The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

Richard’s opponents seized eagerly on this about-turn, painting him as a hypocrite and tyrant who ‘extorted great sums of money’ from his subjects. At the very least, this desperate attempt at fundraising suggested a king who had come to power in a welter of high ideals that he was now manifestly failing to live up to. Richard’s constantly reiterated professions of liberality, generosity and open-handedness had disintegrated on contact with the realities of kingship. What was more, this new round of loans was designed to tackle a conspiracy that the king – who had from the outset presented himself as the figure most likely to bring ‘surety and firmness here in this world’ – had clearly failed to get a handle on.47 Far from bringing peace to England, his reign had descended into a near-constant state of emergency. Even to his supporters, it didn’t look good.

  For Richard, as ever, the root of the problem was morality – not his own, but other people’s. Since seizing power two years previously, his obsession with the spiritual health of the nation had run like a seam through his public pronouncements, the forces of ‘sin and vice’ explicitly equated with his enemies. On 10 March, at Westminster Palace, Richard wrote a letter to Archbishop Bourchier and his other bishops about a matter that, amid all the other ‘businesses and cares’ that preoccupied him, was constantly on his mind. His ‘principal intent and fervent desire’, he wrote, was to promote ‘virtue and cleanness of living’ throughout the country, and correspondingly to punish vice. It was imperative that those of high rank set an example to the lower orders in this regard. Richard was keen that the archbishop identify those in his jurisdiction who were involved in the promotion of ‘sin and vices’ and see to their ‘sharp punishment’ – an action which, Richard assured him, would be gratifying both to God and to himself.48

  Less than a week after this letter was sent came an event that, for his enemies, highlighted Richard’s own moral shortcomings; and which caused even his closest supporters to question his kingship.

  In London on the afternoon of Wednesday 16 March, at around twenty minutes to three, people noticed the quality of daylight begin to alter as the moon moved between the earth and the sun. Within an hour, the sun was almost completely obscured, its corona glowing faintly. Around that time, in her apartments in Westminster Palace, Anne Neville, queen of England, died. Nobody was particularly surprised. Though her end might have been betokened by the solar eclipse, people had been expecting it for weeks.49

  Ill since the turn of the year, Anne had declined rapidly. Her physicians tried everything, yet nothing had worked and the cause of her death quickly became the subject of wild speculation. Talk had it that her sickness had been triggered by the attention Richard had been paying his teenage niece Elizabeth of York and exacerbated by his avoidance of his wife’s bed. It was true that Richard’s marriage to Anne hadn’t proved especially fecund and, with almost a year having passed since the death of their son, there was no sign of Anne becoming pregnant again. Richard, it was said, had complained ‘unto many noble men’ about the lack of an heir. So desperate had Richard been to rid himself of his wife, it was alleged, that he had spread rumours of her impending death, in order to ‘bring her in great dolour’ and thereby exacerbate her illness; alternatively, he was killing her with a slow-acting poison. Hearing the talk, Anne had tearfully confronted her husband, demanding to know why he had ‘determined’ her death. Richard had comforted her with kisses and loving words: ‘signs of love’, it was said, made expressly for public consumption, ‘lest that he might seem hard-hearted’. In the battle for moral supremacy, his pro-Tudor opponents seized gleefully on the rumours: his ‘wicked intent’ towards his late wife, they proclaimed, was proof positive that Richard was ‘wayward from all righteousness’.

  None of these stories had much to substantiate them. Anne probably died of tuberculosis, exacerbated by the doubtful medical concoctions of her doctors; equally, Richard may have been advised to stay away from his wife given the risk of contagion.50 The problem for Richard was that people seemed all too ready to believe the whispers. Indeed, the mechanisms by which Anne’s death were said to have been procured were all too believable. After all, back in 1477, Edward IV had believed himself threatened by prognostications of his imminent death that were intended to make him fall sick through ‘sadness’; Clarence, meanwhile, had ascribed his own wife’s death after childbirth to poisoning by one of her close servants. Then, shortly after Anne’s death, it was reported that Richard was planning to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York.

  Though indecorous, it was hardly unusual for nobles to wed again quickly after a spouse’s death. Clarence himself had been proof that grieving and playing the marriage market were hardly mutually exclusive. For Richard, marrying his niece made political sense. Not only would it deprive Henry Tudor of his putative matrimonial link with the Yorkist rebels, it could also give Richard an escape route from the increasingly narrow power base on which he had come to rely. Such a marriage could conceivably reunite the house of York, re-establishing Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s royal line by a lineal sleight of hand: not in their own right – Richard’s proclamation of their illegitimacy had, after all, enabled him to seize the crown in the first place – but through marriage to Richard. Through this marriage, Richard might refound his reign on a much broader political base. Any heirs that he and Elizabeth produced would embody this newfound unity. The Woodville family, the original source of all Richard’s anxieties, was no longer the problem but the solution. All of which was, of course, the mirror of the Yorkist exiles’ vision for Elizabeth’s marriage to Henry Tudor.

  Whatever the substance of the story, it was taken very seriously indeed. The rumours were said to have convulsed Henry Tudor, ‘pinched him to the very stomach’, and prompted a frantic search for a new bride for him in case the unthinkable happened. It also sent a shockwave through Richard’s regime. Members of his own government were alarmed enough to convene a council meeting, at which the king was called upon to explain himself. At the meeting, Richard appeared to cut a cowed, defensive figure, protesting that ‘such a thing had never entered his mind’. His denials, at least to some of his councillors, weren’t convincing.51

  Talk of Richard’s remarriage to his niece was especially alarming to the tight-knit group of Richard’s supporters who, if such a marriage were to take place, had most to lose under a refounded, reunited Yorkist regime. In the council chamber, Richard was now taken to task by two of these advisers: Catesby and Ratcliffe, the Rat and the Cat.

  It wasn’t enough, the two now told the king ‘to his face’, for him to refute the rumours in front of his own councillors. Unless he went public with his denials, they warned, the northerners ‘in whom he placed the greatest trust’ would rise up against him, believing him to be responsible for the death of Queen Anne. The two councillors could hardly have put it more bluntly. Richard, they stressed, owed the loyalties of his northern following to his late wife – who was, after all, the daughter of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Now, unless Richard could regain control of the situation, there was every chance that those loyalties would evaporate. In any case, the councillors told Richard, citing the opinion of a dozen or so theological experts who had been wheeled into the council chamber for the occasion, such a marriage was within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. It was, they declared – in language presumably intended to press Richard’s moral buttons – positively incestuous, an offence in the eyes of God.

  Naturally, it was their own fortunes that Catesby, Ratcliffe and the rest of Richard’s inner circle were especially worried about, should the rumoured marriage come to pass. A resurgent Woodville family would be hungry to avenge the deaths of the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville and her son Richard Grey, while those Yorkists loyal to the memory of Edward IV and the princes wanted the return of their confiscated lands and offices, which Richard had since redistributed to his own inner circle. If, back in spring 1483, William Hastings had been worried enough about the impact on his own fortunes of a Woodvi
lle-dominated Edward V to urge Richard into regime change, the urgency with which this Cumbrian esquire and Northamptonshire lawyer now told a crowned king of England what he had to do spoke volumes.52 So too did the way in which Richard followed their advice to the letter.

  On 30 March, London’s mayor and aldermen, and other influential citizens, trooped north out of the city to the priory of St John’s in Clerkenwell, where the king had summoned them at short notice. They assembled in the great hall, along with many of the lords and – equally anxious about the implications of a Woodville remarriage – most of Richard’s household men, foremost among them his chamberlain Francis Lovell. As the king spoke, they listened.

  Talking loudly and distinctly, Richard rebutted the rumours that, he noted, had been spread among the people by ‘evil disposed persons’: that Queen Anne had been poisoned by his ‘consent and will’, so that he could marry his niece. The idea of such a marriage, Richard continued, had ‘never come in his thought or mind’; moreover, he was as sorry and heavy-hearted at the death of his queen as it was possible to be. As the clerk of the Mercers’ Company put it – with a hint of the restive businessman sharply aware that every second spent listening to the king’s laboured harangue was costing him money – Richard’s speech was long. Finally, Richard wrapped up with a detailed admonition to the mayor, his own household officers and servants and all ‘faithful subjects’ to report any loose talk and remove any ‘seditious bills’. In early April, Richard sent similar instructions to the city of York, and doubtless to other towns and cities throughout the country. All of which suggested that there was in fact plenty of seditious language and flyposting going on – and not only in London.53

  Although Richard ‘doubted not’ that his denials and instructions had been taken on board, it was proving impossible to shift the toxic haze of uncertainty that now blanketed his regime. One material consequence of this, as a London chronicler noted, was evident among the city’s businessmen. Some had already loaned ‘great sums of money’ to Margaret Beaufort back in the autumn of 1483: now, her agents were again busy. At their head was Reynold Bray, persuading ‘tender and loving friends’ among the city’s mercantile community – men like the goldsmith and former mayor Edmund Shaw and the mercer Henry Colet – that their allegiances and best interests lay with Tudor. Typical of many who, as one chronicler put it, ‘were in such a doubt that they knew not which party to lend unto’, Colet covered both bases, extending credit to Richard and smuggling funds out of the country to Tudor. Others were more resolute. The goldsmith Hugh Brice, who had been a regular lender to Edward IV and close to William Hastings, didn’t give Richard anything. Funds were moved out of England and across the Channel to the exiles, along with a now-constant stream of support. Others, like the former keeper of the Great Wardrobe Piers Curteys, deserted the regime by taking sanctuary.54

  In attempting to extricate himself from the political corner into which he had boxed himself, Richard had only succeeded in provoking doubt among the very supporters on whom he had come to rely, and who, as rumours of his planned marriage to Elizabeth of York continued to circulate, eyed the intentions and actions of their king with fresh uncertainty. Imperceptibly, mistrust spread, and loyalties were loosened.

  In mid-May the long, meandering train of Richard’s travelling household left Westminster for Nottingham, whose castle had become his principal base. It was here that news of his son’s death had reached him, and he had come to associate its familiar apartments with the interminable stretches of watching and waiting. It was, he wrote in a nod to the great allegorical poem Piers Plowman, his ‘Castle of Care’. The reference was telling. From the start of his reign, Richard had conceived of kingship as a burden; in the intervening months, it had only become more oppressive. His citation also contained within it the shade of another meaning.

  In Piers Plowman the narrator dreams of a landscape with a tower on a hill and a great valley in which was a dungeon, separated by a beautiful field in which all kinds of people lived and worked ‘as this world demands’. The sight of the dungeon ‘struck terror’ into the narrator. It was, he was told, ‘the Castle of Care’. Whoever entered it would curse the day he was born. Inside, there lived a being called Wrong: the father of lies, the creator of original sin. Wrong had built the castle. Those who placed their trust in his ‘treasure’ – the word carried with it associations of custodianship, of safekeeping – ‘are betrayed soonest’.55

  Ever since his seizure of power two years before, Richard had castigated his political opponents for their immorality, vice and sinfulness. Unable to acknowledge his own mistakes, Richard had blamed everybody but himself. Here could be glimpsed something else, a flickering moment of profound, agonizing self-awareness: the buck stopped with him.

  What was also glaringly evident was that Richard could find no relief – or, rather, such relief could only come with the elimination of his nemesis, Henry Tudor. In mid-June, a fortnight after his arrival at Nottingham, reports reached him that the rebels were accelerating their invasion plans. Richard’s reaction was instantaneous.56

  On 21 June he issued another nationwide proclamation, spicing it with further graphic details about Tudor and his band of ‘rebels and traitors’. Tudor was a foreigner, a betrayer of England, a rebel without a claim: ‘son of Edmund Tudor son of Owen Tudor’ – the baldness of these plain names emphasizing his lack of lineage – he was ‘descended from bastard blood’ on both sides of his family. If true Englishmen valued their own welfare, and that of their family and country, they were duty bound to turn out on Richard’s behalf, against him.

  Alongside the proclamation, Richard gave orders for yet another general mobilization. Commissioners were to ensure their troops were well armed and ready to assemble on an hour’s notice. They should do so ‘in all haste possible’: a phrase that ran like a mantra through the royal orders. Indeed, it seemed to sum up Richard’s rule over the last year and more, during which time, in response to Tudor’s phantom threat, men had been repeatedly and urgently mustered and, as the menace evaporated, stood down again. 57

  This time, Richard’s information was good. Leaving Paris that spring, Tudor and his men had travelled some eighty miles northwest to the Norman capital of Rouen, the port-city on the Seine that would be the base for their return to England. There, Tudor set about raising an army, and a fleet to carry it. As well as loans scraped together from various sources, including the drip-feed of cash smuggled out of England, the regime of the young Charles VIII had finally put its money where its mouth was, injecting a timely 40,000 livres – £10,000 – into Tudor’s bid for the English throne.58

  This funding had less to do with Tudor’s persuasiveness, and more to do with France’s vulnerability. That spring had seen an increase in aggressive manoeuvring from the kingdom’s habitual enemies: Burgundy, Brittany and England. In both Flanders and Brittany, pro-French forces were on the retreat. Richard, meanwhile, had signed a seven-year truce with Brittany (this time committing to supply the long-promised detachment of archers). If this was intended to distract the twitchy French government from any move against England, or even to intimidate it into coming to terms with Richard, the move had the opposite effect, catalysing French support for Tudor from warm words into hard cash.59

  In the weeks that followed, Richard scrambled to mobilize his forces. He could count on the retinues of his committed household men on whom he had lavished rewards and also, it seemed, great noblemen like Howard, Stanley and Northumberland, who together would supply several thousand troops. But a sense of uncertainty continued to pervade Richard’s orders to ‘all sheriffs’, men whose co-operation in ‘mustering and ordering’ troops was crucial. Sheriffs, or their deputies, were ordered to base themselves in the ‘shire towns’ of their various counties, so that Richard and his commissioners would know where to find them. If they failed to do so, Richard added emphatically, they would answer to him at their ‘uttermost peril’. It was almost as though he half-expecte
d most of them to desert him.60

  Meanwhile, the king tried to work out where Tudor might land. In recent decades, challengers to the English throne had made landfall everywhere: from the northeast, where Richard had returned together with Edward back in 1471; to Calais and Kent, the sites of Edward’s invasion in 1460 and Warwick and Clarence’s challenge in 1469; to the Devon coast, where Warwick and Clarence had arrived from France a year later and where Tudor had made his abortive attempt in 1483. Then there were the various Lancastrian efforts at stirring up insurgency over the years, up and down the Welsh and north-eastern coasts. Richard had to make an educated guess.

  The southwest coast, directly across the Channel from the mouth of the Seine, was an obvious potential landing zone that Richard quickly moved to seal off. Operating out of Southampton, an armed fleet under the command of his chamberlain Francis Lovell patrolled the coastline, paying particular attention to Poole Bay – the site of Tudor’s failed landing back in 1483 – and the village of Milford, which, so one prophesier had forecast, was where Tudor would make for this time.61 The long, exposed Welsh coast was another possibility, especially in the southwest of the principality and the Tudors’ own sphere of influence around Pembroke Castle. Although Richard had been bolstering his defences throughout Wales, his resources could only be spread so far. His authority was strongest along the principality’s south-western coast, where his household man Richard Williams controlled much of the security infrastructure; to the east, the deputies of James Tyrell held sway. (Tyrell himself was still in the Calais fortress of Guisnes, where he had been redeployed the previous January and where he was still needed in the event of a Tudor assault on the Pale.62) Further north, Richard relied on the loyalties and influence of the Stanley family.

  Since demonstrating their loyalty to Richard in the rebellion of autumn 1483, Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William had reaped rich reward from a grateful king. But though Richard had given them much, there were signs that both Stanleys wanted more. Despite his influence in north Wales, Sir William hadn’t perhaps attained the pre-eminence after which he hankered. Meanwhile Lord Stanley, lavished with high office, expected a further boost to his north-western pre-eminence: in February 1485, Richard had instead picked open the scab of Stanley’s decades-old feud with his regional Harrington rivals by bestowing a royal grant on them. For all that, Stanley was Richard’s constable of England, a military linchpin. So when, that July, Stanley asked for permission to leave the royal household, where he was still steward, and return to his Lancashire base of Lathom, Richard let him; after all, Stanley would need to muster his troops in readiness to combat Tudor. But though Stanley had been as good as his word in keeping his wife Margaret Beaufort under house arrest, Richard didn’t entirely trust him. His one condition was that Stanley send his son and heir, Lord Strange, to him at Nottingham, as surety for his continued loyalty. Stanley duly did so. On 1 August, with Stanley still absent, Strange turned up at court.63