The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  As Henry’s corpse was being rowed to its resting place, in London the executions of captured rebels were just starting. Sending a force into Essex to mop up the rebels there, Edward and Richard rode into Kent. Fauconberg himself had gone to sea with ships he had stolen from Edward. Wanting the ships back, Edward offered him a pardon, which he accepted. On 26 May, he came ashore at Sandwich, where Richard received his fresh oath of loyalty on the king’s behalf. Fauconberg aside, Edward was in no mood to be gracious. At Canterbury, royal agents compiled a list of 186 wanted men, most of whom had had the good sense to make themselves scarce before the king arrived. When Edward reached the city the mayor, Nicholas Faunt, detained as an associate of Fauconberg, was summarily hanged, drawn and quartered.

  There was something calculated about Edward’s vengeance. That summer, following his brief foray into Kent, royal commissioners prowled through the county, sniffing out treachery in what one commentator called a ‘season of punishment’. The process was novel enough to attract comment. Those who were wealthy enough were ‘hanged by the purse’: given the chance to buy pardons with exorbitant cash ‘gifts’, and to enter into bonds for their future good behaviour; the poor were simply ‘hanged by the necks’. Another chronicler painted a desperate picture of an indigent rebel scrabbling around to pay the seven shillings necessary to escape capital punishment: selling his clothes, borrowing money on exorbitant terms, then labouring to pay off the debt. From Kent, he said, Edward got ‘much good and little love’.42 For the first time in ten years, England now had only one king, Edward IV. If his rebellious subjects wished to be received into his grace, they could pay for it.

  Part Four

  * * *

  Brother Against Brother

  Summer 1471 – Spring 1483

  ‘The duke of Clarence makes himself as big as he can, showing as he would but deal with the duke of Gloucester. And some men think that under this there should be some other thing intended and some treason conspired …’

  Sir John Paston to his brother, 6 November 1473

  ‘You might have seen flatterers carrying the words of both brothers backwards and forwards, even if they had been spoken in the most secret chamber.’

  Crowland Chronicle

  ‘He said that the king intends to consume him in like wise as a candle consumes in burning.’

  Indictment against Clarence, 1478

  12

  A New Foundation

  On 3 July 1471, some two months after the massacre at Tewkesbury, Edward processed into the parliament chamber at Westminster Palace. With him were his brothers and a clutch of loyalist noblemen and household officers. Restoring Yorkist rule across England would not be straightforward. Although the house of Lancaster and the Nevilles had all but been destroyed, the violent energies that they had unleashed continued to bubble; the Scots and Welsh, meanwhile, were reportedly ‘busy’. The Lancastrian nobleman Jasper Tudor, who had watched helplessly across the River Severn as Margaret of Anjou’s troops had been obliterated at Tewkesbury, was now fighting a running rearguard action across Wales against the pursuing Yorkist forces, counter-attacking viciously where possible. Alongside him was his teenage nephew Henry, now one of the last remaining sprigs of the Lancastrian line. Where the regime’s troops tried to stamp out resistance, royal commissioners were quick to follow, rolling out across the country the procedure they were perfecting in Kent. Backsliders were offered the chance to buy their way back into the king’s grace. From Cornwall to Yorkshire, bonds for future good behaviour were issued and fines extracted, funnelled directly into the coffers of Edward’s chamber – a welcome injection of cash for a king desperately low on funds. As England’s sole king, Edward now had the chance to create a new, solid foundation on which his royal authority would be built across the land, a political settlement that could bring peace and order to his troubled kingdom. The ceremony that unfolded in Westminster that July day, a ritual oath-taking, would be the start. Its focus was the king’s firstborn son, Prince Edward, the boy to whom Queen Elizabeth had given birth in Westminster sanctuary eight months before.

  One by one, the assembled councillors came forward to pledge allegiance to Edward’s ‘true and undoubted heir’, the infant who now represented the dynasty’s future. The first lords to do so were Clarence and Richard. They swore on the Gospels that, should the prince outlive his father, they would ‘take and accept’ him ‘for true, very and righteous King of England’, adding their names to a signed declaration for good measure.1

  The oath-taking was a display of the new-found family unity that had powered Edward’s astonishing victory, at its core the reforged bond between the king and his two brothers. It was also a vision of how, henceforth, he planned to rule. In keeping with this fraternal harmony, Edward had gone out of his way to secure Clarence’s and Richard’s approval for his plans for his little heir. The boy was handed the titles of prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester; and, as was customary, had been set up with his own household and council, which would run his estates and affairs on his behalf until he was fourteen years old. The king’s brothers had, naturally, given their consent. A formality it may have been, but it was a significant one: Prince Edward was now the king’s heir presumptive. Which meant that Clarence, and by extension Richard, were not. Nonetheless, both brothers could console themselves with the fact that, as Edward carved up the political map of England, they were at the head of the queue.

  As he distributed rewards and power, Edward placed a premium on loyalty. Those who had proved themselves during the king’s ‘late troubles’, in particular those who had shared all his ‘conflicts and journeys’, now stood to benefit from his favour. As he had done back in 1469, trying to reimpose control after the orgy of bloodletting at Edgecote, Edward privileged his household men. Many of them had followed him into exile, and had fought with particular ferocity around their king in the recent battles. They were well represented at the Westminster ceremony: John Howard was there, so too Thomas St Leger and the northerners William Parr and Ralph Ashton. Chief among them, naturally, was Edward’s close friend and chamberlain, William Hastings.

  Among the prizes the king handed Hastings was control of Warwick’s former stronghold of Calais. Edward had originally planned to grant the post to another of his companions-in-exile, the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, who had then expressed an ill-timed desire to go on pilgrimage. His wish elicited from Edward a snort of derision and accusations of cowardice – which, while unfair, was probably the king’s frustration at the prospect of being deprived of one of his most useful servants. Woodville took the hint and stayed in England, but it didn’t make any difference: Edward took Calais away from him and gave it to Hastings instead. The move made sense. It bound the workings of this critical but highly problematic enclave, a source of so much trouble over the years, closely to those of the king’s household and chamber. Moreover, Hastings was appointed not captain of Calais, with all the independence of action that title implied, but its lieutenant, locum tenens, the king’s representative there.

  Woodville, who had coveted the role, was furious. Wisely, he expressed his frustrations in private. Besides, as he probably reasoned to himself, further opportunities would come his way: as uncle to the king’s infant heir, he was now a blood relative of the dynasty.2 And as Edward extended his rule across the country, it was his own blood to which he now turned, first and foremost his brothers.

  Contrary to the rosy commentaries, Clarence’s return to the fold that spring hadn’t been down to a sudden outbreak of fraternal love and loyalty on his part. Or if it had, those impulses had been catalysed by an exceptionally attractive counter-offer from Edward. When, back in 1469, Clarence had married Warwick’s older daughter Isabel, he had become heir to the vast portfolio of Neville lands that his wife stood to inherit – though at that point, getting his hands on them was a distant prospect. In the spring of 1471 Edward, happy to promise his brother almost anything to get him back onsid
e, had honoured the arrangement; and Warwick’s killing at Barnet had then clarified the situation marvellously as far as Clarence was concerned. Granted the Neville earldoms of Warwick and Salisbury in the battle’s aftermath, along with a slew of other honours, he set about taking possession of the lands that came with them and, mediating with the king on behalf of Warwick’s former supporters, taking them into his service. For Clarence, the seismic upheavals of the previous two years and more must have seemed entirely worth it.3 Others, who had been at the sharp end of the bloodletting he had engendered, looked askance at the arrangement.

  But it was Richard whose situation was now transformed. His loyalty to Edward had been tested in the king’s ‘time of great necessity’, and it had endured. Not yet nineteen, his blood, his ability and his proven commitment to Edward’s cause made him an automatic pick for a key role in government. Accordingly, Edward had already given him a string of great offices of state: the admiralty and great chamberlainship – both previously in Warwick’s hands – to go with the constableship he hankered after.4 But Richard also needed a landed portfolio commensurate with his status as a royal duke. For the first time in his life, he was in a position to ask for what he wanted.

  Growing up, Richard had had to be content with what he got. When lands and offices were handed out he had been, if not at the back of the queue, then hardly a priority as Edward sought to satisfy the competing demands of key noblemen against a constantly shifting political landscape. Often, Edward had granted him lands only to take them away again, returning them to their previous owners as they were restored to favour, or giving them instead to Clarence. The episode of the lordship of Richmond – wrestled away from Richard by his older brother in a spasm of jealous rage – seemed to sum up the childhood relationship between the two brothers. It was one that Clarence had dominated, both in terms of his then status as heir presumptive and, given the three-year age gap between them, in physical development. At the time, Richard had little option but to take the path of least resistance. The grants he had received were a wide, diffuse scattering of estates and offices that, while they yielded the requisite income to maintain his ducal status, didn’t give him the commodity that all great noblemen regarded as their birthright: a landed powerbase. In 1469, Edward had made a stab at setting up Richard, then sixteen, with an independent sphere of action in Wales, but with Edward and Richard soon fleeing into exile, it hadn’t lasted long. Now Edward was in a position to bestow on Richard the kind of endowment he craved: the great northern patrimony of the earl of Warwick.5

  The estates that Clarence stood to inherit through his wife were only one part of the Neville inheritance. The other half constituted the lands and offices of Warwick’s northern power base, centred on his north Yorkshire castle of Middleham, which Edward now handed to his youngest brother. Edward’s previous attempt to solve the intractable problem of the north, entrusting control of it to the Neville family, had blown up in his face. By transferring Warwick’s patrimony and its networks of influence to Richard, Edward now aimed to impose a permanent solution.

  Though Richard had spent time at Middleham as a teenager in Warwick’s household, his associations with the Neville family weren’t close: indeed, in the recent fighting, he had played a key role in destroying it. Neither was he especially familiar with the bonds of blood and intermarriage that knitted the region together, and the quarrels that simmered between leading local families. He was, in short, hardly a figure to prompt a visceral transference of allegiance among those who had looked to the Nevilles for protection and favour, and who had given their service in return. But then, Richard would not simply be the latest in a line of great regional lords. As the king’s brother, he was the representative and mouthpiece of the crown. Local big men, aware of the influence that Richard could wield with the king, would find his lordship doubly enticing; Richard, meanwhile, would be backed by the full force of royal authority. Away in the south, Edward could rest easy in his Thames-side palaces, safe in the knowledge that the north was in his brother’s reliable, trustworthy hands.6

  This partition of the Warwick estates was, clearly, a division of spoils made after discussions between the king and both brothers. It was also far from straightforward – for the simple reason that the lands were not Edward’s to give.

  There were already legal heirs. The bulk of the lands Clarence now claimed through his wife were due by law to go to Warwick’s widow, Anne. The northern lands now in Richard’s possession, handed down through the male line of the Neville family, were to descend to Warwick’s nephew, John Neville’s young son, George duke of Bedford.

  There was a neat legal solution to the problem of these Neville inheritors. Given that Warwick and John Neville had committed treason, all Edward had to do was to declare them and their heirs legally dead by a parliamentary act of attainder, and all their titles and property would be permanently forfeit to the crown; whereupon Edward could dole them out to his brothers. This, however, was a move that both Clarence and Richard were desperate to avoid. As the brothers knew all too well, what the king gave, the king could also take away. If they gained possession of the Neville estates by royal grant, their lands would for ever be in danger of being ‘resumed’ or reappropriated by the king.

  Both brothers had first-hand experience of the insecurity provoked by these royal property reshuffles. Clarence had registered his frustrations in the most extreme way imaginable, by openly rebelling; Richard had just shrugged his shoulders and bided his time. Both perhaps felt that there was something in Edward – a tendency to indecision and whim – that now made it imperative to avoid such an arrangement. The far more secure way to hold their lands was somehow to inherit them from the legal heirs of the Neville family – which in turn meant that attainting Warwick, John Neville and their heirs was out of the question. On that, Clarence and Richard were agreed, and so they told their brother the king. It was probably the last time the pair were to agree on anything.7

  As autumn came, many who had fought for Lancaster in the recent conflicts remained on edge. Sir John Paston wrote to his younger brother, still lying low at the family home of Caister Castle. Hearing that locals were denouncing him as a traitor, trying to provoke him into ‘quarrels’, Paston urged his brother to watch his step and to be ‘chief of your language’, to avoid loose talk. The royal pardon he had been promised was taking a long time to materialize. It would be good, Paston wrote worriedly, for his brother to be ‘a little surer of your pardon than you are’.8

  Woven into Paston’s correspondence was a reminder of the dangers of straying loyalties. That summer the newly pardoned leader of the Kentish rebellion, Thomas Neville, the Bastard of Fauconberg, had gone north with Richard. His Neville connections and knowledge of the region would have been valuable to the young duke as he sought to assert his new authority; besides which, Richard could keep an eye on Fauconberg in case he was tempted to renege on his new oaths of Yorkist loyalty. Which, apparently, was what had now happened. As Paston reported, Fauconberg was ‘either beheaded, or like to be’.

  The trouble had come when Fauconberg returned south and, that September, had taken command of a ship and put to sea. Some days later, he sailed into the port of Southampton, where he was arrested ‘for a new offence’ and charged with treason: while at sea, his pardon had been revoked and royal agents were busy seizing his goods. What crime he had committed, nobody seemed to know. Given the naval expertise that he had already brought to bear against Edward’s regime, Fauconberg’s apparently unauthorized activities had perhaps been provocation enough to a twitchy government, especially at a time when prominent Lancastrian fugitives had broken out of sanctuary and disappeared.9 Dealing with Fauconberg, however, wasn’t straightforward. The government was anxious to avoid attracting public opprobrium for its procedurally suspect judicial killings (the most egregious example of which had come in Southampton the year before, with John Tiptoft’s impalings). Besides which, Fauconberg’s ‘new offence’ wasn’t
obvious, and it was highly irregular for kings to cancel pardons they had already granted.

  Where the intelligence on Fauconberg had come from was unclear. It was probable that Richard had received it in his capacity as admiral, and taken it to the king; equally probably, he had reassured Edward that he would make the problem go away and Edward, relieved, had given him the go-ahead.

  Richard took Fauconberg north to Middleham Castle where, away from the public gaze, he was summarily beheaded. If there had been a trial, nobody remarked on it. As Fauconberg’s head was brought back to London – one Harry Capp was paid the substantial sum of thirty shillings for carrying it – and joined the thicket of heads on London Bridge, its sightless eyes gazing into Kent, people debated the killing: ‘some men say he would have deserved it and some say nay’.10 Whatever the case, Richard had laid down a marker. Anybody attempting to play fast and loose with the king’s laws would receive the most rigorous justice at his hands.

  For all the frightening uncertainty of Fauconberg’s murder and the anxieties of former Lancastrians, Edward’s punishments had, by and large, been calculated to offer the possibility of a way back into his grace – at a price. Those who had made the mistake of transferring their loyalties to Lancaster – from the Pastons to Warwick’s one surviving brother, Archbishop George Neville – were pardoned. So, too, were diehard opponents of Edward’s regime, like the group of Lancastrian advisers found sheltering with Margaret of Anjou after Tewkesbury. Foremost among them were the west-countrymen Sir John Fortescue, now in his seventies, and the fifty-year-old John Morton. For these men, the equation was simple. They had been unswerving in their allegiance to the house of Lancaster, through thin and thinner. Now, they were forced to acknowledge that their cause was irretrievably lost. John Morton put their line of thinking best. In an ideal world, he later observed, Henry VI’s son would have been king, not Edward IV – but ‘after God ordered him to lose it and King Edward to reign, I was never so mad that I would with a dead man strive against the quick.’11