Richard III (26 page)

The Parliament passed some undeniably useful measures. Henceforth it was illegal when selling land to conceal rights, or secret feoffments, held over it by others; this was intended to stop the endless, unjust lawsuits over property, like that which nearly ruined the Pastons. It was made easier to obtain bail and to avoid imprisonment because of unsubstantiated accusations dictated by malice. Plundering the
property of persons awaiting trial (as the Earl of Surrey had done so recently with Mistress Shore) was declared illegal. There was some mildly xenophobic legislation against Italian merchants trading in England, though many customs duties were lowered – those on books being abolished altogether. There were statutes on hallmarking silver and against using inferior dyes in the manufacture of wool. Bondsmen, or serfs, on Crown lands were freed (which probably affected their lives very little). The Parliament’s
pièce de résistance
, however, was the abolition of ‘benevolences’; these were the contributions to the royal coffers, forced loans in all but name, so common under Edward IV, which had caused ‘divers and many worshipful men of this realm … by necessity to break up their households and to live in great penury and wretchedness’. The Parliament came to an end on 20 February, after voting the King tonnage and poundage (customs revenues) for life.

In his history of Henry VII Sir Francis Bacon, no admirer of Richard, says that the King was ‘a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people’. Needless to say, Kendall claims that the excellent statutes of the Parliament of 1484 were directly sponsored by Richard, while Anthony Cheetham has made much of the King’s employment of ‘the most able and learned men’. Even Gairdner admits that the statutes were beneficial. Yet, as Dr Hanham stresses, it is highly debatable how far this legislation was initiated by the King. ‘So much has been made of Richard’s good government that it ought to be said that he was in no position to enact oppressive measures, even if he had wished to do so; that the abolition of benevolences was probably a concession to popular feeling.’ Moreover, even Kendall has to concede that the legislation of January and February 1484 did not gain Richard any notable good will from his subjects.

During this time the King had also been busy with foreign affairs. Breton privateers were still giving trouble. Early in 1484 Thomas Wentworth had again to take out another squadron to patrol the English coast, reinforced by a second squadron under Lord Scrope of Bolton. Probably their real purpose was as much to guard against another invasion as to fight privateers, even if a few of the latter were
captured. Plainly it was expected that Henry Tudor would try again and soon. The much-vaunted innovation of a primitive postal service by Richard, a kind of pony express – a single horseman was posted every twenty miles on the main roads so that a letter could be carried 200 miles in two days – was intended solely to give early warning of that dreaded event. Commissions of Muster and Array were constantly issued to keep troops in readiness.

Meanwhile, the Scots continued raiding over the Border. In practice the war had never ceased and Dunbar, handed over by Albany the year before, remained in English hands. In February 1484 the King decided to prepare another invasion of Scotland the following May. His motive may have been a desire for prestige; perhaps he hoped to recapture some of the popularity which had followed his triumphs of 1482.

In every single one of Richard III’s actions one can detect a frantic need to establish his insecure regime as solidly as possible. At some date in February he made the Lords Spiritual and Temporal attending Parliament, together with the Knights and Esquires of his Household, take an oath of allegiance to the Prince of Wales. They swore ‘adherence’ to him as their supreme lord should anything happen to his father. Although it was ‘a new kind of oath’, hitherto unknown to the Croyland chronicler, who gives us this information, it cannot have been so very different from the one in which Richard himself had sworn allegiance to his brother’s son.

In his desperate desire for stability the King was even ready for a
rapprochement
with the Woodvilles. It was a grave embarrassment that Edward IV’s Queen and her daughters were still in sanctuary at Westminster. Moreover, the girls were not dangerous in themselves – England was not yet ready for a female sovereign. The Croyland writer tells us how ‘after much pleading, and also threats, had been employed Queen Elizabeth, being very strongly entreated, sent her daughters to King Richard’. But she would only do so after he had sworn a solemn and detailed oath on 1 March 1484 before an august assembly composed of the Peers and Bishops who had come up to London for the Parliament, together with the Mayor and Aldermen. In his oath Richard promised that he would see they came to no harm
– no ‘ravishing or defiling contrary to their wills’ – and that he would not ‘imprison [them] in the Tower of London’. He also pledged himself to give them dowries and to ‘marry such of them as be of marriageable age to gentlemen born … And such gentlemen as shall hap to marry with them, I shall straitly charge lovingly to love and entreat them as wives and my kinswomen …’ (By ‘gentlemen born’ the King almost certainly meant Peers.) The clause about the Tower is significant, and so is the absence of any reference to the girls’ brothers.
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There is no documentary evidence that ‘Dame Elizabeth Grey’, as the former Queen of England was now officially styled, came out from sanctuary with her daughters. However, it is probable that at about the same time she retired to some obscure refuge in the country, since in his oath of 1 March Richard endowed her with a generous sum for her maintenance. (Her estates had been confiscated and were being administered by a receiver, John Fitzherbert.) The King also appointed that ruffian John Nesfield, ‘one of the Esquires of my Body’, to act as her gentleman-in-waiting. He was not taking any chances.

Richard’s defenders have cited Elizabeth Woodville’s behaviour in March 1484 as ‘proof’ that the Princes were still alive or else that it was Buckingham who had killed them. No mother, they argue, would have handed over her daughters to the murderer of her sons. They forget that the King had had another of Elizabeth’s sons, Richard Grey, killed openly at Pontefract.

Presumably to demonstrate his respectability, on 10 March 1484 Richard sent an extraordinary homily to the clergy in Convocation. He told them, ‘Our principal intent and fervent desire is to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced, increased and multiplied, and vices and all other things repugnant to virtue, provoking the high indignation and fearful displeasure of God, to be repressed and annulled.’ No doubt the King wished to be the guardian of public morals, yet the members of Convocation cannot have been over-impressed by his official and enthusiastic recognition of two bastards whom he had sired; there are hints – by Bishop Langton and the Croyland writer – that his own private life was still far from impeccable. Thomas More thought him a hypocrite; discussing Richard’s futile
attempt to discredit Jane Shore, he speaks of him with heavy irony as ‘a goodly continent Prince, clean and faultless of himself, sent out of heaven into this vicious world for the amendment of men’s manners’. The fangs of malice were all too evident in his moralizing.
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The King always had a number of priests and prelates in his train. One was the admiring Bishop Langton of St David’s, whom Richard employed on diplomatic missions abroad and whom he promoted to Salisbury early in 1485. Bishop Redman was equally in evidence. Another from the North was John Shirwood, a former Archdeacon of Richmond, whom he made Bishop of Durham when that key see fell vacant at the end of 1483. The King had a high regard for Shirwood, who was closely identified with his regime, and tried hard to obtain a Cardinal’s hat for him. He was a humanist who had studied at Rome under Byzantine tutors and who could speak Greek as well as read it. Other humanist clerics at court were the Keeper of the Privy Seal, John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells, who had studied at Ferrara; and the Royal Chaplain John Dogget, Cardinal Bourchier’s nephew, who had studied at both Padua and Bologna – as indeed had Langton. Conceivably they may have made their master aware that something very important was taking place in Italy; rather touchingly Richard’s letter to the Pope about Shirwood’s red hat mentions his good Greek – he himself could barely read Latin.

Another cosmopolitan English religious whom the King employed was Fra’ John Kendall, a Knight of Rhodes. The Knights played a considerable role in public life. The Grand Prior of England – ‘My Lord of St John’s’ – ranked as premier baron of the realm, and in London the great hall of the vast priory at Clerkenwell was frequently borrowed for important assemblies. As ‘monks of war’, they could scarcely be expected to be humanist scholars, but they knew Rome and how to handle curia officials – since they usually travelled through Italy before taking ship to their island stronghold. Kendall, who was the Order’s Turcopolier (general of light horse), had been active all over Europe raising funds for the defence of Rhodes against the Turks during the famous siege of 1480. On 16 December 1484 the King commissioned Fra’ John, together with Bishops Langton and Shirwood, to go to the Eternal City and offer the royal obedience to the
new Pope, Innocent VIII. Kendall, who incidentally was a cousin of the Pastons, may have been related to the King’s Secretary. What makes him unique among Richard’s courtiers is that we have a very good idea of what he looked like, from a contemporary Italian portrait medal.

There is, however, a contemporary representation, if not a likeness, of a member of the ‘mafia’. The King’s predilection for Northerners was not restricted to men from Yorkshire or the Border counties. It extended to anyone originating from north of the River Trent. One example is Sir Gervase Clifton of Clifton in Nottinghamshire. Born in 1438 and a nephew of Archbishop Booth of York, he belonged to an old established family of the upper gentry. A former Esquire of the Body to Edward IV, he was created a Knight of the Bath at Richard’s Coronation. Perhaps significantly his wife was a Constable of Flam-borough, so he was a close kinsman of ‘little Sir Marmaduke’ – that key member of the Household. Clifton seems to have done good service during Buckingham’s rebellion, since on 24 April 1484 he was given extensive lands in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Huntingdon, which had once belonged to the Duke. He was to fight for his master the following year. The ballad ‘Bosworth Feilde’ tells us how among those that ‘came that day to serve their King’ was ‘Sir Gervase Clifton in rich array’. He was badly wounded and very nearly killed. Nevertheless, he survived, dying in 1491. What is particularly interesting is his funeral brass at Clifton, which may portray the sort of armour he had worn at Bosworth.
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At the beginning of March 1484 the King and Queen set out on a further progress, through the Midlands. On the way they visited Cambridge, where they stayed for some days. Many of Richard’s favourite clerics were Cambridge men, for whom he had an agreeable if unexplained preference. He was a great benefactor of the university even by royal standards. On this occasion he founded a number of scholarships, bestowed many privileges, and gave £300 towards the completion of King’s College Chapel – begun by Henry VI – while Anne presented Queen’s College, once so favoured by Elizabeth Woodville, with valuable endowments. After pausing at Buckden Manor, near Huntingdon, a stone and red-brick country house of
Lord Chancellor Russell, and also at Stamford, they proceeded to Nottingham, which they reached by 20 March.

Richard’s decision to spend several weeks at Nottingham was dictated by strategic reasons. Here news of trouble on the Scots Border could reach him in half the time it would take to get to London; the Moss troopers were out and if they began to do real damage he would have to go north even before the spring. Above all, the news which he considered most serious of any, that of a landing by Henry Tudor, could arrive almost at once, enabling him to muster his army as quickly as possible.

However, it is unlikely that the King expected to hear anything unpleasant just yet, and he could find time for interests other than affairs of state. Some of his modern defenders suggest that he was a patron of the arts, but while we know that he enjoyed magnificent residences and liked impressive music in church, there is nothing to indicate any marked taste for literature or painting. Yet Richard was undoubtedly interested in one, somewhat exotic, art form – heraldry. Even before taking the Crown he had appointed his own pursuivants, displaying his armorial insignia and badges on every possible occasion. The day after he arrived at Nottingham he issued a charter which incorporated the heralds of the Royal Household into a College of Arms under the Earl Marshal (another emolument for Norfolk). The heralds were given Pulteney’s Inn in Coldharbour in London for their headquarters. Their business was not entirely confined to blazonry, since they also performed diplomatic functions, carrying messages – in particular declarations of war – from one sovereign to another.

The King’s interest in heraldry may explain why in 1484 William Caxton dedicated
The Book of the Order of Chivalry
to his ‘redoubted, natural and most dread Sovereign Lord, King Richard’. In the book, of which he was the author as well as the printer, Caxton laments the decay of knighthood. ‘What do ye now but go to the baths and play at dice?’ he rebukes contemporary English knights. He appeals to the King to order Justices of the Peace to ensure that every knight in the realm should possess horse and armour ‘so as to be always ready to serve their Prince’. It is perhaps not without irony that Caxton promises his sovereign, ‘I shall pray almighty God for his long life, and
prosperous welfare, that he may have victory of all his enemies and after this short and transitory life to have everlasting life in Heaven.’ We do not know whether Richard received a copy.

Important news did indeed come to Nottingham, though not from the Scots Border or from the coast. It was far worse than Moss trooper raids, far worse than any landing by the Tudor. On 9 April Edward, Prince of Wales, had died at Middleham.