The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Over the following days, the games continued under Edward’s watchful gaze. The king went out of his way to favour his guests: at one point, he pulled up one English jouster on a technicality, only allowing him to continue on the Bastard’s say-so.19 Meanwhile, the talks continued – and, as Thomas Howard, son and heir of Edward’s bruising courtier and friend Sir John Howard, later put it, they were all about the marriage between ‘Charles and Lady Margaret’.20 Yet no amount of wining, dining and spectacular feats of arms could shift one major obstacle. While happy enough to sanction the jousts, Charles’s father, Philip of Burgundy, had grown irascible, stubborn and withdrawn. He remained adamantly opposed to the match.

  Then, on Friday 19 June, everything changed. A messenger arrived from Bruges with the news that four days earlier, at nine in the evening, Philip had died: 1,600 torchbearers had escorted the seventy-year-old’s body through the Bruges streets to the Church of St Donatian, where he was buried in regal style. Charles was the new duke of Burgundy. Now, unimpeded by his father’s peevish caution, he could do what he liked – which included marrying Edward’s sister. As he expressed his solemn regrets to the Burgundians, Edward worked hard to conceal his delight.21

  Charles had an expansionist vision far outstripping that of his temporizing father: his vicious, mulish ambition would earn him the soubriquet ‘the Bold’, or, depending on your point of view, ‘the Rash’. He saw himself as ruler of a sovereign Burgundy, free of French overlordship, whose lands extended far beyond its present frontiers. The most immediate obstacle to this great project was the man who Charles detested most in all the world, Louis XI. And while Charles remained lukewarm about the Yorkist regime in England, he knew that unless he came to an agreement with Edward, Louis would get there first – with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Burgundian state. As Charles put it, he wouldn’t have entered into an alliance with Edward ‘if Louis hadn’t already tried to do so’ and made such ‘great offers and promises’ to try and destroy him.22

  On 24 June, as the Bastard and his entourage made their farewells, Warwick docked at the Kentish port of Sandwich. His reception by Louis had been lavish – indeed, he had been greeted as though he was Edward IV himself – and he returned to England weighed down with costly gifts and accompanied by a high-ranking French delegation to continue the progress that had been made in France. Besides the Anglo-French marriage, Louis XI had proposed a wide-ranging trade deal, including franchises for English merchants in France; he had even dangled the tempting prospect of further talks over the cession to England of the dukedoms of Normandy and Aquitaine, lost so catastrophically by the Lancastrian regime back in the early 1450s. With an eye on Edward’s perpetual need for ready cash, Louis also offered to pay him an annual pension of 4,000 marks. The day after the English had left, Louis, convinced that the treaty was as good as signed, had gone public with it, sending details in a letter to all the lords and cities of his kingdom.23 Returning with the French delegation, Warwick also seemed to think Edward’s approval a formality.

  From the moment Warwick landed back in England, however, things didn’t feel quite right. As the French envoys kicked their heels in Sandwich, awaiting the royal safe-conducts that would allow them onward travel, Warwick learned what had gone on in his absence, from the Burgundian talks to his brother’s sacking as chancellor and Edward’s resumption of some of his lands. When the French finally rode into a baking London on 1 July, they found Parliament prorogued; with an outbreak of plague sweeping the city, everybody who could do so was scrambling to leave.24 In the circumstances it was unsurprising, though tactless, that Edward put them up in the same London lodgings just vacated by his Burgundian guests. When the French ambassadors caught up with Edward at Westminster, the royal household frantically packing up around him, the king greeted them with distracted geniality. He was off to Windsor to hunt. The ambassadors could, he said, catch up with him there.

  At Windsor, the Anglo-French negotiations were conducted with leisurely affability by Hastings and Anthony Woodville, neither of whom – closely briefed by Edward – had any interest in reaching an agreement. Some weeks later the disgruntled French ambassadors finally departed with nothing except vague promises. A few pointed details suggested that the English, in fact, were laughing up their sleeves: the ‘fine Burgundy wine’ they had been served throughout their stay, and, along with the presents of cash and plate given them at their parting, more unusual gifts – ‘great mastiffs, collars, leashes and horns’, suggesting that Edward was wishing them better hunting elsewhere.

  It was an outcome that eluded even Warwick’s powers of spin. During their six weeks in England, the French ambassadors had been comprehensively disabused of the notion – built up over the years by Warwick and his agents – that ‘everybody trembled before him’. His carefully cultivated image of powerbroker had been shattered. Indeed, although Edward treated the earl with the scrupulous courtesy that befitted his high rank, he didn’t seem to have much influence on the king at all.

  Warwick followed developments without a twitch of public emotion. But, after seeing the French off at Sandwich, he didn’t return to court. Instead, he went north to Middleham Castle, to sulk.25 Edward didn’t seem particularly bothered. In fact, he seemed to gain satisfaction from the Nevilles’ sidelining.

  Later that summer, a papal messenger arrived from Rome with letters appointing Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury, to the rank of cardinal. It was a fitting reward for this most useful of Yorkist servants, a devout son of the church who was nevertheless happy to order rounds of papal taxes in the knowledge that they would disappear into Edward’s coffers, and whose allegiance, when push came to shove, lay with his nephew the king of England over a distant pope in Rome. When Edward received the letters, he forwarded a copy to the unsuccessful candidate for a cardinal’s hat, his former chancellor George Neville. This, his gesture seemed to say, was what the reward for unquestioning loyalty looked like. Or maybe it was just a cruel joke on Edward’s part. If so, Neville could hardly have found it very funny.26

  That autumn, as Warwick fumed on his Yorkshire estates, the Anglo-Burgundian negotiations were pushed forward with a new urgency. Away in Rome, Burgundian ambassadors informed the pope of the putative marriage between Charles the Bold and Edward’s sister Margaret, anxious to obtain both his holiness’s blessing and the required papal dispensation. On 1 October 1467, as a high-powered delegation travelled to Flanders for talks on a perpetual peace between England and Burgundy, Edward and a great council convened at Kingston-upon-Thames, to listen to Edward’s sister Margaret give her token consent to marry Charles the Bold.

  At the heavily renovated Coudenberg Palace in Brussels, the two negotiating teams settled down to discuss the terms of the marriage. Heading the Burgundian side was Charles the Bold’s seventy-year-old mother, Isabella, who, after years of estrangement from the old duke, was overjoyed to be back at court helping realize her son’s aims – which, in this case, were also hers. Despite her Lancastrian blood, Isabella felt warmly towards her Yorkist cousin, Edward’s mother Cecily, and had been toying with the idea of Charles marrying a Yorkist princess for well over a decade.27 Whatever her inclinations, Isabella was a tough, experienced negotiator of trade agreements; her team was equally hard-headed. The Burgundians refused to move on to discussions over the marriage until a comprehensive trade settlement had been worked out. When, on 24 November, a new thirty-year free trade agreement between the two countries was unveiled in a formal signing ceremony, it was clear which side had been more desperate to get past the first phase.28

  Edward had been only too willing to make concessions. Even before the English team had arrived in Brussels, he had given Charles permission to recruit a force of two thousand English archers to help suppress an uprising in the city of Liège; more significantly, he had signed a warrant lifting the embargoes on Burgundian imports into England, repealing the protectionist legislation passed in the parliaments of 1463 and 1464.
The Burgundians had appeared to reciprocate, but in fact they had proved stubborn, refusing to repeal the ban on the one commodity whose export to Flanders was so vital to the English economy: cloth. So anxious was Edward to bring about the Burgundian marriage that he had signed up to a vastly imbalanced treaty. England’s mercantile community was desperate to resuscitate the cloth export trade, and the deal would take some explaining. More widely, it was hardly likely to go down well among a population historically antagonistic towards ‘Flemings’ and ‘Dutchmen’. For the earl of Warwick, who had never liked the idea of an alliance with Burgundy in the first place, it was a red rag to a bull.29

  Since his diplomatic humiliation that summer, Warwick had remained in the north. As he saw it, the king’s Woodville in-laws, having taken his place at the king’s side, had stitched him up. Now, they were steering Edward towards a highly damaging agreement with Burgundy. It was an agreement that, Warwick felt, had to be stopped at all costs – and he was prepared to work with the French king to stymie it. By ignoring the earl’s advice, prey instead to the blandishments of Rivers and his associates, Edward had shown himself to be a gullible fool. Or, as Warwick put it shortly to the French agents with whom he was in close contact, he was ‘un peu simple’: a bit thick.30

  That autumn, Warwick was said to be building up his armed forces. In itself, this was hardly news: after all, Warwick’s retinues were crucial to the security of the north of England. But with no ostensible threat either from Lancastrian rebels or from Scotland, as had been the case earlier in the decade, this renewed drive to take ‘in fee, as many knights, squires and gentlemen as he might’ inevitably invited speculation.31 So too did reports that the earl was trying to push forward another project: the marriage between his oldest daughter Isabel and the duke of Clarence.

  When, years before, Warwick had first suggested the match, Edward had categorically forbidden it. Such a marriage would have united his brother, his heir presumptive, to the Nevilles – who, Edward probably reasoned at the time, hardly needed any further enhancement to their pre-eminence. Since then, the king’s relationship with the Nevilles had sustained more than a few dents, which only reinforced Edward’s opposition to the marriage. Warwick, though, was still keen. So too was Clarence.

  Clarence’s enthusiasm was understandable. Isabel Neville was one of the country’s great heiresses, bringing with her a vast inheritance: hereditary lands that Clarence, as her husband, could enjoy and pass on to his descendants in perpetuity, safe in the knowledge that – unlike the substantial but more precarious portfolio with which Edward had endowed him – they could not be taken away.

  If, in Warwick’s eyes, Edward was now proving a bar to Neville ambitions, the king’s seventeen-year-old brother looked an altogether more promising project. For Clarence wasn’t entirely happy. Huge as it was, the annual income allocated him by Edward was soon spoken for. Apart from embarking on an expensive programme of building works across his estates, Clarence had local loyalties to attract – which didn’t come cheap – and a magnificent household to maintain, and he soon found himself needing more. There was no guarantee that more would be forthcoming: indeed Edward, with his parliamentary commitment to ‘live upon his own’, had more or less indicated that that would be that as far as royal grants were concerned. And with other members of the king’s inner circle eagerly sniffing out possible opportunities to extend their wealth and power, nor were Clarence’s existing grants especially secure.32

  Throwing a mentoring arm around his young cousin, Warwick played on Clarence’s anxieties: after all, the earl’s own experiences that summer – and those of his brother, the sacked chancellor George Neville – showed that nobody, however close to the king, was immune to the whims of Edward’s favour. The best way for Clarence to increase his income and future-proof his status, Warwick advised, was to marry his daughter Isabel. Dazzled by the attentions of his powerful relative, Clarence quickly convinced himself that it was Warwick, not Edward – who had failed to let him marry who he wanted – who had his best interests at heart. With Clarence and Isabel related within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, Warwick and George Neville set about trying to procure a papal dispensation for the marriage, dispatching a ‘Rome-runner’, a Master Lacy, who boasted good connections at the Curia.33 And as autumn wore on, the uncertainties that Warwick had planted in Clarence’s mind seemed to assume concrete form.

  In north Wales, William Herbert was tackling a renewed outbreak of insurgency, focused on the fortress of Harlech. Despite everything, this formidable castle had remained in Lancastrian hands, its isolated garrison holding out with grim determination. Herbert’s men had formed a ring of steel around it, watching for anything or anybody that came or went. That October, they had detained two Lancastrian agents carrying letters from Margaret of Anjou’s exiled court to the castle’s defenders. Herbert interrogated the men with his usual robustness, then sent them under heavy guard to Edward in London, together with a charge-sheet. Among the ‘many things’ that the men had confessed, Herbert told Edward, one detail was especially significant: while in France, they had heard ‘suspicious talk’ about Warwick transferring his loyalties from Edward to Margaret of Anjou.

  The allegations seemed fairly run-of-the-mill. Margaret of Anjou had been unsuccessfully trying to prise Edward and Warwick apart for years. Nonetheless Edward – perhaps seeing the chance for clear-the-air talks with his disgruntled subject – invited Warwick to come and see him, to clear his name, offering to guarantee his security. Warwick refused. In a demonstration of his continued trust in the earl, Edward sent the accused men north to Middleham under armed guard so that Warwick could interview them himself. Warwick angrily dismissed the whole episode as ‘frivolous’.34 It had, though, confirmed to Warwick what he already knew: that his former retainer Herbert, who in recent years had made inroads into Warwick’s Welsh territories, played a key role in sacking George Neville from the chancellorship and was now married into the queen’s family, was, in conjunction with his Woodville in-laws, looking for every opportunity to alienate Warwick in the king’s eyes.

  If Warwick was now deeply suspicious of Herbert, so too was Clarence. Back in 1462, Edward had granted Clarence the earldom of Richmond and its valuable north Yorkshire estates, which abutted Warwick’s lordship of Middleham.35 The Lancastrian boy from whom Edward had confiscated the title and lands – Henry Tudor – had spent the last six years in Herbert’s possession, growing up quietly in his luxurious Monmouthshire castle of Raglan. Sometime in 1467 Tudor, then ten years old, was joined there by another ward Herbert had recently acquired and who, at nineteen, was on the brink of his majority: Henry Percy, Lancastrian heir to the earldom of Northumberland.36 In 1460, after his father had been killed at Northampton, Edward had given the young Percy into the dubious care of John Tiptoft, and had set about breaking up the family’s vast estates. Some lands had gone to Clarence; others, along with the title of earl of Northumberland, to the Percy family’s great rival, Warwick’s brother John Neville. But Herbert had bought Percy’s wardship for a reason, just as he had bought Tudor’s. He planned to marry the two great young noblemen off to his own daughters.

  Ultimately, Herbert presumably hoped to convince Edward to return to Tudor and Percy their hereditary titles – which in turn would trigger an almighty struggle for the return of their confiscated, redistributed patrimony. Given Herbert’s close proximity to Edward, this scenario was hardly out of the question. It was one that threatened not only Warwick and his brother John Neville, but Clarence, who – if Herbert’s bid were successful – stood to relinquish around a quarter of his grants. If Clarence, in particular, needed any reminding of how unstable was the ground on which his wealth and power rested, here it was.37

  Meanwhile, the alarming increase in violent crime, which had so preoccupied the Commons in Parliament earlier in the year, was getting worse. Nowhere was the deterioration more marked than across the north midlands, where, Edward had been informed, �
��great riots and oppressions’ were constant.

  Early in December 1467, a long-standing feud between two prominent Derbyshire families, the Vernons and Greys, ignited when a gang of sixteen men, servants of Lord Grey, waylaid and killed Roger Vernon, younger brother of Henry Vernon, the family’s chief: a ‘horrible murder’, as one chronicler put it. As both sides looked to their powerful backers for protection, the killing’s resonances rippled through the dense webs of affinity to deep within the royal household. As one chronicler pithily put it: ‘Those around the king favoured Grey’, while Clarence and Warwick – by implication not around the king – ‘favoured Vernon’. It was the kind of situation that set people’s political antennae twitching: a little local trouble threatened to become a fracture at the heart of the regime.38

  Alive to the danger Edward, with a handpicked bodyguard of two hundred men for extra security, was soon in the midlands. Basing himself in Coventry Abbey, he ordered judicial commissions to be held across the region, probing the disturbances and punishing offenders. The names of Warwick and Clarence were listed among the commissioners, followed by those of Rivers, Anthony Woodville, Hastings, Warwick’s nephew John, Lord Audeley – who, newly married into the queen’s family, had been among the nobles complicit in the stripping of George Neville’s chancellorship earlier in the year – and another man whom Warwick had come to dislike intensely, the king’s household treasurer John Fogge.39 But if Edward believed that, somehow, his bickering nobles would unite to investigate troubles that they had effectively endorsed and which reflected their own growing antagonism, it was wishful thinking.