Elizabeth

by Arlene Okerlund

  …the king’s kinsman Anthony, Earl Ryvers, and his heirs and assigns for six years from Easter last, in consideration of the injuries perpetrated on him and his parents by George, late duke of Clarence, and because the said duke on the day of his death and before intended that he should be recompensed, of the manors of Sweyneston, Brighteston, Thoruey and Wellowe with their members with knights’ fees and advowsons of churches in the Isle of Wight, reserving to the king escheats, wards, marriages and reliefs.23

  Clarence’s contrition perhaps amounts to a confession of his part in the deaths of the first Earl Rivers and Sir John Wydeville. No evidence of the ‘injuries perpetrated’ on Anthony survives to explain the recompense Clarence requested. The Wydevilles were not the only victims of Clarence’s greed. When Edward learned of Clarence’s extortion of Lord Dynham, the King granted Dynham an annuity of £100 for six years ‘for the safety of the soul of the said duke’.24 To the end, Edward’s love for his brother tried to save Clarence’s soul from perdition.

  Edward awarded custody and wardship of Clarence’s son, Edward, including the right to arrange the boy’s marriage, to the Queen’s son, the Marquis of Dorset, in return for £2,000 paid to the King. That grant included several of Clarence’s lucrative estates and manors, including ‘the borough, town, hundred and liberty of Tewkesbury’ and ‘the great court of Bristol… called Earles Court, co Gloucester’, along with their knights’ fees, marriages, courts, fairs, markets, parks, forests and waters.25 Dorset also received a grant for life as master of game and steward of Clarence’s properties in the counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.26

  No doubt such preferences shown towards the Wydevilles were resented by the King’s Yorkist relatives, who had been born to title and privilege and took offence when others intruded on those rights. Such conflict remains intrinsic to human nature. In fifteenth-century England, where heredity, rank and wealth counted for everything, the ascendancy of the Wydevilles was not welcomed by those who were displaced. But the world was changing faster than the feudal lords could recognise, and within a generation the next dynasty of Tudor kings would elevate merit, rather than heritage, to the prime qualification for its ministers. Social order was being challenged as the medieval world gave way to the Renaissance.

  In England, the most significant harbinger of such change was the Queen’s brother, Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers. Noted for his military service, chivalric triumphs, intellectual achievements and moral character, this ‘Renaissance man’ had arrived before England was ready for him. Anthony Wydeville would suffer the consequent fate.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Anthony Wydeville: Courtier Par Excellence

  Sometime between 1508 and 1519, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, Baldassare Castiglione wrote Il libro del cortegiano, a manual describing the qualities of the ideal courtier. It swept through European courts with the popularity of a bestseller: ‘The principal and true profession of a Courtier ought to be in feats of arms’. No mere warrior, however, this new ‘Renaissance man’ was courteous, urbane, artistic, scholarly, pious and chivalrous. A gentleman of exemplary conduct, the ideal courtier possessed wisdom and integrity, learning and diplomacy, social skills and eloquence – all to the purpose of fulfilling his major obligation in life: serving his prince as a loyal soldier and wise counsellor.

  Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, Lord Scales could have been the prototype for Castiglione’s courtier. Beyond his appointment as governor to the Prince of Wales, Anthony provided his King exemplary service as military commander, political leader, diplomatic ambassador, estate administrator and scholarly translator. Even the harshest critics of the Wydevilles have nothing bad to say about Anthony. Dominic Mancini, who otherwise describes the Wydeville family as ‘ignoble’1 and ‘obscure’2 commends Anthony, Earl Rivers as ‘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 therefore he had entrusted to him the care and direction of the king’s eldest son.’3

  Elegant, well read, and deeply pious, the young Anthony first earned his reputation through service. After his pardon by Edward IV in 1461, he was summoned to Parliament as Lord Scales in December 1462, then joined Edward’s siege at Alnwick two years before his sister married the King. After the marriage, the tournament at Smithfield and Anthony’s diplomacy in Burgundy earned him the custodianship of Porchester Castle and appointment as governor of the town of Portsmouth in November 1467. (He resigned his rights in Porchester Castle to his brother, Sir Edward, in 1479). In midsummer 1468, Anthony contracted to serve the King with five knights, fifty-five men-at-arms, 2,945 archers, twenty-four shipmasters, and 1,076 mariners.4 On 7 October 1468 he was appointed Captain of the King’s Fleet with 5,000 men, two ships and several galleys that patrolled the waters between England and France.5 With each increasing responsibility, Sir Anthony solidified the trust placed in him by Edward IV. His fluency in French, his urbane manners and his chivalric skills particularly enhanced the image of England during Anthony’s service on the continent.

  After Warwick executed Richard Wydeville, Earl Rivers in April 1469, Anthony inherited his father’s title and became the respected head of the Wydeville family, second only to the Queen in prominence. Troops commanded by the new Earl Rivers were instrumental in scattering the ships of Warwick and Clarence as they fled to France in late 1469.6 During Edward’s exile, Anthony remained by the King’s side. In June 1471, Anthony was appointed Lieutenant of Calais, a position he never filled because Edward subsequently appointed Hastings to that post. Some historians believe that the animosity between the Wydevilles and Hastings began at that point.7 Anthony vacated the Calais office to Hastings in July 1475 after his appointment as governor to Prince Edward, but the ill feeling may have rippled outward and contributed to the developing factions in Edward IV’s court.8

  As governor to Prince Edward, Anthony not only provided the young boy with a humanistic education, but also helped to quell the disorder and unruliness of the Welsh Marches west of Ludlow, through his prominence on the Prince’s Council. In controlling the Marcher lords, each of whom was a law unto himself, the council had to centralise authority under the crown through Commissions of the Peace, which Anthony headed as they met throughout the border counties. In April 1478, for instance, the Commission developed ordinances for the town of Shrewsbury.9

  When his diplomatic skills were needed by Edward, Anthony departed Ludlow to serve the King. Before the French campaign, the King sent Anthony to Charles the Bold’s camp at Neuss to persuade him to lift his siege and to fight in the war against France, as the recalcitrant Duke had promised.10 While Anthony succeeded in his mission, Burgundy’s troops were so battered that by the time they reached France they could provide no help at all to the English, a factor in Edward’s decision to negotiate peace. After the truce at Pécquigny, Anthony did not return directly to England, but departed on another religious pilgrimage, this time to Rome and the shrines of southern Italy.

  His letter of safe conduct from Edward IV to the Duke of Milan, dated 1 October 1475, did little good, for after leaving Rome, Anthony’s group of English pilgrims was robbed at Torre di Baccano, about twelve miles north of the city.11 Anthony lost all of his jewels and plate, which John Paston valued at 1,000 marks.12 The pilgrims returned to Rome to seek remedy and apply for restitution of their property, and Queen Elizabeth sent Anthony letters of Exchange for 4,000 ducats in Rome. When some of the stolen goods appeared in Venice for sale, the Signoria there graciously restored Anthony’s losses ‘out of deference for the king of England and his lordship’.13

  On his way home, Anthony stopped on 7 June 1476 to visit the Duke of Burgundy, who was encamped at Morat. On his arrival, the Duke ‘made much of him and sent to meet him’. At Anthony’s departure days later, the Duke accused him of leaving to avoid combat with the enemy who was near: ‘This is esteemed great cowardice in him, and lack of spirit and honour’, writes
the Milanese ambassador.14 It was hardly cowardice, however, to avoid engagement with Charles the Bold in his disastrous military campaigns. Still fresh in Anthony’s memory was the Duke’s duplicity in promising aid to Edward IV but keeping his troops at Neuss until England’s invasion of France was seriously compromised. Anthony also remembered the English march through Picardy, where the Duke refused to allow English troops inside his cities. Rather than let himself be taken in by Burgundy’s faithless promises and reckless schemes, Anthony headed home to serve his own King. His good judgment was proved when Charles the Bold was slain just months later on 5 January 1477, laying siege to Nancy during the dead of winter.

  During Anthony’s pilgrimage, Pope Sixtus IV honoured him with the title of ‘Defender and Director of the causes apostolique for the holy father the Pope in… Englande’.15 Beyond the spiritual enlightenment of his journey, his grand tour of the continent steeped Anthony in the architecture, sculpture and painting of the Italian Renaissance just as it was reaching its apex. He returned to England filled with images of continental culture, and imbued with the new humanism that was exciting western thought.

  Anthony’s scholarly and artistic impulses, stimulated during the months with Edward IV in Burgundy, were ready to flourish. In Flanders, Anthony had become friends with William Caxton, an English merchant adventurer in service to Margaret of Burgundy. Caxton set up his first printing press at Bruges in 1473, but he moved to Westminster in 1476, where Anthony became his patron. The timing was propitious, since Anthony’s governance of Prince Edward encouraged him to translate texts from French into English to educate his young charge. He chose texts that provided the prince with an education in religion and moral philosophy, the essential foundation for enlightened leadership.

  Anthony’s translation of The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres was the first book published in England by Caxton in 1477. Anthony first encountered this text on his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1473, when a fellow pilgrim, Louis de Bretaylles, gave him a French translation of the Latin original. Anthony’s English translation contains 143 pages of philosophical instructions for living a moral and useful life, followed by a six-page addendum written by Caxton that takes Anthony to task for omitting parts of Socrates.

  In his preface, Anthony reflects upon the human condition, ‘subject and thrall unto the storms of fortune… and perplexed with worldly adversities’, and states that his own ‘iniquities and faults’ compelled him to make the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James. The book he received as a gift offers a guide to all pilgrims as they journey through life:

  When I had heeded and looked upon it [The Dictes] as I had time and space, I gave thereto a very affection, and in especial because of the wholesome and sweet sayings of the paynems [pagans] which is a glorious fair mirror to all good Christian people to behold and understand.16

  The Dictes begins with the sixteen virtues of ‘Sedechias’ (probably Zedekiah, King of Judah), which mixes the admonitions of the Ten Commandments with moral precepts such as ‘have patience… love Justice… be liberal and not covetous’. Anthony quotes Sedechias on the obligations of rulers of kingdoms:

  As it appertains to the people to be subject and obedient to the Royal majesty of their king or prince, right so it behooveth their king or prince to intend diligently to the weal and governance of his people, and rather to Will the Weal of them than his own proper lucre [profit]… If a king or a prince enforce himself to gather money or treasure by subtle exhortation or other ends… he doth amiss, for such treasure may not be gathered without the sequel be to his danger or depopulation of his Realm or country.17

  The Dictes marches diligently through twenty-two pre-Christian philosophers who have instructed their followers in living the virtuous life. Hermes of Egypt (equated with Mercury and the Hebrew Enok) admonishes to ‘let truth be always in your mouth’ and ‘to employ not your time and your mind in falsehood nor in malice’.18 Hermes’s emphasis on ‘science’, or knowledge, endorses the new learning that would soon challenge the faith-based traditions of the contemporary medieval Church:

  He that will not teach that he understands in science and good conditions, he shall be partner to the ignorance offroward [obstinate] folk. And he that denies to teach science to him that it is covenable [appropriate] unto, he ought to be deprived of his benefice in this world… Liberality and largess is better in science than in riches, for the renown of a wiseman abideth and the riches abideth not.19

  Carrying on through the philosopher ‘Tac’ (‘he that cannot refrain his ire hath no power over his wit’) to Salon (the most difficult thing in a man is ‘to know himself’) and Sabyon (‘a Wiseman ought to beware how he weds a fair woman, for every man will desire to have her love and so they will seek their pleasures to the hurt and displeasure of her husband’), the homilies soon weary the modern reader.20

  Didactic to the final sentence, Alquinus, Homer, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Assaron, Legmon, Anese, Sacdarge, Thesille, St Gregory and Galen point out human shortcomings and the need to serve one’s fellow man. The book was so popular that it appeared in three editions in 1477, 1479 and 1489.21

  The content of The Dictes takes on special significance because of Anthony’s governance of the young prince. While we all know that mere words do not guarantee virtuous actions, the education that Edward V received must surely provoke speculation – and regret – about the enlightened leadership that might have resulted from the youth who had studied such a text. Perhaps the character of the precocious Edward, Prince of Wales, portrayed in Shakespeare’s Richard III, originated in knowledge about the education the prince received under the supervision of his enlightened governor.

  The Dictes also suggests something about the character of its translator. While translators do not necessarily follow the precepts they record, this translation required hundreds of hours devoted to contemplating human frailty and to defining moral principles. This was the first of three such works that Anthony translated, requiring similar labour, intelligence, devotion and contemplation of an imperfect human nature.

  After 143 pages of pious instruction, Caxton adds an epilogue that contributes some greatly appreciated comic relief. With tongue firmly in cheek, the printer gently chides the translator for not recording the misogynistic ideas of Socrates, a lapse that the printer feels compelled to correct. Properly deferential, Caxton reiterates several times that Lord Rivers urged him to oversee the work, ‘and where as I should find fault, to correct it’. Caxton gladly seized the opportunity.

  Commending his ‘said Lord’ for his excellent translation from French to English, Caxton then launches into extensive speculation about why the translator deleted Socrates’s antifeminist sentiments: ‘I suppose that some fair lady hath desired him [Anthony] to leave it out of his book’. Or perhaps Lord Rivers was himself ‘amorous on some noble lady for whose love he would not set it in his book’. Or perhaps the faults Socrates found in Greek women do not exist in English women who are:

  …right good, wise, pleasant, humble, discrete, sober, chaste, obedient to their husbands, true, secret, steadfast, ever busy and never idle, temperate in speaking and virtuous in all their works or at least should be so, for which cause so evident my said Lord as I suppose thought it was not of necessity to set in his book the failings of his author Socrates touching Women.22

  Or perhaps this part of The Dictes was missing in Lord Rivers copy: ‘peradventure… the wind had blown over the leaf at the time of translation’. The printer, therefore, was obliged to correct the translator’s omission, especially since his ‘said Lord’ so often commanded him ‘to correct and amend where as I should find fault’.

  Either the ‘said Lord’ had a tin ear for irony or he possessed a sense of humour that allowed Caxton to play such games in print. Protesting more than a little too much, Caxton printed Socrates’s misogynistic musings: ‘He saw a young maid that learned to write, of who
m he [Socrates] said that she multiplied evil upon evil’; ‘Whosoever will acquire and get science [knowledge], let him never put him in the governance of a woman.’ Whether Earl Rivers omitted this text because of his chivalrous nature or because he disputed the content, we shall never know.

  Six weeks after The Dictes appeared on 18 November 1477, an illuminated manuscript of the printed text was completed by a scribe, on 24 December 1477. Prepared as a presentation copy for the King, the illumination that introduces the text shows Earl Rivers kneeling on his right knee and presenting the manuscript to the King, who is sitting on his throne and wearing his crown. The Queen sits on the King’s left, with the prince standing in front of his mother. A dedicatory verse appears below the illumination:

  This boke late translate here in sight

  By Antony Erle [erasure] that vertueux knyght

  Please it to accepte to youre noble grace

  And at youre convenient leysoure and space

  It to see reede and understond

  A precious Jewell for alle youre land

  For therin is taught howe and in what wise

  Men vertues shuld use and vices desuse

  The Subjette theire Princes ere obeye

  And they therein in right defendng

  Thus to do every man in his degree

  Graunte of his grace the Trinite23

  The most remarkable thing about this dedication is the erasure of Anthony’s title from the page. Throughout the manuscript, Anthony’s surname and titles have been carefully excised from each folio where they originally appeared. The first sentence of the preface, where Caxton’s printed book identifies the translator as ‘Antoine Wydeville Erle Ryuyeres, lord Scales’, has been vandalised in the handwritten manuscript with carefully excised deletions: ‘Antoine W[erasure] Erle [erasure] [erasure]’. Even in the end note, his title has been obliterated: ‘Thus endeth the boke of the dictes and notable moral sayenyes of philosophres late translated out of the Frenssh unto Englissh by my forsaide lorde Th erle of [erasure] and by his comaundment seete in forme and emprinted in right substantiall maner.’