Richard III (10 page)

The Duke of Gloucester’s feelings about George’s end are unknown. Mancini reports he was so overcome by grief that he could not hide it. More, while admitting that in public he opposed Clarence’s killing, is not so sure. ‘Some wise men also think that his drift, covertly conveyed, lacked not in helping forth his brother to his death, which he resisted openly, howbeit somewhat (as men deemed) more faintly than he that were heartily minded to his welfare.’ Sir Thomas adds that the same observers thought it quite possible he was glad to see George out of the way in case it became feasible to aim at the throne. Vergil’s information, that the King frequently lamented how no one had pleaded for Clarence’s life, is significant; the youngest of the three brothers had not bothered.

Richard’s anger was real enough, but it was anger at the triumph of the Queen and her kindred – even if he had stood aside and let them persuade Edward to destroy George. Undoubtedly his intercession would have saved his brother. One can only deduce that his failure to do so was deliberate. It is true that he would not obtain the rest of the Warwick estates, which went to the Crown. What he did gain was to become the nearest adult male in line of succession.

Gloucester had won his battle with Clarence. Three days before his uncle’s bizarre death, little Edward of Middleham received one of his titles, being made Earl of Salisbury. Three days after it Richard became again Great Chamberlain of England, an office which he had surrendered some years previously to his late brother at the King’s request. At the very least this indicates a robustly unsentimental attitude.
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However, as Francis Bacon observes of the Plantagenets, ‘It was a race often dipped in their own blood.’

Chapter Seven

RICHARD IN THE NORTH

In the North Richard Gloucester became the mightiest subject that any English King has ever had. By the end of his time there, not even John of Gaunt or the King-maker had possessed more power or independence. It was not just because of his wide lands and many offices. It was a considerable achievement, since Northcountrymen were not easy to govern and the region held ancient loyalties to strongly entrenched families. Yet one may detect shortcomings.

Beyond question the Duke’s overall administration was brilliantly successful. It laid the foundation of the Council of the North, which he set up when he was King and which lasted until Charles I’s time. This enabled Northerners’ problems to be taken care of on the spot instead of being referred to London. Always suspicious of Southerners, the Northcountry people must none the less have been flattered that Richard so seldom left them, not even to go to court which – Mancini heard – ‘he rarely visited’. There is no evidence that he graced Gloucester with his presence before he became King, nor that he ever went to his enormous estates in South Wales. As Anne’s husband, the Nevill’s clan, with their countless retainers, accepted him as a kinsman
and gave him their loyalty. He strove consciously to be worthy of it. Like his Nevill grandfather, he immersed himself in Border politics, guarding his folk against Scots raiders. One may guess that he took on Northcountry qualities, perhaps mannerisms; conceivably a Yorkshire accent was among them. He was always on ceaseless progress throughout the region. It is indisputable that his firm hand and employment of northern officials won him golden opinions and devoted servants among the townsmen and among some of the gentry. But in the end Gloucester’s dependence on the North and, above all, his omnipresence there were to help contribute to his downfall.

The North – England north of the river Trent – was a bleak, often rugged country. West of the Pennine Chain, the Lakeland hills of Cumberland and Westmorland and the sandy wastes and moors of Lancashire were generally poor and sparsely populated, though with pockets of good farmland. East of the Pennines, it was much more varied, rich wolds alternating with vast tracts of desolate moorland – even Derbyshire had its moors. York, the northern capital, was large, rich and prosperous, but the other two principal cities, Durham of the Prince Bishops and Carlisle, were comparatively small – Carlisle’s walls being ‘in compass scant a mile’, according to Leland.

As a race the Northerners were all but intractable – in 1489 a mob lynched the Earl of Northumberland for failing to cut their taxes. They were hard men, harsh and dour. They grew rougher and more warlike still towards the Border, Shaftoes and Fenwicks being a byword for ferocity, a society organized for war. Their squires lived in fortified ‘peel’ towers, not just to defend themselves from the Scots but as protection against their neighbours. Robbery, rustling, arson and manslaughter were endemic. The South dreaded them. A proverb ran:

Gloucester was of course supreme in Cumberland, Westmorland and West Yorkshire, where the bulk of his estates lay. (A local speciality there was the ‘Carlisle axe’, a peculiarly vicious form of halberd.) In addition, although Warden of only the West Marches against Scotland, he had tacit authority over Lord Northumberland, who was the Warden
of the East and Middle Marches. And, as Steward of the Duchy of Lancaster, Richard was all powerful in much of Lancashire as well. In substance, therefore, he was more or less viceroy of England north of Trent. Yet before he became King he would strengthen his position even further.

The Duke was interested in every aspect of his new domain, down to its mineral wealth. He fell victim to the sales patter of some enterprising German miners – though one source says it was a certain George Willarby – who convinced him that silver would be found next to local deposits of copper. In 1475 he obtained the custody of mines in Westmorland from Edward IV, and he appears to have had copper mines operating at Keswick and Alston in Cumberland and also in Northumberland (jointly with the Earl). Ten per cent of the silver was to go to the King. There is no record of any being found.
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Understandably Gloucester was frequently at York, an easy ride from his castle of Sheriff Hutton. The city boasted 12,000 inhabitants and sixty churches – with nine more outside the walls – as evidence of its prosperity. It contained countless artisans and tradesmen and still more merchants who, via the River Ouse and Kingston-upon-Hull, traded with the Low Countries, Germany and the Baltic. The Duke took calculated pains to flatter them all, dealing with such petty matters as the removing of illegal fish traps from the local rivers, and intervening in a disputed election for Mayor. Sometimes he managed to have them exempted from taxes. In 1476 when the King wanted to punish the city for riots, he persuaded him to relent. On one occasion he even sent a member of his household to be tried by the Mayor and Corporation for insulting a citizen of York.

Richard also made a point of being present at the chief event in the city’s year. This was the Mystery Plays, which were performed by the guilds on Corpus Christi – a feast falling between late May and June. As many as 600 players took part in fifty or more scenes staged on wagons in the streets around the Minster.
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In 1477 the Duke and his Duchess tactfully joined the Corpus Christi Guild, one of the richest in York, since it had close connections with the wealthy Merchant Adventurers Company. Graciously they walked in the guild’s procession when it escorted the Host in its silver and beryl pyx to the
great cathedral, led by priests in gorgeous vestments and acolytes carrying candles and burning incense as they chanted. Richard was never averse to a procession of this sort, having a marked taste for formal piety.

His modern defenders make much of his popularity in York. But however rich its citizens may have been, they were politically negligible even though they paid good taxes and supplied soldiers. It is a cliché among historians of the Wars of the Roses that the cities took little part in the struggle. The Duke should have concentrated his energies on winning more friends among the magnates.

Durham had considerable status as the capital of what was almost an independent country, a palatine bishopric comprising Co. Durham itself together with parts of Northumberland and some places in Yorkshire. It was a buffer state between England and Scotland over which the Prince Bishop ruled like a king, striking his own money. It was frequently attacked by the Scots and, if he had little say in its administration, Gloucester had cause to be concerned about its military situation.

For one of the Duke’s problems was that his fief was a frontier land. Every so often Scots raiders struck deep into it, killing, plundering, burning, driving off cattle, in hit-and-run attacks. While York was too far south for them, Durham and Carlisle had always to be prepared for such irruptions, the people round about depending on fortified peel towers and
bastles
(i.e. bastilles) for protection. Richard had to be constantly on progress, not just to dispense justice among his violently quarrelsome subjects, but in order to organize the defences against invasion.

Carlisle, in Cumberland and only a few miles from the Border, was unmistakably a frontier town. Built of red sandstone, it possessed an imposing cathedral and a prosperous market, but was dominated by the huge castle on its bluff which was intended – perhaps unrealistically – to strike fear into Scots. The latter, popularly known as ‘Moss Troopers’, terrorized the local countryside, sallying forth from hidden fastnesses in the ‘Debatable Land’, as the wild moors and marshes of the Solway Moss were called. The Duke had to pay many visits to Carlisle.

A little town which he also visited on a number of occasions was Scarborough in Yorkshire. Like York it had once been controlled by the Earl of Northumberland, but Richard exchanged it for some of his wife’s estates. He developed close links with it and may even have had a house there instead of using the great castle on the cliffs over the North Sea. It was the nearest port to Sheriff Hutton, and a fast horseman could reach it in a few hours. When he became King, Gloucester made it into a county of its own, an extraordinary distinction. The reason for his interest was undoubtedly privateering. The Scots raided by sea as well as by land, even in peacetime, chiefly from Leith, and the English retaliated. The Duke took his office of Lord High Admiral very seriously indeed. In the South he delegated his legal work to a Dr William Godyer, who heard cases appertaining to the sea on a Thames-side quay in Southwark. Here in the North Richard was able to play an active role and fitted out his own ships – in 1474 one of them, the
May Flower
, captured a vessel called
The Yellow Carvel
, which belonged to the King of Scots, and an embassy had to be sent to James III to apologize. Privateering was a nasty, cruel business, captured crews being generally thrown overboard without mercy. There is no record of the Duke sailing on any of these expeditions.

Most warfare waged by Richard was on land. In April 1474 the Duke of Albany, brother to the Scots King, prepared to repulse the Duke of Gloucester, who was rumoured to be about to raid either the West or the Middle Marches of Scotland. This particular raid does not seem to have taken place. (A few years later Richard was to meet Albany in very different circumstances.) But hostilities between English and Scots were perennial.

No great northern lord can have liked having a Royal Duke, and an unusually formidable one, on his doorstep. Not only was Gloucester the King’s brother, but through his mother and wife he was a Nevill as well, and if he had acquired Nevill lands, he had also inherited Nevill feuds – something which he may not have quite understood. Even minor gentry must have been unsettled by so brutal a transference of loyalties as that which took place after the Yorkist triumph. Richard’s presence constituted nothing less than a revolution – social and administrative
as well as dynastic. It is logical to suspect that conservative northern magnates were only too anxious to be rid of this meddlesome interloper, but because of the fear he inspired they hid their resentment under a mask of friendship and co-operation. The fact that he trusted them until the very last indicates a serious inability to judge his fellow men.

Above all, Gloucester misjudged the Percys. Until the rise of the Nevills they had been paramount in northern England. As Lancastrians they had lost their Earldom of Northumberland with the third Earl, who fell at Towton; many other members of the family had also died fighting against the House of York in the recent wars. Henry, the fourth Earl – six years older than Richard – had seen the inside of both the Fleet prison and the Tower before being restored to his lands and honours in 1469. Timid and indecisive, Lord Northumberland was quite ready to co-operate with Edward IV’s all-powerful brother. But it was surely unrealistic to expect him, a genuine, canny Northcountryman, to be unshakeably loyal to someone who, apart from everything else, was a self-made, imitation Northerner, and who must have had irritating southern ways. Furthermore, Gloucester was regarded as an ally by his wife’s Nevill kindred – the very last association to recommend him to a Percy. Yet the Duke obviously trusted the Earl. It surely needed excessive self-confidence to do so. Henry Percy was almost as supreme in the North East as Gloucester was in the North West and in addition commanded a deep, traditional respect throughout the North as a whole. The Duke took the greatest pains to be tactful, acting jointly with him whenever possible. But even if there was a species of condominium and if he was accorded a second-in-command’s rank, it was inevitable that Henry of Northumberland should resent Richard’s primacy. It is plain that he particularly resented the Duke’s influence in York, where once his forebears’ wishes had always been respected; nowadays the citizens took every opportunity to appeal against him to Richard, who invariably supported them. Gloucester and Northumberland were always vying with one another, though perhaps they did not admit it to themselves. Foreseeably – though not foreseen by the Duke – the Earl would eventually betray his rival.

Richard showed still more baseless sang-froid about another magnate, who was what would today be termed an outstanding security risk. Thomas, second Lord Stanley, born in 1435, belonged to a comparatively new great family which was still rising. During recent years it had acquired large estates in Cheshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire. Its present head, once Warwick’s brother-in-law, had twice switched his allegiance from York to Lancaster and then back again. As if that were not enough, his new wife was one of the last surviving Beauforts – Margaret, Countess of Richmond and mother to Henry Tudor. Yet, however obviously a natural traitor, the ‘wily fox’ was always too clever for Gloucester. In the end Thomas Stanley would kill him, or see that someone else did.
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Henry, fourth Lord Scrope of Bolton, was one of the rare northern magnates who might reasonably have been expected to be faithful to Gloucester. Born the same year as Stanley, he had an impeccably Yorkist background; not only had he fought with the King at Towton, but his grandfather had been executed in 1415 with Richard’s grandfather for plotting against Henry V. Admittedly he had compromised briefly with Warwick in 1470, but he had quickly returned to being Edward IV’s loyal and useful servant. Nevertheless, he bore a grudge; he resented the failure to give him back the Lordship of Man, confiscated from his family at the beginning of the century and now held by the Stanleys – doubtless Gloucester often heard about this when visiting Scrope at his splendid stronghold of Bolton. As with Northumberland, the Duke clearly had complete trust in him.
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