The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Rivers was soon in business. As the round-ups continued, Steres and his accomplices were duly found guilty of treason, dragged through London’s streets and beheaded on Tower Hill. Londoners recorded Steres’ execution with particular regret: he had, after all, been ‘one of the cunningest players at the tennis in England’.33

  Some days later, on 9 December, fifteen miles or so northeast of London at the Essex town of Waltham Abbey, three lords and their retinues convened: Warwick, Clarence and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, another nobleman harbouring resentments against the Yorkist establishment.34 There, the three lords put their signatures to a new set of ordinances for the ‘rule and guiding’ of Clarence’s household. On the face of it, there was nothing remarkable about Clarence drawing up a new set of domestic regulations. Such ordinances, however, tended to be produced in response to specific contexts; here, the context leaped out of the document’s wording.35

  After a typical preamble, with its exhortations to piety, came several clauses with more than usual emphasis on conduct. Clarence’s household men were exhorted to avoid ‘vicious rule and suspected places’ and to restrain from ‘seditious language, variances, dissensions, debates and affrays’. This tone of admonition ran throughout the ordinance. Servants should ‘break no doors nor windows, nor pick locks, by night or by day’ to try and gain access to the duke’s goods. The household’s porters, who guarded the house gates, should be particularly diligent in ensuring that no foodstuffs, silver plate, pewter vessels, ‘nor none other stuff of the said household, be embezzled out’.

  While it was customary for household directives to instruct servants to be alert to indiscipline and deviant behaviour, the extent to which this point was laboured suggested that such behaviour was in fact prevalent in Clarence’s establishment. Clarence appeared either unable or disinclined to exert control over his men. What was more, this ‘misgovernance’, as the ordinance noted, was evident not just ‘within the duke’s court’, but ‘without’.

  Given the current state of emergency, with Edward’s agents alert to any hint of careless talk and indiscipline, and royal spies clearly moving within noblemen’s houses, somebody had decided that Clarence’s establishment urgently needed taking in hand. That somebody was Warwick.

  The ordinance also revealed something else. As befitted the foremost nobleman in the land, it made exceptionally generous provision for Clarence’s household: from spices and exotic fruits – ‘Pepper, Saffron, Ginger, Cloves, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Dates, Licorice, Sugar, Raisins and currants, figs’ – to Clarence’s barge with its master and seventeen rowers, and the ninety-three horses in his stables. It also itemized £2,820 17s 8d on yearly wages to his 299 staff and fees to others, a staggering figure which nevertheless excluded sweeteners paid to ‘lords, ladies, knights, and learned counsel and others’. With Edward’s anti-retaining legislation of the previous May explicitly banning the recruiting of anyone other than household ‘servants, officers, or men learned in the law’, Clarence had simply expanded his household to accommodate extra men – not to mention the catch-all ‘others’ to whom he was distributing rewards.36 Besides the borderline illegality of his actions, his ordinance vastly overbudgeted.

  Clarence’s annual income was some £3,400 – a very hefty sum but, following Edward’s clawing back of lands in his act of resumption the previous year, substantially below the amount that had originally been intended for him. Yet his yearly expenditure, as laid out in the ordinance, came to £4,505 15s 10¾d. As well as emphasizing security and strict discipline, then, the ordinances set out details of Clarence’s expanded retinue and a household budget that, given the massive gap between income and expenditure, clearly anticipated some change in the duke’s financial circumstances. That December, anybody looking through the ordinances might have gained the impression that Clarence and Warwick were making plans for such a change in those circumstances – and, in cracking down on loose talk and indiscipline among his household servants, were keen to avoid any unwanted attention.37

  In January 1469 the compliant earl of Oxford was released from the Tower, with sureties imposed for his future good behaviour. The others were not so lucky. At Salisbury, a high-profile commission assembled in the king’s presence to charge Hungerford and Courtenay, the two lords arrested the previous November. Among the commissioners were the king’s brother-in-law Anthony Woodville and the Devon nobleman Humphrey, Lord Stafford, a loyal Yorkist; backing Stafford in his local turf war against his Courtenay rivals, Edward was building him up to become the king’s point man in the west country, just as Herbert had become the king’s proxy in Wales. Heading the commission was the king’s youngest brother Richard.38

  Richard had just turned sixteen. Though the age of majority was twenty-one, children born to rule were often handed active responsibility well before then, just as Clarence had been: Clarence, indeed, had come into his inheritance at the age Richard was now. Richard’s progress had been altogether more low-key than that of his brother: after all, he wasn’t Edward’s heir presumptive. Through adolescence, he had gradually emerged from the cocoon of childhood under Warwick’s guidance, watching and absorbing the way his great older cousin commanded, governed and projected his power, and putting his schoolroom education to use as he started to comport himself in the adult world. At fourteen, Richard was cutting his teeth on legal commissions in York, where his active engagement was remarked upon, and appreciated: indeed, when the city had sent presents of red wine to Warwick and Richard, Richard’s was the larger. It was high time, Edward thought, for Richard to be allowed to wield royal power and authority on his behalf.

  Nonetheless, Richard’s role in the trial of Hungerford and Courtenay was more or less a formality. The pair were charged with treason, on scant evidence. A cowed, intimidated jury returned its guilty verdict under the gaze of the king himself, who had journeyed down to Salisbury to ensure justice was done. Dragged west through the city streets to the outlying village of Bemerton, the two noblemen were put through the full ritual horror of a traitor’s execution: hanged, cut down and eviscerated while still conscious, then beheaded. Some laid the blame for Courtenay’s judicial murder squarely at the feet of his rival Stafford, who had his eye on the Courtenay earldom of Devon – which, months later, Edward duly handed him.39

  With this rash of arrests and exemplary punishments, Edward and his agents seemed to believe they had grubbed up the plot that had taken root the previous spring. The clouds of suspicion and terror started to dissipate; the sun came out. Edward, once more, allowed himself to relax.

  At Westminster Palace, Elizabeth Woodville gave birth to her second daughter, named Cecily, after her mother-in-law. Edward and his friends rejoiced enthusiastically with the help of two barrels of hippocras and a butt of Gascon wine laid in for the occasion – ‘though’, reported one Milanese correspondent from London, ‘they would have preferred a son’.40

  As he celebrated, Edward entertained ambassadors from Charles the Bold – who, as his brand new treaty with Louis XI collapsed, quickly rediscovered his love for his English brother-in-law – and Francis of Brittany, whose ambassador arrived sheepishly in London with a gift of £1,000 in cash and a renewed appeal for English military backing against France. As far as a gratified Edward was concerned, his anti-French coalition was back on. Perhaps more surprising, his patched-up relationship with the earl of Warwick also seemed to be holding together.

  Warwick, indeed, even proving emollient, to the extent that Edward went so far as to trust him to maintain diplomatic relations with Burgundy. In Calais from mid-March, Warwick provided letters of safe conduct for the Burgundian ambassadors’ onward travel to England and even swallowed his distaste for Charles the Bold, meeting with him on three separate occasions. There was, it was true, the odd moment of friction – at one point Warwick and his retinue tried to march into Charles’s court armed, and were refused entry until the earl agreed to give up his sword – but by and large, things went smoothly. That Ma
y, Warwick was among the applauding guests in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, as Edward received the prestigious Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece. It was an honour Edward promptly reciprocated, admitting Charles to the Order of the Garter.41

  Warwick knew perfectly well what was meant by these courtesies of ritual brotherhood. The Garter had been founded by Edward III with the express intention of helping recover the French crown to which he laid claim. No sooner had Charles received his garter than, in a blatant act of provocation against France, he was publicly wearing it.42 Charles’s newfound goodwill towards Edward seemed more committed than before: he expressed an eagerness to restart talks on the cloth embargo, and offered to broker English discussions with the Hanse, relations with whom were almost non-existent after Edward’s ham-fisted aggression the previous summer. All of which Warwick seemed to accept without murmur. He was even prepared to do a little anti-French sabre-rattling of his own, his fleet roaming the western reaches of the Channel and France’s Atlantic seaboard, provoking panicked rumours in France of English piracy and raids.

  To Edward, it looked as though he had finally convinced the Nevilles of the vision that he had unfolded to Parliament a year previously. Back at the heart of Edward’s government, Warwick seemed demurely accepting of his new status: no longer a first among equals but taking his place alongside the ‘queen’s blood’ and those, like Herbert, whose new closeness to the king had punctured Warwick’s former pre-eminence. The vicious rumours of the past years, which had sustained the hostility between the tight group around Edward and circles close to Warwick, seemed to dry up.

  One hot day late that spring, a man turned up at court wearing a pair of waders ‘as long as they might be’ and clutching a spiked wooden staff. Recognized as a jester favoured by the king, he was admitted and brought to Edward, who asked what was going on with the outfit. The jester replied that he had been travelling through many regions of England, and wherever he went ‘the Rivers were so high that I could scarcely escape through them’. As gags went, it was laboured: it was, explained one chronicler unnecessarily, about ‘the great rule that the lord Rivers and his blood’ had in the kingdom. Edward’s response was to laugh.43 At that moment the king seemed supremely, sprawlingly at ease, apparently as unbothered by the subtext of the joke as he was by the reports of popular uprisings that had been coming out of the northeast over the past couple of months.

  In Yorkshire that April insurgency had broken out, led by a shadowy captain calling himself ‘Robin of Redesdale’. It was a resonant name. The Northumbrian valley of Redesdale had a centuries-old reputation as a refuge for outlaws, reinforced in recent years by its use as a base for Lancastrian insurgents. The name Robin needed no explanation: stories of the outlaw and his deeds, resisting the evil councillors who had led their king astray and repressed his impoverished people, circulated widely. He was a popular hero, a righter of wrongs: or, as the insurgent captain’s other nom de guerre put it, ‘Robin Mend-All’.

  A constant presence in the northeast, Warwick’s brother John Neville reacted with typical decisiveness, mustering a large force of men ‘to suppress Robin of Redesdale and other enemies of the kingdom’. Neville’s uncompromising reputation went before him. The rebels melted away.

  Shortly after, violence erupted again, some seventy-five miles away in Yorkshire’s East Riding, led by a man who took his name from the coastal flatlands, ‘Robin of Holderness’. This time, the uprising’s proximate cause was clearer: local discontent at a regional tax levied by St Leonard’s Hospital in York which, despite vocal protests the previous year, Edward had backed. Economic and political grievances mingled. The area was a hotbed of support for the pro-Lancastrian Percy family, whose heir, the twenty-one-year-old Henry Percy, was securely in the wardship of William Herbert away in south Wales: the insurgents wanted him restored as earl of Northumberland in place of the man who had supplanted him, John Neville. Late in May, some fifteen thousand strong, they reached the gates of York before Neville and his men materialized. There, after a ‘long fight’, Robin of Holderness was captured and beheaded.44

  Edward ordered a judicial commission – headed by his brothers and an assortment of nobles including Warwick, Rivers and Hastings – to investigate the disturbances. Given the scale of the insurrection he also decided, reluctantly, to head north himself. Early in June 1469, mustering troops and having ordered the Great Wardrobe to supply ‘banners, standards and coat armours’, fifteen hundred jackets in the Yorkist blue and mulberry ‘and such other stuff for the field’, Edward set off, together with Richard of Gloucester and his Woodville in-laws: Rivers, Anthony Woodville and his younger brother Sir John. He was comfortable enough to schedule in a diversionary loop, a pilgrimage through East Anglia to the great north Norfolk shrine of Walsingham, during which he would recruit additional armed forces for his northern operation.

  The pilgrimage was convivial and boozy. After a stopover at George Neville’s Hertfordshire manor of The More, the king – waved off by the archbishop with an assurance of military help for his northern campaign – weaved his way hazily through Suffolk and Norfolk. At Norwich, the hospitality was so good that Edward pronounced himself ‘well content’ and promised to be back again ‘hastily’. At the Lincolnshire town of Crowland, he went on a walkabout, praising its buildings and the fine triangular stone bridge spanning the two rivers that met there, and soaking up the adulation from well-drilled locals. Finally, he turned south to Fotheringhay, where Elizabeth was waiting for him and where he mustered more troops. A week later, he led his army north. In the second week of July he reached Newark.45 There, the news of what faced him was stark.

  Robin of Redesdale’s uprising had reignited. An insurgent army, reportedly three times the size of Edward’s, was now heading rapidly south. Scribbling orders for more troops to be raised, his tone now suddenly urgent, the king retreated twenty miles southwest for the greater security and strategic position of Nottingham Castle. Soon, he hoped, he would be joined by William Herbert’s formidable Welshmen and the west-country archers of Humphrey Stafford, the new earl of Devon. It wasn’t just the size of this ‘great insurrection’ that had suddenly made Edward sober up, but its nature.

  The uprising had exploded out of Richmondshire, a region dominated by Warwick’s fortress of Middleham and Clarence’s lordship of Richmond. Talk had it that ‘Robin’ himself was Sir John Conyers, Warwick’s household steward at Middleham and the former sheriff of Yorkshire: a man with an intimate knowledge of the region, its security networks, its people and their grievances. Other ‘captains’ in Robin’s ranks were members of the extended Neville family.46 This grassroots insurgency had been co-opted by Warwick and Clarence. Together, they were now driving it directly against Edward and his regime.

  For months, Warwick and George Neville had presented themselves as Edward’s dutiful subjects, happy to accept their place in the new order of things. Clarence had been equally decorous; so too had his household, brought into line by the ordinances of the previous December. Under the crust of observed formalities and protocols, however, the Nevilles stewed with resentment against an accumulation of slights, real and imagined. As Warwick saw it, his diminished standing with the king had had serious consequences. Edward, ignoring his counsel, had staggered from one disastrous piece of policy-making to the next, with serious consequences for England’s well-being and security – not to mention those of Warwick himself. Seen another way, Warwick and George Neville were simply out of season. Edward had moved beyond them. Many of those around the king had adjusted to the new dispensation, but Warwick and his brother had not. Neither had Clarence.

  Edward had gone out of his way to build Clarence up, to transform him into one of the mightiest nobles in the land. Yet Clarence, encouraged by Warwick, had come to fixate on his putative marriage to the earl’s daughter Isabel as a way of insuring himself against fluctuations in the king’s favour. In Clarence’s eyes, it was not Edward – still contemptuously dismissive of
the match – but his Neville cousins who had demonstrated a commitment to their shared future: that March, George Neville’s tireless lobbying in the Roman Curia had finally borne fruit, Pope Paul II authorizing the dispensation for Clarence and Isabel to marry. Not that Edward’s malcontent brother had needed much grooming. Whether or not Clarence was convinced by the need to take action for the good of the kingdom – and Warwick was rarely less than persuasive – he itched to do something for himself. Or, as one anonymous contemporary put it, he had ‘a mind too conscious of a daring deed’.47

  That June, as Edward was making his bibulous way through East Anglia, Warwick was at the Kentish port of Sandwich to inspect his fleet. There, he was joined by George Neville and Clarence – and, briefly, Cecily duchess of York who, perhaps with a mother’s intuition, went to check up on her wilful son.48 Over the following weeks, Warwick and Clarence started mobilizing their forces across the country, ostensibly to ‘join the king in the north’. Then, with the papal dispensation in hand, they went public with their marriage plans, in defiance of Edward. On 4 July, joined by the Nevilles’ brother-in-law John de Vere, earl of Oxford, whose chastening experience at the hands of Edward’s interrogators the previous winter had only hardened his resolve against the regime, they crossed to Calais.

  A week later, in Calais Castle, Clarence and Isabel Neville were married by Archbishop George Neville in a wedding that effectively made Clarence Warwick’s heir. Wandering around Calais at the time was the Burgundian chronicler Jean de Wavrin, who had turned up at Warwick’s vague invitation, hoping the earl would put him in touch with someone who could supply him with reliable sources for the history of England he was writing. Warwick’s mind, Wavrin discovered, was elsewhere and his questions ‘barely answered’: the earl packed him off with the gift of a ‘fine horse’ and told him to come back in a couple of months. As far as Wavrin could see, the wedding venue was deserted; the festivities themselves, clearly cobbled together, lasted barely two days. There were, he thought, other ‘big things’ going on.49