The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Edward was no stranger to creative fundraising. The previous June he had granted two royal servants, David Beaupe and John Marchaunt, a licence to ‘practise the faculty and science of philosophy and the turning of mercury into gold and silver’, presumably on the off-chance that these two would-be alchemists could somehow magic up the necessary funds for his French campaign. The solution he now devised, in conjunction with his chief financial advisers, was not so much a forced loan as an extra-parliamentary tax on income and property: ‘an excellent device to raise money’, as one half-horrified, half-admiring Milanese merchant put it. There was, naturally, nothing optional about the ‘benevolence’, as it was called. All potential donors received advance notification of what was expected of them, royal letters explaining why extra funds were needed for Edward’s ‘mighty war’ and instructing their recipients to give generously. Given that the king himself interviewed potential donors one-on-one, from lords to local gentry and civic authorities, there was little means of escape. It was a time-consuming and laborious process – but then, if there was one thing Edward backed himself to do, it was personal, intimate, seductive charm.6

  As the same merchant remarked, Edward’s approach was astonishingly successful. He himself had seen his London neighbours leaving in response to the king’s summons, looking ‘as if they were going to the gallows’; returning, they were positively ‘joyful’, apparently perfectly happy to have had large sums of cash extracted from them. The process went as follows. Edward greeted the reluctant interviewee familiarly, as though welcoming an old friend, softening him until he was putty ready to be moulded. Talk then turned to the king’s invasion plans, following which Edward popped the question: what personal financial contribution might the interviewee like to make, out of his own goodwill or ‘benevolence’? Most negotiated weakly, if at all. Edward’s strategy was equally effective with women. After one Suffolk widow had put herself down for £10, Edward ‘took her to him and kissed her’, an embrace that she accepted ‘so kindly’ that she increased her gift to £20. But then, Edward had always had a way with widows.

  If the bonhomie was vintage Edward, so was the narrow-eyed calculation that ran through it. As the Milanese merchant put it, this was a ‘method’, a strategy involving the deployment of as much royal spontaneity as the transaction demanded. By the king’s side, a notary hovered. As Edward talked, he assessed, his mind recalling the ‘names and estates’ of potential donors ‘as if he had been in the habit of seeing them daily’. If the sum offered was, he felt, commensurate with the contributor’s wealth, his clerk would write it down; if not, Edward, adjusting the royal charm by a few degrees, would bring his interviewee ‘up to the mark’. When the royal warmth failed to produce the desired outcome, it rapidly gave way to a menacing insistence: people were induced to give ‘with shame, some with fear’.7

  The fundraising campaign had been systematically planned, the king’s itinerary targeting wealthy regions, towns and cities over a four-month period. That autumn of 1474 saw Edward heading west to Bristol, then doubling back through the cloth-producing Cotswolds before heading towards the rich cloth towns of Suffolk. Inevitably, he couldn’t be everywhere. Some communities, expecting the king, had to make do with other ‘solicitors’. Among them members of the royal household and key financial officers such as the queen’s receiver-general, John Forster, and a man who – when not travelling abroad on the king’s confidential diplomatic business – was increasingly to be found at his side: John Morton. Morton’s invisible hand, indeed, may well have guided the benevolence; in any event, he was responsible for raising ‘notable sums of money’. And, given that this was a gift rather than a tax, the proceeds – a staggering £21,656 8s 3d – were paid directly into the coffers of the king’s household.8

  In mid-November Edward returned to London to concentrate his charm on the mayor and corporation. The French ambassador Christophe Lailler was still hanging about, hoping to see him. Given that Lailler had already richly insulted Edward with his menagerie of gifts, it was hard to know what he expected: unsurprisingly, Edward refused. The king’s froideur was as much as anything down to Lailler’s reputation as a state-sponsored assassin: on Louis XI’s orders he had recently poisoned two prominent French noblemen, one of whom, the duke of Berry, was Louis’ own brother. Edward took no chances, detailing two of his chamber servants to wait on the ambassador at all times. When, finally, he granted Lailler an audience, he sat at one end of his presence chamber. Lailler was made to stand at the other end, forty feet away.9

  But if Lailler had put the fear of God into Edward – an outcome that Louis, despite his grumblings about the English king’s paranoia, had probably intended – it didn’t appear to have softened his resolve. There was, remarked John Paston towards the close of 1474, ‘never more likelihood’ that Edward would go to war the following year ‘than was now’.

  As Christmas approached, a ship carrying Archbishop George Neville docked at Dover. Finally, after two and a half years in his Calais prison, he was free, his royal pardon the result of extensive lobbying. Richard, in whose youth the sophisticated Neville had loomed large, had put in a word with Edward, though the tireless representations of Pope Sixtus IV had probably had more to do with the archbishop’s release. The latest papal envoy to England, the distinguished Greek intellectual George Hermonymos, had turned on been persuasive; for Edward – knowing that Neville, in ill health, was no longer much of threat – it was a cheap and easy way to curry favour with the pope. Riding slowly through Kent, Neville spent Christmas quietly at the archbishop of Canterbury’s seat of Knole House, as a guest of Thomas Bourchier, the one-time rival who, years previously, had been awarded the cardinalate that Neville had believed was rightfully his.10

  By the early months of 1475, the entire country was on a war footing. The king’s warships were overhauled and fitted out, and from Cornwall to Sandwich ships were seized and requisitioned, towed ‘to the Thames and elsewhere’ in preparation for the embarkation of his army.11 In Parliament, confronted with Edward’s ‘great displeasure’ at the fact that almost half his tax had not yet been collected, the commons reluctantly agreed to another round of taxation. That spring, as collectors scoured the country alongside Edward and his representatives, still raising contributions through his ‘benevolence’, England’s taxpayers were feeling the pinch. Margaret Paston, for one, was sick of the sight of royal officials: ‘The king goes so near us in this country, both to poor and to rich’, she complained to her son, ‘that I know not how we shall live but if the world amend.’12

  As Parliament authorized partition of the Warwick estates, formally burying the hatchet between Clarence and Richard, one issue remained to be addressed. The stitch-up had left a loose strand in the form of George Neville, duke of Bedford. Now nine years old, this son of Warwick’s brother John Neville remained the legitimate heir to the earl’s patrimony. His continued existence remained a headache – especially for Richard, now in possession of Warwick’s great northern estates – but, given the Yorkist brothers’ eagerness to hold the lands by inheritance rather than royal grant, a necessity. Oddly, then, the continued existence of the male Neville line validated the York brothers’ inheritance of the Warwick lands. Unsurprisingly, the solution was a legal fudge.

  Parliament ruled that Richard, Clarence and their heirs were to keep the lands for as long as the duke of Bedford or any of his male heirs – should he have any – remained alive. When his line died out, so the right of Richard and Clarence to pass the lands on to their own descendants would expire. It was a bodged compromise but the alternative, ripping up the laws of inheritance altogether, would have created a seismic political precedent that would have played exceptionally badly with England’s landed classes, especially at a time when Edward most desired their unity and co-operation.13

  Other problematic standoffs had been resolved. The long-running feud between the north-western families of Stanley and Harrington – which Richard, backing the latter,
had been so evasive in tackling – was finally ended, the Harringtons buckling under furious royal pressure. The king had also brokered an agreement between Richard and the earl of Northumberland that formed the basis for a working relationship between the two in the northeast: Northumberland acknowledging Richard’s pre-eminence, Richard promising to leave the earl’s spheres of interest well alone.14

  Reassuringly, too, the new treaty with Scotland showed every sign of holding and, that February, English messengers headed north to Edinburgh with the first instalment of Cecily’s dowry. There were, inevitably, infractions. Much to Edward’s annoyance, they came from the English side, from his brother Richard and his sidekick Northumberland. Both had been notably remiss in failing to attend cross-border meetings with their Scottish colleagues. Richard, too, had failed to keep in line the fiercely independent frontier communities of which he was now overlord, resulting in vocal Scottish complaints. There was also tension at sea, James III writing indignantly to Edward that one of his ‘own proper’ ships had been plundered by an English vessel under Richard’s command. Perhaps it was slackness on Richard’s part; that, or an unwillingness – or inability – to adjust to the new dispensation of peace with England’s habitual enemy. A visibly irritated Edward gave his brother a ticking-off, telling him that he held Richard directly responsible for the act of piracy – ‘considering that the said ship was his at the time’ – and briskly reminding him to sort himself out and act ‘according to the king’s pleasure for his honour and surety’ at all times. Richard duly fell into line. There would, Edward assured the Scottish king with a hint of gritted teeth, be no further ‘cause of trouble nor breach’ of the truce.15

  By mid-March, Edward’s invasion plans were well advanced. The king’s massive figure could be seen most days at the Tower, obsessively inspecting the artillery that he was assembling there; new guns daily rolled off the production line. A muster date for the army was circulating: 26 May. People were going to extraordinary lengths to prepare for the campaign, commented one Italian observer. Yet he detected an undercurrent of scepticism, as though, at the last minute, the whole thing would be called off: a legacy, perhaps, of Edward’s previous failures to follow through on his promises. ‘Many’, he added in a reference to the doubting apostle, ‘are kinsmen to St Thomas.’16

  The army that assembled in Kent late in the spring of 1475 was, people believed, the biggest English force ever to invade France – bigger even than Edward III’s army at Crécy and Henry V’s at Agincourt. At various muster stations across the country, men reported for duty under their captains and, in the last weeks of May and early June, their baggage trains stretching out for miles behind them, converged in long, snaking, ever-growing columns on the army’s assembly point of Barham Downs, southeast of Canterbury, under the watchful eye of the army’s provost, the queen’s receiver-general John Forster. All Edward’s personal commitment over the past years to the invasion – from the tortuous resolution of domestic problems (foremost among them his brothers’ quarrel) to his energetic raising of cash and troops – had borne fruit. The most prominent banners were those of Clarence’s black bull, under which marched some 1,200 troops, and Richard’s boar: the retinues of Richard and his northern retainers numbered around three thousand men. The turnout also showed the significant pulling power of Edward’s extended family and household, foremost among them lords Hastings and Stanley; the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville; and Henry duke of Buckingham – who, finally, was allowed to do something other than hang around at court.17 All told, the army stood at some fourteen thousand men, a formidable and well-drilled display of unity and firepower.

  Yet the Italian commentator hadn’t been mistaken in detecting a strong whiff of uncertainty running through proceedings. Even now, Edward was unsure about Charles the Bold’s commitment. Despite all his attempts to prise his brother-in-law away from his eastern campaign, the Burgundian duke’s armies were still entrenched in front of the city of Neuss, where late that April Edward had sent Anthony Woodville to ‘stimulate and importune’ him. Woodville delivered a warning. Edward, he told Charles, was ready – but if the duke did not leave Neuss for France immediately, Edward would not invade ‘at all’. Charles, wearing his Garter robes, continued to make positive noises. But he showed no signs of moving.18

  Around this time, Edward was presented with a manuscript by William Worcester, a swarthy, one-eyed Bristolian in his early sixties. A well-read man with an enquiring mind, Worcester loved to talk, and people happily paid his bar bill to hear him do so. Back in the 1450s he had written The Boke of Noblesse, a call to arms, urging Henry VI and his lords to embrace war against France. It had fallen on deaf ears, and Worcester had spent much of the intervening time plodding around the country in a vain attempt to sort out the entangled business affairs of his late master, the Norfolk knight Sir John Fastolf, whose secretary he had been. Now, on the eve of Edward’s invasion, Worcester dusted off his treatise, added some new passages to freshen it up, and rededicated it to Edward for inspiration in his coming war. But in diagnosing the issues that had led to England’s loss of its French territories in the first place – internal squabbling among its nobility; and the English army’s dismal failures in courage, training, organization and discipline – Worcester’s treatise inadvertently underscored the risks that they were now about to face.19

  As Edward and his generals contemplated the war to come, they might have reflected that Worcester’s criticisms remained valid. Edward, it was true, had won a string of battles. However, the brief, decisive encounters of civil war, despite their savagery, weren’t much preparation for the rigours of a drawn-out campaign against a well-organized enemy in his own backyard. Besides which, almost a quarter of a century had elapsed since the English had been kicked out of France: there were now very few people with first-hand experience of what such conflict entailed. While Edward’s preparations had been meticulous, he and his advisers hardly needed Worcester’s treatise to remind him that Charles the Bold and his troops, schooled as they were in northern European conflict, were crucial to the invasion’s success. It was looking increasingly likely, however, that Charles was not going to turn up.

  As the English army mustered at Barham Downs, Garter King at Arms arrived at the French court. Edward’s senior herald carried a final ultimatum for Louis XI: hand over the crown of France or face the consequences. The herald’s visit, however, was less concerned with slamming the door shut on the French king, and more about keeping it ajar. Louis knew it, and beckoned him into a private room for a chat.

  The French king was disarmingly frank. He knew perfectly well, he told the herald, that Edward was in a bind. With Charles the Bold’s army in disarray, and the campaigning season now well advanced, it would be madness to proceed with the invasion – yet, Louis continued, he understood that Edward needed to keep up appearances, that he could hardly call the whole thing off now that he had raised so much money, mustered so many troops and generated such great expectation among the English public. But they both knew, Louis confided, that Edward would do better to make peace than war.

  The herald had come prepared for such a conversation. In a reply scripted by Edward and his advisers, he stated that the English king was open to offers, but that negotiations could only start once Edward ‘had crossed the sea’, once the invasion was seen to be under way. When the English had landed, Louis should send a messenger to the English camp. There, he should ask for one of Edward’s close advisers: John, Lord Howard, or his household steward Lord Stanley.20

  That June, a vast fleet shipped Edward’s army, together with artillery, supplies, carts and carriages, and twelve thousand horses, across the Channel to Calais. The transportation was well-planned – squadrons of escorting warships patrolled against possible attack – and the crossing was uneventful. Over the previous months, Edward’s agents had effectively spread misinformation that the English beachhead would be the Normandy coast: Louis XI’s armies, concentrated some two h
undred miles west along the Channel, waited for an enemy that never materialized. The Hanse, mollified by the terms of their recent treaty with Edward, were quiet. On 4 July, with the bulk of his forces disembarked at Calais, the king crossed, together with his household. Before leaving, he had placed England in the care of his four-year-old heir – who, a nominal ‘keeper of the realm’, was looked after by his mother, Queen Elizabeth – and a governing council packed with the prince’s own officers, at its head the president of his council John Alcock, bishop of Rochester. Edward also drew up a will: the queen, his ‘dearest wife’, in whom ‘we most singularly put our trust’, was one of the nine nominated executors.

  Determined to campaign in a style befitting his status as king of France, Edward took with him a newly made coronation robe of satin-lined cloth-of-gold. As elsewhere, the organization of his entourage had left nothing to chance. Travelling with him was George Neville, taken along perhaps for his administrative knowhow, perhaps because he remained a security risk – though Neville, suffering from kidney stones, was in no condition to make mischief.21 With the king too was a team of twelve surgeons and his usual coterie of physician-astrologers. Among them was an Oxford academic and astrologer named John Stacy, who received the substantial sum of £80 for his services on campaign. Edward, clearly, was impressed with his work – though he hardly needed his flock of prognosticators to tell him what he already knew. His brother-in-law, Charles the Bold, was going to let him down.

  About ten days after Edward arrived in Calais, Charles turned up. A few weeks previously he had finally dragged himself and his ragged forces away from Neuss, after an unsuccessful year-long siege that had cost him some four thousand men. Belatedly trying to raise funds for a fresh army, he found the wealthy cities of Flanders disinclined to extend him further credit for a campaign that would only damage the international trade from which their prosperity derived. Arriving in Calais, Charles was accompanied by a modest detachment of sixty archers – which, it transpired, was the sum total of his military contribution to Edward’s invasion of France.