Richard The Chird (18 page)

A considerable majority favored making peace with France. But the Duke of Gloucester was not among them. In speaking against the abandonment of the war, Richard was, for the first time, opposing a policy of his brother. Doubtless he nursed no illusions about Edward's ability to conquer France; he probably contended that after so many taxes imposed and so many hopes aroused, the English should seek battle with Louis XI in order to treat with him as victors.

Edward, however, had made up his mind. On the morning of August 15 his ambassadors met with those of Louis at a village not far from Amiens. The terms the English brought with them were promptly accepted: in return for the immediate withdrawal of the English army from France and a seven years' truce and intercourse of merchandise, Louis XI agreed to pay King Edward 75,000 gold crowns at once and 50,000 crowns a year; to marry the Dauphin to Edward's eldest daughter, Elizabeth; and to sign a private amity which bound each king to take the part of the other against rebellious subjects. 6 Three days later, having heard the rumor of what was going forward, Charles of Burgundy came storming into Edward's camp. Furiously he accused Edward of perfidy and taunted him with the victories won by other English kings in France. Then he flung away, declaring that he would have no part of Edward's peace.

But King Louis was now the very monarch of hospitality. He threw open the town of Amiens to the English troops. Outside the city gates he planted an array of tables adorned with venison pasties and the finest potables. After the English troops had

EDWARD AND LOUIS

quenched their martial ardors in Louis' wine, they marched to the village of Picquigny, where a bridge had been thrown across the river Somme. On this the two kings met face to face, each accompanied by a dozen attendants. With Edward were the Duke of Clarence and other peers, but not the Duke of Gloucester. Having resolutely opposed the treaty, Richard would not be a party to its signing. Far from valuing his younger brother the less for his opposition, Edward pointedly bestowed on him a fine grant of estates. 7

^ The English King strode onto the bridge at Picquigny a magnificent figure, displaying a black velvet cap gleaming with a jeweled fleur-de-lis and a gown of cloth of gold lined with red satin. Louis . . . Louis cared nothing for the accessories of power. He wore a motley costume of everything and nothing-like a mountebank, some said. His trusted adviser Commynes had been given the doubtful honor of dressing in precisely the same costume in order to halve the danger of assassination. The two kings advanced to the wooden barrier which had been erected in the middle of the bridge, half bowed to each other, embraced through the bars, spoke some words of greeting, and with their hands on a piece of the True Cross, signed the treaty. Motioning their attendants to draw back, they then talked together for some minutes with great cordiality before making their farewells.

Louis was eager to win as many friends at the English court as he could. With Edward's knowledge and consent, the chief councilors of England accepted handsome pensions from the French King, which they preferred to call tribute. The largest pension, two thousand crowns a year, went to the King's most intimate friend, William, Lord Hastings.

Any who looked upon the peace with unfriendly eyes, Louis anxiously sought to placate. When Commynes reported that Louis de Bretaylle, a favorite captain of Edward's, had remarked that though his King had won nine victories, his present defeat was a disgrace which outweighed them all, Louis hastened to invite de Bretaylle to dinner and made him a splendid offer to enter the service of France. When this was refused, he bestowed on

him a thousand crowns, promised to favor his brother, and bade him a warm farewell, Commynes whispering in his ear a plea to work for the continuance of peace.

With what eagerness, then, did Louis seek to exercise his arts upon Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the King's martial brother who had so strongly opposed the treaty. Richard politely accepted an invitation to dine with Louis in Amiens and "received from him, as a courtesy when it could not be taken as a bribe, a present of plate and fine horses suitable to his rank and station." 8 But Richard was too plain and inflexible a personality to respond in kind to Louis' easy camaraderie. Louis felt that he had failed to make an impact upon the Duke of Gloucester. Henceforth, Richard was marked in his mind as an enemy of France—an impression which, to Richard's cost, he would pass on to his successor.

In early September Richard recrossed the Channel. It is unlikely that, before leading his forces back to Yorkshire, he paused in London. Edward's affection had not been lessened by Richard's opposition, nor Richard's loyalty by Edward's disregard of his advice. Yet a residue of feeling was doubtless left in Richard's mind. It represented not a rift but a shadow, a portent, a symbol of the alteration Richard had begun to sense in his brother's character, of an alienation it was impossible to arrest. The distance between the moors of Wensleydale and the Woodville court was measured in more than miles.

By the time Richard reached Middleham, the last of Edward's great army, its mettle untested, had returned to England.

Passing and repassing through Calais in their pride of plumes, banners, and armor, almost all the men of this host have forever faded; whereas one quiet merchant dwelling in the town, a man with a gentle heart and a lively humor, has preserved, fresh and blooming against time's decay, a single moment of his life—when, composing a letter to the thirteen-year-old girl he will subsequently marry, he hears his friends impatiently calling him to come down to dinner and smiles and finishes his missive.

"And if ye would be a good eater of your meat alway," Thomas Betson tells his little Katherine, "that ye might wax and

grow fast to be a woman, ye should make me the gladdest man of the world, by my troth; for when I remember your favour and your sad» [sincere] loving dealing towards me, for sooth ye make me even very glad and joyous in my heart: and on the other side again [i.e., the reverse of joyous] when I remember your young youth. And therefore I pray you, even as you love me, to be merry and to eat your meat like a woman. ... I pray you, greet well my horse, and pray him to give you four of his years to help you with all: and I will at my coming home give him four of my years. . . . Tell him that I prayed him so. ... Commend me to the Clock, and pray him to amend his unthrifty manners: for he strikes ever in undue time, and he will be ever afore. ... I trust to you that he shall amend against my coming, the which shall be shortly with all hands and all feet, with God's grace. . . . And Almighty Jesus make you a good woman, and send you many good years and long to live in health and virtue to His pleasure. [Written] at great Calais, on this side on the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his Dinner, and the clock smote nine, and all our household cried after me and bade me come down; come down to dinner at once! And what answer I gave them, ye knew it of old." 9

As Thomas Betson, Merchant of the Staple, watched the soldiers of King Edward's army re-embark in Calais harbor, he doubtless heard many a disgruntled mutter. They brought home with them neither booty nor glorious scars. The men who had stayed in England grouched also. Though Edward put as good a face as he could upon the truce, the taxpayers grumbled that they had paid for victories, not truces; and they were soon angrily protesting to the King that his disbanded troops were working off their martial spirits by robbery and murder on the highways.

Edward took prompt and thorough action. He journeyed watchfully about his kingdom with his judges "and no one, not even his own domestic, did he spare, but instantly had him hanged if he was found to be guilty of theft or murder." 10 In a short space he had reduced the realm to order by these vigorous measures, and it was not long before his subjects were regarding him with as deep an affection as ever.

In truth, the King had brilliantly solved the dilemma which Henry V had bequeathed to the fifteenth century. By invading France only to sell a truce at an immense price, Edward accomplished two ends: he had set off on the military expedition his subjects demanded and had humbled France* but instead of burdening his people with the immense taxes and inevitable futility of a partial conquest, he secured to himself an annuity which enabled him to dispense with parliamentary grants and to strengthen the powers of his government. The kings who came after him could do no better than to emulate this policy.

Shortly after he reached home, Edward extracted fifty thousand additional crowns from King Louis as a ransom for Margaret of Anjou. When she finally returned to the land of her birth in the following March, she had not only to relinquish all her pretensions in England but to resign to Louis—as payment, he said, for all the help he had given her—her rights of inheritance from her father* With the small pension he doled out she retired to one of her father's estates, on which she lived, brokenhearted, until her death in August of 1482. As soon as Louis heard of her demise, he wrote to demand all her dogs: "She has made me her heir, and . . . this is all I shall get. I pray you not to keep any back, for you would cause me a terribly great displeasure/ 7 X1

If the magnates of the kingdom of England had lost the opportunity of displaying their bravery on the fields of France, bravery of quite a different sort one of the sheriffs of London had had occasion to witness not long before. Though it was more than half a century since the Church, with the fanatical encouragement of Henry V, had carried on a campaign of persecution and fire to extinguish the followers of Wyclif, Lollardry still persisted, particularly among the humble artisans in towns and villages, and on occasion a victim was still seized by the ecclesiastical authorities. John Goos, a Lollard sentenced to be burned at Tower Hill for heresy, "before dinner was delivered unto Robert Byllydon, one of the sheriffs, to put in execution the same afternoon; where he, like a charitable man, had him home to his house, and there exhorted him that he should die a Christian man, and renounce his false errors. But that other, after long exhortation heard, re-

quired the sheriff that he might have meat, for he said that he was sore hungered. Then the sheriff commanded him meat, whereof he took as [if] he had ailed nothing and said to such as stood about him, 'I eat now a good and competent dinner, for I shall pass a little sharp shower ere I go to supper.' And when he had dined, he required that he might shortly be led to his execution." 12

It was some such fate as this which many of Edward's subjects wished for the royal councilors who had gone to France; for though the people could not help taking the King again to then-hearts, they nursed anger against the men who had advised him to make a truce with Louis and who had taken the French King's gold. 13 The popularity of Richard of Gloucester, on the other hand, grew the greater for his refusal to be a party to the treaty.

For a year and a half he now stayed clear of the court and devoted himself to his family, his estates, the Marches, and the men of the North. 14 *

When he journeyed to London early in 1477, it was at the urgent summons of the King, who required his counsel. Out of the sudden misfortune of Burgundy, the guile of Louis XI, and the intrigues of the Woodvilles was developing the train of circumstances which would induce the explosion of that brilliant and unstable star the Duke of Clarence.

The Malcontent

, false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence

IT IS hard to be the brother of a king. To share the blood royal, but not the throne. To be almost everything, and therefore nothing. The French title suits him best: Monsieur. A delicate irony plays in that title, the shadow of amusement. Monsieur must be otherwise nameless because he bears the royal name. King's brother is an occupation without duties but with a thousand temptations. Ambition is his birthright, and conspiracy is the only refreshment of his envy. The pages of history are crowded 'with his troublemaking and his treacheries. Even now the brothers of Louis XI and of James III of Scotland were playing their own spirited variations on this pregnant theme, which George of Clarence so furiously and fertilely embellished.

To his inevitable disabilities as the King's brother, Clarence added a remarkably shallow character. Some of it must have been inherited from his shadowy grandfather, that feckless Earl of Cambridge who indulged in a foolish plot to overthrow Henry V and was promptly beheaded at Southampton in 1415. Clarence was almost as handsome and striking a figure as his brother Edward; he was unusually eloquent; he was capable of radiating a golden charm; and he was incapable of forgetting that a Lancastrian Parliament had once passed a bill regulating the succession in terms of which he could now look upon himself as king.

When Clarence returned from the expedition to France, he was, for the time being, quiescent. But he was only readying his lance to tilt at the first windmill, and it was soon flashing on the horizon. His Duchess, Isabel, died on December 22, 1476, not long after giving birth to a son, who very shortly followed her to the grave. Two weeks later there occurred a more spectacular death, one that startled the monarchs of Europe. On January 5,

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1477, * n the snow before the walls of Nancy, which in fury and despair he had been besieging, was finally snuffed out that fiery particle Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, He left behind him a daughter Mary, the greatest heiress of Europe. And who was happier to receive this news than Louis XI? He promptly announced that the County and the Duchy of Burgundy had reverted to the Crown of France; and he prepared to launch his armies, not only to overrun those territories but to claim as many of the rich towns lying north of the river Somme as he could put his hands on.

For King Edward, the news was extremely grave. The cities of Flanders and the Low Countries were the keystone of English trade. Burgundy was the traditional ally of England, the means of ensuring that Louis gave no trouble and continued to pay his fifty thousand crowns a year. As soon as the King received these unpalatable tidings, he summoned a Great Council to meet on February 13. Richard and Clarence both arrived "in all haste" a day or two after the meetings had begun. 1 What advice Richard offered the King is unknown; in view of his previous attitude toward Louis XI, it is likely that he spoke for taking a strong stand against Louis' determination to dismember Burgundy. Edward and his council, however, temporized. They would support Duke Charles' heiress as best they could without openly opposing the King of France. Messages were hastily sent to Edward's sister Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy. Negotiations were opened with the heiress Mary. Envoys were also dispatched to Louis XI, but their object was only to suggest that the seven-years' truce be extended to endure the lifetime of both kings. Meanwhile the Duke of Clarence had grown ripe with secret hopes and private visions.