by Ann Wroe
Almost any Yorkist refugee who crossed the new prince’s path, from his re-emergence onwards, could have brought him memories of the court if he needed them. These need not have been sophisticated but, more convincingly, the sort of thing a small boy would recall. He needed to know his brother’s games, his sister’s teases, the names of horses and servants. He would need pocket descriptions of family acquaintances, from retainers to archbishops, to tie to the people he might meet. He would need rooms and gardens. Though some supporters would be happy to demand no details from a memory that might be uncomfortably fragile, others would insist on them. The prince would have required help as much as the boat boy, for, as he said, he had purposely emptied his mind of the faces and scenes from his previous life. Those eight desolate years came in handy. You might well not have been able to tell, had you caught him in some hesitation or mistake, whether it was exile or falseness talking.
The sort of memories recorded by Bluemantle Pursuivant, one of Edward’s heralds, at Windsor in 1472 would have set him in good stead. Bluemantle noted the white silk tents over beds and baths, the nightcaps of ginger and syrups, carpets underfoot and, in the park, grazing bucks gleefully set upon by the king’s wild packs of hounds. The chambers of the queen – chambers where Richard spent much of his time – were noisy with games of ivory ninepins and indoor bowls. Some Yorkists would have seen Richard’s marriage, some the funeral of the little girl he had kissed before the altar. Some could describe the gold head of St George in the king’s chapel at Windsor, or the fabulous gold Virgin that Edward had bought for £160 in 1478, sitting with Jesus in her arms on a cushion of silver under a pavilion of gold set with rubies, sapphires and pearls. Esteemed vistors might have seen the king’s books of Josephus and Livy and the Trojan Wars, the heavy leather covers opening like a box, with their great ornamented clasps, to show the close-ranked helmeted soldiers fighting and bleeding.
In June 1478, when Richard was four, someone had brought a lion to court. Did he remember that muzzled sinewy beast, or the thick chain that held it? In the same year, one of the bedrooms was hung with new tapestries showing the story of Noah. Did he remember the animals two-by-two, the rainbow, or the dove with the olive branch, in silk knots under his small patting hands? At his wedding jousts that January Earl Rivers had appeared as St Anthony the hermit, with a hermit’s house made of black velvet, complete with bell-tower and windows and a garden fenced with gold trees, all built into his livery and that of his horse. The bell in the bell-tower even rang; could a boy forget that?
Among those who were associated with him in Ireland or before it, several had their own memories of the court of Edward IV. Taylor the younger had been there as a yeoman of the chamber, probably as a very young man. The Black Book described his duties as ‘to make beds, to bear or hold torches, to set boards, to apparel all chambers . . . to take messages’. He had to watch the king ‘by course’, on a rota, at night as he slept, fetch drink and blankets for him, and possibly let in paramours. Commines, doing similar duty once for the Duke of Burgundy, had to walk up and down the room with him while the duke was assailed by night thoughts. Taylor would also have known the king’s favourite dogs, which shared the chamber; one of the chamber pages’ jobs was to clear up ‘defaults of hounds’. These scenes could easily be shifted from his memory to the receptive mind of a boy, until he too believed that he had seen, through an open door, the gorgeous figured velvets laid out ready, or had dragged a dog away by its studded collar from the damask hangings of the bed.
Stephen Frion, too, who may have known the boy for some time before he came to Ireland to find him, had memories to pass on. From him, the resurrected Richard could piece together the style and personalities of the royal secretariat and details of visits by ambassadors. The single letter of Frion’s that survives, dating from 1480 when Richard was six or seven, also mentioned a huge boar’s ‘tooth’ Edward had just received from Louis XI of France (‘the biggest that was ever seen, one foot and three fingers long and more than two fingers wide’). It came with ‘the dried head of a beast like a wild stag, done up in the most marvellous way you ever saw’. Frion said he had no idea what these strange presents signified. To a small boy, they may have meant nothing more complicated than hunting, and finding, monsters in the deep French woods.
André suggested, however, that the young man’s ‘memories’ had come from a different source. ‘Whatever I told you so readily of bygone signs or times,’ he had him confess to his followers, ‘I kept all that in my memory from when I was very small, for I was the little servant-boy of a former Jew, the godson of King Edward . . . in England, and my master was in the most intimate circle of the king and his children.’ The ‘former Jew’, of course, was Brampton. The boy had not only been his servant, but by André’s account – written for Henry – had lived with him at court in close association with the king’s children, including the little prince whom he was to impersonate.
Brampton, of course, would have denied all this. Yet he could not deny that he and the boy had known each other at least a little; and if they had ever lived together as father and son, as Brampton said the boy had wanted to, there was plenty that ‘the captain’ could have told him. Besides his boasts of the battles he had helped Edward win and the rebels he had sent packing, Brampton had memories of his service as an usher of Edward’s chamber, two stages or so higher than Taylor the younger was. As such, he was often abroad fetching ‘stuff’ at huge expense for the king’s Wardrobe, including, in 1478, seventy-seven yards of black velvet. He also lent Edward large sums of money and probably received, in person, his military commands; he revelled in the king’s sponsorship at his ‘standing-up baptism’ and was close enough, he implied, to feel the king’s back-slapping cordiality and to glow at his least familiarity. It is hard to know how intimate he really was. But he knew enough, for certain, to add precious fragments to the store of the page who waited on his wife.
The pieces, then, were there to be assembled. Nor was it difficult to fix such scenes in a young man’s imagination as something he himself treasured and remembered. The techniques were laid out explicitly in devotional works of the time. By reading such books as St Bonaventure’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christ – found then in most literate households, as well as in Margaret’s library – Richard could learn how to enter, by contemplation, into another world and another life, that of Jesus. He was asked to make himself ‘present in his soul’ in the stable at Bethlehem, drawing close as Mary wrapped her Child in the kerchief from her head and washed Him with milk from her full and aching breasts. He was made to see, ‘as though . . . with bodily eyes’, the livid lacerations on Jesus’s back after the scourging, and how He shivered with cold as He tried to find His clothes. This was true imagination, as St Bonaventure said. This was the ‘oneing and knitting’ of his soul to Jesus.
At times, he was asked to do more than observe and suffer with the characters. He himself had to enter into the story. After the death of Jesus, as Mary, John and Mary Magdalene wept at the foot of the Cross, St Bonaventure enjoined him to comfort them, ‘praying them to eat something, for they were still fasting . . . and so taking their blessing / go thy way’. So summoning his courage, he could walk up to them (Our Lady in her blue robe of constancy, her face still swooning and pale, the Magdalene with her disordered red hair). He could touch them, on a shoulder or the hem of a sleeve. They would turn to him; they would speak to him, just a few words, for him alone, as he knelt among the dry stones on the hill of Golgotha. Of course, this conversation had not truly happened as the world would understand it. But why did his heart move as it did, if he had not been present with them?
In the case of Richard Plantagenet, there was one scene in particular that he was obliged to see in his soul and re-create for those he was trying to persuade. This was the moment of his escape, the moment when he had not died. No other person’s memories could help him here; in effect, he was alone. It might be supposed that he wo
uld revel in this, laying out images of the greatest pathos before his astonished listeners. Yet nothing that survives suggests that he dwelled on what had happened in the Tower.
The most detailed account appears in his letter to Isabella of Castile in 1493. Letters of this sort had been written to most of the rulers of Europe: to Maximilian, to the kings of Denmark and Scotland, and to anyone else in power who could help. Each of them went out with a cover-letter from his protector of the moment. Richard himself implied that he sent many from Ireland in the eight months or so he was there, from the autumn of 1491 until the summer of the next year. One certainly arrived in Scotland: in March 1492 the king paid £9 for letters from ‘King Edward’s son and the Earl of Desmond’. The story in them would have been the same as the one Isabella heard.
Most gracious and excellent Princess, my most noble Lady and cousin, I commit myself entirely to your majesty.
When the Prince of Wales, eldest son of Edward King of England of pious memory, my very Dear lord and father, was put to death, a death to be pitied, and I myself, at the age of about nine, was also delivered up to a certain lord to be killed, it pleased divine clemency that this lord, pitying my innocence, should preserve me alive and unharmed. However, he forced me first to swear upon the sacred body of Our Lord that I would not reveal [my] name, lineage or family to anyone at all until a certain number of years [had passed]. Then he sent me abroad . . .
The letter began abruptly enough, almost shockingly, with Edward dying, but then moved immediately away. At no point, then or later, did Richard seem to describe how his brother had died. In his proclamation of 1496 he omitted him entirely. The verb used in the letter for the killing of Edward, as for his own near-murder, was extinguere, to quench or snuff out a light: a word suggesting neither swords nor blood, though not so specific as to mean suffocation. His brother, the shadow, died bloodlessly. His death was to be pitied, miserandus, but the unemotional gerund suggested a duty of pitying rather than spontaneous tears. It was as if Richard had neither witnessed nor imagined this death, nor felt for the brother who had suffered it. No adjectives of either love or grief were applied to Edward. In a few words, he was gone.
Richard himself was described only a little more clearly. All that was given was his age, ‘about nine’, nonum fere agens annum. There should have been no ‘about’ about it; but in a letter of this sort, intended mostly to arouse compassion, pinpoint exactness was unnecessary. Vagueness was a virtue: blurring faces, blurring times and places, as if the whole picture was seen through tears. He, or rather the Latin secretary, used fere again a little later, to explain how he had wandered ‘for about eight years’. Fuzziness about his own age was suspicious, but may not have sown such doubts at the time. It could be attributed to disorientation as well as to deceit, or could be considered merely normal. Age was ignored for the most part (or guessed at with a casual ‘or thereabout’) except in the case of the very young, the very old, or kings dying. Robert Fabyan thought Richard was about seven when he went to the Tower; Dominic Mancini thought he was eight. By those standards, Richard Plantagenet’s letter was accurate enough.
The matter of his age disposed of, the letter began to race on. He was handed over, Richard wrote, to ‘a certain lord’ to be killed. This, one might suppose, was the most terrifying moment of his life. It was dismissed in a few businesslike words, with no sense of where, when or why the events had unfolded. The story was perhaps assumed to be famous by this time, too famous even to mention the Tower. The lord to whom Richard was delivered, Edward’s murderer, seemed set to kill again, but softened at the sight of Richard. He was evidently someone in high authority, but it was impossible to work out exactly who he was.
These particular details, Richard implied, had not been forgotten (as so much had been) but suppressed. The ‘certain lord’ had made him suppress them. He had done so roughly: the word adegerit suggested physical pushing, and the whole scene was dark, overlaid with fear and obscurity. All that glimmered in this letter was the moment when the lord’s face changed from murderous intent to pity, and the moment when the pyx or monstrance containing the Sacrament was brought for the boy to kiss. That in itself implied that he was hustled somewhere else, or that a priest came, but the imagined scene did not change: the boy, the lord, Christ’s Body, the dark. At some point, Richard hinted, when ‘a certain number of years had elapsed’, he would remember and reveal everything about this scene. But not yet.
It is not known for certain that he ever disclosed it in detail. Yet bits and pieces survive, in the chronicles of Burgundy and the Low Countries, that may be fragments of the story as Richard Plantagenet told it round Europe. The ‘Divisie-chronicle’ of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland, written down around 1500, contains this passage:
some say that Henry Earl of Buckingham killed only one child and spared the other which he had lifted from the font [that is, he had been his godfather], and had him secretly abducted out of the country. This child was called Richard, and after being in Portugal he came into France to King Louis the Eleventh [sic] and from there he secretly came into Brabant to Lady Margaret his aunt.
Molinet, at the Burgundian court, and Commines, at the French, also mentioned Buckingham’s involvement, though not as the murderer-abductor directly. And Molinet produced, uniquely, stories from the Tower. In particular, he gave a remarkable account of the boys’ encounter with the men sent to kill them, perhaps derived from a scene he had heard Plantagenet describe – after 1492, or possibly before it – in the state rooms at Malines.
The elder son was asleep, and the younger one was awake, and he sensed something bad was happening, because he started to say: ‘Hey, brother, wake up, they’re coming to kill you!’ Then he said to the officers, ‘Why are you killing my brother? Kill me and let him live!’
Dr Argentine may have passed on some stories, but not this one. This was a scene only one of the boys, or one of the killers, could have described with any plausibility. Somehow, it had reached the court of Burgundy, and with Richard playing the hero’s part. His brave words to the killers were already famously moving: they were the same as those given to the Virgin in popular meditations, as she upbraided the Jews for wounding Christ and asked them, instead, to kill her. The ‘learn to dance / learn to die’ story may well have come from the same source: the witty little dancing prince, alongside his ‘unsophisticated’ brother, now stirring his audience to sympathetic tears.
Diplomatic correspondence did not allow flights like this. Yet as the story of Richard ran on in his letter, it began to gather pace. He was sent abroad ‘with two men who were to guard me and govern me’, escorts who did not sound entirely benevolent. And so, ‘an orphan deprived of the King my father and the King my brother, exiled from the Kingdom, stripped of my native land, my inheritance and all my fortune, having fled through great dangers I led my miserable life in fear and tears and affliction, and for about eight years I lay in hiding in various countries . . .’
Conveniently enough, some might think, he was not allowed to say who his guards and governors were. In any case, they disappeared from his life when ‘at length, one of those who governed me died, and the other was sent back to his own country, and I never saw him again’. This implied that one of his guardians was not English and was still under outside orders, but the veil was so completely drawn that even these clues were uncertain. As it happened, the reward given to Brampton in 1484 for ‘services to be rendered by him according to certain indentures’ was also made, in the same form on the same day, to ‘Christopher Colyns, esquire’. Colyns had been, like Brampton, one of Edward IV’s gentleman-ushers; he was also a draper and a collector of tonnage and poundage in the port of London, who might have known how to get goods, or boys, secretly out of the port and abroad. In November 1486 Henry pardoned him, three years before he pardoned Brampton; but Colyns (‘late of the county of Kent, late citizen of London’) seems still to have been wandering outside the country.
Richard himse
lf implied that he did not know who these men were, just as he had no idea which countries he was passing through. The only certainty was that, ‘scarcely out of childhood’, he was now alone. He was also desperately sad and poor: as poor as the Lancastrian exiles Commines saw, begging barefoot and barelegged for bread in Flanders in the 1460s, and poorer than Henry had been as he faced ‘a thousand deadly dangers’ in his fourteen years of exile in Brittany. Richard could not cap ‘Henry Richmond, the evil grasper of the kingdom of England’, as he called him, in length of absence; but he could cap him in indigence and in pervasive sadness.
No more about the great escape was mentioned in Richard’s letter. He offered his readers a story that might have seemed, to many, too sketchy to be true. It is possible, though, that more fragments survived not only in the continental chronicles, but in the plausible speech to the court of Scotland that Polydore Vergil gave him later. Vergil never saw the letter to Isabella, though it is possible – since he asked the Scottish king personally for documentary help with his history – that he was shown Richard’s first letter to James. In any event, the story he made Richard tell was remarkably similar to the one that was sent to Spain.