The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Elizabeth, dowager countess of Oxford, may have been sixty-three and infirm, but she wasn’t stupid. Realizing what a precarious position she was in, with her sons declared legally dead and unable to inherit, she had attempted to protect her own considerable estates by ‘enfeoffing’ them, making them over to a number of trustees, with the aim of eventually handing them on to her heirs. Or so she hoped. Richard had other ideas. That Christmas, he rode over to the Essex nunnery of Stratford-le-Bow, where Elizabeth was living, and told her bluntly that ‘the king his brother’ had given him custody of the countess and her lands. Unmoved by the countess’s evident distress – she wept, one of Richard’s men later recollected, and made ‘great lamentation’ – he demanded that she hand over all her ready cash before abducting her. Imprisoned in nearby Stepney, the countess was kept under house arrest until, ‘for fear of her life’, she was forced to sign away everything.

  That the king had, at the very least, turned a blind eye to his brother’s rapacity was clear. Edward’s indulgent attitude was hardly surprising. After all, it was in tune with his own actions: back in the freezing winter of 1464 he had subjected the duke of Somerset’s mother to systematic, vindictive abuse as a way of getting back at the favourite who had abandoned him. For his part, Richard was simply taking a leaf out of his brother’s book. Others helped him: Edward’s chamber treasurer Thomas Vaughan, who lent Richard the Stepney house where he threatened the countess; and John Howard – the countess’s own nephew – who ‘gave great words of menace’ to members of her entourage.24

  If such behaviour on the part of the Yorkist establishment was shocking, it wasn’t unexpected. It was a twisted manifestation of Edward’s philosophy of ‘family first’, which maintained that power should be concentrated in the hands of the ‘king’s blood’. As close family, Richard deserved to be ‘honoured and enhanced of right and power’; therefore, he was entitled to do as he pleased. Nonetheless, Edward knew perfectly well that what his brother was doing was wrong. When, a few years later, he was approached by a petitioner for advice on whether to buy from Richard a London townhouse previously owned by the earl of Oxford, Edward warned him against it. The title deeds, the king added, were secure in ‘my brother’s hands’ but would be ‘dangerous’ for anyone else, given that – as Edward put it – Richard had ‘compelled and constrained’ the countess of Oxford to give him the property in question. Edward, in other words, knew exactly what his brother was doing, and didn’t care.

  When, five months after Richard’s abduction of the countess of Oxford, the scenario repeated itself in the case of Warwick’s widow Anne, it transpired that Edward was prepared not only to sit back and let Richard get on with it, but actively to facilitate the move. What was more, in doing so he was deliberately backing Richard against their brother Clarence.

  Describing what happened to Anne countess of Warwick in the spring of 1473, Sir John Paston was studiedly neutral. But, reading between the lines, it was clear what was going on. While she may have been ‘out of sanctuary’, Anne had not been set at liberty. Richard had abducted her, keeping her securely at Middleham with the aim of forcing her to hand over her estates to him.

  The man whom Richard entrusted with the mission was a young Suffolk knight named James Tyrell.25 Tyrell’s rise had been rapid. Abandoning his family’s Lancastrian associations with the earl of Oxford – his father had been beheaded alongside the old earl back in 1462 – he had thrown in his lot with the Yorkists. At Tewkesbury, his fierce fighting had seen him knighted on the battlefield, following which he had quickly become one of Richard’s closest servants and councillors. Three years younger than Richard, Tyrell was still only seventeen.

  Writing from his chambers at Staple Inn, in the west London suburb of Holborn, the lawyer William Dengayn provided details of what was essentially a stitch-up between Edward and Richard. Apparently responding to the countess’s lobbying, Edward had restored ‘all her inheritance’ to her and mandated her release from sanctuary, whereupon she had then – apparently of her own free will – ‘granted it unto my lord of Gloucester with whom she now is’. The idea that the countess had spent so much time petitioning for the return of her lands, only to make them over to her son-in-law Richard, stretched credulity. Rather, this was a fait accompli, one that forced the countess to give away the lands to whose possession she was entitled in law. As Dengayn put it, with the hint of a lawyerly raised eyebrow, ‘divers folks marvel greatly’.26

  To Edward, it was a neat solution, a way of forcing Clarence to stick to the terms of the Sheen agreement; perhaps, too, it was a warning shot across the bows of a brother around whom talk of conspiracy continued to congeal. Whatever the case, it was evident that, as far as the Warwick inheritance was concerned, Edward was lending a sympathetic ear to his youngest brother. To Clarence, deprived of a large chunk of estates that the king had originally granted him, it looked suspiciously as though Edward was favouring Richard – and persecuting him, Clarence, in the process.

  Late that spring, the fine weather turned remorseless. It was a ‘great hot summer’, reported one chronicler, ‘for both man and beast’. With the heat came disease, and death was everywhere. Epidemics of dysentery took hold. Men out harvesting in the fields ‘fell down suddenly’ – though at least they had had a harvest to gather. In southern Europe, it was said, the heat had ‘burnt away wheat and all other grains and grass’, so much so that a bushel of wheat now cost twenty shillings. That a time of trouble was coming was confirmed in people’s minds by fearful portents. A voice was heard ‘crying in the air’ at various places between Leicester and Banbury, shouting ‘Bows! Bows!’; some said that the voice came from a headless man. Near St Albans, the River Ver burst its banks: heavy rainfall earlier in the year had slowly filtered through chalk to raise the groundwater, to spectacular effect. Such flooding at a time of drought was the phenomenon people knew as the ‘woe water’: a token of ‘dearth, or of pestilence, or of great battle’. Similar floodwaters had been reported in Kent, Sussex and the west midlands. Those that saw them knew that ‘woe was coming to England’.27

  During these enervating months, the king circled the midlands warily, alert to signs of trouble. As Richard, hungry to impose himself, got to grips with the government of his adoptive northeast, Edward put a restraining hand on his brother’s collar, showing him the necessity of pragmatism and flexible thinking in the pursuit of peace and order. Richard, all aggrandisement, had been offering cash payments and distributing his boar badge to servants of the powerful young earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, trying to recruit the earl’s men in his own backyard. Percy had bristled. The king, acutely aware of Percy’s importance to royal control of the region, extracted a promise from Richard to back off, insisting that the pair thrash out their differences and find a way of working together.28 The following month, he appointed Richard head of a commission to look into the entrenched feud between the two north-western families of Stanley and Harrington. Knowing full well Richard’s commitment to the solidly Yorkist Harringtons, Edward ordered him to resolve the dispute in favour of the Stanleys – which made sense, given their practically hegemonic power in the northwest, and the fact that Lord Stanley was Edward’s own household steward. Richard agreed to do so. Yet, faced with obeying his brother the king or abandoning the Harringtons – a family who, with close connections among Richard’s own servants, looked to him for protection and lordship – Richard displayed another kind of flexibility. Over the following months the work of his royal commission gently ground to a halt, the Harringtons left unbothered. The case was quietly dropped.29

  As summer wore on, Edward lingered in the Welsh borders, partly in an attempt to bring the independent-minded Marcher lords to heel, partly to be near the queen, now heavily pregnant. At Shrewsbury on 17 August, Elizabeth gave birth to a second boy, whom she named Richard. Then, towards the end of September, Edward set up his firstborn son and heir with a separate household at Ludlow, complete with a set of ordinances
directing all aspects of his upbringing. The man to whom, that November, Edward entrusted the ‘guiding of our said son’s person’ was the prince’s maternal uncle, the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville. Woodville was in many respects an ideal choice: polished, highly literate, with impeccable chivalric credentials and a record of unswerving loyalty to the dynasty of which he was now a blood relation. He was given oversight of the prince’s upbringing and the smooth functioning of his household and council, whose servants were all answerable to Woodville himself. The prince’s finances were secured in a coffer with three locks, the keys to which were held by Queen Elizabeth, Anthony Woodville, and the man appointed both the president of the prince’s council and his tutor, John Alcock, bishop of Rochester.30

  For all Edward’s commitment to enforcing his laws, and his energetic judicial progress through the country that summer, disturbances continued to flare. According to a Milanese ambassador at the French court, the earl of Oxford had sent Louis XI the wax seals of twenty-four knights ‘and one duke’ who had committed to making war on Edward; along with this evidence of support for his project of regime change, Oxford was demanding for a ‘good sum’ of money from the French king. The identity of the duke was left unspoken: many believed it to be Clarence. Louis, though, demurred, apparently suspecting Oxford of exaggerating his support, and faking the seals. With no money forthcoming from the French king, that summer Oxford abandoned his hideout on the Isle of Thanet and with his small fleet drifted westwards along England’s south coast, plundering hapless merchant ships – and, perhaps, hoping to find backing in the southwest, where Clarence was especially strong. Edward, though, was again one step ahead; early that summer he had put the sheriff of Devon and his networks on high alert, ordering him to prevent Oxford landing and to keep an eye out for any unlawful gatherings. At the end of September, running out of options, Oxford reached the western edge of England. He seized St Michael’s Mount off the tip of Cornwall – the kind of place, remarked one chronicler, in which twenty men could hold out ‘against all the world’ – and hunkered down.31

  On 6 November, Sir John Paston wrote uneasily to his brother from London: ‘The world seemeth queasy here.’ That autumn, fed up with what he saw as manoeuvres by his brother Richard, Clarence had had enough. Threatening to ‘deal with’ him, Clarence was openly recruiting as much hired muscle as he could. Richard, not one to take a backward step, was doing the same.

  With the quarrel between the two threatening to explode into armed conflict, Edward again waded in. Preparing his own display of royal might – his household retinues made a conspicuous show of arming themselves – he announced that he would be ‘a stifler’ between his brothers, smothering their mutual antagonism. But if the king emphasized his own role as neutral arbiter, he was also prepared to follow through on his earlier warning to Clarence. If Clarence continued to be obstructive as far as the Warwick settlement was concerned, Edward was prepared to take away everything he had ever granted him.32

  At Westminster, Parliament was again in session. Two of the items on its agenda were particularly significant. With Edward desperate to draw a line under his long-standing commercial war with the Hanse merchants, Parliament duly passed an act that conceded practically all the Hanse demands: the promises that Edward had made them during his exile in Flanders and which, back in England, he had then failed to fulfil. The act restored to the Hanse their lucrative trading privileges in England, with no reciprocal arrangements given to English merchants – but at least Edward could be sure that his seaborne invasion of France, when it eventually came, would not be harassed by Hanse pirates. Then came the second big piece of parliamentary business: an act of resumption.

  Edward had carried out these sweeping re-appropriations of crown lands earlier in his reign; like others before it, this one was intended to convey the king’s commitment to sound financial practice, to show that he was in control of his landed assets and his income. This act, as one commentator remarked, was especially severe, as it took back into royal control all grants made by Edward since his accession in 1461. There followed the inevitable frantic scramble by those possessing such grants to exempt their property from annexation. As usual, a substantial list of ‘provisos’, exemptions, was drawn up. Richard’s name was on the list. Clarence’s wasn’t.33

  Edward’s reasoning appeared straightforward. Some eighteen months before, he had warned Clarence that any failure to co-operate would be met with royal confiscation of his lands. With Clarence intransigent, the king had duly activated his threat. But, in Sir John Paston’s view, another motive animated Edward’s move against his brother. Clarence’s raising of troops wasn’t simply a frustrated, flailing lunge against Richard: there was, Paston wrote, ‘some other thing intended … some treason conspired’. Paston didn’t elaborate, nor did he comment on the source of the rumours – but given his own connections at court, it was a fair bet that they emanated from circles close to the king himself. In this context, Edward’s resumption of Clarence’s lands carried with it an implicit warning: that if his brother was intent on trying anything silly, the king was watching.

  Towards the end of November, Paston wrote home again. After various requests – he was off again to Calais and, ‘to avoid idleness’, was desperate for his musical instruments, stored in ‘a chest in my chamber at Norwich’ – he updated his brother on the political situation. ‘I trust to God’, he commented, hoping that fraternal peace was about to break out, ‘that the two dukes of Clarence and Gloucester shall be set at one by the award of the king.’34 It was wishful thinking. Passed that December, the act of resumption came as a devastating blow to Clarence’s status, the position of pre-eminence that he believed was his by right.

  Unlike the earl of Warwick, who back in the 1460s had typically kept his emotions to himself until he could vent them in the privacy of his own chamber, Clarence had always worn his heart on his sleeve. (Although, it had to be said, Warwick had never experienced the kind of humiliation that Edward was now visiting on his brother.) Clarence made little effort to conceal his frustrated rage. He was, people noted, ‘extremely sore at heart’.35

  No sooner was the Christmas feasting over than Edward moved against his brother. On 9 January 1474, the king started to take possession of Clarence’s confiscated estates. In showing he meant business, Edward targeted a portfolio of land stretching across the north and east midlands, centred on the duchy of Lancaster honour of Tutbury, possession of which had helped make Clarence a big player in the region.

  Back in 1472, as Clarence tried to make influential friends close to the king, he had appointed William Hastings steward of Tutbury. His gesture had had unintended consequences. Recent disorder in the region had seen local families, sensitive to shifts in power, turn towards Hastings for leadership and justice: Hastings had obliged, stepping in to deal with regional disputes on Edward’s behalf. Now, in repossessing the Tutbury estates, Edward conferred them on Hastings outright. In the spring of 1474, perhaps anticipating resistance from an intransigent Clarence, Edward rode into the midlands himself, Hastings by his side, to oversee the transfer of control to Hastings’ men.36

  Edward was doing more than simply redistributing lands from one nobleman to another. Hastings had few connections with the lands now coming under his control. What he did have – and what attracted locals to him – was exceptional influence with the king, to whom he owed all his power. Unlike Clarence, Hastings knew his position as the king’s devoted servant and was perfectly happy with it. Accordingly, Hastings’ possession of the Tutbury estates was to be qualitatively different. Granted control of the estates for life, he was a crown officer, a glorified estate manager who commanded allegiances as the king’s representative in the region. That spring, Edward personally supervised the appointment of Hastings’ regional staff. Some of Clarence’s men were dismissed. Most, however, transferred easily to Lord Hastings, signing new indentures in which they were promised, as customary, ‘good lordship’ in excha
nge for their service – and, in becoming part of Hastings’ network, they effectively became part of the king’s own.37

  As Edward toured the north midlands, the young Prince Edward’s new council was flexing its muscles in Coventry, a city with close connections to Clarence. That April, Coventry welcomed the three-year-old boy with a sequence of pageants enacting scenarios from the house of York’s history, accompanied by the city band and – in order to keep people really interested – conduits running with wine. At Bablake Gate, an actor dressed as Richard II revelled in the prince’s ancient lineage, rejoicing that ‘the right line of the royal blood is now as it should be’; further on, the sainted king Edward the Confessor reassured the little prince that he was watching over the house of York, reminding him how his father Edward IV had been driven from his throne ‘by full furious intent’, and giving thanks that England was now back ‘in your father’s hand’.38 In playing up Coventry’s special relationship with the prince, the city authorities also sought to gloss over its recent unfortunate associations with Henry VI’s brief restoration: the prince’s triumphant entrance confirmed that the city was back in the royal good books.

  There was, however, more to the prince’s visit. As Warwick’s heir, he saw himself as the city’s overlord; the city, it seemed, saw likewise. Back in June 1472, after the contrite citizens had spent hundreds of pounds trying to work their way back into royal favour, it was Clarence whose mediation with his brother the king had finally obtained Coventry’s pardon. Yet in recent months Coventry had seen its fair share of disturbances, which Clarence had apparently failed to control. The prince’s council, tacitly backed by Edward himself, had stepped in: the boy’s arrival was a timely nod to the civic authorities as to whom they should be answering. Shortly before he left, the prince – or rather, his representatives, Anthony Woodville at their head – extracted from the mayor and corporation a new oath of allegiance.39