The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  The day after the wedding, Clarence, Warwick and George Neville issued a proclamation. It consisted of an open letter, signed by all three, to which was affixed the wax seals of their signets; and a petition which, they claimed, had been sent them by representatives of the king’s ‘true and faithful commons’. Identifying a group of ‘seditious persons’ at the heart of Edward’s regime whose ‘covetous rule and guiding’ had led the king astray and the country into chaos for their own ‘singular lucre and enriching of themselves and their blood’, the commons called ‘piteously’ on the three lords to intercede with the king on their behalf with a view to reforming government: something that would not only be to the king’s ‘honour and profit’, but to the benefit of the ‘common weal’ of England.

  The petition itself painted a picture of misrule that would have been instantly familiar to anybody acquainted with the events of the previous two decades. In fact, the petition declared with menace, the situation that now faced England was similar to crises that had ‘fell in this land’ during the reigns of Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI, ‘to the destruction of them’. For all that, the petition was also specific, both in its identification of the ‘seditious persons’ in question, and the charges laid at their door.

  The named culprits were the queen’s father Lord Rivers, his wife Jacquetta and their first-born son Anthony Woodville; ‘Sir William Herbert’ – pointedly not referred to by his newly acquired title of earl of Pembroke – and the new earl of Devon, Humphrey Stafford; the queen’s younger brother Sir John Woodville ‘and all his brethren’; their brother-in-law Lord Audeley; and, inevitably, Sir John Fogge, who with Rivers had led Edward’s counter-insurgency operation the previous year.

  This cabal, the petition asserted, had inveigled Edward to grant away to them much of the vast wealth that he had inherited on his accession, grants that, as well as being out of all proportion to the recipients’ ‘deserts and degrees’, had plunged the king into poverty. They had been behind the recoinage of five years previously, persuading Edward to ‘change his most rich coin’; behind the endless financial impositions on his subjects, from taxes to borrowing without repayment; behind, too, the siphoning off of papal taxes for the crusade ‘without repayment of our said holy father’; and behind, among other things, the spike in violent crime of recent years, and the accusations of treason against anybody to whom they bore any ‘evil will’ – with the result that people of all ranks went in dread, uncertain of the security of their ‘life, livelihood or goods’.

  The charges were a skilful blending of genuine and confected grievances. There could be no doubt about Edward’s appropriation of papal taxes, nor about his misleading of Parliament: indeed, in calling on him to carry out an urgent programme of financial reform, the manifesto quoted back at Edward the failed promises that he had made ‘with his own mouth to us’. While the recoinage had been a success, the massive profits made by Edward and those involved in the process added to the widespread suspicion that something fishy was going on. Throughout the manifesto, individual voices seemed to surface: Warwick’s indignation over his exclusion from the king’s ‘secret council’; Clarence’s resentment about his ‘impoverishment’, and Edward’s failure to give him ‘sufficient livelihood or goods’. The most prominent of all the charges – and the catalyst for all the other wrongs – was, the petition stated, Edward’s ‘estrangement of the true lords of his blood’. If the commons’ manifesto seemed as though it might have been written by Warwick, Clarence and George Neville themselves, it probably was.50

  The three lords’ proposed solution was drawn straight from the Yorkist playbook of the 1450s. Their proclamation was sent to potential supporters throughout England, urging them to mobilize with as many armed men as possible, and to join the trio as they went to try and make Edward see sense: a threatening deputation that could only end in bloodshed. The parallels with Edward and Warwick’s return from exile in 1460 were also evident in what followed. Crossing back from Calais, the lords advanced through Kent towards London. There, the city gates were opened and the civic authorities, wary of Warwick’s popularity with the commons, had a reluctant whip-round, lending the rebels £1,000. They then headed north out of the city, to link up with Robin of Redesdale’s insurgents and to intercept the isolated Edward before Herbert’s Welshmen and Stafford’s west-countrymen could join the king.51

  Complacent and lethargic, Edward had been caught out. Reading the commons’ manifesto, a copy of which had been obtained and handed to him, his first act was to send the Woodvilles, now clearly public enemies, away from the region for their own safety. Rivers and his second son Sir John Woodville were dispatched to the safety of William Herbert’s castle of Chepstow in south Wales; Anthony Woodville to his lands in Norfolk, on the other side of the country. With the latter, perhaps trying to mobilize more troops, Edward sent his youngest brother Richard.52 He then dispatched the ever-reliable Thomas Montgomery with three letters to Clarence, Warwick and George Neville, stating that he could not believe the rumours of their treachery, that they would be ‘right welcome’ to him, and urging them to listen to what Montgomery had to say. Edward’s astonishment was genuine. He made his way slowly south, hoping to rendezvous with Herbert and Stafford as they rode out of the southwest with reinforcements.

  In the second half of July, Sir John Paston – like many in England – received two letters within days of each other. The first was from ‘his especial true-hearted friend’ the earl of Oxford, who asked Paston to supply three sets of horse-armour ‘in haste’, adding – with a meaningful nod to Paston’s allegiance – ‘I trust to God we shall do right well, who preserve you’. The second letter, from Edward, contained a double validation of his royal authority: signed with his monogram and sealed with his signet. Urgently, Edward ordered Paston to gather as many armed men as he could, and to meet the king at Doncaster, in order to fight the king’s ‘enemies, traitors and rebels’. Faced with this agonizing demand on his loyalty, Paston’s instinct was probably to lie low, just as his father had done almost ten years before during the chaotic sequence of battles that had brought Edward to power.53 But by the time Edward’s letter reached him, it didn’t matter anyway.

  9

  The Matter Quickeneth

  That July William Herbert led his forces purposefully out of south Wales to put down Robin of Redesdale’s renewed insurgency. He and his men were bullish. Feared across England, their confidence was fuelled by a Welsh prophetic tradition that foretold their extermination of the English oppressors. Notwithstanding his own place at the heart of the English royal establishment, it was a narrative that Herbert had skilfully cultivated. So too had Edward, whose Mortimer blood made him, as one bard put it, a ‘kingly Welshman’: the deliverer who would set their nation free. Besides, in the words of one Welsh poet, the northerners were ‘a bunch of churls’, a common rabble whose annihilation Jesus Christ himself would be happy to excuse.1

  Reaching the Cotswolds, Herbert rendezvoused with Humphrey Stafford, earl of Devon. Together, Herbert’s Welsh cavalry and Stafford’s west-country infantrymen and archers were a formidable proposition. Nevertheless, on 24 July, as they made their way towards Northampton, an advance force clashed with a contingent of Robin of Redesdale’s men and came off worst. The two lords halted for the night at the Oxfordshire market town of Banbury.2

  That evening the two nobles’ harbingers, the officers responsible for billeting arrangements, both laid claim to the same inn. This trivial ‘variance’, compounded by a quarrel over which of the lords got to sleep with the innkeeper’s daughter, became a full-blown row. Though he had arrived first, Stafford lost out; honour slighted, he left in a fury, withdrawing his forces some ten or twelve miles distant. The following day, Herbert and his Welshmen advanced out of Banbury, eager for the battle to come, and aware of the need to fight the northerners before reinforcements turned up in the shape of Warwick and Clarence. They bivouacked on high ground to the northeast of Banbury, �
��at a place called Edgecote’. In front of them, open fields sloped into the valley of the River Cherwell; beyond, to the east and south, were rolling hills, and Robin of Redesdale’s army.

  As dawn rose on the morning of the 26th, the northerners advanced into the river plain, their archers loosing volleys of arrows into Herbert’s ranks. Lacking Stafford’s firepower, the Welshmen were exposed and Herbert ordered his men quickly into close combat. Through the morning, the fighting raged around the river crossing; finally, Herbert’s men forced the rebels back. There was a lull as the battered armies regrouped. Then, over the eastern hills, new troops appeared. As they approached, Herbert’s Welshmen could pick out the white bear and ragged staff on their standards and catch their battle-cries carrying on the air: the rhythmic repetition of ‘A Warwick. A Warwick.’

  As Warwick, Clarence and their forces rode north out of London, an advance force had raced ahead under the command of the bruising Essex soldier Sir Geoffrey Gate, one of Warwick’s lieutenants. Now, joining the northerners, they surged into Herbert’s men. Isolated, confronted by what they thought was the earl of Warwick’s main army, they broke ranks and fled. In the carnage that followed, as many as two thousand Welshmen were killed.3

  In Wales the news of Edgecote was greeted as a national catastrophe, a battle to end all fighting. The sense of apocalypse was intensified by weeks of ‘savage weather’, torrential rain and wind that wrecked harvests. Among the survivors who remembered the battle’s horrors was Herbert’s ward, the twelve-year-old Lancastrian Henry Tudor, who had been led to safety by the Shropshire knight Sir Richard Corbet. Edgecote would endure long in the Welsh memory. In the years and decades to come, it would become a byword for resentment against the English – in particular, ‘northernmen’.4

  What happened next was a frightening settling of scores, one which, in its concentrated fury and lack of due process, recalled the bloodletting of the 1450s. The reforming petition that Warwick and Clarence had issued shortly before Edgecote, it transpired, was also a hitlist. Now, in the battle’s aftermath, the two lords dispatched squads of men to hunt down their targets. The first to be captured was Herbert. He was taken the twenty or so miles to Northampton, where Warwick, Clarence and George Neville had arrived, to be tried. Even by the standards of recent years, their judgment was savage – and, given their complaints about Edward’s indiscriminate accusations of treason, darkly ironic. But then, Herbert’s beheading had nothing to do with the law, and everything to do with revenge.5

  For one Welsh poet the execution of Herbert, Edward’s ‘master-lock’ in Wales, was the moment his nation died. Nevertheless, Herbert’s reputation as a cruel and arrogant man, a ‘heavy lord’, also went before him – something he had seemed to acknowledge in the will he made before his execution, when he asked for his body to be sent home quickly and secretly, to avoid abuse. People joked that his soul was past praying for.6 As far as Warwick and Clarence were concerned, though, Herbert’s judicial murder was only the start.

  Other targets on their list were soon run to ground. Lord Rivers and his second son Sir John Woodville, fleeing Herbert’s castle at Chepstow, were tracked down hiding in the thick woodlands of the Forest of Dean. Brought to Coventry, they were summarily executed. Five days later Humphrey Stafford, earl of Devon, whose monumental sulk before the battle at Edgecote had had such catastrophic consequences, was arrested and beheaded at the Somerset town of Bridgwater. Across the country in Norwich, Rivers’ oldest son Anthony Woodville was detained in a city inn by local authorities acting on the orders of the king – or rather, of Warwick and Clarence, who now held the great seal. Woodville knew what awaited him. On the morning of Thursday 25 August, he slipped past his captors and disappeared.7

  Meanwhile, Edward was moving south from Nottingham. He seemed to have no sources of reliable intelligence: days after Edgecote, he was apparently oblivious to the disaster that had taken place. As news finally reached him, and his hastily raised troops started to flee, the reality of the situation set in. Trying to swerve the rebel forces to the east, the king was finally run to ground by George Neville and a detachment of cavalry at Warwick’s Buckinghamshire manor of Olney. He was taken north to Warwick’s base at Middleham and imprisoned there.8

  As Warwick and Clarence continued their savage round of reprisals, tearing down the new edifice of Yorkist power that Edward had been building for the past five years since his marriage to Elizabeth, they also started to undermine the foundations on which it was built.

  That August, a messenger dismounted at Warwick Castle, where the rebel lords had based themselves. He brought disturbing allegations against the Woodvilles, from the influential Northamptonshire gentleman and former sheriff of the county Thomas Wake. A longstanding agent of Warwick’s, Wake had married the earl’s troubled, magnetic young kinswoman Margaret Lucy, who, it was rumoured, had slept with Edward.9 Based at Blisworth, a short ride from the Woodville home of Grafton Regis, Wake was well placed to keep an eye on the activities of the queen’s family. That summer, he had been involved in the fast-moving events on Warwick’s side, turning out to fight at Edgecote. There, his son was killed. If he hadn’t liked his aggrandizing Woodville neighbours particularly much beforehand, now Wake hated them: still raw with grief, he had been in the pack that had hunted down Rivers. And in the days after the battle he had come across a curious artefact, which he now sent to Warwick. It was a little lead figure of an armed man ‘the length of a man’s finger’, which had been deliberately snapped in two, then bound together with wire.

  This figurine, Wake claimed, was modelled to resemble Warwick himself. It had been made by the queen’s mother Jacquetta, ‘to use with witchcraft and sorcery’ in order to bring about Warwick’s death. Wake also had in his possession two more lead dolls representing Edward and Elizabeth, with which, so he alleged, Jacquetta had bewitched the king into his marriage.10

  Back in 1464, the complaints about Elizabeth’s suitability as a royal bride had quickly faded as people adjusted to the new reality. But with the tensions of recent years, and especially in the aftermath of Sir Thomas Cook’s trial, they had resurfaced with a fresh malevolence. Accusations of witchcraft, however, were of a different order of seriousness. They could, and did, destroy even the greatest families: some quarter-century earlier, Eleanor Cobham, the wife of Henry VI’s uncle Humphrey duke of Gloucester, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘treasonable necromancy’, a conviction which had set in motion Gloucester’s own downfall. Now, Wake was effectively asserting that Edward and Elizabeth’s marriage was founded on nothing more substantial than an act of sorcery.

  Wake’s evidence was itself flimsy. His story was embellished around a few lead dolls that, discovered a couple of miles from the Woodville home of Grafton Regis, had been put on display merely as interesting found objects in the village of Stoke Bruerne. Nevertheless, it dovetailed nicely with the rebel lords’ narrative – Jacquetta, after all, had the dubious distinction of being the only woman on Warwick and Clarence’s roster of seditious persons – and cohered perfectly with their aims: nothing less than the total destruction of the queen’s family.11

  It hardly mattered that the allegations themselves didn’t stand up. As Warwick knew perfectly well, the truth of the matter was irrelevant: it was the story that counted. Once rumours of witchcraft began to stick to Jacquetta and Elizabeth, there would be no washing them away. In the febrile atmosphere that August the rumours spread like a contagion. Soon, the ‘common noise and slander’ of Jacquetta’s witchcraft had seeded itself through a ‘great part of the realm’.12

  Writing from an edgy London late that summer a Milanese envoy, Luchino Dalleghiexia, reported that the queen was still in the city. Scared for her own safety and that of her children, she was keeping ‘scant state’, a low profile. People were talking openly about how the queen’s family had monopolized Edward’s government, about how it was all the fault of Elizabeth, ‘a widow of quite low birth’, who had seized with both
hands the chance given her by a bewitched king and who since her coronation had been tireless in her efforts ‘to aggrandize her relations’.

  It was clear where Dalleghiexia – who by his own admission was fairly clueless on English affairs – was getting much of his information: the earl of Warwick, ‘astute as Ulysses’. With many of their political opponents eliminated, he continued, Warwick and Clarence were on to the next stage of their plan, to establish themselves as effective rulers of England, and had summoned a parliament in order to ‘arrange the government’ accordingly.13 If this seemed like 1460 all over again, there were whispers of an even more radical change.

  Warwick wasted no time updating his ally Louis XI. On 8 August, at his Loire chateau of Amboise, Louis held one of his regular private audiences with the latest Milanese ambassador to France, Sforza de Bettini. He was practically capering with joy.

  In a letter to Louis, Warwick had apparently declared that he no longer believed Edward IV to have any right to the throne of England – because, Warwick had discovered, Edward was born ‘a bastard’. He wasn’t Richard of York’s son at all, but the product of an affair of Cecily duchess of York, conceived while her husband had been away fighting the French. As a result, the crown of England didn’t belong to Edward. The rightful king was his younger, true-born brother, the duke of Clarence.14

  Warwick, of course, had form in this regard. Ten years earlier, he had used the same tactics against Margaret of Anjou and her son, the rumours of whose illegitimacy had been virulently effective. Now Warwick was prepared to do the same to Edward, in order to put his new son-in-law Clarence on the throne – and to resume his own position at the king’s shoulder, his pre-eminence restored. But whatever Warwick told Louis, back in England any talk of making Clarence king was kept firmly under wraps.