A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF EDMUND & RICHARD DE LA POLE’S CONNECTIONS TO THE TOWN OF HATTEM AND CHARLES OF EGMOND, DUKE OF GUELDERS
Richard Anderton
The historic gateway to Hattem (author's photograph)
Background – the Wars of the Roses
As you probably know, during the second half of the 15th Century two rival dynasties fought for the English throne. These were the House of York, whose badge was a white rose, and the House of Lancaster whose badge was a red rose. the de la Pole brothers, John, Edmund and Richard were the nephews of two Yorkist kings, Edward IV and Richard III, through their mother, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. They were also cousins of another Yorkist king, Edward V, who was the son of Edward IV. It is said that Richard III killed Edward V, who was only 12 years old at the time of his accession, in order to usurp the throne but the identity of the boy’s murderer is still hotly debated.
Whether he killed Edward V or not, Richard III became king of England in 1483 but his Lancastrian rival, Henry Tudor, disputed his succession. The matter was decided in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth when Richard III was killed and Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII. Neither Richard nor Edward had any male children still living so the Yorkist claim to the throne passed to their nephews: John, Edmund and Richard de la Pole.
John de la Pole’s Rebellion
The de la Pole’s Yorkist claim to the throne stems from their mother, Elizabeth, whose father a descendant of King Edward III, had been Duke of York. Elizabeth had married the Duke of Suffolk in 1458 and the couple produced eleven children, most of whom either died young or entered the church, but John, Edmund and Richard continued the fight against the Lancastrian Tudor King Henry VII.
Their eldest son, John de la Pole, who is usually known by his title Earl of Lincoln to differentiate him from his father (who was also called John), was the first to rebel and he did so with the help of his maternal aunt, Margaret. It is at this point the story involves the Netherlands.
Margaret de la Pole, also known as Margaret of York, had married Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468. After her marriage she is usually known as Margaret of Burgundy but she was widowed in 1477 when her husband was killed at the Battle of Nancy. For a while, Margaret ruled Burgundy as regent for her both her step-daughter, Mary, and after Mary’s death, for her step-grandson, Philip the Fair, son of the future Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg. Margaret was thus a key figure in European politics during the 1480s and 1490s and after 1485 she tried help her eldest nephew reclaim the throne of England.
In 1487 Margaret paid for a mercenary army, led by Martin Schwartz and the earl of Lincoln, to invade England but this force was totally destroyed at the Battle of Stoke Field. One contemporary account describes the rebel corpses as being ‘so full of arrows they looked like hedgehogs and among the dead were Schwartz and Lincoln. Lincoln’s death left his brother, Edmund de la Pole as the chief Yorkist claimant to England’s throne.
Edmund’s First Exile
At first Edmund showed no sign of wanting to be king and it has to be said that he was not very intelligent. He was also something of a playboy but he was athletic and he excelled at the sport of jousting. Unfortunately for Edmund, his rival, Henry VII, could never forget that the de la Pole claim to the throne was stronger than his own, so he set about trying to destroy the entire family. When Edmund’s father died, he was not allowed to inherit the title of Duke of Suffolk, on the grounds he lacked the income to maintain a ducal rank; instead he was granted the lesser title of Earl of Suffolk. This was a calculated insult designed to provoke Edmund into rebellion and he fell into Henry’s trap.
Admittedly, Edmund did much to engineer his own downfall. After a drunken brawl, in which a peasant had been killed, Edmund was arrested and charged with murder but he was offered a full pardon if he attended open court, pleaded guilty and swore an oath of loyalty to Henry. At the time, the killing of commoners by noblemen was no great crime in England (!) and several Tudor courtiers had been pardoned without having to appear in public before a judge. Consequently, Edmund thought he was being singled out for special treatment and he fled.
The fugitive earl left England in July 1499 and at first Henry thought he had travelled to Burgundy to enlist his aunt Margaret’s support for another rebellion. However, the widowed duchess was now too old to meddle in politics, so Edmund sought the protection of Philip the Fair, who had become Archduke of Burgundy, and Maximilian, who had become Holy Roman Emperor. Unhappily for Edmund. his timing could not have been worse.
At this time, both Philip and Maximilian wanted good relations with Tudor England and they told Edmund to make his peace with Henry and all he could do was accept their advice. Yet Edmund’s return to favour was to be short lived. He was continued to be humiliated by the king and matters came to a head in June 1500 when Henry VII met Archduke Philip at Calais for an important trade conference. At the end of these lavish proceedings, Edmund was forced to swear an oath of loyalty to Henry in front of Philip and this was the last straw for the proud earl of Suffolk.
For a year, Edmund let his anger slowly come to the boil and it was during this time that a Yorkist spy at the imperial court began talking to Maximilian about reviving the White Rose claim to the throne. Though it is likely that Edmund had no knowledge of these negotiations at the beginning by the summer of 1501 both he and the emperor was ready to make common cause against Henry. Apparently, Henry had refused to support Maximilian’s proposed crusade against the Turks, who were threatening the Habsburgs’ Austrian heartlands, so Maximilian decided to punish Henry by backing Edmund’s bid for the throne.
Edmund’s Second Exile
At the end of July 1501,Edmund escaped from England for the second time and on this occasion he took with him his youngest brother, Richard. After travelling through Germany for several weeks, the two Englishmen found Maximilian at Imst, in the Austrian Alps, and Edmund was granted an audience. The meeting went well, Maximilian declared he would do everything he could to help his ‘beloved cousin’ and the brothers were told to go to Aachen, where they would be safe from Tudor assassins, whilst preparations for the conquest of Tudor England were made.
Though Edmund thought he would be in Aachen for no more than a few weeks, months passed, then years with no sign of any invasion. During this time Edmund wrote frequent letters to the Emperor asking for an explanation of the delay and each time he was fobbed off with a different excuse. Finally Maximilian claimed that the men and money he had earmarked for the war against Henry would have to be diverted to the Netherlands to crush a rebellion by the Duke of Guelders.
The Guelders Wars & Edmund’s Imprisonment at Hattem
I am sure you know far more than I about the Duke of Guelders’ long fight for independence, so please forgive me for passing over the details of this epic conflict to concentrate on Edmund’s brief involvement.
The year is now 1504 and Edmund is becoming increasingly desperate. He and Richard are still living in Aachen but they have run out of money and they are constantly being harassed by their creditors. Unbeknown to Edmund, Maximilian had accepted a large bribe from Henry to abandon his support for the Yorkists and though the de la Pole brothers were allowed to remain in Aachen the imperial grants that had formed the greater part of their income were withdrawn.
Without Maximilian’s support, Edmund was forced to seek new allies and his first choice was George the Bearded, Duke of Saxony. George’s father, Albert the Brave, had helped another pretender to the English throne, Perkin Warbeck, mount a rebellion against Henry VII and Edmund must have thought George would do the same for him. However, although the initial discussions went well, George demanded that Edmund meet him in person to make an alliance.
This was not as easy as it may sound because George, a die-hard Habsburg loyalist, was fighting his own war in Frisia, in an attempt to impose imperial rule on the rebel Frisians. To meet George, Edmund would have to cross not one but two battle zones as the Guelders Rebellion had also flared into a full scale war. Undaunted, Edmund wrote to Charles asking for safe conduct across his dukedom. Charles granted this request and he invited Edmund to dine with him at his castle of Hattem before he crossed the Ijssel and continued his journey to Frisia. Yet there was a hidden motive behind the duke’s offer.
To wage war on the Habsburg controlled Holy Roman Empire, Charles needed huge sums of money but his war chest was empty. He therefore devised a plan to kidnap Edmund, sell him to his Tudor enemies and use the ransom money raised to finance his fight for independence. This is a shameless example of the new ‘Machiavellian’ style of politics that was becoming common in Renaissance Europe but we should not be too critical of Charles.
Edmund’s first imprisonment at Hattem
There is a saying in England that ‘all is fair in love and war’ and Charles certainly did not mean to harm Edmund physically. Throughout his captivity, the fugitive earl was well treated and Charles later claimed that it had been a condition of his ransom demand that all the lands Henry had seized in the aftermath of Edmund’s self-imposed exile had to be returned. It also has to be said that nobles captured in battle were usually held for ransom; nevertheless, taking Edmund prisoner after inviting him to stay at Hattem as a guest was not the act of a good host!
The slow witted Edmund knew nothing of Charles’ plan and he went blindly to his doom. He arrived at ‘Dikke Tinne’ at the end of April 1504 but as soon as he crossed the moat and entered the castle’s impregnable towers the trap was sprung. Edmund was now a prisoner and messengers were sent to London with the planned ransom demand. However, Charles had asked for so much money, Henry refused to pay. This left Charles with a problem; theoretically Edmund was a very valuable prisoner but if King Henry would not pay, who would?
After his failure in England, Charles turned to the King of Scotland, James IV, to whom he was distantly related (James’ grandmother, Mary of Guelders, was a daughter of Charles’ grandfather, Arnold of Egmond). No doubt Guelders’ beleaguered duke was relying on these family ties, as well as Scotland’s traditional hatred of England, to recruit the Scottish king to his cause, but he had miscalculated badly.
Though James was no friend of the English, he was married to Henry VII’s daughter, Margaret Tudor, and he had no wish to fight his father-in-law, at least not yet. In 1513, James did invade England, to honour Scotland’s ‘old alliance’ with France, but at this time he wanted peace with his English neighbours. James therefore wrote to Charles and told him he had no intention of going to war with Henry or supporting the Guelders Rebellion. He also chastised his cousin for breaking the rules of hospitality.
It had to be said that James letter was, in places, extremely rude and I have included a brief passage to illustrate this in the Appendix to this paper. Yet the Scottish king’s stinging rebuke was the least of Charles’ worries because the war was already going very badly for him. The cities of Zutphen and Arnhem were being besieged by Philip and without foreign aid they could not hold out. If these strongholds fell, the war would be lost and now the story now takes a highly unusual turn.
The Imperial Capture of Hattem
As the war dragged on, the fighting in Guelders increased in ferocity. This devastated Gelderland and the warring armies were forced to forage far and wide for supplies. In July 1505, an imperial raiding party, led by a captain called von Lichtenstein, found itself scouring the countryside near Hattem for food whilst the town’s militia was elsewhere doing the same.
Without soldiers to man the town’s walls, Hattem was defenceless so the terrified citizens sent a deputation to offer the imperial captain their immediate surrender. The townspeople hoped this would spare Hattem the customary looting and pillaging that were common features of medieval warfare. However, although the town had surrendered, the castle had not and Edmund’s guards were determined to keep hold of their prisoner.
At first Lichtenstein refused to accept the town’s surrender because he did not have enough men to besiege the castle but someone told him about the valuable prisoner being held inside. Lichtenstein had the intelligence to appreciate the situation and he sent an urgent message to Archduke Philip, who had now captured Zutphen. Philip too realised Edmund’s value as a diplomatic pawn so he sent a sizeable force to occupy Hattem and besiege the castle. Realising they were outnumbered, and lacking supplies to withstand a long siege, the castle’s garrison surrendered and Edmund was taken into imperial custody.
Despite his good treatment by Charles, Edmund yearned to be free so he could continue his quest for the English throne and he must have thought he was on the point of regaining his liberty as he watched the imperial soldiers cross the causeway over the castle’s moat. After all, Philip’s father was supposed to be the Yorkists’ ally but Edmund was sadly mistaken. Only his gaolers had changed and he remained a prisoner in Hattem.
The contemporary account of this strange episode is contained in a letter, written in July 1505, by an Italian, named Vincenzo Quirini. He was the Venetian ambassador to Antwerp and though I do not have access to the original letter, the English archive contains a summary of its contents in a 19th Century book entitled The Calendar of State Papers & Manuscripts (Venice) Volume 1 edited by Rawdon Brown.
Interestingly, Quirini called the castle where Edmund was imprisoned ‘Aten’, and the Victorian scholar corrected this to ‘Etten’, but there can be little doubt that Brown was mistaken because letters from Edmund written during his imprisonment clearly state the name of the castle in which he was held as ‘Hattem’. I have included excerpts from Edmund and Quirini’s letters in the Appendix, as well as web links to both these sources, but let’s get back to the story.
Edmund’s First Imprisonment by Philip
The loss of Zutphen, Hattem and Edmund had disastrous results for the Duke of Guelders. Without his Yorkist prisoner, Charles had no way of raising the money to pay his men. With his options exhausted, Charles was forced to make peace with Philip and a treaty was due to be signed at Arnhem on the 29th of July 1505. However, before the official surrender took place, Archduke Philip made a catastrophic blunder by handing Hattem and Edmund back to Charles.
Thinking he had won the war, Philip hoped this gesture would cement the peace that had should have been made at Arnhem but the wily Duke of Guelders had other ideas. The return of Edmund meant he had been gifted the means to restart his war, which he promptly did, but this time his valuable hostage was moved from Hattem to the heavily fortified town of Wageningen. By now, Philip had realised his mistake and he demanded the English exile’s return.
Edmund’s Second Imprisonment by Charles
Unfortunately for Charles, Henry VII and James IV still refused to support the Guelders’ cause. In desperation Charles gave Edmund the chance to ransom himself but the destitute earl could not raise the money. Eventually, Philip offered Charles an enormous bribe to return Edmund to his custody and Charles agreed because he had no hope of continuing the war, at least for the moment.
Typically, Philip did not keep his promise and the bribe was never paid. Nevertheless, Charles made peace with Philip for the second time and Edmund was sent back to the victorious imperials. A much relieved Philip immediately sent the White Rose to his mighty fortress of Namur, where he hoped to use his Yorkist hostage ‘as a bridle to lead the King of England by the nose’ but, at this point fate, played a cruel trick on the Archduke of Burgundy.
Edmund’s Second Imprisonment by Philip and the King of Castile’s Shipwreck
As you know Philip the Fair, Archduke of Burgundy, was married to Joanna the Mad, heiress to the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon ruled by her parents Ferdinand and Isabella. After Isabella died in 1504, Joanna became Queen of Castile but her father remained King of Aragon and he had no intention of allowing his daughter to inherit her mother’s realm. Likewise, Joanna’s husband, Philip, also wanted to supplant his wife and rule in Madrid as King of Castile.
There now followed a bitter power struggle between Joanna’s father and husband for control of all Spain but Ferdinand had the advantage because he was already on Spanish soil. Philip understood this and, so he planned a daring a coup d’etat. in January 1506, Philip assembled an enormous armada of more than thirty ships to carry himself, Joanna and an army of over 2,000 battle hardened veterans of the Guelders War to Spain. Also on board, was most of the Burgundian court, together with their retinues, with whom he hoped to impress the Castilians.
One of these courtiers was supposed to be the Duke of Guelders who had been ordered to join the Burgundian armada in order to stop him from restarting the Guelders War. However, the ever-resourceful Charles realised Philip’s absence was the perfect opportunity to do just that. On the eve of the Archduke’s departure, Charles claimed he was too ill to travel and he had fled to Liege before Philip could have the duke arrested. Here, Charles sought sanctuary with the city’s bishop, Erhard de la Marck, who was distantly related to Edmund de la Pole.
In his haste, Philip could not wait, so he set off for Spain without the missing Duke of Guelders but whilst sailing through the English Channel a terrible storm wrecked the entire Burgundian fleet off the coast of Cornwall. The half-drowned Philip managed to reach dry land but he was immediately sent to England’s strongest fortress: the royal castle at Windsor.
Henry had well-deserved reputation for cunning and he quickly realised that fate had given him the means to have Edmund returned to England at no cost to himself. Consequently, though Philip was treated as an honoured guest, the supposed King of Castile was left in doubt that he too was a hostage and the price of his ransom was Edmund de la Pole.
It is one of those strange ironies of history that Edmund’s gaoler was now himself a prisoner and Philip soon realised that his chance of seizing Spain would be lost unless he left England as soon as possible. He therefore agreed to send Edmund to London in chains but he made two conditions: first, that the rebel earl’s life had to be spared and second, he must be restored to his lost lands and titles. Henry readily agreed to this and as soon as Edmund arrived in London, Philip was allowed to continue his journey. Yet Henry did not keep his promise in full. Though Edmund was not executed, he was kept a prisoner in the dreaded Tower of London for the next seven years and he was eventually beheaded by Henry VII’s son, the much-married Henry VIII.
Edmund was sent to the executioner on the 30th of April 1513 but his death is not the end of the story of the de la Pole brothers and the Duke of Guelders.
Richard de la Pole and the Duke of Guelders
Although Edmund had been allowed to leave Aachen and travel to Hattem in 1504, Richard had been forced to remain in the city as collateral for the brothers’ colossal debts. When Edmund failed to return, Richard was beaten up, and his life was threatened, but he managed to escape to Hungary where his cousin, Anne of Foix-Candale, was queen.
After Edmund was kidnapped by Charles and betrayed by Philip, Richard bided his time and waited for the chance to relight the Yorkist torch dropped by his brother. As a result we know very little about his life between 1506 and 1512. When Richard does reappear on the historical stage it is as a client of the French king, Louis XII, who had promised to finance a Yorkist invasion in an attempt to counter the threat posed by Henry VIII. England’s second Tudor king had been crowned in 1509 and he had vowed to emulate his illustrious ancestor, Henry V, by conquering France.
There is little doubt that replacing Henry VIII with Richard de la Pole would change the balance of power in Europe in favour of the French but, first, the new White Rose had to prove himself in battle. Consequently, Richard agreed to fight for France as a mercenary and, in 1512, he took part in Louis’ expedition to drive the invading Spanish out of Navarre. There is also little doubt that Edmund was executed as a reprisal for his brother making an alliance with France.
Undeterred by Edmund’s death, Richard continued to fight for France. In 1513, He was part of the French forces defending Picardy from an English army that was led by Henry VIII in person. Meanwhile, the Duke of Guelders had also persuaded the French to back his cause and though he too fought in the Picardy campaign, Charles and Richard did not meet until 1515.
The occasion of their meeting was the mustering of the French army following the accession of France’s new king, Francis I. Like his predecessors, Francis was determined to prise the wealthy Duchy of Milan from the grasp of the Holy Roman Emperors and both Richard de la Pole and the Duke of Guelders answered their patron’s call to arms.
We can only imagine what their first meeting was like. Richard can hardly have forgotten that Charles had imprisoned Edmund in Hatten and this had led to his brother’s death, albeit indirectly. Yet it seems that the two men had no quarrel with each other and they became good friends. In fact they would be comrades-in-arms, fighting for Francis against both the Tudor king and the Habsburg emperor, for the next 12 years.
The Battle of Pavia
The numerous campaigns to conquer Milan and Naples, which were fought by successive French kings between 1494 and 1559 are known in England as The Italian Wars and Richard would play a crucial role in French strategy both on and off the battlefield. However, the campaign of 1524/5 would end in tragedy for both the House of York and the House of Guelders.
In the autumn of 1524 the French king, Francis I, invaded Italy to punish the imperials for an attack on Marseille and to seize the Duchy of Milan. At first Francis was successful. The city of Milan fell and the imperial army retreated to nearby Pavia. Francis ordered this ancient city to be besieged and Richard was one of the foreign captains who commanded the French army. Unfortunately for Francis, an imperial counterattack became another military disaster for the French.
During the famous Battle of Pavia, which was fought on the 24th of February 1525, the lightly armoured imperial footsoldiers, who fought with early-modern handguns, annihilated the fully-armoured French horsemen, who fought with old-fashioned swords and lances. Though Francis survived the massacre of his noble knights, he was captured and Richard’s courageous attempt to save his patron failed.
At Pavia, Richard commanded a regiment of foot, called the Black Band because they covered their armour with soot to prevent rust. Interestingly, many of Richard’s men were Guelderians, who had fought in the Guelders Wars, and because these soldiers were technically subjects of the Holy Roman Empire, taking service with the king of France, who was the emperor’s hereditary enemy, had made them renegades to whom the rules of war did not apply.
Because of this mutual hatred between Richard’s men and their imperial counterparts, there was no mercy asked or given when the Blank Band met a much larger force of Germans led by the celebrated Father of Landsknechts George von Frundsberg. Frundsberg’s men had been ordered to block Richard’s attempt to rescue to the French king and the imperials were so numerous the Black Band was quickly surrounded. As always, Richard’s men fought extremely bravely but it was hopeless; the imperial force was simply too large and every man in smoke-blackened armour was either shot or hacked to death by their enemies.
After the battle, the body of Richard de la Pole was found among the pile of bloodied corpses but despite being labelled a rebel and traitor by both the King of England and the German Emperor, his bravery was acknowledged with a proper funeral. Richard was laid to rest in Pavia’s ancient church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro and he will spend eternity in good company. Also buried in San Pietro are St Augustine of Hippo, the early Christian theologian, Boethius, the early medieval philosopher, and Liutprand, King of the Lombards.
As for the Duke Guelders, he did not fight at Pavia because he had recovered his duchy, with French help, and to repay Francis for his support, he had agreed to open a second front in the campaign by invading Habsburg territory in the north. As you probably know, Charles managed to continue his war against the Habsburgs until 1536 when he was forced to sign the Peace of Grave with the Emperor Charles V.
Though Charles escaped the disaster in Italy, his nephew, Francois, Lord de Lambesc, who was the son of Rene II, Duke of Lorraine and Charles’ twin sister, Philippa of Guelders, did not. Francois was joint captain of the Black Band with Richard de la Pole and he too died in the slaughter of Pavia, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the last prince of the House of York.
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APPENDIX - EXCERPTS FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES
So that is the tale of the ‘Last Yorkists’ and their association with Hattem and the Duke of Guelders. I hope you will agree that theirs is a remarkable story and there are numerous contemporary documents that allow historians to track their exploits in detail. The following are just four examples of these fascinating letters and papers.
Example 1
The following passage is taken from the letter James IV, King of Scotland, sent to the Duke Guelders in which he refused Scottish aid for Charles’ war. It was written in June 1505 and it contains some brutal criticism of both Charles and Edmund.
“Pray excuse me, illustrious cousin, if I deal not gently with you now. You treat kindly a rebel of England, an exile from the greater part of Christendom, to the disgust of your friends, and to the complication even of your own affairs, at a time when you ought to be conciliating princes rather than exasperating them. Is this what has come of our supplications? Is our bond of consanguinity at an end? Have your promises come to this?”
There are several pages of these insults but I think that is enough to illustrate the point!
Example 2
The second passage is taken from the 19th Century summary of the contemporary account of Hattem’s capture by the imperials, which is now in the English archives. The original report was sent by Vincenzo Quirini, who was the Venetian ambassador in Antwerp, to the Signory of the Most Serene Republic on the 19th of July 1505:
“They [Quirini's informants] also write that Mons. de Lichtenstein, one of the King of Castile's captains, when returning the other day from a foray, passed by chance near another good borough belonging to the Duke of Guelders, called Aten (Etten) commanded by a fortress, where the Earl of Suffolk, "White Rose" is confined. Mons. de Lichtenstein, to his surprise, was surrounded by the inhabitants, who put him in possession of it, together with his whole force, amounting to 300 horse, and as many more infantry. The King subsequently sent reinforcements, and they are besieging the castle with the hope of a speedy surrender, as the garrison is weak, and it so chanced that on the day they entered the town the main guard had gone out to scour the country, having no suspicion of the advance of the King's army, which was at a distance, and on their return found the approaches occupied.
These two announcements [i.e. the capture of Hattem and Zutphen] had caused great rejoicings, as the possession of Zutphen ensured the blockade of the rest of Gelderland; and were no other benefit derived from the capture of Etten [i.e. Hattem], they hope by obtaining "White Rose" to render the King of England anxious to settle the disputes between the English and the Flemings, and that he will do something more for the King of Castile.”
Example 3
The third letter from which I wish to quote is from Edmund to the Burgermeisters and Council of Aachen. It was originally written in Latin and dated the 28th of July, 1505, so it must have been sent shortly after Hattem’s castle had been captured by the army of Archduke Philip.
In this letter, which I have translated into English, Edmund tries to explain that he had not left Aachen to escape his creditors, rather he had been trying to reach Frisia to secure new funds from the Duke of Saxony in order to pay his debts. He also insists that he had been lured to Hattem by the Duke of Guelders, where he had been kidnapped, but he was now being held against his will by Philip. However, Edmund also states that he is sure he will be able to regain Philip’s favour and once the self-styled King of Castile knows the truth, he will repay all the de la Pole brothers’ debts and restart the planning for the long-delayed Yorkist invasion of England.
[Note on Translation: English monarchs always refer to themselves using the second person pronouns e.g. we, us, our]
“Many greetings and love. Honourable and most approved lords, very wise men. All your kindnesses and most extensive friendships which you have shown us, and after our departure from your city to our dearest brother, compel us always to return some thanks to you. In all things, by God's favour, if we live, we hope to return to your dominions.
And although sinister gossip has long reported that we have been here [in Gelderland] by our own accord and intentions, I do not think that [the truth] is hidden from your prudence, and that you and our creditors in various other ways have been certified by us to the contrary. And if many, perhaps, do not at all believe us, nevertheless everyone has been made aware of the full truth in this matter.
We further testify that the singular cause of this danger and imprisonment of ours, which has placed us in the hands of the Duke of Guelders, under the charge of his safety, was certainly with no other motive than that we might freely pass through his country, which he approved, [in order for us to approach] some of our friends for the payment of the debts owed.
Notwithstanding the difficulty of this adversity, now, by the providence of God, the city of Hattem and we, together with the castle, are delivered into the hands of the royal majesty of Castile [i.e. Philip]. And if the matter succeeds so successfully as we hope, and your greatest goodwill and your most favourable friendships [continues], as befits, we shall try to repay all of what is owed to our creditors as soon as possible.
And on top of this, whatever we can lawfully return to your dominions will certainly be most agreeable to us. And in order that you may wish to satisfy the minds of our faithful [creditors] concerning these things, we urgently request your prudence. Farewell, most honourable of men. [Written] in haste from the city of Hattem.”
Example 4
The final document I would like to include here is entitled A Stipulation for the Ransom of Edmund de la Pole, but it is NOT the excessive demand sent by Charles to Henry. In fact, this incredible document is the agreement Charles made with Edmund whereby the White Rose would ransom himself for 2,000 florins. This agreement is dated 24th of September, 1505, which is during Edmund’s second period of imprisonment by Charles. Clearly, Edmund failed to raise the money because he was handed back to Philip shortly afterwards.
“The present writing testifies that I, lord Charles Duke of Gelderland, etc., have negotiated, agreed, and promised Griffon Bastard D'Oysekerke [sic], servant of lord Edmund, duke of Suffolk of England, that the aforesaid lord duke of Suffolk shall pay or cause to be paid to the aforesaid lord Charles de Guelders two thousand [florins] for the expenses of the same duke of Suffolk and his servants in the land of Guelders in the following form; that is to say, five hundred pieces of gold to be given within eight days immediately following the present. And within three weeks of the said eight days immediately following, another five hundred in gold… the same lord Charles duke of Guelders hereby firmly undertakes and promises that immediately upon this, the aforesaid lord Edmund, duke of Suffolk, shall have his full liberty, and depart from his hands and lands at the pleasure and will of the same lord Edmund without further delay.”
WEBSITE LINKS
The Stipulation for Ransom, together with Edmund’s letter of July 1505 and James letter of June 1505, can all be found in a 19th Century collection entitled Letters and Papers Illustrative Of The Reigns Of Richard III And Henry VII, edited by J Gairdner. The excerpt from the King of Scotland’s letter is on page xlix [49] of the preface, Edmund’s letter is on pages 261-262 and the ransom agreement is on pages 269-270. The entire book can viewed online at the Internet Archive using this link:
Similarly, if you would like to examine the summary of Quirini’s letter, it can be found on pages 303-4 of The Calendar of State Papers & Manuscripts (Venice) Volume 1 edited by R Brown. This book can also be viewed at the Internet Archive and here is the link:
