The Perfect Prince by Ann Wroe

Author:Ann Wroe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307432476
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

V

RICHARD STAYED TEN MORE MONTHS in Scotland, living on James’s hospitality. Once his pension resumed it was paid regularly, around the 10th of every month. Yet the king could barely afford to keep him. Ramsay said that James had already turned his chains, plate and “cupboards” into money to finance the raid of September, and fifty-four links of his great chain were sold off the next July and August. The loss of chain, in a prince just as dandified as Richard, underlined how expensive in every way their friendship had become.

They seem to have been together very seldom now. James was living openly with his favorite mistress, Margaret Drummond; Richard was with Katherine. From the payments for stabling his horses, it is clear that the couple were living from early 1497 at the royal hunting lodge at Falkland, in Fife, at the base of the Lomond Hills. Falkland was nearer to Katherine’s family and, in its rural quietness, closer to what she was used to. She and Richard lived there with their own attendants, for Andrew Forman seemed to be back with the king, at least for the time being. James himself, though he liked Falkland, hardly ever visited. In April he passed by on his way to St. Andrews, sending a present of “apple oranges” by messenger, and he heard Mass at the palace chapel on the way back. The chapel was dedicated to St. Thomas, the doubting disciple, though in the end Thomas had decided to believe.

Falkland was a hidden place, remote from the bustle of court and government. James had rebuilt the west and south ranges, but the palace still had narrow old-fashioned windows, and its scale was small. Water came from an aqueduct laid across the meadows. New gardens with a lawn had been made at the palace, an orchard of pear trees planted and a park laid out where horses and cattle were pastured. To the north, or west across the orchard that was misted with white blossom in the spring, the view was of deep forest. To the south, the moor-topped Lomonds rose like a wall. There was wonderful hawking there; and little else perhaps, save loving Katherine and watching their tiny son learn to smile and crawl, that Richard felt inclined to do. Yet he may have been staying mostly because he did not know where else to go.

His backers in Europe still kept his argument going, but with increasing difficulty. Margaret, as ever, remained the most committed. The Spanish sovereigns did not doubt, all through 1496, that she was still his chief support in Flanders—despite the new trade pact with England that forbade her to assist him. They ordered Francisco de Rojas, their ambassador there, “to try to stop the old duchess favoring York and annoying the king of England.” It is not known whether he tried. In October 1495 Margaret, through her council, had endeavored to raise 2,000 Rhenish florins from Casius Hacquenay and other Antwerp lenders to pay for more artillery and supplies for her White Rose.

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