The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Behind the hall, in the seclusion of the private apartments, the noblewomen and ladies dined apart, as was customary. At high table, the women of the Neville family, including Warwick’s wife and his two eligible young daughters – Isabel, just fourteen, and the nine-year-old Anne – were clustered around the thirteen-year-old boy whose educational development Edward IV had recently entrusted to his cousin Warwick. Seated with the women was the king’s youngest brother, Richard.

  Up to now, the question of what to do with Richard had, much like the issue of his appanage, been fairly low down the list of Edward’s priorities. But as he approached adolescentia, Richard was entering a new phase of his education. This was the age at which noble boys left their childhood things behind, exchanging play swords for real weapons; when they began to enact the ‘gests of battles’, the great chivalric deeds of which they had been fed a constant diet ever since they were old enough to understand. Everything about this training – from archery and hunting to fighting with swords and maces, on horseback and on foot – prepared nobles for governing and defending the society of which they were the rulers.

  Richard was a slight boy, not obviously robust. As contemporary theorists stressed, however, a noble education was about more than brute force and athleticism. It was what was in the mind that counted. To hunt deer, wrote one, to kill them and ‘see them bleed’, prepared boys for the violence of war, toughening them up and giving them ‘hardiment’ and courage; the chase, meanwhile, developed their tactical abilities and decision-making skills. It was also about a mentality, which pervaded all aspects of a noble teenager’s education, from military training to courtesy, languages and music. Through all this, through rigorous discipline, ‘temperate behaving and patience’ and books – ‘the example of the noble ancients’ – boys absorbed the lessons and rules of the chivalric tradition of which they were the inheritors. If they did so successfully, in time they too would become virtuous knights.3

  Richard wanted to be a virtuous knight as much as the next boy. A diligent pupil, he absorbed a working knowledge of Latin and law and – an indication, perhaps, of his comfort in the schoolroom – developed handwriting that was more precise than his brothers’ extravagant scrawls. Brought up on standard texts like the Roman strategist Vegetius’ De re militari, the staple military treatise of the age, Richard’s education was conventional enough; so too was his conspicuous piety. But there were hints of a passionate intensity. One book that he kept by him was a collection of chivalric romances, including the story of Ipomedon, ‘the worthiest knight in all the world’, who, undertaking a quest for fame, glory and love, is scorned by his fellow knights and rejected by his beloved before, finally, winning her. At the bottom of one page, in his careful hand, Richard signed his name and the ardent phrase ‘tant le desierée’: ‘I have wanted it so much’, a phrase that was to become his motto.4

  Giving his youngest brother into Warwick’s care was a conspicuous act of trust and favour on Edward’s part, one designed to underscore Warwick’s continued place at the heart of the regime – whatever impressions anybody might have gained to the contrary following the king’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. Warwick’s household was the perfect place for Richard to continue his education. His formal introduction to the world of the Nevilles was George Neville’s enthronement feast at Cawood that September. It perhaps struck the young Richard that it was comparable to anything he had experienced at his brother’s court.

  As Richard settled into life in Warwick’s household at Middleham Castle in the north Yorkshire dales, his perspective, his centre of gravity, began to shift. His first thirteen years had been spent largely in England’s southeast: London, Kent, the Thames valley. Now he encountered a different land with different customs, accents and dialects. Here was a watchful, battle-ready people, one whose cohesiveness was shaped by the intermittent violence in the borderlands to the north, and by the ever-present threat of Scottish invaders. It was an area hard hit by the economic slump of the last decades. Abandoned villages scattered the countryside, and while the once-prosperous port of Hull and the region’s capital of York had seen commerce decline, the trade that remained was increasingly monopolized by London and the southeast. Here, far from the hub of royal power, people looked, as they always had done, to the region’s great noble clans for lordship and the redress of grievances. The greatest of them all, dominating with viceregal authority, was now the Neville family.

  Richard made friends among the other boys who, brought up under Warwick’s supervision, were his ‘henchmen’, his companions and servants. One, Francis, Lord Lovell, had become Warwick’s ward after the death of his father. Warwick had brought the seven-year-old north from his native Oxfordshire, married him off to one of his nieces and installed him in his household. Perhaps, given the five-year age gap, Richard’s relationship to Lovell – both southern boys in an unfamiliar land – was that of a protective older brother. Here, far away from Edward and Clarence, no longer just ‘the other brother’, Richard set about forging his own ties of affinity among those who would become close, not just as servants but ‘lovers’: intimate friends. At Middleham, as Richard watched, learned, imitated and grew, he flourished.5

  Among the faces that Richard now began to encounter more frequently were the two young noblewomen who had shared his dining table at Cawood: Warwick’s daughters Isabel and Anne. Warwick was a predatory operator in the marriage market and, with no sons of his own, had exceptional ambitions for his daughters. But he had not yet found them marriages. After all, the top of the market was thinly populated with suitable candidates – hence the earl’s reported rage at the marrying-off of the duke of Buckingham to the queen’s sister Katherine Woodville. Warwick’s fury may have been whetted by the fact that, according to a story that later did the rounds, he had already made an audacious move on his daughters’ behalf – and Edward, unhesitatingly, had shut it down.

  Late in 1464, reported one chronicler, Warwick had convened a discreet meeting with the king’s brothers Clarence and Richard to broach the possibility of their marrying his two daughters. It was an ambitious gambit, one that would strengthen still further the bonds between the Neville family and the house of York. When news of the conversation reached Edward, he had exploded and, incandescent, summoned his brothers for a dressing-down.

  If they wanted to get married, he told the pair in no uncertain terms, they had to get his royal consent first. Clarence, his tongue running ahead of any sense of discretion, immediately shot back. Clearly, he pointed out acidly to his brother, marrying without anybody’s consent had worked for Edward, since he had managed ‘to gain entry to a good place’. When it dawned on him what Clarence was insinuating, Edward hit the roof. There would, Edward stated flatly, be no marrying Warwick’s daughters. And that, he assumed, was that. As king, he naturally expected even the greatest of his subjects to obey him – and that included, first and foremost, his brothers. Edward’s expectations of Clarence were especially high: ‘more than others’, he should be ‘loving, helping, assisting and obedient’. The matter, he assumed, was closed.

  Apart from this isolated case of fraternal friction, Clarence was obedient enough, and had cut a sensational figure at Elizabeth’s coronation as master of ceremonies. Whatever his sour thoughts about Edward’s marriage, he was probably less concerned about the nature of the match than its almost inevitable outcome: the royal offspring that would see him deprived of his status as heir presumptive. Clarence, moreover, had good reason to behave himself. Early in 1465, Edward had embarked on the latest stage of his plan to transform his brother into a ‘great prince’.6

  That February, Edward pushed through a parliamentary act of resumption. The closest thing to a royal spending review, this wholesale re-appropriation of royal lands and offices from those to whom they had been granted was, this time, designed to provide a living for the king’s family: his new queen and his brothers, especially Clarence. Out of this sweeping annexation, Edward granted hi
s fifteen-year-old brother a vast portfolio of estates throughout the west country and the north: ‘so large portion of possessions’, Edward later commented, as if astonished at his own generosity, that ‘no memory is’ of a king ever having given ‘so largely to any of his brothers’. It was hardly hyperbole. Worth a combined annual income of £3,666, Clarence’s settlement would, when he reached his majority, make him one of the country’s wealthiest noblemen.7

  At the same time, as if to remind him of the nature of his staggering new endowment, Edward involved Clarence in the process of resumption from which his newfound wealth derived. When the act was announced, there was the usual mad scramble by people holding royal grants to ringfence their property from appropriation. If they were lucky – or, more to the point, had friends close to the king in a position to put in a quiet word – their frantic lobbying would bear fruit in a royal proviso for exemption, recorded for posterity on the parliament roll, enabling them to keep hold of their grants. Among those employed to deliver petitioners’ provisos to Parliament on Edward’s behalf was Clarence. It was a practical education to his brother in the reality of royal favour. What the king gave, the king could always take away.8

  The same, of course, did not apply to hereditary lands – estates inherited by birth. But then Clarence, in Edward’s words, was ‘not born to have any livelihood’. The way for Clarence to acquire vast independent landed wealth was through a great marriage, but Edward was in no rush to find his brother a rich bride. Clarence’s hand was a significant card to play and the king would do so when the time was right. But if Warwick had indeed offered his older daughter’s hand, it would hardly have been surprising if Clarence, some twenty years his celebrated cousin’s junior, had found it flattering. Nor if, notwithstanding Edward’s refusal, he had continued to think about it.

  In September 1465, as the gourmandizing at Cawood continued, away in London one of Queen Elizabeth’s chamber servants left for the Low Countries. Thomas Wilde’s trip was, in diplomatic terms, unremarkable: he stayed a few weeks, met some Burgundian councillors, and returned home the following month. Wilde, however, carried with him the significant announcement that Elizabeth was pregnant with Edward’s first child. He returned to England with equally interesting news: Isabella of Bourbon, wife of the Burgundian heir Charles of Charolais, had died. Their eleven-year-long union had been good, albeit – with only one daughter, Mary, now eight years old – not especially productive. However Charles, one of Europe’s most powerful princes, was looking to marry again and, with the growing détente between England and Burgundy, the house of York was an obvious place to look for a bride. Sometime that winter, a Burgundian envoy turned up at Edward’s court with a marriage proposal – or rather, more of an enquiry, about Edward’s third sister.9

  At eighteen, Margaret of York was the oldest of Edward’s unmarried sisters and highly eligible. Brought up for a while alongside her two younger brothers on an adequate but modest allowance, she was bookish and, like her mother Cecily, ostentatiously pious in the manner of the age, her devotion accentuating a natural reserve: she rarely smiled. People found her tall, slim good looks attractive, her grey eyes alive with intelligence. After Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret was regularly in the queen’s company, her courtly education given an extra polish by Elizabeth’s strict observance of protocol. And, as Charles of Charolais had heard, she possessed the most prized quality of all, being ‘well built for producing heirs’.10

  Whether Charles was entirely sincere about marrying her was another question. With his allies in his anti-French coalition backsliding, his priority was to get Edward involved; showing interest in the English king’s sister would, Charles probably reasoned, help things along. At the same time, he was said to be seriously entertaining another marriage proposal, from none other than Louis XI, who had offered Charles the hand of his four-year-old daughter. Keeping his options open, Charles told his envoy to raise with Edward the subject of Margaret of York, but on no account to progress things. Edward, he knew, would be keen. He wanted to keep it that way.11

  A month or so before she was due to give birth, Elizabeth went into confinement, retreating into her richly furnished apartments, her gentlewomen shutting the door on the outside, male world. There, in the still candlelight of her inner chamber – natural light and fresh air were all but blotted out by the decorated arras that hung heavy over its windows – her mother Jacquetta watched as the queen’s midwives safely delivered her baby: a girl, born on February 1466, who was baptized Elizabeth.12

  It was late March when the queen, having recuperated after childbirth, emerged for her ‘churching’, the ritual of purification that marked her return to the public life of the court. Among the waiting crowds was a Bohemian nobleman, Leo von Rozmital, and his entourage. Rozmital was brother-in-law to the king of Bohemia, George of Podĕbrad. His country torn apart for decades by wars of religion, the king dreamed of a vision of a unified Christendom, based not on the supremacy of the pope and Holy Roman Emperor – and the typical aggrandizing and divisive treaties between individual states – but on a multilateral accord between all the kingdoms and principalities of Europe. This ‘bond of alliance’, founded on a common security policy, a single assembly and court, would ensure a peace and friendship between states that would ‘endure and last forever’. It was, as Podĕbrad may have admitted to himself, a far-fetched idea – but he was determined to try to achieve it. The man he dispatched to Rome on this mission, attempting to gain the support of Christendom’s major states as he went, was his brother-in-law Rozmital.13

  Having left his native Prague three months earlier, Rozmital’s eventful journey up the Rhine and through the Low Countries culminated in a petrifying crossing to England from Calais. The first abortive attempt was abandoned after the Bohemians’ ship ‘sprung a great leak’, the horses on board in water ‘up to their bellies’; the second saw them hit by raging storms. Finally, slumped on the ship ‘as if they had been dead’, the Bohemians reached the Kentish coast: ‘high mountains full of chalk’, they wondered, which ‘seem from a distance to be covered with snow’.

  Progressing through Kent, taking in the elegance of Canterbury Cathedral and the richness of Thomas Becket’s gold, gem-encrusted shrine, the saint’s hair shirt hanging above it, Rozmital and his party started to acquaint themselves with English customs, including a beverage drunk by the common people, which, one of the party noted, was called ‘Al’selpir’ (though he didn’t apparently realize that he was being offered a choice: ‘ale’ or ‘beer’). In London, the Bohemians were put up by Edward in opulent lodgings, and deftly escorted by a royal herald around the city’s most spectacular sights, its wealthy guildhalls, churches, shrines and goldsmiths’ shops, and entertained in the Cheapside headquarters of the Mercers’ Company. Noting Edward’s freshly minted currency, ‘nobles and other good coins’ changing hands, they quickly formed the conclusion that London – a ‘powerful’ city, they appraised, with its face turned outward towards the world and ‘rich in gold and silver’ – was England. Despite the continued recession and trade war with Burgundy, there were plenty in the city, it seemed, who were continuing to do very nicely indeed. The visitors’ impression was emphatically reinforced when, after a fortnight or so, they were summoned to meet the king.

  The Bohemians were awestruck by Edward’s court. Its formal splendour all seemed directed towards one thing: elevating the king above the greatest of his subjects. Even the mightiest noblemen were, like Edward’s crisply dressed household staff, required to wear the Yorkist livery collar of suns and roses and, Tetzel remarked, ‘had to kneel to him’. But what astonished them, thrown into relief by the precise ritual that framed it, was Edward’s close physical intimacy. Shaking the hands of Rozmital and his servants, he settled down to listen with ‘great friendliness’ to Rozmital’s account of his journey and mission. Some days later, he threw a dinner in honour of his Bohemian guests, a banquet involving ‘fifty dishes’, after whi
ch Edward personally hung livery badges – gold for the noblemen and knights, silver for those of lesser rank – around the necks of Rozmital and his attendants. As they basked in Edward’s hospitality, they couldn’t help noticing the ladies of various ages, ‘women and maidens’, who hovered in attendance: all ‘of outstanding beauty’.14

  Not long after, the Bohemians were summoned back to court as honoured guests at Elizabeth’s churching. They watched agog as the procession – the child’s godparents Warwick, Jacquetta of St Pol and Edward’s mother Cecily, a stream of relic-bearing priests, musicians, choristers, noblemen, knights and sixty ‘ladies and maidens’, the queen in their midst, illuminated by the candelabrum she held – emerged from Elizabeth’s apartments and wound through a succession of palace galleries to the chapel royal. Edward, now a beaming father, showed Rozmital ‘our Lady’s girdle and ring’: the girdle of the Virgin Mary, one of Westminster Abbey’s collection of relics, which Elizabeth had worn during her pregnancy to help ensure a safe birth.15

  Following the processions and celebratory mass – the singing of the chapel royal choir, remarked a cultivated German in Rozmital’s entourage named Gabriel Tetzel, was sublime – everybody sat down to dinner, the diners filling ‘four great rooms’. This time, Edward was not present. Deputizing for him, sitting alone ‘at the king’s table, on the king’s chair’, was the newborn royal princess’s godfather, the earl of Warwick, served as though he were the king himself. After dinner, Warwick escorted the sated Bohemians to a private chamber – ‘unbelievably costly’, murmured Tetzel of the interior décor – where they were ushered into a hidden alcove to watch Edward’s queen eating dinner: her first meal back in the public world of court.

  Elizabeth sat alone at a dining table, on a golden chair. As her ladies served the first course, two noblewomen – the queen’s mother Jacquetta and one of Edward’s sisters – who had been kneeling at a respectful distance as Elizabeth exchanged the odd word with them, now joined her at table. The meal, a succession of elaborate courses served over three hours, was eaten in complete silence: as the queen dined, her serving ladies waited on their knees. After dinner, musicians started playing and men were allowed into the room; couples danced carefully. At the heart of it all was the queen, still seated. The reverence paid her, Tetzel said, was astonishing. He had never seen anything like it.16