by Ann Wroe
A special cart was needed for Richard’s stuff, with an Englishman, John of Chamer, in charge of it. Richard’s own army numbered about 1,400 ‘of all manner of nations’, Ramsay wrote, but not notably from England. De Lalaing was there with his brother and his band of Germans. The appearance of the ‘Alemans’ can be judged from an etching of the same year by Dürer: swaggering men in padded clothes rather than armour, equipped with swords and halberds but also with fashionable hats, trailing long feathers, slung across their backs. ‘Rugged men of the mountains,’ Vergil called the Germans who fought at Stoke, but Dürer’s had found refinement somewhere.
A force like this posed problems of its own. Mercenaries were professional fighters, bound to the man who had hired them only by their pay and by hopes of plunder. A prince was ill-advised, wrote Christine de Pisan, to fight with great numbers ‘of strange soldiers that he knoweth not’. They caused nothing but noise, tumult and dissension. If the weather turned bad, or if the pay was late, they would often take to pillage to seize back what they felt was owed them. (Germans, Molinet said, always wanted to be paid a month in advance.) They were not easily controlled, and they felt nothing for the land and people on which they practised their well-honed techniques. Like ‘hungry cats’ and ‘ravening lions’, they were fearless and merciless in action, and once their job was done the survivors would move on – the Germans with their drums, the Flemings with their beer-thirst, the Swiss with their blood-freezing war-cries – to terrorise, for pay, some other place.
The march south was difficult, and the weather cold; under his finery, James was wearing socks and thick black mittens. The army took two days to straggle across the Tweed, helped by local coble-men. One of the closed carts got stuck in the river, and was left to stand in the water all night while the rest of the force pushed on. With his beautiful standard and banner, gleaming with gold thread, Prince Richard was now in England. But his subjects did not appear to notice. No supporters came to him along the stony roads. Before the invasion Ramsay had thought that men from Northumberland were gathering ‘shrewdly’ and ‘secretly’ to him, making covert arrangements with Scotsmen, ‘and every day through them their vagabonds escape, coming to Perkin’. A lot of letters had come, too, and Rowland Robinson had ridden to the border in July to stir up interest. But once Prince Richard was there in person – in a place where the wool on the sheep was so scraggly and thin that it was exempted from customs duty – the picture looked far different. As he rode past the isolated hamlets and the bleak hillsides, the response to him was complete indifference; or, worse, fear and hatred of the Scottish-German rabble who came with him. Some of James’s cavalry, sent ahead to see if the English were arming, reported that everything was quiet. The people had retreated to the high stone towers of their lords, expecting, on frequent past experience of visitations from Scotland, that all they owned would be destroyed.
Kings on the move customarily marked their way with little acts of pity and largesse. On the Scottish leg of the march, James’s almoner had ridden with the army to hand out pennies to the sick and poor. The king’s accounts for other years show payments to ‘a travelling man by the road’, to ‘a boy that broke his leg and lay still there’, and to ‘a poor bairn that took the king by the hand’. In England, Henry VII paid generously for small gifts he was given on the road – new bread, cherries, a glass of rose-water – and paid too for crops that were damaged by his progress, or reaping that was interrupted. In these tiny exchanges, the king bound himself to his subjects by accessibility and kindness. He demonstrated the benevolence that was expected of princes and, for that, they thanked him.
Prince Richard knew about benevolence in the abstract. It was in his portrait, the expected expression of gentleness, and in his proclamation, with all that talk of tenderness and love. But now he was bringing ‘his people’ not kindness, but war. As the Scottish army realised that no support was coming for this prince, they turned to the casual pillage that normally characterised their trips across the border. Richard’s mercenaries joined in. The grand campaign became another routine raid. ‘[The king] laid waste the fields,’ wrote Vergil, ‘pillaged and then burnt the houses and villages. The natives who resisted he cruelly killed . . . having widely devastated the countryside of Northumberland, he would have gone even further, but his troops were so laden with spoils that they refused to follow him.’ James allowed this, since he had promised to go home peacefully only if the men of Northumberland came over to Richard’s side. His henchmen had marched south wearing black hoods and jackets, like Death. They stayed to deal it out to the English who had so sorely disappointed him.
His friend did not stay. Barely two days into the march, hardly further than the English side of the Tweed, Richard left the force and returned to Edinburgh. By all accounts, he and James had a bitterly angry exchange of words. Richard, in tears, asked James ‘humbly’ to stop savaging his country and his people. Lordship was worth nothing to him, he said, if it was obtained ‘by so piteously spilling the blood and destroying with sword and flames the land of [my] fathers’. Vergil added that he cried out: ‘Oh my cruel heart, that I am not moved by the destruction of my people!’ The word was meorum: more simply, ‘mine’. But they were not his. James retorted: ‘It seems to me, Sir, that you are meddling in another man’s business and not your own.’
The remark was devastating, and the ‘Sir’, if spoken, made it worse. Chroniclers could not resist thinking that James said more; perhaps he did. He added, in Vergil’s words, ‘that though Peter called England his country and the English his countrymen, no one had rushed forward to lend him their aid’. Buchanan said he pointed out that the English, far from recognising Richard as a king, did not even recognise him as an Englishman.
‘By mutual consent’, according to Buchanan, Richard rode away. Somehow he knew where he was going, eventually splashing through the ford where the Tweed met the Till just east of Coldstream, the first town of size on the Scottish side of the river. James despatched Andrew Forman to go after him and give him a present of £74 8s., the equivalent of two-thirds of his monthly pension. It looked like a peace offering, and so it may have been. The king seems to have been immediately sorry, on one level; but he stayed four more days in England to sack, burn and lay siege to Heton Castle, until the approach of an English force from Newcastle induced him to go home. De Lalaing, the proper soldier, stayed with him; the Burgundian captain was given another two horses ‘to the raid’ to make his presence felt. The king’s treasurer seems to have tried to cover up Richard’s precipitate departure, deleting it without explanation from the accounts for the middle of the raid and inserting it later, so that the prince came home when the guns did. But the truth, as everyone knew, was otherwise.
What had actually happened on the ground by the time Richard left was little enough in the annals of warfare. By Henry’s own estimate, the troops had marched four miles into England and ‘cast down three or four little towers’. Within that range, to be sure, they had ‘done . . . great cruelty to man, woman and child’, besides ‘burning, and other outrageous deeds’, but it is hard to imagine, in that wild and open border country, that many people could be found to be hurt or many buildings to be burned. A solitary complaint survives from Chapletown of Esilmont, about the ‘wrongous spoilation, awaytaking and withholding’, under cover of the raid, of eighty-seven gelded rams worth 4 shillings each. The undoubted violence was on a tiny scale; but it was more than enough to turn Prince Richard’s stomach.
It is possible that he had never been so close to real war before. At Deal he had been out at sea, watching men killed but not seeing in any detail how they died. At Waterford he had stayed well away from the business of fighting. His most prolonged exposure to blood would have been the regular bleedings, essential to health, on which both Margaret and James insisted. These were done most propitiously in the spring, when the sun was in Aries. A little vein in the arm was opened with leeches to take away repletion of blood and aggre
gations of humours from the head, the liver and the heart. Nothing spilled, but the black unmoving slugs swelled in contentment until they were rubbed off with salt and the tiny puncture bound, perhaps with a poultice of mallows to help it heal. This done, people often lay for a while in bed in a darkened room, the windows closed ‘that no air come in to hurt us’, staying still and quiet. Only so much blood coursed in the body, containing its inner heat and spirit; age and sorrows dried and slowed it, and once lost it was not remade. The thought of losing blood, and the sight of others losing it, may well have upset Richard as much as the feeling that the blood belonged to his people. Any of this would have been incomprehensible to James, who was so fascinated by blood that he sometimes paid his servants to let him bleed them or pull their teeth.
Violence, too, was known to upset people physically. The book of the heart, laid open to impressions, began to flutter and fold at the sight of it. William Caxton’s Dialogues included instructions for wrapping in blankets a young girl seized with uncontrollable shaking after seeing two men fighting. In 1465, at the battle of Monthléry, Philippe de Commines related how the young Duke of Berry, then nineteen, tried to stop the fighting because ‘he had seen so many men wounded that he wished these things had never been started’. His listeners were astounded at him. Berry was so inexperienced in war that some said he had never yet put on armour, and wore only a lightweight brigandine of satin covered with gilt pins. It is likely that Prince Richard too had gone to war still decked with fancies and fashions and, like Berry, was shocked by what he saw: shocked into pity.
In books, and in time of peace, the pity and mercy of princes was much admired and recommended. But in the heat of war, pity was itself pitiable. In Richard’s case it was perhaps an act too, another piece of artistry to add to the confection of a king. ‘That glorious sighing,’ Hall called his appeal to James; ‘ridiculous mercy and foolish compassion’. For Vergil, this was the finest performance of the young man’s mendacious career: ‘well worth noting’, as he sarcastically remarked. Rather than stay, and expose his own fakery by his failure to win England over, he gave the excuse that he loved his country too much to carry on. Yet he may have meant it, for all the chroniclers mocked. All these incidents – the hesitation over Berwick, the ‘languishing’ of the proclamation, and now the tears in Northumberland – may have been signs of an involvement that had grown deep enough to hurt him.
Nonetheless, the appearance was awful. When a new knight went first to battle or to the tournament, feeling his courage unsteady, he was told to remember whose son he was. To those still comparing this prince with King Edward – a comparison he had moved slightly away from now, emerging more and more in his own right as Richard – there was a disturbing difference. Edward had loved war as James did, inspecting his guns almost daily and naming two of them, ironically as it might seem now, after his sons (‘Edward and Richard Bombardel’). He had also been notably courageous, fighting eight or nine battles in England by Commines’s count, ‘in which he had always been present himself, and had fought constantly on foot, which redounded much to his honour’. That manly blood appeared to have turned in Richard to milk and water. It was true that the Black Prince, victor of Poitiers, had sired another Richard who had been delicate, effete and soft-fingered, while Henry V, the great hero of Agincourt, had fathered a poor silly saint in farmer’s boots. Perhaps it could be argued that sons often turned out contrary to their fathers. Yet it was keenly disappointing, especially if this son was supposed to win back England.
The king’s army came back home, walking the guns over the hills. A month later, men were still clearing up wheels and a cart ‘that the Englishmen left behind them by the gate [road]’ at Haddington, sorry souvenirs. The dismal failure of the Great Invasion did not leave James’s friendship with Prince Richard undamaged. Although the king had used Richard’s claim largely as a pretext, he did not want vicarious humiliation. Vergil wrote that James, ‘having manifestly proved the man’s vanity and impudence’, paid less and less attention to him, ‘since the facts in no way corresponded with his false statements and promises’.
There is some sign of this. After the raid, the accounts fell largely silent about Prince Richard, as if he was no longer a visitor at court or even an occasional companion. His one surviving letter from Scotland, written that October, was drafted in Edinburgh on a day when James and his court were in Stirling. For some months, possibly because Katherine’s dowry was sustaining him, his pension seems to have gone unpaid. When it reappeared, the next May, the treasurer did not call him the Duke of York or the Prince of England any more; his servants were given his pension for ‘their master’. At each point of payment, ‘York’ was written in the margin in a different, paler ink. It seemed like discourtesy, but – since marginalia were so rare in the Scottish accounts – it may only have been a quick way for James, who reviewed them, to check that payment had been made. The sense survives, though, of a prince now confined to the margins. The Spanish sovereigns, responding on March 28th 1497 to information sent by Ayala, said that ‘since he proved himself by running away, and didn’t stop running’ during the invasion of England, ‘the King of Scotland keeps him now almost as a prisoner’. Now that James had no further reason to protect him, they went on, it was quite likely that he would soon hand him over, or at least keep him in such complete security that he was no longer a nuisance. Perhaps then this liviandad, this frivolity, could be forgotten.
The failure of the invasion and the change of heart in James – overstated but still tangible – did not stop Henry mobilising his army for a huge offensive against Scotland. War was officially declared on September 25th. The king obtained a grant of £120,000 from Parliament and raised, in loans from his subjects, more than £50,000. In all, about £300,000 was gathered in and 44,000 men mobilised for a spring march northwards. James could have war if he wanted it; or he could give up the feigned lad, and have peace. James’s response was to busy himself on the border that winter and spring, checking his forts and preparing men and supplies for the enormous onslaught that threatened from the south; but these efforts now appeared to have little or nothing to do with Prince Richard of England. James was going to fight on his own account.
Since the raid Richard’s supporters had been steadily leaving Scotland, and James was often glad to pay to see the back of them. By the end of September, as Ramsay had predicted, George Neville had gone. De Lalaing, with a farewell present of 100 marks, left on October 7th. Monypeny left on the 19th, taking a gift of £90 in silver and £28 for the two French heralds who accompanied him. ‘O’Donnell’s man’ had taken news of the fiasco to Ireland, to spread among the friends there. James gave Rowland Robinson £200 for the ‘red [paying-off] of the Englishmen to the sea, like as is contained in an indenture made betwixt the King’s good grace and the Duke of York’. Whether this was made pre-emptively, or after the raid, they had agreed, on paper and formally, that the enterprise of getting England back was over for the time being.
The Prince of England may not have minded as much as some supposed. His soldiers may have left him, James may have been disenchanted, but he still had, in Katherine, one believer without reservation. Perhaps this was enough to allow him to live out of the public eye for a while, in a tiny ambit of disinterested love. He had been a wanderer, in whatever version of his life was true, for more than a decade, far away from and out of touch with whatever family had once been his. Now he had the makings of a new family, a household of dependants with ties far closer than disaffected merchants and mercenaries.
Besides Katherine there was also, by now, a baby son who bore his features and, in some form, the name he said was his. Both Bernard André and Andrea Trevisano, the Venetian envoy, thought that by the time Richard left Scotland he had children; Trevisano’s word was fioli, suggesting these were sons. But the firmest evidence came from Maximilian, who received news of York’s ‘one-year-old son’ in October 1497. It is highly likely, then, that the birth of th
is child explained the mysterious payments made to Richard ‘at the king’s command’ in September 1496: the first just before he left for the war, the second as he ‘came home’ from Northumberland. The birth of a first child was often a moment when kings gave presents to their friends. Perhaps, too, the squeamishness Richard felt at the violence to women and children in England was spurred not only by his ‘tender zeal’ for his subjects, but by his longing to be with his own wife and newborn baby at home.
Babies, though mostly women’s work, were still held, kissed and adored by their fathers, no matter how exalted. Edward IV, on his return from exile in 1471, had kissed his ‘sweet babies’, according to a contemporary song, and carried his newborn son in his arms. A man far from home, informed of the birth of a child, was presumed immediately to love him as strongly as though he had seen him. A child – asleep in the cradle with his shock of new dark hair, nuzzling his own tiny fist, softly grasping a finger – extended a father’s claim and blood far into the future. Prince Richard founded his own argument on being Edward’s son, continuing his features, his character and his presence. An heir of his own now deepened and strengthened, as Katherine’s love had done, his own cause and his own person as he had portrayed them to the world. Whoever he was, his little son now touched his face in utter trust and love. This too, like marriage, may have frightened Richard as much as it thrilled him. But he could not, as in Northumberland, mount his horse and ride away, nor would he want to. Like Edward from his exile, he had come home. He was never described as being there at any other point in his career.