The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Edward’s aversion to Herbert, Buckingham’s exact contemporary, was in marked contrast to the trust he had placed in Herbert’s father. Youth was no disqualification: Herbert was the same age as the queen’s son Dorset, who was now being heaped with regional responsibility, along with his younger brother. Perhaps, Edward felt, Herbert was simply less able than his brutal father; he had, it was true, failed to keep his own violent clan in check. As the prince’s council spread its influence out from Ludlow through the region, methodically dismembering Herbert’s networks of influence and ignoring Buckingham’s claims, the two nobles sensed that the prince’s men – the queen’s family and their associates at their forefront – were hungrily acquiring power at their expense. If, previously, the Woodvilles had lacked a significant landed base of their own, now they had one – on behalf, naturally, of the prince and the king.34 Buckingham and Herbert may not have liked it, but there wasn’t an awful lot they could do.

  Across the other side of the country, Richard and the earl of Northumberland toured an unsettled Yorkshire with a force of five thousand troops. At York, the duke told the feuding citizens to keep the peace: any and all violence would be punished, he warned, by imprisonment, fines and ‘grievous pain’, all at ‘the king’s will’. These were royal orders that Richard was delivering; likewise, as an arbiter and judge he would ‘none otherwise do any time, but according to the king’s laws’. The king’s representative in the north, he worked tirelessly to prove himself the region’s ‘good lord’, a great nobleman who would look after everybody who sought his favour – provided that, in the time-honoured equation, they gave him loyalty in return. This dual identity gave him an added attraction, as York’s civic officers were well aware; that March, they lavished gifts on Richard, thanking him for his ‘great labour’ in lobbying the king for the city to retain its corporate privileges.35

  This, of course, was how Edward had always ruled. With his family and close household servants entrusted with the rule of large swathes of the country, he was the splendid sun, even the greatest of his lords reflecting their master’s regal light. Now, as Edward approached his mid-thirties, this quality seemed exaggerated. His furious bursts of activity – counter-insurgencies and judicial progresses – became fewer, his stretches in England’s southeast longer. All of which made sense as far as the business of government was concerned, keeping him near England’s financial and legal centres, and allowing him to react more immediately to developments across the Channel. More to the point, Edward liked his creature comforts – and, just because the French went out of their way to ridicule the English king’s self-indulgence and sybaritism, that didn’t make them wrong.

  As Edward moved sedately, and not always soberly, from one pleasure-filled Thames-side manor to another, he had grand schemes in mind. With the clouds of recession and financial insecurity starting to lift, his coffers flush with Louis XI’s cash, he started to invest in the grand architectural projects that would represent his dynasty’s legacy.

  In recent decades, funds for such schemes had been thin on the ground. Henry VI’s great religious foundations of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge – two of the few consistent preoccupations of his wandering mind – had proved a massive drain on the public purse. As the storm-clouds of civil conflict gathered in the 1450s, work on them had ground to a halt, the unfinished lines of the chapel at King’s abandoned as finances were diverted to pay for troops and armaments.36 Earlier in his reign, Edward improved the royal houses when he could, but the work had been piecemeal: funds were rarely available. Now, however, they were.

  Windsor had always been one of Edward’s favourite residences. Besides the hunting in its parks and the castle’s sheer splendour, its chapel of St George was the spiritual home of the Order of the Garter, an institution that Edward had deployed to great effect to create a cult of personal chivalric loyalty to himself. For years, Edward had had the notion of transforming Windsor into the spiritual centre of the house of York. There was Fotheringhay, of course, but it was remote, a hundred miles away in Northamptonshire; besides which, as the creation of his ancestors it didn’t reflect the new royal dynasty that he himself had brought into being.

  Shortly before his invasion of France the previous year, Edward had plans drawn up for a new chapel at Windsor, a soaring, light-flooded vision in perpendicular Gothic. In a nod towards his ancestor Edmund of Langley’s improvements at Fotheringhay, accommodation for the clerics in the castle complex was to be laid out in the shape of the family’s fetterlock badge. As he embarked for Calais, Edward had told his master-of-works at Windsor, the bishop of Salisbury Richard Beauchamp, precisely where in the new chapel he wanted to be buried, in the event that he died in France.37

  Groundwork for the new chapel had already started before Edward’s return. In the months that followed, he threw quantities of Louis’ cash at new architectural projects: a tower at Nottingham Castle, whose polygonal design and ‘sumptuous’ stonework would draw admiring appraisals in generations to come; and improvements to all his Thames-side houses. One manor in particular, Eltham in Kent, now became the scene of Edward’s most emphatic architectural statement.

  Situated off the main London–Dover road, some eight miles southeast of the capital, Eltham, with its shady, vine-covered galleries and extensive gardens and parks, had for centuries been a house beloved of kings. Successive monarchs had left their mark on it, demolishing, adapting and rebuilding in a profusion of ever more luxurious apartments, though in recent decades it had, like much else, fallen into comparative neglect. Edward liked Eltham. He and Elizabeth had spent their first married Christmas there and, back in 1467, it had hosted the warm-up tournament in anticipation of the Bastard of Burgundy’s visit. In winter 1475 work started on a building that was to become one of the glories of English domestic architecture. Eltham’s new brick-built, stone-faced great hall would be over a hundred feet long and with a gilded hammer-beam roof. Light would flood in from the windows that ran along the hall’s upper storey and from two deep bay windows, either side of the dais, that extended almost to the floor, and into which the royal coats of arms of York were glazed. Clean-lined, perfectly proportioned, it was an architectural statement of intent.38

  As fast as he spent his money, Edward was as keen to keep it coming in. There were other windfalls. Part of the settlement with Louis XI had involved the ransoming of Margaret of Anjou – a figure who no longer posed a problem for Edward but, as a claimant to the powerful house of Anjou, and thus large swathes of provincial France, remained one for Louis. In early 1476 at Rouen, Thomas Montgomery handed Margaret over to the French king’s representatives, in exchange for the first instalment of her £10,000 ransom. Aged forty-six, this resourceful, implacable queen had finally lost everything. Before leaving England, she was made to sign a document renouncing her claim to the throne; when she got to France, Louis forced her to relinquish her rights to the family patrimony of Anjou. Margaret retired to the small village of Reculée near Angers, where she lived off the modest pension that Louis had granted her and contemplated what had been.39

  In constant pain from kidney stones, George Neville had spent the early months of 1476 in seclusion at the Neville family home of Bisham Abbey, immersed – when energy permitted – in diocesan administration and alchemy, trying to find cures for his ailments and misfortunes. The priest and alchemist George Ripley sent him prescriptions and a copy of his new book The Marrow of Alchemy – which, he told Neville, would restore to the ailing, friendless archbishop favour, wealth, and health and happiness, concluding that Neville had ‘God before his eyes’.

  Ripley was right, though not in the way he intended. In the spring, journeying slowly north to his see of York, Neville stopped at the Nottinghamshire village of Blyth, where he died.40 Aged forty-four, the circumstances of his death seemed to mock the powerful flamboyance of his years as one of the regime’s key architects. He left no will: after Edward’s confiscation of his fortune four years previously
, he had little to bequeath. No chantry chapel was built at York Minster; no money had been set aside to pay for the masses that would usher his soul through purgatory. Edward hardly seemed to notice Neville’s passing at all.

  That summer, the king was preoccupied with another interment. When, back in the winter of 1460, his father Richard and brother Edmund were killed in the massacre at Wakefield, they had been hastily buried in nearby Pontefract. There had always been other financial priorities, but now, over fifteen years later, Edward planned to bring the bodies back to their spiritual home of Fotheringhay. The reburial of Richard duke of York would be an epic statement of dynastic assertion and family unity.

  Mid-afternoon on 29 July, at the entrance to Fotheringhay churchyard, a cluster of black-clad figures waited to greet Richard of York’s funeral cortege. In their midst, bulky in a furred full-length habit of mourning blue, was Edward and, flanking him, Clarence and Richard, who as designated chief mourner had brought his long-dead father and brother south.41

  At Pontefract, the two corpses had been exhumed from their resting place in the church of St John’s Priory. There they lay in state as the office of the dead was sung, the coffins covered with rich palls of cloth-of-gold – and in Richard of York’s case, topped with a life-sized effigy of the dead duke, dressed in royal blue, hands clasped in prayer, fixed eyes staring upward. Then, loaded onto funeral carriages pulled by teams of black-caparisoned horses, they set off on their final journey. With them, on foot, went four hundred ‘poor men’, black-habited, with black hoods pulled over their heads, carrying burning torches; a knot of royal officers-of-arms, heraldic coats of arms worn over their mourning black; and several noblemen and their followers, among them Northumberland, Lord Stanley and Richard, riding protectively behind his father’s carriage.42 Along the route, nightly vigils were held at pre-arranged locations, crowds gathering silently and solemnly to watch the processions and hear the masses.

  Alongside the three brothers at Fotheringhay were other members of the family and their closest adherents: among them John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, their fourteen-year-old nephew, and Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex; Anthony Woodville and his nephew Dorset; the omnipresent Hastings. After Edward tearfully kissed his father’s effigy, the reception committee followed the coffins as they were borne into the church and laid under two extravagantly adorned, purpose-built canopies.

  The following day, the royal family and a number of visiting dignitaries crammed into the church for the funeral service. After the obsequies were over, some two thousand guests sat down to a funeral feast in canvas pavilions erected in the adjacent fields, working their way through herds of beef and mutton and flocks of poultry, washed down with forty pipes of wine. Alms were distributed, a penny for each person, and twopence for pregnant women: in all, remarked one herald, ‘up to five thousand people who came to receive alms were counted’.

  Happily for Edward, the massive sums disbursed at Fotheringhay could be instantly recouped. Among the foreign representatives present was the Rouen merchant Guillaume Restout, who had come to hand over the first half-yearly instalment of Louis XI’s pension. The day after the funeral, Edward handed Restout a receipt for 25,000 French crowns.43

  By mid-September, London was finally shaking off the plague epidemic that had hung around all summer. People who had fled at the first signs of the outbreak cautiously began to return. Elizabeth Stonor, wife of the Oxfordshire knight Sir William, who had remained resolutely in her city home, wrote entreating her husband to join her – overburdened with business matters, she needed his help – and to send her children from her first marriage, whom she was missing.44 Later that month William Caxton, former governor of the Merchant Adventurers, arrived back in the capital from his adoptive Flanders after a decade-long absence. Now in his fifties, Caxton had his head full of the new project that he had been developing in Cologne and Bruges for the past five years: printing.

  As much as anything, Caxton’s return was driven by a desire to be close to his target market: an aspirational readership eager for translations of the chivalric romances and histories fashionable in the courts of northern Europe. Nobody else was making them available in print: Caxton, with his bulky contacts book and knowledge of the Flemish literary scene, knew that he was the man to do so. He headed not to the heart of the city, where he would face competition from the publishers of Paternoster Row and other foreign printers who had settled there, but to Westminster. There, on 29 September, he took out a lease on commercial premises in the Abbey sanctuary. Soon, he was pasting up flyers with a notice advertising the sale of his new edition of the ‘Sarum Pye’ or Ordinale Sarum, the service book used around the country, including at its foot a note in Latin: Supplico stet cedula – ‘Don’t take this leaflet’. This, after all, was the first printed advert in England and, Caxton assumed, people would be drawn to its novelty value.45 His timing was impeccable. Ten days after he opened for business, Edward and his court were back at Westminster. The king had summoned a great council – which meant that he had significant matters to discuss.

  Having, as he hoped, fixed stellar marriages for two of his daughters – Elizabeth and Cecily to the French and Scottish heirs, respectively – Edward’s thoughts were on his elder son and heir, now rising six. There was a marriage proposal on the table, to Juana, the second daughter of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. As yet, though, this was a far-off prospect. There was a more pressing issue at hand: Edward’s friendship with Charles the Bold, which had still not recovered from the battering it had taken at Picquigny.

  Now wearing the golden handcuffs of Louis’ pension, Edward’s relationship with France had been reset in a way that had barely seemed possible two years before. For all that, the Anglo-French détente was still no more popular, as the king and his councillors remained uncomfortably aware. Late that year, the French envoy Restout arrived in London with the latest half-yearly payments for Edward and his inner circle. Calling in at Hastings’ house south of St Paul’s with his pension of a thousand crowns in cash, Restout’s deputy, Pierre Clairet, was shown into a private chamber. When Hastings walked in, he indicated the money and asked pleasantly for a receipt. When Hastings demurred, Clairet persisted: could he please just have a few lines addressed to his master Louis by way of proof, so that the French king – ‘somewhat suspicious by nature’, he told Hastings, confidingly – would not think he had run off with his money? Hastings refused. Louis, he retorted, chose to give him the money: ‘I didn’t ask for it’. If Clairet wanted to leave the money, that was up to him. He would get no receipt. ‘What I absolutely do not want’, added Hastings emphatically, ‘is people saying of me that the Lord Chamberlain of England is a pensioner of the king of France’, nor did he want ‘my receipts turning up in the French exchequer’. Whatever his feelings on the relationship with France, it was his public reputation that was most important to Hastings. While perfectly happy to accept French money, he saw no reason that people should know about it. Clairet got the point – and left the money. So did Louis. In future, when his envoys dropped off Hastings’ cash, they never again asked him for a receipt.46

  Louis was sensitive to his English unpopularity. That November, he was reported to be shipping Edward 700,000 butts – 126-gallon barrels – of French wine: ‘a great and marvellous thing’, wondered the Milanese ambassador to France, ‘thought to be in order to ingratiate himself with the people of England’.47 Whether or not Edward redistributed this vast quantity of wine was unclear. Perhaps, rarely able to resist temptation, he was more inclined to drink himself into a stupor instead. Louis probably considered it a win–win outcome.

  Yet Edward’s, and England’s, relationship with Burgundy remained crucial: after all, many close personal connections bound the two states together. And while there was an economic upside to Edward’s détente with Louis, the ill-feeling that festered with Charles continued to impact on English trade with Flanders, a problem that merchants persistently lobbied Edward
to solve. Of equal concern to Edward and his council that autumn was Charles’s behaviour.

  Following the Picquigny meeting, Charles had returned to his evermore compulsive obsession with expanding his eastern borders. His campaign against the independent cantons of Switzerland had limped from one fiasco to another, littered with atrocities – including his lynching of the entire 412-strong garrison of Grandson following the Swiss town’s surrender – and beset by infighting among his mercenaries, the English being the worst troublemakers (they had no respect, reported one envoy, and were convinced of their ‘superiority over all other nations’). Forced out of Switzerland, Charles reinvaded in the spring of 1476. He was camped outside his first objective, the fortress-city of Murten, when Anthony Woodville turned up. Delighted at this indication of renewed English support, Charles made much of him – and was correspondingly incandescent when, a few days later, Woodville suddenly recalled a prior engagement back in England, made his apologies and left. ‘He is gone because he is afraid’, was Charles’s blunt verdict. Or maybe, something didn’t smell right to Woodville. If so, his instincts were good. On 22 June, a relieving Swiss army routed Charles’s forces, slaughtering thousands and capturing the bulk of his artillery. In the following months, Charles’s denial of the disaster that had befallen him left observers unnerved: he just ‘laughs, jokes and makes good cheer’, reported one ambassador, appalled.48

  Assembling yet another army, Charles seemed oblivious to his new vulnerability, and the dangers that accompanied it. Edward and his councillors, though, were deeply concerned. For around a century, the assertive Burgundian dukes had reshaped north-western Europe, their on–off alliance with England a crucial counterweight to the might of France. In his hubris, Charles seemed the last person to contemplate what the repercussions might be if Burgundy collapsed.

  As the court celebrated Christmas that year, the festivities were dampened by news that Clarence’s wife, Isabel Neville, was dead. Early in October she had given birth to the couple’s second son; the delivery was difficult and Isabel had ‘sickened’ – a postpartum infection, probably, from which she had never recovered. Her baby boy, christened Richard, died soon after his mother, on 1 January. If the obsequies for his twenty-five-year-old wife were anything to go by, Clarence’s grief was profound. At Tewkesbury Abbey, following a magnificent service and night-long vigil by members of his household, Isabel’s body lay in state for a month before her burial. Clarence’s mourning was sharpened by an awareness of his new dynastic precariousness, with a three-year-old daughter and a son rising two. As the death of their infant brother had shown all too clearly, there was no guarantee of them reaching the age of inheritance.49