Richard III

by Chris Skidmore

  Other oath-swearing sessions were carefully co-ordinated, orchestrated by the king’s northern favourites, including Sir Marmaduke Constable, William Mauleverer, Sir Ralph Assheton and Sir Thomas Bourchier of Leeds. This was a prelude to the king’s decision to establish an entirely new network of trusted supporters, mostly northerners, in the county, effectively implanting a new gentry class in the region.

  No longer would Richard be prepared to trust his brother’s men. From now on, Richard was determined to move out of his brother’s shadow, appointing his own men, mostly from his trusted ducal affinity, to confirm his authority. Just eleven of Edward IV’s knights would now remain in Richard’s service, and only two south of the Thames.

  Richard was also faced with the difficulty of restoring royal authority to those regions affected by the rebellion. With many of the rebels having been the mainstays of local law and order, local government in these areas now faced a vacuum of power that needed to be filled urgently. This was particularly pressing over the question of the local military command of counties whose leading local figures had fled abroad to join Henry Tudor: Richard needed to restore the structure of local government and the raising of levies if he was to ensure that he would be able to effectively face any future opposing force.

  He was forced to rely increasingly on a small number of men whom he felt he could trust, men who had long been in his service in his ducal household. Yet, in doing so, Richard excluded those whom he desperately needed to build relations with and harness their support. Instead, he only alienated them further: those who had remained loyal to the king during the rebellion of 1483 in their own local areas saw little material reward for their loyalty. In Devon, Richard gave away land valued at around £1,400, yet of the nineteen men who were granted land, just four were local to the area — and between them they received just £180.35

  The northern nobility did especially well from the transfer of land. Richard, Lord Fitzhugh, gained lands in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire worth nearly £140 per annum, while Ralph, Lord Neville, was given the Somerset estates of Giles Daubeney and the countess of Richmond worth £200 per annum. Yet conclusions that Richard had enacted a wide-ranging plantation of the south by northerners is wide of the mark. On first appearances, the northerners William and Halnath Mauleverer, appointed to offices in Kent and Devon, had existing family connections in the areas that they were granted lands, with Halnath having been appointed sheriff of Cornwall as far back as November 1470. On thirty-five occasions during Edward IV’s reign, so called northerners were given offices in the southern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, including the Yorkshireman Sir Roger Tocotes, one of those attainted in 1484.36 Henry Bolingbroke had in 1399 also drawn heavily on his own northern estates of the duchy of Lancaster and was dependent on the backing of northern lords such as the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland.

  The men placed in the south were often second-born sons, with no inheritance to secure their futures in their northern home counties. Without the commitment or tie to their family and estates, Richard carefully selected men whom he recognised would give the attention to their new inheritances carved out especially for them by the king. By 1484, these newcomers accounted for a third of all new sheriffs, and south of the Thames they represented two thirds. Richard’s aim was to re-create the household network that Edward IV had assiduously cultivated; his supporters were to be the king’s own intelligence gatherers, acting as his eyes and ears.37

  The introduction of his northern supporters into southern society could hardly have been expected to be considered a popular measure. ‘What great numbers of estates and inheritances were amassed in the king’s treasury in consequence!’ the Crowland chronicler wrote. ‘He distributed all these amongst his northerners whom he had planted in every part of his dominions, to the shame of all the southern people who murmured ceaselessly and longed more each day for the return of their old lords in place of the tyranny of the present ones.’38

  While Richard passed his Christmas in lavish celebration, at Vannes Cathedral, hundreds of English exiles, many of them rebels who had managed to escape across the Channel and into Brittany, gathered to hear a solemn ceremony. Having managed to eventually make his journey in his battered ship back to Brittany, Henry Tudor had ‘much lamented’ when he was informed of the news of Buckingham’s execution. Tudor’s heart had been lifted, however, on his discovery that the marquess of Dorset, together with a ‘great number’ of English gentlemen, had arrived shortly before him and remained at Vannes. Henry ‘rejoiced wondrously’; meeting with Dorset and the English exiles for the first time, there was ‘much mutual congratulation made’.39 The exiles would now be joined in their common cause: determination to overthrow Richard.

  Neither Henry nor the marquess and his Yorkist followers could deny their families had fought on opposing sides of the civil war; Henry Tudor was of undoubted Lancastrian descent, the royal family many had bitterly fought to overthrow. Yet, with everyone suspecting the death of Edward V and his brother Richard, the Yorkist exiles had no other choice: Henry would have to be their candidate for the throne. A compromise, they argued, would nevertheless still need to be found, in the form of Elizabeth of York, whom Margaret Beaufort had previously argued might marry her son in order to effect a union between the two rival houses, ensuring that the house of York and its lineage remained intact. It was at Vannes on Christmas Day 1483 that Henry, upon oath, promised that ‘so soon as he should be king he would marry Elizabeth, king Edward’s daughter’. His men then swore him homage, ‘as though he had been already created king’, pledging that ‘they would lose not only their lands and possessions, but their lives, before ever they would suffer, bear, or permit, that Richard should rule over them’.40

  14

  TITULUS REGIUS

  Richard would need parliamentary authority to legalise the arbitrary grants he had already made of rebel lands to his supporters, many of which had been made in tail male, permanently alienating the lands, instead of giving them temporary custody. This had been done without taking the correct inquisitions, threatening to put at risk the rights of those who had claims on the land. Parliament would need to be summoned, providing Richard and his regime with the legitimacy that he desperately needed.

  Already, on 9 December, writs had been served for Parliament to meet at Westminster on 23 January. In January, the Great Wardrobe supplied cord, ribbon and 500 lattice nails for the hangings in the Parliament chamber, in preparation for the state opening of Parliament. Richard’s Parliament robe, made from crimson velvet furred with ermine sewn with 6,000 powderings of bogy shanks, was specially designed with a pattern of golden lions, though the fur of the kirtle, mantle and hood was recycled from an old robe of blue woollen cloth made for Edward IV.1

  Having already had to draft two sermons for the previously aborted parliaments, the Chancellor, John Russell, now took the parable of the lost coin from the Book of Luke as the basis of his opening speech. In the parable, a woman is elated when she tidies her house to find a silver coin she thought she had lost: Christ equates this to the joy felt by angels at a sinner’s repentance. Russell explained how ‘that one coin, the tenth, had been lost from the most precious fabric of the body politic of England and that to hunt for it and find it would require the king and all the lords spiritual and temporal to be very assiduous and diligent during this parliament’, concluding that ‘after the finding of the tenth coin, which signifies perfection, our body politic would endure gloriously’.2 The message to those listening to Russell’s sermon would have been clear: the new regime would be determined to be a break with the old, and was equally determined to put its own house in order.

  The purpose of the Parliament, which only sat for twenty-seven days, until 20 February, was threefold: in the shadow of Buckingham’s rebellion, Acts of Attainder needed to be passed against rebel estates, legitimising their confiscation; Richard had to legitimise his own royal title in Parliament; and he
sought to gain the support of his subjects with legislation designed for popular appeal. It is no coincidence that Richard was also the first king to publish in English Acts passed during the Parliament, allowing for a wider circulation of their contents.

  Everything was calculated to please. Richard was careful to distance himself from what he viewed as the greed of his brother’s reign. During the Parliament, Edward was accused of having been ‘of such ungodly disposition and provoking the ire and indignation of our lord God, such heinous mischiefs … were used and committed in the realm among the subjects’.3 Richard was determined to move out of his brother’s shadow. In a highly unusual move, despite being short of money, Richard chose not to request any direct taxation from Parliament. Refusing to collect a tax of the tenth and fifteenth granted in Edward IV’s Parliament, he was, however, prepared to collect the subsidy levied on foreign merchants, something he had done as Protector. Instead, the first of the common petitions passed during the Parliament was an Act ‘to free the subjects from benevolences’.

  The legislation was clearly designed to demonstrate how Richard, in contrast to his brother, wished to present himself as a king ruling on behalf of the people, not merely ruling over them. Richard sought consciously to undermine at every opportunity his brother’s legacy, even if the long-term financial consequences of limiting the king’s authority to raise money were being ignored. The Act described how ‘the commons of this his realm, by new and unlawful inventions and inordinate covetousness, against the law of this realm have been put to great thraldom and importable charges and exactions, and in especial by a new imposition named a benevolence, whereby divers years the subjects and commons of this land against their wills and freedom have paid great sums of money to their almost utter destruction’. Men had been forced to ‘break up their households and to live in great penury and wretchedness, their debts unpaid and their children unpreferred’, while others – ‘to the great displeasure of God and to the destruction of this realm’ – had resorted to cancelling obits and masses for the souls of their ancestors, ‘as they had ordained to be done for the wealth of their souls’. The Act now set out that the king’s subjects ‘and the commonalty of this his realm’ were ‘from henceforth in no wise be charged by no such charge, exaction or imposition called benevolence nor by such like charge’, while outstanding payments owed were to be ‘anulled for ever’.4 A second common petition called for the revoking of an Act passed in the previous Parliament which ensured that the king was to retain the royal rights wardship within the duchy of Lancaster, regardless of whether lands had been enfeoffed. Though Richard recognised that the Act as it stood was ‘to his great profit’, nevertheless it would be to ‘the great hurt and thraldom of his subjects’. Richard therefore agreed to annul the Act, ‘having more affection to the common weal of this his realm and of his subjects than to his own singular profit’ in order that ‘his said subjects stand and be at their liberties and freedom in like form as they were before the making of the same acts’.5 This was almost certainly done under Richard’s initiative: at a time when Richard was seeking popular support, the need for popularity took precedence over the king’s need for money.

  Six of the sixteen statutes further attempted to reform the criminal justice system, in a bid to win popularity. ‘An act for bailing of persons suspected of felony’ ensured that those arrested and imprisoned ‘for suspicion of felony, sometime of malice and sometime of light suspicion’ and who currently were unable to apply for bail ‘to their great vexation and trouble’ would now be allowed to apply to a Justice of the Peace to seek bail. This was a natural extension to legislation passed in 1461. For Richard, the adoption of the petition was an easy item of legal reform, for which a campaign had been ongoing for several years. Alongside this Act, ‘An act for returning adequate jurors’ sought to raise the standard of a jury by raising the qualification for service. Other Acts passed protected a felon’s goods from being seized until he had been convicted, and imposed restrictions on local officials who dealt with disputes arising at fairs and markets, in an attempt to crack down on abuses of privilege, while existing laws relating to land and property susceptible to fraud were also reconsidered.

  Another series of bills, concerned with regulating trade and manufacturing, had a deliberately xenophobic quality to them, designed to appeal to the English mercantile classes. The fact that no fewer than five statutes were passed to protect English traders from foreign competition was a clear demonstration of the king’s desire to befriend his financial backers. Anti-’alien’ Acts had previously been a feature of many medieval parliaments, with Italian merchants the main targets. Now Richard’s Parliament re-enacted two anti-alien Acts of Edward IV’s first Parliament, in addition to new legislation. Foreigners were blamed for everything from the loss of English jobs to the excessive cost and poor quality of imported bowstaves, apparently caused by the ‘subtle means’ and ‘sedicious confederacy’ of the Lombards. Several protectionist measures first introduced by Edward IV, including the prohibitions on the import of silk and laces, were confirmed, with the measures being extended to a wide range of goods manufactured by leather and metal workers. ‘God Save King Richard’, the Pewterers’ Company recorded in their accounts, no doubt in jubilation.6 Foreign merchants were also to be forced to spend their profits on English goods, in an attempt to deal with an increasing shortage of silver, caused by merchants taking their profits out of the country in cash. Regulations were introduced preventing corruption in wine and oil sales, with barrels to be ‘gauged’ by the king’s gauger, to ensure correct volumes were being sold. There was also to be a crackdown on the fraudulent finishing of cloth, though by 25 October this rushed Act had been found to be ‘hurtful’ and sheriffs were ordered to make a proclamation lifting all penalties that had been imposed by the Act.7 The fact that Richard gave his assent to a range of Acts reflecting the powerful xenophobia of the London merchant community suggests that, rather than acting from a position of strength, the king was desperate to win support for his new regime, particularly after the rebellion in the autumn, regardless of the cost.

  The centrepiece of the Parliament was the passing of the Titulus Regius, an Act certifying Richard’s claim to the throne. The Crowland chronicler described how the king’s title was to be discussed and ‘corroborated’ in Parliament, ‘even though that lay court was not empowered to determine on it since there was a dispute concerning the validity of a marriage’. Nevertheless, the chronicler wrote, ‘it presumed to do so and did so on account of the great fear affecting the most steadfast’.8 The preamble of the Act also suggests that there remained some uncertainty surrounding the legitimacy of Richard’s own title. It explained how:

  Where late heretofore, that is to say before the consecration, coronation and enthronement of our sovereign lord King Richard III, a roll of parchment, containing in writing certain articles of the tenor underwritten, on the behalf and in the name of the three estates of this realm of England, that is, the lords spiritual and temporal, and of the commons, by many and divers lords spiritual and temporal, and other nobles and notable persons of the commons in great multitude, was presented and actually delivered unto our said sovereign lord the king, to the intent and effect expressed at large in the same roll; to which roll, and to the considerations and instant petition comprised in the same, our said sovereign lord, for the public weal and tranquillity of this land, benignly assented.

  Yet since none of the people who presented the roll, despite representing the ‘three estates’, had been assembled ‘in the form of a parliament … divers doubts, questions and ambiguities’ had been ‘moved and engendered in the minds of diverse persons’. Parliament was therefore needed to ratify the petition, ‘removing the occasion of doubts and ambiguities’.9

  The petition presented to Richard in June 1483, or at least the ‘tenor of the said roll of parchment’, was then printed in full, describing in detail the failure of Edward IV’s government, before setting o
ut the explanation of the king’s pre-contract with Eleanor Butler, and ‘pretensed marriage’ with Elizabeth Woodville, so that ‘it appeareth evidently and followeth that all the issue and children of the said king [have] been bastards, unable to inherit or to claim anything by inheritance’. Once the text of the petition had been rehearsed, the Act explained how Richard’s title was both ‘just and lawful, as grounded upon the laws of God and nature, and also upon the ancient laws and laudable customs’ of the realm. ‘Yet, nevertheless, forasmuch as it is considered that the most part of the people of this land is not sufficiently learned in the abovesaid laws and customs whereby the truth and right … may be hid, and not clearly known to all the people and thereupon put in doubt and question’, the Act explained, reasoning that ‘the court of Parliament is of such authority, and the people of this land of such nature and disposition’ that any declaration made by the three estates of the realm assembled in Parliament ‘maketh before all other thing, most faith and certainty; and the quieting of men’s minds, removeth the occasion of all doubts and seditious language’. The Act therefore pronounced that Richard was the ‘very and undoubted king of this realm of England … as well by right of consanguinity and inheritance as by lawful election, consecration and coronation’. Finally, it was agreed that ‘the high and excellent Prince Edward, son of our sovereign lord the king, be heir apparent’.10

  Though the assertion of the new king’s title was undoubtedly the main business of the Parliament, as it had been previously for Henry IV in 1399 and Edward IV in 1461, the Act is not presented as the first item of business; rather, in the Parliament roll it appears after the grant of tonnage and poundage, granted on the final day of Parliament, 20 February. It suggests that Richard was keen to give the impression that the issue was being kept at arm’s length, to which he then ‘benignly assented’. It is understandable that Richard would want to distance himself from the statement of his claim to the throne, especially when the main argument for his usurpation had been that his brother’s marriage had been bigamous, and that Edward IV’s children had been bastards; this was a matter for the church courts, not Parliament to decide, a fact not lost on the Crowland chronicler.11