The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Edward had always appreciated talent, wherever it came from; moreover, it was pleasing to be able to pardon those who threw themselves on his mercy. If this small group of highly able administrators and politicians – men who had been instrumental to Margaret of Anjou’s decade-long survival in exile and her unlikely bid to regain power – were now prepared to commit themselves to the house of York, they promised to be considerable assets to Edward’s regime. That autumn, Morton started a new job in the chancery offices in Westminster. Fortescue, meanwhile, wrote for his life, systematically dismembering the case he had made for the house of Lancaster’s supremacy, and in its place offering a full justification for the house of York’s rightful claim to the throne. Edward was gratified.

  Besides pragmatism and self-regard, other impulses underlay Edward’s conciliation. He had to move beyond the internecine bloodletting of the past years, to be seen as a unifier, a merciful healer as well as a deliverer of justice – which meant pardoning people for their misjudgements rather than executing them. There was another reason too.

  Edward had been minded to throw the book at the families of Warwick and John Neville. They had tried to destroy him; in return, Edward would destroy the Neville line and confiscate its lands in perpetuity, through an act of attainder. But the king’s brothers had twisted his arm, and he had changed his mind. The Nevilles would not be attainted in order that Clarence and Richard could benefit from the greater legal security of possessing their lands by inheritance, rather than by royal grant. But if Edward was not prepared to use this devastating political weapon against Warwick, the rebel-in-chief, he could hardly deploy it against the earl’s supporters.12

  With attainder no longer in the equation, Edward and his brothers had to find another legal justification for what amounted to a land grab of staggering proportions. In wrenching the lands away from their rightful Neville heirs, the claims of those heirs would somehow have to be dismissed – or the laws of inheritance would have to be overridden. Then came another twist. At nineteen years old, Richard was on the lookout for a suitable bride. One had recently become available: Warwick’s younger daughter Anne, whose husband, Edward of Lancaster, had died at Tewkesbury. Richard wanted to marry her. If, up to this point, the interests of Clarence and Richard regarding the Warwick inheritance had been reasonably aligned, it was now that they violently parted company.

  There had long been talk of such a marriage. If the rumours back in 1464 were to be believed, it was a match that Warwick himself had wanted. Richard and Anne had known each other for years, growing up together at Middleham. After Tewkesbury, however, she had come under the protection of her husband’s killer, Clarence. Still only fifteen, ‘amiable, beauteous and gracious’, she was perhaps the most eligible young widow in the country – and Clarence knew it. She was now under house arrest, her every movement watched.13

  Clarence had a particular reason for wanting to keep control of his sister-in-law. He held his own share of the Warwick inheritance through his wife Isabel. As joint heiress, Anne had an equally good claim on those lands. It was, therefore, entirely in Clarence’s interest to prevent Anne from making such a claim – which would, of course, threaten his own.14

  For Richard, Anne was more or less the ideal bride. While he already had his portion of Warwick’s lands in the north, Anne embodied the familial link that his lordship in the region lacked. Marrying Anne, Warwick’s daughter, would make Richard a true heir to the Nevilles, giving him more heft among the dead earl’s followers in the region and allowing their allegiances to transfer more instinctively to him. It would also present a chance to muscle in on his brother’s part of the Neville inheritance: potentially, to claim a half-share on behalf of his wife.

  When news of Richard’s bid for Anne reached Clarence, he was livid. On her own account, Anne stood little chance of making good her claims. Backed by a powerful husband, however, it was a different story. Few could match Clarence for wealth and influence, but Richard was one of them. Clarence’s agitation was driven not just by rage, but by anxiety. No sooner had he made good his right to the lands which he had coveted for years than that right started to look newly precarious – undermined, he feared, by his younger brother.

  Clarence went to some lengths to prevent Richard getting his hands on his prospective bride. Disguising Anne as a cookmaid, he placed her in the precincts of St Martin’s-le-Grand, a sanctuary north of St Paul’s Cathedral, where the king’s writ did not run. If Clarence took the view that possession was nine-tenths of the law, so too did Richard, who had no intention of negotiating with his brother for her release. Instead, he found out where Anne was and simply extracted her.15

  Just as Richard had proved brutally uncomplicated in dealing with Fauconberg’s shaky loyalties, so he now pursued his rights with direct aggression. Neither he nor Clarence was prepared to take a backward step over the young noblewoman whom both saw as their property. That winter, as talk of the two brothers’ disagreement spread through the country and into northern Europe, their quarrel deepened.

  The Christmas festivities of 1471 seemed more magnificent than usual. Through the feasting, plays and mummings, and the ribald antics of the abbot of misrule and his accomplices, Edward moved, sovereign in his own land. On Christmas Day, Westminster Abbey bore witness to a joint re-coronation ceremony: a magnificent reassertion of the dynastic order in which Edward and Elizabeth were crowned king and queen, followed by a banquet at nearby Whitehall. The ceremonial continued throughout the festive season. On Epiphany, one of the great ‘days of estate’, the king processed, crowned and in his velvet royal robes, Elizabeth alongside him; visibly pregnant with the couple’s fifth child, she was excused from wearing the heavy gold crown. At the chapel royal, Edward offered up gold, frankincense and myrrh. Later, there was the usual Twelfth Night entertainment: following the Epiphany feast, a great bowl of wassail, spiced ale, was borne into the hall by John Howard and Edward’s new household steward, Thomas, Lord Stanley. Awash with festive cheer, the king, queen and assembled court – including London’s mayor and aldermen, and a group of specially selected citizens – listened appreciatively to ‘fresh songs’ sung by the gentlemen of the chapel royal, who then doubled up as a company of actors in the plays that followed.16

  Meanwhile, Edward had plenty of time to reflect on his tumultuous year, in particular his exile in the Low Countries. Fondly recalling the help he had received from various Burgundian lords, his recollections of Charles the Bold himself were rather different. Edward remembered how, after his arrival in Holland, his Burgundian brother-in-law – scared of the very real probability of a joint invasion by Louis XI and the earl of Warwick – had at first dragged his feet, providing Edward and his men with a shoestring budget and not even acknowledging Edward’s status as king, all the while protesting his Lancastrian affiliations. When some three months later the pair finally met, Edward, all warm hugs and fraternal bonhomie, had suppressed his irritation at these insults. Back in England, he gave it vent.

  Beneath the continued Anglo-Burgundian entente and the frequent ambassadorial exchanges – Edward sending reports of his victories to Charles; Charles offering his sincere congratulations – the English king, reported one ambassador, was stewing over his ‘savage treatment’ by the Burgundian duke. For his part, Charles apparently ‘did not know whether to be happy or not’ about the news of Edward’s victories: the ‘bad grace’ and ‘much regretfulness’ with which he had backed Edward weren’t exactly conducive to their continued friendship.17

  Away in France, these hints of mutual mistrust were seized on by Louis XI, his perpetual anxiety about a joint Anglo-Burgundian alliance newly inflamed by Edward’s conquering return. He dispatched envoys to the English court who worked away on Edward’s grievances against Charles the Bold, further stoked – in the endlessly tangled dance of northern European politics – by Charles’s sealing of a truce with the French king, amid rumours of a marriage treaty between France and Burgundy. This, of cour
se, was England’s horror scenario: an alliance that left it isolated and, as the Burgundian commentator Philippe de Commynes put it, ‘in danger of destruction’ – although, he added laconically, Edward and his council got ‘unnecessarily worked up’ about something that was never going to happen.18

  Unnecessarily or not, Edward did get worked up. He refused to pay the remaining instalments of his sister Margaret’s dowry due to his Burgundian brother-in-law. Payment of the outstanding balance – £30,000, or 75 per cent of the total sum – had fallen due on the second anniversary of their wedding, in July 1470. It was already late, for understandable reasons. Edward, who didn’t have the money anyway, now refused to stump up. His well-ventilated grudges against Charles perhaps gave him an excuse to withhold payment, but his refusal to pay was almost inevitable, given that he was also defaulting on the sweeping financial commitments he had made to the Hanse when in exile, in return for their ships and men. The Hanse were unimpressed.

  Charles was vexed in turn. Never the most temperate of men, he was exercised enough to abandon his recently rediscovered Yorkist loyalties – in private, anyway. In November 1471, he had held a secret ceremony in the city of Arras, in which he signed a statement to the effect that, through his maternal descent from John of Gaunt, founder of the house of Lancaster, he was the rightful heir to the Lancastrian king of England Henry VI, and would claim his throne as soon as chance arose to do so.19

  Whether or not news of the ceremony reached Edward, that winter he was on the alert. As well as the substantial annual intelligence budget of £104 given to the monitoring station that was Calais, Edward handed its treasurer an additional £33 6s 8d ‘for the exploration of rumours’. The money, another document stated, was to be used specifically on the surveillance of the plans ‘of our adversaries’.20

  As a chilly peace settled over northern Europe, Edward’s brothers consolidated their hold on their new lands. In the north, Richard was recruiting. Former servants of Warwick flocked to him: pinning Richard’s boar badge on their caps and their jackets, they pledged their allegiance to him and to the crown. Among them was Sir John Conyers, the man who as ‘Robin of Redesdale’ had sparked popular uprisings on Warwick’s behalf. Further support came from committed Yorkists in the region, from the combative Sir Ralph Ashton – now sheriff of Yorkshire – and his son-in-law John Nesfield, to the Pilkington brothers John and Charles.21 It wasn’t just in the north that Richard had been busy. As Christmas drew to a close, and the royal household began to recover from the abbot of misrule’s twelve days of benign disorder, he was seeking royal backing for his marriage to Anne Neville – and the king was inclined to listen.

  As Edward well knew, Richard’s proposal would be certain to cause trouble. The king had explicitly granted Clarence his portion of the Warwick estates, lock, stock and barrel. In allowing Richard to marry Anne, he was providing his youngest brother with a key to start unpicking Clarence’s settlement. Then again, Richard had proved his loyalty and needed a bride of exceptional status. Edward was in the mood to give Richard what he wanted. Besides, the king was confident in his own ability to straighten out the argument between his two brothers, which, given their status as the regime’s most powerful noblemen, threatened to destabilize whole swathes of the kingdom if it got out of hand.

  On 17 February 1472, the first Tuesday in Lent, Sir John Paston wrote from London to his younger brother with distinctly unLenten thoughts. He was relaxed, skittish even. The Pastons’ political rehabilitation was almost complete. He and his on–off betrothed, Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Anne Haute, had recently spoken at a ‘pretty leisure’. Their marriage was on again – and, with it, Paston’s relationship with the royal family. Paston asked his brother to dig out his copy of John Lydgate’s poem of romantic courtly love, The Temple of Glass, and send it by return, to help him with his courtship.22 Then he turned to political gossip.

  The previous day Edward and Elizabeth, together with Clarence and Richard, had been rowed up the Thames to the royal manor of Sheen to attend a ‘pardon’, a ceremony at which papal indulgences were granted. In fact, Edward planned to use the occasion to thrash out the increasingly toxic spat between his brothers: away from the public gaze of London and Westminster, the relative seclusion of Sheen was as good a place as any to do so. ‘Men say’, Paston added delicately, that the brothers had gone ‘not in all charity’. The atmosphere could have been cut with a knife.23

  Edward had already made one attempt to reconcile his brothers: it hadn’t worked. Shortly before the Sheen trip he summoned Clarence and Richard to a council meeting at Westminster to rule on their claims to the Warwick inheritance. There, in front of the king and a panel of his close advisers, the brothers were ordered to put their cases in turn.

  Both Clarence and Richard were used to heading commissions and presiding over courts; both knew how to debate, to turn a phrase. Even so, as one chronicler – a man either present in the council chamber, or close to someone who was – later recollected, the pair had astonished everybody present, ‘the lawyers even’, with their rhetorical pyrotechnics and their ability ‘to find arguments in abundance’ to support their cases. Edward, meanwhile, had kept order with a kingly affability. Then the writer paused, the scene recollected in his mind’s eye. ‘These three brothers’, he continued, a hint of regret in his appraising tone, ‘possessed such surpassing talent that their triple bond could only have been broken with the utmost difficulty’ – ‘if’, that was, ‘they had been able to avoid conflict.’ It was a big ‘if’. The meeting, increasingly heated, had reached an impasse and the panel had been unable to deliver a judgment. Calling proceedings to a close, Edward announced that he would deal with his brothers himself and be ‘a mediator between them’. Which was where Sheen came in.

  As the talks between the three brothers unfolded – Queen Elizabeth a silent, heavily pregnant presence at the king’s side – it became increasingly clear that what Edward meant by ‘mediation’ was not independent arbitration: at least, not as far as Clarence was concerned. Rather, Edward was quite clearly ‘entreating’ Clarence on Richard’s behalf, trying to persuade Clarence to let their youngest brother have what he wanted.

  In the face of the king’s pressure, Clarence’s eloquence gave way to a sullen defensiveness. Richard could, he conceded, have Anne Neville – but, he added emphatically, ‘there shall part no livelihood’, no lands. It wasn’t the marriage per se that worried Clarence, but the prospect of Richard launching counter-claims to his property on his new wife’s behalf. But as all three knew, Clarence could argue as much as he liked. Edward had already made up his mind what was going to happen.

  The king’s ruling was unequivocally in favour of Richard: he was given the hand of Anne Neville, and with her a chunk of the ‘livelihood’ to which Clarence had clung so desperately. There was some horse-trading. Clarence was given a scattering of lands in compensation. He also extracted an assurance from Edward, on record, that henceforth none of the lands or possessions granted him by the king would be taken away from him or his heirs, ‘neither by authority of Parliament’ – Clarence had always been nervous about parliamentary acts of resumption – ‘nor in any other way’. Inadvertently, this assurance revealed what had already happened at Sheen. Clarence had been presented with a choice: agree with the king, or lose everything.24 Richard, on the other hand, had emerged triumphant as lord of one of the greatest blocs of territory in England. He was hungry for more.

  There was something unwavering about Richard: the way he fought; the way he applied the king’s laws; how he pursued what he believed to be rightfully his. Even more than most, his response to the uncertain, mistrustful world that had formed him – the years of blood-soaked instability, bookended by outbreaks of civil conflict and two flights into exile – was an unyielding insistence on rule and custom. The books he owned and acquired were a case in point. It wasn’t so much that Richard was an exceptional reader. The volumes he read – chivalric romances, histories, �
�mirrors’ or guides for princes, prophecies and pious works – were fairly run-of-the-mill, the kind of books you might find in the chests and coffers of most noblemen of the time.25 It was more his engagement with them, his identification with them – signing not the flyleaves, most at risk from being torn out, but the inside pages – and the way he strived to live by the ideals and virtues they depicted: of chivalry, piety and obedience. All of which provided reassurance and predictability in an unstable world – predictability that Richard seemed to crave. His mottoes seemed to sum this up: the heroic struggle of tant le desierée, ‘I have desired it so much’; and the unconditional loyalty encapsulated in ‘a vous me lie’, ‘I bind myself to you’.

  Edward appreciated such sentiments, hitherto found so lacking in the emotionally incontinent Clarence. Richard’s constancy found its expression in enduring friendships, from the ‘servants and lovers’ of his youth, like Francis, Lord Lovell and the lonely, resentful young Lancastrian duke of Buckingham, Henry Stafford; to Hastings, in whose company Richard had spent plenty of time during the recent upheavals, and the bruising John Howard. Now, the nature of those friendships was evolving, along with Richard’s rapidly changing status. Back in 1468, when accompanying the fifteen-year-old Richard through East Anglia, Howard assured his regional boss, the duke of Norfolk, that when Norfolk said the word, he would instantly drop Richard and attend on him instead. There was little chance of Howard doing the same thing now. Indeed, all the signs were that those around the king were anxious to bind themselves close to Richard, with gifts and favours: a few days after the Sheen meeting, Queen Elizabeth had been quick to renew a grant to Richard that had been about to expire.26