The New Murrey and Blue blog

Halfwit, nothing was ‘normal’ or ‘as usual’ in the spring and summer of 1483 (or for that matter the whole of his reign) so as one historian has noted everything in those short two plus years have been put under a microscopic viewfinder. Anything Gloucester did, or didn’t do, after the untimely death of E4 (and it was, he sent by letter to Lord Howard to attend him – who arrived some days later, spending the weekend in London, and made it to Edward just before he died – clearly, when E4 sent that letter did not stress urgency!) so in such peculiar circumstances (probably the death of any king could be called peculiar) every situation and decision would have been fraught with meaning, speculation, innuendo and then the whisper campaigns unleashed by individuals he had no control over.
We have no idea how either Gloucester or Percy actually conducted situations that arose in the North, where most of their adult careers in policy were spent – I suspect they handled it within their own affinities, and if we lack documentation for every eruption of conflict or evidence of his “good lordship” that is pretty much par for the course with Richard. And IF something did become an issue where E4 did have to intervene and we know because there at least we have a paper trail with Rchard’s involvement (ie. the Pilkington-Savile feud) it was because both parties were embarrassingly Yorkist adherents!
For myself, the notion that the French (and counter-Yorkist elements, who had never rehabilitated to E4’s reign and certainly not to R3’s) were simply sitting over in Paris or Brittany or even Calais and too drowsy to take note that Edward had threatened to restart English aggression to avenge the breaking of the Picquigny Treaty (and the humiliation of Lady Elisabeth, his daughter) is untenable – Mancini may have been a low-rent bottom feeder for information but that doesn’t preclude all interested parties did not have proficient agents in the field, embedded for some time.
Consider the entirety of Louis XI’s fascinating reign, his whole approach to power and kingship, in many ways he was the polar opposite to his nemesis Duke Charles the Rash, who could not bring himself to STAY OFF a battlefield, despite being a very poor strategist and worse commander! Without a campaign to plan, to equip with the latest gear, to to mount for the next season, Charles’ simply could not function. Louis, in contrast, had horror of confrontation: too expensive, too unreliable, short fighting season, the whim of weather and allies, utterly nightmarish scenario! Better to make treaties you intend to break (which he routinely did), to buy off annoying belligerents (with mixed success), or poison, capture, bribe said belligerents, and/or embed your spies in THEIR camps, courts, households, bedchambers; purchase letters from one ruler to another, then dangle those incriminating letters to one (and usually to both parties) and claim you are the virtuous one to these faithless allies, (both E4 and Brittany’s duke Francis were caught like this) and Louis, who learned much from his Milanese friends, would never ever have pulled a stunt like the one where he breaks the Picquigny Treaty, dumps the betrothal with Elisabeth, who is more than ready for matrimony, for a 2 year old archduchess, and then just lays back in his cushy bedchamber to have a good old laugh.
He would want information, what was happening in London, what was being said in the streets, the taverns, on the docks, in the allies and parish churches? Were the people saying Edward was weak? That he was a fool, that their king looked the fool? Were they angry? Even a cleric like Mancini could pick up gossip like that, or anything else embedded agents were feeding the unhappy citizens of London, who, trust me, would not be too happy, remember, the North fleet had not been sent out for the wine, lol, no one making money, not the merchants who needed that fleet to sail, taking English good to France, picking up the wine, returing to London, Hull, Bristol, etc… E4 had not released it – even by April… people are not stupid, maybe Mancini didn’t know West Chepe from the Strand (and he didn’t) but people sensed something awry. Imagine the fertile ground any helpers Louis and his councilors sent found that winter-spring of 1483. As for Louis not caring anymore, he would die by August 1483, well, heck, LXI had been dying for over 2 years, maybe longer, he probably should have died five years earlier! His health was precarious at best, that is ONE big reason he did what he did with Picquigny, but that is another discussion!
Anything Gloucester did would have been watched and weighed and found curious – not just because of the untimely events of Edward’s sudden death, but also because they so rarely saw Gloucester – as far as we know the few properties he held in London he never even stayed in – and to make things even more remote, I can find little to nothing as to when Anne Neville ever visited London! Perhaps she was there for the wedding of young Richard to Anne Mowbray, but I have not read that she was – then again, did Henry Percy and his wife Maud Herbert ever venture into London?
As to explaining that the young bastard had died of being bled, and showing him to all, before his Progress, hmmm, no,ok, then when? Put off the Progress, show him and go when? still bad timing, and Richard, just my opinion here, really wanted that Coronation in York, I think for him THAT was the real coronation that meant something to both of them – so a delay would have been inconvenient but also just bad karma (in our lingo) – the nephew you put aside for his illegitimacy is led to death by his own doctor, you show him to the very unhappy populace and then you leave??? I’m no medieval PR whiz but that looks bad. So you get word that the kid is ailing, and you take both with you on Progress, maybe. Unless young Edward is already too weak to make such a journey, and no matter when he dies how do you stop certain elements from whispering that it was poison? The French themeslves said Edward IV was poisoned…
Richard may have been following E4’s own unhappy policy with George – say nothing. I do not believe George’s body was ever shown to the public, and I may be wrong but I doubt his son, the truly sad case of Edward earl of Warwick, was ever shown to the public after that menace H7 had his head hacked off. (Ditto the sister, elderly Margaret countess Salisbury) – all of those were private executions, well, George’s was a private one, perhaps E4 did not see any reason to exhibit his brother despite his charge of treason and attainder? A more ghoulish spectacle of exhibiting the body of young Edward, to prove to the crowds (what? that he was dead?) I cannot imagine, at any time, and there were enough malignant people in any crowd to just say “poison” to undo any comments by a string of respected doctors that Richard could have provided. What is heard cannot be unheard.
As to Argentyne, IF he did act with malignant intent, to undo the reign of Richard, since he may have felt the cause was lost for young Edward (too little support among the powerful freemen in London, too many already on board with Richard, an adult who had competent allies like Lord Howard – and too many who disliked the Woodvilles, etc – the discussion about Hastings is a long one, but a worthy one, just not here) he may have provided enough raw information to clerics like Mancini, as garbled as he understood it, knowing he himself would also disappear soon, (I do not think anyone knows just where Argentyne went after Richard accepted the Crown, speculation is he too bolted for France and the safety of Cato or Louis’s court, personally I would not be at all surprised if he left WITH Mancini and wrote the infamous Report using the notes Mancini had cobbled together so that it sounded like a field report – the whole thing was done by December then attached to the material given in a speech to the Estates General – in Latin – early in 1484, using very old propaganda from the 1450’s concerning the relentless butchery by the English on their monarchs, just to flesh out the report mind you).
If Argentyne was working to undermine Richard’s reign, for whom would be working? we immediately assume that would be MB, but while we all think she is just desperate and conniving enough to do anything, buy off anyone, and she certainly had her own agents, informers, bought the mercenaries, ships, etc, all that is coming, in the late spring of 1483 I don’t know if she had Argentyne by the nose, but what of Buckingham?
He had not only access to the Tower he would have been the one to permit Argentyne to administer care to one or both boys, at will, without question. Buckingham is also married to one of the Queen’s young sister’s and in 1483 she was expecting their fourth child (4 children in something like 6 years tells me he did NOT detest the woman, regardless what Mancini tells us; Louis d’ Orleans, married against his will, like Buckingham, but to LXI’s daughter Jeanne, did detest that wife, and had to be ordered, virtually under pain of death to even go near her) who knows what Buckingham was plotting? He surely saw himself as Crown worthy, IF by some chance the two boys did not survive the tender care of the good doctor he was next, surely that would be obvious to all – and the dowager Queen happy to have one of her daughters marry HIS HEIR.
But not to be, other plotters were busy, some of them with MB, another group with Morton and Rotherham, and Richard left it all in Howard’s hands, off he went on Progress.
There is SO much to do in ricardian research it is staggering, if I had Bill Gates’ money I would be handing out little piles of $$$ to people to get some of these endless questions resolved – I am convinced the questions we all have are out there, we just keep trying to answer or consider the questions from the same vantage points.
Recently historian Donald Kagan passed away, his area was Ancient Greece (not quite my area) but I read some of his fellow professors and a few of his students’ eulogies with interest, one in particular struck me as timely for what ricardians deal with all the time – the “paucity” of evidence, “the flotsam of fragmentary information carried down the ages by time” – Kagan would implore his students to make “make sense of it all – there was rarely an obvious right or wrong, There were, instead, the plausible, the remotely possible, and the completely absurd…” ((Paul Rahe, New Criterion, Oct 2021)
To my mind we ricardians too easily accept that its plausible Richard had to have killed his nephews, well, two of the many nephews he had had. Why do we knot consider it just as plausible that having the Three Estates deem Edward’s earlier marriage in secret, to Eleanor Talbot, an imminently qualified choice if he was interested in an English noblewoman from his own station, far more illustrious than anything the Woodvilles could produce in their genealogy, her father being Old Talbot, the famous general to his father the duke of York in France, as legitimate impediment to Edward and his siblings as a barrier to the throne? Edward’s marriage to Woodville was also conducted in secret, and kept secret for months, why is that not deemed conduct that is completely absurd for a king and immediately cause rational historians to question its legitimacy?
Why do we ricardians too easily accept that its plausible Richard ordered two of his many nephews killed when it is just as plausible that he ordered them to be moved quietly to less insecure locations? Rivers, Grey and Vaughan were all moved North, and separated for further security, it is imminently plausible that neither would benefit by remaining in London and I doubt any historian would call Richard a careless or reckless man. Killing them when they are already deemed bastards strikes me as in the “completely absurd” category – THE threat of their being rescued, by plotters willing to burn down half of London (that sounds absurd) would have only hastened his intent to get them out of the hornets nest of London, where he would not be for some months.
well, you can see where my argument is going, I just do not see Richard acting knee jerk in a panic, if he had shown this sort of disposition before, say at Edinburgh where in frustration with Albany and the Scots’ lords themselves, decided to just level the city or do as much damage to the castle and town, he did have his bombarde from LXI with him, well, that sort of fitful aggression, with 20K men behind him to loot and cause mayhem, that sort of behavior yes, that sort of person could indeed panic enough to then just tell some henchman to go off the nephews in their beds.
But everything we know about him, from his methodical approach to tracking his properties bought and sold, to the extreme care in his choice of musical selections in church services (apparently he did alot of this himself!) to his minute concerns with legal and business matters (mercantile and his own; he released the northern fleet for the wine, as king, in August 1483, for quick example) not to mention his handwriting (look at any other nobleman/woman of his day or even after, it is astonishing, chancery scribes plod along, his is actually eye opening!) all speaks to a someone who doesn’t just pop off. Even that last charge bearing down on a wide open Harry of Richmond, knocking Cheney out of his way, with only feet between them, even that was not reckless. That would have been a win, but for one William Stanley, the bravest of the brave, striking down one’s ally, one’s king, from behind with your Welsh pikemen.

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