The Last White Rose (29 page)

Foreign envoys were charmed by the friendly way Henry VIII gossiped and joked with them, as a flattered Venetian embassy reported in 1515. But roars of laughter and back-slapping were a good way of concealing his real thoughts. Among these was a lasting obsession with murdering Edmund de la Pole’s brother Richard. Frustratingly, royal agents found that they were pursuing a very elusive quarry indeed.

This obscure cousin frightened the king as much as Warbeck had frightened his father. Richard had been in exile since 1500 when he was a youth of about nineteen. Few Englishmen can have set eyes on him, while the tenants and retainers on the
old de la Pole lands in East Anglia and the Thames Valley had long ago been given new lords. Yet beyond any question, the king feared Richard, convinced there must still be a strong Yorkist underground, the size of which, characteristically, he overestimated.

Left behind at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1504 as security for the debts of Edmund (not then been caught by Henry VII), in a desperate letter, Richard begged his brother ‘humbly’ [‘ombully’] to send him money.
²
In another overwrought letter, he said he was pestered in the streets of Aix, not only by Martyn, landlord at
Le
Pot
, but also by other creditors. The king had written to the burgesses, saying that if they handed him over, he would pay well. People were warning him not to go into the streets because if he was murdered, Henry would pay his killers, although Richard suspected he had been told this to frighten him into returning to England. He swore that if Edmund could get him out of the mess, ‘You will find me your loyal brother, come what may’.
³
Two days later, Edmund, who had no means of helping him, told Killingworth that ‘my brother [is] like to be delivered to King Henry, or else to be driven by force to forsake me, or else to be slain in the town of Aachen by the bourgeois’.
⁴
In January 1506 Richard was still writing in the same vein: ‘And here I lie in great pain and poverty for your grace, and no manner of comfort I have of your grace or none other: nor none is coming, so far as I can see. Wherefore I pray God to send me out of this world.’
⁵
After Edmund had been handed over, Richard’s situation seemed hopeless. Almost miraculously, he was saved by the recently appointed Bishop of Liège, Everard de la Marck (later Cardinal de Bouillon), who paid his debts and sent him as far out of Henry’s reach as possible, to the Hungarian court at Buda. Unlike Edmund or Killingworth, the bishop knew how to make the most of the de la Poles’ kinship with the late Queen Anne of Hungary who, as a Foix-Candale, had been the young man’s cousin. Arriving in August 1506, he was warmly welcomed by Ladislas II and given a pension.

The de la Poles’ steward was still at Aix, nominally in Richard’s service, and in August 1506 Thomas Killingworth of London, ‘gentilman’, was offered a full pardon by Henry VII, despite his recent attainder. It stipulated that ‘whenever the King shall please to examine him alone or cause him to be examined by someone of his council upon any matters concerning the King’s Majesty or the security of his realm, he shall declare all.’ What Henry wanted was the steward’s cooperation in identifying and tracking down Yorkists at home and abroad – including Richard de la Pole.
⁶

Killingworth ignored the offer, however. The following month he obtained a passport from Everard de la Mark to stay at Liège and other cities under the bishop’s control, escorted by four servants armed with swords, daggers and lances. He needed a passport so that he could accept Richard’s invitation to visit Hungary, arriving in March 1507. Richard promptly sent him to Constance, where an Imperial Diet was meeting, to ask for the emperor’s protection for the de la Poles.

The steward wrote in dog-Latin to the emperor, begging him to secure Suffolk’s release, mentioning Henry’s offer but swearing he would stay a faithful servant. ‘I await a reply, Lord Caesar.’
⁷
Reminding the Emperor Maximilian of his promise to help Suffolk and his brother, Killingworth says, ‘I have served my said lord duke for 20 years, which is no small period of time.’ He adds, ‘And to serve my said lord duke I have left wife, friends and possessions, which may no doubt look contrary to nature, yet the ill fortune of the said lord duke grieves me.’
⁸
Later, he told Maximilian that the French might try and persuade King Ladislas to hand over Richard to them, for use as a bargaining counter with England. He suggested that Richard might be hidden in some Austrian castle.
⁹

Killingworth sent a final letter to Maximilian in early summer 1507, saying he owed 53 florins to his landlord at Aix, besides 12 florins to others. ‘I am ill, in the greatest possible want and poverty as I have no money left and do not know where to
turn for it except to Your Sacred Majesty.’ He also warned the emperor against Sir Edward Wingfield, who had recently arrived at the imperial court. After a last plea for money Killingworth disappeared, perhaps dying as a beggar on the streets of Aix. (Somehow Henry’s agents got hold of his correspondence.) He had given everything for the Suffolk brothers – they must have possessed some fine qualities to inspire such loyalty.

For young Richard, bred in East Anglia and the Thames Valley, Hungary and its Magyar language were no doubt bewildering – presumably he communicated in French or Latin. Tudor agents soon learned of his arrival and his links with the Foix-Candale: he had become more dangerous, even though he could not be an immediate threat while his brother Edmund resided in the Tower. Henry VII made repeated demands for him to be sent back to England, but by now he was a favourite of King Ladislas, who refused. (Normally, known as ‘King All Right’ by the nobles, he agreed to everything.) De la Pole’s pension was paid until Ladislas’s death in 1516. His protector was also King of Poland and Bohemia, and it is possible that Richard accompanied him to Prague in February 1509, while he probably went to Maximilian’s court at Freiburg – late in 1510 the emperor wrote to Margaret of Savoy (his regent in Flanders), urging her to try and persuade the English king to pardon ‘the young Suffolk’.

It is likely that, by then, Richard was with the French army in Italy. Because of the war between France and Spain, military skill was a sure way to Louis XII’s favour, and Richard may have served under his fire-eating cousin Odet de Foix-Grailly, Vicomte de Lautrec. If so, he experienced some very fierce fighting. Judging from Louis’s later confidence in him, the tough young Englishman had been noticed by the king who realized he was a born soldier. We know for certain that in 1512 he served in Navarre, a little kingdom stretching across the Pyrenees from Béarn to Tudela, with his Foix cousin Katherine III as queen, which had been invaded by Ferdinand of Aragon. Those who
fought in the campaign to restore her included some of the period’s most famous soldiers, such as the Chevalier Bayard. They were unsuccessful, however, and within a few weeks it became clear that Katherine had lost all her territories south of the Pyrenees.

When hostilities broke out between France and England the same year, a Venetian reported that Louis XII was planning to restore ‘the son of the deceased sister of the King [Richard III] killed by the late King’, by which he meant Edmund de la Pole, who was still alive.
¹⁰
He did not mean Richard, as is sometimes supposed, since he could not usurp his elder brother’s right to the throne; to do so would deny the law of succession on which the de la Pole claim was based.
¹¹
However, Louis gave Richard a pension of 36,000 crowns and a command. It seems he was in touch with his brother in the Tower. During 1512 a French spy at the English court was said to have brought back letters from the Suffolk family, which may mean messages from Edmund. The following year a Milanese wrote that Edmund de la Pole had been executed for corresponding with Richard about organizing a rebellion.
¹²
About this time, Henry VIII began to worry about the presence in France of ‘our rebel Richard de la Pole’.
¹³

Richard had cut an impressive figure during the Navarrese campaign, forming friendships with the Dauphin François and the Chevalier Bayard, and leading a regiment of landsknechts, freebooters marching to shawms and drums, followed by wives and children, thieves and prostitutes, robbing and raping as they went. Always in a state of semi-mutiny, they were not easy to command, but the White Rose knew how to get the best out of them. ‘Your rebel, Richard de la Pole, was in the said wars, captain of the Almains, where there your said rebel and his company received most hurt and loss of men than any other,’ the English ambassador John Stile reported to Henry VIII in January 1513.
¹⁴

Richard began calling himself Duke of Suffolk and White Rose in the summer of 1513, after his brother’s death when
Louis recognized him as King of England. Although he fought against his countrymen at the siege of Therouanne in July, commanding a force 6,000 strong, a handful of Yorkists joined him. Among these was the ‘Bastard of Stanley’, the son of Henry VII’s chamberlain, whom no one in England dared to employ because he had spent fourteen years in the Tower. Richard gave him a job, as gentleman porter at twenty crowns a year. In January 1514 Cardinal Bainbridge, in Rome, reported that he had arrested two members of his household, one of them being Reginald Chambre formerly of the Calais garrison, for planning to join Richard.
¹⁵

In February 1514 King Henry bestowed the duchy of Suffolk on his favourite, Charles Brandon. If a gesture of friendship towards an old friend, it was still more an act of spite, even of fear. For by now he had come to appreciate that the latest White Rose was likely to be much more dangerous than his brother Edmund.

‘The French King this year [1514] appointed to Richard de la Pole, traitor of England and banished the realm, 12,000 lanceknights to keep Normandy, and also to enter into England and conquer,’ says Hall.
¹⁶
Spending so much money on such a large force means that Louis believed that an invasion could succeed, and that he had real respect for the White Rose’s ability as a soldier. Richard took his troops to Normandy, but when they began terrorizing the locals he moved them to St Malo in Brittany. John, Duke of Albany, the Scottish regent who was in France, agreed to welcome them to his own country from where they could invade across the Border. By June everything was ready and it appeared that another battle of Stoke lay ahead. This time the Yorkist army consisted of veteran professional soldiers under a battle-tested commander. All that they would face were inexperienced levies under the Duke of Norfolk (Surrey), whose recent victory at Flodden had been over ill-disciplined and badly led opponents.

Richard was about to sail when suddenly King Louis made peace with Henry VIII. The invasion was abandoned and the
White Rose had to leave France. Louis’s solution was to send him to Metz, just over the border, while the Dauphin gave him a large sum of money. Metz was an imperial city within Lorraine so King Louis wrote to its council asking them to welcome Richard. When he arrived there in September 1514 – with sixty horsemen and a guard of honour sent by the Duke of Lorraine – he was made a citizen, and a local gentleman, the Chevalier Baudoiche, lent him an elegant mansion for his residence, a ‘pleasure house’ which was named Passe Temps.

When Louis died early in 1515, Richard’s French pension was confirmed by the new King of France, his old crony the Dauphin – now Francis I. Richard continued to live at Metz, then a beautiful city, where he gathered a small court including musicians who had played for his brother, and who were clothed in a livery of blue and grey. The most interesting was a singer called Petrus Alamire, who was also a music scribe with a highly successful business in Flanders patronized by several European courts. Another old friend of his brother Edmund with whom he re-established contact was a Flemish merchant named Claus Bakker, who became a useful agent for the Yorkist cause.

From Metz Richard could keep an eye on what was happening in northern France, where the English still occupied Therouanne and Tournai. In February 1515, the garrison at Tournai, led by a Davy Appowell, mutinied over arrears of pay, threatening to lynch their commander, old Sir Sampson Norton from Calais. Order was restored by Lord Mountjoy, but there were too many mutineers to punish.
¹⁷
On 25 February, accompanied only by his cook and a page, Richard had left Metz secretly, riding from dawn to dusk. The agents thought he did so from fear, yet could not explain what he was afraid of.
¹⁸
Fear seems unlikely, since soon he was back at Metz. As his wild gallop brought him within a day’s ride of Tournai, the answer may be that he had hoped to take command of the mutineers, but that order had been restored before he reached the town.

Just as his father’s agents had done with Perkin, Henry VIII’s spies ferreted out all they could about the new White Rose. Their employer must have been disturbed to learn that Richard was treated as an equal by princes and liked by his troops, and that his Foix-Candale cousins were able to open so many doors for him. More worrying still, was his friendship with King Francis.