The Life and Times of Richard III (17 page)

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Authors: Anthony Cheetham

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When Edward died, Jane took up with Lord Hastings. The proclamation of Hastings’s execution for treason made a special point of the fact that these two had spent the previous night in the same bed. Jane was sent to prison, had her possessions confiscated and was compelled to undergo public penance for harlotry. Shortly after the outbreak of Buckingham’s rebellion in October 1483, ‘the unshameful and mischievous woman called Shore’s wife’ crops up in another proclamation, this time as the mistress of the rebel Marquess of Dorset. Even when she was languishing in Ludgate prison, Richard continued to be obsessed by this unfortunate woman. On hearing a rumour that his own Solicitor-General, Thomas Lynom, intended to marry her, he wrote to the Lord Chancellor with instructions to ‘exhort and stir him to the contrary’. Lynom took the hint and the marriage was called off.

Richard’s puritanism had its positive side too. The minute attention he gave to the affairs of York, and the legislative programme of the 1484 Parliament both demonstrate his scrupulous regard for the welfare of his subjects. It is no coincidence that the two most enduring creations of his reign were concerned with the administration of justice. In December 1483, one John Harrington was appointed clerk of a sub-committee of the Council which met in the White Hall at Westminster to consider the ‘bills, requests and supplications of poor persons’. From this developed the institution later known as the Court of Requests. The creation of the Council in the North in the following year was even more significant. It replaced the King’s age-old dependence on feudal chieftains with a modern, streamlined replica of the parent Council at Westminster. The Tudors gratefully adopted the institution as their own, and it proved its value by outlasting the entire Tudor dynasty. It comes as no surprise that the Mayor and Aldermen of York recorded the news of Bosworth with these words: ‘King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was... piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.’

In a letter excusing himself from an invitation to go hunting, Sir William Stanley – an older man than the King – writes that business is too pressing to get leave from ‘Old Dick’. The epithet suggests that Richard, with his conscientious enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of his administration, was regarded as a rather over-earnest plodder, well-intentioned, old-fashioned and a little dull. His private life, or rather the lack of it, supports this view. It gave rise to none of the colourful anecdotes that illumine the saintliness of Henry VI or the appetites of Edward IV. We know nothing about his relationship with Anne apart from the bare fact that they were both mad with grief at the death of her son. A single letter to his mother, Cicely, who was to outlive all her sons, suggests that he remained on polite but rather distant terms with her. The following letter, which concerns the appointment of a new steward to replace the treacherous William Colyngbourne, is the only one of Richard’s family correspondence to survive:

Madam, – I recommend me to you as heartily as is to me possible. Beseeching you in my most humble and affectuous wise of your daily blessing to my singular comfort and defence in my need. And, Madam, I heartily beseech you that I may often hear from you to my comfort. And such news as be here my servant Thomas Bryan, this bearer, shall show you to whom, please it you, to give credence unto. And, Madam, I beseech you to be good and gracious, Lady, to my Lord my chamberlain, to be your officer in Wiltshire in such as Collingbourne had. I trust he shall therein do you good service. And that it please you that by this bearer I may understand your pleasure in this behalf. And I pray God to send you the accomplishment of your noble desires. Written at Pomfret the 3rd day of June, 1484, with the hand of

Your most humble son,

Ricardus Rex.

Richard’s favourite hobby was music. A foreign diplomat, Nicolas von Poppelau, who visited him at Pontefract or Middleham in May 1484, was greatly impressed by the singing at morning Mass. A gentleman of the royal chapel named John Melynek had earlier been commissioned to ‘take and seize for the King all such singing men and children, being expert in the science of music, as he can find and think able to do the King’s service within all places in the realm’. Able minstrels were also well rewarded, particularly those whom he was able to entice to his service from overseas. The King was also an enthusiastic builder, laying out considerable sums for altering and renovating the royal establishments of Windsor Castle, Westminster Palace, Baynard’s Castle, the Tower of London, Nottingham Castle, the palace at York and the chapel at Pontefract. A gift of
£
300 went to the completion of King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, and an annuity of 250 marks to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Even John Rous conceded that ‘this King Richard is to be praised for his buildings’.

The two dominant strains in Richard’s character – an assumption of moral superiority combined with a painstaking and conventional concept of duty – do resolve the puzzling contradictions touching on his personal code of honour. He could denounce the Treaty of Picquigny as a betrayal of chivalry and yet usurp the throne over the bodies of the rightful heirs. He could execute the Queen’s brother, Earl Rivers, for treason, but he would not take the elementary precaution of marrying off the Queen’s eldest daughter whose eligibility was so crucial to Henry Tudor’s plans.

A ‘thirster after blood’ he was not. As Clarence’s death shows, the steady escalation of violence and betrayal that characterises the Wars of the Roses coarsened Edward IV’s amiable nature more than it did Richard’s. Buckingham’s rebellion was followed by less than a dozen executions, despite the fact that there was no pitched battle to take its toll of the King’s enemies. The 95 attainders that followed compare favourably with the 113 enacted by Edward IV’s Parliament after Towton in 1461. Neither Richard nor any of his servants exhibited the cold cruelty of Edward’s Constable, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who was nicknamed the Butcher of England and himself went to the block in 1470 asking that his head should be severed with three strokes ‘in honour of the Trinity’. If Richard had taken a tougher line with the rebel gentry of 1483, Henry would have had to do without a number of the men who joined him on the road to Bosworth. These conclusions portray a Richard very different from the exotic ogre conjured up by More and Shakespeare. Yet the fact remains that he was defeated and killed by a rival with a shaky claim to the throne, a hazy acquaintance with the country he was invading and an inferior army at his back. Why?

The major calamity of his son’s death in March 1484 undoubtedly played its part. After thirty years of intermittent civil war, invasions and depositions the majority of the gentry, merchants and yeomen classes were more interested in a settled succession than in the claims of the opposing branches of Edward III’s quarrelsome family. When Prince Edward died there was little to choose between Richard and the unknown Welshman who had promised to marry Elizabeth of York.

Bad luck is only a part of the story. Despite the disappearance of so many famous names in the wars of Edward IV, it was still the élite of great magnates who decided the issue of who should be King, and it is his relationships with these men that reveal Richard’s greatest failing. ‘Old Dick’, for all his solid virtues as an administrator and his undoubted courage on the battlefield, lacked Edward’s knack of making friends. More’s observation that he had a ‘close and secret’ nature hits on an uncomfortable truth. Perhaps it stemmed from a basic lack of self-confidence in dealing with people. He never felt at home in Edward’s Court circle, distrusting both the easy familiarity of men like Hastings and Dorset, and the waves of intrigue emanating from the Queen’s apartments. The extraordinary circumstances of Richard’s upbringing cannot have failed to leave their mark on him, just as they did on his brother George. But whereas George’s shallow nature gave way to a mixture of paranoia and bravado, Richard became wary, self-reliant and inaccessible. Louis XI, who was a shrewd judge of character, took an instant liking to Edward IV, but when he turned his charm on Richard of Gloucester he met with a total lack of response. Reserved and ill at ease with his peers, Richard chose to put his trust in boyhood friends such as Francis Lovell and Robert Percy, or able lieutenants, like Catesby and Ratcliffe, who owed their positions to his continuing favour. While he was Duke of Gloucester this self-sufficiency was a source of strength. But the King was a public figure whose words and gestures would be carefully marked. Richard’s curt treatment of Louis eight years previously was returned with interest in the form of resolute hostility from the French.

Much more damaging were Richard’s dealings with his own aristocracy. Temporarily dazzled by Buckingham he succeeded in driving Lord Hastings, his key supporter from the old régime, into the arms of the Woodville opposition. Henry Percy, his close associate in the North for more than ten years, was never cultivated. Lord Stanley was arrested, released, loaded with honours, kept close at heel for two years, then allowed to vanish to his estates on the eve of the Earl of Richmond’s landing with polite threats of retribution on his son ringing in his ears. It is no coincidence that the only magnate whose loyalty Richard retained was the Duke of Norfolk, an old warhorse whose outlook was as blunt as his King’s.

Richard was not, to his cost, a political animal. His penchant for direct action in place of patient diplomacy brought him to die in a battle that should never have taken place. Nevertheless, it is as well to remember that for all his political mistakes there was nothing pre-ordained about the battle of Bosworth. With Northumberland and the Stanleys waiting on the sidelines, and Norfolk’s troops matched against Oxford’s, it was the superior generalship of the Lancastrian veteran and Richard’s impromptu cavalry charge that decided the day. Nor did Bosworth represent the verdict of the majority of Richard’s subjects. The general consensus of support that Richard enjoyed from his northern subjects, from his Commons in Parliament and from the country at large during Buckingham’s rebellion did not evaporate mysteriously on Henry’s landing.

In later years, Henry VII’s subjects might reflect that the change of kings wrought few far-reaching changes in their prospects or conditions. The personal style of government inaugurated by Edward IV and inherited by Richard, the techniques of estate management applied to Crown lands, the abandonment of chauvinistic and chivalric adventures overseas, the fostering of commercial interests abroad and at home, and the erosion of baronial power are as characteristic of Henry Tudor’s government as they were of his Yorkist predecessors. For others the advent of the Tudors became a cause for regret. Four years after Bosworth, Henry Percy was publicly murdered near Thirsk while levying a particularly burdensome tax for his new master. The Yorkshiremen thus delivered their own judgment on Percy’s betrayal of Richard and on the rapacity of Henry VII. Morbid suspicion was Henry’s other vice: in 1492 it claimed the life of Sir William Stanley, who was beheaded on a charge of conspiring with the pretender Perkin Warbeck. Three years later the Milanese ambassador reported that ‘the King is rather feared than loved... if fortune allowed some lord of the blood royal to rise and he had to take the field, he would fare badly owing to his avarice; his people would abandon him’.

Dr Thomas Langton, Bishop of St David’s and later of Salisbury, recorded another verdict: ‘He contents the people where he goes best that ever did prince; for many a poor man that hath suffered wrong many days have been relieved and helped by him.... God hath sent him to us for the weal of us all.’ But he was writing about Richard.

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For the study of Richard and his contemporaries there is no more readable or scholarly guide than Paul Murray Kendall, whose four books are listed below with others of relevant interest.

H. S. Bennett,
The Pastons and their England
(1922)

Michael Bennett,
The Battle of Bosworth
(1985)

George Buck,
History of King Richard III,
1619, ed. A. N. Kincaid (1979)

S. B. Chrimes,
Henry VII
(1972)

David R. Cook,
Lancastrians and Yorkists: The Wars of the Roses
(1984)

William Cornwallis,
Encomium of Richard III,
ed. A. N. Kincaid (1977)

James Gairdner,
History of the Life and Reign of Richard III
(rev. ed., 1898)

Anthony Goodman,
The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society 1452–1497
(1981)

P. W. Hammond,
Richard III: The Road to Bosworth Field
(1985)

Alison Hanham,
Richard III and His Early Historians 1483–1535
(1975)

E. F. Jacob,
The Fifteenth Century 1399–1485
(2nd ed., 1961)

R. H. Jarman,
We Speak No Treason
(1971)