The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  In the second week of June, Warwick and Clarence arrived at Amboise for talks. With Louis promising them the financial backing they wanted, the discussions over a potential Lancastrian alliance went smoothly. But where a jumpy Louis wanted to hustle the rebels off French soil as soon as possible, Warwick, characteristically deliberate, was not to be rushed into anything. The proposed alliance involved steering a delicate path through deeply entrenched loyalties, interests and hatreds. Louis’ role was crucial. He would have to gain the trust of both parties – there was no way, in the first instance, that Margaret of Anjou would talk with the loathed Warwick face to face – and he would have to keep his promises of financial help.49 All parties would have to hold their nerve.

  Warwick and Clarence returned to Honfleur to spend the first instalments of Louis’ cash. Assembling munitions, horses and men, they moved their ships west down the coast to La Hougue, a more convenient launch-pad for their invasion of England. Meanwhile, Charles the Bold’s massive navy – an assortment of Flemish, Portuguese and German ships, with a handful of Hanse pirates thrown in for good measure – appeared off the Normandy coast. For Charles, the prospect of a French-backed regime on the English throne was unthinkable. Blockading Normandy’s harbours, his fleet would make sure the rebel lords couldn’t go anywhere.

  On 24 July, after weeks of patient talks between Louis and Margaret of Anjou, the once unimaginable encounter took place. In a public ceremony in Angers Cathedral, Warwick abased himself in front of Margaret and her sixteen-year-old son, Edward of Lancaster; the earl begged her forgiveness – she kept him waiting on his knees for fifteen minutes before granting it – and swore loyalty to Henry VI, Margaret and their son. An official account was written up for Lancastrian consumption. Lingering over the details of Warwick’s submission to the house of Lancaster, it figured forth a glowing picture of reconciliation: of ingrained enmities and old rancours painfully overcome, and of a new bond forged in the service of England and its people. This new unity between former foes would be sealed with the marriage of Warwick’s second daughter Anne and Henry VI’s heir Edward of Lancaster. Clarence, Warwick’s first son-in-law, was pushed further down the pecking order. In this new settlement, Clarence’s claims now came as something of an afterthought. He would be granted ‘all the lands that he had when he departed out of England, and the duchy of York and’, vaguely, ‘many other’.50

  Designed to convince diehard supporters on both sides, barely able to stomach the idea of such an agreement, the account’s glossy brushstrokes hardly painted over the truth. The evanescent possibility of an alliance between Warwick and Lancaster had been in the water for years, but always dismissed for the fantasy it was. Now, with Warwick and Clarence as desperate as the Lancastrians, their worlds were for an instant superimposed: in that moment, they saw common interest. The account smoothed over the insuperable difficulties the alliance threw up. Most glaring was the problem of resetting the political clock to a time before 1461, when the great Yorkist land grab had seen titles, offices and estates snatched from Lancastrian loyalists and redistributed to followers of Edward IV – two of the greatest beneficiaries being Warwick and Clarence. Then there was the fact, indigestible to supporters of Lancaster, that Clarence had been written into the Lancastrian succession. Should the Lancastrian heir die without offspring, the crown would pass to Clarence and his descendants ‘for ever more’: a botched compromise whose pressure points were evident even as it was agreed.

  Ultimately, too, Margaret was not quite able to put ‘deeds past’ out of her mind. As the new allies finalized invasion plans, she refused point blank to entrust her son to Warwick’s care. Warwick and Clarence, along with a group of Lancastrian nobles, would have to prove their new-found commitment to Lancaster by doing the dirty work of regime change: getting rid of Edward IV, putting Henry VI back on the throne and stabilizing the country in his name. Only then would Margaret, her son and his betrothed – Warwick’s daughter – leave France for England.51

  In England that summer, tension built. As Edward’s agents sent back information from northern France, he strengthened the Channel forts and bolstered the Calais garrison; Anthony Woodville’s fleet joined the Burgundian blockade. He also tried to make Clarence see sense. That July, an unnamed lady had passed through Calais to the French court, carrying with her a letter from the king to his errant brother. If Clarence really thought he would benefit from an alliance with Margaret of Anjou and Lancaster, Edward told him shortly, he was deceiving himself. Edward’s agents also reached out to Margaret herself, putting on the table a remarkable compromise. During her negotiations with Louis, Margaret showed the French king a letter she had just received from Edward, ‘by the which was offered to her son my lady the princess’. Edward had tried to disrupt the Warwick–Lancaster talks by proposing a reconciliation between the two houses, the centrepiece of which would be a marriage between the Lancastrian heir and Edward’s oldest daughter Elizabeth. If true, this bid for a joint Yorkist–Lancastrian future for England was a bolt from the blue. Whether or not Edward was serious, Margaret used the proposal merely as a bargaining chip in her discussions with Warwick: it was, she clearly thought, an impossibility.52

  By early August, reports reached London of further disturbances in Yorkshire. ‘There be many folks up in the north’, Sir John Paston wrote to his brother with a southerner’s fearful vagueness. Henry Percy, the new earl of Northumberland, was struggling to contain the rioters – so much so, Paston continued, that Edward had gone north himself with his household men ‘to put them down’.53 Given the events of the previous summer, Edward’s new-found obsession with suppressing popular insurgency was understandable – yet, apprehensive Londoners feared, he had made the wrong decision. With rumours proliferating of the rebel lords’ imminent arrival, people felt that Edward would do better to return south, and fast. ‘I pray you be ready’, Paston urged his brother: ‘the matter quickeneth’.

  Towards the end of the month, copies of a proclamation appeared overnight in London, posted to prominent landmarks: the Standard in Cheapside; the boundary ‘stulps’ in front of London Bridge; and church doors throughout the capital. Addressed from Clarence and Warwick to ‘the worshipful, discreet and true commons of England’, it expounded on familiar themes: the corrupt venality of ‘seditious persons’ around the king who had reduced England to a wasteland of violent disorder and poverty. The rebel lords would right wrongs, restore the rule of law and the ‘common wealth’, and make England ‘free’ again. London’s mayor, Richard Lee, ripped down the letters as fast as they were put up. He also forwarded a copy to Edward.

  Edward’s response, again, was to write to Clarence. This time, he put his brother on notice. He told Clarence that he had seen the proclamations and other dispatches that his brother had been sending into England, ‘no mention made of us’. Appealing to his ‘nearness of blood and our laws’, Edward ordered his brother to come and submit to him ‘in all haste’. If he failed to do so, and if he continued in the ‘unlawful assembly of our people’, Edward would punish him and his followers. Any effusion of Christian blood that followed would be on Clarence’s head.54

  News of the instability rippled outwards. A thousand miles away in Florence, the new head of the house of Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, was finding the bank’s affairs a headache. If Edward’s regime, which Gherardo Canigiani had bankrolled so lavishly, were to be overthrown, there would be little chance of the Medici getting any of their money back. It was highly unlikely that a returning Lancastrian regime would honour the debts that had financed their rival – and Lorenzo knew it. Nothing, he wrote to Tommaso Portinari on 31 July, ‘gives me more concern or greater trouble than this question of London’. Do something, he said to Portinari – and when things had settled down, it would be worth ‘tying Canigiani’s hands, so that they cannot soil us any more’.55

  By 14 August, Edward was at the north Yorkshire city of Ripon, near the insurgency’s reported epicentre. There he
found nothing. Where the new earl of Northumberland had been utterly unable to impose order, the merest rumour of an approaching royal army had apparently been enough to disperse the rebellion, insurgents melting back into their communities.

  As Edward, basing himself in York, picked at the various strands of the uprising, what he found hardly came as a surprise: almost every thread of affinity and allegiance led to Warwick. One name that cropped up again and again was that of Sir John Conyers, the self-styled ‘Robin of Redesdale’, a constant presence behind the insurgencies of the previous eighteen months. Although over the past year Edward had taken significant steps to dig up Neville networks of influence, their roots were deep. Now, he reconfigured military security in the Anglo-Scottish borderlands, removing the Nevilles altogether. Replacing the blameless John Neville as warden of the East March with his newly dominant rival in the region, Henry Percy, Edward stripped the absent Warwick of his wardenship of the West March, giving it to his youngest brother Richard. The appointment was a double-edged sword. This big national security command had been in Neville hands for so long it had come to be seen as a birthright. Richard was profiting from Edward’s destruction of Neville power. Warwick had been Richard’s mentor: now, if things changed, he would be in the vengeful earl’s line of fire.56

  In early September, hearing that the rebel lords planned to make for the Kent coast, Edward sent orders to loyalists in the region to hold the line and, if they were unable to do so, to fall back on London, ‘by which time we trust to be there in our own person or nearby’. Days later, Edward was still in Yorkshire raising men – John Neville had apparently agreed, grudgingly, to march south with him – when news came of Clarence and Warwick’s arrival: not in Kent but far to the west, in south Devon. With them were a group of Lancastrians, including the earl of Oxford and that persistent troublemaker Jasper Tudor. They had returned, they proclaimed, ‘in the name of our most dread sovereign lord, Henry VI’.57

  Four days previously, accompanied by a heavily armed French fleet, the rebel lords had set sail from the Normandy port of La Hougue. By luck or good judgement, their timing was excellent. The blockading Burgundian fleet was nowhere to be seen, either disoriented by thick fog, or scattered by storms, or back in port revictualling. The rebels had a clear run.58

  Making landfall at Dartmouth, the scene of their escape five months previously, Warwick and Clarence’s proclamations revealed a cause transformed. A year before, their strongly populist manifesto had concealed a muddiness in their objectives, and in whose name they were being carried out. This time their message was unequivocal. It was a re-run of 1461, but turned on its head. Now, it was Edward who was cast as the illegitimate ‘usurper, oppressor and destroyer’ of England’s true king, Henry VI.59

  As Jasper Tudor headed into Wales to raise his forces there, Clarence, Warwick and Oxford marched unopposed through the west country, raising a ‘great people’ in a region where Lancastrian affinities, kept smouldering through loyalty to families like the Courtenays, now blazed into life. They made for Warwick’s recruiting grounds in the midlands, where they were joined by Lord Stanley, finally revealing his political hand.

  All over the country, people were hastily weighing loyalty and self-interest in the balance. Disturbingly for Edward, for many the decision seemed all too easy. One chronicler, a Cambridge scholar, summed up the situation succinctly. The ‘common people’, he wrote, had looked to Edward to restore all that was ‘amiss’ in England, and to bring ‘great prosperity and rest’ to the troubled country, ‘but it came not’. Civil conflict had dragged on, with recruits having to march far from their own homes at their own cost; a string of taxes had been imposed under false pretences; and Edward’s decision-making had ‘hurt merchandise’ and damaged the economy. All this had brought England ‘right low’. The balance was tipping firmly towards the invaders.60

  By the time they reached Coventry, Warwick and Clarence’s forces were said to number thirty thousand men. Few, by contrast, were turning out for Edward. Tired of the constant commands to mobilize, aware of the growing power of Clarence and Warwick’s forces, and simply not wanting to make the wrong call and find themselves charged with treason, when presented with Edward’s summons people sat on their hands. With Edward as he set off south to confront the invaders were a knot of loyal men: his brother Richard, Hastings, Anthony Woodville, Tiptoft and John Howard. Their combined forces were nowhere near the numbers that Warwick and Clarence now commanded. Edward badly needed John Neville and his men. At Nottingham he stopped, waiting for them to turn up.

  One night in mid-September, at Nottingham Castle, Edward was woken by a servant with urgent news: Warwick and Clarence were ‘within six or seven miles’ and closing fast. That news was even worse than anticipated. John Neville had recruited forces in Edward’s name but then, still fuming about having been deprived of the earldom of Northumberland in exchange for lands which were not worth a ‘magpie’s nest’, had changed sides. Declaring for Warwick, Clarence and Lancaster – his men were in their saddles shouting ‘Long Live Henry VI’ – he was now coming for Edward. Luckily, one of Neville’s men had slipped away, rode to Edward and told him to ‘avoid’: to get away, while he still could.61

  Edward, though, was trapped between Warwick’s army, blocking routes west and south to London, and John Neville closing from the north. There was only one way open to him: east, through Lincolnshire and, skirting the great estuary of the Wash, to the Norfolk port of Lynn, where Anthony Woodville commanded local loyalties. It was a perilous route, the Wash merging imperceptibly into the shifting tidal marshes that stretched for miles inland. In failing light, crossing a notorious causeway across the mouth of the River Nene – the same place, perhaps, where King John had lost his royal treasure some 250 years earlier – Edward and his men nearly drowned. Darkness had fallen when, on the evening of Sunday 30 September, they reached Lynn.

  Isolated, penniless, with dwindling support and his execution almost certain if captured, Edward took the only available option. The following Tuesday, he and his few hundred men embarked on a small fleet of ships and flat-bottomed boats that had been hastily commandeered, along with their English and Dutch skippers.62 Weaving out through the treacherous shallows of the Wash and into the North Sea, they set course for the coast of Holland and the territories of Edward’s brother-in-law Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

  10

  They Think He Will Leave His Skin There

  North of Bruges, the flat, low-lying polders of Flanders disintegrate into one of Europe’s great deltas, a half-submerged, half-reclaimed world that gives the region its name, Zeeland. Here, where the Rhine, the Maas and the Scheldt disgorge into the North Sea, was Burgundy’s mercantile heart; the series of interlinked ports at Middelburg on the island of Walcheren a constant pulse of activity, shipping and receiving goods from the Baltic to Asia Minor, and beyond. Some hundred miles beyond Zeeland, the Dutch coastline dissolves again into the Frisian islands. Tapering east and north into Germany and Denmark, this beautiful, desolate archipelago – constantly shifting, forming and reforming – marked the limits of Burgundian territory. On 3 October 1470, Edward’s ship headed frantically towards the Frisian port of Texel. It wasn’t where he wanted to end up – the Walcheren, probably, was his original destination – but he had little choice. It wasn’t autumnal storms that had caused his small fleet to scatter, but the North Sea’s other perennial danger: pirates. And in this part of the world, the pirates tended to be Hanse, the trading league of northern European cities with whom Edward’s relations were at rock bottom.

  In Burgundy the Hanse were seen rather differently. Among the Flemish cloth industry’s most important customers, they maintained a high-profile presence through their kontor or office in Bruges, while their ships overwintered in Middelburg. They also had other uses. Their privateers bolstered Flanders’ seaborne defences against raiders – most recently the earl of Warwick. In return, Charles the Bold did more than turn a blind ey
e to Hanse pirates operating out of Burgundian ports; he positively indulged them. When, in the winter of 1469, the notorious Hanse pirate Paul Beneke had captured the English cargo ship John of Newcastle, he towed it back to his base at the Zeeland port of Veere where, under licence from Charles, he sold off his stolen goods and converted the captured vessel into a warship.1 As far as the Hanse were concerned, anything English was fair game. So when a pack of Hanse privateers spotted Edward’s ships heading towards the Dutch coast, it started to hunt them down.

  Trying to shake off their pursuers, Edward’s ragged flotilla split up. One group of ships, commanded by his brother Richard and brother-in-law Anthony Woodville, made for the Zeeland coast, where they reached the shelter of the Walcheren. Edward, with seven ships, peeled off and fled north. Reaching Texel, the largest of the Frisian islands, his captains used the shallow draft of their flat-bottomed boats to escape. Nosing into the shelter of the Marsdiep, the channel separating Texel from the Dutch mainland, they left the larger Hanse ships behind, unable to follow for fear of running aground.2

  Some days later, Edward’s dishevelled band marched into the Dutch city of Alkmaar. There, they were warmly received by one of Charles the Bold’s pre-eminent courtiers, the governor of Holland and Zeeland, Louis of Gruuthuse. In his mid-forties, Gruuthuse, a veteran of the recent Anglo-Burgundian negotiations and a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, knew the familial and chivalric ties that bound Edward to Charles, and took his duties as host very seriously indeed. The fugitives’ journey south was transformed into something more convivial. At Leiden, Edward and his entourage refreshed themselves with four jugs of sweet, spiced hippocras and three pounds of sweetmeats, washed down by more rounds of Burgundy and Rhenish wine; reaching The Hague, they sank with relief into the luxury of Gruuthuse’s official residence, which he had placed at their disposal. Meanwhile, some two hundred miles south, Gruuthuse’s messengers arrived at Charles the Bold’s castle of Hesdin with news of Edward’s arrival.3