The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  On 5 May 1468, barely a month after Portinari’s letter, the ink was drying on a twelve-year agreement between Charles the Bold and the papacy. The agreement, which made illegal the importing of alum from non-papal sources, appointed Tommaso Portinari the sole authorized importer and vendor of alum into the Low Countries on behalf of the Bruges branch of the Medici bank.61 Edward, though, had stood firm against the imposition of a similar agreement in England. Given that the bulk of his sister’s dowry due to Charles would probably have to come from English merchants, a community whose dwindling goodwill would be eroded by the imposition of an alum monopoly, this was hardly surprising. Moreover, whereas Portinari and the papal legate to Burgundy had proved a persuasive team, their counterparts in England were not so minded. Canigiani, as English as he was Italian, was inclined to see things Edward’s way; Edward and Trenta, meanwhile, were barely on speaking terms. The pope shrugged his shoulders: Charles’s agreement would do for now.

  Edward had already been given fulsome guarantees by Burgundian diplomats that everything was going to work out. On 11 April, he actioned the first payment of his sister’s dowry, a bond of £10,000, with a promise to pay the remainder in three annual instalments. The money, naturally, would be deposited with Portinari.62

  Following closely after were invitations – or rather orders – to the retinue that would accompany Margaret of York to Flanders for her wedding festivities. In the third week of April, Sir John Paston received his, its wax seal impressed with the king’s signet: Paston was told to attend on Margaret ‘every excuse or delay laid apart’, in order to do ‘jousts and pleasure’ at the glittering ducal court in Bruges.63 It was almost exactly twelve months since Paston had bet his friend Thomas Lomnour that the wedding would not go ahead within two years. Now, though Paston had lost, he was undoubtedly delighted to have done so: after all, he had been handed a courtier’s dream opportunity to put himself about in the most glamorous of settings.

  For Edward there was one large stumbling block still to negotiate. Despite having committed to pay his sister’s dowry, he hadn’t yet got the money together. Which was where Parliament came in.

  Due to convene on 5 May, Parliament was informed by its new chancellor, Robert Stillington, bishop of Bath and Wells – a man heavily involved in Edward’s Burgundian negotiations – that the session would be postponed while the king awaited news from ‘certain other people’. Two weeks later, on Friday 17 May, that news finally arrived. Fresh from negotiating the alum treaty, the Burgundian agent Ferry de Clugny had arrived in England with confirmation that paperwork for the dispensation was now all present and correct. That morning, the recalcitrant Stefano Trenta was summoned to Westminster Palace, where he set his seal on the dispensation for Margaret of York’s marriage to Charles the Bold. No sooner had he done so than, away in another part of the palace, Edward’s new chancellor rose to address the assembled Lords and Commons about why it was that the king so earnestly desired money from them.64

  Part Three

  * * *

  A Season of Punishment

  Spring 1468 – Summer 1471

  ‘I will advise you in especial

  To have good guiding and inspection

  To every trouble in this nation

  For though by a little it beginneth

  It may destroy us all before it endeth.’

  George Ashby, Active Policy of a Prince

  ‘Edward, late earl of March, usurper, oppressor, destroyer.’

  Proclamation by Warwick and Clarence, 1470

  ‘He that is not against me is with me.’

  The Arrivall of Edward IV, 1471

  8

  Robin Mend-All

  A biddable diplomat and civil servant, Robert Stillington had risen high during his two decades in royal service. He had made himself a fortune into the bargain, accumulating a portfolio of wealthy ecclesiastical livings and acquiring a notorious reputation for neglecting his flock. During his quarter-century-long tenure of the bishopric of Bath and Wells, he would appear in his see precisely once – but then, pluralism and absenteeism were necessary evils when serving the crown. As the keeper of the privy seal his legal expertise, experience and unquestioning usefulness had caught Edward’s eye. Now, in his new role as chancellor, Stillington opened Parliament with the customary sermon to the lords and commons: the perfect opportunity to impress his enthroned, onlooking king.1

  In a sweeping survey of Edward’s achievements, Stillington expatiated on his king’s tireless work in imposing the rule of law, restoring peace and order to a ravaged England, and on his exhaustive efforts – paid for out of his own coffers – to secure a succession of treaties and trading agreements with former enemies, now friendly neighbours with whom England could do business. Foremost among them, of course, were Charles the Bold, now about to marry Edward’s sister Margaret, and Duke Francis of Brittany, the ‘mightiest princes who hold their land under the crown of France’. Which brought Stillington to his point.

  These alliances were part of a grand plan: to recover the French crown that rightfully belonged to the kings of England. Now, with Edward’s allies urging him to invade Louis XI’s lands and promising military co-operation, England’s ‘old and ancient enemy’ was ripe for the plucking. Such opportunities were rare and had to be seized when they arose – and besides, domestic peace could be best achieved through foreign war. All of which, as many present were aware, was an argument straight from the playbook of Henry V.2 But, concluded Stillington, Parliament need not just take his word for it. The king would tell them himself.

  Stirring himself, Edward expanded on the recent events that had led to his diplomatic crowning glory, the forthcoming Anglo-Burgundian marriage, which was the final piece in the jigsaw of anti-French alliances that he had been constructing. Then, after setting out his plans for war, he let Stillington pose the inevitable request for Parliament’s loyal backing, in the form of a tax.3

  Almost exactly a year before, Edward had assured the Commons he would not ask them for money except for ‘great and urgent causes’. War with France was one of those causes, and the king’s belligerence was infectious: Parliament duly voted him the funds. The snag was that the tax was already spoken for.

  Just over a week before Parliament opened, the Medici trouble-shooter Agnolo Tani, who had been so appalled by the state of the London branch’s balance sheet, had written to head office in Florence with an unaccustomed lightness. In a private audience with Edward, he had received the king’s personal guarantee that between ‘£3,000 to £4,000’ of the forthcoming tax would be allocated to servicing the Medici debt.4

  Yet the Medici bank was only one creditor in a complex web of loans that Edward had put in place to fund his sister’s dowry, the first £10,000 instalment of which had to be paid before the wedding could proceed. Although Edward had already instructed a bond for the amount to be issued to Tommaso Portinari – the Medici, inevitably, were handling the transaction – he had struggled to raise the required finance, even the most reliable of his creditors by now being reluctant to lend.

  The security provided by a parliamentary tax, however, made an instant difference. On 28 May, the Calais Staplers agreed to pay the first instalment of the dowry. Their loan was secured by bonds from sixty-two London merchants, themselves secured against the tax that Parliament had voted for Edward’s war against France.5 It was precisely the situation that Edward, the previous year, had given Parliament his solemn promise to avoid.

  Edward had another burning issue to tackle. As a worried Commons repeatedly stressed, the kingdom was hardly in the state of tranquillity that Stillington had depicted. They demanded that the king do something about it.6

  Edward made a conspicuous attempt to do so. He passed a new act against retaining – the private recruitment of men that, in times of tension or emergency, could see a nobleman’s retinue swell alarmingly into a private army. Given that retaining was also the glue that held society together, allowing noblemen to ex
tend their influence over the country and to mobilize troops on the king’s behalf, the legislation, packed with loopholes, proved just as slippery as previous attempts to control lords’ distribution of their badges and liveries. Neither, it seemed, did anybody take much notice. One eyewitness later recalled how he had seen the lords, gathered in Westminster Palace’s Star Chamber, swear to obey the act they had just drawn up on the king’s command. Less than an hour later, ‘while they were still in the Star Chamber’, he saw the same lords ‘making retainers by oath’ and generally breaking all the promises that they had just sworn to keep.7

  Edward, it seemed, remained unswerving in his personal conviction that he could deliver both internal peace and a major military campaign against France. Parliament, for now, believed him. But that spring, there were palpable indications that the king was not in control of either process.

  Dominated by its castle and rising above the tidal marshes of the Thames estuary, the Kentish port of Queenborough doubled as a bulwark of southeast England’s coastal defence and, as one of two ‘staple’ ports in Kent authorized to handle the country’s wool exports, a busy mercantile centre. That June, as the town returned to normal after the processions and feasting of Whit week, royal officials monitoring the incoming marine traffic from northern France, the Netherlands and beyond, stopped and searched a man coming into the country.8 Identified only as ‘Cornelius’, a shoemaker, his unremarkable appearance was designed to evade suspicion, but the letters he was found to be carrying incriminated him. Cornelius was no shoemaker but the servant of Sir Robert Whittingham, a London draper and one of Margaret of Anjou’s advisers-in-exile. He had travelled to England from Margaret’s small court at Koeur to assess loyalties and raise funds for the Lancastrian cause.9

  That spring Margaret’s chancellor Sir John Fortescue, who had persistently lobbied the French king over the past years with scant results, sensed a new opportunity. Louis XI had tried everything to wreck the impending alliance between England and Burgundy: lobbying the pope, spreading lurid and baseless rumours about Margaret of York’s promiscuity, cultivating Warwick. Nothing had worked. Angry and alarmed at the bellicose noises coming from Edward IV’s government, he had shut down the Medici branch at Lyons in retaliation for the bank’s facilitating of the Anglo-Burgundian marriage. And, clutching at straws, he began to pay attention to the Lancastrian agents who for years had hovered, ignored, on the margins of his court. Foremost among them was Fortescue, who told Louis that he knew a way to restore Henry VI to the English throne easily, cheaply and without the need for expensive military intervention, thereby solving Louis’ Anglo-Burgundian headache at a stroke. Fortescue’s was the alluring promise of exiled regimes throughout history: a plan for regime change that, in exchange for a modest investment, would bring the potential backer exceptional returns, including, in this case, ‘perpetual peace’ and the promise of a lucrative commercial alliance between England and France.10 There were other ‘more secret matters’ that Fortescue would be happy to discuss in person with Louis or his representatives. The approach coincided with a marked increase in clandestine Lancastrian activity.

  Edward’s counter-intelligence operation, led robustly by Rivers and the royal household’s treasurer John Fogge, went swiftly into action. Brought into the Tower of London, Cornelius was joined there by an Oxfordshire lawyer named Thomas Danvers, an addressee of one of his letters and a man with strong Lancastrian connections. Edward was concerned enough to interrogate Cornelius personally as he was tortured, the soles of his feet burned with hot irons.11 One of the names Cornelius revealed was that of John Hawkins, a servant of Warwick’s associate John, Lord Wenlock, who proved a fruitful line of enquiry. Racked exhaustively by Rivers and Fogge, Hawkins ‘showed unto them many things’, the pain so intense that he accused himself of treason to make it stop. From this forced testimony, Edward’s officials constructed a disquieting map of subversion. Among the people that Hawkins incriminated were his boss Wenlock and a handful of prominent Londoners. One of the names he mentioned came as a bombshell to the inquisitors.

  One of London’s richest, most powerful citizens, the draper Sir Thomas Cook had been instrumental in marshalling the corporate loans that kept Edward on the throne, as well as being a major creditor in his own right: back in 1465 a grateful king had knighted him just before Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation. Since then, Cook’s dormant Lancastrian affiliations had been revived. Back in October 1466, he had been discreetly approached for funds by a Lancastrian agent. As Cook later told it, the approach simply involved an exploratory conversation over the possibility of a reconciliation between York and Lancaster: indeed, he had sought guarantees from the agent that there were no plans to dethrone Edward. Cook, however, had failed to report the conversation to the proper authorities. And that, in the view of Edward and his advisers, was treason.12

  Cook was arrested and bailed. His release was down to the personal intervention of Edward’s sister Margaret, who valued Cook’s role as one of the sureties guaranteeing payment of her dowry. With the finance in place, the long-coveted marriage finally in view and Margaret’s departure for Bruges imminent, Edward didn’t want any more hold-ups. On 18 June, the chastened Cook was among the gaggle of city dignitaries that saw Margaret off on the first stage of her journey to the Low Countries, presenting her with a marriage gift of two fine silver-gilt bowls. In a gesture of familial rapprochement, Warwick had even deigned to turn up, Margaret riding pillion behind him through London. Five days later, Margaret and her glittering entourage, waved off by Warwick and her brothers Clarence and Richard, set sail from Margate for Sluis. With his sister safely on her way, Edward promptly re-arrested Cook. This time he was imprisoned, pending trial.13

  Escorted by fourteen heavily armed ships – rumour had it that a desperate Louis XI would make a last-ditch attempt to scupper the marriage – Margaret’s crossing was uneventful. Disembarking at Sluis, she was immediately plunged into the first stage of a ceremony of staggering scale and opulence. Charles the Bold was determined that his wedding, for which he had made Edward pay through the nose, would reflect his own stratospheric ambitions.

  One chronicler in Margaret’s wedding party scribbled down everything he saw: the procession, late in the warm midsummer evening, through Sluis’ torchlit streets, and the mimed pageants, enacted opposite Margaret’s lodgings, depicting her auspicious destiny as duchess of Burgundy. At a reception the following day, Margaret was presented to her new family, Isabella of Portugal peering into her prospective daughter-in-law’s face, scrutinizing – ‘avising’ – it, as if committing her features to memory. When Charles met his bride-to-be, the chronicler likened the moment to when the heroic warrior Troilus first spotted Criseyde, pole-axed by love. Amid the welter of gift-givings and speeches was a florid oration by Elizabeth Woodville’s secretary, John Gunthorpe. A master of the new style of Latin sweeping the courts and chancelleries of northern Europe, Gunthorpe deployed his full range of rhetorical tricks and recondite classical allusions. Not everyone was impressed by this revolution in eloquence: it was, grumbled one Flemish listener, windy and incomprehensible.14

  Amid the meticulously planned splendour were some hasty last-minute recalibrations. The day before the wedding, Charles got round to giving notice to the small group of Lancastrian exiles whom he had been supporting financially over the past years. Given a sweetener of eight hundred livres to make himself scarce, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, left Bruges to rejoin Margaret at Koeur. Other Lancastrian sympathizers stayed in the city, going to ground. Whatever his newfound commitment to the house of York, Charles hadn’t so much abandoned his Lancastrian loyalties as brushed them under the carpet.15

  Early on the morning of Sunday 3 July, following a private wedding ceremony, Charles and Margaret set out on the short journey from Damme to Bruges. Dressed in white cloth-of-gold and wearing a crown adorned with the initials C and M and Yorkist suns and roses worked in precious stones, the new duchess of Burgundy
was carried along on a richly dressed litter, surrounded by a phalanx of forty archers, their specially commissioned coats glittering with precious stones supplied by Charles’s own jeweller Gerard Loyet, and accompanied by a ‘noise of trumpets’, English and Dutch musicians shoulder to shoulder.16

  Bruges itself had been transformed into a land of chivalric fantasy. As the wedding party moved slowly through streets lined in Burgundian black-and-crimson, clouds of roses and sweet herbs drifted down among the procession. Children leaned from windows showering the duchess with marguerites as she passed; flocks of pigeons were released from turrets. On street corners and in marketplaces, actors brought to life biblical and historical scenes depicting themes of Anglo-Burgundian unity. Entering the Prinzenhof, the ducal palace, guests were greeted by ingenious fountains of wine – red Burgundy, white Rhenish and sweet spiced hippocras – fired in a constant flow from the arrowheads of sculpted archers, before proceeding into a great dining hall built for the occasion: a hundred and forty feet long by seventy wide, all turrets, glass windows and gilded surfaces, its interior lined by the greatest collection of tapestries in Europe, silver and gold thread shimmering in the candlelight. The wedding supper was brought in a succession of thirty ships. Between courses, as the guests digested, a series of entremets – pageants – told the story of Hercules’ labours. At one point, blaring trumpets announced the arrival of a tower, forty-one feet high, topped with a leopard clutching the banner of England and a marguerite. From it emerged a stream of performers dressed as animals: seven gambolling monkeys kept in line by a tambourine- and flute-wielding master; four donkeys singing, the delicate strands of polyphony weaving together; a dwarf duetting with the lion on which he rode.17