by Ann Wroe
One more document remained for the king-to-be to sign. This one was drawn up partly on his own behalf, as a last will and testament before his invasion of England, and partly on behalf of Maximilian, who also had claims to pursue. The King of the Romans had insisted for some time that he had a claim to England, as Charles the Bold did, through Isabella of Portugal, his first wife’s grandmother. At Malines on January 24th 1495 a portentous document was therefore drawn up in the name of Richard, King of England and France, Duke of York, Lord of Ireland and Prince of Wales, granting England to Maximilian, his son Philip and their heirs, if Richard should die without legitimate male issue.
This extraordinary statement had been at least ten weeks in the making, with the first draft sketched out at Vilvoorde, near Brussels, on November 9th. The final version opened with the royal ‘We’, Nos, trailing huge curlicues down the margin and about to sprout with leaves. Next, his claim: ‘It is incontestable that the dominions of our late Lord and Father Edward, King of England and France, Duke of York [a slip; he had not been], Lord of Ireland and Prince of Wales, have devolved on us by virtue of our legitimate right.’ This was his inheritance. Those who occupied it at present – for some reason, they were plural – were ‘iniquitous usurpers’.
After this came laborious expressions of respect for Maximilian, confidence in his virtues, careful reflection on his own part ‘bearing in mind the value of this transfer’, and assurances that although he might be thought under age (seeming again to be unsure precisely what that was, but hovering around twenty), this was a spontaneous, not a forced, donation. The imperial secretary had ended his text with a colon and a quick curving line, indicating where Richard should sign; and in his usual neat hand, now fluid and confident, he did so, Rychard d’engleterre manu propria.
The French formulation was presumably for Margaret’s and Philip’s benefit; the second document he signed in Latin, Richardus Angliae rex. man. prop. This may have been the first time he had signed himself ‘King of England’. Manu propria was the proper style for business or formal letters signed by kings. Richard’s propria sailed out into the margin, beyond the ruled pencil line that kept the text contained, and there had obviously been a pause, betrayed by the slightly higher placing of the word, while he wondered whether or not to cross it. The pause, one assumes, was not about propria itself, and the question of whose ‘own hand’ this was.
Underneath his signature Richard drew a monogram, as kings did. Twice he took the pen down, then up, making loops, before he finally made a horizontal stroke through the whole thing, looped it, and finished with twirls until his ink ran out. The first downstroke wavered a little, betraying uncertainty about the pattern he was to make, for it is likely that he had never drawn one before. Monograms could not be done quickly. They had to be the same each time, as Henry made sure his were always the same: tiny emblems of the steadiness of kingship.
The usual signs and tokens accompanied this transfer of England to Maximilian. It was done in Margaret’s oratory in the palace at Malines, with the Holy Scriptures laid open for Richard to touch and kiss before four witnesses. The document acknowledged that this had been done. On a separate slip of paper two inches wide, fed through slits in the document, red wax was puddled with a candle to take the impression of his seal.
The second-ranking witness, watching as her White Rose drew his king’s monogram first on Maximilian’s copy, then on Philip’s, was Margaret herself. The moment could be judged a triumph for her. Her prince and Maximilian had combined their interests, and, at least on paper, the throne of England had come considerably closer. Yet there was still a sharp distinction between the settled and confident authority of Maximilian and Philip and the nebulous ‘powers’ that Richard was transferring to them, ‘with all the rights attached to any title, whatever it may be, and whatever rights may be added to them in the future’. The deed itself was described as a donatio, cessio, translatio sive quocunque nomine conspexi possit, ‘a donation, handing-over, transfer, or by whatever name it can be described’. No document of such terrifying vagueness could have issued from an English chancery. Nonetheless, Richard had recited it aloud, or read out the vital parts of it, in the full character of a king. Besides the clothes, the jewels, the attendants, the deportment, he had now taken on – for himself or for others – a king’s cares: enemies, dynastic solicitude, the necessity of fighting, and the risk of failing.
4
Fortune’s smile
Around 1494, when Richard Plantagenet was travelling back with Maximilian through Austria and Germany, Albrecht Dürer drew the goddess Fortuna with a sprig of sea holly in her hand. Dürer was twenty-three, three years or so older than Richard. He drew Fortuna often in those years in the landscape Richard now knew: naked or dressed like a rich burgher’s wife, her head bandaged or her hands full of horse-harness, strolling past steep-roofed houses or looming in the clouds with the peaks and woods of the Tyrol spread out far beneath her. His ‘Little Fortune’ of 1494 was a particularly disturbing figure. She was naked, round-shouldered, heavily pregnant, and trying to keep her balance on the little globe under her feet. She also seemed blind, holding out the sea holly (which symbolised luck in love) like a weapon whose leaves could cut and draw blood.
Fortune would have been on Richard’s mind as much as she was on Dürer’s. Those who claimed to be kings were well aware of Fortune’s keen interest in them, as she turned with a wink and a kick the great wooden wheel on which they rose and fell. The going up was easy: they scrambled on eagerly, naked and bareheaded, gradually acquiring robes, crowns and sceptres as Richard was starting to acquire them. At the top of the turn they sat for one giddy moment, enthroned. But asses’ ears were already sprouting on their heads, pushing off the crowns, and they tumbled down as full-scale donkeys, bare-arsed and braying. Fortune, impassive, kept turning. As the wheel’s rim touched the earth, more would-be kings climbed on.
She danced with men, too. A powerful verse from a poem attributed to Skelton described how Fortune had lured Edward IV into the whirling, senseless round with her. To do so was not difficult. At the Christmas and New Year disguisings she could easily have taken the floor with him, elaborately masked and in the bright deceiving clothes in which it was impossible to tell one woman, or one man, from another. Edward, like Henry VII after him, loved these games of extravagant concealment. In Skelton’s poem, Fortune sniffed her perfume ball, tossed it in the corner and drew Edward on:
She took me by the hand and led me a dance,
And with her sugared lips on me she smiled;
But, what for her dissembled countenance,
I could not beware til I was beguiled . . .
Richard Plantagenet’s Fortune was cruel and alluring in just these ways. In his formal transfer of England to Maximilian in 1495 he described (not in his own words, but solemnly reciting in Latin, one hand on the Scriptures) how men reeled under her blows. ‘Exposed to her attacks’, ‘up against a blind opposition’, all they – and especially he – could do was have faith that Divine Providence would eventually ‘brush aside these blunders’. In Bacon’s version of one of Richard’s speeches, collated from much that he actually wrote, he described himself as ‘tossed from misery to misery and from place to place’, like Fortune’s tennis ball.
But he was also aware, as young men were renowned to be, of Fortune’s importuning and seductive side. He was reported to have said much later, at the moment when he gave himself up, that for two years he had longed to escape from his troubles, ‘but Fortune had not allowed him’. To those who wondered why he kept going, when going on made no sense, this was his answer. The girl with sugared lips had drawn him, amorously and imperiously, into her great deceiving dance.
Henry VII’s attitude to Fortune was different. He too had been her plaything to much the same degree: exiled to Brittany, forced at one point to flee through the woods in disguise, battered by storms on his first attempt to land in England. Yet since 1485 she had been kinder
to him. He could attribute to her steady favour (as well as to the Virgin, who always heard his prayers) his landing at Milford Haven, his victory at Bosworth, his marriage, the birth of Arthur, his victory at Stoke. Although Fortune could never be depended on and could be forestalled only by patient planning – such as doing his most vital business on Saturdays, his lucky day – Henry did not seem to feel he was her victim, as his rival did. He was always on the watch for her, one envoy said, and he often challenged her, energised more than dismayed by the risk of fighting. The names of the royal ships he built for the 1497 campaign, sparked by Scotland’s support for the feigned boy, were the Mary Fortune and the Sweepstake. Astrologers, whom he consulted regularly, seemed to keep him ahead of most of the hazards that lay in wait for him.
Henry was also a devoted gambler, betting – and often losing – large sums at cards, dice, tennis and shooting at the butts. His love of tennis was unsurprising, for it was seen as a game that enabled a man to win against Fortune by sheer dexterity, strength and talent. If Richard saw himself as the hapless ball, Henry was a player, skilfully engaged. An Italian treatise on ‘the Ball Game’ exhorted players to think of the court, closed in on all sides by walls and barriers, as ‘nothing more or less than this troublesome world’:
But we should be calm and tense, not expose ourselves too much, not be too daring or too timid, have our eyes and hands alert for defence, and, when the blows come, overhand, back-hand, open-hand, at the volley, at the bounce or at the half-volley, endeavour cautiously to return them as soon and as best we can, so that the adverse blows of Fortune do not strike us.
Whole afternoons were spent in the long grass alleys at Sheen and Windsor, ratcheting the bucking crossbow or batting leather balls, with the flat of the hand, into the hazard or the chase. Whole nights, too, were spent at a table with tricks, trumps, sleight of hand, and close advisers who would lend him money. The card games of the time proclaimed their danger in their names: Flux, Plunder, Pillage, Triumph, Condemnation, Honours, Cuckoldry, Torment, Who Wins Loses. For those tired of cards, there was a game called Totum Nihil (All or Nothing), played with a four-sided disc that was spun like a top. On the night before the surrender in person of the lad who called himself Plantagenet – the night when, as Raimondo Soncino put it, Henry had at last made himself ‘perfectly secure against Fortune’ – he wagered, and lost, the biggest sum he had ever risked at cards.
Yet no one was secure, least of all a king. Human life was a progress through ambushes and shadows, across ground made ‘slippery and lubric’ by the goddess herself, and disaster could not always be prevented. The warnings were hard to read. In 1497, the year the mawmet from Flanders made his most determined attempt on England, Londoners were alerted to trouble of some sort by a mysterious ‘Spanish’ sickness and, at St Neots, by a storm of hailstones as large as plates ‘which beat down the corn standing that it came never to good’. Strange weather – thunder in the small hours of the night in December 1500, a great night wind in June the next year – was always ‘wonderful’ to the London chronicler, a matter for awe and speculation. Molinet, Dürer and Maximilian all noted, with a mixture of fascination and fear, the swarm of little crosses that appeared at Liège in 1501, in houses and churches and on the clothes of women, ‘really strongly imprinted, and not with the least artifice, as they would be if portrait painters had done them’. Molinet could not decide whether the crosses were feints ou saints, approuvées ou reprouvées, veritables ou variables, but waited for some disaster to occur. Maximilian, in his magpie way, collected the cross-imprinted kerchiefs and aprons and deduced that they meant war against the Turks.
The sky seethed with doubtful signs as the wind blew and, at night, stars moved. In 1472, the year of Richard of York’s generation, a comet was sighted that lasted for almost two months. It changed constantly, at first shining with a long white flame of fire, then dwindling to the size of a hazel-stick, then quenched-out and dark. The chroniclers did not try to guess what it meant. The next year, Richard’s birth-year, saw aches, fevers and bloody flux, cutting men down as they worked in the harvest fields. A little stream near St Albans called the Womere, or Woe-water, surged high and flooded, as did others at Lewisham and Croydon, and a headless man called out ‘Woes! Woes!’ between Banbury and Leicester. This meant dearth, pestilence or battle, depending on how troubled the water was and how long the man was heard crying. Since no one was quite sure, it was safest to take these as warnings ‘for amending of men’s living’: to repent, and avoid sin in future, in case calamity sprang suddenly from the water or the air.
England by then had been through four decades of political upheaval. Things had quietened down, and in fact all through the struggles between York and Lancaster the violence had been localised, doing little to deter the self-improvement of gentry and tradesmen. Commines thought the wars had been remarkable for leaving England so undamaged. Yet nervousness persisted just below the surface. Deep into the ostensibly peaceful reign of Edward IV, the world was still sometimes ‘right queasy’ and ‘all quavering’ to the comfortable Paston family, landowners in East Anglia. There was no knowing where it might ‘boil over next’.
Henry’s main objective, when he became king in 1485, was to establish a sense of continuity and tranquillity through settled rule. But his arrival did little at first to settle stomachs, since he came accompanied by an illness, the sweating sickness, that no one had seen before. This distemper was not seated in the veins or the humours, but sent a malign vapour directly to the heart. The treatments that seemed most obvious – cool air, cold water – often killed the victims. Although the outbreak disappeared as quickly as it had come, people were left wondering what it meant. Perhaps the king would sweat and struggle too, or the whole kingdom would.
In the decade since, Henry had governed with remarkable care and circumspection. Self-sufficient as he was, and suspicious of the motives of others, he gathered power mostly to himself and to a circle of intimates who were often self-made men. His favoured institutions were his own council and special tribunals under his control, such as the court of Star Chamber, to which even the most powerful magnates could be summoned without fear of defiance. The great houses of England, weakened by decades of fighting and often now headed by minors, could in any case be largely bypassed or ignored. Repeatedly, in the hope that the lesson would be remembered, Henry’s statutes stressed that his subjects owed loyalty first to him, rather than to any local lord. They also emphasised honest dealing, a necessary restoration of trust. In 1493, a law was passed against idlers and malingering beggars; in later years Henry issued a strong new coinage, including a pound-sterling coin with his face in profile, and standardised weights and measures stamped with his name and his arms.
In all these ways, elements of disruption and uncertainty were removed from English life. Yet Henry’s subjects, while appreciating this, had not yet taken to him by the mid-1490s. Though often affable, with a love of music and a keen eye for pretty women, he did not have Edward IV’s common touch, and displayed an anxiety for amassing money that coarsened to sheer greed as he grew older. He had still not managed to outlaw the dangerous bands of fighting men retained by local lords, largely because he needed them for his own armies. His skill at keeping England out of foreign wars was acknowledged, but England itself was not yet resigned to the new dynasty that Henry represented. The pretenders that dogged him, though he scorned them as foolish children, consumed much of his attention and his energy; and all through his reign, the queasiness lingered. Around 1503, a group of his officers in Calais seemed by no means sure that Henry’s son would succeed him. It depended, said several, on ‘how the world turned’.
The king’s insecurity, like other people’s, was constantly fanned by rumour. People despised ‘flying tales’ yet nonetheless repeated them, and almost every important story arrived in fragments of steadily hardening speculation. In 1456 came a rumour that Lord Beaumont was slain, ‘and my Lord of Warwick sore hurt, 1,000 m
en slain, and six score knights and squires hurt; and nothing true, blessed be God’. When Katherine of Aragon landed in England in 1501 the news was hailed as ‘tidings of certainty . . . albeit that many times fleeting rumours ran that she was landed sundry times before’. By contrast, several months elapsed before certain news of Richard III’s death at Bosworth reached the court of France.
Accurate reports were further hampered by bad roads and heavy seas. When Henry VII travelled, he needed guides to help him in the trackless countryside round Guildford and Bath; road-clearers went ahead of the royal convoy, together with scouts who checked for signs of plague. In 1497, important letters sent by Ferdinand and Isabella were lost at sea, and others that survive from near that date are heavily stained with seawater. (‘None of the other letters you mention in your last have arrived. Please always send duplicates.’ ‘Don’t send the treaty by land courier. The roads are insecure.’ ‘Sent the dispatches to Flanders, but they were probably forwarded in the ships that were driven to Ireland by bad weather.’) Whenever Richard Plantagenet changed his bolt-hole it was weeks, sometimes months, before the crowned heads of Europe could find out where he was. Even Henry lost track of him occasionally. He paid £5. 0s. 10d. in the autumn of 1495 for ‘letters about rumours’ of his whereabouts, a hefty sum for unsubstantiated news.
Henry had a sharp suspicion of flying tales. He was known to be ‘hard of credence’ and slow to move; Soncino said he was ‘cautious, and reflects deeply all his proceedings’. He would not allow himself to be disturbed by news that lacked confirmation, but would send his servants to check that the rumour was true. ‘If ye knew King Harry our master as I do,’ said Sir Hugh Conway, speaking in Calais around 1503, ‘ye would be wary how that ye brake to him in any such matters, for he would take it to be said but of envy, ill will and malice.’ Henry also insisted on knowing the names of informants, to test their motivation. Only then, when he felt as assured against lies and surprise as he could be, did he take action.