The Life and Times of Richard III (2 page)

In the following spring discontent boiled over into open rebellion. Suffolk was assassinated. Jack Cade and an army of Kentish rebels marched on London and forced the King to flee from his own capital. The Bishop of Salisbury was murdered by his flock who ‘spoiled him unto the naked skin, and rent his bloody shirt into pieces and bare them away with them and made boast of their wickedness’.

Someone had to call a halt. Richard, Duke of York had already identified himself as an opponent of the Court party and as a long-standing enemy of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. In 1445 Somerset had blocked the renewal of York’s appointment as the King’s Lieutenant in France. Four years later he had engineered York’s removal from the Court to an honourable exile as Lieutenant of Ireland. By 1451 it was also beginning to look as if York, or his eldest son Edward, would one day inherit the Crown. Henry’s three uncles had all died childless, and the King still had no children by his French wife.

Cade’s rebellion provided York with an excuse to return from Ireland and seek a confrontation with the King. Faced with the evidence of his misgovernment, Henry caved in and agreed to put matters right by consulting his Parliament in October. Parliament was solidly for York. Among the many reforms they demanded were Somerset’s imprisonment and York’s recognition as the King’s chief councillor. But by December Queen Margaret was once again calling the tune. Somerset was reinstated and Parliament was prorogued. When it reassembled in May 1451 one Thomas Young of Bristol was committed to the Tower for proposing that York should be named as heir apparent. As far removed from power as ever he was in Ireland, York retired to his castle of Ludlow in the Welsh Marches.

The struggle between the reformers and the Court party had now assumed the character of a vicious personal duel between York and Somerset. With Henry refusing to name his heir, York was afraid that his rival might persuade the Queen to override his legitimate claims. For Somerset too had a claim to the throne through his descent from John of Gaunt and his mistress Catherine Swynford. Early in 1452 York was ready to try again – this time with an army at his back. In a proclamation issued at Ludlow on 3 February, he protested that he was ‘the King’s true liege man’: his reforms had been negated ‘through the envy, malice and untruth of the said Duke of Somerset’ who ‘laboureth continually about the King’s Highness for my undoing and to corrupt my blood, and to disherit me and my heirs’. When York’s army reached London he found the city’s gates closed, and Henry at Blackheath with a force that outnumbered his own. Anxious to avoid bloodshed at any price, the King induced York to surrender on the promise that Somerset would be arrested and tried. But the Queen would not give up the new favourite who had taken Suffolk’s place in her affections. The King, always putty in her hands, was induced to break his word. York, who had obediently given himself up, was forced to undergo the humiliation of swearing a public oath never again to take up arms against the King.

Thus, in the year of Richard’s birth, the kingdom already teetered on the brink of civil war. In the twelve months that followed, two events of cardinal importance sufficed to push it over the edge. On 17 July 1453 John Talbot, veteran of countless battles and sieges in the English reconquest of France, was killed at the battle of Castillon, and the last English army in France was annihilated by French cannon. By the year’s end Bordeaux had fallen, Guyenne acknowledged Charles VII and the Hundred Years’ War was at an end. At Henry’s accession thirty years before, the Plantagenet dominions in France had embraced Normandy, Picardy, Ile de France and Gascony: now only Calais and the Channel Islands remained. An irreparable blow was dealt to English pride. Henry’s government was branded with the stigma of defeat, and his French Queen became a symbol of England’s shame. The defeated soldiers returning from the wars roamed the countryside in armed bands, a menace to the already disintegrating fabric of public order. Most important of all, the loss of empire dissolved the restraining bonds of patriotism which had held the domestic squabbles of the aristocracy in check.

Worse was to follow. Less than a month after Castillon, a bout of insanity deprived King Henry of speech and sense.

Her husband’s madness brought out both the best and the worst in Queen Margaret. Still only twenty-three years old, she devoted her spectacular energy and courage to the defence of Henry’s rights. But she was deaf to the real grievances of the Court’s political opponents, construing their reforms as a direct assault on the royal prerogatives. While Somerset could do no wrong in her eyes, she had conceived a special loathing for the Duke of York. Without Henry’s moderating influence, the Crown now became an instrument of faction. Queen Margaret did not hesitate to press her claims. In October her position was much strengthened when she gave birth to a son, Edward of Lancaster. This was a harsh blow to York’s chances but popular feeling still ran high in his favour. The prospect of another long royal minority had little appeal for the Commons who assembled in Parliament early in 1454 to settle the question of the regency. Despite the protests of the Court, Richard of York was declared ‘protector and defenser’ on 27 March.

The Fifteenth-Century Wool Trade

Wool has been described as ‘the flower and strength and revenue and blood of England’, and during the late medieval period it was undoubtedly the principal source of wealth to the country. The revenue derived from the trade brought wealth both to secular merchants and to the great monasteries. Thus many of the fine houses and churches built in the fifteenth century were based upon wool.

The protectorship did not survive the year’s end. In December King Henry recovered his wits and formally recognised his son. Somerset, who had been committed to the Tower twelve months previously, was released, and York’s ministers were dismissed. Both the Queen and Richard were now set on bringing matters to a head. York withdrew to Sendal Castle in Yorkshire and set about raising an army in conjunction with his brother-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury. The Queen and Somerset summoned their supporters to a meeting of the Great Council at Leicester. The Yorkists mobilised first and marched south, and with an army of about three thousand men, they collided with the royal army at St Albans. In the first pitched battle of the Wars of the Roses, York was completely victorious. Somerset was slain and the King himself received a flesh wound from a Yorkist arrow.

York’s dilemma was that he still claimed to act in the King’s name. But, while the King was ruled by the Queen, his only sanction lay in superior force. The next three years were characterised by an armed truce during which the Queen’s party slowly regained lost ground. The resurrected protectorship which York forced on the King was again abolished. A hollow reconciliation staged at St Paul’s in March 1458 produced no real solutions, and the Duke of York confined himself warily to his estates.

The Yorkists entered the next round of hostilities with only two positive gains. The Merchants of the Staple, the most influential financial organisation in the country, backed them rather than the King as the best hope for a return to good government. The second was that the captaincy of Calais passed, on Somerset’s death, to Cicely Neville’s young nephew, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Both as a refuge and as a springboard for invasion, Calais was an asset of incalculable value.

As usual the country at large suffered greater hardship than the principals who had brought about the breakdown of central government. The following summary by an anonymous chronicler, though biased in favour of the Yorkists, probably gives a fair picture:

In this same time, the realm of England was out of all good governance, as it had been many days before, for the king was simple and led by covetous counsel, and owed more than he was worth. His debts increased daily, but payment was there none: all the possessions and lordships that pertained to the crown the king had given away, some to lords and some to other simple persons, so that he had almost nought to live on. And such impositions as were put to the people, as taxes, tallages, and quinzimes, all that came from them was spended on vain, for he held no household he maintained no wars. For these misgovernances, and for many others, the hearts of the people were turned away from them that had the land in governance, and their blessing was turned into cursing.

In Devonshire the Courtenay family terrorised the countryside in pursuit of private vendettas. In Northumberland the Nevilles took full advantage of their temporary ascendancy over the Percies. In 1457 the French launched a raid on Sandwich and burned it to the ground.

Early in 1459, York’s youngest son, Richard, then in his seventh year, first felt the impact of war. With the Queen’s party openly preparing for an armed challenge, Richard’s father no longer considered Fotheringhay a safe refuge for his two younger sons, George and Richard. He therefore decided to move them to the greater isolation and superior defences of his great castle at Ludlow, where they joined his two older boys, the seventeen-year-old Edward, Earl of March, and his sixteen-year-old brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland. As it turned out, this was a most unfortunate decision. By early autumn the Queen’s army was gathered at Coventry, poised to march on Ludlow. Despite the arrival of Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and his son Warwick, the Duke of York was heavily outnumbered. On the night of 13 October, with the royal army encamped only a mile from Ludlow, he heard that Warwick’s most experienced troops – a contingent of the Calais garrison – had defected to seek the King’s pardon. The news broke his nerve. The Yorkist leaders took to their heels and made for the Welsh coast. The Duke, who took with him only his elder sons, left his army, his wife and the rest of his family to fend for themselves. He and Edmund sailed for Ireland: Warwick and the others took refuge in Calais.

The Duchess Cicely and her two younger sons were not harshly treated. They were put into the custody of Richard’s aunt, the Duchess of Buckingham, and lived on one of Buckingham’s manors. In the following year the two boys were attached to the household of Thomas Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Late in June 1460 they heard the welcome news that their brother Edward had landed at Sandwich with Salisbury and Warwick. On 2 July the three Earls were welcomed in London, where only the Tower held out for King Henry. Then the Yorkists marched north: once again the Lancastrians were inadequately prepared. When the two armies clashed on 10 July, south of Northampton, the Yorkists carried the day in less than an hour. The Queen had wisely remained in Coventry during the battle and fled with Prince Edward, first to Harlech Castle in Wales, then to Scotland. King Henry was taken in his tent. For a second time he suffered the indignity of being rescued from his councillors in a pitched battle, and was taken back to London to sanction a Yorkist government.

But York, returning from Ireland in mid-September, had more ambitious plans. The clumsy fiction of the protectorship could be taken away as easily as it was granted. On 10 October he informed the astonished Lords in the Painted Chamber that he claimed the Crown by right of inheritance. Many of those present looked on York as a reformer rather than a candidate for the throne, and were not ready to depose the King in his favour. After much debate a compromise was reached: Henry would continue to rule for his natural life, but on his death the Crown would pass to York and his heirs. In the meantime York was to be Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester – and Protector of the Realm.

While the embarrassed Yorkist lords were arguing over their leader’s claims, Queen Margaret was busy canvassing support to put another army in the field. In great secrecy a Lancastrian army was assembled at Hull. She was rewarded with total success. On 9 December York divided his strength, sending Edward west to pacify Wales, while he marched north to deal with the Queen. On the last day of December, the Lancastrians launched a surprise attack on Wakefield where the Protector was lodged. Although heavily outnumbered, York did not run away as he had at Ludlow. He and his son Edmund were killed on the battlefield. His brother-in-law Salisbury was taken and executed. The heads of the Yorkist leaders were impaled on the gates of York. The wars had entered a new and bloodier phase.

For the next three months confusion reigned as the country waited for the final battle that would decide the issue. The Prior of Croyland described the panic engendered by Queen Margaret’s northerners as they marched on London:

...the northmen... swept onwards like a whirlwind from the north, and in the impulse of their fury attempted to overrun the whole of England. At this period too, fancying that everything tended to insure them freedom from molestation, paupers and beggars flocked forth from those quarters in infinite numbers, just like so many mice rushing forth from their holes, and universally devoted themselves to spoil and rapine, without regard of place or person.... Thus did they proceed with impunity, spreading in vast multitudes over a space of thirty miles in breadth, and, covering the whole surface of the earth just like so many locusts, made their way almost to the very walls of London.

Early in February came news that Edward had crushed the Earls of Pembroke and Wiltshire at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross. Warwick, who had charge of London, advanced to block the northerners’ march on the capital at St Albans. Early in the morning of 17 February the Queen’s advance guard entered the town. By mid-afternoon Warwick’s left wing had crumbled and he fled westward with the remnants of the army, hoping to join forces with Edward.

London now lay undefended. York’s Duchess, who had already lost a husband, a son and a brother, boarded a ship bound for the Low Countries with George and Richard. Mysteriously, Margaret refused to seize the prize that was hers for the taking. Ten days later she had lost her chance. Edward and Warwick entered London in triumph on 26 February. Hugely relieved at their deliverance from the northerners, the citizens gave them a jubilant welcome. But the hero of the hour was Edward of York. Not yet nineteen years old, exceptionally tall and good-looking, he had already given proof of his ability as a commander of men at Mortimer’s Cross. After York’s death at Wakefield and Warwick’s rout at St Albans, only his swift action had saved London from a Lancastrian sacking. He inherited all his father’s charms without any of the rancour and suspicion generated by years of political in-fighting. There were no dissenting voices when he was proclaimed King at Paul’s Cross on 4 March 1461.