by Thomas Penn
Among Richard’s vulnerable pressure points was Calais, whose garrison had been at the heart of attempts at regime change over the last decades. Around the same time as Lovell’s ‘stranger’ was spreading confusion in the Exchequer, Richard was tipped off about a plan by Tudor and his rebels to free a long-term Lancastrian prisoner, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, from the Calais fortress of Hammes where he had been incarcerated for a decade. In the intervening years, Oxford – who, over the previous two decades, had careered from reconciliation with the house of York to outright opposition, from conspiracy with Warwick and Clarence to disaster in the fog at Barnet and increasingly aimless manoeuvrings in the 1470s before his final arrest at St Michael’s Mount – had been all but forgotten. Following one leap into the moat at Hammes that might have been either an attempted escape or a suicide bid, he seemed resigned to dying in prison. Tudor’s arrival in France, though, had given this Lancastrian loyalist a new political significance and a new lease of life. When Richard sent one of his chamber servants to Calais to transfer the earl to the greater security of the Tower, the servant arrived to find him gone. Together with his gaoler James Blount – another disaffected friend of the late William Hastings – and a handful of sympathizers, Oxford was making for Paris, the French court and Henry Tudor.31 Once again, Richard’s grasp closed on thin air.
Around the same time, insurgency flared in the Essex town of Colchester and moved west, into Hertfordshire. It quickly became clear that these new troubles were connected to those in Calais, the skeins of conspiracy looping and threading across the Channel. A central node was the earl of Oxford, who had been tapping up residual loyalties in his family’s Essex heartland. Another shadowy figure in the uprising was John Morton, busy pulling strings from his Flanders hiding place, exploiting his regional connections built up as bishop of Ely. Again, however, the troubles spread fast through the system of local government. The Colchester uprising was led by a handful of Edward IV’s former servants, at their head Sir William Brandon, who had been involved in the previous year’s rebellion. Richard reacted fast to put down the uprising, and the rebels scattered. Brandon’s two sons William – leaving behind him a baby boy named Charles – and Thomas fled to the windswept tidal island of Mersea, where they commandeered a boat and disappeared in the direction of France.32
The effects of the abortive Essex uprising rippled through south-eastern England. Richard put the armed forces of neighbouring counties on half a day’s notice to resist ‘any sudden arrival’, any surprise attack by the rebels; he also commanded the Calais garrison to besiege Hammes Castle, where the remaining rebels were holed up.
That November, as sheriffs across the country finished their annual term of office, Richard took the opportunity to weed out officials suspected of colluding with the rebels, who had displayed an apparent lack of commitment, or who had failed to respond with sufficient alacrity to royal commands – which now, in Richard’s eyes, were more or less one and the same. From the west country to Wiltshire, East Anglia and the southeast, more of Richard’s tried-and-trusted household men replaced recalcitrant locals. Robert Percy, controller of the king’s household, was made sheriff of the problematic county of Essex; John Wake, one of Richard’s gentleman ushers, was given the equally febrile counties of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. Decades before, when forced to send his close adviser Thomas Montgomery to investigate disturbances in East Anglia, a young Edward IV had grumbled that Montgomery was a servant he could not do without. For Richard, this lack of reliable human resources was becoming the norm.33
In early December, as royal agents tried to stamp out the fires of insurgency, they seized copies of a letter from Henry Tudor to potential supporters in England. Confident and intimate in tone, it asked for help in pursuing ‘my rightful claim’ to the crown, and in overthrowing ‘that homicide and unnatural tyrant’ on whose head it currently rested. Describing himself as ‘your poor exiled friend’, Tudor urged people to raise what forces they could, to cross the sea and join him in France, thanking them in advance for their ‘loving kindness’. The letter concluded with a regal flourish, sealed with ‘our signet’ and signed with the monogram ‘H’ – Henry.34
Tudor’s open declaration of his royal ambitions was an audacious move. When, back in 1471, Edward IV returned from his Burgundian exile, he concealed his attempt to regain the throne under protestations that he simply wanted to reclaim his dukedom of York: this from a man who was a crowned king of England. Tudor, who barely had a claim to the throne at all, nevertheless owned that claim, putting it front and centre of his appeals for support. To Richard, Tudor’s letter, allied to the surge in insurgent activity across southern England, signalled one thing: his invasion was imminent.
Back in Westminster, Richard issued a proclamation condemning Tudor and the leading rebels, from the marquis of Dorset and Sir Edward Woodville to the earl of Oxford, newly arrived in the rebel camp. He denounced Tudor for his claim to the throne, ‘wherein he hath no manner interest, right, or colour’; for allying with France, England’s ‘ancient enemy’, and for signing away England’s claims to the French throne in the process. He added, for good measure, a lurid portrayal of the horrors that a Tudor regime would visit on England’s people, and an appeal to all Englishmen to resist the invaders. Alongside the proclamation, Richard ordered another general mobilization; and with it, instructions to commissioners in each county to carry out a detailed review of their defence plans, to ensure all was in readiness.35
Meanwhile, after months of conspirators slipping through his fingers, Richard finally ran one insurgent cell to ground. The west-country rebels Collingbourne and Turberville were found guilty of treason in a perfunctory trial. Turberville was imprisoned. Collingbourne – whose derisive couplet had caused fury at the heart of Richard’s regime – was subjected to the full ritual horror of a traitor’s execution. On Tower Hill, in front of a fascinated crowd, he was hanged until semi-conscious, then ‘cut down and ripped’: his stomach slashed open. The butchery was swift and expert. Collingbourne was still alive to witness his intestines pulled out and thrown on a fire, one bystander hearing him gasp: ‘Oh lord Jesus, yet more trouble.’36 This, Collingbourne’s execution was presumably intended to convey, was what happened if you messed with Richard – though as a deterrent, it was hardly likely to work. By now, the rebels had worked out the risks.
There seemed something impulsive, impatient about Richard’s response that winter. That Tudor’s threat was real was beyond doubt. Yet it didn’t appear to occur to Richard that his overblown proclamation against Henry served only to magnify his opponent’s credentials and attractiveness to those disillusioned with Richard’s rule. Indeed, Richard could scarcely have advertised better how seriously he was taking this obscure nobleman who most in England otherwise barely knew at all; who even those in relatively information-rich London were describing simply as ‘a gentleman named Henry’. Likewise, Tudor was hardly on the brink of invading England. His own letter, copies of which Richard had seen, was little more than a speculative and hopeful plea for sympathizers to join his small band in France. Moreover, while Charles VIII had welcomed Tudor with open arms, and had given him 3,000 livres towards his military costs, it wasn’t a sum that would go very far: more a symbolic gesture than anything else. The French government, too, continued to keep the diplomatic door open to Richard, sending envoys to the English court. After all, situations could quickly change.
Richard found both his elusive enemy and the contradictions of foreign policy unsettling; his response, as usual, came in clear, straight, unambiguous lines. Seen one way, his military preparedness made sense. But his orders to his commissioners betrayed an anxiety about his own troops’ state of readiness, about their allegiance – men were to report to only those commanders whom Richard had appointed, ‘and none other’ – and about the availability of defence funds: money raised by local officials was either not being paid in at all, or was being embezzled from, ‘taken out of
the keeping of’, those officers appointed to look after it.37 More than anything else, however, Richard’s anxieties were all too evident in the way he put the entire country on a military footing, waiting for an invasion that might never come, and through his increased hostility towards Tudor’s new backer, France – at a time when an outstretched hand might have worked wonders. As Christmas approached, Richard re-imposed his control, stamping out the latest wave of insurgency and securing Calais. Yet his dependence on his small pool of trusted servants was self-perpetuating, and increasingly problematic. His coterie of close advisers was being spread exceptionally thin. Despite having become the king’s linchpin in south Wales, James Tyrell was redeployed to Calais and made lieutenant of Guisnes Castle, in order to shore up the creaking security apparatus there; Robert Brackenbury, delegated to tackle ‘arduous business concerning the king’s right’, was also over-stretched.38
The architects of Tudor’s strategy of disruption – Morton, Lovell, a sharp Lincolnshire canon lawyer in his late thirties named Richard Fox and the group of experienced, knowledgeable Yorkist officials with them in France – were making a devastating impact, as much as anything else on Richard’s mind. For one Tudor commentator, the Italian Polydore Vergil – a man who constructed his history of England from first-person interviews with precisely these men – the impression was of a king ‘as yet more doubting than trusting in his own cause’, and who by this time was ‘vexed, wrestled and tormented in mind with fear almost perpetually of the earl Henry and his confederates’ return’.39 Vergil’s sources, and the context in which he wrote, naturally gave his history an ingrained bias. Yet his description of Richard’s fears suggested that this was precisely the effect that Tudor’s rebels, with their constant worrying away at the government’s connective tissue, hoped to produce. They knew Richard, and they knew the effect political uncertainty had on him. As much as anything, theirs was a strategy of mental disintegration. And there were signs that it was working.
Around this time, Richard acquired a book of hours. Designed for personal, everyday use, this prayer book was small, its illuminations – initials, sprays of foliage, the occasional illustration picked out in pink, blue and warm orange, with gold leaf – simple and practical, designed to guide the reader around the text in the course of their devotions. It was a book to be carried, to be kept close and consulted frequently.40 Into this book, a scribe had copied a prayer tailored to Richard himself. Its wording drew on a long tradition of appeals for heavenly protection from danger: invocations which, when muttered repeatedly, mantra-like – one rubric advised saying the prayer on thirty consecutive days for its full power to take effect – were intended to soothe the mind of the anxious supplicant.
Yet there was nothing generic about the mood of claustrophobia that clouded Richard’s prayer, with its appeal to Christ to ward off the king’s adversaries, to ‘turn aside, destroy and bring to nothing the hatred they bear towards me’; to deliver Richard from ‘the plots of my enemies’; and to send to his aid St Michael. This was the angel who in Yorkist prophecy had foretold the reunifying of England under the kings of the house of York, and who, back in 1465, Edward IV had credited with his destruction of Lancastrian insurgency, the saint from whom his newly minted ‘angel’ coins had taken their name. Along with the repeated exhortations to Christ to free him from the ‘tribulations, sorrows and troubles’ that seemed to press in on him from all sides, Richard begged for a release from dolor, infirmitas and paupertas: abstract nouns that all, nevertheless, spoke to his own afflictions – the grief of his son’s sudden death; the discomfort and sudden spasms of pain from his twisted back; his ever-present financial problems.41 Months before, Richard had told Nicolas von Poppelau of his desperation to confront ‘all my enemies’. The wording of Richard’s prayer suggested that desperation was becoming ever more acute.
For all Richard’s money problems, Christmas at Westminster that year was magnificent, the habitual crown-wearing at Epiphany more than usually majestic: like being ‘at his original coronation’, as one onlooker put it. Richard seemed to submerge himself in the light relief of the festivities: in the prurient words of one commentator, ‘far too much attention’ was paid to ‘singing and dancing’. Even Richard’s own supporters had expressed reservations about the ‘sensual pleasure’ in which the king indulged, and the implied contradiction with his own moralistic trumpetings on his late brother’s faults. In particular, Richard seemed to be drinking more and excessively. Just maybe, he sought solace from his ‘tribulations, sorrows and troubles’ at the bottom of a wine glass.42
One piece of royal frivolity struck observers as genuinely shocking. Following Richard’s guarantees of protection the previous March, the Woodville ladies had made a quiet re-entry into political life. In the intervening months they had kept a low profile, their public appearances few and far between. That Christmas, however, Richard lavished attention on the former queen – Dame Elizabeth Grey, as she was now styled – and her family, as honoured guests at court. Richard’s way of emphasizing the Woodvilles’ political rehabilitation was to order his wife, Queen Anne, and Elizabeth, the blonde, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, to swap costumes and, with them, identities.43
In a way these ‘vain exchanges of clothing’ were of a piece with the seasonal atmosphere of license and misrule, the order of things subverted. But this upending of sumptuary laws placed the eighteen-year-old Elizabeth on a par with Richard’s own queen. It was the king’s way of publicly resuming control of the young woman who, betrothed by Yorkist exiles to Henry Tudor in Rennes the previous Christmas, had been transformed into a political figurehead for the rebels: their queen-in-waiting, in whose person the regime of Edward IV would be restored. The clothes-swap was bound to set tongues wagging – and that was the point. It would reach the clandestine cells across England and the exiles in France; and, by signalling the Woodvilles’ total reintegration into Richard’s regime, indicate the favourable treatment their supporters should expect, should they desert Tudor and seek a return to the king’s grace.
For all their success in infiltrating Richard’s networks, and in stretching his already scant resources to the limit, the rebels were themselves hardly well placed. Although the arrival of the earl of Oxford had given Tudor’s cause some added aristocratic lustre and military experience – Oxford immediately proved his credentials by returning to Calais to break the remaining rebels out of Hammes Castle – French interest in the exiles’ project was proving predictably uneven. With civil war threatening to erupt in France, Charles VIII’s beleaguered government had its hands full: the cause of Tudor and his allies had fallen rapidly down its list of priorities. By the early months of 1485 morale was beginning to sink among the rebels who, ‘weary with continual demanding of aid’, began to believe they were getting nowhere. Some among them felt that Henry was hopeless, that nothing ‘went forward with him’. There were signs that Richard’s attempt to divide the exiles, to entice Yorkist rebels back to grace, was working. A trickle of Woodville adherents accepted pardons from the king and agreed to financial bonds for their future good behaviour. Among them were the queen’s younger brother Richard Woodville, and Sir John Fogge, whose handshake with Richard back in June 1483 signalled an apparent rapprochement with supporters of the young Edward V before things had gone horribly wrong. Richard almost landed one of the biggest fish of all. His arch-enemy Thomas Grey, the marquis of Dorset, was in constant correspondence with his mother Elizabeth Woodville, who assured him of the lavish settlement that awaited him should he return to Richard III’s court – the king had, apparently, ‘promised mountains’. Fed up with kicking his heels in France with Tudor waiting for something to happen, Dorset left Paris secretly one night and headed for Flanders. He was run to ground by John Cheyne’s brother Humphrey some fifty miles northeast of Paris at the town of Compiègne and hauled reluctantly back to the capital.44
Though Dorset’s break for the border
had failed, it signalled two related points. The exhausted, shattered Elizabeth Woodville, desperate for a quiet life and a stable future for her daughters, now saw her best chance of achieving these goals with Richard. If Elizabeth and Dorset felt that way, as time passed there was every chance that other Yorkist rebels, fed up with the boredom and penury of exile, would arrive at a similar conclusion.
Richard’s own problems, however, were continuing. His attempts to improve his finances the previous autumn hadn’t worked: constant mobilization against his elusive enemy – from soldiers’ wages to much-needed upkeep of defences and the supply of weapons and ordnance – and the disruptive manoeuvrings of Tudor’s agents were proving a drain on his already depleted coffers.45 In early 1485 he turned to his late brother’s favoured mechanism for raising funds: a forced loan. That February, royal officials sent out targeted letters to potential creditors across the country, stipulating the required sum each lender was expected to stump up: ‘every true Englishman’, the letters said, should be willing to contribute to the defence of the realm.46 This appeal to patriotism could hardly mask the fact that having made financial reform a central plank of his government, Richard was now engaging in precisely those practices that, the previous year in Parliament, he had unequivocally condemned and sworn never to use.
