Richard III (28 page)

At sea it was a different matter. We know that Richard had already had experience of directing naval operations. He returned to his familiar base of Scarborough in June and again in July, staying with Anne in the castle (though a house in the town is traditionally called ‘King Richard’s House’). The first occasion was to organize the large fleet which he had gathered there. To begin with the English ships met with reverses at the hands of the Scots, who were probably reinforced by French privateers, since none other than John Nesfield, Esquire of the Body, was captured by a French vessel – though apparently he was soon ransomed by the King. Nevertheless, it seems that Richard quickly inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scots fleet, after successfully bringing it to battle; it is not impossible that he himself was in command, as the Croyland chronicler attributes the victory to ‘his skill in naval warfare’. Certainly his second visit to Scarborough was of comparatively long duration, since he was there from 30 June to 11 July. At York shortly afterwards he signed a warrant for ‘victualling the King’s Ships at Scarborough’. Plainly he had good reason to be grateful to the men of Scarborough since he erected the town into an independent county of its own.
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But by now Richard knew that it was a futile war. He took advantage of his victory over James III to suggest they make peace. The King
of Scots, who had clearly reached the same conclusion, nominated ambassadors to come to Nottingham in September and negotiate. When they came they agreed a three-year truce without difficulty, to be cemented by the marriage of Richard’s niece – Anne de la Pole, daughter of the Duchess of Suffolk and sister of the Earl of Lincoln – to the Duke of Rothesay, James’s heir. From a personal point of view, the most notable aspect of the Scots embassy to Nottingham was the Latin oration delivered before Richard by its leader Archibald Whitelaw, Archdeacon of Lothian. During it the Archdeacon quoted and applied to the English King ‘what was said by the poet of a most renowned Prince of the Thebans, that nature never enclosed within a
smaller frame
[italics mine] so great a mind or such remarkable powers’.
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Whitelaw’s polite compliment confirms yet again every other contemporary source as to Richard’s size. In addition to Rous, Vergil and More, the Elizabethan antiquary John Stow (born in 1525) had spoken to men who remembered him and who agreed that he was of short stature. There is one exception, however. A certain Nicolas von Poppelau from Silesia visited England as the Ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. It is likely that he was both boastful and an oddity; in his travel diary he says he carried a huge lance with him everywhere, which no one but he could lift – even if they managed to pick it up for a moment, its weight quickly dragged them to the ground. He was given an audience by the King at Pontefract on 1 May and spent ten days at his court. After the customary oration, Richard shook Poppelau’s hand and told an attendant to give him good accommodation. Next day he was present at the King’s Mass (was it yet another Mass for the Dead?), where he was impressed by superb music. Afterwards he watched Richard dine – Kings then dined alone or with their consort, served on bended knee – amid a crowd of courtiers. Richard singled him out, asking him many questions about the Emperor and the Princess of the Empire. He was delighted by Poppelau’s account of the Hungarian King’s victory over the Turks the previous year, exclaiming, ‘I wish my kingdom was on the Turkish border; with my own people alone and without being helped by other Princes, I would so much like to drive out not only Turks but all my other enemies.’

Richard may well have had the fashionable, if impracticable, enthusiasm for the crusade shared by many contemporary noblemen. He expressed more than once a wish to fight the infidel. The ballad ‘Bosworth Feilde’, most convincingly in view of Poppelau’s report, makes the King say, ‘I would I had the great Turk against me to fight.’

The Silesian was fed at the same table as the greatest courtiers for the remainder of his visit, and Richard gave him a gold collar which he ‘took from the neck of a certain lord’. What is baffling is Poppelau’s description of his host: ‘King Richard [was] three fingers taller than I, but a little thinner being not so thickset and much leaner; he also had very thin arms and legs, though a great heart.’
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Poppelau’s fascinating account of his meeting with the King is – in modern terms – the only personal interview which has survived, even though it has to be treated with some caution. Clearly Richard flattered the Silesian; he may well have been much more open with a foreigner than he would have with any Englishman. The overall impression made on Poppelau (who, it must be remembered, had met other monarchs) is undeniably that of a formidable, dignified and intelligent ruler, but it is also that of one with a Sword of Damocles hanging over him. The only puzzling detail is the Silesian’s claim that Richard was three fingers taller, but no doubt Poppelau was a barrel-chested dwarf.

Even if the King could not persuade his English subjects to approve of him, he was much more successful with the Irish lords, as the House of York had never lost the esteem earned by his father’s reign in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant. What authority there was in that turbulent country – or in the part of it supposedly subject to English rule – was exercised by the mighty FitzGerald family, Earls of Kildare and of Desmond. Richard left the Earl of Kildare undisturbed as Lord Deputy, though he seems to have had an excessive estimate of the Earl’s powers; hearing that Kildare’s sister had married the O’Neill, he somewhat optimistically asked the Earl to persuade that peculiarly intractable chieftain to return something of the royal Earldom of Ulster. The King was equally amiable to the Earl of Desmond, declaring he had ‘always had inward compassion of the death of his said father’ (who may indeed have been killed to please the Woodvilles). If certain reports had travelled across St George’s Channel, the
Earl would no doubt have been surprised by this sympathy for his parent’s fate, especially when described by Richard as ‘atrociously murdered by colour of the law, against all manhood, reason and sound conscience’, though such moralizing was becoming familiar enough to his English subjects. The ‘Lord of Ireland’ – Richard’s official title – apparently feared that Desmond might go native among ‘the wild Iresshe’ and succumb to Gaelic culture; he asked him to wear English dress – presumably instead of trews and saffron mantle – and presented him with English doublets and hose, together with a robe of velvet and cloth of gold bearing a collar of golden suns and roses and a white boar.
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Polite messages were sent to other Irish magnates, thanking them for their loyalty. He secured it by leaving them alone.

Richard’s most important and lasting work was at home in England. In July 1484 he set up a permanent Council of the North, to be presided over from Sheriff Hutton by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. It was to meet quarterly at York. This body replaced the unofficial condominium exercised by himself when he was Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Northumberland prior to 1483. A genuine administrative achievement, it was to endure for 150 years. But nothing could have been better calculated to anger Henry Percy, one of those three principal props of Richard’s throne. Northumberland must have been still more incensed when, that autumn, Lord Dacre of Gilsland was appointed Warden of the Western Marches.

In August Richard at last brought himself to settle the succession. This too must have irritated Northumberland, since the new heir to the throne was none other than the Earl of Lincoln, President of that most unwelcome Council. Lincoln was the eldest son and heir of Richard’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. He was nineteen, already married, vigorous and intelligent. He received the titular Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, held by all Yorkist heirs apparent. Rous says that the young Earl of Warwick had previously been acknowledged as heir, and ‘in ceremonies at table and chamber was served first after the King and Queen’, but this is unlikely; if his father’s attainder had been reversed, he would have had a better claim to the throne than Richard. Rous adds that then ‘the Earl of Lincoln was preferred’.

Few people took Lincoln seriously as a future King of England. Richard confided to his counsellors that he was worried by his lack of children. He compensated by advancing his bastards. Although still a minor, John of Gloucester, referred to in household documents as ‘My Lord Bastard’, was made titular Captain of Calais. The patent of his appointment, surely dictated by his father, refers to ‘our dear son, our bastard John of Gloucester, whose quickness of mind, agility of body and inclination to all good customs give us great hope of his good service for the future’. ‘Dame Katherine Plantagenet’ was married to the Earl of Huntingdon – Great Chamberlain to her half-brother, the Prince of Wales – in 1484 and given a notably splendid dowry. (She died young like her brother, bearing no heirs.) But the King never contemplated legitimizing them, although he and his wife must have known that they would have no more children by each other.

His bewilderment, possibly remorse and fear, is evident during the time he spent in the North from May to July 1484. The Grey Friars of Richmond were engaged to say a thousand Masses for the repose of Edward IV’s soul. The Austin Friars of Tickhill were given an annuity and the Trinitarian Friars of Knaresborough also had a benefaction. His gift to his old acquaintance Prior Bell and the Austin Canons of Carlisle Cathedral was an undeniably agreeable way of asking them to drink the King and Queen’s spiritual health – two tuns of claret annually in return for saying Mass for their well-being. Yet, curiously enough, there is no evidence that Richard ever visited or endowed the Carthusian hermits of Mount Grace, whose charterhouse was within easy reach of Sheriff Hutton. This is most surprising in view of their widespread reputation for extraordinary holiness. It may be that he was afraid of them.

His grim side was again in evidence in the autumn of 1484, when Mr William Colyngbourne was caught at last. Colyngbourne had immortalized himself on 18 July by posting his famous couplet on the door of St Paul’s:

The Cat was of course
Cat
esby, the Rat was
Rat
cliff, and the Dog
referred to Lovell’s crest,
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while Hog expressed what all too many Englishmen thought of Richard and his boar. A gentleman from Wiltshire of handsome and impressive appearance, once Sergeant of the Pantry to Edward IV, Colyngbourne had been active in raising his county for Buckingham. Moreover, there had been some sort of trouble in the West Country during the summer of 1484 – armed disturbances, rumours that men were waiting eagerly for a second invasion by Henry Tudor. Colyngbourne’s real crime – one which deprived him of any hope of mercy – was to have offered a certain Thomas Yate £8 to go to Brittany and persuade the Earl of Richmond to invade England; he had also suggested that Henry should tell the French government that the King was about to attack France. He was tried at Guildhall in the City by an imposing tribunal which comprised two Dukes and seven other Peers, besides five Justices of the King’s Bench, so seriously were his offences regarded. Found guilty of high treason, after a new pair of gallows had been specially built, he was half hanged, then castrated, disembowelled and quartered on Tower Hill; during the torments which followed the formal pretence at strangulation he showed remarkable fortitude, but, when his testicles and entrails had been burnt before him and the executioner began to pluck out his heart, he screamed, ‘O lord Jesu, yet more trouble!’ The London draper Robert Fabyan says that Colyngbourne was ‘cast for sundry treasons and for a rhyme which was laid to his charge’, adding that he died ‘to the great compassion of many people’. Despite all the battles, the statutory penalty for treason had been witnessed comparatively rarely in recent years. Early Tudor London had reason to remember the reign of Richard III.

Another to suffer for his opposition to the King was Sir Roger Clifford. A member of the great Lancastrian family, he too had been implicated in Buckingham’s rebellion. He was caught outside Southampton, probably while trying to find a ship to take him abroad to safety, and brought back to London to be tried and executed. Fabyan, perhaps an eyewitness, tells us that as he was being dragged on the customary hurdle to Tower Hill through the City, the priest attending him untied his bonds and when he passed the church of St Martin-le-Grand, his servants tried to pull him into the sanctuary. But the
Sheriff’s officers threw themselves on him and held him down till he could be secured again. Clifford was at least spared the agonies of Colyngbourne and died by the axe.

Colyngbourne had been a household man of the old Duchess of York. His replacement, probably long before his execution, was the occasion of Richard’s one surviving letter to his mother:

One can only wonder what the pious dowager thought of a son who had directed his usurpation from her own house, who had murdered her grandsons, after branding them as bastards together with her granddaughters, who had reviled her triumphant Edward’s memory, and who had had her accused publicly of being an adulteress. Since 1480 Cecily Nevill had been living the life of a Benedictine nun – or rather of a Benedictine abbess – at her castle of Berkhamsted, which she had transformed into something very like a convent. She was to survive all her sons, dying in 1494, only a few years before Vergil’s arrival in England. He tells us that the Duchess, ‘being falsely accused of adultery, complained afterwards in sundry places to right many noble men, whereof some yet live of that great injury which her son, Richard, had done her’.