Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (26 page)

By this time Francis was an ill man, who seems to have suffered from bouts of mental fragility and seizures, leaving him unable to conduct affairs of state for months at a time. Consequently, most decisions of state were taken by the duke’s influential treasurer Pierre Landais. Landais’s decision was an easy one to make; for the moment, it seemed that Richard had left him with little choice but to support Tudor against the background of a fierce naval war that raged in the Channel between the two countries, as Richard was determined that Brittany would be made to pay the price for their support for Henry. As the situation deteriorated, on 15 December 1483 Francis had issued musters to resist any possible invasion by English forces. Richard continued to order that Breton ships in the Channel be plundered, while in early 1484 a commission was issued to the Yorkshireman Thomas Wentworth to captain a squadron of ships ‘to resist the king’s enemies of Brittany and France’, with a separate commission being issued to John, Lord Scrope of Bolton in March 1484. The mayor and aldermen of London were ordered to sieze all Breton property and ships. Landois must have felt that he had little choice but to support any form of resistance to the English king, whose actions were strangling the country’s trade and finances. Once again Francis promised Henry aid, allowing the earl to begin preparations for rigging another naval force, ‘and made himself ready for the sea, that he should not be hindered from any attempt by latches of time’.

6

THE CAT, THE RAT AND THE DOG

C
hristmas festivities at Richard’s court were held with unrivalled splendour. Two hundred and seventy-five pounds of silver plate were purchased specially for £550, even though royal treasures including a gold-plated helmet that had belonged to Edward IV had to be pawned to pay for them. Robes for the king and queen were purchased at a cost of over £1,200 together with costly gems from a Genoese dealer. There had not been, Commynes wrote after hearing descriptions of Richard’s magnificence, a king who reigned with greater splendour ‘these last hundred years’.

It was a time to reflect upon the past and to consider the future. Richard’s overarching desire was to now repair the damage that had been wrought by last autumn’s rebellion, restoring the country to peace. In a proclamation issued in December 1483, he stated that ‘His Grace is utterly determined that all his subjects shall live in rest and quiet, and peaceably enjoy their lands, livelihoods and goods, according to the laws of this land’.

Parliament had been summoned to meet on 6 November, but rebellion had caused it to be postponed until 23 January. It was obvious from the start that the assembly would be nothing more than a rubber stamp. The choice of Speaker, Richard’s confidant and councillor William Catesby, who had never sat in Parliament before, typified the obedient nature of the institution. The Crowland Chronicler believed that ‘such terror affected even the most stout-hearted men among them’ that the commons would agree to the king’s every wish.

Richard’s first intention was to have his title as king formally ratified in statute; since it was Parliament that ‘maketh before all things most
faith and certainty’, the king hoped that both houses would be able to legitimate his own claim to the throne, removing the ‘divers doubts, questions and ambiguities’ that had been ‘moved and engendered in the minds of divers persons, as it is said’. Richard hoped that, with Parliament’s official consent to his kingship, this would remove ‘all occasion of all doubts and seditious language’, ‘quieting men’s minds’. A statute, the ‘Titulus Regius’, was introduced into Parliament, underlining Richard’s claim to the throne: the preamble to the statute stated how, due to the invalidity of Edward IV’s marriage, his children were to be deemed illegitimate. Instead Richard was to be presented as the natural successor to the Yorkist crown, and the people’s choice as king. To highlight the fact, a raft of legislation aimed at reforming the land tenure system and, in criminal justice, the right to bail were combined with a commitment on Richard’s part to end the highly unpopular practice of royal benevolences. In doing so, even Polydore Vergil would pay Richard the backhanded compliment that ‘he began to give the show and countenance of a good man, whereby he might be accounted more righteous, more mild, more better affected to the commonalty’.

The main purpose of Parliament’s assembly, however, was to legalise a massive confiscation of the lands and offices of men who had taken part in Buckingham’s rebellion. One hundred and four individual attainders were passed, including thirty-three from Wiltshire, twenty-eight from Kent and Surrey, eighteen from Exeter and fourteen from Berkshire. ‘So many great lords, nobles, magnates and commoners, and even three bishops, were attainted’, the Crowland Chronicler commented, ‘that we nowhere read of the like even under the triumvirate of Octavian, Anthony and Lepidus. What great numbers of estates and inheritances were amassed in the king’s treasury in consequence!’

The large number of attainders underlined how Buckingham’s rebellion and the outbreaks of revolt across the south and southwest had created a vacuum of authority at a local level, as many of the key members of the gentry, crucial for establishing order, had either been executed or fled abroad to join Henry Tudor in Brittany. The attainder of so many men also left Richard with a dilemma of how exactly he should fill the gap left by the rebels. He was determined not to allow his authority to be questioned ever again. Southern counties
such as Kent had an intractable history of disorder and lawlessness, stretching back to Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450 and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

The king’s solution was to rely ever more on a close knit group of his loyal dependents to fill the gap, displaying the enormous degree of trust that Richard was prepared to place in a handful of his closest advisers. Over thirty grants were made, redistributing the lands of the attainted rebels into the hands of Richard’s own household. Sir Richard Ratcliffe was granted lands in south-west England worth 1,000 marks a year, well in excess of what a lord might be expected to accumulate. His secretary John Kendall was bestowed lands and presents worth £450 a year; Robert Brackenbury £400 a year; Sir Thomas Montgomery, a member of Richard’s council, £412 a year; Sir William Catesby £323 11s 8d a year. In total, Richard granted away over £12,000 in lands and annuities. His aim of securing support through financial reward had its precedence in the early years of Edward IV’s reign, and in the reign of Henry IV, where £24,000 a year was spent on annuities alone, yet Richard’s actions reveal the price that needed to be paid to buy support in order to shore up an insecure and unstable regime.

What this wholesale transfer of lands and offices could not buy was repaired relations with the rest of the country. In fact, it would ultimately breed further resentment at the confiscation of the rebels’ property and offices, and the men who were chosen to replace them. In the absence of any appropriate men from the southern counties, Richard was forced to rely upon the network of northern gentry that he had cultivated during his years leading the campaigns against the Scots in addition to the gentry close to his northern estates. This resulted in a large number of northern men now being appointed to lands and offices hundreds of miles south from their homelands; for instance, Thomas Huddleston from Cumberland became sheriff of Gloucestershire, Edward Redmayne from Yorkshire became sheriff of Somerset and Dorset, Halnath Mauleverer, also from Yorkshire, was appointed sheriffof Devon. This left Richard wide open to the accusation that he was deliberately attempting to secure a widely feared ‘invasion’ of northerners into the south, hardly aiding the king’s popularity. The Crowland Chronicler believed that Richard had ‘planted’ his northern followers, ‘to the disgrace and loudly expressed sorrow of
all the people in the south, who daily longed more and more for the hoped-for return of their ancient rulers rather than the present tyranny of these people’.

One of the ‘northern’ gentry who Richard had chosen to reward was Sir Marmaduke Constable. A member of one of the wealthiest northern knightly families from Flamborough in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Constable, like his father, was a retainer of the Earl of Northumberland. Yet Richard’s coronation saw Constable naturally place his loyalty towards the crown. He had served under Edward IV during his expedition to France in 1475, and had also seen military service under Richard at the capture of Berwick in 1482.

In spite of his northern background, Richard decided that he needed experienced and trusted men such as Constable to restore order in the south. By December 1483 he had become a Knight of the Body, possibly even one of the king’s councillors, and placed on the commission of the peace for Kent. For six months Constable was given several posts, including heading the investigation to value the estates of rebels within the county, as well as becoming steward of the manors of Tonbridge, Penshurst and Brastead, whose residents, possibly after displaying signs of resistance to Constable’s command, were ordered by the king during a personal visit to Sandwich on 22 January 1484 not to ‘take clothing or be retained by any man, person or persons whatsoevere’ but instead to attend upon Constable, whom Richard had ‘deputed and ordained … to make his abode among you and to have the rule within our honour [of Tonbridge] and the lordships foresaid’. By April, the receiver of Tonbridge was also ordered to pay Constable £27 10s for his living expenses in the lordship.

No sooner had Constable submitted his first receipts than Richard decided that his services were required elsewhere, implanting him in the Midlands. It was an indication of how few reliable men Richard felt able to trust during his quest to restore order in his realm. This time Constable was granted a host of Duchy of Lancaster posts across Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire, including steward of the honour of Tutbury, constable of Tutbury Castle and steward of the lordship of Newcastle-under-Lyme, steward and constable of the High Peak, steward of the lordship of Ashbourne, and steward and constable of Castle Donington. By May 1484 he had been appointed
a commissioner of array for Derbyshire, and sheriff of Staffordshire in November. With office also came welcome material reward, with an annunity of £89 16s 8d from the honour of Tutbury, as well as the lordships and manors of Braunstone and Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. Constable’s own kinsmen from the north were also rewarded, including Sir Gervase Clifton of Clifton in Nottinghamshire; a nephew of the Archbishop of York and an esquire to the body of Edward IV, Clifton was married to a relative of Constable’s. He was granted extensive lands formerly belonging to the Duke of Buckingham in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Huntingdon.

Men like Marmaduke Constable and Gervase Clifton owed their livelihoods to Richard, who could be confident of their loyalty; yet while Richard sought to refashion the gentry of the southern counties in his own image through his steadfast supporters, still the traditional power structures mattered, and could hardly be ignored. It was less easy to win the support of the nobility, none of whom owed anything to the king. Nevertheless, Richard was confident that, with enough royal patronage their support could be bought. The king was aided by the fact that the depletion of their ranks through the executions and deaths in battle during the civil wars meant that the size of the nobility had shrunk dramatically: twenty-six peers attended the Parliament in 1484, compared to fifty-one in Edward IV’s first Parliament in 1461. With a reduced peerage, Richard was able to focus his attention of rewarding those whose support he was confident of securing.

Again the pattern of patronage was a familiar one, as Richard sought to bestow both office and annuities, essentially yearly salaries paid for by the crown, on the nobility he believed could be bought. John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln, the son of the Duke of Suffolk and Richard’s sister, was granted lands worth £333 2s 5d in addition to receiving an annuity of £176 13s 4d. Lincoln was further rewarded with the office of King’s Lieutenant in Ireland in October 1484 and made president of the newly established Council of the North. Other members of the nobility who were close supporters of Richard included Francis, Viscount Lovell, the chamberlain of the royal household, who was rewarded with the offices of chief butler and Constable of England, and given grants of lands from Buckingham’s forfeited estates in Oxfordshire, Berkshire
and the Thames Valley worth £400 a year, though it seems that Lovell, given his close proximity to the king, chose to spend most of his time at court. William Devereux, Lord Ferrers, was rewarded with an annuity and lands in Hertfordshire worth £146 a year. John, Lord Audley, was appointed a royal councillor with an annuity of £100, as was John, Lord Dudley, who was further rewarded with lands worth a similar amount for his services in putting down Buckingham’s rebellion. Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor was granted lands in Norfolk, Suffolk and Rutland worth £266 13s 4d, while John, Lord Dinham, received lands worth £133 6s 8d for his loyalty during the rebellion. Richard did not worry about the mounting costs upon the crown’s finances: most importantly, the king hoped he had purchased loyalty and devotion.