The warrants also provide us with a hint of the additional help that Henry had received during the conflict. The Scots commander Alexander Bruce who had accompanied Henry from France was rewarded with an annuity of £20, for his ‘good, faithful and approved services heretofore done by him with great trouble and recent personal service … he sustaining therein great losses’. He was granted safe conduct and special protection for himself and a retinue of twenty persons, with a licence to make ‘whatever stay he pleases in England, and to go to and fro as often as he likes during this protection’.
The Earl of Oxford was to play a crucial role in the early days of Henry’s new administration. As the Great Chronicle observed, the earl was recognised as almost an agent to the new king, ‘to whom was then made great suit and labour as well for matters concerning himself as for causes touching soliciting of causes unto the king, for then such persons as had occupied his lands by gift of King Edward or by purchase were fain to restore it, with all such profits’. Desperate in the hope of securing the support of the new regime, the University of Oxford wrote to the earl, flattering him with warm words: ‘during your long exile, in the many changes of this life and the cruelty of fortune, your unswerving loyalty and noble character have caused you to be regretted by the people as few have been; so that we may venture to say that, though none dared to praise, yet none ceased to love you. So marvellous have been your escapes from snares and perils that we must attribute them to a special interference of providence, which has brought you back to your country not only in safety but in honour; to be the chief buttress of the throne and defender of the realm.’
A sign of his influence in the new regime, Oxford was appointed to the hereditary office of great chamberlain, an honour which his ancestors had held from 1133 to 1388. He was further granted the office of Admiral of England, ‘in consideration of the sincere and inward affection which the king bears him’, and appointed constable of the Tower of London on a salary of £50, his prisoners including the Earls of Northumberland and Surrey as well as accommodation for seven Frenchmen and two Scotsmen who may have been participants in the battle. Oxford’s appointment as constable highlights Henry’s own preoccupation with immediately securing the defence of the capital, with other offices in the Tower going to loyal men such as Henry’s ‘faithful servant’ Robert Jay, who was made keeper of the ‘New Bulwark’ at the Tower for his ‘true service … as well beyond the sea as within this our realm, at our victorious field’. Almost immediately, Henry ordered for the Tower to be restocked with supplies, with Sir Richard Guildford confirmed in his post as master of the ordnance and master of the armoury with a salary of 2s a day, with ‘divers allowances for persons employed under him’, and sergeant of the master of armour in the Tower with a salary of 12d a day. The appointment was dated from 8 August 1485, ‘when he was appointed by the king to this office’. Mindful of the value of having skilled craftsmen working there, and perhaps even impressed at the sight of the dead king’s own armour and weaponry in battle, Henry also reappointed Richard III’s armourer Vincencio Tutolez as his official armourer with a salary of £20 a year. He was soon busy re-equipping the royal supplies, ordering 1,000 bowstaves at a cost of £42 10s. William Nele, ‘gunfounder’, was paid £10 for making weights, while William Meryk, a merchant from Bristol, was paid £16 13 4d for gunpowder. William Lovell was appointed master and keeper of arrows as ‘bowyer’ in the Tower, Thomas Walsh the sergeant of ‘the king’s tents and pavillions’. Others who no doubt helped to play a critical role in the campaign and battle were further rewarded: John Rygby, an ‘archer of the king’s guard’, was granted the bailiwick of Rye while John Harpere, the ‘yeoman harbinger’ for Henry’s household, was appointed the sergeant of the Mace in Parliament, with a daily salary of 12d, for his service ‘in Brittany and France during two years and in this our noble realm at our victorious field in subduing our enemies’.
Other key strategic defence posts throughout the country would be rapidly filled with trustworthy captains who could secure the coast and Marches against invasion. Nearly all the new officeholders had both accompanied Henry from exile through his ‘victorious journey’ and fought at Bosworth; for their services they would now be amply rewarded. Sir Edward Woodville was rewarded with the captaincies of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight and Porchester Castle, as well as the ‘government of the town of Portsmouth’, while Giles Daubeney was made constable of Bristol Castle. Sir James Blount was regranted the possession of Hammes Castle. Thomas Idem was rewarded for his ‘good and gratuitous service’ abroad ‘as on this side of the sea, now lately in the conflict which has lately taken place between the king and his mortal enemies, sustaining thereby for a long time excessive losses in his goods and possessions’ the keepership of Rochester Castle. In granting him the keepership of Sandwich Castle in Kent, Henry acknowledged that William Frost sustained ‘for a long time excessive losses in his goods and possessions’ as a result of his ‘good and continuous service which he performed, as well beyond the sea in those parts where the king was before he returned, with the help of God, to this kingdom, as on this side of the sea, now lately in the conflict which has lately taken place between the king and his deadly enemies’. John Turbevill ‘for good and faithful service done at his great costs and charges’ was made constable and keeper of Corfe Castle. John Spicer was appointed porter of Hertford Castle for his ‘service beyond the sea and within this realm’. Jevan Lloyd Vaughan was made constable of Neath Castle in Glamorgan for his ‘true and faithful service to us late done in our late triumph and victory’. Thomas Gaywode was rewarded with the office of porter of Stafford Castle for his service ‘in our most victorious journey’.
Many of Henry’s companions in exile were appointed as yeomen to the king’s guard, a personal bodyguard that would be employed to defend the king, similar to what Henry had witnessed at the French court. According to Polydore Vergil, ‘they should never leave his side, in this he imitated the French kings so that he might thereafter be better protected from treachery’. The guard, numbering 200 men who were each paid 6d a day and under the command of the captain of the guard, Sir Charles Somerset, the illegitimate son of Henry, Duke of Somerset, and arguably one of Henry’s closest male relatives after his uncle Jasper, were composed of men who had followed Henry into exile and had fought at Bosworth, proving their military capabilities to the full. They included John Edwards, Henry’s ‘wellbeloved servant’ who had performed ‘true and faithful service … in Brittany and France’, Robert Bagger, John Rothercomme, Owen ap Griffith, Thomas Leche, William Brown for his good service ‘beyond the sea as at our victorious journey’, Richard Nanfan, Richard Selman, Richard Pigot, Henry Carre ‘in consideration of good and true service, as well beyond the sea as within the realm of England’, William Cheeseman, Stephen John, Thomas Kingman, Robert Jay, Thomas Westby and Thomas Gaywode, among others. Many of these yeomen were also granted local offices to keep law and order, for instance Thomas Kingman and Stephen John being made bailiffs of Somerton and gaolers of Ilchester in Somerset.
While the new regime had quickly made peace with France, the flight of Richard’s supporters, including the Harringtons, the Huddlestons, the Middletons and the Frankes, together with Lord Lovell remaining in sanctuary, posed a significant challenge for the fledgling authority of Henry’s kingship, breeding uncertainty. As the fellows of Oxford University wrote to Thomas Stanley, ‘everything is new to us, and though we hope the present order may prove firmly established, it is but in its infancy’. Order struggled to be established, as Robert Throckmorton, the new sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, had noted in his petition to the king that there was ‘within your realm such rebellion and trouble, and your laws not established’. Henry’s greatest challenge lay in the north, Richard III’s home territory, which remained fiercely loyal to the dead king and the Yorkist memory. Henry himself was fully aware of the contribution that northerners had played in the battle, issuing a proclamation on 24
September which stated how ‘many and diverse persons of the north parts of this our land, knights, esquires, gentlemen and other have done us now of late great displeasure being against us in the field with the adversary of us’. While some had sought pardon to be reconciled to their new king, others flatly refused to obey Henry’s authority. When Henry issued a separate proclamation on 8 October excluding certain of Richard’s Yorkshire supporters from pardon, including the city of York’s recorder Miles Metcalfe, a prominent supporter of the dead king who it was claimed ‘hath done much against us which disables him to exercise things of authority … which his seditious means might … and fall to divers inconvenients’. But still York refused to replace Metcalfe, though any possibility of a stand-off with the new king was resolved when Metcalfe died early in 1486; even then, the authorities replaced him not with Henry’s own nominee, but one of Richard’s supporters, John Vavasour. In this febrile atmosphere, there was every possibility that the country might once again become divided upon regional loyalties as Richard’s memory burned bright; worse still, if the northern rebels were able to join up with the Scots leading to an invasion across the border, Henry’s kingship threatened to become the shortest in living memory.
On 25 September Henry issued commissions of array in case of a possible Scottish invasion; in a telling display of either trust or of his own vulnerability, he deputed Thomas Stanley to raise the whole of Lancashire on his behalf. On 17 October Henry wrote to Henry Vernon, explaining ‘that certain our rebels and traitors being of little honour or substance’ had made contact ‘with our ancient enemies the Scots’ and had ‘made insurrection and assemblies in the north portions of our realm, taking Robin of Reddesdale, Jack St Thomalyn at Lath, and Master Mendall for their captains, intending if they be of power the final and abversion … of our realm’. It was a fragile time filled with uncertainty, but before Henry could deal with suppressing rebellion within his realm, he needed to be officially crowned and recognised as King of England.
* See Postscript, p.390
13
REWARD, RETRIBUTION AND RECONCILIATION
After Parliament was summoned on 15 September to meet at Westminster on 7 November, preparations began in earnest for the coronation that had been arranged for Sunday 30 October. On 19 October a commission to prepare for the coronation met, headed by Sir Edward Courtenay and the Earl of Oxford, with the new steward of the royal household, Robert Willoughby, being placed in charge of ordering supplies for the spectacle. Immediately work started on crafting the extravagant display, with twenty-one tailors and fourteen skinners specially employed to fashion the robes of the new king, his nobles, including a robe for the Earl of Oxford cut from forty-one yards of crimson velvet at a cost of £61 10s. Throughout the symbols of St George – with a banner of the saint’s cross being made from six yards of crimson velvet costing £4 11s – the red rose of Lancaster and the Welsh dragon were ever visible. Two cartloads of clothing and hangings were taken from Richard’s royal castle at Nottingham. In total, £1,506 18s 10d would be spent on the ceremony, preparing garments and attire from the finest silks that could be found from whatever tailor or silk woman that was prepared to sell them.
Before the coronation would take place, Henry had already decided that other ceremonies should take precedence. First, he had resolved, there were further rewards to be made. On Thursday 27 October, on the eve of the feast of St Simon and St Jude, Henry dined with the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth before going to the Tower, ‘riding after the guise of France with all other of his nobility upon small hackneys, two and two upon a horse’. The next morning, after attending Mass, the king returned to his presence chamber where, under his cloth of estate, he sat as his uncle Jasper, already appointed as Lieutenant of Ireland, was presented before him, this time ‘in the habit of estate of a Duke’. Jasper was led by the Duke of Suffolk and the Earl of Lincoln, having recently been released from prison, a clear sign of Henry’s determination that members of the Yorkist royal household serve the new regime, with William, Viscount Berkeley carrying his cap of estate, and the Earl of Shrewsbury bearing his sword, the pommel facing upwards. ‘In the entering of the chamber door he did his first obeisance, and in the midst of the chamber the second, and in the king’s presence the third’. The Garter King of Arms, John Writhe, delivered the letters patent to the Earl of Oxford who, as great chamberlain, in turn delivered the patent to the king. Henry handed over the letters to his secretary, commanding that they be read openly. As they were read out, Henry placed a girdle around his uncle’s neck, and a cap upon his head. After the patent had been read, ‘the king received it, and delivered the said patent of the creation of the annuity of the Duchy of Bedford to his said uncle the Duke of Bedford’.
From that day, as the legends of his seal and the opening sentence of his letters patent bear witness, whenever his name was cried out in public by heralds, Jasper was styled ‘The high and mighty prince, Jasper, brother and uncle of kings, Duke of Bedford and Earl of Pembroke’. The choice of titles could hardly have been more prestigious. There had only been two previous Dukes of Bedford, and while the second holder of the title, George Neville, the son of John Neville, the Earl of Northumberland, was relatively unknown, it was the first Duke of Bedford, Henry V’s younger brother John, whom Henry must have had in mind when seeking a title for his uncle. The link signalled Henry’s conscious desire to reflect the continuity between the house of Tudor and the house of Lancaster. It also reflected Henry’s gratitude to a man without whom his kingship would have been impossible. Whereas the first Duke of Bedford had been a pillar of the house of Lancaster, establishing a formidable reputation as a soldier and statesman, Jasper too had dedicated his life in exile to securing his nephew’s future. In doing so, he had sacrificed his own personal life, being without a wife or an heir. With his new ducal title, in his fifties, Jasper now turned to resolving the problem; by 7 November he had found himself a bride in Katherine Woodville, the widow of the Duke of Buckingham and the sister of the dowager Queen Elizabeth. She was twenty-seven, half Jasper’s age. Jasper could have been forgiven for thinking that, over twenty-five years after he had pledged to avenge the death of his father and the fall of the house of Lancaster, in which he had given up years of exile and imprisonment for the sake of the welfare of his young nephew, only now had he only just begun to live a life for himself.
Jasper’s new title was not the only peerage that Henry decided to bestow upon his supporters over the next few months. The most unexpected promotion came for Henry’s French commander Philibert de Chandée, who had led his French mercenaries at the battle to devastating effect. Despite having no connection to the local area, Chandée was created Earl of Bath on 6 January 1486, ‘in consideration of his laudable service to us done heretofore’, and was awarded an annuity of 100 marks. He entertained the French ambassadors at Greenwich the same year, at a cost of £26, and was then conducted by one of the king’s councillors to Dover, stopping off at Braynford and racking up further expenses of £23 6s 8d, before heading back to France. We hear little more of him after, and his name disappears from record.
Sir Giles Daubeney, one of Henry’s most trusted councillors and described by Bernard André as ‘a good man, prudent, just and loved by all’, was to be created Lord Daubeney in March 1486, on the grounds that he had been a descendant of a baron from the fourteenth century, and his impeccable Yorkist credentials – he was an esquire of Edward IV’s body before deserting Richard to join Henry in exile – helped to reassure those who may have considered that Henry would reward only his Lancastrian supporters.
On the same day as Jasper’s elevation to the dukedom of Bedford, Henry further restored Edward Courtenay to the earldom of Devon, a long-cherished ambition of Courtenay’s, whose calculated gamble in supporting Henry’s cause during Buckingham’s rebellion had finally paid off. Henry also chose to reward one of his longstanding supporters, granting an earldom to Thomas, Lord Stanley, ensuring that his mother Ma
rgaret would be raised to the status of countess. Like Jasper Tudor’s dukedom, Lord Stanley’s new title of Earl of Derby had strong Lancastrian connections, since the title had last belonged to Henry of Bolingbroke, the founder of the house of Lancaster. Though Thomas Stanley would continue to insist that he had played little part in the battle, stating in a confession concerned with Henry’s papal dispensation to marry Elizabeth of York that he had known Henry ‘well’ only since 24 August, two days after the battle, the patent creating him an earl clearly acknowledged his role in the fighting and the action on the day, referring to ‘his distinguished services to us and indeed the great armed support recently accorded us in battle, both by himself and by all his kinsmen, not without great hazard to life and position’.
Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors Page 42