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mother’s London house – it had been his father’s too – Baynard’s Castle, beside the Thames and not far from the Tower. Although he was only a small boy, his brother the King heaped honours on him. He was made Admiral of the Sea and Commissioner of Array for the North Parts (Northumberland, Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmorland). With George and Margaret, he moved to more royal accommodation at Greenwich Palace. Little is known of him during these early, prosperous years of his brother’s reign.
    Richard Gloucester – as he signed himself, not ‘of Gloucester’ – in his capacity as a Commissioner of Array with power to recruit troops took a contingent to join Edward IV’s army at Leicester early in 1464. The reason was a potentially very serious Lancastrian rising in Northumberland under the Duke of Somerset, but it was speedily crushed before Richard was able to see any fighting. Despite his extreme youth, he was already a power in the land, if obviously something of a figurehead. His Commissions of Array in 1464 extended to nine counties. For some time King Edward had been bestowing important offices on him. In 1462 he had received the Honour andLordship of Richmond and the Honour and Lordship of Pembroke, besides being made Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine, and Constable of Corfe Castle. Every year he was given more confiscated Lancastrian estates, including the entire lands of the Duke of Somerset in 1463. The King’s purpose seems to have been to stop his brother Clarence from becoming over-mighty by providing a counterweight. Certainly George was undoubtedly jealous, protesting so much about the Honour of Richmond being given to Richard that Edward took it back and bestowed it on Clarence. In the light of future events, of George’s treachery and of Richard’s loyalty, one may well wonder if the King already distrusted the former brother and preferred the younger.
    Some time in 1465 Richard found himself a henchman in the household of his first cousin the Earl of Warwick, where he was to be brought up – just as his father had been a henchman of their mutual grandfather, Lord Westmorland. 1 One surmises that the three years which Richard spent at Warwick’s castle of Middleham in Yorkshire were the most formative of his childhood. Here he acquired his abiding love of northern England, together with that understanding of its inhabitants which one day enabled him to make them his most formidable tools. He may even have learnt to speak with their own harsh accent which Southerners found so difficult.
    Middleham was in Wensleydale, a twenty-mile stretch in the upper valley of the fast-running River Ure, in the heart of the North Riding moors but only a short distance from the Pennines. Leland, speaking of it in 1538, says it is ‘a pretty market town and standeth on a rocky hill, on the top whereof is the castle … The town itself is small.’ The inhabitants spoke the dalesmen’s dialect, full of Norse words inherited from Viking settlers, though on the moors some shepherds still counted their sheep in a Celtic jargon. Yorkshire has a curiously hard quality and has always been famous for producing hard men. The winters can be surprisingly severe – no doubt Richard had the experience of being snowed up.
    As Scottish raids were a constant danger, the castle was strongly fortified, with a vast Norman keep whose walls were ten foot thick and fifty-five high (from the top of which there was a wonderful view of the surrounding countryside). It was separated by a great guardtower and drawbridge from a wide outer court to the east and ringed by a deep moat and massive curtain walls. It nevertheless seems to have been surprisingly comfortable, possessing more lavatories than almost any other English medieval house which has survived, and having three large parks next to it. 2 Leland thought it ‘the fairest castle of Richmondshire next Bolton’.
    Neighbouring magnates included Lord Scrope of