Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (27 page)

Still, it was the most important members of the nobility, the dukes and earls of his realm as well as super magnates such as Thomas, Lord Stanley who, in controlling vast geographic areas of the country within their lordships, mattered most. At his accession, Richard had managed to secure power with the support of the four most powerful members of the nobility: Buckingham, John, Duke of Norfolk, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland and Thomas, Lord Stanley. Now only three of these pillars upon which Richard’s kingship rested remained. Despite Buckingham’s rebellion, the revolt itself had failed with the assistance of the other three nobles in crushing the rising. Howard, who had been created a duke by Richard shortly after his coronation, had been instrumental in suppressing the Kentish rebellion, while Northumberland had been active in raising troops in the north for Richard during the rebellion. And it had been Stanley’s inaction in Wales and their heart-lands in Lancashire and Cheshire that, in spite of his wife’s troublesome plotting on behalf of her son, had meant that Buckingham’s attempt at raising rebellion there collapsed.

If Richard was to continue to effectively control the kingdom, all would need to be rewarded appropriately. Richard’s accession had not merely seen John Howard be raised to the Dukedom of Norfolk and his appointment as Admiral of England; the king had sought to vastly increase his landed estates. On 25 July 1483, Howard had been granted forty-six manors in Berkshire, Wiltshire and Cornwall; upon Rivers’s death, he had also been given the profits of twenty-five manors formerly belonging to the earl. When Katherine Neville, the dowager
duchess of the Mowbray Duke of Norfolk, who had died back in 1432, finally died in September 1483, her estates were granted by Richard to be split between the heirs, Norfolk, and William Berkeley, Earl of Nottingham. In addition to this, Richard further granted a sizeable portion of lands in East Anglia formerly belonging to the Earl of Oxford to Norfolk, and as well as promoting Norfolk’s son Thomas Howard to the Earldom of Surrey, awarded him the staggering annuity of £1,100.

Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland was appointed steward and chamberlain of England, and after Buckingham’s downfall was rewarded with the duke’s lordship of Holderness in Yorkshire, worth over £1,000 a year. The earl was also granted possession of the lucrative Brian lands in the south-west, formerly held by the Duke of Clarence, although Northumberland also had a claim to the lands. In addition to being appointed captain of Berwick in May 1483, seemingly an uninspiring promotion until its salary of £438 a month, or £5,000 a year, is taken into account.

Thomas, Lord Stanley had been one of the first to benefit from the duke’s fall, receiving his lordship of Kimbolton on the same day of Buckingham’s execution. Further rewards followed, with Stanley being appointed to Buckingham’s former office of Constable of England in December 1483, together with an annuity of £100. Stanley’s loyalty was further rewarded with large grants of lands within the Welsh Marches and Cheshire, in addition to the lordship and castle of Thornbury in Gloucestershire, worth £687 a year. Richard also sought to further extend the Stanley family’s influence in North Wales to replace the absence of leadership left by Buckingham’s execution. Stanley’s brother Sir William Stanley was appointed chief justice of North Wales on 12 November and later given the constableship of Caernarfon castle, while one of their kinsmen, William Griffith of Penryhn, was made chamberlain of North Wales. In spite of these grants, Richard was unwilling to grant the Stanleys the degree of influence that he had been prepared to give to Buckingham; instead, other key offices in North Wales went to his northern followers, possibly as a deliberate check to prevent the Stanleys’ power from growing too strong.

Richard’s hesitation in rewarding Thomas Stanley and his family with what they might have considered their due is perhaps understandable
given Margaret Beaufort’s own involvement in the conspiracy and rebellion during the previous autumn, which if anything was clearly apparent from the number of her kinsmen and servants who were listed among the rebels. According to Polydore Vergil, Margaret was ‘commonly called the head of that conspiracy’.

Many had been surprised, angry even, that Stanley had not only escaped punishment but had received reward; ‘it went very hard,’ Vergil observed, ‘that Thomas Stanley was not accounted among the number of the king’s enemies, by reason of the practices of Margaret his wife’. Some even suspected that Stanley himself had been one of the instigators of the rebellion, and if Vergil is to be believed, Stanley was interviewed by the council where he ‘proved himself guiltless of all offence’. It is hard to believe that Stanley would not have at least been aware of his wife’s intrigues, or even considered the prospect of raising his stepson to the throne. According to a later ballad that recalled the time of the rebellion, Thomas Stanley sent one of his retainers, Humphrey Brereton of Malpas, Cheshire, to Henry. Brereton sailed in one of Stanley’s ships from Liverpool, near to one of Stanley’s residences, with a large sum of money which he took to Henry, finding him at the Cistercian abbey of Begard, near Paimpol on the north coast of Brittany. While the evidence contained in the ballad cannot be verified, it is striking that it records Henry’s residence as being near Paimpol, exactly the same location where Duke Francis II handed over his loan of 10,000 crowns on 30 October before the earl departed on his ill-fated voyage to England.

Laying aside Thomas Stanley’s own involvement, how to deal with Margaret Beaufort posed a potential problem for Richard. He needed to retain Stanley’s support; adding his wife’s name to the list of attainders would hardly achieve this. Even if Richard had wished to pass an attainder against Margaret, the fact that her marriage settlement with Stanley in 1472 guaranteed the earl a substantial income from her estates, as well as the cessation of Margaret’s legal rights to property would have jeopardised Stanley’s own interest in his wife’s estates, potentially alientating Stanley’s support. Instead, Richard chose to spare Margaret, ‘remembering the good and faithful service that Thomas, Lord Stanley hath done … and for his sake’.

Nevertheless, for Margaret herself the commensurate punishment
could be considered equally harsh. She was to forfeit her right to all titles and estates, with all her properties being regranted to her husband. The material change may have been small, but for Margaret the significance could hardly have been greater. For a woman who fiercely guarded her independence, not to mention the protection of her only son’s rights and inheritance, she was being reduced to the status of a humble wife, dependent entirely upon her husband and his survival; the body of her estates, now granted to Stanley for life, would upon his death revert to the king. Her rights to her mother’s Beaufort inheritance were also cancelled, while lands that Margaret might have hoped to be given to Henry were granted away to others.

This was not the only punishment that Margaret would have to endure. The king’s council also decreed that Stanley was to ‘remove from his wife all her servants, and to keep her so straight with himself that she should not be able from henceforth to send any messenger neither to her son, nor friends, nor practice any thing at all against the king’. Effectively forced to renounce her independence, it can only have been a humiliating experience for Margaret. Yet reflecting upon what had taken place over the past months, she would have been able to retain the satisfaction that her efforts had not been in vain. Her son Henry had not only been greatly strengthened with the arrival of several hundred exiles from the rebellion to his side; then Margaret herself had set in motion Henry’s claim to the throne, while the ceremony at Vannes on Christmas Day had finally brought to fruition her long cherished ambition that Henry might one day marry Elizabeth of York. For thirty years, Margaret had weaved through the dangers at court, as she sought incessantly to protect her only son; now she had come close to securing an unofficial acknowledgement that, should Richard be swept aside, Henry might be crowned king. For all this, she must have considered, her own confinement within her household was a small price to pay. ‘Albeit in King Richard’s days she was oft in jeopardy of her life,’ a later account recalled of Margaret’s persistence, ‘yet she bore patiently all trouble in such wise that it is wonder to think it.’

Richard’s decision not to deliver a more severe punishment to Margaret Beaufort was a sign of the king’s own willingness at reconciliation;
members of Margaret’s household who had been explicitly involved in the rebellion, including Reginald Bray and Sir Richard Edgecombe, were granted a general pardon, despite the fact that by this time Edgecombe had already made his way to Brittany. Later in the spring, Richard would decide to pardon a third of those attainted, drawing up a list of men he hoped to rehabilitate, including rebels such as William Berkeley of Beverstone, Walter Hungerford and William Brandon – even Sir John Fogge, a former treasurer of the royal household and a kinsman of the Woodvilles who had been pardoned by Richard after his accession to the throne, having been brought out of sanctuary at Westminster where he shook the king’s hand. Fogge had raised rebellion in Kent, yet Richard still thought fit to pardon him for a second time.

Margaret was not the only woman that Richard sought to appease. Since the flight of the exiles from Buckingham’s rebellion to Henry Tudor in Brittany, the king had been determined to obtain intelligence as to what his rival was planning. ‘He had provided himself with spies overseas,’ the Crowland Chronicler observed, ‘at whatever price he could get them, from whom he had learned almost all the movements of his enemies.’ As soon as Richard had received news of Henry Tudor’s promise to marry Elizabeth of York at Vannes, the king understood the urgent need to neutralise the threat that Queen Elizabeth and her daughters, remaining in sanctuary at Westminster, posed. If he could gain possession of Elizabeth of York and her younger sisters Cecily, Anne, Katherine and Brigitte then he would be able to arrange their marriages himself, choosing suitably loyal husbands for each of them, thereby frustrating Henry’s ambitions. Despite the fact that Elizabeth Woodville had been at the very centre of the plot to overthrow him, Richard now sought to extend the branch of peace. Sending messengers to her urging her and her daughters to leave sanctuary, he promised that he would secure their welfare. Queen Elizabeth, whose grief over the disappearance of her sons ‘seemed scarce able to be comforted’, was understandably suspicious. She had heard the same promises before, when she gave up her youngest son Richard to Archbishop Bourgchier in preparation for his brother’s coronation; that was the last time she had had sight of him. Resisting Richard’s entreaties, it was only ‘after much pleading, and also threats had been employed’, with the queen
being ‘very strongly entreated’, that she finally caved in to the king’s demands.

Before she would allow her daughters to leave sanctuary, Elizabeth first insisted that she would only do so on condition that the king swear a solemn and lengthy oath in front of an assembly of the nobility and bishops, together with the mayor and aldermen of London. Addressing the gathering on 1 March, Richard, his hands placed upon a bible, declared that

Richard further promised that he would ensure that each of the daughters would be married to ‘gentlemen born’ with a dowry of lands worth 200 marks a year provided for each of them. For the queen, he pledged that retiring to the country, she would receive 700 marks a year. Ominously, the king also stated that she would be personally attended by ‘one of the esquires of my body’, John Nesfield, the man who had been appointed to encircle the sanctuary at Westminster with an armed guard; however, Nesfield was soon to be ordered to command a naval fleet at sea, suggesting that his appointment was a nominal one, and that the queen would be
allowed to retire from court in comfortable seclusion.

Becoming increasingly unsettled and nervous of Henry Tudor’s growing strength across the seas in Brittany, Richard also believed it necessary for not only his own title, having been confirmed by Parliament, but the future security of his family dynasty to be given wider recognition. A month after Parliament had been dissolved, Richard would summon leading members of the London livery companies to Westminster to hear the ‘king’s title and right’ announced to them, in which it was explained how Richard took his descent from Henry II. As soon as he had managed to gain possession of the Woodville daughters from sanctuary, Richard ordered his nobility and the court to attend a ceremony by which they swore their allegiance to his son Edward, Prince of Wales as the king’s sole heir. The Crowland Chronicler recorded how