade his English subjects to approve of him, he was much more successful with the Irish lords, as the House of York had never lost the esteem earned by his father’s reign in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant. What authority there was in that turbulent country – or in the part of it supposedly subject to English rule – was exercised by the mighty FitzGerald family, Earls of Kildare and of Desmond. Richard left the Earl of Kildare undisturbed as Lord Deputy, though he seems to have had an excessive estimate of the Earl’s powers; hearing that Kildare’s sister had married the O’Neill, he somewhat optimistically asked the Earl to persuade that peculiarly intractable chieftain to return something of the royal Earldom of Ulster. The King was equally amiable to the Earl of Desmond, declaring he had ‘always had inward compassion of the death of his said father’ (who may indeed have been killed to please the Woodvilles). If certain reports had travelled across St George’s Channel, the Earl would no doubt have been surprised by this sympathy for his parent’s fate, especially when described by Richard as ‘atrociously murdered by colour of the law, against all manhood, reason and sound conscience’, though such moralizing was becoming familiar enough to his English subjects. The ‘Lord of Ireland’ – Richard’s official title – apparently feared that Desmond might go native among ‘the wild Iresshe’ and succumb to Gaelic culture; he asked him to wear English dress – presumably instead of trews and saffron mantle – and presented him with English doublets and hose, together with a robe of velvet and cloth of gold bearing a collar of golden suns and roses and a white boar.7 Polite messages were sent to other Irish magnates, thanking them for their loyalty. He secured it by leaving them alone.
Richard’s most important and lasting work was at home in England. In July 1484 he set up a permanent Council of the North, to be presided over from Sheriff Hutton by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. It was to meet quarterly at York. This body replaced the unofficial condominium exercised by himself when he was Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Northumberland prior to 1483. A genuine administrative achievement, it was to endure for 150 years. But nothing could have been better calculated to anger Henry Percy, one of those three principal props of Richard’s throne. Northumberland must have been still more incensed when, that autumn, Lo
rd Dacre of Gilsland was appointed Warden of the Western Marches.
In August Richard at last brought himself to settle the succession. This too must have irritated Northumberland, since the new heir to the throne was none other than the Earl of Lincoln, President of that most unwelcome Council. Lincoln was the eldest son and heir of Richard’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. He was nineteen, already married, vigorous and intelligent. He received the titular Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, held by all Yorkist heirs apparent. Rous says that the young Earl of Warwick had previously been acknowledged as heir, and ‘in ceremonies at table and chamber was served first after the King and Queen’, but this is unlikely; if his father’s attainder had been reversed, he would have had a better claim to the throne than Richard. Rous adds that then ‘the Earl of Lincoln was preferred’.
Few people took Lincoln seriously as a future King of England. Richard confided to his counsellors that he was worried by his lack of children. He compensated by advancing his bastards. Although still a minor, John of Gloucester, referred to in household documents as ‘My Lord Bastard’, was made titular Captain of Calais. The patent of his appointment, surely dictated by his father, refers to ‘our dear son, our bastard John of Gloucester, whose quickness of mind, agility of body and inclination to all good customs give us great hope of his good service for the future’. ‘Dame Katherine Plantagenet’ was married to the Earl of Huntingdon – Great Chamberlain to her half-brother, the Prince of Wales – in 1484 and given a notably splendid dowry. (She died young like her brother, bearing no heirs.) But the King never contemplated legitimizing them, although he and his wife must have known that they would have no more children by each other.
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