Richard The Chird (30 page)

Though most of the spiritual lords in the new council had been far from hostile to the Woodvilles, they could be counted on to accept Richard's government, or any government which was clothed in the appearance of law or traditional right. As bishops, these men supported peace and continuity and royal dominion. They were also—indeed, primarily—civil servants, learned though they were in theology and conscious though they remained of being churchmen. Bishoprics were the rewards they had received for being successful ministers of state. The English Church did not supply the King with officers; the officers of the King staffed the English Church: they were denizens of West-

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE REALM 225

minster, not of their sees. Hence, public servants like John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, or John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells, or John Morton, Bishop of Ely, did not possess power but were its servants. Their force lay in the abilities they exercised in their dual roles of executives and advisers. They administered policy which they created only to the extent to which power heeded their counsel.

The sudden eclipse of the Queen and the Marquess had left a kind of political vacuum. The Woodvilles had been for years the only check, so it seemed, upon Hastings' will. Within the frame of the protectorship, he and the barons were the one discernible party. In supporting Richard, they were acknowledging their own triumph. When Hastings had come from Calais in the faU of 1482, five hundred gentlemen in white gowns had met him at Dover to escort him in honor to the King. 13 His intimacy with Edward, his services to the royal house, his unparalleled popularity with nobles and commons alike, gave him a position of indefinite but immense power. How could he help seeing himself as the guardian of the cause of York? The protectorship entitled Richard to the form of complete authority because Edward had so willed it and because Richard was the King's only brother. As for the fact of power, that was to be wielded harmoniously, through the Protector, by Hastings and his friends. The future looked no less bright than the immediate present. Surely the young King, now effectively separated from his maternal kindred, would not forget the services nor withstand the charm which had so captivated his father. In the race for the favor of the boy who within a few years would rule in his own right, whose chances were brighter than Hastings'?

The inner baronial group of which Hastings was chief was in fact very small, numbering only Lord Stanley, Lord Howard, and—of much lesser weight—William FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel and Warden of the Cinque Ports. With these must be considered the Earl of Northumberland, who, though exerting small force at the center of authority, represented another kind of power as Warden of the East and Middle Marches and, next after Richard, chief of the North. During these first weeks of May he prob-

ably stood beyond the periphery of Hastings' interests. Richard, it seems, had not found reason to be sure of his loyalty. Therefore the Protector renewed Northumberland's appointment as Warden for one year only, carefully guaranteeing him the payment of his expenses, and extended his captaincy of Berwick for no more than five months. This provisional grant invited Northumberland to declare his allegiance unequivocally. 14

The barons who had welcomed him so warmly to the capital Richard, in turn, heeded and honored. Hastings kept all his offices: the governorship of Calais, the sinecure of the mastership of the Mint and the Exchange, and the office of Lord Chamberlain, which gave him ready access to the young King's ear. Richard and Buckingham made much of him, deferred to his opinions, and sought his company. A protege and agent of his, a rising young lawyer named William Catesby, he recommended to Richard's attention; Richard obligingly appointed Catesby Chancellor of the earldom of March and made him a member of the council. Hastings' deputy at Calais, Lord Dynham, was given the stewardship of the Duchy of Cornwall. Thomas, Lord Stanley, second in importance to Hastings, also fared well enough: he seems to have retained the prominent position in the Protector's council which he had held in the late King's as well as the stewardship of the royal Household. Lord Howard was made Seneschal of the Duchy of Lancaster south of Trent; and the Earl of Arundel became Master of the Game of all the Bong's forests, chases, and parks south of Trent. 15 *

Yet upon the fair prospects of Hastings and his friends a mighty shadow had fallen. It was cast by Henry Stafford, second Duke of Buckingham. They could not have foreseen his sudden leap to Richard's side, nor, immediately after, what the leap might portend. When Buckingham rode into London, they doubtless supposed that he would slip quietly into their ranks; there was nowhere else to go. It was not long before they were undeceived. From the very first, Buckingham's voice sounded often and weightily in the council chamber. Without as well as within the chamber he made no bones about the fact that he was the Protector's ally, the Protector's friend, the Protector's man. It was

Buckingham who rushed in to fill the political vacuum left by the collapse of the Woodvilles. He created, he was, the party of the Protector. 16

Nor did Richard look askance at his enthusiastic adherent. His motives for so willingly accepting Buckingham's service were mixed and perhaps not altogether conscious, and perhaps they shifted and changed shape with the passage of time. In this uncertain and unsettled May he could scarce have helped appreciating so zealous a supporter. Furthermore, Buckingham the man of state was newborn. In the feuds of Edward's court he had assumed no positive role; he was entangled in no old commitments nor molded by previous political partisanship; though his family was Lancastrian, he had been reared in the bosom of the House of York; though he was married to a Woodville, his antipathy to the tribe was known to all. Since, in addition, he was, after Richard, the first peer of the realm, and therefore born to greatness, none of the barons had reason to be offended if Richard showed him high favor. His strength and his chief lands, too, lay in the very region in which, Richard realized, his government was weakest—Wales—for Wales and the Marches had been ruled by Earl Rivers. Yet part, at least, of the explanation for the tremendous hold which Buckingham, in a matter of days, had secured upon the Protector lay in the depths of Richard's character. He had plucked the dominant string of Richard's sense of loyalty. First to put himself at the Protector's side, he had been a rock of dependability in that anxious, slippery situation at Northampton and Stony Stratford which afterward looked so simple only because it had been so adroitly handled. He had become, indeed, a friend, to a man who lacked the flexible and easy temperament to be a maker of friends. It is not uncommon for men without the radiance of a vivid personality to overvalue that radiance, to mistake a will-o'-the-wisp for a genuine fire. Such doubtless was Richard. And such a prismatic man was Buckingham, catching the light of public attention and reflecting it intensified and flashing in a thousand glints and colored sparkles. Probably he reminded Richard of his brother George, sounded in Richard's heart a tone like that

which long ago within the walls of Fotheringhay Castle George had sounded for the first time. If this be so, Richard would not let himself remember that the radiance of George of Clarence had been only a mask for dreams that were ego-ridden, irresponsible, and in the end, fatal. 17 *

On May 15 Richard signalized Buckingham's pre-eminence in the protectorship by two vast grants of concentrated authority and patronage. In one he was given the power of supervision and array of all the King's subjects in Shropshire, Hereford, Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire, and in the same counties he was made Constable of all the royal castles, as the offices should fall vacant, and Steward of all the royal demesnes and manors. The second grant was yet more opulent: he was appointed Chief Justice and Chamberlain in both North and South Wales; Supervisor and Governor of the King's subjects in those regions; Constable, Steward, and Receiver of the most important Welsh castles and lordships, with power to appoint all the chief officers of the counties; and Keeper of all the royal forests and chases therein. He had the right to stuff castles with as many soldiers as he pleased, to take for his own use whatever armaments were on the royal lands, and other goods as well, to dispose of great sums of royal income with very little accounting. That not even a few islands of land might remain which were not subject to his sway, he was a few days later made Constable and Steward of the castles and manors within Wales which belonged to the Duchy of Lancaster and the earldom of March. These grants, it must be noticed, were not of possessions but of authority. They did not increase Buckingham's baronial holdings at the expense of the Crown; they did not create a great hereditary appanage. What they did, however, was to make Buckingham the ruler, virtually the viceroy, of Wales and the Marches and a good slice of the West Country. 18

By the middle of May other men had gathered about the Protector, developing the political organism which Buckingham had created at one startling bound. It was hardly a party. It had been called into being by the fusion of unique circumstances and particular personalities; yet it represented, generi-

cally, the accretion of ambitions and devotions and hopes and loyalties mixed with self-interest which attaches itself to any leader of known capacity. In the eyes of certain councilors, however, it began to take on the color of a party. The men of this accretion were alike only in their general allegiance to Richard; they were separated from the baronial group, at first, only by their belief, in most cases vague, that the protectorship possessed substance and meaning as well as form.

Francis Lovell, created Viscount Lovell shortly before Edward's death, was one of them, a man of whom little is known save that he was probably Richard's oldest and dearest friend. He was destined to perish mysteriously—by starvation, probably, as a consequence of being walled up in what he thought was a safe refuge—after an adventurous life, through which runs the one decisive theme of his devotion to Richard of Gloucester. Richard now appointed him Chief Butler of England, an office Earl Rivers had held, and gave him the ruling of the honor of Wallingford and the lordship of Thorpe Wa-terfelde. Another adherent from among the nobles was the young Earl of Lincoln, son of Richard's sister Elizabeth and the Duke of Suffolk and great-great-grandson of Geoffrey Chaucer. Two prelates of the council soon identified themselves with the Protector's circle: Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who had once been Chancellor to King Edward and an intimate friend of the Duke of Clarence and was no lover of the Wood-villes; and Thomas Langton, whom Richard elevated to the bishopric of St. David's on May 21 and w^ho, like Gunthorpe and Russell, was an experienced diplomat and a man of the New Learning. Some of Richard's northern followers had been added to the council or to his household, men like Sir Richard Ratdiffe and Sir James Tyrell and Robert Brackenbury. And William Catesby, Hastings' man, was more and more becoming the Protector's man. 19 *

Except for the unexpected prominence of Buckingham, what most keenly flicked Hastings was the quiet shift in allegiance of John, Lord Howard. Howard had been one of the small group of barons at the heart of King Edward's government, a

pack-horse, like Hastings, in the great affairs of the 1460*5 and i47o's. Howard had served under Hastings, had deferred to him. It was only when he dined at Lord Hastings' house that he honored the master in sending generous tips to the cooks. For the Christmas of 1481 he had given "my lord chamberlain a double silver dish to put hot water in" which cost twelve pounds, a handsome and expensive present. Two months later Howard gave him a pipe of fine wine costing three pounds, six shillings, eight pence. After the King's death he had stood with Hastings against the Woodvilles; along w r ith Lord Stanley he was the nucleus of Hastings' party. Sometime during the month of May, however, it became clear that Howard now looked to Richard of Gloucester for leadership. What may well have galled Hastings most was that Howard could be considered to represent —second only to himself among the barons—the true interests, the authentic tradition, of the royal house.

John Howard was, indeed, of the essential stuff from which the triumph and dominion of York had been fashioned. Bred out of a union of the gentry with the high peerage, he sprang, on his father's side, from an old East Anglian family, while his mother was the daughter of that Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, who had been exiled for life by Richard II. Some thirty years old when Edward assumed the crown in 1461, he made his first notable appearance in history as the new King marched toward Towton. Sir John Howard joined young Edward with a sword in one hand and a bag of gold in the other, the gold being a gift of a hundred pounds sent by the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds. The moment symbolizes the pattern of Sir John's subsequent life: devotion to Edward's cause and readiness to fight for it, a strong sense of the practical, the habit of being on hand at critical moments. Fortune and his abilities raised him to consort with princes; he came to know the lavish hospitality of Louis XI as well as the luxury of Edward's court. Yet he seems always to have remained the Essex man—plain, solid, tough, a careful householder with a generous heart, a lover of Colchester oysters and of the sea from which they are ripped. The sea was his element. He traded in ships; he fought in ships; ships were

his dearest substance. But like most captains of his time he fought on land as well. In the summer of 1462 he was besieging the Lancastrians in Alnwick Castle; three or four months Fater he was commanding part of a fleet which harried the French coast. He served a time as Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. He engaged in the rough and tumble of East Anglian politics and cooled his heels in prison a short while because of a fierce bout with the Pastons, in the course of which his wife remarked —with his own bluntness—that if Sir John's men found Paston, his life would not be worth a penny. Soon, however, it was John Paston's turn to taste prison life and Sir John Howard was set at liberty. In the unruly world of the i46o's Edward well realized his need of men like Sir John. 20 *