Richard The Chird (3 page)

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Hichard, Buke of Gloucester

I

Cradle of Violence

/. . all the clouds that loured upon our house . . .

RICHARD Plantagenet, afterward Duke of Gloucester, and still later King Richard the Third, was born on October 2, 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle. He was the last but one of the dozen children whom Duchess Cicely presented to her lord Richard, Duke of York, and he was the youngest of the four sons and three daughters who survived infancy. Nothing is known of his coming into the world and almost nothing of the first seven years of his life. It is probable, however, that before he was many days old he was fondled by a king.

During the month of October, Henry the Sixth made a brief progress to Stamford and Peterborough, one object of which was undoubtedly to pay a call upon the Duke of York at nearby Fotheringhay. 1 Richard's first encounter with royalty must have been an occasion more pathetic than splendid: an undersized, sickly infant being gingerly inspected by a peaked monarch whose mind was already beginning to cloud over. A superstitious retainer of the Duke's might have fancied that the feebleness of

the child reflected his father's fortunes. The older children, born while York's career was advancing, were big and handsome and vigorous. It was when the Duchess was carrying Richard in her womb that her husband had fallen into the power of his enemies.

The world into which Richard Plantagenet had come on October 2 was a broken time, a time between, the disordered ending of many things, a society "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." When he was less than a year old, all Europe was shaken by the news that the Turks had finally stormed Constantinople, slaying the last Emperor of Rome as he fought heroically in the breach. Within a few months of Richard's birth, there came into the world four male babies who would variously ring the changes upon these changing times: Ferdinand of Aragon and Savonarola and Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus. In Germany, men had just begun to print books from movable type. Attempting the reconquest of Gui-enne, old Talbot, the Terror of the French, was killed and his army blown to bits, in July of 1453, by the artillery of Charles the Seventh. France was struggling at last into nationhood, while England, the conqueror, slid toward the twilight of anarchy.

From his birth until the summer of 1459 little Richard probably remained at Fotheringhay. So precarious was his health that a versifier, rhyming the family of the Duke, could only report, "Richard liveth yet." 2 His first memories were of the great castle, thronged with servants and retainers, which was the earliest home of the House of York—a mass of stone battlements and towers rising, in the shape of a fetterlock, the family badge, from the north bank of the river Nene and protected on its other sides by a double moat. The Norman knight Simon de St. Liz had built it not long after noo. It was little Richard's great-grandfather Edmund, fifth son of Edward the Third and the first Duke of York, who had enlarged and re-edified the castle. Whenever the child was well enough to trot across the drawbridge on his pony, he would see Edmund's shield shining above the north gate. Beyond the bustle and noise of the castle household stretched a quiet world. Nearby to the west rose the spire of the collegiate church which Edmund had begun and which Richard's

father was still building. Next to it, huddled a small village. From the battlements of the keep little Richard could look far and wide over marshy fens through which wound the Nene until it emptied into the Wash. 3

Most of his brothers and sister were probably unknown to him. Anne, thirteen, and Elizabeth, eight, were being schooled, as was the custom, in other noble households. The two eldest boys, Edward and Edmund, dwelt far across England in Ludlow Castle. Richard's playfellows were the children nearest him in age: George, three years older, and Margaret, six. Of his father and mother he saw little. They would arrive with a great train of attendants; hangings were unpacked from carts to blaze upon the walls of the great hall; and sitting in splendid robes on the dais, his father and mother entertained the nobles and gentry of the neighborhood. Sometimes there were musters of armed men. Then in a little while the Duke and Duchess—with their guard of bowmen, the lords and clerics of their council, their minstrels, trumpeters, heralds, and menials, and a long train of carts carrying beds, tapestries, food—clattered across the drawbridge into the great world of which Richard knew nothing.

In these first seven years it was his sister Margaret who played mother to him, though George was her favorite. Little Richard would accept the unequal division of affection as inevitable, for he stood in awe of George. George was not only three years older; he was everything that Richard was not—strong, big for his age, handsome, charming, and spoiled. Richard was never entirely to free himself from the vision of a" golden elder brother, whose caprice was instantly to be obeyed, whose casual smile was a dazzling reward. 4 *

At the end of these seven years the unknown world beyond the horizons of the fens suddenly rushed upon him. It was England of 1459, a world of violence.

The nobles fought each other or ranged for prey like beasts in a jungle, unchecked by the royal authority. The Crown was mired in disgrace and impotence because of King Henry's feck-lessness and Queen Margaret's savage partisanship. The long wars in France had shivered the dream of chivalry and rent the

JO RICHARD THE THIRD

texture of knightly society. Loyalty, the essential thread, was frayed and twisted. Allegiance was now sold for money, like any other commodity, and shifted when a higher bidder appeared. Only the memory of feudalism remained—an outward display, a mask for anarchy. The old ties of obligation based on land tenure had been replaced by a cash-and-power nexus called "livery and maintenance." In return for his service in peace and war, a retainer received from his lord wages or favors, protection against enemies, and immunity from the law. Hence, justice went the way of loyalty. The magnates overawed courts and sheriffs, packed juries with their followers, threatened dire reprisals if they themselves or their adherents were convicted. The lord who could not protect his retainers soon lost them, and perhaps his life as well. 5

When these forthright methods failed on occasion, the magnates simply helped themselves to the royal prerogative. This procedure took care of John Paston when he had the temerity to bring suit for assault against Lord Moleynes. True, Moleynes had stormed a manor of Paston's as if it were a French village, rudely ejecting Margaret Paston from the premises and threatening Paston with death if he interfered. But Lord Moleynes had friends at court. Before the case opened at Walsingham, Sheriff Jermyn served notice on John Paston that he had received a positive injunction from King Henry to make up a jury panel which would acquit Moleynes. 6

The chronicler John Hardyng, appalled by what was happening to the realm, cried out to the King:

In every shire with jacks and sallets clean Misrule doth rise and maketh neighbors war;

The weaker goes beneath, as oft is seen; The mightiest his quarrel will prefer;

The poor man's cause is put on back full far, Which, if both peace and law were well conserved,

Might be amend, and thanks of God deserved. 1

It was a world harboring bitter foes of the House of York. While little Richard had been sheltered at Fotheringhay, the

fabric of order, crumbling for a generation, had fallen to pieces. Authority had become only a name for the duel to die death between the Duke of York and Queen Margaret. 8 *

Before Richard had completed his first year, two events occurred which fatally altered the struggle between the Queen and the Duke of York. In August of 1453, as the result of "a sudden and thoughtless fright," King Henry at last went mad, even as his grandfather Charles VI of France, had gone mad. 9 He could neither speak nor understand. With lackluster eyes he stared at his frantic Queen, or turned his head aside to look upon the ground. Three months later, Margaret was delivered of a son in the palace of Westminster. She was a dynast. The complex elements of her nature and her breeding became fused in the savage instinct to protect the birthright of her child. Henceforth, she would struggle passionately to annihilate her enemies and to nurse the King into a semblance of sanity so that he might be persuaded to resign the crown to his heir.

When she could no longer conceal the madness of her hu&and, Margaret and her party were forced to summon a Great Council and to permit the Duke of York to take his place at its head. A little before Christmas of 1453 the Council committed the Duke of Somerset to the Tower. In the spring of 1454 York was appointed Protector and Defender of the Realm with full powers as Regent. Loyally he assembled the nobility to take the oath of allegiance to Margaret's son, Prince Edward, as heir to the crown. By constant labor he managed to suppress the worst disorders in the kingdom. Then, in the Christmas season of 1454, King Henry regained his sanity. On December 30 he happily acknowledged his son, so it was given out. According to another report, he threw up his arms in amazement when the infant was presented to him and declared that he must be the son of the Holy Spirit. 10 In any case, York's regency came to an abrupt end. His ministers were turned out of office. Somerset was released from the Tower and again made Captain of Calais. The Duke of York retired quietly to his castle of Sandal, in Yorkshire.

In May of 1455 the Queen and Somerset summoned a Great

Council to which no prominent Yorkist was invited. The Council promptly ordered an assemblage of nobles at Leicester "for the purpose of providing the safety of the King's person against his enemies." 13 - York had no difficulty in realizing that he must fight for his life. With his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury, and with Salisbury's son, the Earl of Warwick, he marched southward, determined to secure a hearing from the King and disprove the slanders of the court party. Surrounded by a quarter of the peers of England, Henry started northward to meet him. The two armies collided at St. Albans. In an hour the forces of York were completely victorious. Somerset, Northumberland, the Duke of Buckingham's eldest son, and Lord Clifford were slain; the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Dorset, and the Earl of Devon were wounded and taken prisoner; the Queen's favorite, James, Earl of Wiltshire, ignominiously fled. The Yorkists brought King Henry back to London, paying him due reverence.

Within a year the victory of St. Albans had gone for naught. Again, the Queen and her party had achieved control of the King's government, because they controlled the King. Again, they had made York "to stink in the king's nostrils even unto death; as they insisted that he was endeavouring to gain the kingdom into his own hands." 12 Again, it had been brought home to the Duke that he could accomplish nothing unless he resorted to force. If he took up arms before his enemies moved, however, he would be condemned by many for an aggressor; if he waited until the Queen's party struck an open blow, he was likely to find himself at their mercy. It was impossible to make war on the Queen without seeming to make war on the King; yet unless the Queen's power over the King were broken, neither the realm nor he himself could count upon peace. York's failure to solve this double dilemma would be his destruction.

The state of war was now chronic; the country was split into two irreconcilable factions. Such was the feuding among the nobles that if one lord espoused York's cause, another instantly upheld the Queen. She could also command those barons who enjoyed the climate of anarchy or who, suspicious of York, rallied to the King's banner out of loyalty to the reigning House

of Lancaster. York's most powerful supporters were Salisbury, Warwick, and the Duke of Norfolk, all kinsmen by marriage; the men of the Welsh Marches and the southeast counties; and the commons generally, in particular the merchants of London, who looked upon the Duke as the only hope of stable government and the revival of trade. The chroniclers of the time, the ballad makers, were almost all his ardent well-wishers. ^ The next three years (1456-59) are among the murkiest in English history. While little Richard toddled after George and Margaret within the great castle on the banks of the Nene, the Queen sought furiously to strengthen her following and to establish her small son in the nation's heart; Richard's father moved watchfully from Fotheringhay to Sandal, from Sandal to his strongholds at Ludlow or Wigmore, from the Welsh Marches back to Fotheringhay.

In 1457 the kingdom was shamed and outraged when it learned that Piers de Breze, one of the great generals of France and a friend of Queen Margaret's, had landed on the coast of England and burned Sandwich. The Queen became the butt of scurrilous tales and ballads. It was said that Prince Edward was a changeling; it was whispered that he was the son either of the Earl of Wiltshire or of the Duke of Somerset. So violent was public indignation that the Queen's government was forced against its will to give the Earl of Warwick a commission to keep the sea for three years. As Captain of Calais, the office he had been granted after the death of Somerset, he had already made a name for himself. Soon England was ringing with his exploits in the Channel. In 1458 occurred a token reconciliation between the Yorkist leaders and the sons of those lords who had died at St. Albans. Two by two and hand in hand they went in procession • to St. Paul's, the Duke of York escorting the Queen. It was an empty show, a will-o'-the-wisp in the thick night of disorder. There was no government in England. Tense and miserable, the country waited for the worst.