Introduction
Henry Tudor’s fateful
flight from Vannes in Brittany into France in the autumn of 1484 is claimed by
the Tudor histories to have been precipitated by the finalisation of negotiations
between Richard III and Francis Duke of Brittany’s treasurer, Pierre Landais, for
his repatriation to England. Neither of the earliest narrative accounts of these events, those of Bernard André (1500-1502) and Polydore Vergil (c. 1512), refers
to the presence in Brittany of any envoy from King Richard at the time of
Henry’s flight.[1]
Modern historians in search of the exact trigger for his departure have,
however, noted that an offering was made on 12 September 1484 at
St. Vincent Ferrer’s tomb in Vannes cathedral by ‘le Grant Escuier
d’Engleterre’ (in modern French le Grand Écuyer d’Angleterre): literally
‘the great esquire from England’.[2] Not
unnaturally, this man has commonly been assumed to have been the individual
whom King Richard had sent to conclude the negotiations for Tudor’s
repatriation; he has been identified by some authors as William Catesby,
esquire, and by others as Sir James Tyrell.
William Catesby as Envoy
Probably on the basis
that William Catesby was far and away the most powerful esquire in King
Richard’s service, in their discussion of this second failed attempt to capture
Tudor, in 1985 Ralph Griffiths and Roger Thomas asserted that Catesby ‘was in
Brittany by September 1484 (when he made an offering in Vannes cathedral . .
.)’.[3] This
identification has since been followed by Rosemary Horrox and Henry VII’s most
recent biographer Nathen Amin.[4] It
does, however, contain two major flaws.
The
first of these flaws is that William Catesby cannot have been in Vannes, in
southern Brittany, on 12 September 1484. On 11 September Scottish ambassadors
had reached King Richard at Nottingham, 160 miles from the south coast; on the
following day – the day on which the Grant Escuier made his offering in
Vannes cathedral – William Catesby was with the King to hear the address given
by the Scottish ambassador’s spokesman, Archibald Whitelaw; two days later
Catesby was formally appointed as one of the commissioners to treat with the
Scots for a truce and marriage treaty, and on 20 September was named in
Richard’s ratification of the resulting truce as one of those who had
negotiated it on his behalf over the period of the previous several days (per
nonullos dies mensis Septembris).[5] The
second issue is that the translation of le Grant Escuier as ‘the
Great Esquire’, upon which this individual’s identification as Catesby is
based, is almost certainly misleading. The word escuier/ écuyer
has two meanings: in most contexts it is the equivalent of the English
‘esquire’, with which, indeed, it shares a common root. But it was also used to
refer to the man in charge of the stable (écurie) of a lord or prince
and in France le Grand Écuyer was the official title of the man in
charge of the king’s stable, the officer known in England as the Master of the
Horse.[6] William
Catesby was not Richard III’s Master of the Horse.
Sir James Tyrell as Envoy
The true significance of
the term ‘le Grant Escuier d’Engleterre’ had evidently
been noticed by Clifford Davies when, in 1993, he suggested that the individual
in question was ‘probably Sir James Tyrell’, Richard’s ‘master of the horse,
and known to be employed on delicate foreign missions. . .’.[7] Davies
did not, however, offer any further explanation of the point for readers
unfamiliar with the term grand écuyer and so the man’s identification as
Richard’s ‘great esquire’, William Catesby, did not fall out of favour.
On
the basis that Tudor was fleeing Brittany to avoid being sent back to England,
and that Sir James Tyrell was Richard’s Master of the Horse, Davies’
identification of Tyrell as the le Grant Escuier d’Engleterre
who made offering in Vannes cathedral on 12 September 1484 is utterly
reasonable. Yet, unfortunately, Tyrell was no more available to perform this
task than Catesby since he too is recorded as a witness to Archibald Whitelaw’s
address at Nottingham Castle on the critical day.[8] But
if this English Master of the Horse was not Tyrell, then who was he? The puzzle
is perhaps not insoluble, but we may have been looking in the wrong direction
for its solution.
An Alternative Grand Écuyer
Whilst it is true that Henry
Tudor made his own last recorded offering at Vannes cathedral on 8 September 1484,
just four days before the offering made by the Grand Écuyer, he may not
have left Vannes for a further three weeks as it was not until 11 October that
the French court at Montargis received word that he had left the Duke of
Brittany’s domains and was on his way.[9] The
mysterious Grand Écuyer would therefore seem to have been someone from whom
Henry did not consider himself to be in danger.
Sir
James Tyrell’s immediate predecessor as Master of the Horse was John Cheyne,
esquire, and Cheyne had been well known in the French-speaking world since the
late summer of 1475 when he and Lord Howard had been left in France as hostages
to ensure the return to England of King Edward’s forces and had been nobly
entertained in Paris by Louis XI. Both Commines and the Paris notary Jean de
Roye, author of the ‘Chronique Scandaleuse’, refer to Cheyne as le
Grand Écuyer d’Angleterre, de Roye seemingly having known him only by
this title.[10] After losing his post to
Tyrell in 1483, Cheyne had thrown in his lot with Buckingham’s Rebellion, and following
the collapse of the rising had had the good fortune to find passage from Devon across
to Brittany, where he had joined Tudor’s growing band of exiles.[11] When
Henry fled from Vannes he took with him less than half a dozen on his most
trusted followers; Cheyne was not amongst them as is demonstrated by the Breton
financial records, which show that payments of 100 livres each were made
to Lord Scales, John Cheyne and Edward Poynings, ‘Englishmen who were left
behind at Vannes after Richmond went to France’, to help them to leave Brittany.[12] Therefore,
regardless of whether Tudor had left Vannes between 8th and 11th
September, Cheyne would still have been there on the 12th and available to make the Grant
Escuyer’s offering at the tomb of St. Vincent.
In Search of an Alternative Envoy
This solution does, however, leave us without an
identity for the English envoy from whose approach Tudor is often assumed to
have fled; it is therefore time to examine Richard’s diplomatic links with
Brittany during 1484. Although there is evidence of written communications
passing between the English and Breton governments that summer, the statement
given by the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais after his arrest in June 1485
indicates that much of the diplomacy had taken place in the context of
tripartite negotiations between King Richard, the Breton government and the
Archduke Maximilian of Austria, who was concentrating all his efforts on
securing the rule of the Low Countries for his infant son Philip.[13] This
ties in with Polydore Vergil’s claim that Henry’s flight was caused by the
arrival not of an English agent but of a messenger from John Morton, Bishop of
Ely, who was then living in exile in Flanders, with a warning about ‘this
treacherous agreement’.[14]
Bishop Morton would have had a very personal motive for sending such a message
since his nephew and protégé Robert Morton (later Bishop of Worcester) was with
Henry in Brittany and so also at risk.[15]
Sources and Suggestions for Further
Reading
Nathen Amin, Son of Prophecy: The Rise of Henry Tudor (Stroud, 2024)
I. Arthurson and N. Kingwell, ‘The Proclamation of Henry Tudor as King of England, 3 November 1483’, Historical Research, LXIII, Issue 150 (February 1990)
A. Bernier (ed.), Procès-verbaux des séances du Conseil de régence du roi Charles VIII pendant les mois d’août 1484 à janvier 1485 (Paris, 1836)
Bernard
André:
James
Gairdner (ed.), Memorials of King Henry the Seventh: Historia Regis Henrici
Septimi, a Bernardo Andrea Tholosate Conscripta (London, 1858) (Latin text)
Daniel Hobbins (trans.), Bernard André: The Life of Henry VII (New York, 2011) (English translation)
M. Condon, ‘The Kaleidoscope of Treason: Fragments from the Bosworth Story’, The Ricardian, VII, no. 92 (March 1986) ( https://richardiii.net/research/the-ricardian-journal/ )
C. S. L. Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and Henry Tudor’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, XXXVII, 1993
James Gairdner, Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, 2 vols, I (London, 1861)
Chris Given-Wilson et al., The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME) (Woodbridge, 2005)
Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester, 1985)
Rosemary Horrox, Richard III, A Study in Service (Cambridge, 1989)
Rosemary Horrox, ‘Catesby, William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4884)
Rosemary Horrox and P. W. Hammond (eds.), British Library Harleian Manuscript 433, 4 vols, III (Gloucester, 1982)
Michael Jones, ‘“For My Lord of Richmond, a pourpoint . . . and a palfrey”: Brief Remarks on the Financial Evidence for Henry Tudor’s Exile in Brittany 1471–1484’, The Ricardian, XIII (2003), pp. 283-293 (https://richardiii.net/research/the-ricardian-journal/)
Michael Jones, ‘La Bretagne et le Pays de Galles à la fin du Moyen Âge: contacts et échanges’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, XCI (2013)
B. de Mandrot (ed.), Journal de Jean de Roye, connu sous le nom de Chronique Scandaleuse, 1460-1483, 2 vols, I (Paris, 1894
B. de Mandrot (ed.), Mémoires de Philippe de Commynes, 2 vols, I: 1464-1477 (Paris, 1901)
Stephen O’Connor (ed. and trans.), Polydore Vergil’s Life of Richard III: An Edition of the Original Manuscript, Richard III Society (Westoning, 2023) (Latin text on odd-numbered pages, English translation on evens)
Thomas Rymer, Foedera, Conventiones, Literae et Cujuscunque Generis Act Publica, 12 vols, XII (London, 1727)
Chris
Skidmore, Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (London, 2013)
[1] Gairdner, Memorials (André),
p. 24; Hobbins, André, Life of Henry VII, p. 20-21; Vergil’s Life of
Richard III, pp. 33/34, 35/36.
[2] ‘. . . l’offerte que fait le
Grant Escuier d’Engleterre sur la tombe de Saint Vincent’ (Jones, ‘La
Bretagne et le Pays de Galles’, p. 241, n. 85).
[3] Griffiths and Thomas, Making of
the Tudor Dynasty, p. 111.
[4] Horrox, A Study in Service,
p. 278, and ‘Catesby, William’, ODNB; Amin, Son of Prophecy, p.
387.
[5] Gairdner, Letters and Papers,
I, pp. 63-67; Rymer, Foedera, XII, pp. 236, 242-3.
[6] ‘Écuyer’, Dictionnaire de
l’Academie Française (https://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr); ‘La Maison du Roi: écurie: le
grand écuyer’ (https://www.heraldica.org).
[7] Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and
Henry Tudor’, p. 117 & n. 38.
[8] Gairdner, Letters and Papers,
I, p. 65.
[9] Skidmore, Bosworth, p. 181;
Bernier, Procès-verbaux, p.128.
[10] Mandrot (ed.),
Chronique Scandaleuse, 1460-1483, I, p. 345; Mandrot (ed.), Philippe de
Commynes, I, pp. 306, 325.
[11] PROME, Parliament of
January 1484, item 3 [7]; Arthurson and Kingwell, ‘Proclamation’, p. 102.
[12] Jones, ‘Pourpoint’, p. 293.
[13] Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and
Henry Tudor’, pp. 111-2, 117, 125.
[14] Vergil’s Life of Richard III,
p. 33/34.
[15] Condon, ‘The Kaleidoscope of
Treason’, p. 210.
