Richard III (27 page)

Chapter Eleven

THE DEATH OF RICHARD’S SON

No one records how Edward of Middleham died. It was clearly a sudden and unexpected death. The Croyland chronicler merely says that it took place after only a very short illness, while Rous calls it ‘a tragic death’. Since his mother was apparently consumptive, the ten-year-old Prince may well have suffered a lung haemorrhage, which could have been both messy and painful. Richard and his Queen were crushed by this cruellest, most hideously ironical of blows. He had been their only son, ‘in whom all the hopes of the royal succession, fortified with so many oaths, were centred,’ the Croyland writer tells us. An eyewitness, he adds ‘You might have seen his father and mother in a state bordering almost of madness, by reason of their sudden grief.’ The boy expired on 9 April, a year to the day after Edward IV, and in an age of omens it seems that many Englishmen saw his death as God’s judgement on Richard – it is quite possible the King did so himself. The chronicler at Croyland observes gloomily, ‘It was fully seen how vain are the thoughts of a man who desires to establish his interests without the aid of God.’ The last Plantagenet Prince of Wales was buried in the parish church at Sheriff Hutton, where his battered, pathetically small, alabaster effigy may still be seen.
¹
There was now
a succession problem, since there was no obvious heir presumptive to the throne. So shaken was Richard that it took him several months to come to a decision.

It may not be over-fanciful to detect a certain deterioration in the King after his son’s death. Admittedly he still tried to be efficient and popular. He negotiated sensible peaces with Scotland and Brittany and found time to deal with Irish affairs. His precautions against Henry Tudor continued to be excellently organized, while he employed a very professional intelligence service – with ‘the aid of spies beyond sea, at whatever price they could be secured, from whom he learned nearly all the movements of the enemy,’ according to the
Croyland Chronicle
. But plainly he felt crippled by his lack of an heir, as he would show by his sinister treatment of his unfortunate wife. He was increasingly worried about his unpopularity and ‘seditious rumours’. There are signs of vacillation, errors of judgement. Growing short of money, he returned to Edward IV’s forced loans – the ‘benevolences’ so ostentatiously forgone in his Parliament. The threat of invasion became an obsession.

When Richard had usurped the throne, Henry Tudor had not even been a cloud on the horizon – simply a Welsh exile from a lost cause, saved from obscurity only by a dash of questionably royal blood. The
Great Chronicle of London
preserves the memory of how little he was known to ordinary people, but how soon they became interested in him – ‘word sprang quickly of a gentleman being in the parts of Brittany named Henry and son of the Earl of Richmond’. Thanks to the usurpation and to his mother and John Morton, his star was clearly rising. By 1484 men were following the fugitives of 1483 across the sea to join him, from motives which varied from sheer opportunism to hatred of the present King of England. It was no longer a fight between Yorkist and Lancastrian but simply a struggle between two claimants. Despite his Coronation, his most royal blood and the purity of Plantagenet descent, Richard remained unaccepted by his people. It did not matter that his rival was part Welsh squire, part Valois prince, with a dash of Beaufort in him. Henry Tudor was the sole alternative.

For – as contemporaries, including the King himself, must have realized with bewilderment – the once invincible Yorkist party had
broken in pieces. The loyalties which had triumphed at Towton, at Barnet and at Tewkesbury, which had eventually made Edward IV impregnable, no longer existed. The members of Edward’s Order of Our Lady of the White Rose may still have worn their insignia, yet they were ready to abandon their rose. Some former Yorkists had joined Henry Tudor, more would do so, while many who did neither nevertheless detested Richard, and were not going to risk their necks for him in battle. In place of the old Yorkist party the King had only his henchmen and three overmighty subjects – two of them treacherous.

Henry’s supporters were an increasingly formidable band.
²
What was beginning to look like a court in exile included Lords Dorset, Pembroke (Jasper Tudor), Rivers (Edward Woodville), Devon (Edward Courtenay) and Welles, and many knights and gentlemen. There was also a briefless barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, Thomas Lovell, who would end his life as Treasurer of the Royal Household. Clerics too were joining the cause, not just the Bishops of Ely and Exeter, but men like Richard Fox, a future Bishop of Winchester. Morton, who for some reason preferred to stay in Flanders, communicated with Henry through Christopher Urswick, Rector of Puttenham in Hertfordshire, Margaret Beaufort’s confessor and one day to be Dean of Windsor. (Perhaps ironically this 36-year-old ‘honest, approved and serviceable priest’ was a Northcountryman from Furness in Lancashire.)
³
Henry of Richmond may eventually have had as many as 500 followers with him in Brittany and France. They were certainly not a revived Lancastrian party, whatever Henry may have claimed, but simply an anti-Richard III party – as the King himself must have recognized with some bitterness.

Plainly Richard was by now only too well aware that the Welshman whom he had not even bothered to name in his proclamation against Buckingham the previous year was a danger to be eliminated at all costs. Once Henry Tudor was out of the way Richard would be perfectly secure. There was no other possible Pretender capable of challenging the King with any hope of success. Buckingham was dead; admittedly he had left a son – later to be executed by Henry VIII precisely because of his royal descent – but in 1484 he was only six.
Otherwise there was Clarence’s son Warwick, aged eight (and perhaps mentally retarded, though there is no firm evidence), Warwick’s sister – also to be executed by Henry VIII – and the bastardized daughters of Edward IV. The ‘Old Royal Blood of England’ had run very thin indeed.

Since the summer of 1483, Richard had had an envoy at the court of Duke Francis, one Dr Thomas Hutton – ‘a man of pregnant wit’ and presumably of unusual diplomatic skill – and a member of his own Council. Hutton’s first instructions make no mention of Henry, and his main business seems to have been to negotiate a friendly alliance, Brittany standing in relation to France much as Scotland did to England. He was sharp enough to pick up news of Henry’s first expedition and rush back to warn Richard. The difficulty with Francis II of Brittany was the Duke’s fear, admittedly quite understandable, of Louis XI of France – the English King’s refusal to supply troops to defend the Duchy against the French threat explains why Francis had helped the Tudor. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the Duke was suffering from what appear to have been fits of premature senility, and that control over Breton affairs was passing into the hands of his unusually venal minister Pierre Landois.

Landois realized the financial possibilities of the situation. Some time in May 1484 his agents arrived in England and negotiated what was meant to be a lasting peace. At considerable expense Richard signed a treaty at Pontefract on 8 June, a treaty with secret clauses. He would supply a thousand archers, pay the Duke the revenues of the Earldom of Richmond – which had once belonged to the House of Brittany – and pay other large sums. In return Landois, who would be the real pecuniary beneficiary, would ensure that Henry Tudor was kept under strict confinement – probably he had every intention of handing Henry over.

Once again Morton thwarted the King. Somehow he heard of the negotiations with Landois and sent Urswick to warn Henry. Also acting under Morton’s instructions, Urswick – having delivered his message to Henry at Vannes – went on to the French court to beg an asylum in France. The Tudor would plainly be of use to the French as a stick with which to threaten England if necessary, especially in any conflict over Brittany. The actual ruler of France was not of course the boy Charles VIII, but his elder sister Anne de Beaujeu. Although only twenty-two, she was extremely formidable, a true daughter of Louis XI, who controlled the French Council through her husband, the future Duke of Bourbon. Francis II had no male heir and it was more than likely that when he died both Richard and the new Habsburg rulers of Flanders would do their best to stop France from taking over Brittany – the last of the semi-independent
appenages
within the French Kingdom.

Urswick found the French court at Angers and had no difficulty in obtaining a passport for Henry. The Tudor then sent a large deputation of his followers from Vannes to plead his cause with Duke Francis, who at that moment was most conveniently in residence near the Anjou border. This was a feint; his uncle Jasper had orders to take the party into France by side roads and bridle paths, which they did successfully. Meanwhile, Henry stayed behind at Vannes with a considerable group, to avoid causing any suspicion. However, two days after Jasper’s departure, escorted by only five servants, he himself left Vannes on the pretext of visiting a friend at a nearby manor. Five miles on, the little group disappeared into a wood, where the Tudor changed clothes with one of his servants. They then rode as hard as possible by a secret route for Anjou, deliberately changing direction several times – so careful was Henry that his followers in Vannes had no idea that he had left them. All went well and he crossed the frontier, rejoining his uncle Jasper’s party at Angers as planned. It was in the nick of time. Troops sent by Landois with instructions to arrest him reached the border only an hour after he had crossed it.

The exact date of this sensational escape is not known, but Henry Tudor undoubtedly received a friendly welcome at the French court. The Council gave instructions on 11 October that he and his supporters were to be treated with honour; it also made financial provision for them. Then Duke Francis suddenly and unexpectedly recovered his wits and was furious with Landois for having harried this useful refugee into escaping. He summoned Sir Edward Woodville and Edward Poynings, the chief among the Tudor followers left behind at Vannes, and gave them and their friends permission, together with travelling expenses, to rejoin their master in France for over a year. Henry and his by now very substantial following were to accompany the peripatetic French court on progress, from Angers to Montargis and then to Paris.

Richard finally decided that he had no hope of repeating the glories of 1482 in Scotland. That summer the Duke of Albany and his fellow exile, the Earl of Douglas, led what may have been a fairly considerable attack into Dumfriesshire; but on 22 July their English troops were cut to pieces at Lochmaben; Douglas was captured and though Albany succeeded in fleeing back across the Border, he was plainly of little future value. It was clear that there would be no more military promenades to an undefended Edinburgh and that Albany would never be ‘Alexander IV’; he died in France the following year, accidentally killed in a joust by the Duke of Orléans (the future Louis XII). The raiding and counter-raiding went on and it is likely that the Scots had the best of it.