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 chronicler 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.
The city authorities, it was said, carried out ‘much search’ for the culprits, but despite many arrests nobody was charged. By the time royal agents had worked out who they were meant to be hunting, the perpetrators had gone to ground. William Collingbourne and John Turberville were west-countrymen. A loyal member of Edward IV’s household, Collingbourne had been among the Wiltshire insurgents the previous autumn, but where other Yorkist rebels had fled to Brittany he had stayed on, smuggling messages, funds and men out of the country to the exiles. Turberville was a relative of John Morton. Both, in other words, fitted the profile of the committed Yorkist dissident who now saw Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne as the best chance of overthrowing Richard, the king they hated.
Their scurrilous rhyme was only the tip of the pair’s activities that summer. In regular contact with the rebels, and – in Collingbourne’s case – cultivating unrest among disaffected Londoners, they were among the dissidents trying to help Tudor co-ordinate another landing for the following autumn, again on the Dorset coast. However, with Richard’s new truce with Brittany showing every sign of holding, and so frustrating rebel attempts to provoke insurgency, they urged Tudor to change tack and seek backing elsewhere. Collingbourne suggested sending the reliable John Cheyne – a man he knew well from Edward IV’s household – to the court of the French king on a fundraising mission.14
Meanwhile, Richard prepared to return to his restive capital after his long tour of the north. He was aware that he could hardly be at both ends of the country at once, and characteristically, even as he castigated his late brother’s methods of government, he looked to them for a solution. In the 1470s, Edward IV had handed the rule of Wales and the Marches to his young son’s council, an arrangement that allowed him to delegate the everyday running of the region, while keeping it in the family and under his personal control. Richard had planned to do much the same thing for the north, placing his own son at the head of a dedicated council. Now, though, his son was dead.
Late that July, shortly before he returned south, Richard signed a set of articles for a new council in the north, now clearly defined as a sub-department of the king’s own council. Casting around for an appropriate figurehead, the king passed over the claims of leading regional lords, chief among them his ally Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. While Northumberland had supported Richard’s seizure of power in the hope that the king would restore to him his family’s traditional authority in the northeast, Richard had no intention of letting that happen. The idea of putting the earl at the head of royal networks in the north seemed exceptionally unwise. Like their detested rivals the Nevilles, the Percies had historically proved themselves dangerously independent-minded: a challenge, rather than a support to royal authority. There seemed no point in risking this again. Instead, Richard appointed as president of the council in the north his nephew, and now his closest adult male relative, John de la Pole, the earl of Lincoln.
Son of the duke of Suffolk and Richard’s older sister Elizabeth, John de la Pole was close Yorkist family. Visible at court during Edward IV’s last years, he had easily transferred his loyalties to Richard and played a leading role at his uncle’s coronation. For all that, de la Pole had spent the twenty years of his existence shuttling between his family estates in East Anglia and the Thames valley. He knew next to nothing about the vast region over which, as president of the Council of the North, he now had nominal control. For Richard, though, that was the point. De la Pole was a figurehead, a conduit for Richard’s authority, heading a council of royal servants who between them possessed a wealth of local knowledge and administrative expertise. As a continuation and expansion of Edward’s methods of extending royal control through the regions, it made sense. The earl of Northumberland didn’t like it very much, however. Nor was he impressed by the terms of his renewal of his wardenship of the East March, overseeing the security of England’s northeast. This was an office customarily renewed in five- or even ten-year periods – though Northumberland regarded it as his by right. That August, Richard reappointed him for a year. There had always been some needle between the two as far as the northeast was concerned, Northumberland perpetually in Richard’s shadow. Now that prickly relationship continued, Richard making it emphatically clear who was in charge. Northumberland brooded.15
Back in London that August, Richard made renewed efforts to woo the mercantile community, lending a sympathetic ear to their concerns and, where he could, paying off his debts. In addition to the rumours of war with France, civil conflict had again erupted in Flanders, making it too hazardous to trade safely; the Merchant Adventurers imposed a blanket ban on commerce with the region. Assuring them of his support, Richard issued a proclamation cracking down on English pirates, now forbidden to attack ships of any nation. It was a welcome, if belated, volte-face and a sign that he was attempting to engage with business, though in fact he made one exception: French ships were still, apparently, fair game. In return, London’s mollified corporation responded to his appeal for funds, extending him a substantial and much-needed loan of £2,400.16
Meanwhile, in an act of political penance and reconciliation, Richard ordered the remains of the Lancastrian king Henry VI to be disinterred from their sequestered location at Chertsey Abbey, and royally reburied in the choir of the near-completed chapel of St George at Windsor, close to the body of the man who had destroyed him and his family, Edward IV. Edward, of course, had designed the chapel specifically as the last resting place of the Yorkist kings. The symbolism of Richard’s gesture was lost on no one: in death, at least, the houses of Lancaster and York were to be unified. Perhaps, Richard hoped, some of the Lancastrian king’s saintliness would rub off on him by association. And, as a flood of pilgrims descended on Windsor to venerate the bones of the saintly Lancastrian king, Richard redoubled his efforts to get hold of his rather more troublesome living descendant, Henry Tudor.17
In Brittany, Richard’s agents reassured the duchy’s de facto leader Pierre Landais that its long-desired military support would soon be coming, in the form of six thousand English archers. The arrival of Richard’s right-hand man James Tyrell at the Breton court, then resident in the city of Vannes, was enough to trigger rumours that the soldiers were already on their way: the French government was concerned enough to investigate the reports. To Tudor and his supporters, scattered in lodgings across the city, Tyrell’s presence was alarming. It suggested that the Breton government was preparing to hand Tudor over to Richard.18
For Landais and his regime, Tudor and his growing band had become not only a financial burden but a political liability. That summer, as Landais scaled back support for the exiles, Tudor had followed Collingbourne’s advice and reached out to the French king. It was a move that threatened to upset Landais’ own manoeuvrings. With Tyrell communicating Richard’s fulsome assurances of military aid, and promising that Tudor would be well treated back in England – restored, indeed, to his earldom of Richmond – Landais knew that the time had come to cash him in.19 But Tyrell was too late. Shortly after his arrival in Brittany, Tudor vanished. He had been tipped off.
Since escaping to Flanders after the previous autumn’s rebellion, John Morton had sat tight, monitoring events in England and Brittany, watching and waiting. His contacts were good. Hearing about the plan to extradite Tudor, Morton sent one of his own entourage, a priest named Christopher Urswick, the four hundred and fifty-odd miles across northern France to Vannes, with a message for Tudor to get out of Brittany as soon as he could.
Tudor left Vannes on horseback with five friends, pretending to pay a call on a local acquaintance. Once out of the city, he disguised himself as a servant; the small group then fled towards the French border. Their absence was soon noted. As detachments of Breton troops rode furiously in pursuit, the fugitives crossed into France by the skin of their teeth.
Finally, news of Landais’ machinations reached Duke Francis. Angry and ashamed at his treasurer’s betrayal of Tudor, whom he had protected for over thirteen years, the duke summoned representatives of the three hundred English exiles remaining in Vannes – Sir Edward Woodville, and the Kentish esquire Edward Poynings, a capable military man who had risen rapidly to become ‘chief captain’ of the rebel army. Giving them travel funds, Francis told them they were free to rejoin Tudor in France. Within weeks, Tudor and his group were at the Loire city of Angers and the court of Charles VIII. Greeting them warmly, the boy-king ‘promised him aid, and bade him be of good cheer’.20 For the English king, the threat from Tudor had suddenly got a whole lot worse.
That summer, Richard had successfully ended his conflicts against Brittany and Scotland in order to concentrate his resources on eliminating renewed domestic insurgency and extinguishing the rebellion at source by extraditing Tudor to England, while maintaining a belligerent stance towards France. These latter warlike ambitions dovetailed perfectly with his aim of shutting down the rebel threat – so long as Tudor remained in Brittany. Now, having eluded Richard’s grasp, Tudor had found shelter with a French government with whom Richard was aggressively at odds. Charles VIII and his advisers were deeply concerned about Richard’s manoeuvrings – his intensifying of the naval war against France, and his dabbling in a resurrected anti-French coalition. For the French, Tudor was not simply a political card to be played; he was a weapon to be deployed against Richard.
For many involved, the echoes of recent history were all too clear. Back in 1470, the French king Louis XI had backed an insurgency against Edward IV: an insurgency which, led by two renegade Yorkist figureheads in Warwick and Clarence, aimed to restore the Lancastrian Henry VI and his heirs to the throne. The scenario that now faced Richard III was its obverse: the French government was backing a group of mainly Yorkist exiles, using a Lancastrian figurehead to topple a Yorkist king and restore the line of Edward IV. In an added historical irony, Charles VIII’s promises to Tudor had come at Angers, scene of the Louis XI-brokered agreement between Margaret of Anjou and the earl of Warwick some fourteen years previously. The repercussions of this new conjuncture were soon being felt in England.
As Tudor rode headlong into France, Richard was returning north. At Nottingham that September, he received a Scottish diplomatic mission, listening to an elegant oration from James III’s secretary, Archbishop Whitelaw. Through Whitelaw’s unctuous flattery – ‘Never before’, he oozed to Richard, ‘has nature dared to encase in a smaller body such spirit and strength’ – ran a clear message: war was expensive and pointless. For once, Richard concurred. Signing a new Anglo-Scottish truce, he brought a halt to his own decade-long obsession with Scottish conflict.21 There were more pressing matters on his mind.
That autumn at Nottingham, Richard settled down to tackle the problem of his rickety finances. Emulating his brother, he aimed to delve into the furthest recesses of his kingdom, to know everything ‘that might be most for the king’s profit’. As Edward had done, he targeted the great royal estates, which provided a huge proportion of the crown’s regular revenues. In a new ‘remembrance’, or set of guidelines, he set down procedures for the ‘hasty levy’ of income from these lands, aiming to maximize that income, ensure its efficient collection and audit, and swift payment into the depleted coffers of his chamber. All of which depended on the reliability and trustworthiness of the king’s network of local officials, and their effective communication with central government – the Exchequer was directed to use ‘hasty process’ against any dilatory financial officers and aggressively pursue debtors to the crown – and the king himself.22
Among the business that Richard processed that autumn was a set of instructions to one of his key officers in Ireland, the earl of Desmond. Writing to Desmond, Richard – as he increasingly seemed to be – was in reflective mood. As his recent reburial of Henry VI indicated, political killings of the past were much on his mind. In his letter to Desmond, he recalled John Tiptoft’s ‘extortious slaying’ of the earl’s father back in 1468 ‘against all manhood, reason and good conscience’, and urged him to seek legal redress. For Richard, the episode brought to mind a ‘semblable chance’ – similar thing – that had since happened in England: the judicial murder of his brother Clarence. Clarence’s killing, Richard told Desmond, had been wrong, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable about it. Not, it had to be said, that Richard’s unease had stopped him from lobbying for the duke’s forfeited property at the time; nor that it now extended to seeking justice for his murdered brother’s family.23
This sense of seeking exculpation, of making good, perhaps informed another of Richard’s actions that October. Among the warrants that he authorized – payments for building works; £270 to two Calais merchants for a consignment of wine – was a grant to a widow, Johanne, or Janet, Forest, and her son Edward.24
Johanne’s husband Miles Forest, the wardrobe keeper at Richard’s fortress of Barnard Castle, had recently died. On hearing the news, Richard converted his salary, an annuity of 5 marks, into a pension to Johanne and her son, payable as long as either of them lived. According to Thomas More, Forest had been one of the murderers of Edward IV’s sons. He had died not long after, ‘rotting away’ in the London sanctuary of St Martin’s-le-Grand – which, in the ‘very bowels’ of the city, housed the usual assortment of social outcasts, ‘a rabble of thieves, murderers, and malicious heinous traitors’.25 More’s emotive language aside, the question of whether Forest had sought shelter in St Martin’s – or, indeed, whether he had been involved in the boys’ killing – was moot. What was certain was that Forest was now dead, and that Richard had made his widow and son not only a generous settlement, but an unusual one. This pension was paid, not in recognition of a lifetime of service on Forest’s part – rewards for ‘good service’ tended to be recognized explicitly as such – but ‘for diverse causes and considerations us moving’, a formula kings habitually used when referring to confidential business carried out on their behalf.26 It was impossible to say for sure what ‘diverse causes and considerations’ might have moved Richard. But whatever Forest had done for him, it merited an exceptional royal response.
The impact of Tudor’s flight to France was soon being felt in the autumn of 1484. In England, there was a marked upsurge in clandestine activity. Richard responded fast, ordering his agents to make more arrests in the ‘west parts of the realm’. At Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, royal officers presided over the confessions of three west-country merchants who had sent funds to Tudor’s men in Brittany, their punishment to be ‘in fearful example of other’.27 But if Richard thought he was getting a handle on the conspirators, he was mistaken. What was more, the rebels’ activity seemed organized, purposeful and with a definite aim in view.
That November, Exchequer officials in Westminster, following Richard’s orders to move aggressively against slack financial practice, took action against a Devon official called Thomas Pyne. Pyne was the county’s escheator, the officer responsible for enforcing the king’s rights, a potentially lucrative area of royal income that Richard had been trying to tighten up. Typically, royal officers were required to provide financial sureties to ensure they fulfilled their roles properly: failure to do so would trigger the penalty. Such sureties were underwritten by others, family and friends. When Pyne failed to file his accounts at the Exchequer, his surety of £40 was triggered. Following Richard’s recent instructions, Exchequer officials duly carried out ‘hasty process’ against the man who had given the surety, a king’s yeoman named Griffith Lloyd, turning up at his home to seize goods and assets to the required value. They were confronted by an outraged Lloyd, who swore blind that he had never stood surety for Pyne at all.
Investigating further, royal officials pieced together an altogether more disturbing picture. Lloyd had been the victim of both fraud and identity theft. Earlier that autumn, a ‘strange person’ had walked into the Exchequer claiming to be Lloyd, put his name down for Pyne’s surety, and then vanished into thin air. The scheme had involved Pyne himself: probably disgruntled at having to work for the man Richard had planted in Devon as the county’s sheriff, the Yorkshireman Halneth Mauleverer, he had defected to Tudor and fled to Brittany. As royal agents discovered, however, the man behind the operation was a figure who would become one of Henry Tudor’s closest, most uncompromising advisers: Thomas Lovell.
This wasn’t a headline-grabbing case, but it was an audacious one. It was designed specifically to cause disruption – or as Richard put it, ‘vexation and damages’ – in the workings of government, to prevent the smooth and efficient flow of funds to his impoverished regime and, in doing so, to erode trust between the king and the network of royal officials on whom he relied.28
There was nothing isolated about the Pyne case. That autumn, the regime’s nervous system seemed under attack. County sheriffs and other local officials, aware of their king’s jumpiness, took care to acquire royal pardons: insurance against any failure to fulfil their duty that might be construed as disloyalty. Another official who failed to account to the Exchequer was the escheator of Worcestershire, Robert Hunde; elsewhere, the sheriff of Lincolnshire John Meres, demonstrably reluctant to take up his post in the first place, was proving to be a serial foot-dragger. Both men, unbeknownst to Richard, were now working for Tudor. By simply failing to do their jobs – and, probably, re-routing their unpaid revenues to the rebels in France – they were slowly bringing the everyday mechanisms of local government and revenue collection to a grinding halt.29
Richard was a diligent man. He was, very probably, sharply aware of what the rebels were trying to do, and how they were doing it; accordingly, he tried to keep the system functioning smoothly, to tighten up procedures against financial malpractice, to make sure funds were paid in and the wages of government officials were paid. Yet it was all but impossible to work out who was being slack, and who was actively committing treason. As one chronicler put it, where ‘some man of name passed over daily to Henry’, others ‘favoured secretly some partners of the conspiracy’. If the former included men such as Pyne, the latter were exemplified by the likes of Hunde and Meres.30
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.
Richard’s opponents seized eagerly on this about-turn, painting him as a hypocrite and tyrant who ‘extorted great sums of money’ from his subjects. At the very least, this desperate attempt at fundraising suggested a king who had come to power in a welter of high ideals that he was now manifestly failing to live up to. Richard’s constantly reiterated professions of liberality, generosity and open-handedness had disintegrated on contact with the realities of kingship. What was more, this new round of loans was designed to tackle a conspiracy that the king – who had from the outset presented himself as the figure most likely to bring ‘surety and firmness here in this world’ – had clearly failed to get a handle on.47 Far from bringing peace to England, his reign had descended into a near-constant state of emergency. Even to his supporters, it didn’t look good.
For Richard, as ever, the root of the problem was morality – not his own, but other people’s. Since seizing power two years previously, his obsession with the spiritual health of the nation had run like a seam through his public pronouncements, the forces of ‘sin and vice’ explicitly equated with his enemies. On 10 March, at Westminster Palace, Richard wrote a letter to Archbishop Bourchier and his other bishops about a matter that, amid all the other ‘businesses and cares’ that preoccupied him, was constantly on his mind. His ‘principal intent and fervent desire’, he wrote, was to promote ‘virtue and cleanness of living’ throughout the country, and correspondingly to punish vice. It was imperative that those of high rank set an example to the lower orders in this regard. Richard was keen that the archbishop identify those in his jurisdiction who were involved in the promotion of ‘sin and vices’ and see to their ‘sharp punishment’ – an action which, Richard assured him, would be gratifying both to God and to himself.48
Less than a week after this letter was sent came an event that, for his enemies, highlighted Richard’s own moral shortcomings; and which caused even his closest supporters to question his kingship.
In London on the afternoon of Wednesday 16 March, at around twenty minutes to three, people noticed the quality of daylight begin to alter as the moon moved between the earth and the sun. Within an hour, the sun was almost completely obscured, its corona glowing faintly. Around that time, in her apartments in Westminster Palace, Anne Neville, queen of England, died. Nobody was particularly surprised. Though her end might have been betokened by the solar eclipse, people had been expecting it for weeks.49
Ill since the turn of the year, Anne had declined rapidly. Her physicians tried everything, yet nothing had worked and the cause of her death quickly became the subject of wild speculation. Talk had it that her sickness had been triggered by the attention Richard had been paying his teenage niece Elizabeth of York and exacerbated by his avoidance of his wife’s bed. It was true that Richard’s marriage to Anne hadn’t proved especially fecund and, with almost a year having passed since the death of their son, there was no sign of Anne becoming pregnant again. Richard, it was said, had complained ‘unto many noble men’ about the lack of an heir. So desperate had Richard been to rid himself of his wife, it was alleged, that he had spread rumours of her impending death, in order to ‘bring her in great dolour’ and thereby exacerbate her illness; alternatively, he was killing her with a slow-acting poison. Hearing the talk, Anne had tearfully confronted her husband, demanding to know why he had ‘determined’ her death. Richard had comforted her with kisses and loving words: ‘signs of love’, it was said, made expressly for public consumption, ‘lest that he might seem hard-hearted’. In the battle for moral supremacy, his pro-Tudor opponents seized gleefully on the rumours: his ‘wicked intent’ towards his late wife, they proclaimed, was proof positive that Richard was ‘wayward from all righteousness’.
None of these stories had much to substantiate them. Anne probably died of tuberculosis, exacerbated by the doubtful medical concoctions of her doctors; equally, Richard may have been advised to stay away from his wife given the risk of contagion.50 The problem for Richard was that people seemed all too ready to believe the whispers. Indeed, the mechanisms by which Anne’s death were said to have been procured were all too believable. After all, back in 1477, Edward IV had believed himself threatened by prognostications of his imminent death that were intended to make him fall sick through ‘sadness’; Clarence, meanwhile, had ascribed his own wife’s death after childbirth to poisoning by one of her close servants. Then, shortly after Anne’s death, it was reported that Richard was planning to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York.
Though indecorous, it was hardly unusual for nobles to wed again quickly after a spouse’s death. Clarence himself had been proof that grieving and playing the marriage market were hardly mutually exclusive. For Richard, marrying his niece made political sense. Not only would it deprive Henry Tudor of his putative matrimonial link with the Yorkist rebels, it could also give Richard an escape route from the increasingly narrow power base on which he had come to rely. Such a marriage could conceivably reunite the house of York, re-establishing Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s royal line by a lineal sleight of hand: not in their own right – Richard’s proclamation of their illegitimacy had, after all, enabled him to seize the crown in the first place – but through marriage to Richard. Through this marriage, Richard might refound his reign on a much broader political base. Any heirs that he and Elizabeth produced would embody this newfound unity. The Woodville family, the original source of all Richard’s anxieties, was no longer the problem but the solution. All of which was, of course, the mirror of the Yorkist exiles’ vision for Elizabeth’s marriage to Henry Tudor.
Whatever the substance of the story, it was taken very seriously indeed. The rumours were said to have convulsed Henry Tudor, ‘pinched him to the very stomach’, and prompted a frantic search for a new bride for him in case the unthinkable happened. It also sent a shockwave through Richard’s regime. Members of his own government were alarmed enough to convene a council meeting, at which the king was called upon to explain himself. At the meeting, Richard appeared to cut a cowed, defensive figure, protesting that ‘such a thing had never entered his mind’. His denials, at least to some of his councillors, weren’t convincing.51
Talk of Richard’s remarriage to his niece was especially alarming to the tight-knit group of Richard’s supporters who, if such a marriage were to take place, had most to lose under a refounded, reunited Yorkist regime. In the council chamber, Richard was now taken to task by two of these advisers: Catesby and Ratcliffe, the Rat and the Cat.
It wasn’t enough, the two now told the king ‘to his face’, for him to refute the rumours in front of his own councillors. Unless he went public with his denials, they warned, the northerners ‘in whom he placed the greatest trust’ would rise up against him, believing him to be responsible for the death of Queen Anne. The two councillors could hardly have put it more bluntly. Richard, they stressed, owed the loyalties of his northern following to his late wife – who was, after all, the daughter of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Now, unless Richard could regain control of the situation, there was every chance that those loyalties would evaporate. In any case, the councillors told Richard, citing the opinion of a dozen or so theological experts who had been wheeled into the council chamber for the occasion, such a marriage was within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. It was, they declared – in language presumably intended to press Richard’s moral buttons – positively incestuous, an offence in the eyes of God.
Naturally, it was their own fortunes that Catesby, Ratcliffe and the rest of Richard’s inner circle were especially worried about, should the rumoured marriage come to pass. A resurgent Woodville family would be hungry to avenge the deaths of the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville and her son Richard Grey, while those Yorkists loyal to the memory of Edward IV and the princes wanted the return of their confiscated lands and offices, which Richard had since redistributed to his own inner circle. If, back in spring 1483, William Hastings had been worried enough about the impact on his own fortunes of a Woodville-dominated Edward V to urge Richard into regime change, the urgency with which this Cumbrian esquire and Northamptonshire lawyer now told a crowned king of England what he had to do spoke volumes.52 So too did the way in which Richard followed their advice to the letter.
On 30 March, London’s mayor and aldermen, and other influential citizens, trooped north out of the city to the priory of St John’s in Clerkenwell, where the king had summoned them at short notice. They assembled in the great hall, along with many of the lords and – equally anxious about the implications of a Woodville remarriage – most of Richard’s household men, foremost among them his chamberlain Francis Lovell. As the king spoke, they listened.
Talking loudly and distinctly, Richard rebutted the rumours that, he noted, had been spread among the people by ‘evil disposed persons’: that Queen Anne had been poisoned by his ‘consent and will’, so that he could marry his niece. The idea of such a marriage, Richard continued, had ‘never come in his thought or mind’; moreover, he was as sorry and heavy-hearted at the death of his queen as it was possible to be. As the clerk of the Mercers’ Company put it – with a hint of the restive businessman sharply aware that every second spent listening to the king’s laboured harangue was costing him money – Richard’s speech was long. Finally, Richard wrapped up with a detailed admonition to the mayor, his own household officers and servants and all ‘faithful subjects’ to report any loose talk and remove any ‘seditious bills’. In early April, Richard sent similar instructions to the city of York, and doubtless to other towns and cities throughout the country. All of which suggested that there was in fact plenty of seditious language and flyposting going on – and not only in London.53
Although Richard ‘doubted not’ that his denials and instructions had been taken on board, it was proving impossible to shift the toxic haze of uncertainty that now blanketed his regime. One material consequence of this, as a London chronicler noted, was evident among the city’s businessmen. Some had already loaned ‘great sums of money’ to Margaret Beaufort back in the autumn of 1483: now, her agents were again busy. At their head was Reynold Bray, persuading ‘tender and loving friends’ among the city’s mercantile community – men like the goldsmith and former mayor Edmund Shaw and the mercer Henry Colet – that their allegiances and best interests lay with Tudor. Typical of many who, as one chronicler put it, ‘were in such a doubt that they knew not which party to lend unto’, Colet covered both bases, extending credit to Richard and smuggling funds out of the country to Tudor. Others were more resolute. The goldsmith Hugh Brice, who had been a regular lender to Edward IV and close to William Hastings, didn’t give Richard anything. Funds were moved out of England and across the Channel to the exiles, along with a now-constant stream of support. Others, like the former keeper of the Great Wardrobe Piers Curteys, deserted the regime by taking sanctuary.54
In attempting to extricate himself from the political corner into which he had boxed himself, Richard had only succeeded in provoking doubt among the very supporters on whom he had come to rely, and who, as rumours of his planned marriage to Elizabeth of York continued to circulate, eyed the intentions and actions of their king with fresh uncertainty. Imperceptibly, mistrust spread, and loyalties were loosened.
In mid-May the long, meandering train of Richard’s travelling household left Westminster for Nottingham, whose castle had become his principal base. It was here that news of his son’s death had reached him, and he had come to associate its familiar apartments with the interminable stretches of watching and waiting. It was, he wrote in a nod to the great allegorical poem Piers Plowman, his ‘Castle of Care’. The reference was telling. From the start of his reign, Richard had conceived of kingship as a burden; in the intervening months, it had only become more oppressive. His citation also contained within it the shade of another meaning.
In Piers Plowman the narrator dreams of a landscape with a tower on a hill and a great valley in which was a dungeon, separated by a beautiful field in which all kinds of people lived and worked ‘as this world demands’. The sight of the dungeon ‘struck terror’ into the narrator. It was, he was told, ‘the Castle of Care’. Whoever entered it would curse the day he was born. Inside, there lived a being called Wrong: the father of lies, the creator of original sin. Wrong had built the castle. Those who placed their trust in his ‘treasure’ – the word carried with it associations of custodianship, of safekeeping – ‘are betrayed soonest’.55
Ever since his seizure of power two years before, Richard had castigated his political opponents for their immorality, vice and sinfulness. Unable to acknowledge his own mistakes, Richard had blamed everybody but himself. Here could be glimpsed something else, a flickering moment of profound, agonizing self-awareness: the buck stopped with him.
What was also glaringly evident was that Richard could find no relief – or, rather, such relief could only come with the elimination of his nemesis, Henry Tudor. In mid-June, a fortnight after his arrival at Nottingham, reports reached him that the rebels were accelerating their invasion plans. Richard’s reaction was instantaneous.56
On 21 June he issued another nationwide proclamation, spicing it with further graphic details about Tudor and his band of ‘rebels and traitors’. Tudor was a foreigner, a betrayer of England, a rebel without a claim: ‘son of Edmund Tudor son of Owen Tudor’ – the baldness of these plain names emphasizing his lack of lineage – he was ‘descended from bastard blood’ on both sides of his family. If true Englishmen valued their own welfare, and that of their family and country, they were duty bound to turn out on Richard’s behalf, against him.
Alongside the proclamation, Richard gave orders for yet another general mobilization. Commissioners were to ensure their troops were well armed and ready to assemble on an hour’s notice. They should do so ‘in all haste possible’: a phrase that ran like a mantra through the royal orders. Indeed, it seemed to sum up Richard’s rule over the last year and more, during which time, in response to Tudor’s phantom threat, men had been repeatedly and urgently mustered and, as the menace evaporated, stood down again. 57
This time, Richard’s information was good. Leaving Paris that spring, Tudor and his men had travelled some eighty miles northwest to the Norman capital of Rouen, the port-city on the Seine that would be the base for their return to England. There, Tudor set about raising an army, and a fleet to carry it. As well as loans scraped together from various sources, including the drip-feed of cash smuggled out of England, the regime of the young Charles VIII had finally put its money where its mouth was, injecting a timely 40,000 livres – £10,000 – into Tudor’s bid for the English throne.58
This funding had less to do with Tudor’s persuasiveness, and more to do with France’s vulnerability. That spring had seen an increase in aggressive manoeuvring from the kingdom’s habitual enemies: Burgundy, Brittany and England. In both Flanders and Brittany, pro-French forces were on the retreat. Richard, meanwhile, had signed a seven-year truce with Brittany (this time committing to supply the long-promised detachment of archers). If this was intended to distract the twitchy French government from any move against England, or even to intimidate it into coming to terms with Richard, the move had the opposite effect, catalysing French support for Tudor from warm words into hard cash.59
In the weeks that followed, Richard scrambled to mobilize his forces. He could count on the retinues of his committed household men on whom he had lavished rewards and also, it seemed, great noblemen like Howard, Stanley and Northumberland, who together would supply several thousand troops. But a sense of uncertainty continued to pervade Richard’s orders to ‘all sheriffs’, men whose co-operation in ‘mustering and ordering’ troops was crucial. Sheriffs, or their deputies, were ordered to base themselves in the ‘shire towns’ of their various counties, so that Richard and his commissioners would know where to find them. If they failed to do so, Richard added emphatically, they would answer to him at their ‘uttermost peril’. It was almost as though he half-expected most of them to desert him.60
Meanwhile, the king tried to work out where Tudor might land. In recent decades, challengers to the English throne had made landfall everywhere: from the northeast, where Richard had returned together with Edward back in 1471; to Calais and Kent, the sites of Edward’s invasion in 1460 and Warwick and Clarence’s challenge in 1469; to the Devon coast, where Warwick and Clarence had arrived from France a year later and where Tudor had made his abortive attempt in 1483. Then there were the various Lancastrian efforts at stirring up insurgency over the years, up and down the Welsh and north-eastern coasts. Richard had to make an educated guess.
The southwest coast, directly across the Channel from the mouth of the Seine, was an obvious potential landing zone that Richard quickly moved to seal off. Operating out of Southampton, an armed fleet under the command of his chamberlain Francis Lovell patrolled the coastline, paying particular attention to Poole Bay – the site of Tudor’s failed landing back in 1483 – and the village of Milford, which, so one prophesier had forecast, was where Tudor would make for this time.61 The long, exposed Welsh coast was another possibility, especially in the southwest of the principality and the Tudors’ own sphere of influence around Pembroke Castle. Although Richard had been bolstering his defences throughout Wales, his resources could only be spread so far. His authority was strongest along the principality’s south-western coast, where his household man Richard Williams controlled much of the security infrastructure; to the east, the deputies of James Tyrell held sway. (Tyrell himself was still in the Calais fortress of Guisnes, where he had been redeployed the previous January and where he was still needed in the event of a Tudor assault on the Pale.62) Further north, Richard relied on the loyalties and influence of the Stanley family.
Since demonstrating their loyalty to Richard in the rebellion of autumn 1483, Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William had reaped rich reward from a grateful king. But though Richard had given them much, there were signs that both Stanleys wanted more. Despite his influence in north Wales, Sir William hadn’t perhaps attained the pre-eminence after which he hankered. Meanwhile Lord Stanley, lavished with high office, expected a further boost to his north-western pre-eminence: in February 1485, Richard had instead picked open the scab of Stanley’s decades-old feud with his regional Harrington rivals by bestowing a royal grant on them. For all that, Stanley was Richard’s constable of England, a military linchpin. So when, that July, Stanley asked for permission to leave the royal household, where he was still steward, and return to his Lancashire base of Lathom, Richard let him; after all, Stanley would need to muster his troops in readiness to combat Tudor. But though Stanley had been as good as his word in keeping his wife Margaret Beaufort under house arrest, Richard didn’t entirely trust him. His one condition was that Stanley send his son and heir, Lord Strange, to him at Nottingham, as surety for his continued loyalty. Stanley duly did so. On 1 August, with Stanley still absent, Strange turned up at court.63
Throughout the country that summer, with forces mobilizing and the threat of renewed civil war in the air, the prevalent response to Richard’s call to arms seemed to be fatigue. For most, the demand to prove themselves ‘good and true Englishmen’ by marching halfway across the country to endanger their lives in a conflict of remote significance was, as it always had been, something best avoided. Meanwhile, in villages and towns, marketplaces, churches and inns, life continued. People discussed the usual subjects and anxieties, the usual hopes and fears: the harvest – better, this year, than the appalling yields of recent times, despite the damp weather; property disputes; exchange rates, business deals and the price of cloth; and a virulent new sickness, its hallmark a violent fever, which killed in hours.64 Yet somehow the constant enervating state of emergency had to be resolved; sides had to be chosen. The instinctive impulse of many, when presented with Richard’s letters and a flourish of the great seal, was to turn out for their sovereign lord against rebels who, as Richard’s proclamation put it, had confounded ‘all truth, honour and nature’ by ‘forsaking their natural country’. In the minds of others, the blame for England’s instability was to be laid firmly at Richard’s door.
On 31 July, as troops assembled, William Caxton brought out an edition of the late Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. The story of King Arthur and his knights of the round table was a perennial favourite – Caxton had, he said, been prompted to publish by ‘many noble and diverse gentlemen’ – and Malory’s version was an obvious choice. Malory had fought in Edward IV’s wars against the Lancastrians and had completed his book in prison during the tumultuous late 1460s. All human life was here, Caxton explained in his prologue: ‘herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin.’
The printed book included a number of alterations to Malory’s manuscript. In one episode, a sleeping King Arthur dreams of a mortal fight between a ravening bear, ‘a tyrant that torments your people’, and a dragon, which kills it. In Caxton’s edition, someone changed the bear to a boar. The allusion was unmistakeable: the boar was Richard. And the dragon? Back in 1461 Edward IV had claimed that beast, portraying himself as heir to the mythical British king Cadwaladr – ‘rubius draco’ – who would unite England, Wales and Scotland and whose heirs would reign to the end of the world. But now, in the summer of 1485, ‘rougedragon’ denoted somebody different: the man who, in the absence of Edward’s children, loyalists to the late king now saw as the heir to his cause – Henry Tudor.65
On 11 August, days after Caxton’s publication of the Morte d’Arthur, messengers arrived at Beskwood Lodge outside Nottingham, where Richard was hunting. Tudor had landed. The prophecy was right, in a way. Tudor had landed at Milford, but not the Dorset village: he had come ashore at Milford Haven, on the westernmost tip of Wales. Richard, it was said, was jubilant: ‘the day he had longed for, had now arrived’. The same day, he fired off urgent orders. The final confrontation with his elusive enemy was at hand. Nobody, he told his followers, was to miss it.66