The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  In putting the three Yorkist brothers centre stage, this book casts the Wars of the Roses in a fresh light: as a conflict between two royal houses that, apparently resolved, in fact re-emerged as a sickness within the Yorkist family. It reassesses the brothers themselves: Edward IV, whose slow transformation from virile teenaged war-leader to bloated, avaricious tyrant – traits that, skipping a generation, found new form in his grandson Henry VIII – remains obscure in the public imagination; the simmering stew of self-entitlement and personal inadequacy that was George duke of Clarence; and Richard III. Richard’s notorious reign, of course, needs no introduction. Yet by placing it in the context of his fraternal relationships, we can perhaps arrive at a sharper understanding of why Richard behaved and acted as he did; and to find, if not definitive answers to the controversial questions that hang around him, then at least a hint of smoke.

  Appropriately for this disruptive, disrupted age, this is a story reconstructed from fragments. In the surviving written record – itself exceptionally uneven – these extraordinary historical characters are elusive, flickering presences. They are glimpsed in chronicle accounts and diplomats’ reports; in the administrative and financial records of government and household; in letters and manifestos. Their ways of thinking are traced, too, through the books and political tracts that people read or absorbed second hand as they sought paths through these crisis-ridden years, clutching hold of ideas and ideals that, all too often, evaporated on their first contact with reality.

  In exploring the brothers York and their mutually destructive relationship we can form a clearer sense of why such an ostensibly successful ruling house – and one that, unlike its successors the Tudors, produced in abundance that prerequisite for dynastic succession, legitimate male heirs – should have so suddenly and completely collapsed in on itself. In a consummate historical irony, it was an unlikely offshoot of the Lancastrian dynasty – the house the Yorkists had long since exterminated – that profited from its demise: Henry Tudor.

  Surveying the corpse-strewn battlefield at Bosworth, Shakespeare’s Tudor pronounces ruefully on the state of his new kingdom. ‘England’, he declares, ‘hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself; The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood.’ The tragedy of the brothers York was that they destroyed themselves. This book explores how and why they did so.

  Part One

  * * *

  Blood Royal

  Winter 1461 – Summer 1464

  ‘The king has had false counsel, for his lands are lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost … He owes more than ever did king in England, and yet daily his traitors that be about him wait wherever thing should come to him by his law, and they ask it from him.’

  Cade’s manifesto, 1450

  ‘I warn you everyone,

  for you should understand,

  There sprang a rose in Rouen

  and spread into England.’

  Yorkist verse on the Battle of Towton, 29 March 1461

  ‘Necessity knows no law.’

  Yorkist verses on the Battle of Northampton, 10 July 1460

  1

  Three Suns

  On 2 February 1461, dawn broke clear and freezing over the Welsh Marches. At an obscure Herefordshire crossroads in the valley of the River Lugg an army was deploying in battle formation. Its commanders, whose land this was, had chosen their position well, their flanks protected by an escarpment on the right and, on their left, the river. Behind them, the valley narrowed. Ahead, it broadened into meadow, the Roman road slicing through the frost-encrusted plain. Along that road, from the south, their enemies were coming.

  As scouts rode in with updates on the advancing forces, the troops went deliberately through their preparations: knights and infantrymen buckled on armour, swords and daggers; archers in their padded, steel-reinforced jackets strung longbows, staking out arrows in the ground ready for rapid fire. Then, at around ten in the morning, unease swept through the ranks. Either side of the low sun two illusory suns appeared: men looked skywards, aghast. The three suns – an effect of light refracting on drifting ice crystals – climbed higher, drawing closer, their light blinding; finally they resolved, merging into one. As captains tried to restore focus and discipline among the frantic soldiers, their leader, a giant eighteen-year-old, knelt and thanked God; then, getting to his feet, he addressed his men.

  If Edward earl of March was scared, he hid it well. Some three months before, at a parliament in Westminster, his father Richard duke of York had been named heir to the throne of England, governing in the name of the incapable Lancastrian king Henry VI. But by Christmas Richard was dead, ambushed near Wakefield on his south Yorkshire estates by vengeful Lancastrian noblemen. The news of his father’s killing had reached Edward as he recruited soldiers in the Welsh Marches, too late, too distant to go to his aid. Now, marching towards Edward was an army of Welshmen, bolstered by French and Breton mercenaries, led by a diehard Lancastrian: Henry VI’s half-brother Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke.

  The two royal houses of Lancaster and York were at war. With his father’s death, Edward became heir to the house of York; still, his situation was bleak. He was a teenager who had never led an army. Nonetheless there was something about him that was irresistible; his certainty that cold winter morning, faced by his own frightened troops, was total.

  The Marches, the patchwork of fiefdoms that bordered England and Wales, was Edward’s land. Intimately familiar with the surrounding country, the fortress-studded hills of his youth, he had grown up among the men whose loyalties he now commanded, their affinity to the house of York hardened in the turf wars of recent years – many of which had been fought against Henry VI’s relatives. A few miles to the north of Edward’s army was Wigmore Castle, the eagles’ nest from which his forebears, the Mortimer earls of March, had ruled the surrounding lands since time out of mind.

  Royal blood ran in the Mortimers’ veins: blood which, if their family tree was to be believed, flowed from Cadwaladr, the great king of British prehistory, through the peerless Edward III to Richard of York and his heirs. But sixty years previously, that line had been usurped. When Henry IV deposed Richard II in 1399, he became the first king of the house of Lancaster. Henry IV’s claim to the crown – stemming from Edward III’s third son through the male line of descent – appeared robust enough; and, indeed, served to establish the Lancastrian dynasty. But his was not the only claim nor, as some believed, the best. If you traced another line, from Edward III’s second son – through the women, this time, rather than the men – you came to Anne Mortimer and her son Richard duke of York. This claim made the Lancastrian kings uneasy. They tried both to explain it away – the presence of women in the direct line of succession, Lancastrian lawyers argued, invalidated it – and to airbrush it from history, omitting the line from their genealogies. Despite their efforts, the idea of Mortimer had lingered: an ancient, imperishable right.1 The Yorkist Edward was the family’s latest hope and, on that unbearably bright winter morning, even the name of the muddy crossroads at which he now awaited Jasper Tudor’s army seemed freighted with significance: Mortimer’s Cross.2

  Once the fighting started, Edward’s Marcher men – hard, experienced, in familiar territory, led by the eighteen-year-old who tore with terrifying aggression into the enemy ranks – massacred Jasper Tudor’s forces. The battle gave birth to a new myth: of a young noble warrior who, asking for a sign from God, received it in the form of three suns symbolizing the Holy Trinity, and whose God-given victory transformed him into England’s king-in-waiting, his inevitable succession long foretold by prophecy. In its aftermath, Edward adopted a new emblem. Taking his father’s badge, the white rose, and an emblem of his illustrious forebear Edward III, a sun bursting through cloud, he combined them. From that point on, the badge that his men wore – pinned or sewn into their jackets, on armbands round their biceps – was a sun in splendour, golden sunbeams streaming out from the white ros
e of York.3

  Myth-making aside, the fact remained that the incumbent king, Henry VI, was still very much alive. In pressing his claim, Edward looked to many like a young nobleman simply chancing his arm. In the previous months, moreover, any pretence that England’s warring factions might somehow be brought together by an appeal to national unity had evaporated. On the other side of England, the main Lancastrian army, having massacred Richard of York and his men, was moving south at speed, pillaging and plundering, towards an exposed London. In the city were Edward’s mother, three sisters and two younger brothers, George and Richard, both still children. If Edward were to prevail, he would need all the fortune that had accompanied him at Mortimer’s Cross and more. He would also have to prove to England that he was rather different from his father.

  Edward was eight years old and living in Ludlow when in September 1450 his father, returning from a tour of duty as the king’s lieutenant in the restive province of Ireland, made landfall on the north coast of Wales. It had been a terrible year for England. During the preceding few decades the bankrupt, broken regime of Henry VI had lurched from one disaster to another. War had proved a massive drain on royal resources, exacerbated by a deepening Europe-wide recession, and Henry had proved an appalling monarch, his vague extravagance a gift to the grasping courtiers that clustered around him. The king’s bloated, chaotic, fiscally incompetent household had become a symbol of all that was rotten about the regime, his servants lining their pockets even as trade dried up and revenues dwindled. Throughout the country, civil unrest started to spread.

  Across the Channel, things were even worse. Thirty years previously the king’s warrior father, Henry V, had conquered swathes of northern France, including Paris, and had claimed the French crown that English kings believed was rightfully theirs. It was a remarkable but fleeting achievement. Soon after, dysentery had killed Henry V. In the following decades a resurgent France regained much of its lost territory, leaving only Normandy in English hands, a colony that provided rich pickings for the country’s elites. Nobody was prepared for its capitulation. But in 1449, in the face of a new French offensive, the response of Henry VI’s government was incoherent and disastrous. English rule in Normandy collapsed, demoralized garrisons falling like dominoes. Still only twenty-eight years old, Henry VI was proving not just a shadow of his father, but his negation.

  Across the country, people struggling to make a living – from the propertied gentry to smallholders and labourers – were sick of a ruling class that had become a byword for venality and corruption: frittering away taxpayers’ money; incapable of dealing with the slow collapse in public order; indifferent to even the most modest proposals for reform; ineffective and disunited in every respect – except, apparently, when it came to preserving their own vested interests. The ‘common voice’ of this increasingly literate and politically conscious public was growing louder. In manifestos and the darkly allusive language of prophecy, it called in the name of the king’s ‘true liege men’ for the removal and punishment of the ‘untrue’ councillors who had led their sovereign astray, and for financial and political reform. It was a message that England’s great noblemen, officers of state and royal household – men in whom ‘the might of the land’ rested, their own economic and political privileges enmeshed in this dysfunctional system – chose to ignore. In the spring of 1450, as French privateers raided England’s coasts, the discontent exploded.4

  Led by a man named Jack Cade, southeast England rose in revolt. The Kentish commons surged towards London and, as the king and his court fled into the midlands, trashed the city. The insurgency had barely been suppressed and Cade executed when, in August, a ragged English army returned from France, marching through London’s gates. Days later, refugees started to arrive from England’s lost territories in Normandy: a stream of men, women and children, carts heaped with armour, bedding, household goods and whatever families had been able to seize as they fled their homes ahead of the marauding French – ‘piteous to see’, noted one onlooker grimly. During these long, disastrous months, Richard of York had been absent from England but not, it seemed, from people’s minds.

  News of York’s sudden return from Ireland in September 1450 panicked the government. During the recent troubles, royal agents had heard ‘much strange language’ about him, and the insurgents’ list of demands had included a call for Henry to put York, a great nobleman unjustly shouldered aside by the king’s evil councillors, in charge of his government. York would put things straight, they argued, because he was ‘the true blood of the realm’: untainted both by association with Henry VI’s disastrous government, or – so the implication went – by Lancastrian blood.5

  For the first thirty-nine years of his life, York had proved a dutiful subject to the Lancastrian kings. He was orphaned by the age of four – his mother dead through illness; his father executed for a plot to seize power – and was brought up a royal ward in a securely Lancastrian environment. The marriage arranged for him bound him even more tightly to the regime: his wife Cecily’s family, the Nevilles, were a powerful northern clan with solid Lancastrian connections.6 He was appointed regent of France, where his vast hereditary power and wealth were directed to shoring up England’s crumbling overseas dominions and to carrying the fight to the resurgent French.

  Richard and Cecily had endured ‘long barrenness’ early in their marriage, but their move to France proved fruitful. Though Richard spent long stretches at the front on campaign, much of the time he was within a day’s ride of the great Norman city of Rouen, the capital of England’s French territories, and the couple found enough opportunity to be together. There, Cecily gave birth to three children, two boys and a daughter, in quick succession. The first arrived in the early hours of 28 April 1442 and was named Edward, like his illustrious ancestor Edward III. Edward’s christening was apparently low-key, yet there was no doubting his parents’ relief, pride and ambition for their son and heir. By the time Edward was three years old, his father was in talks to marry him to one of the king of France’s daughters. By the end of the year, however, Richard had been recalled to England.7

  Back home, though he continued to receive a steady trickle of royal favour, he wasn’t especially close to Henry VI. Despite Henry’s marriage in 1445 to the fifteen-year-old French aristocrat Margaret of Anjou, the king, who had a saintly horror of sex, remained childless. As time went on, the extended Lancastrian family pressed ever more tightly around the hapless monarch. Foremost among them were his Beaufort relatives, descendants of the dynasty’s founder, John of Gaunt, and his mistress Katherine Swynford; although subsequently legitimated, the family had been barred from the throne by act of Parliament. The Beauforts gobbled up the fruits of royal favour and, in 1447, destroyed the king’s de facto heir, his uncle Humphrey duke of Gloucester. Gloucester’s death marked a shift in the political landscape. The role of royal heir now passed, unofficially but tangibly, to England’s greatest nobleman of royal – though not of Lancastrian – blood, Richard of York. Richard, though, kept his head down, and in July 1449 took up the post of lieutenant of Ireland. In Dublin on 21 October, Cecily gave birth to another son, George.8

  Like the rest of England, York had been aghast at the loss of Normandy. He had maintained extensive interests and responsibilities there and had grown deeply sceptical of his successor as regent, the king’s cousin Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset. York himself had an unbending sense of duty and honour: as he wrote fiercely to his brother-in-law that summer, he ‘dreaded shame’ and would rather die than lose control of a precarious Ireland. Somerset’s behaviour in Normandy, York felt, had been unchivalrous, bordering on treasonable, particularly in his ignominious surrender of York’s beloved Rouen. Yet following Somerset’s inglorious return home – it had been Somerset’s dishevelled troops that straggled into London that summer – he had, to York’s horror, been instantly rewarded for his failure with a place at the heart of the political establishment, as the king’s chief ministe
r.9

  All York would say, that September of 1450, was that his return from Ireland had been prompted by ‘very necessity’: with disturbances escalating there, the government had failed to respond to his increasingly urgent demands for military aid and York was anxious about being held accountable for the disorder. He was, though, concerned about his own place in Somerset’s new administration, wanting to be at the centre of things as the regime teetered on the brink, to see what happened. Landing in north Wales and dodging an attempt to arrest him, he headed south to London.10

  The prevailing language of political reform gave shape to York’s ambitions, and his alignment with the cause of the people that summer allowed him to believe his own rhetoric. In London, he issued a succession of public manifestos demanding ‘due reformation’ of government, at the same time stressing his loyalty to Henry VI’s regime: his concern was purely for the ‘surety and prosperity’ of the king and the ‘welfare’ of England. Like a character from a book in his own library, the Roman general Stilicho, York convinced himself of his destiny as a reforming hero, moulding the people’s calls for change into his own political programme. By sweeping away the ‘traitors’ who had led England astray – foremost among them Somerset, the man he loathed – York could take up that position at the head of government to which the rightness of his cause and the purity of his royal blood entitled him. Soon, he had harnessed the people’s bitter discontent. York, reported one correspondent, ‘desired much thing, which is much after the commons’ desire’. And, he added, ‘all the king’s household was, and is, afeared right sore’.11