The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Already, Edward’s ease in his own skin was surprising people. Here was a young monarch who, though inclined to opulence and able to work a sensational wardrobe, could cut through the glittering formality at a stroke: summoning stunned commoners into his presence; lifting kneeling diplomats up with a handshake or an enveloping embrace. The contrast with Henry VI, a king with whom familiarity only bred contempt, was marked. Tactile, with an appetite for physical contact, Edward was happy for people to get up close – and the closer you got, said contemporaries, the better it was: his face ‘lovely’, his body ‘mighty, strong and clean made’. Here was a heady presence who could inspire a warband and melt resistance, in both men and women. Perhaps justly, given the staggering victories he had achieved at such a young age, nobody seemed more intoxicated by his charisma than Edward himself.

  Indeed, there was something calculated about his insouciance. Edward, people remarked – astonished to find themselves in the presence of a king who remembered anything at all – never forgot a face, or a name. Whoever you were, noted one chronicler, once you were fixed in his memory, for good or bad, you stayed there.42

  In the first week of April, news of Towton began to reach Flanders and northern France, first in a trickle then, ‘hour by hour’, in a flood, carried by heralds, in diplomatic letter-bags, by merchants as they travelled their regular routes between London and the cities of the Burgundian Low Countries. In Bruges, the papal legate Francesco Coppini, having stuck his neck out for the Yorkist cause, was in excellent good humour as he related how Warwick had ‘made a new king of the son of the duke of York’, a teenage king who was already proving ‘prudent and magnanimous’. And, said Coppini’s secretary, as he relayed the news to Pigello Portinari, head of the Bruges branch of the powerful Medici bank of Florence, it was a result that was both good for England and – with Edward intending to ‘amend and organize matters’ – good for ‘future well-being’. After the last ruinous years of Henry VI’s reign, Yorkist England would soon be open for business.43

  When the news reached Philip of Burgundy, custodian of Edward’s younger brothers George and Richard, he acted fast. Previously, he had packed the boys off to Utrecht, an independent city 140 miles away outside Burgundian jurisdiction, keeping his association with the house of York at arm’s length, just in case. Now, he transferred them hurriedly to his glittering household in Bruges, where they were put up in lavish apartments staffed by Philip’s own servants. The duke himself paid the princes a personal visit, showed them off at court, threw a banquet on their behalf and, in general, paid them ‘the highest honour’. Laden with gifts and under tight security, they were transferred the seventy or so miles west to Calais, where a ship was waiting to ferry them across the Channel. They made the journey to London in slow, triumphant stages, proclaimed as ‘the brothers of King Edward of England and France’. On 12 June, the three brothers were reunited west of London at the Thames-side manor of Sheen, formerly a favoured Lancastrian house. As craftsmen set about eradicating the Lancastrian devices that were everywhere moulded, painted and glazed into the house’s fabric – the antelopes, swans, ostrich feathers and, for Henry VI and Margaret, the crowned initials ‘H and M’ – and replacing them with Edward’s sunburst and white rose, the new king prepared for his coronation.44

  Two weeks later, surrounded by his household men and preceded by a mounted escort of London’s red-robed mayor and aldermen and four hundred citizens dressed in green, Edward rode over London Bridge and east through the city’s narrow streets to the Tower, where he overnighted. There, as tradition demanded, he created a number of knights of the Bath, their loyalties bound to him as the fount of chivalric honour. Foremost among them were his ‘dearest beloved brethren’, George and Richard. The next day, as the royal procession wound through London’s crowds and out, through Ludgate, to Westminster, the two boys were in the pack of newly dubbed knights who, wearing their blue gowns and white hoods, tokens of white silk lace adorning their left shoulders, rode directly in front of Edward himself.45

  In Westminster Abbey on the morning of Sunday, 28 June 1461, in front of the high altar – and rather more lords spiritual and temporal than had been present at his inauguration as king some three months previously – Edward was anointed and crowned by the ever-reliable Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury, with Edward the Confessor’s ‘rich crown’ of solid, jewel-encrusted gold.46

  Even though Edward had, in the words of one poet, come to ‘love London’, the love wasn’t universally reciprocated. One citizen bluntly turned down his neighbours’ invitation to join them in cheering Edward along his coronation route: ‘Twat and turd for him,’ he retorted, adding that he would rather watch a duck-hunt. The neighbours, failing to see the funny side, reported him to the authorities. In the city, never mind the rest of the country, Edward still had plenty of convincing to do.47

  In the following days, Edward’s natural right to the crown of England was driven home. On Monday 29th he returned to the Abbey, where he sat enthroned and crowned, a figure of regal authority. His lineage was traced in a profusion of brightly coloured illuminated rolls, visual masterpieces that, unfurled and pinned to boards in the Abbey, helped spectators understand the magnitude of what they had seen. One, prefaced by an image of an armoured, crowned Edward riding into battle, bordered by the heraldic banners and badges of his predecessors alternating with his white rose-en-soleil, and sprinkled with white roses and sunbursts, revealed his lineage through the arcana of British myth-history.48 In another, depicted with a cartoonist’s eye, the tangled descent of Lancaster and the pure line of York twisted upwards in the thorned branches of a rose briar, each member of the house of Plantagenet springing from a rosebud. At the top, Henry VI, barely seeming to know one end of his sword from the other, was confronted by a martial Edward IV. Above them, Edward’s deeds unfolded in a storyboard: five dramatic panels, each paralleled by an image from the Old Testament. The defining, transformative battle of Mortimer’s Cross – signified by three crowned suns and, in case anybody missed the point, the words ‘sol in forma triplia’ – was Edward’s Damascene moment: ‘Lord, what would you have me do?’, he said, a speech bubble scrolling from his lips. Later, he was Moses in front of the burning bush, taking his commandments from God. Other genealogies underscored Edward’s Welsh Mortimer ancestry: lines of red and gold arrowing their way across the parchment to his Mortimer ancestors and, through them, to the mythical king of Britain, Cadwaladr. Here, Edward’s crowning was the inevitable fulfilment of a prophecy made by the archangel Michael to the despairing Cadwaladr as his people were driven out of their devastated country: in time future, the angel told him, his heir would conquer all before him. Uniting England, Wales and Scotland, the ‘three portions’ of Britain, this descendant would bear the ancient name of Britain, ‘rubius draco’, the red dragon, and he and his heirs would reign to the world’s end.49

  Edward’s immediate heir was – until such time as he married and had sons of his own – his brother, the eleven-year-old George. Later that same Monday at a great feast in George’s honour, in the bishop of London’s palace, Edward created him duke of Clarence. A title that had originally belonged to the second son of the great Plantagenet king Edward III, from whom the Yorkists were descended, it resonated with York’s superior claim to the throne. It also underscored George’s own significance as heir presumptive.50

  The glittering ceremonial continued. Edward ‘went crowned’ twice, processing around Westminster Abbey and then St Paul’s Cathedral. In St Paul’s, a packed congregation watched as a figure dressed as an angel was lowered dramatically through the great vaulted interior, swinging a censer, bathing Edward in wafts of incense: Cadwaladr’s prophecy re-enacted and fulfilled. Some onlookers, even those sympathetic to the regime, were unimpressed. In wanting ‘to heap glory on glory’ the crown-wearings, with their overcooked symbolism and expensive populist stunts, were, one observer thought, striving for effect. Surely the coronation, the suprem
e moment of legitimation, was enough.51 It looked, he implied, a bit desperate.

  This was hardly surprising. While Edward’s charismatic leadership promised much to those who had witnessed it in action, his claim to the throne still needed a great deal of explaining to the vast majority. What was more, Edward had been brought up a nobleman, not a king-in-waiting. Now, as he began to reign, he had to undergo a rapid education in kingship to learn how to rule the whole country ‘indifferently’ or impartially, and how to command the undivided loyalties of all – not simply the hungry, expectant faction that had brought him to power and now clustered round to receive its rewards. Although government clerks were busy churning out the formulas of the new regime – the warrants, patents and proclamations that briskly dismissed Henry VI as king of England ‘in fact but not of right’ – the truth was that not until Henry’s cause was eliminated could Edward be sovereign in his own land.52

  For many, throughout both England and Europe, Edward was the usurper; Henry VI remained the rightful king. Conflict had not ended with the carnage of Towton. Rather, with the existence of two crowned kings of England, it had mutated. As spring turned into summer, disorder continued unabated across huge swathes of the country. Much of the violence, from the southwest, through Wales and the midlands to the northeast, was explicitly connected with the house of Lancaster. Meanwhile, at both ends of the country, the new Yorkist regime was under stress. Across the English Channel, Henry VI’s uncle Charles VII of France, his sympathies squarely with the Lancastrian regime, was believed to be assembling an armada. That same May, a French force had taken control of Jersey: rumours abounded that the French would take control of the other Channel Islands and use them as a springboard to invade England.53 Where the French led, the Scots, their junior partners in the ‘auld alliance’, tended to follow. At the Scottish court the exiled Lancastrians had quickly cut a deal with their hosts, receiving military aid in exchange for the valuable, perpetually contested border stronghold of Berwick. Soon, packs of Scottish and Lancastrian raiders were pouring back across England’s northern border.

  The opulence of Edward’s coronation ceremonies, meanwhile, barely masked the new regime’s insolvency. Since his accession, Edward had been living on individual and corporate loans from well-wishers. The coronation had been paid for with the last scrapings of cash from a near-empty Exchequer or, as Edward commanded with some desperation, ‘the first and most ready money that is come or by any means may come to your hands’.54

  Nevertheless, the sudden materializing on England’s throne of this fresh-faced giant gave force to all the redemptive Yorkist propaganda. Edward’s coming marked a clean break from the tired, squalid struggles of the past decade. In order to make good on the Yorkist promise to ‘save all England’, he would have to deliver on the pledges that he, and his father before him, had made: to bring security to England’s borders and the surrounding seas; to stamp out the violence in England’s provinces, which had fuelled and been exacerbated by civil war; and to deliver justice, peace, prosperity and fiscal reform, starting with the crown’s own rickety finances. If Edward were to reset the crown’s battered sovereignty on new foundations, those of the house of York, he would have to show that royal authority lay in him, and him alone.

  3

  The World is Right Wild

  In July 1461 two envoys from the duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, rode up through Kent towards London. Previously one of northern Italy’s most brutal mercenary commanders, Sforza had proved himself as deft a diplomat as he was a military tactician. With Charles VII of France maintaining a predatory interest in the Italian peninsula, Sforza grew closer to those princes who feared French expansion, among them Philip of Burgundy. In recent years, relations between France and its most powerful vassal state, always tense, had deteriorated further when the man Charles loathed most of all – his own estranged son and heir, Louis – fled France for the Burgundian court. There, sheltered by Philip, Louis spent much of his time fervently praying for his father’s death. Sforza, meanwhile, had followed developments with interest – an outbreak of war on France’s north-eastern frontier would, after all, be just the way to distract the French king from further meddling in Italy – and had been further encouraged by events in England. Close to Burgundy, hostile to France and in desperate need of international recognition, the fledgling Yorkist regime was, Sforza felt, a government with which he could do business.1

  Earlier that summer Sforza’s agent in Bruges had complained that it was impossible to get any clear picture of the situation in England: ‘every day and every hour, conditions change’. As the envoys entered London, however, any impression that they might have formed of Edward IV’s impermanence was quickly dispelled. Awaiting them, fresh from his coronation and surrounded by a pack of lords and gentlemen, was the king himself. Edward lavished attention on his Milanese visitors: never, members of London’s Italian merchant community assured them, had so much honour been shown to an embassy.2

  Edward had his priorities clear. As king, it was his duty to dazzle, to lift himself above even the greatest of his nobles – which, in the sumptuary arms race of the time, nobles turning up at court in ever more ‘excessive and inordinate arrays’, was no mean challenge – and to project his ‘royal majesty’ through conspicuous wealth. The royal household was a reflection of both the king’s authority and power and, in microcosm, the condition of his kingdom. It was, contemporary theorists stressed, an urgent political necessity that the king stuff his houses with costly tapestries and other fine furnishings; that he fill his wardrobes and jewelhouse with ‘rich clothes, rich furs, rich stones, and other jewels and ornaments’. With his love of clothes, his awareness of exactly how good he looked in them, and his compulsive magpie eye for fine things, Edward didn’t need a second invitation. From the moment he ascended the throne, George Darell, the newly appointed keeper of his Great Wardrobe – which, from its sprawling complex at Blackfriars on London’s western edge, supplied the king’s personal wardrobes, as well as those of his family, with all the fine textiles they needed – was working overtime buying furs, velvets, satins, silks, cloth-of-gold and delicate linens and, with his army of craftsmen, transforming them into sensational outfits for his fashion-conscious young king. In the process, he was quickly running up a substantial deficit, outstripping his income by hundreds, then thousands of pounds.3

  Magnificence didn’t lie simply in soft furnishings, knick-knacks and an impressive wardrobe. Kings were supposed to overwhelm subjects, guests and adversaries alike through every aspect of their household: its smooth, well-drilled functioning; its polished, courtly, intimidating servants; and the endless stream of fragrant, exquisite dishes that emerged from its kitchens, washed down by a lavish supply of wine from its well-stocked cellars. Ostentatious hospitality was called for. That July, the only thing preoccupying an intensely relaxed Edward, it appeared, was making sure that he and his guests had as much fun as possible.

  The ensuing days and weeks passed in a blur of royal hospitality. As the envoys made their way slowly west up the Thames valley to Windsor, they remarked on how Edward was constantly immersed in ‘some sort of pleasure’, showering on the ambassadors ‘every gratification’. Daily hunting parties, lubricated by the tuns of ‘good Gascon wine’ that a perpetually thirsty Edward demanded be stationed at convenient intervals ‘ready there for our drinking’, grew increasingly sodden. By night, the ambassadors were treated to ‘festivities of ladies’, as they put it with diplomatic vagueness; where once a horrified Henry VI, confronted with a troupe of bare-breasted dancing girls laid on to ‘entice’ him, had quickly left the room, Edward could not get enough of such enticement.4

  Keeping pace with the appetites of England’s prodigious eighteen-year-old king proved a challenge – one of the ambassadors, Count Ludovico Dallugo, had a recurrence of gout – and in fact the envoys had tried repeatedly to leave. But Edward, all ‘fair words’ and courteous conviviality, refused to let them, plunging
them instead into yet another round of entertainment. Not only did Edward push his own hedonism to the limit, he expected his guests, as well as his closest servants, to keep up.

  Amid the relentless partying, Dallugo managed to glean some information about the state of England. Things were improving for the new regime with each day that passed. In the north, the earl of Warwick and his uncompromising brother John Neville had pushed the bands of Scottish and Lancastrian raiders back over the border. In Wales, too, Edward’s loyal point man William, Lord Herbert, sent by the king to ‘cleanse’ the principality, was proving effective, so much so that Edward, who had plans to lead an army into Wales, kept putting them off. There was, he felt, no need to go until later in the summer, after harvest, when there would be plenty of food for his men. Running through this strategic decision, however, was the sense that Edward was having rather too much fun where he was.

  Dallugo had managed to get close to one nobleman in particular, with whom he had several conversations, and who had told him bluntly that, with all Henry VI’s lords coming over to Edward, the Lancastrian cause was irretrievably lost. Dallugo was impressed: the nobleman in question had formerly been one of Henry’s foremost lords. Indeed, he and his son – both men of ‘very great valour’ – had been released from the Tower only weeks before; now, pardoned and rehabilitated, they were working their way into Edward’s good graces. The nobleman’s name, Dallugo remembered, was Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers.5

  Although Dallugo was inclined to take everything he was told at face value, late in July events did indeed seem to be sliding decisively in Edward’s favour. The French king, ill for years, succumbed to the infections that had left his face and intestines so swollen that he was unable to take liquid. Nobody was more delighted than his son, the thirty-eight-year-old Louis, who had been assiduously following astrologers’ predictions of his father’s death and was agreeably surprised to find that it had come even sooner than they had forecast. Crowned Louis XI at the great cathedral of Notre-Dame in Reims, he carried out a wholesale purge of his father’s ministers. Among the people he locked up were the two key commanders of the planned Lancastrian reinvasion of England: the French general Pierre de Brézé and Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Whether Louis had absorbed Duke Philip’s pro-Yorkist tendencies during his Burgundian exile – at Towton, a detachment of Burgundian troops had fought for Edward under Louis’ banner – or whether his behaviour was a last vindictive spasm against his hated father, was unclear. Either way, French backing for the Lancastrian cause was, at least for the time being, off.6