by Ann Wroe
Ramsay claimed to have done his best to persuade the Scottish nobles away from war. He had given James’s brother, the Duke of Ross, a crossbow, evidently a present from Henry, and had ‘communed at length’ with him, as a result of which the duke said he would not march against the King of England. But Ross was a bending reed, helping at the same time to get letters from Richard to Margaret, and James was intractable, hell-bent on invasion.
Only two offers might have dissuaded him: peace with England on his own terms, or a proper marriage with a Spanish princess in exchange for a truce with Henry. As late as August, a Scottish envoy was still offering ‘perpetual peace with England and perfect safety for Henry from York’ if James could be given a princess of Spain. The possibility was kept dangling before him by Ferdinand and Isabella, but no daughter materialised. (‘We have no daughter to give to the King of Scots, as you well know,’ the Spanish sovereigns wrote to de Puebla, ‘but we must not deprive him of his hope. On the contrary, we must amuse him as long as possible.’) James, however, knew he was being duped, not least because he had intercepted the Spanish ambassadors’ letters of instruction before they arrived. An embarrassing showdown seems to have occurred in the new garden at Stirling. ‘We are very sorry about what you say the King of Scotland tried to do in the castle garden, especially since our ambassadors were there,’ wrote Ferdinand and Isabella, blushing to think of it. They remained unblushing about their own deceptions.
Since James felt that both Spain and England were playing with him – warming the wax, as the saying went, without setting it alight – he would play with France, their great enemy, and he would go to war. When Ayala arrived from Spain late that summer, with a brief to do all he could to persuade James to marry Henry’s daughter, it was already too late. With his brand-new ally, or without him, James wanted to fight almost for the sake of fighting.
If love resembled war, the rituals of warfare were often close to those of love. Young men ‘did battle in love’ and ‘embraced each other to joust’; the strokes were given and received on ‘targes’, or breastplates, that covered only lightly the target of the heart. Tournaments often started with beguiling displays of beauty, only to end in blood and death. At the jousts in 1494 for little Henry, Duke of York, four young women in white satin gowns, riding on white palfreys, led in the four defending knights by laces of white and blue silk; before the famous tournament of Anthony Woodville against the Bastard of Burgundy in 1465, the Bastard accepted the challenge by honouring and touching a ‘flower of souvenance’ concealed in a young woman’s handkerchief. Yet, as in love, these delicate rules of engagement were a cover for violent compulsion. In the Woodville tournament, the Bastard was unhorsed when Woodville’s pike crashed into the nostrils of his mount, and Woodville came within an ace of cleaving his opponent’s skull through the eye-piece of his helmet. At the jousts of 1494 the best bouts were fought ‘furiously’, and a combatant who moved away from the sword-strokes, either out of fright or short-sightedness, ‘was not praised for the voiding’. ‘Good stripes’ and ‘good strokes’ were what spectators hoped for: shards of spears flying into the viewing stands, or the sword, often still in the gauntlet, smashed out of the hand. This was probably how James had hurt himself at Richard’s wedding, with the sheer force of steel on steel, or pommel on glove, in the brawl of sword-fighting that followed the tilts.
From tournament to real war was often a small step for those who starred in both proceedings. The urge to do something warlike often came on, like love, in the spring. Jean Molinet described how shortly after Easter in 1489 ‘some young gentlemen of Hainault . . . wishing for honour and wanting to perform some exploit of prowess that would be famous in time to come’ attempted to seize the castle of Arras from the French. In the same season the young Duke of Saxony seized the town of Arscot and then took, and burned to the ground, the castle of Luine. ‘It was a night in May,’ wrote Molinet, ‘when gentle companions in war are wont to challenge their enemies and to plant the May boughs, that the duke of Saxony rode out, flowering in prowess and in knightly deeds of arms.’ May boughs were symbols of a young man’s arousal, in love as much as war; and it was under the hawthorn that William Dunbar dreamed of fields of young women dressed in green, the colour of new passion, playing dangerously with bows and guns.
Most sieges and wars began, as courtships did, as elaborate set-pieces, with challenges sent out by heralds and trumpeters and painstaking preparation of weapons, tents and battle clothes. Henry VII, gathering forces in 1492 for his ‘noble voyage’ into France, ordered cloth-of-gold, precious stones and rich pearls for the garnishing of helmets and head-pieces, together with several sets of white armour, for a total cost of more than £4,000. If war soon showed itself as brutal and chaotic as ever, it was also ritual and spectacle. Sir John Paston in 1474 wrote that he would be very sorry to miss the French king and his great host if they came near Calais; a year later, he intended ‘to ride into Flanders to purvey me of horse and harness [armour], and percase I shall see the siege at Neuss ere I come again, if I have time . . . I think that I should be sick but if I see it’.
This appeared to be James’s view: sick if he did not see war. Richard’s attitude, on past and future evidence, was exactly the reverse. He had presumably read the same books as James and, indeed, as Henry: Livy’s History of Rome, the siege of Troy in various versions, the feats of arms of Alexander, the war commentaries of Caesar. Henry’s son Arthur, then aged ten, was being coached from them in that very year. They were part of any prince’s education and essential, too, for pseudo-princes. From these histories he could learn tactics, strategy, orders of battle, the laying of sieges and the management of men. From works like Christine de Pisan’s Fayttes of Armes and Chyvalrye and the Secreta, Alexander’s own rule-book, he could draw precise lessons in how to behave on the field: not to risk his own person, not to follow the enemy when it fled, to camp near water and, before battle, always to check that Leo was in the ascendant and Mercury in mid-heaven. Richard probably read all this, and picked up a little: the lesson, for example, that he should not land at Deal himself, but should send some troops ahead of him.
What he may never have received was physical instruction in war. Little Prince Richard fought with sticks and a two-handed sword and the next year disappeared into the Tower, his military education over. The child Piers in Tournai would have seen, at most, archery and crossbow competitions in which the rival bands gave themselves names such as ‘Joy’ and ‘Good Loving’. The boy in Portugal waited on a knight who may have trained him, or may have preferred to use him as decoration. Pages at the Portuguese court were not allowed swords of their own, and the favourite game for young men, besides girl-chasing, was tilting at each other with canas, or untipped lances made of reeds. (‘A pretty dangerous game,’ Dr Münzer thought.) The new-fledged prince may never have seen, or only touched in admiration, the costly white armour that Taylor the elder apparently brought for him when he arrived in Ireland.
Since then he had seen plenty of ceremonial warfare, sometimes of a semi-comic kind. On All Saints’ Day in 1494, on Maximilian’s return to Antwerp, jousts had been demanded by Claude de Vauldrey, who declared himself the servant of ‘the beautiful giantess with the blonde wig, the biggest wig in the world’, and who claimed he had been inspired by Mars and Pallas telling him in a dream, on twelve successive Tuesday nights, to do this for Jesus. Sire Claude could not sit at table, or kiss a woman, until he had proved how brave he was. These jousts, which Richard would have watched from the best seats, were fought for nothing but two rings, though each was worth at least 10,000 écus. Like any prince, he had also done his share of hunting and hawking: good experience, many said, for deploying forces, discovering terrain, use of scouts, surprising the enemy, encounter and pursuit. Perhaps so, if you were not thinking more keenly of the bright arc of a falcon’s flight, or the dewy greenness of the morning woods, or the girl you would rapturously unmake when it was over, perhaps on that very bed
of grass from which the deer had risen. Little about Prince Richard, as he hawked in the mountains, suggested Edward IV’s military prowess, James’s bravery or Henry’s gift for tactics. He was a prince for chambers and gardens.
Yet he seems to have come to Scotland prepared to fight. His servants included one Laurence the armourer, a Frenchman who can only have been assigned to make, and fit, armour especially for him. Laurence was at Richard’s wedding, arrayed by James in a tawny gown, a velvet doublet and black hose, and was given an arming jacket for the tourney, in which he may have seen some action. In any event, his services had been judged necessary as the White Rose left Flanders.
So too had those of Roderick de Lalaing, Richard’s old troop commander and, in Molinet’s opinion, one of his ‘chief managers’. Soon after his arrival James bought a small ship for him for £60, on which he sailed to and fro fetching men and munitions from Flanders. De Lalaing was from the line that had produced Jacques de Lalaing, praised by Georges Chastellain as the greatest jouster of his age. The whole family, Commines said, was remarkable for its courage, bravely serving generations of Burgundian princes, as well as producing a series of mercenary leaders and captains for the recent wars in Flanders. In 1491 Roderick, as a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, fought with distinction in the lists held at Malines when Philip joined the order. There, among knights assuming the mottoes ‘It’s done’, ‘Noiseless’, ‘Knock-out’ and ‘Waiting for it’, he took the motto Riflez, Ranconnez: roughly, ‘Lay them waste and make them pay’.
De Lalaing was a typical international fighter, and a man after James’s heart. He could fight in jousts, he could fight wars; it did not matter, though it helped, as in Scotland, if someone provided his armour and equipment. Although he was rough and illiterate, signing his pay-warrants with a wild ‘Z’, James clearly liked him, giving him fancy clothes and calling him ‘Rodego’, like a Spaniard. With Richard, de Lalaing got on much less well. The artificial world of the jousts, with its gilded mottoes and disguises and made-up names, happened to be one the captain excelled in: but he did so as a tough skilled fighter and not, like Margaret’s protégé, as a bridegroom prettily parading in his white-and-purple fighting jacket.
By the summer, real war was approaching fast. Ramsay reckoned that the Scottish people, as opposed to their king, had no wish to fight; and if it came to war, he told Henry, ‘I doubt not . . . your Grace shall have ye best day-work of your enemies that any king of England had this C years.’ Aberdeen, certainly, preferred not to help with the ‘fortifying and supplying of the prince of England, Richard Duke of York’, but obtained a licence for its citizens to stay home instead, joyfully announcing it through the streets with the ringing of the hand-bell. Some of the Buchanans had to be pardoned later ‘for their inobedience and contemption done to the king’s highness’ in not joining his war-force. But the prospect of a jab at England seems to have been broadly popular, even if the cause still made some Scots uneasy.
James worked his war-makers hard all through July, August and September. Since his men were bound to serve him, the army itself, as Ayala pointed out, did not cost the king a maravedi; but the equipment did. The accounts bristle with payments to wheelwrights, cartwrights, armourers and fletchers. Tallow and tar were bought for the wheels and axles, special carts for hauling the serpentines, chains for harnessing the draught horses. De Lalaing brought a contribution from Margaret of ‘lx of Alemans . . . and sundry pleasant things for the war, both for man and horse’, conveyed in ‘twa little ships’, as Ramsay reported. Deliveries were taken of arrows, stone cannonballs, gunpowder, saltpetre and sharp-edged ‘diamonds’ to be fired from guns.
James, like many kings of his time, had a weakness for artillery. Ramsay sniffed that the king had ‘but little, that is to say twa great curtalds that were sent out of France, x falcons or little serpentines, xxx cart guns with iron chambers’, but Ayala thought James’s French guns were very good and ‘modern’. Frequent royal visits were made to the gun-house in Edinburgh to chat with the Flemish or German gun experts, Hans and Henric (as armourers were French, so gunners were German), and to admire the pieces. James’s favourite was Mons, later known as Mons Meg, a mighty cannon that was almost too heavy to shift. She was not used for the 1496 campaign, though she was there, and was doubtless shown to Richard as the king’s pride. She was wheeled out a year later for a back-up invasion, minstrels playing before her as she rumbled along the street, but broke down before she reached the outskirts of the city. As she lay there at St Leonard’s, like a wounded whale, it took seven wrights two and a half days and thirteen stone of iron to make a new cradle for her, and eight ells of brightly painted canvas ‘to be Mons’s cloth to cover her’. The tenderness reflected the way James felt about her, his wonderful big gun, although she had not yet struck terror in any Englishman.
The main war-preparation for Prince Richard, typically enough, was his beautiful battle-banner: double red taffeta faced with single blue taffeta, on which a yard of single white taffeta was worked into a rose. Two ounces of gold foil and three leaves of a book of silver were used to pick out the centre of the rose and perhaps the rays of the sun behind. More gold ornamented the taffeta ground. Each colour of the banner had its own virtues in war display: gold for the sun, ‘very clear and resplendishing, virtuous and comforting’, a colour to be carried only by a prince; red for fire, the most noble of the elements, symbolising a prince’s eminence and majesty; blue for air, ‘receptive of the luminous influences’; white or silver for water, cleanliness, innocence, the robes of Christ. The banner appeared incongruously among the lead, gun-shot, cart-chains and powder-horns, but it was meant to be a war-cry too, marking the position of the prince in the middle of the battle, where he was meant to be. Richard also had a battle-standard, four yards of linen cloth worked with half a book of gold foil, which may have displayed the Yorkist sun that was now to rise over England.
James, too, to judge by the accounts, was preoccupied with matters more decorative than carts and gun-stones. In the July accounts, where twenty-six entries covered artillery, twenty-seven had to do with the making or ornamenting of pavilions. Ayala mentioned this obsession: when James prepared for war, he wrote, he had thousands of tents made. For the 1496 campaign they covered the meadows at Restalrig, north-east of Edinburgh towards the Forth, where the soaked lengths of canvas were laid out to dry and the finished pavilions assembled. The king himself had several tents of different sizes for bedroom, council chamber, chapel and ‘ousting closet’, or privy. On all these, as on Prince Richard’s pavilions, the vanes were gilded and ornamented with pennants and the flaps held back with ropes of silk. There was so much sewing to be done, with bright blue thread, that children were recruited and given ‘drinksilver’ for their efforts. At night, like the guns, the pavilions had men appointed to watch them.
Any army on the move, especially in uncertain weather, needed cover. Some kings were unfussy about it. Henry VII kept his tents for years in a house in Holborn for which, in 1495, four years’ rent was owing, and his tent expenses were largely for patching up the tattered stock. Others took portable palaces with them. Charles the Bold on his Swiss campaign of 1476 had carried his jewels, tabernacles, reliquaries, archives, coffers full of carpets and Flanders lace, his solid-gold chair and 300 complete dinner services of silver plate. His tents far outshone James’s, boasting glass windows in frames of gold. Yet James’s emphasis on pavilions reflected, once again, how closely tournament and war resembled each other for those who promoted them. Every tournament field was lined with such tents, gilded and embroidered with the colours of the challenger, just as James and Richard laid out theirs.
These tents meant war; and yet, in the stories of Arthur and elsewhere, their other meaning was sport and delight. They were places of snatched passion, together with pantries, cellars, gardens, woods, attics, wardrobes and stables. It was in a pavilion outside a city that Sir Gawain and the Lady Ettard took supper together; a bed was made
up for them, and there, over two days and nights, ‘she granted him to fulfil all his desire’. Sir Lancelot narrowly escaped death when a knight, returning to the pavilion of red silk where he expected to find his mistress, found Lancelot in the bed instead. The pavilions of pleasure set up by Edward IV when he went hunting were presumed to be precisely that, furnished and cushioned with women.
Inside these pavilions, the language of war and the language of love were often the same. To ‘have ado with’ was both to make war and to make love. A man’s sexual organs were his ‘weapon’, his ‘gear’ and his ‘harness’; he came to bed, both partners hoped, with his bonne epée d’armes hard and ready in his hand. ‘Mercy’ was shown both by the warrior, sparing his victim, and by the girl, admitting the aching lover to her body. The act of love itself was a ‘raid’ or ‘sweet combat’ after which, as after real battle, the combatants were exhausted. Love, like war, addled a man’s wits until his lust was sated, but speedy success in either was a triumph. Henry VII’s court poets in 1486 delighted to yoke together, in frames of full-blown red roses, his victory at Bosworth and his victory in the bedchamber, planting Prince Arthur almost at once in the belly of his queen.
Both love and war were young men’s games. And appropriately enough, James and Richard – cousins in love, partners in war – camped in the pavilions before they set off in earnest. At the end of August, two or three weeks before the march towards England began, they were already sleeping under canvas. The canvas was overlaid with silk, embroidered with their arms, and Richard’s banner with the White Rose floated beside his door; but it still meant dewy-cold mornings, pallet beds and trips to the ousting closet across the grass. September was late for northern campaigns. ‘Ye inconvenience of ye season’, Ramsay called this; and he was watching him.