Richard III

by Chris Skidmore

  The military preparations were not without their costs. The Crowland chronicler observed that Richard was already struggling financially, with the king ‘beginning to run very short’.42 Richard was fully aware of the perilous state of the royal finances. Despite having an income of around £25,000 and the greatest landed income of his predecessors due to the scale and size of the attainders he had been able to pass as a result of Buckingham’s rebellion, by now Richard had granted away over £12,000 of lands, with just a total of £735 in rent being paid back into the royal finances. The collapse in the wool trade had seen his revenues fall further, but it was the administration of the crown’s estates that Richard was particularly concerned to attempt to reform. Late in 1484, a ‘remembrance’ for the ‘hasty levy of the king’s revenues growing of all his possessions’ had been drawn up. Aside from recognising the delayed debts owed to the crown, the need for yearly audits of lordships by surveyors and greater efficiency in collecting customs, the document highlights the concerns facing Richard. Many lordships and manors, the remembrance noted, have been ‘committed to divers persons … by the which the king’s woods and his courts with other casualties been wasted and lost to his great hurt’.43 Allowances that had been granted for the repair of castles and manors had frequently been mis-spent, while the lordships themselves were failing to bring in the revenue expected. At the same time, there was concern that ‘lords, knights and esquires, many of them not lettered’ had been made stewards of the king’s lands in several counties, where they had taken for themselves ‘great fines and rewards of the king’s tenants … to the king’s hurt and impoverishing of his said tenants’. Others lacked the ‘cunning and discretion’ to order and direct the king’s business appropriately, ‘with many more inconveniences’. Where possible, the document suggested, it would be ‘most profitable’ for stewards of the lordships to be ‘learned men in the law … for many causes concerning the king’s profit and the weal of his tenants’.44 Yet despite Richard’s concern over the depletion and wastage of natural resources on crown land, the practices seem to have continued regardless, with wood sales replacing monetary transactions.45 Three years later, in 1488, an enquiry into the condition of the New Forest found that 500 deer had been killed during Richard’s reign by a group identified only as ‘the northern men’.46

  Emergency measures were taken to help restore the king’s finances, with orders issued to Sir James Tyrrell on 20 January to take from the merchants of the Staple wool sacks worth £3,000, ‘to sell and utter for our use and profit’.47 In February, the convocation at Canterbury had voted for another clerical tenth, worth around £10,000. An additional £5,120 may have also been raised by the clergy. By late February, Richard decided to finance the extra cost of military operations and defences by sending out urgent appeals for loans to his nobility and gentry. Royal commissioners were appointed and given a copy of a letter from the king, with which to approach potential lenders. The decision to raise a benevolence was destined to be unpopular – this Richard must have known, having campaigned to end the practice during his brother’s reign. The need to do so suggests that Richard was in serious financial difficulty.

  Royal servants were assigned counties and were issued with individual letters, containing the amount of money requested, but most left with the names of the recipient blank, to be decided at their discretion. Along with a list of named individuals, potential lenders were to be approached for sums of money ranging from £40 to £200, with the commissioners given template letters in which they were to fill out the blanks, accruing to their ‘politique and wise means’. To assist their work, the commissioners were provided with a ‘remembrance’ of words that they should attempt to use to persuade their pliant victims.

  ‘Sir, the king’s grace greeteth you well’, the rubric ran:

  and desireth and heartily prayeth you that by way of loan ye will let him have such sum as his Grace hath written to you for; and ye shall truly have it again at such days as he hath showed and promised to you in his letters. And this he desireth to be employed for the defence and surety of his royal person and the weal of this his realm. And for that intent his Grace and all his lords, thinking that every true Englishman will help him in this behalf, of which number his Grace reputeth and taketh you for one; and that is the cause he this writeth to you before other, for the great love, confidence, and substance that his Grace hath and knoweth in you; which trusteth undoubtedly that ye, like a loving subject, will at this time accomplish this his desire.48

  Richard had, the Crowland chronicler believed, ‘resorted to the exactions of King Edward which he himself had condemned in Parliament, only avoiding in every case the word “benevolence”.’ Yet the practice seemed effectively the same; ‘selected men were sent out’, he wrote, ‘who extorted great sums of money from the coffers of persons of almost every rank in the kingdom, by prayers or threats, by fair means or foul’.49 The chronicler’s view of Richard’s financial activities may have been a poor one, but it seems to have been distorted by his belief that Richard had squandered and spent a large treasure left by Edward IV, a view that the surviving records of the financial legacy left to Edward V cannot sustain. In fact, the loans that Richard organised were not strictly in the same category as the benevolences of Edward IV that had been condemned in the previous Parliament. With repayment due by June 1486, Richard was still technically able to request the loans. Yet the Crowland chronicler’s reaction may reflect the wider feeling of ill-will that the loans generated. The commissioners chosen by the king were almost all the king’s household men, although where possible Richard used men who were native to their local counties, perhaps for local knowledge or to help sway local opinion. If Richard had hoped that this would lead to a rapid generation of income, he was to be disappointed. The commissioners were first provided with a number of unaddressed letters for various amounts, with the name left blank for the commissioners to fill in themselves once they had found a suitable donor. Three weeks after their original instructions they received a much longer and detailed list of men to be asked for specific sums. This suggests that attempts to bargain with local gentry figures to become potential lenders had proved more difficult than first thought. The status of the commissioners chosen must have been partly to blame. Once again they were not local figures, and came from humble backgrounds, such as was the case with Walter Grant, a yeoman of the queen’s chamber who was appointed a commissioner for Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire.50

  Nevertheless, the surviving Exchequer records indicate that the loans did have some effect on revitalising Richard’s ailing finances. The roll for Michaelmas 1484–5 indicates that royal revenue had more than doubled since Easter 1484, to a total of £18,720 18s, with large increases in the amount of cash raised from the customs, with Southampton bringing in a payment of £2,000 on 17 February. Fifty-four loans raised £4,485 in 1484.51 By Easter 1485, revenue had increased to £24,496 5s 8½d, with the loans raising around £11,000, the highest total since 1478. Blank bonds amounting to £18,600 were to be placed by the king’s agents where it was possible, but there was no guarantee that this money would be raised. In the end, less than a seventh of the hoped-for total for the blank bonds actually made it onto the receipt roll, with a total of £4,420 being raised from seventy-six loans.52

  Still sedition continued, with a steady drip of conspiracies or rumours of conspiracies to come. One involved two fellows of Peterhouse at Cambridge, possibly connected to John Morton, while another involved a group of Sussex gentry, including Thomas and Roger Fiennes, and other gentlemen at Winchelsea.53 In April, Edward Gower was ordered to seize the land of the ‘king’s rebel’ John Peke, who previously had been bound over to appear before the royal council in October 1483.54 On 29 April 1485, Ralph Ashton and Robert Rydon were appointed vice-constables to proceed against and try crimes of lèse-majesty ‘summarily and plainly without noise and show of judgement on simple fault’.55 On 2 May, Sir Robert Clifford, a Lancastrian
knight who had been involved with Buckingham’s rebellion and captured at Southampton, was taken out of the Tower of London to be tried at Westminster. Found guilty, Clifford was to be dragged by a cart immediately to Tower Hill to be executed. Yet when Clifford passed by the church of St Martin’s le Grand, with the help of a friar who had acted as his confessor ‘and one of them that was next about him, his cords were so loosed or cut’ that Clifford attempted to flee into sanctuary. ‘And likely it had been ye he should haue so done’, one chronicler noted, had it not been for the efforts of the sheriffs and the king’s men, who forced him onto the ground and bound him tighter, and ‘so harried him to the said place of execution, where he was divided in two pieces, and after his body with the head’ was taken to Augustine Friars to be buried.56

  Henry Tudor was never far from Richard’s mind. ‘At length rumours grew daily that those in rebellion against the king were making haste and speeding up the plans for their invasion of England’, the Crowland chronicler wrote; Richard, however, remained uncertain as to where Tudor intended to land, ‘for his spies were not able to bring any certain information’. Instead Lord Lovell was sent to near Southampton, ‘to deploy his fleet carefully so as to keep a faithful watch on all the ports of those parts and not to miss the chance of engaging the enemy with the united forces of the whole neighbourhood if they tried to land there’. The chronicler remained highly critical of ‘this unnecessary policy’, which resulted in ‘stores and money’ being lost. ‘The king incurred such great expenses so that he might not be deceived by the ambiguity of the name of the port which was said by many people to be chosen for descent’, the chronicler noted, since ‘some people, as though gifted with the spirit of prophecy, foretold that these men would land at the port of Milford’. Since there were two ports named Milford – a small bay near Southampton and the other, more familiar, location at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, and it was reckoned that ‘such prophecies were customarily fulfilled not at the better known but most often at another place of the same name’, Richard ‘saw fit to set up so many forts, at this time in that southern part of the kingdom’.57

  Preparations for war continued in earnest. On 18 June, Richard wrote to Edward Benstead, a gentleman usher of the chamber, ordering that he go to the Tower and ‘shoot certain our guns we have been making there for their prove and assay’ while they were to be ‘stoked and cauted’. ‘And also that the long scaling bridge that is making there’ be finished, ‘after the mind of him that devised the same.’ Benstead was also to repay all creditors for the charges ‘as shall grown from time to time … so that there be none exclamation upon our said servant by the said creditors’.58 Calais too was victualled with an extra two barrels of gunpowder, three hundredweight of lead and two serpentines.59

  At Nottingham Castle on 21 June, Richard signed a warrant for a second proclamation against Henry, to be issued two days later. The text of the proclamation was mostly a reissue of the warrant that had been sent before, in December 1484; however, as if to underline Richard’s own fury at Henry Tudor’s pretensions to rule, new material was included to stress the illegitimate nature of Tudor’s claim, not merely through Owen Tudor’s relationship with Katherine Swynford, but by debasing the Beaufort line of his mother, Margaret, also. Henry, the ‘captain’ of the rebels, was merely:

  descended of bastard blood both of father side and of mother side, for the said Owen the grandfather was bastard born, and his mother was daughter unto John, Duke of Somerset, son unto John, Earl of Somerset, son unto Dame Kateryn Swynford, and of her in double avourty [adultery] gotten, whereby it evidently appeareth that no title can nor may be in him, which fully intendeth to enter this Realm, purposing a conquest. And if he should achieve his false intent and purpose, every man his life, livelihood, and goods should be in his hands, liberty and disposition, whereby should ensue the disinheriting and destruction of all the noble and worshipful blood of this Realm forever, and to the resistance and withstanding whereof every true and natural Englishman born must lay to his hands for his own surety and weal.

  Revealingly, the revised text of the proclamation now stated how Henry not merely ‘encroached’ upon the royal title, but had now ‘usurped upon him the name and title of royal estate of this Realm of England’.60 Once again Richard set out the familiar claim from the previous proclamation that Henry, having obtained the ‘assistance of the King’s said ancient enemy of France’, had struck a deal with the French king, Charles. The proclamation added one further detail, that Henry was planning to ‘exclude the arms of France out of the arms of England for ever’. Perhaps Richard was gambling under the impression that Tudor was hardly likely to be allowed to sail from France and launch his invasion with French mercenaries with his royal arms quartered with those of France. The proclamation then launched into what might be placed at risk by a successful invasion; Richard had done so in the December proclamation, but now chose to be more specific as to whose titles specifically might be at risk, claiming that Tudor had already parcelled out rewards to his followers.

  After the proclamation had been read, men were to be instantly prepared, with the king commanding ‘all his said subjects to be ready in their most defensible array to do his Highness’ service of war, when there be open proclamation, or otherwise shall be commanded so to do, for the resistance of the King’s said rebels, traitors and enemies’.61 The following day, 22 June, the king’s proclamation was reinforced by the issuing of a new commission of array that had also been sent out the previous December. ‘Forasmuch as certain information is made unto us’, the commission declared, ‘that our Rebels and traitors associated with our ancient enemies of France and other strangers intend hastily to invade this our Realm purposing the destruction of us, the subversion of this our Realm and disinheriting of all our true subjects’, all commissioners who had been appointed were now to muster their soldiers ‘in all haste possible’ according to a set of instructions included with the orders. After the commissioners had assembled their men, they were to thank them on the king’s behalf, ‘exhorting them so to continue’. The assembled forces were to be checked to ensure they were ‘able persons, well horsed and harnessed to do the king service of war. And if they be not to put other able men into their places.’ The commissioners were to send letters in particular to all ‘knights, squires and gentlemen to prepare and ready themselves in their proper persons to do the king service’ upon an hour’s warning, with the menacing threat ‘that they fail not so to do upon the peril of lessening of their lives, lands and goods’. Likewise the commissioners were to announce that ‘all men be ready to do the king service within an hour warning whensoever they be commanded by proclamation or otherwise’. The same day, Richard sent another letter to every sheriff, ordering that upon receiving their instructions from the Commissioners of Array, they were to remain within their shire town or at least ensure that their deputy was present, in order to assist the commissioners with their tasks, ‘not failing hereof in any ways, as ye will answer unto us at your uttermost peril’.62

  Richard’s orders were quickly acted upon. On 28 June 1485, the city of London promised the king a loan of £2,000 ‘for the defence of the king against his rebels’.63 The mayor, aldermen and commons of the city ‘and specially every person as his true and faithful subject and friend’ were ordered to ‘have and be ready with his harness’, though ominously orders were given that no man was ‘to send or to loan any harness out of this city to any person, but to hold and keep it with him for the surety and safeguard of the King’.64

  Preparations for battle were hard to miss. On 28 July, the city authorities in London ordered a new watch over the capital each night and mustered 3,178 citizens, from seventy-three companies. At Leadenhall, under four overseers, they rehearsed their proposed battle formation, with bowmen followed by two aldermen on horseback, followed by ‘the brigandines’, men in full body armour, then the mayor and two sheriffs on horseback, followed by ‘armed men’. The remaining aldermen
brought up the rear on horseback, with ‘the jakkes’, self-armed citizens wearing ‘sleaveless tunics’, at the very back.65 Meanwhile back at Nottingham, Richard sent a letter to the Chancellor, John Russell, ‘in which it was contained that the said chancellor for certain reasons moving the king’ should send the Great Seal to the king by the Keeper of the Rolls, Thomas Barowe.66 The last time that Richard had requested the Great Seal to be in his personal possession had been after the outbreak of rebellion back in autumn 1483. On Friday, 29 July, Russell handed over the seal to Barowe. Two days later, on 1 August, Barowe arrived at Nottingham Castle, carrying the Great Seal in a white leather bag, sealed with Bishop Russell’s signet, bearing the image of an eagle. At seven o’clock in the evening, in the oratory of the chapel of the castle, and in the presence of the archbishop of York, John, earl of Lincoln, Thomas, Lord Scrope, George, Lord Strange, and the king’s secretary, John Kendall, Barowe delivered the seal to Richard, ‘whereupon the king, for causes and considerations him moving’, returned the seal into Barowe’s hands, appointing him Keeper of the Great Seal ‘then and there’.67

  With the Great Seal in Richard’s hands and preparations for war made, all that was needed was to wait for Henry Tudor’s arrival.