by Ann Wroe
The white rose was Margaret’s device also, occurring on her jewels and belts, on her wedding crown and in her books. By sharing it with him, their stems were twined together and their common stock made obvious. White roses also proclaimed their dedication to the Virgin, whose flower this was, and placed their enterprise under her protection. By then, it was almost a secret code between them, like the ‘White Rose’ letters later sent from him to her: a code everyone knew, as they knew the Ragged Staff was Warwick and the Eagle was Stanley. These badges themselves – for which men plotted and fought, fastening them on their hats or stamping them on their spurs – summed up the character of a dynasty, its strength, its forbearance or its craftiness. If Richard Plantagenet was now the White Rose, the symbolism to a certain degree overtook the name and the face. It transfigured him.
But two could play at roses, as England knew. Henry VII’s red rose, or his new Tudor rose of Yorkist white and Lancastrian red, were badges of triumph that were being carved on the king’s palaces and leaded in his windows, sewn onto his liveries and painted in his books. His buckhounds had red roses, fleurs-de-lis, crowns ‘and other our badges’ enamelled on their gilt collars. Sick men and women in the London hospital he founded lay under green-and-white coverlets, his colours, embroidered with the red rose. Henry’s court poets described a garden of Tudor roses being planted in England, barbed and seeded proper, as the genealogists insisted, and guarded by the Richmond greyhounds and the Beaufort portcullises, the other devices of his family. Against these the White Rose in Malines was sometimes equal: Edward’s swelling and aggressive flower, its branches stuck with thorns. More often, however, the symbol mirroring Richard’s fortunes, it seemed decorative and almost powerless. It could prick and scratch, as when the degraders of Richard’s escutcheon had been roughly chased away. But its beauty had not yet made the point that this was a badge to fear.
Behind these outward signs, the prince himself may still have needed working on. The chroniclers reported that Margaret made her protégé repeat again and again, in public and private, the tale of his wonderful escape and of his wanderings, smoothing it with repetition and turning it by long familiarity into his own life. Vergil said, as André did, that these stories were the chief reason people believed in him.
In general, few public utterances were required of princes. Much of the ceremonial was conducted without words. A man knelt to his prince, was motioned to rise, was beckoned to come closer or take up another position, and was grateful for any remark that was made to him. When the prince turned his back, he was tired of him and, wordlessly, expected him to leave. Meals were consumed largely in silence, though minstrels might play or improving books might be read aloud to the diners. Richard, however, had to speak more than most, since so much of his pulling power lay in his story.
His public recitals were presumably both in French and in English, raising again the question of how well he spoke either. A prince’s claim to speak a language often meant little: Maximilian boasted that he had picked up Bohemian from peasants, Spanish ‘from messages in letters’ and English from archers. Sycophantic servants would ensure that their masters believed they were fluent, even if they could do no more than drop a stray phrase into a conversation. Again, Richard had to do considerably better than that.
Certainly, at first, his English was not much needed. In France he could have spoken French to almost everyone, including Alexander Monypeny, his guardian-in-chief, without incurring comment. (For his part, Henry VII in England conducted much of his business, and confessed, in French, feeling more at ease in this than in English.) Northern European princes spoke French as the normal language of royalty, the mark of a civilised man, and shouted it on the tennis court and the hunting field. French had been the language of the books of chivalry and romance that Edward IV had acquired for the instruction of his sons; French words had given Richard, Duke of York his first images of knightly adventure, as his servants carefully carved and served his meat.
The working language of the court of Burgundy was also French, written and spoken. Margaret’s estate accounts were in French, as were all the books she commissioned for her library. She prayed in it, as well as using it for impatient memoranda. Yet she also kept her English going. When Caxton presented her with the first printed quires of his translation of the Recueil des Histoires de Troie, Margaret checked them through and found ‘a fault in mine English which she commanded me to amend’. The fault, Caxton surmised, came from his clumsy Kentish mannerisms; he had learned to speak and spell broad Wealden English, rather than the polished court version the duchess knew.
If an English prince, risen from the dead, had come to Margaret’s court, he would have had to speak English on at least some occasions to her and her visitors, however Frenchified he might appear from day to day. She could not have carried on the promotion, or the deception, without it. And it seems that her protégé rose to the occasion. André claimed, for Henry’s ears, that the boy had been brought up in England; Vergil said he already spoke English when Margaret found him. In the confession, he learned it twice over. All this suggested his English was so good that it needed accounting for. No slips in English were laid against him afterwards, although this would have been a simple way to expose and mock him, and despite the fact that even native speakers could get mixed up when they had lived some time among foreigners. After eight years in Bruges, Caxton in his French-Flemish phrase-book was beginning to drop Flemish words into his English: ‘It en is not’, from the Flemish het en es niet, and ‘spoil the cup’ from spoel, meaning ‘rinse’. He may not have noticed, but Englishmen would.
Only two pieces of evidence give a hint of what this young man’s English sounded like. In September 1497 Richmond Herald, who was probably a native of southern France and who worked mostly in French at Henry’s court, described him as ‘well-spoken’. He seemed to mean in English, though that is not completely certain, and the young man might naturally have fallen into French with him. If it was English, Richmond was a poor judge of that; he was said to have turned down the job of Garter Herald in the mid-1490s because he could not speak the language well enough. By ‘well-spoken’, he probably meant a gracious manner of speech in which the graciousness, rather than the grammar, impressed him.
A second clue comes from October 1496, when a letter was written by ‘Richard of England’ from Edinburgh. The beautiful hand, strikingly close to the finest hand of Edward IV’s secretariat, was not his, belonging probably to the scrivener Nicholas Astley, who was in his service; the well-bred English spelling was Astley’s job, too; but the elegant English itself and the almost over-zealous punctuation, in an age that largely ignored it, were strongly suggestive of the way Richard had spoken as he dictated. The phrasing of his proclamation to the people of England, probably written a few weeks before, was very similar. There were few English people around him at this stage in his career, none of them – Sir George Neville partly excepted – of quality; and there were none, as far as we know, whose English was like this.
Right trusty and our right entirely wellbeloved, We greet you heartily well / Signifying unto you that we be credibly informed of the great love favour and kindness, that ye in time past showed unto our most dread lord and Father King Edward the fourth, whose soul god rest, With the sage / and politic counsels, that ye, in sundry wises, full lovingly gave unto him, whereby he obtained, the advancement and promoting of his matters and causes: wherefore ye stood right much in the favour of his grace. / Desire and heartily pray you, to be from henceforth unto Us: as loving / faithful and kind Counsellor and Friend: as ye were unto our said Father, in showing your good and discreet minds for Us, in such matters and causes, as by your great wisdom ye shall seem best to be moved / for our weal / comfort and relief / and that it will please you to exhort move and stir / our lovers and friends / to do the same / and that We may understand, the good heart and mind that our most dear Cousin the King of Spain / beareth towards Us. / And in your so doing / y
ou may be sure to have Us / as loving a good lord. unto you / or better, than ever was our said lord and Father. And any thing: that ye shall of reason desire of Us / that may concern the weal of you, and of our right trusty and wellbeloved servant / your son / Anthony de la Forsa: which hath full lovingly, given his long attendance upon Us / in sundry Countries, We shall with good heart / be ready / to accomplish, and perform the same / When it shall please almighty god to send Us unto our right / in England; and that it may please you, to give credence unto your said Son of such things as he shall show unto you. / And our lord Jesu preserve you in all honour joy and felicity, and send you the accomplishment of your noble heart’s desire.
The style this letter most closely resembled in the graceful musicality of its phrases was that of Earl Rivers, poet-philosopher and knight-errant, who had overseen the education of Edward, Prince of Wales. That was the standard: as literate as England could produce.
His handwriting, too, looked English, though high-class Frenchmen and Burgundians – including Archduke Philip and the Binche receiver – could also produce hands much like this. Since no sample of his writing survives from before August 1493, it is hard to tell what improvements, if any, were made to his hand in Malines. By then it was impressive, often hard to distinguish in size or fluency from the hand of the notary or the secretary. His ‘Richard’ was signed in the same way as almost any other English Richard of the time: a V-shaped ‘R’, a trailing ‘y’ (never ‘i’), a loop on the final ‘d’. His signature did not change through his career, though it got more confident. The first surviving example, on the letter to Isabella, was small and cautious; the one on the letter from Scotland was deliberately larger and freer, a bold prince’s hand. To have fine and plausibly English handwriting, if he was a fake, showed extraordinary care in his fakers, since princes wrote so seldom that any vaguely educated hand might pass muster. Maximilian, for example, said that people were amazed by his own good handwriting, and James IV’s signature, from a highly cultured man, was a child’s scrawl. If his handwriting did not prove Plantagenet was authentic, it nonetheless showed the enormous care with which he had been created.
His manners, too, seemed perfect. Moving as he did among royalty, he could not have got away with less. Envoys noted, in detail, the dispositions and words of princes when they first met them. They recorded whether they had smiled, stepped forward, nodded, drawn the envoy confidingly aside or made any other gesture of graciousness. If the visitor was near in rank, there was careful hat-work to be done: the velvet bonnet nudged, half-lifted, sometimes removed completely and held flat against the chest for as long as was honourable and fitting. At table, precedence in sitting down and taking water to wash was very keenly noted. The meetings of princes with favourite envoys sometimes entailed small comedies of stirrup-holding and elbow-taking, or were complicated by national fashions in kissing. The giving of gifts, often meant to be spontaneous, could lead to long combats de generosité in which the recipient protested his unworthiness and the giver, with increasingly sharp-edged courtesy, forced them on him.
Richard Plantagenet seemed to fit flawlessly into this world. A tiny detail of his manners emerged in 1496 in Scotland, when he approached and politely saluted a Burgundian captain who would not speak to him. He observed thereby the first rule of courtesy, that a man should be eager to greet others first, and showed besides that he had learned to imitate Edward IV’s confident and easy accessibility to ordinary people.
There were no recorded mistakes, save one that was apparently mentioned by Giles, Lord Daubeney, Henry’s chamberlain, in October 1497. When the young man called himself Plantagenet in France, Daubeney wrote, he said it was his baptismal name, ‘and that the second son of King Edward was so called. And by this it appears that the whole affair was a lie and an abusion.’ This, sent across to Calais with the confession, seemed to be the best that Henry and his officers could do. At one point, he had got his name wrong. Yet many may neither have noticed nor been bothered. Erasmo Brascha, the Milanese ambassador in Flanders, reported a conversation in which Richard told him that ‘Ireland had held him for its lord before he went to France’. The remark seemed utterly casual and confident, as well as embellished, since Ireland had done no such thing. Brascha relayed it straightforwardly, feeling no urge to question whether this young man was really so exalted. He took him for a prince as, by now, he was.
Margaret’s next necessity was to seek out new sponsors for him. Richard’s letter to Isabella claimed that by this stage, late August of 1493, ‘envoys offering friendship and confederation’ had come to him from Denmark and Scotland, and that ‘great nobles of England’, banished by Henry, were also seeking him out. But the most vital man to persuade was Maximilian, King of the Romans: not only Margaret’s lord and her stepson-in-law, but potentially the most powerful ruler in Europe. That very month Maximilian’s father, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, had been suddenly carried off by a surfeit of ripe melons and cold water; and the whole sprawling territory of the Habsburg empire, stretching from the North Sea to the Dolomites to the borders of Hungary, had fallen at last to his son’s charge.
Maximilian was thirty-three, getting into middle age: magnificently athletic, intellectually omnivorous, aquiline, jut-jawed, and distracted by ambitions as various as the lands he ruled over. From well before his father’s death, he had been deeply embroiled in trying to consolidate the interests of the Empire. In particular, he wavered between mending fences with France and fighting to regain the territories on his western border, a land-claim going back to Charlemagne. In 1490 he had opted for peace of a sort, concluding a treaty of marriage between his little daughter Margaret and Charles VIII; but within a year Charles had broken that treaty and sent Margaret home. Maximilian did not forget the humiliation. Worse was to come, for in November 1492 Henry VII, a possible and intermittent friend, suddenly made peace with Charles. The treaty left the King of the Romans, as one Prussian merchant put it, ‘sitting between two chairs’. Maximilian, incensed at this betrayal, now began to look for ways to take revenge on Henry. As it happened, Margaret had just the instrument he needed: a young man whose hopes had also been dashed by the Treaty of Etaples. As long as Maximilian had been toying with an English alliance, she had hesitated perhaps to push her White Rose forward. Now she could.
In November 1493, therefore, it was arranged that Richard should go to Frederick III’s funeral in Vienna. (The old emperor’s body, brought slowly down the Danube from Linz on a funerary barge ablaze with lights, had lain for fifteen weeks in the cathedral while his far-flung subjects made their way towards him.) Richard went with Duke Albrecht of Saxony, Maximilian’s uncle, and Albrecht’s son Duke Henry. Already, however, he appeared to have little need of chaperoning. On the evening of November 6th, a Tyrolese official called Ludwig Klingkhamer caught sight of him as he came into Vienna. The grand entourage was travelling in three carriages, presumably one each, containing also their luggage and changes of clothes. With at least four horses to each carriage and thirty mounted attendants to each lord, this made a considerable procession. Klingkhamer thought the young man with Albrecht and Henry was ‘a king from England’ – indeed, he thought he was Margaret of Burgundy’s ‘own brother’, or Edward IV himself.
The party had to wait a while for Maximilian, who had business to finish against the Turks; but on the Wednesday after St Katherine’s Day, November 25th, he received Richard in audience. Into his reception hall, crowded with princes and ambassadors (as an officer reported back to Nuremberg) came ‘a young lord’
who claims to be the rightful next natural heir to the kingdom of England. He had Bruno, his spokesman [Ludovico Bruno, Maximilian’s Latin secretary], make a formal speech in Latin, an oratio, as the learned men would say: how he was deprived of his kingdom by the pretended King of England who currently ruled there, and how they were unjustly keeping it from him by force, although it was his by right and nature. For this reason he was desperately unhappy, and by t
elling his story he was begging [Maximilian] for his gracious advice, help and support, that he might not be utterly abandoned. In the same manner he asked the princes and the ambassadors to support his request before His Majesty with their prayers.
The chancellor, Dr Konrad Sturtzel, answered him in Latin on His Royal Majesty’s behalf and with the advice of the princes and ambassadors. His Imperial Majesty was delighted to see in person the prince who had just been announced and glad that he had arrived in good health. And he was very sorry for the adversity he had met, or might meet. But as the matter was so important and so serious, His Royal Majesty wanted to think it over, take advice, and then give an answer. And if [the prince] found any shortcomings in his lodgings, anything that was not arranged to his pleasure, His Majesty would give orders that it should be put right.
They exchanged these speeches and then took leave of each other.
Ten days later, on St Nicholas’s Day, December 6th, the visitors converged for Frederick’s funeral. The setting was the Stefankirche in Vienna, in which, Molinet reported, 8,412 Masses had already been said for the emperor in the weeks when his body had lain there. The atmosphere in the cathedral was so thick with incense and candle-smoke that it was difficult to breathe, and the open sobbing of mourners added to the heaviness of the air. It was late in the day, and the background gloom of the Stefankirche was reinforced by black drapes that fell from the vaulting to the floor. Almost 800 candles, each of them repelling a demon from the corpse and lighting the way for Frederick’s soul, burned in sconces on the columns and the walls.
A wooden chapel, built for the occasion, stood in the centre of the church with 346 candles blazing around it. Inside was the emperor’s coffin, covered with white damask and then with black silk embroidered with a great cross of gold. Laid out on the coffin were the symbols of Frederick’s power: his sword, his sceptre, the imperial crown, the golden orb. The Herald of the Empire, in a surcoat of cloth-of-gold, stood before it, and around it were forty-eight monks in black hooded capes, heads bowed, with flaming torches in their hands.