Richard III Read Online Free Page A

in return the French brought wine, the Genoese and the Venetians silk, velvets, spices, sugar, gems, precious metals, armour and drugs, and the Germans timber, corn, amber and furs. For all their narrow streets and wooden houses, English merchants were busily building glorious guildhalls and soaring churches in the new Perpendicular style. The clergy too were prospering. Abbeys were richer than ever – ‘more like baronial palaces than religious houses’ wrote a Venetian at the end of the century – even if there were fewer monks. Secular priests made an excellent living while the Bishops were mighty lords. Indeed, there was much envy of the clergy, often expressed in a sometimes ferocious anticlericalism.
    The class who suffered most was that of landowners, especially the great. Although by continental standards the English aristocracy were not really a nobility but simply rich gentlemen, they none the less constituted a warlike élite who dominated the country. The combination of declining revenues among them and of exceptionally inept central government produced anarchy. The sixty or so English peers degenerated into something halfway between war lords and gang bosses, in the phenomenon known as bastard feudalism; they built up personal armies, ‘retaining’ local gentry with annuities. Any country gentleman who wished to save his estate and his goods – occasionally his life – had to be retained and have a protector. Finding themselves increasingly short of money, most magnates saw good reason to quarrel with each other over lands and local influence, even fighting private wars – sometimes there were full-scale pitched battles. More usually, in the struggle to preserve their wealth and authority, they simply terrorized the country round about; they beat up or murdered their weaker neighbours, or else forced them to submit by law cases during which juries were bullied into finding against them. Law and order broke down and there was widespread banditry. In consequence, there was no security for property, whether houses, movables, farmland or livestock. In the Act of 1461 which deposed King Henry, Parliament stated that under his rule
    not plenty, peace, justice, good governance, policy and virtuous conversation, but unrest, inward war and trouble, unrightwiseness, shedding and effusion of innocent blood, abusion of the laws, partiality, riot, extortion, murder, rape and vicious living, have been the guiders and leaders of the noble realm of England.
    It was only too easy, as lesser lords allied with greater, for private gang battles to escalate into civil war on a national scale. For the greatest lords, the ‘overmighty subjects’ – as a contemporary, Chief Justice Fortescue, termed them – had the military strength to pursue their political aims by other means. An unusually strong King like Henry V might have held them in check, but not his son.
    The traditional view of Henry VI is that he was too holy and too simple to rule, and that his Council of greedy favourites was responsible for the country’s miserable condition. Recently, however, it has been argued that the King himself must take much of the blame and was as perversely wilful as he was incompetent. 3 Yet his subjects were reluctant to blame him even if, in 1450, the men of Kent could complain that his ‘false Council has lost his law, his merchandise is lost, his common people is lost, the sea is lost, France is lost, the King himself is so beset that he may not pay for his meat and drink’. Not until the end of the 1450s could the English conceive of replacing Henry by another King. Most magnates supported the court party in any case, if only because it was the King’s party. As leader of the anti-court faction, the Duke of York would at first find little support among the lords, save from his Nevill kinsmen. None the less, Henry and his Council were very conscious of their unpopularity and extremely nervous about an heir presumptive to the