The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  In early May, Edward’s agents arrested an eminent Oxford astrologer named John Stacy. The accusations against him were specific. Stacy had been approached by the adulterous wife of Richard, Lord Beauchamp to murder him by necromancy. Beauchamp, an officer of Clarence’s, was from a circle of squabbling midlands noblemen and gentry who in recent years the duke had struggled to control. It was precisely the kind of situation that made Edward’s ears prick up.

  Stacy was tortured, during which ordeal he revealed a rather more significant plot: an attempt to murder the king himself, and his young son and heir, by witchcraft. He also named an accomplice, a gentleman named Thomas Burdet from the Warwickshire village of Arrow. Burdet was one of Clarence’s men.17

  The plot, so it was alleged, had been hatched some two and a half years previously, on 12 November 1474. At a secret meeting in Westminster, Burdet had asked Stacy and his Oxford associate Thomas Blake to ‘calculate the nativities’ of Edward and his eldest son, in order ‘to know when the King and Prince should die’. Prognostication was common practice – after all, everybody at some point wanted to know what the future held, or what the outcomes of their actions might be, from harvests to business transactions – but the divination of future events often shaded imperceptibly into trying to control or shape them. This was why predicting the future lives of monarchs was strictly off limits: it was categorically forbidden without their explicit permission, and potentially treasonous. For all that, kings and princes were as anxious as anybody to predict events.18 At times, Edward sanctioned his own coterie of physician-astrologers to dabble in prognostication. Back in 1474, that select group included the newly recruited, handsomely salaried figure of John Stacy himself.19

  When Stacy accepted Burdet’s request, performing two astrological consultations, he did so as a prominent member of Edward’s own household. The divinations yielded some disturbing portents. On 26 May 1475, shortly after the second of these sessions and as Edward’s army was embarking for France, Stacy and Burdet divulged to various of the ‘king’s people’ what their calculations showed: Edward and his son and heir would ‘in a short time die’.20

  Whatever the impact of Stacy’s findings, there was no immediate reaction from royal circles. Stacy travelled to France with the royal retinue and remained a valued member of Edward’s household. But in spring 1477, almost two years after the event, the episode came back to haunt him.

  Following Stacy’s interrogation, Burdet was detained in the west London suburb of Holborn, where he had been caught circulating ‘seditious and treasonable bills and writings, rhymes and ballads’, urging people to turn against Edward and his son, ‘and rise and make war’ against them. On 17 May, the two men, together with their associate Thomas Blake, were brought in front of Edward’s newly appointed commission at Westminster, a roll-call of the Yorkist establishment that included, among others, the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville and his nephew Dorset.

  Burdet, Stacy and Blake were charged with the treasonous offences of ‘imagining and compassing’ the deaths of Edward and his firstborn son and trying to bring about their deaths by ‘art, magic, necromancy and astronomy’. The indictment stated that in circulating the findings of his May 1475 consultation, Stacy had been trying to sap the people’s confidence in Edward’s regime by implying that the king would shortly die. Such a prophecy was designed to be self-fulfilling: this withdrawal of public love from the king would in turn sap his energies and his life would be correspondingly ‘shortened’.21

  From early in Edward’s reign, those about him had been concerned about the deleterious effects of his promiscuous, self-indulgent lifestyle, not only on his physique but on his behaviour and, by implication, on his ability to rule. In recent months, those concerns had increased. By the spring of 1477, there was a heightened anxiety around the state of Edward’s mood and health: an anxiety that Louis XI had picked up on, and that Hastings had brushed aside. Whether or not Edward was physically ill – the ague or malarial infection that he was said to have picked up in France had, perhaps, become chronic – or whether he was simply in a pensive frame of mind was unclear. Maybe it was both. Whatever the case, these concerns – as they tended to do – congealed around the idea that somebody was trying to harm the king through sorcery. In their frantic hunt for the source of this threat, royal authorities had alighted on Stacy.

  Stacy, one insider said, was unmasked for what he was: ‘a great sorcerer’. When, back in 1475, he had gone public with his worrying astrological findings about Edward and his son, Stacy had done so – as the indictment put it – in order that the king ‘would be saddened thereby’. The word ‘sad’ carried with it a host of resonances: weariness, fatigue, lethargy and melancholy.22 All of which rather suggested that the king was currently exhibiting these symptoms, and that Stacy’s two-year-old prognostication was now deemed the root cause. At the time, Stacy’s announcement, while known to ‘the king’s people’, had passed entirely without comment. Now, somebody had recalled his prognostication and, realizing the astrologer’s links with elements perceived to be hostile to the crown – Thomas Burdet and his boss, Clarence – had put two and two together. In arresting and torturing Stacy, royal agents were armed with prior knowledge about Stacy’s consultation and his associations. They had been tipped off.

  The indictment named only one of the people to whom, back in 1475, Stacy had revealed his findings: one Alexander Rushton, described as a ‘servant of the king’. Yet until recently Rushton was both a servant of the duke of Clarence and an associate of Stacy’s conspirator Burdet. It seems possible that Rushton kept Stacy’s information to himself for two years – until such time as it became very useful indeed. Probably one of the rumour-mongers that moved between Clarence’s household and the king’s, Rushton mentioned Stacy and Burdet to one of the king’s close advisers. If Clarence could believe that Edward was capable of poisoning him, it was hardly surprising if Edward – seeking explanations for his inexplicable ‘sadness’ – felt that his brother’s guiding hand was behind this plot against the crown.23

  The subsequent trial was short. Burdet and Stacy were convicted of treason. Dragged through the streets to the gallows at Tyburn, the pair were put through the full horror of a traitor’s execution: hanged, then cut down and disembowelled, their entrails thrown onto a fire before, finally, being beheaded and quartered, their body parts ‘to be disposed of at the king’s pleasure’. Right to the end, at the foot of the gallows, the pair continued to insist on their innocence. Stacy’s plea was ‘faint’, whether from the effects of his torture or the prospect of the ghastly execution he was about to endure.

  For those with long memories, the episode recalled another case of necromancy. Back in 1441 two astrologers, Roger Bolingbroke and Thomas Southwell, had been arrested for trying to bring about the death of Henry VI. The pair had, it was alleged, been commissioned to read the king’s horoscope by Eleanor Cobham, the wife of Henry VI’s independent-minded uncle Humphrey duke of Gloucester, who was keen to see her husband on the throne in the event of the then-childless king’s death. The astrologers were accused of revealing to many people that Henry VI would die of melancholia, an act that was intended to provoke the people into withdrawing their love from the king, whose consequent sorrow at this erosion of his subjects’ loyalties would bring about his death. The charges were uncannily similar to those now levelled against Stacy and Burdet – so similar, in fact, that they might have been used as a template. Bolingbroke’s declaration of his innocence – he had, he explained, simply ‘presumed too far in his cunning’ – could have been Stacy’s also.24

  For Edward, the executions eliminated a threat to himself and his family. They were also a warning shot to his brother with whom – however obliquely – Stacy and Burdet had been connected. Clarence saw the killings as something else: the latest in a series of royal assaults on his diminishing power, enabled by one of his former servants, Alexander Rushton, who – in what was becoming an all-too-familiar p
attern – had become one of the ‘king’s people’. What was more, on the day Stacy and Burdet were executed, Edward announced the judicial review of a trial that Clarence had recently overseen. In doing so, he confirmed Clarence’s deepest fears.25

  Some six weeks earlier, in the early afternoon of 12 April, eighty armed men wearing Clarence’s colours and led by his servant Richard Hyde rode into the manor of Keyford, near the Somerset market-town of Frome. Keyford was home to an elderly widow of some standing, Ankarette Twynyho. Sheep farmers and wool merchants, the Twynyhos were an influential local family; they were also part of Clarence’s network. A number of Twynyhos had been in his service, including both Ankarette’s sons and Ankarette herself, who had worked for his late wife Isabel. It was Ankarette who Clarence’s men were now hunting.26

  Breaking into her house with ‘great fury and frenzy’, the men seized Ankarette and rode off with her, heading into the midlands. Two days later, at sunset on Easter Monday, they arrived at Clarence’s base of Warwick, some ninety miles northeast. Telling Ankarette’s worried daughter and son-in-law, who together with a few servants had followed her abductors, to make themselves scarce ‘on pain of death’, they stripped the widow of all her jewels and money and locked her up.

  At six the following morning the bewildered woman was brought in front of two Warwickshire justices and charged with having murdered Clarence’s wife Isabel by giving the duchess ‘a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison’. Two others were indicted alongside Ankarette: John Thuresby and Sir Roger Tocotes, both servants of Clarence’s. Thuresby was accused of poisoning the duke’s infant son; Tocotes with abetting both crimes. In the ensuing trial a hastily assembled local jury, intimidated by Clarence’s baleful presence, found all three guilty. Convicted by this kangaroo court, Ankarette and John Thuresby – Tocotes, fortunately for him, had managed to evade arrest – were taken to a gallows on the city’s eastern outskirts and hanged. It was still only nine in the morning. The whole process had taken three hours.27

  People were wearily used to noblemen taking the law into their own hands. Even so, these judicial murders were shocking – particularly that of the defenceless Ankarette, who had been kidnapped and hauled across three counties to be subjected to a verdict that was, as several of the jury later confessed, blatantly ‘untrue’. Running through the episode, though, was the hint of a ghastly, paranoid rationale on Clarence’s part; one that had everything to do with an overwhelming sensation that his authority was fracturing and splintering, and that the walls were closing in on him.

  The Twynyho family had been solidly loyal to Clarence: both Ankarette’s sons had been involved in his rebellion against Edward back in 1470. But in recent times, as Clarence’s sphere of influence was gradually encroached upon, the Twynyhos had like many others adapted to the resulting shifts in power. Where some had turned to Hastings and some to the king himself, Ankarette’s kinsman John Twynyho, a noted Wiltshire lawyer, found advancement with the queen’s family. Working for her son Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, he landed the plum post of attorney general to Edward’s young heir, appointments to whose household were rubber-stamped by the prince’s governor, Anthony Woodville. Perhaps Ankarette Twynyho, newly unemployed following the death of Clarence’s wife, had drifted into Woodville circles, like her co-defendant Sir Roger Tocotes, another long-standing servant of Clarence’s, who had taken up lucrative offices on the queen’s Wiltshire estates. If the likes of John Twynyho clearly felt that it was acceptable to serve more than one master – a common-enough practice, especially for lawyers – Clarence didn’t.

  For the duke, who for years had watched his estates being eaten away at by his rivals around the king, his servants’ loyalties trickling like sand through his fingers, there was an exemplary savagery in his pursuit of Twynyho, Thursby and Tocotes. In his deranged state, still mourning his lost wife and child, Clarence probably believed they had committed the crimes of which they were found guilty – though he had rigged the justices and jury just to make sure. But even if they hadn’t, he perhaps felt, their disloyalty meant they had it coming.28

  Edward thought otherwise. News of the Twynyho trial took a while to reach him, but on 20 May the case was transferred to Westminster for judicial review by the judges of King’s Bench. Coming as it did on the day that John Stacy and Clarence’s servant Thomas Burdet were hanged and eviscerated at Tyburn, the timing seemed more than coincidental.29 The events of that May day seemed to unlock something in Clarence. His sense of discretion, perspective and self-control, always rickety, collapsed.

  The following day, the king’s council was in session at Westminster. Edward himself was absent, away at Windsor. Clarence barged into the council chamber, a grey-habited Franciscan friar trailing behind him. In front of the stunned councillors the friar, at Clarence’s prompting, proceeded to read out the declarations of innocence that Burdet and Stacy had made before their executions, thereby effectively accusing Edward of a miscarriage of justice. To add fuel to the fire, the friar Clarence had chosen to challenge the king’s supreme legal authority was William Goddard, a preacher notorious for his political sermons. Back in September 1470, when Clarence and Warwick had reclaimed the throne on behalf of Henry VI and Lancaster, Goddard had stood at Paul’s Cross outside the cathedral, publicly elucidating Henry VI’s rightful claim to the crown.

  Seen one way, Clarence’s act might have been a desperate, ham-fisted attempt to protest his own innocence, to ward off any accusations of guilt by association with Burdet and Stacy. But in light of the Twynyho trial, and his hyper-aggressive reaction to the leaching away of his power and authority, the duke’s behaviour suggested the opposite: that he was actively identifying himself with the executed men. Moreover, in defending convicted traitors and identifying himself with their cause, Clarence had employed a man who had once denied Edward’s very right to the crown.30 His compulsive charge into confrontation with his brother’s authority seemed driven by a desire to force matters to a head.

  As news of Clarence’s transgression reverberated around London, Edward met it with silence. For three weeks he stayed at Windsor, hunting, letting the implications of his brother’s deranged behaviour roll slowly around in his mind. Then, he sent Clarence a summons to appear before him at Westminster.

  Late in June, the two brothers came face to face, Clarence mute in the face of the king’s precise, controlled fury. Edward told his brother that by intervening in the due process of law he had ‘used a king’s power’, a crime known as ‘accroachment’; what was more, he had committed embracery, trying to rig justice. His behaviour was ‘a great threat to the judges and jurors of the kingdom’. Clarence was arrested and taken from Westminster across London to the Tower, where he was locked up.

  After ten years of his brother’s provocative insubordination, Edward’s patience had finally snapped. The king’s actions were saturated with anxiety about his own popularity. Clarence’s undermining of the judicial system, bringing the king’s justice into disrepute, was precisely the kind of behaviour guaranteed to impact on the people’s love for their king. Around the time of Clarence’s arrest, moreover, there were rumours that the Lancastrian earl of Oxford had escaped from his Calais prison and, resurfacing on the Cambridgeshire–Huntingdonshire border, was trying to raise an insurgency. The man – an impostor – was quickly detained, but for Edward it was a reminder of Oxford’s plots of a few years before, through which Clarence’s presence had seemed to flicker. That summer, as Clarence sat in the Tower, talk of another conspiracy coalesced around him.31

  A week or so before the brothers’ confrontation, Hastings arrived back in London for a whistle-stop visit after four months in Calais.32 Hastings’ return was intentionally timed: with a French embassy shortly due in London for wide-ranging talks, he could update Edward on the delicate international situation. The trip also gave Hastings, who firmly expected the visiting French to brief against him to his own king, the chance to get his own account of things in first.
His instincts were good.

  That July, the French ambassadors lodged an official complaint with Edward about his chamberlain’s clandestine military operations against France; actions which Hastings had vociferously denied. Elegantly avoiding any direct accusation of Edward, the envoys claimed that Hastings was working secretly and independently, in league with Margaret of Burgundy and in opposition to the official English policy of neutrality. The French complaints had another purpose – obfuscation. In the ensuing talks, so much time and energy were spent dealing with their grievances that they returned to France having made no headway on the matters on which Edward wanted progress: the financial sureties for his pension and his daughter Elizabeth’s marriage to the dauphin. Which was just how Louis wanted it.

  The French king’s frustrations were genuine enough. While his ambassadors were in England, the Habsburg heir Maximilian’s wedding to Marie of Burgundy presaged a drastic shift in the geopolitical atmosphere. Although most in the Low Countries were sceptical of the whimsical young archduke’s ability to resist the French – dawdling to Flanders, he had turned up with only four hundred horsemen and a modest war-chest – he was, at least in theory, backed by the might and resources of the Holy Roman Empire. Sensing his window of opportunity in Flanders closing, Louis ramped up military operations. French troops devastated the region south of Calais, burning towns and abbeys and destroying harvests. Rumour had it that Louis, thwarted by obdurate resistance from the strategically important town of St Omer, planned to bypass it to the north by marching his army through the wetlands of the Calais Pale. Just to be on the safe side, Hastings opened the enclave’s complex system of sluice gates, flooding the marshy ground and rendering its causeways ‘broken’ and impassable. When one of Hastings’ messengers turned up at the French camp, a frantic Louis raged at him, imprecating against his master. Amid widespread fears that the French were about to besiege the Pale – if he did, blanched one Calais inhabitant, ‘Flanders will be lost’ – Hastings tried to de-escalate the situation.33