The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain (24 page)

Exactly what form Clarence’s secret execution took has never been established beyond doubt. However, the rumour
that he was drowned in a barrel of Malmsey wine was in circulation at a very early date.

1479–83

In 1480 Edward, irritated by Scottish cross-border raids, prepared for a major campaign. Richard of Gloucester, who was heavily involved in restoring law and order in the north, made a sally into Scotland in 1481 (intended as the precursor of a full-scale invasion the following year) to set upon the Scottish throne the Duke of Albany, the discontented brother of King James III. By an agreement made at Fotheringhay in June Albany agreed to restore Berwick and to do homage to Edward as his overlord. Edward was too unwell to undertake the campaign himself, and it was Richard who invaded the Lowlands and occupied Edinburgh. However, by this time, the Scottish brothers had made up their differences, and at the same time, Edward’s continental diplomacy came unstuck when Louis XI and the Duke of Burgundy signed the Treaty of Arras (March 1482).

All that Edward’s diplomacy and threats of war had achieved was a temporary improvement in the finances of the crown. This had been valuable in the work of restoring stability in England, but it left the international situation much as he had found it in 1471. That stability was now threatened again. In the spring of 1483 the king fell ill, possibly as a result of over-indulgence, and he died on 9 April, bequeathing the crown to his 12-year-old son. Once again England faced the prospect of rule by a minor.

1483–5

The king’s sudden death set a power struggle in motion. Edward IV died at Westminster with his wife and her close relatives around him, but his heir, Edward V, was at Ludlow with his uncle, Earl Rivers. Richard of Gloucester was at Middleham in the Yorkshire Dales. Both parties immediately set out for London for both needed to secure the person of the young king. Richard intended to take up the role of protector, which he believed was his by right, but the Wood-villes planned to establish a regency council of which Gloucester would be only one member. It was in their interests to have the young Edward crowned as quickly as possible so that they could begin to issue instructions in his name. This Richard was determined to prevent, and on 28 April he intercepted Earl Rivers and his charge. The earl was sent north to Pontefract Castle and was discreetly executed. Richard took control in the capital and lodged the king in the Tower, where he was joined in June by his younger brother.

The rival groups spent the next weeks building up their support, but Richard was quicker, more efficient, more thorough and more ruthless. He carried out a purge of the council, claiming that his victims had plotted against him and the king, and on 22 June his own accession was publicly proclaimed, on the grounds that Edward’s sons were bastards. On 6 July he was crowned as Richard III. His motives were probably a mixture of ambition, contempt for the Woodvilles
and concern for the good government of the country. Handing power to a child in the control of an upstart clique who lacked the support of England’s political elite seemed a certain way to return the country to the situation that had existed during the worst days of Henry VI’s reign. Richard could justify his usurpation to himself, if not to everyone else.

Richard’s callously efficient seizure of power was probably his undoing, especially when the rumour spread that he had had his young nephews murdered in the Tower (there was no word of their being seen after mid-July). In the autumn one of his own allies, the Duke of Buckingham, rose against him, calling for people to rise in the name of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond (a fact that may indicate that he believed the ‘Princes in the Tower’ were now dead). This revolt quickly fizzled out, but it was precursor to more widespread opposition to the new regime.

Destiny seemed to be closing in on Richard. In April 1484 his only son died, and his wife survived this tragedy by less than a year. His attempt to have Henry Tudor apprehended in Brittany failed, and Henry was able to escape to France where he was supported by King Charles VIII. He steadily gained credibility as a potential rival, and several influential figures crossed the Channel to join him. Richard, meanwhile, gathered as much support as he could and even sought a rapprochement with the Woodvilles. However, in September 1484 he reluctantly agreed a truce with the Scots in order to leave himself free to face the expected challenge from Henry Tudor.

Henry landed in south Wales on 7 August 1485 and began his march eastwards, picking up fresh adherents along the way. The king summoned his nobles to join him with their armed retainers and was able to gather an army of more than 10,000 men with which to confront the rebel force of some 5,000 at Market Bosworth in Leicestershire on 22 August. The overwhelming odds should have ensured victory for Richard, but he could not rely on some of his captains, such as the Earl of Northumberland, who waited to see how the battle would turn out before committing themselves. There is no clear account of the Battle of Bosworth, and existing reports contain conflicting details but three facts are beyond dispute: Northumberland refused to commit his troops; Lord Stanley, after keeping his men at a distance, went over to Henry’s side; and Richard III met his end in a death-or-glory charge upon the standard of his opposite number. According to one colourful account by a Spanish servant in Richard’s entourage, the death of the last Plantagenet occurred in this manner:

Now when Salazar … who was there in King Richard’s service, saw the treason of the king’s people, he went up to him and said, ‘Sire, take steps to put your person in safety, without expecting to have the victory in today’s battle, owing to the manifest treason in your following.’ But the king replied, ‘Salazar, God forbid I yield one step. This day I will die as king or win.’ Then he placed over his head-armour the crown royal, which they declare be worth 120,000 crowns, and having donned his coat
of arms, began to fight with much vigour, putting heart into those that remained loyal, so that by his sole effort he upheld the battle for a long time. But in the end the king’s army was beaten and he himself was killed … After winning this victory Earl Henry was at once acclaimed by all parties. He ordered the dead king to be placed in a little hermitage near the place of battle, and had him covered from the waist downward with a black rag of poor quality, ordering his top be exposed there for three days to the universal gaze.
¹

POSTSCRIPT

So ended three turbulent centuries of rule by Henry II and his Plantagenet successors. They were years of almost unremitting warfare as kings contended with foreign monarchs and with their feudal barons, whose power in their own regions was greater than the monarch’s. The Plantagenet rulers gained and lost a sizeable continental empire and gained control of Wales, but failed to conquer Scotland or to extend effective rule over the whole of Ireland.

Although we use the term ‘England’ to describe the heartland of Plantagenet territory, this land was far from being a recognizable, independent entity. Not only was the country divided into petty princedoms held in fee from the crown, but also, for much of the period, the magnates who held sway in their localities had more in common with their counterparts on the other side of the Channel, and their fortunes were intertwined with those of French dukedoms such as those of Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Maine. The English had no common language, regional dialects varying widely from each other. Norman French was spoken at court and was the language of diplomacy. Churchmen, scholars, lawyers and the scribes who drew up official documents used Latin, the language that united England with the rest of western Christendom. Only gradually did the language of London and the southern counties emerge as a common vernacular and this process was only completed in the 16th
century thanks to the greatest invention that the Plantagenet age bequeathed to its followers – the printing press.

The merchant turned printer, William Caxton (
c
.1422–91), wrote the following in the preface to the first book to be printed in the English language: ‘… I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book in print after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books [have] been, to the end that every man may have them at once, for all the books of this story named the recule [collection] of the histories of Troy thus imprinted as ye here see were begun in one day, and also finished in one day.’
¹

His
Recuyell of the Histories of Troy
began a revolution. The invention of the printed book was the biggest single development in communication before the invention of the telephone. Caxton was a successful member of the London Mercers’ Company who, by about 1450, settled in Bruges and enjoyed the patronage of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, Edward IV’s sister. There he developed a commercial interest in the latest craze sweeping Europe – cheap books.

Johannes Gutenberg had developed in Mainz an apparatus that combined movable type, oil-based ink and a wooden screw press. The result was a machine for mass-producing books, pamphlets, posters and official documents. The printing press caught on rapidly and by 1475 there was scarcely a town or city of any size in continental Europe that did not have at least one printworks. The cheap book was an idea whose time had come. The gradual spread of education
created a demand for the written word. The ‘Clerk of Oxford’ in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
was shabbily dressed because he spent all his money on books:

For he would rather have at his bed’s head.

Twenty books, bound in black and red

Of Aristotle and his philosophy,

Than rich robes or a fiddle or a psaltery.
²

Books were expensive because they were laboriously hand made and took days or weeks of work to complete. Originally they were produced by monks labouring in the scriptoria of monasteries. This was because most books were intended for religious use – bibles, psalters and devotional works. Many were labours of love whose pages were embellished with beautiful coloured decoration. But there was also a secular trade in volumes of stories, technical manuals and songsheets. By the 13th century many commercial scriptoria had come into being employing teams of scribes who worked long hours to meet the growing demand. But this was still a luxury industry whose products could only be acquired by the relatively well-to-do. An efficiently run printworks was, therefore, a potential gold mine. Caxton returned to England and set up his press in Westminster in 1476.

The impact of the printed book was incalculable. Just as a literate clientele had created the demand, so the growing volume of books encouraged more people to become literate. Writers were able to spread their ideas more rapidly and widely than had ever been conceivable. This was not always
welcomed by the authorities. We have seen how the church clamped a ban on the circulation of Lollard bibles and tracts. The spread of ‘heretical’, unorthodox or ‘seditious’ books created fresh problems for ecclesiastical and government censors. From time to time they staged public burnings of ‘undesirable’ books. But there was no effective way to stop people reading. As the 15th century came to a close books were bringing a whole new dimension to the lives of many people.

But the printed word was far from being the only positive contribution of the Plantagenet centuries to posterity. Political and constitutional conflict produced a bicameral parliament. Thanks to the honing of technical and entrepreneurial skills England emerged as the producer of Europe’s finest woollen cloths. The church’s long struggle with Lollard heresy indicates that there existed a vigorous intellectual life struggling for independence from control by ecclesiastical and political hierarchies, which produced,
en passant
, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge where many of the acutest English minds were trained and have continued to be trained throughout ensuing centuries. When we think of ‘medieval England’ the image that comes most readily to mind is of soaring Gothic cathedrals and parish churches filled with masterpieces of the carvers’ and glaziers’ art. But, if we were to seek the ‘biggest’ contribution to national life made during the period 1154–1485, a case could very well be made for the growth of the British legal system. From manorial and market courts, through regional assizes and episcopal courts right up to parliament and the king’s council
there developed a complex but functional system whereby – theoretically at least – the ordinary subject might obtain justice. The system did not always work well; there were times and places when and where it did not work at all. But Magna Carta, the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Peasants’ Revolt and the numerous adjustments to the workings of the judiciary displayed a deeply felt concern for the right relationships between the king and all his subjects, high and low, under a written code, impartially administered.