by Charles Ross
Yet Edward did little to advance the material interests of the queen’s relatives. Certainly, with the partial exception of her father, they never enjoyed the lavish patronage in land, wardship and profitable offices which had so benefited the Nevill family and men like Hastings and Herbert in the early years of the reign.3 On 4 March 1466, Richard, Lord Rivers, replaced Sir Walter Blount in the highly lucrative office of treasurer of England. On 24 May 1466 he was created Earl Rivers, and on 24 August 1467 he succeeded the earl of Worcester, who was leaving for Ireland, as Constable of England, the office being granted to him for life, with remainder to his son Anthony. Together these offices, and his position as a member of the king’s council, provided him with an income of £1,330 per annum. But he was given no land, since the king probably judged him rich enough already from the very extensive dower revenues of Duchess Jacquetta.1 His eldest son, the talented and cultivated Anthony, Lord Scales, already had a respectable income in right of his wife, Elizabeth, heiress of Thomas, Lord Scales. In November 1466 he was given the lordship of the Isle of Wight, with the castle of Carisbrooke, and a year later was made keeper of the castle of Portchester in Hampshire. Otherwise, he received nothing of value until he became head of the family following the death of his father in 1469.2 His younger brothers, Sir Edward and Sir Richard Woodville, got very little from Edward either before or after 1471, and neither seems to have enjoyed the king’s confidence at any time during the reign.3 The fourth brother, Lionel, became archdeacon of Oxford at nineteen and dean of Exeter at twenty-five, but had to wait until he was twenty-nine before he was promoted to the bishopric of Salisbury in 1482. Of the queen’s two sons by her first marriage, the elder, Thomas Grey, had already been provided with the rich marriage of Anne Holland, and nothing more was done for him in the first decade of the reign.4 No grants to the second son, Richard Grey, are recorded during Edward’s reign, and he was never given any important office or appointment. Finally, the dower estate assigned to Queen Elizabeth herself for the maintenance of her household was on a modest scale, and smaller than that given to Queen Margaret of Anjou. Edward was careful to see that it was allotted to her with the advice of a council of great lords. Her household was also more economically administered than her predecessor’s.5
The cost of providing for the queen’s kindred had not, after all, proved high. No more had been done for them than they might reasonably expect. Edward had not given away much in terms of cash revenue, nor used royal resources to increase the local influence of the Woodvilles in competition with other families. Grants to other families continued, and some, like the Nevills themselves and the Herberts, probably received more from the king during the years after 1464 than did any member of the queen’s family. None of Edward’s nobles could justly complain that he had been starved of royal patronage by the rise of the Woodvilles, if we except Warwick’s grievance about the seven great marriages. When, in July 1469, the rebel manifesto inspired by Warwick accused several members of the court of having impoverished the realm, ‘only intending to their own promotion and enriching’, the charge had far more substance as applied to Herbert, Humphrey Stafford or Audley than it did to the Woodvilles held guilty – and could equally well have applied to Warwick himself.1
Yet the Woodvilles soon became – and remained – highly unpopular. Much of the evidence for this comes from prejudiced or later sources (perhaps in part reflecting their increased power and influence after 1471), but it is too persistent and general to be disregarded.2 Dislike of the Woodvilles is so prominent as an element in Yorkist politics that it requires some discussion and explanation. Some initial resentment may have been caused by the speed rather than the scale of their promotion. The seven marriages, Rivers’s appointment as treasurer and his creation as earl, and Scales’s grant of the Isle of Wight, all fall within a period of two years after the announcement of Edward’s marriage. No month seemed to pass without further evidence of Woodville advancement. There was also a continuing snobbish resentment of people regarded, whether rightly or wrongly, as parvenu.3 More important in creating their unsavoury reputation was their own behaviour. As a family, the Woodvilles were not conspicuous for charm and amiability. Like his daughter, Earl Rivers seems to have been greedy and grasping, and the duchess of Bedford was not much better. They could also be vengeful and overbearing.4 Their eldest son, Anthony, Lord Scales, is a more attractive figure. His literary interests and his early patronage of Caxton have won for him a certain posthumous esteem. The earliest products of Caxton’s printing press in England were made from Anthony Woodville’s translations of ‘The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers’ and the Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pisan, published in November 1477 and February 1478. He was later to travel widely in Italy, Spain and Portugal, mainly to make pilgrimages to Rome, Compostella and shrines in southern Italy, and also had a considerable reputation for his knightly feats of arms. He is unusual (though not unique) amongst fifteenth-century laymen for a strange streak of melancholy and asceticism, reflected both in his ‘death-day ballad’ and his practice of wearing a hair-shirt beneath the silken clothes of the courtier.1 Alone among the Woodvilles, he earned the approval of Mancini: ‘a kind, serious and just man, and one tested by every vicissitude of life. Whatever his prosperity he had injured nobody, though benefiting many’; and Commynes saw him as ‘ung tres gentil chevalier’.2 Edward thought well enough of him to appoint him ‘governor and ruler’ of the young prince of Wales in 1473. Yet he too could be unscrupulous and overbearing. According to More, when balked by Hastings of the office of captain of Calais, he spread slanders about his rival, and temporarily brought him into disfavour with Edward.3 He was also very much a realist in politics. As the recent discovery of some of his business papers relating to the last few months of the reign has shown, he was concerned to exercise the very considerable power which his control of the prince of Wales gave him, and his activities in Wales may have contributed to the fears which led Richard of Gloucester to seek power by force in 1483.4 Less is known of the other male members of the family, but Thomas and Richard Grey and Sir Edward Woodville appear later in the reign as playboy-courtiers, enjoying a generally unsavoury reputation as the profligate companions of Edward’s drinking and wenching. Thomas Grey, however, was also emerging as a serious political figure in the later part of the reign. Like Rivers, he had a personal feud with Hastings, and in 1482 the rivals were busy suborning informers and spreading incriminating stories about each other. Their quarrel gave the king much worry in the last months of his life.5
Yet the main source of Woodville unpopularity was undoubtedly the contemporary belief that they exercised an excessive and malign influence upon the king. They were essentially a courtier family, and their very numbers and closeness to the king made them a very conspicuous element in the royal entourage. In 1469 a court jester told the king that in some places the ‘Ryvers’ were so high that he could scarce escape through them.1 The introduction of a new and favoured group into the malicious and competitive atmosphere of a royal court was likely to produce exaggerated reports of its influence. How great was the political weight of the queen and her family is not easy to determine, but there are good reasons for believing that it was much more considerable than some scholars would allow.2 There is no need to rely upon a prejudiced chronicler for early evidence as to the powerful influence the Woodvilles had upon the king. T. B. Pugh has recently pointed out how revealing is the sober evidence of a marriage contract, between Lord Herbert’s heir and the queen’s sister, Mary Woodville, made on 20 March 1466. In ‘this treaty of alliance between two upstart magnate families’, Lord Herbert, whose own influence with the king was not negligible, stipulated that his existing lease of the lordship of Haverfordwest should be converted into a grant to him and his heirs, and he also sought to acquire from the king the reversion of Kilpeck (Herefordshire) and certain other lands. Rivers promised to arrange that these grants took place before the young couple were married, and they were all dul
y made on 26 September 1466.3
This evidence puts a different perspective on the participation of the Woodvilles in a famous episode – the persecution in 1468 of a former Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Cook, as related in the Great Chronicle of London.4 The author of the Chronicle, probably Robert Fabyan, states that he was himself an apprentice in Cook’s household at the time, and his description is so circumstantial as to make this probable. Cook was accused of treason and imprisoned. Whilst he was still in gaol, the servants of Rivers and Sir John Fogge (who was treasurer of the royal household, and a kinsman of the queen) ransacked his town house, drinking all they could from the wine in his cellars and letting the rest run to waste, and carrying away two hundred broadcloths, together with jewels and plate worth £700, and a valuable arras much desired by Jacquetta, duchess of Bedford, and said by Cook’s foreman to have cost £800. The duchess is said to have borne a grudge against Cook because she had not been able to purchase this arras ‘at her pleasure and price’. Cook was eventually brought to trial, and found guilty not of high treason but of the much lesser offence of misprision of treason (that is, being aware of treason but not revealing it). This verdict, according to the chronicle, did not entirely please the king, but so angered Rivers and his wife that they procured the dismissal from office of John Markham, chief justice of the king’s bench, who had presided over the trial.1 Cook was condemned to pay the enormous fine of 8,000 marks, and although (as the chronicle admits) an independent tribunal of merchants was appointed to assess the damage done to his property by Rivers and Fogge, the amount of which was to be deducted from his fine, he now had to face further demands from the queen. Under her ancient right of ‘queen’s gold’, she claimed a further 800 marks, to which Cook had to agree, besides giving ‘many good gifts’ to her council. In his petition to the Readeption parliament (for, not surprisingly, Cook was a vigorous supporter of the restoration of Henry VI), Cook is said to have estimated the damage done to his property in London and to his country house in Essex, also ransacked by the servants of Rivers and Fogge – and clearly not paid for – at the vast sum of £14,666.2 Recent attempts to maintain that the whole affair was conducted by due process of law lack conviction.3 The legal records themselves show that, whilst the London juries of presentment were willing to indict known Lancastrian agents, such as Hawkins, whose evidence under torture involved Cook, they would not accept charges of treason against prominent and respectable London citizens. The first jury of presentment would not even allow that Cook and other Londoners accused with him were guilty of concealing treason. It became necessary for the commissioners to dismiss this jury, and empanel a new one. On the third day this second grand jury was prevailed upon to indict Cook and the others of the full charges, but the trial juries entirely acquitted the others – a London mercer named Portaleyn and Hugh Pakenham ‘late of Southwark, gentleman’ – and found Cook guilty of misprision. Clearly the juries were acting under extreme pressure.1 Though the chronicler’s version of these events is obviously partisan, it cannot easily be set aside. It may well be, as Miss Scofield observed, that ‘the truth of the whole ugly story seems to be that Earl Rivers and his wife, who for some reason wanted to get rid of Cook, played upon the cupidity of the king … in order to accomplish their purpose’. In the wider context of Edward’s courting the goodwill of the Londoners, this persecution of Cook, who had been created a knight of the Bath at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation only three years before, seems ill-judged and impolitic in the extreme.2
It is unlikely that the influence of the queen and her family diminished in the second decade of Edward’s reign, especially as other contenders for power were removed, with the fall of the Nevill family in 1471, the overthrow of Clarence in 1478, and Gloucester’s virtual withdrawal to the north of England about the same time.3 The records of the London Mercers and Merchant Adventurers contain a number of revealing entries which show that the queen’s influence, at least, had not diminished with the passage of time. In 1479 they incurred the royal displeasure through being in arrears in the payment of their subsidy, and the king demanded a ‘recompense’ of £2,000. The merchants lobbied the queen, the marquis of Dorset, the earl of Essex, and Lord Hastings to ‘labour the king’ on their behalf. Hastings, whose own influence at court was very considerable, promised to be ‘their very good and special lord’, but advised them, nevertheless, to apply their labour still ‘unto the queen’s grace and to the lord marquis’, and he (Hastings) would help also ‘when the time cometh’. It was especially through the queen that ‘we trust in God to have help and comfort’. Further labouring of Earls Rivers, Dorset and Hastings followed, but in the end it was ‘at the instance of the queen’s good grace’ that Edward agreed to forgo a part of his demand. Nor was this the only example of her ability to protect the interest of the adventurers.1 The corporation of Bristol likewise found comfort in Woodville influence when their mayor was maliciously accused of treason by one Thomas Norton. After the king, who personally heard the case, had decided in their favour, they sent off a series of letters of thanks for ‘good and favourable lordship’ to Rivers, Dorset, his brother, Richard Grey, Lord Dacre, the queen’s chamberlain, John Alcock, bishop of Worcester, who was president of the prince of Wales’s council, and Sir Thomas Vaughan, treasurer of the prince’s chamber, and a close Woodville associate.2 Nor were the queen’s relatives neglectful of their own interests. Promoting a landed endowment for the queen’s sons by her first marriage, Thomas and Richard Grey, involved the king in one of the more shabby inheritance deals of the reign, and Rivers’s position as governor of the Prince of Wales gave him and other Woodville associates considerable political power in Wales and the Marches. Not only had he control of the prince’s revenues but also the right to remove the person of the prince from place to place at his discretion, which provided him with important political initiative in the event of any mishap to the king, and apparently also power to raise troops in Wales if need be.3
The prominence of the Woodvilles at court, even their control of the heir to the throne (and his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury), would have been less politically dangerous if they had not been at once so widely unpopular and so jealous of their own influence as to be on bad terms with possible rivals for power, among them Gloucester and Hastings. Amongst contemporary writers, Dominic Mancini is the most forthrightly critical of the Woodvilles. He may have exaggerated their influence, but as a foreigner, with no political axe to grind, he is probably accurately reflecting contemporary opinion in reporting how unpopular they were, especially among the nobility.4 A year later, in his attempt to blacken his brother’s regime, Richard III did not need to name the ‘persons insolent, vicious and of inordinate avarice’ whose evil counsel had misled Edward IV.5 Mancini is supported by the more temperate testimony of the Croyland Chronicler. In the vital council meeting which took place shortly after Edward’s death, he tells us (and he was probably present in person), all the councillors were anxious to secure the untroubled succession of Edward V, but the more prudent councillors believed that it would be utterly wrong to entrust the government of the young king to ‘the uncles and brothers of the queen’s blood’.1 Apart from the queen’s jealousy of Gloucester, her animosity towards Hastings, and the latter’s feud with the marquis of Dorset, were unfortunate in persuading the powerful and much respected Hastings to lend his support to Gloucester against the Woodvilles, until, too late, he began to suspect Gloucester’s intentions towards the young princes. Hastings told the same council meeting that he would withdraw to Calais if the young king came to London at the head of a Woodville army, for he ‘feared that if supreme power fell into the hands of those of the queen’s blood, they would most bitterly revenge themselves on himself for the injuries which they claimed he had done to them’.2 Mancini was probably right in his belief that an important factor in the revolution was the dissension between Hastings and Dorset, for despite the king’s attempt to reconcile them on his deathbed, the latent jeal
ousy between the two remained.3 Edward had created a real risk to the future political peace of his realm in allowing his heir to be surrounded by Woodvilles from infancy, educated under their guidance, and necessarily under their influence. When Edward died prematurely in April 1483, the likelihood of a regency dominated by the queen’s unpopular family was a prospect which commended itself to no one.
