Richard The Chird (53 page)

She was scarcely in her grave—perhaps not even yet dead— when Richard discovered that a fog of rumor had crept over the palace walls to envelop him.

It was whispered that he was planning to marry his niece Elizabeth, and the gossip was tricked out with dark hints that he was far from unhappy to see his wife descend into the tomb. The very kindness with which Richard and Anne had treated the Queen's daughters, the position of princely dignity they had accorded Elizabeth during the Christmas festivities, were now turned against the Kong.

The rumors may have had a slender foundation in actuality. It is probable that in his wretchedness Richard had given vent to his longing for an heir, had desperately or grimly tossed ont a mention of the Princess Elizabeth, whom Henry Tudor had sworn to

marry in order to hold the Woodville faction to his side. He had said enough to alarm two of his most intimate advisers, William Catesby and Sir Richard Ratcliffe, who were touchy on the point for reasons of their own. He had said enough to enable a treacherous councilor tq .set in motion the machinery of gossip. That he ever seriously contemplated marrying his niece is unlikely. To deny her to the Tudor, he had only to wed her to any man of his choosing. To marry her himself would be tacitly to acknowledge that the precontract was an invention and he, a usurper. It did not require the cunning of Louis XI to read this elementary lesson in polity. 2 * Polydore Vergil himself has revealed the secret enemy in whom Richard by favor and friendliness had sought in vain to kindle loyalty. It was Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, who wrought the words Richard had spoken in confidence into a morsel of malicious gossip.

These rumors about Elizabeth were but a new stage in the campaign of slander which the partisans of Henry Tudor had begun waging the year before. In the previous December Richard had written to the Mayor of Windsor about the false reports, invented by "our ancient enemies of France" (a reminder that Henry Tudor was now an instrument of French interests), which were being circulated by seditious persons to provoke discord and division between the King and his lords; the Mayor was commanded to examine "the first showers and utterers thereof" and commit them to prison as an example to others. 3 The employment of rumor and broadsides for political purposes w r as not new, as has been shown, and Henry VII would find himself attacked by this same weapon. But the campaign carried on by the Tudor's partisans seems to have been more deliberately organized than any which had preceded it. It was undoubtedly Rotherham who had betrayed Richard's negotiations with Brittany to John Morton in Flanders and who kept that consummate intriguer in touch with events. Morton was probably one of the directors of the campaign; Reynold Bray, the shrew T d, energetic servant of Stanley's wife, whom Richard had pardoned despite his prominent role in Buckingham's revolt, was unquestionably another, Since there was little they dreaded more than that the King might marry off the girl on whom depended

much of Henry's support, it seems likely that, whether genuinely alarmed or not, they seized the advantage of the Queen's death to prevent, by slanderously mooting it, a marriage that would play havoc with their hopes. Both the intensity and the frail substance of this guerilla warf are-by-rumor suggest that the Tudor partisans were experiencing some difficulty in finding authentic injustices or severities on which they could capitalize.

Meanwhile, in these gloomy March days of his grief, Richard turned to hunting, a pastime in which he had shown no marked interest. Toward the end of Anne's illness and after her death he called for hawks and falcons, and men were sent into Wales and even beyond the sea to secure them for the King, who sought in the open air of field and forest and in the clean plummet of the bird of prey some release from the arena of his emotions. 4 This reflex of pain availed little. Soon he was goaded into denying to his own council the rumor that he intended to marry his niece. So fearful were Catesby and Ratcliffe of the revenge which Elizabeth might seek because they had urged the execution of her uncle Rivers and her half brother Richard Grey, that they belabored the King with arguments of doctors of divinity affirming the marriage to be incestuous and with their own declarations that the North would never accept such an insult to the memory of Warwick's daughter. Distracted by his grief and his impotent anger and the clamor of these advisers, Richard impetuously assembled within the great hall of the hospital of the Knights of St. John in Clerk-enwell the Mayor, Aldermen, and chief citizens of London, the lords spiritual and temporal then at the capital, and the officers of his Household. He stood before them to deny "in a loud and distinct voice" the gossip which had been spread against him and to charge all public officers with the duty of apprehending seditious rumormongers.

A few days later he informed his friends, the men of York, of his public denial and reiterated his command that the bearers of false tidings be apprehended and their tales traced. "It is so," he wrote, "that divers seditious and evil disposed persons (both in our city of London and elsewhere within this our realm) enforce themselves daily to sow seed of noise and disclaundre against our

RICHARD THE THIRD

person, and against many of the lords and estates of our land, to abuse the multitude of our subjects and avert their minds from us . . . some by setting up of bills, some by messages and sending forth of ... lies, some by bold and presumptuous open speech and communication one with another, wherethrough the innocent people which would live in rest and peace, and truly under our obeisance ... be greatly abused, and oft times put in dangers of their lives, lands and goods, as oft as they follow the . . . devices of the said seditious persons, to our great heaviness and pity. . ..»•

Henceforth there grew in Richard's heart an anger against Henry Tudor, who used the arrow which flies by night to attack his honor and flung poisoned barbs to prick the skin of England's peace.

Meanwhile, Henry was "pinched by the very stomach," as Vergil puts it, at the thought of King Richard's marrying Elizabeth. The report had arrived, at a critical moment in his affairs. After taking hasty counsel with his chief followers, he pitched upon a substitute bride, the sister of Sir Walter Herbert, a man of influence in Wales. Since the Earl of Northumberland's wife was kin to Sir Walter, Henry sought, according to Vergil, to open communications with the Earl by sending him two messengers, both of whom were intercepted by men loyal to the King. It was soon clear, however, that Richard was not going to marry Elizabeth, and Henry resumed the military preparations which not long before he had been able to begin.

Henry had had no easy time since he had passed into France. For a man pretending to a royal destiny to play humble suitor to a King is bad enough; Henry had to sue to divers lords and councilors as well. The court of France was still a battleground of factions, none of w r hich Henry could afford to neglect. Hat in hand, supple of mind and of smile, he had to beg of them all. It was the moment of his exile which would require many years of absolute rule and a proud Spanish marriage—of his son Arthur to Katherine of Aragon—to wipe out. He had effective resources, however. He was himself of the royal line of Valois, his father and Louis XI being first cousins; he had been so long on the Continent that his

language and his manner, no less than his blood, must have made him seem half a Frenchman to the court of Charles VIII; and though, afterward, he would be very sparing of his charm, he was able now to speak so movingly of his "wrongs" and so persuasively of his "rights" that Commynes was much impressed. 6 The Regent, Charles VIII's sister, feared Richard's intentions toward France and had her father's dealings with Edward to guide her. To weaken England, she would encourage pretenders to its throne. If they succeeded, they might be grateful; at least, they would be too shallowly rooted to offer trouble for some time. If they failed, they might nonetheless provoke a period of civil strife; at worst! the aid given them—never very much—could be disavowed.

Before the coming of spring, Henry's begging had succeeded. And none knew better than he that it was high time. The escape of Oxford had been a great stroke of fortune; but the Marquess of Dorset's attempt to steal away cast an ominous light upon the future. He could not for long sustain the hope of his followers in England or of his band of exiles. He had to go forward, or decline into the precarious desuetude of a French pensioner, which might be no less dangerous than the invasion which he contemplated. Having finally extracted from the court of Charles a promise of money, ships, and some troops, he was setting up his headquarters at Rouen when he was distracted by the report of Richard's marriage plans.

Richard, meanwhile, was kept informed by his agents of Henry Tudor's preparations, and in his outward life, he applied himself to the task of countering the blow.

The heavy costs of suppressing Buckingham's rebellion and of conducting military operations on land and sea during 1484, and the liberality of his grants and gifts, had now seriously depleted his treasury. Seldom, if ever, had a King undertaken such prolonged employment of fleet and army without the financial support of a parliamentary grant. To find the ready money he needed for the defense of the realm, he was compelled to resort to loans. He made It clear that these requests were not the benevolences which his Parliament had otrtlawed. For the loans which he floated among the merchants of London he provided, as he had done the

RICHARD THE THIRD

year before, "good and sufficient pledges," and the invitations to subscribe money which the royal commissioners—carefully coached in the courteous language they were to use—delivered to the wealthy gentlemen and abbots of the shires bore a specific promise of repayment in two installments spread over a little less than a year and a half. Only a few loans of as much as £200 were asked; most were from £40 to £ 100 or 100 marks. A number of the "charters" were issued bearing the names of men to be approached; others were to be filled in at the discretion of the commissioners. The solicitation lasted from late February until April i, Good Friday, and seems to have brought in about .£20,000—a heartening amount, considering that the customary parliamentary tax of a Fifteenth and a Tenth netted only some ;£ 31,000 (after a deduction of ;£ 6,000 for the relief of decayed towns). Benevolence or not, however, the measure was obviously far from popular. 7

As the season of sea storms and bogged roads gave way to the sun of spring, Richard learned that Henry Tudor's fleet was rigging at Harfleur and that the government of Charles VIII was providing men and money as well as ships. When the blow would come and where it would strike, the King's agents had been unable to discover.

There was small chance that the exiles would attempt to land in the North or in East Anglia, districts loyal to the King in which they had developed no following. The South and the southeastern coasts had seen successful invasions in the past and would be the more vulnerable since Richard meant to go northward again in order to station himself at Nottingham. In 1461 the Yorkist lords of Calais had entered the kingdom through Sandwich; eleven years later, Queen Margaret had landed at Weymouth; and ^'1483 Henry Tudor had touched at Poole, in Dorset. All these ports were not much more than a day's inarch from London, and London seemed to be the touchstone of the fortunes of the House of York. Hence, in April, Richard dispatched Sir George Neville to sea with a fleet to watch the Channel and guard the harbors of Kent. 8 Viscount Lovell was set to strengthening the coast defenses and mustering the forces of the southern counties. As for the cap-

ital itself, a good store of ordnance had been accumulated in the Tower, and the Duke of Norfolk would remain in East Anglia to guard the approaches to the city, as he had done at the outbreak of Buckingham's rebellion. In the West, Richard took no precautions beyond those addressed to the whole kingdom. A few of his northern friends, like John, Lord Scrope of Bolton, held positions of authority in Devon and Cornwall. 9 The chief supporters of Henry Tudor and of the Woodvilles had fled to Brittany, and the rebuff Henry had encountered at Plymouth was not one he was likely to risk again. The West was no hotbed of Yorkist sympathies but neither did it appear to be propitious soil for invasion.

There remained Wales. Henry Tudor was half a Welshman; his followers boasted that he was descended from the misty line of Welsh kings; and though the men of Wales were not given to uniting in a cause, he offered them an expression of national pride and national aspirations which had been stifled for three quarters of a century. His uncle Jasper Tudor still styled himself Earl of Pembroke and had been a great lord of the land. In the 1460'$ he had held Harlech Castle for the cause of Lancaster long after the rest of England was Edward's. The disappearance of Buckingham had left a gap in the royal government. Wales was controlled piecemeal by officers of the King and native chieftains like Rhys ap Thomas. James Tyrell, Knight of the Body and one of Richard's most trusted servants, ruled Glamorgan and Morgannok; but when Tyrell was sent to hold Guisnes Castle, the charge of these lordships was left to his deputies. 10

Richard was not without resources in Wales, however. Fifteen years before he had had a brief experience of governing the Marches, and since becoming King he had shown favor to the Welsh. Many had proved themselves loyal during Buckingham's rebellion, and a number had been rewarded with small annuities. Morgan KidweUy, Richard's Attorney General, was a Welshman. Rhys ap Thomas, the principal chieftain of South Wales, protested that Henry Tudor would have to pass over his belly to penetrate that country. The chief justiceship was in the hands of William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, Richard's son-in-law and scion of a family which had long been identified with the region. Finally,

on the eastern border of Wales stretched a great demesne of Mortimer and York lands, now united to the Crown, which, along with the Severn River, formed a stout barrier against an incursion from the Marches.