For one of the Duke’s problems was that his fief was a frontier land. Every so often Scots raiders struck deep into it, killing, plundering, burning, driving off cattle, in hit-and-run attacks. While York was too far south for them, Durham and Carlisle had always to be prepared for such irruptions, the people round about depending on fortified peel towers and bastles (i.e. bastilles) for protection. Richard had to be constantly on progress, not just to dispense justice among his violently quarrelsome subjects, but in order to organize the defences against invasion.
Carlisle, in Cumberland and only a few miles from the Border, was unmistakably a frontier town. Built of red sandstone, it possessed an imposing cathedral and a prosperous market, but was dominated by the huge castle on its bluff which was intended – perhaps unrealistically – to strike fear into Scots. The latter, popularly known as ‘Moss Troopers’, terrorized the local countryside, sallying forth from hidden fastnesses in the ‘Debatable Land’, as the wild moors and marshes of the Solway Moss were called. The Duke had to pay many visits to Carlisle.
A little town which he also visited on a number of occasions was Scarborough in Yorkshire. Like York it had once been controlled by the Earl of Northumberland, but Richard exchanged it for some of his wife’s estates. He developed close links with it and may even have had a house there instead of using the great castle on the cliffs over the North Sea. It was the nearest port to Sheriff Hutton, and a fast horseman could reach it in a few hours. When he became King, Gloucester made it into a county of its own, an extraordinary distinction. The reason for his interest was undoubtedly privateering. The Scots raided by sea as well as by land, even in peacetime, chiefly from Leith, and the English retaliated. The Duke took his office of Lord High Admiral very seriously indeed. In the South he delegated his legal work to a Dr William Godyer, who heard cases appertaining to the sea on a Thames-side quay in Southwark. Here in the North Richard was able to play an active role and fitted out his own ships – in 1474 one of them, the May Flower, captured a vessel called The Yellow Carvel, which belonged to the King of Scots, and an embassy had to be sent to James III to apologize. Privateering was a nasty, cruel business, captured crews being generally thrown overboard without mercy. There is no record of the Duke sailing on any of these expeditions.
Most warfare waged by Richard was on land. In April 1474 the Duke of Albany, brother to the Scots King, prepared to repulse the Duke of Gloucester, who was rumoured to be about to raid either the West or the Middle Marches of Scotland. This particular raid does not seem to have taken place. (A few years later Richard was to meet Albany in very different circumstances.) But hostilities between English and Scots were perennial.
No great northern lord can have liked having a Royal Duke, and an unusually formidable one, on his doorstep. Not only was Gloucester the King’s brother, but through his mother and wife he was a Nevill as well, and if he had acquired Nevill lands, he had also inherited Nevill feuds – something which he may not have quite understood. Even minor gentry must have been unsettled by so brutal a transference of loyalties as that which took place after the Yorkist triumph. Richard’s presence constituted nothing less than a revolution – social and administrative as well as dynastic. It is logical to suspect that conservative northern magnates were only too anxious to be rid of this meddlesome interloper, but because of the fear he inspired they hid their resentment under a mask of friendship and co-operation. The fact that he trusted them until the very last indicates a serious inability to judge his fellow men.
Above all, Gloucester misjudged the Percys. Until the rise of the Nevills they had been paramount in northern England. As Lancastrians they had lost their Earldom of Northumberland with the third Earl, who fell at Towton; many other members of the family had also died fighting against the House of York in the recent wars. Henry, the fourth Earl – six years older than Richard – had seen the inside of both the Fleet prison and the Tower before being restored to his lands and honours in 1469. Timid and indecisive, Lord Northumberland was quite ready to co-operate with Edward IV’s all-powerful brother. But it was surely unrealistic to expect him, a genuine, canny Northcountryman, to be unshakeably loyal to someone who, apart from everything else, was a self-made, imitation Northerner, and who must have had irritating southern ways. Furthermore, Gloucester was regarded as an ally by his wife’s Nevill kindred – the very last association to recommend him to a Percy. Yet the Duke obviously trusted the Earl. It surely needed excessive self-confidence to do so. Henry Percy was almost as supreme in the North East as Gloucester was in the North West and in addition commanded a deep, traditional respect throughout the North as a whole. The Duke took the greatest pains to be tactful, acting jointly with him whenever possible. But even if there was a species of condominium and if he was accorded a second-in-command’s rank, it was inevitable that Henry of Northumberland should resent Richard’s primacy. It is plain that he particularly resented the Duke’s influence in York, where once his forebears’ wishes had always been respected; nowadays the citizens took every opportunity to appeal against him to Richard, who invariably supported them. Gloucester and Northumberland were always vying with one another, though perhaps they did not admit it to themselves. Foreseeably – though not foreseen by the Duke – the Earl would eventually betray his rival.
Richard showed still more baseless sang-froid about another magnate, who was what would today be termed an outstanding security risk. Thomas, second Lord Stanley, born in 1435, belonged to a comparatively new great family which was still rising. During recent years it had acquired large estates in Cheshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire. Its present head, once Warwick’s brother-in-law, had twice switched his allegiance from York to Lancaster and then back again. As if that were not enough, his new wife was one of the last surviving Beauforts – Margaret, Countess of Richmond and mother to Henry Tudor. Yet, however obviously a natural traitor, the ‘wily fox’ was always too clever for Gloucester. In the end Thomas Stanley would kill him, or see that someone else did.3
Henry, fourth Lord Scrope of Bolton, was one of the rare northern magnates who might reasonably have been expected to be faithful to Gloucester. Born the same year as Stanley, he had an impeccably Yorkist background; not only had he fought with the King at Towton, but his grandfather had been executed in 1415 with Richard’s grandfather for plotting against Henry V. Admittedly he had compromised briefly with Warwick in 1470, but he had quickly returned to being Edward IV’s loyal and useful servant. Nevertheless, he bore a grudge; he resented the failure to give him back the Lordship of Man, confiscated from his family at the beginning of the century and now held by the Stanleys – doubtless Gloucester often heard about this when visiting Scrope at his splendid stronghold of Bolton. As with Northumberland, the Duke clearly had complete trust in him.4
Another important magnate was Lord Greystoke, whose lands were scattered all over Cumberland and Northumberland. Apparently he was helpful enough. However, having been born the year before Agincourt, Ralph Greystoke had reached what was then considered a great age by the time Richard arrived in the North.
However, it was not only the great families who retained their power which constituted a potential danger. The Cliffords, who had once held sway throughout the Lake District and in much of western Yorkshire, were old enemies of the House of York, long dispossessed. The tenth Lord Clifford had fallen in the battle against Gloucester’s father, while the thirteenth – known as the ‘black’ or the ‘butcher’ – slaughtered the Duke’s brother Rutland on the bridge at Wakefield, before being killed and attainted himself. Clifford’s son Henry, only three years younger than Gloucester, was brought up secretly in remote Yorkshire or Lakeland farmhouses, so humbly that he could neither read nor write; the ‘shepherd lord’ would not recover his inheritance until after Bosworth. Meanwhile, Richard occupied the Clifford Barony of Westmorland, the Clifford hereditary Sheriffdom of Cumberland and the Clifford family home at Skipton-in-Craven in the Pennines. Privately many north-western gentr
y must have resented such a usurpation and being forced to abandon their traditional loyalties. And rumours circulated widely that there was still a Clifford heir in hiding.
The North was in fact full of danger. Over large areas nobility and gentry were unhappy, seriously unsettled, and they were the people who did the fighting. But, judging from his behaviour when King, Richard trusted almost implicitly anyone who came from the North. His administration there is cited by most historians, hostile or friendly, as evidence that he would have made an excellent monarch had he survived. Nevertheless, his failure to inspire loyalty among its magnates indicates a disastrous incapacity to make good friends.
The men who worked most closely with Richard in the North were Lords Northumberland, Stanley, Scrope, Greystoke and Lovell, Sir Richard Ratcliff, Sir Ralph Assheton, Sir James Tyrell, Sir Thomas Makenfield, Sir Thomas Everingham, Sir John Conyers, Sir John Savile and Messrs Fairfax, Kendall, Harrington, Metcalfe and Pygott. These, with various unknown lawyers, were his administration’s principal officers. Not all came from the North. Lovell was from Northamptonshire and Tyrell from Suffolk, while Kendall, a ‘household man’ of the House of York, may possibly have originated from the West Country. But despite these exceptions it is clear that Gloucester had a predilection for Northerners – it was to become increasingly apparent after he became King.
Naturally the Duke had as many dealings with the Lords Spiritual as with the Lords Temporal. Senior clerics were no less professional administrators than churchmen. Among the Archbishops of York, George Nevill – the King-maker’s brother and Richard’s near kinsman – was completely broken when he was released from imprisonment, and died in 1476; ‘such goods as were gathered with sin were lost with sorrow’, his very mitre being broken up and its jewels set in a crown. Despite being a former Chancellor of Queen Margaret’s household and tutor to Prince Edward, and having once been suspended for Lancastrian sympathies, his successor Lawrence Booth gave no trouble. The humbly born Thomas Rotherham, who succeeded Booth in 1480, gave useful assistance, although Lord Chancellor of England and more often in London than in York; one day Richard would put him in prison. At Durham William Dudley, a former Dean of Windsor, was to send his troops to fight for the Duke against the Scots on three occasions. At Carlisle John Story was a gifted administrator and well thought of at court, being appointed an executor of Edward IV’s will; he acted as envoy to the Scots in 1471. Among the Bishops of Lincoln was John Russell, who was to be Richard’s Lord Chancellor and (almost certainly) would write the continuation to the Croyland Chronicle.
Gloucester made a point of being on very amiable terms with religious houses. In particular he gave offerings to Our Lady of Jervaulx and to shrines at Fountains Abbey and at Coverham Abbey. (Leland notes that ‘there was good singing in Coverham’ – perhaps it was the same in Richard’s time.) The Duke presented £20 to the Abbot and Canons of Coverham to help them rebuild their church. All three were mitred Abbots and men of considerable influence, even if they did not sit in the House of Lords.
The Duke was an ostentatiously munificent benefactor of the clergy. He paid for repairs at churches near his Yorkshire houses, among them Skipton-in-Craven and Sheriff Hutton, where he built a new chapel. He did still more at Middleham, where he converted the parish church into a ‘college’ with a dean, six chaplains, four clerks and six choristers; their function was to celebrate Masses for the King and Queen and their children, for himself and his wife and son, his mother and sisters – for their ‘good estate’ when alive and for their souls when dead. The Masses were also for the souls of his dead father, brothers and sisters. There was an altar for each of Gloucester’s favourite saints at this time, a fairly conventional selection – the Blessed Virgin, St George, St Catherine, St Cuthbert and St Barbara – apart from St Ninian.5 He intended to found a similar but larger college at Barnard Castle, though this does not seem to have materialized; it was to have been dedicated to St Margaret and St Ninian. (His devotion to the latter was perhaps a souvenir of some raid into Dumfriesshire.)
It has long been suggested – and almost equally long denied – that there may be significance in the fact that the licences for these foundations were both obtained on 21 February 1478. This was precisely three days after Clarence’s killing, and also the same day that Gloucester acquired Clarence’s office of Great Chamberlain. Whether there is any connection between the two events, Richard certainly believed that it was not just ‘an holy and wholesome thing to pray for the dead’, but a means of buying forgiveness for sins.
The Duke built on a large scale at his many residences. He had a string of mighty houses in his vast northern territories, to serve as centres of local influence and to facilitate his constant journeying – not only he, but his large retinue as well, had to be accommodated and provided with fresh horses – and he was constantly improving his residences. For a time he also possessed a house in the South, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, to which he added a superb great hall lit by huge Perpendicular windows with delicate tracery, though there is no evidence that he ever visited it. His real home, in so far as he had one at all, was divided between Middleham and Sheriff Hutton.
Middleham has already been described. Its rival, Sheriff Hutton, was closer to York and Scarborough. Only a few fragments remain of this once palatial house and a farm has been built inside its walls. Not even seventeenth-century prints preserve a glimpse of its splendours. Fortunately it was visited by Leland fifty years after Richard’s death. He tells us:
The castle of Sheriff Hutton, as I learned there, was builded by Ralph of Raby, the first Earl of Westmorland of the Nevills [Gloucester’s grandfather] … I marked in the forefront of the first area of the castle [it]self three great and high towers of which the gatehouse was the middle. In the second area there be a five or six towers, and the stately stair up to the hall is very magnificent, and so is the hall itself, and all the residue of the house, in so much that I saw no house in the North so like a princely lodgings.
Sheriff Hutton was the nexus of a group of princely manors which all belonged to Richard.
Another castle of which the Duke seems to have been fond was Pontefract in the West Riding, the southernmost of his northern residences. He was also partial to Skipton-in-Craven, and to Barnard Castle in the extreme south-west of Co. Durham. Built on a steep bank a hundred feet above the River Tees, the latter was almost as palatial as Sheriff Hutton, with two inner courtyards and, according to Leland, towers of ‘great lodging’. With its outbuildings it was reputed to cover almost seven acres. Barnard Castle was at the foot of the Pennines and a useful staging place on the long ride from Middleham to Penrith. Constructed of red sandstone like Carlisle, eighteen miles away, Penrith was yet another of Warwick’s former castles to which Richard grew attached. Here too he repaired the local church. Even today its windows preserve portraits said dubiously to be of his father and mother and of himself as King, and an inn in the town is still called The Gloucester Arms.
In addition the Duke must frequently have stayed with his subjects, whether at the mansions of great Lords, at Bishops’ palaces or at abbeys. When he visited York, he usually seems to have been the guest of the Augustinian friars at Lendal. We know that he was not above sleeping at ordinary inns. Yet undoubtedly he preferred splendour, demanding magnificence in his own dwellings. Although he seldom came to London, sometime after 1475 he purchased Crosby Place in Bishopsgate, which had been recently built by a rich woolman, Sir John Crosby. ‘Very large and beautiful and the highest at that time in London’, the Elizabethan antiquary John Stow informs us. (Forty years later it was bought by Thomas More – perhaps its ownership had something to do with his fascination with Richard.)
As Mancini says, Gloucester rarely went to court. The Italian believed that this absence was deliberate, to ‘avoid the Queen’s jealousy’, which sounds likely enough. The Woodvilles were steadily increasing their already substantial power and influence. They consisted of Elizabeth’s two son
s, the Marquess of Dorset and Richard Grey – generally known as ‘Lord Richard’ – together with her brothers, Anthony, Earl Rivers, Sir Edward Woodville, Richard Woodville and Lionel Woodville, who was Bishop of Salisbury. In addition some, though not all, of her brothers-in-law belonged to the party, which had acquired such useful recruits as Sir Thomas Vaughan, tutor to the Prince of Wales. Dorset and Sir Edward were reasonably formidable, but the real leader was Rivers.
3. Crosby Place, Richard’s London town-house (or ‘inn’) when he was Duke of Gloucester – from here he organized his seizure of the throne in 1483. The great hall was moved from Bishopsgate to Chelsea in 1910. The hall is now being extended on its new site by the Thames.
Lord Rivers was an undeniably attractive figure, chivalrous, cultivated and travelled, a patron of letters, something of a mystic, and even a poet. Mancini gathered that ‘Rivers was always thought of as a generous, sensible and fair minded man, who had shown his quality throughout every possible change of fortune. However successful, he had never harmed anyone but indeed had done many kind actions.’ All these virtues did not stop Lord Rivers from being both ambitious and ruthless, and in the right circumstances he would obviously make the most of having ‘the care and direction of the King’s son’. In contrast to the Earl, the other three brothers were hated by everybody, not simply for their greed and lack of scruple but for being upstarts. The ‘old nobility’ in particular detested them. Moreover, according to Mancini, the whole of England blamed them for the destruction of Clarence.
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