Richard The Chird (47 page)

The accounts appeared to be incompatible. She had conspired against Richard the moment her husband was dead; her kindred had fomented the recent rebellion; her daughter she had promised in marriage to Henry Tudor in order to bring him to the throne; and her son the Marquess and her brothers were even now in Brittany at his side. She could retort that her brother Anthony and her son Lord Richard Grey had been executed, her family attainted, her children bastardized, her two Princes bereft of the crown and—as she had certainly been persuaded to believe the preceding fall—of their lives as well.

Yet the accounts proved not to be incompatible, after all. She sent her five daughters forth from sanctuary into Richard's care, on terms which the King, in a public ceremony, swore to abide by. On March i, 1484, before an assembly of lords spiritual and temporal and the Mayor and Aldermen of London, he took his oath:

I Richard . . . promise and swear, verbo regio, that if the daughters of Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England . . . will come to me out of the Sanctuary of Westminster, and be guided, ruled, and demeaned after me, then I shall see that they shall be in surety of their lives and also not suffer any manner hurt . . . nor them nor any of them imprison . . . ; but I shall put diem into honest places of good name and fame, and them honestly and courteously shall see to be founden [supported] and entreated [treated], and to have all things requisite and necessary for their exhibitions and findings as my kinswomen; and that I shall do marry [arrange for the marriage of] . . . them to gentlemen born, and every of them

give in marriage lands and tenements to the yearly value of 200 marks for term of their lives. . . . And such gentlemen as shall hap to marry with them 1 shall straitly charge lovingly to love and entreat them, as wives and my kinswomen, as they will avoid and eschew my displeasure.

And over this, that I shall yearly . , . pay ... for the exhibition and finding of the said Dame Elizabeth Grey, during her natural life ... to John Nesfeld, one of the esquires of my body, for his finding to attend upon her, the sum of 700 marks . . . ; and moreover I promise to them that if any surmise or evil report be made to me of them by any person . . . that then I shall not give thereunto faith nor credence, nor therefore put them to any manner punishment, before that they or any of them so accused may be at their lawful defence and answer. . . 11

These terms were far from being extravagantly attractive; they indicate that Richard was offering no concession out of fear or reparation out of guilt. Why Queen Elizabeth, for her part, was induced to this startling acquiescence presents a problem so obscured in the mystery of the Princes' fate that it must be discussed in the chapter dealing with that subject.*

Did the Queen herself come forth from sanctuary? The Croy-land chronicler, Polydore Vergil, and the oath itself say only that she delivered up her daughters. There is no further light upon the enigma. John Nesfeld, who had been set to guarding the sanctuary in the late summer of the preceding year, would shortly be fighting at sea for the King, his task at Westminster presumably finished. It seems unlikely that if Elizabeth was willing to trust her daughters to Richard, she would herself choose to remain in the wearisome confines of the sanctuary or that Richard himself would be willing to strike a bargain that did not include her coming forth. It seems reasonably probable that she had secretly agreed to retire to a country house, under the nominal wardenship of Nesfeld, where she could, in seclusion, support a modest state on her annuity of seven hundred marks. Richard had, in fact, provided the Queen, his enemy, a handsomer stipend and a greater liberty than one day Henry Tudor would allow her

* See Appendix I, p. 490.

when she was his mother-in-law. Neither Elizabeth nor her daughters ever complained of the treatment they received at Richard's hands—had they done so, the Tudor chroniclers would scarcely have failed to make use of the story. Not only did the Queen take Richard at his word and accept his modest offer, but not long after, she began sending secret messages to her son the Marquess, urging him to abandon Henry Tudor and return to England, where he should find favor with the King. Whatever the vagaries of a much-tried woman, it might be supposed that the Marquess would ignore the pleas and scorn the promise. Not so. Determining to seek his peace with Richard, he fled one night from Paris and made for Calais or Burgundy. He was, however, overtaken at Compiegne by emissaries of the outraged Henry and "persuaded" to return. For all his travails and his family's pains, he had considered Richard's word better than the Tudor's hope. 12

While King Richard was occupied during this winter and early spring with these weighty matters, the registry book of his writs and grants—Harleian MS. 433—reveals that he and his council were also concerned, as usual, with the affairs of humbler folk.

Aware of the hardships of the innocent creditors of the Duke of Buckingham, the King had commissioned Sir William Husee, Chief Justice of King's Bench, and William Catesby and a few others to administer certain of the Duke's forfeited lands in order to pay his debts; he even made an outright payment of some ^27 to Richard and Roger Baker of Brecknock for bread and ale delivered to Buckingham's household. Having learned that the Prior of Carlisle was hard pressed to meet the ^8 fee he was charged by the Chancery, as was customary, for a royal license, Richard ordered the clerk of the Hanaper to return the Prior's money and further instructed him not to charge the bailiff of Huntingdon for letters patent he was granting to the town. The distribution of ecclesiastical Evings came under his eye too: when he was informed of unfair dealing in the diocese of Exeter, he bluntly bade the Vicar-General, Master John Combe, to promote Master Rauf Scrope to the vicarage of

Paynton, "which the said Mr. John Combe hath presented himself unto by crafty means."

Misfortunes, needs, good services, were likewise noticed. On February 7 there was issued "a protection for requiring of alms by Edmund Filpot of Twicknam . . . Bricklayer, who by in-fortune and negligence had his dwelling house and place, with thirteen small tenements to the same annexed, and all his goods therein then being, suddenly burnt, to his utter undoing; who before, kept after his degree a great household, by the which many poor creatures were refreshed." To the Abbot of Creyke, county Norfolk, who had suffered the same disaster, Richard^ two weeks later, sent a contribution of £46 13^. 4 d. toward the repair of his church. A few days after, he presented an annuity of £4 to Master John Bentley, clerk, to help defray his expenses at Oxford. To two of his minstrels who pleased him well, Robert Green and John Hawkins, he granted, about the same time, annuities of 10 marks each. The registry book likewise reveals the King's affection and esteem for his faithful secretary, John Kendall. Sometime during the winter he was given an extra wage of 6d. a day and an annuity of ^80 during the life of the attainted Sir William Stonor's mother; in March of 1484 he not only received .£100 out of the sum that had been realized from confiscated Breton goods but he also shared with Thomas Met-calfe, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and one of the Yorkshire Metcalfes who had long been devoted to Richard, the considerable grant of 500 marks yearly "during pleasure" from the temporalities of the bishopric of Ely,

As the first spring of Richard's reign approached, John Brown, the King's bear-ward, or "Master-Guider and Ruler of all his bears and apes," set off along the roads of England, protected by a royal letter bidding mayors and bailiffs not to vex or molest him or his charges. Throughout the shires, men and women were anticipating journeys to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket or to Our Lady of Walsingham. It would not be long before Richard's officers were issuing licenses for shipmasters to sail with boatloads of pilgrims to the famous tomb of St. James of Compostelk in Spain. 13

During the first week in March, Richard and his Queen once again set forth from London. Henry Tudor would make another descent upon England whenever he was able; spring would bring weather suitable for an invasion. Richard felt himself best able to meet the threat by making his headquarters at Nottingham, in the heart of his kingdom. Middleham, too, was much in his thoughts, and the eleven-year-old boy in whom dwelt his and Anne's hopes for the future. Though Edward's health had apparently never been good, his father and mother probably took heart from remembering that Richard himself had been a sickly child. While Parliament was still sitting, the King had assembled in a palace chamber not far from the Queen's apartments the principal lords of his realm, his councilors, and the chief officers of his Household in order to administer to them a special and solemn oath that if anything happened to him, they would be true to his son. 14 Voices less articulate also called him northward as the first breath of spring quickened the air. To move from town to town, to spend hours a day in the saddle, better sorted with his temper than to continue holding court in the palace at Westminster. His fragile body housed a will fed by remarkable energies and a valiant but unquiet heart; his earnestness to bring peace to the realm and the remorseless gnawing of his need for justifying his rule drove him forth to grapple at first hand with the issues that confronted him.

But when Richard and Anne reached Cambridge, they tarried happily for a few days in the congenial cloisters of the University. Perhaps Richard discussed ecclesiastical politics with learned doctors, for he was now about to send to Rome Thomas Langton, Bishop of St. Davids, to join Dr. John Sherwood, the Bishop-Elect of Durham, in representing England at the Vatican. The King had chosen the two men, of those he could spare, who would best reflect, at the Renaissance court of Sixtus IV, the luster of the New Learning in their native land. Richard and Anne bestowed a variety of endowments and gifts of money upon the University. To express its thanks for this bounty Cambridge hastened to procure a decree from the Archbishop of York that

whereas Queen Anne had endowed Queens' College with

About the middle of April a messenger from the North brought the news that their little son was dead. "You might," records the Croyland chronicler, "have seen his father and mother in a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief." ie

Anne did not outlive her boy a year. For her was the sorrow, doubly poignant, of a bereaved mother who can have no more children. For Richard, there might be something worse. Had God dispossessed him of a son because he had dispossessed his brother's son of a crown ... if not of more? Was he the striker of the blow by which his child had been extinguished, his delicate wife stricken? According to tradition, he henceforth called the gloomy rock of Nottingham the Castle of his Care.

But a King must have a successor. There were two possibilities: Clarence's son, the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Lincoln, son of Richard's sister Elizabeth and the Duke of Suffolk. Clarence's descendants had been disabled by attainder but this could be reversed. Warwick, however, was only a boy of ten and he appears to have been what in the present age would be called a retarded child. Lincoln was a man, married, who had already demonstrated his martial spirit during the rebellion. For four months Richard could not bring himself to make any public announcement regarding the succession. Then, on August 21, he

appointed Lincoln as Lieutenant of Ireland, a post which the House of York had come to bestow upon the heir apparent. This appointment did something to repair the disaster to his dynasty, but there was nothing , which could retrieve the disaster to his spirit. 17 *

Summer

No news so bad abroad as this at home.

GRIEF was a luxury that a King so placed as Richard could not long indulge. As summer weather approached, the Scots were beginning their border forays, and the chaotic warfare at sea .grew in intensity. The fabric of foreign affairs, unraveling during the last year of King Edward's reign, remained to Be knit up. The threat of Henry Tudor and his followers swelled like a thunderhead on the southern horizon. Whatever the loss of Prince Edward had meant to the father and the dynast, the King summoned his experience of affairs, his vitality, and his courage, to fight where he must and negotiate when he could.

Against the exiles in Brittany, records the Croyland chronicler, he "took all necessary precautions for the defence of his party. . . . The King was better prepared to oppose them in the present year than at any time afterwards, both by reason of the treasure which he had in hand ... as well as particular grants which had been . . . distributed throughout the kingdom.'* To speed his communications, he re-established the system of posts which King Edward had introduced during the campaign against the Scots in 1482, whereby a message could be dispatched two hundred miles within two days; and to keep watch on Henry Tudor he sent agents into Brittany "from whom he learned nearly all the movements of the enemy/* 1

If his system of posts looked toward the future, so too did his interest in ordnance. By temperament, King Edward had not been much disposed to pay attention to gunpowder, though he had made some use of it in battle and accumulated a number of guns in the Tower. Warwick the Kingmaker appears to have caught a glimpse of its true possibilities. He had experimented

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