The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  In London that same Sunday, Clarence finally put in an appearance at court, joining the rest of the family at Baynard’s Castle for three days of Shrovetide feasting, hosted by Cecily duchess of York, before the abstinence of Lent. Under their mother’s eye, Edward and Clarence were on their best behaviour – but, one chronicler noted, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife, everybody making ‘fair dissimulated countenances’ to each other.

  The following Tuesday, Edward finally rode out of London for Lincolnshire with a group of lords including Hastings and Henry Percy, newly restored to his earldom of Northumberland. Clarence, apparently surplus to requirements, headed southwest to meet up with his wife. Before Edward left, he handed pardons to Lord Welles and Thomas Dymmock. Then, just to be on the safe side, he detained them: hostages guaranteeing the good behaviour of the Lincolnshire rebels.34

  That evening Edward arrived at Waltham Abbey, some fifteen miles north of London, to news of Sir Robert Welles’s uprising. Over the following days, as he rode onwards, updates flooded in: the uprising was spreading like wildfire; in Yorkshire, men were heading south to join the Lincolnshire insurgents. Edward also received a message from Clarence, who proposed linking up with Warwick: the pair would then come to help him out with reinforcements. Edward replied, thanking him. He also sent for his two hostages, Lord Welles and Dymmock. Brought to him at the Cambridgeshire town of Huntingdon, they were interrogated apart. Both confessed to involvement in the uprising. Edward then forced Lord Welles to write to his rebellious son with a royal ultimatum: either he give himself up, or the hostages would be executed.

  As Edward advanced, royal scouts monitoring the rebel forces noticed that, instead of moving south to confront the royal army, they were avoiding it, heading into the east midlands. Sir Robert Welles, it later transpired, was following instructions from Warwick, who told him that he and Clarence were raising men ‘in all haste’ and would be at Leicester the following Monday with twenty thousand men. The communication was done at arm’s length, orders delivered to the rebel camp by various messengers – later, a confused Sir Robert remembered some of the names; others ‘I remember not’ – Warwick careful to distance himself from potential acts of treason until the decisive moment.

  It was typical Warwick. Characteristically, he hedged – or, as Sir Robert Welles put it, ‘seemed to tarry long’. This was the habit that the French ambassador Monypenny had contemptuously described as ‘lache’: cowardly. In fact, Warwick was trying to draw Edward into a trap. He told Welles on no account to engage the king’s army, but ‘to pass north and give them the way’. Then, Welles’s rebels could form a barrier between Edward and the road back to London. Warwick’s and Clarence’s forces, under pretext of linking up with the king, would destroy him. Anybody fleeing south would be mopped up by Welles’s insurgents.

  That, at least, seemed to be the plan. Yet there seemed a tension in the rebels’ movements, one perhaps inherent in the changing relationship between Warwick and Clarence, who strained against his older cousin’s caution. The pair, it was reported, weren’t getting on: indeed, they had left London ‘on bad terms’.35 Now, if Warwick remained a nebulous presence, the involvement of Clarence’s men was markedly more open, from John Barnby to the presence in the insurgent army of one of the duke’s chamber servants, ‘Walter’, whipping up the rebels with fiery speeches and shaping their tactics. Nonetheless, Warwick’s caution predominated, the rebels following his instructions to the letter: these were the curious troop movements spotted by royal scouts. Then, on Sunday 11 March, a royal messenger arrived with Lord Welles’s ultimatum and wrecked everything.

  Realizing his father was in ‘jeopardy’, Sir Robert changed direction, leading the rebels straight down the Great North Road towards the king’s army to rescue him. In their midst, urging them on, was Clarence’s servant Walter, who repeated, again and again, that the rebels should ‘destroy the king’ and set Clarence up as king in his brother’s place.36

  Until now Warwick had been the senior partner, the guiding spirit, in challenging Edward’s regime: manoeuvring cautiously, striking when he felt the timing was right, giving ground where necessary. At this point the momentum shifted, and an impatient, impetuous energy took hold of the insurgency. Now the rebellion was out of Warwick’s control. It was all about Clarence.

  Edward, though, was several steps ahead. Learning that the rebels aimed to ambush him as he arrived at the town of Stamford, he moved fast, reaching Stamford on the morning of the 12th, ahead of the insurgents. There, he found fresh dispatches from Clarence and Warwick, who told Edward they were coming to help the king ‘against his rebels’ and would be with him the following night. All Edward had to do was sit tight. He did exactly the opposite.

  Advancing out of the town, he soon found the rebel forces in open country near the village of Empingham, tens of thousands of men drawn up in battle formation against him. Faced with this exemplary act of treason, Edward kept his promise. Lord Welles and Sir Thomas Dymmock were led out in front of the royal army, shoved to their knees under the king’s banners and, in clear sight of Sir Robert Welles’s insurgent army, beheaded. Then the royal guns opened up.

  Despite their considerable numbers, Welles’s men were mostly untrained, ill-equipped foot soldiers. Blasted by Edward’s artillery, ridden down by his cavalry, their cohesion didn’t last long. Their exposed lines fragmenting, they fled across the fields – the rebels’ frantic shedding of the padded jackets that mostly served as their armour earning the battle the derisive name of ‘Losecote Field’. Though Edward, in a populist touch, was said to have intervened repeatedly to prevent the slaughter of his ‘poor and wretched commons’, many were killed. Locals renamed a nearby patch of woodland ‘Bloody Oaks’.

  Brief as the clash had been, there had been enough to indicate its driving force. The rebels had advanced with a repeated yell of ‘A Clarence. A Clarence. A Warwick.’ Several – including their leader Sir Robert Welles – had worn Clarence’s colours. On the corpse of one of them, hacked down as he fled, was found a casket stuffed full of documents, shocking pieces of ‘great sedition’ and ‘abominable treason’. A servant of Clarence’s, he had been the duke’s go-between with Sir Robert Welles: perhaps it was Walter, who had grabbed a spear and gone into battle shouting death to King Edward.37

  In the battle’s aftermath Edward dispatched riders throughout the midlands and western England, proclaiming the victory and ordering a general demobilization. Nobody, he made it emphatically clear, was to raise troops on the commandment of anybody at all – no matter how high-ranking – unless that order came directly from the king. At the same time, he sent one of his close household servants, the trusted Welsh esquire John Donne, to Clarence and Warwick with messages written ‘of his own hand’. Eventually tracking the pair down at Coventry, Donne presented them with the king’s letters, which ordered them blandly to stand down the forces they had raised, and to come to him with their usual retinues. Attempting to read between the lines of Edward’s instructions, the pair lost their nerve.38 Warwick and Clarence set out, with the messenger in tow; soon after, Donne pointed out that they were going in the wrong direction. Concocting a flimsy explanation about raising more men on the king’s behalf – something Edward had expressly forbidden without his say-so – they headed north, away from the king and the royal army.

  Meanwhile, Sir Robert Welles and other rebel leaders were hunted down and brought to Edward at Grantham. At the king’s side, newly returned from Ireland, was John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, his inquisitor-in-chief. Interrogated separately, the rebels made full and frank confessions – which were obtained freely, ‘not for fear of death’ and with no resort to ‘duress’, the official account stated, unconvincingly. Then they were executed.

  Warwick and Clarence, the confessions stated, had been the prime movers in the uprising, ‘the partners and chief provokers of all their treasons’. Clarence’s late arrival in London had been deliberately planned, aiming
to delay the king for as long as possible, to give him and Warwick time to raise troops and co-ordinate with the insurgents. All the disturbances of the past months had had one overriding end in view: to destroy Edward and to put Clarence on the throne.

  According to the official account, an artless piece of propaganda, it was at this point that the scales fell from Edward’s eyes: a trusting king aghast at the ‘false dissimulation’ of his blood relatives. Even given Edward’s exceptional confidence in his own personal qualities, it would have been surprising had a flicker of suspicion not crossed his mind. The more cynical might have thought that a vengeful king was giving his brother and cousin just enough rope to hang themselves. Whatever the case, he was now in hot pursuit.39

  As Edward chased Warwick and Clarence into Yorkshire, remnants of the insurgency evaporated before him and the forces of the solidly loyal John Neville. As messengers rode between the king and the rapidly retreating lords, Edward was in no mood for mucking about. In response to their demands for sureties and pardons, he gave them an ultimatum. If they came to see him unconditionally, he would be ‘pleased’; if they refused, he would deal with them as their ‘unnatural demeaning’ required. But at Rotherham Edward was forced to stop. Warwick and Clarence had fled through the Peaks into Lancashire. The king, not provisioned for a long campaign, headed north to York, where he could resupply his army and monitor any rebel movements in the northeast. He knew where Warwick and Clarence were headed – towards Manchester and the territories of Warwick’s slippery brother-in-law Thomas, Lord Stanley.40

  Lord Stanley had spent much of the last decade sitting on the fence. After the battle of Towton, where he had conspicuously failed to put in an appearance, his assimilation into the regime was smoothed by his family’s dominance of England’s northwest, which Edward needed him to secure, and his Neville connections: his wife was Warwick’s sister Eleanor. But as Edward moved against the Nevilles, those connections had started to become a headache. And in March 1470, as the rebel lords headed towards him seeking refuge, Stanley’s new neighbour, the king’s brother Richard, was breathing down his neck.

  About a year previously Edward had bestowed on Richard a collection of royal offices and lands in Lancashire and Cheshire, squarely in the middle of Stanley territory. Stanley had responded with active hostility. Richard, bristling, had stood his ground. As Warwick and Clarence arrived in Lancashire, he was still in the area, having waded into a longstanding local feud between Stanley and the staunchly Yorkist Harrington family – on the Harringtons’ side. If it crossed Stanley’s mind to lend Warwick a hand, Richard’s presence probably made him think again; besides which, Edward was monitoring the situation closely. On 25 March, in a shot across Stanley’s bows, Edward issued a proclamation commanding that nobody should use the ‘variance’ between his brother Richard and the Stanley family as an excuse to commit crime, on pain of death. His meaning was clear. Stanley sat tight.41

  With their northern options shut off, Warwick, Clarence and their dwindling forces turned south. They did so with a price on their heads. In a proclamation distributed throughout the country, Edward pronounced them his ‘great rebels’ and traitors; anybody bringing them to the king would be given land worth £100 annually to his family in perpetuity, or £1,000 cash down. Meanwhile, royal agents moved onto the rebels’ estates, seizing lands, buildings and assets in the king’s name.42

  Reaching Devon, where they were harboured by the sympathetic Courtenay family, the rebel lords joined up with Warwick’s wife Anne and their two daughters. Isabel, Clarence’s wife, was now heavily pregnant with the couple’s first child. On Monday 9 April they set sail from Dartmouth, a cobbled-together flotilla carrying their remaining men.43 To Warwick, it was déjà vu. Ten years before, pursued by Lancastrian troops, he and Edward had left south Devon for Calais, first their refuge, then their springboard for invasion. Now, with Calais under the control of Warwick’s deputy, Lord Wenlock, they had a similar plan. Edward, though, was several steps ahead of them.

  In the Channel, a squadron of royal ships captained by John, Lord Howard was on the prowl; another fleet, including Warwick’s impounded flagship Trinity, was being fitted out at Southampton under the command of Anthony Woodville. Warwick wanted his flagship back. As the rebels passed Southampton Water, he dropped anchor and sent a raiding party to seize it. Woodville’s troops were lying in wait. Overwhelming the raiders, they took several rebel vessels; Warwick, Clarence and the rest of their ships headed rapidly for the open sea.44 Shortly after, Edward and his army arrived in Southampton. The captives were handed over to John Tiptoft for trial.

  Tiptoft condemned a number of Warwick’s men to death – his close associate Sir Geoffrey Gate, an influential and potentially useful man, was spared – and the executions began. Not content with the full ritual horror of hanging, drawing, and beheading, Tiptoft went a stage further in underscoring the full coercive power of the Yorkist state. Stringing up the beheaded, eviscerated bodies by the legs, Tiptoft had stakes sharpened at both ends: one end was driven into each corpse ‘at buttocks’ until thoroughly wedged; the corpse’s detached head was jammed on the other. News of the killings, and the sadistic personal flourish of Tiptoft’s impalings, spread quickly among a horrified public.45

  Sailing up the Channel, Warwick and Clarence managed to dodge Howard’s patrols. Calais, though, proved no refuge. Trying to enter the harbour, the rebel lords were met with a hail of gunfire from the fortress of Rysbank and forced back into the open sea. Edward’s orders to hold Calais against Warwick had already reached the garrison, which obeyed them to the letter. Its captain Lord Wenlock had little option but to fall into step.

  Wenlock did manage to smuggle a message to Warwick, along with two flagons of wine for Clarence’s wife Isabel, who was enduring a traumatic labour on board ship. Calais, Wenlock warned, was loyal to Edward; moreover, its officials had appealed to Charles the Bold for military aid. Marine reinforcements would be arriving any day, and Warwick should make himself scarce while he still could. In the bedlam, Isabel gave birth to a girl; she didn’t live long. After burying the little body on the coast near Calais, the rebels headed back out to sea.46

  In the days that followed, something changed in Warwick’s thinking. Over the previous weeks, hunted down by an aggressive Edward, the earl’s decision-making had been tired, cautious and predictable. The sea, though, tended to bring out an instinctive, counter-intuitive aggression in him. Bolstered by a flotilla commanded by his illegitimate cousin Thomas Neville, wh0 had deserted Howard’s fleet, Warwick went on the attack, raiding and pillaging the Flanders coastline and terrorizing the local population. Intercepting a Flemish merchant convoy off Calais, he seized the ships and their cargo, and threw the crews overboard. If this brazen act of piracy helped raise much-needed funds, it also seemed crazily provocative: with Edward trying to hunt them down and Calais’ gates shut, the rebels now had Charles the Bold on their tail too. But there was method in Warwick’s madness. What he and Clarence now desperately sought was the backing of the French king Louis XI. And the quickest way to achieve that, Warwick reasoned, was to stretch tensions between Burgundy and France to breaking point.

  The rebel lords headed west along the Channel, towards the French coast. On Tuesday 1 May, their forty-odd captured ships in tow, they dropped anchor at the mouth of the Seine, some 150 miles west of Calais, and came ashore at the port of Honfleur, where a reception committee headed by the admiral of France gave them a cordial welcome. When reports of their arrival reached Louis XI at his Loire castle of Amboise, however, he was rather less pleased.

  The French king’s anxiety was understandable. No sooner had Warwick and Clarence reached Honfleur than they were using it both as a base to terrorize Channel shipping and as a marketplace for their plunder. Their presence on French soil threatened to trigger what was for Louis the disaster scenario: conflict with both England and Burgundy. As a livid Charles the Bold informed Louis in no uncertain terms, he regarded
the French king’s sheltering of the rebel Englishmen as an act of war. Publicly distancing himself from Warwick and Clarence, Louis ordered his commanders to get rid of them as fast as possible.

  Nothing, however, was straightforward with Louis. He had instantly grasped the possibilities offered by the rebel lords’ arrival in France. It wasn’t so much that he wanted them gone but that, in an area crawling with Burgundian spies, any help he gave them would be immediately reported back to Charles the Bold. Louis told Warwick to leave the Seine estuary and go further west down the Normandy coast, ‘away from the danger area’.47

  Warwick, though, wanted to draw Louis into the conflict – with both Burgundy and Edward. He refused to budge. And, as the days passed, the idea that had for some time hovered on the edge of Louis’ imagination finally seeded itself.

  Through the first half of May the Milanese ambassador to France, Sforza de Bettini, noticed an increase in unusual comings-and-goings at Amboise. Louis was, he reported, constantly closeted away in secret discussions, while various advisers – chief among them the ubiquitous Monypenny – had been sent to Honfleur to talk with Warwick and Clarence. Then, Bettini wrote, events started to assume a surreal, free-floating quality, ‘such that I seem to be dreaming as I write of them’.

  Louis, Bettini had heard, was brokering an alliance between two apparently irreconcilable enemies: Warwick and Clarence on the one hand, and Margaret of Anjou and the exiled Lancastrian regime on the other. With French backing, Warwick and Clarence would return to England, throw Edward IV off the throne on which Warwick had placed him almost a decade previously, and restore the king and dynasty that Warwick had once been instrumental in deposing: Henry VI and the house of Lancaster. Warwick, Bettini wrote with a diplomat’s succinctness, hadn’t got what he wanted from Edward, so had decided to back Henry instead.48 Where this left Clarence, whose royal claims seemed to have been set aside as quickly as they had been taken up, was unclear.