by Ann Wroe
Edward had claimed the throne de facto in 1461 – his predecessor, Henry VI, being both in custody and judged incapable – by seating himself on the marble chair in Westminster Hall. He claimed it also de jure, calling his father Richard, Duke of York, ‘king in right of the realm of England’. Having inherited the kingdom like a piece of property, as his father’s ‘vray and just heir’, his title was then assured by the lords in council and by the acclamation of the people as he sat on the King’s Bench in the royal cap and robe, with the sceptre in his hand. He later claimed it again from the throne in Westminster Abbey, with St Edward’s crown on his head, while the congregation saluted him as just, legitimate and true. On the two days following, he kept wearing the crown so that people should see him and know that it was his. As he wore it at St Paul’s on the second day, a representation of an angel descended and censed him: God’s power directly flowing from Heaven to the House of York.
Yet the Yorkist claim was shaky. It not only passed through women, but lacked the recent continuity of the Lancastrians in Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI. Edward had won his crown in 1461 only by removing that last Henry, the reigning monarch, from the throne that was his. In 1470, under the threat of a Lancastrian restoration engineered by the Earl of Warwick, Edward himself had been forced to flee the country. Charles the Bold, who sheltered him, signed a statement in 1471 – when Edward was barely out of the door – declaring himself heir through his mother, Isabella of Portugal, to all the possessions of Henry VI, and promising to make good his claim as soon as possible. In 1475 he remarked to a Milanese ambassador that ‘Edward was afraid of him, in fact hated him, on account of his claim to the English crown’. His own title, Charles bragged, was much better than Edward’s. There was an argument in this, as well as a reminder of the others who waited if Edward stumbled.
After his victory at Barnet in 1471, Edward gave out that his title now rested on reason, the authority of Parliament, and his triumphs on the battlefield. Yet in 1485, at Bosworth, that claim of victory in battle passed to Henry Tudor. God (who controlled the disposition of such things) had approved him, rather than the blood of Edward. Henry had had the Te Deum sung on the field of Bosworth and immediately afterwards, the sweat of battle still on him, had exercised his royal prerogative by knighting eleven of his followers. Richard’s battle coronet, plucked in legend from a hawthorn bush, became one of his devices, with the branches growing through it to become his own dynastic flowers. His victory at Stoke two years later showed God’s continued blessing of his rule, and the battle-standards he had carried then were dedicated in thanks to Our Lady at Walsingham. The image of himself he ordered for his tomb was ‘in manner of an armed man’, of wood plated with fine gold, in full armour, sword and spurs, ‘holding between his hands the Crown which it pleased God to give us, with the victory of our Enemy at our first field’.
Sanctified victories apart, Henry’s title was considerably weaker than that of the pageant-king across the Channel, if the pageant-king’s claim was true. His descent, after all, was by illegitimate line from John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward III. To England’s crown, as Richard III put it, ‘he hath no manner of interest, right, title or colour, as every man well knoweth; for he is descended of bastard blood, both of father’s side, and of mother’s side’. Although the Beauforts, who made up much of this bastard blood, had been legitimised, doubts remained as to whether or not they were banned from holding the crown. Only the result of one battle, not particularly noticed outside England, proved to anyone that Henry should have been king.
He himself acknowledged the weakness of his claim by bolstering it from other quarters. In December 1491, just after he had heard of the surfacing of Edward’s son in Ireland, Henry wrote the pope a letter that begged him ‘firmly to support our rights and claims, and not to give ear to the fictitious complaints and accusations of our enemies’. If popes could not help him, legends might. He claimed a mist-shrouded pedigree from Cadwallader, the last British prince to have hegemony over Britain (‘Saint Cadwallader’, in André’s estimation), and kept his red fire-breathing dragon as one of his devices. At the banquet that followed his coronation, the king’s champion rode into Westminster Hall – a riot of red roses, dragons and green-and-white Tudor fringes – on a horse entirely caparisoned with Cadwallader’s arms. In that same pedigree, Henry’s kingly title was traced back as far as the Trojan Brutus, who was said to have ruled over Britain in the Dark Ages. His propaganda claimed that even his enemies were forced to acknowledge it. André’s Margaret, stiffening the spine of her beloved nephew in Malines, sneered at Henry’s line as ‘that Trojan blood’.
The king’s ancestry then passed through Arthur. Henry, to double-prove the point, had named his eldest son after him and had especially engineered his birth to take place at Winchester, the alleged site of Camelot, where the real Round Table hung on the cathedral wall. One of Henry’s greyhounds was called Lancelot; his favourite oath, ‘By the faith of my heart’, uttered with both hands pressed to the breast, was Lancelot’s favourite also; in court poetry and pageant he ruled over ‘Britain’, Arthur’s country. Keen attention was paid to the prophecies of Merlin that the true heir of the Celtic kings would come from Wales, as Henry had done, to rescue England from the tyrant. Welsh harpers and rhymers were paid for the genealogical comfort they gave him.
Yet Arthur had been chosen king merely ‘by adventure and by grace’. More solid and more contemporary proofs were needed too. As often as he could, Henry associated himself with Henry VI, his father’s half-brother, whose sanctity was attested since his death by miracles, and who was said to have picked the young Henry out as a ‘lad’ destined for greatness. Most vitally, he had married Elizabeth of York, thus yoking to himself the title of her house as well as Lancaster. He was adamant, however, that his claim did not reside in his wife, and made sure that Parliament recognised his own title, entailed upon ‘his most royal person’, before it incorporated hers. The reason for this, Bacon thought, was that he knew her claim might not stand because her brothers, or one of them, might have been saved and alive.
Two more devices were used to reinforce his claim. One was to date his reign from the day before Bosworth, in order to turn his opponents that day into traitors against their king. His rewards to those who had served him in the battle talked of ‘the recovery of our realm of England’, as if he was merely taking back what was his. The second device was to obtain from the pope in March 1486 a bull of anathema and excommunication against all rebels, present or potential. This was powerful medicine, as Henry told the pope the next year. A man called John Swit had mocked the papal bull, asking aloud, ‘What signify the censures of Church or Pontiff? Don’t you see they have no force?’ ‘When he pronounced these words,’ wrote Henry, exulting in the story, ‘he fell dead upon the ground, and his face and body immediately became blacker than soot itself, and shortly afterwards the corpse emitted such a stench that no one could come near it. This really happened, Most Blessed Father, and if we hadn’t been certain of it we wouldn’t have written to you.’ There could be no clearer sign of God’s approval of Henry and his censure of those who threatened him. And yet, despite it all, Henry could not disguise that he had come to England as an adventurer and usurper.
In October 1494, as Richard Plantagenet in Antwerp paraded his murrey-and-blue halbadiers, played with his seals and handed out his insulting silver groats, Henry organised his most direct riposte to him. He created his own little Duke of York in his son Henry, then aged three. Young Henry’s titles included Earl Marshal and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; his colours were blue and tawny (close enough), his badge the white rose as well as the red. The four challengers in the ‘jousts of peace’ that followed wore cognisances of the queen’s livery, murrey and blue, on their helmets. At Henry’s institution his father went crowned, wore his state robes and stood under his Cloth of Estate in the Parliament chamber, sparkling and utterly royal, to receive the obedience of his new knights.
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Margaret’s White Rose could not compete with this. But he still had his claim to argue. He had no fear of bastardy now, since Richard III’s act against Edward’s sons had been reversed by Henry himself. Papal anathemas burdened him, but the pure right of his title meant that he could not possibly be struck to the ground, scorched and twitching, as John Swit had been. A dispossessed king could not be a rebel. His route de jure was clear, obstructed only by ‘Henry’, or ‘Henry Tydder’ (deliberately made title-less, like a peasant), ‘who illicitly occupies England’.
When Margaret and Maximilian wrote letters to the pope on Richard’s behalf, they made no argument for him other than the right of blood. Margaret’s letter, written by her lawyer on May 8th 1495, was a passionate statement that the pope had been deceived in his acceptance of Henry’s arguments, especially the request for excommunication. Rightful heirs, the letter ran, should be allowed to hold their kingdoms in peace; if ‘tyrants without sufficient title . . . sprung from adulterous embraces’ usurped them, nothing should prevent the true heirs recovering their right. Though Henry, by marrying Elizabeth, was trying to secure the succession of his children, ‘the most illustrious lord Richard’ had the only legitimate claim. It went ‘against the necessity of nature’ if his subjects, his friends and especially Margaret could not intervene to restore him. To recover his throne was ‘an act of piety’, both in himself and in others. Margaret’s lawyer made this appeal ‘on behalf of my most illustrious lady, the most illustrious lord Richard, the whole House of York, those adhering to him and those who will do so, those who follow him, his dependants and those who will be drawn into connection with him . . .’ This was almost becoming a claim by acclamation.
Yet Richard’s arguments were still made by others rather than himself. It was not he who wrote to the pope advertising the justice of his cause, but his two chief sponsors. His letter to Isabella was much thinner on the subject of his legitimacy than Margaret’s was. She apparently also wrote several times to John Morton, the Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, to tell him that her protégé was King Edward’s son. (‘But truly he is not reputed the son of King Edward in this country,’ Morton said he replied to her, with an old man’s dryness.) It does not appear that her White Rose ever wrote to Morton himself. The churchman, then in his mid-eighties, had been Edward IV’s Master of the Rolls and had been promoted by him; but he was now extremely close to Henry, too close for Richard to dare a direct approach.
Without Margaret physically behind him, his statement of his claim always seemed more timorous. His proclamation of September 1496, when, as Richard IV, he finally invaded England, reduced his case to mere phrases here and there. Henry Tudor had seized the crown ‘unto us of Right appertaining’, and had then tried to divert Richard’s subjects from ‘the duty of their allegiance’; but Richard, once restored, would re-establish the laws of ‘our noble progenitors, Kings of England’. These were not byzantine lawyers’ arguments, but simply right speaking: ‘right and nature’, as he had told Maximilian.
And right could be used. Now that Margaret had her claimant, she could make him work for her in more selfish ways. She had her own claims to pursue, and could extract from her White Rose promises to restore her to her proper rank in England. Her chief worry, one that did not cease to agitate her, was that Edward IV had never finished paying her dowry: 81,666 gold écus, almost half, was still owing. After Charles’s death, she could not claim several of her Burgundian territories until the dowry was paid in full. Importuning letters to Edward got her nowhere; he appeared not to care that she was ‘one of the poorest widows, deserted by everyone, especially by you’, or that the King of France ‘does his best to reduce me to a state of beggary for the rest of my days’.
Margaret had claims too to Hunsdon, a fine manor house in Hertfordshire of which she was particularly fond, and unexploited rights to ship 860 half-sacks of wool a year into the Low Countries and ‘through the straits of Morocco’, the standard term for unrestricted trade. On top of this, she was owed for money paid to Lord Lovell and the Earl of Lincoln for promoting the Simnel rebellion. Her king, once seated in Westminster Hall or crowned in the Abbey, the angel censing him, could give back everything; he could make her a powerful English princess again, in exchange for everything she had made him.
The deeds in which he promised to do so were drawn up in December 1494, in Antwerp, not long before the planned invasion of England, which had been set for February. They filled six protocols. The final instruments themselves do not survive, but the notary’s drafts do. They were jotted down in French, presumably the language of the discussion that produced them, and show how exhaustively the promises were teased out and rewritten until Margaret was satisfied with them. They are also a picture, one of few we have, of sponsor and protégé working together, two years after he had been taken publicly under her wing in Malines.
It seems that his statement of his claims was still being refined. He was Duke of York, not king, and each form of words for his relationship to Edward was slightly different. At the beginning of the first document, the words vray heretier et successeur du royaume d’engleterre, ‘true heir and successor of the realm of England’, were squeezed in as an afterthought in the margin. In the sixth deed, the word vray, true, was missed out and had to be inserted. The sense that he would mark the beginning of a dynasty that would endure was still cloudy: in several of the deeds, the words ‘and our heirs’ or ‘and their property to come’ were inserted as an afterthought to bolster his personal obligations. There was, however, a reference at Margaret’s dictation to the Yorkist effort that had preceded his. The purpose of the 1487 rebellion had been ‘to recover the kingdom of England for our line’ and ‘to kick Henry out of it’. The perpetrators (as the Antwerp notary, a Fleming, misheard them) had been ‘the lords of Lincol and Louvet, our cousins’, but they were clearly not meant to be its prime beneficiaries. Their effort was part of a continuum that was reaching its apex with his own plans.
The smoothest parts of these documents were those that dealt with the relationship between Richard and his ‘very dear and well beloved lady’, Aunt Margaret. No deletions or amendments were needed to Margaret’s ‘great love’ and ‘perfect kindness’, nor to his own gratitude: ‘We have no doubt that, if it is the pleasure and permission of God that we may see our kingdom again, it will be through the good favour, help and diligence of her and her good friends, for which we do not know how to thank her enough.’ As a rather peculiar act of gratitude, he made her a present of the castle and town of Scarborough on the bracing coast of Yorkshire, a town that Richard III had particularly liked and visited, and whose liberties he had extended.
There was no doubt who was the moving force behind these deeds, despite Richard’s assertion of ‘our free will and desire, without constraint’. Margaret’s determined sense of wrong shone through them, as in the insertion made after her statement of her wool-shipping rights: ‘from which she has profited not at all, or hardly’. Richard was getting the deeds notarised ‘as it pleases our aunt’, and was committing himself to these obligations as she and her council would advise for the best, ‘without deception’. He promised to restore her rights or pay her money ‘at her will and pleasure’, not his own, and bound himself by papal censures to do as she requested. In the case of the dowry, about which she cared so deeply, he divested himself of any legal recourse if he failed to pay. At one point, a wordy phrase describing when he would restore her rights, once he was king, was replaced with the single word ‘immediately’. This was exactly the tone of Margaret’s letters to her officers: ‘Don’t fail’, ‘No later than the end of this week’, ‘No more excuses’.
The last deed of all was more personal. Richard spoke less as a king-to-be than as a nephew, acknowledging a private debt to Margaret of 8,000 gold écus for supporting and equipping him for his invasion of England. At almost every point, he – or Margaret – used the first person singular, which was then corrected to the royal first
person plural. The etiquette of kingship, like his title, looked unsettled, as if he, or she, could not yet put that social distance between them. Perhaps they could not.
We, Richard, Duke of York, legitimate son of the late Edward of happy memory, last of that name King of England, and true heir and successor to the Kingdom and Crown of England, Recognise and confess by these presents a duty and loyal obligation to my very dear and well-beloved Aunt Madame Margaret of England, Duchess of Burgundy, blood-sister of my said late lord and father, in the sum of 8,000 gold écus of the coin and mint of the King of France, above and beyond the other sums of money that We [‘I’ deleted] owe her and for which sums We are [‘I am’ deleted] obligated to her in previous instruments, the which sum of 8,000 gold écus aforesaid is not included in these preceding obligations, but arises as much from money lent and money spent by her for Us [‘me’] and our [‘my’] affairs, as from responses and obligations she has entered into in her own name on our [‘my’] account towards certain persons and for certain particular business of ours [‘mine’], of which we do not wish to make further declaration here, and We are well pleased and satisfied with it all.
When all the rewriting was done, and the deeds redacted, ‘the most Illustrious Lord Duke’ signed them and sealed them. The chief witness was Robert Clifford, who had also been chief witness to the shape of Plantagenet’s body and the features of his face.