by Ann Wroe
Sons of rulers, especially rulers who had been loved, were naturally expected to resemble their fathers and were endlessly compared to them. Chastellain, describing Charles the Bold, could think only that his face was rounder than his father’s, his complexion darker, and his eyes, light as an angel’s, ‘his father’s living image’ perfectly reflected. Dr Shaw saw in Richard of Gloucester ‘his father’s own figure . . . the very print of his visage, the sure undoubted image, the plain express likeness of the noble duke, whose remembrance can never die while he liveth’. People led before the new-found prince in Malines searched in just this way for the ‘print’ and ‘favours’ of Edward, and many may have found them. To judge by the only contemporary likenesses of the king, in some ways the young man was strikingly like him. His face was the same shape, as were his chin, jaw, mouth and nose, and the same curious crease of bone ran from his right eye up to his brow. Artistic convention accounted for some of that, but not all of it; no similar features, save strong chins, linked the portraits of Edward and his brother Richard III.
Other aspects of the young man’s face did not suggest that he had Edward’s blood in him. Edward’s eyes were very different, set in pronounced lids with lower brows; his upper lip was long; and his hair was brown, rather than fair, though he had sired a crowd of fair-haired children. (At Elizabeth of York’s coronation, observers had marvelled at her yellow hair falling loose down her back.) Most strikingly, Edward had been over six feet tall, commanding, broad-chested, room-filling, where the boy who claimed to be his son was still childishly slight at the age of twenty. ‘Of invincible courage, and the handsomest prince my eyes ever beheld,’ said Commines of Edward, though he thought him a little gone to seed when he saw him at the Anglo-French peace talks at Picquigny in 1475. ‘His thoughts were wholly employed upon the ladies, hunting, and adorning his person.’ Certainly the adorning of the person was there in the young man, and perhaps the easy amorousness also. He would only have had to curse like Edward (‘By God’s blessed Lady!’) to start a pulse of recognition in his hearers, as he would only have had to fall on his knees to say the Angelus, the prayer Elizabeth Woodville had wanted to be said three times a day in England, to kindle thoughts of the mother who must have tenderly instructed him.
To see Edward in Richard Plantagenet entailed catching and dwelling on certain things, rather than others. There was no perfect match. Nonetheless, a resemblance was recognised then that can still be seen now. The Irishmen and others who accosted the boy in Cork, according to Henry’s story and the confession, insisted that he must be some sort of Plantagenet. Most of them could not have known what a Plantagenet looked like, but their recognition was meant to add authenticity to the story. Henry himself implicitly admitted it: the face looked right. ‘He looked somewhat like the Duke of Clarence’, said Molinet, who could not possibly have known that. It was there in the young man who called himself Plantagenet, some sort of Yorkist look.
Later historians floated the idea that the new-found Duke of York might have been a bastard of Edward’s, a memento of some fleeting love affair on one side or other of the Channel, but contemporaries did not think so. Certainly the young man at the court of Burgundy was too young to have been a souvenir of Edward’s exile there at the end of 1470. Possibly he was the fruit of some casual liaison elsewhere. But bastards were usually recognised and usually quiescent, accepting their status and grateful for whatever position they could get. Besides, those who saw the resemblance between Edward and Richard Plantagenet in the 1490s seem to have accepted it as legitimate, in every sense. They had many motives for doing so: defiance, dynastic loyalty, love, hate, gratitude. Fired by all these, they laid the ghost face on the living one. The print and favours Yorkists found in Richard were what they longed to see: Edward in remembrance, living.
This seems to have been Richard Harliston’s case. Harliston, Edward’s governor of Jersey for fifteen years, had resolved to hold the island for York after Bosworth and, though attainted of treason and subsequently pardoned, went on to fight for the young man whom he supposed was Richard. A Jersey chronicler in the next century, struggling to explain such a risky course of action, wrote that Margaret
had so skilfully arranged matters that several servants of Edward IV, and the most loyal ones at that, believed and were persuaded by her [that the two sons of King Edward were still alive] . . . among whom Harliston firmly believed it to be true, that the said child [Richard], to avoid the fury and rage of King Richard his uncle, had found a way to escape and come to Flanders; and he abandoned his office of captain and went to Flanders thinking to give help to the child of Edward, who during all his life had been his good lord and master.
The first leap of faith was the hardest, to picture Richard out of the Tower and alive. After this, the process was uncomplicated, an act of piety for the king he had loved. Yet Harliston, with his life in the balance, would hardly have made such a decision if the young man himself had failed to persuade him.
Nor would Robert Clifford, who joined Richard Plantagenet in Malines in 1493. Clifford had known both Edward IV and Richard, Duke of York, and at close quarters. As a young man, a minor officer at court, he had been the most ardent of Yorkists, and had been among the first to sign up for Richard’s wedding jousts in 1478. He had received his prize for the best ‘tourney without’ from a little bride who sat under a canopy with a notably pretty little boy, in yards of shining silk, with a bridegroom’s crown pressed down on his fair hair. Clifford himself was dressed then, as he had fought, in full Yorkist colours of murrey and blue, on a horse caparisoned with those colours ‘inramplished’ with suns and white roses. This was presumably not his only sighting of the little prince, but it may have been the most memorable, even if sweat and exhilaration blurred the look of him. Presumably he still had his prize, an ‘M’ of gold for ‘Mowbray’, set with an emerald, to remind him of the emotions of that day.
When Clifford saw the young man in Flanders, he immediately believed that he was of royal descent. Iuvene viso, Vergil said, he was convinced: as soon as he saw him, and apparently by sight alone. Hall said he knew him to be King Edward’s son ‘by his face and other lineaments of his body’; John Stow thought it was ‘gesture and manners’ that convinced him. Having seen and believed, Clifford then wrote letters of credit and confidence to England, affirming what he saw. He also spread the word in Calais, telling a lady of the town that this was King Edward’s son. The man who reported this remark, then deputy lieutenant of Calais, felt the force of this bald observation: ‘Never words went colder to my heart than those did.’
Frank testimonials like Clifford’s were rare. Too often, people who could have made the comparison – favourably or not – did not do so. In Setubal, disappointingly, Brampton was not asked whether the new-found Richard of York resembled the old one. But Rui de Sousa was. He had reported enthusiastically that the little prince he saw in 1482 was un muy gentil mancebete . . . muy lindo y la mas hermosa criatura. Was the person he had seen in Lisbon, the one who now said he was the Duke of York, anything like that wonderfully ‘noble’ and ‘pretty’ little boy? ‘No, because the other one was very beautiful.’
What made the young man in Malines less handsome may well have been his discoloured eye, mentioned as a sign by nobody, but undoubtedly noticed, as King Ferdinand’s tiny cast in the same eye was noticed when he smiled. Presumably, too, that eye could instantly prove or disprove Plantagenet’s claim to be the prince. If he was an impostor, his promoters had therefore taken a calculated risk in choosing him; but if the general look and manner of Edward’s son were right, small physical flaws or differences could be explained away. Perhaps in his long years of wandering someone had beaten him, prince though he was.
All these were, in any case, proofs positive. Vague as the marks may have been, they went uncountered by proof that Richard, Duke of York was dead. Without this, the young man’s pretensions could never be quashed entirely, no matter how sceptically the claims and th
e signs were received. When Isabella got Margaret’s letter, she wrote back pointing out ‘such doubts about him’, but this cold water had no effect. Margaret simply said ‘that she would never write anything to them about him again’; the defiant embrace of the protégé, the toss of the head. As the Easter anthem Christus Resurgens demanded of the Jews, ‘Let them either produce Him buried, or adore Him rising.’ Until the body of the little prince was produced, nobody could say that Plantagenet was indisputably a fake. Maximilian found this a powerful argument. As he wrote in ruminative mood, justifying his belief in Richard, Duke of York many years later, ‘nobody had seen him dead’.
A corpse was essential. In April 1471, after the battle of Barnet at which Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and his brother had been killed, Edward IV had the bodies of his two great enemies brought to St Paul’s: ‘and in the church there, openly showed, to all the people’. They lay there for three or four days. Margaret herself, in a letter written that year to her mother-in-law, Isabella of Burgundy, explained how important this had been. Her brother had heard ‘that nobody in the city believed that Warwick and his brother were dead, so he had their bodies . . . laid out and uncovered from the chest upwards in the sight of everybody’.
Henry VII could not produce, and was never to produce, the body of Richard, Duke of York. Faced with death and silence, he could do no better than anyone else. Undoubtedly he wanted to. This, after all, was the man who wrote to Pope Julius II that the best way to save the Church and confound unbelievers was ‘to seize with a strong hand the most holy sepulchre of Christ from the hand of the infidels, and exhibit His presence corporally’.
Without bodies, there could still be a murder story. People still lived – among them James Tyrell, now an officer in Calais, Sir John Howard and Dr Argentine, now one of Henry’s physicians – who could probably have produced one. Henry did not seem to ask them, although for a time, in 1486, Tyrell was under subpoena to reveal what he knew about certain other policies of Richard III ‘touching imprisonment and coercion’. Perhaps the king presumed, as was true, that most people shared his own opinion. Richard of York’s death was the fundamental, unspoken fact against which to judge the absurdities that pestered him.
There are hints that he tried to trace the possible movements of the princes. In the early spring of 1494 Thomas Lyneham was paid 66s. 8d. ‘for an inquisition and investigation of certain evidence, charters and muniments belonging to the domains of Middleham and Sheriff Hutton and for his expenses in bringing the same to the king and his council’. These two northern castles, where Richard III had lived and Warwick had been kept for a while, were places to which some said the princes had been taken and, perhaps, spirited away again. But Henry seemed to find no clues there. In default of physical proofs, the main argument expressed by his envoys was the one Margaret had mentioned: everyone knew Richard was dead, and it was madness to think otherwise. Henry instructed his envoys, Vergil wrote, to say that Richard had been murdered with his brother in the Tower many years before on the orders of their uncle. Sicut in confesso erat, the fact was beyond doubt; nemo homo nesciebat, there was no one who did not know this. To assert otherwise was ‘completely absurd’ and ‘the height of madness’, since Richard III would in no way have safeguarded himself by killing one boy and not the other.
Yet Henry at this stage offered neither witnesses nor proofs. Only his envoy Somerset, who proposed in 1495 to show Margaret and Maximilian the chapel where Richard was buried, tried to back up the story with evidence that could be seen and touched. Somerset’s bluff, however, was not called, which was just as well, since neither he nor Henry had any tomb to show. Molinet was taken in, saying that the boys had been given ‘royal obsequies’ after King Richard’s death, but few followed him. No funerals would have been held with more pomp and show than those of the princes if Henry had discovered them. There could also have been false tombs and false bones, the ossified remains of any poor children wrapped in rags of velvet, as the presumed bones allegedly appeared when they were found in 1674. Any of these would have helped the king. Yet none could be as convincing as the stiffening bodies, still recognisable, laid out naked from the waist up as Warwick’s had been, ‘to show the people’ – thereby rendering as cold, and as dead, any lingering hopes the people may have had.
iv
Having decided to help him – having been unable to refuse him – Margaret now had to determine how to do so. She had no resources, she told Isabella, but was a poor widow as bereft as Richard was. She hardly knew where to turn. Her first action, tantamount to declaring war on his behalf, was to organise through Philip’s council the issue of letters of marque, allowing Flemish merchants to take reprisals against English ships. But to raise the money and armies needed to win back a kingdom was clearly beyond her: ‘for after so many slaughters of our most unhappy house . . . what help, what aid remains in me?’ For the moment, she had to make her protégé a king in other ways, by polishing him and giving him the tokens and trappings of royalty.
Richard ‘kept his magnificence’, as Molinet put it, first in the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Malines, which Margaret had placed at his disposal as soon as he arrived, and later at the Hôtel des Anglais in Antwerp, the House of the Merchant Adventurers. This house stood in Bullinckstrate, or Wool Street, beside the Old Bourse: a substantial building on three floors, with a fashionably stepped façade, three entrance doors and half a dozen large windows for each floor on the street side. Inside were several chapels, though the Merchant Adventurers, when they left in the summer of 1493, were careful to take with them the ‘jewels and stuff’ with which the chapels had been decorated. Bare rooms with stripped-down altars, at least at first, heard Richard’s prayers for the success of the enterprise.
Outside the House of the Merchant Adventurers he displayed his arms, also provided by Margaret: an escutcheon quartered with the royal arms of England and France, the three lions and the three lilies. (He preserved, as all English kings did, a largely spurious claim to France based on territories long since lost.) Beneath the shield, written out in full, were his titles: Arma Ricardi principis Walie et ducis Eboraci, filii et heredis Edouardi quarti, nuper Dei gratia, regis Anglie et Francie, domini Ybernie. Molinet reported that this shield, ‘displayed as a public and common spectacle where so many very illustrious princes were passing, so many grand persons and merchants from different countries’, astounded some people. Two of those offended, English supporters of King Henry, rode up one night to throw a big pot of mud and ‘other filth’ at it, meaning to mock and degrade not only the arms and the titles, but, with them, the young man who flaunted them. Clumsily, they splattered the door rather than the shield, and Richard’s protectors burst out and gave chase. The culprits got away, but an innocent bystander was killed in hot blood during the pursuit. He had felt, Molinet wrote, the rough sharp-stinging thorns of the White Rose defending his arms: or rather of Margaret’s and Philip’s men, defending them for him.
One of Maximilian and Philip’s most trusted officers, Huc de Melun, governor of Dendermonde and knight of the Golden Fleece, was put in charge of Richard’s affairs, ‘running the whole business’. A big house at Dendermonde was also made available to him, and it was from here that he wrote to Isabella, pressing his newly provided signet ring, engraved with lions and lilies, into the warm red wax. De Melun took command of Richard’s personal bodyguard, thirty halberdiers in the Yorkist livery of murrey and blue embroidered with the white rose: exactly the outfits that Margaret’s bargemen had worn when they had escorted her by water from London. That glorious Yorkist scene, Margaret’s last sighting of England with her house at the apogee of its power, was now revived in Richard.
The badge of the white rose that surrounded him had become his personal possession, as it had been Edward’s. On the king’s accession, a chronicler had dreamed of the garden that might be made in England ‘with this fair white rose and herb’. Margaret now wanted her protégé to walk in that image from day to
day. Round the court, at her insistence, Richard was called ‘the White Rose’. Molinet too followed her orders, working the metaphor with delight. ‘The rose bush that symbolised England,’ he wrote, ‘was heavy at that time with double roses, some of which were carried by the king and some, white ones, by Richard of York, and their thorns were scratching each other.’ Envoys and merchants visiting Flanders picked up the image too. Caspar Weinreich, a Prussian merchant trading with Flanders, referred in his Chronicle simply to ‘the White Rose’ who, in the summer of 1494, sprang up against the King of England; Adam Abell’s vernacular chronicle spoke of the ‘White Rose’ who arrived, apparently fresh from Margaret, in Scotland; and the only time Raimondo Soncino called the Duke of York ‘the White Rose’ was when he was writing to Milan from Bruges in the summer of 1497. Richard was the prince on whom the hopes of York depended, and Margaret did not let him forget it.
Edward IV’s white rose had come with a motto: confort et liesse, comfort and joy. Margaret’s White Rose was quite likely to have kept the motto of the man he claimed as his father. Such a tag was even more appropriate to him, the prince restored to his people, as Jesus at His Nativity had brought God in person to mankind. He had scarcely been recognised, a poor frail child who had formed in His mother’s womb as quietly as dew on the April grass. ‘Who have you seen, shepherds? Quem vidisti?, ran the teasing Christmas antiphon. Surely not a king? Yes, truly, a king: comfort and joy.