A Richard for All Seasons - Richard III wins the Battle of Bosworth Field

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RyuDrago

Really enjoyable timeline and York wank!

I wonder how things will turn down to Italy with France out of the screen and any dream of Italian claims butterflied... Maybe Ludovico Sforza could manage uncontested to rebuild the fortunes of the Milanese power under the period of the Visconti... Or the Borgia will rise... Or Venice will take the lead.
 

BlueFlowwer

I think that the Italian War are unavodiable even if England has taken Normandy. But it won't be as grand as OTL and Milan will have a different outcome.
 
Artaxerxes

Artaxerxes

Banned
BlueFlowwer said:
I think that the Italian War are unavodiable even if England has taken Normandy. But it won't be as grand as OTL and Milan will have a different outcome.
Click to expand...

If France can't afford the modern artillery train and the men to crew it, especially the staff officers, then the Italians can do a lot more to resist any advance.
 

RyuDrago

BlueFlowwer said:
Not to mention that the spanish and the holy roman empire will get involved. Messy, messy, messy....
Click to expand...

What would be different from OTL in being a messy series of conflict?

I realized that France may have a simple reason to intervene however: 16th century encirclement paranoia. A British-Imperial-Spanish block around is not less worrisome than a butterflied Hapsburg one.

France is really crying much this TL. The 100HYW was for naught.
 

BlueFlowwer

Well, it won't be on the same grand scale to start with given the circumstances. With a part of France in English grip and no Charles VIII to claim Napel, the focus will most likely shift to Milan, Louis XII had a vested interest in it. So does Maximilian as Milan is a potential border to the HRE.

The spanish here won't be run by the bloody hapsburgs, so the utter paranoia about the enemy encirclement is lesser. France has more chances to broke alliances. But yes, it's not stacked in French favour.

Off course it depends on the capabilities of the kings as well. Just because I have butterflied away the walking human disaster that was Henry VIII does not mean that some other king is gonna be a flaming trashcan of a ruler....

And the english aren't gonna hold their territories forever, time is against it....
 
XVI: Young Hearts
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    • Philippe le Bel

    Philippe le Bel

    Banned
    A Richard for All Seasons

    whiterose.jpg


    Young Hearts
    1498
    ​
    The young lovers were lucky, and they stayed lucky. In more ways than one.

    Lucky, Zio [1] Giacomo’s reaction.

    After hasty kisses and embraces, Giuseppe did not take Catherine upstairs for amusement. He was well aware of possible consequences, and he also sensed that she was different. Daughter of a king, the fairest of all the women he had known in his twenty five years on earth, his ten years knowing women. He took her upstairs to see his uncle Giacomo, who had been just about to go to bed after the splendid feast.

    “Zio Giacomo, look how beautiful your new niece is. I mean, will be, when I marry her, Zio.”

    Giacomo gazed at his nephew in amusement, but searchingly. Never had the young man been so out of breath, so mentally off balance. There was something dangerous here. “Well let me look at her then, my Peppino. My my, how gorgeous, her skin is sparkling my boy, you’ve done well. Beautiful and tall enough to maybe be noble, hmmm?”

    The young man blushed under his uncle’s gaze. Adept at lying to men and women everywhere, in every great city of Europe, he could do nothing but tell the truth to this man who would do anything for him. “Indeed she is, Zio.”

    Giacomo frowned, not sure what to do. His nephew could well be put to death, and maybe even legally, by this girl’s relatives. But on the other hand, Giuseppe was like a son to his uncle, and Giacomo knew him, his usually constant ways. This was not just some girl. He sighed, “Go to our house in Paris, my boy. Talk to Bishop Pierre there, you know him, I’m sure he’ll marry you with witnesses and all. Here’s some cash for the road. Godspeed, Peppino.”

    Giuseppe kissed his uncle on both cheeks and the two young not-quite-lovers rode off at a good canter on two excellent horses. Giacomo could buy two more in the morning easily enough.

    Lucky, the night at Crosby Hall.

    On arriving at Crosby Hall the carriage driver looked back and saw five or six golden haired princesses sleeping, just as they’d been when they left Westminster. He was tempted to touch a royal bosom or two, then thought of the consequences and went meekly to bed. One sergeant had drank and played dice for hours throughout the feast, and couldn’t even count his own fingers. The other had just woken from his nap in the saddle and had eyes for nothing but his bed.

    The girls were woken by the king’s yawning steward, receiving them as quickly as possible and not even looking at their faces.

    Nobody noticed Catherine’s absence until the next morning. Anne of York’s husband Thomas Howard woke before dawn, as usual, and so began the day of the royal family. But first he and Anne amused themselves for a good half hour before truly getting up. The slamming of doors and regular conversation woke Cecily and her husband Ralph Scrope, and Bridget the nun, why prayed before she was even wholly awake.

    Then she looked for Catherine, who would have shared a bed with her, and didn’t see her. So she assumed that Catherine had already woken. Unusual, since Catherine usually slept the most, but it had happened before. It wasn’t until they were being assembled for breakfast that they realized that nobody in the household had seen Catherine.

    “Did you see her last night?” King Richard asked the steward, staring.

    The man gulped, excuses flitting through his mind. “I thought...Sire, I saw...they all have yellow hair, there were five or six of them…!” The man knelt, almost blubbering at this point. Richard turned on his heel, ignoring him, and shouted for a thorough search to be made. Prince Richard patted the steward’s shoulder with a reassuring hand and pulled him up.

    The king ordered a secret investigation, so naturally the whole city knew by lunchtime. Those who knew Catherine were relieved that she’d finally done something scandalous, those who didn’t were worried about the fate of a royal girl in the big bad city. Duke Henry Percy was glad that he would finally stop being the butt of the court.

    Steps were retraced, a reward offered. Edward Hastings’s wife put forward acidly that Catherine hadn’t been able to take her eyes off some Italian. The seating arrangement was consulted and by dinnertime the day after the feast Giacomo Mezzasalma was summoned in lieu of his nephew, who couldn’t be found by any of the grim faced sergeants sent around to crack his head and take him in.

    It wasn’t even a particularly hot day, but Giacomo was sweating profusely, standing in front of the throne King Richard was seated on. “Sire, my ingrate of a nephew told me that some gamblers were looking for him, that he feared for his life.” The portly middle aged man wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Naturally I helped him, I gave him my two fastest horses and some money. My apologies, Sire, but it did not occur to me at all that he could be fleeing justice.”

    “Your nephew deserves those gamblers and more!” Richard said in a stormy voice.

    “Yes, of course Sire! How I wish I’d left him to his own devices. Sire, I cannot be sorry enough for his misconduct.” Giacomo went to his knees with some difficulty and stared at the floor, thinking and praying. When he heard of the missing princess he put two and two together immediately with horror, and he hired the fastest messenger he could find with a coded letter for Peppino. Then he visited the farthest, most rural customer he had near London, and once summoned rode slowly back to Westminster with the sergeants, claiming stomach pains from stress and too much good food at the feast.

    Now he was mostly telling the truth to the king, because it was all easy to find out. Two horses had been seen clattering across London Bridge and through Southwark by guards, but not suspiciously. Over the next few days the events took shape, of a nighttime race across Surrey and Sussex, stopping twice to frantically wake innkeepers to trade horses (and pay money, and get inferior horses in exchange) and change their rich, expensive clothes for rough common stuff, and arriving in Brighton the morning after the feast. Fifty five miles in five or so hours.

    Ratcliffe’s deputy at Brighton had seen nothing wrong about these passengers to France or their possessions (two horses, average clothing, and some money for fare and to bribe him into writing a cross-Channel travel pass for the girl), and they had taken ship that morning for Fecamp, right across the Channel. Miraculous northern winds and seas calmer than even the oldest sailors could remember spirited them across before nightfall, and they availed themselves of the great monastery at Fecamp for the night.

    The distance from Fecamp to Paris was almost exactly 130 miles and this Giuseppe and Catherine accomplished in six steady but not breakneck days.

    Lucky, that Bishop Pierre asked few questions.

    So it was that a week after abducting the niece of the King of England, the commoner Giuseppe Mezzasalma, silk merchant, married her and was finally able to take his gorgeous love to bed.

    [1] Italian for uncle
     
  • Index
    • Philippe le Bel

    Philippe le Bel

    Banned
    Howdy y'all, just a short update now about the aftermath of the Italian rogue Giuseppe's freeing/kidnapping of Catherine of York :D Don't worry, more historical and kingdom-scale stuff to come soon enough.
     
    Skallagrim

    Skallagrim

    Banned
    Giuseppe is living up to the noblest traditions of being really Italian about things. :cool:

    "I could be sensible right now, but I like this girl a lot. Time to cause an international incident and make a king very angry!"
     

    AngelQueen

    *winces* Oh boy, let's see how Richard reacts to this. I mean, neither of the Henrys of OTL took kindly to this kind of thing. Henry VII pitched a fit when Cecily remarried a nobody after her Tudor loyalist husband died, cut her off from her income and generally made their lives miserable until Margaret Beaufort stepped in to help Cecily out. And the less said of Henry VIII, the better.

    Let's hope for Giuseppe's sake that his fate is not one we would see in ASOIAF: "Heads. Spikes. Walls."

    Great job! Thanks for sharing! :)
     

    BlueFlowwer

    I know that Richard will certainly want Guiseppe's head on a spike and poor Catherine is looking down a life in a uber-strict nunnery. But that is if they get caught. Right now they are in Paris and Richard can't reach them there.

    Man, Guiseppe must have some brass balls to run off with a foreign king's niece. On one hand, the english royal orders from his family's silk businnes is gonna dry up, but, on the other, imagine the explosion of orders in France!

    Also Plantaganet entanglements in italy will happen, but not just this one....
     
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