Henry VII E-Book

Charles Williams

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Anyone who has had to read in the history of the Tudor Age finds his attention turned, sooner or later, to the person of King Henry VII. So much began with him—much that lasted, and much that did not last. But who was he that began it all? There are studies: Miss Temperley’s learned and lucid account of the reign, Dr. Busch’s even more learned and a little less lucid. Of shorter articles the most illuminating are those by Dr. Conyers Read and Dr. C. H. Williams. Even so, the reader is left a little defeated.

Charles Walter Stansby Williams (September 20, 1886-May 15, 1945) was an English writer.

Leseprobe

HENRY VII

BY

CHARLES WILLIAMS

1937

© 2021 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383831273

Table of Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER I “That most Innocent Ympe”

CHAPTER II “Change of Worlds hath caused Change of Mind”

CHAPTER III The King and the Kings

CHAPTER IV The Multiplication of the King

CHAPTER V “He of York”

CHAPTER VI The Marriages (i)

CHAPTER VII The King in His State

CHAPTER VIII The Hunting of Suffolk

CHAPTER IX The Nature of the King

CHAPTER X The Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INDEX

PREFACE

Anyone who has had to read in the history of the Tudor Age finds his attention turned, sooner or later, to the person of King Henry VII. So much began with him—much that lasted, and much that did not last. But who was he that began it all? There are studies: Miss Temperley’s learned and lucid account of the reign, Dr. Busch’s even more learned and a little less lucid. Of shorter articles the most illuminating are those by Dr. Conyers Read and Dr. C. H. Williams. Even so, the reader is left a little defeated.

To have some notion of Elizabeth, Mary, and Henry VIII, and none of their father and grandfather, is merely tiresome. This book is a personal effort to avoid that tiresomeness. The mere difficulty of discovering Henry as a person makes him attractive, and the unspecialized reader may find matter of interest—such as the translation of Prince Henry’s protest against his marriage with Katherine of Aragon—and a more artistic interest in the picture of a King, who, having built a great edifice of monarchy, and peering about it with a candle to provide against cracks, set light to a train of powder that shattered it. Francis Bacon—and wherever Francis Bacon went future travellers have to learn from him—said of Henry VII that his nature and his fortune so ran together that no man could distinguish between them. The full distinction (which is what all biography tries to effect) may perhaps never be drawn. This is at least a conjecture.

If I say that the responsibility for the book is partly Mr. Arthur Barker’s, it is only to make an opportunity of offering a gratitude for a continued kindness and goodwill not only in relation to King Henry VII but in many incidents of the last few years.

CHAPTER I “That most Innocent Ympe”

He began by being, on both sides, almost a bastard. His mother’s grandfather had been John of Gaunt; his father’s mother had been Katherine of Valois, widow of Henry V. John of Gaunt’s legitimatized granddaughter Margaret Beaufort had married Katherine’s legitimatized son Edmund Tudor. Henry was their only child.

The marriage in after years was said by St. John Fisher, on the authority of Margaret herself, to have been directed by supernatural power. She had been, a little before her ninth birthday, offered a choice between two bridegrooms, one of whom was Edmund. She had been in some doubt and had taken her difficulty to a friend, a pious old lady, who had told her how St. Nicholas was “the helper of all true maidens,” and had advised her to invoke his aid. At about four in the morning of the day when she was to decide, the saint, in episcopal vestments, had appeared to her, and told her to take Edmund for her husband. She obeyed; she “inclined her mind” to Edmund, and so (said Fisher) became the ancestress of kings. This had seemed unlikely at the time, for the legal instrument that had corrected the birth of his mother’s house, called Beaufort, and put them within the law, had particularly separated them from the Throne. An act of Richard II and again of Henry IV had declared the Beauforts capable of everything except the royal dignity. Nor on the other side could the relationship carry any claim. Katherine of Valois had married—if she had married—an unknown man, a Welshman, a hanger-on of the Court, Owen Tudor. It had been something of a scandal. Certainly the Tudor professed a descent that made Valois and Plantagenet seem upstarts; he said he sprang from the original kings of Britain, Cadwallader and the rest. Edmund, the son of Owen and Katherine, abandoned the arms of that pre-historic house in favour of a more modern shield, quartering the arms of England and France. It was at once a less modest and a more modest display. He had been brought up with his half-brother, the son of Henry V, who had already become Henry VI, and he enjoyed that King’s favour, so long as the King had favours to grant. Edmund died, still young, in 1456.

The wars of the Roses were then a threat to the land. In the preceding year the first skirmish had taken place at St. Albans, and the King had fallen into the hands of the Duke of York, but serious fighting did not begin till 1459, and not until 1460 did the Duke make his own public claim to the Throne. At St. Albans the Earl of Somerset, also a Beaufort and their chief, had been killed. There had been whispers that Henry VI had intended to make Somerset heir-presumptive, in spite of the legal disability. The suggestion was unpopular, doubly so because Somerset was regarded as responsible for the loss of English territory in France, but also unpopular in itself. The whole idea did no good to the Beauforts or indeed to the Crown.

Margaret Beaufort, who was then not quite fourteen, had taken or been taken to refuge with her husband’s relations in Wales. His brother, Jasper Tudor, who had fought at St. Albans, was Earl of Pembroke, and lord of Pembroke Castle. There, towards the end of January 1456-7, her child was born—probably on 28th January, and there for some years he remained, slowly discovering who he was, and how for all the panoply of three royalties—Welsh, English, and French—that danced about him, he was, when it came to the point, no one very particular. His mother, before he was four and she eighteen, had left him to Jasper in Pembroke, and had married again; her new husband was the Lord Stafford, a son of the Duke of Buckingham. It left him by himself then, but it was to be of use later.

The child’s legal misfortunes were not ended with his birth. The Roses pranced bloodily over the land, and were marked more and more by actions of personal hate. “The war,” in Mr. Belloc’s phrase, “was becoming a violent vendetta of reciprocal murder.” The Duke of York and his young son were shamefully killed in 1460. In 1461 Henry’s grandfather, Owen, who was still alive, and his uncle Jasper of Pembroke, led a force westward in support of the Queen, Margaret of Anjou. They marched to Mortimer’s Cross, where on 2nd February they met a much more brilliant captain, Edward Plantagenet, now Duke of York, by succession to his murdered father, and they were utterly defeated. Owen Tudor was taken prisoner and promptly executed; his head, adorned with candles, was set up at Hereford. Jasper escaped from the battle and fled to Scotland. Edward Plantagenet proclaimed himself King, and was crowned at Westminster. Henry VI was captured and confined in the Tower. Edward proceeded to attaint his chief enemies; among them Jasper Tudor in exile, and the small Henry Tudor in Pembroke. His inherited title of Richmond was formally bestowed on Edward IV’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence. Nevertheless, for some time the child remained in Lancastrian hands. The castle of Pembroke held out, and before it fell Henry had been transferred to Harlech. Harlech, the last stronghold of Lancaster, was taken at last by Lord Herbert on King Edward’s behalf in 1466, and the boy with it. Herbert became the Yorkist Earl of Pembroke in place of the attainted Jasper, and was given the wardship of the captive and attainted Henry.

At the age of nine, therefore, the boy could have no concern with the Crown; he was a minor, of one of the attainted houses of English nobility, and hereditarily debarred at that from all legal pretence to majesty. What he could hardly have known was the extent to which the prestige of the Crown was beginning to be shaken. The accession of Edward IV might have improved matters, for Edward, if he had any claim at all, had a stronger claim than had his prisoner Henry VI. But alternations of occupancy were bound to shake stable allegiance, and in 1467 another reversal of fortune drove out Edward and brought back Henry VI. The new Earl of Pembroke had been thinking of marrying his ward to his own daughter, but before anything had been done about it the Lancastrians rose, and at Banbury, defeated, captured, and executed him. Jasper Tudor, who had been moving about between Scotland and France, recovered possession of his nephew, and brought him up to London.

In London Henry was presented to the saintly and unfortunate King, whose fate was, as it were, a sacrifice for the rebellion of his grandfather Henry IV against Richard II. It was afterwards said that the King, contemplating the high carriage of the son of his half-brother, was moved to prophecy: “This truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.” A hundred years later, writing under the established sovereignty of that boy’s granddaughter Elizabeth, Shakespeare, practising his own young technique, turned the doubtful story to verse.

King Henry. My Lord of Somerset, what youth is that

Of whom you seem to have so tender care?

Somerset. My liege, it is young Henry, Earl of Richmond.

King Henry. Come hither, England’s hope: If secret powers

Suggest but truth to my divining thoughts,

This pretty lad will prove our country’s bliss.

His looks are full of peaceful Majesty,

His head by nature fram’d to wear a crown,

His hand to wield a sceptre, and himself

Likely in time to bless a regal throne.

Make much of him, my lords; for this is he

Must help you more than you are hurt by me.

At least, Henry’s attainder was reversed, with those of all other Lancastrians; he was again Earl of Richmond. It was 1470, and he was thirteen, a person of standing, old enough to take part in affairs, old enough to be decided. His health, during that disturbed boyhood, had not been good; on the other hand, it was asserted that his tutors had been astonished at his quickness. If it were true, it was because he had had, so far, no need to disguise his quickness; he could let himself be known to be swiftly apprehensive. But, like Elizabeth after him at something the same age, the chief thing he had to apprehend, now and for long, was his own safety. All else depended on that.

The year which followed that momentary sun of the Red Rose’s winter saw the White Rose snowing down again, and the young Earl fleeing from the storm. It was the year of the return of Edward IV, of Warwick’s defeat at Barnet and Queen Margaret’s at Tewkesbury, of the fourteen-year triumph of York. The organized forces of Lancaster were completely overthrown; the Prince of Wales was stabbed after the battle of Tewkesbury; King Henry was murdered on the night of Edward’s return to London. Jasper Tudor, after the presentation in London, had gone back to Wales. There, as soon as he heard of the queen’s landing, he had raised forces to join her. He had set out with them on his way to Tewkesbury, and had passed Chepstow, when he heard of the grand defeat. He retired on Chepstow, then again back to Pembroke. There King Edward’s Welsh allies besieged him under a leader called Morgan Thomas. But in a few days Morgan’s brother David came down against him with another force to support Jasper—it is an epigram of those wars—and raised the siege. Jasper could not see anywhere a point of stability for himself or his friends. His sister-in-law, Henry’s mother Margaret, sent to him urging him to save her son; delay and capture were growing more dangerous to life with each successive change in the holder of the Crown. A child of four might have escaped what now a boy—a young man—of fourteen might not; the Prince of Wales had been only seventeen when he was stabbed. Jasper consented; he and his nephew fled to Tenby, and then oversea.

Henry had thus escaped the Restoration, but he was an exile. But also, whether or not he or any realized it during that short voyage, he was becoming by now the exile. Illegitimate as regards the Crown, attainted as regards his earldom, fugitive as regards his person, it was yet true that he was by now the only likely head of the Lancastrian party. He was the nearest thing to royalty that, if it survived, it possessed. Whether it would survive was another question, but Henry’s own survival was its best chance. It is impossible that he should not have seen it. He was a hope. But he showed no immediate eagerness to be regarded as a hope; he was more concerned with his simple survival, and the more he became a hope the less likely was he to be a survival.

Refugees of royalty were common in Europe. It was generally a little difficult to say accurately at any moment what the exact standing of any of them was. Between two mornings a guest of such a kind might become a hostage or even a prisoner; he might, on the other hand, be proposed as a claimant and supported as a Pretender. Henry’s ship drew in to Brittany; he was brought to the Duke. He became immediately a piece on the board of a different game. He might be the rising head of the Lancastrians, but that Red castle was now to be pushed about in the moves of a conflict with which in Pembroke they had been little concerned. It was a conflict of more importance to the future history of Europe than the English wars; it was to decide to what extent France should be a nation. The future of France has been ever since what that decision made it.

The Government of France was concerned in a task similar to that of the Government of Spain, and to what was presently to be the task of the Government of England. It was recovering and consolidating territory; it was abolishing feudal lordships of independent power and uncertain loyalty; it was discovering and stabilizing its strength; it was recreating its King. Over the Pyrenees the joined powers of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were attempting the same thing against the Moorish settlements as well as the Spanish divisions. But in France there were no Moors; there were only duchies and counties, which by one method or another were falling more and more into the power of the French King. The northern parts had been recovered by war in the time of Henry VI, after the great initiative of St. Joan of Arc. Anjou, Maine, Provence, and Burgundy were, or were in process of being, obtained by one device or another. There remained only the Duchy of Brittany and the English city of Calais.

The immediate pressure of the French Government was now maintained against Brittany. Against that pressure the Duke of Brittany had two chief weapons—his soldiers and his two daughters, whose marriages to suitable husbands might procure him more soldiers. The arrival of Henry provided him with the hope of another weapon, or of the means at least to procure other weapons. Henry found himself hospitably received, but it became clear to him, as to all such refugees, that he could not tell from day to day what was the exact nature of the smiles on the faces of his hosts, or how much of promise mingled with how much of pretence. It was a lesson he did not forget when, in later years, he himself was threatened, or in a narrowing mind believed himself to be threatened, by claimants from foreign shelters.

The King of England, the now firmly established Edward Plantagenet, opened correspondence with the Duke of Brittany. He was at that time in alliance with the other great Duchy of Burgundy and in hostility to France under Louis XI. Louis bought him off, but he was still desirous, if possible, to recover the person of Henry, so-called Earl of Richmond. He was aware that Henry “was the only person to disturb all his felicity,” though Henry’s chances of doing so were small and Henry’s claims to do so were smaller. Allegiance in these last months of revolt and re-revolt, of rebellions and treacheries and murders, had come to mean almost nothing. Edward maintained a pressure on the Duke to surrender his guest. The Duke had not so great an objection to surrendering him as to surrendering him without compensation. It was all one to him, then and later, whether he supported Henry in a reconquest of England or surrendered Henry to the present conquerors of England, so only that the rulers of England supported his own battle against the central government of France. Edward, or his ambassadors, assured the Duke that the King had it in mind to marry Henry to his own daughter Elizabeth. The Duke allowed himself to be persuaded, and imagined his own best prospects to lie in handing over his guest to the union. Henry was passed to the ambassadors; he had fallen, they say, “through agony of mind, into a fever.” It is not unlikely; his reluctance to return and his disbelief in the marriage were equally strong; he knew the daggers that had stabbed King Henry and Prince Edward, or the axe that had despatched his grandfather, would not be slow to end him if the King chose. The envoys, guarding the fabulous and feverish bridegroom, had reached St. Malo when they were overtaken. The Duke had changed his mind; he would not let Henry go. It may be he had become doubtful of the King’s meaning and had a sense of decency towards his guest; it may be that he had determined to have greater assurances of aid from England before he gave up his great hold on England. His treasurer, Peter Landolf, came riding into the town. He found the ambassadors; he explained that his errand was to recover Henry. The ambassadors protested; there was conversation. During the conversation the Breton soldiers who had accompanied the Treasurer got hold of Henry and carried off “that most innocent ympe” to sanctuary. The ambassadors protested more vehemently, but they could not do anything. They were compelled to compromise on Landolf’s promise that Henry should either be kept in the sanctuary where “by their negligence,” as Landolf rather unkindly said, he now was, or be held in a stricter custody by the Duke. At least Henry, as he was carried back, had been saved from whatever kind of marriage had awaited him in England.

Nothing more of violence threatened him during the reign of Edward IV. He remained under restraint, observing as far as he could the activities of Europe. The restraint was relaxed on the death of Edward and the usurpation of Richard III. Richard was crowned on 6th July 1483. On 26th August 1483 the Duke of Brittany sent the new King a letter. He wrote that he had been several times urged by the King of France to deliver to the said King the person of “the lord of Richmond his cousin.” He went on to dilate on the strength of the King of France, which was indeed continually in his thoughts for other reasons than any concerning the lord of Richmond. He added that he might be compelled, because of that strength, “of necessity to deliver to the said King Louis the said lord of Richmond, and to do other things to which he would be very loth for the injury which he knows the said King Louis would or might inflict upon the said King and Kingdom of England.”

Such a letter, sent within seven weeks of Richard’s seizure of the Throne, was obviously a threat. It was accompanied by a suggestion that Richard should send four thousand English archers to Brittany to operate if necessary against France, and help to keep the Duke independent; in which case there was every possibility that the lord of Richmond might be kept under renewed restraint. Richard did not see his way to satisfy the Duke’s desires. It chanced, therefore, that on 22nd November in the same year the Duke issued a warrant to allow his treasurer to deliver ten thousand crowns of gold “to our most dear and well-beloved cousin the Lord of Richmond without making any difficulty therein . . . notwithstanding whatsoever commands, orders, prohibitions, restrictions, or other things to the contrary.”

The immediate cause of this grant was the changed situation in England. In 1482 Henry’s mother’s second husband, Henry Stafford, had died, and she had married again. Her third husband was Thomas, Lord Stanley, a great person both with Edward IV and Richard III. She had so far left her early Lancastrian connexion behind that she carried the Queen’s train at King Richard’s coronation, but she had not left either the Buckingham relationship or her Tudor son behind. The present Duke of Buckingham was a descendant of John of Gaunt’s brother on the father’s side; on the mother’s, he also was of the Beauforts. The removal of any real sense of allegiance was opening, to any of the nobility who was remotely connected with the Blood Royal, a possibility of the Crown. Buckingham had helped to gain it for Richard; within a few weeks of the coronation he had taken umbrage, retired from the Court, and was considering striking for himself. It is said that he had forgotten the existence of Richmond until one day, when he was out riding, he met by chance Richmond’s mother, and he saw her and her son as “both bulwark and portcullis” between him and “the majesty royal and getting of the crown.” It was said also, much later, that the Duke knew he had in his possession a version of the Act legitimatizing the Beauforts in which the critical words saving the royal dignity were omitted, and that he had once intended to give the said writing to the future King, but the Duke said that “he would not have done so for ten thousand pounds.” Whatever the cause, he determined to be a kingmaker rather than a king. He had tried with Richard, and Richard had disappointed him; he would try it again with the young man of twenty-six over the water. He discussed the matter with one then in his custody, John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Morton was a Balliol man, and a canon lawyer, and very nearly a great man; the description of him, ten years later, remains to us in the pages of Sir Thomas More. He was in 1483 a man of just over sixty; he had been a Lancastrian until Tewkesbury, when he had made his submission to the ruling house and had been employed and preferred by Edward. He had been one of the negotiators of the King’s treaty with Louis of France, and had become Bishop of Ely in 1479. But on the usurpation of Richard he had been arrested on some pretext of being concerned in conspiracy—certainly because he was suspected of too great loyalty to Edward’s sons, the Princes in the Tower. He had been handed over to Buckingham’s custody, and Buckingham had removed his distinguished ecclesiastical prisoner from the Tower to Brecknock Castle, where he could be kept more safely not only from the Lancastrians but from the King, and where he now came to talk to him.

The Duke was very angry, and consequently very repentant. He lamented to the Bishop his folly in the past, his support of the wild boar who now crouched on the Throne. The Bishop listened cautiously, but did not at first commit himself. “When he understood his just cause of hatred,” he became convinced of the new convert’s probity. He may have sighed for the hatred as a Bishop, but he took advantage of it as a Lancastrian. It was known that a marriage between Henry Tudor and King Edward’s daughter had once been suggested, and the proposal was now more seriously revived under the influence of Henry’s mother. Morton and Buckingham sent messengers to Elizabeth’s mother, the Dowager Queen of Edward IV, and found that the Countess Margaret’s messengers were there before them, urging the same plan.

The Queen Dowager was then in sanctuary at Westminster with Elizabeth her daughter; she had fled there to be safe from the new King. Her sons had been in the Tower; now they had disappeared. They had been the chief danger to the new King. She was contented to pay herself back and to pay the King out with a son-in-law, though she was not a person whose conspiracies could be very firmly relied on. But she was only asked to agree. The arrival of the double embassy convinced her; she agreed to the marriage. Messengers were sent over to Brittany to inform Henry Tudor of the plans and to arrange for a co-ordination of movements.

Henry found himself offered the Crown. The primary importance of the offer was that it came from what had been the other side. It was conditional, but the condition was not very onerous; marriages of convenience were common enough, and he could hardly have hoped for a better, nor indeed for one as good. He knew very well how faint was his real claim to the Throne, however his Lancastrian partisans might brag of it, and if he had known of the paper the Duke of Buckingham was hiding, he would not have thought that made the claim much stronger. He was never a rash crusader; he weighed his chances. But the chances were all on one side; on the other was the mere certainty of quiescence in the power of the Duke of Brittany. The Duke had seemed kind of late, and had even talked of marrying Henry to his daughter Anne, but if Richard of England proved to be firmly settled and were willing to stand with Brittany, that was not at all a likely marriage. So long as he kept his person safe he could not lose much. He determined to go, but to go cautiously. He accepted the proposal; he promised to marry Elizabeth; he made preparations. He was informed that the rebellions were to begin through the south of England on 18th October simultaneously; it was hoped he would land in Wales by then. On 12th October he put to sea; fifteen ships carrying five thousand men—hired soldiers—rode on the waters under the Red Rose.

A storm struck them. Henry saw his fleet dispersed and his plans deranged by the skies. He eventually reached the English coast, his own ship accompanied only by one other, and sailed along it westwards towards Plymouth. At Plymouth he hesitated about landing, but from some uncertainty on the shore he took alarm and gave up the attempt. It was the first military crisis of his career; the second, and last, was Bosworth. He was saved this time by intelligence, as the next time by cunning. The rebellion had already failed, and the King’s troops were hunting it down. Kent had risen too soon; and King Richard had seized his chance. A price was already on Buckingham’s head. He had set up his standard at Brecknock, but a storm swelled the Severn; he was unable to cross and join the rebels in Devonshire. His soldiers began to desert; he himself fled, and was betrayed by the man with whom he took shelter. He was seized and executed on 2nd November.

Buckingham’s claim to the Throne may have been small, but, such as it was, it had vanished. All possible Yorkist claimants seemed to be disappearing one by one. The Princes in the Tower were gone; Richard’s own son was soon to die, and he would have to name as heir his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. The White Roses were falling from their bush; on the Red, Henry was the last. He landed in Normandy on 30th October; thence he came again to Brittany, by permission of the French Government—which makes the Duke of Brittany’s earlier letter a little odd. He heard of the collapse of the rebellion, the death of Buckingham, and the royal action towards the rebels. There were many attainders, but the King had been gracious to Henry’s mother, Margaret, and only handed her over (with all her property) to the custody of her husband Lord Stanley. Bishop Morton had crossed to the Low Countries before the rebellion began. “After the Duke was engaged, and thought the Bishop should have been his chief pilot in the tempest,” said Bacon unkindly, “the Bishop was gotten into the cockle-boat, and fled over beyond seas.” Other lords, gentlemen, and clerics came over to Brittany: the Marquis of Dorset, son of the Queen Dowager before her marriage with Edward; the Bishop of Salisbury, the Bishop of Exeter; a Bourchier, a Courtenay, a Poynings. Allegiance was coming less than ever to mean anything. “The more party,” wrote a City chronicler, “of the gentlemen of England were so dismayed that they knew not which party to take but at all adventure.” More and more the growing opposition to Richard (helped by the rumours of the murder of the Princes in the Tower) necessarily meant support for the Tudor. More and more the exile found himself surrounded by something like a Court. It was at this juncture that the Duke of Brittany sent him the ten thousand crowns.

It was then that Henry determined to act by himself, to have at last a conspiracy, an army, and an oath of his own. It was more to his taste than joining some other. He always preferred to be with himself in secret than with others in frankness; now, however, he was frankly himself; the crowns may have determined him, for he must always be on good terms with money. By the end of 1483 he promulgated state. He still accepted the idea of marrying Elizabeth, and he made use of this to declare himself. He was twenty-seven years old, tall and lean, fair-haired and fair-skinned, with a smiling amiable face—“especially in his communication.” The amiable smile of communication was not perhaps entirely disinterested; in later years he did not keep, or did not trouble to keep, the smile. But he presented himself all graciousness now. In the Cathedral of Rennes, on Christmas Day, he heard mass and stood up to make oath that he would marry the Princess Elizabeth as soon as he had achieved the Crown. His assembled Court did homage to him as if he were already anointed and crowned. He ceremonially put himself at the head of the Opposition, that is, at the head of the baronial party of Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform. He was to mean exactly that, and the three words were to mean rather more than his aristocratic supporters knew.

There was one possible hindrance to the intended marriage. Richard was presently talking of marrying Elizabeth himself, niece of his though she was. The Queen Dowager, bored with sanctuary, had on the collapse of the rebellion left it and gone over to Richard, daughter and all. The King kept the Princess Elizabeth in his power, as he did the only son of his other brother Clarence, the only other heir of his family, the small Earl of Warwick. He made renewed efforts to extract from Brittany the young man who had sworn, though not in any passion of romantic love, that he would certainly become Elizabeth’s husband—when he had become King. He promised the Duke all the titles and revenues of Richmond if the Duke would send over to him the man who had pretended to be Earl of Richmond and was now pretending to be more than an earl. He issued pardons, in order to lure the Earl’s supporters; notably he tried to recover John Morton, who in Flanders was another rallying point of the Opposition. He raised troops against the threat of invasion. And finally he talked of marrying Elizabeth.