by Thomas Penn
The city authorities, it was said, carried out ‘much search’ for the culprits, but despite many arrests nobody was charged. By the time royal agents had worked out who they were meant to be hunting, the perpetrators had gone to ground. William Collingbourne and John Turberville were west-countrymen. A loyal member of Edward IV’s household, Collingbourne had been among the Wiltshire insurgents the previous autumn, but where other Yorkist rebels had fled to Brittany he had stayed on, smuggling messages, funds and men out of the country to the exiles. Turberville was a relative of John Morton. Both, in other words, fitted the profile of the committed Yorkist dissident who now saw Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne as the best chance of overthrowing Richard, the king they hated.
Their scurrilous rhyme was only the tip of the pair’s activities that summer. In regular contact with the rebels, and – in Collingbourne’s case – cultivating unrest among disaffected Londoners, they were among the dissidents trying to help Tudor co-ordinate another landing for the following autumn, again on the Dorset coast. However, with Richard’s new truce with Brittany showing every sign of holding, and so frustrating rebel attempts to provoke insurgency, they urged Tudor to change tack and seek backing elsewhere. Collingbourne suggested sending the reliable John Cheyne – a man he knew well from Edward IV’s household – to the court of the French king on a fundraising mission.14
Meanwhile, Richard prepared to return to his restive capital after his long tour of the north. He was aware that he could hardly be at both ends of the country at once, and characteristically, even as he castigated his late brother’s methods of government, he looked to them for a solution. In the 1470s, Edward IV had handed the rule of Wales and the Marches to his young son’s council, an arrangement that allowed him to delegate the everyday running of the region, while keeping it in the family and under his personal control. Richard had planned to do much the same thing for the north, placing his own son at the head of a dedicated council. Now, though, his son was dead.
Late that July, shortly before he returned south, Richard signed a set of articles for a new council in the north, now clearly defined as a sub-department of the king’s own council. Casting around for an appropriate figurehead, the king passed over the claims of leading regional lords, chief among them his ally Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. While Northumberland had supported Richard’s seizure of power in the hope that the king would restore to him his family’s traditional authority in the northeast, Richard had no intention of letting that happen. The idea of putting the earl at the head of royal networks in the north seemed exceptionally unwise. Like their detested rivals the Nevilles, the Percies had historically proved themselves dangerously independent-minded: a challenge, rather than a support to royal authority. There seemed no point in risking this again. Instead, Richard appointed as president of the council in the north his nephew, and now his closest adult male relative, John de la Pole, the earl of Lincoln.
Son of the duke of Suffolk and Richard’s older sister Elizabeth, John de la Pole was close Yorkist family. Visible at court during Edward IV’s last years, he had easily transferred his loyalties to Richard and played a leading role at his uncle’s coronation. For all that, de la Pole had spent the twenty years of his existence shuttling between his family estates in East Anglia and the Thames valley. He knew next to nothing about the vast region over which, as president of the Council of the North, he now had nominal control. For Richard, though, that was the point. De la Pole was a figurehead, a conduit for Richard’s authority, heading a council of royal servants who between them possessed a wealth of local knowledge and administrative expertise. As a continuation and expansion of Edward’s methods of extending royal control through the regions, it made sense. The earl of Northumberland didn’t like it very much, however. Nor was he impressed by the terms of his renewal of his wardenship of the East March, overseeing the security of England’s northeast. This was an office customarily renewed in five- or even ten-year periods – though Northumberland regarded it as his by right. That August, Richard reappointed him for a year. There had always been some needle between the two as far as the northeast was concerned, Northumberland perpetually in Richard’s shadow. Now that prickly relationship continued, Richard making it emphatically clear who was in charge. Northumberland brooded.15
Back in London that August, Richard made renewed efforts to woo the mercantile community, lending a sympathetic ear to their concerns and, where he could, paying off his debts. In addition to the rumours of war with France, civil conflict had again erupted in Flanders, making it too hazardous to trade safely; the Merchant Adventurers imposed a blanket ban on commerce with the region. Assuring them of his support, Richard issued a proclamation cracking down on English pirates, now forbidden to attack ships of any nation. It was a welcome, if belated, volte-face and a sign that he was attempting to engage with business, though in fact he made one exception: French ships were still, apparently, fair game. In return, London’s mollified corporation responded to his appeal for funds, extending him a substantial and much-needed loan of £2,400.16
Meanwhile, in an act of political penance and reconciliation, Richard ordered the remains of the Lancastrian king Henry VI to be disinterred from their sequestered location at Chertsey Abbey, and royally reburied in the choir of the near-completed chapel of St George at Windsor, close to the body of the man who had destroyed him and his family, Edward IV. Edward, of course, had designed the chapel specifically as the last resting place of the Yorkist kings. The symbolism of Richard’s gesture was lost on no one: in death, at least, the houses of Lancaster and York were to be unified. Perhaps, Richard hoped, some of the Lancastrian king’s saintliness would rub off on him by association. And, as a flood of pilgrims descended on Windsor to venerate the bones of the saintly Lancastrian king, Richard redoubled his efforts to get hold of his rather more troublesome living descendant, Henry Tudor.17
In Brittany, Richard’s agents reassured the duchy’s de facto leader Pierre Landais that its long-desired military support would soon be coming, in the form of six thousand English archers. The arrival of Richard’s right-hand man James Tyrell at the Breton court, then resident in the city of Vannes, was enough to trigger rumours that the soldiers were already on their way: the French government was concerned enough to investigate the reports. To Tudor and his supporters, scattered in lodgings across the city, Tyrell’s presence was alarming. It suggested that the Breton government was preparing to hand Tudor over to Richard.18
For Landais and his regime, Tudor and his growing band had become not only a financial burden but a political liability. That summer, as Landais scaled back support for the exiles, Tudor had followed Collingbourne’s advice and reached out to the French king. It was a move that threatened to upset Landais’ own manoeuvrings. With Tyrell communicating Richard’s fulsome assurances of military aid, and promising that Tudor would be well treated back in England – restored, indeed, to his earldom of Richmond – Landais knew that the time had come to cash him in.19 But Tyrell was too late. Shortly after his arrival in Brittany, Tudor vanished. He had been tipped off.
Since escaping to Flanders after the previous autumn’s rebellion, John Morton had sat tight, monitoring events in England and Brittany, watching and waiting. His contacts were good. Hearing about the plan to extradite Tudor, Morton sent one of his own entourage, a priest named Christopher Urswick, the four hundred and fifty-odd miles across northern France to Vannes, with a message for Tudor to get out of Brittany as soon as he could.
Tudor left Vannes on horseback with five friends, pretending to pay a call on a local acquaintance. Once out of the city, he disguised himself as a servant; the small group then fled towards the French border. Their absence was soon noted. As detachments of Breton troops rode furiously in pursuit, the fugitives crossed into France by the skin of their teeth.
Finally, news of Landais’ machinations reached Duke Francis. Angry and ashamed at his treasurer’s betrayal of Tudor, whom he had prote
cted for over thirteen years, the duke summoned representatives of the three hundred English exiles remaining in Vannes – Sir Edward Woodville, and the Kentish esquire Edward Poynings, a capable military man who had risen rapidly to become ‘chief captain’ of the rebel army. Giving them travel funds, Francis told them they were free to rejoin Tudor in France. Within weeks, Tudor and his group were at the Loire city of Angers and the court of Charles VIII. Greeting them warmly, the boy-king ‘promised him aid, and bade him be of good cheer’.20 For the English king, the threat from Tudor had suddenly got a whole lot worse.
That summer, Richard had successfully ended his conflicts against Brittany and Scotland in order to concentrate his resources on eliminating renewed domestic insurgency and extinguishing the rebellion at source by extraditing Tudor to England, while maintaining a belligerent stance towards France. These latter warlike ambitions dovetailed perfectly with his aim of shutting down the rebel threat – so long as Tudor remained in Brittany. Now, having eluded Richard’s grasp, Tudor had found shelter with a French government with whom Richard was aggressively at odds. Charles VIII and his advisers were deeply concerned about Richard’s manoeuvrings – his intensifying of the naval war against France, and his dabbling in a resurrected anti-French coalition. For the French, Tudor was not simply a political card to be played; he was a weapon to be deployed against Richard.
For many involved, the echoes of recent history were all too clear. Back in 1470, the French king Louis XI had backed an insurgency against Edward IV: an insurgency which, led by two renegade Yorkist figureheads in Warwick and Clarence, aimed to restore the Lancastrian Henry VI and his heirs to the throne. The scenario that now faced Richard III was its obverse: the French government was backing a group of mainly Yorkist exiles, using a Lancastrian figurehead to topple a Yorkist king and restore the line of Edward IV. In an added historical irony, Charles VIII’s promises to Tudor had come at Angers, scene of the Louis XI-brokered agreement between Margaret of Anjou and the earl of Warwick some fourteen years previously. The repercussions of this new conjuncture were soon being felt in England.
As Tudor rode headlong into France, Richard was returning north. At Nottingham that September, he received a Scottish diplomatic mission, listening to an elegant oration from James III’s secretary, Archbishop Whitelaw. Through Whitelaw’s unctuous flattery – ‘Never before’, he oozed to Richard, ‘has nature dared to encase in a smaller body such spirit and strength’ – ran a clear message: war was expensive and pointless. For once, Richard concurred. Signing a new Anglo-Scottish truce, he brought a halt to his own decade-long obsession with Scottish conflict.21 There were more pressing matters on his mind.
That autumn at Nottingham, Richard settled down to tackle the problem of his rickety finances. Emulating his brother, he aimed to delve into the furthest recesses of his kingdom, to know everything ‘that might be most for the king’s profit’. As Edward had done, he targeted the great royal estates, which provided a huge proportion of the crown’s regular revenues. In a new ‘remembrance’, or set of guidelines, he set down procedures for the ‘hasty levy’ of income from these lands, aiming to maximize that income, ensure its efficient collection and audit, and swift payment into the depleted coffers of his chamber. All of which depended on the reliability and trustworthiness of the king’s network of local officials, and their effective communication with central government – the Exchequer was directed to use ‘hasty process’ against any dilatory financial officers and aggressively pursue debtors to the crown – and the king himself.22
Among the business that Richard processed that autumn was a set of instructions to one of his key officers in Ireland, the earl of Desmond. Writing to Desmond, Richard – as he increasingly seemed to be – was in reflective mood. As his recent reburial of Henry VI indicated, political killings of the past were much on his mind. In his letter to Desmond, he recalled John Tiptoft’s ‘extortious slaying’ of the earl’s father back in 1468 ‘against all manhood, reason and good conscience’, and urged him to seek legal redress. For Richard, the episode brought to mind a ‘semblable chance’ – similar thing – that had since happened in England: the judicial murder of his brother Clarence. Clarence’s killing, Richard told Desmond, had been wrong, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable about it. Not, it had to be said, that Richard’s unease had stopped him from lobbying for the duke’s forfeited property at the time; nor that it now extended to seeking justice for his murdered brother’s family.23
This sense of seeking exculpation, of making good, perhaps informed another of Richard’s actions that October. Among the warrants that he authorized – payments for building works; £270 to two Calais merchants for a consignment of wine – was a grant to a widow, Johanne, or Janet, Forest, and her son Edward.24
Johanne’s husband Miles Forest, the wardrobe keeper at Richard’s fortress of Barnard Castle, had recently died. On hearing the news, Richard converted his salary, an annuity of 5 marks, into a pension to Johanne and her son, payable as long as either of them lived. According to Thomas More, Forest had been one of the murderers of Edward IV’s sons. He had died not long after, ‘rotting away’ in the London sanctuary of St Martin’s-le-Grand – which, in the ‘very bowels’ of the city, housed the usual assortment of social outcasts, ‘a rabble of thieves, murderers, and malicious heinous traitors’.25 More’s emotive language aside, the question of whether Forest had sought shelter in St Martin’s – or, indeed, whether he had been involved in the boys’ killing – was moot. What was certain was that Forest was now dead, and that Richard had made his widow and son not only a generous settlement, but an unusual one. This pension was paid, not in recognition of a lifetime of service on Forest’s part – rewards for ‘good service’ tended to be recognized explicitly as such – but ‘for diverse causes and considerations us moving’, a formula kings habitually used when referring to confidential business carried out on their behalf.26 It was impossible to say for sure what ‘diverse causes and considerations’ might have moved Richard. But whatever Forest had done for him, it merited an exceptional royal response.
The impact of Tudor’s flight to France was soon being felt in the autumn of 1484. In England, there was a marked upsurge in clandestine activity. Richard responded fast, ordering his agents to make more arrests in the ‘west parts of the realm’. At Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, royal officers presided over the confessions of three west-country merchants who had sent funds to Tudor’s men in Brittany, their punishment to be ‘in fearful example of other’.27 But if Richard thought he was getting a handle on the conspirators, he was mistaken. What was more, the rebels’ activity seemed organized, purposeful and with a definite aim in view.
That November, Exchequer officials in Westminster, following Richard’s orders to move aggressively against slack financial practice, took action against a Devon official called Thomas Pyne. Pyne was the county’s escheator, the officer responsible for enforcing the king’s rights, a potentially lucrative area of royal income that Richard had been trying to tighten up. Typically, royal officers were required to provide financial sureties to ensure they fulfilled their roles properly: failure to do so would trigger the penalty. Such sureties were underwritten by others, family and friends. When Pyne failed to file his accounts at the Exchequer, his surety of £40 was triggered. Following Richard’s recent instructions, Exchequer officials duly carried out ‘hasty process’ against the man who had given the surety, a king’s yeoman named Griffith Lloyd, turning up at his home to seize goods and assets to the required value. They were confronted by an outraged Lloyd, who swore blind that he had never stood surety for Pyne at all.
Investigating further, royal officials pieced together an altogether more disturbing picture. Lloyd had been the victim of both fraud and identity theft. Earlier that autumn, a ‘strange person’ had walked into the Exchequer claiming to be Lloyd, put his name down for Pyne’s surety, and then vanished into thin air. The scheme had involved Pyne himself: probably disg
runtled at having to work for the man Richard had planted in Devon as the county’s sheriff, the Yorkshireman Halneth Mauleverer, he had defected to Tudor and fled to Brittany. As royal agents discovered, however, the man behind the operation was a figure who would become one of Henry Tudor’s closest, most uncompromising advisers: Thomas Lovell.
This wasn’t a headline-grabbing case, but it was an audacious one. It was designed specifically to cause disruption – or as Richard put it, ‘vexation and damages’ – in the workings of government, to prevent the smooth and efficient flow of funds to his impoverished regime and, in doing so, to erode trust between the king and the network of royal officials on whom he relied.28
There was nothing isolated about the Pyne case. That autumn, the regime’s nervous system seemed under attack. County sheriffs and other local officials, aware of their king’s jumpiness, took care to acquire royal pardons: insurance against any failure to fulfil their duty that might be construed as disloyalty. Another official who failed to account to the Exchequer was the escheator of Worcestershire, Robert Hunde; elsewhere, the sheriff of Lincolnshire John Meres, demonstrably reluctant to take up his post in the first place, was proving to be a serial foot-dragger. Both men, unbeknownst to Richard, were now working for Tudor. By simply failing to do their jobs – and, probably, re-routing their unpaid revenues to the rebels in France – they were slowly bringing the everyday mechanisms of local government and revenue collection to a grinding halt.29
Richard was a diligent man. He was, very probably, sharply aware of what the rebels were trying to do, and how they were doing it; accordingly, he tried to keep the system functioning smoothly, to tighten up procedures against financial malpractice, to make sure funds were paid in and the wages of government officials were paid. Yet it was all but impossible to work out who was being slack, and who was actively committing treason. As one chronicler put it, where ‘some man of name passed over daily to Henry’, others ‘favoured secretly some partners of the conspiracy’. If the former included men such as Pyne, the latter were exemplified by the likes of Hunde and Meres.30