Richard III

by Chris Skidmore

  Pray you therefore to send for him, and in that ye goodly may exhort and stir him to the contrary. And if ye find him utterly set for to marry her and none otherwise will be advertised, then if it may stand with the law of the church, we be content the time of marriage [be] deferred to our coming next to London that upon sufficient surety found for her good abearing ye do send for her keeper and discharge him out of our said commandment … committing her to the rule and guiding of her father or any other by your discretion.16

  From Pontefract on 3 June, Richard found time to write to his mother, Cecily, duchess of York, informing her that her servant, a Wiltshire gentleman named William Collingborne, was to be removed from his post, though he had secured a replacement, to whom the king requested Cecily ‘to be good and gracious lady … I trust he shall therein do you good service, and that it please you that by this bearer I may understand your pleasure in this behalf.’17 Several months earlier, he had granted Cecily a lavish grant of the customs of wool; in recompense for grants totalling £689 6s 8d yearly that had been made by Edward IV, but ‘of which she has received no payment’, Richard had generously given his mother permission to ship 775½ sacks of wool for the next two years, then reduced to 258½ sacks ‘until the king shall provide her for life with the sum’ that she had been promised, an enormous grant that must have been worth thousands of pounds.18 Richard’s affection for his mother in his letter is obvious. Not only does the king recommend himself ‘as heartily as is to me possible’; Richard went further to request from his mother ‘in my most humble and effectuous wise of your daily blessing, to my singular comfort and defence in my need’, adding, perhaps somewhat poignantly, though implying that both mother and son had not been in contact for some time, ‘Madam, I heartily beseech you that I may often hear from you to my comfort,’ Richard wrote to inform Cecily: ‘And I pray god send you the accomplishment of your noble desires.’ It was signed: ‘with the hand of your most humble son, Ricardus Rex’.19

  Surviving letters and accounts provide us with momentary fragments of Richard’s life as king; those written in his own hand, or dictated by him, bring us as close as is possible to the public persona. But what of his private thoughts? One of Richard’s most treasured possessions would have been his illuminated Book of Hours, produced around 1420, though several prayers have been added to the work, suggesting that the collection had been chosen and then enhanced for the king’s personal use and tastes. It is tempting to read back into many of the prayers the king’s own voice speaking to us, highlighting his personal fears and ambitions. A prayer to St Michael in Richard’s Book of Hours begins, ‘O St Michael the archangel of God, defend me in battle that I perish not in the terrible judgement’.20 In a litany added to the book, the idea of the just crusade is highlighted: ‘Let us pray almighty ever loving God, in whose hand are all the rights of kingdoms, come to the help of the Christians and let the peoples of the heathen who trust in their fierceness be destroyed by the power of your right hand.’21 Special prayers in Richard’s Book of Hours include to Ninian, George, Christopher, Joseph the Patriarch and Julian, although only the prayer to Ninian has been added for Richard personally:

  O God who has converted the peoples of the Britons and the Picts by the teaching of St Ninian, your confessor, to knowledge of your faith, grant of grace that by the intercession of him by whose learning we are steeped in the light of your truth, we may gain the joys of heavenly life. Through Christ our lord. Amen.

  As patron saint of the West March towards Scotland, St Ninian was perhaps an unsurprising choice of saint for Richard to venerate; however, it demonstrates the efforts that Richard was making to ensure that he would become integrated into northern society. Yet the king’s northern piety ran more than skin deep. Six years earlier, in July 1478, Richard had established his college at Middleham, providing for six priests whose stalls would especially venerate Saints George, Katherine, Ninian, Cuthbert, Anthony and Barbara. The preamble to the Middleham foundation gives an insight not only into Richard’s own piety, but also the duke’s understanding of his own complex and varied journey through a life already very much lived. In a sense it reads like a confessional, of a man grateful for his sudden rise in the world, in the knowledge that his own fortunes have come at the expense of others.

  ‘Know ye that where it hath pleased Almighty God, Creator and Redeemer of all mankind’, the text began, ‘of His most bounteous and manifold graces to enable, enhance and exalt me His most simple creature, nakedly borne into his wretched world, destitute of possessions, goods and inheritaments, to the great estate, honour and dignity that He hath called me now unto, to be named, knowed, reputed and called Richard Duke of Gloucester.’ God’s ‘infinite goodness’, Richard proclaimed, had not only endowed ‘me with great possessions and of gifts of His divine grace’ but had also managed to ‘preserve, keep and deliver me of many great jeopardies, perils and hurts’.22

  The statutes also give detailed instructions for services, which mostly followed the traditional Catholic ceremony, although specific details bespeak a strong northern element to the devotions. The ‘anthem of Saint Ninian confessor’ was to be sung, with the Latin colet, ‘Deus qui populous Pictorum et Britonum’. The feast days of St George and St Ninian, Richard declared, were to be marked out by the foundation to be ‘served as principal fests, when so it their days fall, and also Saint Cuthbert day in Lent, and Saint Anthony day that falls in January, be served as principal in likewise.’

  In establishing the foundation at Middleham, Richard was clearly considering his own mortality and the salvation of his soul. Nevertheless, the foundation was to pray for the souls of himself and his wife jointly, further underlining Richard’s mission that the foundation was to follow in the footsteps of his Neville inheritance. Richard’s instructions concerning the conduct of the six priests at the foundation are also striking for their tone and concern for moral behaviour. No minister was to ‘haunt tavern or other unhonest place or person at any time’ or be allowed to ‘lie out of the College’ during night time, without the permission of the dean. If any priest or clerk ‘use at any time in ire any inhonest or slanderous words against his fellow, his superior or inferior’, he was to be fined two pence from his wages each time. And perhaps attesting to the casual violence that remained largely accepted in fifteenth-century society, Richard further commanded that if any priest ‘draw violently a knife, he shall pay of his said wage at every time so doing four pennies, and if he draw blood he shall pay of his said wage as much as the dean … shall reasonably deme him to pay’.23

  The statutes designed for Middleham bear a striking resemblance to those drawn up the previous year in Richard’s grant of land to Queen’s College, Cambridge, in order to employ four priests who were ‘well learned and virtuously disposed as doctors of divinity, bachelors, opposers or masters of art’ as well as ‘being priests of ability’ who would ‘proceed to be doctors and to preach the word of God’. Each of the priests would be paid £8 a year, and again would pay particular attention to the honouring of St Anthony, St Ninian and St George, reflecting Richard’s own personal religious preferences not only for traditional saints such as St George, but northern saints such as St Ninian of Whithorn, Galloway, who had converted the Picts to Christianity, and who came to symbolise the claims of the diocese of York over south-west Scotland.24

  The grant gives the impression that Richard was a man whose piety was both genuine and well versed in the liturgical details set out in the Middleham statutes, which reserved to the duke the sole power to revise and adjudicate on any disputed interpretation of the statutes. Richard’s choice of saints is idiosyncratic and reflects at the same time the personal piety of the duke, which must have been heartfelt. Among the total list of thirty-five saints whom Richard had expressed ‘such saints as that I have devotion unto’, the choice of five native saints can be explained through Richard’s northern connections: St Wilfrid of Ripon and St William of York were celebrated Yorkshire saints, w
hile even the rather obscure Gloucestershire martyr St Alkelda had been included, no doubt since the parish church of Middleham had been dedicated to her memory. Both St Anthony and St Ninian, who appear in the Middleham statutes and the foundations of Queen’s College, Middleham and Barnard Castle, were also painted on the stalls of Carlisle Cathedral during Richard’s time in the north. Perhaps tellingly, the legend of St Anthony recalled how the saint had lived in the desert ‘twenty-four years and more without any company but the wild boar’.25 It was the boar that was the only beast which refused to threaten Anthony, despite the orders of the devil, and it may be this religious connotation that inspired Richard to take up the symbol of the white boar for his insignia. The surviving copies of the Duke Richard’s books suggest that he maintained a strong religious interest; alongside his copy of the Visions of Matilda and his verse Old Testament, unusually Richard owned a copy of Wycliffe’s translation of the New Testament.26 Other glimpses of Richard’s piety can be witnessed in his donation of £40 in 1472 and 1473 to the repair of the impoverished church at Coverham, a Neville foundation near Middleham, while in 1474 he presented a bell to the fraternity of shipmen in Hull, to hang in the chapel of the Trinity Guild, and gave a contribution to a window depicting the Last Judgement at Great Malvern, where the duke was lord of the manor.27

  Richard’s active religious faith, his relationship with God, and his belief in the power of prayer can also be seen in a prayer specially added to his Book of Hours. The beginning is missing, but among the requests that Richard would have incanted are the following passages:

  deign to establish and confirm concord between me and my enemies. Show to me and pour out on me the glory of thy grace. Deign to assuage, turn aside, extinguish and bring to nothing the hatred they bear towards me …

  Jesus Christ, so of the living God, deign to free me, thy servant King Richard from all the tribulation, grief and anguish in which I am held, and from all the snares of my enemies, and deign to send them Michael the archangel to my aid against them. Deign, O Lord Jesus Christ, to bring to nothing the evil designs which they make or wish to make against me … O most gentle Christ Jesus, by all these things, to keep me thy servant King Richard, and defend me from all evil and from my evil enemy, and from all danger, present, past and to come, and free me from all the tribulations, griefs and anguishes which I face …

  In these words, one can almost sense Richard’s own personal struggle against his perceived enemies, whether they were the French, the Scots, Henry Tudor and the English exiles, or the experiences of a king, facing rebellion and grieving over the death of his son, who now sought solace in prayer. Yet Richard’s prayer for deliverance from his enemies should not be taken as a text exclusively reserved for the king’s own struggles during his reign. Victory over one’s enemies is just one of the militaristic themes of many of the psalms: another prayer in the manuscript seeks protection from the ‘good angel’ against all enemies, ‘visible and invisible’.28 Nor is Richard’s prayer by any means unique, for the text itself was already over a hundred years old. Richard’s sister, Anne, duchess of Exeter, owned a prayer book containing the same prayer, while it was copied into the primer of Alexander, Prince of Poland, in 1491. It is from this text that we can perhaps deduce the rubric to Richard’s prayer, which is missing in the psalter. It reads: ‘Whoever is in distress, anxiety or infirmity or has incurred the wrath of God, or is held in prison, or has experienced any kind of calamity, let him say this prayer on thirty successive days and he must be without mortal sin. It is certain that God will hear him completely, that his trouble turn to joy and comfort – and this is proven by many persons.’29 The closing paragraph of the prayer, with its thanks to God ‘for all the gifts and goods granted to me because you made me from nothing and redeemed me out of your beauteous love and pity from eternal damnation’ is also strikingly similar to the tone of the foundation charter for Middleham, with its references to Richard as a ‘most simple creature, nakedly born into this wretched world, destitute of possessions’ who had been raised to ‘great estate, honour and dignity’.30

  That Richard viewed himself as a man chosen by God, and as someone who could identify his own fate through the Old Testament kings, is reflected in the inclusion of a rare prayer to Joseph, the youngest son of Jacob, who usurped his eldest brother’s birthright, in which direct comparison is made with Richard:

  O God who gave wisdom to the blessed Joseph in the house of his Lord and in the presence of Pharaoh and freed him from envy and hatred of his brother but also raised in honour, I pray to you Lord God Omnipotent that similarly you deliver over your servant Richard from the plots of my enemies and to find grace and favour in the eyes of my adversaries and all Christians.31

  What use Richard made of these prayers, or how often he sought to repeat them, cannot be known, though the king considered the work important enough to take with him even when staying in his royal tent, where it would eventually be discovered.

  17

  ‘COMMOTION AND WAR’

  While Richard remained in the north, the sea war against the Scots had continued in earnest, becoming Richard’s principal concern in the months of June and July. From his base at Scarborough, he co-ordinated the activities of ‘our army now being upon the sea’. Further orders for military weapons and guns to be sent north were issued.1 According to the Crowland chronicler, ‘near the town and castle of Scarborough’, where Richard resided between 27 June and 11 July, ‘in the same maritime theatre he had remarkable success against the Scots’, despite the fact that ‘he had lost to the French some ships and two of the toughest captains Sir Thomas Everingham and … John Nesfield’ in a naval battle near the Scarborough coast.2 The Scots’ siege of Dunbar had also failed due to Richard’s ability to keep the fortress supplied by sea; since he was only likely to keep an army in the field for a month at most, James III desperately needed to sue for peace.3 Richard was more than prepared to oblige. On 21 July, James wrote to Richard, stating that he had been informed by an English embassy led by ‘your familiar squire’ Edward Gower that Richard wished for an Anglo-Scottish truce, to be sealed with a marriage alliance.

  The news that Richard was prepared to abandon his hostilities towards Scotland had come as a bitter blow to the Scottish exiles, James III’s erstwhile brother, Alexander, duke of Albany, and James, the forfeited 9th earl of Douglas.4 With Richard preparing to come to terms with James III, in desperation the two men launched a raid into Scotland. It was to prove a disaster. On 22 July, Albany and Douglas were routed at Lochmaben in Dumfriesshire by a small army of local lairds. Douglas was imprisoned while Albany fled back to France, where he would be killed a year later fighting in a tournament in Paris. For the Crowland chronicler, the debacle and defeat at Lochmaben countered English successes on the seas, admitting that ‘in that same summer … they inflicted no less destruction upon us, for the Scottish fugitives … besides many Englishmen … fell into their hands’.5

  James III would have preferred to negotiate a peace rather than a truce; however, the Scottish terms, which included the return of Dunbar and Berwick, towns that had been hard won by the English, were unrealistic. Berwick itself had been the only prize gained from Richard’s invasion into Scotland in 1482, significantly improving England’s defences against that nation. It was unlikely that Richard would ever give up these towns unless forced to do so. The Scots embassy arrived at Nottingham Castle on 12 September, led by James III’s trusted secretary, William Whitelaw, where they were met by Richard, surrounded by an impressive number of advisers. Whitelaw opened with a lengthy Latin oration, filled with classical allusions, which he delivered in front of the king for at least half an hour. Whitelaw clearly expected Richard to understand the compliments that he now poured effusively upon him. First the secretary listed what he believed to be Richard’s greatest virtues, namely his humanity, courtesy, liberality, loyalty, justice, his greatness of heart and a wisdom that had instilled in him a kindness that was directed to
everybody. Next, Whitelaw thought it best to praise Richard’s military virtues, including his experience, courage, authority and good fortune. In doing so, Whitelaw compared Richard to Tydeus, who had been the bravest warrior at the siege of Thebes, in spite of his small stature. ‘Never before had nature dared to encase in a smaller body such spirit and such strength’, Whitelaw related, adding ‘in his small body the greatest valour held sway’, possibly reflecting on Richard’s own small stature.

  Neatly, Tydeus’s own emblem was that of a boar also. It was this image of the boar that Whitelaw continued with in his oration when extolling the benefits of peace, with a quotation from Vergil which described a boar peacefully roaming the mountains: ‘so long as rivers flow into the sea … so long as the wild boar delights in the mountains … your honour, your name and your glory will survive for ever’. Aside from the allusion to Richard’s own insignia and behind the diplomatic flattery was the clear point that Richard, having won all possible laurels, had no need for war. Contrasting the horror of war, which ‘gives the country a frightful aspect’, Whitelaw explained how ‘in peace God is worshipped particularly because He is the provider of peace; strong and effective justice prevails, every virtue and good government flourish’.6