The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Warwick’s deeds, Hastings declared, had been a feat of chivalry achieved against all odds, and the Scots would repent their support of the Lancastrian ‘traitors and rebels’ until Judgment Day. In Edward, England had a king at ease in his own kingdom, confident in the loyalties of his great subjects, and ‘without any doubt or fear’ about their ability to suppress the violence on its peripheries. Without a care in the world, the king was currently absorbed in nothing more taxing than his ‘sports and pleasures of the hunt’. Hunting, as Hastings well knew, was a word freighted with innuendo – and, as the man who controlled access to the king’s chamber, he helped facilitate the ins and outs of Edward’s bachelor lifestyle.

  For all its apparent flippancy, the contrast that Hastings had drawn between Warwick’s perpetual motion and Edward’s insouciance was sharp. It played up the self-image that Edward was deliberately cultivating: the sense of sprawling, capacious authority betokened by his motto ‘confort et liesse’, ‘comfort and joy’ – a choice that contrasted deliberately with the aggressive mottoes of many of his leading noblemen. Edward was the sun in whose warmth his subjects basked, and around which even his greatest lords revolved.3

  In the event, the French needed no persuading. Soon, the talks with Louis XI were back on. They presented a chance to freeze the house of Lancaster out of international politics for good.

  Later that month Edward’s chancellor George Neville and his fellow ambassadors were riding to Dover, to take ship for France. They broke their journey in Canterbury. The Benedictine monks of St Augustine’s Abbey were accustomed to noteworthy visitors – in recent years they had become as used to armies, passing from London to Dover and back, as they had pilgrims – but what Neville did during his short stopover shocked them. Monday 15 August, the great feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, was an important date in the liturgical calendar and Neville, in the absence of Archbishop Thomas Bourchier, led the celebrations in the great Gothic splendour of Canterbury Cathedral. He did so in the red robes of a cardinal. Neville’s hankering after a cardinal’s hat was an open secret; but dusting off the robes that had belonged to the most recent English cardinal, Bourchier’s predecessor as archbishop, John Kemp, was for the attendant clergy a strange and provocative move, not least because Bourchier had his eye on a cardinalate himself.

  Unsurprisingly, Neville and his party were long gone – seen off at Dover by Edward, who had made the trip down through Kent to discuss policy objectives with him and his colleagues – when, at the end of the month, Archbishop Bourchier himself arrived in Canterbury with Edward’s two brothers, George and Richard, whose education and upbringing the king had entrusted to his care.4

  George duke of Clarence was growing up fast. Nearly fourteen, he was sharply sensitive to his role as heir presumptive and hungry for power. It was an attitude Edward understood perfectly and was quick to encourage. While he subscribed to the traditional view that the ‘might of the land’ rested in the ‘great lords’, he stressed that power should most of all be concentrated in the hands of his family, the ‘king’s blood’. The quantity of royal blood in people’s veins correlated directly with the extent that they should ‘of right’ be ‘honoured and enhanced of right and power’. In this vision, nobody was more deserving of such power than his brother and heir.5

  Clarence, still in his ‘tender youth’, was Edward’s project. In his mind’s eye, as he later put it, Edward saw his brother as his right-hand man: exceeding all other noblemen in his ‘might and puissance’, alive to all the king’s ‘good pleasures and commandments’ and aiding him in ‘all that might be to the politic weal of this land’. But in order for this to happen, Edward had to build Clarence up. As one of Richard of York’s younger sons, Clarence had had little by way of inheritance: not enough, at any rate, to support his exalted status as a royal duke and heir to the throne. He had to be endowed with lands sufficient to support this great rank, and Edward had every intention of providing such ‘livelihood’. There was another motive behind his heaping of possessions and riches on Clarence. With every grant, Edward would bind his brother more tightly to him. Clarence, he later emphasized, would be tied not only by ‘the bonds of nature’ or blood, but by ‘the bonds of so great benefit’ that he received from the king. For Edward, it was a way of underscoring their familial closeness, and the servitude that lay at the heart of their fraternal relationship. Clarence would be enveloped in Edward’s smothering love; in return he would give the king his unconditional obedience.6

  Clarence, indeed, was reliant on the king for everything, right down to his daily essentials. Even the sensational wardrobe with which Edward supplied him – ‘all manner stuff’, textiles of every imaginable variety, from Venetian cloth-of-gold and damascene silks, to fine Flemish linens, German hats, piles of furs and seven and a half stones of feathers for beds – was a reminder of that dependence, each parcel supplied direct from the king’s Great Wardrobe. A nagging sense of this reliance accentuated what was becoming evident in Clarence: a quick-eyed petulance, aggressively resentful of any perceived slight done him, and of favour shown to others. Back in August 1462, as Edward had cast around for lands with which to endow his youngest brother Richard, he had granted him the Yorkshire lordship of Richmond, recently confiscated from the young Lancastrian nobleman Henry Tudor. When Clarence kicked up a fuss, Edward, wanting only to make the problem go away, shrugged and regranted it to his middle brother instead.7

  Pushy as Clarence was, Edward was happy enough to see him taking responsibility for the offices and lands with which he had been loaded. On 22 April 1463, St George’s Eve, Clarence had attended a chapter of the Order of the Garter, a boy among great lords and hard-bitten knights. If Edward imagined his brother might be awed by the experience, it seemed to produce the opposite effect: to swell an already inflated sense of entitlement.8

  That last Sunday in August, as Clarence and Richard processed into Canterbury Cathedral for mass, Clarence did so with an attendant in front of him bearing his sword, point uppermost, representing the king. The boy’s behaviour might have jogged in Archbishop Bourchier an uneasy memory of a moment three years before, when Richard of York had marched into Parliament to claim the crown and, hesitatingly contradicted by Bourchier, had shown his bewildered rage at being denied. Now, Bourchier let Clarence have his pre-eminence and, as an onlooking monk noticed with a hint of weariness, the boy milked it for all he was worth, insisting on having his sword borne in front of him wherever he went, not just that morning for mass, but in ‘other places’. There was a certain desperation in Clarence’s arrogance. After all, when Edward married and produced children, his exalted status as heir to the throne would evaporate.9

  That August, after her failed invasion and flight from northeast England, Margaret of Anjou had docked at Sluis, seeking aid from Philip of Burgundy, who was appalled at news of her arrival. At that moment Philip, self-styled honest broker between France and the house of York, was directing preparations for the upcoming summit at St Omer where George Neville and his ambassadorial team – given expansive assurances over their personal security by both Philip and a newly obliging Louis XI – were arriving under heavy escort from the enclave of Calais. The disruptive presence of the Lancastrian queen was the last thing any of them needed. Philip warned Margaret not to follow him to St Omer: the area around Calais, he said, was crawling with Yorkists. Margaret ignored him. Disguising herself as a ‘poor lady’ to evade capture, she commandeered a peasant cart and headed after him in pursuit. At Lille, Margaret found the welcome she craved. It came not from Duke Philip, but from his estranged son, Charles of Charolais.10

  Thirty-two years old, Charles was everything his father was not. Stocky, with a mop of black hair and pale grey eyes, he gave an impression of fury barely contained by an exaggerated chivalric courtesy. Charles and Philip disagreed on everything, including the future of Burgundy. Charles detested his father’s pro-French appeasement and viewed his complaisant relationship with Lou
is XI – whom Charles didn’t trust an inch – as hopelessly naïve. Charles believed that Burgundy’s only hope lay in the assertion of its own sovereignty, of becoming an independent state. Given that Louis was hardly likely to wave goodbye to his prized vassal state, this ultimately meant war with France. Hostile to everything his father stood for, Charles chose to identify with everything and everybody Philip did not. This included his cultured mother, Isabella of Portugal, who had left the increasingly faction-ridden Burgundian court, her husband and his clutch of mistresses and set up her own establishment. And, given that Isabella was descended (through her English mother) from the founder of the Lancastrian dynasty, John of Gaunt, Charles’s causes also included the house of Lancaster.11

  With Philip of Burgundy enduring regular bouts of ill-health, the Yorkists were becoming increasingly worried about the growing influence of his pro-Lancastrian son. In a bibulous encounter in Paris with one of Charles’s agents, an envoy of the earl of Warwick blurted out their anxieties. The envoy was ‘neither secret or sober’, the Burgundian agent reported back to Charles with relish, and had made perfectly plain ‘the fear that they’ – the Yorkist regime – ‘have of you’, especially if Philip were to die any time soon.12

  In his warm reception of Margaret of Anjou, Charles played up to those fears. Publicly recognizing her as queen of England, he lent her five hundred crowns and egged her on in her mission to bring Edward’s rapprochement with Louis XI crashing to a halt. A move calculated to provoke his father, Louis and Edward, it was also fuelled by a deep sense of affinity, of shared Lancastrian blood.13

  With Margaret absent in Lille, the talks at St Omer went smoothly. While the French were put out at Warwick’s non-appearance – he had written to Louis personally to express his regret at having been detained in the north of England – George Neville and his delegates managed to wrap up two deals. The first was a new trade treaty with Burgundy; the second, having extracted a promise from Louis XI not to give any further ‘help, aid or favour’ to Henry VI, Margaret or their son, was a truce with France.14

  Publicly, at least, Margaret was now a pariah. Philip of Burgundy was quick to hustle her off his lands to her designated place of exile: her father’s run-down castle of Koeur, in Lorraine in eastern France. As far as Louis XI was concerned, Koeur was perfect. Far enough away for Margaret not to bother him, its remoteness also gave Margaret security against possible Yorkist attack. While he had no intention of giving her any support, financial or otherwise, Louis knew it was useful to keep the exiled Lancastrians up his sleeve. Just in case.15

  Early in September 1463, Edward left the comforts of Fotheringhay and marched north on the first leg of his Scottish campaign. Tracking him up the coast was a fleet commanded by John Tiptoft, which had taken most of the summer – and the large sum of £4,580 – to fit out. Reaching York on the 13th, the king fired off a dispatch to Warwick in Newcastle with news of his imminent arrival in the northeast. The earl’s reply, within a couple of days, let Edward down gently but firmly: Warwick and his allies had everything under control. Edward should stay put.16

  As he wrote in his ‘simple hand’, Warwick had been overjoyed to learn that Edward, together with his ‘mighty power’ of men, was intending to invade Scotland, and had no doubt whatsoever of his sovereign’s ultimate success. But, he continued briskly, forward planning was essential. Edward needed to ensure he could provision his army by sea, and that those supply lines stayed open; he also needed sufficient stocks of weaponry and ammunition, and to be prepared for different kinds of warfare, including ‘great guns’ for sieges and pitched battles. Until he ‘could be sure of the said provision’, it was the general consensus of ‘the lords and men of reputation of these parts’ – in other words, the Neville brothers and their supporters – that Edward should ‘in no way’ come north now.

  Although Warwick knew of Edward’s plans – indeed, he had supplied six ships to Tiptoft’s fleet – his letter conveyed a note of surprise, almost as though, for all Edward’s warlike noises and preparation throughout the summer, he had failed to consult with his senior commander in the north before setting off. Was there just the trace of a rebuke in Warwick’s reply? Edward, it seemed to say, had not sought his advice. Now, he was getting it. The Nevilles were in charge of the north – on the king’s behalf, naturally – and they would be the best judges of what the king should do, and when.17

  Running through Warwick’s letter was the sense that an invasion of Scotland was neither desirable nor necessary. As he took a grip on the security of England’s north, so Warwick had come to dominate diplomatic contact with Scotland, which, shorn of its powerful French ally, was now scrambling to the negotiating table. Over the past years, Bishop James Kennedy had led the Scottish government’s support for the exiled Lancastrians. But as he ruefully acknowledged, now that Louis XI had abandoned the Lancastrian cause, Scotland, isolated and facing ‘perdition’ from Yorkist England, was now in a corner. There was no option but to open talks with Edward – or rather with the man who, from where Kennedy was standing, ‘ran the kingdom’ for him: Warwick.18

  Looked at one way, the mothballing of Edward’s Scottish expedition made sense. Merely the threat of war had brought Scotland to the table, and however much it might have cost to assemble an army, following through on that threat would have cost a great deal more. And while Edward’s expensively assembled display of naval power was patrolling England’s eastern seaboard and keeping crucial trade routes open, he had also managed to settle some of his long-standing debts to the Calais garrison with the taxes raised to cover his now-aborted invasion.

  Pragmatic as it was, however, Edward’s abandonment of the Scottish campaign was deeply unpopular among the taxpayers who had funded it, and among the thousands of men who had marched so far from their own regions, only to sit around doing nothing. Across the country, people ‘grudged sore’. One Londoner grumbled about the squandering of resources ‘in vain’; another chronicler declared it ‘shame and confusion’, a ‘wretched outcome’. The city’s authorities were particularly alarmed by one agitator, a hosier called John Peysaunt, who made several incendiary speeches at Paul’s Cross.19 That November Edward, aware of the increasing unrest, agreed to remit £6,000 of the tax granted him, and also agreed to a phased collection of the balance that remained, so that the commons could check that he was indeed spending it, as agreed, on defence.20

  On 9 December, at York, Edward’s representatives signed a truce with Scotland, the Scots promising to withdraw all support for the Lancastrian royal family. To make the point, Bishop Kennedy had Henry VI brought south into England – albeit not into Yorkist hands. Rather, he was delivered to Bamburgh Castle, which was still in Lancastrian control. And whatever the Scots’ publicly expressed intentions about peace with the house of York, Henry’s reappearance south of the border coincided with a disturbing upsurge in Lancastrian activity.21

  As a bitter winter set in, the whole country gripped by a ‘fervent frost and snow’, Yorkist forces in the north were on high alert. About a week before the Anglo-Scottish agreement was signed, news came from the Welsh Marches. During the past months, the duke of Somerset had done some thinking. Whether his tense experience in Edward’s household earlier in the year had made him realize that genuine reconciliation with the Yorkist regime was impossible; whether he was resentful at being denied the few grants that Edward had failed to restore to him; or whether he was, simply, less enthusiastic about Edward than Edward was about him, the duke had rediscovered his Lancastrian loyalties. In early December, with a small group of men, he had left Chirk Castle and disappeared.22

  Weeks later, Somerset was spotted some two hundred miles away in Durham, heading northeast to link up with his men who now formed a detachment of Newcastle’s garrison. Yorkist forces were tipped off. Breaking into his lodgings, they detained two of his men and seized his armour and a casket of correspondence; Somerset himself escaped into the freezing night, ‘in his shirt and barefoot�
�. As his troops in Newcastle were rounded up – those who didn’t manage to escape were arrested and beheaded – he managed to make his way north to Bamburgh, where Henry VI had now arrived.

  Throughout the summer and autumn, Somerset told Henry, he had been busy re-establishing links with pockets of resistance across the country. There remained, he declared, huge popular support for the house of Lancaster. No fewer than seventeen Welsh lords had sworn allegiance to him in the name of Henry VI; he had also obtained the oaths of many more in southwest England. Somerset had also been in communication with Margaret of Anjou, who, from her new place of exile at Koeur, was sending a stream of dispatches to Bamburgh. Other agents slipped through the Yorkist naval patrols on England’s eastern seaboard, including one who carried ‘gracious and comforting’ letters from Somerset’s friend Charles of Charolais, who was working with Margaret to get supplies, guns and money to Bamburgh. Margaret was also apparently in discussions with the duke of Brittany, at the other end of the northern French coast, about sending an army into Wales under the command of the exiled Lancastrian Jasper Tudor, ‘to keep Edward busy at both ends of the country’.23

  Edward was beside himself with rage at the news of Somerset’s defection. In seeking to wash away the bad blood between the house of York and the Beauforts, he had shown Somerset every conceivable expression of love. Somerset had violated his trust and had betrayed the oath of loyalty he had sworn to Edward as his sovereign, going against chivalry and ‘gentleness’ itself.24 Now, Edward’s love turned to hate.

  Ordering the immediate confiscation of Somerset’s lands and offices, the king regranted them all to his youngest brother Richard. This still didn’t solve the problem of Richard’s meagre endowment – the Beauforts had relatively little land, and much of it was already spoken for. Edward wanted to avenge himself on the Beaufort family by any means he could, and that winter Somerset’s sick, ageing mother, Eleanor, bore the brunt of the king’s malice. Arrested and imprisoned, she was subjected to months of systematic intimidation and abuse: deliberately starved, ‘spoiled’, with no way of accessing any income or credit, and deprived of the constant medical attention she needed due to ‘bodily infirmities not likely to be recovered’. She was, as she wrote pleadingly to Edward, ‘guiltless, God knoweth’.