The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Reaction in the English camp was predictably violent. Some felt the whole thing should be called off at once; others, vaingloriously, that they didn’t need the Burgundians anyway. For now, at any rate, Edward and his advisers decided to continue the campaign. With the French army still in Normandy, he marched out of Calais and, unopposed, through Burgundian territory towards eastern France and his eventual target: Reims, the traditional coronation place of France’s kings. On the way the English halted at Agincourt, pitching camp on the battlefield for inspiration. By early August they had reached the French borderlands. The weather was deteriorating but, so Charles had assured Edward, the renegade constable of France was prepared to hand over the strategic city of St Quentin that now stood before him.

  Charles had added what Philippe de Commynes chucklingly described as ‘a bit of fat’ to his story. Approaching St Quentin to receive its surrender, an English deputation was met by a barrage of cannonfire and quickly retreated. With Charles refusing Edward and his troops shelter in the nearby Burgundian town of Péronne, the English were forced to camp in open country, in what was now torrential rain. For Edward, it was the last straw. He had always found the realities of a long campaign unappealing. Now, with summer nearly over, the weather foul and the English camp a breeding ground for disease; with cash running out and his hoped-for allies, including the flip-flopping duke of Brittany, sitting on their hands; with the regrouping French army now less than fifty miles away and closing fast, he made up his mind.22

  On 12 August, the same day that Charles left in a cloud of promises to rejoin his own army some hundred and fifty miles away, Edward made contact with Louis XI, using as his go-between a French prisoner who had been briefed by lords Howard and Stanley. Recognizing the names that Garter herald had recommended to him weeks before, Louis moved fast. His own messenger, dispatched immediately, made emollient noises of friendship to Edward and his advisers: Louis had only ever wanted peace with England, his real enemy being the duke of Burgundy; he knew, besides, what vast expense Edward had gone to, and how much pressure he was under to make war on France, If he was now minded to discuss a treaty, Louis would most certainly make it worth his while.

  Talks started almost instantly; indeed, the shopping-list of English demands, produced almost at once, seemed pre-prepared. Two days later, a delegation headed by Howard and the coolly appraising figure of John Morton met French representatives to discuss terms. Their demands were substantial: a one-off payment to Edward of 75,000 crowns for Edward, to be paid immediately; an annual payment or ‘pension’ of 50,000 crowns for life; a new Anglo-French treaty founded on a marriage between Louis XI’s heir and one of Edward’s daughters, the cost of which would be covered by the French king; and – a sop to English public opinion – a demand for independent arbitration over Edward’s claim to the French crown. In return, Edward promised to lead his army back to England as soon as the paperwork had been signed and exchanged.23

  Aware that negotiating would only slow things down, Louis agreed to everything. Delighted to usher Edward out of France as quickly and honourably as possible, he agreed to English proposals for a summit between the two kings, at Amiens. To keep the English troops sweet, Louis opened the gates of the city to them. Over the following four days, with its innkeepers ordered to serve Edward’s men whatever they wanted, the city was effectively transformed into a free bar. Confronted by the prospect of unlimited booze, in time-honoured fashion the English entirely failed to control themselves. They staggered around, one bar reportedly running up a hundred and eleven separate tabs before nine in the morning, before Edward finally sent in guards to carry away his sozzled army.

  On 29 August, some three miles downstream at the village of Picquigny, the atmosphere was rather more upright as Edward and Louis finally came face to face. With their respective armies lining opposing banks of the River Somme, the kings met in the middle of a specially constructed bridge over the river. Louis was mindful of a meeting between two French royal factions in similar circumstances back in 1419, when John of Burgundy was hacked to death on the orders of Louis’ father. Accordingly, his encounter with Edward took place through a protective trellis. At his master’s shoulder, one of the architects of the talks, Philippe de Commynes – who, having received an overwhelmingly attractive offer from Louis, had defected from Charles the Bold – watched attentively.

  Despite their marathon drinking session the mounted English troops, drawn up in battle order, were an intimidating sight. Commynes looked on as the unmistakeable form of Edward approached the bridge, twelve close advisers at his back, foremost among them Clarence, Hastings and Northumberland. The last time Commynes had encountered Edward was in Flanders, five years before. Then, Edward had been a penniless, albeit magnificent fugitive. Now, dressed in cloth-of-gold and a black cap studded with a jewel-encrusted fleur-de-lys, Edward cut a regal figure ‘but’, said Commynes, was ‘beginning to get fat’: no longer the prince whose good looks had once taken his breath away.

  Since their respective crownings within a month of each other back in the summer of 1461, the fortunes of Edward and Louis had been closely entwined. As they met, they perhaps felt a sense of mutual familiarity. Striving to outdo each other in elaborate courtesies, they embraced through the trelliswork, Edward towering over the diminutive, ageing form of the French king. Edward’s French, noted Commynes, was ‘pretty good’. After copies of the treaties were exchanged, Louis invited Edward banteringly to Paris to ‘dine with the ladies’, offering to provide a pliant confessor to ‘absolve him from sin’, before the talk again turned serious. The pair discussed France’s neighbours and enemies, Burgundy and Brittany. At the mention of Charles the Bold, Edward shrugged – his brother-in-law was more or less dead to him – but he asked Louis not to make war on the duke of Brittany, whose friendship he valued. Shortly after, amid a profusion of mutual compliments, the two kings and their entourages parted.

  Edward had done exceptionally well out of what became known as the Treaty of Picquigny: a seven-year truce that included a bilateral free-trade agreement, a mutual defence pact and a substantial financial settlement in Edward’s favour. The one-off payment he had demanded, equating to £15,000, was delivered instantly; the annual pension of £10,000 would cover most of the running costs of his household or, depending on how Edward chose to spend it, the financing of the Calais garrison. Either way, a perennial headache had been solved. In addition, Louis had committed to providing a jointure of 60,000 crowns for the projected marriage at the treaty’s heart, between Louis’ heir and Edward’s oldest daughter Elizabeth. To oil the wheels, Louis also distributed sizeable pensions and ‘a lot of ready cash and plate’ among Edward’s most influential advisers, including Thomas Montgomery, John Morton, John Howard, the chancellor Thomas Rotherham and William Hastings, who received the biggest pension of the lot. All had been intimately involved in the negotiations. It was hardly surprising that – as one anonymous chronicler, a member of Edward’s administration, put it – they considered Picquigny an ‘honourable peace’. Others saw it differently.

  When news of the treaty reached him, Charles the Bold reacted with predictable fury. He stormed into the English camp, where his vexation was met with collective indifference from Edward’s advisers. One French envoy, reporting the meeting to the French king, did an impression of the frenzied duke of Burgundy, stamping his feet and swearing, calling Edward ‘all the insults under the sun’.

  Although he always enjoyed impressions of the volatile Charles, Louis remained wary. As his agents told him, the mood in the English camp was dark. One of Anthony Woodville’s close friends, the hard-bitten Gascon Louis de Bretailles, told Commynes that Edward had won nine battles and had never lost – until now. The shame of returning home, moreover, ‘was greater than the honour he had gained in winning the other nine’. What worried Bretailles most was the reception that they were going to face back in England, and precisely how they were going to explain themselves to an enraged
public. Those of Edward’s advisers who had accepted French pensions felt anxious about having done so. Louis’ agents identified several leading Englishmen openly uneasy about the treaty – or, more to the point, uneasy about being seen to accept it. Foremost among them was Richard: he was, said Commynes, ‘not happy’.

  Richard’s martial reputation preceded him, and he wanted war. His reluctance to accept the treaty terms alarmed Louis. At Amiens, the French king had thrown everything he had at Richard to bring him round, entertaining him lavishly, loading him with presents of fine plate, cash and horses, and assiduously flattering his martial pretensions. Louis’ gifts included a ‘great bombard’, a gift that proved an ice breaker: ‘I have always’, Richard later wrote to Louis warmly, ‘taken great pleasure in artillery.’ Richard warmed up – or, as Commynes, a master of the apposite verb, put it, ‘recollected’ himself. Recognizing that Richard didn’t want to be associated with the appeasement of Picquigny, Louis gave him a way out: as Edward signed the treaty, Clarence at his side, Richard was absent, inspecting the French troops at Louis’ invitation. It was a neat way of distancing himself from the treaty in the eyes of his troops and those back home while at the same time accepting it.24

  In France, widespread fear of the English had already given way to scorn. Songs circulated about how Edward’s ‘great army’ had been washed away by a deluge of fine French wine and some pies – which, given quite how much it had cost Louis to buy Edward off, was a narrative he jumped on. In private, he mocked the English capitulation mercilessly. On one such occasion, the king realized to his horror that an expatriate French merchant, domiciled in England, was present, having been admitted to petition for an export licence. Ordering him not to return to England, Louis immediately had the merchant resettled in his native Bordeaux, where he was set up with a good job and reunited with his hastily repatriated wife. There was no way he was going to risk stories of his jokes getting back to Edward.25

  Adding to the general air of malaise that hung over the English army was a fug of disease. As they marched dejectedly back through the malarial marshlands of the Somme valley, they finally managed to emulate Henry V’s forces, in this respect if no other. ‘I mislike the air here’, Sir John Paston wrote to his mother from Calais. Having arrived in excellent health, he reported, he was now ‘crazed’ with sickness, his stomach in a terrible state.

  Edward himself was noticeably subdued. He had, some conjectured, come down with ague, malarial fever – though it may have been the dawning realization that, despite having struck an excellent financial deal with Louis, there was little likelihood of him ever again having a crack at gaining the French crown.26 That, and his preoccupation with how the deal was going to be received back in England.

  The trans-shipment of Edward’s army back across the Channel took most of September. Adding to the delay, so talk at the Burgundian court had it, was the king’s refusal to let his brothers Clarence and Richard return to England before him. Apparently, Edward feared they might become a focus for popular discontent – especially Clarence, whose previous attempt to ‘make himself king’ was uppermost in the English king’s mind. That, at least, was what Charles the Bold was saying. And Charles was in such a state about Edward that he was prepared to say any old thing.

  For the Burgundian duke, Edward’s peace settlement was a betrayal of chivalric values so profound that it could only be explained by his ignoble parentage. Edward, he fulminated, wasn’t the son of Richard of York at all. Rather, he was the offspring of an affair between Cecily Neville and an English archer stationed at Rouen, whose name, as the infuriated Charles now called Edward, was ‘Blaybourne’.27 Such rumours had been floating around for years – at least since the bloodletting after Edgecote back in 1469, when Warwick and Clarence had spread talk of Cecily’s liaison with the archer – though where the detail of the archer’s name had come from was unclear. Whatever the case, Charles’s rift with Edward now seemed irreconcilable. In his fury, the Burgundian duke even signed a new peace treaty with Louis XI, the man he hated most – though Edward now ran Louis a close second. In one paroxysm of rage, Charles tore his Garter into tiny pieces with his teeth.28

  On 28 September Edward and his army entered London, battle standards aloft and trumpets blaring. Escorted by the mayor and five hundred citizens dressed in Yorkist colours, they followed the usual route of kings returning in triumph, over London Bridge and through the city, stopping to offer up thanks to God at St Paul’s. Whatever his inward concerns, Edward brazened it out: this, the military parade seemed to say, was a victory as comprehensive as anything that might have been achieved on the battlefield.29 In the days and weeks following the royal return, a slew of pronouncements continued to spin the official line. Edward’s pension was in fact tribute money, acknowledgement by Louis of the English king’s rightful claim to the French throne. Moreover, the new Anglo-French free-trade deal would be to the ‘universal weal and profit of us and all our subjects’. All this seemed reasonable enough. There was no doubt that the lifting of restrictions on trade with France would benefit the country; the ‘tribute’, meanwhile, would go a fair way to easing the royal burden on the English taxpayer, something Edward emphasized in graciously waiving the last portion of his war tax, due for collection that autumn.30

  But as Edward and those around him knew, it was the big picture that counted. Edward might have clinched the best deal in the world, but in the public imagination the more fine-grained fiscal, economic and commercial arguments were lost, swamped by the one truth that people understood. Having extracted a series of exorbitant taxes from them under what now looked like false pretences – a practice in which he had a long and undistinguished record – Edward had led a massive army to reconquer France and had returned empty-handed and humiliated. The English wanted their kings to deliver military glory, preferably over the French. Whatever the advantages of a king who preferred business ‘aventures’ to chivalric ones, the sense of national bathos was palpable.

  Back home, Edward’s discontented, newly demobilized troops prowled the country. Disorder spiked and, reported one chronicler, ‘no road throughout England was left in a state of safety’. Edward had anticipated disturbances, and his response was quick and savage. Late that autumn, he rode through Hampshire and Wiltshire dispensing summary justice: anybody found guilty of theft or murder, even members of his own household, was ‘instantly hanged’. Such brutal decisiveness, noted one government official approvingly, contained the disorder. People inclined to violent protest instead saw the wisdom in keeping their resentments to themselves.31

  Edward, though, was disinclined to move far from England’s southeast. The winter of 1475 saw him moving slowly between his Thames-side houses, from Westminster to Greenwich, then back upriver to Windsor. With regional troubles again bubbling up, exacerbated by Edward’s absence in France and the ugly national mood on his return, he turned to the great family power bases that he had spent recent years establishing.

  In the early months of 1476, attempting to get a grip on the endemic disorder in Wales and the Marches, Edward handed Prince Edward’s council – at its head, the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville – further judicial and military powers, which it was quick to deploy. Among the more visible councillors riding through the region and extending the young prince’s authority ever further afield were the queen’s sons by her first marriage: twenty-year-old Thomas Grey, recently created marquis of Dorset, and his teenage brother Sir Richard. The queen’s family was establishing an ever-greater presence in the prince’s council and household at the expense of other major players in the region. Notably absent from efforts to impose royal law and order were the earl of Pembroke William Herbert, son of Edward’s Welsh ‘master-lock’, and Henry duke of Buckingham. Edward evidently didn’t rate either of them.32

  Despite absorbing him into the Yorkist family as an eight-year-old and marrying him off to the queen’s sister Katherine, Edward had never seemed inclined to make Buckingham pa
rt of his plans. Perhaps Edward was wary of the great duke’s Lancastrian blood; then again, perhaps he just didn’t like him, refusing to give the duke any political responsibility whatsoever. Over the years, Buckingham’s role had been restricted to that of a glittering court mannequin, wheeled out on great occasions of state – a role which, it had to be said, the elegant duke played to perfection. Obsessive about his appearance, he was a regular patron of the royal apothecary John Clark, who supplied him with various kinds of skin clarifier and whitener to obtain the aristocratic pallor prized especially by noblewomen; and a night-time face pack, to be washed off the following morning with an infusion of ‘strawberry leaves, wild tansy, bean flowers and roses’.33

  Buckingham, though, also wanted power – which, by early 1476, he looked ever further from acquiring. His poor relations with Edward had been aggravated by his insistence on parading his own Lancastrian credentials, incorporating the arms of his royal forebears into his own. If this hardly endeared him to the king, he and Edward then fell out during the invasion of France, when – perhaps vocally opposing the king’s settlement with Louis XI – he had left for England with his four hundred troops even before the treaty was signed. Whether he had stomped off in a huff, or whether he had been ordered unceremoniously back by Edward, was unclear. Despite his family’s traditional prominence in Wales, the twenty-year-old Buckingham was systematically excluded from the work of the prince’s council.