by Thomas Penn
With Edward and Warwick finally on their way north at the head of an army, the Lancastrian options were dwindling. Edward, though, was progressing by slow stages up the Great North Road. At the end of April, apparently in no particular hurry, he spent a few days at the Northamptonshire town of Stony Stratford: hunting, or so it was said. Somerset had a fast-closing window of opportunity to strike against John Neville’s forces before the main Yorkist army arrived in the region.44
Early that May at Somerset’s base of Hexham on the River Tyne, recruits streamed in to join the Lancastrian army. It was a turnout boosted by the presence of a crowned Henry VI who, decked out in his war armour, was paraded through the region propped up on a horse. As news of the mobilization reached John Neville some twenty miles east at Newcastle, he realized he couldn’t wait for Edward and Warwick to arrive. On Sunday 13 May, he assembled his men and moved fast towards Hexham. His instincts were good.45
While Somerset had recruited substantial numbers of troops, the majority were commons: occasional, possibly reluctant soldiers, ill-equipped and inexperienced. There was also another problem, one that affected the detachments of battle-hardened mercenaries, gunners and foot soldiers on whose solidity Somerset’s otherwise ragtag army depended. A Lancastrian knight, Sir William Tailboys, had failed to appear with the Lancastrian war chest, some £2,000 in silver. Unpaid, the mercenaries refused to move: they ‘would not go one foot’ with Somerset ‘till they had money’. By dawn on the 15th, the cash still hadn’t turned up.
Camped south of Hexham, in meadowland around Devil’s Water, a twisting, steep-banked tributary of the Tyne, Somerset’s men were caught in the open. The battle, such as it was, quickly turned into a rout. As the Lancastrians, scattering into the surrounding woodlands, were hunted down, Somerset’s charmed existence came to an end. Acting on Edward’s orders, and in any case disinclined to spare the man who had slaughtered his father at Wakefield back in the winter of 1460, John Neville had him pushed to his knees and beheaded on the spot.46
Ten days later, his victorious journey south punctuated by rounds of executions, John Neville marched into York, where he was greeted by a beaming Edward IV and, flanking the king, Warwick and chancellor George Neville. Amid further beheadings, another detachment of Yorkist soldiers arrived with the man whose failure to turn up at Hexham had robbed the Lancastrian army of any chance it might have had. In the valley of Redesdale, some twenty miles north of Hexham, Sir William Tailboys had been found hiding down a coalmine with the missing war chest. Tailboys was summarily beheaded and the money disbursed among John Neville’s troops: a ‘wholesome salve’ for their wounds, as one chronicler put it, as were the ministrations of Edward’s surgeon, a Master Gerard, to whom the king paid £10 for his treatment of those ‘late hurt in our wars in the north country’.
A few key figures had escaped the Neville dragnet, among them not only Somerset’s younger brothers, Edmund and John Beaufort, but also Henry VI himself. At York, John Neville presented Edward with Henry’s ‘bycocket’: the jewel-encrusted coronet that the Lancastrian king had worn as he went through Northumberland encouraging people to flock to his cause, and which he discarded as he fled.
With this furious bloodletting, the war in the north, which had almost brought Edward’s regime to its knees during the past years, was over. A king without a crown, Henry VI was on the run somewhere in the north of the country, passed from safe house to safe house by committed partisans. Margaret of Anjou, in exile with her ten-year-old son, deserted by her former allies France and Scotland, was surrounded by a small group of courtiers and advisers whose subsistence she barely had funds to cover. In England, it seemed, the Lancastrian cause was all but eradicated. It was a triumph delivered to Edward by his cousins, the three Neville brothers.
On Sunday 27 May, Trinity Sunday, in the archbishop’s palace at York, John Neville received his reward from a grateful king. Edward bestowed on him the earldom of Northumberland, which had belonged to the Nevilles’ great Lancastrian rivals, the Percies, along with swathes of their ancestral lands in the northeast. One of Neville’s achievements meant more to Edward than anything else. The title was granted, he said, ‘for having executed the duke of Somerset’.47
There was still an endgame to be played out: the recapture of the three great, troublesome Northumbrian castles, still in Lancastrian hands and now utterly isolated. On Saturday 23 June, in the midsummer heat, Alnwick promptly capitulated to the Neville forces; it was followed, the next day, by Dunstanburgh, some eight miles north along the coast. The third castle, Bamburgh, proved more problematic.
With their forces and artillery deployed, including three massive, wall-breaking guns, Warwick and John Neville sent a herald to deliver their ultimatum to the garrison’s renegade commander, Sir Ralph Grey. Edward, they said, wanted his anti-Scottish defences kept intact and would be exceptionally vexed if he was forced to destroy his ‘jewel’ of Bamburgh. Given this, he was willing to pardon all the castle’s defenders if they surrendered immediately, except Grey and his deputy. But if the Yorkist besiegers were forced to fire guns at the castle walls, each shot would cost the head of a member of the garrison until there was nobody left. Grey turned his back on the herald and walked off.
The bombardment that followed was intense. Bamburgh’s walls exploded in showers of splintering stone; chunks of masonry flew into the sea. One of the siege guns, the ‘Dijon’, trained on Grey’s chamber, pounded it ferociously. Before long, Neville’s troops were surging over the wrecked walls. Finding Grey still alive amid the rubble, they took him 150 miles south to the Yorkshire town of Doncaster, where Edward was in residence.
Edward’s instant response was to hand Grey over to his constable of England, John Tiptoft, to be tried for treason. The trial, as all parties knew, was a formality. Sitting in judgment, invoking the full force of the laws of chivalry, Tiptoft detailed to Grey precisely why it was that he had to die.
Before Grey was killed, Tiptoft told him, he would undergo the full ritual degradation of knighthood. First, his spurs would be hacked off – here, Tiptoft gestured to Edward’s master cook, standing aproned and clutching a knife in readiness – then, the royal heralds would cluster round and rip his coat-of-arms from his body, before dressing him in a paper replacement painted with his coat-of-arms reversed that he would wear as he went to his execution. Here, Edward saw fit to intervene, graciously commuting the humiliation in memory of Grey’s loyal grandfather Sir Thomas, who, half a century before, had been convicted for his part in a plot to kill the Lancastrian king Henry V, and executed alongside Edward’s grandfather. Without further ceremony, Grey was drawn on a hurdle to a makeshift scaffold and beheaded.48
Edward was in no hurry to return south. Apart from wanting to give his plague-ridden capital a wide berth, business kept him in Doncaster. The timing of his arrival in the town, the day after England’s clergy had assembled there to discuss a papal request for a subsidy towards a planned crusade against the Ottoman Turks, was no coincidence. Surprisingly, given how reluctant England’s kings were at the best of times to indulge the pope’s demands for cash, Edward was suddenly anxious that the subsidy be raised.49
The previous autumn Pope Pius II, approaching Christendom’s princes for a new round of funding to revive his moribund crusade, had written to Edward seeking a return on the spiritual capital that he had invested in the house of York. At the time Edward, facing a funding crisis of his own, had refused point blank. In the intervening months, however, the idea had grown on him.50 Edward informed the pope that he was keen to help. While a papal tax on England’s subjects – a ‘novelty’ that would set an uncomfortable precedent – was out of the question, he proposed instead a voluntary subsidy on the clergy, to be levied by Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury.
Writing to his bishops, Bourchier instructed them to hand in their receipts not to the Exchequer in the usual way, but directly to the king or his financial representatives, who would then pass the money
on to designated papal officers. Shortly after, Bourchier wrote again to say that Edward was unhappy at the proposed rate of 4d in the pound. As the pope was relying on England’s support for the crusade, Bourchier, ‘as tenderly as possible’, required his bishops to increase their contribution to 6d. That July, Edward’s presence at the Doncaster synod made it clear that there was nothing remotely discretionary about the subsidy.
Although Pius II died of a fever a month afterwards, the subsidy continued to be gathered. But when, with the help of a papal collector who seemed only too happy to look the other way, the money found its way into the king’s chamber, it stayed there – either by accident or design.51
Later that summer, Edward embarked on a more ambitious venture. It was a project that revealed how, in his desire for ready cash, he was formalizing an ad hoc process used since the beginning of the reign, in which he bypassed the administrative red tape of the Exchequer whenever he could, funnelling finance directly into his household.
Edward made his way slowly southwards. In early August, he reached the Lincolnshire market town of Stamford where, after discussions with ‘experienced men and merchants’, he made an announcement. He was going to carry out a recoinage, the first for half a century.52
This, Edward stressed, was a measure taken ‘for the common good’. It was designed to tackle the extraordinary ‘scarcity of money’ in the country – one made more acute, the king explained, by the high precious-metal content of English coin, meaning that people got less spending power for their bullion than in ‘other princes’ mints’ elsewhere in Europe. But for all the public-spiritedness of his proclamation, the people who stood to benefit most were precisely those ‘experienced men and merchants’ who had advised him, not to mention the king himself.
The recoinage would be co-ordinated by Edward’s close friend William Hastings, newly reconfirmed in his post of master of the king’s mints and handed control of all the financial exchanges in England, Ireland and Calais into the bargain. Hastings would oversee the recall of all the ‘unclean’ silver and gold coinage in circulation, and the minting of new, revalued coins. Now, one pound of silver bullion would yield not 360 but 450 lighter, finer silver pennies; the worth of a gold ‘noble’, meanwhile, would increase from 6s 8d to 8s 4d. In other words, money would go further: people’s spending power would be increased by 20 per cent. At a stroke, English exports would become cheaper, to the considerable advantage of anybody involved in the country’s wool and cloth export trades. This of course included the merchants who had bankrolled the regime through its first unsteady years, and Edward, one of the export trade’s biggest players. Even so, the biggest profits to the king lay elsewhere. Announced at the same time were jaw-dropping hikes in seigniorage, a tax due the king from all bullion brought to the royal mint for recoining. For each pound of gold minted into coins, seigniorage was increased from 3s 6d to a staggering 47s 8d; for silver, from 3d to 3s 4d. Hastings’ role was to make sure these increased takings were siphoned through to the king’s chamber.
Two more of Edward’s closest servants were appointed to key positions in the process. Thomas Montgomery and the king’s esquire Thomas St Leger, a familiar presence at Edward’s side, took up posts in the Tower Mint as, respectively, warden and assay master (who assessed the weight and purity of bullion brought to the Mint, and the new currency coined from it). Like Hastings, neither man was involved in the day-to-day running of the Mint: this was carried out by the usual combination of goldsmiths, smiths and alchemists, now under the watchful eye of Hastings’ deputy, Hugh Bryce, a London goldsmith who was proving a generous creditor to Edward’s regime.53
This extension of the royal household’s reach over the Mint’s financial workings was deliberate and unprecedented. Montgomery had held the same role under Henry VI, but where before he had delivered the profits from seigniorage and minting charges into the Exchequer, now he was ordered to pay them directly to the king’s household treasurer, Sir John Fogge, and his cofferer John Kendal.54 The Mint had effectively become a sub-department of the king’s household, which was also consuming its profits: a closed loop.
The impact of the recoinage was astonishing. In the first three years of Edward’s reign, the profits from the Mint in seigniorage and minting charges had been some £100 per year. Over the next two years, the trickle would turn into a torrent, with over £20,000 flooding into Edward’s coffers, a major boost to the king’s annual income. It seemed a win–win situation. Edward had gone some way to alleviating England’s liquidity crisis and stood to make a fortune into the bargain. But for many throughout the country, the process was difficult to comprehend and negotiate. There was something uncanny about it, the new coins difficult to ‘reckon’: as though the Tower’s assayers, in determining the metal content of the new coins, had somehow magicked value out of them.55
Nevertheless, Edward’s new coins were the expression of a prophecy fulfilled. His gold rose noble eclipsed that of his illustrious Plantagenet forebear Edward III, now withdrawn from circulation. Some months later the king introduced another gold coin, an ‘angel’. Its obverse showed the ship of state, its mast the cross of St George, flanked by suns in splendour; on the reverse was an image of the winged angel that gave the coin its name, St Michael, slaying Satan in the form of a dragon. In the Yorkist prophecies, it was St Michael who had appeared to the legendary Cadwaladr, to tell him of the great prince who would eventually defeat the kingdom’s enemies and bring peace, unity and prosperity. Now, Edward’s new gold angel proclaimed, that era had arrived.56
Towards the end of summer, as a sense of Edward’s uncontested sovereignty settled on England, a great council was convened at Reading. With widespread talk about Edward’s extended bachelorhood, it was time, people felt, that he consolidated his crushing of the Lancastrians into something more durable: dynastic stability. Marriage was an indication of kingly maturity and, at twenty-two years old, it was high time Edward made a dazzling foreign match, settled down and procreated, legitimately, for the good of his kingdom. If his advisers wanted precedents to set before him, there could be no better example than that of the mythical King Arthur, whose first action after uniting Britain through a series of bitterly fought wars was to marry the breathtakingly beautiful Guinevere. Arriving at Reading in mid-September, braced for the days of tactful persuasion that lay ahead, they were unprepared for the bombshell Edward now dropped. He was in fact already married.57
Part Two
* * *
Blind Affection
Summer 1464 – Spring 1468
‘I say only for spousal and wedlock
In the face of the church it oweth to be had
And not in dark corners behind thy back
Such blind bargains beith oft full bad …’
Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son, c. 1474
‘The king was wedded to Elizabeth Grey, widow … and the wedding was privily in a secret place.’
Warkworth’s Chronicle
‘In England, things are upside down and in the air.’
Giovanni Pietro Panigarola, Milanese ambassador to France
5
Now Take Heed What Love May Do
On Wednesday, 3 October 1464, at Reading Abbey, the veteran diplomat John, Lord Wenlock sat down to write a delicate letter. That summer, at the latest round of peace talks with France, hosted by Philip of Burgundy at his opulent castle of Hesdin, Wenlock had had the tricky task of deputizing for the earl of Warwick, away mopping up the final Lancastrian resistance in England’s northeast. Irritated by Warwick’s failure to turn up, the French king Louis XI had been further vexed when it became clear that Wenlock had no power to progress the issue on which Louis had become fixated – the marriage of his sister-in-law Bona of Savoy to Edward IV. In the circumstances, things had gone quite well. Presented to Edward’s prospective bride, Wenlock had made enthusiastic but non-committal noises before agreeing to another round of marriage negotiations early that autumn and leaving l
oaded with gifts. Now, however, Wenlock wrote to the Franco-Burgundian diplomat Jean de Lannoy that the wedding was off. Edward had already taken a wife ‘at his pleasure’.1
Nobody, Wenlock insisted, had known anything about the marriage: Edward had managed to keep it ‘very secret’, even from his closest advisers. Finally, backed into a corner over the impending negotiations with France, the king had broken the news to the great council that had gathered at Reading Abbey. Here and there, Wenlock’s carefully modulated sentences betrayed the councillors’ efforts to keep composed in front of their wilful twenty-two-year-old monarch, until they got back to the privacy of their lodgings. ‘We must be patient’, he exhaled, ‘despite ourselves.’
Although Wenlock glossed over the bride’s identity, her details were already circulating through northern Europe. In Bruges, Venetian merchants travelling from London reported what everybody was saying. Edward had married impulsively, for love. His chosen bride was no great foreign princess but an Englishwoman, the daughter of Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers and Jacquetta of St Pol, formerly brilliant ornaments of the Lancastrian court who had successfully transferred their loyalties to Edward. What was more, she was no virgin, but a widow with two children. The ‘great part of the lords and the people in general’, the merchants added, thought it was a very bad idea.2
For Elizabeth Woodville, life in recent years had been trying. Her husband, the Lancastrian knight Sir John Grey, had been killed early in 1461 at St Albans, and, with two small sons to bring up, she faced the widow’s usual problem of trying to claim her jointure while fending off other interested parties. The trouble had come in the form of her mother-in-law, who was trying to get her hands on Elizabeth’s land and goods. In property disputes like these, it was normal to petition the king and those around him to intervene. Although Elizabeth’s own parents had grown close to Edward, her mother-in-law’s Bourchier relatives – prominent among them Edward’s uncle Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex – were a Yorkist family, and more influential still with the king.3 Perhaps, her parents felt, Elizabeth stood more of a chance of getting the king’s backing if she petitioned him in person.
