Richard III

by Chris Skidmore

  18

  REBELS AND TRAITORS

  Henry Tudor’s defection to France had been an unmitigated disaster for Richard. Yet Tudor’s immediate prospects remained wafer thin. There seemed little chance that France would be able to spare any forces for his cause, with its Flemish cities now at war with Maximilian of Austria. If anything, Henry’s flight had removed the immediate need for English military or financial aid to Brittany. Yet Henry Tudor’s escape and survival now came to dominate Richard’s foreign policy, as the king was determined to quash any threat that this possible usurper and his band of exiles might pose.

  By the autumn of 1484, a new cycle of rebellion and unrest had broken out. Christopher Colyns was ordered to command two ships, the Carrigon, with 200 soldiers on board, and the Michael of Queenborough, with 100 soldiers, between October and November at a cost of £129 4s 2d.1 On 9 October, Richard was presented with the confessions of three merchants from the West Country who had been arrested and taken to Exeter, ‘which have lately aided our rebel Sir Robert Willoughby and other being in Brittany’. Once again, commissions were issued under John, Lord Scrope, ‘for whose punishment in fearful example of others’.2 Richard seems to have been genuinely frightened that a new rebellion was on the horizon. Orders were given to the earl of Arundel that no one was to fit out a ship for sail without making bonds of security that it would not be employed against the king’s friends or subjects.3 Around the same time, a writ was to be sent to Edward Berkeley, ‘to show why he might not answer us of 1,000 marks by him forfeited of recognisance for the misbehaving of our rebel Sir William Berkeley’.4 Sir John Ferrers was also bound by a recognizance of 500 marks, to ‘henceforth keep duely our peace’, and ordered not to depart more than a mile out of the walls of the city of London. Lord Lisle and Sir James Lawrence were also bound under recognisances ‘that they should not pass our city of London or a mile about the same unto such time as ye should have from us otherwise in commandment’. Both bonds were cancelled in early December, ‘for certain causes and considerations us moving be content that they shall depart at liberty’.5

  In the capital, tensions between traders and foreign merchants seem to have also erupted. The official figures recorded in the Exchequer seem to point to England’s trade with the continent slipping into an economic recession. Between October 1482 and September 1485, the number of wool sacks exported fell to an average of 5,283 sacks, compared with an average of 8,064 sacks in the decade previously, and 8,742 sacks between October 1485 and September 1490.6 The most severe drop in exports took place in the north-eastern ports, with Boston shipping just 883 sacks in 1484–5. As a result, the staplers and clothiers seem to have been competing for a diminishing supply of wool, which resulted in a proclamation being issued in October 1484 that no one was to ‘buy or bargain any wool not shorn before the Feast of St Bartholomew [24 August], except to make cloth within the realm’, preventing the staplers from undermining clothiers by making advance purchases of wool before it had the chance to be woven into cloth.7 Orders for the ‘restraint to continue both for strangers and the King’s subjects’ were discussed at the Guildhall in front of the mayor of London on 27 August 1484, while on 3 October it was noted how the mayor ‘divers times had communication and moved to forgo going to fairs’.8 On the Tuesday before 21 October, a crowd of ‘many simple disposed persons of divers crafts’, including shearmen, fullers and cappers, gathered at the Guildhall, calling for the mayor to return wool that had been shipped to Calais, ‘with much crying and matter of grief and complaint, simple and rudely than uttered’. The alderman Edmund Shaa, on behalf of the mayor, agreed that no more wool would be shipped, nor would ships already filled with wool be allowed to depart until ‘the coming of the King to the town, at whose coming then the Mayor and Aldermen would help to show their grief, and beseech and pray the King’s grace to see a remedy to their comfort’. The crowd remained unconvinced, however, and ‘with a great cry and shout’ departed. The mayor and aldermen sent messengers to the men, who replied that they believed the words had been spoken ‘under a cloak’ merely to allow the foreign ships carrying wool to set sail. Making their way to the harbourside, they began to take down the sails of the wool ships and forcibly remove woollen cloth from the ships. Fearing a riot, the mayor ordered that an armed force be sent to the harbour, at which point the rioters ‘departed and fled’. The city remained on tenterhooks. The Mercers’ Company recorded how the mayor ordered every man to ‘be ready in his harness’, prepared ‘to come forth when so ever he be called’, while servants were to be prevented from going ‘unto any congregation or assembly’ and the loan of harness was to be strictly prohibited.9

  Amid this unrest, on 2 November, the trial of William Collingborne took place at the Guildhall. The trial was intended to demonstrate the consequences of rebellion against the king, even if it had involved pinning rhymes to the door of St Paul’s and around the capital. Collingborne was brought before the justices at the Guildhall by the sheriffs, where he denied all charges. The following day, Friday, 3 November, the jury declared a guilty verdict, pronouncing their sentence that Collingborne ‘be taken to Newgate gaol, and from there dragged through the city to Tower Hill, hanged there upon the gallows, cut down to the ground while living, his innards to be taken out of his belly while living and burnt, and his head removed, his body to be divided into four parts and his head and quarters to be placed wherever the king should decide’.10 The Londoner Robert Fabyan described in his Chronicle how a new pair of gallows was specially constructed for Collingborne, who, after he had hanged ‘a short season’ from its rope, was ‘cut down, being alive, and his bowels ripped out of his belly and cast into the fire there by him’. All the while, Collingborne remained conscious until, according to Fabyan, the executioner ‘put his hand into the bulk of his body’. ‘O Lord Jesu, yet more trouble’, Collingborne managed to cry out. They were to be his final words; he died shortly afterwards, ‘to the great compassion of many people’.11

  If Henry Tudor had managed to slip through the net and escape to France, Richard was not prepared to allow any further mistakes to occur. News reached him through his network of spies that Henry and the English exiles, their confidence raised from their arrival at the French court, were planning to rescue the Lancastrian earl of Oxford, John de Vere, incarcerated since the 1473 rebellion at St Michael’s Mount in Hammes Castle, one of the forts on the Calais pale. Oxford, who had fought against Richard at the battle of Barnet thirteen years earlier, had been a formidable military commander and a devout follower of the Lancastrian cause. He also had his own personal reasons for hating Richard, who had confiscated his mother’s estates and left her almost destitute, as he later complained, ‘by heinous menace of loss of life and imprisonment’. If the earl was prepared now to support Tudor’s cause, Richard recognised that any plot needed to be foiled if he was to prevent Tudor from gaining a major publicity coup as well as a dangerous new ally. On 28 October, William Bolton, a yeoman usher of the royal chamber, was dispatched from Nottingham Castle to Hammes, carrying with him personal letters from the king to Sir James Blount, captain of the castle there, ordering Blount to hand over his most celebrated prisoner ‘in all goodly haste’ to Bolton, ‘and to see him surely conveyed to the sea side’. Blount was not to depart until the earl had been ‘shipped’.12 Sir Robert Brackenbury, the constable of the Tower, was also sent to Dover, in preparation to meet the earl and escort him to the Tower.13

  Bolton was too late. Not only had Oxford escaped from Hammes, but he had done so with the assistance of Blount and John Fortescue, the gentleman porter of Calais, who as sheriff of Devon and Cornwall in the 1470s had been responsible for first arresting the earl. Blount had left the garrison and its seventy-three men in the hands of his wife, with orders for the castle to be defended against any future attack. Oxford, Blount and Fortescue fled immediately to Henry Tudor’s exiled court, now residing at the Ile-de-France. Meeting the earl, Henry was ‘overwhelmed with extraordin
ary joy’, Polydore Vergil later wrote, ‘wherefore because of the coming of the earl of Oxford rejoicing above all measure he began to hope better of his affairs’.14 The arrival of Oxford, together with Sir James Blount, gave Henry Tudor for the first time not only substantial military reinforcements that would help persuade the French government that his cause was worth supporting; it also gave him the confidence that he could claim the throne in his own right, no longer as a puppet ruler propped up by the Woodvilles.

  When Richard discovered the news of Oxford’s escape, he ‘bewailed’ being ‘greatly disturbed that distinguished men, whose influence was strong among the people, inclined with such eagerness towards Henry’.15 More alarming, however, was the defection of Sir James Blount, a member of the king’s own household, raising Richard’s doubts over the loyalty of his own establishment and making himself even more mistrustful of those outside his own close-knit circle.

  News of Oxford’s escape and the defection of the Hammes garrison was serious enough for Richard to immediately depart from Nottingham Castle on 4 November, reaching Westminster by Wednesday, 10 November.16 By now, news had reached the king of yet another rebellion on the Essex coast. On 2 November, John Risley of Colchester, his servant, William Coke of Lavenham, Sir William Brandon and his sons William and Thomas, Sir William Stonor and others launched an armed rising in Colchester. The rebels then seized a boat at East Mersea, escaping to join Tudor in France.17 The rebellion had been planned for some time, with money being raised in London for the enterprise; the pewterer Everard Newchurch later informed Henry Tudor that he lent £13 to Sir William Brandon ‘to go to do your good grace service beyond the sea’.18 The rebellion seems to have extended into Hertfordshire, with Ralph Penne of Aldenham suffering forfeiture of his estates, while another gentleman, Robert Clifford, was pardoned the following April for his involvement in the rising, but only after earlier promising to inform the royal council of any news or information which he might obtain that affected the king.19 Meanwhile, Robert’s brother Roger had been arrested in the south-west, with the Exeter records mentioning that he passed through the city as a prisoner.20 It all pointed to the potential for a revolt on a far wider scale, while Richard would not have failed to notice that many of the rebels involved had close connections with the earl of Oxford’s household and Essex estates, suggesting some degree of co-ordination had been planned to chime with the earl’s escape. While the Essex rising may have been small by comparison to the rebellion of the previous autumn, most worrying for Richard was the fact that new rebels close to the royal household had chosen to become involved. John Risley was an esquire of the king’s body, who had been rewarded with land in Hampshire for his service against the rebels the previous year.21

  Richard was sufficiently alarmed to decide to travel to the south coast in person, in an attempt to shore up royal authority along the coastal areas of the Channel vulnerable to invasion. He first journeyed to Dartford, then Rochester Castle the following day, before arriving at Canterbury on 17 November.22 It seems that the king ordered that his illegitimate son, John of Pontefract, be sent over to Calais, possibly to join John, Lord Dynham, in organising a siege of Hammes Castle, for which Dynham would spend £500 of his own money.23 Richard attempted to win back Blount to his side, offering him an initial pardon on 17 November, and again on 30 November, promising to protect all the offices that had been granted him by Edward IV if he returned to the fold.24 John Morton also received an unsolicited pardon, this time issued uniquely under the Great Seal, less than a fortnight later.25 Richard’s overtures for peace were ignored.

  Elsewhere, the king’s officers doused out any remaining flickers of rebellion. While Richard was absent from the capital, on 17 November 1484, assembling a band of armed men wielding swords and daggers, one of the king’s own knights of the royal body, Sir Gilbert Debenham, broke into the rebel Sir William Brandon’s London residence in Southwark, and with ‘force and arms’ seized £100 ‘and took it away contrary to the king’s peace’.26 The practice of confiscation of land gave Richard’s own household servants and followers a power which they wielded with a brutal lack of restraint. William Finch, who was in the service of Robert Morton while in exile with Henry Tudor in Brittany, later described how, when he returned ‘in his coming home from Brittany’ he was tracked down by ‘the servants of the said King Richard’ and ‘not only beaten and maimed … as it appeareth as well on his hands as other parts of his body, but also all that he had was taken from him … Through the which he was and is sore impoverished and so indebted.’27

  Several months after his attack on Brandon’s house, Debenham was once again on the rampage, this time attacking the possessions of Thomas Fastolf in January 1485 on what seems to have been his own private act of revenge. Worryingly, Debenham was accompanied by John Waynflete, the serjeant-at-arms. It seemed as though, with a taste for power that their offices and royal authority brought them, Richard’s men were beginning to cross the line and descend into violent abuse of their office.28 Yet Debenham’s behaviour did not prevent Richard from employing him to keep the peace at Harwich, where Richard remained nervous that a rebel invasion might still be planned, sending a commission to the bailiff and constables of Harwich in late December, ‘to aid and assist Sir Gilbert Debenham and Philip Bothe in the keeping of the said town and to resist rebels if they arrive there’.29 Whether Richard was simply unaware of Debenham’s private abuse of his position, or if he chose to turn a blind eye to such events, his toleration of violent and illegal behaviour seems to stand in stark contrast to his profession of love for the ‘administration of justice’ just a year earlier, or his impartial treatment of members of his own retinue who had committed offences during his time as duke of Gloucester.

  Yet Richard had no other choice. Ever since Buckingham’s rebellion, with the defection of a large number of the Yorkist royal household overseas, men whom the Yorkist dynasty had depended upon for maintaining law and order in their localities, Richard had been forced increasingly to rely instead upon a dwindling band of supporters to prop up his kingship. His authority rested on the shoulders of men such as Debenham, for without them, in the face of an ever-growing threat of invasion by Henry Tudor, Richard must have known that his kingship would be nothing.

  As winter settled upon the country, Richard was becoming preoccupied to the point of fixation with addressing the threat of Henry Tudor. On 5 December, he wrote to the city of York, apologising that he had no time to consider their application for a royal clerk: ‘for certain urgent causes we have not granted the said licence unto our said servant, but the same have deferred unto after Christmas’.30 Whether through his spies, scouring the country for evidence of activity by Tudor and his accomplices, or through the open publication of Henry Tudor’s letters that seem to have been flowing into England on a regular basis, Richard ordered a fresh crackdown on anyone receiving any information or letters from the rebels. On 6 December, Richard wrote to the mayor of Windsor that he had been ‘credibly informed that our rebel and traitor now confederated with our ancient enemies of France by many and sundry ways conspire and study the means to the subversion of this our realm and of unity amongst our subjects’ by ‘sending writings by seditious persons which counterfeit and contrive false inventions … and rumours’. Their intention, Richard believed, was to ‘provoke and stir discord and division betwixt us and our lords’, which, the king was keen to stress, ‘be as faithfully disposed as many subjects can suffice … We therefore will and command you straightly’, the letter continued, that in addition to ‘eschewing the inconvenients abovesaid … You put in your utmost devoir if any such rumours or writings come amongst you, to search and enquire of the first showers and utterers thereof, and them that ye shall so find you do commit unto your ward and after proceed to their sharp punishment in example and fear of all other, not failing hereof in any wise as ye intend to please us, and will answer to us at your peril.’31

  Whatever messages passed across the s
eas during the winter, one letter survives, copied down alongside Richard’s own letter, suggesting that the mayor had been vigilant in obeying the royal commands. The author purports to be none other than Henry Tudor himself, and the document a circular letter to his ‘good friends and our allies’, in which he states he has been ‘given to understand your good devoir and intent to advance me to the furtherance of my rightful claim due and lineal inheritance of that crown’. As if recognising that his own flimsy claim to the throne would not be enough, Tudor’s appeal to any potential supporters centred also on the man he hoped to replace, calling ‘for the just depriving of that homicide and unnatural tyrant which now unjustly bears dominion over you … I give you to understand that no Christian heart can be more full of joy and gladness’, the letter continued, ‘than the heart of me your poor exiled friend who will upon the instance of your sure advertisement, what powers you will make ready and what captains and leaders you get to conduct, be prepared to pass over the sea with such forces as my friends here are preparing for me, and if I have such good speed and success as I wish according to your desire, I shall ever be most forward to remember and wholly to requite this your great and most loving kindness in my just quarrell’. In a clear sign that the letters had been part of an active recruiting drive through a network of secret messengers sent across the Channel, a postscript read: ‘I pray you give credence to the messenger of that he shall impart to you.’ The letter noted that it had been ‘given under our signet’; signed with the regal monograph, ‘H.R’.32