The Life and Times of Richard III (7 page)

There is no record that Richard had any part in these proceedings, and it seems likely that the summer months kept him busy in Yorkshire. When he rejoined the Court in the late autumn Clarence’s life hung by a thread. The Woodvilles, who still regarded him as Warwick’s accomplice in the murder of two of their kin, were baying for his blood, and the story of the King’s bastardy was one that snapped even Edward’s patience. Richard was the only member of the royal family to speak up for his brother: Clarence was a nuisance, but since Warwick’s defeat he had never been a threat. Moreover, he was loath to see the Woodvilles manoeuvring one of his brothers into killing the other.

But Edward was determined to go through with it. On 16 January 1478, the Lords assembled in Parliament before the King to try Clarence on charges of high treason. In a hushed chamber none of them dared utter a word in accusation or defence. Only the King could prosecute the King’s brother. The verdict was ‘guilty’, and the Duke of Buckingham, as Steward of England, pronounced the sentence of death. When Edward hesitated to set a date for the execution, the Commons presented a petition that it should be carried out swiftly. A few days later the Duke of Clarence at last earned in his death the fame that had eluded him in his lifetime, when he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. Contemporary accounts record that Edward offered Clarence a choice of death, and that he elected to be drowned in a butt of wine. This has led later historians to declare that Clarence was a drunkard, but others have suggested that the butt of Malmsey held a symbolic significance as a reminder of the presents of tuns of wine sent to Clarence by Edward in happier days. Margaret Pole, Clarence’s daughter, certainly wore a model of a wine cask on her wrist in remembrance of her father’s death.

Dominic Mancini, the Italian cleric who in 1483 wrote an invaluable account of his stay in England, states that Richard was ‘overcome with grief for his brother’. He also provides the clue to the origins of Richard’s bitter antagonism towards the Woodvilles:

Thenceforth [Mancini continues] Richard came very rarely to court. He kept himself within his own lands and set out to acquire the loyalty of his people through favours and justice. The good reputation of his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers.... Such was his renown in warfare, that whenever a difficult and dangerous policy had to be undertaken, it would be entrusted to his discretion and his generalship. By these arts Richard acquired the favour of the people, and avoided the jealousy of the Queen, from whom he lived far separated.

*

Clarence’s death clearly left scars on Richard’s memory. Three days after the execution he procured a licence to set up two religious foundations to pray for the royal family and for his dead brothers and sisters. It is equally clear that he blamed the Woodville Queen for what had happened. But his estrangement from the Court went deeper than this. The reference to ‘the good reputation of his private life’ hints at a contrast between Richard’s asceticism and the frivolity, the gormandising and the freewheeling sexual antics of Edward’s entourage. The differences between the two surviving sons of York are so strong as to prompt the thought that there may have been some foundation for the tale of Edward’s bastardy. Richard, short, frailly built, intense and rather straight-laced, and ill at ease in company; Edward, a fat, pleasure-loving giant with easy manners and extravagant tastes. Mancini paints a striking portrait of Edward in his later years:

In food and drink he was most immoderate: it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more. For this reason and for the ease, which was especially dear to him after his recovery of the crown, he had grown fat in the loins, whereas previously he had been not only tall but rather lean and very active. He was licentious in the extreme: moreover it was said that he had been most insolent to numerous women after he had seduced them, for, as soon as he grew weary of dalliance, he gave up the ladies much against their will to the other courtiers. He pursued with no discrimination the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly: however he took none by force. He overcame all by money and promises, and having conquered them, he dismissed them. Although he had many promoters and companions of his vices, the more important and especial were three of the aforementioned relatives of the queen, her two sons and one of her brothers.

As Mancini points out, it was in the North, far removed from the Court’s politics and pleasures, that Richard’s talents were most fruitfully employed.
‘Loyauté me lie’
– ‘loyalty binds me’ – was the motto Richard adopted, and for thirteen years he effectively ruled the northern counties as Edward’s deputy in war and peace. His first task was to establish a working relationship with the Earl of Northumberland. Generations of Percies had been lords of the North, and much depended on Richard’s tactful handling of the young Earl. In May 1473 the two men entered into a formal agreement, whereby Henry Percy recognised Richard’s ultimate authority, while Richard promised to uphold the Earl’s rights. In the East Riding and in Northumberland Percy’s authority continued unchallenged: Westmorland, Cumberland and the West Riding were Richard’s preserve.

The key to the North was York itself, a city of more than twelve thousand inhabitants, and headquarters of a prosperous merchant community. The Merchant Adventurers of York, incorporated more than a century before, carried on a brisk trade with the Hanse towns and supplied the city with its municipal officers. More than once discontented factions appealed to the Earl of Northumberland over Richard’s head, but the city’s records show that the great majority of the citizens regarded the Duke of Gloucester as their special friend and protector. The details of his administration confirm the importance that the Yorkist rulers attached to their relationships with the major cities of the realm – a fact often obscured by the battles, executions, feuds and intrigues that monopolised the attentions of the chroniclers. Authorising the destruction of illegal fish traps on the Humber and the Ouse, arbitrating in disputed municipal elections, quelling riots and commuting taxes in times of need, Richard worked hard to earn the title of ‘our full tender and especial good lord’. A typical entry in the civic minutes records the decision that ‘the Duke of Gloucester shall, for his great labour now late made unto the King’s good grace for the confirmation of the liberties of this City be presented, at his coming to the City, with six swans and six pikes’. When the traditional spring pageant was celebrated in 1477 Richard and Anne marked their special bond with the city by joining the Corpus Christi Guild, a religious fraternity closely associated with the powerful Merchant Adventurers.

It was an active life which left Richard little time to enjoy the comforts of his Duchess’s household at Middleham. When in York he generally stayed at the house of the Augustinian friars at Lendal. His estates at Sheriff Hutton, about ten miles north-east of the city, were also conveniently close and bordered on some of Henry Percy’s chief manors. The castle of Pontefract, twenty-two miles to the south-west, was his official residence as Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster beyond Trent, while Barnard Castle, some fifty miles to the north-west, was his chief seat in the county of Durham. Richard’s normal administrative duties were frequently supplemented by legal commissions that toured the countryside hearing pleas, initiating inquiries and settling disputes. As Richard’s reputation spread, the personal following who comprised his Council took on increasingly the functions of a court of law, offering ‘good and indifferent justice to all who sought it, were they rich or poor, gentle or simple’.

Richard’s other great office, the wardenship of the West March, did not seriously occupy his attention until the spring of 1480. Persuading James III of Scotland to break his truce and authorise large-scale border raids was one of Louis’s many ploys to keep the English busy while he tidied up his Burgundian conquests. In May Richard’s military powers were augmented by the office of Lieutenant General in the North, and in the autumn of 1480 he launched a border raid of his own into Scottish territory. This was to be the curtain-raiser to a full scale invasion planned for the summer of 1481. King Edward was to command in person. With Northumberland as his deputy, Richard spent the winter inspecting the border garrisons, repairing the fortifications of Carlisle and conducting a military census. Late in March 1481 he was with Edward in London, putting the finishing touches to their plan of campaign.

But the campaign never materialised. Although a fleet under Lord Howard devastated Scottish shipping in the Firth of Forth, Edward never stirred from his capital, immobilised by financial worries and failing health. Richard and Northumberland were left to conduct a border raid on a scale no greater than that of the previous autumn. By the spring of 1482 a significant victory over the Scots had become a political as well as a military necessity. The exceptionally bad harvest of 1481 was causing severe disturbances in several counties; Edward’s attempts to levy a tax, commuted on his return from the inglorious French campaign of 1475, proved as unpopular as benevolences; and there were rumours that Burgundy, despairing of armed support from England, was about to come to terms with King Louis. In that event England would be isolated without a Continental ally, and Edward could kiss goodbye to his annual French pension.

In 1482 the sole command of the Scottish expedition was vested in the Duke of Gloucester. The two brothers met at Fotheringhay in June, and Richard was furnished with an unexpected ally in the person of James III’s younger brother, the Duke of Albany – a ‘Clarence in kilt’ – whom the brothers promised to seat on James’s throne. Early in July Richard and Northumberland marshalled their forces under the battlements of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. The army was estimated at twenty thousand men, backed by a formidable siege train of artillery. Their first objective was the town of Berwick, in Scottish hands since Margaret had surrendered it two decades before. The town itself capitulated at once but the citadel, commanded by the Earl of Bothwell, held out. Detaching Lord Stanley and his contingent from Lancashire and Cheshire to press the siege, Richard drove on to meet the Scottish army. After all the efforts and expense that had gone into the campaign, it must have come as something of a disappointment to hear, at the end of July, that James III was the victim of a
coup
organised by his own barons. Disillusioned by their sovereign’s foolhardy sabre-rattling, the Scottish lords refused to risk their lives in a pitched battle, and Richard entered Edinburgh unopposed. At Albany’s request Richard’s soldiers were forbidden even their traditional right to pillage the conquered city. Negotiations for a peace settlement proved equally fruitless: no treaty would long survive the political upheavals of James’s Court. Mindful of the crippling costs of keeping his army in the field indefinitely, Richard had no alternative but to march back the way he had come, determined at least to salvage his and the nation’s pride by completing the reduction of Berwick Castle. Albany, who had made his peace with the Scottish lords, remained behind, promising to secure a lasting truce for his English allies. On 24 August the Scots at last agreed to the permanent cession of Berwick to the English Crown, and the citadel was delivered to Lord Stanley. The news was trumpeted in London as if Richard had won a second Agincourt, and Edward was lavish in his praises. In a sour and more realistic vein, the Croyland Chronicler noted that ‘this trifling, I know not whether to call it “gain” or “loss” (for the safekeeping of Berwick each year swallows up ten thousand marks) at this period diminished the resources of the king and kingdom by more than a hundred thousand pounds’.

The man who benefited most from Richard’s martial exploits was undoubtedly ‘the universal spider’, Louis XI. For, shortly after Christmas, the Court learned that Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy had signed a treaty with the King of France. Their daughter Margaret was to marry the Dauphin, in flagrant disregard of the Dauphin’s previous betrothal to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth.

The collapse of Edward’s diplomacy abroad did not touch Richard’s reputation. In recognition of ten years and more of service in the North, capped by the subjection of Edinburgh and the recapture of Berwick, Parliament bestowed on him in February 1483 the permanent and hereditary wardenship of the West Marches towards Scotland. This plum was sugared with a further grant of the castle and city of Carlisle, and all the King’s manors and revenues in the county of Cumberland. To these would be added any further conquests won from the Scots. At the age of thirty Richard could look forward to the undisputed possession of his own palatinate, and many years of active service in which to give rein to his proven talents.

Richard’s sojourn as Lieutenant of the North was brought to an abrupt end by the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483. Overweight and oversexed, his indulgence of these two appetites had undermined his health, but it was a chill caught on a fishing trip which was reported to have killed him. He left his kingdom and his Crown to his twelve-year-old son Edward, Prince of Wales, who kept his own Court at Ludlow Castle under the care of his uncle Anthony, Earl Rivers.

England had known relative peace for twelve years; but a royal minority threatened to unleash all the tensions created by Edward’s patronage of the Woodville family and inflamed by Clarence’s execution. On his deathbed Edward had foreseen the worst, and striven to prevent it. He entrusted his son not to the Queen but to his brother Richard, who was named Protector. Richard could command the obedience of older nobility who despised the Queen and the swarm of relatives whom the King had endowed with high office, titled husbands and wealthy heiresses. As a further insurance he persuaded two particular rivals, Lord Hastings and the Queen’s eldest son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, to shake hands in a formal gesture of reconciliation.