The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  There followed an act of attainder, confirming in law the permanent disinheritance of the rebels. Going out of his way to prove his commitment to the coronation oaths he had sworn, to justice and the common good, Richard also passed a slew of more progressive measures. These included a series of legal reforms in a genuine attempt to address the muddle of legislation on property ownership; the outlawing of his late brother’s deeply unpopular practice of forced loans or ‘benevolences’; and – this time taking a leaf out of Edward’s book – protectionist legislation aimed at guarding domestic workers against the ‘devious and crafty means’ of foreign craftsmen and merchants, with Italians, as usual, the prime target for English xenophobia. An exemption was made for any foreigners involved in the book trade, who were free to import and sell ‘any kind of books, written or printed’: always a keen reader, Richard was perhaps unwilling to deny himself the pleasures of European literature.53 All of which, if the parliamentary record was anything to go by, showed a government in control, listening to the will of the Commons and addressing its concerns; an authoritative display of kingship.

  Others saw it differently. One anonymous chronicler was furious that Parliament saw fit to endorse Richard’s title to the throne. The validity of Edward IV’s marriage, he fulminated, was no business of Parliament’s; rather, it was a matter for the church courts, which alone had the authority to adjudicate matrimonial cases. As far as this, admittedly hostile, chronicler was concerned, Richard had intimidated parliamentarians into endorsing his title: mute with fear, they waved the legislation through. The act of attainder, meanwhile, was a travesty: a land grab unprecedented in history, allowing the king to seize ‘great numbers of estates and inheritances’, which he then parcelled out to his northern followers.54

  As well as driving home the validity of his rule, Richard intensified his efforts to eliminate resistance to it. Furious at Brittany’s backing of Tudor, he tried to batter the duchy into submission. Ratcheting up the English piracy of recent months, making it official government policy, the king intensified it into an indiscriminate naval war against Breton shipping. Nor was it just Brittany. Determined to pursue the Scottish war he had been forced to abort back in September 1482, Richard ignored the Scottish king’s overtures of friendship and initiated preparations for a fresh invasion. And, following the prescribed policy advice for unifying a divided country, he gave his sea captains licence to attack French vessels wherever they found them (in the process letting England’s current truce with France lapse). One command, on 12 February, summed up the military fronts to which Richard had, almost involuntarily, committed himself. It gave the order to fit out and supply a number of royal ships ‘to resist our enemies the Frenchmen, Bretons and Scots’.55 Richard’s way of proving himself a war-leader, it seemed, was to declare war on everybody at once.

  There were some belated signs of conciliation on Richard’s part. One was enforced. If Lady Margaret Beaufort had played a crucial role in the uprisings, her husband Lord Stanley had, after some customary vacillation, turned out for Richard. Taking into account Stanley’s ‘good and faithful service’, Richard spared Lady Margaret ‘for his sake’. However, he tied her hands, transferring all her property and wealth to her husband and others, and extracting a promise from Stanley to keep her in isolated house arrest. At the same time, Richard tried to drive wedges between various elements of the resistance: among those to whom he offered a pardon was Lady Margaret’s fixer Reynold Bray. Bray ignored it.56

  Then, Richard scored a coup. After weeks of negotiation with Elizabeth Woodville and her representatives, attempting to detach Edward IV’s queen from association with the rebels, a deal was brokered. With the lords and London’s mayor and aldermen as witnesses, Richard swore on the gospels to protect Elizabeth and her five daughters; to provide for and treat them as his ‘kinswomen’; to find the girls good marriages, and make sure their husbands treated them right. Elizabeth, ‘late calling herself queen of England’, would be given a quarterly stipend of £466 13s 4d to maintain her household, head of which would be Richard’s servant John Nesfield. Elizabeth Woodville’s decision to leave the safety of Westminster sanctuary was driven, very probably, by a mixture of impulses: resignation; a sense of futility; a desire for some sort of security for her and her daughters in the likelihood of Tudor’s rebellion being destroyed – or more likely, as time went on, simply petering out into nothingness. On 1 March, she and her daughters, foremost among them the girl whom Henry Tudor had sworn to marry, emerged cautiously from the cramped sanctuary lodgings where they had passed the previous ten months and gave themselves into Richard’s care.57

  Reports of another recent ceremony might also have swayed Elizabeth’s mind. One day in late February, the lords spiritual and temporal, together with a number of the king’s more senior household knights and squires, gathered in ‘a certain downstairs room’ in Westminster Palace. Each in turn added his signature to a written declaration pledging allegiance to Richard’s son, ‘should anything happen to his father’. The oath-taking, however, was not so much about Richard’s fears as his dynastic hopes.

  Back in 1471, following Edward IV’s destruction of the Lancastrian cause at Tewkesbury, noblemen and knights loyal to the regime – Richard and Clarence foremost among them – had gathered at Westminster to pledge loyalty to his son and heir, the boy who became Edward V. Now, Richard re-enacted this dynastic statement of intent. News that the lords and commons, or a representative sample of them, had recognized Richard’s ten-year-old son as England’s future king perhaps signalled to Elizabeth Woodville that the door was closing on any prospect of an alternative. Early that spring, after months of conspiracy and rebellion, it seemed as though Richard III had started to lay the foundations of his rule.58

  20

  The Castle of Care

  In early March 1484 Richard travelled north with Anne, his queen, to Nottingham. With Edward IV’s costly new state apartments almost complete, Nottingham Castle was a fitting home for a king: ‘a place full royal’, as one of the elegies on Edward’s death had put it, approvingly. Both Richard’s planned five-month-long absence from the southeast, and his choice of Nottingham – positioned on the River Trent, the traditional dividing line between north and south – as a base, confirmed the royal shift in gravity. A self-assertive move, it suggested that Richard felt he had repaired the damaged political landscape of southern England following the previous autumn’s rebellion, and had secured his own rule there. Whatever the case, his focus was north.1

  Progressing up the Great North Road, Richard and Anne had stopped for a few days at Cambridge, where they were given an effusive welcome by university officials; although Richard had displayed his credentials as a patron of learning at Oxford the previous summer, it was Cambridge whose northern graduates predominated in his close circle of advisers. There, Richard basked in an encomium from the university’s chancellor, Thomas Rotherham, praising his ‘royal munificence’. (Rotherham, Edward’s former chancellor, so hostile to Richard’s seizure of power the previous summer, was now apparently reconciled to the fact.) Among the gifts Richard distributed was a grant of £300 towards the construction of King’s College Chapel, whose stop–start works were testament to the upheavals of the last decades. Now, though, it was taking shape, recognizably the building that would become, as Rotherham put it with spectacular but justifiable hyperbole, ‘the unparalleled ornament of all England’.2

  The king and queen reached Nottingham in mid-March. They had been there a fortnight when news reached them from Middleham Castle that their son and heir, always in fragile health, had fallen ill and died.

  Richard and Anne were devastated. For a long time after, remarked a contemporary, they were ‘almost out of their minds’. The ten-year-old-boy had carried all Richard’s hopes of dynastic succession: he and Anne had no children left. The tentative foundations he had started to put down were wrecked. For some, it was divine judgment. This was what happened, remarked the same c
hronicler unfeelingly, when a king ‘tried to regulate his affairs without God’.3

  It was late April by the time Richard, recovering himself, moved slowly north to Pontefract, York and Middleham. On the way, an envoy from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III caught up with him: a nobleman named Nicolas von Poppelau, from Silesia on the Empire’s eastern borders.

  Von Poppelau was the ideal ambassador. Equally at home in the tiltyard, court and library, he possessed sensational strength – he carried with him a lance so heavy that only he could lift it – and could turn a well-worked oration. As he travelled up from London, however, he concluded he didn’t like the English very much. In his league of national stereotypes, they more or less came bottom, outdoing the Poles in pretension, the Hungarians in violence and the Lombards in duplicity. Their women, though stunning, were rather too independent-minded for his liking. And their cooking was atrocious. Von Poppelau arrived at Pontefract on the first day of May with something like a sense of relief. There, he was given a magnificent welcome from Richard III – and, if he wasn’t so keen on the English, he liked their king.4

  In the following days, Richard sublimated his grief, entertaining his visitor with an expansive display of regality – an awkward simulacrum of his late brother’s easy intimacy, albeit with less of the physical contact (where Edward hugged, Richard stuck out an awkward hand). He showed off the magnificent chapel royal in which, following Edward, he was investing heavily, and invited von Poppelau to dine with him each day. On one such occasion the king beckoned over one of his attendant noblemen, relieved him of his gold livery collar, and hung it round his guest’s neck.

  Von Poppelau, who saw Richard at close quarters for some eight or nine days, had plenty of opportunity to assess him. Though England’s king was somewhat taller than himself – by ‘three fingers’, von Poppelau estimated, almost as though he had measured the difference between them in person – his slightness was thrown into further relief alongside his visitor’s muscular frame. In fact, von Poppelau struggled to find the right words for Richard’s stature: the king was, he put it tactfully, ‘a little thinner’, ‘much more lean’ than him, with ‘delicate arms and legs’. Whether or not it escaped him – Richard had always effortfully concealed his physical condition, except when it suited him to do otherwise – von Poppelau said nothing about his scoliosis. His abiding impression was the striking contrast between the king’s thin body and the ‘great heart’ that burned within it.

  On 2 May, the day after his arrival, von Poppelau was given the honour of a private audience with the king: the pair were left together, ‘quite alone’. Richard quizzed his guest about the political situation in the Empire, and the Turkish armies encroaching on its south-eastern borders; and listened hungrily to the Silesian’s embellished account of a recent victory over the Ottoman forces in Hungary. At one point, unable to contain himself, Richard burst out: ‘I wish my kingdom shared a border with Turkey’, adding that he would love – ‘with my own people, without the help of other princes’ – the chance to drive away ‘not just the Turks but all my enemies.’5

  For decades, a succession of popes had urged England’s support in the fight against the Ottoman advance. Edward IV had constantly disappointed them. While making all the right noises, he had seen papal demands as an irritant to his sovereignty and kept Rome at arm’s length, only approving papal fundraising in order to help himself to the proceeds. Richard was different. He venerated England’s crusading kings, monarchs like the lionhearted Richard I, and longed to emulate them.6 For all this a different, more complex desire seemed to animate his words to von Poppelau. To Richard, the idea of crusade had become rolled up into one definitive confrontation against, as he put it, ‘all my enemies’. Hovering in his mind’s eye was the vision of one great existential battle, a final victory which would solve the various troubles that now pressed upon him.

  Most of those troubles, it had to be said, were fights that Richard had started himself, provoking hostilities with Brittany, Scotland and France. That spring, rumours persisted that there would be war with France by the summer; speculative talk, given there was neither the finance nor the political will for such a huge campaign, but there was something in the air.7 When Richard talked to von Poppelau about ‘all my enemies’, he meant it. He was running three separate conflicts against three separate international powers at the same time, apparently in the God-given conviction that he could win the lot.

  As in his observations on Richard’s physicality, so there was in von Poppelau’s comment on the king’s ‘great heart’ a hint of diplomatic circumlocution. While, as a crusading knight himself, the envoy admired Richard’s passionate belligerence, he may also have been taken aback by the number of simultaneous battles the king was picking.

  In recent weeks, though, Richard had seemed to sense that he was overreaching himself. The loss of his son was a shattering reminder of the precariousness of his kingship. Just as significantly, his thin financial resources could hardly stretch to such ambitious operations, while his aggressive foreign policy was not popular with his main source of credit, the merchants of London and Calais. As much as anything else, his change of mind was bound up with the manoeuvrings of the man he was trying to force the duke of Brittany to hand over. Around the time Richard’s son died, rumour spread that Tudor and his exiles ‘would shortly land in England’.8

  One unanticipated side-effect of Richard’s destructive naval war was to force France and Brittany, suspicious neighbours at best, into a defensive alliance against England. Persuaded by the French and by Tudor, the Breton ruler agreed to fit out another small fleet to carry the exiles to England.9 As it turned out, the fleet – its details entered neatly in the Breton receiver-general’s account book – consisted of no more than six ships, with a capacity of 890 men. Richard, though, wasn’t taking any chances. On 1 May, he issued orders to put the entire country on high alert, instructing his chief officers in each county to be ready to raise troops at a moment’s notice. This was not an offensive move, but a defensive one: against Tudor.10

  In the intervening weeks, however, the political situation in Brittany had shifted abruptly. That April, Duke Francis’s powerful treasurer, Pierre Landais, shoved aside his rivals and, with the duke increasingly ill and absent-minded, took control of government. A resolute believer in the duchy’s independence, Landais was hostile to its French overlords. Reaching out to opposition forces at the French court, he tried to stir up the antagonistic factions around Charles VIII, while attempting to revive the network of international alliances against France. Key among them was England. That spring, Breton ambassadors arrived on Richard’s doorstep with the now-customary demands for military aid – in return for which, support for Tudor would be suspended. This time, Richard was eagerly receptive. Early that June, a truce was agreed which was to last until April the following year.

  Détente with Brittany was soon followed by a thawing of relations with Scotland. While Richard, overseeing operations from the Yorkshire port of Scarborough, was winning his seaborne war against the Scots, this success was offset by the English-backed duke of Albany’s latest failure. When, that July, his forces were destroyed at the town of Lochmaben, Albany slunk off to France. Ineffectual, unlikeable and highly unreliable, Richard’s Scottish puppet had nevertheless been key to his Scottish invasion plans. Without him, Richard grudgingly accepted the Scottish government’s offer of talks, to take place at Nottingham the following September. All of which eased the pressure on Richard’s finances and his military and intelligence resources – which was just as well, given that insurgent activity was once again bubbling in the south of the country.11

  By July 1484, royal agents were focusing on pro-Tudor plotting in the far southwest, where, the previous autumn, rebels had been the first openly to proclaim him king. But it was in London that rebel activity, emboldened by Richard’s prolonged absence – he had been away from the south now for over four months – was most boldly evident. On
18 July, Londoners awoke to find ‘seditious rhymes’ put up in prominent locations around the city. One, pinned to the doors of St Paul’s, was memorable and damning. It ran, simply,

  The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our Dog

  Rule all England under a hog.

  The verse didn’t need much deciphering. The Cat and the Rat were, respectively, Richard’s counsellor William Catesby and the Cumberland man Sir Richard Ratcliffe, who had grown ever more influential, leading negotiations with Scotland and wielding exceptional power in the northeast. Francis Lovell, Richard’s childhood friend and chamberlain, clearly wielded as much influence with Richard as his predecessor William Hastings had done with Edward IV: besides, the inclusion of his name made the rhyme scan nicely. The hog, a scathing reference to his white boar badge, was – of course – Richard.12

  Pinned up in one of the most prominent locations in the entire kingdom, the rhyme was immediately and memorably insulting, a blow against the public royal image that the king was so carefully and self-consciously tending. But it also made a serious political point. In the months after his coronation, Richard had emphasized that he would rule on behalf of the entire country, for rich and poor: ‘for the weal of us all’, as Thomas Langton had put it. Yet following the previous autumn’s rebellion, Richard had turned to men of proven loyalty who had worked for him as duke of Gloucester, rewarding them with illegally seized property and offices confiscated from the southerners whose communities they now dominated. Anxious about the uncertain commitment of those in the south, Richard had either punished them or simply ignored them – or that was how many now felt, a sense reinforced by Richard’s marked absence from the south of the country. There was an increasingly prevailing view that, far from governing for the common weal, Richard was ruling by and for a privileged clique.13 That July, all this was summed up in the damning couplet pinned to the doors of St Paul’s Cathedral.