On his expedition to France, Edward IV’s artillery train comprised at least thirteen pieces of heavy artillery, including a huge cannon known as a bombard (called ‘bumbardelle’), five ‘fowlers’, a form of long-range field gun, a ‘curtowe’ (a short-range field gun) and three ‘potguns’ or mortars. These were intended for use both in the field as well as sieges. There was an evident pride in the artillery pieces – both the ‘long fowler’ and the ‘bumbardelle’ were named Edward. Richard, it seems, shared his brother’s enthusiasm for the latest technology on the battlefield; when, in 1480, Louis XI had sent him a huge bombard capable of destroying even the thickest of castle walls, Richard wrote to the French king thanking him for ‘the great bombard which you caused to be presented to me’, acknowledging that ‘for as I have always taken and still take great pleasure in artillery I assure you it will be a special treasure to me’. Richard’s choice of St Barbara to be among the patrons of the college that he founded at Middleham is also interesting in this context: St Barbara, whose murdererer was killed by lightning, was the patron saint of miners, gunmakers and gunners, all of whom invoked her name against sudden and unexpected death.
An idea of the arsenal’s operation in the Tower can be gathered from the king’s command in February 1484 for the constable of the Tower to deliver seven serpentines on carts, twenty-eight hackebushes ‘with their frames’, one barrel of torch powder, two barrels of ‘serpentine powder’ as well as 200 bows, 200 bills, 400 sheaves of arrows, and ten gross of bowstrings to be sent to Scotland. Several months later in June, another order came for the delivery of two serpentines, ‘two guns to lie on walls’, twelve hackebushes, ten steel crossbows, sixty longbows, one hundred sheaves of arrows and two barrels of gunpowder. In order to re-equip supplies, twenty new guns and two serpentines were purchased from merchants at Southampton for £24 in March 1484.
Possession of the latest weaponry was one thing, how to correctly use it was another. Given the fleeting nature of battle in the campaigns of the civil wars, sieges had been few, leaving the English development of weaponry far behind the Continent. Commynes noted in 1477 that ‘because the English had not fought outside their kingdom for so long, they did not understand siege warfare very well’. To address this, men from the Continent with sufficient expertise were drafted into the Tower. William Clowte ‘of Gelderland’ was employed as a ‘gun-maker’ along with William Nele, who was granted an annuity of 6d a day. Another Dutchman, Patrick de la Motte, was appointed chief cannoner and master founder of the king’s cannon, with two other men from abroad, Theobald Ferrount and Gland Pyroo, who were taken into the king’s service as gunners. The king’s official armourer was Vincent Tetulior, paid a salary of £20. He had ordered for the Tower to be restocked with harnesses, complete suits of plate armour, with 164 being purchased from Breton and Genoese merchants for five marks a harness, totalling £560. Plated suits of armour were also specially bought from Antwerp.
In the face of the prospect of an invasion by Henry Tudor at any time, Richard considered that the country should be placed on a constant state of readiness, with men prepared for war if and when it came. In particular, the Crowland Chronicler noted how the king introduced a method of communication last used by Edward IV ‘at the time of the last war in Scotland’ of allocating a mounted courier for every twenty miles, each able to ride with the ‘utmost skill and not crossing their bounds’. The result was that messages could be passed 200 miles within two days ‘without fail by letters passed from hand to hand’.
When rumours of a possible attack reached Richard, no doubt from his spies on the Continent, in the spring of 1484, immediate action was taken, with the king issuing Commissions of Array on 1 May, mustering men from across the country to be prepared to take up arms within twenty-four hours’ notice. An indication of the urgency of the summons can be found in the lists of those appointed, for the name of the recently deceased Prince Edward had failed to be removed by the time they were issued. The names of the commissioners responsible for raising troops reveal the extent to which Richard had become dependent upon the small group of trusted men he himself had chosen to reward for their loyal service: the North was to be raised by Northumberland and Lincoln, Yorkshire by Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Sir Gervais Clifton and Lord Scrope of Bolton, the Midlands by Lord Lovell, William Catesby and Marmaduke Constable, East Anglia by Norfolk and his son Surrey, together with the warden of the Cinque Ports, the Earl of Arundel and Sir Robert Percy, the Comptroller of the royal household.
In spite of this, Richard could be confident that he would be ready to face down any invasion, as he had been when he had crushed Buckingham’s rebellion the previous year. ‘The king was better prepared to resist them in that year,’ the Crowland Chronicler wrote, ‘than he would have been ever at any time afterwards’. Yet the rumours of Henry Tudor’s planned arrival were just that, rumours. There would be no invasion, not this year at least.
As worshippers arrived at the great door of St Paul’s Cathedral on the morning of 18 July 1484, they were greeted by a sheet of parchment, pinned to the door and flapping in the wind. Scribbled on the parchment was a simple rhyming couplet:
The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel our dog,
Ruleth all England under a Hog.
Those crowding round curiously to read the words would have understood fully the cryptic verse. It was aimed as a barbed attack on Richard’s closest councillors: the ‘Cat’ stood for Sir William Catesby, the ‘Rat’ for Sir Richard Ratcliffe, and Lovel ‘our dog’, Francis Viscount Lovell, the king’s councillors and friends who had been richly rewarded by their king, ‘the Hog’, a clear allusion to Richard’s own heraldic device of the Boar, and whose influence and power throughout the country had come to be bitterly resented.
Just as soon as the doggerel had been torn down, a search was ordered for the author of the seditious verse. Soon after, William Collingborne, a gentleman from Wiltshire, was arrested and charged with the offence. Collingborne had been been a former servant of Edward IV, who seems to have fallen out with the new regime shortly after Richard’s accession, being removed from his position on the commission of the peace in Wiltshire. What was perhaps more worrying was that he had been a household officer to Richard’s own mother, Cecilly Neville. Richard had written to her in June 1484, just a month before the offending verse had been pinned to the door of St Paul’s, explaining how he had replaced Collingborne, requesting that she ‘be good and gracious lady’ to his chosen replacement who would be ‘your officer in Wiltshire in such as Collingborne had’.
At Collingborne’s trial several months later, the seriousness with which Richard regarded the crime was reflected in the panel of the jury which included two dukes, thirteen lords, the lord mayor of London and nine judges. As the trial progressed, it was clear that Collingborne’s treachery went far beyond lampooning the king’s councillors. Ten days before he had decided to nail the sheet to the door of St Paul’s he had offered one Thomas Yate £8 to travel to Brittany to deliver a letter he had written to Henry Tudor and his exiles declaring that
they should do very well to return into England with all such power as they might get before the feast of St Luke the Evangelist next ensuing … And that if the said Earl of Richmond with his parttakers, following the counsel of the said Collingborne, would arrive at the haven of Poole in Dorsetshire, he the said Collingborne and other his associates would cause the people to rise in arms and to levy war against King Richard, taking part with the said earl and his friends, so that all things should be at their commandments.
Yate was also commanded by Collingborne to encourage Henry to send Sir John Cheyney to the French king, ‘to advertise him that his ambassadors sent into England should be dallied with’ until winter had passed, so that at the beginning of the following summer, Richard would seek to make war with France, ‘invading that realm with all puissance’ and ‘so by this means to persuade the French king to aid the Earl of Richmond and his partakers in their quarrel again
st King Richard’.
The jury’s guilty verdict delivered, Collingborne was condemned to death. Unlike most of the rebels in Buckingham’s rebellion, whose method of execution was to be the relatively painless death of swinging from the gallows, Collingborne’s end was to be a gruesome one. His body was dragged behind a cart of horses through the filth of the capital’s streets to Tower Hill, where he was first hanged from the gallows. Just as he was close to gasping his final breath, he was cut down, collapsing to the floor. Hauled to his fleet, he was thrown onto a table where his body was ‘straight cut down and ripped’, with his genitals also being castrated. The ‘torment’, the Great Chronicle of London recorded, ‘was so speedily done’ that Collingborne was able to look down as his executioner thrust his hand into his chest and pulled out his heart, crying, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Yet more trouble!’
Collingborne’s seditious verse may be the only example that survives, yet it was certainly not an isolated case, as rumours and written propaganda against the king circulated in the capital and beyond, stoked no doubt by Henry’s exiled community in Brittany.
Still unsettled by rumours that Henry was planning an invasion that summer, Richard was determined to crack down on any possible further treason before it escalated into revolt, punishing those who he discovered had been in contact with Henry Tudor. The cook William Finch later recalled that he had been in service with Robert Morton, the nephew of John Morton, Bishop of Ely and formerly clerk of the Rolls before he had been dismissed from his office the previous summer, when he had travelled with Morton to join Henry in Brittany. When Finch decided to return, Richard’s men were waiting for him: not only was he ‘beaten and maimed’ by Richard’s servants, ‘as it appeareth as well on his hands as other parts of his body’, ‘but also all that he had was taken from him’. On 6 July John, Lord Scrope of Bolton was ordered to try James Newenham, who had been pardoned the previous year, yet had ‘lately confessed great treasons’. The same month Scrope was further appointed to investigate the treasons of several Cornishmen who had planned to send £52 to Robert Willoughby and Peter Courtenay in exile in Brittany, with the indictment accusing the men of aiding the rebels ‘to the destruction of the crown’. In September Richard ordered that several persons in the West Country be arrested for actions ‘against their natural duty and liegeance’. And to prevent any ships departing the country for Brittany, in August Richard sent out orders that no one was to fit out a ship without first making a pledge and giving securities that the vessel would not be used against the king’s subjects or friends.
Of all the allegations contained in Collingborne’s indictment, most concerning for Richard must have been the accusation that he had urged Henry Tudor to make contact with France. Since the death of Louis XI on 30 August 1483, the political situation in France had remained highly unstable. Louis’s heir, the new king Charles VIII, was just thirteen years of age. The queen mother, Charlotte of Savoy, had been removed from power altogether by the late king, and suffering poor health died a few months later in December 1483. In the absence of any recognisable authority, a struggle broke out between Charles’s eldest sister Anne of Beaujeu and the next in line to the throne, the senior prince of the blood royal, Louis, Duke of Orleans, who was also the husband of Charles VIII’s younger sister.
The political infighting in France had become entangled with the equally factious political rivalries taking place in Brittany at the same time. Duke Francis, his mind failing through age, was becoming increasingly frail, ‘by reason of sore and daily sickness’. The Breton government was being effectively controlled by Francis’s treasurer and chief minister Pierre Landais, ‘a man both of sharp wit and great authority’. Landais’s supremacy was resented by other members of the Breton nobility, dissatisfied with their treatment at the hands of a man they considered base-born. Events took a dramatic turn after the sudden death in prison of Landais’s rival, the deposed chancellor Guillaume Chauvin on 5 April 1484. Exasperated at Landais’s control of the duke and his court, two days later a group of dissident nobles led by the Prince of Orange and the Marshal de Rieux stormed the ducal palace at Nantes, attempting to seize the confused Francis and force him into arresting Landais. The uprising failed and the conspirators fled, seeking sanctuary at Anne of Beaujeu’s court. Recognising that Duke Francis had no heir apart from his young daughter, Anne realised the potential for an alliance that might eventually secure the union of France and Brittany, marrying Charles VIII to Francis’s daughter Anne. Eventually an agreement, the Treaty of Montargis, was signed between the Breton nobles and the Beaujeu government on 28 October 1484.
Facing this dangerous challenge to his authority, Landais chose to forge an alliance with the dissident French nobles, known as the Orleanists, led by the Count of Dunois, Orleans’ cousin. On Easter Day, 18 April, Dunois and Orleans arrived in Nantes to give Landais their backing. In order to defeat his rival Anne of Beaujeu, Landais’s support for his cause was only part of Orleans’ grand plan. He was to cast his net for support far wider: in an attempt to create a coalition against the Beaujeu government, he had made contact with Maximilian of Austria, the ruler of the Netherlands, and Richard, hoping to combine the support of his French nobility, Brittany, Burgundy and England, which would ensure that a rebellion against Anne would prove insurmountable.
Maximilian himself had also been encouraging Richard to invade France. He had been humiliated by the treaty of Arras in 1482, which had cost him the loss of Burgundy, Artois and the towns of the Somme; he also wanted to ensure that his son Archduke Philip was less dependent upon the regency government of Charles VIII. He sent an embassy to England with instructions to explain to Richard how the king’s own interests would be served by joining a united alliance against France, and that this would be best achieved by going to Brittany’s aid. When Richard remained hesitant to involve himself in an alliance with Brittany due to the shelter that the Breton government was providing for Henry Tudor, Maximilian suggested that negotiations should be opened up to persuade Duke Francis to ‘leave the party’ of the earl, with Maximilian proposing that he would personally act as the duke’s surety and pledge.
Richard’s own diplomatic situation was looking increasingly bleak. His attempt to establish a puppet regime in Scotland under the Duke of Albany had failed with Albany’s flight to England. Though the Scots signalled their intentions to negotiate a peace, at the same time they continued their attacks on the English garrison at Dunbar. By April 1484 they had reaffirmed their traditional alliance with France. Meanwhile French ships had turned their firepower on English fleets in the Channel, and it was widely expected in London that a French invasion would take place in the summer. The French had already denounced Richard’s usurpation as ‘orgies of crime’ at a council at Tours in the spring of 1484, declaring that ‘Edward IV’s children were murdered with impunity, and the crown transferred to their assassin by the goodwill of the nation’. On 5 April 1484 a French delegation, led by three councillors of Charles VIII, had even arrived in Brittany promising support for a new English venture under Henry Tudor. The French government’s motives were highly suspect: though they assured Francis that he had the survival of Brittany at heart, in reality Anne of Beaujeu hoped that another invasion by Henry would distract Richard’s naval fleet from the damaging piracy that was affecting French ships, at the same time as potentially weakening any prospect of English support for Francis against a French invasion of the duchy. The offer was too generous for Francis not to suspect that the French had their own agenda; nevertheless, work began on preparing a small fleet for Henry, a flotilla of six ships from the ports of Morlaix, St Pol de Jean and Brest, carrying 890 men.
Meanwhile Landais wanted to commit to Orleans’ cause against the French regency government, yet he too had his hesitations. He knew that without English military support it would be a risky strategy to involve Brittany in a French civil war, when the consequence of failure might be a French invasion of his own nation. Landais needed Richa
rd’s own commitment to join in the attack. In return, he would use the one card that remained: handing over Henry Tudor. Already Richard had sent messengers to the duke, though finding Francis incapacitated, they dealt solely with Landais, promising him the yearly revenues of the confiscated lands belonging to Henry and his exiles if he agreed to place them in custody.
It was a tempting offer. Since arriving in Vannes after the failure of Buckingham’s rebellion, the English exile community had been at liberty within the town, where the cathedral accounts offer glimpses of their activities there, recording their offering of 6 livre tournois 7s 1d during the celebrations of the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin on 2 February. Yet the presence of over 400 exiles within the confines of the town’s walls was becoming a burden on the towns-people; the city burgesses had donated 2,500 livre tournois to the impoverished exiles, while the canons of Vannes Cathedral had loaned the English 200 livre tournois, a sum they would later complain in 1498 had yet to be repaid. The chronicler Commynes also noted how the exiled community was becoming an equal financial burden upon Francis’s finances: in June 1484 he gave 3,100 livre tournois to the Englishmen for their lodging; in addition, he paid a pension of £400 to the Marquess of Dorset and his men, £200 to John Halewell, £100 to Robert Willoughby and Sir Edward Woodville, in addition to a monthly sum of £100 ‘for his people’ that totalled £900 for nine months. Tensions between the English exile community and native Vantois were also becoming apparent, with Duke Francis even obliged to grant compensation of 200 livre tournois to the widowed Georget le Cuff, whose husband was killed by one of the exiles.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 22