Richard The Chird (48 page)

with Flemish hand-gunners at the disastrous second battle of St. Albans in 1461 and had effectively employed cannon to reduce Lancastrian castles in 1462-63. During the years Richard spent in Warwick's household he possibly had acquired his first respect for this weapon. Gunpowder had been used, gingerly, for over a century, but outside of France, where Charles VII and Louis XI had developed a strong corps of artillery, there was little confidence in it. Had not an exploding cannon blown James II of Scotland to bits? Did not a soldier often find his handgun more dangerous to himself than to the enemy?

During the early months of 1484, Richard set about developing an arsenal of artillery in the Tower. One Roger Bykeley was appointed to hire carpenters and "cartwrights" and other workmen to help in assembling "cannons and necessaries for the King's ordnance." William Nele, gunner, was granted a life annuity of sixpence daily for his good service in making cannon within the Tower of London and elsewhere. Richard also relied upon the skill of Flemish artisans: Patrick de la Mote was made chief cannoner and master founder of all the King's cannon, and Theobald Ferrount and Gland Pyroo, gunners, were taken into Richard's service. At a cost of twenty-four pounds the King purchased twenty new guns and two serpentines, which were perhaps imported from Flanders. 2

Ordnance, however, was still secondary to men-at-arms and archers. On the first of May, Richard issued commissions of array for most of the counties of England, the name of the dead Prince Edward still appearing in them. For foreign war this levy of arms had long ago been abandoned in favor of indentures, but it remained the only practicable means by which forces could be raised on short notice for the defense of the realm. As the conflict between Edward and Warwick had revealed, the royal levy had come, in this century, to represent such allegiance of the most warlike nobles and gentry as the King could depend on in his hour of trial.

The names of Richard's commissioners suggest the web of loyalties he had sought to weave. The North would be raised by the Earls of Northumberland and Lincoln, the increasingly

influential Yorkshire knight Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Lord Scrope of Bolton, and Gervase Clifton, Knight of the Body; the Midland counties by Richard's Chamberlain (Viscount 'Lovell), his councilor William Catesby, and another Knight of the Body, Sir Marmaduke Constable, who was Lord of the Manor of an obscure village called Market Bosworth; East Anglia and the southern counties were the charge of the Duke of Norfolk, his son the Earl of Surrey, Sir Robert Percy, Comptroller of the royal Household, and the Earl of Arundel, Warden of the Cinque Ports. The southwest, however, had to be left largely to men from other parts, such as Attorney General Morgan Kidwelly, Scrope of Bolton, and Lord Zouche of the Midlands. There were no commissions of array for Wales; various royal officers, Eke Sir James Tyrell and Sir Richard Huddleston, who commanded the chief castles and towns, would summon to the field the Welshmen under their jurisdiction. Nor were there commissions for Cheshire or Lancashire; the Stanleys, who wielded an archaic feudal power in these regions, were sworn to rally their men to the King's support. Sir William Stanley was, in addition, the chief commissioner for Shropshire. 3

Richard issued no proclamations against Henry Tudor, for by the end of July it appeared that he would be unable to invade the realm during the present summer. Still, except for excursions into Yorkshire to take action against the Scots and to direct the fleet which he had based in northern waters, and one visit to London, the King kept his watch at Nottingham, high on the great thrust of rock in the Castle of his Care, until early November.

These were months of harassing problems and constant labors. At the same time that he was preparing his defenses against invasion, Richard had been forced to find means of combating the Breton fleet, the Scots fleet, and French corsairs and rnen-of-war and to take action against English pirates who were exacerbating his relations with friendly powers,

The vigorous naval campaign which he had waged against Brittany during the winter soon bore fruit, however. Before the end of April, Duke Francis had called home his battered warships

and promised to observe for a year the truce and commercial agreement which he had concluded with the late King Edward. 4 Against the pirates, too, Richard took active measures. These hard-bitten freebooters of East Anglia and Devon and Cornwall not only plundered Breton and French vessels, but ever since the last years of Edward IV had been falling with equal zest upon the merchantmen of Spain and Burgundy. The ships of their own countrymen they usually spared—as long as foreign game was in sight. As soon as Richard came to the throne he had been confronted by claims for reparation brought by English merchants against Burgundian pirates and by claims of Bur-gundian and Spanish traders against the men of Fowey and Plymouth, claims which in some instances reached back several years. 5

To check piracy, Richard used all the means at his command. The energies of his shipmasters and his mariners he enlisted for his naval campaign; on receiving complaints of piratical depredations, he dispatched officers to the port towns to investigate the trouble and arrest the malefactors; he developed the office of the admiralty; he required owners and captains of vessels to post ample security that they would attack no ship of a friendly power, and he ordained that town magistrates who permitted unbonded ships to leave harbor would be liable for any damages they did; he negotiated with Burgundy to settle past claims and injuries by means of a diet; he satisfied Spanish traders with customs concessions. These measures seem to have done much in the course of the year to restore the confidence of merchants and bring piracy under control 6

In order to meet the haphazard naval challenge of the French and to cool the ardor of the Scots, who were preparing for battle by land and sea, Richard recruited a force of northern men to watch the borders, and commissioning every ship he could come by, he managed to assemble a powerful fleet off Scarborough to deal with both the French and the Scots. The former did not offer themselves for a large-scale engagement; but in a skirmish two of his bravest captains, John Nesfeld and Sir Thomas Ever-ingham, were captured and held for a ransom, which was im-

mediately paid by the King. About the same time as this minor reverse occurred, however, his navy finally brought the fleet of Scotland to battle and gave it a decisive beating. In June, Richard had come to Scarborough to supervise the outfitting of his ships; he again hurried to that port in July to take active charge of their rearming and revictualing. Since the Croyland chronicler records that the victory over the Scots was gained "by means of his [Richard's] skill in naval warfare," it is quite possible that the King had taken personal command of his fleet and directed its triumphant engagement. Meanwhile, on the borders his northerners won a great victory over a marauding army of Scots. These defeats by land and sea had the effect for which he had been hoping: King James the Third sent word that he wished to treat for a genuine peace. 7

Such was Richard's prime purpose during this summer to

fight with all the strength he could command in order to convince his enemies of the wisdom of treating with him. Both the swirl of warfare from which he extricated himself with such success and the difficulty he was encountering in diplomatic negotiations sprang not so much from the determined hostility to his regime of other European powers as from the consequences of Louis XI's diplomatic victory over Edward IV and the wave of internal weaknesses by which most of the countries happened to be assailed at the very time when Richard came to the throne. It was his peculiar misfortune to find himself ringed by states

which lacked the stability to offer meaningful alliances and

in the case of France, for example—the discipline to control their freebooters. Even his relations with the papacy were haunted by his evil chance. Before Richard's impressively erudite envoys, Thomas Langton and John Sherwood, could do much more than establish themselves at the Vatican, Sixtus IV died; and in December, Richard had to commission Langton, Sherwood, and an English officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem to offer his spiritual obedience to Innocent the Eighth. 8

Spain was far from weak, but Ferdinand and Isabella's chief interest in England seems to have been centered in the hope that by making war on France, she would leave them free to com-

plete their conquest of^the Moors. No record survives of any response they made to Richard's embassy. It may be that they considered his offer to renew the treaty of amity an insufficient inducement, or thought his position still too uncertain to make negotiations worthwhile. When Bernard de la Forssa returned to England, however, his services were rewarded by an annuity of forty pounds. With the other power of the Iberian peninsula, Portugal, Richard was more successful; in June he concluded a treaty reaffirming the pact of friendship which had been established in the time of Richard II. 9

But England's most important ally, Burgundy, was still torn by Maximilian's struggle to recover the rebellious cities which held his son Philip and carried on a government in Philip's name. As a result of his difficulties, Maximilian pressed on Richard a series of proposals which he could not accept because they were contrary to his interest. Early in 1484 Maximilian had asked to arbitrate the quarrel between England and Brittany—his object being to free Richard for the adventures that he wanted the King of England to undertake. Richard had replied that there could be no arbitration until Duke Francis gave an undertaking to keep Henry Tudor and his followers in protective custody. Later, Maximilian sent an embassy armed with a set of requests and promises that were patently the product of wishful thinking. Richard should not make a treaty with France, for that would lose him the glowing opportunity of conquering that country. If, instead, he would cut off all trade with the rebellious cities and supply Maximilian with six thousand archers and a navy to help reduce them, then Maximilian would provide a great army to help Richard to win France, or, if the King should chance so to prefer, to overwhelm Scotland. Richard not only realized the absurdity of these promises but knew that the prosperity of his merchants depended upon trade with the cities of Flanders. He had no alternative but to persuade Maximilian to be content with the existing treaty of amity and mercantile intercourse and to dispatch an embassy to make a separate commercial treaty with the cities. This treaty was signed on September 25, and on October 6 the men of Ghent and the other towns agreed to the

SUMMER

holding of a diet in London on the following January 20 to settle the claims of the merchants of both parties, 10

France, there was no dealing with. She, too, was weak and divided, suffering the greedy dissensions of a minority rei^n-The conflict between the houses of Orleans and Bourbon was threatening to deprive the boy king Charles VIII of his throne. Though the Estates-General, meeting at Tours in January, 1484, had sought to avert open war by appointing a council of "twelve* representing aU interests, to carry on the regency, the Princes were still intriguing against the Regent, the Lady of Beaujeu, and preparing to stir up strife. This weakness would seem to work to ^ Richard's advantage. The French, however, appeared to be united in harboring the conviction, bequeathed by Louis XI, that the English King was an enemy of France and would revive when he could the claims of Henry V. They were neither in a position nor in a mood to offer a firm truce. Then, in this summer, fortune suddenly placed in the hands of the French court a weapon which might be used to cause the English King, at the very least, a good deal of trouble. That weapon was Henry Tudor and his followers.

Consequently, Richard found it impossible to come to an understanding with France. It is possible that the protracted negotiations with Lord Cordes for mutual redress of grievances bore some fruit, for Richard authorized a payment of £150 to two traders of Rouen and nothing more is heard of Lord Cordes' depredations; but the state of undeclared hostility persisted. In March, Richard had instructed Bishop Langton to present himself, on his way to Rome, at the French court and had given him the power to conclude a truce with the government of Charles VIII and arrange a diet for settling claims and injuries. As a result of Langton's mission, the French informed Richard that they wished to send an embassy, and on September 13 he dispatched the safe-conducts for it. Apparently, it was this embassy of which Maximilian had got word; there is no record, however, that it ever reached England. The court of France, fearing civil strife, hoped that it might distract its neighbor by the same specter. 11

One way of bringing France to terms was to support Brittany, the last province which still maintained an independent existence; and before the end of April Richard had succeeded in bringing the Bretons to seek an alliance. But Brittany also was distracted at this time, and her internal troubles would cost the King of England dear. Duke Francis was suffering from bouts of insanity. His Treasurer and chief officer, Pierre Landois, was hated by the nobles. It was Landois' government that, having abandoned the sea war and promised to observe the existing truce, sent an embassy to England toward the end of May. When Richard met the Breton envoys at Pontefract at the beginning of June, they quickly came to terms. On June 8 Richard signed a truce and abstinence of war to endure until the following April 25. It appears that there was a secret codicil to the treaty: in return for the aid of a thousand archers against France and probably for a grant of the revenues of the chief rebels' estates, Pierre Landois agreed to return Henry Tudor to the same careful custody in which he had been kept until the death of Edward IV. The archers were recruited by indenture; John, Lord Powis was appointed their captain; a commission was empowered, in the latter part of June, to take muster of the forces at Southampton, If the expedition sailed, however, it soon returned to England. Brittany was in no condition to conduct military operations against France; besides, it was no longer possible for Landois to fulfill the conditions on which the archers had been promised. 12