Richard The Chird (39 page)

As the Church lost touch with men's sense of awe, the unknown became more fearsome and superstition burgeoned. When people cease to believe in God, Carlyle remarks, God pays them back by making them believe in Cagliostro. People had not ceased to believe in God, but throughout the century there seems to have been an increasing preoccupation with witches and the forces of darkness. In 1441 Humphrey of Gloucester's wife, Eleanor, had been condemned to life imprisonment for dabbling in the black art; Elizabeth Woodville's mother was formally accused of witchcraft in 1469; Clarence became enmeshed in the alleged wizardry of his follower Burdett. Politicians had discovered that men were quick to believe any tale of necromancy. There was a growing fear of the world which could not be apprehended by the senses. Men's minds had become less satisfied, less secure. To these gnawing uncertainties were mated a sharpening curiosity about life and a fresh political and social awareness.

But the means of communicating knowledge had not kept pace with these intellectual hungers, printing being as yet but a whisper. From this unslaked need was generated the writhing crop of rumors which plagued men's minds, which had caused many of King Edward's troubles, and which, under the artful manipulation of Henry Tudor's followers, would poison King Richard's hopes. The marvelous, fading from the Church, grew a new head in the market place. Credulity was nourished by suspicion and ignorance. Carried by peddlers, disbanded soldiers, itinerant friars, the menials of the great, rumor sifted through the kingdom like a contagious disease. The food it battened on was the affairs of the great—above all, the mystery which hedges a king. When Edward the Fourth died, the word "poison" rode a foam of whispers. Soldiers fleeing from Barnet after Hastings' wing was crushed outstripped pursuit to retail the hideously toothsome news that Edward and his two brothers had been butchered by Warwick. In 1461 tales had been wafted across the Channel that Queen Margaret and Somerset had murdered King Henry to gratify their guilty passion and their ambition.

With superstition and rumor ran their stablemate, prophecy, mysteriously wise after the event and often pungently ironic.

During the unrest provoked by Clarence in the early *47 o * s i King Edward dared not summon a popular prophet named Hogan, lest people take it for a sign that the King endorsed Hogan's powers. Folk believed that Edward had condemned George of Clarence because of a prophecy which said that one whose name began with G would supersede Edward's heirs—though it seems likely that the prophecy was not invented until after Richard of Gloucester had assumed the throne. Following this event, says iMancini, the pat prognostication circulated that within a space of three months three kings would reign. Commynes remarks that the English are never unprovided with prophecies. Superstition, rumor, and prophecy w r ere powerful, and could be dangerous, forces in the England of King Richard. And the fat whale of the church establishment fed well and lived on until, half a century later, it was suddenly dispatched by a harpoon.

The three quarters of a million or so inhabitants of the realm of England struck foreigners as being so different from other Europeans as to require considerable interpretation, laudatory and derogatory by turns. There was no doubt in these visitors 1 minds that the English were an entity, a nation; and there are plenty of indications that the English heartily agreed with them. If the swan of an enlightened patriotism had not yet spread her wings, the unprepossessing cygnet of insularity and xenophobia was in lusty growth. The conclusions of the Bohemian knights who came to England in 1466, of Mancini, who recorded the -events of the protectorship, of Nicolas von Poppelau, who had journeyed the length of Europe to meet King Richard at Middle-ham in 1484, and of the Italian diplomat who set down his impressions some fifteen years later must be considered with a good deal of caution. They looked through the special aperture of their own customs and prejudices and they too were not uncritical of foreigners; but their reports often jibe and their strongest: impressions are the ones in which they show most agreement.

Your Engiisftmaa ©f Richard's day knew that no other fend or folk could hold a candk to his people. The Island Race lumped

aliens together as a conniving lot who "never came into their island but to make themselves masters of it and to usurp their goods." As for their own virtues: "The English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that 'he looks like an Englishman, 7 and that 'it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman'; and when they partake of any delicacies with a foreigner, they ask him, 'whether such a thing is made in their country?' ... It is not unamusing to hear the women and children" of former sanctuary men who have been forced to leave the kingdom "lament . . . that 'they had better have died than go out of the world,' as if—the Italian added scornfully—"England were the whole world." Perhaps part of this insularity sprang from a deep-grained conservatism, jarring to an Italian diplomat of flexible mind: "If the king should propose to change any old established rule, it would seem to every Englishman as if his life were taken away from him. . . ." The events of the succeeding generation, however, told a somewhat different story.

Englishmen were amazingly hardy and robust fellows: ". . . their bodies are stronger than other peoples', for they seem to have hands and arms of iron." Naturally, they were prodigious trenchermen. "They have a very high reputation in arms ... but I have it on the best information," the diplomat confides, "that when . . . war is raging most furiously, they will seek for good eating and all their other comforts, without thinking of what harm might befall them," Dinner was indeed an important occasion. The English "think that no greater honour can be conferred or received than to invite others to eat with them, or to be invited themselves; and they would sooner give four or five ducats to provide an entertainment for a person, than a groat to assist him in any distress." Their chief virtues, von Poppelau thought, were their wealth and hospitality, but he found their cooking poor. Baffling to the Italian mind were the rough and ready humor, the careless dispositions, the rudiments of a sporting instinct: the English "have no idea of the point of

honour. When they do fight it is from some caprice, and after exchanging two or three stabs with a knife, even when they wound each other, they will make peace instantly, and go away and drink together." Yet men of breeding could be very civil too, even by Italian standards. They "are extremely polite in their language, . . . They have the incredible courtesy of remaining with their heads uncovered, with an admirable grace, whilst they talk to each other."

Foreign travelers were titillated by the discovery that English women insisted on being people too and w r ere very much a part of the scene. They were enthusiastically commended as "the greatest beauties of the world, and as fair as alabaster"—but amazingly bold and free: following the hunt like men, preferring to ride horseback than to go sedately in a carriage, and thus often showing a tantalizing glimpse of limb. Very beautiful, von Poppelau also conceded them to be, but "astoundingly impudent." And how familiar they were! An English woman, Erasmus noted with favor, by way of salutation kisses every man she knows at all well. This warmth of greeting had amazed the Bohemians: on the arrival of guests, "the hostess comes into the street to receive them with all her household and they all kiss."

Yet there was a darker side to English character, which in the hard days of the earlier Tudors would grow yet grimmer, until under the last Tudor of all hidden sweetness would find its way into the light. With varying emphases, almost all of the foreigners found the English grasping, cold, materialistic. Von Poppelau was impressed by the virtues of King Richard, but his subjects were another matter: ". . . they surpassed the Poles in ostentation and pilfering, the Hungarians in brutality, and the Lombards in deceit. . . . The avarice of the people made everything in England dear."

To the Venetian diplomat, the English showed so little feeling that he thought them either "the most discreet lovers in the world or ... incapable of love. They keep a jealous guard over their wives, though anything, in the end, may be compensated by the power of money." They are equally wanting in affection for their children; **for after having kept them at home till they

arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years. And these are called apprentices and during that rime they perform all the most menial offices; and few are born who are exempted from this fate, for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own.' And on [my] inquiring their reason for this severity, they answered that they did it in order that their children might learn better manners. But I, for my part, believe that they do it because they like to enjoy all their comforts themselves, and that they are better served by strangers than they would be by their own children. [These] never return, for the girls are settled by their patrons, and the boys make the best marriage they can and, assisted by their patrons, not by their fathers, they . . . strive diligently ... to make some fortune for themselves."

The widow of a merchant or a rich man, the Venetian continues, usually bestows herself on the apprentice in her house who is most pleasing to her and who was probably not displeasing to her in the lifetime of her husband. When her children are of age, "their fortunes [i.e., what they inherited from their father] are restored to them by their mother's [second] husband, who has enjoyed them for many years, but never [restored] to the full amount. » . . No Englishman complains of this corrupt practice, it being common throughout the kingdom." Wardships of rich or highborn orphans were, indeed, bought and sold like any other commodity; what could be made out of the particular marriage arranged for the orphan and out of the use of his money while he was a minor constituted the buyer's profit.

The Italian's generalization is, of course, overlarge, and no doubt he mistook undemonstrativeness for lack of feeling; but while the Paston Letters and other sources reveal instances of strong domestic affections, the usual behavior of the Pastons toward their children supports the Italian's general view. When Elizabeth Paston, for example, returned home, unmarried, from service in another household, her mother made life such a hell

for her that her cousin wrote her brother begging him quickly to find Elizabeth a marriage because she was beaten weekly or oftener and so severely that on the last occasion her head was broken in two or three places. A widower appeared on the horizon, middle-aged and disfigured, so unpalatable that even the family had its doubts. Elizabeth, a girl of twenty, indicated that she was willing to have him—"if his land be sure." Again, the Fasten Letters in general confirm the observation that Englishmen were preoccupied with gain and often harsh and suspicious in their methods of dealing. They had not yet quite perceived that life need not be so hard and that a man could prosper without ruthlessness. At its best, this arrant materialism shows as a forthright insistence on reality, an expression of prodigious, though unenlightened, energy.

There was yet another side to the Englishman of King Richard's day, a sensibility and a capacity for simple delight as yet only haltingly articulate. Look at his gardens and his parks. He had learned to enjoy "flowers white and red" and the green of fields, dogs and horses, the sea, the grace of swans, "and the young rabbits that in a sunny morning sit washing their faces." The loveliness of spring shines in his songs and carols; his ballads are bright with the brave poigaance of star-crossed love. Though he thought himself an unmoved, no-nonsense sort of fellow, he had a child's love of color—in his dress, his house, his church, and the court of his King. Witness his fondness for pageantry, which popped out at a funeral as weE as a marriage. With any excuse he had braying trumpets, flkkering torches, cloth of gold, singing, actors posturing on stages, banners, minstrelsy, and whatever else he could devise of "gorgeous ceremony." He had not yet found his full voice or mined his genius or harnessed his energies by his imagination. But he was vigorously alive, a lusty aad o>mpkx fellow not too easily penetrated by foreigners.

It was a changing, txafisstiiftiog, restless time. The seeds of still richer and greater changes in men's minds had already begun to burgeon. In the year of 1483 a crop of manrekms boys nursed thoughts and visions that their elders did not suspect. John More,

the witty butler of Lincoln's Inn, was the father of a youngster of five named Thomas. In Ipswich dwelt another Thomas, three years older, son of a dealer in meat. Of about the same age as this Thomas Wolsey was a lad, now in school at Cracow, destined to make a far deeper impress on men's imaginations, a Polish boy who would someday be called Copernicus. Michelangelo and Raphael and Niccolo Machiavelli were growing into their teens in far-off Italy. The bastard son of a priest, a young man of about seventeen named Desiderius Erasmus was stuffing into his head all the learning he could find in the religious house in which he was immured. In the insignificant German town of Eisleben there was born this year a child christened Martin Luther, while at Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent, poet and prince and patron, fed with his taste and his generosity a blaze of Greek learning, philosophical speculation, painting, architecture, sculpture. Between the bronze doors of Ghiberti and Giotto's campanile walked Florentines whose heads were singing with Plato and whose eyes were fixed upon a misty dream of the Full Life. Pico della Mirandola defended against the frownino-doctors of the Church the nine hundred theses into which he had compressed all knowledge. One hundred and thirty-seven of them having been declared heretical or suspect, Pico fled to France, was arrested at the instigation of the papal legate, was permitted to escape, and hastened to Florence and a triumphal welcome by Lorenzo. Rome herself would soon be driven to a sudden frenzy by a glimpse of the loveliness of the pagan world On April 18, 1485, some workmen dug up a statue of Julia, daughter of Claudius. As the tremendous news spread through the city, the statue was hurried to the Capitol Thronging from all quarters, a wild procession of pilgrims passionately adored "Julia Antiqua" as a revelation of the classic age. Pope Innocent the Eighth so feared for the True Faith that under the cover of night he had Julia removed from the Capitol and secretly buried. Meanwhile, across the Channel, a master builder was dying as Richard began his reign; the old fox with the shrewdest brain in Christendom, now terror-stricken at the approach of death, was holed up in his impregnable den at Plessis-les-Tours. Death