by Ann Wroe
The most worrying rumour of all took no time at all to cross the sea. The story that Richard of York was alive leaped out of France and Flanders into England, ‘blazing and thundering over’, in Bacon’s words. Reports arrived from travelling Yorkists and in letters written directly by Richard or his sponsors, asking for help. From the spring of 1493 these were being received in London; gradually, they spread to the furthest reaches of England. Conspiracies blossomed after them, Vergil wrote, like the leafing and flowering trees.
Each man who received the news (no women are specifically known to have done) had to decide on his answer. First of all, he had to determine whether to believe this flying tale, or leave it well alone. The whole of England, Vergil said, was split into rival parties by the news of the resurrected Richard, with every man poised between hope and fear, profit and peril. Some, who had lost their jobs or offices with the new regime or had suffered an uncomfortable change of master, had little to lose by supporting the risen prince. Many were in a more difficult position. To believe this tale, and to act accordingly, would involve hazarding comfort, money, office, property and reputation: in short, everything. The reward for picking the winning card would be new power and preferment, with luck; the penalty for losing would be disgrace, attainder and death. Blind Fortuna, teetering on her globe, now rolled above their heads.
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Polydore Vergil found a mixture of motivations among the Englishmen who cast their lot with Richard. The most fervent, he claimed, were lost souls, perditissimi, sanctuary men and outlaws who were pushed by poverty or bribes to join him. Among the better class of his supporters, many were foolish dreamers and risk-takers. Some, royal officers and servants, believed that Henry had not adequately rewarded them. Certain people longed genuinely for the restoration of the House of York. Others simply wanted excitement, novelty and change. So said Vergil; though it is hard to believe that many in the England of the mid-1490s truly wanted that.
His description, as cutting as one would expect from Henry’s historian, was nevertheless largely true. From the start, the English conspiracies in favour of Richard Plantagenet had no focus save, vaguely, him. No one man organised them. They grew organically, on a small scale, in different corners of England, nudged along sometimes by local knights but more often – especially in London – by freeholders, minor royal officers, priests or schoolmasters. The cells began, and remained, as largely unconnected groups of the like-minded. Many of those involved have no known history beyond their indictments for treason. They are merely names, united by little more than random, often foolhardy, acts and by a longing for the past. The story of these plots is a journey deep into the undergrowth of unconverted Yorkist England.
At the core of the conspiracy were people who had been at King Edward’s court. Their motivation was loyalty to the house and the regime, sometimes reinforced by land-ownership or marriage and now sharpened immeasurably by the shift of power, offices and land to the party of the red rose. In Richard’s intimate circle, Frion, Ward and Taylor the younger had all been Edward’s servants; Frion had probably been Margaret’s too, from well before the business of princes. Anthony de la Forsa was the son of a veteran diplomat, Bernard de la Forsa, who had done Edward’s negotiating with Spain; George Neville had been an esquire of the body to Richard III and had married the widow of Earl Rivers.
As early as February 1492 one of Edward’s yeomen, or attendants, of the chamber was hanged at Tyburn for treason, presumably an old servant spreading word of the resurrected prince. Richard Harliston had also been a yeoman of his chamber before becoming governor of Jersey. Later indictments mentioned Edward’s bow-maker; a servant of Richard’s sister Elizabeth of York; and William Daubeney, the clerk of Edward’s jewel house. James Tyrell, with his mysterious services for Richard III, was now employed out of the country; but Sir Thomas Tyrell, his first cousin, who had been a chamber-servant of both Edward IV and Richard III, fomented Yorkist plots at his house in Hampshire. He was also the nephew of Elizabeth d’Arcy, the long-serving mistress of the nursery for Edward IV and his queen. That was how close the connections went to the court and the little prince.
Up and down the country, other old Yorkist servants and receivers of Edward’s favour rallied to the cause. One web centred on south-west Suffolk. Sir Robert Chamberlain and Sir Gilbert Debenham, both knights of the body to King Edward, were landowners there from the Mowbrays, Anne’s family. For both these reasons, they extended their loyalty to Richard, Duke of York. Debenham had been pardoned for ‘treasons’ in March 1486, becoming a knight of Henry’s body and keeper of the Irish mines, but had clearly not reformed. Richard White, who had conspired with Chamberlain earlier but had escaped hanging, naturally joined the ‘new’ (or possibly old) conspiracy; two other Whites who joined, yeomen of Suffolk, may have been relations.
Far to the north another web was woven in the Cumbrian fells, where the Skeltons, who held lands by grant of Richard III, had been conspiring and rebelling ever since Henry had appeared. Edward Skelton, ‘gentleman’ of Carlisle, had joined the cause of Simnel, fought at Stoke and fled to the court of Burgundy. Once the new prince was in place, Skelton plied back and forth between Malines and England, helping to foment conspiracy. From Cumbria this northern web reached into Durham, where George, Lord Lumley (who had married one of Edward IV’s illegitimate daughters) plotted with, and won a pardon for, Rowland Robinson, the errand-boy between Richard and Margaret.
Yet another network centred on Calais, which was something of a nerve-centre between English Yorkists and Margaret’s court, as well as a bastion of spying. Out of Calais came Sir Thomas Thwaites, the treasurer of the English garrison by Henry’s appointment, and Sir Robert Radcliffe, the keeper of the gates. Thwaites had been Edward’s chancellor of the exchequer and, in 1475, his secretary of war. He was also one of the royal officers, in his jacket of murrey and blue embroidered with the white rose, who had escorted Margaret down to the sea by barge at the end of her visit to England in 1480.
One particular circle of conspiracy was inspired not only by loyalty to Edward but also by affection for Edward’s mother, Cecily, Duchess of York. Cecily still lived, now in her late seventies, in deeply devotional retreat at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. Several of the most fervent adherents of the new White Rose came from close by. Robert Clifford lived at Aspenden; his father-in-law, William Barley, lived at Albury, together with the Bramptons, Thomas and John. All these (the Bramptons being no relation to Duarte Brandão, but solid Englishmen) arrived at Malines together in June 1493. Thomas Brampton, like Thwaites, had attended Margaret in 1480 in his Yorkist livery. Barley, like Thomas Tyrell – whom Barley placed in charge of several of his manors while he was away on Richard’s business – had connections to the royal nurserymaids: women who, as Margaret said, would have known the prince without thinking.
The Berkhamsted influence spread further. A priest from Aspenden, Bernard Oldham, also went over to Malines. Robert Leybourne, the Dominican prior of King’s Langley, six miles from Berkhamsted, was condemned for his part in the conspiracy in 1495. Richard Lessy, dean of Cecily’s chapel and steward of her household, became a chief conspirator in England. In 1495, Cecily in her will (of which he was executor) assigned him money to pay whatever he owed the king in fines for his treason: ‘and if that [he] cannot recover such money as I have given to him . . . then I will he be recompensed of the revenues of my lands to the sum of 500 marks at the least’. No other debt so troubled her. When Lessy was bound to the king for his loyalty – put under surety and the threat of fine if he should misbehave – nine other esquires and gentlemen of Berkhamsted were named with him, four of them members of Cecily’s household. They may well have shared his sympathies.
Cecily’s will contained several other names close to, or connected with, the plots around her resurrected grandson. She left her carriage, horses and harness to Richard Boyville, who had been bound for his loyalty with Lessy and had served Margaret in Malines. She left her
best down-feather bed to Alexander Cressener, a relative; his son Thomas was later condemned for his part in the conspiracy. Another legatee, Anne Lounde, who received ‘a little buckle and a little pendant of gold . . . a little girdle of gold and silk . . . and a little round-bottomed basin of silver’, may have been related to William Lounde, the priest who became Richard’s chaplain and chancellor. The network centred on Cecily strongly suggests that Margaret, who wrote to kings, popes and cardinals on behalf of her White Rose, wrote of him to her mother too, stirring some quiet hope there.
A large number of conspirators were clergy, ‘sounder in body than in mind’, Vergil thought. They included the Dean of St Paul’s, William Worseley, a renowned doctor and preacher; the provincial of the Dominicans, William Richford, ‘outstanding in his knowledge of sacred literature’, according to Bernard André; the prior of the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, John Kendal; the pastor of St Stephen’s Walbrooke, Dr William Sutton, ‘a famous divine’, as well as an executor of Elizabeth Woodville’s will; and the Abbot of Abingdon, who had been involved in half-cocked Yorkist plots before. Priests had a particular grievance against Henry. Since 1489, ex-clerks or those without papers had been made subject to the ordinary criminal law for serious offences, and were being branded on the left hand with an ‘M’ for murder or a ‘T’ for theft, like laymen. This may have disposed them to support Henry’s rival, but their chief motivation seems to have been the usual one: old loyalties to York.
Since few indictments survive, it is often unclear what these conspirators did. André said that the big names, including the churchmen, sent money to Flanders or passed along cash given secretly by others: a clue that, as Henry feared, the ‘names’ were only the tip of the trouble. Of necessity, the conspirators moved with great care. Much of their communication was by secret signs and codes. A cryptic language of Yorkist conspiracy was already well established. Taylor the elder’s letter of 1491 mentioned unspecified words that had passed between the plotters ‘at the Black Friars, when ye were at your breakfast’, and ‘in Stokingham Park, when Sir John Halwell hunted therein’. They also used secret handshakes: ‘Sir, ye remember, that the token between you and me is, that such as I shall send unto you, shall take you by the thumb, as I did you, when ye and I went up out of the cloister into St Peter’s Church, and by that token ye should be assured of all things, and fear nothing.’ Later Yorkist secret tokens included silver-tipped laces, bent ducats, pairs of gloves and holy pictures, sent wordlessly between the conspirators. Letters to supporters were written in tiny characters, then folded so small that they could be hidden in the palm of a hand.
Most of the plotters in the early 1490s kept what was called ‘a foot in two shoes’, working for Richard Plantagenet but performing, without tremors, the offices that the king or their immediate masters expected of them. This was only prudent, for there was no knowing how solid the young man ‘beyond the sea’ would turn out to be. Nonetheless, letters came that had to be answered. Several of the attainders for conspiracy involved receiving messages from Richard and, worse, writing back.
In early February 1493 such a letter reached Sir Gilbert Debenham at his house in Westminster. On the 10th, Debenham and Sir Humphrey Savage drafted a letter to send back with Richard’s messenger. Debenham said he would come as soon as possible to help Richard prepare for war. Savage, meanwhile, would stay in London to await Richard’s coming. Both, in the standard language of their indictments, promised to do all in their power to comfort and assist him and to overthrow the king. By May 20th, Savage was in consultation with another group, including Robert Bulkeley, one of Henry’s yeomen of the chamber, and two monks from Westminster Abbey, John Grove and William Graunt. They agreed to get war-gear together, including ‘bills’ (small halberds, somewhere between a spear and a battle-axe) and brigandines, or coats of mail. The presence of Bulkeley suggests an attempted infiltration of Henry’s household through the menials who made the king’s bed and packed up his regalia, possible assassins.
At some stage, Henry’s sergeant-farrier, the ‘well beloved’ servant who was marshal of his mares and foals, was prised away too. His name was William. The last recorded payment to him, in January 1492, was for ‘the leechcraft of a horse of ours’ and the careful leading of the horse, once cured, from ‘le Studde’ near Warwick to Eltham, in Kent. The king’s last grant to him, of a tenement in Warwick, occurred in March 1493. By the year’s end William had joined the plotters and gone across the Channel.
This was still a London conspiracy, but by the summer of 1493 letters from Richard were getting further afield: to Suffolk, and to Roger Harlakenden in mid-Kent. Harlakenden, receiving on July 6th a missive ‘desiring, moving and arousing him’ to join the cause, wrote back the same day, agreeing to help Richard ‘in all that he desired against the king’. He was probably typical of the rare country gentlemen tapped by Richard: the most important man in Woodchurch, custodian of the church keys, with his own pew in the church and a house large enough to contain a private chapel. His household servants joined the cause with him. His neighbours, however, disliked him and kept their distance from his treasons.
Meanwhile, another cell was forming not by letters, but by word of mouth. On January 12th 1493, Robert Clifford and John Ratcliffe, Lord Fitzwater had a long talk about King Edward’s son at the ‘Syon house’ in Windsor, possibly a house connected with the strongly Yorkist Sion foundation at Isleworth, some way downriver. Fitzwater was Henry’s steward of the household – an intimate and influential post – and had been high steward at his coronation. He had also, however, been one of Edward IV’s esquires of the body, once warning Edward privately at dinner that he was about to be assassinated. As a result of what Clifford told him, Fitzwater agreed to get an armed force together, 500 men arrayed for war, to help Edward’s son ‘in whichever part of the country he entered’. He made this offer with some warmth, saying he was willing to forgo the services of these men for the rest of his life in order to make Richard king. It seems that Clifford had made contact with the risen prince, who had only just reached Malines from France, and was already strongly proselytising for him. On January 14th, he agreed with Fitzwater that he should go to Richard, tell him what they were prepared to do for him and urge him to make war on Henry.
Clifford was to prove the key figure in the English conspiracy, a rare link between otherwise self-willed groups of plotters. He was not without bravery. At Richard of York’s wedding jousts he was among the first to sign up and fought ‘with ardent courage’, though he won his prize for ‘prudent behaving’: having dislodged a rib of his opponent’s armour, he took no advantage of this to do him further damage. Yet Vergil thought there was nothing of firmness in him and, in general, Clifford nailed his colours to safe masts. Before Bosworth, he had been a forthright Yorkist. After it, he became Henry’s chamberlain of Berwick, on the Scottish border, and was given some of the lands that Lovell had forfeited. At Stoke, he fought for the king against Yorkist rebels and was knighted on the battlefield, as George Neville was. Later that year, he helped to carry the canopy over Elizabeth’s litter at her coronation. Between 1489 and 1491 he was frequently in Brittany, at first as the captain of a company of archers and later as one of Henry’s envoys.
In that second capacity Richmond Herald went with him, and his report catches something of Clifford’s difficult, imperious character. At Southampton Clifford turned down the ship Richmond had ordered, saying it was ‘too small for his person’ and pulling rank – by means of a warrant sealed with the king’s privy seal – to get a vessel four times as large and elegantly furnished. The wind was contrary, but Clifford nagged the sailors first to depart, then to put into Guernsey and let the ambassadors off, and then (the envoys safely on shore) to chase the French warships they had encountered. He refused to take risks or be made a fool of. On the embassy itself he let Richmond do most of the talking, while he himself listened, sized up his interlocutors and, where necessary, retired with them
for private conversations. At the end of their trip Richmond came home early with a report to give the king; but Clifford stayed, up to something.
In the spring of 1493, his secret conversations were not limited to Fitzwater. On March 14th he was talking again about the young man who said he was Richard, this time in Sir William Stanley’s house at St Martin-in-the-Fields, near Charing Cross. This was then outside the city, a slightly risky and under-built place, though Stanley’s house was no doubt impressive. By now Clifford had probably been back to Malines to transmit the plan he had made with Fitzwater, and had returned even more fired up, convinced that he had kissed the hand and knelt at the feet of Edward’s son. He would have needed this enthusiasm to dare approach Stanley, the biggest fish of all.
Stanley was Henry’s chamberlain, the man who controlled the appointment of all household officers, the ceremonial of state and, most especially, access to the king in his private apartments. He was therefore as close as any man could be to Henry, a ruler who deeply distrusted both political intimacy and the presumed prerogatives of high birth; and he was, within these limits, pre-eminent at court. He had won Bosworth for Henry by belatedly bringing in his 3,000 troops on his side, and it was he who had crowned him, in the field, with the battle coronet plucked from the hawthorn bush. Yet Stanley had been a Yorkist for much of his life. Henry VI had charged him with treason, and two years later, in 1461, Edward IV in victory had knighted him. He had also been steward of the household at Ludlow of Edward, Prince of Wales. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that he wavered at Bosworth. His betrayal of Richard III proved no deep conversion, but simply a tendency to follow the way the wind was blowing.