Richard The Chird (37 page)

Leaving their robes of estate upon the dais, Richard and Anne retired for a little to their private chambers. It was perhaps in this domestic interlude that Anne presented to her husband the coronation gift which Peter Curteys had agreed to make for her: a long gown of purple cloth of gold embroidered with insignias of the Garter and white roses and lined with white damask. Perhaps, too, they commented to each other on certain minor aspects of the ceremony, which must have struck many who saw it. Buckingham had blazed in solitary splendor—his Wood-ville wife had not attended, or had not been permitted by her lord to attend. Lord Stanley's lady, on the other hand, like Stanley himself, had been specially honored. While many an earl had merely walked in procession, Baron Stanley had borne the Constable's mace, though he was not Constable, 8 * and while numerous countesses and even the Duchess of Norfolk took stations behind

the Queen, it was Stanley's wife, the mother of Henry Tudor, who carried Anne's train and stood on the left hand of her seat of estate.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Norfolk had ridden into Westminster Hall on a charger trapped to the ground in cloth of gold to dismiss the throng of spectators so that the coronation banquet might begin. Buckingham busily supervised the setting up of four great tables in the lower part of the hall and one on the dais. At four o'clock in the afternoon the King and Queen made their appearance. When the lords and ladies had done their homage, they retired to their respective boards: one for the bishops, one for the earls, one for the barons, and a board for the ladies, who sat all on one side with their carvers kneeling before them. At the table on the dais Richard was seated in the middle, with Anne on the left end. Whenever the royal couple touched food, cloths of estate were held over their heads. Two squires were stretched prone at Richard's feet. Norfolk, Surrey, Lord Audeley (the carver), and the King's boyhood friends Sir Robert Percy and Viscount Lovell served him with dishes of gold and silver. At the beginning of the second course Sir Robert Dymmock, the King's Champion, rode into the hall in pure white armor astride a steed trapped in red and white silk. After he had delivered his traditional challenge and the hall had resounded with the single, massive cry, "King Richard!" the Champion was served red w°ine in a covered cup. He drank, cast the rest of the wine to the floor, and retired with the cup as his fee.

It was growing dark now. For the third course the attendants served only wafers and hippocras. As men appeared bearing clusters of flaming wax torches and torchets, the noble company gathered round the dais to make obeisance to their new-crowned sovereigns. To the music of the trumpets and clarions, Richard and Anne walked from the hall, and the lords and their ladies departed into the summer darkness.

Never before had the Abbey witnessed so gorgeous a coronation. 9 * With the exception of three earls who were minors and a handful of other nobles, the entire peerage of England had assisted at the enthronization of King Richard. By comparison, the

coronation of Edward IV and, even more, the coronation of Henry VII were rump affairs. Richard had reason to think that the realm had accepted him with good heart.

If he stood musing at an open window in his chamber, he must have heard the murmur of the tide, and seen, beyond the great, dark curve of the Thames, the glimmer of lights. So had the Plantagenets who had gone before him gazed upon the river and the town, moved by the glory of St. Edward's diadem. So too had his brother gazed. Edward had loved London. Edward had been as comfortably at ease in this palace as if it were a favorite cloak. Yet Edward too had taken the crown. ... A thousand problems loomed in the darkness. But they were all one problem —to reach the hearts of men and satisfy them that he was their sovereign. Only thus could he hope to satisfy his own conscience and to endure the eye of God. Had God withheld His Presence from the chrism? In his own works he must seek an answer. He was a King.

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England: 1483*

Then this land was famously enriched

THOUGH the walls and spires of London stood in Richard's sight as they had for centuries, new forces and transformations, decay and fresh growth of which Richard could only sense the first effects, coursed in the blood of the giant that, beyond the east windows of Westminster Palace, lay sprawled beside the tidal water that gave it life.

The London of King Richard more nearly resembled, perhaps, the town of Edward the Third than the city of Elizabeth, since the daily pageantry of the Church was yet to be shorn and suburbs would blot out environing fields and farms; but in its riches, energy, and self-esteem London was far more like what it was to become under Gloriana than what it had been. It was the principal home of the King; it was now the seat of Parliament, which at the bidding of the House of York had ceased to wander from town to town; it housed the great lawyers in their inns, courtiers, bishops, foreign merchants, and envoys dispatched by the European princes. All the highways of the island led to the capital;

its broad estuary enticed the traffic of the Channel and the seas: around it lay some of the most fertile lands in the kingdom. To the marvel of continental visitors, London blazed on the far perimeter of civilization the Queen City of the Oceans. If Paris was the largest and Rome or Venice the grandest, London was the richest and busiest of towns.

It was a filthy, crowded, clamorous hive of human activity—its narrow streets, many unpaved, running all huggermugger, darkened by the leaning upper stories of gilt and gabled houses and thick with refuse which was left to be scavenged by flocks of kites and ravens. Erasmus, a few years after this time, permitted himself to be appalled by the stench and the dirt; but his nose, it must be remembered, had been thrown somewhat out of joint by his failure to find preferment and by an unfortunate argument with the royal customs which had left him twenty pounds the poorer. Yet, dirty the city certainly was. It was also an architectural hodgepodge. So thought Italian visitors, accustomed to their sharply defined cities of stone. They found the houses quaint and crazy, comfortable and often opulent on the inside but built every which way as fancy and convenience dictated— houses with ground floor of stone supporting wooden eaves and "pentices"; houses of half-timber and whitewashed plaster; here and there a building of brick, or a thatched roof, or a stone mansion. London architecture was like the English law: traditional, eccentric, and mysterious. Yet, despite themselves, these visitors were impressed, even awed. A double wonder invests their comments: their marveling at London and their marveling at their own enchantment.

The heart of the city—its chief highway and its means of life —was the clear-flowing river. Small boats plied up and down like restless water bugs. The barges of the great glided westward to Westminster or down to Greenwich, floating caravans of carved wood and gilding, gay with banners, with the liveries of the oarsmen, with burnished armor or scarlet gowns. The barges slid between the traffic of the seas. The greatest vessels— carracks of Genoa or the Flanders galleys—had to tie up five

miles below the city; but ships of a hundred tons—and many whose prows split the oceans were no larger—sailed up past the Tower to the city's heart. On many of these the old leg-of-mutton sail had given way to a rigging of several sails which permitted them to navigate closer to the wind and to hold their courses in heavy weather. A forest of masts and tackle grew thick along the river bank. Great cranes—amazing to the Italians—swung bales from ship to shore. From the Tower to Blackfriars stretched the wharves and warehouses, broken by the battlements of Baynard's Castle and by the stone bulk of the Steelyard, the shop-warehouse-legatine compound of the Easterlings which stood where Cannon Street Station stands now.

The crown of the river was the Bridge, known throughout Christendom as one of the wonders of the world. It was grander, longer, and more exciting than the Rialto, the Ponte Vecchio, the Pont Neuf. With stone gates at both ends and a towered gate in the middle from which the drawbridge was worked (kept permanently lowered after 1481), London Bridge supported on its twenty pillars of bright white stone a piece of the city itself. Its ancient roadway was hemmed on both sides by the ground-floor shops of mercers and haberdashers who dwelt in the stories above. Underneath, the current rushed with a low roar through nineteen arches; "shooting the bridge" was only for the experienced waterman. The dwellings and the drawbridge still bore scars of the great night battle the citizens had fought with Jack Cade's rabble in the summer of 1450 and of the Bastard of Faucon-berg's attack in the spring of 1471.

By present-day standards London was neither large nor populous. It housed between fifty and seventy-five thousand inhabitants—four times the number of its nearest rivals, York and Bristol, and, in the opinion of an Italian visitor, no fewer than Florence or Rome. It stretched little more than a mile along the river and less than that from the river to its northern walls. Its extent is recalled today in the names of streets and Underground stations. From the Tower, its eastern boundary on the river, the city wall—marked by its gates—ran in a rough semicircle north-

ward to Aldgate, then westward past Moorgate and Aldersgate and so south by Newgate and by Ludgate, on the hill west of St. Paul's, to Blackfriars on the river.

Dominic Mancini presents the only surviving description of the city as it looked on the day that Richard was crowned, "London might complain of us for ignoring her," he says, a as she is so famous throughout the world." He distinguishes three principal paved streets, "the busiest in the whole city and almost straight. Of these three, the one closer to the river and lower than the rest, is occupied by liquid and weighty commodities: there are to be found all mariner of minerals, wines, honey, pitch, wax, flax, ropes, thread, grain, fish and 71 —adds the refined Italian, dead to the romance of commerce—"other distasteful goods." This was Thames Street, still traceable, skirting the wharves, warehouses, Fishmonger Hall, and the Steelyard, in almost a straight line from the Tower to Blackfriars. In the second street, part way up the slope from the river, "you will find," Mancini reports, "hardly anything for sale but cloths." Actually far from straight and today not so easily discerned, this street ran westward from the Tower as Tower Street, became East Cheap, broadened into lines of mercers' and drapers' shops on Candlewick (Cannon) Street, and then twisted its way by Budge Row and Watling Street into St. Paul's churchyard. "In the third street, which touches the centre of the town and runs on the level, there is traffic in more precious wares such as gold and silver cups, dyed stuffs, various silks, carpets, tapestry, and much other exotic merchandise." Commencing as Aldgate Street in the east, this thoroughfare first became Cornhill; from the Stocks Market it continued as the Poultry until it was transformed into West Cheap or Cheapside, the most splendid roadway in the city, often called simply "the Street." Earlier in the century Lydgate had mentioned tiie rich wares of Cheap; travelers from Bohemia marveled, in 1466, to learn that London boasted two hundred master goldsmiths; **Chepe*' was their glittering domain. A few years after Mancini's visit, another Italian found here "fifty-two goldsmiths' shop so rich and fall of silver vessels great and small, that in all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice, and Florence put

together I do not think there would be found so many of the magnificence that are to be seen in London. And these vessels are all either salt cellars or drinking cups or basins to hold water for the hands; for they eat off that fine tin [pewter], which is little inferior to silver. , . ." Mancini declares that "there is no where a lack of anything. . . . There are in the town many other populous quarters with numerous trades, for whatever there is in the city it all belongs to craftsmen and merchants.*' At booths and stalls capped apprentices showed their masters* wares. "Yet their houses are not"—as in other cities—"encumbered with merchandise only at the entrance: but in the inmost quarters there are spacious depositories, where the goods are heaped up, stowed and packed away as honey may be seen in cells."

The Italian who looked at London not many years after Mancini noted that the merchants were no less proud and no less esteemed than the merchant-nobles of Venice itself. The edifices these men reared in stone and wood reflected their wealth: the cloth market of Black\vell Hall (Basinghall Street), the Leaden-hall, the Stocks Market (on the site of Mansion House), Guildhall, and the handsome halls of the Merchant Taylors, the Grocers, the Goldsmiths, the Skinners, the Haberdashers, the Vintners. Edward the Fourth was happy, in 1467, to demonstrate the prosperity of London to the Bastard of Burgundy by feasting with him in Grocers Hall. Nor did the merchants fare less well by themselves. At a Lord Mayor's banquet, a thousand guests would spend four hours consuming, with punctilious etiquette, a choice of fifty or sixty courses served on plate of silver or silver gilt. The homes of these men of trade were now beginning to keep pace with their means. Crosby's Place is the best surviving example. Built in Bishopsgate Street by Sir John Crosby in the first years of the reign of Edward the Fourth, it was purchased or rented by Richard to serve as his town house. Its great hall, with richly carved ceiling and musicians' gallery and high walls and spacious windows—designed like the hall of an Oxford or Cambridge college—stands today in Chelsea on the river bank. These merchants were royally cherished by the House of York.

Edward, himself a trader, made them his familiars, borrowed money from them which he repaid by valuable customs concessions, spent lavishly in their shops, steered his foreign policy in their interest, and shaped his domestic legislation by their counsel. Richard followed his brother's example. He canvassed their support and was sensitive to their opinions; he took their advice in Parliament; he sought to keep the seas safe for their shipping and to negotiate with foreign powers to their advantage.