The new queen’s family, the Woodvilles, were in the ascendant at court and might be seen to threaten the position of Warwick and the other Nevilles. The king also arranged a series of marriages between Elizabeth’s immediate relatives and various available aristocrats; since she had five brothers and seven sisters, this diminished the prospect of further patronage for many more distinguished families. Her younger brother, for example, was married off at the age of twenty to the sixty-five-year-old duchess of Norfolk; the duchess was a wealthy widow who had already buried three husbands, but she also happened to be the aunt of Warwick himself. Warwick’s feelings at what was described at the time as a ‘maritagium diabolicum’ are not recorded. He would have been justified in thinking, in the language of the time, that the honour of his family had been disparaged and that his elderly relative had been made to look ridiculous. In fact the old lady outlived her young spouse, who ended on the scaffold. Louis XI disclosed the fact that he had received a letter expressing Warwick’s dismay at Edward’s behaviour; he hinted that Warwick might even try to supplant his sovereign, but all is lost in a mist of diplomatic surmise and posturing. The French king was not known for nothing as ‘the spider king’.
A more tangible source of discord can be found in the foreign affairs of the nation. Warwick wished above all else for an alliance with France, while Edward favoured an accommodation with Burgundy and Brittany. Various strands of policy were involved. Warwick was receiving many favours from Louis XI, while the Woodvilles were related to the noble families of Burgundy. Burgundy was also the largest market for English cloth, and thus the principal trade partner of the English merchants. In any case the French were the ancient enemy who at this time were harbouring ambassadors from Margaret of Anjou.
In 1467 a commercial treaty was signed between England and Burgundy, swiftly followed by a peace accord and by the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to the duke of Burgundy. In his defeat and disappointment Warwick retired to his estates in Yorkshire, where it was rumoured that he had begun conspiring against his sovereign; it was said that he had been able to suborn the duke of Clarence in a plot against the throne. A French chronicler, Jean de Waurin, reported that Warwick promised Clarence that he would give him his brother’s crown. The old allies had fallen out.
Other rumours were circulating in the spring and autumn of 1467. The most astonishing of them was that the two inveterate enemies, Warwick and Margaret of Anjou, would enter an alliance and would invade England with the purpose of destroying Edward IV. It is not clear who proposed the bargain, but many observers suspected that the French king would do anything to stir up unrest and riot in the enemy country. Warwick and his kinsmen still attended the English court, however, and appeared to be on amicable terms with the king himself.
The break came in the summer of 1469. In June a rebellion in the northern shires was fomented by ‘Robin of Redesdale’ alias ‘Robin Mend-All’ alias Sir John Conyers who was a cousin of Warwick himself; it was in part a popular rebellion, inspired by those who were discontented with Edward’s rule. The king was on pilgrimage to Walsingham, but on hearing news of the gathering insurrection he broke off his pious journey and marched with his retainers to Nottingham. He was hearing rumours from all sides of the treacherous designs both of Warwick and of his own younger brother; it was also reported that Warwick’s brother, George Neville, the archbishop of York, was part of the insurrection. In a defiant spirit he wrote to the three of them, demanding their unconditional loyalty to confirm the fact they were not ‘of any such disposition towards us, as the rumour here runneth’.
No such news reached the king. He was informed instead that the duke of Clarence was about to marry Warwick’s daughter, despite the fact that he had already forbidden the union, and that the parties concerned were sailing to Calais for the ceremony. It was a clear act of defiance and disobedience.
From Calais, Warwick and his associates then issued a proclamation in which they took the part of the northern rebels against a king who was being governed by ‘the deceivable covetous rule and guiding of certain seducious persons’; the last adjective suggests a modern mingling of seductive and seditious. These suspect persons were of course the Woodvilles, who had already been asked by the king to return to their home territories for safekeeping. Warwick invited his supporters to meet him at Canterbury on 16 July. It is possible that he intended to declare Edward illegitimate and to replace him with Clarence. This was not a struggle between Yorkists and Lancastrians, but between two factions of Yorkists.
Warwick and his newly aggrandized forces crossed the Channel and marched upon London, where Warwick himself was very popular; then they made their way towards Coventry, where they determined to join the men in league with Robin Mend-All. The king’s army came up to challenge them, but a sudden attack by the rebels forced them to disperse. Some of the commanders of the king’s army were taken on Warwick’s orders, and in a gratuitous act of injustice he beheaded them on the following day.
Edward himself was by this time on the road to meet his army, and did not learn of its defeat until it was too late to turn back. His men promptly deserted him. This is the best to be made out of a confused narrative. He decided to turn back to London, accompanied by a small retinue, when he was surprised by the forces of the archbishop of York. The king was taken, with all due courtesies, and promptly confined to Warwick Castle. Two of the most prominent members of the Woodville family, the father and younger brother of the queen, were captured and beheaded on Warwick’s order. He now controlled both the country and the king.
He could do nothing with either of them. The earl was in practice the ruler of the country, but he lacked legitimacy and moral authority. He could hardly rule on the king’s behalf if he kept the king confined to a castle. Edward’s council seems grudgingly to have accepted Warwick’s direction, but the hiatus in national affairs provoked outbreaks of local violence and rebellion. Once more the great families of the realm could attack one another with impunity. Only one remedy offered itself. The king had to be released from custody and allowed to resume his sovereignty. So Edward IV returned to be met by a contrite earl, archbishop and younger brother who pleaded that they had acted only in the interests of the realm. Edward and his supporters then processed towards London, where they were met by the mayor and aldermen in their scarlet regalia. ‘The king himself’, John Paston wrote, ‘has good language of the Lords of Clarence, of Warwick, and of my Lords of York and Oxford, saying they be his best friends.’ But he added that ‘his household men have other language’. His household, in other words, were inclined towards revenge.
Yet the king realized that the stability of the realm had to be regained at all costs. According to the chronicler Polydore Vergil ‘he regarded nothing more than to win again the friendship of such noblemen as were now alienated from him …’. He invited Clarence and Warwick to join the sessions of a great council that was called to arrange ‘peace and entire oblivion of all grievances upon both sides’. He also allowed his four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, to be betrothed to Warwick’s nephew. Warwick had of course only recently murdered the young girl’s maternal grandfather and uncle. The politics of power are always realistic.
Nevertheless the earl had been dealt a grievous blow; it had been proved that he could not wield authority without the presence of the king. In the spring of 1470 he was once again implicated in armed rebellion. The revolt came from Lincolnshire where certain families, afraid of the king’s justice or offended by the king’s depredations, rose up with the intention of giving the crown to Clarence. When Edward took the field against them they cried out ‘A Clarence! A Clarence!’ and ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ It was all the evidence the king required. His army defeated the Lincolnshire men with ease, and the site of the battle became known as ‘Lose Coat Field’ for the number of clothes bearing the livery of Warwick or of Clarence that the soldiers discarded in their flight. After his overwhelming victory, his two opponents fled to the safe
ty of the court of Louis XI in France. Some of their collaborators were not so fortunate. One of Warwick’s ships was seized at Southampton, where the gentlemen and yeomen on board were beheaded. A sharp stake was then driven through their posteriors, and their heads were impaled on top.
Warwick and Clarence were now joined by Margaret of Anjou. She, too, had left her familial lands and arrived at the court of the French king. Louis had three birds in his hand, but Margaret and Warwick had been fierce enemies for a long time. The king now entered into protracted negotiations in order to reconcile her to the man who had been ‘the greatest causer of the fall of Henry, of her, and of her son’. He spent every day in long discussions with her until eventually she deferred to him. Margaret now agreed to conspire with her once inveterate enemies and to overthrow Edward IV. Her husband, still in the Tower, would regain the throne; her son Edward, prince of Wales, would marry another of Warwick’s daughters and thus become brother-in-law to Clarence. The families of York and Lancaster would therefore be finally united. The young couple were betrothed in Angers Cathedral.
Warwick and his new ally now began preparations for the great invasion of England. Edward kept his eyes upon the coasts but, in the summer of 1470, he was distracted by news of further rebellions in the north inspired by Warwick’s cause; he was obliged to march to York and Ripon. He could not be sure where Warwick’s fleet might land – anywhere from Wales to Northumberland – and he took a calculated risk in going northward. While he lingered in York, having successfully overcome the incipient rebellion, the news came in the middle of September that Warwick and Clarence had landed at Exmouth in Devon from where at once they began their march towards him. The king was in hostile country in any case, and it became increasingly clear that Warwick was acquiring supporters as he moved forward.
The public records of Coventry reveal that Clarence and Warwick ‘drew to them much people’ and that ‘they were thirty thousand’ by the time they reached the city. Edward had left York for Nottingham, but he was still in desperate circumstances. He had ‘sent for lords and all other men’, but to his dismay ‘there came so little people to him that he was not able to make a field against them’. In the words of the public record Edward ‘went to Lynn’. In fact he made a rapid retreat to what is now King’s Lynn where he took ship and sailed towards the Low Countries. He had few men, and little money; such was his penury that he had to pay for his transport with the furred gown he was wearing.
Eventually he landed in Holland, where the governor of the province was known to him; he was in Burgundian territory, and the duke of Burgundy was an ally. The duke, having married Margaret of York two years before, was also the king’s brother-in-law. So Edward was, for the time being, safe from his enemies. Elizabeth Woodville and her mother had already taken sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. The sanctuary stood at the bottom of the churchyard to the west of the abbey. It was described as ‘a gloomy building, of sufficient strength to withstand a siege’. It was here that the queen was delivered of a son.
Warwick returned to London in order to confirm his supremacy. Margaret and her son remained in France, waiting for Henry VI to be given back his throne. So the once abandoned king was led from the Tower after an imprisonment of five years; he was wearing a long gown of blue velvet, but he was ‘not so cleanly kept as should be such a prince’. In his captivity he sometimes quoted words from the seventh psalm to the effect that ‘My help cometh of God, who preserveth them that are true of heart’. Now God had worked an unlooked-for wonder. Truly He moved in mysterious ways. At the opening of Henry’s parliament the archbishop of York preached upon the text ‘Turn, O backsliding children’.
But if Henry was once more king in name, Warwick was the puppet master. Henry was according to a contemporary chronicler no more than ‘a crowned calf, a shadow on the wall’. Warwick now had to balance a variety of interests in order to preserve his rule; he had to satisfy his Lancastrian supporters as well as the Yorkists who had favoured Edward IV. He also had to manage the ambitions of Clarence, who might have wished the crown for himself. These various tensions and divisions did not augur for good rule. The noblemen of England had in any case become increasingly disenchanted with the protagonists on both sides, and were inclined merely to give their support to the strongest at any given moment. ‘Trust not much upon promises of lords nowadays,’ Margaret Paston told her son, ‘that you should be the surer of the favour of such men. A man’s death is little set by nowadays. Therefore beware of simulation, for they will speak right fair to you that would you fared right evil.’
Soon enough another reversal of fortune complicated a story already filled with strange turns and accidents. In the early spring of 1471 the duke of Burgundy agreed to finance an invasion of England by Edward, and on 14 March the exiled monarch landed at Ravenspur on the coast of Yorkshire; his reception was not at first encouraging. ‘There came right few of the country [Yorkshire] to him,’ according to a contemporary history, ‘or almost none.’ The men of Holderness turned him away, and he was only permitted to enter York on the declaration that he had come to claim his father’s dukedom rather than the English crown.
Nevertheless he kept on moving towards London. He marched towards Doncaster and, learning that Warwick was gathering his forces in Coventry, turned towards that city. The duke of Clarence now deserted the earl in favour of his brother; with Henry VI back on the throne, and with Margaret of Anjou poised to return to England with her son, he may have realized that his chance of gaining the crown was now remote. He was also suspected by his erstwhile enemies; he was held, as a contemporary wrote, ‘in great suspicion, despite, disdain and hatred with all the lords … that were adherents and full partakers with Henry’. But his actions may have had no logic to them at all; he was young, impressionable and impulsive with little control over his tongue or over his actions. He was a shuttlecock flying in all directions.
Edward, leaving Warwick embattled in Coventry, decided to move swiftly upon the capital and to announce himself once more to be king. The archbishop of York, brother of Warwick, tried to rally support by parading Henry VI through London; the king was still wearing the blue velvet gown in which he had been dressed when he left the Tower. Edward entered the city and urgently sought an interview with the old king. ‘My cousin of York,’ Henry told him, ‘you are very welcome. I know that in your hands my life will not be in danger.’ In this he proved to be mistaken. The unhappy monarch was once more consigned to the cold walls of the Tower, while Edward was united with his wife and his newborn son fresh out of sanctuary. Very little time could be spent in celebration, however, and on the following morning the king ‘took advice of the great lords of his blood, and other of his council, for the adventures that were likely to come’. The adventures reached a climax on 14 April at Barnet, a small town north of London, where the Yorkists won the victory with a confused set of skirmishes in thick fog; in the subsequent rout Warwick himself was killed. The ‘king-maker’ was slain by the forces of the king.
The earl of Warwick is not a happy figure. Lands and wealth had been heaped upon him by an over-generous monarch, and as a result he became fractious and over-mighty; he proclaimed himself to be the representative of the rights of England, and yet he was merely the tool of faction and of family; he aspired to glory, but in victory he was cruel and vindictive; he was a politician without any grasp of political strategy, and a statesman who had a habit of opposing the national interest at every juncture. His vanity, and his ambition, destroyed him. In these respects, he was not so different from his eminent contemporaries.
Margaret of Anjou and her seventeen-year-old son, Prince Edward, had sailed from France without knowing of Edward’s victory over Warwick. The news greeted her soon after her landing at Weymouth, in Dorset, with her followers. It was too late to flee; she could only fight. She made her way north towards Bristol, picking up supporting forces on the way, but Edward’s army was approaching from the east. At this moment John Paston wrot
e to his mother, Margaret, that ‘the world, I assure you, is right queasy’. On 4 May 1471, in a meadow just to the south of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, the Lancastrians were overtaken by the Yorkists; in the subsequent mêleée Prince Edward was killed and Margaret was taken prisoner.
Edward IV returned in triumph to London less than three weeks later. On that same day, Henry VI was killed in the Tower of London. It was said that he had expired from melancholy, but the truth is no doubt more prosaic. He had been murdered on the orders of the victorious king, who wished to hold no hostages to fortune. It was claimed later that his assassin was Edward’s youngest brother, the duke of Gloucester, but this inference may entirely be due to Gloucester’s later fame as the inglorious Richard III. It seems appropriate, at any rate, that he should now enter this history of England as a man of shadows.
In any event the Lancastrian royal family, descended directly from Henry IV, was now extinguished. Henry’s body was taken from the Tower to St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was laid out ‘open vysagid’ so that all might recognize him. Margaret of Anjou was incarcerated in the Tower, where she remained for four years before being ransomed by Louis XI; she spent the rest of her days, impoverished, in France. Her life had been lived in a storm that had claimed her husband and her son.
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