The Life and Times of Richard III Read online

  Nevertheless, divine intervention was at hand. Twelve months previously the Duke of Burgundy had bound himself to join Edward with a force of ten thousand men not later than 1 July 1475. But for months past he had been embroiled in the schemes of his eastern neighbour, the Holy Roman Emperor, and when he finally presented himself on 14 July, his promised army was busy pillaging Lorraine. ‘God,’ as Commynes remarked, ‘had troubled his sense and his understanding.’

  Prospects of a second Agincourt were receding fast, and on 11 August they were blighted by a second disappointment. The Count of St Pol, who had promised Charles and Edward the important town of St Quentin, closed the gates and fired on the English as they advanced to take possession. On the same day the Duke of Burgundy took his leave, ostensibly to collect his army for an assault on Champagne. For Edward this was the last straw: the following day he opened negotiations with Louis. Too much of a realist to hope for the reconquest of Normandy and Guienne, Edward was quite prepared to let the threat of force extract concessions as favourable as any he might obtain on the battlefield. Louis also was a realist, and it took only three days to hammer out the main heads of agreement. For a down payment of seventy-five thousand crowns and an annual subsidy of fifty thousand, Edward would take his army home again. English and French merchants were freed from trade restrictions in each other’s countries. The five-year-old Dauphin was betrothed to Edward’s ten-year-old-daughter Elizabeth. Margaret of Anjou, a prisoner since Tewkesbury, would be ransomed for a further fifty thousand crowns. And both Kings promised to aid each other against rebellious subjects. Before the treaty was formally concluded on 29 August 1475 by the two sovereigns in person at Picquigny, Louis organised a gigantic alcoholic party for the entire English army at Amiens: it lasted three days.

  There was, however, a minority who felt that Edward’s peace treaty was no cause for celebration – among them the Duke of Gloucester. Richard was conspicuously absent from the signing ceremony: his sympathies were with the Gascon knight who told Commynes that Picquigny was a disgrace outweighing all King Edward’s battle honours. Or, as Louis himself put it, ‘I have chased the English out of France more easily than my father ever did; for my father drove them out by force of arms, whereas I have driven them out with venison pies and good wine.’

  Who, in fact, gained most from the Peace of Picquigny? The speed with which terms were arranged suggests that both sides got what they wanted. Edward had made his point about Louis’s meddling in English affairs, and received a handsome tribute for the privilege. Louis was left free to plot the destruction of Burgundy, and he could call the King of England his pensioner.

  On 21 August Edward’s army re-embarked for England and early in September Richard was back in Wensleydale. Here he spent the best part of the next two years. When he returned to the Court in February 1477 it was to face a new crisis in foreign policy – and the last act in the pitiful career of George, Duke of Clarence. The crisis arose from the death in the battle of Nancy of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, at the hands of Swiss pikemen, on 1 January 1477. With him were slaughtered the remains of the Burgundian army which had already sustained a crushing defeat at the battle of Morat six months previously. King Louis, wrote Commynes, ‘was so overjoyed he scarcely knew how to react’. This was an overstatement. Since Charles left no male heir, Louis immediately claimed that the duchy of Burgundy, along with the northern counties of Artois, Picardy and Flanders reverted to the French Crown. His opponents were Charles’s twenty-year-old daughter Mary, and her childless step-mother, Margaret of York.

  Margaret naturally turned to her brother Edward for help. But Edward could not make up his mind. There was a strong case for propping up the shaky Burgundian régime which had, in the past, provided a useful check to Louis’s more extravagant ambitions. Should the Burgundian possessions in Flanders fall to the French Crown, England’s Continental foothold at Calais would be entirely surrounded by Louis’s domains. But if Edward declared openly in favour of Charles’s heiress, he would have to forego his French pension and disburse the considerable treasure he had amassed since 1475 on an expeditionary force. In the end he made a few ineffectual protests and did nothing. Despairing of Edward’s help, Mary’s advisers scoured the Courts of Europe for a rich and war-like husband to come to her rescue. An atmosphere of gloomy foreboding dominated the English Court. ‘It seemeth that the world is all quavering’, wrote John Paston, ‘It will reboil somewhere, so that I deem young men shall be cherished.’

  The young man the Dowager Duchess Margaret cherished was George, Duke of Clarence. Here was a golden chance to bestow on her favourite brother, whose wife had just died in childbirth, the hand of the greatest heiress in Europe. However, it was hardly surprising, as the Croyland Chronicler put it, that:

  ...so great a contemplated exaltation of his ungrateful brother displeased the King. He consequently threw all possible impediments in the way, in order that the match before-mentioned might not be carried into effect, and exerted all his influence that the heiress might be given in marriage to Maximilian [of Austria], the son of the [Holy Roman] Emperor; which was afterwards effected. The indignation of the Duke was probably still further increased by this; and now each began to look upon the other with no very fraternal eyes. You might then have seen (as such men are generally to be found in the courts of all princes), flatterers running to and fro, from the one side to the other, and carrying backwards and forwards the words which had fallen from the two brothers, even if they had happened to be spoken in the most secret closet.

  Clarence’s paranoid feelings were further inflamed by the news that Edward had proposed as his candidate for Mary’s husband a member of the despised Woodville clan, the Queen’s brother Anthony, Earl Rivers. This time Edward was not prepared to turn a deaf ear to his brother’s threats of treason and revenge. After a final warning Clarence was to be struck down. The warning took the form of a death sentence on one of the Duke’s retainers, one Thomas Burdett, who was condemned on charges of treasonable writing and necromancy. Ignoring the danger signal Clarence interrupted a Council meeting at Westminster to protest Burdett’s innocence. Even more recklessly he began to spread the old story that Edward was a bastard, armed his retainers and managed to engineer riots in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. In the meantime, King Louis, ever anxious to keep his English cousins at each other’s throats while he completed the dismemberment of Burgundy, sent word of further treasonable gossip. Edward summoned Clarence to Westminster and had him confined to the Tower.

  There is no record that Richard had any part in these proceedings, and it seems likely that the summer months kept him busy in Yorkshire. When he rejoined the Court in the late autumn Clarence’s life hung by a thread. The Woodvilles, who still regarded him as Warwick’s accomplice in the murder of two of their kin, were baying for his blood, and the story of the King’s bastardy was one that snapped even Edward’s patience. Richard was the only member of the royal family to speak up for his brother: Clarence was a nuisance, but since Warwick’s defeat he had never been a threat. Moreover, he was loath to see the Woodvilles manoeuvring one of his brothers into killing the other.

  But Edward was determined to go through with it. On 16 January 1478, the Lords assembled in Parliament before the King to try Clarence on charges of high treason. In a hushed chamber none of them dared utter a word in accusation or defence. Only the King could prosecute the King’s brother. The verdict was ‘guilty’, and the Duke of Buckingham, as Steward of England, pronounced the sentence of death. When Edward hesitated to set a date for the execution, the Commons presented a petition that it should be carried out swiftly. A few days later the Duke of Clarence at last earned in his death the fame that had eluded him in his lifetime, when he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. Contemporary accounts record that Edward offered Clarence a choice of death, and that he elected to be drowned in a butt of wine. This has led later historians to declare that Clarence was a drunkard, but others have suggested that the
butt of Malmsey held a symbolic significance as a reminder of the presents of tuns of wine sent to Clarence by Edward in happier days. Margaret Pole, Clarence’s daughter, certainly wore a model of a wine cask on her wrist in remembrance of her father’s death.

  Dominic Mancini, the Italian cleric who in 1483 wrote an invaluable account of his stay in England, states that Richard was ‘overcome with grief for his brother’. He also provides the clue to the origins of Richard’s bitter antagonism towards the Woodvilles:

  Thenceforth [Mancini continues] Richard came very rarely to court. He kept himself within his own lands and set out to acquire the loyalty of his people through favours and justice. The good reputation of his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers.... Such was his renown in warfare, that whenever a difficult and dangerous policy had to be undertaken, it would be entrusted to his discretion and his generalship. By these arts Richard acquired the favour of the people, and avoided the jealousy of the Queen, from whom he lived far separated.

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  Clarence’s death clearly left scars on Richard’s memory. Three days after the execution he procured a licence to set up two religious foundations to pray for the royal family and for his dead brothers and sisters. It is equally clear that he blamed the Woodville Queen for what had happened. But his estrangement from the Court went deeper than this. The reference to ‘the good reputation of his private life’ hints at a contrast between Richard’s asceticism and the frivolity, the gormandising and the freewheeling sexual antics of Edward’s entourage. The differences between the two surviving sons of York are so strong as to prompt the thought that there may have been some foundation for the tale of Edward’s bastardy. Richard, short, frailly built, intense and rather straight-laced, and ill at ease in company; Edward, a fat, pleasure-loving giant with easy manners and extravagant tastes. Mancini paints a striking portrait of Edward in his later years:

  In food and drink he was most immoderate: it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more. For this reason and for the ease, which was especially dear to him after his recovery of the crown, he had grown fat in the loins, whereas previously he had been not only tall but rather lean and very active. He was licentious in the extreme: moreover it was said that he had been most insolent to numerous women after he had seduced them, for, as soon as he grew weary of dalliance, he gave up the ladies much against their will to the other courtiers. He pursued with no discrimination the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly: however he took none by force. He overcame all by money and promises, and having conquered them, he dismissed them. Although he had many promoters and companions of his vices, the more important and especial were three of the aforementioned relatives of the queen, her two sons and one of her brothers.

  As Mancini points out, it was in the North, far removed from the Court’s politics and pleasures, that Richard’s talents were most fruitfully employed. ‘Loyauté me lie’ – ‘loyalty binds me’ – was the motto Richard adopted, and for thirteen years he effectively ruled the northern counties as Edward’s deputy in war and peace. His first task was to establish a working relationship with the Earl of Northumberland. Generations of Percies had been lords of the North, and much depended on Richard’s tactful handling of the young Earl. In May 1473 the two men entered into a formal agreement, whereby Henry Percy recognised Richard’s ultimate authority, while Richard promised to uphold the Earl’s rights. In the East Riding and in Northumberland Percy’s authority continued unchallenged: Westmorland, Cumberland and the West Riding were Richard’s preserve.

  The key to the North was York itself, a city of more than twelve thousand inhabitants, and headquarters of a prosperous merchant community. The Merchant Adventurers of York, incorporated more than a century before, carried on a brisk trade with the Hanse towns and supplied the city with its municipal officers. More than once discontented factions appealed to the Earl of Northumberland over Richard’s head, but the city’s records show that the great majority of the citizens regarded the Duke of Gloucester as their special friend and protector. The details of his administration confirm the importance that the Yorkist rulers attached to their relationships with the major cities of the realm – a fact often obscured by the battles, executions, feuds and intrigues that monopolised the attentions of the chroniclers. Authorising the destruction of illegal fish traps on the Humber and the Ouse, arbitrating in disputed municipal elections, quelling riots and commuting taxes in times of need, Richard worked hard to earn the title of ‘our full tender and especial good lord’. A typical entry in the civic minutes records the decision that ‘the Duke of Gloucester shall, for his great labour now late made unto the King’s good grace for the confirmation of the liberties of this City be presented, at his coming to the City, with six swans and six pikes’. When the traditional spring pageant was celebrated in 1477 Richard and Anne marked their special bond with the city by joining the Corpus Christi Guild, a religious fraternity closely associated with the powerful Merchant Adventurers.

  It was an active life which left Richard little time to enjoy the comforts of his Duchess’s household at Middleham. When in York he generally stayed at the house of the Augustinian friars at Lendal. His estates at Sheriff Hutton, about ten miles north-east of the city, were also conveniently close and bordered on some of Henry Percy’s chief manors. The castle of Pontefract, twenty-two miles to the south-west, was his official residence as Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster beyond Trent, while Barnard Castle, some fifty miles to the north-west, was his chief seat in the county of Durham. Richard’s normal administrative duties were frequently supplemented by legal commissions that toured the countryside hearing pleas, initiating inquiries and settling disputes. As Richard’s reputation spread, the personal following who comprised his Council took on increasingly the functions of a court of law, offering ‘good and indifferent justice to all who sought it, were they rich or poor, gentle or simple’.

  Richard’s other great office, the wardenship of the West March, did not seriously occupy his attention until the spring of 1480. Persuading James III of Scotland to break his truce and authorise large-scale border raids was one of Louis’s many ploys to keep the English busy while he tidied up his Burgundian conquests. In May Richard’s military powers were augmented by the office of Lieutenant General in the North, and in the autumn of 1480 he launched a border raid of his own into Scottish territory. This was to be the curtain-raiser to a full scale invasion planned for the summer of 1481. King Edward was to command in person. With Northumberland as his deputy, Richard spent the winter inspecting the border garrisons, repairing the fortifications of Carlisle and conducting a military census. Late in March 1481 he was with Edward in London, putting the finishing touches to their plan of campaign.

  But the campaign never materialised. Although a fleet under Lord Howard devastated Scottish shipping in the Firth of Forth, Edward never stirred from his capital, immobilised by financial worries and failing health. Richard and Northumberland were left to conduct a border raid on a scale no greater than that of the previous autumn. By the spring of 1482 a significant victory over the Scots had become a political as well as a military necessity. The exceptionally bad harvest of 1481 was causing severe disturbances in several counties; Edward’s attempts to levy a tax, commuted on his return from the inglorious French campaign of 1475, proved as unpopular as benevolences; and there were rumours that Burgundy, despairing of armed support from England, was about to come to terms with King Louis. In that event England would be isolated without a Continental ally, and Edward could kiss goodbye to his annual French pension.

  In 1482 the sole command of the Scottish expedition was vested in the Duke of Gloucester. The two brothers met at Fotheringhay in June, and Richard was furnished with an unexpected ally in the person of James III’s younger brother, the Duke of Albany – a ‘Clarence in kilt’ – whom the brothers promised to seat on James’s throne. Early in Jul
y Richard and Northumberland marshalled their forces under the battlements of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. The army was estimated at twenty thousand men, backed by a formidable siege train of artillery. Their first objective was the town of Berwick, in Scottish hands since Margaret had surrendered it two decades before. The town itself capitulated at once but the citadel, commanded by the Earl of Bothwell, held out. Detaching Lord Stanley and his contingent from Lancashire and Cheshire to press the siege, Richard drove on to meet the Scottish army. After all the efforts and expense that had gone into the campaign, it must have come as something of a disappointment to hear, at the end of July, that James III was the victim of a coup organised by his own barons. Disillusioned by their sovereign’s foolhardy sabre-rattling, the Scottish lords refused to risk their lives in a pitched battle, and Richard entered Edinburgh unopposed. At Albany’s request Richard’s soldiers were forbidden even their traditional right to pillage the conquered city. Negotiations for a peace settlement proved equally fruitless: no treaty would long survive the political upheavals of James’s Court. Mindful of the crippling costs of keeping his army in the field indefinitely, Richard had no alternative but to march back the way he had come, determined at least to salvage his and the nation’s pride by completing the reduction of Berwick Castle. Albany, who had made his peace with the Scottish lords, remained behind, promising to secure a lasting truce for his English allies. On 24 August the Scots at last agreed to the permanent cession of Berwick to the English Crown, and the citadel was delivered to Lord Stanley. The news was trumpeted in London as if Richard had won a second Agincourt, and Edward was lavish in his praises. In a sour and more realistic vein, the Croyland Chronicler noted that ‘this trifling, I know not whether to call it “gain” or “loss” (for the safekeeping of Berwick each year swallows up ten thousand marks) at this period diminished the resources of the king and kingdom by more than a hundred thousand pounds’.