Richard III (29 page)

In August 1484 Richard briefly abandoned his central command post at Nottingham to return to London for what he obviously regarded as a very important occasion indeed. This was the ostentatiously magnificent reburial of one of his earliest victims, Henry VI. During the thirteen years that the Lancastrian King’s remains had lain at Chertsey Abbey, his grave had become a place of popular pilgrimage, multitudes flocking to it to pray for his intercession – some claiming not only that their prayers had been answered but that miracles were performed. Even his murderer may have visited Chertsey, ‘And wet his grave with my repentant tears’ – to quote Shakespeare’s
Richard III
.

No one was more credulously superstitious than Richard, more anxious to placate a saint. According to Rous, who is clearly reporting widely believed gossip of the time,

If the King himself credited these edifying reports, as seems extremely likely, he must have been seriously alarmed at being reminded of killing anyone quite so holy. It cannot be too much emphasized that by then all England considered Henry VI a saint. Richard saw that Henry’s body was re-interred in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on the south side of the high altar in a place of the utmost honour, which at once became a shrine; the fan vaulting above was painted with his personal emblems and badges, and his helmet was hung over his grave; relics were displayed next to it, such as sheets from his death bed and his red velvet cap (which, if worn, cured headaches). Rous tells us how immediately after the re-interment, which had been accompanied by solemn and splendid ceremonies, ‘at once miracles abundantly attested the King’s sanctity’. He appeared to a wounded sailor dressed as a pilgrim, in a vision, to reassure him; stemmed the flow from some poor carter’s broken wine casks; and healed a hernia caused by a misdirected kick during a football match. No doubt such manifestations, widely reported, made Richard still more uneasy.

The King went back to Nottingham – his ‘castle of care’, as he is supposed to have named it – the same month, after only a few days in the South. However, early in November he returned to his capital, going first to a long-forgotten palace – the Wardrobe on Ludgate Hill, so called because all monarchs from Edward III to James I kept their clothes there. The Scots question had been settled and there was no danger on the Border, while a lasting peace had been concluded with Brittany. It was scarcely likely that Henry Tudor would invade so late in the year.

Nevertheless, at the end of October Sir William Brandon and his two sons had tried to start a rising at Colchester, expecting an invasion – fleeing to France by boat when it did not come. Disturbances by armed men in Hertfordshire were linked with the Brandons’ rebellion.

Just after Richard’s return to London, news came from Calais of a damaging blow to his prestige. John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the most distinguished Lancastrian commander to survive, had escaped from Hammes after ten years’ imprisonment. (He had tried to escape before, unsuccessfully, jumping into the moat where he would have drowned but for the water coming
only up to his chin.) He was not merely Premier Earl of England and a former Lord High Constable, but a very brave man and a very fine soldier – the Croyland chronicler calls him ‘
miles valentissimus
’ (a most doughty knight). He had personal reasons for hating the King: in 1473 Richard had reduced his mother to beggary, forcing her to hand over her entire estate to him – ‘by heinous menace of loss of life and imprisonment,’ her son afterwards complained. He had at once gone to the French court, then at Montargis, to join the English exiles. Nor did he come alone, bringing with him his gaoler James Blount, the Captain of Hammes, and Sir John Fortescue, the Gentleman Porter of Calais. Vergil says that Henry was ‘ravished with joy’.

Moreover, Blount had given the garrison at Hammes (one of the fortresses defending Calais) orders to hold it against Richard. He had also left his wife in command of the men, probably about thirty in number. Lord Dynham, the Captain of Calais, immediately moved up troops to retake the castle. But Mistress Blount resisted stoutly, sending to Henry for help. He dispatched Thomas Brandon with thirty more men-at-arms, who entered Hammes by a secret path through a marsh and prolonged the siege into the New Year. The King only recovered the fortress at the end of January 1485, at the cost of a free pardon to the Blounts, Brandon and the entire garrison – the Blounts and Brandon joining Henry at the French court. Richard hastily replaced Lord Mountjoy, Blount’s brother, as Captain of Guisnes (the other castle defending Calais) by Sir James Tyrell.

In November Brackenbury was reappointed Sheriff of Kent. The King’s agitation during the Hammes affair is very evident. On 6 December the Mayor of Windsor was ordered to take action against anyone found spreading rumours intended to cause unrest, which were being circulated by ‘our ancient enemies of France’; such persons were to be imprisoned and severely punished. Next day Richard issued his first proclamation against his rival. It lists various rebels, who have ‘chosen to be their Captain one, Henry Tydder’; from ‘insatiable covetousness’ the latter ‘usurpeth upon him the name and title of royal estate of this realm’, and has promised his supporters all the possessions of the King’s subjects, even bishoprics. On 8 December Commissions
of Array were issued on a very large scale indeed. On 18 December commissioners in counties immediately adjacent to London were ordered to report how many reliable men-at-arms they could produce at twelve hours’ notice. Richard took very seriously a report that Harwich was threatened by attack from the sea. A rising in Essex and Hertfordshire was forestalled just in time; it was connected in some way with the trouble at Calais and was apparently waiting for an invasion to land on the east coast. What made it so alarming was the involvement of two members of the household, John Fortescue and John Risley, both Esquires of the Body.
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The atmosphere at court that Christmas, which the King kept at Westminster, cannot have been pleasant. The dancing and revelry during the Twelve Days were noticeably frenetic, the splendour excessive. No doubt there were all the entertainments we hear of in the Paston letters – singing, lute playing, cards, dicing and backgammon – with fools, jugglers and tumblers and blind man’s bluff. Surrounded as he was by hidden disaffection, Richard can be compared with the blind man. For the spectres of invasion and renewed civil war would have been in his courtiers’ minds, making them forget momentarily the terrible cold, dampness and darkness of a medieval English winter; in the dimly lit palace all too many noblemen were asking themselves whether they would succeed in choosing the winning side. This overcast, doom-laden mood was scarcely dispelled by the fact that Queen Anne was obviously dying; no doubt she had the hectic flush and glittering eyes symptomatic of tuberculosis of the lungs. She was very much in evidence throughout the celebrations and with the King when he presided over the Twelfth Night revels in Westminster Hall. He wore the crown of St Edward, just as he had on the day of his Coronation. In the midst of the revels, so the Croyland chronicler tells us, ‘his spies from beyond sea’ brought him an urgent dispatch – ‘notwithstanding the potency and splendour of his royal state, his adversaries would without doubt invade the Kingdom during the following summer’. Richard commented that nothing could give him greater pleasure, a response which perhaps indicates not so much confidence as self-command at breaking point. Moreover, there were sinister whispers not only of impending battles but of incest.

What shocked the court, if the Croyland writer is to be believed, were the peculiarly personal attentions which the King paid his niece, Elizabeth of York, during that grim winter. In the circumstances she was the last person one might have expected to see there. Although officially a bastard, his brother’s eldest daughter had been given dresses of exactly the same fashion and rich material as those of the Queen; indeed, they seem to have worn them in turn, ‘exchanging apparel’. (These dresses would have been very narrow-waisted, full-skirted gowns with remarkably low necks – a small bosom was fashionable – with tight sleeves down to the knuckles, under great ‘butterfly’ head-dresses of wired veils which swept back from the forehead.) Plainly Elizabeth gave the impression of being a second consort. The chronicler refers to ‘many other matters as well, which are not written down here for shame’; taken in conjunction with Bishop Langton’s discreet mention of ‘sensual pleasure’ increasingly apparent in Richard’s behaviour, this hints that some courtiers had little respect for his morals despite his pious exhortations. The prominence of the former Princess Elizabeth ‘horrified’ prelates. ‘It became common gossip that the King was bent on marrying Elizabeth, whatever the cost, either because he expected the Queen would soon die or that he would obtain a divorce for which he thought he could find adequate grounds.’

Shortly after the exertions of Christmas, Anne Nevill fell very ill. Probably she had never recovered from her son’s death – perhaps it was he who infected her. It took her a month to die. If her illness was a galloping consumption, as seems likely, the symptoms would have been terrifying: drenching sweats, a constant racking cough and copious vomits of blood. One shudders at the medicine her age prescribed for the disease – potions of arsenic, garlic and mercury. Richard ‘shunned his wife’s bed entirely. He declared that it was on his doctors’ advice.’ This may well have been the case and quite justified, since tuberculosis of the lungs can be virulently contagious. However, he appears to have used their advice with a deliberate callousness to hasten the poor woman’s end, if one is to credit the Croyland chronicler, who comments, ‘Need one say more?’ His absence in itself was bad enough; in the fifteenth century the marital bed was an object of
symbolical fidelity, as with European peasants until the early 1900s – it was shared regardless of illness. But the Queen had reason to suspect that he wanted her to die.

The King had complained to Archbishop Rotherham and various noblemen of Anne’s barrenness and inability to give him children. Dynastically she was an encumbrance. Several days before her death a rumour circulated that she was already dead – allegedly put about by Richard to frighten her and make her condition worse. She was terrified when she heard it and went to her husband in tears, asking if she had done anything which made him think she deserved to die. Both Polydore Vergil and the Croyland writer are convinced that the King tried to finish her off by psychological methods.
¹¹

There were also tales that Richard was poisoning the Queen. It is possible that, what with her spouse’s obvious desire to be rid of her, and the miseries of her medicine and a Lenten diet – no meat, game or poultry, only salt fish – Anne may really have feared this was happening. Alison Hanham is inclined to attribute Rous’s changed attitude towards Richard III not so much to a desire to curry favour with the new regime as to a genuine conviction that the King had murdered a member of the beloved family to whose patronage he owed his career – his words are: ‘And Lady Anne, his Queen, daughter to the Earl of Warwick, he poisoned.’ Dr Hanham also cites Rous as evidence that rumours of the Queen having been poisoned were circulating soon after she died, and were not invented by ‘Tudor chroniclers’. As will be seen, even firmer evidence of such rumours exists – given by no less a witness than Richard himself.

Anne Nevill died on 16 March 1485 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the King’s presence, with all the pomp fitting for one of her rank. She cannot have been more than twenty-seven years old. Apart from the bare fact of her existence, she had made little impression on history – though the
Great Chronicle of London
does at least call her ‘a woman of gracious fame’. Her death took place on a day when there was a total eclipse of the sun. In that superstitious age such a coincidence did not help her husband’s reputation.

Chapter Twelve

‘OUR GREAT HEAVINESS’

The final months of Richard III’s reign were the unhappiest of all. He was very much aware of his unpopularity, of the sinister tales about him circulating among his unloving subjects. They spread across the Channel, too. Molinet often exaggerates yet his account of Richard’s unsavoury reputation in Europe sounds genuine enough. ‘He reigned with great cruelty’ says Molinet, ‘the most feared of all the Kings of the West.’
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It is hard to imagine a lonelier figure. He had lost his family, he would not be able to find a new wife and beget an heir, and he does not seem to have taken a mistress. Lord Lovell is said to have been ‘his best friend’ but this is mere surmise, while if Norfolk – thirty years his senior – was a trusted ally, he was usually far away. There were of course ‘Mr Ratcliff and Mr Catesby’ (as the
Great Chronicle
calls them) yet they scarcely sound people to inspire affection. In any case the King was not a man to have a male favourite. Nor, for all his vaunted piety, was a confessor or priest particularly close to him.

Moreover, ‘trusting few of such as were about him’, he would surely have sensed the uneasiness of his courtiers, the latent treachery everywhere. Sir Francis Bacon, who could conceivably have met people who had known survivors from Richard’s court, writes, ‘Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats among birds, they ever fly by twilight … They dispose Kings to tyranny.’ In addition, contemporaries tell us that Richard suffered from a terrifying sense of guilt and was a haunted man, sometimes on the edge of hysteria. Perhaps he awaited
Henry Tudor’s invasion as a trial by battle before God. As Gairdner surmises, the King was leading ‘a life of great agony and doubt’. Bosworth may have come as a welcome relief.

There seems to have been something like a standard official portrait of King Richard. The best-known version is that in the Royal Collection at Windsor, of which there are several copies. Itself a mid-sixteenth-century copy, it depicts a most unusual face which has made a curious impression on many people. It put Dr Parr, the famous eighteenth-century scholar, in mind of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Josephine Tey, the novelist, sees

G. K. Chesterton discerns ‘a remarkable intellectual beauty’. Paul Murray Kendall, who clearly idolized his subject, finds

The Croyland chronicler casts an interesting light on the clothes the King is wearing. He says that at Christmas 1482 Edward IV had appeared in ‘garments of a completely different fashion to those which had been seen hitherto in our land. The sleeves of the robes were very full and hanging, much resembling a monk’s cowl [over tunic] and were … lined with costly furs and rolled over the shoulders.’ This suggests that the only other contemporary portrait of Richard, in which his brocade doublet resembles those in his brother’s pictures, may date from before 1483 and would therefore have been painted when he was still Duke of Gloucester. (The inscription,
Richards. Rex Tertius
, could be a later addition.)

This other portrait of Richard is in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries. It is an early-sixteenth-century copy of a lost original and
undoubtedly the earliest surviving likeness. He looks in the opposite direction to that of the better-known portrait, though here too he fiddles nervously with a ring – obviously a characteristic gesture. There is no sign of deformity in the shoulders, though this may be due to a good tailor. It is the hard-favoured, warlike visage of which More heard, an alarmingly forceful and indeed a merciless face. In the present writer’s view, here is the most convincing likeness of him.
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There is no question that the King had every intention of marrying his niece. Elizabeth was more than nubile – she was twenty in February 1485 – a tall, intelligent beauty with the same fair complexion and golden hair as her mother. (The Croyland writer describes all Edward IV’s daughters as ‘beauteous maidens’.) Richard’s sensuality may well have been aroused and heightened by the gloomy atmosphere of Lent; in the next century Grafton imagined him as having ‘fancied apace Lady Elizabeth’. But, above all, the Croyland chronicler stresses, such a marriage made both political and dynastic sense, even though the girl had been legally bastardized. Like his great-nephew Henry VIII, Richard III was in a dynastic impasse – the Earl of Lincoln was no substitute for a Prince of Wales. The King ‘saw no other way of confirming himself as King, nor of crushing the ambitions of his rival [Henry]’. Shakespeare is at his most intriguing, and entirely convincing, when he makes an anxious Richard say:

Significantly Henry Tudor is known to have been very alarmed when rumours of the projected marriage reached him in France; in the vivid phrase of Vergil’s sixteenth-century translator, ‘it pinched him to the very stomach’. Furthermore, the King was also rumoured to be trying to marry off Elizabeth’s only other sister of marriageable age, Cecily, to someone of obscure rank, to end the Earl of Richmond’s last hope of a bride from the House of York. In desperation Henry considered marrying a Welsh lady, a Herbert – scarcely an adequate substitute, even if she was Northumberland’s sister-in-law.

Predictably ‘The Most Pleasant Song of the Lady Bessy’ claims that the girl was revolted by the thought of becoming Richard’s wife. No
less predictably Polydore Vergil declares that she would have preferred ‘martyrdom to marrying a man who is the enemy of my family’. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that she accepted the situation. There was nothing against such a marriage in Canon Law; before and since then, the Church has given dispensations for uncle-niece marriages. A gentle soul, Elizabeth of York may very likely have been under pressure from her mother to take the King. The former Queen had lost faith in Henry Tudor and, with her combination of opportunism and political ineptitude, had decided to make the best of a bad job and compromise with Richard.

In early 1485 Elizabeth Woodville was writing to her son Dorset in Paris, telling him to come home and make his peace. After all his perils – hunted with hounds like an animal when escaping from Westminster, then having to flee again for his life after Buckingham’s débâcle – Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, must have been badly shaken. In any case he was a weak and unstable character. The third senior peer of England, he was living in penurious exile; his vast wealth had been confiscated, and he had had to leave many children behind him. He knew Henry Tudor’s plans; plainly he saw little hope for them – without Elizabeth of York, Henry’s chances were very slim indeed. It looked as though the present regime was going to last. The Marquess accepted Richard’s offer of a pardon. One night in February or March 1485, Dorset left Paris suddenly and secretly. This defection by someone so important and so well informed about them horrified the exiles. A warrant for his arrest was obtained from the French government and a hard-riding Humphrey Cheyney caught up with the Marquess at Compiègne and persuaded him to return to Paris, although perhaps unwillingly. We know that Henry would not trust Dorset for a long time. His distrust reflects deep pessimism about his prospects. Richard III was still very much King of England.

Sir George Buck, one of Richard’s earliest would-be rehabilitators, compiled a strange book in the 1620s, made even stranger by being rewritten by an erratic and over-imaginative kinsman. However, Buck saw documents now lost. He claims to have seen a letter, long since vanished, at Arundel House, which throws an extraordinary light on Elizabeth of York’s response to her uncle’s amorous intentions.
Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, the letter – according to Buck – asks him to intercede with the King about her marriage to him, swearing that Richard is ‘her only joy and maker in this world, and that she was in his heart and thought’. She adds that she fears the Queen will never die. What gives Buck’s story some conviction is that he is using the letter to try to show that the King did not want the marriage.

Undoubtedly Richard consulted theologians. (Again, there is an uncanny parallel with Henry VIII.) But, whatever they and the canon lawyers might say, there was no English precedent for such a match. The Croyland writer informs us that ‘the King’s determination to marry his niece Elizabeth reached the ears of his people, who wanted no such thing’. (If Malory is representative, fifteenth-century Englishmen were revolted by incest; when Mordred wishes to marry Queen Guinevere ‘and said plainly that he would wed her, which was his uncle’s wife and his father’s wife’, the Archbishop of Canterbury curses him with bell, book and candle for making ‘a foul work in this land’.) What finally decided Richard against the marriage was Catesby and Ratcliff telling him ‘to his face’ that if he did not abandon the idea and deny it publicly, even the Northerners would rise against him. They would accuse him of killing the Queen – daughter and heiress to the Earl of Warwick through whom he had first won their loyalty – in order to be able to indulge his incestuous lust for his brother’s daughter, something abominable before God. The Croyland chronicler goes on to explain that though Catesby and Ratcliff then produced theologians and canon lawyers of their own way of thinking, their real motive was fear that if she became Queen, she might try to avenge her Woodville kindred – after all everyone knew that Ratcliff had personally superintended the murders at Pontefract. This may well be true, though unquestionably Richard would have earned even more damaging unpopularity if he had made the girl his consort, merely because of such a marriage.

The Croyland writer says that ‘even the King himself seldom dared oppose’ the views of these two. ‘And so, a little before Easter, in the great hall of St John’s and before the Mayor and citizens of London, the King totally repudiated the whole idea, in a loud, clear voice.
Though people thought it was more because of his advisers’ wishes than his own.’ On the other hand, Polydore Vergil says that the marriage was the brain-child of Catesby and Ratcliff – we will never know whether the chronicler or Vergil was better informed. What we do know however, from the records of the London Mercers’ Company (first printed and published in 1936) corroborates the chronicler as to the public denial. On 30 March 1485 the Mayor and Corporation were summoned to the Priory of the Knights of Rhodes at Clerkenwell, together with many lords and citizens, to listen to an extraordinary announcement by Richard. He told them that ‘It never came in his thought or mind to marry in such manner-wise [i.e. his niece], nor willing or glad of the death of his Queen, but as sorry and in heart as heavy as man might be.’ He complained furiously of rumours – presumably about his poisoning Anne. It says volumes for the King’s sinister reputation among his subjects that he had to descend to such a humiliation.
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During the Clerkenwell address Richard also threatened anyone caught repeating such calumnies with imprisonment until they told the authorities where they had heard them. The Mercers’ records are confirmed in their turn by a letter which the King wrote to the citizens of York very shortly afterwards. He informs them that he is aware that

He grumbled that the slanders were being spread by means of posting bills or by ‘bold and presumptuous open speech’, ordering the arrest of those who were spreading the rumours.

Elizabeth was packed off to Sheriff Hutton, which Richard clearly regarded as the safest place for her. He kept little Warwick there, as he had Lord Rivers during the usurpation. He was not going to risk any attempts at abduction by the Tudor’s supporters. The future mother of Henry VIII stayed in Yorkshire all spring and summer, until after the King had fought and lost Bosworth. However, at Sheriff Hutton, even if probably under surveillance, Elizabeth of York would have found herself among reassuringly distinguished company. Besides Warwick and his eleven-year-old sister Margaret (who, as the very last Plantagenet, would be executed in 1541), there were John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln – heir presumptive and President of the Council of the North – and his brother-in-law, Lord Morley. Some of Elizabeth’s sisters may have been staying there as well. A special scale of allowances of food and drink was laid down for this resident house-party, the largest measures of ale and wine being reserved ‘to My Lord [of Lincoln] and the children’. Sir Clements Markham argues speciously that these ‘children’ of high rank were in fact the former Edward V and his brother, a claim which does not merit serious consideration.