Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (28 page)

Few could have imagined that barely a month later, their oaths would prove unnecessary. Richard and Queen Anne were at Nottingham castle when on 9 April, it was broken to them that the king’s only son and heir, Edward had died. The news came as a complete shock. Prince Edward himself had been at Middleham in Yorkshire, when he had suddenly been taken ill, dying after a ‘short illness’. The Crowland Chronicler provides a pained eyewitness account of the king and queen’s outpouring of unrestrained emotion: ‘You might have seen the father and mother, after hearing the news at Nottingham where they were staying, almost out of their minds for a long time when faced with the sudden grief’.

Only glimpses of Edward’s short life can be gleaned from the
surviving accounts at Middleham for the previous year; he had made a journey to the abbeys of Jervaux, Coverham, Wensleydale, Fountains and Pontefract, where he had made offerings of 15 shillings, 20d, 2s 6d, and 4 shillings. Other purchases included a book of hours covered in black satin and a Psalter, a gown of grey cloth, 6s 8d to his servants ‘for running on foot beside my lord prince’ and 100s for the wages of Jane Colyns, who must have been one of the prince’s maids. As the young prince reached his maturity, it was clear that Richard intended for his son to play a full role in regional affairs; Edward had already been granted possession and nominal control of Richard’s northern estates, and had been crowned as Prince of Wales during an elaborate ceremony at York the previous August. Richard’s personal interest in his son’s upbringing is perhaps testified by a manuscript copy of the popular classical military treatise
De Re Militari
, by Flavius Renatus Vegetius, essentially a handbook on how to prepare for war and win battles, that was in the king’s possession. Its frontispiece is illuminated with the English royal arms and a griffin, the insignia of the Earl of Salisbury, the title to which Edward acceded in 1478.

Richard had wept genuine tears for the death of his only legitimate son; his grief had been compounded by the fact that so soon after ‘so many solemn oaths’ had been sworn to Edward, in whom ‘all hope of the royal succession rested’, he had lost his sole heir to the throne. Since his Queen Anne was only twenty-six, Richard could certainly hope for more children; in the meantime, however, he would need to appoint an heir presumptive. Shortly after Edward IV’s death, it had been reported that Edward, Earl of Warwick, the eldest son of the Duke of Clarence, was reportedly in the royal court proclaimed heir apparent to Richard’s son, and in both ceremonies ‘at table and chamber’ he was to be served first after the king and queen. Since Clarence had been found guilty of treason in 1478, it would seem strange that his son would suddenly be rehabilitated, especially since the boy, as the son of Richard’s elder brother, possessed a claim to the throne far stronger that the king’s own. Possibly, realising the danger that the young Earl of Warwick threatened since the death of his son, Richard ordered that he be sent to his residence at Sheriff Hutton; John Rous wrote that ‘later he was placed in custody and the Earl of Lincoln was preferred to him’. With Prince Edward’s death, Lincoln would also be
chosen to supersede his positions in the north, ruling on the king’s behalf from Sandal Castle, which had been appointed the headquarters of the Council of the North.

Dealing with the royal succession was not the only issue confronting the grieving king. Rumours once again began to circulate that Henry and his exiles were planning an invasion, and ‘would shortly land in England, together with their leader, the Earl of Richmond, to whom all the outcasts, in the hope that a marriage would be contracted with King Edward’s daughter, had sworn fealty, as to their king’. Richard had resolved to be adequately prepared for any forthcoming military action: not only had he directed a royal fleet, commanded by John, Lord Audley, to patrol the Channel in order to intercept any invasion during the early months of 1484, but he had also set about strengthening his arsenal of artillery and munitions in the Tower in preparation for conflict.

The arsenal had for a long time been the pride and joy of English kings, with an Italian visitor to London in 1475 observing how the king inspected his artillery in the Tower each day. Even as early as 1396, there was an available stock of fifty guns in the Tower, together with 4,000 lbs of gunpowder and 600 lbs of saltpetre. Early in the fifteenth century the privy wardrobe’s functions were succeeded by the newly established ordnance office, with a master of ordnance. Henry VI appointed a London merchant, John Judde, to the office, after Judde had first attracted the king’s attention by promising to provide sixty serpentines (a type of cannon), and twenty tons of saltpetre and sulphur, which he would deliver ‘under certain reasonable contitions’. Within a month, he had provided twenty-six serpentines to the king, and claimed also to have cast three ‘great serpentines to subdue any castle or place that would rebel’. In June 1460, while conducting a new delivery to the king, Judde was ambushed at St Albans and killed, according to one commentator, in ‘a wretched end, as the caitiffdeserved’.

On his expedition to France, Edward IV’s artillery train comprised at least thirteen pieces of heavy artillery, including a huge cannon known as a bombard (called ‘bumbardelle’), five ‘fowlers’, a form of long-range field gun, a ‘curtowe’ (a short-range field gun) and three ‘potguns’ or mortars. These were intended for use both in the field as well as sieges. There was an evident pride in the artillery pieces – both
the ‘long fowler’ and the ‘bumbardelle’ were named Edward. Richard, it seems, shared his brother’s enthusiasm for the latest technology on the battlefield; when, in 1480, Louis XI had sent him a huge bombard capable of destroying even the thickest of castle walls, Richard wrote to the French king thanking him for ‘the great bombard which you caused to be presented to me’, acknowledging that ‘for as I have always taken and still take great pleasure in artillery I assure you it will be a special treasure to me’. Richard’s choice of St Barbara to be among the patrons of the college that he founded at Middleham is also interesting in this context: St Barbara, whose murdererer was killed by lightning, was the patron saint of miners, gunmakers and gunners, all of whom invoked her name against sudden and unexpected death.

An idea of the arsenal’s operation in the Tower can be gathered from the king’s command in February 1484 for the constable of the Tower to deliver seven serpentines on carts, twenty-eight hackebushes ‘with their frames’, one barrel of torch powder, two barrels of ‘serpentine powder’ as well as 200 bows, 200 bills, 400 sheaves of arrows, and ten gross of bowstrings to be sent to Scotland. Several months later in June, another order came for the delivery of two serpentines, ‘two guns to lie on walls’, twelve hackebushes, ten steel crossbows, sixty longbows, one hundred sheaves of arrows and two barrels of gunpowder. In order to re-equip supplies, twenty new guns and two serpentines were purchased from merchants at Southampton for £24 in March 1484.

Possession of the latest weaponry was one thing, how to correctly use it was another. Given the fleeting nature of battle in the campaigns of the civil wars, sieges had been few, leaving the English development of weaponry far behind the Continent. Commynes noted in 1477 that ‘because the English had not fought outside their kingdom for so long, they did not understand siege warfare very well’. To address this, men from the Continent with sufficient expertise were drafted into the Tower. William Clowte ‘of Gelderland’ was employed as a ‘gun-maker’ along with William Nele, who was granted an annuity of 6d a day. Another Dutchman, Patrick de la Motte, was appointed chief cannoner and master founder of the king’s cannon, with two other men from abroad, Theobald Ferrount and Gland Pyroo, who were taken into the king’s service as gunners. The king’s official armourer was Vincent Tetulior, paid a salary of £20. He had ordered for the Tower to
be restocked with harnesses, complete suits of plate armour, with 164 being purchased from Breton and Genoese merchants for five marks a harness, totalling £560. Plated suits of armour were also specially bought from Antwerp.

In the face of the prospect of an invasion by Henry Tudor at any time, Richard considered that the country should be placed on a constant state of readiness, with men prepared for war if and when it came. In particular, the Crowland Chronicler noted how the king introduced a method of communication last used by Edward IV ‘at the time of the last war in Scotland’ of allocating a mounted courier for every twenty miles, each able to ride with the ‘utmost skill and not crossing their bounds’. The result was that messages could be passed 200 miles within two days ‘without fail by letters passed from hand to hand’.

When rumours of a possible attack reached Richard, no doubt from his spies on the Continent, in the spring of 1484, immediate action was taken, with the king issuing Commissions of Array on 1 May, mustering men from across the country to be prepared to take up arms within twenty-four hours’ notice. An indication of the urgency of the summons can be found in the lists of those appointed, for the name of the recently deceased Prince Edward had failed to be removed by the time they were issued. The names of the commissioners responsible for raising troops reveal the extent to which Richard had become dependent upon the small group of trusted men he himself had chosen to reward for their loyal service: the North was to be raised by Northumberland and Lincoln, Yorkshire by Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Sir Gervais Clifton and Lord Scrope of Bolton, the Midlands by Lord Lovell, William Catesby and Marmaduke Constable, East Anglia by Norfolk and his son Surrey, together with the warden of the Cinque Ports, the Earl of Arundel and Sir Robert Percy, the Comptroller of the royal household.

In spite of this, Richard could be confident that he would be ready to face down any invasion, as he had been when he had crushed Buckingham’s rebellion the previous year. ‘The king was better prepared to resist them in that year,’ the Crowland Chronicler wrote, ‘than he would have been ever at any time afterwards’. Yet the rumours of Henry Tudor’s planned arrival were just that, rumours. There would be no invasion, not this year at least.

As worshippers arrived at the great door of St Paul’s Cathedral on the morning of 18 July 1484, they were greeted by a sheet of parchment, pinned to the door and flapping in the wind. Scribbled on the parchment was a simple rhyming couplet:

Those crowding round curiously to read the words would have understood fully the cryptic verse. It was aimed as a barbed attack on Richard’s closest councillors: the ‘Cat’ stood for Sir William Catesby, the ‘Rat’ for Sir Richard Ratcliffe, and Lovel ‘our dog’, Francis Viscount Lovell, the king’s councillors and friends who had been richly rewarded by their king, ‘the Hog’, a clear allusion to Richard’s own heraldic device of the Boar, and whose influence and power throughout the country had come to be bitterly resented.

Just as soon as the doggerel had been torn down, a search was ordered for the author of the seditious verse. Soon after, William Collingborne, a gentleman from Wiltshire, was arrested and charged with the offence. Collingborne had been been a former servant of Edward IV, who seems to have fallen out with the new regime shortly after Richard’s accession, being removed from his position on the commission of the peace in Wiltshire. What was perhaps more worrying was that he had been a household officer to Richard’s own mother, Cecilly Neville. Richard had written to her in June 1484, just a month before the offending verse had been pinned to the door of St Paul’s, explaining how he had replaced Collingborne, requesting that she ‘be good and gracious lady’ to his chosen replacement who would be ‘your officer in Wiltshire in such as Collingborne had’.

At Collingborne’s trial several months later, the seriousness with which Richard regarded the crime was reflected in the panel of the jury which included two dukes, thirteen lords, the lord mayor of London and nine judges. As the trial progressed, it was clear that Collingborne’s treachery went far beyond lampooning the king’s councillors. Ten days before he had decided to nail the sheet to the door of St Paul’s he had offered one Thomas Yate £8 to travel to Brittany to deliver a letter he had written to Henry Tudor and his exiles declaring that

Yate was also commanded by Collingborne to encourage Henry to send Sir John Cheyney to the French king, ‘to advertise him that his ambassadors sent into England should be dallied with’ until winter had passed, so that at the beginning of the following summer, Richard would seek to make war with France, ‘invading that realm with all puissance’ and ‘so by this means to persuade the French king to aid the Earl of Richmond and his partakers in their quarrel against King Richard’.

The jury’s guilty verdict delivered, Collingborne was condemned to death. Unlike most of the rebels in Buckingham’s rebellion, whose method of execution was to be the relatively painless death of swinging from the gallows, Collingborne’s end was to be a gruesome one. His body was dragged behind a cart of horses through the filth of the capital’s streets to Tower Hill, where he was first hanged from the gallows. Just as he was close to gasping his final breath, he was cut down, collapsing to the floor. Hauled to his fleet, he was thrown onto a table where his body was ‘straight cut down and ripped’, with his genitals also being castrated. The ‘torment’, the Great Chronicle of London recorded, ‘was so speedily done’ that Collingborne was able to look down as his executioner thrust his hand into his chest and pulled out his heart, crying, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Yet more trouble!’