by Thomas Penn
Now well into his sixties, Morton’s experience of the crises of past decades was practically unrivalled: indeed, he had been at the heart of many of them. From St Albans to Towton, to a decade-long stretch in exile plotting the restoration of the house of Lancaster, to the political conversion after Tewkesbury that saw him become one of Edward IV’s closest advisers, Morton’s extraordinary journey had now brought him, via the devastation of Richard’s fateful council meeting in the Tower that June, to Brecon, where he sat chatting comfortably and confidentially with the proud, greedy young nobleman who was his gaoler.
Earlier that summer, Richard and Buckingham had had a spat. When the duke demanded the grant of some of his ancestral lands now held by the crown, Richard, in a rare display of anger against the ally whom he had already so richly rewarded, slapped him down. Perhaps, the king felt, Buckingham’s persistent grabbiness would carry on unless checked. Whatever the case, the argument summed up a change in their relationship. During Richard’s protectorship, commentators had seen Richard and Buckingham, ‘these dukes’, as two sides of the same coin. Since Richard’s coronation, this balance had, inevitably, tilted. Richard, now, was king; Buckingham, however exalted, was his subject. And the duke didn’t like it.18
In Thomas More’s account, Morton played Buckingham with consummate skill. Teasing out the duke’s envy of Richard, playing on his frustrated royal ambitions as a Lancastrian descendant of Edward III, Morton then introduced an ominous note. Ruminating on the widespread resentment against Richard, he suggested that Buckingham would be far better off, not to mention safer, by distancing himself from the king and aligning himself instead with the Woodville–Beaufort conspiracy. All the while, like the experienced councillor he was, Morton ‘rather seemed to follow’ the duke’s train of thought ‘than to lead him’.
When Morton was done with him, Buckingham had come to believe that rebellion against Richard III was the obvious best step, of ‘infinite benefit’ to the kingdom – and that it was all his own idea. According to Thomas More, Morton even insinuated that Buckingham himself should be king. Gratified, the duke told Morton that he was keen to use his ‘faithful secret advice and counsel’. Reynold Bray shuttled unobtrusively between Brecon and Lady Margaret Beaufort, who adjusted her plans accordingly. By the end of the summer Buckingham had been sucked into a conspiracy against Richard III, the king that he had put on the throne, on behalf of ‘the blood of king Edward’ – the Yorkist line that, only months before, he had helped overthrow and tried to destroy.19
On 29 August 1483, his progress swelled by seventy northern knights and gentlemen that had joined him at Pontefract, Richard entered York in triumph, together with his wife and their ten-year-old son Edward. The boy was in delicate health, brought by chariot the fifty miles south from Middleham Castle, though he had managed to get on a horse for the procession into York. For Richard’s latest, triumphant homecoming, the city corporation had laid on a spectacular welcome. Its plans, as was customary, had been drawn up in close consultation with Richard’s household, the fretful demands of his secretary John Kendall betraying a king who, beneath the expansive exterior, was anxious to make the right impression on his new royal entourage. Richard, wrote Kendall, wanted plenty of pageants, speechifying and spectacular décor, ‘for many southern lords and men of worship are with them’. These southerners, Kendall added, would ‘mark well’ the kind of welcome they got in York: its extravagance would reflect the love northerners had for their lord, now England’s king.20
Richard needn’t have worried. The following days unfolded in a haze of wining, dining and corporate hospitality – York’s mayor spent a ruinous amount hosting two banquets for the king and select members of his retinue – as well as the required pageants and plays. At his lodgings in the archbishop’s palace, Richard graciously received civic notables and their gifts, laying on feasts and entertainments ‘to gain the affections of the people’.21
During those days, one of the king’s advisers, Bishop Thomas Langton, wrote to his friend William Sellyng, one of England’s finest scholars and the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury. Both in their early fifties, the two men were old friends; Langton kept an eye out at court for Sellyng’s interests. Desperate to find a secure way to ship a much-needed consignment of Bordeaux wine back to England – in the Channel, English and French ships continued to attack each other at will – Sellyng wrote anxiously to Langton, who provided reassuring advice and promised to put in a word with the king. He then turned to the subject of Richard himself.
The king’s progress north, Langton wrote, had been an astounding success. Richard had the popular touch: ‘he contents the people wherever he goes, best that ever did prince.’ Open-handed and magnanimous, he went out of his way to redress injustices, especially among the poor and needy who had previously ‘suffered wrong’ and who were ‘relieved and helped by him and his commands’. Truly, Langton pondered, ‘I never liked the conditions of any prince so well as his’ – which, given that he himself was currently luxuriating in the king’s favour, was unsurprising. Only weeks before, Richard had bestowed upon Langton the Welsh bishopric of St Davids; Langton, though, already had his eye on the much richer see of Salisbury, recently vacated by Lionel Woodville – and was expecting to get it. As he put it to Sellyng with a nod and a wink, he hoped soon to be ‘an English man and no more Welsh’, adding, in Latin, ‘sit hoc clam omnes’ – ‘mum’s the word’.
Yet Langton’s assessment of Richard was sincere enough. The king was showing a keen desire to deliver on the sacred oaths he had made at his coronation two months previously. As he watched Richard go about his work, Langton was judging him against those ideals and, implicitly, against the government of his late brother Edward. In short, Richard was a bright new dawn for England: not simply a monarch for a privileged few, as Edward’s reign had increasingly come to be seen, but for the many. ‘God hath sent him to us for the weal of us all.’
If such an encomium might have been made to order by Richard himself, the king would have been less delighted with Langton’s comment on his household, in which ‘sensual pleasure holds sway to an increasing extent’. Richard, apparently, was enjoying the well-stocked royal cellars – though such an observation was not, Langton added hastily, to detract from his words of praise.22
The high point of the royal visit came on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. That day, Richard and Queen Anne processed, crowned, through York’s streets to the Minster, where they celebrated mass in a ceremony that to one observer seemed like a ‘second coronation’: a way, perhaps, of acknowledging the special relationship between Richard and this great northern city. Then, they returned to the archbishop’s palace, where Richard created his son prince of Wales, investing him with the role that Edward IV had once given his own heir, the boy who had become Edward V.23
In a proclamation announcing his plans for his son, Richard set forth his own vision of kingship: the well-worn simile of the king as the sun, bathing the orbiting planets – his noblemen – in his ‘outstanding light’. Despite its ubiquity, there was something distinctive about Richard’s use of the image. For him, kingship combined both power and heavy responsibility. If Richard was all-seeing, training the ‘gaze of our inward eye’ on his kingdom and its subjects, he could also discern the ‘immensity’, the magnitude, of the task that confronted him – the ‘great responsibilities that press upon us’. There was little here of Edward IV’s ‘comfort and joy’. Richard’s was a burdensome power.24
Soon after Richard’s arrival in York, an envoy came from Brittany with a letter from Duke Francis. Expressing profuse gratitude for Richard’s friendship, Francis asked for English military support against Louis XI. Having menaced the duchy’s borders for years, Louis was now putting immense pressure on Francis to hand over Henry Tudor, threatening war unless he did so. With conflict looming, the Breton duke urgently needed Richard to supply and pay for a defence force of four thousand archers. Otherwis
e, Francis regretted, he might be forced to give Tudor to the French king – something he was ‘very loath’ to do, given the harm Louis was capable of inflicting on Richard and England.25
Richard hardly needed reminding about Louis’ propensity for meddling in English affairs. But over the decades, he had also become familiar with Francis’s wheedling demands for military aid. It was true that the duke was only following up on promises made him by Edward IV – shortly before his death, in his violent fury against Louis XI’s double-crossing, Edward had assured Francis of his support – but to Richard, it looked suspiciously like blackmail.26 Barely had he received Francis’s request, however, before the situation in France changed suddenly and dramatically.
On 30 August Louis XI died, the cumulative impact of multiple strokes finally catching up with him. While sometimes too artful for his own good, this absurdist French king had often run rings round his enemies, and had been a constant, antic presence in the upheavals of Edward IV’s reign. His death brought to the throne his thirteen-year-old heir, Charles VIII. A tantalizing ten months short of his majority, the boy was surrounded by a cluster of predatory French nobles seeking to control him and wield power – a mirror-image of the circumstances that had confronted England on Edward IV’s death five months previously.
With the French crown now gripped by its own internal troubles, the situation seemed turned on its head. For Richard, the international outlook was now rich with promise. During the last years of his brother’s reign he had watched Edward’s increasingly tortuous diplomatic manoeuvrings, his own frustrations barely relieved by the occasional charge across the border into Scotland. Richard yearned to show himself to his subjects as a royal war-leader: now, here was the opportunity. At the very least, he could turn up the pressure on a newly vulnerable France; there was even perhaps the chance of getting Edward’s French pension restarted that, earlier in the year, Louis XI had cut off. By the same token, there seemed no need to respond to Brittany’s nagging pleas for military support: Richard duly ignored them. And, in the meantime, Richard’s expansionist ambitions in Scotland had been given a welcome boost by the return of the Scottish pretender Albany, who had – predictably – fallen out with his brother James III’s regime once more and had again fled south of the border. Determined to dominate his European neighbours, to show that neither he nor England would become entangled in the way his brother had been, Richard started to flex his muscles.
After three weeks in York, Richard started out on the journey back south to Westminster, where Parliament, after two abortive summonses during the recent upheavals, was due to convene on 6 November. He left in a cloud of goodwill, having bestowed on the city a raft of generous tax breaks. Never before, wrote his secretary, had a king done ‘so much’ for the city. For all that, the extent of Richard’s grants was vague: so much so that three representatives of York’s corporation hurried after the royal party to ‘speak with his good grace’ and find out what he had actually given them.27
In the second week of October, the royal household was making its leisurely way from Gainsborough to Lincoln when royal agents, riding across country from Wales, caught up with it. The messengers brought news that Henry duke of Buckingham, Richard’s right-hand man, had raised an army and was marching out of Wales against him.
It was perhaps their altercation that summer that had made Richard suspect something was up. Whatever the case, his agents had been watching Buckingham for weeks. Reluctant to believe ill of the duke, Richard did what kings tended to do in such situations, summoning him with ‘exceeding courtesy’ to court to explain himself. When Buckingham refused, citing a stomach bug, Richard sent another, sharper message, telling him to stop temporizing and come immediately. Buckingham’s response was a declaration of war. By the time his defiant message reached the king, Buckingham had mustered his troops at Brecon and was on the move.28
Whatever the extent of Richard’s suspicions, he was unprepared for this devastating betrayal. Reaching Lincoln, he scrambled to raise troops and wrote to his chancellor John Russell in London, urgently demanding the great seal, the supreme symbol of royal authority that would give added weight to his commands. Alongside the precise formal text of his secretary’s letter, Richard scrawled his own personal postscript. Picking up mid-line where the clerk had finished, he wrote in a neat, crabbed hand whose speed left a trail of smudges and inkblots; when space ran out, he turned the letter ninety degrees, his message crammed perpendicular in the left-hand margin.
Ordering Russell to bring the seal in person immediately, and to send it securely if not – the chancellor was, apparently, ill – Richard then slid into incredulous rage at Buckingham’s treachery. The duke had ‘best cause to be true’, he wrote, yet had proved to be ‘the most untrue creature living’. Why, Richard seemed to be asking himself, should somebody he had loaded with rewards now betray him so completely? Struggling to rationalize Buckingham’s behaviour, Richard was itching to deal with him: ‘never’, he ended his postscript grimly, was ‘false traitor better purveyed for’.29
As Richard mobilized his forces, the full extent of what now faced him became clear. News came in of another rebel front on the other side of the country, in Kent. Following the disturbances that summer, Richard was alert to goings-on in the southeast. The snag was that the nobleman he had appointed to lead the commission into treasonable activity in London and the surrounding counties was Buckingham himself – who, it now transpired, was part of the problem. Luckily for Richard, John Howard also happened to be in the area. In mid-September, touring his new ducal properties in Surrey, Howard had sniffed conspiracy. As he returned to London in early October, reports of uprisings flooded in.
At first, it looked to Howard like the kind of local trouble that had erupted out of Kent for generations – ‘the Kentishmen are up in the Weald’, he remarked, and aimed ‘to come and rob the City’ – though he was also long enough in the tooth to know that apparently spontaneous popular protest was often shaped by bigger political forces. Howard set about raising more troops, secured the Thames crossings and the city, and waited.
Soon, two things were disturbingly apparent. The revolts were more extensive than Howard had at first thought, spreading not just across the Thames into Essex and East Anglia, but throughout southern England. As one insurgency ignited, so another caught, carried like brushfire through the forest and heath of the Weald from Kent, through Sussex, westwards.30 What was more, the uprisings were co-ordinated.
In barely two months, the circle of conspirators around Lady Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville had given fresh impetus and focus to the disaffection against Richard and, in co-ordination with Buckingham’s rebellion in Wales, had stitched together local cells of resistance in a series of armed uprisings. Their ringleaders were men at the heart of the political establishment, former household men of Edward IV, loyal to his two disappeared sons. In Kent the trouble was spearheaded by the local Woodville-supporting Guildford family and their associates, bolstered by men from East Anglia like Sir William Brandon; further west, in Wiltshire, it was driven by men like John Cheyne, Giles Daubeney and Walter Hungerford, all of whom had been coffin-bearers at Edward IV’s funeral. In the southwest, another rebel cell was headed by Thomas St Leger, members of the disgruntled Courtenay family (including the bishop of Exeter, Peter Courtenay) and Elizabeth Woodville’s son Dorset, who had resurfaced after months on the run, at his side a square-jawed lawyer named Thomas Lovell who had, it was said, saved Dorset’s life. As the uprisings spread, others joined them: men like the Oxfordshire knight, and Dorset’s brother-in-law, William Stonor who, receiving an order to mobilize on Richard’s behalf, ignored it and linked up with the rebels instead.31
Rising up, the rebels attacked royal authority wherever they found it, ripping up the infrastructure and networks of which they had been an integral part, and disrupting Richard’s lines of communication. As the king’s officers moved across the country on routine business, reporting
to central government in Westminster, they were stopped, their documents and funds seized. One customs official, John Kymer, travelling from the Dorset port of Poole, realized that men like him were being targeted: there was no way, he wrote, that he could travel to Westminster, as rebels were out ‘in great number’ along his route. He stayed put.32
As further updates came in, Richard seemed torn between marching south to safeguard London, and combating Buckingham’s forces as they marched out of Wales. The rain that autumn was incessant, turning roads to mud, hampering the king’s progress and the mobilization of troops – which, even without the foul weather, was proving problematic. With funds low, Richard was forced to scrape together money from his own advisers and to ask his supporters to fund themselves, with a promise to repay them when he could.33 Besides which, there was widespread hesitancy. Writing from Lancashire, the gentleman Edward Plumpton reported how people were faced with conflicting orders from both Richard and Buckingham, ‘in the king’s name and otherwise’, and froze: ‘they knew not what to do’.
Plumpton’s candid assessment of the situation was coloured by his own context, as secretary to the twenty-three-year-old Lord Strange, son and heir of Lord Stanley. Stanley was now a key figure in Richard’s regime, but the pair had history and Stanley’s reputation for slipperiness preceded him; besides which, his wife Margaret Beaufort was one of the main drivers of the rebellion. From the noises that Plumpton made about the duke of Buckingham’s ‘malice’ – an echo of Richard’s own language – it looked like the Stanleys had decided to throw their weight behind the king: Lord Strange, indeed, was due to march south with ten thousand men. But the note of doubt remained. Where Strange was headed, Plumpton added coyly, ‘we cannot say’.34