by Ann Wroe
I think you are not unaware, O King, of the misery which befell the issue of Edward King of England, the fourth of that name. In case you do not know, I am his son, saved from slaughter by the beneficence of most high and almighty God. For my father Edward, when he was dying, appointed as guardian of his sons his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, whom he hoped to make more attached to his sons the more he loaded him with favours. But alas, to my misery, it happened otherwise than he imagined. That man was not the guardian of our line but almost its extinguisher. Behold, suddenly the cruel tyrant, seized with ambition to be king, ordered that my brother Edward and I should be killed together. But the man who had been given the unspeakable task of murdering us, pitiful innocents that we were, loathed the abominable deed as much as he feared not to do it. Being thus in two minds, at last, in order to satisfy the tyrant and in part escape the blame, having murdered my brother, he saved me, and allowed me to leave the country with only one servant to keep me company . . .
Beyond the striking similarities, several details diverged. The reference to Gloucester was new; but this was probably Vergil’s addition, since the resurrected Richard, perhaps diplomatically, did not mention his uncle in anything that survives. The ‘certain lord’ was now merely a man, ille; there was no oath of secrecy, and only one companion who was subservient to the boy. This man was described later, Vergil ‘reporting’ Richard, as ‘a loyal household servant of Edward his father’, narrowing the field a little and raising again the shadow of Brampton, if you assumed the rescue to be true. As always, however, that was a large assumption.
Neither the letter nor the speech saw any dynastic purpose in Richard’s rescue. He was saved out of simple pity, then abandoned, as if he had no usefulness to those who had pitied him. This was sad, but also inexplicable. Why should he be saved, if his brother was killed? How had he been taken from the Tower? If he was truly a prince and a claimant, whose claims people knew, how was it that he had been left for eight years to wander alone? Looked at hard, the story was unconvincing on all those points. But you could also argue – if Yorkist sympathy inclined you to – that this letter, in its very artlessness, was the authentic voice of a traumatised young man.
At the moment of his emergence in Ireland, no work seems to have been done on the details of his past. The imaginations of Richard were limited to what was necessary, no more. The story was still crude. But the most important point of his letters was a different one. More than anything, he had to establish himself as the second son of Edward IV. Whatever authority he claimed to have came from his father, not from himself. Deprived of his father, he wrote, forbidden even to remember him, he had been reduced to nothing. The repeated invocation of Edward in these letters and the heavy, almost physical, sense of him were the first steps towards the remembering of Richard: as if the coat of golden chain-mail that hung above the dead king’s tomb, covered with crimson velvet, embroidered with the arms of England and France in gold, rubies and pearls, stirred with the limbs of a prince who was now old enough and strong enough to put it on.
He and his sponsors sent out the letters, and waited.
3
Evidence of things seen
Richard Plantagenet’s months in Ireland were spent in half-hiding. Despite that, Henry had already been sneaking vicarious glimpses of him. He knew he was there, by naval intelligence, as soon as he arrived, and confidently told the pope that the French were behind him. At this point all he knew of the young man himself, according to Vergil, was that he was saying he was Richard, Edward’s son. Henry had no idea whether this was true, but the very claim may have made him ill; his apothecary’s payments that autumn were seven times higher than usual.
Accordingly, he took no chances. On December 7th 1491, John Ismay was sent to check on the readiness of ships between Southampton, Land’s End and Bristol; the next day, a force of 200 soldiers was despatched under Thomas Garth and James Ormond to ‘suppress the king’s rebels’ in Ireland. That same month a ship sailed to catch Meno, who had ‘conveyed the Child’ (Henry’s words, and apparently his emphasis) across the sea. In February the Margaret of Barnstaple, ‘among other vessels’, fitted with guns, several barrels of gunpowder and 110 men armed with bows and bills, was deployed to ‘go on warfare’ along the Irish coasts. Spies kept Henry supplied with extra soundings and sightings.
Around June of 1492, an invitation came from France promising Richard – as he told Isabella – help and assistance against the ‘criminal usurper’, Henry Tudor. It was late in coming, but all the more welcome because his supporters in Ireland, warier now than when Simnel had appeared, had failed to coalesce. The invitation was accepted, and sometime in late June or July the new-fledged prince was fetched by Stephen Frion and Louis de Lucques, one of Charles VIII’s chief naval captains. As Richard put it, they came ‘with many ships and a great company’ to ‘call me forth’. Henry, in London, would not have been surprised. ‘The French are so on the watch to increase their power by any villainy,’ he had written that January to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, ‘and what mischief the French are machinating against us, or what snares they are laying, we pass over in silence.’
Charles viewed the sponsoring of Richard Plantagenet as the ultimate prop of his defences against England. For much of that year, well aware of the vast fleet that Henry was assembling on the south coast and the English armies gathered to defend Brittany, he had been raising heavy taxes to fortify his own coasts and the castles on his borders. Armies had been recruited too, including mercenaries from Switzerland. As he explained in his tax-raising letters to his people, Charles felt surrounded by enemies on every side, especially by ‘our old enemies and adversaries the English’, who would not hesitate to undermine him by malice or sheer force. The last part of his war strategy, as he explained it in a letter of September 30th, had been to get several warships ready and send some to Ireland, to bring the Duke of York to France. ‘And both this and all the other things concerning the security of our kingdom have put it in such good order and provision that the English and our enemies will not be able to put anything over on us, for which may our Creator be praised.’ In Richard, Charles had a rival to Henry who could, perhaps, topple him; or, at the least, make him beg the French for terms.
So Charles hoped. But for much of 1492 he was not sure what the prince in Ireland amounted to, and bided his time. It is probable that Taylor the elder, sent the previous autumn, had reported that Richard was not as ready to launch his claim as the king supposed. At the beginning of June, in Dieppe, an Italian merchant who was being pumped for the usual news of England – how many ships ready, what tonnage, how many men, what Henry intended – was asked what the English were saying about ‘King Edward’s son who is in Ireland’. His answer, based as it seemed to be on quayside chat in Portsmouth and Southampton, was not encouraging. ‘They talked about him more before than they do now,’ he said. ‘Some said [then] that he wasn’t there at all, others that he was the son of King Edward’s brother. Anyway, for the moment they don’t bother with him much.’ Perhaps, if the English themselves were not bothered, the King of France should not be.
Nonetheless, in the end Charles brought him over, braving the English ships and the roving German pirates. Béraud Stuart d’Aubigny, an expatriate Scot who was Charles’s chamberlain and one of his councillors, welcomed the prince at Honfleur, the port from which Taylor had departed. As Richard arrived Honfleur was being strongly fortified, with two towers and a gate, against the English; and here was Charles’s other defensive ploy, a slight young man whose arrival was described as a descente, just like the descente expected any day by Henry on Calais. The word implied that he came in armed strength, and the record confirmed it. He was surrounded with ses gens, usually men-at-arms, as well as attendants and servants, and Charles had to send out orders that these particular ‘English’ were not to be attacked without his leave.
D’Aubigny was probably picked, as he had been picked to escort English am
bassadors the year before, because he was ‘well used to English ways’. He also brought with him, no doubt, a contingent of the king’s Scots Guard, of which he was made captain the next year: a dazzling troop mounted on white horses, in white surcoats embroidered with gold and silver. The ‘waiting for [the duke’s] coming’ and the reception cost well over 500 écus, for Charles sent additional ‘men to provision them’, seemingly surprised by their numbers. The young man who disembarked thought he was in Heaven, Vergil wrote. He now had kings among his friends.
He found shelter in France for about five months. Almost nothing is known of what he did there. For the time he was at court, d’Aubigny’s pension was increased from £2,300 to £3,000 tournois, perhaps concealing duties performed for him. Richard’s chief minder, however, was Alexander Monypeny, who had been sent to Scotland by Charles the summer before. His father, William Monypeny, had long been in the diplomatic service of the French kings, ‘enjoying the highest authority and foremost about his Majesty’, as one ambassador described him. During the secret negotiations for a marriage-that-never-was between Charles, then dauphin, and Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth, Monypeny was said to be the only man admitted, besides the English herald, to the intimacy of the French king’s chamber. For foreigners, the family could hardly have been closer to the royal designs.
The intimacy of Charles’s chamber was presumably offered to Richard too, though it is not certain. The king was twenty-one when his guest arrived in France; sweet-natured, but not yet capable, Commines said, of understanding state affairs at all. This may have explained both his invitation to Richard and his quixotic decision, within three years, to invade Italy and press his claim to the kingdom of Naples. He was sickly, almost deformed, and with an energetic taste for curiosities. Small dogs overran his apartments, ripping the cloth-of-gold curtains on his bed, and parrots and white blackbirds, hung with little bells and coloured ribbons, fluttered on perches near the ceiling. In the palace at Plessis he had a giant aviary in which canaries flew and sang. The cages of his singing birds were dressed in bright green silk to look like trees. In many ways, Richard Plantagenet in France was such a creature, hung with ribbons and bright colours, learning to sing but not yet to be risked outside his gilded cage.
Nonetheless the stay in France, short though it was, provided a space in which the prince could be consolidated. He had already built a network of diplomatic contacts by dint of the appeals sent out from Ireland. A letter to Ludovico Sforza that December from the Milanese envoy in Vienna showed that ‘the son of King Edward’ was being talked about at Maximilian’s court, and was thought to be on his way to Augsburg; perhaps the King of the Romans had invited him. Envoys came to visit from Burgundy, where Margaret was preparing for him, and from Scotland. The employment of Monypeny and d’Aubigny so close to him showed clearly the continuing interest of the Scots. To them, too, he was ‘King Edward’s son’.
A tiny court had formed around him. It seems to have contained the Taylors, father and son, Frion, George Neville and Anthony de la Forsa, the young son of a famous Yorkist diplomat. At this stage Frion may have been Richard’s chief councillor as well as his secretary, although he did not stay with him past December. Month by month, more refugees joined the new-found prince and more visitors came through, presenting their credentials and, at the same time, assessing his. He was still a strange and surprising figure, but one who was accruing power. According to a later letter from one of Henry’s officers, ‘when he was in France at the king’s court he made himself be called Plantagenet’. There was authority in that ‘made himself be called’, as if the motivation came from him. Given such confidence, it was hardly surprising that Charles ‘affirmed’ to James IV that this was Edward’s son. Already, nine months away from Cork, this young man had the hauteur of a prince.
That in itself would have commended him. The first view of Richard Plantagenet was not necessarily a clear one, but a general impression of suitability. He was ‘either true or plausible’, in the nimble diplomatic language of the time. Georges Chastellain saw this in Philip the Good of Burgundy: he was instantly a prince by semblant, effigie, image and figure, sheer appearance. And this was often all that was required. If the heart was uplifted, as general impressions of nobility or beauty always vaguely stirred it, there was no need to investigate further. It was enough to be able to apply to Richard Plantagenet, as to a far-away city or a gold cup, the adjective ‘rich’ or ‘fair’, without testing how thick the metal was or whether, on closer inspection, the shining towers and spires would dissolve into the air.
In the Secreta Secretorum, Aristotle’s supposed book of advice to Alexander, princes were advised always to show themselves in rich and precious clothing ‘of the most strange cloth that can anywhere be found’. Tiny stitches and shifting colours, as on a piece of gold-embroidered satin, were cause for astonishment. At the court of Burgundy, Charles the Bold was said to have a passion for being seen as extraordinary and strange: haute magnificence de coeur pour être vu et regardé en singulières choses. A king or queen who appeared ‘uncuriously adorned’ – like Louis XI in his old grey coat, with a lead badge in his hat – had lost, with robes and jewels, the dignity of royalty.
Impassiveness, too, was expected of kings. By appearing still as statues, they summed up the unchanging dependability of their laws; they were true, veritable and steady, as God was. Solemnity, or ‘sadness’, was also expected, alongside the stillness. The Milanese envoy Raimondo Soncino, given audience in 1497, found Henry VII standing quite still, leaning against a chair upholstered in cloth-of-gold. He found his presence ‘wonderful’. The Venetian ambassador Andrea Trevisano saw him two weeks earlier in the same pose, ‘leaning against a tall gilt chair’. Throughout Trevisano’s presentation of his credentials Henry stayed standing and did not stir, possessing his throne in steadiness, as a king should.
Soncino noted also that the king wore a ‘most rich’ collar, with four rows of large pearls and jewels. Gems of uncommon beauty clearly distinguished not only princes from people, but princes from princes. Henry understood this as well as anyone, seeking out – as one way among many of bolstering his fragile claim to the crown – rare jewels of great price. In 1504 alone, his bill for jewels was £30,000. The king’s gems were ‘attended’ when he went on his journeys, wrapped in careful packaging of soft wool, and the palace rules of 1494 stipulated that on grand occasions he should put on his most precious jewels himself, no purely temporal man touching them.
Richard Plantagenet, the wandering prince, could not compete with this. But at some point, probably in France, he acquired the code-name ‘The Merchant of the Ruby’. The stone carried some association with him, not implausibly because he wore one – perhaps as the jewel in his hat-brooch – as the gift of someone who cared for him. That brooch too you could try to interpret if you cared to, as people interpreted Philip the Good’s black hat, strewn all over with huge pearls like tears, as a sign of grief for his wayward son. Richard’s three pendant pearls, perhaps, were tears for the father, mother and brother he had lost. But a ruby would have drawn most attention to him. Beyond its intrinsic virtues – an inextinguishable light that glowed in darkness, the power to protect a man from losing blood – the ruby was understood to hold the kingship among jewels. It was the stone of the sun, which, as it rose, was always described as red rather than gold. Both the Great Khan and Prester John were said to light their palaces with dozens of rubies, set into pillars and walls. On the island of Macumeran, according to Mandeville, the ruler was obliged to wear a ruby about his neck, ‘for if he beareth not the ruby, they would no longer take him for king’. Isabella of Spain seemed to take this to heart, covering herself, according to Richmond Herald, with rose-red balas-rubies the size of beechnuts and tennis balls. Yet one ruby alone could make that point strongly enough.
In the ever-moving royal court at Amboise, Vincennes, Moulins or Bois Malherbes – as later at Malines, Innsbruck, Vienna, Edinburgh and Stirling – Ric
hard Plantagenet gave the required impression. He was living in the royal apartments and the royal hunting lodges, eating, dancing, hawking and hearing Mass alongside the king’s young cousins, or the king himself. They greeted him as one of them, with the usual ‘caressing demonstrations’. Like them, he would have spent long hours outdoors, seeking the fresh air that doctors recommended to stir the king’s stale humours and make him stronger. The very sight of Richard then, magnificently mounted, hounds at his heels and hawk on wrist, showed the world that he was noble. He wore the glittering clothes of a prince, unless he was in shirtsleeves, hose and slippers to play tennis, a sport Charles loved. The king’s courtesans were also available to him. At night, the sheets on his bed – ‘white sheets and soft’, an unspeakable luxury – carried scents of violets and red roses from the royal laundry. Charles called him ‘cousin’ and, in proclamations to his people, styled him the Duke of York without equivocation, ‘true heir to the realm of England’.
This prince had courtiers and soldiers round him. When he went through the streets of Paris, merely a few months out into the public view, he rode attended by a guard of honour, probably part of the king’s Scots Guard, under Monypeny. Advisers huddled with him in corridors, suggesting important and secret business. Servants held his stirrup when he dismounted, half-knelt to give him letters, tasted his wine before he drank it, took his cloak from his shoulders and draped him in it again. This was how a prince was treated and how he was judged: by the number of his horses, the crowd of his attendants, how he disposed them and gave them their orders, and whether they kept their faces continually turned towards him ‘with reverence and honour and obedience’.