Richard The Chird (32 page)

Treason*

To make an act of tragic violence . . ,

WITH the beginning of June there comes a change. A feeling of unease, restlessness, doubt, gathers like mist at Westminster and the Tower. It is a thing of dark corners and the rustle of whispers, insubstantial but pervasive. Some do not perceive it or have no inkling of its meaning.

Writing on Monday, June 9, to an acquaintance in the country, Simon Stallworthe, a servant of the Lord Chancellor's, reports that there is nothing new since he has last written, sometime before May 19. The Queen is still in sanctuary with the little Duke of York, Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury, and others and will not yet depart. Wherever they can be found, the possessions of the Marquess are seized; the Prior of Westminster is in great trouble on account of certain goods [part of the royal treasure, no doubt] which the Marquess had delivered to him. Anne, the Lord Protector's wife, arrived in London on June 5. There is great business over the approaching coronation. The Protector, Buckingham, and all the other lords spiritual and temporal have been at Westminster in the council chamber from ten till two. None spoke with the Queen. . . . x

Only the last sentence points to any change in the political situation; negotiations with Elizabeth had been, at least temporarily, broken off. It is a pity that Stallworthe did not know, or was not moved to report, what happened in this formal session of the council, which apparently took place on the same day he wrote his letter; for on the following day the Protector set in motion a policy which abruptly altered the complexion of the protectorship.

The gatherings of Hastings and his friends had not gone unnoticed, nor the occasions they found to speak together with the

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young King. The very composition of the group suggested its reason for being. While Richard had remained afar off in Yorkshire, while Buckingham had been only a courtier and Howard, a follower of Hastings; Rotherham, Morton, Stanley, and Hastings had sat at the heart of Edward's government. Now they, the center, felt themselves relegated to the periphery, while the periphery had presumed to become the center. Well before May had run its course, Richard must have realized that this group had grown into a settled dissastisfaction with the new shape he had given the world, resented the pre-eminence of Buckingham, and considered themselves bereft of power they had taken for granted they would enjoy. 2 *

Richard was already on guard against countermovements by the Woodvilles; men had been appointed to investigate and subdue any troubles they might foment. Perhaps it was such men who had first detected something suspicious in the activities of Hastings' party; perhaps these activities had been betrayed to the Protector by one of Hastings' followers. Buckingham set himself to probing their designs covertly, while he consorted with them in order to sound their intentions. To the Protector he certainly did not minimize the danger of an incipient conspiracy. 3

Richard listened to the reports of his men and to Buckingham's warnings. He must have realized that Buckingham's tale lost nothing in the telling. He knew that Buckingham himself was the chief cause of the disaffection. The tendrils of Richard's life were intertwined with Hastings'; they were the two men the mighty Edward had looked to before all others; they had shared the flight to Burgundy and the mist-wrapped, bloody journey of Barnet; and the genuine affability of the Lord Chamberlain had warmed Richard as it had the rest of the world. To win back Hastings, Richard would, in some measure, have to sacrifice Buckingham. Yet, if he followed this policy, he would deflate his partisan in order to placate a man who was beginning to act like his rival; and he was tied to Buckingham now by a bond of loyalty which it was not in his nature to break. The chief men who whispered with Hastings, furthermore, had each already stirred distrust or dislike in Richard's mind.

When he was but seventeen years old—in the spring of 1470— he had experienced Stanley's capacity for disloyalty, when that shifty lord had been the husband of Warwick's sister. Now Stanley was the husband of a Lancastrian Pretender's mother. Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, had all too recently shown where his heart lay; it was obvious that, resenting his loss of office and hankering after the Woodvilles, he looked sourly upon the protectorship. By far the most formidable in ability of the malcontents was John Morton, Bishop of Ely. He had served Edward well, but only after the cause of Lancaster had finally expired. In ardently supporting the fortunes of Queen Margaret, he had hazarded his life in the field of action and been undaunted by danger or disaster. Captured after the battle of Towton, he had escaped from the Tower to rejoin Margaret in France, and he had marched with her the dusty miles to the fatal field of Tewkesbury. Like many another man of the century, he had espoused the Church in order to rise. His metier was the manipulation of power, not the service of God. He was formidable because his fertile mind was driven by prodigious energy and will and an unflickering ambition, and because, having a vast experience of men and affairs, he knew when to be bold as well as prudent. Mancini describes him as a man "of great resource and daring . . . trained in party intrigue since King Henry's time. . . ." It says much of him that, afterward, he would serve Henry VII as first minister, to the entire satisfaction of them both, and that he would be mainly remembered as the wielder of Morton's Fork, a device to extract money for his master. To one who spent much, Morton declared that obviously he could give much; to one who spent little, the Cardinal pointed out that therefore he could give much. Whether or not he actually invented this remorseless stratagem, its popular ascription to him reflects the esteem in which he was held when he at last achieved his ambition. Now, in the spring of 1483, though in his sixties, he was the master plotter of England. 4 *

Perhaps Morton had hoped to receive the post of Privy Seal or even Chancellor, or saw no love for himself in the Protector's eyes, or distrusted the Protector's intentions; perhaps, offered by

the discontents of Hastings and Stanley the opportunity of weaving the threads of secret, weighty affairs, he could resist no more than a landlocked mariner resists the chance of putting to sea; and perhaps, remembering Henry Tudor in Brittany and beholding at last the first rift in the House of York, he was moved by an intuition that he might yet help Lancaster to regain the realm.

Richard, for his part, probably found neither Morton's past nor his character congenial; Richard's taste in ecclesiastical statesmen ran to men of genuine learning like Russell and Gunthorpe. He could sense that the wily Bishop of Ely might be dangerous— as he was well aware, for example, that the even more wUy Louis XI was dangerous—but not that it might be wise to make use of him. There was little in common between the chieftain of the House of York and the ambitious ex-Lancastrian partisan who was deeply, subtly versed in the ways of power.

Such was the quadrumvirate of the dispossessed who, sometime in May, had moved from the private airing of their grievances to the more clandestine stage of seeking means to alleviate them. As this duel, hidden from all except Hastings' and Richard's intimates, was beginning to develop, Richard was suddenly put in possession of an old but highly inflammable secret—one which had, perhaps, previously brushed his mind, but only as a fleeting rumor of what his brother Clarence had once whispered or was said to have whispered.

Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, one day sought out the Protector in order to inform him—on what grounds will shortly appear—that the King and the little Duke of York had no rightful claim to the throne because Queen Elizabeth had not been Edward's lawful wife. At first, Richard probably communicated this startling and dangerous information to no one; then, after some days, only to Buckingham and one or two other trusted intimates. He well knew that the continuation of the protectorship itself was becoming doubtful enough, without his violently shaking an already explosive mixture. As he turned the revelation over tensely and gingerly in his mind, his energies were bent to the double load of carrying on the government and discerning the purpose and the pace of Hastings' plans. The strin-

gency of time gave an obvious edge to both. If the Protector were to be undone, the deed almost certainly had to be accomplished before Parliament met on June 25 to give the protectorship the tremendous reinforcement of its confirmation. Even at Crosby's Place there were certain to be men of Hastings' following. If they detected, as sooner or later they must, the rustle of a weighty secret being discussed in camera by the Protector's advisers, the Lord Chamberlain's suspicions would undoubtedly increase the urgency of his plans. 5 *

Meanwhile, the iron circle of necessity had closed upon the quadrumvirate of the dispossessed, and they had realized that there was but one direction in which they could move. Having supported Richard in order to drive out the Woodvilles, they now had to turn to the Woodvilles in order to unseat the Protector. Such a reversal is a classical rhythm of politics. The Queen was no more distasteful to Hastings than Margaret had been to Warwick. The present impotence of the Queen's friends was more than balanced by their relation with the King. Hastings had to win young Edward; therefore he must unite with those the King held most dear. This policy was urged upon the Lord Chamberlain by more than reason. The bright voice of Jane Shore was in his ear. At Edward's death, if not before, she had become the mistress of the Marquess of Dorset. When Hastings got rid of the Marquess he had taken over from that rival his dead master's woman, as he hoped to take over from Richard his dead master's son. Though she was hardly beloved of the Queen, Jane's warm heart, and perhaps her troubled conscience, made her an active champion of the Woodvilles. When Hastings revealed to her the direction of his thoughts, she begged him to succor the Queen and become the protector of the young King. She herself, she declared, would act as intermediary—who would be less suspected? Once Hastings and his friends determined to join forces with the Woodvilles, Jane Shore was chosen to deliver their messages to the sanctuary. 6 *

Either she was closely watched and her purpose discovered or the new alliance was brought to light by the men who had previously revealed Hastings' disaffection. Buckingham now pos-

sessed a powerful argument to drive the Protector to action, Richard listened to him and to other advisers and weighed the news.

Hastings was creating a formidable conspiracy; the King was accessible to the plotters; nobles and their retainers thronged the streets of London—in these circumstances, to delay until the plot was consummated or driven into the open might easily be fatal. Again, a problem of state assumed a military shape in Richard's eyes. One sudden stroke at Stony Stratford had undone the Woodvilles without jarring the web of peace and order. Was not the same strategy called for here, in a situation strikingly similar, a strategy condoned by the lawfulness of the power it preserved and the evil of disorder it averted? If, suddenly appropriating the King, Hastings' party sought to govern in his name, Richard must either lose his protectorship and perhaps his life, or conduct a civil war to regain Edward V as his father had been forced to conduct a civil war in order to approach Henry VI.

Powerful emotions swirled among these thoughts. The moment Hastings and Morton and Stanley and Rotherham touched hands with the Woodvilles, they had recreated, in Richard's eyes, the evil circle of Edward's court. They were seeking to revive a bitter pattern of estrangement and corruption. This political fusion probably struck deeper as an affront to his feelings than as a threat to his government; it fired in him a decade's accumulation of hurt and anger. Any thought of frankly exploring with Hastings their differences was blocked by the shadow of the dead King, the presumption of Mistress Shore, and the tongue of Buckingham. Richard's urge to retaliate against the past not only marched with his determination to safeguard the future but darkly marked out the course suggested to him by Stillington's revelation. A rush of passion swept him alike beyond the calculation of political expediency and the control of his conscience.

Perhaps, deepest of all, there stirred in Richard the sense that Hastings was disputing his dearest loyalty, that Hastings dared to consider himself truer to Edward than Richard was. With Stillington's secret lying unresolved in his mind and Jane Shore

sharing the Lord Chamberlain's bed, it was a challenge Richard could not endure.

On June 10, the day after the full meeting of the council mentioned by Stallworthe, Richard abruptly took action. He appealed to the North for military aid against the Woodvilles and called upon the Earl of Northumberland, who must have previously sent assurances of his loyalty, to take command of the expedition. ''Right trusty and well beloved," he addressed the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commons of the city of York,

we greet you well, and as ye love the weal of us, and the weal and surety of your own selves, we heartily pray you to come unto us to London in all the diligence ye can possible after the sight hereof, with as many as ye can defensibly arrayed, there to aid and assist us against the Queen, her blood adherents, and affinity, which have intended, and daily doth intend, to murder and utterly destroy us and our cousin the duke of Buckingham, and the old royal blood of this realm, and as it is now openly known, by their subtle and damnable ways forecasted the same [i.e., plotted the same], and also the final destruction and disinheriting of you and all other inheritors [Le., men of property] and men of honour, as well of the north parts as other countries, that belong to us; as our trusty servant, this bearer, •shall more at large show you, to whom we pray you give credence, and as ever we may do for you in time coming fail not, but haste you to us hither. 7

It is at this moment that Sir Richard RatclifFe, a Yorkshire knight and brother-in-law of Richard's neighbor Lord Scrope of Bolton, enters upon the stage of history. He was "this bearer/' Leaving London on Wednesday, June 11, with a saddlebag of Richard's letters, he galloped northward at a punishing speed. He halted at Leconfield, one of Northumberland's Yorkshire manors, to deliver messages to the Earl, who only the day before had returned from York; then he lashed his horse onward to reach the city on Sunday, June 15, only one day after John Bracken-bury had arrived with the letter of June 5. The instant the Mayor had scanned Richard's request, he sent his servants running to summon the members of the counciL What explanation Ratcltffe