by Thomas Penn
The existing trade agreement between England and Burgundy was due to expire on 1 November and, as the date approached, the city corporation wrote urgently to Edward to stress how ‘behoveful’, ‘expedient’ and indeed ‘necessary’ it was for it to be renewed. Edward’s response was sluggish. On 19 October, barely two weeks before the treaty was due to expire, he ordered a group of representatives from Calais and London’s Merchant Adventurers to open negotiations. It was too little, too late.24 A week later, Philip tore up the trade treaty, banning all English cloth imports to the Low Countries. In doing so, he ripped through one of England’s main economic arteries.
In the scramble that followed, English merchants reacted with practised efficiency. In the Low Countries, the governor of the Merchant Adventurers there, a bookish, cosmopolitan mercer in his mid-forties named William Caxton, had been part of Edward’s negotiating team and had sensed what was coming. By the time the ban came into force a month later, the Bruges and Antwerp offices of the Merchant Adventurers were locked and shuttered, their stocks of cloth safely shipped out of the impounding reach of the Burgundian authorities. The merchants relocated a hundred miles northeast to Utrecht, the city outside Burgundian territory where, some three and a half years previously, Edward’s young brothers had found refuge and which, keen to attract lucrative English trade, had promised Caxton a ‘free market’ there. Notwithstanding Caxton’s decisiveness, however, the ban hit English commerce immediately and hard.
Cloth, piled high in London’s warehouses and wharves, gathered dust; empty ships remained at anchor. In the Low Countries, Philip’s officers moved through ports and towns, confiscating all the English cloth they could find. As autumn deepened into winter, the cost to London’s export trade became apparent. Cloth exports plummeted. Trade with the Low Countries, in the doldrums for much of the previous decade, all but ground to a halt.25 Now, desperate to re-establish relations with Burgundy, the city’s merchants were only too happy to throw their weight behind England’s new queen, whose family connections seemed to offer just such an opportunity.
With the city dying of the plague at the rate of two hundred a day, Edward and his new bride continued to give Londoners a wide berth, staying in the relative isolation of Reading Abbey with occasional forays up the Thames valley. In late November, skirting the capital’s southern edge, they arrived at the royal manor of Eltham in the Kent countryside.
Elizabeth was growing into her role. She carried out the visible acts of piety demanded of a queen, from almsgiving and pilgrimages to the endowment of chantries and religious institutions; and quickly proved an effective lobbyist with her husband, on behalf of both the many petitioners who beat a path to her chamber and her own relatives, who luxuriated in their new status as royal family.26 Elizabeth’s parents, and her polished brother Anthony Woodville, were ubiquitous at court. Her large wider family, however, was not. Her parents’ marriage had proved staggeringly productive; even more remarkably for the age, of their fourteen children only one had died in childhood. There was, besides, the matter of Elizabeth’s two young sons from her first marriage, the ten-year-old Thomas Grey and five-year-old Richard. With Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth, the house of York had not only changed in nature, it had ballooned. And Edward’s new in-laws had to be provided for in a manner befitting their new status.27
By this point, Edward didn’t have an awful lot of land to grant. The dower estates he now handed Elizabeth were worth strikingly less than those given to her Lancastrian predecessor, Margaret of Anjou – though Edward made a virtue out of his relative parsimony. Elizabeth’s budget, a dower yielding an annual income of £4,500, was the same sum that his glorious Plantagenet forebear Edward III had given his wife Philippa of Hainault, a well-loved queen of impeccable Burgundian lineage.28
Determined to be a model of queenly prudence – and, perhaps, to earn comparison with the illustrious Philippa in the process – Elizabeth embraced her role. She seemed to have an instinctive sense of what was needed. From the outset her household operated in an atmosphere of careful, almost self-conscious economy, the queen surrounding herself with a notably scaled-down staff and keeping a restraining hand on expenditure. Elizabeth was also attentive to ways of augmenting her income and, if there was a hint of acquisitiveness in her control, she nevertheless strove to maintain the magnificence that her royal rank demanded. Sharing her husband’s eye for fine things, she spent freely on furs and goldsmiths’ work, and allocated over a third of her budget to building a lavish wardrobe.29
Together with her parents – in particular Rivers, who seemed to keep a tight grip on his daughter’s new royal seal – Elizabeth set about doling out favour to her kinfolk. Her younger brother John Woodville became master of the horse, and her Kentish cousin James Haute was made one of her stewards; among her ladies-in-waiting was her sister Anne. Other key offices were given to her Bourchier in-laws, knitting the Woodvilles even tighter to this influential Yorkist family. But there were only so many posts that Elizabeth could give to her relations. If she were to keep a tight grip on her finances, and to sniff out revenue-increasing opportunities where they presented themselves, she also needed expertise.
Given that much of her dower came from the great estates of the duchy of Lancaster, now in royal hands, it made sense that many of her administrators were seasoned duchy officials, men who knew how such estates were run and, just as importantly, how to extract value from them. In typical Yorkist fashion, they also included men with close connections in the city of London. One man who spanned both worlds was the man appointed keeper of Elizabeth’s Great Wardrobe, William Kerver.30
As receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster, Kerver was an experienced accountant. He also had other qualities. As a mercer, he was a member of one of London’s richest livery companies, one that dominated England’s cloth trade with the Low Countries. In Kerver, as in so many of his colleagues, the worlds of royal administration and mercantile trade and finance blurred.31 Someone who paid him close attention, who indeed may well have helped find him this key post in Elizabeth’s household, was her father.
Whatever his demerits in the eyes of the nobility, Rivers’ chivalric charm seemed to go down well among city merchants. Over the years, he had built up a reliable circle of London creditors, including the prominent draper Henry Waver and, very probably, Kerver himself. Alert to the opportunities presented by his daughter’s extraordinary marriage, Rivers seemed to sense that Kerver was a very useful man to have onside.
Unusually, Elizabeth’s receiver-general, her chief financial officer, had no record of royal service. In his early thirties, John Forster was the oldest son of an influential London couple – Sir Stephen Forster had been mayor some ten years previously; his wife, Agnes, was well known for her charitable work – and had trained as a lawyer before making an exceptional marriage to Joan, daughter of the powerful London draper Thomas Cook. John’s head for business, and his in-laws’ connections, had taken him into some heady but dangerous company. When in February 1461 Margaret of Anjou’s ravening army threatened the city, Forster was on her wanted list. He had fled with his notorious grandfather-in-law, Philip Malpas, on the same ship as Edward’s future close servants William Hatteclyffe and Thomas Vaughan. After they were captured by French privateers, the men had plenty of time to get to know each other as they awaited ransom. Forster’s father-in-law Thomas Cook had found favour with the Yorkist regime: facilitating corporate loans that helped keep Edward’s regime afloat, making large private donations out of his own coffers, and becoming mayor of London in the process. Perhaps Cook had had a few discreet words with royal officials; perhaps Hatteclyffe and Vaughan also had views. Whatever the case, Forster’s appointment was a nod to the cabal of London associates who had proved such valuable creditors to Edward, another link between them and the newly remodelled Yorkist family.32
At Eltham, Edward and Elizabeth celebrated their first married Christmas. The continuing plague and Philip of Burgundy’s
trade embargo only exacerbated another harsh winter which, coming after a poor harvest, meant there was little food around: livestock which might otherwise have consumed precious grain were slaughtered for meat instead. Edward, though, let nothing get in the way of his festivities. With Elizabeth not yet crowned and still awaiting the formal assignment of her lands, Edward advanced her £466 13s 4d ‘against this feast of Christmas’ for her wardrobe, chamber and stable expenses. Amid the liturgies and processions, the feasting, revelling and games, there was talk of another marriage.33
That January, one of Queen Elizabeth’s brothers, the twenty-year-old Sir John Woodville, was betrothed to Edward’s aunt, the wealthy dowager duchess of Norfolk – a ‘slip of a girl’ at eighty years old, snorted one chronicler, it was a ‘maritagium diabolicum’. In fact, the duchess was in her mid-sixties and the disparity in age was hardly unusual. What the duchess’s expectant heirs did find diabolical was the prospect of their inheritance evaporating before their eyes: should the duchess die before her young husband, which looked likely, the chances of prising their jointure out of his grasp looked slim.34 The betrothal, too, sent out a signal. With a clutch of unmarried siblings – only her oldest brother, Anthony Woodville, was already married – as well as her own sons from her first marriage, Elizabeth and her parents were a new and aggressive presence in the marriage market.
If the Woodvilles were on the alert for rich and influential matches, the process worked both ways. After all, marrying the ‘queen’s blood’ was to marry into the royal family itself, bringing with it the chance to jump the long queue for favour and advancement either to consolidate your position within the regime or, at a stroke, to place your family at its heart. However, apart from the systematic speed with which Edward’s new in-laws worked – the first betrothal, of Elizabeth’s closest sister Margaret to the earl of Arundel’s son and heir, had taken place weeks after the revelation of Elizabeth’s own marriage – what prompted muttering in some quarters was the inevitably destabilizing effect of a large family entering the top end of the market. What was more, that family was backed by royal muscle. If Elizabeth and her parents were the driving force, the betrothals were clearly done, as one contract put it, at Edward’s ‘instance’ and ‘pleasure’.
Not long after, the Woodvilles landed one of the biggest fish of all. The Lancastrian nobleman Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, was one of England’s greatest subjects and, as far as the lucrative market in wards was concerned, a great investment. With his father already dead, Buckingham had inherited his title aged four when his grandfather was singled out and slaughtered at the battle of Northampton. Early in 1464, Edward had shelled out the substantial sum of £1,830 to acquire control of the boy, his property and marriage rights. Now, he married the nine-year-old Buckingham off to the queen’s sister Katherine, two years the boy’s junior, handing him to Elizabeth to bring up in her household. It was a match that added another layer to Edward’s new dynastic foundation. Few others could have afforded it, though one of them was the earl of Warwick, who had two daughters of his own to marry off. He was, it was rumoured, secretly furious at the news. What the young duke himself felt about his marriage went unrecorded. In any case, it was neither here nor there.35
In late January 1465, Parliament reassembled at Westminster. The atmosphere was fretful. With the Burgundian trade embargo predicted to have a drastic and far-reaching impact on the English cloth trade, with layoffs across the industry and the newly unemployed driven into ‘sin and evil living’, the Commons demanded reprisals.36 They petitioned Edward to impose a blanket ban on Burgundian imports and, into the bargain, massive fines for anybody caught trying to evade such a ban by importing under royal licence. Edward, unsurprisingly, was evasive. At that moment, a delegation headed by one of his chamber servants, Sir John Donne, had arrived in Brussels. Announcing Elizabeth’s forthcoming coronation, to be held on Sunday 26 May, Donne asked Philip of Burgundy whether her uncle Jacques of Luxembourg might attend as the state’s official representative.37 Amid these flickerings of Anglo-Burgundian détente, the last thing Edward wanted to do was antagonize Philip further; besides which, he had no intention of getting rid of the lucrative loophole that allowed him to issue import licences to anybody he saw fit. When, some two months later, he finally passed the Commons’ ban, the loophole remained; moreover, though the Commons insisted that the ban should last ‘forever’, Edward stipulated that it should endure ‘at the king’s will and pleasure’. Not only could Edward bypass the ban whenever he wanted, he could repeal it too.38
At the Burgundian court, Sir John Donne and his fellow ambassadors found a fluid, fast-changing situation. Newly reconciled with his father, Charles of Charolais was now driving forward his offensive against his bitter enemy Louis XI. If Edward could be persuaded to join Charles’s coalition of renegade French lords – who, styling themselves the Ligue du Bien Public, or League of the Common Wealth, were harnessing popular resentment in a bid to remove Louis from power – things would look very bad indeed for the French king.
Louis was rattled. Early that February, chuntering on to a Milanese ambassador about Edward’s ‘inconstancy’, he waved around a letter from Margaret of Anjou.
From their base in eastern France, Margaret and her small circle of advisers, headed by the shrewd pair of Sir John Fortescue and John Morton, maintained a flimsy network of potential European support. Despite their isolated destitution – ‘We be all in great poverty’, acknowledged Fortescue frankly39 – they persisted in reminding Louis that they were players at the table of international politics. That February day, Louis summarized Margaret’s letter for the hovering ambassador. There was a rift between Edward and Warwick – old, out-of-date news, as far as Louis was concerned – and now was an ideal time for the Lancastrians to try to regain the English throne. Would Louis help her? And if not, would he be happy for her to seek assistance from the other ‘great lords’ of France? The threat was implicit: by ‘great lords’ she meant Louis’ enemies in the coalition of nobles now being ranged against him. ‘Look how proudly she writes’, Louis said thoughtfully. Trying to work out the French king’s attitude to the Lancastrian exiles, the ambassador gave up. ‘Your lordship’, he advised his master, ‘will learn of English affairs better by way of Bruges than by this way.’40
Those affairs were progressing fast. The following month, as preparations began for Elizabeth’s coronation festivities, the new queen’s Burgundian uncle was back in London, urging Edward to join Charles’s anti-French league. Edward’s participation in the league, though, was out of the question. The Burgundian trade embargo was still in place, and in any case, England’s beleaguered taxpayers would hardly be prepared to underwrite the colossal expense of a war against France. There also remained question marks over Charles’s allegiances: he was still quietly funding prominent Lancastrians, including the new duke of Somerset, Edmund Beaufort. Jacques of Luxembourg, however, had brought Edward another invitation, evidence of Charles’s new warmth towards the house of York, at which Edward’s eyes lit up.
The invitation came from a figure even closer to Charles – his half-brother Anthoine, the ‘Bastard of Burgundy’. The product of one of Duke Philip’s countless liaisons, Anthoine wore his illegitimacy with as much flamboyance as he fought.41 Now, in the spirit of closer Anglo-Burgundian relations, he was throwing down the gauntlet to Edward – or, rather, to Edward’s new in-laws. Here was a chance for the Woodvilles to confirm their newly acquired royal status and their distinguished Burgundian heritage on a glittering international stage, through the activity they did best: jousting.
On Wednesday 17 April, Edward and Elizabeth had just finished celebrating high mass at the Thames-side manor of Sheen, west of London. The elaborate ceremonies of Holy Week, with their processions and crown-wearings, were in full swing and petitioners were out in force, trying to press requests for favour into the hands of those close to the king. As the royal procession made its way out of the chapel royal, Eliza
beth’s brother Anthony shouldered through the crowds of courtiers to speak to his sister about a business matter that he needed progressing. As he greeted her, dropping to one knee and sweeping his hat from his head, ‘as my duty was’, an extraordinary transformation took place.42
Suddenly, as if in a dream, beautiful women clustered about him. A pair of hands reached for his left thigh, tying around it a gold collar studded with pearls and with an enamel flower attached. The ladies explained to the befuddled Woodville that this ‘flower of souvenance’ or forget-me-not, one of Queen Elizabeth’s emblems, was a token: he was being set an ‘emprise’, a chivalric quest. Then the ladies – the queen’s gentlewomen – disappeared. Woodville came to and picked up the hat that had slipped from his grasp. Out of it dropped a letter, written on fine parchment and tied with gold thread, containing details of his quest. Wandering off to find the king, Woodville was admitted to his presence and, dropping to his knees, handed him the still-sealed letter, begging Edward to license him to take up the challenge contained in it, ‘for the adventure of the said flower of souvenance’. Edward snapped the gold thread, handed the letter to one of the hovering lords around him to be read out and, having listened to it, gave his assent.
This moment of carefully stylized spontaneity was Anthony Woodville’s response to the Bastard of Burgundy’s proposal for a great Anglo-Burgundian tournament. In taking up the Bastard’s challenge, Woodville proposed a great wargame, a pas d’armes, to be held in London, which would pit teams of the finest warriors in England and Burgundy against one another. Such encounters took place within a world of Arthurian make-believe, whose storylines imbued their real-life protagonists with a mythological lustre. Casting Anthony Woodville in the central role, this scenario focused international attention on the chivalric glamour of the queen’s family. Then and there John Tiptoft, in his capacity as constable of England, handed a copy of the tournament rules, already carefully drawn up, along with Elizabeth’s ‘flower of souvenance’ to a waiting officer-of-arms, Chester Herald, who was wearing Anthony Woodville’s coat of arms.43
