Richard III (24 page)

The King received news of the impending rebellion and of Buckingham’s involvement on 11 October. His spies had discovered the plot just in time. It took him so completely by surprise that he was without the Great Seal. On 12 October he wrote from Lincoln to the Lord Chancellor, ordering him to send it with all speed possible. Richard added a postscript, which rings with almost hysterical rage. It contains these words:

(The phrase ‘loved be God’ has a personal sound about it, and may often have been on the King’s lips with perhaps a Yorkshire accent.) The Great Seal arrived soon enough, being delivered to Richard on 18 October at the Angel and Royal Inn at Grantham. His army – including 300 men from York – assembled at Leicester, in sufficient strength for him to be justified in his savage optimism and to march south on 24 October.

As Lord High Constable of England, Buckingham had been the King’s senior military officer. Among his duties was that of presiding over courts martial. To replace him Richard therefore appointed a Vice-Constable. He chose Sir Ralph Assheton of Fritton-in-Redesdale.
Born in 1420 and consequently well over sixty, Assheton was by origin a Lancashire man, although he lived in Yorkshire and had been a Sheriff of that county. Not only had he served with distinction in the Scottish War, but he came from a family noted for soldiers, his father having been one of Henry V’s most trusted senior commanders in France. A long-standing member of the Household, Sir Ralph had ridden in his master’s Coronation procession. He appears to have had an extremely unpleasant name, perhaps partly from the fact that his half-brother was a famous alchemist and partly from his affectation of always wearing black armour, though chiefly because of his ferocity. His conduct during the subsequent campaign in 1483 earned him much hatred. The King gave him power to try treason cases ‘without formalities or appeal’. A grim jingle ran:

The ‘Black Knight’, as he was popularly known on account of his armour, is credited – in legend – with rolling prisoners downhill in barrels filled with spikes. Unquestionably he was the best man for stamping out rebellion of any sort, but Richard did not endear himself to his subjects by employing someone with quite so sinister a reputation as the Black Knight.

Luckily for the King the Duke of Norfolk happened to be in London, where the news of the rising broke on 10 October. Apparently the rebels in the Home Counties would not wait and rose prematurely. He at once began to assemble troops; he wrote to John Paston, among others, asking him to bring ‘six tall fellows in harness’ (armour) and explaining that ‘the Kentishmen be up in the Weald and say that they will come and rob the City’. One may guess that Norfolk had the fervent support of the Londoners, who remembered other visitations from Kent, such as those by Jack Cade and the Bastard of Fauconberg, only too well. The Duke quickly dispatched a small force to occupy Gravesend, and this effectively stopped the Kentishmen from crossing the Thames to join their friends from Essex. He also occupied Reigate,
which frightened off the Surrey men at Betchworth Castle, and sent out raiding parties. Shaken, the rebels withdrew to Guildford to await the arrival of their main army from the West country.
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However, the Duke of Buckingham raised his standard at Brecon on 18 October, as originally planned. This was the same day that Norfolk was occupying Reigate. Accompanied by the Bishop of Ely and various others – including a certain Thomas Nandike, ‘necromancer of Cambridge’, as he was to be described in the subsequent Bill of Attainder – Buckingham began his fateful march. The Westcountrymen also rose as planned, and seem to have proclaimed the Earl of Richmond ‘King Henry VII’ at Bodmin.

Richard, acting ‘in no drowsy manner’, according to the Croyland chronicler, had already used his agents to stir up the Welsh Yorkists. These raided the Duke’s lands as soon as he marched off. The local Welsh had been bullied and oppressed by Buckingham, ‘a sore and hard dealing man’, and must have caused considerable damage – no doubt news of it was brought to the Duke’s levies, who began to desert. In any case few of his ‘tenants’ felt any obligation to join him. Still more important, one of the henchmen, Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton – presumably with the campaign of 1471 in mind – speedily organized breaking down bridges and blockading roads into England. However, it was all unnecessary. The heavens opened and a deluge like Noah’s Flood descended. Soon the Severn and the Avon broke their banks and every little stream became a raging torrent; fords vanished and roads turned into quagmires – the Vale of Evesham transformed itself into an inland sea. The ‘Duke of Buckingham’s Water’ was long remembered, with horror. The chronicler Grafton is almost certainly reporting accurate folk memory when he says that ‘Men were drowned in their beds, children were carried about the fields, swimming in cradles, beasts were drowned on hills; the rage of water lasted continually for ten days.’

Buckingham never succeeded in even crossing the Severn, and only got as far as the Forest of Dean. Sodden, famished, hopelessly demoralized, his unexpectedly small army simply disintegrated and ran for cover. He himself retreated north, perhaps making for Brecon, though by now his stronghold there had been stormed by the King’s
men. The Duke had already entrusted his son Lord Stafford to the wife of a faithful follower, Lady Delabeare, who shaved the little boy’s head, dressed him like a girl and concealed him in a safe place. Buckingham disguised himself as a labourer and took refuge near Wem in Shropshire in the house of a supposedly trustworthy retainer, his servant Humphrey Bannister. Dr Morton, whose instinct for survival was much more strongly developed, made discreetly for East Anglia and, after hiding for a while in the Fens of his diocese, crossed unnoticed to Flanders. (Ludicrously Richard’s latterday partisans have accused the fugitive prelate of finding time, while on the run, to visit Croyland Abbey and falsify its monks’ chronicle.)

Meanwhile, the furious King, with his undoubted flair for strategy, was marching southwards – first towards Coventry, and then towards the West Country, which he had correctly identified as the most dangerous region. He had issued an extraordinary proclamation, phrased in his most self-righteous style, against the ‘traitors, adulterers and bawds’. Headed ‘Proclamation for the Reform of Morals’, it alleges that Dorset was a dishonourer of ‘sundry maids, widows and wives’ and that the rebels were guilty of ‘the damnable maintenance of vices and sin as they had in times past, to the great displeasure of God and evil example of all Christian people’. (Ross comments that it ‘reads more like a tract against sexual licence than a condemnation of armed treason’.)
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More practically, besides these clumsy attempts of character assassination, he offered huge rewards for their capture; whoever apprehended Buckingham would receive either £1,000 or lands worth £100 a year (the fortune of a substantial squire or even knight), though some rebels rated only £12 a year. Richard soon learnt how Norfolk had ended any threat to London, then of the disaster which had overtaken Buckingham.

So did the rebels in the West Country and the Home Counties, themselves demoralized by the wretched weather. They dispersed in panic, those who could fleeing abroad, some going into sanctuary, others taking to the woods. When Richard reached Salisbury at the very end of October, he met no opposition whatever. Shortly afterwards the Duke of Buckingham was brought in by the Sheriff of Shropshire, to whom he had been betrayed by Bannister. (The latter was set up as a
gentleman in reward, as Lord of the Manor of Yalding in Kent.) Buckingham was immediately tried by a court presided over by Assheton and sentenced to death. He begged frantically for an audience of the King, who refused, perhaps wisely, since years later the Duke’s son claimed that his father had meant to kill Richard with a hunting knife. The over-mighty, over-subtle Harry Buckingham was beheaded in Salisbury market place on Sunday 2 November, although it was All Souls’ as well as the Lord’s Day. His vast estates were forfeited to the Crown. The King marched on into the far West Country, right down to Exeter, where he had arrived by 8 November; he installed himself in the Bishops’ Palace from where Peter Courtenay had fled only a few hours before. He was watching the situation throughout the entire South and sent orders to besiege Bodiam in Sussex – though that mighty fortress put up little resistance, quickly surrendering to the Earl of Surrey.
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In the meantime Henry Tudor had sailed from Paimpol in Brittany, apparently in late October. The same storm which ruined the rising inland struck his little fleet at sea and left him with only two ships – he must have had to run before the wind. When he sailed into a West Country port, either Poole or Plymouth, he saw that the harbour was ringed with troops and sent a boat to investigate. The armed men on shore – who were Richard’s – shouted that they were a detachment of Buckingham’s army. Henry was too wary to be caught, and realized that there had been a disaster. Wisely he set sail for Brittany. He was forced to land in Normandy, but after three days received French permission to march back to Brittany. Here he was told of Buckingham’s death, though also that Dorset and others were at Vannes. He summoned them to meet him at Rennes, the ducal capital.

At Exeter, the King executed Sir Thomas St Leger, among others, on 12 November. He was Richard’s brother-in-law, having been the second husband of his sister Anne, and offered a large sum of money in return for his life – to no avail. (There was a familiar moralizing note in the subsequent Act of Attainder; St Leger had ‘by seditious means married Anne, Duchess of Exeter, late wife of the said Duke, he being then living’.) We do not know how many conspirators
perished. Vergil names several besides St Leger whom the King executed together with ‘divers others, even of his own household’. Some were taken to London to suffer. They included four former Yeomen of the Crown to Edward IV, who were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Sir George Browne and another leading rebel were beheaded on Tower Hill in December.

Half a century afterwards Sir Thomas Wyatt – the poet and lover of Anne Boleyn – boasted of the fidelity of his father, Henry Wyatt, to the Earl of Richmond. Richard had imprisoned the elder Wyatt in the Tower for nearly two years, presumably for involvement in the rising of 1483. According to his son, Richard had him racked in his presence. ‘Wyatt, why art thou such a fool?’ asked the King. ‘Henry of Richmond is a beggarly pretender; forsake him and become mine. Thou servest him for moonshine in water.’ The tale is supposedly supported by a fanciful Wyatt family legend of later date:

Wyatt, one is told, persuaded the gaoler to cook the birds for him, surviving to be released by Henry VII and given high office. The legend adds that for the rest of his life Henry Wyatt, ‘would ever make much of cats’. After allowing for poetic exaggeration, there may be a basis of truth in the story of Henry Wyatt’s imprisonment. Wyatt had land in Surrey near Camberwell and could have been recruited for Buckingham by the neighbouring Gaisfords of Carshalton. He was extremely able (to judge from his future career under Henry VII) and the King may indeed have thought that he would make a useful servant.
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Richard spent mid-November marching from Devon to London. He went by way of Salisbury, Winchester, Farnham and Guildford. He returned to his capital in the last week of November, receiving the customary welcome from the leading citizens who rode out to meet him at Kennington.

He had put down an extremely dangerous rebellion without meeting a sword drawn in anger. Yet he was sowing dragon’s teeth. First by confiscating southern estates on a scale which had not been seen for centuries; as Machiavelli might have told him, ‘Men forget the death of their fathers sooner than the loss of their patrimony.’ Moreover, he did not wait for such formalities as Acts of Attainder and confiscated them illegally. Second by giving the estates to northern henchmen like Scrope, Assheton and Ratcliff – the last picked up manors worth nearly £700 a year, the income of a minor peer – or to the greatest in the land, whose loyalty would always be dubious. At least a hundred other Northerners profited. He should have brought in support from other regions as well instead of alienating them by his obvious preference for the North. He simply did not know how to use the vast patronage which had fallen into his hands.