Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (29 page)

Collingborne’s seditious verse may be the only example that survives, yet it was certainly not an isolated case, as rumours and written propaganda against the king circulated in the capital and beyond, stoked no doubt by Henry’s exiled community in Brittany.

Still unsettled by rumours that Henry was planning an invasion that summer, Richard was determined to crack down on any possible further treason before it escalated into revolt, punishing those who he
discovered had been in contact with Henry Tudor. The cook William Finch later recalled that he had been in service with Robert Morton, the nephew of John Morton, Bishop of Ely and formerly clerk of the Rolls before he had been dismissed from his office the previous summer, when he had travelled with Morton to join Henry in Brittany. When Finch decided to return, Richard’s men were waiting for him: not only was he ‘beaten and maimed’ by Richard’s servants, ‘as it appeareth as well on his hands as other parts of his body’, ‘but also all that he had was taken from him’. On 6 July John, Lord Scrope of Bolton was ordered to try James Newenham, who had been pardoned the previous year, yet had ‘lately confessed great treasons’. The same month Scrope was further appointed to investigate the treasons of several Cornishmen who had planned to send £52 to Robert Willoughby and Peter Courtenay in exile in Brittany, with the indictment accusing the men of aiding the rebels ‘to the destruction of the crown’. In September Richard ordered that several persons in the West Country be arrested for actions ‘against their natural duty and liegeance’. And to prevent any ships departing the country for Brittany, in August Richard sent out orders that no one was to fit out a ship without first making a pledge and giving securities that the vessel would not be used against the king’s subjects or friends.

Of all the allegations contained in Collingborne’s indictment, most concerning for Richard must have been the accusation that he had urged Henry Tudor to make contact with France. Since the death of Louis XI on 30 August 1483, the political situation in France had remained highly unstable. Louis’s heir, the new king Charles VIII, was just thirteen years of age. The queen mother, Charlotte of Savoy, had been removed from power altogether by the late king, and suffering poor health died a few months later in December 1483. In the absence of any recognisable authority, a struggle broke out between Charles’s eldest sister Anne of Beaujeu and the next in line to the throne, the senior prince of the blood royal, Louis, Duke of Orleans, who was also the husband of Charles VIII’s younger sister.

The political infighting in France had become entangled with the equally factious political rivalries taking place in Brittany at the same time. Duke Francis, his mind failing through age, was becoming increasingly frail, ‘by reason of sore and daily sickness’. The Breton
government was being effectively controlled by Francis’s treasurer and chief minister Pierre Landais, ‘a man both of sharp wit and great authority’. Landais’s supremacy was resented by other members of the Breton nobility, dissatisfied with their treatment at the hands of a man they considered base-born. Events took a dramatic turn after the sudden death in prison of Landais’s rival, the deposed chancellor Guillaume Chauvin on 5 April 1484. Exasperated at Landais’s control of the duke and his court, two days later a group of dissident nobles led by the Prince of Orange and the Marshal de Rieux stormed the ducal palace at Nantes, attempting to seize the confused Francis and force him into arresting Landais. The uprising failed and the conspirators fled, seeking sanctuary at Anne of Beaujeu’s court. Recognising that Duke Francis had no heir apart from his young daughter, Anne realised the potential for an alliance that might eventually secure the union of France and Brittany, marrying Charles VIII to Francis’s daughter Anne. Eventually an agreement, the Treaty of Montargis, was signed between the Breton nobles and the Beaujeu government on 28 October 1484.

Facing this dangerous challenge to his authority, Landais chose to forge an alliance with the dissident French nobles, known as the Orleanists, led by the Count of Dunois, Orleans’ cousin. On Easter Day, 18 April, Dunois and Orleans arrived in Nantes to give Landais their backing. In order to defeat his rival Anne of Beaujeu, Landais’s support for his cause was only part of Orleans’ grand plan. He was to cast his net for support far wider: in an attempt to create a coalition against the Beaujeu government, he had made contact with Maximilian of Austria, the ruler of the Netherlands, and Richard, hoping to combine the support of his French nobility, Brittany, Burgundy and England, which would ensure that a rebellion against Anne would prove insurmountable.

Maximilian himself had also been encouraging Richard to invade France. He had been humiliated by the treaty of Arras in 1482, which had cost him the loss of Burgundy, Artois and the towns of the Somme; he also wanted to ensure that his son Archduke Philip was less dependent upon the regency government of Charles VIII. He sent an embassy to England with instructions to explain to Richard how the king’s own interests would be served by joining a united alliance against France,
and that this would be best achieved by going to Brittany’s aid. When Richard remained hesitant to involve himself in an alliance with Brittany due to the shelter that the Breton government was providing for Henry Tudor, Maximilian suggested that negotiations should be opened up to persuade Duke Francis to ‘leave the party’ of the earl, with Maximilian proposing that he would personally act as the duke’s surety and pledge.

Richard’s own diplomatic situation was looking increasingly bleak. His attempt to establish a puppet regime in Scotland under the Duke of Albany had failed with Albany’s flight to England. Though the Scots signalled their intentions to negotiate a peace, at the same time they continued their attacks on the English garrison at Dunbar. By April 1484 they had reaffirmed their traditional alliance with France. Meanwhile French ships had turned their firepower on English fleets in the Channel, and it was widely expected in London that a French invasion would take place in the summer. The French had already denounced Richard’s usurpation as ‘orgies of crime’ at a council at Tours in the spring of 1484, declaring that ‘Edward IV’s children were murdered with impunity, and the crown transferred to their assassin by the goodwill of the nation’. On 5 April 1484 a French delegation, led by three councillors of Charles VIII, had even arrived in Brittany promising support for a new English venture under Henry Tudor. The French government’s motives were highly suspect: though they assured Francis that he had the survival of Brittany at heart, in reality Anne of Beaujeu hoped that another invasion by Henry would distract Richard’s naval fleet from the damaging piracy that was affecting French ships, at the same time as potentially weakening any prospect of English support for Francis against a French invasion of the duchy. The offer was too generous for Francis not to suspect that the French had their own agenda; nevertheless, work began on preparing a small fleet for Henry, a flotilla of six ships from the ports of Morlaix, St Pol de Jean and Brest, carrying 890 men.

Meanwhile Landais wanted to commit to Orleans’ cause against the French regency government, yet he too had his hesitations. He knew that without English military support it would be a risky strategy to involve Brittany in a French civil war, when the consequence of failure might be a French invasion of his own nation. Landais needed
Richard’s own commitment to join in the attack. In return, he would use the one card that remained: handing over Henry Tudor. Already Richard had sent messengers to the duke, though finding Francis incapacitated, they dealt solely with Landais, promising him the yearly revenues of the confiscated lands belonging to Henry and his exiles if he agreed to place them in custody.

It was a tempting offer. Since arriving in Vannes after the failure of Buckingham’s rebellion, the English exile community had been at liberty within the town, where the cathedral accounts offer glimpses of their activities there, recording their offering of 6 livre tournois 7s 1d during the celebrations of the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin on 2 February. Yet the presence of over 400 exiles within the confines of the town’s walls was becoming a burden on the towns-people; the city burgesses had donated 2,500 livre tournois to the impoverished exiles, while the canons of Vannes Cathedral had loaned the English 200 livre tournois, a sum they would later complain in 1498 had yet to be repaid. The chronicler Commynes also noted how the exiled community was becoming an equal financial burden upon Francis’s finances: in June 1484 he gave 3,100 livre tournois to the Englishmen for their lodging; in addition, he paid a pension of £400 to the Marquess of Dorset and his men, £200 to John Halewell, £100 to Robert Willoughby and Sir Edward Woodville, in addition to a monthly sum of £100 ‘for his people’ that totalled £900 for nine months. Tensions between the English exile community and native Vantois were also becoming apparent, with Duke Francis even obliged to grant compensation of 200 livre tournois to the widowed Georget le Cuff, whose husband was killed by one of the exiles.

On 8 June 1484 a truce between Brittany and England was finally agreed at Pontefract, to last until 24 April 1485. According to Landais, Richard sent his envoy ‘le petit Salazar’, a Spanish captain who had fought for Maximilian in the Netherlands up to 1483, to negotiate the terms of the truce, revealing the influence that Maximilian had behind the scenes. Central to the agreement was a promise by Richard to provide Brittany with a force of archers, yet rather than the 4,000 archers Francis had demanded the previous year, Richard would only agree to sending 1,000 archers. Jean Lesquelen had been sent to Richard to hold him to his promise that the men would be sent; Guillaume Guillemet
was also sent with seven ships to ensure their safe arrival. Meanwhile Landais made plans for Henry Tudor’s imminent arrest, preparing to sacrifice the young man he had sheltered for the past thirteen years for the sake of his own political advantage.

7

A CONFEDERACY OF REBELS

H
enry had remained at Vannes throughout August and into September, unaware of the diplomatic negotiations that were secretly conspiring against him. On 15 August and 8 September 1484 he is recorded in the cathedral accounts as having attended Mass there, making small offerings of alms. In the same accounts, several entries below, there appears an offering from ‘
le grand escuier d’Engleterre
’ – most likely James Tyrrel, Richard’s Master of the Horse. The net around Tudor was closing rapidly.

If Richard soon expected to have his enemy in his grasp, he could have hardly countenanced the turn of events that would leave his carefully laid plans in tatters. The king could have been forgiven for believing that John Morton, now living in exile in Flanders after his near escape from England the previous autumn, remained a relatively harmless threat to his regime. Yet Morton’s intervention would now prove decisive. When the bishop was secretly informed of Landais’s negotiations with Richard ‘from his friends out of England’, possibly from Margaret Beaufort or even Thomas Stanley, who would have been present during council negotiations over the truce with Brittany, Morton managed to get notice to Henry of the trap that was being laid around him. Sending his agent Christopher Urswick, one of Margaret Beaufort’s chaplains who had travelled to Flanders to join Morton, to Henry at Vannes, Urswick impressed upon Henry the danger that he was in, urging the earl to ‘get himself and the other noble men as soon as might be out of Brittany and into France’. Henry immediately sent Urswick on to the French court at Angers to request Charles VIII’s permission for Henry to enter France.

Anne of Beaujeu could hardly believe her good fortune. With the mounting threat of Orleans’ invasion backed by Burgundy, Brittany and
England, possession of Henry Tudor would be the perfect diplomatic counter to threaten Richard, possibly dissuading him from providing aid to Brittany. She immediately accepted Urswick’s request.

Urswick returned to Henry, informing him of the news. He had already begun to plan his escape. Secrecy was vital. Only a few of his men were trusted with the plan, including his uncle Jasper, who was instructed to lead a delegation of only a handful of men who were told that they were to ride in convoy along well-known routes to visit Duke Francis, who at the time was staying near the French border while he recuperated from his illness. Jasper had been given the secret instructions that when he arrived at the French border, ‘he should suddenly turn aside and make straight for France’. This they did ‘without inter-mitting any one moment of time’ and continued across into France, aiming for Anjou.

Two days later Henry himself left Vannes, accompanied by five servants, on pretence of visiting a friend who lived in the nearby countryside. His departure raised little suspicion, especially since there remained several hundred of his followers within the city walls. When he had travelled five miles outside of the city, he turned off the highway into a nearby forest, where having changed his clothes so as to appear dressed in ‘a serving man’s apparrel’, ‘and followed one of the servants who was acting as guide on this journey. He travelled with such speed, following no definite route, never stopping save to rest the horses until he had come into the territory of Anjou and rejoined his followers.’