Richard The Chird (54 page)

In the northeast of England, however, lay the power of the Stanleys, Sir William owned most of East Denbighshire, was the Chief Justice of North Wales, and wielded great influence in Shropshire. His brother Lord Stanley and Stanley's son Lord Strange dominated Cheshire and Lancashire. If Henry Tudor landed on his ancestral shore and struck north, the Stanleys would hold the position of critical importance. What manner of men they were, none had better reason to know than Richard the King.

The coming of May found him still in London. Not until the middle of the month did he bid farewell to his capital and ride to Windsor, accompanied by the Knights and Esquires of his Household, by Lord Stanley, John Kendall, William Catesby, and other advisers. A body of councilors, headed by Chancellor Russell, remained in London to carry on the government. Viscount Lovell was stationed at Southampton to see to the refitting of the fleet and to lead the forces of the southern counties against an attempted landing in that neighborhood. John, Duke of Norfolk, and his son the Earl of Surrey stood ready in Essex. The immediate defense of the capital was committed to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the Constable of the Tower.

From Windsor, Richard moved to Kenilworth, where he lingered for at least two weeks. It was probably the middle of June when he took up his watch upon the great rock which towered above the town of Nottingham. He had come home to the Castle of his Care. 11

At this time he sent the eldest daughter of Edward IV to reside in the household of the Council of die North, which now lay at Sheriff Hutton, not far from the city of York This castle was become a stone chalice, holding much of what was left of the blood royal of York: the Princess Elizabeth and doubtless one or more of her sisters, the Earls of Warwick and of Lincoln, Lord Morley, husband of one of Lincoln's sisters, and perhaps Richard's bastard son John of Gloucester.

Richard continued with the customary measures of defense. On June 21 he ordered his Chancellor to issue another proclamation against "Piers Bishop of Exeter, Jasper Tidder son of Owen Tid-der calling himself Earl of Pembroke, John late Earl of Oxon, and sir Edward Widevile, with other . . . rebels and traitors . . . [who] have chosen to be their captain one Henry Tidder, which of his ... insatiable covetousness . . „ usurpeth upon him the name and title of royal estate of this Roialme. . . ." Except that the Marquess of Dorset's name was now omitted and the bastard descent of Henry "Tidder" was traced, this proclamation is almost identical with the one Richard had published the previous December. The kingdom was warned that Henry had surrendered all English claims in France and had promised the great lands, offices, and Church dignities of England to his followers; and all subjects of the King were called on "to be ready in their most defensible array, to do his Highness service of war. . . ." 12

Next day Richard sent instructions to his commissioners of array in all the shires. They were commanded "first that they, in the King's behalf, thank the people for their true and loving disposition showed to his highness the last year, for the . . . defence of his ... person and of this his realm against his rebels and traitors; exhorting them so to continue." Next, they were to review the levies "and see that they be able men, and well horsed and harnessed, and no rascal." Lastly the commissioners were to u show all Lords, Noblemen, captains, and other, that the King's noble pleasure and commandment is, that they truly and honourably—all manner quarrels, grudges, rancours, and unkindness kid apart— attend and execute the King's commandment, and everyone be loving and assisting to other in the King's quarrels and cause." At the same time the sheriffs of the shires were ordered to remain at their posts that they might be ready for instant action as soon as the invasion was reported. 13

These precautions represented—save for the characteristically intimate and earnest tone of the instructions to the commissioners —the ordinary machinery of defense in this age. Richard apparently did not—or would not—consider Henry Tudor a mortally dangerous threat to his crown. To make such an admission to his

kingdom, to confess it to himself, would be to acknowledge that government by desert was a failure or that he had failed in the measure of his desert. The heart of his proud disdain for the pretensions of the Tudor was contained in his refusal to marry off Elizabeth and her sisters. The promise of marriage to a daughter of Edward IV was the very pith of Henry Tudor's strength, the scaffolding of his claim, the sole means of projecting himself as a national figure rather than a factional chieftain. When Elizabeth Woodville sent forth her daughters from sanctuary, she had dealt Henry a deadly blow, of which Richard refused to take advantage. Was there an archaic residue of chivalric feeling in his refusal? In the case that Heaven chose to bless the Tudor's enterprise, finding him, Richard, wanting in its enigmatic scales of justice, did Richard conceive it to be the part of honor and the way of God's will to leave Princess Elizabeth's destiny to be decided by the ordeal of battle? Or did the thought flicker across his mind that she might escape beyond the sea, if he were defeated, and one day restore in its own right the blood of his brother Edward to the throne? Only the fact itself speaks clearly: he did not give Edward's daughters in marriage though doing so would have put them beyond the reach of the only enemy who threatened his rule. 14 *

Below these outward manifestations of his life there flowed a profounder compulsion, a deep and undeviating stream on which his daily acts floated in eddies and superficial currents which masked the ineluctable course beneath. He moved now like a man walking under the postulates of a dream, half fulfilling and half creating the direction of his life. Forward went the search to discover in him who had taken the throne from his brother's son the lineaments of the man he had thought himself to be. Rigidly continued the testing of his own actions, and the estimating of others', by the assumptions on which his conscience had permitted him to become King. Yet his grip on life had been progressively undermined by emotional disasters. He had recreated Clarence in Buckingham, and Buckingham had promptly fulfilled the re-creation by betraying him. He had taken the throne from Edward's son, and Heaven had soon after taken his own son from him. The woman to whom he had given the life of his heart had sunk into

the grave, stricken by despair as much as by disease. His effort to rule well had been mocked by rumor, the quiet of the realm and his own peace poisoned by conspiracy. His courage had not diminished; his will to pursue the path he had marked out did not falter. But he could not sink the man in the King. The tide of hope had drained away from his resolves, leaving them exposed as barren and stony absolutes. Perhaps there flickered within him an inarticulate feeling that to follow the trail straight off the map might provide some ultimate confirmation of its validity.

Not long after Richard reached Nottingham, he made the choice which signaled the direction of his course. To him came Thomas, Lord Stanley, with his thin, shrewd face 15 —full of years and gravity and exemplary sentiments and prudent counsel and exudations of loyalty—to ask leave to retire for a time to his estates, from which he had been long absent, in order to rest and refresh himself. Should the invasion occur during this interval, he was quick to point out, he would be the better able, at home, to rally his men to the King's cause.

Richard listened, studying Stanley's face—had he not always known that this request would be made? From the day he had taken the man into his favor after the execution of Hastings, there is no record that Lord Stanley had ever left his side. This baron had great experience of affairs both military and civil, had for more than a decade been an assiduous servant of King Edward's, and had proved himself a worthy captain in Richard's great campaign against the Scots. As Steward of Richard's royal Household, 16 he had to be in close attendance upon the King; and the business of his estates, his local authorities, he had his energetic brother Sir William and his son Lord Strange to look after for him. Yet both Richard and he knew—each aware that the other must be likewise aware—that there could be a more compelling motive on Richard's part for asking this constant service, and on Stanley's a prudent reason to refrain from seeking leave to depart from court. As long as Stanley was in attendance, Richard did nor have to recognize the possibility of his disloyalty.

In a century of civil strife, fierce partisanship, betrayals, broken causes, in which many among the lords and gentry had been

brought to ruin or extinction, Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William had thrived. They thrived by daring to make politics their trade, by sloughing off the encumbrances of loyalty and honor, by developing an ambiguity of attitude which enabled them to join the winning side, and by exploiting the relative facility with which treason in this age might be lived down, provided it were neither too passionate, too overt, nor too damaging.

In 1459 the Stanleys had begun the operations which were to bring them great lands and high place. Sir William joined the cause of the Duke of York and following the disaster at Ludlow was attainted by the Lancastrian Parliament which met soon after. Thomas delayed and temporized, ignoring several royal summonses, and when he at last appeared at Blore Heath with two thousand men at his back, he stood idly by while the Earl of Salisbury defeated the Lancastrian army sent to crush him. The Commons petitioned for his attainder, but Stanley had sufficiently developed his arts to persuade King Henry's lords to forgive him. Though he duly took his place in the army which opposed the Yorkists at Northampton in 1460, he apparently fought with little heart, for the victors promptly made him Chief Justice of Cheshire and Flint. The appointment is the more remarkable considering that a decade before, his father had been one of the Queen's emissaries who attempted to ambush the Duke of York on his journeys to and from Ireland,

He espoused Warwick's cause in the late 1460'$; but just as Warwick and Clarence, in March of 1470, were fleeing to him for the succor he had promised, he was given a fright by Richard of Gloucester, and hastily deciding that the Earl's chances were dim, he refused to stir. Yet, on Warwick's invading the kingdom the following October, Lord Stanley rode into London at his side, having managed to excuse his previous desertion. When Edward and Richard returned from Burgundy, the Stanley brothers again divided their allegiance. Sir William is reported to have joined Edward at Nottingham with three hundred men. Lord Stanley was besieging Hornby Castle for King Henry. 17 He apparently lay low until Barnet and Tewkesbury had unmistakably demonstrated the triumph of the House of York. Thai he reappeared before King

Edward, and so convincing was his self-exculpation that he not only was forgiven the betrayal of his oath to Edward—canceled by the betrayal of his oath to Henry—but became one of Edward's intimate advisers and Steward of his Household. Thus his success in extricating himself from the collapse of Hastings' conspiracy was but a further manifestation of an accomplished political agility; and his ambiguous position during Buckingham's rebellion— when the speedy ruin of his wife's cause and his being caught at Richard's side made it inexpedient for him to show his colors— represented the familiar juggling with allegiance which he had ever been able to manage to the increase of his fortunes. If his wife lost her estates, he became Constable of England, received huge grants of lands, as well as possession for life of the Countess 7 property, and bounded into a position of the greatest influence with the King.

Granted his smooth pliancy, his shrewd and wary maneuvering, his wonderful capacity to inspire confidence, still, at a remove of five centuries, it remains puzzling that he so often escaped the consequences of his betrayals. Part of the answer may be that kings like Edward and Richard seem, paradoxically, to -have been less sensitive—or more charitable—to treason than the impersonal governments of our day. The traitor was not then, as now, automatically seized by the machinery of law and condemned and executed for faithlessness to a concept called the state. In the fifteenth century treason was highly personal, the desertion of an oath made by a man to his lord, the breaking of an intimate compact. Because the offense was personal it was bitter, but it was forgivable; and medieval people were apparently more tolerant of human frailty and its effects than ourselves—as, for example, of bastards, who were by and large accepted as the inevitable fruit of man's weakness. The traitor did not disappear into the automatic jaws of law, his fate on no man's hands. He confronted the judgment of the King he had wronged, and might therefore—if the King were generous and he, artful— elicit mercy/play upon kindness, soften anger, to evade the penalty of his offense. It is also true that in the fifteenth century, when broken allegiance was endemic and moaarchs were not

settled in sanctity, political advantage often prompted a king to overlook a discreet treason, particularly when committed out of self-interest rather than incorrigible partisanship. After all, it was likely that the motive of interest might be touched to secure loyalty, as it had previously led to disaffection; and the expectation of good service, a commodity of which the King in these days always stood in need, could quench the desire to administer punishment, which punishment itself might lead to fresh trouble if the traitor were of a great house or had built himself a staunch following.

Such were the shifting courses of the Stanleys and such were the conditions of fifteenth-century kingship which enabled Lord Stanley and Sir William to grow fat upon a diet that had brought mortal pangs to many. During these two and a half decades of Yorkist rule not only had they come to great power in the royal government but by assiduously cultivating their local authority and influence, they had made themselves masters of Cheshire, Lancashire, North Wales, and part of Shropshire. There now were few lords besides themselves whom men had served for a generation. Except for the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Northumberland, the Stanleys commanded the greatest seignorial power in England.