The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Edward, inevitably, had his own recipe for treacle, which, despite the poet’s scepticism, was used as an antidote to poison. He also had other expensive, bespoke remedies made for his ‘preservation’; one, made up by Marshall, used the resinous leaves or root of the dragon tree, native to the Canary Islands.44

  But while Edward’s resort to medicine was hardly unusual, the quantities in which he consumed drugs, and the way he did so, raised eyebrows. In 1464 – admittedly, a plague-ridden year – his pharmaceutical bill came to a whopping £87, though given that this was a year in which his councillors became increasingly concerned about his sexual activity, these might have been prescriptions for a quite different sort of prophylactic.45 His use of emetics – an otherwise standard remedy in the physician’s cabinet – was eye-catchingly alarming. When full to bursting after one of his marathon sessions at the dinner table, he would ‘take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more’. Instead of balancing the bodily humours, maintaining a state of physical equilibrium, Edward swung violently between extremes.

  It wasn’t so much that Edward ignored medical advice, more that he followed it selectively, inconsistently and – when he did so – to excess. Edward’s reflexive gulping down of medicines seemed to betray an insecurity below the bombast, a sense that sickness and death awaited at every turn, whether from plague, or poison, or the invocations and experiments of astrologers and sorcerers. Such fears pervaded society. But in Edward, as with everything else, such anxieties were magnified and exaggerated: both because, as king, he mattered most; and perhaps because, despite everything, there remained something brittle at the heart of Edward’s sense of himself and his kingship.46

  Edward had another reason for getting his house in order. For years, he had toyed with the idea of invading France. A successful French campaign was in many ways the ultimate benchmark of English kingship. But in the decades after Henry V’s triumphs, as his son’s failing regime presided over the catastrophic loss of its French territories and England erupted in civil conflict, so this vision of a muscular, expansionist kingdom had faded from view. So too had a generation of men who, having fought and lived in Normandy and Aquitaine, had returned home only to die fighting each other instead. France, though, had stayed in Edward’s mind: in 1468, he had even raised taxes for an invasion, only to squander them elsewhere. So when, in March 1472, Charles the Bold and his longstanding ally Duke Francis of Brittany, constantly searching for ways to distract the French king from menacing their respective borders, raised the idea of a joint invasion, Edward responded. He might not have liked Charles, but he did like the idea of becoming king of France.47

  Beneath the vague, glorious notions of a quest for the French crown, other more practical considerations bubbled. Charles the Bold’s rumoured alliance with Louis XI had been weighing on Edward’s mind: would it be better to suppress his grudges against his Burgundian brother-in-law and ally with him, before the French king got there first? Besides which, local turf wars continued to flare in England and Wales. Political advisers commonly prescribed overseas invasion as a cure for internal ills: a war against France, Edward felt, could unify the country – and especially his bickering brothers – in a common cause. That spring, as Edward sent a force of archers to bolster Brittany’s defences against a menacing France, Charles as usual couldn’t wait. Itching to attack Louis, he led an army across the border, without his allies. While the Burgundian forces drew a breathless description from one English envoy, the invasion was badly planned. Within weeks, his men had run out of food; they retreated in a miasma of indiscipline. Although Charles detailed his soldiers’ war crimes with pride, bragging in one letter about the effectiveness of his ‘throat cutters’, there was no getting away from the fact that his invasion had been a failure – nor that in order to do it properly, he needed the English.48

  Edward needed no second opportunity. Stepping up the English naval presence in the Channel, he sent another force of two thousand archers to Brittany. In the meantime, his truce with Louis XI had lapsed: he didn’t renew it. Early that September Edward signed a new treaty with Burgundy and Brittany. At its heart was a plan for a new joint invasion of France, England at its head, whose ultimate ambition was to see Edward regain the French crown. He would show Charles how it was done.49

  Around the same time Charles the Bold’s close adviser Louis of Gruuthuse arrived in England to patch up the tattered Anglo-Burgundian entente. Whatever Edward’s suspicions of Charles, his gratitude to Gruuthuse – who had done so much to help Edward in his exile – was unbounded. He rolled out the red carpet.50

  Met by English representatives at Calais, Gruuthuse progressed through southern England in a haze of hospitality. Stuffed with game and ‘dainties’, awash with fine wine and loaded with gifts, he rode through the gates of Windsor Castle to be greeted by smiling, familiar faces: William Hastings and a group of lords and knights whom he had last seen eighteen months before in rather different circumstances, waving them off from Bruges on the first leg of their uncertain return to England.

  Embracing Gruuthuse, Edward took him into the heart of the royal family. With Hastings and other close servants a constant, solicitous presence in Gruuthuse’s guest apartments – two exquisitely furnished, arras-lined rooms with expansive views over the surrounding parkland – he was led through a profusion of entertainments and ceremonies that revealed the house of York in all its splendour. Wandering over to the queen’s apartments with Edward, the pair watched Elizabeth and her ladies playing indoor bowls and ninepins; later, as the games gave way to dancing, Edward danced with his oldest daughter Elizabeth, now aged five. The following morning, after a mass ‘melodiously sung’ by the chapel royal, Edward presented Gruuthuse with a gold cup, inset with a piece of unicorn horn – an antidote to poison – and on its lid a great sapphire. Then, after introducing the Burgundian to his two-year-old heir, dandled in the arms of his chamberlain Thomas Vaughan, the king took Gruuthuse and his men off for a day of sporting action in the ‘little park’, the carefully curated 650-acre expanse of hunting grounds that sprawled east and south of the castle, Gruuthuse riding the king’s own horse and carrying another, extravagantly useless, gift: a silk-stringed crossbow with gilt-tipped quarrels, in a velvet case embroidered with Yorkist badges. The hunting was poor – late in the afternoon, they finally managed to run to death half a dozen deer with hounds – but it hardly mattered.

  That evening, Gruuthuse was guest of honour at a banquet hosted by Elizabeth in her apartments. Sharing Gruuthuse’s ‘mess’, a profusion of fine dishes, were the king and queen and various family and in-laws. Among them was the seventeen-year-old duke of Buckingham who, married to the queen’s sister Katherine, had been festooning the Yorkist court for much of his short life and who now spent most of the evening dancing with the noblewomen in attendance. At an adjoining table, a ‘great view’ of ladies sat displayed for the appreciation of the other guests.

  After the evening’s dancing, Gruuthuse was ushered into another set of apartments in which he would pass the night: three ‘chambers of pleasance’, a vision in white silk and shimmering cloth-of-gold, the bed’s silk curtains tied back to reveal bedlinen and pillows especially chosen by Queen Elizabeth herself. In an adjoining chamber were two baths: that evening, Gruuthuse and Hastings bathed together, an intimate expression of the close bond between England and Burgundy.

  During Gruuthuse’s visit, Parliament opened at Westminster. On St Edward’s day, 13 October, in front of the king and the assembled Lords, the speaker William Allington gave a commendation, a speech of praise on behalf of the Commons. The first subject of Allington’s oration was the queen, who had borne the trials of Edward’s exile with ‘great constancy’: her ‘womanly behaviour’ all the more remarkable because, during this fraught time, Elizabeth had given the country the great ‘joy and surety’ of an heir to the throne. Both Anthony Woodville and Hastings were praised for their ‘constant faith’ during the king’s Burgu
ndian exile, while attention was drawn to the bravery and chivalry of the king’s brothers, Clarence and Richard, in the recent fighting. Then came Gruuthuse’s turn. In acknowledgement of the humanity and kindness he had shown Edward and his men, Gruuthuse was made earl of Winchester, the occasion celebrated with processions, feasting and – it being St Edward’s day – the inevitable assertions of sovereignty, a crowned Edward processing around Westminster Abbey together with his little son.51

  There was another point to Gruuthuse’s appearance in Parliament. Living proof of the special Anglo-Burgundian relationship, he had also brought with him copies of the new tripartite treaty between Burgundy, Brittany and England, mandating them to make war on France. By parading Gruuthuse in front of the assembled Lords and Commons, Edward was able to show quite how committed Burgundy was to a joint invasion. After all, if he was to go to war, he needed to raise funds on the kind of scale that only Parliament could mandate. And Parliament was going to take some convincing.

  13

  Master of the Game

  At the top end of the great London thoroughfare of Cheapside, in the shadow of St Paul’s, stood the church of St Michael-le-Querne. Taking its name from a corn market once held nearby, the church marked the entrance to another district, one concentrated on the street that ran arrow-straight along the northern boundary of St Paul’s Churchyard: Paternoster Row. Here, and in the adjoining lanes stretching north to the blood and noise of the shambles at Newgate, was the epicentre of England’s book trade: the stationers, as they were known. On the Row itself, thirty-odd shops were crammed: small, two-storey units, little more than ten feet wide by ten deep. In them worked parchmeners, textwriters, illuminators and bookbinders, laboriously copying out everything from legal documents to romances in the uniform scribal hands of the day. Brightly coloured initials and coats-of-arms were worked, together with animals and foliage whose tendrils strayed and wandered through books’ margins. The different texts – religious, historical, chivalric; from recipes and medical cures to navigational instructions and political tracts – were gathered together and stitched into the composite volumes that people kept by them. One such shop, next to St Michael-le-Querne itself, was owned by John Multon, a bookseller, translator and textwriter whose occasionally slapdash work was more than compensated for by his entrepreneurial spirit. Over the decades Multon had developed a keen eye for what sold and, with a thick book of city and courtly contacts, where to get hold of it. As well as an ever-popular backlist – Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, mountains of John Lydgate’s interminable rhyme royal – he sold the texts everybody was talking about. Back in 1459, copies of the Somnium Vigilantis, the literary text condemning the Yorkist cause, could be found on his shelves; so too, in 1471, ballads celebrating Edward IV’s all-conquering return. It was hardly a surprise that in the autumn of 1472, timed to coincide with the opening of the new Parliament at Westminster, Multon put out the latest work by a man with whom he had a long association: Sir John Fortescue, the Lancastrian propagandist now eagerly embracing the house of York.1

  As Edward set out to persuade a sceptical public to fall into line with his renewed plans for an invasion of France, he needed all the help he could get. In the previous decade, he had twice gone to the parliamentary well to draw taxes for military campaigns against Scotland and France. On both occasions the money’s disappearance into the bottomless pit of his dynastic plans had been a key driver of public anger against his regime. As Parliament convened that October, the king embarked on a sustained public relations exercise, one to which Fortescue’s A Declaration upon Certain Writings Sent Out of Scotland was mood music.

  A self-exculpatory disavowal of his former Lancastrianism, the Declaration was a masterpiece of rhetorical contortion. Fortescue had, he confessed, been a biased ‘partial man’, fighting his former master Henry VI’s corner with any arguments that came to hand – arguments that had now, he was delighted to acknowledge, been comprehensively disproved in favour of the house of York. And what a blessing it was, Fortescue continued smoothly, that God had bestowed upon Edward IV the kingdoms of England and of France, because now his loyal subjects could, ‘without any doubt or scruple of conscience’, sign up to fight for him in France against the man who was currently occupying his throne there: Louis XI.2 All these themes were taken up in the regime’s opening salvo to Parliament: a lengthy peroration by John Alcock, bishop of Rochester, standing in for the absent chancellor Robert Stillington, being the first of ‘many speeches of remarkable eloquence’ intended to whip up war fever among the assembled Commons.3

  Since the last time he had put the case for war to Parliament, back in 1468, Edward’s grip on power had clarified spectacularly. There could, Alcock asserted, be ‘no colour or shadow’ in anybody’s mind that Edward was now ‘sole and undoubted king’: king ‘in deed’ as he had always been ‘in right’. Yet although the root cause of England’s troubles, the house of Lancaster, was ‘extinct’, the symptoms of civil conflict persisted, with ‘many a great sore, many a perilous wound left unhealed’. The problem was, Alcock continued, that the armed retainers responsible for much of the recent and ongoing violence were those same people who, in times of conflict with external powers, the king would call on to defend England. If Edward were to mete out justice commensurate with their misdeeds, the country would be significantly weakened. There was, however, another solution: war against France. Such a campaign would redirect the violent impulses of ‘idle and riotous people’, restoring ‘peace inward’. It would also pit the country against its number one enemy, Louis XI, who, in stirring up the ‘most unnatural inward trouble’ and backing the aggression of other international powers – notably Scotland – was the chief source of all England’s problems, internal and external. Besides which, invading France would bring many material benefits: making the Channel safe for English trade; solving those niggling inheritance problems by providing land to redistribute to ‘younger sons and others’; and permanently ridding the country of the said ‘riotous persons’, by resettling them in France where they would garrison the lands that Edward would conquer. In any case, as Alcock pointed out, since the Norman Conquest no king had managed to impose justice, peace and prosperity in England except through ‘war outward’.4 And never had there been a more perfect time to invade.

  The king had, Alcock said, already done all the heavy lifting, assembling a grand anti-French coalition at vast personal expense – judiciously, Alcock glossed over the fact that much of that expense had involved credit raised against the security of parliamentary taxation – and obtaining promises of military support from Burgundy and Brittany, guarantees of which were ‘ready to be shown and read’ to Parliament.

  Together, the drip-feed of parliamentary speeches and cheerleading pieces had the desired effect. Edward’s invasion plans were, so it was reported, met by Parliament with ringing acclaim. Among those applauding loudest – their presence perhaps encouraging those inclined to give a more muted response – were the thirty-nine members of Parliament who were men of the king’s household.5 The tax was voted: a staggering £118,625 to keep an army of thirteen thousand archers in the field for twelve months; the invasion would take place on or before 1 April the following year. No sooner had Parliament signed off the tax than, with predictable inevitability, Edward’s carefully assembled coalition began to unravel.

  If the flaky loyalties of Francis of Brittany came as little surprise to Edward, given his vacillations of a few years before, the speed of his backsliding was remarkable. On 15 October 1472, barely a month after finalizing his treaty with Edward, and with French forces mobilizing threateningly on his borders, the Breton duke signed a panicky truce with Louis XI and sent envoys advising Edward and Charles the Bold to do the same. Charles promptly did so; three weeks later, the ink was drying on a new Franco-Burgundian truce. By early November, reports had reached London that the English taskforce sent to Brittany to bolster Francis’s meagre army ha
d been decimated by the flux – dysentery – ‘and other epidemics’: those not already dead were coming ‘hastily home’.6

  To add to the general sense of frustration that autumn, regional disorder and violence was increasing. Parliament fielded vocal complaints from representatives in the Welsh Marches about the ‘outrageous demeaning of Welshmen’.7 From the southwest to the midlands, the northwest and Richard’s new stamping ground of the northeast, old hatreds were stirred into life by Edward’s new political reordering of the previous year; by the deepening animus between his two brothers; and by talk of new conspiracy, involving Clarence.

  On 25 November in the Flemish town of Gravelines, a few miles along the coast from Calais, the papal envoy Pietro Aliprando was fuming. Waiting to cross the Channel to England, he had had a run-in with customs officials at Calais. Rummaging through his baggage, they had found papal documents in support of the imprisoned George Neville – on whose behalf Aliprando was trying to intercede with Edward – and promptly frogmarched the diplomat off English territory. Aliprando poured out his frustrations in the first of a stream of dispatches to the duke of Milan, Galeazzo Sforza, for whom he was also working, on the political situation in England.8