The Last Plantagenet

by Thomas B. Costain

  This is much more worthy of discussion than the strategy of Barnet or the folly of Tewkesbury. This eager and resourceful man, verging on old age when he began work, deserves the nod of posterity as much as the grandiose Kingmaker or the vengeful Margaret.

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  In October 1470, Edward of England, fleeing from the successful invasion by Warwick, came to Bruges with a party of 700 or 800 men. They were a sorry lot, a hungry and downcast collection of die-hard adherents of the Snow Rose. A throne had been lost and the coins in all of their pockets, if added together, would not have filled a wine cup. The magnificent but unready Edward had even found it necessary to strip the fur-lined coat from his back to pay the master of the ship on which he had crossed the narrow seas. The refugees threw themselves on the bounty of the few friends they had left in the Low Country.

  It happened that, by virtue of an act which Edward himself had passed granting a charter to the Merchant Adventurers at home and abroad, the mercers of London had opened a hall at Bruges. Then they had established a governor there to control matters of trade between England and the Flemish merchants. The incumbent at the time was one William Caxton, once a mercer in London and a man of high courage and rare tact, and, of at least equal importance, a man with a vision. His courage he displayed by welcoming the deposed king. It required a stout heart to do this, for the Lancastrians now held London and the members of the Mercers’ Guild, who had appointed him, were paying lip service, at least, to the Kingmaker. His tact entered into the arrangements he helped to make in finding temporary homes for the morose and half-stunned men who had accompanied Edward into exile. His vision would be displayed later.

  The house of the Merchant Adventurers in Bruges was large but probably not imposing. It had to be of sufficient size to hold the incoming supplies of English wool and probably the goods to be exported back to England. The living quarters undoubtedly were small, for one of the rules governing the appointment of men to represent the Adventurers abroad was that they must not be married. The building probably stood tall and upright, a many-storied mart of trade, with stout timbers and a great deal of cheerful paint, these being architectural earmarks in the Flemish world. It was a busy hive with so much buying and selling to oversee.

  The matrimonial prohibition of the Adventurers provides one of the few clues to the character and personality of Caxton. He was a bachelor, an aging bachelor, moreover, being around fifty years old at this stage of his life. As nothing in the way of a description of him is available, and even hearsay is silent on the subject, it is possible to use nothing more than imagination in attempting to draw a picture of him. He was undoubtedly an industrious and austere man, devoted closely to his work and the splendid ambition which filled his mind, a good foot shorter in stature than the imposing king, probably plain of face and quiet of mood. He married a little later, probably after he had given up his duties at Bruges. His wife, Maude, gave birth to one daughter named Elizabeth, who married in the course of time a merchant trader in London.

  Caxton was beginning to realize that his real interest in life was shifting from merchandising problems to a curious new trade which had risen on the mighty wave of the Renaissance. Printing. The printing of books and pamphlets. The preparation of books was being removed from the skilled hands of monks who spent years on emblazoning beautiful scripts for the powerful and wealthy into the ink-stained fingers of workmen who would make books by the thousands for the reading of the many. It is certain that Edward visited the hall of the Merchant Adventurers in Bruges and that he acquired there, through contact with William Caxton, an interest in printing. With the king went his brother-in-law, Lord Rivers, who had his full share of the Woodville good looks but who possessed something the other brothers of the queen lacked—an interest in letters. Rivers and the earnest Caxton discovered an affinity at once, an admiration for the glossy and easily read volumes which were beginning to roll off presses in Italy and Germany.

  Edward’s stay in Bruges was a brief one, for he accomplished the quickest turnabout in history. In a space of time several months shorter than the span of Napoleon’s enforced exile at Elba, the king completed arrangements for a return to England. He had been staying in the town mansion of Louis de Bruges and here his urbanity had made him very popular with the townspeople. When word reached him that a fleet of ships supplied by Louis XI of France had assembled at Damme, the port of Bruges, he left at once with a following not much larger than the party he had brought with him from England. The worthy burghers were so sorry to see him go that Edward decided not to reach the port by using a canal boat but by walking there, so that all the Brugeois would be able to see him en route. The streets were lined with people who cheered the tall monarch and shouted their good wishes. It will be abundantly clear by this time that Edward IV, with all his faults, had an instinct for popularity that has seldom been equaled and never excelled by any wearer of a crown.

  Six years later Caxton had passed through some form of self-imposed apprenticeship, mostly spent at Cologne, and had mastered the mysteries of printing. He proceeded then to carry out his ambition to set up a shop in England where books could be printed in the English tongue. It now becomes apparent that Edward possessed another virtue—not found in all kings—his willingness to remember those who had helped him. Appreciating the courage which Caxton had shown when he was in exile, he now used whatever influence may have been needed to secure for the latter the use of a building at Westminster for the start of his enterprise. Two years later the king granted him the sum of twenty pounds for “certain causes and matters performed.”

  There has never been a time when a new trade has come into being without serious opposition. Caxton was to find that the Guild of Stationers in London was strongly against the new method of making books by machinery. What would become of the scriveners and text writers who made their living by the making of copies of books by hand? The church at first considered printing an unholy practice. It was the hand of the devil reaching out to spread wrong thinking and wrong teachings. Without the support of the Crown, Caxton might have found angry mobs gathering outside his shop, ready to destroy the ungodly instruments with which he sought to poison the minds of men. The rumor spread, of course, that he was a Lollard and a man of evil intent.

  Through some influence, possibly that of the king, he was given the use of a small building called the almonesrye in a group of similar structures occupying an enclosure southwest of Westminster Abbey. Here he set up a pale, a sign painted red to denote his occupation, and began on the methods of producing books which he had learned on the continent.

  No authentic description of the place has been left, but it is generally assumed that he did not live on the premises. Some of the space was devoted to the very necessary task of selling the books to the public. It was Caxton’s practice to issue what were called advertisement sheets (the word “advertisement” could not have been new at the time for he uses it several times in the volumes he produced) in which he announced that certain books were available and advised customers “to come to Westminster in to the almonesrye at the reed pale.” People began to come in numbers which increased steadily. Caxton often had to print third and fourth editions of his books.

  The work which went on inside can be explained in some detail. One biographer, H. R. Plomer, says that the center of the workshop contained “a substantial framework of timber and iron, the mechanical part being fitted with an ordinary worm-screw and iron.” This was said to resemble, in fact, the old cheese presses in use up to comparatively recent times. On this mounted platform were placed the small metal frames in which the compositors (this term seems to have been a century later in achieving common usage) had set up words with small letters of lead. This appears to have been a slow process because of the necessity of carrying each line completed from the type case to the press.

  Beside the press were pots filled with ink and “inking balls,” which are described as much like boxing gloves tied to the en
d of a stick. When enough lines of type to make a page had been assembled on the press, the balls would be dipped in ink and the type thoroughly swabbed. After this a sheet of paper would be placed on the form and the pulling of a lever would press the paper against the type. This meant, of course, that only one sheet could be printed at a time. Sometimes ink stains were left on the sheet and it would then have to be discarded and another drawn. Caxton, it seems, was so determined to produce good-looking books that he would often discard many pages before securing one which suited him.

  The pages would be laid in piles until all of the copy for the book had been put into print. Each pile was then sent to be bound. The trade of the bookbinder had been plied in England in the previous century. They were employed then, no doubt, in binding the illuminated sheets which came from the monasteries and the copies turned out by scriveners. It seems certain that at first Caxton did not have his own bindery.

  In addition to the large room where the printing was done, there was a smaller one for the making and casting of type. Caxton seems to have designed his own type, with the exception of one “fount” which he brought with him from the continent. The type faces he designed later were much more artistic and at the same time easier to read.

  Although he is supposed to have been so completely immersed in the work himself that he sometimes set type and even helped with the laborious work of printing, he depended on a foreman, a young man from Alsace who had accompanied him to England, named Jan van Wynkyn, but who is most often called Wynkyn de Worde. This ambitious young man took over the production end of the business. After Caxton’s death, he acquired the plant and made a considerable success of it, issuing 110 works which are known and perhaps many more. Wynkyn de Worde became so prosperous, in fact, that he moved away from the premises at the reed pale and purchased two houses on Fleet Street. One he used as his dwelling and the other became the printing plant. On the opposite side of Fleet Street stood the printing shop of one Richard Pynson who had set himself up in opposition. The proximity of these two pioneering efforts established a tradition and led to Fleet Street being the recognized site of publishing endeavors down through the centuries.

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  William Caxton was not content to print books; he always concerned himself with the translations and with the preparation of the copy. Before returning to England, he had made a translation of Le Recueil des Histoires de Troye, a romance which had been highly successful. This he produced later from his busy little plant in Westminster. The first book he printed in England, however, was a more serious venture, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. This had been translated from the French by Caxton’s aristocratic friend, Lord Rivers, but that gentleman of varied interests realized that it required some additional attention. This he was quite willing to entrust to the busy printer, and so Caxton went to work and introduced some revisions and also wrote an additional chapter, which he believed necessary. This initial venture was so successful that the little shop at the almonesrye rang with preparations for more. One of the most commendable of his early efforts was an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which was much larger than any of the others. Undoubtedly it did much to acquaint the people of England with the work of their great poet. He also put out an edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s King Arthur and a translation of Cicero’s De senectute. That he translated the last named himself is an evidence of his scholarship.

  Caxton apparently was qualified to translate from both French and Latin. His first years were frantically busy ones, for in addition to his editorial duties he always supervised the work going on in the shop under young Master Wynkyn. He did not confine himself to his more serious ventures in publishing. A continuous succession of smaller books and pamphlets poured out from the ever busy press—some devotional books, some ballads, some short romantic tales. Caxton was not only jealous of his reputation as a judge and editor of literary material, he was also a very good man of business. The smaller books, particularly the short romances, were probably the ones from which the bulk of his profits were derived. In the course of the fourteen years between the founding of the printing house and his death, he produced nearly eighty books in all classifications.

  He died in harness. On his last day of life he was busily engaged on a translation of Vitae Patrum, which was finished after his death on instructions from Wynkyn de Worde, who later published it. No reason is supplied in the records for his death but the suddenness of it suggests that his heart failed him. There is no record of the exact day on which the busy pen fell from his hand, except that it occurred in the year 1491. He was buried in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster.

  Such in brief is the story of a man who deserves to be remembered for all time. History, which seldom has endings to record because of the cycles which bring to life again and again the issues which have seemed dead and done with, is full of robust and stimulating stories of the beginnings of things. The work of this courageous and industrious pioneer lacks the excitement of political change and the fascination of the chronicles of war. But in his quiet way he provided the foundation, or at least an important part of it, from which would rise the mightiest of towers.

  PART THREE

  THE GREAT MYSTERY

  CHAPTER I

  The Whipping Boy

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  THE whipping boy was an unfortunate youngster appointed to receive any chastisement earned by the son of a royal family, on the theory that princes were above physical punishment. Sometimes the king might take it on himself to doff his crown, roll up his ermine sleeves, and lay the erring son across his august knee, but that was outside the rule. Under no circumstances should stinging whip or menial hand be laid on the hide of an heir apparent. It was supposed that the sight of someone else suffering for his wrongdoing would create a feeling of shame in the princely breast and be fully as effective, therefore, as a good, sound, personal beating.

  The custom was not universal. The whipping boy was not a fixture in all royal households as was, for instance, the court jester and the dancing master. But references creep into the pages of history often enough to indicate that it was frequently the practice. It is recorded that one Barnaby Fitzpatrick was on hand to receive the hidings which ordinarily would have been the lot of Edward VI. That delicate little fellow, who resembled his burly father, Henry VIII, in so few respects, could not have been guilty often of offenses against discipline.

  There seems to have been in the main a more common-sense approach to the problem in England, a feeling that the lesson would be more effective if the beating were administered to the one who had earned it.

  The classic example of vicarious punishment was placed on the scroll of time by a ceremony at Rome when permission was granted Henry of Navarre to abjure the Huguenot faith and become King of France. Pope Clement VIII had a stubborn streak in him which had to be overcome first. It may have been not too difficult for Henry to consider Paris worth a Mass, but he, Clement, was not convinced that Henry was worth receiving into the church unless he underwent a cleansing ceremony. In diplomatic circles in Rome there was a fear that the Navarene, being a prince of such high spirit, might regard this as humiliating and refuse to agree. Then someone, recalling the custom of the whipping boy, suggested that the whole matter could be carried off by proxy. It has been contended since that Henry was kept in the dark until the ceremony had been performed.

  Accordingly on September 16, 1595, the two ambassadors from France, D’Ossat and Du Perron, walked on foot to a church in Rome and knelt on the worn stone steps, in recognition of their unworthiness to go inside. Here they chanted together “Have Mercy, Lord” and on the closing line of each verse a switch was laid across their bent shoulders. It is said the switch was a slender one and that orders had been given that the blows were to be light. Both of the ambassadors were later made cardinals, a more than fair exchange; a red hat for a somewhat less than pink shoulder blade.

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  Richard III, who called himself Richard
Plantagenet, succeeded his brother Edward IV. He ruled briefly, for little more than two years. His accession has been judged by history to be the most glaring and inexcusable of usurpations. His motive is still believed to have been personal ambition and his methods are held up as a combination of cunning and cruelty. Edward IV had left two sons, one twelve and one nine. They were incarcerated in the Tower of London and supposedly died there at the hands of assassins employed by Richard. It was due to the wave of horror which swept across the nation, so history tells us, that Henry of Richmond was able to land in England and draw to his banner strong enough forces to defeat and kill the king at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485.

  Shakespeare, who cannot be blamed for taking history as it came to him between staid and sacrosanct covers, has used Richard as the darkest and most devious villain in his series of historical plays. Anyone who has seen an accomplished actor play the role in King Richard III can never forget this evil creature hobbling about the stage and later dying on the battlefield with the cry which lingers in every memory: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

  This is the Richard III with whom the world has grown up. This is the version generally accepted, despite efforts which have been made, sometimes guarded but sometimes loud-spoken and decisive, to say that there is little or no truth in it.

  That Richard III was the most notorious whipping boy in history is a theory which is now being widely held. Fortunately for him he did not know when he fell in battle the humiliating role he would play. It was his memory and not his body which was to bear the brunt of blame for the blackest of deeds. Richard, whose naked body had been carried off the battlefield on a donkey’s back with a halter around his neck, was in his grave and there was no voice that dared speak up for him. It is perhaps not strange that all the blame has been heaped on the supposedly crooked back of the last of the Plantagenets, while Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, has emerged in the full white light of blamelessness.