Edward IV
Page 29
The solution to these problems, imposed upon the king by pressure from his brothers, was eventually carried through with a high degree of callousness and disregard for the laws of inheritance. It was not achieved without further disputes between Clarence and Gloucester. In June 1473 the countess of Warwick was at last allowed to leave sanctuary, and was taken off to the north by one of Gloucester’s retainers, Sir James Tyrell. This move seems to have been inspired by Gloucester, with the king’s approval, and led to rumours that her estates might be restored to her, so that she could convey them to Duke Richard.1 Clarence was displeased and suspicious. In November 1473 Sir John Paston reported that he was again behaving aggressively. The duke, he said, ‘maketh him big in that [i.e., so far as] he can, showing as he would but deal with the duke of Gloucester’, but, he added, the king intended to be ‘as big as they both, and to be a stifler atween them’. Soon after he expressed the hope that the two dukes would be ‘set at one’ by award of the king.2
During the fifth session of the parliament of 1472–5 (9–28 May 1474) a settlement was finally achieved. That assembly submissively accepted an act recognizing the right and title of the dukes and their wives to the inheritance of Richard, late earl of Warwick, and providing for its partition between them. The widowed countess was wholly barred from any claim or interest in her own patrimony, and was regarded as if she ‘were now naturally dead’. Since Gloucester’s marriage had not yet been confirmed by papal dispensation, it was provided that he should retain control of Anne Nevill’s share of the estates in the event of their divorce, so long as he did not remarry.3 A second act of parliament of 23 February 1475 expressly barred the claims of any male heir of the late Marquis Montagu to any portion of Warwick’s Nevill inheritance, a measure which chiefly concerned Gloucester as possessor of these North-Country estates.4 In the preamble to this act, it was rehearsed that the king had intended to attaint Montagu and his heirs, but had been dissuaded by a request from Clarence, Gloucester and other lords of the blood royal, which clearly indicates why Warwick and his brother, the arch-offenders of 1471, had not been attainted.5 The whole purpose had been to allow Clarence and Gloucester to succeed to the Warwick inheritance in right of their wives and by inheritance, not royal grant.1
The whole episode shows Edward, as well as his brothers, in an unattractive light. By any standards it was a shabby and sordid operation. In its shameless disregard for the rules of inheritance, it set precedents for similar and later transactions in favour of Edward’s younger son, Richard, duke of York, and members of the queen’s family.2 But it also provides a measure of the contrast between Edward IV and his feeble predecessor. In this vital sector of high politics, the management of great men, Edward had succeeded in stifling their disputes and keeping the peace of the realm. But it is clear that Clarence’s behaviour placed a severe strain on his brother’s patience. Already he had shown himself to be incorrigible, the main charge in the indictment which brought about his downfall and death in 1478.
Another reason for Edward’s growing hostility to Clarence may have lain in the suspicion that he was involved in treasonable designs with his wife’s kinsmen, Archbishop George Nevill and John de Vere, earl of Oxford. The archbishop had apparently remained in the king’s favour since his brother’s death, and was expecting Edward for a hunting party at his manor of The Moor in Hertfordshire, when, on the night of 25 April 1472, he was suddenly placed under arrest, and sent across the Channel for imprisonment in the castle of Hammes in the Calais marches. The king lost no time in making his action the occasion for financial as well as political profit. Two senior officials of the royal household, its controller, Sir William Parr, and Sir Thomas Vaughan, treasurer of the chamber, were sent down to The Moor to take possession on the king’s behalf of Nevill’s large personal treasure, amassed ‘through his great covetousness’, and his splendidly jewelled mitre was broken up and made into a new crown for Edward. The king seems to have made some effort to get George Nevill deprived of his see, but, failing in this, contented himself with drawing the revenues of the see of York for the next two and a half years. The archbishop’s household was dispersed: among its members were some ‘great clerks and famous doctors’ whom the scholarly George had patronized, and who, Sir John Paston tells us, ‘go now again to Cambridge to school’ – reluctantly, we may suspect.3
Since no formal or public charges were ever brought against the archbishop, we cannot know the reasons for Edward’s sudden action. He was not much given to capricious acts of revenge, even against a man he clearly disliked, and John Warkworth was probably correct in his belief that George Nevill was in communication with his brotherin-law, John, earl of Oxford, who had now arrived in France and was raiding the marches of Calais. It is likely that Edward struck first to avoid further intrigue. No contemporary source claims, or even implies, that Clarence was involved, but the suspicion remains, especially since it was widely believed that the duke was in touch with Oxford a year later; and Clarence was the most obvious focus for any plot to overthrow Edward now that the Lancastrian cause had been extinguished.1
Oxford had been getting help from Louis XI and the Hansards, both of whom had good reason for wishing to embarrass Edward, and he further hoped to exploit the temporary discord between England and Scotland. His hopes of support from James III of Scotland failing, he decided to attempt a landing in England, and on 28 May 1473 he landed at St Osyth’s in Essex, near the centres of his family power. Frustrated in this by the earl of Essex and Lords Dinham and Duras, he took his ships to sea again, and during the summer months roamed the Channel as a pirate. On 30 September he suddenly descended on Cornwall and seized St Michael’s Mount. This rocky off-shore fortress was virtually impregnable and could easily be held even by the tiny force under Oxford’s command if properly victualled. But the military threat from Oxford was negligible, and royal measures to deal with him were at first confined to preventing provisions reaching the Mount. Men, ships and cannon were eventually sent down to blockade and besiege it in December, and after a month Oxford eventually capitulated, largely because his men were defecting in response to Edward’s promise of pardon. The earl himself was pardoned on 1 February 1474, and sent off to prison at Hammes Castle, where he was to remain until his escape ten years later.2 It is hard to believe that Oxford’s adventure caused the king much concern. But it is clear that Oxford hoped to get support in England, and Louis XI is said to have been presented by him with the seals of twenty-four knights and esquires and one duke who had promised to rise with him against the king. This apart, evidence of Clarence’s collusion with Oxford is confined to some necessarily veiled statements in the Paston family correspondence, but many people, both on the Continent and in England, believed that Clarence was treasonably involved with Oxford, and, through him, with Louis XI.3
With Oxford under lock and key, Edward thought it safe to release George Nevill in November 1474, and he died in England on 8 June 1476, a broken man, though not yet forty-five years of age. Probably few mourned his passing. Intelligent, smooth-tongued, and unprincipled, he is the supreme example in his age of the aristocratic political bishop, whose only loyalty lay in the cause of Nevill family aggrandizement. He possessed to the full the Nevill characteristics of acquisitiveness and ruthless ambition. As a churchman little can be said in his favour. Himself well educated, he was a considerable patron of scholars and scholarship, but this scarcely offsets his long neglect of his province or the example of worldly pomp and ostentation – worthy of a Wolsey – which he offered to his fellow-churchmen.1 With Oxford behind bars, and George Nevill in his grave, the last dangers of Nevill-Lancastrian intrigue against the Yorkist throne died away, for only the political feuds following on Richard Ill’s usurpation were to make that obscure exile, Henry Tudor, a serious contender for the crown. Except for the rumbling discontents of Clarence, the political peace of England was not to be threatened again by conspiracy, rebellion or invasion as long as Edward lived.
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p; (iii) Policies towards Wales, the north of England, and Ireland
The upheavals of 1469–71 presented Edward with the opportunity to devise new political settlements for the most rebellious and lawless regions of his realm. The death in battle of William Herbert, 1st earl of Pembroke, had created a power vacuum in Wales and the Marches which had to be filled, and a similar situation had arisen north of Trent, and especially in Yorkshire and the north-western counties, with the overthrow of Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick. The policies which Edward gradually introduced for the government of these regions were to have far-reaching though very different consequences.
In the fifteenth century Wales had become a by-word for lawlessness, and the problem was equally acute in both of the areas into which the country was divided by two distinct forms of government.2 Much of west and north-west Wales made up the shires of the principality, organized in two groups centred on Carmarthen and Caernarvon. These were governed by a justiciar and chamberlain for each group, appointed by the prince of Wales or by the king when there was no adult prince, but these officers, especially in the reign of Henry VI, tended to be absentee English magnates with littíe direct interest in their task. The remainder, and larger part, of Wales was divided into numerous Marcher lordships, where ‘every function of government was the sole responsibility of its marcher lord’, and the king’s writ did not run. By 1450 the majority of these lordships had fallen into the hands of great English magnates, like the dukes of York and Buckingham and the earl of Warwick, to whom their Welsh possessions were chiefly valuable as a source of profit. Effective control at the local level passed into the hands of deputies drawn from the more thrusting members of the Welsh squirearchy. Neither king, prince, Marcher lord, nor gentry had much interest in law and order, and the endemic violence of Wales was intensified by the general practice of suspending the great sessions or sessions in eyre in each lordship (both within and without the principality) in return for a financial contribution, the ‘general fine’ from the community.1 Such judicial paralysis meant that lawlessness went wholly unpunished. Not only the Welsh themselves, but also the English border counties suffered from the lack of any effective peace-keeping machinery in the Marches of Wales. Criminals from one lordship could only too easily take refuge within another. Methods did exist to deal with this problem – there were ‘love days’ and ‘days of redress’ when the men of each lordship could meet their neighbours to compose their differences, and arrangements could be made for extradition; but such devices were frequently frustrated for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, responsibility for law and order rested with the English Crown, but attempts by Henry VI’s government to tighten up the existing machinery met with little success, and were overtaken by the struggle for power which led to civil war in 1459.
Edward’s primary concern in Wales and the Marches lay, however, far more in the assertion of political control than in any problem posed by the daily violence of Welshman against Welshman. In this he had been greatly aided by the fact that civil war brought an exceptional number of Marcher lordships under his control, either temporarily or permanently, among them twenty-three lordships belonging to his own earldom of March, and by the invaluable services of an able lieutenant, whose personal interests lay in Wales, in William Herbert, 1st earl of Pembroke.1 Immediately after the earl’s death, he had entrusted Duke Richard of Gloucester with primary responsibility for Wales, but this arrangement could not continue when, in 1471, the duke’s energies were committed to the north of England.2 The king then turned in the first instance to the youthful William Herbert, 2nd earl of Pembroke, who, on 27 August 1471, was allowed to enter upon the offices of justiciar and chamberlain of South Wales, and a series of other offices in Wales and the Marches, which had been granted in tail male to his father in 1466. The office of justiciar in North Wales was given on 11 September to another young magnate, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, whose own landed interests lay in the English border counties.3
Unfortunately, the 2nd earl of Pembroke was not the man his father had been, and proved ineffective and uninterested in his duties. The once paramount Herbert influence in South and West Wales rapidly declined, and in 1479 William Herbert was compelled to surrender his earldom of Pembroke to the prince of Wales, receiving only slender compensation in the title of earl of Huntingdon and a few manors in Somerset and Dorset.4 Meanwhile, the problem of disorder in Wales seemed to grow worse rather than better. In the parliament of 1472 there were bitter complaints from the English border counties about ‘the outrageous demeaning of Welshmen’, and requests for special counsel to be taken with the Lords Marcher to deal with the problems of that region. In response, Edward was driven to intervene. In June 1473 he held a meeting with the Marcher lords at Shrewsbury, and entered into agreements with them. Though these introduced no new peace-keeping machinery, they did commit the lords to a formal promise to carry out their traditional responsibilities.5 Disorder and even open defiance of the government was not thereby checked immediately. In 1474, for example, three bastard sons of the 1st earl of Pembroke and two sons of Roger Vaughan refused to appear before the king’s council when summoned to answer for various offences: they fled to Wales and there began stirring up insurrection. Strong commissions appointed to deal with them evidently had little effect, for these rebels were still at large in 1478 when they attacked and seized Pembroke Castle, and held it by force.1
By this time, however, a new machinery to exercise continuous supervision over Wales and the Marches more effectively than the distant king could do was slowly coming into being. The idea of a regional authority did not spring from any carefully-conceived plan, but was a piece of improvisation typical of Edward’s rather opportunist methods of government. The notion came from the need to provide a suitable household for the king’s infant son, Edward, who, at the age of six months, was formally created prince of Wales and earl of Chester on 26 June 1471, and duke of Cornwall on 17 July. At the same time a body of fifteen councillors was appointed to administer the principality until the prince reached the age of fourteen.2 At first this council had little power, and not until 20 November 1472 was the prince allowed to draw the revenues of the principality and the counties of Chester and Flint. This led to a reorganization of his council, which was increased in number from fifteen to twenty-five members on 20 February 1473. The new members included two Marcher lords, Shrewsbury and Ferrers, and four professional lawyers. This council was given general power to administer the prince’s possessions in Wales, Cornwall and Chester, but as yet had no special judicial authority in the Welsh Marches. Following the request made by the commons of 1472, Edward sent his son and a body of councillors to Hereford to represent the majesty of the Crown. Both then and in February 1474 they were given instructions to deal with disturbances in the border counties; but these were for specific purposes and do not represent any clear intent to transform the council ‘from a body for administering estates into a court for enforcing the law’.3
Further developments followed from the king’s decision that the prince should take up permanent residence in the Marches. In the winter of 1473–4 an inner council was created through the appointment of Anthony, Earl Rivers, as ‘governor and ruler’ of the prince’s household, and of John Alcock, bishop of Rochester, as president of his council, and also as his teacher ‘that he may be brought up in virtue and cunning’, and Thomas Vaughan, treasurer of Edward’s chamber, was confirmed in his position as prince’s chamberlain also.1 Elaborate ordinances for the government of the household were drawn up on 27 September 1473, which regulated the prince’s daily life in minute detail as well as providing for the size of the household and the conduct of its officers.2 Towards the end of the year the prince and his officers began to reside regularly at Ludlow Castle, the principal York family residence in the Welsh Marches. From then on it was natural that the princely council should become a focal point for the exercise of royal authority in the area, and should gradually acquire larger though rather
ill-defined powers.
In January 1476 the prince was given a general commission of oyer and terminer within the principality, the Marches, and the adjacent English shires of Gloucester, Hereford, Shropshire and Worcester, with power to array men if necessary, and authority to appoint others in his place. In March further power was given to him and some of his council to enquire into all liberties and franchises in the Marches and the English border counties which might be resumed into the king’s hands, and into all escapes of criminals in those areas. This was all preliminary to a meeting arranged at Ludlow in March 1476 between the prince’s council and the Marcher lords to discuss the best methods of suppressing crime, and Edward backed this up by announcing his intention to visit the region in person after Easter.3 Probably as a result of the discussions in March, the prince’s council was given authority in December 1476 to appoint judicial commissions in Wales, the Marches and the border shires, to array men if necessary in pursuit of criminals, and to enquire into official negligence.4 Clearly a serious effort was being made to coordinate the administration of justice in the entire region, with the king’s sovereign powers semi-permanently delegated to a resident council at Ludlow. Its responsibilities were further increased in December 1477, when the lordships of the earldom of March began to be put under its direct control, and in 1479, when William Herbert was compelled to give up his earldom of Pembroke to the prince for the reformation of the weal public, restful governance, and ministration of justice in the said parts of South Wales’.5 All this did not mean that the prince’s council could interfere in the day-to-day government of the many Marcher lordships still in private hands, but at least it had a supervisory authority both there and in the border counties to deal with failures of justice or official negligence, as well as complete power in the principality, the earldom of March, and other lordships belonging to the Crown. Unfortunately, little information has survived about the activities of this regional council during the later years of Edward’s reign, and we cannot know how effective it proved. But the problem of disorder within the Marcher lordships remained intractable, as Henry VII was to discover, and its only real solution lay in the abolition of Marcher privileges eventually undertaken by Henry VIII.1