Richard The Chird (19 page)

The Dowager Duchess Margaret, it turned out, had very definite proposals to make. Her favorite brother, George, represented in her eyes the solution to the problem. Having conveniently become a widower, he could now wed Mary. The marriage would keep Burgundy firmly in the English orbit, and Clarence could at last experience the bliss of wearing, if not a crown, the most splendid coronet in Europe. This was the substance of Clarence's

visions. But there were breath-taking extensions to this substance, of which Edward and his ministers remained as yet unaware. Clarence, and possibly Duchess Margaret, looked upon the marriage to Mary as but a steppingstone. Clarence would use the splendid resources of his new dukedom to achieve his rightful position as King of England.

What Richard thought of his sister Margaret's proposal has not been recorded. King Edward, however, at once quietly quashed it. Mary herself was of like mind. What she needed was a great prince to defend her dominions against Louis XI and she had no inclination to give her hand to an English duke who could bring her nothing except trouble. So Edward's refusal was unnecessary. But Clarence's cup of bitterness spilled over, for he persuaded himself that Mary would certainly have married him if his spoilsport brother had not ruined everything.

He proceeded to make himself as unpleasant as possible. He rarely appeared at court in the succeeding weeks; when he appeared, he ostentatiously refused meat and drink, as if he suspected poison. From noblemen such as Lord Dynham he was extorting money for his schemes' by threats and intimidation. 2 He glowered upon everybody, but particularly upon the Woodvilles. For by this time he had got wind of the fact that King Edward had put forward as a candidate for Mary's hand the Queen's brother Anthony, Earl Rivers. Mary refused the Earl even more peremptorily than she had refused the Duke, and Edward no doubt was content enough. He had proposed Rivers only at the entreaties of his Queen, who was almost always able to persuade him to gratify her insatiable ambitions for her family.

To Clarence this proposal was the pitch of the intolerable. On April 12, at Layford, in Somersetshire, two of his bravoes, backed by eighty armed men, smashed into the dwelling of Ankarette Twynyho, who had been an intimate servant of his dead wife, and forcibly carried her off to Warwick. Here Clarence had judges and jurors in his pocket. Ankarette was hailed before the Justices of the Peace, charged with having poisoned the Duchess of Clarence, and promptly condemned, by the jury, "for fear and great menaces and doubt of loss of their lives and goods," Protesting

THE MALCONTENT

her innocence to the last, she was hustled to the gallows and hanged; and hanged with her was one John Thuresby of Warwick, on the charge of having poisoned the Duchess' infant son. Though the windings of Clarence's mind are obscure, his principal motive was obvious: to suggest that Ankarette Twynyho had been suborned by the Woodvilles or by the King to strike a dastardly blow at the noble Duke of Clarence. Beyond its terrible brutality, this deed of Clarence's had a sinister connotation which Edward could not miss. Clarence had taken the King's justice into his own hands, as if indeed he were king. 3

The last shreds of Edward's amazing patience were gnawed away by the Woodvilles. The blood of the Queen's father and her brother John still glistened on Clarence's hands. Now the opportunity for the long-deferred revenge had at last arrived. Elizabeth and her kindred had their servants everywhere, their agents, their talebearers. The King's ear was assaulted by stories of Clarence's evil ambitions, by rehearsals of the injuries he had done the Woodvilles. The Queen feared, reports a contemporary, "that her offspring by the King would never come to the throne, unless the Duke of Clarence were removed." 4 *

Clarence's downfall began obliquely. An Oxford clerk, John Stacey, was accused of sorcery. In his confession he in turn accused another Oxford clerk, Thomas Blake, who was of no importance, and one Thomas Burdett, who was of immense importance because he was a trusted member of Clarence's household. Arraigned on a charge of disseminating treasonable writings and of attempting to procure the King's death by necromancy, Burdett was tried before a commission of lords and condemned to death on May 19. Before he was hanged the following day, Burdett passionately protested his 'innocence.

Thus had King Edward given his brother a stiff warning. But warnings were lost on the Duke. As soon as Edward went to Windsor, Clarence burst in upon the King's council at Westminster, bringing with him Dr. John Goddard— the very minorite preacher who had proclaimed Henry VFs title to the throne at Paul's Cross in September of 1470 — and forthwith ordered Goddard to read Burdett's last protest. From this rash defiance dar-

ence soon rushed into wilder acts. He gathered followers in his halls, he sent his servants about the land to declare that the King resorted to the Black Art and poisoned his subjects by craft, he cried fiercely that the King meant to consume him "as a candle consumeth in burning, whereof he would in brief time quyte [requite] him." To season his own claim to the throne, he spread the tale that Edward was a bastard and he struck at the Wood-villes by impugning the validity of Edward's marriage. Finally, having ordered his retainers and followers to a be ready in harness within an hour warning ... to levy war against the King," he managed to stir up a small rising in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, which soon flickered out. 5 *

At this moment, early June of 1477, Edward received further confirmation—if more was needed—of his brother's treason. It was Louis XI who completed the downfall of Clarence. Out of pure friendship—Louis enjoyed making Edward miserable—he reported to the King of England what his spies had learned in Burgundy—that Clarence had sought the hand of Mary only as a means of seizing the English crown. 6

Edward summoned Clarence to appear before him in the palace of Westminster. In the presence of the Lord Mayor of London, he accused his brother of subverting the laws of the realm and presuming to take justice into his own hands. Then abruptly calling his guards, he consigned the malcontent Duke to the Tower.

Richard had returned to Yorkshire before Clarence was committed to prison. By October he had again journeyed to London on the King's business, and a more poignant mission. 7 * For him, and for Edward too, the approach of the Christmas of 1477 offered little cheer. Its festivity was haunted by a live ghost, their brother George, who lay miserable in a stone chamber while the Woodvilles made merry.

The gaiety of court was heightened by the imminent marriage of Edward's second son, Richard, and given a new flavor by a recent venture of Anthony, Earl Rivers. At the sign of the Red Pale—a building which stood in a court of almhouses some yards west of Westminster Abbey—William Caxton had printed on November 18 The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, a

translation by Rivers of a French manuscript which Louis de Bretaylle had given him during a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella. When Caxton, not many months before, had finally returned to the land of his birth, he had been recommended by Duchess Margaret of Burgundy not only to the King, who was to become his patron, but to her favorite brother, to whom he had already dedicated an edition he had printed in Flanders of The Game and Play of the Chess—* pastime requiring precisely those qualities of mind which Clarence lacked. But Caxton had found the Duke in no position to help him and the talented Earl Rivers ready with a manuscript which he was pleased to offer. The volume that the court was now curiously inspecting was probably the first book printed in England.

Meanwhile, against the mumming and the music of the Christmas entertainments, Richard pleaded with King Edward for George's life. That the Duke of Clarence was the prime architect of his own ruin, Richard must have recognized; but he was moved by a loyalty spun in childhood, the force of a primal affection, and bitterly moved, too, by his knowledge that it was the omnivorous Woodvilles—the tribe that had shut him off from his royal brother and stained Edward's greatness—who were triumphantly pushing Clarence toward the abyss of death. But Edward, touched though he must have been by Richard's pleas and his own pangs of regret, remained curiously inflexible. Though forgiving brother George had become well-nigh a habit with him, some action or word of Clarence's had enabled the Woodvilles to hold him to his resolve—perhaps the Duke's dangerous assertion that the royal marriage, and hence the royal heir, were illegitimate. 8 *

The Christmas season was crowned on January 15, 1478, by the marriage festivities of the Duke of York, aged four, and Anne Mowbray, aged six, the heiress of the House of the Dukes of Norfolk. After the ceremony in St. Stephen's chapel, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, dipped into golden basins filled with coins and threw a largesse to the onlookers. Then he and Henry, Duke of Buckingham, escorted the little bride to the King's great chamber for the wedding banquet. A week later, a joust was held at

Westminster. The chief challengers were the Queen's eldest son by her previous marriage, the Marquess of Dorset (formerly Sir Thomas Grey), and the Queen's brother Anthony, Earl Rivers (formerly Lord Scales), first knight of the tourney. One of the three principal prizes was won by Richard Haute, a relative of the Queen's, and the most splendid figure of the day was Earl Rivers, "horsed and armed in the habit of a white hermit" complete with his hermitage "walled and covered with black velvet." This gorgeous spectacle, Richard took no part in, nor even attended. Tournaments, like everything else, had become the special preserve of the Woodvilles. 9

The day after Anne Mowbray's wedding, January 16, Parliament convened to try George of Clarence on an attainder of high treason. It proved to be a terrible occasion—the House of York rending its own flesh in public. Nobody accused the Duke except the King. Nobody answered the King's accusations except the Duke. Edward rehearsed the story of Clarence's repeated treacheries and of his own repeated acts of forgiveness. Even now, he declared with feeling, he would have pardoned his brother if Clarence had made due submission; but Clarence had proved incorrigible, and he was therefore forced to act for the safety of the realm. There was no question of the Duke's guilt. On February 7, the Duke of Buckingham, who was appointed High Steward for the occasion, passed the sentence of death upon Clarence. 10

Yet now Edward's heart failed him, or perhaps Richard's pleas held his hand. Torn by doubts, he hesitated for ten days. But the Woodvilles had their way. 11 On February 18, the Speaker of the Commons came to the bar of the Lords and requested that whatever was to be done should be done at once. On the same day, George, Duke of Clarence, was privately executed in the Tower, none knows how. The execution was a formal one, however; Clarence was informed of his imminent end and accorded the usual rites of the condemned. He may have been extinguished— or his body afterward immersed—in a vat of his favorite malmsey wine. Perhaps this bizarre ending was at his own wild, desperate, contemptuous request. 12 *

The King preserved the earldom of Warwick for Clarence's

heir and carefully supervised the welfare of his daughter Margaret. On Richard's little son Edward was bestowed the dignity of the earldom of Salisbury. Richard himself was given the office of Great Chamberlain, which he had relinquished to Clarence in 1472. He gained, however, no benefit of lands from Clarence's death. True, he received the fee farm and castle of Richmond, which fifteen years before he had resigned to his envious brother, but this grant came to him merely in exchange for the manors of Sudeley, Farley, and Corff, which he relinquished to the King. Edward kept most of Clarence's estates in his own hand. The Marquess Dorset received some toothsome titbits of offices and profits. 13 *

Three days after Clarence was executed, Richard secured a license to found two colleges, one at Barnard Castle and one at Middleham. Their purpose was to house priests and choristers who would pray for the King and Queen, for Richard and Anne and their little son, and for the souls of the King's deceased brothers and sisters, of whom Clarence was now one. 14

The Northerner"

. . . the citizens, Your very worshipful and loving friends .

IT IS hard to be the brother of a king. . . . The Duke of Gloucester was an anomaly. During these years of strife with brother George, the invasion of France, and unhappy and enforced journeys to Westminster, Richard had been transforming the unruly North—rife with intermingled Lancastrian sympathies, memories of the House of Neville, and habitual subservience to the Percies—into a land of comparative peace and order, reconciled to the House of York and devoted to himself.

He left Westminster soon after Clarence's execution. He was back at Middleham before the end of March. 1 With all speed he had withdrawn into his own country and would remain there as long as he was able. The North was the touchstone of happiness and fulfillment; the South meant trouble, unease, division of spirit. So, to Richard's undoing, would it always mean.

During the next four years he rode to London only twice—once to pay a brief visit to his sister Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, who came to England in the summer of 1480, and again in the early spring of 1481 to advise with the King concerning the Scots war. 2 Yet, hidden though he was from the gaze of the kingdom, his work in the North became a byword. An Italian visitor, Dominic Mancini, who arrived in England in 1482, recorded what he was told about the Duke of Gloucester. After the death of Clarence, says Mancini, "he 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

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whenever a difficult and dangerous policy had to be undertaken, it would be entrusted to his direction 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/' 3