Edward IV

by Charles Ross

  Rich cloths, rich furs … rich stones … and other jewels and ornaments … rich hangings and other apparell for his houses; vessels, vestments, and other ornaments for his chapel.

  There was little need for Sir John Fortescue to urge Edward of York to spend money on such objects of conspicuous kingly consumption, for they account for a significant part of his annual expenditure from the very beginning of the reign. Between April 1461 and September 1462, a period which includes the coronation, his keeper of the great wardrobe, George Darell, spent £4,784 2s 10½d on clothes, linen, furs and other fine fabrics for the king, his household and his family, exceeding his receipts by £1,481 11s 5¾d. Between September 1462 and April 1465 he spent another £5,201, an average of some £2,000 a year.3

  The king never stinted himself on his personal finery. In 1471, for example, amongst other things he was supplied with a jacket of cloth of-gold, lined and trimmed with satin, linen and damask, at a cost of £ 13 6s 8d; another containing 5#fr1/2> yards of gilt cloth at nearly £ 18; a robe made from 14 yards of black damask, trimmed with velvet; 15 yards of crimson velvet and 14 yards of black damask, ‘for the king’s person’; a cloak of black and crimson velvet lined with satin; and a robe of gilt tawny satin lined with velvet and costing £32 6s 8d, with yards of velvet to line it at 12s a yard. In 1480 the great wardrobe account lists twenty-six gowns, doublets and jackets for the king’s person, many in the richest materials – blue cloth-of-gold upon a figured satin ground and lined with green satin, black velvet lined with purple, white damask furred with sable, purple cloth-of-gold upon a satin ground and furred with ermine. There were several dozen pairs of boots, shoes and slippers, hats, bonnets and other clothing, including forty-eight handkerchiefs. The king’s clothes were as modishly up to date as they were lavish. At Christmas 1482, for instance, he appeared at court ‘clad in a great variety of most cosdy garments, of quite a different cut to those which had usually been seen hitherto in our kingdom’.

  Furnishings for the royal houses and palaces were also provided on a lavish scale. In June 1468, for example, £397 was paid for a collection of gilt plates, saucers, spoons, basins, cups and wash-basins, for ‘the king’s private use in his chamber’, and the further huge sum of £984 was spent on some sets of arras representing scenes from the History of Nebuchadnezzar, the History of Alexander, the Passion, and the Judgement, together with two dozen green cushions and some lengths of green velvet.1 The money came from part of the fine levied upon the former Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Cook. There is no reliable way of translating these sums into meaningful modern equivalents, but it is worth remembering that the Black Book of the Household of 1471–2 put the annual cost of a viscount’s household at £1,000, a baron’s at £500, and a knight’s at £100. Modern calculations suggest that in the early sixteenth century there were in the whole country only 200 knights with an average income of £200, and that the average income of 50 peers was about £800. The normal daily wage of the labouring class was about 5d. In these terms, the royal arras represented the fruit of some 45,000 working days.2

  By these standards royal expenditure on plate and jewellery is even more impressive, although it also represented a useful form of investment which could be pawned or used as security for loans in times of need. Thus, on 27 July 1461, the king redeemed from the executors of Sir John Fastolf two valuable jewels, one of which had probably belonged to an earl of Warwick. They were described as ‘an ouche [a jewelled clasp] of gold set with a great pointed diamond set upon a rose, enamelled white, and an ouche of gold in the fashion of a ragged staff [the Warwick badge] with two images of a man and woman garnished with a ruby, a diamond, and a great pearl’: together they had been pledged by the king’s father, Duke Richard, to Sir John for £437.1

  On important family occasions expenditure was on a lavish scale. In 1465 no less than £108 5s 6d was paid to Matthew Philip for a cup and basin for the queen’s coronation. In the following year £ 125 was spent on a jewelled ornament ‘against the time of the birth of our most dear daughter Elizabeth’. In 1478 the king bought from the duke of Suffolk an elaborate jewel, with ‘an image of Our Lady of gold with Our Lord in her arms and the images of Saint John Baptist and Saint Katharine on either side of Our Lady and two other images with seven angels thereto pertaining’, garnished with great numbers of precious stones, at a cost of £160. This may have been intended as a gift to the chapel at Windsor. On one occasion Edward is reported to have bid as high as £3,000 for a huge diamond and ruby ornament, but without being able to meet the price demanded by the Italian importer, Luigi Grimaldi of Genoa.2

  Such special purchases apart, routine expenditure on jewellery was considerable. In June 1469, for example, when short of cash and pawning some jewels to raise money, the king nevertheless paid out £930 for jewels supplied to him by John Barker and Henry Massey, goldsmiths of London.3 Some idea of the nature of these regular purchases can be gained from a surviving bill, presented on 5 September 1478 by one ‘Cornelius the goldsmith’, which included the following items:4

  I cross of gold garnished with a diamond, 4 rubies and 7 pearls, £4.

  A flower of gold garnished with a fleur-de-lys diamond, £6.

  Another flower, with a pointed diamond, 4 rubies and 4 pearls, £4.

  Another flower, with a great sapphire, 40s.

  A tooth-pick of gold, garnished with a diamond, a ruby and a pearl, £8 6s 8d.

  4 rings of gold, garnished with 4 rubies, at 10s each, 40s.

  Much of the treasure which contemporaries believed Edward had accumulated by the time of his death was probably in the form of collected plate and jewels, though it is doubtful whether he spent nearly so heavily on either as did the avaricious Henry VII.1

  Edward IV seems to have been the first English sovereign to accumulate a substantial and permanent royal library.2 His interest in collecting manuscripts, as we have noted, was stimulated by his exile in Bruges, and copies of many of the works afterwards commissioned by Edward were already in the library of his host, Louis de Gruthuyse. Soon after his return he began to order a series of illuminated manuscripts from Flemish artists and scribes working mainly in Bruges, and his collection grew with the years, especially around 1479–80. These huge volumes, often measuring nineteen inches by twelve, and containing some three to four hundred parchment folios, were generously illustrated with miniatures and decorated with the royal arms, the Garter insignia, and a number of Yorkist badges, especially the ‘rose en soleil’. Apart from these specially commissioned works, of which a score or more survive among the Royal MSS in the British Museum Edward certainly acquired a number of other manuscripts and printed books. Soon after his death this royal collection, then at Richmond, was large enough to be shown to the French ambassador as one of the sights which a distinguished foreign visitor ought to see.3

  Edward’s tastes as a book-collector closely resembled those of the Burgundian court circle. The earlier Valois dukes had accumulated a substantial library, which was almost quadrupled by Duke Philip the Good, and his kinsmen and servants included several noted bibliophiles, among them the Bastard of Burgundy as well as Gruthuyse.1 Though much smaller in scale, Edward’s collection resembled theirs in a preference for showy and lavishly-illuminated volumes, in the predominance of French over Latin works, except for service books, and in the absence of any interest in contemporary Italian humanism. He shared, too, their liking for histories and historical romances – the two are not always clearly distinguishable. These formed the largest group among the surviving works known or presumed to have belonged to him. They included several histories of the ancient world, in medieval French versions, such as Raoul le Fevre’s Receuil des Histoires de Troyes, the anonymous La grant hystoire Cesar, and works by Josephus and Livy. General histories included Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale in the French of Jean de Vignay and the compendium by Jean Mansel, the Fleur des Hystoires, and amongst recent histories were a chronicle of Flanders, two volumes and a conti
nuation of William of Tyre’s History of the Crusades, and portions of Froissart’s Chronicles. There were also two volumes, part of a set of seven, of Jean de Waurin’s Anchiennes et nouvelles cronicques dangleterre. Of Flemish work, these were almost certainly executed for Edward IV, and among their sixty-seven miniatures is a picture of the king seated on his throne, wearing the collar of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece, and receiving the book from its kneeling author.2

  Late medieval royal and aristocratic patrons had a decided taste for didactic and moralistic works, drawing upon history and legend for a series of exempla. A good specimen in Edward’s library is a work very popular in Burgundy, Les IX malheureux et les IX malheureuses, consisting of eighteen ten-line stanzas put into the mouths of such figures as Priam, Hercules, Saul, Pompey, Hannibal, Helen and Medea. Bound up in the same volume (Royal MS. 14 E II) were other works of a similar character, like Boccaccio’s Des Cas des Nobles hommes et femmes malheureux and Alain Chartier’s Le Breuiaire des Nobles (thirteen poems in ballad form spoken by ‘Noblesse’ and twelve other Virtues). He also owned a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, though this can scarcely be included among the moral treatises. Relatively few religious and devotional works survive in the Old Royal Library, probably because most were given away or deliberately disposed of at the time of the Reformation. Edward gave all the books of his chapel to the queen under his will, except some destined for the canons of Windsor. Amongst those remaining are a French version of St Augustine’s City of God, three volumes of a Bible Historiale, and the theological allegory called La Forteresse de la Foy.

  Probably, like the Burgundian collectors, Edward owned a number of chivalrous romances, but much depends on the attribution of one beautiful manuscript (British Museum MS. 15 E VI). This was originally produced for John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, for presentation to Margaret of Anjou, and may have been taken over among the chattels of Henry VI: it was certainly in the Royal Library in 1535. It contains a number of romances of Alexander, Charlemagne, Ogier the Dane, Guy of Warwick, Le Livre des fais darmes et de chevalerie and le ordre du gartir, some of which were afterwards printed by Caxton.1 Queen Elizabeth owned a romance of the Holy Grail and a Morte d’Arthur, parts of a work by the twelfth-century author Walter Map.

  Apart from books specially commissioned or bought by the king, his library probably also contained several works presented to him by their authors. These include John Harding’s Chronicle in its second version, Capgrave’s Chronicle, and William Worcester’s rather carelessly revised version of his Boke of Noblesse, originally intended for Henry VI and urging a renewal of the French wars. All these were dedicated to Edward.2 He may also have possessed a few printed books, the early products of William Caxton’s new printing-press established in 1477 in the precinct of Westminster Abbey. Caxton’s emergence, first as a translator and then as printer, undoubtedly owed a good deal to encouragement from members of Edward’s family and the court circle. His first printed work, published at Bruges in 1474, was, as Caxton himself records, ‘Translated and drawen out of frenshe in to englisshe by William Caxton mercer of ye cite of London at the comaundement of the right hye myghty and vertuouse Pryncesse hys redoubtyd lady Margarete … Duchesse of Bourgoyne.’3 Upon arriving in London, Caxton attracted the valuable support of the king’s brother-in-law, Anthony, Earl Rivers, whose own translation of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers became the first book to be printed in England (1477). With Rivers’s continued encouragement, Caxton went on to print the earl’s translations of Christine de Pisan’s Moral Proverbs and the Cordyale (1478 and 1479). Hugh Brice, the London goldsmith, who had close court connections, commissioned The Mirror of the World in 1481 for presentation to his superior at the Royal Mint, William, Lord Hastings.1 Edward’s cousin, William, earl of Arundel, was another of Caxton’s early patrons, the Golden Legend (1483) being undertaken at his command and request.

  From all this Edward himself seems rather noticeably absent. Much of Caxton’s output reflects the tastes and interests of his aristocratic patrons and consists of English versions of the moralities, histories and romances which they had hitherto been purchasing in manuscript and in French.2 His books might have been expected to appeal to the king in person. Indeed, Caxton directly sought royal patronage. In three of his works he claims to have enjoyed ‘the umbre and shadowe’ of the king’s protection, and two (Tully of Old Age and Godefroy of Bologne, both printed in 1481) were dedicated to Edward, who was asked to receive a copy, ‘and not to desdeyne to take it of me so poure and ignoraunt & symple a persone’.3 Edward has often been reckoned amongst Caxton’s patrons.4 But there is no reason to suppose that his protection or his interest was anything more than passive. Caxton’s own prologues and epilogues show that the king never directly commissioned or encouraged any of his printed works. There is a revealing sentence in the prologue to his Life of Jason, which was dedicated to the young prince of Wales, ‘to thentente that he may begynne to lerne rede Englissh’: Caxton did not, however, he tells us, presume to present it to the king, ‘for asmoch as I doubte not his good grace hath it in frensh, which he well understandeth’.5 Since Edward continued to commission manuscripts from Bruges, he may well have preferred the more splendid artefacts of the illuminator to the less colourful productions of the printer.

  The royal library, we are told, ‘tended rather to entertainment and edification rather than to study and the advancement of learning’.1 If so, the fault was one common to most princely libraries of the day outside Italy. Edward’s Lancastrian predecessors, Henry V and Henry VI, had been exceptional in the range of their scholarly and theological interests.2 Edward’s own court circle contained amongst its lay members one or two like John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, and Anthony, Earl Rivers, with an interest in classics and contemporary Italian humanism. They were, however, rather unusual in this respect. The lay aristocrats of fifteenth-century England were neither illiterate nor uneducated, but they did not as yet form part of the intelligentsia: and this was the class in which Edward himself had grown up.3 But within the limits of his literary interests Edward, like Duke Philip of Burgundy, may well have enjoyed being read aloud to, as fifteenth-century authors assumed their works would be. If he rarely dealt with Latin works, he was clearly very much at home in French as well as English. The value he attached to his books is shown not only in the expensive bindings of velvet and silk with gold clasps which he ordered for them but also in the fact that some of them at least followed him round from palace to palace carefully packed in ‘coffins of fir’.4

  Unlike Henry VI, but in common with his brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, Edward IV had no wish to be remembered by posterity as a patron of learning. It is true that the Croyland Chronicler informs us that he was ‘a most loving encourager of wise and learned men’. His councillors and servants included a number of influential and learned churchmen who, after the fashion of the age, did much to promote scholarship and found schools and colleges. Of the four men who served him as chancellors, Archbishop George Nevill was a noted patron of scholars and of humanist studies as well as a considerable bookcollector; Bishop Stillington of Bath and Wells founded a college at Acaster in Yorkshire; and Thomas Rotherham, archbishop of York, established a college at Rotherham in Yorkshire, on the lines of Eton and Winchester, and was an active benefactor of Lincoln College, Oxford, and of the university of Cambridge. The only clerical treasurer of the reign, William Grey, bishop of Ely, had himself studied in Italy under the humanist Guarino da Verona, was a patron of humanists, and presented a notable collection of philosophical and humanist works to his own Oxford college, Balliol. Bishop John Russell of Rochester and Lincoln, who was keeper of the privy seal from 1474 to the end of the reign, was reputed ‘one of the best learned men undoubtedly that England had in his time’. This list could easily be extended further.1

  Very little of their interest in scholarly and educational patronage rubbed off on their royal master. Unlike Philip the Good of Burgundy, he di
d not maintain writers or official historians at his court.2 He was never tempted to follow the example of educational foundations set by Henry VI at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. Indeed, his vindictive antipathy towards these institutions because of their Lancastrian associations came near to wrecking their future. Shortly after his accession, he ordered King’s College to pay all its revenues into the exchequer. Though the college itself was exempted from the general resumption in the parliament of 1461, its estates were not allowed to escape. Some were restored in 1462, but much of the founder’s endowment was permanently lost, and the number of fellows had to be substantially reduced in consequence. Eton came even closer to extinction. In Edward’s first parliament, all grants made to it by Henry VI were revoked. For a time the king contemplated suppressing it altogether and annexing it to St George’s Chapel at nearby Windsor. To this end a bull was procured from Pope Pius II in 1463 authorizing its abolition, and in 1465 orders were given for the removal to Windsor of Eton’s bells, jewels and furniture. Though the provost and three or four fellows continued to live there, building operations stopped – the chapel being left without a roof – and it is doubtful whether the school continued. But in 1467 the king relented, restored lands to the college, and in 1469 petitioned Pope Paul II to revoke the bull annexing it to Windsor. After 1471 he even gave Eton a few inexpensive favours. His queen may have given even more, but there is no evidence to support the legend dating back to the seventeenth century that the college was saved by the intervention of Edward’s favourite mistress, Jane Shore. Even the portraits of her which hang at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, are in fact sixteenth-century versions of paintings of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of King Henry II of France.3