Richard III (11 page)

Another important magnate was Lord Greystoke, whose lands were scattered all over Cumberland and Northumberland. Apparently he was helpful enough. However, having been born the year before Agincourt, Ralph Greystoke had reached what was then considered a great age by the time Richard arrived in the North.

However, it was not only the great families who retained their power which constituted a potential danger. The Cliffords, who had once held sway throughout the Lake District and in much of western Yorkshire, were old enemies of the House of York, long dispossessed. The tenth Lord Clifford had fallen in the battle against Gloucester’s father, while the thirteenth – known as the ‘black’ or the ‘butcher’ –
slaughtered the Duke’s brother Rutland on the bridge at Wakefield, before being killed and attainted himself. Clifford’s son Henry, only three years younger than Gloucester, was brought up secretly in remote Yorkshire or Lakeland farmhouses, so humbly that he could neither read nor write; the ‘shepherd lord’ would not recover his inheritance until after Bosworth. Meanwhile, Richard occupied the Clifford Barony of Westmorland, the Clifford hereditary Sheriffdom of Cumberland and the Clifford family home at Skipton-in-Craven in the Pennines. Privately many north-western gentry must have resented such a usurpation and being forced to abandon their traditional loyalties. And rumours circulated widely that there was still a Clifford heir in hiding.

The North was in fact full of danger. Over large areas nobility and gentry were unhappy, seriously unsettled, and they were the people who did the fighting. But, judging from his behaviour when King, Richard trusted almost implicitly anyone who came from the North. His administration there is cited by most historians, hostile or friendly, as evidence that he would have made an excellent monarch had he survived. Nevertheless, his failure to inspire loyalty among its magnates indicates a disastrous incapacity to make good friends.

The men who worked most closely with Richard in the North were Lords Northumberland, Stanley, Scrope, Greystoke and Lovell, Sir Richard Ratcliff, Sir Ralph Assheton, Sir James Tyrell, Sir Thomas Makenfield, Sir Thomas Everingham, Sir John Conyers, Sir John Savile and Messrs Fairfax, Kendall, Harrington, Metcalfe and Pygott. These, with various unknown lawyers, were his administration’s principal officers. Not all came from the North. Lovell was from Northamptonshire and Tyrell from Suffolk, while Kendall, a ‘household man’ of the House of York, may possibly have originated from the West Country. But despite these exceptions it is clear that Gloucester had a predilection for Northerners – it was to become increasingly apparent after he became King.

Naturally the Duke had as many dealings with the Lords Spiritual as with the Lords Temporal. Senior clerics were no less professional administrators than churchmen. Among the Archbishops of York, George Nevill – the King-maker’s brother and Richard’s near kinsman
– was completely broken when he was released from imprisonment, and died in 1476; ‘such goods as were gathered with sin were lost with sorrow’, his very mitre being broken up and its jewels set in a crown. Despite being a former Chancellor of Queen Margaret’s household and tutor to Prince Edward, and having once been suspended for Lancastrian sympathies, his successor Lawrence Booth gave no trouble. The humbly born Thomas Rotherham, who succeeded Booth in 1480, gave useful assistance, although Lord Chancellor of England and more often in London than in York; one day Richard would put him in prison. At Durham William Dudley, a former Dean of Windsor, was to send his troops to fight for the Duke against the Scots on three occasions. At Carlisle John Story was a gifted administrator and well thought of at court, being appointed an executor of Edward IV’s will; he acted as envoy to the Scots in 1471. Among the Bishops of Lincoln was John Russell, who was to be Richard’s Lord Chancellor and (almost certainly) would write the continuation to the
Croyland Chronicle
.

Gloucester made a point of being on very amiable terms with religious houses. In particular he gave offerings to Our Lady of Jervaulx and to shrines at Fountains Abbey and at Coverham Abbey. (Leland notes that ‘there was good singing in Coverham’ – perhaps it was the same in Richard’s time.) The Duke presented £20 to the Abbot and Canons of Coverham to help them rebuild their church. All three were mitred Abbots and men of considerable influence, even if they did not sit in the House of Lords.

The Duke was an ostentatiously munificent benefactor of the clergy. He paid for repairs at churches near his Yorkshire houses, among them Skipton-in-Craven and Sheriff Hutton, where he built a new chapel. He did still more at Middleham, where he converted the parish church into a ‘college’ with a dean, six chaplains, four clerks and six choristers; their function was to celebrate Masses for the King and Queen and their children, for himself and his wife and son, his mother and sisters – for their ‘good estate’ when alive and for their souls when dead. The Masses were also for the souls of his dead father, brothers and sisters. There was an altar for each of Gloucester’s favourite saints at this time, a fairly conventional selection – the Blessed Virgin, St George, St Catherine, St Cuthbert and St Barbara – apart from
St Ninian.
⁵
He intended to found a similar but larger college at Barnard Castle, though this does not seem to have materialized; it was to have been dedicated to St Margaret and St Ninian. (His devotion to the latter was perhaps a souvenir of some raid into Dumfriesshire.)

It has long been suggested – and almost equally long denied – that there may be significance in the fact that the licences for these foundations were both obtained on 21 February 1478. This was precisely three days after Clarence’s killing, and also the same day that Gloucester acquired Clarence’s office of Great Chamberlain. Whether there is any connection between the two events, Richard certainly believed that it was not just ‘an holy and wholesome thing to pray for the dead’, but a means of buying forgiveness for sins.

The Duke built on a large scale at his many residences. He had a string of mighty houses in his vast northern territories, to serve as centres of local influence and to facilitate his constant journeying – not only he, but his large retinue as well, had to be accommodated and provided with fresh horses – and he was constantly improving his residences. For a time he also possessed a house in the South, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, to which he added a superb great hall lit by huge Perpendicular windows with delicate tracery, though there is no evidence that he ever visited it. His real home, in so far as he had one at all, was divided between Middleham and Sheriff Hutton.

Middleham has already been described. Its rival, Sheriff Hutton, was closer to York and Scarborough. Only a few fragments remain of this once palatial house and a farm has been built inside its walls. Not even seventeenth-century prints preserve a glimpse of its splendours. Fortunately it was visited by Leland fifty years after Richard’s death. He tells us:

Sheriff Hutton was the nexus of a group of princely manors which all belonged to Richard.

Another castle of which the Duke seems to have been fond was Pontefract in the West Riding, the southernmost of his northern residences. He was also partial to Skipton-in-Craven, and to Barnard Castle in the extreme south-west of Co. Durham. Built on a steep bank a hundred feet above the River Tees, the latter was almost as palatial as Sheriff Hutton, with two inner courtyards and, according to Leland, towers of ‘great lodging’. With its outbuildings it was reputed to cover almost seven acres. Barnard Castle was at the foot of the Pennines and a useful staging place on the long ride from Middleham to Penrith. Constructed of red sandstone like Carlisle, eighteen miles away, Penrith was yet another of Warwick’s former castles to which Richard grew attached. Here too he repaired the local church. Even today its windows preserve portraits said dubiously to be of his father and mother and of himself as King, and an inn in the town is still called The Gloucester Arms.

In addition the Duke must frequently have stayed with his subjects, whether at the mansions of great Lords, at Bishops’ palaces or at abbeys. When he visited York, he usually seems to have been the guest of the Augustinian friars at Lendal. We know that he was not above sleeping at ordinary inns. Yet undoubtedly he preferred splendour, demanding magnificence in his own dwellings. Although he seldom came to London, sometime after 1475 he purchased Crosby Place in Bishopsgate, which had been recently built by a rich woolman, Sir John Crosby. ‘Very large and beautiful and the highest at that time in London’, the Elizabethan antiquary John Stow informs us. (Forty years later it was bought by Thomas More – perhaps its ownership had something to do with his fascination with Richard.)

As Mancini says, Gloucester rarely went to court. The Italian believed that this absence was deliberate, to ‘avoid the Queen’s jealousy’, which sounds likely enough. The Woodvilles were steadily increasing their already substantial power and influence. They consisted of Elizabeth’s two sons, the Marquess of Dorset and Richard Grey – generally known as ‘Lord Richard’ – together with her brothers, Anthony, Earl Rivers, Sir Edward Woodville, Richard Woodville and Lionel Woodville, who was Bishop of Salisbury. In addition some, though not all, of her brothers-in-law belonged to the party, which had acquired such useful recruits as Sir Thomas Vaughan, tutor to the Prince of Wales. Dorset and Sir Edward were reasonably formidable, but the real leader was Rivers.

Lord Rivers was an undeniably attractive figure, chivalrous, cultivated and travelled, a patron of letters, something of a mystic, and even a poet. Mancini gathered that ‘Rivers was always thought of as a generous, sensible and fair minded man, who had shown his quality throughout every possible change of fortune. However successful, he had never harmed anyone but indeed had done many kind actions.’ All these virtues did not stop Lord Rivers from being both ambitious
and ruthless, and in the right circumstances he would obviously make the most of having ‘the care and direction of the King’s son’. In contrast to the Earl, the other three brothers were hated by everybody, not simply for their greed and lack of scruple but for being upstarts. The ‘old nobility’ in particular detested them. Moreover, according to Mancini, the whole of England blamed them for the destruction of Clarence.

The Woodvilles and Greys were not the only people with influence at court. There were two much-respected prelates. One was Richard’s neighbour, the Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor, Thomas Rotherham. The other was the even more formidable John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who was More’s future patron. And above all there was Hastings, Chamberlain of the Royal Household.

William, Lord Hastings, was Edward IV’s oldest and closest friend. Probably that alone was enough to make Elizabeth Woodville his enemy. ‘Hastings against whom the Queen especially grudged for the favour the King bare him,’ explains More. She also suspected he was a bad influence on her husband, ‘familiar with the King in wanton company’. (She may well have been right; after his death Richard’s propagandists would claim that the Chamberlain encouraged Edward ‘by his evil company and sinister procuring … in vicious living and inordinate abusing of his body’.) Furthermore he had been a firm friend of Clarence; it was he who persuaded the Duke to come over from Warwick in 1471. He thought of himself as no less of a friend of Gloucester, his old comrade in arms – we know from More that Richard had a very high opinion of him. On the other hand, there was venomously bad blood between Hastings and Dorset, if Mancini is to be believed. ‘He maintained a deadly feud with the Queen’s son,’ we are told, ‘on account of the mistresses they were always trying to steal or seduce from each other.’ To cap everything, he was Governor of Calais, a post of vital importance which the Woodvilles coveted. While aware of how much his wife loathed the man, Edward IV was unwilling to throw him over after a friendship of twenty years. It is true that on one occasion Rivers managed to slander him so convincingly that the Chamberlain found himself ‘far fallen into the King’s indignation and stood in great fear of himself’ but ‘it lasted not long’. (We only know of this incident from More.)

In 1480 Lord Hastings was fifty – approaching old age by fifteenth-century reckoning – a soldierly mixture of bravery, bluffness and frivolity, not very intelligent. But for all his failings he was deeply respected for his honesty and shining loyalty to the House of York, and was one of the most influential men in England. Everyone except the Woodvilles liked Hastings. He was especially popular with the ‘old nobility’ who regarded him as their spokesman at court against the Queen and her kin.
⁶
(The phrase ‘old nobility’ was really a party label and simply meant those noblemen who disliked the Woodvilles and Greys. Far from being old, an entire new Yorkist peerage had been created; during his reign Edward made four Dukes, two Marquesses, eleven Earls, two Viscounts and six Barons – endowing them with the estates of peers who had backed the losing side.)