Richard III (30 page)

Dynastically Richard was in a complete impasse. He had not dared marry Elizabeth Plantagenet himself; nor did he dare to marry her or her sisters to anyone else, for fear their sons might eventually claim the throne. It had quickly become clear that Lincoln was unacceptable as heir presumptive. Little Warwick, the only other surviving male of the House of York, was the King’s obvious successor, but the Attainder of 1478 would have to be reversed; if that were done, in theory at least, he would then possess a better title to the throne than his uncle. And without an assured succession Richard’s regime could not appear secure, as he must have known all too well. Everything and everyone was conspiring against the King.

At the same time there were other, more material, and new reasons for Richard’s unpopularity. Although when he had usurped the throne he found ‘ample resources’, he was soon overspent, despite the bonus of so many forfeited estates after Buckingham’s rebellion. It has long been a cliché that the Yorkist monarch evolved many of the financial methods employed by the Tudors, though at the same time it is recognized that Henry VII used them much more efficiently. Edward IV gave generous rewards to his followers in order to establish himself on the throne and only managed to balance his books towards the end of his reign. In his desperate need to buy friends Richard III handed out confiscated lands on a truly prodigal scale. The expenses of his ostentatious court, of the Breton and Scots wars and, above all, of
costly precautions against invasion or revolt, quickly exhausted his funds. There is also some slight indication that Richard had always lacked financial expertise; in 1482 the Council of the Duchy of Lancaster had stated bluntly that his neglect and inefficiency over a period of years had seriously reduced the Duchy’s revenues – selling timber to raise ready cash and not replanting was one example.
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According to the Croyland writer, the King was now forced to go back to Edward IV’s compulsory loans ‘which he had openly condemned in Parliament, though he was very careful to avoid using the word “benevolence”. He sent out officials to scrape up huge sums out of all records relating to almost any sort of property holding in the realm.’ In reality Richard was probably only trying to raise a comparatively small sum, perhaps as low as £10,000; it has been calculated that in the event he obtained less than half that sum. Moreover, while Edward IV’s benevolences were extorted with no guarantee of repayment, Richard gave ‘good and sufficient pledges’ the money would be reimbursed. Between February and April 1485 a number of men of substance – prelates, landowners, merchants – seem to have been approached because of ‘such great and excessive costs and charges as we hastily must bear and sustain, as well for the keeping of the sea as otherwise for the defence of this our realm’. It is reasonable to suspect that all too many of those approached were sceptical about his ability to repay. Politically it would surely have been much wiser for the King to borrow from other sources rather than lose face in this way – as Gairdner emphasizes, ‘Commercial credit is a thing without which even tyrants cannot succeed.’

He was growing unpopular in York, of all places. It is true that when the news of Bosworth came, the Mayor and Corporation would record how ‘King Richard late mercifully reigning over us … was piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.’ Yet even before his reign some citizens of York were sceptical about the value of his friendship – one asked publicly in 1482, ‘What may My Lord of Gloucester do for us of the city? Nothing but grin of us!’ The
Great Chronicle of London
speaks of otherwise unrecorded troubles in the North during the summer of 1483 which the King had to repress in the course of his progress. In autumn 1484 there was a nasty riot
at York when Richard consented to the enclosure of certain common lands; despite a stern warning from the King, who sent no less a personage than the Comptroller of his Household (Sir Robert Percy) to deliver it, armed rioting broke out again in January 1485 and there were several casualties. Nor, whatever a Mayor might say, did the city remember him with universal affection. During a drunken brawl at Christmas 1490 a local schoolmaster accused Richard of having been ‘an hypocrite, a crouchback and buried in a dike like a dog’. The Croyland writer tells us that there were many Northerners among the deserters at Bosworth.

Considerable sums were spent on building up a large arsenal of field artillery and hand-guns at the Tower. Much of it consisted of ‘serpentines’. These were long, light cannon, which were mounted on pivots and fired a four-pound ball, and were the latest thing in the period’s weaponry. The King imported Flemish gunsmiths to manufacture them, presumably at great expense.

All the indications are that Richard was obsessed by the Pretender threatening his throne. Henry’s anonymity may have made him seem more formidable than he really was. During the 1939–45 War, Field Marshal Montgomery had photographs of the German army commanders confronting him hung in his battle caravan to help him guess what was in their minds. The King can have had no idea of what the Tudor even looked like. At Barnet he had known Warwick, Montagu and Exeter very well, and it is likely that at Tewkesbury he could say he had at least met the Beauforts. But if Richard had even heard the name Henry Tudor before 1483, it was merely as that of an obscure by-blow of the Beauforts; indeed, he was not even a Beaufort, let alone a Plantagenet of the ‘Old Royal Blood of England’. The name is misspelt ‘Tydder’ in all proclamations against him. The proclamations also describe his parentage and descent, pointing to some sort of official investigation. Although the ‘spies across the seas’ were almost certainly at Henry’s little court – not so little now – to judge from his secrecy and reserve after he had become King, they would scarcely
have been able to tell Richard much about the man himself or about what he was thinking. The sixteenth-century chronicler may have been using his imagination when he makes Richard tell his captains, before Bosworth, that the Tudor was a ‘Welsh milksop’, but he is certainly near the truth in making the King say additionally that ‘the Devil, the disturber of concord and sower of sedition, hath entered into the heart of an unknown Welshman whose father I never knew, nor him personally saw’. One is tempted to wonder whether Richard thought it was a vengeful God rather than the Devil. Devoured by guilt and superstition as he was, the King may sometimes have suspected, like Commynes, that ‘God had raised up an enemy against him.’

Throughout his reign Richard III seems to have taken refuge in the undeniable fact that although a usurper he was none the less the legal, anointed and crowned – and therefore divinely appointed – King of England. Hence his excessive wearing of the royal diadem, like some sort of talisman. Hence too his constant, and emphatic, references to treason – plainly a word which obsessed him. ‘Treason’ was embodied by one man, Henry. The Welshman’s use of the royal style, ‘Henricus Rex’, must have infuriated him.

Both the Croyland writer and Polydore Vergil tell us that on the night before Bosworth Richard had nightmares. Vergil says that this was a frequent occurrence. As has been already said, More claims to have heard from the King’s attendants that almost every night of his reign he was troubled by ‘fearsome dreams’. This is the origin of the lines which Shakespeare gives Queen Anne:

That Richard suffered from remorse, or at least from an uneasy conscience, seems to be indicated by his quite remarkably intense care for the repose of the souls of dead kindred. It is of course true that, before and after his usurpation, his foundations for chantry priests were to celebrate Masses for all members of his family and not just his victims. He could scarcely single out Edward V and little York
(which may lend substance to Sir Thomas’s stories about a secret reburial, or perhaps a secret Requiem).

In the fifteenth century Requiems and prayers for the dead were considered a duty to an exaggerated degree. All over Western Europe countless chantries – or endowments to say Masses for them – were being founded. But Richard set up chantries on a truly extraordinary scale. Even Rous praises him for it. It is likely that only a handful, such as the collegiate chapels at Middleham, Barnard Castle and Barking or the thousand Masses for Edward IV by the friars of Richmond have been identified. He must have presented York Minster with many vestments, a common practice by the great at that time because of the high cost of silk and velvet, yet it is curiously fitting that the only one of which the Minster archives give us any detail was black.

Most peculiar of all was the huge chantry Richard planned for York Minster, where he clearly meant to be buried. Presumably he intended to build a chapel – anticipating Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster. What made this one so unusual was that there would be six altars served by a hundred priests saying Mass for the Dead without a break, with a staff of two or three hundred clerks, choristers and servants, for whom an enormous endowment was needed. Probably no one in Christendom has ever contemplated praying for the dead on such an exaggerated scale. Richard’s motive here must have been the same as that stated in his foundation charter for Middleham – the Masses were to be ‘in part satisfaction for such things as at the dreadful day of judgement I shall answer for.’ He also wanted to make quite sure that the souls of the dead should rest in peace.

An urge for atonement and propitiation is also evident in Richard’s treatment of his enemies’ wives and children. His partisans ascribe it to unusual magnanimity, but he was no more merciful than Edward IV in providing such casualties with pensions. Both Kings seem to have set store by an ostentatious show of mercy. In the case of Hastings’s family, Richard was undeniably lavish in allowing the son to inherit his father’s estate, as though there had been no charge of treason,
and the widow to have the wardship. Yet again, one discerns an uncomfortable conscience.

The King’s personal spiritual life, in so far as we know anything about it, conveys an even stronger sense of desolation. His
Book of Hours
– his principal prayer book – has fortunately survived. Illuminated between 1430 and 1450, it had at least one previous owner – probably a member of the Warwick family. What makes it so interesting is the addition in a different hand of a long prayer for the King’s use. It is in Latin, headed ‘
De beato Juliano
’. ‘As you wish to relieve those burdened with sore affliction,’ it opens, ‘release me from the affliction, temptation, grief, infirmity, poverty and peril in which I am trapped and give me aid.’ Appeals for protection are repeated over and over again. It begs, ‘Make peace between me and my enemies … lessen, turn aside, extinguish, bring to nothing, the hatred they bear me.’ After citing the mercies of the Old Testament and the Passion of Christ, it pleads, ‘Son of the living God, deign to free me, thy servant King Richard, from all the tribulation, sorrow and anguish in which I am and from all my enemies’ snares, and deign to send Blessed Michael the Archangel to aid me against them and the evil they are planning.’ Undeniably the prayer is deeply moving. Yet it is not over-fanciful to detect a note of almost hysterical fear, of paranoia. It gives a unique glimpse of the King’s innermost feelings.

Professor Lander stresses that one simply cannot write off as propaganda a highly personal and specially composed prayer which reads ‘like the incantation of a litany, fraught with notes of the deepest gloom, oppression and danger, in which the highly charged reference to Susannah,
de falso criminere et testimonio
, so prominently stands out’. Lander continues,

The words ‘
De beato Juliano
’, overlooked even by Lander, are the key to the prayer. They indicate that it was intended to invoke the intercession of this obscure saint, who enjoyed a widespread popular cult during the later Middle Ages. Little is known of Julian the Hospitaller save that according to medieval hagiographers he killed his own father and mother, and that after doing penance for many years it was revealed to him that God had pardoned him. It is almost certain that Richard was familiar with the tale since it appears in the version of
The Golden Legend
which Caxton printed at Westminster towards the end of 1483. A parricide was a fitting intercessor for an infanticide, let alone a man who had murdered a saint.
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Richard would have become still more uneasy about his enemies if a certain letter from Henry Tudor had fallen into his hands. Dating from the first months of 1485, it probably circulated widely. Addressed to Henry’s ‘Right trusty, worshipful and honourable good friends’, it reads: