by Charles Ross
The Yorkist court, rather than the council, was the main marketplace for those who wished to buy and sell influence. Even the great influence wielded by that prominent councillor, William, Lord Hastings, sprang more from his office of king’s chamberlain throughout the reign, for in this capacity he controlled business brought before the king in person, including the hearing of petitions.1 In the second decade of the reign, however, even Hastings’s influence seems to have been overtaken by that of the queen and her relatives, as Hastings himself admitted. Even before 1470, the support of the queen’s kinsmen was thought well worth having. In 1469 the Pastons sought the good lordship of her brothers, Anthony, Lord Scales, and Sir John Woodville, although neither is known to have been a councillor at the time. We have already seen how anxiously the London Merchant Adventurers and Mercers lobbied the queen and her kinsmen; so too did the corporation of Bristol, when they wished to ‘move’ the king. The Woodvilles were the courtier group par excellence in Edward’s later years.
Whether any of Edward’s numerous mistresses exercised much influence at court is a question almost impossible to answer. Among the ladies who graced the royal court in Edward’s later years there were many who attracted the king’s attention, for there is no evidence that his licentiousness diminished with age. Dominic Mancini, writing in 1483, insists that2
He was licentious in the extreme; moreover, it was said that he had been most insolent to numerous women after he had seduced them, for, as soon as he grew weary of dalliance, he gave up the ladies much against their will to the other courtiers. He pursued with no discrimination the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly: however, he took none by force.
Edward’s detractors could later dwell on the extent to which his lechery had become a source of public scandal and irritation. Richard III used his brother’s womanizing to discredit his memory, and More echoes the phrasing of the act of settlement of January 1484:3
the king’s greedy appetite was insatiable, and everywhere all over the realm intolerable. For no woman was there anywhere, young or old, rich or poor, whom he set his eye upon … but without any fear of God, or respect of his honour, murmur or grudge of the world, he would importunely pursue his appetite, and have her, to the great destruction of many a good woman … and all were it that with this and other importable dealing, the realm was in every part annoyed. …
The identities of almost all the ladies who shared the royal bedchamber are nowadays decently obscured from us, and probably few had much influence over him. The exception is perhaps the charming Mistress Shore (whose real name was Elizabeth, not Jane), of whom Sir Thomas More has left a touching portrait. The wife of a London merchant, William Shore, she was still alive, though old and impoverished, when More was writing his History of King Richard III:1
Proper she was and fair. … Yet delighted not men so much in her beauty, as in her pleasant behaviour. For a proper wit had she, and could both read well and write, merry of company, ready and quick of answer, neither mute nor full of babble, sometimes taunting without displeasure and not without disport. The king would say that he had three concubines … one the merriest, another the wiliest, the third the holiest harlot in his realm, as one to whom no man could get out the church lightly to any place, but it were to his bed. The other two were somewhat greater personages, and nathless of their humility content to be nameless, and to forbear the praise of those properties. But the merriest was this Shore’s wife, in whom the king therefore took special pleasure. For many he had, but her he loved, whose favour to say truth … she never abused to any man’s hurt.
More believed that she had considerable influence with the king, though she did not use it for her own personal gain:
Finally, in many weighty suits, she stood many men in great stead, either for none or small rewards, and those rather gay than rich: either for that she was content with the deed itself well done, or for that she delighted to be sued unto, and show what she was able to do with the king, or for that wanton women and wealthy be not always covetous.
However this may have been, Mistress Shore, unlike Edward III’s unattractive mistress, Alice Perrers, was not showered with rewards which left their traces in the official records of the reign, and More may have overstated her influence. In the absence of any other references to the king’s mistresses, it seems reasonable to assume that, like Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, he altogether excluded his mistresses from state affairs, and there is no evidence that any exerted an influence comparable with French royal mistresses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.2 Queen Elizabeth may well have resented Edward’s womanizing: More tells us that she hated Lord Hastings partly because of his influence with Edward, but also she thought him ‘secretly familiar with the king in wanton company’, though Mancini reported that not only Hastings but also the queen’s sons, Dorset and Richard Grey, and one of her brothers, Sir Edward Woodville, were the principal ‘promoters and companions of his vices’.1 But there is no good reason to suppose that the king’s promiscuity in any way diminished the queen’s influence over her husband.
For those who possessed it, influence at court was a highly marketable commodity, to be paid for in grants of office or fees, gifts in cash and kind, bribes and douceurs. Hastings’s standing at court brought tangible rewards in the form of fees or annuities from an impressive list of English lords, ladies, bishops, abbots and gentry, especially some, like Lord Rivers, who felt their position to be politically dubious at the outset of the reign, and in the large pensions he was later to receive from Duke Charles of Burgundy and King Louis of France.2 Unfortunately, we possess little similar information about the rewards accumulated by other prominent courtiers, but there is no reason to suppose that Hastings was in any way exceptional. Very probably John, Lord Howard, for example, benefited handsomely from his influence with Edward after 1475: Louis XI gave him presents worth 24,000 crowns in cash and plate as well as a pension of 1,200 crowns yearly, though these may well reflect Howard’s importance as Edward’s principal negotiator in his dealings with France.3 What cannot be readily assessed is the flow of gifts of pipes of wine, venison and other dainties which an influential courtier might expect to receive wherever he went, and of which many examples survive, especially in the records of the English towns. Yet it would not do to over-emphasize the importance of such rewards, for they do not compare with the wealth and influence which these men acquired by the king’s own gift. More than one of Edward’s courtiers rose from comparative rags to riches through the patronage lavished on them by their royal master. But the typical Yorkist courtier was no pleasure-loving favourite, no idle fop-about-town. He was generally not only a courtier but also a councillor, administrator, soldier and king’s servant. Save for a few of the queen’s kinsmen, Edward’s grace and favour had to be earned.1
The fifteenth century in England was an age when educated laymen steadily penetrated into areas of government formerly monopolized by clergy. Nevertheless, the Crown still relied heavily on the higher clergy for the conduct of government at the centre. With the exceptions of Thomas Bourchier, William Grey and George Nevill, promoted respectively to Canterbury, Ely and Exeter during Duke Richard of York’s tenure of power in the 1450s, Edward IV had inherited a Lancastrian-appointed episcopate, some of whose members had had close links with Henry VI or his queen. Seven bishops (apart from those mentioned above) chose to link themselves with Yorkist fortunes after the take-over of power in July 1460, and four of these appear at various times on Edward’s council in the early years of the reign.2 But only one Lancastrian bishop, Lawrence Booth of Durham, who was translated to York in 1476, was ever promoted to a higher see, and this not until he had proved his loyalty; and only Booth, as chancellor from July 1473 to May 1474, from this Lancastrian group was ever to hold high office in Yorkist administration. Richard Beauchamp, bishop of Salisbury from 1450 to 1481, claimed in 1462 that he was high in favour with the king, ‘as the chief of the three to whose judgement all the most s
ecret matters of the council are referred’, but in default of other evidence his claim lacks substantiation. He was, however, prominent in the negotiations leading to the Burgundian marriage of the Lady Margaret, and performed the wedding ceremony, and in the 1470s, when he became chancellor of the Order of the Garter, he was closely connected with Edward’s rebuilding of St George’s, Windsor.3 Otherwise, Edward had little confidence in the Lancastrian bishops, and they are not prominent in his government. This is in spite of the fact that vacancies on the episcopal bench were remarkably few in the first decade of the reign, except in the remote see of Carlisle. This was normally occupied by northerners who had little share in central government, and was of no political importance. Apart from Canterbury, three sees, two of them major – Winchester, London and Lichfield – were held throughout the reign by Lancastrian-appointed bishops, and (except at Carlisle) there were only four English vacancies and one Welsh in Edward’s first decade. He had, therefore, little chance before 1471 to stiffen the bench of bishops with his own supporters.1
The three ‘Yorkist’ bishops, Bourchier, Grey and Nevill, stand somewhat apart from their fellows not only for their earlier political connections with the House of York but also in being men of high birth with powerful aristocratic affiliations. In 1461 Archbishop Bourchier was already a man of about fifty, and had been a bishop for twenty-eight years. His thirty-two-year tenure of Canterbury (1454–86) was to prove the longest in the long history of that see. He was an experienced administrator, and his close support as primate was of great value to the king. Though never appointed by Edward to a major office of state, he was active in the council chamber, officiated at state functions such as coronations and prorogations of parliament, lent considerable sums of money to the Crown, and occasionally served on local commissions. He also managed the convocation of Canterbury in the king’s interest, and proved very willing to follow the king’s line in respect to such matters as papal attempts to tax the clergy. His attitudes reflect clearly enough the general attitude of the English clergy to the pope, which has been described as ‘the passive recognition of the pope’s leadership of Christendom, the faint acknowledgement of his right to obedience, the dislike of taxation, and the effective dominance of the king who was close at hand’.2
The subtle and energetic personality of the young George Nevill is even more prominent until the breach between Edward and the Nevills made him suspect and disloyal. Chancellor of England until 1467, he proved an able servant, who was also active on the council and in the negotiations with France and Burgundy, and was probably the chief spokesman for the Nevill interest at court. He had been well rewarded for his services by translation to York in 1465, and was one of the few ecclesiastics to be given substantial grants of land at the king’s disposal during the great share-out of the early 1460s.3 Less well connected than the others, the scholarly William Grey, who had spent several years studying in Italy, was none the less a useful royal servant: a councillor at least from 1463, he was also the only cleric to hold the office of treasurer (1469–70). Edward himself, however, was careful not to choose his bishops from the families of the high aristocracy, as had often been the case under Henry VI. Until the appointment of his brother-in-law, Lionel Woodville, to the see of Salisbury in 1482, Bourchier and Nevill had no counterparts on the Edwardian bench. Three younger sons of peers were preferred (Richard Scrope to Carlisle, William Dudley to Durham, and Edmund Audley to Rochester), but none was of magnate origin.
The typical Yorkist bishop, as revealed in Edward’s own promotions, owed nothing to birth or high connection. He was usually a man from the lesser gentry or of merchant background who had made his mark in some aspect of the royal service, and had risen through his proven abilities in the conduct of secular affairs. They were in general a competent and hard-working body of men. Almost without exception they were highly educated, graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, many of them with doctoral degrees. Some of the most successful had been trained in canon or civil law, and the number of lawyer-bishops increased significantly in Edward’s reign. These also tended to command the more important and wealthy sees. Several were themselves respectable scholars, and most were patrons of scholarship and education. Some at least managed to combine active service to the king with conscientious, if not spiritually inspiring, government of their dioceses. Men like Bishop Robert Stillington of Bath and Wells, who visited his diocese only once in twenty-six years, were scandalous exceptions rather than the norm. They owed their advancement, however, less to personal piety, scholarship or pastoral devotion, than to their value to the king.1
Of the twenty-two men who became bishops in Edward’s reign, only seven had no known close connection with the king. Four of these held the more obscure Welsh sees, and the other three were short-lived incumbents of distant Carlisle. Of the remainder, three had their start by serving the king as his secretary – which now became a firm steppingstone to a see – and a fourth went on to serve Henry VII in the same capacity, and was promoted to Exeter in 1492.2 But it is a sign of the times that the other two men who held this essentially ‘clerical’ office, William Hattcliffe (who had been Edward’s physician) and William Slyfield, were both laymen. Three more of Edward’s bishops, Robert Stillington of Bath and Wells, Thomas Rotherham of Rochester, Lincoln and York, and John Russell of Rochester and Lincoln, were rewarded with sees for their services as keepers of the privy seal, an office which between them they held throughout the reign, whilst Stillington and Rotherham together held the chancellorship of England for a total of fourteen out of twenty-two years. In these two major offices there was, therefore, a remarkable continuity of occupation. Other bishops were able chancery clerks, such as John Alcock, bishop of Rochester (1472–6) and of Worcester (1476–86), and John Morton, bishop of Ely (1479–86), the future cardinal-archbishop of Canterbury. Both of them, as successive masters of the rolls, had been the effective departmental heads of chancery. Richard Martin, who became bishop of St David’s in 1482, likewise had chancery experience, but had also been one of the king’s chaplains. Another royal chaplain was William Dudley, who was appointed dean of the chapel royal immediately after Edward’s restoration, but he probably owed this, and his later promotion to the very wealthy see of Durham in 1476, partly to Edward’s gratitude, for he had been one of the first to join Edward in 1471.1 Thomas Milling, who was advanced to Hereford in 1474, likewise owed his progress to political services. As abbot of Westminster, he had sheltered the queen and her family in sanctuary during Edward’s exile, and he was one of the only two members of religious orders to achieve an English see under Edward’s rule.2
Such men served the king in a variety of ways. Apart from monopolizing the chancellorship and keepership, the great majority of the bishops, more especially Edward’s own appointees, were active members of the king’s council. All had experience in diplomatic work. Bishop Russell, for example, was heavily engaged as ambassador both before and after his promotion to Lincoln. In 1467–8 he had been prominent in the negotiations with Burgundy; between 1471 and 1473 he was a leading negotiator both with Burgundy and the Hansards, and after 1474 also served on embassies to Scotland and Brittany.3 Bishop John Alcock, the founder of Jesus College, Cambridge, was another successful lawyer-administrator, who first appears in the 1460s as an expert appointed to hear appeals in the admiral’s and constable’s courts of England. In 1470 he was on embassy to Spain, and in 1471 was an envoy to the Scots. By then master of the rolls, he was one of those appointed to administer the lands of the prince of Wales, and in November 1473 was made the prince’s tutor and president of his council, and much of his work thereafter lay in Wales and the Marches. His close connection with the royal family is illustrated by the fine set of stained-glass portraits of the king, queen and some of their children which he installed in his newly-rebuilt priory church at Little Malvern in Worcestershire.1 The civil lawyer, James Goldwell, acted as master of requests, as ambassador, as clerk of the council, and as Edward IV’s a
gent in Rome at various times during the reign, becoming bishop of Norwich in 1472. The Franciscan Richard Martin of St David’s was a councillor from 1470, chancellor of the earldom of March and chancellor of Ireland, a councillor of the prince of Wales from 1473, and an ambassador to Burgundy and Spain.2 It is not surprising to find in view of this record of service that no fewer than nine of Edward’s surviving bishops went on to find favour with Henry VII, some to hold high office, some to achieve further promotion within the episcopate.
If the clerical statesmen and civil servants still supplied invaluable traditional expertise in the work of diplomacy and administration, they were already being overshadowed in the political aspects of government by their lay counterparts. One of the characteristic features of Edward’s choice of royal servants is the extensive use he made of laymen, especially those below the rank of baron. This was not wholly without precedent, for both Richard II and Henry IV, in special circumstances, had delegated important tasks to knights and gentry. Yet the process had not been continued under Henry V and Henry VI, and Edward’s reign marks an important phase in the development which was soon to lead to the virtual monopolization by laymen of government office. The main reason for this phenomenon under Edward IV is the highly personal nature of his rule in an age when the reassertion of royal prerogative power and the maintenance of effective political control in the country at large were the ruler’s main preoccupation. It also owes something in the early years of the reign to the circumstances of his accession; like Henry IV, Edward found that the political basis of his regime amongst the established peerage was slender, and he had to rely on the services of lesser men (some of whom he ennobled) to a greater degree than had been normal in the previous half-century. Even when fully secure on the throne, however, he continued to rely on proven gentry servants, and the men of the royal household and the knights and esquires of the body are even more prominent in the second decade of the reign.
