Eventually a three-year truce was concluded; however, no long-term peace could be accepted by the Scots without the return of Dunbar and Berwick, which Richard absolutely refused to countenance. It seems likely that Richard himself conducted the negotiations over the truce; the Crowland chronicler admitted that the agreement was drawn up ‘as the king desired’ on ‘those matters which seemed to require particular attention’.7 With his own relationship with France deteriorating rapidly, Richard urgently needed to secure his northern border, and maintain a peaceable truce for the immediate future. On 23 September 1484, letters were issued ordering that no subject, no matter ‘what estate, degree or condition they be’, should make war by land or sea against the Scots, ‘under pain of death and of all they may forfeit’.8
During the summer, before the visit of the Scottish embassy, Richard abruptly chose to return to the capital. His decision seems to have been influenced by unrest in the south, with the growing threat once more of rebellion. That summer, James Newenham ‘lately confessed certain great treasons by him and others conspired and done’. On 6 July, while at Scarborough, Richard issued letters of commission to Lord Scrope, the mayor of Exeter and seven gentlemen, ‘to sit, hear and determine upon the said treason and to proceed to the execution and judgement against the offenders according to their demerits’.9 Later the same month, Scrope was again instructed to investigate the treason of Richard Edgecombe of Cotehele, John Lenne of Launceston and several other men who had apparently conspired to send 2,000 lb of tin worth £31 13s 4d and broadcloth valued at £15 to two of the exiled rebels, Robert Willoughby and Peter Courtenay, the bishop of Exeter. Edgecombe was indicted for planning to send Lenne to Brittany with the cash; both men having been declared rebels intending ‘the destruction of the crown’, Edgecombe’s lands and goods were seized; however, he managed to escape to join the exiles in Brittany.10
More threatening was the discovery of the treason of William Collingborne, the servant of Richard’s mother, Cecily, who had been removed from her household by the king only the previous month. According to a later indictment, Collingborne and ‘other false traitors to the king’ had on 10 July 1484, ‘in the parish of St Botolph, Portsoken ward, falsely and treasonably imagined and contrived the death and destruction of the lord king and the subversion of his realm of England’. Collingborne had apparently ‘excited, moved and urged a certain Thomas Yate, offering him £8 to go to foreign parts across the sea in Brittany to speak there to Henry, once calling himself earl of Richmond, Thomas, formerly marquess of Dorset, and John Cheyne, esquire, and other traitors, rebels and great enemies of the lord king’. Yate urged them to return to England around the feast of St Luke, 11 October, ‘with all their power, and to say that, if they should return to the port of Poole in Dorset’. Collingborne would arrange to meet them there, ‘together with the people of the realm, and make insurrection and war against the king, and that the whole realm would join them’. The indictment asserted that ‘They also urged John Cheyne to go to the king of France and tell him that his ambassadors were being deceived, and that the king of England will not keep his promises, except to postpone the war between them from the winter to the spring so that he can prepare his forces, and also to advise the king of France that he should assist the traitors.’ Eight days later, on 18 July 1484, in London, in the parish of St Gregory the Pope in Farringdon, Collingborne ‘gathered together other traitors and rebels, and imagined and contrived the death and destruction of the king through war, commotion and discord between the king and his subjects’. As the indictment described:
And to achieve that false and nefarious aim, Collingborne and others, on the said 18 July, falsely and treasonably wrote and made various bills and writings in rhymes and ballads (‘in rittimis et balladis’) containing mutterings, seditious speeches and treasonous incitements, and having made them, on the same day placed and publicly fixed them to various doors of the cathedral church of St Paul in London, to move and excite those king’s lieges reading and understanding the bills and writings to make and levy commotion and war against the lord king, against their due allegiance, to the final destruction of the lord king and the subversion of his realm of England.11
The actual text that Collingborne had pinned to the door of St Paul’s was not recorded by the indictment, though it was not missed by the author of the Great Chronicle, who recorded the rhyme that had been ‘fastened upon the Cross in Cheap and other places of the city’:
The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog,
Ruleth all England under a Hog.
The chronicler knew exactly what the cryptic verse meant, explaining how the Cat and the Rat stood for Sir William Catesby and Sir Richard Ratcliffe, while Lovell was Francis, Viscount Lovell, who between them ‘ruled this land under the king which bare a white boar for his cogniscance’. ‘For the devisers of this rhyme, much search was made’, the chronicler noted, with ‘sundry accused to their charges’, before eventually William Collingborne was arrested and imprisoned, awaiting trial for treason.12
The rhyme evidently hit a raw nerve, exposing as it did the influence of Richard’s councillors on the king. Even as far away as Durham, the prior, Robert Ebbchester, had written to Richard Redman, the bishop of St Asaph, describing how Sir Richard Ratcliffe had come to him bringing witnesses to show that he had a grant of a vicarage that had been agreed by his predecessor, requesting that Ebbchester ratify the grant. ‘Whereupon with the advise of my brethren’, Ebbchester continued, ‘considering the great rule that he beareth under the king’s grace in our country’ he had agreed to Ratcliffe’s demands.13 Having already been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer and served as speaker in Richard’s Parliament, William Catesby occupied the supreme position within the royal council. Already in December 1483, Thomas, Lord Stanley, had paid him an annuity of five marks ‘for his good will and counsel past and to come’; other rewards of both office and land were soon to follow, which Catesby was swift to accept. Lord Dudley made him a steward of his manor of Rugby with a fee of ten marks, while the archbishop of Canterbury appointed him bailiff of Pagham and the Abbey of St Mary’s Combe with a fee of two marks.14 All three men had been richly rewarded over the past year. William Catesby had been given lands in Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and London worth £273 a year, with a rent payable to the king of only £20.15 Sir Richard Ratcliffe, the younger son of a Cumberland esquire, was granted lands in the south-west worth 1,000 marks (£666 13s 4d), for which he had to pay an annual rent to the crown of £50. Lovell, who had only reached his majority in 1477, had known Richard since childhood, having grown up in the earl of Warwick’s household. Though his family estates were based around Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, Lovell remained a dutiful follower of Richard’s, being knighted by the duke in August 1481 during the Scottish campaign. The following June, Lovell had intended to journey south to attend the king, when he had heard that Richard ‘and such other folk of worship as hath any rule in the said north parts’ were to be sent north to fight the Scots. Out of loyalty, Lovell felt obliged to stay. When Richard became Protector, Lovell was appointed chief butler of the royal household; upon Richard’s accession to the throne, he was created chamberlain of the household, a position which required constant and close contact with the king. In addition to several annuities worth at least £64, Lovell was granted rebel estates in Oxfordshire and Berkshire worth a total of £400 a year, for a rent of just £30 a year. All three men held highly influential positions in Richard’s government, for which they were amply rewarded, yet to single out Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell risks glossing over the many other supporters of Richard’s regime who profited handsomely from acquiescing with the king’s rule. Over the course of his reign, Richard would give away or ‘alienate’ lands worth £12,000 a year to his close-knit group of supporters, many of them already part of his ducal retinue, receiving just £735 15s in return from reserved rents. Other families were also massive beneficiaries from Richard’s patronage, not l
east John Howard, the duke of Norfolk, and his son Thomas, earl of Surrey. In August 1484, Surrey was granted £1,100 a year from the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall, nearly half of the entire net revenue of the duchy, while as late as 28 February 1485 Norfolk was granted thirty-five lordships and manors.16
The other reason for Richard’s return to the capital was to oversee the reburial of the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, whose corpse Richard now ordered to be exhumed from its grave at Chertsey Abbey, to be reburied at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Over the past decade, Henry’s final resting place had become a shrine for visiting pilgrims, spurred on by an increasing number of supposed miracles, the first being dated to as early as 1481. By moving Henry’s remains to Windsor, Richard hoped that the revenues from the growing cult of the saintly king would be able to be put to better use in funding the chapel, which had been founded by Edward IV and to which Richard had already contributed significantly. The body apparently smelt ‘very pleasantly scented’, a sign of his holy properties; it was ‘certainly not from spices’, John Rous observed, ‘since he was buried by his enemies and butchers’. Leafing open the corpse’s shroud, it was found to be ‘for the most part’ uncorrupted, ‘the hair in place, and the face as it had been except it was a little sunken, with a more emaciated appearance than usual’.17 When the vault of the tomb was opened in 1910, however, Rous’s claim was found to be completely untrue. Not only were the bones found wrapped in fabric, and placed inside a wooden box, measuring just over three feet in length, ten inches wide and nine inches deep, and sealed with a sliding top panel; the wooden box had then been placed in a lead casket, not much larger in size, that had been soldered shut, before finally being enclosed in a full-sized wooden coffin, fastened with bands of iron. The intention was clear: that it would seem to those present at the reinterment that the king’s intact body was being laid to rest. The entire cost of the translation of the remains, recorded in the accounts of the College of Windsor, was £5 10s 2d.18 Later, John Pigot, the abbot of Chertsey, would claim that Richard had ordered the tomb of Henry VI to be broken up despite the vociferous protests of the monks, yet this was countered by the dean of Windsor, Christopher Urswick, who claimed that the exhumation had been made with the approval of the abbot, who had in fact insisted on opening the tomb himself. Interestingly, Richard himself was present at Windsor on 19 August, having made the journey from Westminster. It seems that the king had timed his visit to coincide with the translation of the Lancastrian king’s remains.19
Richard was determined not to remain in London for long. After a stay of barely two weeks, Richard was back in Nottingham on 26 August in preparation for the visit of the Scottish embassy and the signing of the truce. Richard’s arrival at Nottingham marked another lengthy stay away from the capital. Apart from a five-day stay at Tutbury Castle between 22 and 26 October, Richard would remain at Nottingham for nearly three months, departing for London on 4 November.20
Now that a truce with Scotland had finally been arranged, Richard recognised that he would need to deal with the threat that Henry Tudor and the English exiles in Brittany posed. A truce with Brittany had already been arranged on 8 June, to take effect from 1 July and to last until April 1485.21 This was a welcome relief to naval shipping in the Channel, as well as to Duke Francis, who had feared an imminent English invasion. Now peaceful relations between the two countries had been restored, once again Richard tried to coax the duke into handing over Henry Tudor.
The presence of Tudor and the 400 English exiles in the small walled town of Vannes was becoming oppressive, as tempers often flared in the tense atmosphere of uncertainty and fear.22 Richard sent messengers to Francis, promising him the yearly revenues of the confiscated lands belonging to Henry and his exiles if he agreed to place them in custody. When the messengers arrived, they found the aged Francis unwell, ‘by reason of sore and daily sickness’. The duke was also suffering from a failing mind. Instead they were received by Francis’s chancellor and chief minister, Pierre Landais, ‘a man both of sharp wit and great authority’.23 Resented by several Breton nobles, Landais was in need of allies. He had reached out to France, forming an alliance with Louis, the duke of Orléans, who was currently in a power struggle with his cousin Anne of Beaujeu over the control of the young French king, Charles VIII, and the running of the kingdom. Orléans was seeking to create a grand coalition with England and Burgundy’s ruler, Maximilian of Austria, along with French nobles and Brittany to attempt to topple Anne and her government. What both Landais and his ally Orléans needed was for Richard to agree to support an invasion of France, in return for which Landais would arrange for Henry Tudor to be handed over.
For Richard, the opportunity to help lead a joint offensive against England’s longstanding enemy was too good to miss. On 11 August, in a proclamation prohibiting piracy against all nations, significantly the French were excluded.24 Two days later, on 14 August, letters were sent informing recipients that the king had been ‘credibly informed that his adversaries of France’ intended to launch an attack on the Calais pale, ‘for whose malice to be mightily resisted, his highness hath made and daily is making great and notable punishment sufficient with God’s mercy to break all their purpose’. Ordering for all subjects in the Cinque Ports and ‘other places of the sea coasts’ to provide ships ‘to serve the king when need shall be’, Richard commanded that everyone was to:
Make themselves daily ready in their persons with their ships, guns, artillery, arms and victuals and other things necessary to the war so that as soon as any certainty of assigning the king’s town of Calais or any other place within the pale, there shall be notified unto them by the king or his council, they fail not to assist his royal person, his lieutenants and deputies in manner and form afore … and as they be bound to do at such times as kings of England make their voyage unto France upon pain of forfeiting. … Letting them wit that the king that is prince which for the defence of this realm and all the possession of the crown of England is disposed to employ his own royal person as far as any king that hath done in years past to the encouraging of his faithful subjects and confusion of all his enemies.25
It certainly seemed that Richard was serious enough about military involvement against France. Around the same time, Richard offered Brittany between 4,000 and 6,000 archers, the offer being made through the Burgundian agent, ‘le petit Salazar’, Juan de Salazar, a Spanish captain who was in Duke Maximilian of Austria’s service.26 No archers were for the moment provided, but news soon reached the French court in September of a rumour that 6,000 English archers were soon to arrive in Brittany. Everything now centred on securing possession of Henry Tudor.
Henry himself remained at Vannes in August and into September, for on 15 August and 8 September 1484 he is recorded in the cathedral accounts as having attended mass there, making small offerings of alms.27 Four days later, there appears in the same accounts an offering from ‘le grand escuier d’Engleterre’ – most likely Sir James Tyrrell, Richard’s Master of the Horse, whose arrival in the town suggests that the net was closing on Tudor.28
Richard’s plans to capture Tudor were just days away from being finalised. It was John Morton, the bishop of Ely living in exile in Flanders, who being informed ‘from his friends out of England’ about Landais’s negotiations with Richard, managed to get notice to Henry of the trap that was being laid around him. His agent, Christopher Urswick, who had travelled to join Morton in Flanders, met Henry at Vannes, where he passed on the message, advising him to ‘get himself and the other noble men as soon as might be out of Brittany and into France’.29 Henry immediately sent Urswick on to the French court to request Charles VIII’s permission to enter into France. Two days later, around 1 October 1484, Henry himself left Vannes, accompanied by five servants, on pretence of visiting a friend. He would not return. When he had travelled five miles outside the city, he turned off the highway into a nearby forest. Stopping to change his clothes into those of a common servant, he then rode str
aight across the border and into France. Landais had been finalising plans to send a number of specially chosen men under ‘trusty captains’ to seize Henry when he first heard news of Henry’s escape. Immediately he sent out men on horseback in pursuit, with orders that if they could overtake Henry they were to arrest him and return him to Brittany. Yet, upon their arrival, they discovered that Henry had crossed the French border ‘scarcely an hour before’.30
For the 400 Englishmen remaining at Vannes, their future seemed a terrifying prospect. Having no knowledge of Henry’s flight, when they discovered what had happened ‘they were overcome with such fear that now they despaired for their safety’. Yet when Duke Francis discovered what had happened, ignorant of his treasurer’s plans to seize Tudor, he was aghast. He had always been consistent in his support of the exiles, and it was at the very least a matter of honour that their welfare should be taken care of. In compensation, he rewarded Sir Edward Woodville, Sir John Cheyne and Edward Poynings with a gift of 100 livres tournois each, as well as one livre tournois for each of the 408 exiles still stationed at Vannes. The cost of their lodging was also paid by the duke in recompense, totalling 2,500 livres tournois, while the duke offered free passage for the English exiles into France.31
Meanwhile, the French king, Charles VIII, was at Montargis when he was informed on 11 October that Henry had arrived in his kingdom. Charles was evidently delighted with the arrival of his new guest. On 3 November, he wrote how the English were ‘in marvellous and grand division’ over Tudor.32 The following day, a commission was given to lodge 400 of Tudor’s supporters in Sens, sixty kilometres to the east of Montargis, while on 17 November the French council authorised a payment of 3,000 livres tournois to Henry, declaring, however, that it was ‘for this time only’.33
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