The Life and Times of Richard III (13 page)

Richard’s greatest source of power and wealth lay, in fact, in the Crown lands. At his accession in 1483, these included not only the combined possessions of the Lancastrian and Yorkist kings, but also vast forfeitures of dead or attainted Lancastrian magnates, which Edward had granted to Clarence and to Richard himself, as Duke of Gloucester. This accumulation of manors, castles and townships yielded an annual revenue of nearly
£
25,000. Even after the salaries of a small army of royal officials had been paid, estate management could be made to show a handsome profit and more than covered the
£
11,000 needed to support Richard’s perambulatory household. For the organisation that administered the Crown lands Richard was again indebted to his profit-conscious brother. Edward IV had been very professional about estate management, appointing men with legal training rather than local squires or knights as his stewards and surveyors, conducting regular audits, and controlling the whole operation through the Treasurer and clerks of his Chamber.

As a usurper Richard was inevitably committed to handing out a fair chunk of his estates as rewards for his supporters. At the time of his coronation a golden shower of grants fell on the not unexpectant trinity of Norfolk, Buckingham and Northumberland. But these grants were only a curtain raiser for those that followed at the end of the year. The confiscations and attainders visited on the rebels of Buckingham’s rebellion gave Richard the opportunity to create a whole class of men with a vested interest in his political survival. Buckingham himself was the greatest landowner in England after the King, and the annual value of the lands Richard bestowed on his loyal followers totalled
£
12,000. It was this redistribution of property – the greatest since Richard II despoiled his opponents in 1398 – that prompted Sir Thomas More’s acid comment: ‘with large gifts he got him unsteadfast friendship, for which he was fain to pillage and spoil in other places, and got him steadfast hatred’.

The list of recipients again contains the names of the small nucleus of barons who were neither dead nor exiled. Northumberland was granted the extensive holdings of his mother’s family, the Poynings, in Surrey, Sussex and the West Country. Lord Stanley and his brother, Sir William, shared in the spoils of Buckingham’s Welsh holdings. Other rewards were parcelled out to Norfolk and his son, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, to Richard’s nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and to William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, who had married the King’s bastard daughter, Catherine. But the largest group were men with a more direct stake in Richard’s future, his personal following of knights and esquires, whose rewards were coupled with responsibilities as sheriffs, keepers of castles or guardians of the royal estates. The harsh lessons of the careers of Warwick and Montagu, Clarence and Buckingham had taught Richard not to build his fortunes solely on the shifting sands of baronial loyalty.

The King’s preference for men of middle rank, especially for the associates of his lieutenancy in the North, did not pass without comment. The Croyland Chronicler reported that ‘the immense estates and patrimonies’ collected by attainder were all ‘distributed among his northern adherents whom he planted in every spot throughout his dominions, to the disgrace and lasting and loudly expressed sorrow of all the people in the south’.

Of Richard’s three closest advisers, two – Francis, Viscount Lovell and Sir Richard Ratcliffe – were former members of his Council in the North. The third, William Catesby, came from the Midlands and was a comparatively recent discovery. This trio was commemorated in the famous rhyme nailed to the door of St Paul’s later that year in July:

‘The Cat, the Rat and Lovell our dog
Rulen all England under an Hog.’

The King’s secretary, John Kendal, had previously served as the Duke of Gloucester’s secretary, and was rewarded with the lucrative office of Controller of the Mint. Lord Scrope of Bolton, another of Richard’s Northern Council, also belonged to the inner circle of the King’s Council. Further down the scale were a number of other northern knights, including James Tyrell; Robert Brackenbury, the Constable of the Tower and Sheriff of Kent; Robert Percy, the King’s boyhood friend and Controller of the Household; and Ralph Assheton, the Vice-Constable of England. Richard’s trust in these northerners was not misplaced: with one exception all of them would ride with him to Bosworth.

As soon as Parliament had concluded its business Richard was chafing to resume his travels. Two final precautions – both of them reminders that he still had powerful enemies – detained him until the first week of March 1484. One was the agreement negotiated for the release of the Queen Dowager’s daughters from Sanctuary. The other was a solemn ceremony described by the Croyland Chronicler:

Shortly after mid-day nearly all the lords of the realm, both spiritual and temporal, together with the higher knights and esquires of the king’s household, met together at the special command of the king in a certain lower room near the passage which leads to the Queen’s apartments; and here each subscribed his name to a kind of new oath... of adherence to Edward, the king’s only son, as their supreme lord, in case anything should happen to his father.

Then he was away, with Queen Anne at his side, heading for the cloisters of Cambridge University, and what was to be the last interlude of peace in his short, unhappy reign. During the week they spent at Cambridge, Richard and Anne made generous endowments to King’s and the Queens’ Colleges, which the University promised to remember in a special Mass to be celebrated on 2 May. As the royal cortège left Cambridge, Richard’s thoughts turned to the challenges that the new campaigning season would bring: French and Breton ships were preying on English merchantmen; the Scots were stirring on his northern borders; and in Brittany Henry Tudor was gathering his resources for a fresh invasion. On 20 March Richard established his military headquarters behind the massive battlements of Nottingham Castle. Here, poised at the heart of the kingdom, he would be ready to strike wherever danger threatened.

Here too, in the middle of April, he received the news that must have affected him more deeply than any of the bereavements and betrayals which already crowded his life. Edward, Prince of Wales, was dead. A note of emotion is visible even in the terse report of the Croyland Chronicle: ‘this only son of his, in whom all the hopes of the royal succession, fortified with so many oaths, were centred, was seized with an illness of but short duration and died at Middleham Castle in the year of our Lord, 1484.... You might have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief.’

The public impact went further than the private grief. Throughout the Wars of the Roses the uncertainty of the succession was at the root of the conflict and invited the aristocracy to further mischief in their own interests. Prince Edward’s death now invited the surviving magnates – Norfolk, the Stanleys and Northumberland – to reconsider their allegiance to Richard. Equally important was the psychological effect on the gentry, the merchants and the yeoman classes – men whose tacit consent was vital in turning a successful
coup d’ état
into enduring government. They might well reflect that the little known Lancastrian claimant, allied to a Yorkist bride, was better placed to outlaw faction at home and piracy at sea than a childless usurper.

As the war of nerves mounted in the spring and summer, Richard pondered on the choice of his successor. Queen Anne, barren for ten years since Edward’s birth, could bear him no more children. The King inclined at first to Clarence’s son, Edward, Earl of Warwick. This ten-year-old boy was eventually passed over, not so much because he was Clarence’s son but because he was too young and showed signs of being mentally retarded. Edward of Warwick is one of the most pitiable victims of dynastic politics: kept in solitary confinement from the age of five he grew up, according to one report, unable to ‘tell a goose from a capon’. Richard did something to alleviate his condition by establishing him with a household in the oak-lined park of Sheriff Hutton, but under Henry VII he was returned to the Tower and eked out his imprisonment until he was executed on a fabricated charge of treason.

Richard’s final choice fell on John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, eldest son of the Duke of Suffolk and Richard’s sister Elizabeth. The young Earl of Warwick was too risky a candidate at this time of crisis, while Lincoln was a grown man, already identified with Richard’s government. On 21 August Richard followed Yorkist tradition by appointing the heir apparent Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

In the meantime Richard laboured to put his kingdom in readiness for war. On 1 May he sent commissions of array to his chief lieutenants, empowering them to call men to his standards at short notice. A network of couriers was set up to link him with his Chancellor’s Council in London and with his sentinels on the coasts. However, Richard was not content to wait for Henry to come to him: he was also engaged in organising a diplomatic
coup
whose success would render his military preparations unnecessary.

Relations with Brittany had been fouled from the start by Duke Francis’s attempt to blackmail Richard. In exchange for keeping his guest Henry Tudor on a tight leash, Francis demanded four thousand English archers to help him in his quarrels with the King of France. Richard refused. Francis responded with generous loans to the Lancastrian exiles and loosed his Breton corsairs on English merchantmen. A vigorous naval campaign undertaken in the winter of 1483–4 led to the conclusion of a truce in April 1484. Since Francis was suffering from some form of mental illness, the government of the duchy was by now in the hands of his more amenable treasurer, Pierre Landois, and when the truce was ratified at Pontefract on 8 June, it contained an additional secret clause. Richard would supply the Bretons with one thousand archers, provided that the self-styled Earl of Richmond was kept in custody. This accord was apparently followed by further overtures, during which Landois was offered the revenues of the earldom of Richmond if he would deliver Henry Tudor to Richard’s agents. Rumours of these proposals came to the attentive ears of John Morton in Flanders. He promptly despatched a warning message to Henry at Vannes. The messenger – a priest named Christopher Urswick – was instructed to continue his journey to the French Court and ask for political asylum on behalf of the Earl of Richmond and his followers. Permission was eagerly granted. The French were in some disarray since the recent death of Louis XI: but Charles VIII’s Council were agreed that King Richard was no friend of France. Had he not led the hard-liners who spoke out against the Treaty of Picquigny in 1475, and given fresh proof of his enmity by seeking an alliance with Brittany?

Richmond’s next problem was to elude the vigilance of Landois’s men and slip over the duchy’s borders into France. With only five followers he rode out of Vannes under the pretext of visiting a neighbour. As soon as he was clear of the town, he exchanged clothes with a servant and rode hell for leather towards the frontier. As he crossed into Anjou, those whom Landois sent in pursuit were only an hour’s ride behind him.

It was a near miss. But the restless summer brought other achievements to set against this diplomatic failure. Richard’s punishing itinerary bears witness to the energy with which he tackled the perennial problems of the Scottish border and the administration of the northern counties. Early in May he visited York, Middleham and Durham. Naval preparations kept him at Scarborough until the second week of June, when he received the Breton embassy at Pontefract. By mid-June he was in York, then on to Scarborough again, and back to York late in July. Haunted by the spectre of Henry Tudor’s invasion, Richard was determined to step up the military and diplomatic pressures on the Scots until James III came to his senses and sought a permanent peace. Details of the campaigns he set in motion have not survived, but the Croyland Chronicle reports that the Scots ‘sustained a great defeat from our people by land’ followed by an equally significant naval victory for the Scarborough squadron. These measures achieved precisely the effect Richard had in mind, for in July James III sent Lord Lisle to open negotiations. Once he had assured himself that the Scots were in earnest, the King gave safe conducts for a formal embassy to attend on him at Nottingham in September.

Equally important was the form of government that Richard established for the North at York on 21 July. A formal Council, under the lieutenancy of the Earl of Lincoln, was to supervise the keeping of the King’s peace throughout the counties of Yorkshire, Westmorland and Cumberland. Although Lincoln was appointed Lieutenant in the North, the Council derived its authority from the King, and the household he maintained at Sheriff Hutton was designated the King’s household in the North. The detailed instructions Richard dictated for his Council’s operation emphasised that ‘all letters and writings... be made in our name, and the names to be endorsed with the hand of our nephew of Lincoln below with the words
“per consilium regis”’.

In effect the Council served as a junior branch of Richard’s Council at Westminster. It was to meet every quarter at York to ‘hear, examine and order all bills and complaints and other there before them to be served’, and was vested with complete authority to cope with public disorder. The military duty of defending the border lay outside its functions and was retained by the Warden General. The Councillors included both local magnates and professional lawyers. Few of their names are known to us. Northumberland, certainly, was a member of the Council, as was Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Lord Morley. The retarded Earl of Warwick, who was entrusted to Lincoln’s care at Sheriff Hutton, was given a nominal role by merit of his royal blood. Richard’s innovation clearly grew out of his own Council during the last decade of Edward’s reign. But in another sense it represented a significant break with the past. The Duke of Gloucester’s authority sprang from the fact that he was a great landowner in the North, while Lincoln was a royal official, appointed to serve at the King’s pleasure.