The War of the Roses (19 page)

In real life Henry VII, a French ally in 1485, now lent troops for Breton resistance, with traditional English efforts to keep Brittany independent continuing. He sent Sir Edward Woodville to aid the Duchy against Charles VIII's regency;
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however, the French secured Francis' heiress Anne and the Duchy. Edward IV, betrayed by Louis XI who had abandoned their political/ marital alliance in 1482, would have been equally if not more hostile to France in 1488. It is possible that the belligerent Richard of Gloucester would have successfully urged intervention to save Brittany from the French regency regime, leading an armed force there if not himself preoccupied with the succession-crisis in Scotland.

The overthrow of James III in June 1488 by a coalition of his principal nobles, led by the Border magnates under Archibald (‘Bell-the-Cat') Douglas, would have occurred irrespective of events in England and been of concern to their neighbour Richard. He had attempted to manipulate a Scots revolt to coerce or remove James in 1481–2. The heiress of Duke Francis II of Brittany, Anne, born in 1476, was of a reasonable age to be married off to Edward IV's eldest son Edward (born November 1470) in a potential union of crowns, as revenge on France for its ‘desertion' of the English alliance in 1482. Alternatively, if the hand of the future Edward V had been bestowed elsewhere (perhaps one of Ferdinand and Isabella's daughters) she could have been married to his next brother Richard, Duke of York. Either would have been fiercely resisted by the French regency, and entailed a long war in which taking sides in a Breton succession-dispute served as a means of drawing England and France back into open war as in the early 1350s. Edward IV being unfit for major foreign campaigning, the obvious person to lead an expedition to Artois to link up with the Yorkists' Habsburg allies was Richard of Gloucester. Maximilian of Habsburg would have been no more reliable for the English than his father-in-law Charles of Burgundy had been for Edward IV in 1470–1 or 1475, and ultimately an Anglo- French treaty would have been possible securing Brittany for England (or at least its junior line as represented by the Duke of York). If Edward IV wished to keep his sons for a more senior princess, Anne of Brittany could have been bestowed on his eldest Pole nephew–the older and militarily active John, Earl of Lincoln.

Would Richard of Gloucester have intervened in Scotland again as rebels rose against James III in 1488–or done so earlier to impose James' brother Alexander as king? The treacherous Alexander had deserted him in 1482 but was still ambitious enough to link up with England again. Richard had the men to invade, and the Scots leadership was seriously divided with James III's low-born ‘favourites' a source of aristocratic anger. Presumably the English would have been unable to forcibly keep a nominee like Alexander on the throne indefinitely against the resistance of most of the Scots nobility, as Edward III had found with Edward Balliol in the 1330s. A small English army had installed Edward Balliol in Perth in 1332 and after his eviction Edward III had intervened in greater force in 1333–4, ultimately to no effect; the English could at best dominate the Eastern lowlands and hold onto key castles with local help. (Edward had also had local aristocratic backing from the ‘disinherited', partisans of the deposed John Balliol expelled by Robert Bruce in 1307–14; Richard did not have such a ‘bloc' of support.) Richard would have had no better luck than Edward III if the nobility turned against Alexander, and the French were liable to assist any anti-English contender as they had backed David Bruce in the 1330s. Like Edward Balliol facing the young David Bruce after his seizure of the Scots Crown in 1333, the English-appointed usurper would have been at the risk of a long civil war and then deposition (in favour of James' son) as soon as his sponsor became preoccupied elsewhere.

If Richard had had the troops to force Alexander onto the throne as an English vassal in 1488 and the unpopular James III been unable to stage a comeback (as he was captured and murdered?) James' son James IV would have been the beneficiary of a ‘backlash' in Scotland against an English-imposed king. Richard, possibly adding parts of Galloway or Lothian to his northern principality with the ruthless brutality he showed in dealing with opponents in real-life 1483, would have had to campaign hard year after year to keep his lands and his candidate as King of Scots. He could have ended up being forced to abandon his efforts due to the cost causing complaints in London (Parliament) and Edward IV refusing him more aid, and then blamed the withdrawal of his brother's support on the Woodvilles. If Edward IV was physically failing, the Queen and her brothers would have been wary of allowing Richard a large army lest he turned it on them in a succession-dispute. As an over-powerful ‘Lord of the North', Richard would have seemed as threatening to his rivals in London in the mid-late 1480s as Warwick was in the 1460s or the Percies were to Henry IV in 1403. Conceivably, the brave but rash Richard, campaigning in person in Scotland, would have ended up killed in battle and the Scots venture abandoned as Edward IV had to come to terms with the new regime of James IV–presumably by the marriage of one of the King's daughters to James as an ally. Princess Cecily had been considered already by 1483.

 

Richard of Gloucester and a more adult Edward V: a king at odds with his uncle like Richard II's and Henry VI's uncles?

If Edward IV, apparently in poor health and not campaigning in person by 1482, had died when his elder son was aged over fifteen or so (c. 1486) there would have been no need of a ‘Protector'. A semi-adult Edward V would have succeeded with the Woodvilles as the main power at court. Richard would then have been isolated and unable to secure influence with the King, but with his military power in the north would have been too powerful to be dealt with decisively except by a trick. The messy expense and defeat of his attempts to take over Scotland for a client king could have provided his enemies with an opportunity to undermine him. Like the previous Dukes of Gloucester, Thomas and Humphrey, he would have been vulnerable to a sudden arrest and execution by a distrustful nephew encouraged by his rivals. He would have been very much aware of their fates, and of the fact that they had both been seized by surprise by a ‘treacherous' King–Thomas arrested in person by a royal-led ‘posse' at his Essex residence of Pleshy Castle, and Humphrey arrested at Parliament at Bury St Edmunds.

Richard's alternative course was to put himself at the head of a coalition of disaffected lords complaining at a monopoly of patronage by the Queen's kin, in the manner of Simon de Montfort against the Poitevins in the 1250s or Thomas of Lancaster against Gaveston and other royal allies in 1308–22. The chances are that Richard would not have challenged them in his brother's lifetime, unless Edward IV was seriously ill or ‘senile' and perceived to be the helpless puppet of a greedy clique as Edward III had been in 1376. Both ambitious nobles such as the Duke of Buckingham (Richard III's real-life chief assistant and then betrayer in 1483) and a ‘reforming' Parliament impatient at the abuse of power, as in 1376, could have aided Richard's ambitions to overturn the power of the King's current favourites as Edward IV aged and lost control of politics and patronage through the 1490s.

The dynamics of inter-state relations would have been the same, with England balanced against France and the Empire. Would Edward V or Richard, Duke of York been married off to Catherine of Aragon or a sister of hers–not the oldest, Juana, as heiress to Castile–as part of an alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella against the old enemy, France? (There were no French princesses near their age available.) The sister of Philip I of Burgundy and daughter of Emperor Maximilian, Margaret (born 1480), was an alternative and would have been useful in an anti-French alliance; Edward IV's sister Margaret (real-life Yorkist pretender-sponsor from 1486 to 1499) was available to negotiate with her stepson-in-law Maximilian. It is possible that the French regency-government would have retaliated for Edward IV's support for Breton independence from 1488 by smuggling Henry Tudor into France and using him as a Lancastrian pretender–if Edward had not had him extradited from Brittany first. Richard III attempted to get his hands on Tudor in real-life 1483–4, bribing Duke Francis' chief minister Landois, only for Tudor to flee to Paris; Edward IV could have done this too.

Until the major rift in the Yorkist regime caused by Edward V's real-life deposition and disappearance Henry had negligible support in England, as shown by the failure of the Earl of Oxford to win support in his Cornish venture in 1474. If Edward IV had died while the Anglo-French dispute was still underway Henry was no real threat to a (semi?-) adult Edward V. The Woodville alliance with Henry Tudor of Christmas 1483 only followed the disappearance of the deposed Edward V and his brother, and the scale of ex-royal Household men's involvement in the autumn 1483 revolt showed that many Yorkist stalwarts did not accept Richard. It is unlikely that Richard could have had the backing of many major nobles to depose an adult Edward V. Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI had all been perceived as inadequate, faction-dominated kings for many years (22, 22, and 38) before they were deposed; Edward IV's deposition in 1470 was a ‘special case' as his legitimacy as king was more in question and he had a deposed, ‘legitimate' predecessor to hand for rebels to use. The rebels were led by Edward's cousin and ex-chief adviser Warwick, who had many clients from the vast Neville estates ready to back him, and included Edward's next adult male heir Clarence. Richard could only have removed Edward V on the grounds of legality, using the supposed ‘pre-contract' of Edward IV to marry Eleanor Butler to argue that Edward V was illegitimate; and the story relied on at most one live witness (Stillington?) as of 1483. The question of its believability is obscured by the frantic efforts Henry VII made to ‘airbrush' the incident out of history after 1485
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–which themselves argue that Henry feared it was believable. But could Richard have won the Council to his side if he did not have Stillington (who died in 1495) to hand, as the latter was the key figure in the ‘revelations' made in mid-June 1483?

If Richard had secured a client on the throne of Scotland (Alexander of Albany or Prince James?) in alliance with rebel Scots nobles around 1488 and/or led a successful expedition to Brittany or Artois, he would have boosted his military reputation. If he also had the manpower of his ‘palatinate' to call upon against Edward V's unpopular Woodville relatives' domination of patronage and had allied nobles such as Buckingham, an attempt to coerce an ageing Edward IV or more likely a young Edward V was possible. But even if the rebels had been as effective against an untried new king as those of 1387–8, yet another royal deposition was an unlikely result. The previous depositions of adult kings–Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward IV–had all been spearheaded by an ambitious rival, or in Edward II's case the mother of his heir and her lover, after either a period of weak government or the domination of government and patronage by one contentious person or faction. There was a chance that the Queen-Mother and her Woodville relatives could dominate politics and amass lands and titles for themselves in a similar manner under a young Edward V, perhaps from c. 1488 for five to ten years, and that Richard could act as a focus for resentment. Alternatively, the Woodvilles–or the King–could have seen him as a military threat and confiscated his ‘palatinate', driving him into exile as Roger Mortimer had been imprisoned by Edward II or Henry IV had been exiled by Richard II, and thus caused an invasion. In that case Charles VIII's regency or Richard's favourite sister, Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, were possible allies for him; in real life Margaret was to back Richard's heir Lincoln against Edward IV's daughter and son-in-law in 1486–7.

The deposition of an untried young king was unlikely to win support from the great nobility; the removal of his ‘evil ministers', as the Lords Appellant had done to Richard II in 1387–8, was a more likely precedent. Richard of Gloucester would have found it more difficult to claim the throne from an adult king (and his younger brother Richard of York) by inventing or publicizing the conveniently-discovered story about the illegality of Edward IV's marriage. But if he had been responsible for having Edward V's chief ministers and maternal relatives rounded up and killed he would have been in the same position as Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, in the 1390s–facing the hostility of a chastened King determined on revenge at a later date and so with a reason to secure his position by usurpation. A confrontation between Richard of Gloucester and the Woodvilles over control of the young Edward V's government could have seen a repeat of the 1390s in the 1490s, and much would have depended on the personal capacity and leadership of the King. If Richard did not defend himself he could have shared the fate of Thomas of Gloucester in 1397, arrested and quietly murdered by his vengeful nephew. His extensive lands would have been a powerful inducement for his nephew to remove him and auction them off to royal supporters.

The Franco-Spanish showdown over Navarre in 1512 would have been a good opportunity for Edward V–or if he was dead, his brother Richard–as king to invade France. The English king, aged 41/2 (Edward V) or 39 (Richard of York), would have been unlikely to have had much military experience unless there had been an Anglo-French clash in the 1490s following the Breton succession-war. Burgundy, and thus their Habsburg allies, would have been the Yorkist government's principal Continental ally in 1485–1503, in contrast to real life where Maximilian as well as Duchess Margaret backed the pretender ‘Perkin Warbeck' against Henry VII (in return for the pretender naming Maximilian as his heir). France would, however, have still had Italy as its priority under Charles VIII and Louis XII, with an invasion of England to back a Lancastrian claimant–Henry Tudor? –a much more risky affair than it was in real-life 1485 when Richard III lacked legitimacy or support.