by Ann Wroe
In the next paragraph of their letter (for the Spanish sovereigns, as so often, seemed to be maturing their thinking as they dictated), a less unselfish plan was taking shape. They had it deleted afterwards, but they had toyed with it all the same:
As it would be a very great disadvantage to the King of England in his negotiations with us, and a great security for us to make him fulfil all his promises, we should very much like, if possible, that our servants should take him prisoner, or that others should take him and deliver him to us. But . . . we are of the opinion that it is best only to cut him off from all assistance, and for the King of England to get him into his hands by his own exertions.
In January 1496 a rumour came, passed on from de Puebla, that York was actually in Spain. No, said Ferdinand and Isabella, he had not come, as though he would have arrived in great state and would not have been missed. At the end of March, replying to de Puebla’s letter of January 21st, which had just arrived, they were ‘astonished’ that the ambassador had no news of him and that, if ‘he’ had gone to Scotland, their ambassadors to Scotland had sent them none, ‘because making sure that the King of Scotland doesn’t help him or do anything for him is one of the things they’re there for’. The complaint was strengthened later: this was the main news that Ferdinand and Isabella wanted. Nothing the ambassadors wrote has survived, but gradually, as James showed his friend increasing favour, the tone in Spain changed. By April, Ferdinand and Isabella were consistently calling James’s guest ‘the Duke of York’, and were treading more carefully in the marriage negotiations with Henry ‘until we see where the affairs of the King of Scotland will stop’. And at this point too the old idea, to get York into their hands, began to gleam again.
They clearly wrote about it to de Puebla, for on June 13th he thanked them for a letter they had sent him, ‘[which] gave me great pleasure, because . . . do not doubt this, you would have absolute control of things here, if you had in your hands him who calls himself the son of King Edward’. He then showed the letter to Henry:
And when the King of England had understood your Highnesses’ secret instructions, and everything in your letter, he said that by the faith of his heart you showed in this your prudence and greatness and the love you had for him, and that if your Highnesses could quickly conclude that matter, there would be no delay or altercation in these matters [of the marriage]; that otherwise he might indeed get more heavily involved in a war, having such a problem in the kingdom of Scotland, and he implored me that he wanted both matters concluded soon and in secret. And [he said] I might rest assured that if your Highnesses can do what you say in the one business and in the other business, he will do whatever you desire.
De Puebla said he was writing immediately to tell them this. ‘Above all, I beseech your Highnesses to get him who calls himself Edward’s son into your royal hands. He is the entire obstacle. If you can have this person, and take him away from France, that is the complete remedy for the present troubles.’ In a postscript, he kept pushing. ‘This is the whole thing . . . once you have him of York in your royal hands, know for certain, from what I can understand and from what they tell me, that they will absolutely do your Highnesses’ will in omnibus et per omnia.’
How the capture was to happen was either never discussed or has not survived. The only hint appeared in a letter to de Puebla of April 14th: ‘We shall not try to get him to come to Spain, but if we can get him in our hands, we will try to do so for all the good reasons you say. There is no more to be said on this matter.’ The Spanish sovereigns did not, however, warm to the next part of the scheme as Henry envisaged it, that they should send ‘him of York’ as a prisoner to England. ‘If we had him in our power,’ they told de Puebla, ‘he would not be a person to be kept by us, but the King of England would request us to deliver him into his hands – a thing which we would not do for any consideration whatsoever.’
During these months Pedro de Ayala too – whose relations with de Puebla were famously poisonous, though they were meant to be working in secret concert for the marriage and the peace – was trying to persuade Richard to leave Scotland for Spain. Ayala was a charmer, a dancer, a hunter and player of cards with James; ‘not learned’, Vergil said of him, but clever and exceedingly discreet. He would have encountered the Prince of England on the dance-floor or out hawking, and would have befriended him in his easy and laughing way. He had arrived just before the raid on England and had gone along, unusually for an ambassador, to observe at first hand not only James’s wild foolhardiness, which he reported, but the timidity and distress of his friend. His despatches, packed with information and colour but relatively rare, never mention the young man, and it is hard to tell what he thought of him. His sovereigns, however, were displeased with Ayala for ‘so easily believing what the Scots tell him’.
Ayala, in fact, was playing a double game they would have approved of. Zurita said the ambassador had been given a commission to ensure that the King of Scotland delivered ‘this false duke’ up to Ferdinand, and that the King of England ‘should never have him’. He was therefore working on James to persuade him to drop his prince; but James, to lull any suspicions, was to keep paying Richard his pension as usual. At the same time, Zurita said,
[Ayala] gave him of York to understand, as if in great secrecy, that peace was inevitably going to be concluded between the Kings of Scotland and England, to put him in suspicion and fear. Distrust of this peace put him in such terror that he determined to leave [Scotland] to go to Ireland, where he would put himself in a Spanish boat that had carried fish, and sail from there to seek a safe-conduct from the Catholic king.
Whether or not the full particulars of this scheme were laid out by October, Ayala was already mentioning Spain to Richard. The ambassador was also writing back to Spain that he had some hope of getting the Duke of York, and Ferdinand and Isabella were urging him ‘to accomplish this in every respect’. (‘Write to us particularly about all this,’ they begged de Puebla, ‘and tell us what must be done.’) They hoped to achieve this ‘secret thing’ before making any public announcement of the marriage of Katherine and Arthur; it was that important.
At this point, Richard wrote to Bernard de la Forsa. It was only prudent to check, from some knowledgeable source, what his fate was likely to be when he got to Spain. De la Forsa was the best man to know, for as Edward’s envoy to the Spanish court he had often been instructed to talk freely to Ferdinand and Isabella, trying by his discretion and ‘by all means of policy’ to draw what was necessary out of them. Ferdinand was perhaps particularly mentioned in the letter because Isabella had been tried before, to no effect. She may have been more sceptical; certainly, when she wrote to de Puebla on her own account in July 1496, she dismissed the Scottish nuisance as ‘that boy’, a term never used for him when she and Ferdinand wrote jointly. Both sovereigns had told de Puebla, though, that they had read ‘his’ letter and had spurned it equally.
Yet Richard’s enquiry about Ferdinand’s state of mind was almost forgotten in his letter. Instead, he did his utmost to recruit a new friend, a suddenly remembered and obvious one, in a landscape that was now almost barren of supporters. The theme of love occurred repeatedly, as if repetition could bind the wise old diplomat to the tenuous claim of a young man he did not know. The loving counsellor, if he showed Richard the same love he had shown his father, would in turn be rewarded even more lovingly. Richard would be his ‘good lord’, his pledged and dependable protector. He asked de la Forsa to ‘exhort move and stir our lovers and friends’ to advise him what best to do. Lastly, he signed himself ‘your friend Richard of England’, in a hand so expansive, so boldly and informally assuming friendship on the other side, that the words ‘your friend’ squeezed ‘of England’ almost off the edge of the page. The letter was then folded several times, very small, and tied with a ribbon on which the royal seal was set.
There is no sign that de la Forsa answered. He may not have been inclined to for, despite his Yorkist s
ervice, he had worked more recently for Henry too. Like his son Anthony, who was apparently still at Richard’s side, he was happy to serve both the White Rose and the Red. He was paid a regular annuity of £40, topped up by larger rewards, in the late 1480s and early 1490s. The work of ‘our trusty and wellbeloved Bernard de la Forsa’, as Henry too called him, was never specified, nor his exact standing in relation to the king. But he was certainly paid on occasion for spying for Henry in Brittany and later in Spain, invaluable work. It is possible that Richard did not know – and certain that Anthony, himself so recently in Henry’s pay, would not tell him – that Bernard’s love was likely to be much more constrained than the love that was poured out on him.
Richard’s letter ended up somehow at the Spanish court, either sent on directly or intercepted before it had reached its destination. His letters seemed to have a habit of ending up there, and perhaps not simply because the Spanish sovereigns wished to read them and laugh. Their secretary Almazan endorsed this one as he had endorsed the one to Isabella, but with different words. This letter was now ‘from the Duke of York’, their own possible pensioner, puppet and prince.
The greatest pressure on James to drop Richard, however, was coming from England. By the summer of 1497 Henry had spent at least £60,000, an almost unconscionable sum, equipping an army and a navy for war. Robert Clifford’s registers of expenditure, as master of the ordnance, show how frenetically busy he now was opposing the young man he had once supported. It was Clifford’s job to draw up contracts with the twenty-two ships, from ports all over England and from abroad, that were destined for Berwick with timber, cannon, serpentines, carts, ‘crows of iron’, barrels of gunpowder, gun-shot and gun-stones, axes and padlocks, hogsheads of vinegar, and all the gear of war. There they were to wait ‘until such time as the king’s grace shall come thither’. Ordnance and artillery were brought too from the palace at Kenilworth, from the Tower and from Calais, emptying the forts elsewhere. Some pieces had aggressively Tudor names: Windsor, the Rose, the Greyhound. One May afternoon in 1497, on the Tower walls, Clifford arranged a demonstration of the guns for Henry, but it was James and his prince who were meant to hear them firing.
By June 1497 the fleet had sailed north, one-third of the king’s forces were committed against Scotland and another third were making their way to Newcastle, where Lord Daubeney was to command them. Henry had also stepped up his own diplomacy, continuing to offer James the hand of his six-year-old daughter Margaret as well as peace, but James had to relinquish his guest first. Revelling in the attention, he went on refusing. On grounds of honour and the bond of blood by marriage, Vergil said, he could not deliver the young man up to death. Yet the pressures from both directions, England and Spain – with the pope, equally anxious to see Europe united against France, adding his weight – were so intense that James was bound to yield eventually. Vergil thought the king had in any case understood ‘that Peter was not Richard the son of Edward’; but if he did, James never said so. De Puebla was probably closer when he said later that it was Henry’s mobilisation, the sight of ‘the ears of the wolf’, that finally cooled James’s appetite for war. By that June, the question was not whether to divest himself of Prince Richard, but how to do so as fast as honour would allow.
His friend may have sensed this some time before. Though Richard made a good show of buoyant determination, he cannot have missed the indications that his days in Scotland were numbered. There is some sign too that James hoped he would leave earlier, just after the failed invasion. The ship in which Richard eventually sailed was bought by the king that same October, with some difficulty, from a couple of ‘Frenchmen’, actually Bretons, Guy Foulcart and Jean Peidzoun. The Cuckoo, as she was called, was not a large vessel; she cost something over £100 Scots, or perhaps 40 ‘pounds English’, as Ramsay would have put it. After a bitter spat in court over the silver owed for her, James ordered Peidzoun to furnish her in the Duke of York’s service. From the end of 1496, therefore, the ship that was to take Richard away from Scotland was already in dock, being patched up in all the ways necessary to transform a merchant vessel into a craft for a prince.
Yet her name remained, and the cuckoo was a bird associated everywhere with foolishness. In Sebastian Brant’s ‘Ship of Fools’, idiots held cuckoos on their wrists when they went hawking, and the cutaway fashions of Malines and Leyden, as favoured by presumptuous peasants, were said to have a cuckoo embroidered on the (extra-wide) sleeves. The cuckoo was also famous as an interloper, muscling its way into the nests of other birds demanding to be fed, though its plumage showed clearly that it must be an impostor. The connotation of foolish generosity to a masquerading prince was difficult to miss, as was the echo of that prince’s empty claims: for the boaster was like a cuckoo, said The King’s Book, ‘that can sing no song but of himself’. The name may well have contributed to Henry’s later remark that his enemy had been ‘set full poorly to the sea by the king of Scots’.
They parted in the first week of July 1497. The farewells were apparently said in Edinburgh, with little of the ceremony that had greeted Prince Richard’s arrival nineteen months before. Vergil said that James, summoning the young man before his court, reminded him of his kindness to him and pointed out, too, that nothing he had done for him had borne any fruit in England. He had tried his best, but his friend had made too many ‘empty promises’ of the favour he would find across the border. From now on, he would have to pursue his claim himself. That claim, James believed, was still important, but he would have to bide a better time somewhere else. Having said this and more, Vergil wrote, the king ordered him to leave.
This does not ring true. James was dismissing Richard with honour and as his friend, with the wife he had given him still lovingly beside him. But the moment was no easier for that. Richard’s reply was apparently an impressive example of dissembled politeness, concealing the devastation he felt inside. He said he was deeply grateful and would not forget. ‘Having understood the king’s wishes,’ said Buchanan, ‘he was utterly cast down by this . . . But having accepted so many benefits without being able to repay them, and not wishing to seem ungrateful, he accepted the king’s orders with equanimity.’ He left Scotland, Buchanan went on, ‘laying down nothing of his simulated greatness of soul’.
Their belongings were loaded on two carts and, in slow convoy, they made their way west to Ayr. James had arranged to pay for Richard’s board and lodging in his ‘chamber’ in the town, the word still implying his princeliness, since only men of standing ate in their rooms and not in the common tavern. His meals and incidental expenses there, for perhaps one night, came to £10 16s., extravagant to the last. Andrew Forman remained in attendance on him. Ayr – a brewing town as well as a port, smelling of fish and beer, loud with seagulls – was full of the prince’s men; James paid to lodge them too, and for the hire of other horses to take thirty of these men to the sea.
James himself was not there. Some of his horses were in the town, and men were paid for walking them, but on July 9th he was at Kinghorn in Fife, on the other side of the country. As always, he had done his best for Richard, even paying him the July instalment of his pension early, on June 27th. Katherine was given a last present from him of three and a half yards of tawny Rouen cloth for a sea-gown, and two and a half yards of black Lille cloth for a cloak: sensible, unluxurious travelling clothes. His last present to Richard was to pick up the tab, through Forman, for the ‘quitting out’ of the prince’s brown horse, which was left behind in Ayr to cover £14 in debts.
The company that sailed from Ayr was not a war-party. Richard was transporting himself and his family away, as if his whole claim to kingship-in-exile was now contained in the timbers of one small ship. The Cuckoo was provisioned with a good Scottish diet of oatmeal, biscuit, six stones of cheese, a hogshead of herring, twenty-three sides of mutton, seventeen carcasses of salt beef, twelve large dried cod, beer for the men and four pipes of wine for the nobility. Cider, a rarity in Scotland,
seems to have been laid on especially for English tastes. The equipment, however, was spartan: five drinking vessels, some barrels of water, a cauldron for cooking, coals and peat for the fire, a hundred candles for light.
Most strikingly, however, the Cuckoo contained no weapons and no soldiers. She was just a merchant ship, as she had been before. They had even left Laurence the armourer behind. Protection was provided by two renowned sea-captains, Andrew and Robert Barton, in their own ships (Andrew had also provided the cider, biscuit and beer). Guy Foulcart, the previous owner of the Cuckoo, was still in charge of her. If thirty horses had gone towards the sea at Ayr, there were presumably thirty men with Prince Richard, but they were probably attendants and the small, established circle of advisers. The number of his supporters had not grown since his arrival in Scotland, except for the beautiful young woman in the tawny sea-gown and the little boy, wide-eyed, squirming or asleep, held tight in his nurse’s arms.
His family’s presence on the small and unarmed craft suggested that they were sailing for some unknown safe-haven. But as far as James was concerned, his friend was heading directly for the land he claimed was his. The agreement between James and Foulcart was that the captain should ‘only [dumtaxat] restore the Duke of York to the shores of England’. In effect, any landing of Richard in England would be, as James well knew, an act of war and probably an act of suicide. But the western parts of England were restless, and it seems that James and Richard had devised a two-pronged plan: Richard would attack from the south-west, James from the north. As yet the plan was ill-formed, and there was little hope of proper co-ordination; but as the Prince of England sailed, James’s guns and pavilions were being assembled again and the troops and masons recruited. Robert Barton knew all about it, telling the Breton pirates who subsequently captured his escort ship that he was in the middle of ‘making war on England’. Certainly Richard let James know when he arrived in Cornwall, as if this was expected, and as he left Scotland he seemed to announce that England was his destination. His parting words may be paraphrased in Adam Abell’s vernacular history: he was passing with Katherine to England ‘to win his father’s crown as he alleged’.