The Last White Rose (34 page)

You shall be led to the King’s prison and there laid on a hurdle and so drawn to the place of execution, and there to be hanged, cut down alive, your members to be cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burned before you, your head smitten off, and your body quartered and divided at the King’s will, and may God have mercy on your soul.
¹⁰

Although both verdict and sentence may no doubt have been technically sound according to the law of the land, morally they amounted to murder. A recent American biographer of Buckingham has argued that sixteenth-century England always accepted such decisions without question.
¹¹
However, this was simply not true, as, for example, had been amply demonstrated by the revulsion at Warwick’s fate. ‘If all the patterns of a lawless prince had been lost in the world, they might have been found in this king,’ Sir Walter Raleigh later observed of Henry VIII.

‘You have said as a traitor should be said unto, but I was never none,’ the duke told the court calmly. ‘But my lords I nothing malign [you] for that you have done to me, but the eternal God forgive you my death, and I do [too].’ He added, with the curious fatalism of Tudor victims of state, ‘I shall never sue to the King for life, howbeit he is a gracious prince.’ Buckingham ended by saying, ‘I desire you, my lords, and all my fellows to pray for me.’ Then he was taken back to the Tower, the axe displayed with its edge towards him where he sat in the barge. Shakespeare refines movingly the words attributed by Hall:
¹²
‘When I came hither, I was lord high constable, And Duke of Buckingham: now, poor Edward Bohun.’ (
Henry VIII
, Act II, scene 1)

His son-in-law Lord Bergavenny (once Edmund de la Pole’s boon companion) was committed to the Tower for not having reported the duke’s alleged threats against the king. This made him guilty of the crime called ‘misprision of treason’ and he was only released on payment of a huge fine. This so impoverished Bergavenny that, years afterwards, the imperial
ambassador would comment sardonically that he had ‘lost all his feathers’.

The Carthusians of Hinton wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, asking that Dan Nicholas should be sent to some other charterhouse, ‘there to be punished for his offences as long as shall please the King’s noble grace’.
¹³
According to tradition, poor Hopkyns died from grief. Nothing more is known about the other witnesses.

On 17 May 1521 Buckingham was escorted by 500 troops to Tower Hill, where he was beheaded, dying on the block with notable courage despite a messy execution that took three strokes of the axe to cut off his head. As had been done with Warwick and Suffolk before him, his corpse – reunited to his head – was buried in the church of the Austin Friars. Even Hall, a fanatical supporter of everything done by King Henry, admitted that many of the watching crowd (who may have included Hall himself) were in tears.

At the next Parliament an Act of Attainder was passed, disinheriting Buckingham’s heirs and confiscating his estates. Yet another indignity had already been inflicted, the duke’s posthumous ‘degradation’ from the Order of the Garter. His garter-plate and banner with the arms of England (the display of which gave Henry so much offence) were taken down from over his former stall in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Then the heralds solemnly kicked the insignia out of the chapel before throwing them into a ditch.

More than a few of Buckingham’s contemporaries felt sorry for him. Having read the chronicles of Hall and the Elizabethan historian Stowe, Shakespeare hints at this pity, although he shifts most of the blame for his destruction from Henry on to Wolsey. While there was not the slightest sign of protest, the incident contributed to the king’s growing unpopularity. Some of his subjects began to realize he was no longer the young god whom they had worshipped at his accession in 1509 and that they had an alarmingly ruthless ruler.

Edward Stafford’s only ‘crime’ lay in speaking of the possibility that Henry VIII and his children might die young, and that he would inherit the crown.

20. Winter 1520–Spring 1521: ‘A Giant Traitor’

1
. W. Roper,
The Life of Sir Thomas More
, London, J.M. Dent, 1906, p. 14

2
. Vergil,
op. cit
., p. 278

3
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. III (i), 1070.

4
. William Shakespeare,
Henry VIII
, Act 2, Sc 1.

5
.
LP Hen VIII,
op. cit
., vol. III (i), 1283.

6
.
Ibid
., 1284.

7
. In J.S. Brewer,
The
Reign of Henry VIII from his Accession to the
Death of
Wolsey
, ed. J. Gairdner, London, 1884, vol. 1, pp. 391–2.

8
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. III (i), 1284.

9
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 623.

10
.
Ibid
., p. 624.

11
. Harris,
Edward Stafford, op. cit
., pp. 192–3.

12
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 624.

13
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. VI, 1164; Thompson,
History of the
Somerset Carthusians
, p. 284.

21

Winter 1524–5: A White Rose Dies

‘The White Rose died on the field of battle – I saw him lying dead with all the others.’

Macquereau, Histoire générale de l’Europe
¹

In October 1518 a new peace between England and France put plans for a Yorkist invasion on hold once again. More discouragement came in June 1520 after Henry VIII and Francis I had an exceptionally amiable meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold, although the French king continued to pay the White Rose a lavish pension. When the Chevalier Baudoiche asked for the return of his mansion (perhaps because Richard had seduced his daughter), the canons of Metz cathedral gave Richard a lease for life at a low rent for a château called La Haulte Pierre near St Symphorien on condition he refurbished it, which he could afford to do in splendid style. Undoubtedly, his standing at the French court remained high. In 1518 Francis had acquired a strong-minded new mistress, the Comtesse de Châteaubriant.
Born Françoise de Foix and sister of Marshal Lautrec, she was Richard’s cousin and an invaluable contact.

Never for a moment did he lose sight of his ambition to take Henry’s place on the throne. In September 1519 a priest named Edward Allen was arrested at Leicester, accused of being one of Richard’s spies, suspicion being further aroused when servants of Lord Hastings and Sir Richard Stanley brought Allen expensive food in prison – a haunch of venison – although there was no evidence to implicate their employers. The authorities were also worried about the Marquess of Dorset, but unable to find any solid proof that he supported the White Rose.

Rumours persisted that Richard was on his way with an invasion fleet. In August 1521 a totally unfounded story circulated that, accompanied by the Duke of Albany, he had landed at Dunbar and, joined by Scottish troops, was marching south towards the Border, although after their bloody humiliation at Flodden the Scots were in no mood to risk another war. Even so, during the following year Wolsey was to complain of Albany’s support for the White Rose, declaring that King Francis was encouraging him. The cardinal was more than justified. About midsummer the same year, King Francis commissioned Derick van Reydt to tell Duke Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp that should the English attack France or Scotland he intended to give Richard an invasion fleet.
²
Later, he suggested that Frederick’s daughter should marry Richard if he succeeded, and Frederick was so excited that he sent his secretary to Paris to discuss the idea.

At home, Yorkist sentiment was far from dead, even though most of those who still retained it were usually wise enough not to advertise the fact. In May 1521, however, the parson of Rampisham in Dorset, Robert Sherard, told a parishioner called Agnes Clyfton that the king was unworthy of his crown – ‘the father of Henry VIII was a horsegroom and a keeper of horses’, who had no more right to the crown than Agnes because ‘he came to the throne by dint of the sword’.
³
During the previous month Lord Mounteagle had arrested his own (bastard) son,
together with another parson and a soldier called John Goghe (or Strydley), for planning to go abroad and join the White Rose. Goghe had boasted of meeting Richard de la Pole at Rouen, saying he was ‘a valiant man, worthy to be a great captain’.
⁴
Admittedly, these two were obviously a most unsavoury pair, the priest accompanied by his young mistress and Goghe bragging of his success as a blackmailer.

The Duke of Buckingham’s execution that spring had horrified many of the courts of Western Europe, besides damaging Henry’s popularity at home. In August 1521 a Hanse merchant, Perpoynte Deventer, informed the English authorities that the Lieutenant Governor of Boulogne had asked him if he knew the duke’s son, commenting that a Yorkist invasion from Scotland would certainly find 50,000 supporters in England. Deventer said, too, that he had met the Duc de la Trémouille, the French king’s Lord Chamberlain, who told him that if Henry declared war the White Rose would cross the Channel. In addition, the Duc de Vendôme had told Deventer that France and Denmark were planning to help Richard raise a revolt in areas with estates that had formerly belonged to Buckingham.

In the meantime, the White Rose acquired a mistress at Metz, a certain Sebille who was considered the loveliest young woman in the city – ‘tall, straight and slender, and white as snow’, according to the chronicler Philippe de Vignolles. She was the wife of a rich goldsmith, Mâitre Nicholas, employed by Richard, who sent him on a mission to Paris so that he could seduce her. In the autumn of 1520 she fled to La Haulte Pierre to live with him, prudently bringing with her the pick of her husband’s jewels. Shortly after, Richard was acosted in the streets of Metz by the incensed Nicholas with a band of friends. Richard drew his dagger and, when the goldsmith ran for his life, threw it after him. The city council intervened, and Richard offered to give her up, on condition her husband did not beat her. Nicholas refused, hiring German assassins to kill him, but he escaped. Eventually, Sebille rejoined Richard and for the next three
years they lived together at Toul in a house lent to them by the Cardinal of Lorraine.
⁵