Perkin

by Ann Wroe

  Please your Grace anent the matter that Master Wyatt laid to me I have been busy about it, and my lord of Buchan takes apon him ye fulfilling of it, if it be possible; and thinks best now in this lang night within his tent to enterprise ye matter; for he has nae watch but the King’s appointed to be about him; and they have ordained the Englishmen and strangers to be at an other quarter lodged but a few about him.

  The evenings were already drawing in: ‘this lang night’. The civilian English advisers, on whom Prince Richard relied quite heavily, were sleeping elsewhere; around him were ‘the King’s appointed’, Scottish men-at-arms. The tent, for all its grandeur, smelt of tanned sheepskins. The Prince of England slept alone, or essentially alone, like a knight before his induction.

  The ‘matter’ that Ramsay mentioned to Henry, and about which he and Buchan had been so busy, was almost certainly his murder. Everything pointed to that: the setting within the tent, the advisability of darkness, the need to overpower his guard. The Earl of Buchan, James Stewart, was another Scot happy to linger round the court and work against James. Although he did not report direct to Henry, in this instance the English king offered a reward for his services. (‘I presented my Lord your letter,’ wrote Ramsay, ‘of the which he was full glad and well contented.’) In the end, however, the deed was not attempted, or not done. The murder of Prince Richard might have scotched the invasion plans, dismantling the fair pavilions all over the meadows of Restalrig, but not necessarily. James, once fired with a project, was difficult to turn round, and the killing of his cousin would have been another pretext for war. Besides, he had spent £110 on a new cloak for this: his favourite velvet cramoisy, lined and bordered with crimson satin, fit for any sort of jousting, and the colour of fresh-spilled blood.

  iv

  The army marched for England on September 17th. Three days before, James and Richard commended their cause at High Mass in Holyrood, then full of their guns, on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. At the sight of that blessed wood, ran the Sequence of the Mass, ‘kings believe, enemies retreat, and one man drives out a thousand’. Reges credunt, hostes cedunt. At the Offertory, the priest prayed that the sign of the Holy Cross would protect them from ‘all the wiles of the enemy’.

  James paid for Richard’s offering again: 14 shillings. He paid too for candles to burn on the altar of Our Lady and for a trental of Masses – thirty over the year, with daily recitation of Placebo and Dirige – to be sung before her altar and that of St Triduan, the local patron. These were Masses both of intercession and of requiem for the souls of the departed. The two young men (bellies aching as they inspected the ordnance afterwards, for this was a bread-and-water fasting day) expected hard fighting and deaths: or at least James did. Richard, always sunny, seemed to be thinking mostly of the people who would flock to him. Vergil said he assured James ‘that great reinforcements were coming from England, and that many nobles would come over to him when they heard he was raising his standard’. The king apparently believed him. Similar dazzling reports had reached Maximilian since the beginning of the year, ‘informing him that his affairs were prospering and that, through the disturbances imminent in England, he hoped for victory’. In September, Richard seems to have told his European backers that he and James were taking the field against Henry with 30,000 men, at least seven times the true number. But he was forgiven. Just before they left Edinburgh for the invasion James gave him a present of £36, spontaneous and unexplained.

  In truth, even his inner circle was not secure. Ramsay observed that one of the boy’s chief counsellors, George Neville, was wavering. Neville was the wavering sort. Pardoned after Bosworth, he was knighted by Henry for fighting for him at Stoke against Lincoln and Simnel, but soon drifted Yorkist again. ‘What ye think best me to do I shall gladly follow your mind,’ he wrote to an associate some years later, half-helping another Yorkist claimant, but unsure. In September 1496 he was both advising Richard and talking to Ramsay, agreeing that he would ‘quit him’ of the boy if James and Henry came to terms. But Ramsay could hardly follow the contortions of his loyalty. Neville seemed to be not only in a ‘new consort’ with the boy, but also keen to do Henry pleasure, ‘and I answered him that ye cared not for his pleasure or displeasure’. So much for one of Richard’s longest-serving friends.

  His firmest support no longer came from his advisers, but from James, in his pushing and full-hearted way. Yet their interests were not always complementary. This much could be seen from the focus of the war. James wanted a raid on Northumberland, and never considered anything else, for he was doing all the planning; but Richard’s support, such as it was, lay at the western end of the border. Ramsay noted the arrival on August 28th of a man from Carlisle who had been sent, so Ramsay was told secretly, by the brother of Lord Dacre, Henry’s loyal lieutenant of the West Marches. Henry’s spy believed there was a connection between the new recruit and the Skeltons of Cumbria, ‘for Michael Skelton that is here had ye conveyance of him’. Edward Skelton was by then full-time in Richard’s service; and Neville, too, had Carlisle connections. When the new recruit arrived, Richard welcomed him and took him at once to James as a token of the great rush of support he knew would come. But in many ways the king was not fighting this war for him.

  Like Maximilian before him, James had managed to extract from Richard a high and material price for his support. On September 2nd, Ramsay wrote, the king had gathered his chief advisers in the council chamber and summoned ‘the boy’ before him. The etiquette of the meeting was suggestive: not two allies holding a war council together, but the king in his council ordering Richard to attend. Ramsay always insisted on this contrast: the king and the boy, active and passive, powerful and powerless, though they were almost the same age and dressed in much the same fashionable splendour. James then demanded of his friend, as expected, the castle and town of Berwick on the border, currently held by the English and well stocked with English guns; the restoration to Scotland of seven border ‘sheriffdoms’, unidentified tracts of the debatable lands between the kingdoms; and 100,000 marks, or just under £70,000 English, ‘for the listing of the king’s army, and for charges made upon him and his company’. All this was to be given to James, of course, when Richard was crowned king, the money to be paid within five years of his entry into his kingdom.

  Ramsay reported that the boy did not agree to this immediately. He asked for a delay until the morning and then, with his advisers Neville, John Heron and William Lounde, went before James’s council for more ‘lang communing’. In the end he granted about half of what James wanted, refusing to surrender the sheriffdoms and reducing the sum of money to 50,000 marks, to be paid within two years. The agreement was then drawn up in writing.

  In Flanders in 1495, ten weeks of deliberation had preceded the signing away of England in Richard’s name. Yet it was almost certainly Margaret and Maximilian who wrangled then, while their protégé sat silently by. In Scotland, the debate depended on him; and he resisted, at least in part, the demand to give his kingdom away. The bits in question were wild, far-flung and already half-Scots, but he clung to most of them, as well as cutting the colossal sum that James demanded. As his dependant in every way, he was in no position to bargain. But he tried, arguing for a night and a day, as if responsibility and the claim to a birthright meant something real to him. Perhaps they did, or perhaps he had grown sufficiently into the role to understand that they should. Whatever the truth, he was acting now like a man who cared for England.

  On his coming to Scotland he had given a love-letter to a girl he did not yet know. On his coming to England he bore a proclamation addressed to a people he did not know either. Whoever he was, he had never engaged with them. At best, they had forgotten him; at worst, they dismissed him as a French or Flemish trickster. All this he knew. The proclamation, elegantly written and inordinately long, was intended to persuade them of his sincerity and urge them to join his cause. From a distance he looked lovingly, sadly and hopeful
ly on England, as he had gazed on the unknown young woman with her white neck and her eyes like stars.

  The voice behind the proclamation seemed to be his own, rather than that of any of the rag-tag people round him. It ran on for almost two thousand words, all of them shouted by common criers at the gates of a handful of English border towns. It is impossible to know how this torrent sounded in the ears of those who heard it in the early autumn of 1496. But it shows, more clearly than anything, the weight that sat on this young man’s shoulders, whether or not it belonged there.

  Richard by the grace of God King of England & of France Lord of Ireland prince of wales. To all those that these our present letters shall see hear or Read & to every of them greeting

  & whereas we in our tender age Escaped by god’s might out of the tower of London / and were secretly conveyed over the sea into other divers Countries / there Remaining certain years as unknown; The which season it happened one Henry son to Edmond Tydder Earl of Richmond created / son to Owen Tydder of low birth in the Country of wales / to come from france & Entered into this our Realm / and by Subtle false means to obtain the Crown of the same unto us of Right appertaining: Which Henry is our Extreme & mortal Enemy . . .

  The usurper-king had tried to destroy him in every way he knew, but he had ‘graciously’ escaped, and was now with ‘the right high and mighty prince our dearest cousin the King of Scots’:

  which without any gift or other thing by him desired or demanded to the prejudice or hurt of us or our Crown or Realm / hath full Lovingly and Kindly retained us . . . ascertaining you how the mind and intent of the foresaid noble prince our dearest Cousin is if that he may see our subjects and natural liege people according to Right & the duty of their allegiance resort lovingly unto us with such power as by their puissance shall move, be able of likelihood to distress & subdue our enemies he is fully set & determined to Return home again quietly with his people into his own Land, without doing or suffering to be done any hurt or prejudice unto our Realm or to the inhabitants of the same.

  After that necessary reassurance, there followed a catalogue of Henry’s crimes. He had cruelly murdered ‘our Cousin the Lord Fitzwater Sir William Stanley Sir Robert Chamberlain Sir Simon Mountford Sir Robert Radcliffe, William Daubeney Humphrey Stafford and many other besides such as have dearly bought their lives’. He also kept ‘our Right entirely well-beloved Cousin Edward son and heir to our uncle Duke of Clarence’ and others in prison, preventing them from helping the true heir, himself. But for all his cruel wiles, the usurper was beginning to panic. He had sent his treasure abroad, and was preparing to escape:

  And if he should be so suffered to depart as god defend it should be to the greatest hurt jeopardy & peril of the whole Realm that could be thought or imagined; Wherefore we desire & pray you . . . as ye intend the surety of yourself and the Common weal of our land your native ground to put you in your most effectual devoirs with all diligence to the uttermost of your powers to stop and let his passage out of this our Realm; ascertaining you that what person or persons shall fortune to take or distress him shall have for his or their true acquittal in that behalf after their Estate and degrees / so as the most low and simplest of degree that shall happen to take or distress him shall have for his labour one thousand pounds in money / and houses and lands to the yearly value of one hundred marks to him and his heirs for Ever

  Richard moved on to the pitiful state of England: the ‘great and execrable offences daily committed & done by our foresaid great enemy and his adherents’ against the Church, ‘to the high displeasure of almighty god’, besides ‘the manifold treasons, abominable murders, manslaughters, robberies, extortions the daily pilling of the people by dismes, taxes tallages, benevolences, and other unlawful impositions’. He, however, came as a saviour, putting himself ‘Effectually in our devoir / not as a stepdame / but as the very true mother of the Child / languishing or standing in peril to Redress, and subdue the foresaid mischief and misrule’. He would govern benevolently, ‘dreading god & having tender zeal & affection to indifferent ministrations of Justice and the public weal of the land’. Good laws and customs would be enforced and preserved, wrongs righted ‘according to Right law and good Conscience’, trade promoted, and all grievous exactions ‘utterly . . . fordone and laid apart & never from henceforth to be Called upon but in such causes as our noble progenitors, Kings of England, have of old time been accustomed to have the aid succour & help of their subjects and true liegemen’. He was not so unworldly as to forgo grievous exactions altogether.

  Lastly, Richard promised to pardon all those who had ‘imagined, compassed or wrought privily or apparently since the reign of our foresaid enemy, or before anything against us’; unless they had imagined his death. By these gentle means, he hoped his enemies would be persuaded to embrace his cause. Yet for those who did not, punishment would be severe. Everything depended on the side his listeners chose.

  And over this we let you wit / that upon our foresaid Enemy / his adherents & partakers, with all other such as will take their false quarrel and stand in their defence against us with their bodies and goods / we shall come and enter upon them as their heavy Lord and take and repute them and every of them as our Traitors and Rebels / and see them punished according; and upon all other our subjects / that according to right and the duty of their liegance will aid, succour & comfort us with their powers with their lives or goods / or victual our host for Ready money; we shall come and enter upon them Lovingly as their natural liege lord & see they have Justice to them equally ministered upon their causes,

  wherefore we will and desire you & every of you that incontinent upon the hearing of this our proclamation ye according to the duty of your allegiance arready yourselves in your best defensible Array and give your personal attendance upon us where we shall then fortune to be; And in your so doing ye shall find us your Right especial & singular good lord / And so to see you Recompensed and Rewarded as by your service unto us shall be deserved.

  RR

  RR: Ricardus Rex. The first ‘R’ was his monogram again, exactly as he had drawn it in January 1495. Although the original proclamation does not survive, the early seventeenth-century copyist was careful to record that final flourish. In fact, Richard had improved on it, for the final left-to-right horizontal no longer petered out inconsequentially: it became the second, smaller ‘R’, placed to the bottom right and ending with a graceful flourish towards the left. The monogram was instantly recognisable, and it was consistent. He had evidently been practising it, as he kept practising everything to do with being a king.

  He had not been crowned, but he anticipated it. When he spoke of ‘our Realm’, ‘our subjects’, ‘our land’, ‘our crown’, he did not argue his right to the throne, but wrote as if he already sat there. Such pre-emptive talk of kingship had been heard only once before in England’s long history of seized crowns, when Henry Tudor had written that way after his landing in Wales in 1485. Yet Richard’s letter carried this palpable distinction; that he was apart, both physically and mentally, from the land he loved and longed to relieve. One little slip, the phrase ‘our land your native ground’ suggested, maybe more than he meant to, the distance between himself and the people he claimed as his.

  Nor did he really know the state of his country. The picture of England that he painted, ground down by Henry’s taxes, was to be truer the following year than it was in 1496, when Henry was only just beginning to levy the enormous sums that were to finance his war with Scotland: oppressions justified, of course, by his rival’s presence there. As it was, Richard’s listeners may well have wondered what ‘abominable murders, manslaughters, robberies [and] extortions’ he was thinking of. Once more, as in the love-letter, these were standard phrases. The misery, like the beauty, was heavily overstated so that the lover might rise to the occasion: either to worship, or to rescue, the object he loved.

  The most striking image in the proclamation was of himself saving England, ‘not as a stepdame
/ but as the very true mother of the Child / languishing or standing in peril to Redress’. ‘Very’ and ‘true’ were the same word; he could not emphasise the fact enough, nor the depth of his involvement. A true father could have intervened just as effectively, but fathers did not languish, pining for pity and love, and they did not feel a mother’s passionate compulsion, driven by emotion rather than strength, to run into danger to save her child. This, Richard was saying, was how he felt. Henry had no regard or care for England, beating it like an evil stepmother, blackening it with ‘Injuries and wrongs’. He, on the other hand, though he would not hesitate to punish as a ‘heavy Lord’ those who fought against him, meant mostly to ‘come and enter upon them Lovingly’, as he hoped they would resort lovingly to him.

  Few love-letters are entirely true, and certainly this one was not. King Richard did not hesitate to peddle false stories of nobles and treasure sent abroad on Henry’s orders, and of the quavering king’s intention to flee before him. The largest lie came early, with the assertion that James had asked for ‘no gift or other thing’ that would be prejudicial to England. A few sentences later came something between a lie and a pious hope: the claim that James, once he saw ‘our subjects and natural liege people’ returning to their allegiance, would go back home quietly, making no more trouble.

  The proclamation went first; the army followed. The men marched south-east from Edinburgh across the wide, bare Lammermuir Hills towards the border, marked by the west–east course of the Tweed. James had gone ahead with his force and was waiting at Ellem Kirk, at the confluence of the Whiteadder and the Blackadder, for Richard to join him. He was anxious to get on, for he did not intend the expedition to take long. Despite the lengthy preparations, workmen had been recruited from the streets of Edinburgh – 143 carters at a shilling a day, paid in advance, and seventy-six men with spades and mattocks to clear the way for the guns through ‘peats and mires’ – for two weeks’ service only. A quick border raid, not a war, seemed to be what James imagined. The king would start matters off, and when he saw England rising for his friend he would leave him to continue.