The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (23 page)

By March 1484 King Richard’s position seemed to be stronger and he had convinced the Queen Dowager, ‘after frequent entreaties as well as threats’, that the Tudor enterprise was doomed. She was having a nervous breakdown and agreed that Princess Elizabeth of York and her sisters should leave sanctuary. However, she insisted that King Richard must first give an undertaking that the princesses ‘would not suffer any manner of hurt...nor imprison within our Tower of London or any other prison’.29 She was also persuaded to send for her eldest son, to recall Dorset from Brittany, and he, weak as always, set out for home. He was soon missed and Henry’s emissaries rode out. They hunted down every route to England and eventually Sir John Cheyne found him at Compiègne in Flanders. He was persuaded to return.

In England conspiracies were about. A Wiltshire gentleman – amongst others – was ‘abbreviated shorter by the head and divided into four quarters’. He had nailed ‘bills and ballads of seditious rhyme’ to the doors of St Paul’s and corresponded with Earl Henry. It was the celebrated attack on King Richard and his cronies, Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell: ‘The Cat, the Rat and Lovell our Dog, Rule all England under the Hog’.30

They may have ruled, but events were taking over and control was becoming harder. King Richard needed to know what was happening and when.
The Crowland Chronicle
reported, ‘he observed the new method, introduced by King Edward at the time of the last war in Scotland, of allocating a mounted courier to every 20 miles...these men carried messages 200 miles within two days’. He also ‘provided himself with spies overseas...from whom he learnt almost all the movements of his enemies’.

But despite the organization, King Richard was struggling on several fronts. He was short of funds and trusted men and had been obliged to impose northerners on the southern counties to replace the sheriffs and others who had fled to Brittany; inevitably his men were loathed. Even his Scottish policy came to nothing: his overtures of the previous year had been overtaken by a French embassy led by an ex-patriot Scot called Bernard Stewart, Lord d’Aubigny, who was high in French favour. King James agreed a new Franco-Scots alliance and when Stewart returned to France he took with him ‘eighteen companies of Scots foot’.31

It seemed that England could be fighting a war on two fronts, so any focus for internal rebellion had to be neutralized. King Richard dispatched another embassy to Duke Francis, this time proposing action against France and hard cash to buy Henry Tudor. The envoys were received by the Duke’s Treasurer, Landois, who knew just how badly Brittany needed England’s help against France. He also wanted to stop the drain on the Treasury caused by the Tudor contingent and, as the Duke was again ill, he negotiated a deal.

Bishop Morton in his Flanders exile heard of the danger and dispatched Christopher Urswick to warn Earl Henry. The source of his intelligence is unknown. However, Urswick was the confidential agent of Margaret Beaufort, whose husband Lord Stanley was a senior member of the King’s Council.32 At this time Margaret was landless, as Buckingham had implicated her in his plot, so her lands had been confiscated and given to Stanley, who was then made responsible for his wife’s behaviour.

Earl Henry, well aware of his vulnerability, sent Urswick straight on to the new King of France asking for asylum, which was immediately granted (11 October 1484). He decided a few important people would slip away with him – uncle Jasper, presumably the Bishop of Exeter and Dorset – and, without waiting for the answer from France, announced that he was going to visit Duke Francis who was convalescing on the French border. Away he rode with 12 companions, and once they were clear of the city he changed clothes with his groom.

The Treasurer saw the English gold disappearing and sent armed guards in hot pursuit but they were just one hour too late. The companions and their groom had crossed the border into France. Duke Francis recovered and, overriding his Treasurer, sent for Edward Woodville, John Cheyne and Edward Poynings who had remained in Rennes with the main party. The Duke believed he had an obligation and, being a man of honour, provided passports and money for the 411 Englishmen to follow Henry. The level of pay-out reflects the Duke’s view that Woodville, Cheyne and Poynings were important, the others not.33 But he did not override the main agreement; he needed England’s goodwill, irrespective of who was on the throne.

King Richard probably congratulated himself on closing Brittany to the Tudors. To reinforce the arrangement, he sent Lord Grey of Powys with 1,000 archers to Brittany, ostensibly to deter a French invasion. It was lucky for Henry that his crisis coincided with an urgent French need for a clever move. The Regent, Anne de Beaujeu, and the 13-year-old King Charles VIII34 were under considerable pressure; a new alliance of Burgundy, Brittany and England had been formed, which looked dangerous and there were internal problems with a recalcitrant group of French noblemen known as the Feudal League.

In addition King Charles strongly disapproved of King Richard, believing he had ‘barbarously murdered his two nephews to whom he had sworn allegiance’ and ‘caused the daughters to be degraded and declared illegitimate’.35 Consequently he made a show of refusing to answer King Richard’s letters or see his ambassadors. This was not just a foreign-policy matter but an issue of the sanctity of kings and the precedent that King Richard had set must not be allowed.36 The result was an enthusiastic welcome for Earl Henry and an immediate cash payment with promises of more to come.

The exiled Englishmen proposed an invasion but they were lacking an experienced army commander. Henry had commanded nothing and uncle Jasper’s experience had been confined to guerrilla warfare. He had only once commanded a division in action and that had been at the disastrous battle of Mortimer’s Cross, while at Tewkesbury he had failed to get his men to the battlefield in time.

Edward Woodville had commanded his fleet but did not have the political stature or experience to be the army commander. The obvious choice was the Earl of Oxford, an experienced general and a committed Lancastrian. However, he was a prisoner and, for the last ten years, had been incarcerated at Hammes, one of the two fortresses defending the English Calais enclave. He loathed King Richard who had bullied, threatened and robbed his old mother in a disgraceful case ten years earlier.37 Oxford had become increasingly frustrated by his imprisonment and at one point had tried to escape by leaping off the walls into the moat. He got stuck in the mud up to his chin and had to be rescued by his gaolers.

The Captain of Hammes was Sir James Blount, one of Hastings’s lieutenants, who had no illusions about King Richard. He was happy to release Oxford and join the Tudor cause himself, leaving his wife and a garrison of 52 men behind. A detachment was sent from the main garrison at Calais to recover the castle but Lady Blount and the soldiers at Hammes decided to pull up the drawbridge and appeal to Earl Henry for help. The newly liberated Oxford took a company and prepared to attack the Calais detachment, but rather than have a fight they decided to allow Lady Blount, the garrison and their baggage to march off and join Sir James and Lord Oxford. This shows just how precarious was King Richard’s hold on the situation, and morale must have been at rock bottom with his regular troops.

While Oxford’s presence helped persuade the Regent of France that an invasion was worth backing, what really convinced her was the news of ‘six thousand hostile archers heading for Brittany’.38 It was this supposed action by the anti-French alliance coupled with danger from the dissidents in the Feudal League that made her decide on solid support.

King Richard had miscalculated by squeezing Henry Tudor out of Brittany and into the arms of a more effective sponsor. However, in England he was managing matters with apparent success and, aware that the 16-year-old Princess Elizabeth of York was critical to Henry’s plan, brought her to court and paid obvious attention to her.
The Crowland Chronicle
observed: ‘but let it not go unsaid that during this Christmas festival [1484], an excessive interest was displayed in singing and dancing and vain changing of clothes by Queen Anne and Lady Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of the late King, who were of similar complexion and figure’.

Queen Anne died in March 1485 and King Richard then indulged his niece, so tongues began to wag. The gossip was that he had poisoned his wife in order to marry Elizabeth. It seemed logical because if he could marry her then it would wreck the Tudor plans. When the rumour reached France it ‘pinched Henry by the very stomach’, but, fortunately for Elizabeth, Richard’s trusted northerners disapproved of incest.

Many of them had originally been Warwick’s men who had transferred their allegiance to Richard because of Anne Neville and they were becoming uneasy.
The Crowland Chronicle
reported that others ‘put so many obstacles in the way through fear that if Elisabeth became Queen it might be in her power some time to avenge the death of her Uncle, Earl Anthony [Rivers] and of her brother, Richard [Grey]’.

The rumours were probably untrue but the strength of them forced the King to make a humiliating public denial and look for an acceptable wife. He wrote to a distant cousin, King João of Portugal, asking for his sister, the ‘Infanta Joana’, as a bride. However, Joana was in a nunnery and happy there. She told her brother the marriage would be pointless because – she forecast – King Richard would be dead within the year.39

Meanwhile the Tudor high command considered its invasion plans. A Welsh landing was attractive because of family connections, lack of central authority and the fact that there had not been an effective Welsh overlord since Anthony Woodville. Additionally the Stanleys, whose support was hoped for, had their strength in North Wales and the North West, so a meeting in the West Midlands would be expedient. The arguments of inaccessibility and of King Richard anticipating such an obvious choice were dismissed and Pembrokeshire was chosen for the landing of the invasion.

On 23 June 1485 King Richard ordered his Chancellor to again issue a proclamation (the previous one had been six months earlier) against ‘Piers Bishop of Exeter, Jasper Tidder son of Owen Tidder calling himself Earl of Pembroke, John late Earl of Oxon and Sir Edward Widevile with other rebels and traitors...who have chosen to have as their captain one Henry Tidder, who of his insatiable covetousness...usurpeth upon him the name and title of royal estate of this realm’. This confirms that King Richard regarded Edward as a key figure in the equation and also that Henry was short of impressive names. The proclamation went on to tell its readers that Henry ‘Tidder’ was a bastard on both sides of his family and to remind Englishmen that he would be brought to these shores in French ships crowded with foreign soldiers. It is a fine example of ‘the politic, manipulative side of an insecure monarch who sought to deploy the arts of propaganda to steady his regime’.40

In France Henry Tudor ‘tarred and rigged his navy at the mouth of the Seine’, or so reported Vergil (was this
The Trinity
and
The Falcon
?). Henry believed his opportunity was coming and would have heard from England that King Richard was not providing the stability that would make people support the establishment. Henry’s mother believed the Stanleys would fight for him, and her agents had reported lively sympathy for the Lancastrian cause in Wales and England. On the Yorkist side, the exiles were confident that their friends in England would rise for Princess Elizabeth’s future husband.

Perhaps more importantly, the French government was now committed to the project, but for pragmatic rather than altruistic reasons. The Regent decided a serious diversion was needed and the Tudor enterprise was in the right place at the right time and, in the scheme of things, it only needed minimal assistance. She agreed to lend Henry 40,000 livres (but only paid 10,000).

Henry borrowed a further 30,000 livres commercially, although he had to leave two noblemen in Paris as a pledge; unsurprisingly he chose Dorset to be one of them. As a ‘Marquis’ he was valuable, but being completely unreliable was better out of the way. So Henry managed to borrow around £4,400, as presumably the lenders thought he had a reasonable chance of success. The Regent would also have insisted on an unequivocal commitment to good Anglo-French relations and support for France should Henry be successful.

If Edward had been paying his men a standard rate for the last two years then there might be around £4,000 left in his war chest. While history does not relate what happened to the £10,000, if there was any still around, it would certainly be needed, as would any additional funds Margaret Beaufort could arrange – one of her people had recently arrived with coin from England. There might also be something left from Duke Francis’s contribution.

There has been much debate about the composition of the Tudor army. If Edward’s company was there then it would form the professional core, to which the exiles and the Hammes garrison would be added, making a total of some 500 Englishmen. There was a French division of 1,800 commanded by Philibert de Chandée.41 Of those foot soldiers, 1,500 had (probably) been discharged from the army camp at Pont de l’Arche and may have been trained pikemen. For the last six years Swiss
reislaufers
, or petty officers, had been training the French infantry which was reorganized on the Swiss model, so these pikemen should have been well disciplined, presumably discharged simply for the invasion, and were outside formal French responsibility.

Although that seems probable, it may be that they were simply redundant and coincided with Henry’s need. Seigneur d’Esquerdes, a.k.a. Lord Cordes, now a Marshal of France (with an annual pension of 12,000 livres, the second highest in France) was responsible for the base at Pont de l’Arche and there is some form of confirmation in his funeral epitaph where he is described as having been the veritable arbiter of Henry of Richmond’s fate. Cordes was certainly a powerful man in the hierarchy, a foreign-policy hawk and quite capable of arranging whatever Henry needed.