Richard The Chird (31 page)

It was Howard who pursued Warwick's fleet in the spring of 1470, and before the Earl slipped into Honfleur, wrested prizes from it. Taking sanctuary when Edward fled to Burgundy, he managed to reach London on Good Friday of 1471, the day after the King re-entered his capital, and thus he fought at Barnet and Tewkesbury. By this time he had been created a peer; he was soon after elected a Knight of the Garter. With Lord Hastings, his companion-in-arms and fellow member of the King's council, he entered, in 1471, into a closer relationship when he was appointed the Lord Chamberlain's deputy at Calais. The 1470*5 being a decade of peace, Howard became a diplomat. He helped weave a web of treaties between Duke Charles of Burgundy and Edward which led to the invasion of France in 1475—but he was not becalmed of adventure. On one of his missions the ship in which he was sailing to Calais was attacked by three Hanse vessels and driven onto the sands, and in the fierce fight sixteen of Howard's men were hacked to death by the Easterlings. Lucky as well as handy with his sword, Howard escaped without a wound.

On the expedition to France he was one of the four commissioners who negotiated the treaty with Louis XL After accompanying Bang Edward onto the bridge at Picquigny, he was dined the same evening by King Louis, With the exception of Hastings', his was the handsomest of the French pen-

sions, twelve hundred crowns a year, and he received many a fine piece of plate to boot. Subsequently, he became Edward's chief envoy to the court of France. It was the war with Scotland which gave him his greatest opportunity as an independent commander, and on the element he loved. In 1481 all England rang with his exploits after he had steered boldly up the Firth of Forth to destroy the pride of Scotland's navy.

The sketch of the man which his career draws—the outlines of a man of action—is transformed into a living portrait by his account books. For all his honors, his scars, and his service at court, he yet remained essentially the country lord, concerned with the welfare of his tenants and neighbors, immersed in the business of his estates, knowing every detail of his household affairs. At home, on his manor at Stoke Nayland, in Essex, he sat down with his steward every Saturday and went over the accounts, annotating them copiously with his own hand. Yet his purse was always open. He enjoyed pleasing children with little gifts; he was constantly bestowing alms wherever he went; "item," reads the account book for October 13, 1482, "to the young man of the stable that is sick, 40!." Several promising youngsters around the countryside he supported, wholly or in part, at Cambridge University, and he encouraged other talents as well. On October 18, 1482, "my Lord made covenant with William Wastell, of London, harper, that he shall have the son of John Colet, of Colchester, harper, for a year, to teach him to harp and sing, for the which teaching my lord shall give him 135 4d and a gown. . . ." Howard, in fact, dearly loved music, music of all kinds: the earnest drone of a village bagpiper, the martial airs of my lord of Gloucester's trumpeters, the lovely polyphony of trained voices. He kept in his household 'Thomas the Harper," a singer, Nicholas Stapleton, and at least four children to sing in his chapel, for whom he bought masses and anthems and doubtless provided schooling. Wandering musicians and the minstrel bands of the magnates alike found a warm welcome in his hall; the "waytes" of London caroled for him when he visited the capital. Plays he took great pleasure in too; the strolling companies in noble livery and the

humbler players of neighboring towns visited him often and fared well. And when he sailed to fight the Scots, he took with him not only caltrops and serpentines and steel harness but French romances and French treatises on dice and chess and Les Dits des Sages.

Though for two decades John Howard had done service of peace and war with Richard of Gloucester, relations between the two men seem to have become more intimate after the Scots war broke out. On the naval expedition of 1481 he and Richard had conferred about operations at Newcastle or Scarborough; the success that each achieved in the North itself provided a fresh tie. In the course of 1481 Richard sold to John Howard his East Anglian manor of Wysnowe for eleven hundred marks. The following February John Kendall arrived at Stoke Nayland to deliver the "evidences," Le., the title, of the property. He returned to Yorkshire with a generous amount of Howard's silver jingling in his purse and in his baggage Howard's gift to his master of seven crossbows of wood and one of steel. What more fitting present from the first admiral to the first general of the realm? That summer Howard was entertained by Richard's players on the shawms, and at Christmas by a traveling quartet of his actors. 21

Music and armor. . . . The two men had interests in common. There were other reasons why Richard and Howard might develop a relationship different from that which existed between Richard and the other great barons of the King's council. Unlike Hastings, Howard was not a boon companion of the King's idleness; unlike Stanley's, his hard service to the cause of York was flawed by no lapses in allegiance. There were affinities of temperament as well—plainness of mind, hardihood developed by a long experience of action, a mutual sense that each was a man deeply rooted in his own "country" and touched by the spirit of the feudal past. 22 *

Despite his association with Hastings and Stanley, John Howard chose to regard the Protector as the stable and meaningful center of the new regime. On May 15, the day after he had been granted the stewardship of the Duchy of Lancaster sooth

of Trent, Lord Howard presented to Richard a cup with a cover, weighing sixty-five ounces of gold. When Anne, Duchess of Gloucester, arrived in London three weeks later, she sent, that very day, a box of "waffers" to John Howard's wife. 23

Despite the differences in interest and allegiance that were beginning to develop among the councilors, the government of the Protector functioned in harmony and with confidence throughout the month of May. Still, men's minds were very sensitive to the future. Edward the Fifth was King right enough, but in the view of the times, he would not be utterly and finally enthroned until he received the chrism and the crown in Westminster Abbey. Recognizing this feeling, Richard had pushed on preparations for a splendid coronation. Under the direction of Peter Curteys, Keeper of the Wardrobe, tailors were busily fashioning satin and velvet and cloth of silver and of gold into ceremonial costumes for the young King and his household. 24 The date of the event had been moved forward from Tuesday, June 24, to Sunday, June 22, though the change had probably not yet been announced. 25 * The counties and towns were electing men to represent them in the Parliament. The citizens of York had chosen Thomas Wrangwysh and William Wells, and, with their usual shrewd eye to business, had decided to pay their representatives for two extra days in order that they might attend the coronation "to commune with such lords as shall be there for the weal of the city." 26 *

The men of power, however, did not view the coronation in the same sentimental light as did most of the commons. In the councilors' view, far from stabilizing affairs, it would offer a terrible challenge to order . . . and also to ambition. To Richard the problem was most urgent because most dangerous. In the council which after the coronation must inevitably govern for Edward while he was a minor, there would exist neither a leadership nor a relation with the King prescribed by law. How could government fail to become an arena of savagely competing interests, a bitter struggle to gain the ear of the young King who would soon be the fountainhead of power?

About mid-May—either at the same time that the council decided to summon Parliament (before May 13) or only a little while after—Richard raised the question of the future. In answer, a proposal was put forward that the protectorship be continued until Edward the Fifth became of age to rule. The clerics of the council, the party of peace, supported it strongly- Hastings and his friends apparently approved also, either because they had not yet become seriously uneasy about their interests or because they found it impossible to defeat, and therefore impolitic to oppose, so popular a measure. The policy of extending the protectorship! the council agreed, should be presented for the sanction of the Lords and Commons as the chief business of state which had required the summoning of Parliament. 27

Richard well realized that there was no "made law" or custom which dictated—or even acknowledged—such a proceeding. Like men of former times, he solved this problem of government for which the past offered no solution by consulting the Law of God and the Law of Nature. These, the fifteenth century knew, were written plain in the divine order of the world. It was left for later centuries to invent the idea that the sum of such solutions was something called the English Constitution. By the Law of Nature, Richard recognized that political order and the rights of his own power could only be secured upon the good will of the realm. By the Law of God, he recognized that justice would be truly observed if the Lords and Commons, assembled with the King in his own High Court of Parliament, gave their assent to a bestowal of authority that the King himself, being a minor, was not able, and that no one else was entitled, to make. That Parliament would so assent, Richard, like the rest of the council, took for granted. The Commons too knew the Law of God, wanted peace, and approved of the Protector. The most influential among the lords spiritual and temporal were already committed. 28

So passed the month of May and the first days of June, 1483. What was to be feared and hoped from the future dominated the thoughts of men, as would poignantly appear before the protectorship was six weeks old. John Russell had begun to draft the speech which as Chancellor—and Richard's spokesman—he would

deliver at the opening of Parliament. Taking for his theme, as was customary, the text from Holy Writ appropriate to that date—in this case, the text for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, which fell on June 24, the day before—Russell was shaping it by the tortuous scholastic method of the time into an appeal for harmony among the lords and orderly obedience in the commons, these to be nurtured by Parliament's confirming the continuation of the protectorship. Even by the standards of modern rhetoric, Russell had hit upon two moving and dramatic touches—in one he was going to picture the youthful King as standing between two royal brothers of high renown, his dead father and his uncle the Protector; the second he was working up as his peroration, in which, speaking as in the King's own person, he would declare, "Uncle, I am gladde to have yow . . . confirmed in this place [,] you to be my protector in alle my [affairs] and bese-nessez. ltd fiat, amen." 29

Russell's future audience was already beginning to arrive in London; in the narrow streets lords and their retinues jostled knights of the shires and burgesses from the towns. How the government conducted itself from now until the coronation would be under the scrutiny of the whole realm. Busy with plans for the coronation and the Parliament as well as routine affairs, the council moved about rather bewilderingly, however, and often split into groups charged with special duties. At times the whole council met formally in the Star Chamber, the famous camera stellata at Westminster. More often, at the Tower Richard drafted in council, a smaller administrative council, the writs and bills through which business was dispatched, and the Bong then affixed his signature or sign manual by way of commanding that the bills be executed under the Great Seal or the Privy Seal or the Signet Seal, as the particular bill or writ warranted—that is, by John Russell's office, if it was an important patent that must blaze with the full authority of red wax and linen; or by John Gunthorpe's office, if it was a routine command; or merely by Richard's secretary, John Kendall, if it was business which demanded great haste or did not need to be formally registered.

The committees of the council had divers meeting places. At

Westminster a committee headed by Chancellor Russell seems to have had charge of coronation arrangements. Another set of councilors—particularly Hastings, Stanley, Rotherham, Morton, and their staffs—gathered at the Tower for official consultations about the conduct of Parliament and spoke frequently with the King; less officially, they had also begun to meet at each other's houses. Still another group, Richard's intimate circle of advisers, clustered at Crosby's Place. Functioning in this maze of conciliar business were three various centers of governmental or court activity. The most formal consisted of the justices, the heads of the Exchequer, the officers of the Chancery and of Privy Seal, who carried on their work at Westminster. The apartments of the boy sovereign in the Tower had become the haunt of a variety of men, some of whom came openly in dutiful homage while others made more covert visits as friends of the Woodvilles, as the King's sympathizers and adherents. The third center was Crosby's Place, the court of the Protector, thronged with his household staff, a growing body of supporters, and the daily procession of men with suits, grievances, hopes of place or favor.

Amidst increasing tension generated by the approach of the coronation and the meeting of Parliament and by the unacknowledged differences which smoldered in the council, Richard carried on the labors of government, weighed the counsel of his friends, and talking little himself, listened to the minds of many men. Buckingham was the talker, and Buckingham was everywhere. When Richard rode through the streets, Buckingham was at his side. In council, Buckingham dominated the discussion. Buckingham was working enthusiastically at being a great man.

So passed the days of May. On June 5 Richard welcomed his wife, Anne, to Crosby's Place; he must have besought her to join him as soon as he reached London. Their little son, however, she had left at Middleham; his health was too delicate for such a journey. In the first hours of their reunion Anne reported to Richard that his friends the citizens of York were growing anxious about their suit for the reduction of the city fee farm. 30 * They could not be expected, Richard now realized, to understand that the moment was unpropitious for such a grant on his part.

When Anne retired to her chambers, Richard summoned John Kendall, and despite the pressure of greater affairs, earnestly sought to make clear to the men of York that he had not forgotten them:

Right trusty and well beloved, we greet you well, and where, by your letters of supplication to us delivered by your servant John Bracken-bury, we understand that, by reason of your great charges that ye have had and sustained, as well in the defence of this realm against the Scots as otherwise, your worshipful city remaineth greatly in poverty, for the which ye desire us to be good mean unto the King's Grace for an ease of such charges as ye yearly bear and pay unto His Highness, we let you wit that for such great matters and businesses as we now have to do for the weal and usefulness of the realm, we as yet can not [ne can] have convenient leisure to accomplish this your business, but be assured that for your kind and loving dispositions to us at all times showed, which we can not [ne can] forget, We in goodly haste shall so endeavour us for your ease in this behalf as that ye shall verily understand we be your especial good and loving lord, as your said servant shall show you, to whom it will like you herein to give further credence; and for the diligent service which he hath done to our singular pleasure unto us at this time, we pray you to give unto him laud and thanks, and God keep you. 31