Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (32 page)

Soon, contrary to the earlier reports that he had received, news reached Richard from his spies that Henry had been ‘hindered amongst the French by reason of the time’ and had grown ‘weary with continual
demand of aid, that he profited nothing, nor that anything went forward with him, but that all things which he diligently had devised fell out not well’. The king appeared with renewed confidence, ‘as though he had vanquished the whole wars, and had been delivered from all fear’, though, considering earlier reports that a landing would be planned for the summer, he remained convinced of the need to prepare for the defence of his kingdom.

First money would be needed. By late February Richard decided to finance the extra cost of military operations and defences by sending out urgent appeals for loans to his nobility and gentry. Royal commissioners were appointed and given a copy of a letter from the king, with which to approach potential lenders. ‘Selected men were sent out … who extorted great sums of money from the coffers of persons of almost every rank in the kingdom, by prayers or threats, by fair means or foul’. The sums requested were as high as £200, though most were for £40, to be paid back at ‘Martinmas next coming’ (11 November). ‘Assuring you that accomplishing this our instant desire and hearty prayer ye shall find us your good and gracious sovereign lord in any your reasonable desires hereafter’. With the prospect of Henry’s invasion imminent, there must have been doubts that the king would honour his debts. The decision to raise a loan was bound to be unpopular – this Richard must have known, having abolished the practice of ‘benevolences’, so-called voluntary gifts to the king in the Parliament of 1484. That he still needed to do so suggests the king was in serious financial difficulties.

Royal servants were assigned counties and were issued with individual letters, containing the amount of money requested, but most were left with the names of the recipient blank, to be decided at their discretion. In Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, Richard Croft and Thomas Fowler were given thirteen blank letters and five addressed to specific gentry. They were also given a crib-sheet with formulae to persuade lenders to part with their money. The money was needed for the defence of the realm, something which ‘every true Englishman’ should agree. Commissioners were also advised to flatter their victims, approaching them with the weasel-like words that the king personally ‘writeth to you before other, for the great love, confidence and substance that his grace hath and knoweth in you’. The first letters were sent out on 21 February, aiming to raise £9,000; in March letters to
bishops and religious houses sought £4,390, further letters sent out represented a further £15,000. The response was disastrous. Some money drifted into the chamber – half of all loans that totalled £4,400 on the Easter receipt roll were likely from the commissioner’s efforts – yet this represented but a fraction of what had been expected. Some men such as Roger Harecourt paid up, loaning 200 marks, though he had been asked for £200. The status of the commissioners chosen must have been partly to blame. Once again they were not local figures, and came from humble backgrounds, such as Walter Grant, a yeoman of the queen’s chamber who was appointed a commissioner for Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire.

Richard was also convinced that, since the debacle of Oxford’s escape, urgent action would need to be taken to shore up his authority in the Calais garrisons. Sir James Blount’s defection had called into question the suitability of Blount’s elder brother Lord Mountjoy as Lieutenant of Guisnes; already seriously ill, on 22 January he was replaced by James Tyrell, a sign of the growing urgency with which Richard viewed the deteriorating situation. Tyrell had however been one of the king’s main supporters in Wales, playing a leading role in the restoration of authority after Buckingham’s fall. Now Tyrell was simply removed from his job there and ordered to reside in Guisnes. To compensate for his absence, Richard merely sent out orders to Welsh officials and gentry ‘to accept’ their absentee lord ‘as their governor and leader as he hath been heretofore, notwithstanding that the king sendeth him to Guisnes’. Government was expected to continue by proxy.

Despite his efforts in besieging Guisnes, Lord Dinham was dismissed from his post as governor of Calais. On 11 March, in a sign of how few men the king could rely upon to defend the town, Richard appointed his illegitimate son John the captain of Calais and commander of its three fortresses; since John was under twenty-one, he was escorted there by Robert Brackenbury, with his authority ultimately wielded by a royal council.

If Richard was determined to prepare for every eventuality for the defence of his kingdom, he was equally convinced that he could erode Henry’s morale and support base by winning back those disaffected Yorkists who had fled in exile after Buckingham’s rebellion. Realising the potential backlash that Henry’s ill-advised declaration
of his Lancastrian claim might have upon those men who had previously fought against the Lancastrian regime and whose future welfare now seemed in doubt if Henry attempted to seize the throne, Richard believed that their reconciliation to his authority would be perfectly possible, especially since he had now managed to win over Elizabeth Woodville. Issuing promises of a pardon if they might return to the fold, his offer was met with considerable success; on 12 January Queen Elizabeth’s brother Richard Woodville and John Fogge submitted themselves to the king, and were bound over for 1,000 marks to secure their pardons. Other former rebels soon followed, including Richard Haute, the Woodville kinsman Reginald Pympe, Roger Tocotes, Amyas Paulet and William Overdale. A general pardon was even offered to Elizabeth Blount and Thomas Brandon and thirty-seven men who had defected from the Hammes garrison. Robert Ratcliffe, who had sailed with Edward Woodville’s fleet in 1483, was welcomed back to England and rewarded in April 1485 for ‘good service to the king … in foreign parts’.

The greatest prize, however, came with the flight of Thomas Grey, the Marquess of Dorset from Henry’s camp. Dorset had already received letters from his mother, pleading with him to return home. Now, faced with the prospect of his own authority over Henry being supplanted by the Lancastrian stalwart Oxford, Dorset had ‘despaired of Henry’s success’ when according to Vergil he had ‘been corrupted by Richard’s promises’. In January 1485 Dorset sent his Portugese agent Roger Machado to Flanders, with instructions to meet the commander of the Flemish armies, Jacques de Savoie, who was battling against Maximilian’s armies, possibly in the hope of securing a safe haven there. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he fled the French court at Paris, aiming for Flanders. As soon as Henry discovered Dorset’s escape, having most likely been informed by Machado, he was ‘deeply disturbed’. Seeking Charles VIII’s permission to have the marquess tracked down, every highway was immediately searched, until Humphrey Cheyney managed to hunt down Dorset in the town of Compiègne. Cheyney managed to ‘persuade’ the marquess to return to the French court, though it would be surprising if a threat of force had not been used. Dorset’s attempted escape must have been a serious blow to Henry; for the moment, he must have been relieved that Dorset had
failed in giving Richard the propaganda coup he had hoped for. More worrying, the marquess’s escape had revealed the divisions in his own camp over which he was struggling to control and maintain discipline while the prospect of French support for an invasion remained a farflung promise. Shaken by the entire episode and its potential consequences, Henry resolved that he could hardly trust Dorset again.

Confident of the appeal of his pardons, Richard even felt able to offer the same to John Morton, with the pardon granted under the Great Seal, a sign of the king’s personal commitment to forgiveness. Richard had underestimated the bishop. Morton ‘held him off by fair and wise excuses, till he had more experience of the sequel’. Meanwhile he made his way to Rome, where on 31 January his signature can be found in the register of the Santo Spirito fraternity. The purpose of Morton’s visit seems likely to have been to seek a papal dispensation from Pope Innocent VIII for a marriage between Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York, since both were descended from John of Gaunt. If Morton hoped that a marriage might still one day be possible, equally he had underestimated the king, for Richard was about to move to crush any chance of Henry Tudor marrying his intended bride.

8

THE SPIRAL OF DECLINE

I
t had been at the Christmas festivities at court when men began to notice that something did not seem right. What caught the eye of most spectators in particular had been ‘the vain changes of dress, similar in colour and design, presented to Queen Anne and the Lady Elizabeth’. Since her release from sanctuary the previous March, Elizabeth of York had spent her days at the king’s court. Together with her sisters, described by one chronicler as ‘beauteous maidens’, Elizabeth, on the cusp of turning nineteen years old in February 1485, had grown into a tall beauty with golden hair, the image of her mother. Her striking presence was bound to have an effect, though the rumours that began to circulate were unexpected nonetheless. According to the chronicler, this ‘caused the people to murmur and the noble and prelates greatly to wonder thereat; while it was said by many that the king was bent, either on the anticipated death of the queen taking place, or else, by means of a divorce, for which he supposed he had quite sufficient grounds, on contracting marriage with the said Elizabeth’.

Part of the rumour, it seemed, would soon be proved true: it was not long after Christmas, the Crowland Chronicler recorded, that Queen Anne ‘fell extremely sick’. The queen grew increasingly frail, unable to attend functions and ceremonies at court. The disease was possibly tuberculosis, which would explain why Richard ‘entirely shunned her bed, declaring that it was by the advice of his physicians that he did so’. While Anne lay sick in her bed, rumours of the queen’s death had begun to spread. According to Vergil, the queen had confronted Richard, blaming him for spreading them. The king’s decision to ‘forbare to lie with her’ and reports that he had begun ‘to complain much unto many noble men of his wife’s unfruitfulness, for that she brought him no children’, fuelled the gossip that Richard wanted Anne dead. Yet
there seems no reason to doubt the king’s genuine affection for ‘his dearest consort’ for whom, in the months of her disease, he made a grant of £300 to a university college which in the previous year he had decreed an annual Mass for their ‘happy state’. As the agony of the queen’s disease increased, Richard threw himself into the distraction of hawking, ordering commissions to be sent out on 8 and 11 March to search for falcons and other birds to be purchased ‘at price reasonable in any place within this realm’ as ‘thought convenient for the king’s disports’, as well as sending five men abroad for the same purpose.

Just after nine o’clock on Wednesday 16 March, in the south-eastern sky the morning light began to darken as the sun began to disappear behind the curved shadow of the moon’s disc, until its light had almost completely extinguished. For almost five minutes, darkness descended upon the world. An eclipse was considered an omen of the worst kind. Later that day the funereal toll of the great bell at Westminster began to resound, announcing the death of Queen Anne.

Anne was buried ‘with no less honours than befitted the interment of a queen’. Just as soon as her embalmed body was lowered into the ground, fresh rumours began to circulate that Richard hoped to marry again – this time to Elizabeth of York. Richard was forced to deny in public ‘in a loud and distinct voice’ that ‘such a thing had never once entered his mind’, with the king convening a meeting of the mayor and citizens of London on 30 March at the priory of St John in Clerken-well to denounce the accusations. The Crowland Chronicler believed the opposite to be the case, revealing that the king’s own councillors ‘very well knew to the contrary’. In particular, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby, men ‘to whose opinions the king hardly ever dared to offer any opposition’, had warned Richard directly ‘to his face’ that if he did not repudiate the rumours that he might attempt to marry his niece in front of the mayor and commons of London, the consequences would be serve. The ‘opposition would not be offered to him by merely the warnings of the voice,’ they warned. ‘For all the people of the north, in whom he placed the greatest reliance, would rise in rebellion against him, and impute to him the death of the queen, the daughter and one of the heirs of the Earl of Warwick, through whom he had first gained his present high position; in order that he might, to the extreme abhorrence of the Almighty, gratify an incestuous passion for his said niece’.
Twelve Doctors of Divinity were summoned to assert that no dispensation would ever be granted by the pope for such a marriage, ‘in the ease of such a degree of consanguinity’. According to the chronicler, there were other reasons for Richard’s advisers to fears such a marriage: if Elizabeth ever became queen, ‘it might at some time be in her power to avenge upon them the death of her uncle, Earl Anthony, and her brother Richard, they having been the king’s especial advisers in those matters’.