Richard The Chird (51 page)

On the other hand, a positive determination to encourage good living and to seek men of good character for offices pervades documents, letters, instructions, from his hand. None more succinctly expresses his feeling than the communication which he sent to each of his bishops in March of 1484.

The Convocation of the clergy, meeting during the sessions of Parliament, had supplicated Richard, first to confirm the

rights of the Church, as King Edward had done, and then to enforce those rights, painting a lurid picture of clerics "cruelly, grievously . . . troubled . . . and arrested," dragged to prison from the very altar by impious secular hands or so threatened by the laity that they dare not reside on their benefices. Richard granted the Church its liberties, including the traditional privilege of trying erring members in its courts; 8 but he seized the occasion to address to the bishops a plea of his own. "Our principal intent and fervent desire," he begins directly, "is to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced . . . and vices . . . provoking the high indignation and fearful displeasure of God to be repressed and annulled; and this . . . put in execution by persons of high estate . . . not only induceth persons of lower degree to take thereof example . . . but also thereby the great and infinite goodness of God is made placable and graciously inclined to the exaudition of petitions and prayers." Since in every diocese there are men, spiritual as well as secular, leading evil lives, Richard wills each bishop to reform such persons, "not sparing for any . . . favour ... or affection, whether the offenders be spiritual or temporal." In return for diligent obedience to this behest, he promises that clerics will be punished only according to the laws of Holy Church. "And thus proceeding to the execution hereof, you shall do unto yourself great honour, and unto us right singular pleasure."

This exhortation provides an ironic commentary on the stagnation which had settled upon the Church—once the single great force making for righteousness in a society ignorant and often brutal, now having to be implored by a King, and bribed with the promise of retaining its immunities, to set a decent moral example to the world!

The pattern of Richard's many grants and gifts also shows the mingling of the policy of the ruler and the predilections of the man. To the great seignorial personalities—Buckingham, Norfolk, Northumberland, the Stanleys—went the largest endowment in lands. In order to fill vacancies in the knighthood of the Garter, Richard's chapter elected his friend Viscount Lovell, the Lord Chamberlain; Thomas, Earl of Surrey, Nor-

folk's heir, who enjoyed a cash annuity of £1,100; that influential councilor Sir Richard Ratcliffe of Yorkshire; Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose allegiance Richard was seeking so hard to win; and three of the Knights of the Body—Sir Thomas Burgh, Sir Richard Tunstall, and Sir John Conyers. 9

His intimate servants he could not resist loading with presents. The diligent and much-employed Robert Brackenbury received grants and rewards providing an income of at least £400 a year, a sum which probably equaled the revenue of many a baron; Sir Richard Ratcliffe was given in 1485 a vast array of lands with a rent roll of some £650; about forty other royal servants, Knights and Esquires of the Body most of them, shared grants of forfeited estates yielding more than £2,500 annually. On John Kendall, secretary, Richard bestowed a rich variety of presents and perquisites worth some £450 a year, and he advanced his official status from Yeoman of the Crown to King's Councilor. Kendall's father appears to have been that John Kendall who had spent his life in the service of Richard's father and brother and whom King Edward had appointed to the office of Controller of the King's Works and later made an Alms Knight attached to the chapel of St. George. He died sometime during Richard's reign, having lived to see his son play the most important role in the government which a King's secretary had yet achieved. The career of John Kendall the younger anticipates the elevation of Thomas Cromwell, as Henry VIIFs secretary, to the position of first minister formerly held by the Chancellor. 10 *

In numbers, these various grants represent but one arrow in the full quiver of gifts which Richard sent winging among all sorts and conditions of men. Puritan though he was in many ways, he could not forgo the self-indulgence of liberality. Much of his giving was calculated upon no expectation of political increment. Sometimes the motive of honorable obligation appears, but often Richard scattered small gifts like a benevolent agent of Providence. The record of his grants is peppered with annuities of a few marks or pounds to humble folk, many of whom were widows. He was sensitive of his duty to old servants: he continued an annuity of ^20 to Joan Peysmarsh "for her good service

to the King in his youth and to his mother"; he revived a .£10 annuity which Warwick years before had bestowed upon a faithful follower; to Anne Caux, "once the nurse of Edward IV," he gave £20 yearly "in consideration of her poverty"; Katherine Vaux, the faithful lady in waiting to his old enemy Queen Alar-garet of Anjou, received an annuity of 20 marks. He relieved the distress of wives of rebels whose property had been forfeited: he granted an annuity to the Duchess of Buckingham, ordered Lady Rivers' tenants to pay her their dues, gave the Countess of Oxford a pension. "For her good and virtuous disposition" he took Florence, wife of the rebel Alexander Cheyney, into his protection and granted her the custody of her husband's lands. For his times, Richard reveals a surprising sense of women as people in their own right, and it appears that he liked to compliment those whose character or domestic virtues moved his admiration. In gifts of small annuities he frequently coupled the wife's name with the husband's; to Alice Shipwarde, wife of a Bristol merchant, he gave a handsome annuity of ^40; Viscount LovelTs sister, Frides-wide, wife of Edward Norris, received on one occasion "a reward" of 50 marks, on another an annuity of 100 marks; Joanna Mountfort, one of the daughters of Sir Thomas Mountfort, enjoyed a bounty of 10 marks yearly.

The structure and texture of Richard's rule were not without weaknesses. The Croyland Chronicle —probably in the person of the censorious monk who edited the "Second Continuation" rather than the learned statesman who provided much of the information—makes two specific complaints against Richard's government; the King favored northerners to the displeasure of the men of the southern counties, and he was extravagant in his expenditure. 11

In the first accusation there is much truth. Of his chief temporal advisers and officers, Lords Stanley and Scrope of Bolton, Viscount Lovell, Brackenbury, Ratcliffe, Sir Robert Percy, and John Kendall were all northerners, and William Catesby was a man of the Midlands. Possibly a considerable number of minor posts—those of bailiffs, parkers, wardens, rangers, stewards, porters, and the like—went to northern men also. No less than

seven members of the Metcalfe family of Wensleydale, for example, received offices or annuities, the latter very small. Certain royal demesnes, lands forfeited by rebels, and supervisory authorities in the southern and southwestern counties were given into the hands of royal servants who were mostly from the North. Scrope of Bolton and Lord Zouche of the Midlands held commissions of oyer and terminer for Cornwall and Devon; George Neville was made Keeper of Parks and Chases in Dorset; Robert Brackenbury became Sheriff of Kent; Sir Marmaduke Constable, of the Midlands, was given charge, after Buckingham's rebellion, of the honor and town of Tunbridge and its neighboring lordships.

Richard had not come to the throne, however, at the head of a party. He had for years been associated with one region of the kingdom, where he had won a great following. It was almost inevitable that he should often turn, in his exigencies, to the men of that region for trusty service and feel moved to reward their loyalty. The pronounced northern influence upon the heart of his government was undoubtedly a greater source of dissatisfaction than the moderate infiltration of northerners into positions of authority in the southern counties. On the whole, this animus does not appear to have been sufficiently widespread to undermine Richard's hold upon the obedience of his subjects.

The second accusation, of extravagance, seems more significant. Richard's munificence had deprived the Crown of many of the great lands forfeited by rebels, and saddled his regular sources of income with numerous charges for annuities; by the beginning of 1485 he had apparently consumed the treasure which his brother had accumulated; and by diminishing his resources, he diminished his power of levying the sinews of war to meet the impending challenge of Henry Tudor. To such criticism Richard might have replied that it becomes a King to reward good service, even good conduct; that the grants he had made to his followers gave them the greater means to maintain his authority in peace and back his quarrel in battle; and that without asking Parliament for a grant of taxes, he had put down Buckingham's rebellion and carried on successful campaigns against the Bretons, French, and Scots. Perhaps

he also believed that through his financial reforms, the Crown lands and other sources of revenue would be made to yield a markedly increased return. Still, even though his grants sprang from generous motives, they did not contribute greatly to the strength of his rule and they threatened to shake the structure of his credit.

A subtler weakness derived from the earnestness of his character; he was 7 in a sense, the victim of the terms on which he was determined to govern. He lacked the sustained and purposive ruth-lessness which, though it would not have enhanced the happiness nor probably even the tranquillity of the realm, would doubtless 1 have assured his grip upon it. Had there existed no concentrated, external threat to his rule, his generous behavior to the Stanleys and Northumberland might have proved a wise policy of conciliation; but in the circumstances and on their political records, the power Richard allowed them to exercise cannot be justified by any standard of Redpolltik. As a consequence of his incapacity to sink the man in the King, he betrayed a feeling of insecurity; a mounting strain which gave him sleepless nights, a care-worn look, and an uneasy manner; an almost feverish preoccupation with affairs large and small; a haggard pursuit of his subjects' good will—all of which must have tended to make men suspicious of his intentions, doubtful of the solidity of his rule, and troubled, or wearied, by the intensity with which, like a bird circling its nest of young, he hovered over the kingdom and all within it.

Yet Richard's government not only was well intentioned but appears to have been, in general, fairly popular. According to the testimony of Commynes, who disliked him—perhaps because he was acquainted only with Henry Tudor's version of English events —and from what may be discerned even in Vergil, Richard's authority and the beneficence of his rale were acknowledged by the mass of his subjects. The esteem which he afterward retained among the followers of the House of York is reflected in a proclamation of Perkin Warbeck, who, even while he had to maintain the role of younger son to Edward IV, felt compelled to declare that "though desire of rule did bind [King Richard], yet, in his other actions, he was noble, and loved the honour of the realm, and the contentment and cornfoct of Ms nobles and people. 3 ' More

reliable testimony to his hold upon the kingdom can be descried in the quick collapse of Buckingham's rebellion, the comparative peace and order that lapped the country, and the paucity of charges which his enemies could find to rumor against him. Whatever numbers of people may have suspected concerning the fate of King Edward's sons, however much sentiments were at first offended by the sudden seizure of the crown, Richard's subjects had apparently become content, by the time the second Christmas of his reign arrived, to leave to Heaven's judgment his transgressions in assuming the purple and to accept a rule which augured well for themselves and the realm. Thomas Langton, one of England's few ornaments of the New Learning, had declared enthusiastically that "God hath sent him to us for the weal of us all"; though Langton was a favored councilor of Richard's, he was so able a man that only his sudden demise prevented his elevation, by Richard's successor and foe, to the archbishopric of Canterbury.

When the picture of Richard's government is viewed in the frame of its actual brevity, the remarkable dimensions of his achievement leap into focus. Even though it was not so much a reign in being as a reign in defense of its being, Richard vigorously translated the idiom of his character into the language of kingship. In the course of a mere eighteen months, crowded with cares and problems, he laid down a coherent program of legal enactments, maintained an orderly society, and actively promoted the well-being of his subjects. Comparable periods in the reigns of his predecessor and of his successor show no such accomplishment.

The metal of Richard's character must be mined from his acts and his rule. Little evidence survives of his private life, his personality, the color of his mind. The record of his official behavior does, however, reveal a marked dualism that also seems to be discernible in his nature. For his advisers he chose the most learned clerics of his time, but as the servants of his will he apparently had a liking for brave, hardy, venturesome men. He showed a sensitivity to the feudal past and was attracted to the traditional ways of the North, and yet he energetically forwarded the interests of the rising middle class and experimented with the machinery of

government. Though he was a lord of the moors, a great captain, a doer, he admired the New Learning and seems to have been introspective, though not subtle, of mind. Elements of this antithesis are symbolized in Richard's founding and incorporation of the College of Arms—the movement toward organization and system-atization pointing to the future, and the interest in crests, coats of arms, and ancestral lineage suggesting a love of the past. This dualism is likewise symbolized in a work, the Order of Chivalry, which William Caxton dedicated to King Richard, probably in 1484. In it the printer, harbinger of the coming day, looks to the King to revive the knightly spirit of a former age, hoping that he may "command this book to be had and read unto other young lords knights and gentlemen within this royaume that the noble order of Chivalry be hereafter better used and honoured than it hath been in late days passed. . . . And I shall pray almighty God for his long life and prosperous welfare and that he may have victory of all his enemies. . . ,"