With this guarantee Henry sailed to England at the time of Buckingham’s rebellion; all but two of his fifteen ships were scattered by a tempest and, when he hovered close by the coast of Dorset, he discovered that the revolt had ended ignominiously. So he returned to Brittany, followed by the rebels who had managed to evade the king’s wrath. Henry Tudor set up what was in effect an alternative court.
Yet Richard was for the moment safe. He tried to make his position even more secure by promoting northerners into the positions previously held by the magnates of the south, although of course this proved less than popular with the southerners themselves. They did not want ‘strange men’ in their shires, where rule was generally maintained by a closely knit group of relatives. Each shire was essentially a family business. The king was now stripping its assets.
The nature of his subsequent rule, however, has perhaps been judged unfairly because of its inauspicious beginnings. He had all the makings of a firm and even ruthless administrator. He set up a ‘council of the north’ to consolidate his power in that region, and it proved to be such a necessary tool of administration that it continued into the middle of the seventeenth century. Such was his zeal for public business that more than 2,000 official documents passed through his hands in the course of two years. Everything came to his attention, from the preparations for battle to the mowing of hay at Warwick. The high dignitaries of the Church, in convocation at the beginning of 1484, addressed his ‘most noble and blessed disposition’. This may be the standard language of the supplicant, but differs so notably from the usual accounts of Richard III that it deserves to be mentioned. The more benevolent view of the king is strengthened by the words of a popular ballad, ‘Scottish Field’, in which is described:
Richard that rich lord: in his bright armour.
He held himself no coward: for he was a noble king.
The king also gained the reputation of being a good lawmaker. When at a later date an alderman of London disagreed with Cardinal Wolsey over a proposed exaction, he reminded the prelate that such forced taxation had been forbidden by a statute of Richard III. ‘Sir,’ Wolsey said in his usual high-handed manner, ‘I marvel that you speak of Richard III which was a usurper and a murderer of his own nephews, then of so evil a man how can the acts be good?’ The alderman replied that ‘although he did evil yet in his time were many good acts made not by him only but by consent of the whole body of the realm which is in parliament’. So, contrary to the Tudor myth of the evil hunchback, memories of Richard III’s good governance remained in London fifty years after his death. Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor in a different reign, commented upon ‘the politic and wholesome laws’ passed in Richard’s first and only parliament.
Piety, verging on moralism, seems to have been the most abiding aspect of his character. In the Act claiming his title to the throne the king denounced the rule of Edward IV as that of one who, determined by ‘adulation and flattery and led by sensuality and excess, followed the counsel of persons insolent vicious and of inordinate avarice despising good virtuous and prudent persons …’. It seems likely that he did believe the Woodvilles to be of ‘sensual’ stock, and therefore justified to himself the murder of the two princes as a means of cleansing the body politic.
Two months after publishing this attack upon the Woodvilles he sent a circular letter to the bishops of England in which he declared that his fervent wish was ‘to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced’. This might just be an act of public piety but, after the death of his wife and only son, he composed a prayer of more private intent in which he asked God ‘to free me thy servant King Richard from all the tribulation, grief and anguish in which I am held’. His son, Edward, had died at the age of eleven in the spring of 1484; the insecurity of the York lineage was clear to all. His wife followed her child to the grave early in the following year. Richard was effectively alone in the world, prey to the ‘grief and anguish’ he lamented in his prayer.
Another intriguing aspect of his religious faith can be found. He owned a copy of the Wycliffite translation of the New Testament, as well as William Langland’s Piers Plowman; both of these books had been condemned by a synod of the Church in 1408. They smacked of Lollardy and a more austere version of Catholicism. It can be safely concluded that Richard was interested in an unorthodox and more rigorous piety, wholly in keeping with what can be surmised of his stern character. He need have no scruples if he was doing the work of the Lord.
