The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  On Thursday 17 December a ship from northern France, making for the Yorkshire coast, ran into strong gales in the English Channel and made unscheduled landfall at Sandwich. Among the passengers was Guillaume Monypenny, an expatriate Scot working for the French crown, whose long involvement in Anglo-French negotiations included the previous summer’s fiasco at Windsor, and who was carrying letters from Louis XI to Warwick. Travelling with him was an equally seasoned diplomat, Warwick’s secretary Robert Neville. Forced to continue their journey overland, they stopped off in London, where they met up with a number of Warwick’s councillors, including two of his closest agents: John, Lord Wenlock and Thomas Kent. Over the years, both men had absorbed Warwick’s views on England’s foreign affairs. Both, like the earl, were hostile to Edward’s Burgundian plans.40

  Wenlock and Kent were impatient for news from France. Was it true, they asked Monypenny, that Louis XI and Charles the Bold had started talking again? When the envoy affirmed that they had, Wenlock practically rubbed his hands with glee. It was, he said, ‘the best news Warwick could possibly have’. Inflamed by Edward’s recent trade treaty, Wenlock continued, anti-Burgundian sentiment was rife in the city’s taverns: it would only be fuelled by this evidence of Charles the Bold’s untrustworthiness. People were saying that the ‘traitors’ who had advised Edward to reject France in favour of Burgundy – in other words, the circle dominated by the queen’s family – needed beheading. Meanwhile, rumours circulated that Louis XI, tired of Edward’s refusal to enter meaningful talks, was instead throwing his weight behind the exiled Lancastrian regime. There was renewed talk of invasion, and people were ‘more scared than they had ever been’.

  In his dispatches back to Louis XI, however, Monypenny revealed a further change in French attitudes towards Warwick. No longer was he the man who, with a judicious whisper here and there, could drip-feed French policies into the English king’s mind. Rather, the earl was a populist, a disruptor: he would stop the Anglo-Burgundian treaty from going ahead by fuelling the widespread English discontent against it.

  Warwick, Monypenny wrote, was breathtakingly popular. People loved him. Wherever Warwick and his glittering entourage travelled through England’s regions and towns, it was ‘like God had come down from heaven’, crowds shouting chants of ‘Warwick! Warwick!’ As another chronicler remarked, his legendary hospitality kept him in ‘great favour’ with the public. Nowhere was Warwick’s open-handedness more extravagant than in his London household, where ‘six oxen were eaten at a breakfast’ and anybody who knew anybody among his servants could take away as much boiled and roast beef ‘as he might carry on a long dagger’. Warwick’s investment was shrewd. As people in London’s inns ate his food, they also talked about the affairs of the day.41

  The friction at court was spilling over into city politics. One Londoner reported how ‘many murmurous tales ran in the City’ between the earl of Warwick’s men and the ‘queen’s blood’. People walked around openly wearing the badges and colours of rival lords, the kind of provocation that led to increased tensions and fighting, forcing a concerned corporation to proclaim that if any citizen or city officer took or used ‘the livery of any lord or magnate’, he would lose his freedom and office. That Christmas, however, Wenlock, Kent and their colleagues had been ordered by Warwick to stay behind in London. Their mission was to ‘cultivate those in the city’, as Monypenny put it, who were opposed to both Edward’s policies and the close advisers who had counselled him. Not to take the heat out of the situation, in other words, but to stoke the fire.42

  Wenlock’s demeanour was that of a faithful but disappointed subject, concerned that Edward had been badly led astray by the group around him. He urged Monypenny to seek an audience with the king, to see if he might sway his mind away from Burgundy and back towards France. Four days later, riding north, Monypenny duly broke his journey at Coventry Abbey, where, in a typical French slip of the tongue, he wrote that ‘Warwick’ was spending Christmas. He meant the English king.43

  No sooner had Monypenny dismounted than he was brought to the king. Surrounded by a knot of his habitual friends, including Anthony Woodville, Hastings and Herbert, Edward asked Monypenny whether he had brought him any letters from Louis XI. No, came the answer. Yet, countered Edward, he was carrying letters for Warwick: did he know what was in them? No, replied Monypenny again, adding that he assumed they expressed Louis’ surprise at Edward’s failure to respond to French proposals for peace in the previous summer’s talks. Edward, all seriousness, replied that he fully intended to act on Warwick’s advice and send an embassy to France ‘very soon’. To demonstrate his goodwill, Edward presented Monypenny with a gift of 25 marks and invited him to stay for Christmas.44

  By February, a reconciliation of sorts had been brokered between Edward and Warwick. The earl finally agreed to attend a council meeting at Coventry, provided that the people he most loathed were absent. Persuading Rivers and Anthony Woodville to make themselves scarce, Edward laid on a lavish reception, greeting Warwick with exaggerated affection; the earl then made an awkward peace with a number of the lords with whom he was at odds, including Herbert. The man who acted as the go-between in this rapprochement, eager to work his way back into favour, was Warwick’s brother, Archbishop George Neville. Returned to the king’s good books, he was rewarded with two manors and, so it was reported, would soon regain the chancellorship.45

  Yet the troubles and disorder continued, with rioting erupting in other parts of the country. At Maidstone in Kent, a local mob stormed onto Rivers’ manor, the Mote, destroying parkland and slaughtering stocks of deer. Another uprising, in south Yorkshire, seemed more organized and more nebulous. A company of three hundred archers had assembled under a ‘captain’ – a word that carried ominous overtones of insurgency – calling himself, simply, ‘Robin’. He had sent word to Warwick saying that he, his men and much of the local population were ready to turn out on the earl’s behalf when needed.

  Still hanging around at Edward’s court, Monypenny believed that these were popular uprisings: spontaneous grassroots outbursts of frustration against Edward’s rule and, in particular, his new alliance with Burgundy. Warwick, naturally, was the perfect figurehead for such opposition. There were, Monypenny reflected in a dispatch to Louis XI, two problems with Warwick: he tended to overthink things and was, besides, ‘un peu lache’, a bit of a coward. Nevertheless, affairs were bubbling nicely. If, Monypenny felt, the marriage between Margaret of York and Charles the Bold could somehow be prevented from taking place, the subsequent crisis would destroy all those around Edward who had supported it.46

  Since the signing of the Anglo-Burgundian trade agreement, talks had moved on to the marriage treaty. The Burgundian negotiators put their price on the table: Charles wanted Margaret to come with a dowry of two hundred thousand crowns, or £41,666 – a sum not far short of the king’s regular annual expenditure. It was a huge demand from which they refused to budge. Edward caved in, but it was unclear where the money was going to come from.47 Although in recent months Edward had been raising yet more finance from the ever-obliging Medici banker Gherardo Canigiani, he had been spending it as fast as it came in.

  Canigiani had been busy. In September 1467, he had brokered a thousand-mark loan to Edward, from a long-term creditor of Edward’s and friend of the queen’s family, the London alderman and former mayor Sir Hugh Wyche. Two months later, the Florentine surpassed himself. On 28 November, at Edward’s ‘special desire and commandment’, he lent the king the massive sum of £8,468 18s 8d, paying it directly into the king’s chamber account. The problem was, as indicated by an itemized schedule of recent payments authorized by Edward, the cash was already spoken for. That year, he had paid the Calais garrison over £6,000 in backdated wages; sent Tiptoft into Ireland with a large force of men to suppress rebellion there, an expedition that cost £2,896 16s 8d; handed Warwick 2,000 marks for the expenses of his pointless French embassy; and made various smaller but still significan
t payments to ambassadors and spies.48

  A couple of months later, a lugubrious figure materialized in the Medici bank’s London offices. Since leaving his post as head of the Bruges branch almost three years previously, Agnolo Tani had watched from afar as his successor, Tommaso Portinari, had embarked on what he considered the bank’s ruinous policy of lending money to princes, making himself indispensable to Charles the Bold through a succession of large loans. As he riffled through the accounts of the London branch, the troubleshooting Tani took grim satisfaction in finding his misgivings thoroughly substantiated. Canigiani’s loans to Edward were secured against everything from wardships to customs income and licences for toll-free shipping, which was all very well, but repaid this way, the debt was going to take a very long time to recover – with potentially catastrophic consequences for the bank’s liquidity. Writing back to head office about the London branch’s affairs, Tani remarked with gloomy relish that ‘my assignment is to resurrect a corpse’.49

  Edward desperately needed to find other creditors to help him fund his Burgundian commitments. He had been hoping that bringing Warwick onside would do the trick. As Monypenny reported it, Edward had asked Warwick to provide security for a loan of a hundred thousand marks to Charles the Bold. Taking the opportunity to explain to Edward the idiocy of his foreign-policy plans, Warwick refused point-blank.

  Denying Edward credit was one way to stop the Anglo-Burgundian marriage coming to fruition. There was another line of attack. As Monypenny stressed to Louis XI, it was crucial to make sure ‘by any means possible’ that the pope did not issue the dispensation needed for the wedding to go ahead.50 It was a strategy that Monypenny had clearly discussed with the Nevilles because, even as he was working his way smoothly back into Edward’s favour, Archbishop George Neville was busy trying to entangle the dispensation in red tape. And he had an ideal tool at hand.

  In the autumn of 1467, a representative of Pope Paul II disembarked at Dover. Stefano Trenta, bishop of Lucca, had set out from Rome over a year and a half earlier. In Bruges, he had kicked his heels for months waiting for diplomatic accreditation to continue his onward journey to England. Edward was not at all keen to see him.

  While Edward was anxious to show himself a loyal son of the pope when it suited him to do so, his reluctance to let Trenta into the country was hardly surprising. Trenta’s English mission involved three tasks: to find out what had happened to the proceeds of the papal tax raised by Edward back in 1464, not a penny of which had been delivered to Rome; to drum up fresh financial support, long promised by the Yorkist regime, for the papal crusade against the Turks; and another, equally critical task. This was to persuade Edward to cede the papacy exclusive rights to sell alum, the dye-fixer crucial to the functioning of England’s cloth trade, now in the hands of the Medici bank. Edward did not want Trenta meddling in his financial affairs, especially given that the tax in question had disappeared into his own coffers. Neither did he want a papal legate going round the country making tax demands of his already hard-pressed subjects. He was also reluctant to antagonize the merchant-financiers of London and Calais – the very communities from whom he was hoping to secure the credit for his sister’s dowry – by enforcing a monopoly that would push up the price of alum.51 But the papal granting of a cardinal’s hat to Edward’s favoured candidate Thomas Bourchier demanded a quid pro quo, and Edward could hardly refuse a man so close to the pope.

  At first, Trenta met with a warm reception from the king and his advisers. However, once it dawned on them that – unlike previous, pliable, papal officials – a sprinkling of royal graciousness and the odd backhander would not persuade the unswerving envoy to go easy in his investigations, the bonhomie soon wore off.52 Soon, the legate came up against a wall of obfuscation; turning up to one meeting, he was confronted by an intimidating phalanx of royal lawyers. Warned to back off, and unable to trust anybody, Trenta shut himself away in his sumptuous accommodation in St Bartholomew-the-Less, near Smithfield, and turned down all invitations to socialize: he would, it was said, ‘never come at no feasts nor dinners with no man, with king nor lord’. Londoners felt it was a shame that his visit should have been ‘kept so privily’, not least because of Trenta’s reputation as a cultural giant. For his part, the isolated Trenta wrote back to Italy pleading to be recalled from the wasteland that was London.53 However, by early 1468, he had found a friend whose cultural and political sympathies were in tune with his own: George Neville.

  From his opulent Hertfordshire home of The More, the archbishop started a correspondence with Trenta, in which the homesick envoy took great comfort. Solicitous about Trenta’s health – plague was still rife – and sympathetic to his predicament, Neville invited him to dinner. As soon as the wary Trenta realized Neville was back in the king’s grace, he accepted – much to the astonishment of one Londoner, who was surprised to see him going out at all. Feeling he had an ally, Trenta allowed his guard to drop. In doing so he committed a rare written indiscretion, one that revealed precisely why Neville had been so keen to cultivate him.

  In a letter of 1 February, Trenta reassured Neville that he had mentioned the archbishop’s piety in his dispatches to the Curia. Neville clearly wanted it known that, in the pecking order of allegiances, his loyalty to the Most Holy Father took priority – even, so the implication went, over that of the English crown. Trenta then added that he was continuing to lobby the pope on behalf of Neville’s ‘fratre magnifico’. By ‘big brother’, Trenta meant Warwick. And although he was careful not to commit the details to paper, ‘this business’, as Trenta referred to it obliquely, concerned the two papal dispensations: one that Warwick wanted to obtain, for the marriage of his daughter Isabel to Clarence; the other, permitting the marriage of Margaret of York to Charles the Bold, that he was equally anxious to quash.54

  Grooming impressionable papal representatives was a strategy that the Neville brothers had used to stunning effect years before when, seeking international legitimacy for the Yorkist cause, they had co-opted the legate Francesco Coppini. Now, Trenta found himself caught up in the high-stakes game the Nevilles were playing against Edward, in co-operation with Louis XI, who had sent his own personal secretary to Rome to try to prevent the coveted dispensation being issued.55

  Still, Edward and Charles had both done their own intensive lobbying at the Curia, and the signs looked good.56 On 16 February, informed that the dispensation for his marriage was on its way from Rome, Charles put his signature to the marriage contract with England. Nine days later, a Burgundian envoy arrived back in Brussels with the paperwork from Rome and was instantly sent on to London. The document in question, however, was not itself a dispensation but a mandate instructing an officially designated papal executor to issue one. In England that executor was Stefano Trenta, now actively working on behalf of George Neville to make sure the paperwork never got issued.57

  At the end of March, Trenta dropped his bombshell. He informed Edward that he had found some irregularities in the dispensation and would not be approving it. It had taken him an entire month to let the king know: a month in which Edward, assuming Trenta’s approval was a formality, had publicly ratified the marriage treaty in a ceremony at Westminster, committing himself to the vast expense of his sister’s dowry, and – openly now – stating his commitment to the Anglo-Burgundian defence pact that he had signed in secret some eighteen months previously. Irate, Edward ordered the envoy in front of his council to explain himself. Trenta refused to turn up.

  Instead, in a letter dripping with offended dignity, he told Edward that there were problems with the documents. There was probably some truth in this: the process was a complex one and Trenta was a finicky man. But other considerations had informed his refusal to sign, among them his disgust at his treatment in England, now compounded by public calls for him to be stripped of his papal office for obstructing the dispensation, calls which, he said, stemmed from a ‘certain prince’ – in other words, Edward himself. Trenta, who
liked things done the Italian way, ‘secretly and quickly’, had a horror of the English habit of airing dirty linen in public. Now, he was washing his hands of the whole business. Edward could inform Charles that as far as he, Trenta, was concerned, the dispensation was dead in the water.58 The marriage treaty, on the brink of consummation, had been plunged into crisis.

  Edward and Charles still had an ace to play. There was another organization that was exceptionally keen that the marriage should go ahead, which had invested heavily in both the English and Burgundian regimes, and which had every interest in ensuring an ever-closer union in which it saw substantial financial possibilities, not least in its role as the pope’s official seller of alum, the mineral on which Anglo-Burgundian trade depended: the Medici bank.

  A week after Trenta’s revelation, Tommaso Portinari, chief of the bank’s Bruges branch, wrote to the Medici head office in Florence. News of the fiasco in England had just reached the Burgundian court and Charles, apoplectic, had no doubt where the blame lay: ‘He could not be less contented with the Pope.’59 Nonetheless, Portinari continued, a solution was at hand. All Charles had to do to obtain the dispensation was to concede on the issue dear to the pope’s heart: to agree to impose the papal alum monopoly throughout the Burgundian dominions. It would be a wildly unpopular measure. But the man perfectly placed to ensure, gently, that Charles agreed to it was his right-hand man and banker, as well as the agent responsible for the sale of papal alum in Burgundian lands – Tommaso Portinari himself.60