by Thomas Penn
In the days that followed, the tournament that unfolded in Bruges marketplace was an epic spectacle that came complete with its own chivalric storylines, the combatants enacting a variety of quests. This, the pas d’armes, was fighting as drama, myth and legend made reality – though it didn’t stop people and horses getting hurt. The fighting culminated in a tournoi: a mounted battle between the two twenty-six-strong teams on horseback. Sir John Woodville, one of Elizabeth’s brothers, was proclaimed the winner. After their near-disastrous encounter at Smithfield the previous year, Anthony Woodville and the Bastard of Burgundy were kept well apart.
Amid all the feasting and junketing, the younger John Paston had taken time to write to his mother in Caister. Never, he wrote, did Englishmen have such a good time ‘out of England’. Anything you wished for simply appeared, while the pageants were ‘the best that ever I saw’; the fun-loving, courteous Burgundians were ‘the goodliest fellowship I ever came among’. As for Charles the Bold’s court, the only thing he could possibly compare it with was the fabled court of King Arthur. Nonetheless, the English wedding party, Paston wrote, was due to leave sooner than expected. Threatened by the new Anglo-Burgundian treaty, Louis XI had decided that attack was the best form of defence. French armies were on the move, marching fast towards Flanders, and Charles was scrambling to mobilize against them.18
Back in England, trouble was also brewing. In early July, as Paston and his friends caroused in Bruges, news reached Edward that the perennial Lancastrian troublemaker Jasper Tudor, sailing from the French port of Harfleur – Louis XI had, after all, proved receptive to Sir John Fortescue’s suggestions – had landed in mid-Wales with a small band of armed men and was heading northeast to relieve the Lancastrian defenders at Harlech. Immediately Edward sent William Herbert, his ever-reliable ‘cleanser’ of Welsh troubles, to eliminate the problem; he also dispatched a seaborne force of marines, gunners and sappers to tackle Harlech, once and for all.19 The day after Herbert left, a commission convened at London’s Guildhall to start legal proceedings against the fifteen men whom Rivers, Fogge and their colleagues had identified as a Lancastrian support network. At the top of the list was Sir Thomas Cook.
Edward wanted a swift and decisive prosecution. Sensing the possibility of resistance, the commission he appointed was a model of political balance. Alongside Rivers was Warwick, their mutual loathing reduced to a simmer for the occasion. Clarence headed the panel: when, at one point, London’s mayor Thomas Oulgreve, ‘a replete and lumpish man’, nodded off, Clarence snidely warned the assembled court to ‘speak softly, for the mayor is asleep’. But the hearings soon ground to a halt. Perhaps through sympathy, perhaps because it didn’t feel there was a case to answer, the jury was reluctant to indict Cook and his fellow defendants. It was promptly discharged and another jury appointed. The difficulties continued, the commission chopping and changing juries as it sought to secure indictments and verdicts.
Eventually, the Lancastrian agents were convicted of treason and condemned to death. Others, including Cook, were found guilty of misprision, failing to reveal a plot against the king: a lesser, but still exceptionally serious offence. Cook was hit with a fine of 8,000 marks and briefly imprisoned before, on 26 July, receiving a royal pardon. By this time his case had become a cause célèbre.20
The way Cook’s case had been handled didn’t look good. Rivers and Fogge, who had extracted forced confessions under torture, had been ubiquitous throughout: one of the juries was later said to have been rigged explicitly ‘by the means of Fogge’. Cook’s fine, imposed by a cash-strapped king on one of his wealthier subjects, was enormous. While Cook himself was still in custody, Edward ordered Rivers and Fogge to break into his property and seize his moveable assets in order to pay off the debt: a common, if harsh, practice that their men interpreted liberally, turning Cook’s London townhouse upside-down, drinking his cellar dry and carting off large quantities of cloth, £700 in plate and jewels, and a series of exquisite, jewel-encrusted tapestries depicting the Siege of Jerusalem. They left the house in an ‘ill pickle’. Some thought Cook deserved it: he was a vain, bullying man who was endured rather than liked. But soon his treatment was being seen in a different way.
As well as the parts played by Rivers and Fogge, two other stories were circulating. The queen’s mother Jacquetta had long had her eye on Cook’s magnificent tapestries. Enraged when he refused to sell ‘at her pleasure and price’, she quickly annexed them after Cook’s house was trashed by her husband’s men.21 Meanwhile, following Cook’s sentencing, Elizabeth herself had taken him to court to obtain a surcharge of eight hundred marks due on his fine, a prerogative tax known as ‘queen’s gold’. While little more than an expression of her propensity for wringing cash from whatever sources she could find, it was, as Elizabeth herself quickly recognized, a tactless move: her receiver-general John Forster – who, happily for Cook, was his son-in-law – agreed to waive the fine. But the damage was already done. Cook was cast as an innocent Londoner who had suffered the roughest of justice at the hands of the ‘queen’s blood’.
This tale of the victimized Cook, repeated and embellished, was a narrative that encapsulated the shortcomings of a failing regime: of a king who, rather than knowing his own mind, was prey to the Woodville-dominated cabal around him (though Edward was sufficiently in control to blow almost a thousand pounds of Cook’s fine on several sets of exquisite Burgundian tapestries).22 Given the earl of Warwick’s notorious reputation for spreading damaging rumours – back in the 1450s, Margaret of Anjou’s men had been unable to stem the tide of insinuation about her infidelity – and the recent efforts of his agents to spread ‘murmurous tales’ against the queen’s family, it would have been a surprise if, in the city’s taverns, his agents weren’t loudly sympathetic on Cook’s behalf. They were also continuing to stir up indignation about the Burgundian alliance and the part the queen’s family had played in forging it.
Towards the end of July, barely a fortnight after Margaret and Charles’s wedding, civic authorities intercepted plans for a night-time riot against the Flemish community in Southwark, involving hundreds of men from various guilds. Fuelling it was the usual stew of economic and xenophobic grievances, one ringleader confessing that the plan had been to target Flemings, ‘to cut off their thumbs and hands’, thereby depriving them of the means by which they took away ‘the living of English people’. One trigger had been talk about the poor hospitality Englishmen had received at the recent wedding – ‘the Burgundians’, wrote one chronicler, ‘showed no more favour to Englishmen than they would to a Jew’ – which ran counter to all the available evidence. Spread by people who knew perfectly well that, once in circulation, such false news was almost impossible to counter, it was immediately effective.23
That summer, rather than dampen down the toxic atmosphere, Edward and his councillors added fuel to the flames. In recent years relations with the Hanse, the mercantile league which dominated trade with the Baltic cities and the Rhineland, had been volatile at best. As English fleets tried to muscle in on trade in the North Sea and the Baltic, there were tit-for-tat reprisals, the latest of which had come that June. Failing to obtain redress for earlier English aggression, the king of Denmark seized six English ships anchored in the Øresund strait and sold off their cargoes in Danzig. Edward sought retribution. With few rich Danish subjects in England, he instead went after the Hanse. In retaliation for their tangential part in the Danish episode, all Hanse merchants in the country were arrested and imprisoned, their goods confiscated. While they might have played to the populist gallery, the reprisals were condemned internationally and at home, appalling everybody from London’s own Merchant Adventurers – reliant on good relations with the powerful Hanse – to hard-hit clothworkers in Gloucestershire, who blamed the accusations against the Hanse on ‘malice and evil’, as well as ‘singular profit’ on the part of certain people who wanted them kicked out of England altogether. It wasn’t difficult to work out who th
ose individuals were. Edward had been pushed into this disproportionate lashing-out by the ‘verdict of the council’ – in particular, councillors with substantial shipping interests who had sustained losses in the Danish incident, and who would themselves benefit from a lack of Hanse competition in England. Foremost among these councillors were Warwick and Fogge (for once, their shared financial interests had pushed them together) and the perpetually enraged Sir John Howard.24 In the following months Edward, advised to rectify his mistake, released the merchants, rowed back on the fines he had imposed and tried to re-establish diplomatic relations with the Hanse. It was too little, too late.
Any residual glow of satisfaction from the Anglo-Burgundian wedding was fading fast. That summer Edward, never the most consistent seeker of advice, appeared vulnerable and overly susceptible to the cabal around him. The magnificent regal style that he had cultivated, a sun around whom all revolved, was fine when all the satellites were in alignment. When things were out of order, however, his motto of ‘comfort and joy’ began to look like laziness or, just as bad, helplessness. The king seemed to be floundering, unable to impose himself on the small group that, in the warmth of his favour, wielded his power with impunity, let alone to get a grip on the country’s many ills or his nebulous, agile political opponents. His responses, when they came, were flailing, inconsistent and vindictive. Sir Thomas Cook’s case had turned into a public-relations disaster, while his response to the Hanse fiasco suggested a king who was neither in control nor aware of the consequences of his actions. Meanwhile, he seemed unable to prevent a few well-placed rumours from turning popular opinion against a marriage that should have been a diplomatic triumph. This was a king who, in the eyes of many, was failing to fulfil his recent parliamentary commitments on unity, security and prosperity. His failure to do so looked like weakness and indecision, his actions ill-judged and erratic.
As the summer wore on, there were signs that the widespread gossip and innuendo that had attached itself to the queen’s family was starting to stick to Edward himself. As people questioned the king’s fitness for his role, so – inevitably – they started to examine his right to rule: where issues of credibility were raised, issues of legitimacy were rarely far behind. In one case, a labourer called John Lacy was hauled before London’s mayor and aldermen, accused of seditious language, and specifically of two statements: first, that Edward IV was not king by right; and second, that he was ‘not born a gentleman’ – which, in not so many words, implied that he was not the son of the duke of York but a bastard.25
At last, one good news story for the regime came from north Wales. In the face of Lord Herbert’s overwhelming military muscle, Jasper Tudor’s insurgent army had melted away. Tudor himself had escaped – disguised as a peasant, a bale of straw on his back, he had fled on a boat to France – but on 14 August 1468, after holding out for some seven years, the Lancastrian defenders of Harlech finally surrendered. Herbert’s supremacy in Wales was now more or less total: he was, as one Welsh poet admiringly put it, Edward’s ‘master-lock’ in the principality. He returned to London in triumph; there, a delighted Edward conferred on him Jasper Tudor’s title of earl of Pembroke. Given the threat that Herbert presented to their interests, it was not a move to delight Warwick or Clarence.26
Despite its ultimate failure, Jasper Tudor’s brief, high-profile incursion had in a way done its job. It had shown that the Lancastrian cause was alive and kicking, and that it had in Louis XI a sponsor who was prepared to support it, at least in an exploratory way. Coming at this time of heightened tensions, its timing had been impeccable.
Towards the end of September, a pale blue comet appeared in the sky. Astronomers in China minutely described its position, its northeast direction and its white-blue tail extending southwest, details that recurred in the reports of Japanese and Korean observers. In the Hungarian city of Pressburg, the Polish astronomer Martin Ilkusz wrote a report on it for his employer King Matthias of Hungary, saying it spelled danger; an observer in Paris noted its tail passing over the asterism of the plough, or ‘chariot’, as the French termed it. And in England, a chronicler noted how, ‘shortly before Michaelmas’, the blazing star appeared, moving from ‘west to north’, and stayed in the sky for the following five or six weeks, finally disappearing in the first week of November. Though he didn’t try and explain it, like Martin Ilkusz he thought it a portent.27
That autumn, the wheels came off Edward’s expensively assembled anti-French coalition. With French armies massing on his borders, Duke Francis of Brittany made desperate appeals to Edward for military aid. Even though Edward responded with alacrity, the agitated duke was pressured into signing a new treaty with Louis XI; in so doing, he ditched his agreements with Edward and Charles the Bold.
Charles, Edward’s new brother-in-law, was proving equally unreliable. The alliance with Burgundy hadn’t brought the breakthrough in trade talks for which England’s businessmen desperately hoped: despite all Edward’s concessions, the bans against English cloth imports into Flanders remained firmly in place. And Charles’s own commitments to the Yorkist regime were looking distinctly equivocal. His Lancastrian friends, sent hastily away from Bruges a day before his wedding, were back in town, while Edmund Beaufort was fighting for the Burgundians against the French. Worse followed. On 14 October, in the Somme town of Peronne, Charles, while insisting on his treaty with Edward, signed a comprehensive truce with his arch-enemy Louis XI. Noting the utter incompatibility of being friends with both England and France, one puzzled Italian envoy remarked that Charles was ‘trying to put two feet into one shoe’.28
For critics of Edward’s Burgundian alliance, this was all grist to the mill. Barely three months after the spectacularly expensive wedding for which he had fought so hard – as well as some £18,000 subsequently shelled out on military backing for his flaky coalition partners – Edward’s plans were in tatters, the foreign policy statement that he had trumpeted to Parliament unrecognizable. He now tried to reopen negotiations with Louis XI, who revelled in the irony: this time, it was Edward’s ambassadors who returned from France loaded with gifts but ‘without effecting anything for which they came’. Louis was enjoying himself. According to the Milanese ambassador Panigarola, the French king was putting it about that he planned to extend backing to the ‘old queen of England’, Margaret of Anjou – although, Panigarola added, ‘I hear of nothing actual being done’. When the talk reached an increasingly jittery Edward, he took it seriously.29 The seaborne army originally mobilized in support of his former ally the duke of Brittany was now redeployed defensively; late that autumn, it roamed the English Channel on the lookout for a Lancastrian invasion force. And, at last, Edward turned to the two great lords who had so vehemently backed peace with France, and whom he had hitherto ignored: Warwick and his brother George Neville.
Suddenly, Edward seemed to wake up to the potency of the Neville brothers on the international stage and to their popular appeal back home: the ‘hearts my lords hath gotten’, as one correspondent put it. Both noblemen were once again treated to the king’s closest attentions. Seen regularly at court and in Edward’s chamber, they were even spotted talking amicably with the lords they loathed most, Rivers and Herbert. It was suggested that George Neville would soon be restored to the chancellorship from which Edward had sacked him some eighteen months previously. Edward seemed satisfied that this dose of royal charm had done the trick, dissolving the rancour and rivalries that had built up in the last months and years: that bygones were now bygones. He imagined that the Nevilles, back in the sun of his grace, felt the same.30
But as Edward stretched out one hand in conciliation, he punished with the other. That November, riding into various counties, detachments of his household men made a slew of arrests. Among those detained was the donnish figure of Ralph Makerell, one of Margaret of Anjou’s close advisers, who was intercepted making his way secretly back to his native Suffolk to establish contact with the circle of plotters in Engla
nd. In Wiltshire, two young lords were detained: Sir Thomas Hungerford and Henry Courtenay, heir to the earldom of Devon. Both had strong Lancastrian connections. Hungerford’s father had been executed back in 1464; Courtenay’s younger brother was in Flanders where, along with his Beaufort cousins, he was being funded by Charles the Bold. Accused of plotting with the exiled Lancastrians, the pair were taken to Salisbury and imprisoned, pending trial. So too was the twenty-six-year-old John de Vere, earl of Oxford, whose father and older brother had been convicted and executed back in 1462. Like Hungerford and Courtenay, Oxford’s assimilation into the Yorkist regime had been thought complete – but, in the febrile atmosphere, his Lancastrian associations came under fresh scrutiny. Brought into the Tower, Oxford quickly folded under interrogation and ‘confessed much thing’. Armed with a fresh list of names, royal agents rounded up more Lancastrian sympathizers: regional big men like the East Anglian knight Sir John Marney, and smaller fry like the London skinner Richard Steres and two esquires, John Poynings and William Alford, who had accompanied Margaret of York to Flanders the previous July and, while there, had allegedly been in ‘familiar communication’ with Edmund Beaufort and his men.31
With a slew of treason trials pending, Edward appointed a new constable of England to judge them. John Tiptoft was unavailable, having been sent to Ireland to sniff out suspect officials and reimpose English control in the volatile province. There, he had produced immediate and characteristic results. After condemning his predecessor, the earl of Desmond, to death for ‘horrible treasons’, Tiptoft took custody of the dead earl’s two young sons, whom he was said to have used with ‘extreme cruelty’ before eventually having them beheaded: in his bewilderment the older of the boys, who had just turned thirteen, told the executioner to avoid a sore on his neck.32 Despite widespread disgust at the killings, and his own vexation at the death of Desmond, a man he liked, Edward nonetheless left Tiptoft in Ireland to get on with the job. In his absence, the king’s choice of constable was predictable – a man who, at the forefront of royal counter-insurgency, was scaling ever-greater heights in Edward’s favour, his father-in-law Rivers.
