The account recorded by the Chester Herald states that 5,000 people came to receive alms. Others enjoyed the ceremonies in
…tents and pavilions and halls of canvas where people could sit and rest and there were as many as 1,500 places where they could sit and eat, besides other, reserved, places; and apart from the court of the king there were counted on the said day as many as twenty thousand persons; and there was enough to drink and eat of wine and meat for everybody.16
Provisions for feeding such a mass of people required slaughtering 49 beef, 210 sheep, 90 calves and 200 pigs, supplemented by unknown, but obviously enormous, quantities of fish and poultry. Thirty-one tuns of ale and forty pipes of wine provided liquid refreshment.17
Noteworthy is the presence of ‘the king’s daughters’, who were unnamed in the contemporary accounts. Most likely they were Princess Elizabeth, aged ten, and Mary, almost nine. Edward and Elizabeth were grooming their children for their roles as royal adults, even as their already goodsized family continued to increase. If not during their stay at Fotheringhay, it was at some point close in time that their eighth child was conceived. Elizabeth gave birth to a third son, who was named after his uncle George, Duke of Clarence, sometime before 12 April 1477. The name, for those who believe in sympathetic correspondences, proved unpropitious. The child died as an infant, perhaps from the plague epidemic that struck London in 1479.
The days at Fotheringhay were the last the family York would spend together in harmonious celebration. Storm clouds were gathering over the life of George, Duke of Clarence. They would soon burst, with disastrous and lasting consequences for the Royals.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
George, Duke of Clarence: Perpetual Malcontent
If Queen Elizabeth disliked Clarence, who could blame her? He was part of Warwick’s rebellion in 1469, which had executed her father, Earl Rivers, and her brother, Sir John Wydeville. Clarence had helped Warwick depose her husband during the Lancastrian readeption of Henry VI. Following Edward’s victory over Warwick, the brief moments of family repose and leisure had been disrupted by the conflict between Clarence and Gloucester over their Neville wives and inheritances. Now Clarence once again shattered the peace of both nation and family during the prosperous years that followed the invasion of France. Elizabeth lived with the machinations and malevolence of Clarence every day of her life. Her dislike of the man was both reasonable and right.
Even though Clarence had been welcomed back into the family after his treason with Warwick and his quarrel with Gloucester, he remained a malcontent. His marriage to Isabel Neville had produced two surviving children, a daughter, Margaret, and a son, Edward. Six weeks after giving birth to another child, Isabel died on 22 December 1476. She was twentyfive years old. Left a widower at the age of twenty-seven, Clarence was once more an eligible bachelor and began looking for a new wife.
Having made a fortune with his first marriage, he held hopes for even more success with a second. Clarence looked towards Burgundy, where the recent death of Charles the Bold had left his daughter, Mary, a very rich and powerful Duchess of Burgundy. Mary’s stepmother, Margaret of York, had always favoured her younger brother Clarence and supported a marriage between him and her stepdaughter. Edward IV objected, knowing well his brother’s overreaching ambitions and disloyal tendencies. The King of England could not countenance Clarence having power in Burgundy, where he could cause endless trouble with France and Brittany. Croyland records the King’s displeasure at such a marriage:
He threw all possible impediments in the way, in order that the match beforementioned might not be carried into effect, and exerted all his influence that the heiress might be given in marriage to Maximilian, son of the emperor, which was afterwards effected.1
Perhaps to buy time, Edward IV proposed another suitor: Anthony, Earl Rivers, the cultured and recently widowed brother of Queen Elizabeth. The best-educated and most urbane of the English candidates, Anthony’s status, however, was insufficient to interest a duchess. As Philippe de Commynes sniffed from his French perspective: ‘he was only a minor earl and she was the greatest heiress of her time’.2 Edward IV very well knew the importance of rank and perhaps was trying to send his sister Margaret the message that their brother Clarence did not have his approval.
At the same time, Louis XI of France offered the eleven-year-old Dauphin as husband to the twenty-year-old Mary, never mind the previous betrothal of the Dauphin to Princess Elizabeth of York. The Duchess of Burgundy herself settled the issue by marrying Archduke Maximilian of Austria, in accordance with an agreement made earlier by her father and the Holy Roman Emperor.
Clarence responded with all the petulance that thwarted ambition and a disturbed mind could produce. He blamed Queen Elizabeth and her brother Rivers for obstructing his marriage, although clearly Edward IV was the one who had sent Sir John Donne and John Morton to Ghent, in February 1477, to formally propose the marriage of Anthony and the Duchess Mary.
Clarence’s revenge took twisted, quite astonishing turns. His actions are somewhat murky, given incomplete historical records, but the certain facts begin with two bizarre trials in April and May 1477, both of which involved Clarence. The first, held at Warwick Castle, accused three defendants of causing the death of his wife, Isabel, by poisoning. Ankarette Twynyho, servant to Isabel, was accused of serving her mistress poisoned ale on 10 October, which caused her death on 22 December 1476. John Thuresby was accused of giving poisoned ale to the baby Richard on 21 December 1476, leading to the infant’s death on 1 January 1477. Sir Roger Tocotes was accused of helping the other two carry out their dastardly deeds.3
The trumped-up charges were ridiculous, especially given the absurdly long time between the alleged poisonings and the ensuing deaths. Nevertheless, Clarence’s men seized Ankarette at her manor at Cayford, and took her seventy miles across three counties to Warwick, the seat of Clarence’s power. They took from her ‘all her jewels, money and goods, and also in the said Duke’s behalf, as though he had used King’s power… kept Ankarette in prison unto the hour of nine before noon on the morrow, to wit, the Tuesday after the closing of Pasche [Easter]’.4 In three short hours on 15 April 1477, Ankarette was indicted, tried and found guilty by a jury which determined that ‘she should be led from the bar there to the gaol of Warwick and from thence should be drawn through the town to the gallows of Myton, and hanged till she were dead’.5 Ankarette and her alleged accomplice, John Thuresby, were executed on the spot by the sheriff. Sir Roger Tocotes had the good sense to be absent.
Rigged from start to finish, the trial was conducted by justices and a jury of Clarence’s tenants, who dared not cross their lord. In a subsequent petition to the King, Ankarette’s kinsman, Roger Twynyho, stated that ‘the jurors for fear gave the verdict contrary to their conscience, in proof whereof divers of them came to the said Ankarette in remorse and asked her forgiveness, in consideration of the imaginations of the said Duke and his great might’.6 After her death, Roger asked that the record, process, verdict and judgment be voided, but that the justices and sheriff ‘not be vexed’, since the entire process was done ‘by the command of the said Duke’. Edward IV’s official response was pro forma: ‘Soit fait come il est desire.’ (‘Let it be done as desired.’) Perhaps the best explanation for this sorry episode is Professor J.R. Lander’s: ‘the accusations were so fantastically implausible that only a seriously disturbed mind could have produced them’.7
Within a month, another trial occurred in London involving three conspirators – John Stacy, Thomas Blake and Thomas Burdet – indicted for ‘seeking the death and destruction of the King and Prince’.8 The three men were accused of disseminating rhymes, ballads, complaints and seditious arguments against the King, actions intended to provoke rebellion and to cause ‘the final destruction of the King and Prince’. The defendants were tried by a jury of nobles, including ten members of the Order of the Garter and seven from other ranks of English nobility – one-third of the English no
bility. This powerful and authoritative jury convicted all of the accused.9 Blake was later pardoned, but Burdet and Stacy were hanged at Tyburn on 20 May 1477, each declaring his innocence before execution.
Because Burdet was a close associate of Clarence, the one who would most benefit from the death of the King and the prince, the Duke immediately fell under suspicion of conspiring with the traitors. Such suspicion might have remained mere gossip, had Clarence not committed a very strange and inexplicable act. While the King was at Windsor, Clarence and a Franciscan friar, Doctor William Goddard, attended a meeting of the King’s Council at Westminster, where Goddard read the declarations of innocence made by Burdet and Stacy before their executions. After making that statement, Clarence and Goddard left the council.10
Not only did the visit call attention to Clarence’s close relationship with the traitors, but it provocatively challenged the King and the system of justice that had convicted them. Twice within two months, Clarence had acted irresponsibly, first using his power as if he were King and then defying a ruling of the courts. Edward IV had no choice but to arrest his brother. In June 1477, Clarence was sent to the Tower accused of ‘conduct… derogatory to the laws of the realm and most dangerous to judges and juries throughout the kingdom’.11
Clarence was tried by Parliament during the sessions, which began on 16 January and ended on 21 February 1478. Convicted by Parliament, he was sentenced to death. When Edward hesitated for ten days in carrying out the death sentence, the Speaker of the Commons formally asked the House of Lords to impose the punishment. Clarence died on 18 February 1478, at the Tower of London – whether drowned in the infamous barrel of Malmsey wine or executed in some more direct manner remains obscured in myth and history.
All this would seem to have little to do with Queen Elizabeth, except that subsequently she was accused of instigating the actions taken against Clarence! Five years later – after the death of Edward IV – Dominic Mancini reported that Elizabeth resented Clarence for ‘his bitter and public denunciation of Elizabeth’s obscure family’.12 Only a foreigner ignorant of the prominence of the first Earl Rivers and the Duchess of Bedford in the courts of both Henry VI and Edward IV, as well as of the stature of Anthony, the second Earl Rivers, could call the Wydevilles ‘obscure’. An Italian who spoke limited English, Mancini depended on informants for his analysis of English politics and the complex personalities at its centre. He gathered his information during the anxious period after Edward IV’s death, when Richard of Gloucester was claiming the crown and disseminating propaganda that demeaned and denigrated the Wydevilles. As good as he was at gathering intelligence, Mancini inevitably recorded what he heard on the streets of London. His conclusions must be weighed against other evidence.
Mancini claims that Clarence’s insults and calumnies caused Elizabeth to believe ‘that her offspring by the king would never come to the throne, unless the duke of Clarence were removed; and of this she easily persuaded the king’.13 In Mancini’s account, the Queen arranged to have Clarence ‘accused of conspiring the king’s death by means of spells and magicians’. Mancini also alleges that after Clarence’s death, ‘Richard duke of Gloucester was so overcome with grief for his brother, that he could not dissimulate so well, but that he was overheard to say that he would one day avenge his brother’s death’, providing a motive for Richard’s actions against Edward’s children and wife.14
Ever since, some historians have blamed Queen Elizabeth for Clarence’s death. M.A. Hicks, Clarence’s biographer, doubts the justice of Clarence’s trial and questions Edward’s intent to execute his brother. Based on the delay between Clarence’s arrest and execution – and on reports of the King’s subsequent regrets – Hicks speculates that Edward IV ultimately acted against Clarence only because of ‘the instigation of others’.15 Those ‘others’ were the Wydevilles, who supposedly stacked the Parliament of 1478 that convicted Clarence. As evidence, Hicks points to Wydeville dominance of Prince Edward’s household, and their overwhelming presence in London during Clarence’s trial and imprisonment.
The Wydevilles were, indeed, prominent in London during Clarence’s trial because Edward IV had, in typical fashion, scheduled a magnificent royal event to coincide with the meeting of Parliament. What better opportunity to display to the nobles and citizens of his realm the King’s wealth, prestige and progeny? The occasion featured the wedding of the four-yearold Prince Richard to Anne Mowbray, an older woman at the age offive. All the Wydevilles attended the wedding and the tournament, while Clarence was conspicuous by his absence, imprisoned as he was in the Tower.
The marriage, on 15 January 1478, was a splendid affair – as were all royal events during these years. Anne was heiress to the enormous wealth of the recently deceased John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, a bride worthy of a royal prince. At the wedding ceremony, the Wydevilles fulfilled their roles as relatives of the groom’s mother, but they certainly did not displace Edward IV’s family. If during the bride’s presentation in the King’s great chamber at Westminster, on the day before the wedding, she was ‘led by the right noble Count Rivers’, on the morning of the wedding, Princess Anne:
…came out of the Queen’s chamber at Westminster, and so proceeded through the King’s great chamber, and into the White Hall, and so proceeded into Saint Stephen’s Chapel, being attended by great estates and many ladies and gentlewomen, my lord the noble Count of Lincoln led her on the right hand, and upon the second hand the noble Count Rivers.16
The Count of Lincoln was the King’s nephew, John de la Pole, in the place of honour on the bride’s right. The rest of the royal family sat under a canopy of ‘imperial cloth of gold’ and included ‘the King, the Queen, and my Lord the Prince, and the right high and excellent Princess and Queen of right, Cicely Mother to the King, the Lady Elizabeth, the Lady Mary, the Lady Cicely, daughters to the King and our Sovereign Lord’.
The King himself escorted the bride to the altar, and ‘the high and mighty Prince the Duke of Gloucester’ brought in golden basins filled with coins of gold and silver to cast among the common people.17 After the ceremony, Princess Anne was led to the feast by Gloucester on her right hand and the Duke of Buckingham on her left, both relatives of the King. The Wydevilles were present, but the King’s blood relatives took precedence during the wedding ceremony.
The Wydevilles, as always, dominated the ‘Jousts Royal’ held at Westminster on the following Thursday, where they captured the public’s attention through their splendid chivalric display. The Marquis of Dorset entered the lists first, with his helmet carried by the Duke of Buckingham (a courtesy that contradicts reputed and repeated claims of Buckingham’s long-standing antagonism toward the Wydevilles). Sir Richard Grey, the Queen’s second son, followed next with his retinue of knights and esquires, clothed in blue and tawny, and three horses trapped in crimson cloth of gold and tissue. ‘The victorious Earl Rivers’ made a dramatic entrance in ‘the house of an Hermit walled and covered with black velvet’. Exploiting the pageantry of the celebration, Rivers was ‘armed in the habit of a White Hermit’, a costume of ‘pleasance’ which he removed before the tournament began. His servants also wore livery of blue and tawny, embroidered with columbines and embellished with drops and flames. Sir Edward Wydeville participated, with horses trapped in cloth of gold and tissue.18
After all the spears were broken and strokes exchanged, the tourney prizes went not to the Wydevilles, but to the opposing team. Thomas Fynes was declared the best jouster, Richard Haute the best runner of the ‘Ostinge Harnesse’, and Robert Clifford the best of the Tourney. In a characteristic act of noblesse oblige, Earl Rivers ‘rewarded the said Kings of Arms and Heralds with twenty marks’.19
Certainly, Clarence’s absence from the wedding celebrations emphasised his isolation from the family. But to assert that the Wydeville presence at the wedding and prominence at the tournament caused Parliament to convict Clarence is to ignore Clarence’s history of perfidy and treason, while shifting bla
me for his crimes to his victims. Innuendo, suggestions and subjunctive verbs in modern histories distort the facts: ‘…the Wydevilles probably pulled every available string. But in happier circumstances, if ascendant, Clarence might have commanded support which in adversity he was denied.’20 Reiterated allegations, such as ‘The Wydevilles and their allies strove to influence elections’, and negative sneers about ‘the Wydeville connection’21 and ‘the Wydeville coalition’22 rhetorically demean the family beyond any substantiating evidence.
Hypothetical speculation cannot obscure Clarence’s lifetime of treacheries. Nor should it transfer Clarence’s crimes and greed to Queen Elizabeth and her family. The profound irony of such displaced blame lies in the contrast between Clarence’s wealth, all obtained through marriage or grants from the King, and the quite modest holdings of the Wydeville brothers and sisters. After Warwick’s death, for instance, Clarence had become the second richest man in the kingdom by denying inheritance rights to the Duchess of Warwick. Never satisfied with what he had, he always grasped for more – the crown itself – until he finally overreached his bounds. That Edward IV may, indeed, have regretted the death of his younger brother merely accentuates the King’s infinite patience with Clarence in spite of his disloyalty and treasons. Regret and sorrow for a lost brother, however, hardly proves domination – or even undue influence – by the Wydevilles.
A modern psychologist might analyse Clarence as a privileged individual with a sense of entitlement who finds himself outclassed by those he considers inferior. Resultant anger, exacerbated by instability, rapaciousness and envy, led to actions that were no less than criminal. When Clarence finally confronted his death and the fate of his soul, his last thoughts tried to set right the evils he had perpetrated on the Wydevilles. His final wishes, in essence, confessed his sins against the Queen’s family. Accordingly, on 19 November 1478, the King granted to
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