by Dan Jones
Jasper Tudor’s invasion was followed by rumours of other plots. ‘That year were many men impeached of treason,’ wrote one chronicler.12 The London aldermen Sir Thomas Cook and Sir John Plummer and the sheriff Humphrey Hayford were accused of plotting and deprived of their offices, while a noble conspiracy was detected involving John de Vere, heir to the earl of Oxford who had been beheaded in February 1462, and the heirs of the Courtenay and Hungerford families. De Vere was imprisoned and eventually pardoned, but the other two were condemned and killed in early 1469. And so it was across the realm: ‘Diverse times in diverse places of England, men were arrested for treason, and some were put to death, and some escaped,’ recalled one writer.13 As the plots seemed to spiral, England was becoming generally more violent: a spate of aristocratic warmongering was the subject of complaint during the summer parliament of 1467, which implored the king to deal with the ‘homicides, murders, riots, extortions, rapes of women, robberies and other crimes which had been habitually and lamentably committed and perpetrated throughout the realm’.14
It is hard to know now whether the increased sensitivity to conspiracy was genuinely the sign of more dangerous times, or of paranoia in the king’s council. From late 1467 there had been rumours that Warwick was in touch with Margaret of Anjou, who was living in uncomfortably impoverished exile with a small court of dissidents at her father’s castle of Kœur, 150 miles east of Paris. Even if these rumours were nothing more than baseless gossip, the earl’s cold and obstructive behaviour in early 1468 did nothing to suggest his total loyalty to the regime. And indeed, when another front of disorder and opposition to Edward’s rule opened in 1469, Warwick finally decided to abandon the king and throw in his lot with a man who might prove to be more pliable. But it was not a Lancastrian: rather, Warwick decided to make use of the man who would be his son-in-law, Edward’s own brother and still his male heir, George duke of Clarence.
At the beginning of 1468 Clarence was eighteen years old. Like Edward he was capable of charm and wit and he shared with the king what one writer called ‘outstanding talent’.15 He was smooth, elegantly attractive and sharp-tongued – ‘possessed of such mastery of popular eloquence that nothing upon which he set his heart seemed difficult for him to achieve’.16 His childhood under his brother’s rule had been spent in large part at Greenwich Palace, where he lived with his sister, the now departed Margaret, and his younger brother Richard duke of Gloucester. He had been recognised as an adult on 10 July 1466 – still only sixteen years old – when he paid formal homage to the king and was rewarded with possession of massive estates centred on Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire: a large and modern fortress protected with thick curtain walls and several towers with luxurious residential apartments inside, warmed by giant fireplaces hewn from huge blocks of locally quarried stone. As an important property of the duchy of Lancaster, Tutbury had once belonged to Queen Margaret, who spent a great deal on its improvements. It was a commanding position from which he could survey the sprawling patchwork of lands that he now controlled. Amid this luxury, Clarence enjoyed mastery of the biggest and most lavish household staff of any nobleman in England, consisting of nearly four hundred people at an annual cost of £4,500.17
But if Clarence was superficially attractive, handsomely gifted and indulged by his elder brother, he was also glib, shallow and spoiled.18 Like Warwick, extravagant royal favour only served to increase his ambition. He was bewitched by his own magnificence, and like Humphrey duke of Gloucester (and perhaps like his own father) he saw his position as the king’s male heir as licence to create an ostentatious alternative court. This instinct would lead him into trouble: for while he could at times perform as a competent magnate, settling the debates of his tenants and subordinates, he was a wilful, self-centred and infuriating man with a penchant for skulduggery and schemes.
One such scheme was to pursue marriage to Warwick’s eldest daughter, Isabel. From a royal point of view it would have been considerably more useful for Clarence to have entered into a union with a foreign princess than a Neville (Charles the Bold’s daughter Mary was briefly considered). This may well have been what Edward was thinking when he flatly refused to endorse the marriage in early 1467, though it is more likely that he simply wished to avoid connecting his two greatest nobles by allowing a marriage alliance between them. Warwick’s power needed no bolstering via a direct link to the adult royal heir – traditionally a hub around which opposition to the Crown would gather. The politics of the midlands, meanwhile, would be thrown horribly out of balance by joining together the two most powerful lords in the region. Warwick began plainly to chafe against the restriction. To the king’s clear concern, his brother George – young, impressionable and used to getting his own way – fell under Warwick’s spell.
The consequences of a Warwick–Clarence alliance against the king whom each had every duty to serve and obey became clear from the spring of 1469. It began in April with a series of popular riots in Yorkshire, as large numbers of local men convened under the leadership of a figure calling himself ‘Robin of Redesdale’ or ‘Robin Mend-all’ – a sort of Jack Cade of the north, whose name was clearly a nod to the outlaw ballads that had by this time been in circulation for more than a century, and whose heroes – Robin Hood, Adam Bell and Gamelyn – embodied the ideal of the wronged man who imposes rough justice on corrupt officials. There were a number of likely causes for this disorder, high among them longstanding local disgruntlement at the demands of St Leonard’s Hospital in York, which had long levied the ‘petercorn’ – a tax on arable farmers – in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland. The master of the hospital had the previous year secured his right to the tax in Edward’s court of chancery.19 Under ‘Robin of Redesdale’ a spate of rioting whipped across the county. It was put down by Warwick’s younger brother, John Neville, earl of Northumberland, the hero of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham and one of the crown’s most reliable men of the north. But within two months ‘Redesdale’ had sprung up again, and this time the Neville family were not the scourges of the rebels, but their covert sponsors.
The second wave of rebellion, which took place in June and July of 1469, was significantly different from the first. The leader still went under the name ‘Robin of Redesdale’, but was in this case either Sir John Conyers of Hornby, Warwick’s steward at Middleham Castle and an experienced soldier, or else a puppet of the same. Whereas the disorder earlier in the year had focused on local disaffection, now, said one writer, the people ‘complained that they were grievously oppressed with taxes and annual tributes by the said favourites of the king and queen’. A regional uprising had been stirred up into a protest against national government. The second Redesdale rising was secretly supported by Warwick with the aim of causing the king maximum discomfort. And it was done with great effect. There was talk of a popular army of sixty thousand men being mustered in Yorkshire. The disturbances were beginning to resemble what the chroniclers called a ‘great insurrection’ and a ‘whirlwind from the north’.20
Edward set off to deal with the rising in mid-June, accompanied by his youngest brother, Richard duke of Gloucester, along with Earl Rivers, Lord Scales and a number of his other Woodville relatives. At first Edward failed to calculate how dangerous the situation had become, but as he rode north it began to dawn on the king that this was more than a local rising and he sent out urgent demands to the towns and cities of the midlands to supply him with archers and men. He also wrote to Clarence, Warwick and George Neville, archbishop of Canterbury, sending each a terse note on 9 July demanding that they ‘come unto his Highness’ with all urgency. ‘And we ne trust that ye should be of any such disposition towards us, as the rumour here runneth, considering the trust and affection we bear in you,’ he added in his letter to Warwick.21 But as the wax was hardening on the king’s letters, Warwick, the archbishop and Clarence were on their way to the military stronghold of Calais, taking with them the earl’s daughter Isabel.
On 11 July Cla
rence and Isabel were married in Calais, in direct defiance of the king. The following day, Warwick and his allies wrote an open letter to the king in support of the Robin of Redesdale rising. The letter called for reform, accusing Rivers, Scales, Sir John Woodville, the earl of Pembroke, his brother Sir William Herbert and Humphrey Stafford, earl of Devon, as well as others around the king, of allowing the realm to ‘fall in great poverty of misery … only intending to their own promotion and enriching’, and warning darkly that the fate that had befallen Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI might just as easily be visited upon Edward IV. They also named Earl Rivers’s wife, Jacquetta duchess of Bedford, as a malign influence on the king. ( Jacquetta would later be accused of having used witchcraft to engineer the king’s marriage to her daughter Elizabeth Woodville, and of creating lead models of Warwick, Edward and the queen for the purposes of sorcery.) A manifesto for reform was attached to the letter – supposedly belonging to the rebels, although as it took an almost exclusively national outlook and was riddled from beginning to end with the sort of political jargon in whose uses the earl of Warwick was the most practised man alive, it was likely to have been either strongly influenced from or wholly manufactured in Calais.22
The northern rising, swelling by the day, was led by Warwick’s relatives and friends. As Sir John Conyers and his son of the same name, Sir Henry Neville and Henry Fitzhugh marched their northerners towards the midlands, Warwick and Clarence returned to England from Calais, landing in Kent on 16 July. Two days later they began a push up the country to join forces with ‘Robin of Redesdale’. They stopped briefly in London before sweeping up the road towards Coventry, gathering men as they rode. Edward, camped with his army at Nottingham, now found a pincer closing rapidly around him. His best hope for repelling the rebels was to receive reinforcements from Wales under the earl of Pembroke, and from the west country under the earl of Devon.
On Wednesday 26 July Pembroke and Devon’s men had reached Banbury in northern Oxfordshire and were camped in the broad fields surrounding the town when they were attacked without warning by the northern forces. The main body of the royal army was separated from the archers, and they thus went into battle severely hampered. ‘A great battle was fought, and a most dreadful slaughter, especially of the Welsh, ensued,’ wrote one chronicler, who reckoned that four thousand men were killed on the battlefield known as Hegge-cote or Edgecote.23 The considerable disarray among Pembroke’s men was worsened when a small band of warriors bearing the earl of Warwick’s arms arrived in the field, causing panic in the lines and leading many to take flight. The end result was terrible casualties on both sides. The rebel leaders Sir Henry Neville and John Conyers the younger were killed, but the battle was remembered in Wales, as the bloody fate of the Welsh infantry was shared by their commanders. The poet Lewys Glyn Cothi called it ‘the mightiest [ battle] of Christendom’. During the fighting Pembroke and his brother Sir Richard Herbert were captured and taken as prisoners to Northampton, where they were met by the earl of Warwick. On Thursday 27 July Warwick held a summary and utterly illegal trial, pronounced a death sentence and had both beheaded.
Panic spread. News of the disaster at Edgecote took several days to reach Edward IV, but when it did, his men scattered from his side. Alone and totally exposed, the king was taken prisoner at Olney in Buckinghamshire by a party led by Archbishop George Neville. His horse was harnessed to his captors’ and he was escorted to Warwick Castle, the vast and unbreachable midland seat of the Nevilles, to be held captive while his associates were hunted down.24 Throughout August, Warwick’s men stalked England, capturing those men who had served the king and murdering them. Earl Rivers and Sir John Woodville were run to ground in Chepstow and taken to Kenilworth, where both were beheaded. The earl of Devon was taken ‘by the commons’ in Bridgwater, Somerset, ‘and there right beheaded’.25
Despite the fact that Warwick and Clarence were acting effectively alone – mustering their own vast resources rather than manifesting the will of any wider portion of the nobility or the realm – it had taken them less than three months to gain command of the king, butcher his allies and assume control of the government. Edward had spent the best part of a decade establishing his birthright, starting a new royal family, rebuilding a secure crown and a stable government and reasserting the majesty of English kingship. And yet in the late summer of 1469 he found himself in the same predicament as his predecessor: two kings were now prisoners of their own subjects. Seizing the crown had become all too easy.
15 : Final Destruction
Like Richard duke of York before him, Richard earl of Warwick found it a great deal simpler to capture a king than to govern in his name. From Warwick Castle in the heart of the midlands, the earl moved Edward to Middleham Castle, the magnificent stonewalled stronghold that loomed over the Yorkshire Dales. But as news filtered across England and Wales of the king’s captivity, the realm erupted into violence and disorder, which proved quite beyond Warwick’s capacity to control: for while he had the royal person, this was by no means the same as having royal authority.
In London there was a burst of robbery, rioting and open violence, barely kept in check by the efforts of Burgundian ambassadors who happened to be in the city. Elsewhere, noble quarrels spilled over into private wars, waged from Cheshire and Lancashire to Gloucestershire and Norfolk, where the Paston family were forced to defend their castle at Caister from a siege laid to it by the duke of Norfolk, who had ‘the place sore broken with guns’.1 Warwick’s realm was alive with the boom of cannon, the hum of arrows and the crackle of flames licking ruined buildings. Even in Yorkshire Warwick could not keep order as the king’s teenage brother Richard duke of Gloucester took up arms in a dispute against Lord Stanley. Worst of all, rumours circulated in Wales suggesting that a Lancastrian revival would shortly be underway somewhere in the realm. And so it proved: in August two members of a renegade branch of the house of Neville raised Henry VI’s banner in northern England. ‘The earl of Warwick found himself unable to offer an effectual resistance,’ wrote one chronicler. ‘For the people, seeing their king detained as a prisoner, oner, refused to take notice of proclamations’ until Edward was set at his liberty.2
Warwick had no choice. Edward was free by the middle of October. Sir John Paston watched the king ride into the city of London in splendour, surrounded by a large posse of loyal lords including Gloucester, Suffolk and Lord Hastings, the mayor and all the city aldermen, two hundred guild members and what Paston described in a letter as a thousand horses, ‘some harnessed and some not’. The king had crushed the northern rebellion with ease, issued a general pardon to the rank and file and was set on reasserting himself in the realm at large, an end he pursued with almost ominous good cheer. Paston noted with some trepidation that while ‘the King hymself hath good language of’ Warwick, Clarence and their small group of allies, including the earl of Oxford, ‘saying they be his best friends’, quite another message was being broadcast by the men of the royal household. Edward was almost always magnanimous after victory – but it seemed clear, to Sir John Paston at least, that a great reckoning could not be far away.
Only two serious reorganisations took place in the aftermath of Warwick and Clarence’s revolt. The first was enforced: Wales had been deprived of its leading nobleman when William Herbert, earl of Pembroke was beheaded after the battle of Edgecote. In Herbert’s place, Edward promoted his own brother, Richard duke of Gloucester. Aged seventeen, Gloucester was growing into an able soldier and a trustworthy lieutenant. Tall but slender and not as physically striking as either Edward or Clarence, Gloucester was a tenacious and loyal young man in whom Edward saw a great future. He made him constable of England in place of the executed Earl Rivers, justiciar of north and south Wales and steward of the whole principality. In effect Richard became the king’s hand beyond the western marches. He took to his role with some enthusiasm and purpose.
Edward also moved to weaken some of the Nevilles’ power in the north. Jo
hn Neville, earl of Northumberland, had remained loyal during his brother’s rebellions; all the same, Edward decided that there were advantages in moving his territorial base away from northern England. The king released Henry Percy from long-term imprisonment in the Tower of London, restored him to his father’s lands in the north and gave him Neville’s title of earl of Northumberland. Historically the Percys had been the dominant family in the north – a fact only changed by the ascendancy of the Nevilles in the 1450s. Now Edward was moving to restore the balance of power. To compensate John Neville for his losses, he was created Marquess Montague and awarded a huge tract of lands in south-west England, another area of perpetual bloodletting and chaos, which had fallen vacant on the death of the earl of Devon. Neville’s young son George was created duke of Bedford and betrothed to the king’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, who turned four years old in the spring of 1470. It looked like a handsome settlement for a loyal man, which served to restore some balance to the power politics of northern England while injecting a degree of much-needed experience into the south-west. Unfortunately, it would prove to have serious consequences for Edward’s rule.
