Richard The Chird (24 page)

Men were stunned. Suddenly, they had lost the strong and affable genie who had held them safe in his great hand. He had of late years grown stout, but on his mighty frame this corpulence was not unseemly; he had become less active than formerly and suffered periods of ill health or debility, but all had hoped that the King had before him a mellow middle age in which to enjoy the quiet he had won for his realm and to oversee the coming to manhood of his elder son and heir. On the day of his death he was three weeks short of being forty-one years old.

His feast of the Christmas past had exceeded in opulence the entertainments of former years. To lutes and viols the court danced. There were "disguisings"—ancestor of the Elizabethan masque. Actors thrived, for the King called for plays, and surrounded by his courtiers watched the antics of the Vice Titivillus, the agony of Mankind besieged by World, Flesh, and Devil, the coarse horseplay which flickered about the grim specter of Death. Trumpets and clarions summoned a richly dressed throng to banquets of royal length. Edward's beautiful daughters, shining like angels in their Christmas gowns, cast a glow of innocence upon the revelry. Presiding over the festivities like a genial wizard, in a new fashion of very full sleeves which were rolled across the shoulders, King Edward entertained with affection and pride his victorious young brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester. 2

Yet neither the faithful service of Richard nor the merry de-

vices of his court could rescue him from the grip of a profound melancholy. He was not a professional monarch like Louis XI or Henry VII: he could not sink the man in the king or squeeze the juice of life from a grim pursuit of destiny and dynasty. The Treaty of Arras burned in his blood like a fever, but not simply because he regretted his failure to shore up Maximilian against the French. King Louis' triumph was a fateful pointer, underscoring the inaction of his later years, the loss of youth, the emptiness of pleasure, the end of his bright vitality . . . quenched by nights of sensual indulgence crowded upon the labors of statecraft. Touched by the passion of the Renaissance, he had reached out avidly for experience. But were not his carouses, like his Christmas reveling, in part a groping to escape the pangs of memory? He could not sink th©~mm4r^ the king. He could not, in contemplating the greatness of his accomplishment, forget what it had cost. The past was crowded with lost illusions and the faces of men dear to him whom he had had to crush; the present was dominion that had lost its savor; the future, a weary bickering with fate and his own mistakes. Even the amplitude of his might, the loyalty of his brother Richard, the wit of Mistress Shore, and the love of his subjects could not comfort him. Once an illness laid him abed, the conqueror of Warwick let death take him, apparently without a struggle. When he lost his ebullience, he lost everything.

As his last hours approached, the King's thoughts coiled uneasily about his twelve-year-old heir, Edward, who had dwelt most of his life far off at Ludlow on the border of the Welsh Marches. At the age of three he had been sent there, with his council, to win the loyalty of Wales. The council which governed in his name was the chief of Edward's administrative innovations that the Tudors and their successors copied. Almost two hundred years later, a masque— Comus —written by young John Milton, was first performed at Ludlow Castle for the induction of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of the Council of Wales.

With an eye to the future—less prudent, as always, than ambitious—the Prince's mother had seen to it that her son was sur-

rounded by Woodvilles; "in effect," More remarks, "everyone as he was nearest of kin unto the Queen, so was planted next about the prince . . . whereby her blood might of youth [i.e., from his childhood] be rooted in the prince's favour." Though John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester, was titled President of the Council, its ruling power was Earl Rivers, the Queen's brother, who held the office of Governor of the Prince; Lord Richard Grey, her younger son by her first marriage, was one of the councilors; and Richard Haute, a relative of the Woodvilles, was Comptroller of the Household. The council owned a dual function: to supervise the upbringing of the Prince and to exercise jurisdiction not only over his lands in Wales, Cornwall, and Chester but also over the Marches and the border shires of Shropshire, Hereford, Gloucester, and Worcester. By the standard of the times, it was a sheltered existence that young Edward led—removed from the main current of life into the placid backwater of Ludlow; padded by an elaborate regimen of "virtuous learning/' daily orisons, literary edification, and manly sports; and nurtured by his mother's kin, whose view of politics and personalities was the only one he ever knew. 3

To the dying King, the peaceful succession of his son was now his one worldly preoccupation. There pressed upon him the awful realization that he was leaving his boy threatened by perils that he himself, with forethought, might have extinguished. Two shadows in particular he had allowed his reign to cast upon the future. One, very large and ominous, was rooted at the heart of his government. The other represented a loose end of statesmanship which he had not quite tied up and which the now triumphant Louis XI might pounce upon, to England's cost.

This second shadow emanated from the figure of a young man whose only name was Henry Tydder or Tudor but who persisted in calling himself the Earl of Richmond—a Lancastrian refugee at the court of Francis, Duke of Brittany. The lineage of Henry Tudor was high, mysterious, and flawed: it was blazoned with royal colors which were everywhere crisscrossed by the bar sinister. In his mother's descent, his great-great-grandfather was John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III. Gaunt had a mis-

tress, Catherine Swynfoxd, who was the daughter of a Flemish herald named Payn Roet. She bore him four children while her husband, Sir Hugh, and Gaunfs second wife, Constance of Castile, were both alive. After the demise of their respective spouses Gaunt married her. A protege of the Duke's, one Geoffrey Chaucer, had married her sister. Despite the buzz of scandal, Richard II was kind enough to legitimate Gaunt's bastards by patent and act of Parliament, to bestow upon them the impressive name of Beaufort (derived from the castle in France where they were born), and to set them on the path to high station. John, the eldest, became Earl of Somerset; his brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester and Cardinal. In 1407 Gaunt's son Henry IV, half brother to the Beauforts, confirmed their patent of legitimacy but added the limiting phrase excepta dignitate regali. Whether, in the light of present-day constitutional studies, he had the right so to alter an act of Parliament matters little; most people of the fifteenth century took it for granted that the legitimating patent barred the Beauforts from the throne.

The Earl of Somerset's granddaughter, sole heir of his eldest son, John, Duke of Somerset, was a shrewd, pious, learned girl named Margaret Beaufort In 1456, at the age of thirteen, she was married to Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Some two months after his death, on January 28, 1457, she gave birth to Henry Tudor. She was twice more to marry, but Henry was the only child she brought into the world—as if, the historians of the Tudor dynasty would one day unblushingly declare, after she had produced so great a gift for England, Providence decreed that she had richly fulfilled her destiny.

On his father's side, Henry's ancestry was far more mysterious than on his mother's; it was equally illustrious and flawed. A generation before Henry's birth there had appeared at the English court an adventurous Welshman named Owen Tudor. So far as anyone knew, he came of an Anglesey family of no great pretensions; his father, Meredith, had been butler to the Bishop of Bangor and escheator of Anglesey. Later, much later, the Tudors were traced back to dizzy heights in the dimness of the ancient past; they were sprung, it would be solemnly averred, from the

loins of Cadwallader himself and were thus vessels of the royal blood of Celtic Wales. Owen managed to become a clerk of the Wardrobe in the household of Queen Katherine, Henry V's widow and daughter of the mad Charles VI of France, She lived remote from court, forgotten. No doubt she was lonely. Owen Tudor would be handsome and sympathetic and he would know how to sing sad Welsh songs to the sad Katherine. Soon he had sung himself into her bed. She bore him three children: Jasper, Edmund, and Owen. So obscure was Katherine's household, so unheeded by the court, that not, apparently, until she died in 1437 did the council of Henry VI discover her amour.

They were furious. The Queen meant nothing to them, but the slight upon the memory of their hero, Henry V, meant a great deal. Owen protested that he and the Queen were truly married. No proof of the wedding was ever forthcoming, however; and since Owen had not troubled to apply for letters of denization, the marriage would have been illegal. Cast into Newgate Prison by the outraged council, the dashing Welshman pursued his adventures. "This same year [of 1437]," records the Great Chronicle, "one Owen no man of birth neither of lyflode [property] broke out of Newgate against night at Searching Time through help of his priest and went his way hurting foul his keeper. But at the last blessed be God he was taken again. The which Owen had privily wedded Queen Katherine and had three or four children by her unwyting [unknown to] the common people till that she were dead and buried." 4 *

Eventually, the weak and kindly Henry VI made all well. He recognized his half brothers, welcomed them at court, and in 1453 created Jasper Earl of Pembroke and Edmund Earl of Richmond. Owen, the third son, had become a monk at Westminster. Perhaps the taint of madness in Queen Katherine's veins, which clouded the mind of King Henry, had passed mainly, in the children of her second connection, to the monk Owen, of whom nothing is known; perhaps it appears in Jasper's childlessness; perhaps, in the suspicions which smoldered in Henry Tudor's mind in his later years.

Not long after the birth of her son, Margaret Beaufort married

Sir Henry Stafford. She relinquished Henry to his uncle Jasper to be reared in Wales at Pembroke Castle. In February of 1461 Jasper managed to escape after the crushing defeat at Mortimer's Cross; but young Edward of March, soon to be Edward IV, captured and condemned to death Henry's grandfather. Even when the scaffold was erected in the market place at Hereford, the jaunty Owen hoped to circumvent death as he had circumvented so many obstacles in his adventurous life, "weening and trusting alway," Gregory reports of him, "that he should not be headed till he saw the axe and the block; and when he was in his doublet^ he trusted on pardon and grace till the collar of his red velvet doublet was ripped off. Then he said, 'That head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie in Queen Katherine's lap' and put his heart and mind wholly unto God and full meekly took his death." Then his head was "set upon the highest grice of the market cross, and a mad woman kemped his hair and washed away the blood of his face, and she got candles and set about him burning, more than a hundred." 5

For several months young Henry Tudor was hidden in the bit of Welsh territory still held by the Lancastrians. When Lord Herbert captured Pembroke Castle in September of 1461, he found Henry within it. Herbert was granted the castle and, on the payment of a thousand pounds, the custody and marriage of the four-year-old captive. The Herberts took the boy to their hearts, reared and educated him like a son, and fondly looked forward to his becoming the husband of their daughter Maud. Their hopes were bloodily ended at the field of Edgecot in. August, 1469; Herbert of Pembroke was captured and immediately executed by Warwick and Clarence. When, a year later, Jasper Tudor accompanied this pair on their successful invasion of England, he found his nephew Henry living quietly in the household of the Countess of Pembroke. 6

After the final defeat of the Lancastrian cause at Tewkesbury, Jasper and Henry fled to Pembroke Castle and then, perceiving that England held no safety for them, took ship for France. The master of the vessel, however, was a Breton. Through his treachery or the unkindness of the elements, they were put ashore at

Brest. They found themselves the uncertain guests of Francis, Duke of Brittany, and pawns in the game of European politics. King Edward, whose aid against Louis XI the Duke of Brittany was constantly seeking, made offers for their return. King Louis, whom Francis feared above all mortals, demanded that Jasper and Henry be surrendered to him or at least be prevented from passing into the hands of anyone else . . . meaning Edward. Counters so valuable Duke Francis would not relinquish—until, that is, the price was right. When, a few months after the fugitives had reached Brittany, Edward IV renewed a thirty years' treaty with Francis, the most the Breton duke promised was that Jasper and Henry would be kept under strict surveillance.

As, with the passing years, the die-hard adherents of the House of Lancaster, deprived of their root of allegiance, turned to the spurious or doubtful graft upon the stock, King Edward became increasingly concerned about this remote but not necessarily trivial threat to his dynasty. The year after he had returned from his French expedition Edward made a vigorous effort to secure Henry Tudor, offering Francis a handsome subsidy for his delivery and promising that he would not only treat Henry honorably but provide him with a marriage in the royal family. Edward had small reason to fear Henry himself; it was the nuisance value which the ingenious Louis XI might discover in Henry that motivated Edward's generous, and doubtless genuine, offer.

Only Polydore Vergil, Henry Tudor's own historian, reports the sequel. At last, he tells us, "wearied with prayer and vanquished with price/' Duke Francis delivered up Henry Tudor to King Edward's ambassadors, who "departed with great joy to St. Malo . . . there to have taken shipping. . . ." The natural suspiciousness of Henry's character having been aggravated by his experience, he was so sure death awaited him that "through agony of mind [he] fell by the way into a fever." So says Vergil, following, no doubt, the reminiscence of Henry himself. It is likely that this illness was, partly at least, counterfeited in a desperate hope of gaining time. The child of circumstance must throw himself upon the succor of circumstance. Now, as later, Henry showed himself to be the white-headed boy of fortune.