by Ann Wroe
Stanley was also related to Henry by marriage, since his brother Thomas, Earl of Derby, had married the king’s mother. He had expected to reap particular favours from this tie, especially the earldom of Chester, but Henry did not rule in that way, preferring to keep the crown apart from the factionalism that Stanley represented. As it was, he had been made constable of Caernarvon, justice of north Wales, and lord chamberlain, for which he drew a salary of £100 a year. He had extensive estates in Cheshire, bringing in £3,000 a year from rents and fees, and in his castle at Holt, on the Dee in north Wales, he was rumoured to have money, jewels and plate valued at more than 40,000 marks. In short, he was one of the wealthiest men in England.
Yet Stanley was still unsettled. In the first Parliament after Bosworth he had sent a nervous petition to Henry, fearing that Richard III’s grant of lands and manors to him was ‘not sure and sufficient in law’. Confirmed in part in those, and compensated for the rest, he still seemed distrustful, and apparently felt that Henry’s rewards were not enough for what he had done. Such edginess, a sense of coolness on the other side and ‘not feeling quite in grace’, was a common court affliction. Vergil thought that Henry detected his resentment, was put out by it and ‘relaxed a little his affection for him’, increasing Stanley’s unhappiness. During the Simnel rebellion, according to one tale, he had dressed his men in the rebel colours, and once again his forces had been late to engage on the king’s side. Among all that finery in the castle at Holt he still kept a Yorkist souvenir, a girdle clasp decorated with part of a livery collar of gold with suns and white roses. Had Fortune smiled differently, he might have worn such a collar again.
His conversation with Clifford on March 14th was probably not the first he had heard of the resurrected Richard Plantagenet. As Humphrey Savage’s uncle, he may have been aware of the whisperings in that house and the rustle of letters passing. Robert Bulkeley too, the royal servant with whom Savage was plotting, was related to Stanley by a series of family marriages. The servant at the chamber door, made bold by blood-intimacy, could murmur to the chamberlain, and the infiltration of Henry’s household could become extraordinary.
When Stanley and Clifford talked, they agreed that Clifford should cross the sea, enter the service of Edward’s son and help him with preparations for invading England. Stanley himself would do nothing yet. He would wait for ‘a certain private sign they used between them’, and whenever Clifford sent such a sign he would leap in with all his power to assist the war effort. The attainder called these ‘promises’ made by Stanley. It is unlikely they were anything as firm as that, at this stage or later. The only charge that seemed to be laid against him was a remark, made in the course of talking to Clifford, that ‘if he knew for sure that the young man were King Edward’s son, he would never bear arms against him’.
Clifford set out for Malines on June 14th, accompanied by William Barley and others from the Berkhamsted circle. He was to spend the best part of seventeen months in association with the White Rose, leaving behind the wife who had thoughtfully sent him ‘horses, harness and stuff’ when he was on service in Brittany. His presence in Calais late in 1493 suggests that he was also on official business for the king from time to time. He kept his feet in two shoes. Reports and visits were meanwhile made to Stanley. During those months Clifford seemed to work his way deep into Plantagenet’s confidence, so that by December 1494 he was one of the witnesses to the protocols that were drawn up with Margaret. Robert Fabyan said he was ‘by such favour . . . taken in with him’ that he came to know all such friends as the doll-prince had in England.
Stanley, meanwhile, waited for the secret sign they had agreed between them. He remained imperturbably at the centre of Henry’s court, showing nothing of the disaffection in his mind. Fabyan gave a glimpse of him on Twelfth Night in 1494, when Clifford had been six months at the court of the White Rose. On the day of the festival Stanley sat alone, as lord chamberlain, at the high table in Whitehall, ‘keeping the estate for the king, and was served as the king should have been in many points’. In the evening, at 11 o’clock, he was in Westminster Hall with all the court to see the disguisings. They began with a man from the king’s chapel, dressed as St George, riding into the hall followed by ‘a fair virgin attired like unto a king’s daughter, and leading by a silken lace a terrible and huge red dragon, the which in sundry places of the hall as he passed spat fire at his mouth’. The allusion was to England’s peril and Henry’s valiant protection; André, too, portrayed the feigned boy in Flanders as a monster hissing out flames. After the dragon came courtiers and ladies, ‘all costiously and goodly disguised’, who danced for ‘a large hour’ before the assembly. In the midst of this entertainment, where so much was not what it seemed and where the sixty dishes that made up dinner were served by breathless courtiers still masked with gold spangles, Stanley sat with a worm of deception in his own heart.
There were other such scenes. One involved Thomas Langton, Bishop of Winchester, who in October 1494 assisted in full pontificals, with mitre and crosier, at the institution of little Henry Tudor as Duke of York. For a year, and possibly longer, Langton had been part of a cell centred on John Kendal, the prior of the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in England. It included Dr William Hussey, Archdeacon of London, Thomas Tyrell and Sir James Keating, prior of Kilmainham and head of the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in Ireland. Keating had supported Simnel, but had been pardoned. He had held his ecclesiastical posts in Ireland for well over a decade, and from this vantage point he passed on information about Richard Plantagenet from an early stage in his reappearance. He then joined him at Malines, and relayed news from there. Kendal also kept an agent, Guilhem de Noyon, a brother-knight of his order, permanently in ‘the parts of Flanders’ to tell him how Richard’s affairs were going, and these reports were sent on to Langton and the others.
The cell was well concealed. One scene, and a snatch of conversation, showed it in operation. It took place at Christmas in 1493 or 1494 at Tyrell’s place, a fine house at Aven in Hampshire. Kendal and Langton were visiting, and Kendal chanced to remark that ‘King Edward was in this house in the old days’. True, Tyrell replied: ‘and he made good cheer in the old days, and I hope, if it pleases God, that his son may make as good cheer as he did’. His son; no hesitation. Tyrell also boasted that his house had been built with money from France, ‘and he hoped soon to have enough to build another one just as nice’. That too had a Yorkist gloss, for Edward had wrung a lot of money out of France by threatening a war, and many hoped that his son might do so after him. All in all, more than enough treasonous talk for a Christmas gathering.
Kendal himself was a curious figure, part-rover, part-soldier, part-huckster. He raised money for his order by selling indulgences, printed by Caxton, for a national crusade to rescue the island of Rhodes from the Turks. In 1485 he acted as ambassador for the Master of Rhodes, and tried to relieve the Turkish siege of the island by shipping in oil and wine. By 1487 he was also a sort of errant ambassador for both the pope and the King of England. The Venetians thought highly of him, voting him money in the Senate to replace his ‘most excellent’ horse when it was stolen, but his actions on behalf of his order – from handling funds to launching land claims – were often suspect. Some of the money he raised in these dubious ways may well have gone to Richard Plantagenet.
The doings of Kendal’s circle were frequently bizarre. Much of this activity was exposed when one of his agents, Bernard de Vignolles, made a confession in March 1496 in Rouen. The original document has La confession de Bernat de Vignolles in Henry’s hand on the back, suggesting that he took possession of it personally. It made good reading, for this was schoolboy stuff: pranks, tricks, ointments and disguises, though deadly serious in intent.
The core of de Vignolles’s testimony involved a plot to kill Henry, his children, his mother, and anyone else who was close to him. This seemed to require the services of an astrologer, someone able n
ot only to mix secret ointments but to tell the best time to apply them. When Kendal and Dr Hussey were in Rome in 1492 (Plantagenet being only just in France, and his cause very young), the archdeacon was sent to find such a star-gazer. The first one he came across, a Spaniard called Radigo, could not help, but a second Spaniard, Master John Disant, was willing. In order to prove his credentials, Master John arranged the murder – probably with counterfeit sugar – of a servant of Gemes, brother of Bajazet II, the Emperor of the Turks, who was then in Rome in papal custody. But the money the Englishmen left the assassin ‘by banker’s bill’ was not enough, and for some time the project hung fire.
Eventually, de Vignolles was sent to nudge Master John along (as well as to silence the first astrologer, who had been gabbing of the plots). Master John thought matters might proceed more quickly if he came to England; de Vignolles was afraid he would be recognised, but Master John volunteered ‘to come in the habit of a friar, and since he was missing two teeth, he would make two others of ivory, the colour of his own; and he would come by sea, to be on the safe side, and say he was going to St James of Compostella’. So the astrologer, disguised as a friar, carrying deadly stuff, perhaps disguised as sugar, was to make a false pilgrimage on behalf of a young man, perhaps disguised as Richard, Duke of York. That made sense.
In the end, Master John stayed in Rome; he too was short of funds. But before de Vignolles left, the astrologer gave him a little wooden box containing ointment. This ointment, he told him, should be spread along and across any doors through which the king passed, ‘and if this were done it would cause the persons who bore the greatest love for the king, to murder him’. Apparently it worked by twisting minds towards violence, rather than by killing on contact, but by this time de Vignolles wanted nothing to do with it anyway. Back in his lodgings he opened the box, only to find such a vile and stinking mixture that he threw the whole thing into the latrine. Compunction seized him on the way home; Kendal wanted this stuff, after all, and was expecting to receive it. So de Vignolles bought a similar box from an apothecary and filled it with a mixture of dry earth, water, quicksilver (also bought from the apothecary) and soot scraped out of the chimney, until it was the same colour as the ointment the astrologer had given him. Why he went to such trouble to reconstruct something that Kendal had never known or seen is impossible to say; but the counterfeit had to be perfect, even if no one but the counterfeiter would appreciate how perfect it was.
Eventually, back in England, he delivered the box to Kendal. The prior would not touch it; he was galvanised by de Vignolles’s description of how it worked, ‘that it was very dangerous to touch it if you wanted to do something bad with it, and he would be in great danger if it stayed twenty-two hours in the house’. Kendal ordered him to throw it away somewhere far from the building, where it would never be found, and de Vignolles did so.
That seemed to be the end of the plot to assassinate Henry. Kendal decided to concentrate on the cell’s main business, finding money (‘stones’, or inverted triangles, in their makeshift code) for the Merchant of the Ruby, their code-name for Richard Plantagenet. He was certainly looking for funds in 1494, though the letters on the subject that survive, written in dreadful Italian spiked with worse Spanish, date from two years later. This one was sent to de Vignolles, who had probably already jumped ship.
On the 15th of this month I received your letter written at Rouen and I understood that you’ve found two merchants at Rome who are used to selling stones, who were very pleased to meet you and would gladly know if you want to get some of these things. I’m well pleased with all this and would like them to go to Brother Guilhem de Noyon, who can be found three or four miles from Aire and Douai in the Pays d’Artois. I pray you to go there yourself to assess the perfection of these stones and then to come back here immediately. And when I’ve heard from you that the thing is certain, they will immediately be told of my decision through you, and in one way or another we’ll find a way to conclude the business to their satisfaction . . . The bearer has been badly delayed on the road because he was held up for twelve days at Portsmouth . . .
If . . . you do not find Brother Guilhem at home, leave the merchants there and go and find Brother Guilhem at Bruges or wherever he may be. At any rate, he won’t be far away. Nothing else comes to mind at the moment. I’ve given the present bearer three [inverted triangles].
How de Vignolles was supposed to find Guilhem, at no fixed address in Artois, is hard to imagine. A letter sent two weeks later by Kendal to Guilhem himself said that Bernard had been sent to find ‘his little brother’ Guilhem ‘in Rouen or in the interior of Picardy’, an even wider area to search. Such plots seem hardly serious; and it was typical of Richard Plantagenet that his subscribers included, alongside the serious and devoted, enough worthless charlatans to suggest that he might be one himself.
While Kendal was doing all this, he was also one of Henry’s trusted servants. Far more than Fitzwater or Stanley, who had done little but promise to help, he walked an astonishing tightrope between the king in England and the young man across the sea. In the same year as the astrologer-search through the back streets of Rome, Kendal helped to negotiate the Treaty of Etaples, which obliged Charles VIII to stop assisting Henry’s rebels. He was also a fairly regular member of Henry’s council. It is true that he got into a scrape or two. In 1492 he was in trouble for publishing papal bulls preferring him to the priorship of St John’s, which was then vacant, without the king’s permission; and at a council meeting in 1494, in Henry’s presence, he was proclaimed deserving of ‘grievous punishment’ for making a false claim, by means of a false deed, in the council itself, absque verecundia, without shame. Kendal’s whole career was conducted absque verecundia.
His circle, however, with its distinguished divines, its sprinkling of country gentry and its access to cash, should have been one of the more useful for Richard Plantagenet in England. The newly formed prince needed people of this sort. The cause was lamentably short of lords like Fitzwater, who could raise men, and of merchants, who could raise money. Fitzwater was the only lord who committed himself to the cause. (André, Molinet and Richard himself said there were many more ‘great men’ involved, but named no names.) Among his supporters who were charged with treason, only three were active merchants, and only Maurice Seles, a goldsmith, represented the higher-earning echelons of London trade. Taylor the younger had been a merchant, but plotting had taken him over; John Heron, later Richard’s right-hand man, had been a mercer in London, but had fled the city with his debts unpaid.
The presence of more such adherents, however, is shown by other London pardons: of a knight, two ‘gentlemen’, a vintner and four drapers, all drawn into Richard’s plots. It is also suggested by the bonds for allegiance, like Richard Lessy’s, that Henry demanded from subjects he did not trust. In the early 1490s the number of these increased dramatically, as Henry endeavoured to keep Yorkist murmurings in check. The £1,000 bond in 1493 of Sir Ralph Hastings, whose steward, William Lounde, had already decamped to Malines, was typical. A group of acquaintances, including a fishmonger, an armourer, a goldsmith and a London alderman, pledged themselves to meet his bond in the sum of £50 or £100 each. All were required to appear before the king and his council at regular intervals. In the same year, however, Hastings himself stood guarantor for 1,000 marks of the bond of John Hayes, the man who had received Taylor the elder’s letter from Rouen. The guarantors might promise ‘faithful behaviour as lieges’, but they were sometimes of the same political sympathy as those who were being punished. They helped them for that reason. Among those, for example, who stood surety for the allegiance of John de Lysa, ‘that he would not associate with the king’s traitors and adversaries in Flanders, or lend them his aid’, was Thomas Barley, gentleman of Hertfordshire, whose brother William was already in Flanders, and in deep.
So the conspiracy was growing, cell by cell, with only limited evidence that the cells connected. Vergil mentioned a ‘g
eneral decision’ to send Robert Clifford and others to Flanders, and spoke of the conspirators as one large group. The legal records give a different impression, of small inward-looking clusters with no wider organisation. Yet as soon as Clifford had confirmed from Malines that this was Edward’s son, some concerted effort was made to spread the word. Hall, writing fifty years later, said Clifford’s ‘letter of credit and confidence’ was published by the other conspirators, so that people would know the rumour was true.
The beginning of 1494 saw a flurry of publicity. In the first week of February one group, consisting of Thomas Bagnall, John Heath, John Scott, Alex Singer, John Kennington and others, ‘made and fabricated . . . various bills and writings, rhymes and ballads concerning seditions and treacheries and uprisings as much against the king as other nobles of his council’. Of the five named, four were yeomen; the rhymer, and perhaps the sole writer-down of these spoofs while the others thought them up, was probably Kennington, a schoolmaster. All but Bagnall were Londoners, and were said to have supported the king’s enemy in Flanders ‘for many days before’. On the 5th, they pinned up their poems on the door of St Benedict’s in Gracechurch Street, near London Bridge, on the Standard at Chepe and on the doors of St Paul’s. They had not ventured far from home (St Benedict’s, by the herb market, was probably their local church), but they had done their part.
Three days later, in the parish of St Andrew’s Holborn in the London suburbs – and for some days beforehand elsewhere – a group of conspirators also agreed to spread word of Richard Plantagenet ‘in various towns and counties of England and in all the towns along the sea-coast’. This was to be done very subtly and artfully, Vergil said, so that the rumour could not be tied to anyone in particular. The man picked for the job was Edward Cyver, known as ‘English Edward’, a hat-maker from Northampton. He and several others, perhaps with yokes of spurious bonnets slung across their shoulders, were to find out how people were thinking and work to shift their sympathies from Henry to Richard. When the survey was done, Cyver was to report back to Richard on the readiness of England to receive him.