Richard The Chird (10 page)

In naked rage at his defeat, Warwick retired to his Yorkshire strongholds, summoning his brothers to a council and communicating with his ardent follower, the Duke of Clarence. George, Archbishop of York, hurried to Warwick's side; he was clever and ambitious, a zestful intriguer, fluid as quicksilver. John of Northumberland, however, the blunt and brilliant soldier of the family, gave his brothers cold comfort: he would stand by the King and that was that.

When Edward moved to Coventry to keep his Christmas of 1467 and investigate a ripple of discord in the Midlands, he took with him a bodyguard of two hundred archers and he also took with him George of Clarence, scarcely for the pleasure of his company. Yet Edward soon indicated that he cherished the Earl of Warwick—as the first servant of the Crown. Early in January the King bade Warwick come to a council meeting. The Earl replied with open hostility that Edward would not see him as long as the Woodvilles and Lord Herbert were at court; but the Archbishop of York, judging that the time was not yet ripe for fomenting trouble, patched matters up with Earl Rivers at Nottingham and persuaded Warwick to go to Coventry. The King greeted him warmly, reconciled him with Lord Herbert,

and kept the Woodvilles pretty well out of sight. But Warwick had come only to make Edward see the error of his ways, and that he failed utterly to do. By the end of March, 1468, not only was the marriage treaty with Burgundy finally approved, but the King signed an alliance with Francis, Duke of Brittany, against the King of France.

Yet Warwick was offered, and did not refuse, the honor of escorting Margaret of York on the first stage of her wedding journey. On June 18 she set out from London with the Earl and a train of lords and rode to the monastery of Stratford Langthorne in Essex. Here she lingered for several days of feasting with her three brothers, with Edward's Queen, and with Warwick—an inflammable company whose merriment must have covered many an incendiary glance and bitter whisper. There sat young Richard in their midst—having turned his back upon Warwick and Clarence, whom he loved, because he could not turn his coat against his brother Edward, whose Woodville court he could not like. This is our only glimpse of him throughout the year of 1468. He and the King, Warwick, and Clarence accompanied Margaret to Margate, whence, on June 23, she sailed to become the bride of Charles, accurately called the Temerctire, Duke of Burgundy. 18

Then the royal party galloped back to London, for the realm was stirring uneasily and the Specter of Lancaster was again raising its head. Some weeks before, a captured agent of Queen Margaret's, when his feet were burned with hot irons—it was the Tudors who made torture an art—implicated many persons, including one Hawkins, a servant of Warwick's friend Lord Wen-lock. Hawkins, in turn, accused Lord Wenlock and Sir Thomas Cook, a former Mayor and one of the wealthiest merchants of London, of treasonable correspondence with Queen Margaret. 19 Cook had been released on bail at the request of Margaret of York, for he had been instrumental in arranging the bond which guaranteed her dowry. Edward not only took no action against Wenlock but appointed both Clarence and Warwick to the commission of inquiry investigating the case, as a sign of his confidence in them.

At this moment, Louis XI, eager to do Edward any mischief,

launched the Lancastrian Jasper Tudor, still calling himself Earl of Pembroke, upon the coast of Wales. Though he burned Denbigh, he was soon routed by Lord Herbert's brother; and Lord Herbert himself shortly afterward captured Haiiech Castle, the last foothold of Lancaster in Britain, for which feat Herbert received the earldom of Pembroke. This uprising in Wales, however, convinced Edward that Hawkins' accusations had some foundation in fact. Earl Rivers was therefore able to persuade the King that Sir Thomas Cook was guilty, and the unfortunate merchant was rearrested. Rivers' motives of cupidity and personal revenge were nicely balanced. Rivers' wife, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, "ever was extremely again [against] . . . Sir Thomas, and all was because she might not have certain arras at her pleasure and price belonging unto . . . Sir Thomas." Under the guise of seeking evidence, Rivers and his relative by marriage, Sir John Fogge, Treasurer of the royal Household, spoiled Cook's town and country houses. Besides valuable plate and other goods, Rivers and Fogge seized "the aforesaid arras which the Duchess of Bedford desired, wrought in most richest wise with gold of the whole story of the Siege of Jerusalem which . . . cost in barter when [Cook] . . . bought it £800." Yet when Sir Thomas was brought before Chief Justice Markham, famed for his honesty, Markham ordered the jury to return a verdict of misprision of treason only. Rivers promptly had Cook committed to King's Bench Prison to exact the dreadful fine of ,£8,000, and then Elizabeth Woodville, by the archaic right of "Queen's gold" mulcted him of 100 marks for every ,£1,000 of fine. Rivers crowned his victory by driving from office the Chief Justice who had dared to cross him. 20

Much earlier in the year, it seems that Queen Elizabeth had compassed a long-sought revenge of her own, according to a story which may be colored in some of its details but is fundamentally credible. About the time of the Queen's coronation, in May of 1465, the Earl of Desmond, Deputy Lieutenant of Ireland, had come to England in order to clear himself of some charges brought against him and to pay homage to the King. Desmond was a man after Edward's own heart: cultivated, brave,

convivial. One day when they were out hunting, Edward, in his direct and merry way, inquired of Desmond what he thought of the royal marriage. Desmond replied frankly: he esteemed the Queen's beauty and virtues but he thought the King would have done better to marry a princess who would have secured him a foreign alliance. Edward accepted this answer in the spirit in which he had asked the question and sent Desmond back to Ire-land loaded with presents. A little later, in casual jest, he reported the Earl's words to Elizabeth—being not yet well schooled in his queen's character. Coldly furious, she dissembled her feelings and grimly awaited an opportunity to settle accounts with Desmond. When, in 1467, the Earl of Worcester became Deputy Lieutenant of Ireland, he agreed to give the Queen her revenge. Desmond was indicted on a flimsy charge, and when he bravely came in to face his accusers, he was cast into prison and condemned to be beheaded. Shortly after he suffered on the block, two small sons of his were cruelly murdered. It is said that the Queen stole the King's signet to seal the death warrant; there is evidence that the King was not pleased with the news of Desmond's execution. 21 *

Edward had shown no lack of wisdom in choosing to make a marriage which would help him to break the baronial domination of the Crown. The trouble lay with the particular family whom he had touched with his golden scepter. Their abuse of greatness probably harmed him as much as he was aided, in his work of strengthening the royal power, by their utter dependence upon him.

The uneasy year of 1468 drew to an end in comparative quiet, but tension was in the air. Richard of Gloucester, young though he was, must have realized that the choice of allegiance he had had to make might soon be forced upon the nation as a whole. Clarence and the Nevilles were a hive of secret plans, from which, now and then, came an ominous buzzing. Small comfort would it have been to the King's subjects if they had realized that Edward and Warwick seriously misunderstood each other. The Earl was blind to the King's great abilities; the King failed to appreciate the limitations of the Earl's intelligence.

Lion into Fox

He knows the game; how true he keeps the wind!

THE beginning of the trouble seemed relatively trivial: in the early spring of 1469 an agitator calling himself Robin of Redesdale stirred up a small rising in Yorkshire. John Neville, Earl of Northumberland, promptly put it down. Almost immediately a new Robin, Robin of Holderness, popped up in the East Riding to lead what seemed at first only a riotous airing of local grievances, but soon the rioters were shouting for the restoration of Henry Percy as Earl of Northumberland. Again John Neville sprang to arms and at the gates of York defeated the rebels, killing their leader. By this time, however, Robin of Redesdale had appeared in Lancashire and was raising a more formidable head of insurrection.

When he received this news, King Edward decided to come north himself to investigate and punish these persistent disturbances. The southern coasts were safely guarded against Lancastrian or French attack by the Earl of Warwick, whose fleet was cruising in the Channel. Edward ordained "stuff for the field"—artillery, tents, a thousand jackets of blue or murrey— to be carted to Fotheringhay. He sent out a few calls for troops. But the risings seemed no more dangerous than others which had been easily taken in hand, and the King did not seek to raise a large army nor to hurry northward. Had he been a connoisseur of prognostics, he might have adopted a less leisurely pace. Months before, a shower of blood had stained grass and drying linen in Bedfordshire; elsewhere a horseman and men in arms were seen rushing through the air. "A certain woman, too, in the county of Huntingdon, who was with child and near the time of her delivery, to her extreme horror, felt the embryo in her womb weeping . . . and uttering a kind of sobbing noise." x

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Edward took with him two of his best captains, Sir John Howard and Louis de Bretaylle, his faithful Knight of the Body Sir Thomas Mongomery, and a swashbuckling Portuguese Jew, Edward Brampton, who, as was the custom, had been godfathered at his ceremony of conversion by the King himself and had gratefully adopted the royal name;- but the King's chief companions were kindred of the Queen: Earl Rivers and two of his sons, Lord Scales and Sir John Woodville. Perhaps Edward was not entirely happy to find himself surrounded by Wood-villes; perhaps it occurred to him, after much persuasion by Richard himself, that his younger brother, now in his seventeenth year, was ready for a mild taste of campaigning. Just before he departed, he ordained that Richard was to go with him. Hastily making what preparations he could, Richard set off, eager to "wage" men for his service but sorely lacking in money. Among those in his train were his boyhood friend Robert Percy and John a Parr, one of his squires. 3 *

Leaving London the first week in June, the royal party proceeded into East Anglia to visit the shrines of St. Edmund and of Our Lady of Walsingham and to gather men. En route they Called briefly on George Neville, Archbishop of York, at his manor of The Moor, in Hertfordshire. Thinking that it might be well to keep an eye on the slippery Archbishop, King Edward suggested that he come north to look into these troubles in his diocese, and George Neville readily promised that he would join the King a little later. About June 18 the royal cavalcade rode into Norwich.

Here Edward and Richard found themselves in the middle of a serious land dispute between the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the Paston family. Norfolk claimed the castle of Caister; Suffolk, the manor of Hellesden—portions of the estate of the late Sir John Fastolfe which had come into John Paston's hands as Fastolfe's chief executor. Paston's elder son, Sir John, now head of the family, was engaged to a relative of the Queen's. Therefore Sir John's brother applied to the three Woodvilles to help him bring his case to the King's attention. They were all profuse with promises "that the matter should do well enough,"

but in the end young Paston wrote with some bitterness to Sir John that "for all their words of pleasure, I cannot understand what their labor in this country hath done good." Of his own volition, however, King Edward warned the Duke of Norfolk's council to abide by the law's decision; and the fact that the King's route to Walsingham lay through the manor of Hellesden, some two miles northwest of Norwich, provided a means of letting Edward see with his own eyes the lawless violence that Suffolk had used. In 1465 his men had invaded the estate, stripped the house of its valuables, and wrecked the lodge. Thomas Wing-field, a member of the royal household, promised Sir John's brother "that he would find the means that my lord of Gloucester and himself both should shew the King the lodge that was broken down, and also that they would tell him of the breaking down of the place."

Richard and Wingfield duly pointed out the ruins of the lodge to the King, but Edward told Sir John's uncle that if Suffolk had indeed done the damage, the Pastons should have complained to the commission of oyer and terminer which sat at Norwich shortly after; he added that he would not do special favors for the Pastons or anybody else. Though Richard was not successful in his intercession, he did succeed in "waging" four men of young Paston's acquaintance to take arms under his banner: "Bernard, Barney, Broom, and W. Calthorp." He did better than Lord Scales, who was unable to persuade young Paston to enter the King's service. 4

By June 21 Edward and Richard had left Norwich for Walsingham. When they reached Castle Rising on June 24, Richard found himself so short of money that he was forced to dispatch to one of his followers an urgent plea for a loan, the earliest letter of Richard's that is extant. "Right trusty and well beloved,' 7 he dictated to his secretary in the customary style of the day,

we greet you well. And forasmuch as the King's good grace hath appointed me to attend upon his highness into the North parries of his land, which will be to me great cost and charge, whereunto I am so suddenly called that I am not so well purveyed of money therefore as behoves me to be, and therefore pray you as my special trust is in

you, to lend me an hundred pound of money unto Easter next coming, at which time I promise you ye shall be truly thereof content and paid again, as the bearer hereof shall inform you: to whom I pray you to give credence therein, and show me such friendliness in the same as I may do for you hereafter, wherein ye shall find me ready. Written at Rising the 24 day of June.

R. GLOUCESTRE

Seizing a pen, Richard wrote the superscription, "The Duke of Gloucester," and added an anxious postscript: "Sir I say I pray you that ye fail me not at this time in my great need, as ye will that I show you my good lordship in that matter that ye labour to me for." 5 *