Blood and Roses by Helen Castor

Author:Helen Castor [Helen Castor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571286805
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

They were inept with money, he said, whether because they were incompetent at collecting it or foolish in spending it (‘either you gather shrewdly or else you spend lewdly’).35 Not only that, but their failure to take their responsibilities more seriously showed that they cared little about his welfare: ‘you may remember by this how you should do if this were yours alone’, he wrote, ‘and so do now’.36 It was an angry diatribe, both offensive and unfair to a devoted wife and a loyal servant who had defended his interests with remarkable tenacity. It was also totally unrealistic in its assessment of the strain which the conflict was putting on the family’s resources, both personal and financial. Evident in every word was the distress of a man under intense pressure – and, if the situation in which John found himself was largely self-created, that only compounded his problems, since he was simply incapable of modifying his behaviour.

John Russe tried again to talk him round in May 1465. His advice was that John should negotiate, and by Russe’s account Yelverton and Jenney were more than willing to talk: ‘they many times have moved a treaty’, he said, ‘and never it takes to no conclusion’. At the very least, he suggested, if John agreed to a meeting, he would have a chance to discover what his opponents wanted, and for what they might settle. He pressed the point despite the fact that he knew his advice was likely to fall on deaf ears: ‘I conceive well your mastership has a conceit that, if a man of goodwill moves you or remembers you to treat, that that man, whatsoever he be, should be moved by your adversaries to move you in that matter’. More than anyone else, Russe was prepared to tell John to his face that he was his own worst enemy. The letter itself was torn at both sides at some point after it was written, making it impossible now to reconstruct everything Russe wrote, but the force of his comments is unmistakable:

Sir, at the reverence of Jesu consider how many years it is past that my good lord and master deceased, and how little is done for … of the great substance that he had; it is heavy to remember. You say the default is not in you, after your conceit; but I can hear no … in that of your opinion, for this I know for certain, if it had pleased you to have ended by the means of treaty you had made … peace to the great well of the dead with the fourth part of the money that has been spent, and as men say only of very wilfulness … own person. For the mercy of God, remember the unstableness of this world, how it is not a minute’s space in comparison to ever … leave wilfulness, which men say you occupy too excessively.

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