Richard The Chird (50 page)

Meanwhile, outside the palace of Westminster the hum and

365

buzz of human existence sounded in its accustomed way, whatever the sorrows and problems of Plantagenet. The shops in Cheapside were bright with silver goods, gold cups, Italian necklaces, Flemish tapestries. The Wayts of London serenaded gentry and merchants with carols. Men and women on country manors prepared to entertain neighbors with games of cards, backgammon, harping and playing on the lute by talented servants, and communal singing.

Not many yards from Westminster Palace, at the sign of the Red Pale in the western precincts of the Abbey grounds, William Caxton, now in his sixties but still vigorous of mind, must have been looking upon the Christmas season with satisfaction. During the past year his press had dressed in the fine uniformity of type, among other treasures, the Canterbury Tales and the Troilus and Criseyde of Master Geoffrey Chaucer, the English poet he admired above all others. With his assistants he would be planning further triumphs, the clatter of metal resounding from the composing room, the good bite of wet ink in his nose, and a puff of monkish song drifting from the Abbey doors to the east.

Up in York, one John Stafford was in trouble. His boy Richard was in trouble too and that was what John minded most. He had been "noised for a coiner" and on Thursday, December 17, he was arrested by order of the Mayor, Thomas Wrang-wysh, who ordered his officers to search the suspect. One hundred counterfeit crowns were found on him—French crowns —and other coins of "laton," a soft alloy, "which he thought to have gilt and uttered [passed] within the city and other places, in the great deceit and hurt of the King's people." Though Stafford protested anxiously that his boy Richard had no part in his counterfeiting, both of them were committed to prison. 3

The next morning the Mayor, aided by Thomas Aske, the city attorney, and a few of the Aldermen, secretly examined Stafford. Having been caught in the act, he made a full confession, doubtless hoping at least to save his son if he could not manage to save himself. It was a grave business. False coining,

by statute of Edward III, had been declared high treason; the punishment was death in its direst form. The chy now turned to the Council of the North, which King Richard had established the previous July. Wrangwysh wrote to the Earl of Lincoln at Sandal, recounting the coiner's confession and requesting the Earl, who was president of the council, "to show your commandment by our servant this bearer how I shall deal with the said John and with his son."

The city's message reached Sandal the same day; the Earl at once composed a reply, which Wrangwysh received the next morning. "You have," wrote Lincoln, "not only done unto me a right singular pleasure but for the same have deserved of the King's grace a great and special thank not be be unremembered; nathless [nevertheless] I pray you for sundry considerations on Monday next to do [cause] the said Stafford to be sent hither unto me, keeping with you his son." He added that before Christmas Day he would be sending dispatches to the King "amongst which your faithful diligence and acquittal in this behalf ne shall be forgotten. . . ."

On the twentieth the Mayor read Lincoln's answer to the city council. They were pleased but slightly uneasy, for the Earl's request to examine the coiner touched a tender spot— the prerogatives of the corporation of York. After some debate it was agreed that the Mayor should accede to Lincoln's wish, but remind him of those prerogatives. Consequently, Wrangwysh wrote frankly to Lincoln that, though the council was pleased to send him the coiner to be examined "after your high pleasure and wisdom," John Stafford was then to be remitted to York "to be punished after his demerits, according to the rights of the said city. . . ."

So, a week before Christmas, with his boy languishing in York jail, John Stafford was taken by John Sponer and John Nicholson to face the questioning of the Earl of Lincoln and his fellow councilors of the North. Here Stafford drops from the pages of history as abruptly as he entered them. There is reason to suppose, however, that he and his son lived to give

thanks at the Mass of Christ. For the confession that he had made was also a defense which was certainly ingenious and may very well have been true.

John Stafford told the Mayor that while dwelling on the late Earl of Shrewsbury's manor of Wynfeld in Derbyshire he had found certain coining irons, "one bearing the print and coin of the French King called the crown, and the other bearing the print of the Dutch coin called St. Andrew, with which irons he hath coined and set the prints of the said irons upon laton gilt, by the space of a year or more, and thought to have uttered them to such as he might." But he had a trump card to play. Indicted for coining in Derbyshire, he had obtained a special charter of pardon "under the King's broad seal of England." This he probably had with him and produced before the Mayor and the city attorney. He had been pardoned for the reason that though counterfeiting English coin was treason, counterfeiting the coin of any other kingdom was not even a felony; it would not become so till the reign of Henry VII. Stafford's story of how he came by the coining irons is convincing, for the "late Earl of Shrewsbury" was the grandson of that John Talbot, first Earl, who, in 1452 while King's Lieutenant of the Duchy of Aquitaine, was granted the power to coin French money of gold and silver as often as he thought fit. This circumstance neatly accounts for the presence of the irons on the manor of Wynfe'ld. So perhaps John Stafford and his boy Richard had a happy Christmas, after all.

To a family in Norfolk the season was presenting an age-old problem: how much gaiety is to be permitted in a household recently bereaved? On Christmas Eve Margery Paston ceased her tasks to take up pen and report to her husband what she had discovered on this vexed subject, which had arisen because of the death of her mother-in-law early in November. This girl Margery, married to John Paston the younger, was not known to that Italian diplomat who a few years later recorded that he had never observed a sign of love among the English. Before they were married Margery had boldly kt her John know how much she longed to be his bride, had signed herself his Valen-

tine, and had worked hard to secure her father's consent to the marriage settlement. 4

"Please it you to know," she wrote John, who was away in London,

that I sent your eldest son to my Lady Morley to have knowledge what sports were used in her house in Christmas next following after the decease of my lord her husband, and she said that there were no disguisings, nor harping, nor luting, nor singing, nor no loud disports, but playing at the tables [backgammon], and chess, and cards. Such disports she gave her folks leave to play and none other.

Your son did his errand right well as ye shall hear after this. I sent your younger son to the Lady Stapleton, and she said according to my Lady Alorley's saying in that, and as she had seen used in places of worship where she hath been. . . .

I am sorry that ye shall not at home be for Christmas. I pray you that ye will come as soon as ye may. I shall think myself half a widow, because ye shall not be at home. . . . God have you in his keeping. Written on Christmas even. By your M.P.

So arrived, within and without the King's palace, the Christmas of 1484.

On Epiphany, Richard and his dying Queen, wearing their crowns, presided over a courtly revel. At this moment he was handed an urgent message. "While he was keeping this festival with remarkable splendour in the great hall/' records the Croy-land chronicler, "news was brought him . . . from his spies beyond the sea, that, notwithstanding the potency and splendour of his royal state, his adversaries would, without question, invade the kingdom during the following summer. . . , Than this, there was nothing that could befall him more desirable, . . ."*

Man and Governor*

Not my deserts, but 'what I will deserve . . »

RICHARD had reigned for only eighteen months, but whatever shape and meaning his government possessed was now developed. Ahead, lay preparations for defense, a span of strained waiting, and a journey into despair.

Much of Richard's policy was aimed at fulfilling the work of his great brother; much, however, turned away from what Richard conceived to be the errors into which Edward had been led by the distractions of his court. But it was fused into a whole by the heat of his convictions. Seldom has a rule so brief been so impregnated by the character of the ruler; seldom has a ruler spoken with so personal an accent. Both the government and those it governed he conceived in intimate terms. He wore the function of the Crown like a coat of his own making: it contained and represented and expressed him. Thus, he was unusually sensitive of his self-imposed duties to his subjects, but he was also unusually vulnerable to the attacks of his conscience.

Richard was accessible, earnest, concerned. The King was not remote and awe-full, as he was to become in Tudor times— ascended into a state above mortality, addressed no longer as "Your Grace" in common with dukes and archbishops but uniquely as "Your Majesty," perceptible in his acts only through his officers, perceptible in his person only from a distance, perceptible in his thoughts and feelings never, during the secretive reign of Henry VII, and, during the last half of Henry VIIFs reign, mostly in vindictive punitions and the harsh fiats of an ailing, suspicious nature.

The governor preoccupied with justice has no rest, and in the fifteenth century, could have small comfort. Viewed as a social

37<>

phenomenon, Richard's reign can be seen as an ironic comedy of justice: ironic because he offended against justice in securing the authority by which to pursue it and because his subjects preferred something else, namely, stability. Viewed as the history of a man, his reign shows elements of true tragedy, for the protagonist cannot resolve the conflict within himself'and he cannot win his conflict with the world, with which he refuses to compromise.

Richard pursued justice into thickets of trivial matters as well as through the forest of high affairs. This preoccupation stands foursquare in the series of parliamentary statutes designed to free the individual from oppressions of his person and his purse. In the proclamation he published in Kent shortly after Buckingham's rebellion, Richard showed himself more anxious to persuade the citizens to be just to one another than to seek out concealed rebels and to demand public order. Similarly, when local grievances provoked a riot in the city of York in the early fall of 1484, Richard's concern was not with punishing the rioters but with lecturing them on the proper means for them to seek redress of their wrongs. 1 The burden of his exhortation to the lords and gentry, following his coronation, was not that they uphold his government but that they be very justicers to those they governed. In the detailed instructions which Richard gave Sir Marmaduke Constable for the efficient managing of the royal honor of Tutbury, his first command was for Sir Marmaduke to root out the evils of livery and maintenance; his next, to discharge all county bailiffs who had been practicing oppressions and extortions upon the common people. Intent upon understanding the machinery of justice, he summoned his judges to the Star Chamber in order to question them earnestly about his laws. 2

When Richard heard that a Vicar-General had defrauded a parson of his living, he was quick to send a warrant demanding restitution. Upon learning, even as he was busy stamping out the last embers of Buckingham's rebellion, that one of the underclerks in the office of Privy Seal had, despite markedly good service, been passed over in the promotion list, he sent

a warrant to John Gunthorpe, Keeper of the Privy Seal, "to discharge Richard Bele from his place in the office of the said Privy Seal, to which he had been admitted contrary to the old rule and due order, by means of giving of great gifts and other sinister and ungodly ways in great discouraging of the under-clerks, which have long continued therein, to have the experience of the same—to see a stranger,, never brought up in the said office, to put them by of their promotion." In Bele's stead Richard granted the place to Robert Bolman, for his "good and diligent service ... in the said office, and specially in this the King's great journey and for his experience and long continuance in the same." Though a reorganization in the office of Privy Seal reduced the number of clerks to six and thus left Bolman an underclerk, the King gave him an annuity of a hundred shillings and later granted him a clerkship at the first vacancy. Richard conceived the King's relationship with the realm to be that of the Duke of Gloucester with the North writ large, in that he meant to make his rule personal, accessible, and paternal. But recognizing that it would be impossible for the King to establish so close a bond with the entire kingdom, he chose to make use of the few great magnates who remained after decades of civil strife in order to create in the regions of England something like the government he had given Yorkshire. Thus it was that he conferred lands and powers upon Buckingham in the West, Norfolk and Surrey in East Anglia, the Stanleys in Cheshire, Lancashire, and North Wales, and Northumberland in the North and upon the Marches. These great lords were granted commissions of array, of the peace, and of oyer and terminer, which gave them broad powers of rallying men for defense, maintaining order, and enforcing the laws. Richard meant their authority as lieutenants of the King to replace, or transcend, their personal sway as inheritors of the feudal tradition, and he hoped that the opulence of their endowments would remove all motive for aggrandizement against their neighbors, injustice to those they governed, or disloyalty to the King. Thus did he seek to reinterpret the old function of the King as head of the feodality, to work a transmutation Bpon

moribund feudalism whereby men of lands and lineage were to reassert their primitive roles as active leaders and doers, but as agents, now, of the King's law and the King's peace. Thus did he seek to maintain the strong central government his brother had created, and yet to make it parochial in its sensitivity to local issues and grievances while it remained national in its final authority. But to these magnates he had given a feudal-Iike governance that was not circumscribed by the old feudal dues and ideas. In this age between, they were no longer bound by obligation arising out of land tenure but they had not yet been securely subdued to the royal power expressed as law. It was on the doubtful cement of loyalty that Richard had to depend.

Still, though he tried to reanimate traditions of the past, he was thoroughly aware of the rising power of the middle class, as represented by the merchants of the towns, and he exerted great efforts to establish a bond of trust between them and the Crown, His relations as Duke of Gloucester with the men of York had given him a deep respect for the worth and importance of this class. He granted governing privileges, presents of money, and partial remission of royal fees to no less than eighteen towns in all quarters of the kingdom during the first year and a half of his reign. Their well-being spelled prosperity for the country; their devotion to the King foretold an alliance of the stable middle class with the throne against baronial irresponsibility or recalcitrance; the increasing importance of townsmen encouraged the spread of those virtues which they were beginning to exemplify: sobriety, industry, piety. That they might not be drawn into the quarrels of nobles or be distracted from their direct allegiance to the King, Richard repeatedly exhorted municipal officers to see that no citizens accepted liveries or retainders. In May of 1485 he addressed a long letter to the Mayor of Coventry which represents the concern he felt for the good governance of his towns, and is also a remarkably able piece of prose. The opening sentence strikes the theme of the whole document:

. . . It is come unto our knowledge how that ye have late full laudably with great diligence applied you to the observing and executing of

such sad [serious] directions and substantial ordinances amongst you according to our writing late directed unto you in that behalf as thereby love and unity is enhanced amongst you, and dissensions, variances and discords set apart to the honour and weal of our city there: for the which we greatly laud and commend your sadness and circumspect wisdoms, and thank you heartily for the same, willing and exhorting you that like as ye have begun and done ye will diligently ensure the perfect continuance of the same. 3

To the lower classes—peasants, yeomen, urban artisans— Richard sought to give the protection of justice, not only under his law and through his officers, but by making himself accessible to appeal, particularly through the medium of his council. King Edward had apparently established a committee of his advisers to hear the causes of men who had not the means to seek their rights in the courts or from those in power. In order to foster this service Richard formally created the institution (though not the name, which came later) of the Court of Requests, which was to endure for many a year. John Harrington was appointed, in December of 1483, to the clerkship of a special branch of the council sitting in the White Hall whose duty it was to hear the "bills, requests, and supplications of poor persons." 4 In addition, the council as a whole functioned as a final tribunal of appeal to which the King's subjects might prefer complaints of oppression or extortion or other injustice. Sometimes the council took action; sometimes it referred a case to an appropriate court; sometimes it requested local authorities to investigate. This latter course it took, for example, in the case of a woman of York about whom the King dispatched a communication to the Mayor in September of 1484,

letting you know that grievous complaint hath been made unto us on the behalf of our poor subject Katherine Bassingbourne of an injury to be done unto her by one Henry Faucet, as by a bill of supplication which we send unto you herein enclosed more at large it appeareth. Wherefore we willing in that behalf the administration of justice whereunto we be professed, and also trusting in your wisdom and indifferency, will and desire you that ye—taking the contents of the said bill in due and mature examination—will, calling the parties

before you, set such final direction in the same as shall accord with our laws and good conscience. . . .

In selecting his councilors, Richard emulated the achievement of his great brother. For more than a century preceding Edward's coming to the throne, the magnates had dominated the King's council, often exercising their influence in it to thwart the King; and in the long disaster of Henry VTs reign they had used the council as an instrument for entirely usurping the royal power. After Edward had freed himself of the House of Neville and crushed the power of the barons, he maintained a council which was completely the servant of his will, composed largely of gifted commoners in holy orders who were his personal advisers and diplomatic emissaries.

For his council Richard chose the ablest men that England could then boast; they had all served his brother at home and abroad and the chief of them were the first Renaissance scholars which England had yet produced, men who had studied in Italy (with the exception of John Russell), collected classical manuscripts, and written Latin works: Russell, the Chancellor; John Gunthorpe, Keeper of the Privy Seal; Thomas Langton, Bishop of St. David's and then of Salisbury; John Sherwood, Bishop of Durham and Richard's representative at the Vatican (for whom he had tried to secure a cardinalate in recognition of his abilities and of his erudition). Other clerics on the council included Edmund Chaderton, Treasurer of the King's Chamber and Royal Chaplain; Rotherham, Archbishop of York; the Bishops of Worcester, St. Asaph's, Bath, and Wells; Thomas Barowe, Master of the Rolls; and Dr. Thomas Hutton; and there were three influential commoners: John Kendall, the King's secretary; the lawyer William Catesby; and Sir Richard Ratcliffe. Two other commoners served as the principal legal advisers: Thomas Lynom, the King's Solicitor, and Morgan Kidwelly, his Attorney General. Only a few lords sat, on occasion, at the council table and these because Richard sought their advice: John, Lord Audeley, who in December of 1484 became Treasurer of the Exchequer; Lord Stanley, Steward of the royal Household; Viscount LovelL, the Chamberlain; John, Lord

Scrope of Bolton, Richard's friend and neighbor from Wensley-dale. Richard meant the nobility to be the agents of policy, not its creators.

He had his own agents too, men who were constantly employed in carrying out the council's decisions and who, so far as their personalities can be conjectured, were of an entirely different stamp from the learned, deliberate, and sedentary councilors. These were ready men of action, captains on land or sea, officers capable of executing dangerous errands, of maintaining peace in the wilder portions of the Welsh Marches, of holding master strongholds for the King, supervising lands of the royal demesne, or taking charge of estates forfeited by rebels. Prominent among these men were Sir James Tyrell, Master of the Horse and of the Henchmen; Sir Robert Brackenbury, Constable of the Tower, called "gentle Brackenbury" by one chronicler 5 and evidently a man of wide popularity and some learning, to wham the Italian poet, Pietro Carmeliano, seeking his fortune in England, had dedicated one of his Latin works; and that doughty adventurer Edward Brampton, who received many gifts from Richard for his services and finally a knighthood— the first ever conferred in England upon a converted Jew. For a number of these trusted men of his Household Richard found special employment as sheriffs. The office of sheriff, a yearly appointment, had once represented the authority of the King in each county; by the first years of Edward IV, however, the sheriff had lost almost all his powers to the Justices, or Commissioners, of the Peace. Richard r it appears, sought to revive his importance as a means of strengthening the power of the central government in the shires; for the principal lords and gentry of a county were usually its Justices of the Peace. Sir Robert Brackenbury became Sheriff of Kent for life; Sir Richard Ratcliffe, Sheriff of Westmorland for life; Sir Thomas Wortley, Knight of the Body, Sheriff of Staffordshire; Sir Robert Percy, Comptroller of the Household, Sheriff of Essex and o£ Hertfordshire; Sir Edmund Hastings, who had been a member of Richard's ducal council, Sheriff of Yorkshire.

There were otto: governmental reforms and innovations

which Richard found the time to institute. Much concerned with the development of English sea power, he offered as an inducement toward the building of ships the attractive bounty of a first voyage free of customs duties; and since Norfolk, the Admiral, was busy with many affairs, he created by commission an Admiralty Office with Sir John Wode and the indefatigable Brackenbury as Vice-Admirals, a staff of three under them, and a notary to keep official records. After a study of governmental finance, he inaugurated a rigorous reform which transferred many functions from the inefficient and tradition-bound Exchequer to an officer of his Household, the Treasurer of the Royal Chamber. This reorganization, which gave the King a more direct and flexible control of his revenues, was so successful that it was copied in detail by Richard's successors. 6

His most important and enduring creation was the Council of the North, established in July of 1484, which lasted, almost precisely as Richard instituted it, for more than a century and a half. In general, this council functioned for the northern regions as the council at Westminster functioned for the entire kingdom; its places of residence, Sandal Castle and Sheriff Hut-ton, were called the King's Household in the North; John, Earl of Lincoln, who was Richard's heir and the President of the council, signed its decrees per consilium Regis; and for the operation of the Household as well as for the proceedings of the council Richard drew up detailed sets of instructions.

Essentially, the council extended the accessibility of the King as the redresser of grievances and the maintainer of harmony. Its chief objects were to give justice and promote tranquillity. It possessed both civil and criminal jurisdiction, the power of investigating, commanding the presence of witnesses by subpoena, ordering by decree, giving verdict, punishing.

Only a few of its members are known, With its President, the Earl of Lincoln, was nominally associated—he was still a boy —Clarence's son, the Earl of Warwick. Lord Morley, Lincoln's youthful brother-in-law, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, were also members. No register of the council's activities has survived; but its work is illustrated in the story of John

Stafford, the coiner, and the municipal records of York indicate that less than three months after its establishment the council dealt effectively with a riotous protest against certain enclosures of land. This success aroused, however, the resentment of the proud Henry Percy, whom the city had ignored in making its appeal to the council. 7

Even though the treason of Buckingham had left Wales without a central government, it is not difficult to perceive why Richard chose to institute this council in the North rather than to revive the Council of the Welsh Marches, which King Edward had inaugurated years before. It was in the North that King Richard's heart and his strength lay. The loyalty which the region had accorded him as Duke of Gloucester he wished to retain for the Crown; it was the most instinctively feudal and conservative quarter of the realm, and it was remote from Westminster; presumably, it would offer a lively, but not harsh, school of government for the Earl of Lincoln; and it was a region over which the Earl of Northumberland patently longed to reassert the sway which his ancestors had enjoyed. Mindful of the resentment which the Earl had shown signs of cherishing in the 1470*5 because of the uncertain division of their powers, Richard tried to establish a clearer separation of authority. Northumberland enjoyed the military jurisdiction of Warden-General of the Scots Marches, with the captainship of Berwick; he was appointed Sheriff of Northumberland for life, Constable of all its royal castles, and Bailiff of Tynedale; and he received grants of manors that made him the greatest landowner in England. The Council of the North exercised authority only in Yorkshire, Cumberland, and Westmorland. Yet, even though he was himself a member of the council, Northumberland was not content. That body represented a continuance of Richard's hold upon the North, which sat ill upon Henry Percy's haughty stomach, dieted though it was with mighty offices and opulent possessions.

The dominant tone of Richard's government, ringing through these institutions, was created by his own preoccupations and attitudes, the reach and stress of his character to express him-

self as King. Such was his concern with justice; such, too, was his hope of effecting an amelioration of men's morals. In the coils of circumstance and high place, of opportunity in the guise of duty, of warped memories of the past and cloudy urgencies of the present, Richard had seized the throne and then, very possibly, had done a far more grievous wrong; yet, though these acts cast an ironic shadow they need not cast doubt upon the intense sincerity of his moral feeling. This sincerity is demonstrated not only in deeds and documents but also by the strain under which he labored precisely because he could not reconcile some of his acts committed in the arena of power with his view of himself as a responsible human creature balanced upon the awful enigma of God's hand. He had to rule by merit because such rule was good in the judgment of Heaven and because it might even be good enough to mitigate his transgressions.

Richard's concern for morality, like his quest for justice, fused his character and his politics. He was a rudimentary Puritan, as were many of the townsmen to whom he felt himself so warmly bound. It was the vices particularly repugnant to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritans from which he wished to turn men's habits—lechery and arrogance and dishonesty and blasphemy and ruthless greed. Hence, in part, his antagonism to his brother's court, his attack upon the dead Hastings' reputation, his insistence that Jane Shore do public penance for harlotry. Hence his disregarding political expediency to attack the Marquess of Dorset, in the proclamation of October, 1483, as a lecher, and his rather wishful assumption, in his proclamation of December, 1484, that Henry Tudor represented a rabble of extortionists and adulterers.