The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Writing to Louis, the chamberlain again denied accusations that he had committed ‘acts of war’ against France. In fact, he had ignored all Margaret of Burgundy’s pleas for help (this was a blatant untruth, given that he had sent her military aid on at least one occasion). Edward had, Hastings continued, invested ‘special confidence’ in him to maintain the relationship between England and France, and he would not displease Edward ‘for all the goods in the world’. Hastings had been nurtured by Edward’s father and by Edward himself. He had shared all the king’s adversities, experiences which had led to the closest understanding between him and his master: there was no way he would do anything to cause Edward ‘dishonour or displeasure’, a point on which he was insistently sincere. If Louis was trying to drive a wedge between Hastings and Edward, went the subtext of Hastings’ letter, he was wasting his time.

  By this point, as Hastings knew, another high-ranking French embassy was on its way to England, armed with detailed instructions from Louis. Once again, the ambassador had a delicate balancing act to perform: to give every impression of progressing the negotiations without actually doing so and, in the process, to make Edward feel that Louis was his best friend in the world. As usual, Louis’ technique was distraction. The ambassador was to brief against Hastings again, but this time with a subtle difference. Instead of telling Edward that Hastings was ignoring his orders, the ambassadors should inform the English king that Hastings was involved in a conspiracy against him – and that his co-conspirators were Edward’s sister Margaret and his brother Clarence. As well as telling his representative what to say, Louis told him how to say it.

  Arriving at Edward’s court late in the summer of 1477, Louis’ chef de mission apologized profusely for the delay in the talks. He said that his master would have given his previous embassy sweeping powers, had he not been deeply concerned about the warnings ‘from all sides’ that ‘monsieur le chambellan’ – Hastings – and Edward’s sister Margaret had been in secret talks regarding a separate English deal with Burgundy. Here, the ambassador reminded Edward that the English had no business meddling in what was, essentially, an internal French affair involving ‘rebellious subjects’ of the French crown – the worst of whom was the ‘widow of duke Charles’, Margaret herself. And it wasn’t just Louis against whom Margaret had been manoeuvring.

  Many reports of private conversations at the Burgundian court, the ambassador continued, had reached Louis’ ears. Edward clearly didn’t know the truth of what was going on. If only he could have heard what his sister Margaret was secretly saying about her ambitions for a marriage between Clarence and the Burgundian heiress Marie, and about what Clarence planned to do in England should he become duke of Burgundy – try to seize Edward’s crown, was the implication – Edward would realize that such a marriage would have done much more harm to him than to France. Louis wanted Edward to know all this purely out of the goodness of his heart. In any case, Edward should keep his eyes open.34

  This was all typical Louis – a cluster of half-truths that, seeded in the recipient’s mind, would blossom slowly into doubts and anxieties. But there was little in it to disconcert Edward and his advisers. They were experienced in the slippery game of international diplomacy, a game that they had played just as well as Louis in the past months. Edward, of course, had not gone anywhere near his sister’s scheme to marry Clarence to the young duchess – a ship that had, in any case, sailed with Marie of Burgundy’s marriage to Maximilian. Neither did he have any doubts about Hastings’ loyalty. Meanwhile, Louis’ latest efforts to draw Edward into a war against Burgundy were undermined by the breaking news that the French king, frustrated by Calais’ flooded waterways, had disbanded his increasingly mutinous army, agreed a truce with Maximilian and gone home for the winter.35

  Louis XI’s innuendo about Clarence was similarly groundless. He had no evidence whatsoever for his claim that the duke, plotting with his sister, was planning to usurp the throne of England.

  Yet here, the French king’s insinuations fell on fertile ground. They fed the story that Edward had constructed for himself about Clarence’s behaviour: a story of persistent disloyalty that had prompted Edward’s close scrutiny of and active intervention in his brother’s affairs, culminating in his imprisonment. It wasn’t so much that Edward was taken in by Louis; rather, the French king simply confirmed what Edward already thought about his brother. There was no reason, in other words, for Edward not to believe him.

  In mid-September, shortly after the French embassy had left, a Medici agent in the city of Arras wrote back to Florence with news from England. Edward, people were saying, had had his brother Clarence killed – ‘but’, the agent added, the news was ‘not confirmed’.36 He was wrong: Clarence was still in the Tower. That such rumours could even be given credence, however, was ominous.

  At the start of November England’s noblemen gathered in London, summoned by Edward to a great council. With it came the usual round of feasting, which involved a marked focus on the dynasty’s future – Edward and Elizabeth’s two boys. On the 9th Prince Edward, just turned seven years old, presided over a banquet given in his name. After dinner, the replete nobles lined up to pay allegiance to the younger prince, who stood by the ceremonial bed that festooned the king’s presence chamber. First in line was his uncle Richard, who knelt and, after his nephew’s little hands had clasped his own, did him homage and kissed him. The four-year-old boy thanked him – clearly enough for those in attendance to hear – for having performed the act ‘so humbly’.37 Over the next fortnight, the council pored over lavish plans for the upcoming wedding of this second son of Edward’s to the three-year-old Anne Mowbray, only child of John, duke of Norfolk, who had died suddenly in his bed two years before.

  The marriage was a typically predatory move on the regime’s part. The wealthy Mowbray patrimony had been due to be divided between various co-heirs, including the late duke’s widow and his cousin John Howard, one of Edward’s staunchest supporters. In a stroke, Edward sliced through the complex inheritance. Making his second son duke of Norfolk, he bought off Mowbray’s widow and settled the entire inheritance on the late duke’s daughter Anne. In the event that Anne died without heirs, everything would go to her husband the prince. In his mid-fifties, John Howard was frozen out. It was the latest in a string of unethical legal sleights of hand that had seen great noble inheritances such as those of Warwick and Oxford carved up and settled on members of the royal family – and against which, in Howard’s case, even years of long and loyal service to the family was no immunity. Given that Howard had helped Richard defraud the countess of Oxford some years before, he can hardly have been surprised. If he minded, he didn’t say so – in public, anyway.38

  For Edward, his family had always come first, with closeness of blood the index of entitlement: the ‘higher’ you were in the king’s blood, the more you deserved to be ‘honoured and enhanced of right and power’. His younger son was the latest beneficiary of this aggrandizing logic. The little prince’s wedding to Anne Mowbray would be held the following January; the festivities would run alongside a parliament that would enshrine in law this latest act of Yorkist appropriation. The main business of the upcoming parliament, though, was to deal with the one member of the family whose face no longer fitted, whose very presence had become incompatible: Clarence.

  That November, Edward and his councillors assessed the case to be brought against his brother. Towards the end of the month, there came hints that the king had already made up his mind: not just about the charges, but the trial’s outcome.

  As riders made their way through the kingdom with wedding invitations and writs for the forthcoming parliament, Sir Thomas Vaughan arrived up in Coventry. Representing both the king and his eldest son, within whose jurisdiction the city – formerly Clarence’s stamping ground – now fell, Vaughan carried an uncompromising message to the civic authorities. Anybody suspected of using seditious language was to be rounded up, ‘openly punished’
as an example to others, and imprisoned. The authorities were to tell citizens that anybody holding money, jewels or ‘pledges’ – sureties for debts owed – from Clarence was to declare them immediately, ‘without concealment’.

  The financial reckoning indicated that Clarence’s property was about to become forfeit to the crown; the tightened security suggested a pre-emptive move by the king against any possible disturbances in support of his brother. Which in turn suggested that, in Edward’s mind, Clarence was already guilty.39

  On 15 January 1478, guests gathered at Westminster Palace for the royal wedding. With Anthony Woodville holding her left hand, and on her right Edward’s teenage nephew John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, the three-year-old bride was led gently into the richly decorated interior of St Stephen’s Chapel. Ensconced under a canopy were the royal family: Edward, Elizabeth and their children, and the dynasty’s matriarch Cecily duchess of York. After the requisite papal dispensation was flourished for this wedding between two relatives of such ‘nearness of blood’, Anne was taken to the high altar where her little prince awaited her. The marriage over, Richard stood at the chapel doors, delving into gold basins filled with coins, flinging showers of gold and silver over the waiting crowds outside. Then, he and the duke of Buckingham accompanied the new bride out of the chapel to the wedding feast. So many were the ‘famous’ names and so great the crush of people, noted one herald, that he had been unable to write them all down.40

  The following day Parliament was opened and quickly adjourned in order that the gathered Lords and Commons could enjoy the festivities: a jousts royal, which would take place in Westminster Yard, transformed for the occasion into a temporary stadium. The revels absorbed most people’s attention – as, perhaps, Edward had intended. From Norfolk, Sir John Paston’s younger brother wrote eagerly for news ‘of the marriage of my lord of York and’, he added vaguely, ‘other parliament matter’.41

  Over the following week, the tournament unfolded in front of Edward, Elizabeth and their sons, the assembled nobility, French and Imperial ambassadors and ‘other strangers’, twenty-four new knights created by Edward for the occasion, and hordes of retainers, servants and hangers-on. There was a marked emphasis on youth in the two teams of jousters: among them was Richard’s servant Sir James Tyrell and Edward’s master of horse, a giant Kentishman called John Cheyne, who had been brought up in the queen’s household and who, at six feet eight inches, looked down even on the king himself. Most evident of all was the participation of four members of the queen’s family, all of whom were officers in Prince Edward’s household: the Grey brothers Thomas and Richard, her cousin Sir Richard Haute and, most spectacular of all, Anthony Woodville.

  As the joust opened, knights rode into Westminster Yard in a riot of colour, their flamboyant entrances heralded by a rasping of trumpets and an explosion of noise from the crowds crammed into the stands built for the occasion. Woodville stole the show. At thirty-seven, he had lost none of his glamour: his entrance, drawing on the latest continental fashions, was pure sporting drama. A team of horses drew a wheeled tableau or ‘pageant’ depicting the ascetic Franciscan preacher St Anthony, played by Woodville himself. In front of a stylized hermitage of black velvet and glass, he sat motionless on an armoured horse, swathed in a hermit’s white robe and hood. When the tableau halted in the arena, Woodville’s servants ripped off his white habit to reveal a dazzling coat of arms: tawny satin, woven with golden trees and flames.

  For all Woodville’s glory, another moment best summed up the pre-eminence of the queen’s family. Dressed in his colours of white and mulberry, the marquis of Dorset rode into the arena in ‘great triumph’ surrounded by a pack of ‘great estates, knights and esquires’. Foremost among them, carrying Dorset’s helmet, was his brother-in-law the duke of Buckingham. At twenty-two, the pair were exact contemporaries. But where Dorset had been loaded with royal favour and office, Buckingham, who had spent a lifetime at court waiting for something to turn up, had not. Since falling out with Buckingham some years before, Edward’s indifference towards him had become more pronounced: characteristically and scrupulously acknowledging his high rank, the king refused to give the duke any political responsibility whatsoever. The jousts royal was precisely the kind of occasion that rammed home to the aristocratic Buckingham the gulf in power that existed between himself and Dorset, a commoner who had been ‘made lord’. Ten years previously, the twelve-year-old duke had borne Anthony Woodville’s helmet and weapons into the lists at Smithfield for his fight against the Bastard of Burgundy. Now, as he rode into Westminster Yard bearing arms for another of his Woodville in-laws, Buckingham perhaps reflected quietly to himself that, in the intervening decade, nothing had changed.

  After a day’s fighting, documented by a gaggle of heralds and chroniclers – the ‘furious’ swordplay of ‘this famous earl’ Anthony Woodville was breathlessly noted – the wedding celebrations dissolved into an evening of music, dancing, drinking and prizegiving. The trophies, including a great ‘E’ of gold inset with a ruby, were awarded smilingly by Edward’s oldest daughter, the blonde, blue-eyed Princess Elizabeth, who was just turning twelve.42 As a glittering display of family unity, it was complete.

  The festive mood evaporated as the Lords and Commons filed into the Parliament chamber, MPs like James Tyrell and John Cheyne exchanging their armour for more sober attire. The opening sermon was preached by Edward’s chancellor Thomas Rotherham, who held forth on everything that Edward had done for his subjects. Invoking Psalm 23, ‘The Lord rules me and I shall lack nothing’, he stressed that those obedient to the king would be well looked after. Those, conversely, who did not submit to his authority should ‘be afraid’. Here, Rotherham veered off into St Paul’s letter to the Romans. The king did not carry a sword without cause. Indeed, as God’s representative, he was a ‘revenger’, come to ‘execute wrath upon him that doeth evil’. It didn’t take an expert in exegesis to understand what Rotherham was talking about.43 Parliament knew what was coming.

  If the Lords had already been brought onside during the previous autumn’s great council, the Commons had been equally well arranged. Edward and those close to him had gone to considerable lengths to pack the lower house with compliant MPs. Among those who interfered in borough elections – bringing in their own candidates, rigging ballots and tampering with returns, erasing names and writing others in their place – were Richard, who had at least five associates among the assembled MPs, and Hastings, with seven. Of the 296 members of the Commons who took their places in the chamber that January, some 20 per cent were royal servants, of whom 43 were members of the king’s household. At their head, the new speaker William Allington – who had previously delivered on Edward’s tax demands for his French invasion and who, that summer, had quashed the insurgency led by the impostor earl of Oxford – was an exceptionally safe pair of hands, close to both Edward and Queen Elizabeth.44 The stage had been set.

  Brought from the Tower, where he had spent the last six months, Clarence was led into the Parliament chamber and led in front of Edward who sat enthroned, massive in his parliament robes. As he stood there, alone, the king charged his brother with treason.

  The role Edward now took was unprecedented in a parliamentary trial. Over the years, his regime had resorted to treason laws reflexively in the face of opposition, the king’s ability to discern treason a quick, clean solution to chronic political problems. What followed was this instinct pushed to its logical conclusion: an act of calculated legal destruction that one appalled observer, an anonymous civil servant, found so traumatic that when he tried to describe it his mind refused, ‘ran away’.45

  Incorporating the full dossier of charges that he had compiled against Clarence over the years, Edward’s indictment was saturated with the emotive language of fraternal betrayal. He had always wanted the best for a brother who, from his ‘tender youth’ until now, he had always ‘loved and cherished’. In living memory, no king of England had ever heaped such
great wealth and power on one of his brothers – so much so that in his ‘livelihood and richesse’, Clarence had been second only to the king himself. In return, Edward continued, he had asked only for his brother’s love, help, and his obedience ‘to all the king’s good pleasures and commandments’. Time and again Clarence had failed him; time and again Edward had forgiven him, even wiping the slate clean following his rebellion in 1470.46 His love hadn’t worked.

  In recent years, Clarence had perpetrated new treasons, ‘more heinous and loathly than ever before’, plotting the ‘extreme destruction and disinheriting of the king and all his issue’. This accusation – that Clarence was plotting to destroy Edward, Elizabeth and their heirs and to place himself on the throne of England – echoed through the indictment. In language redolent of Stacy’s and Burdet’s indictments the previous year, Clarence stood accused of persistent efforts to incite rebellion: from his spreading of vicious rumours about the king’s malign treatment of his subjects in order to provoke the people ‘to withdraw their hearts, loves and affections from the king’; to his accusations that the king planned to take away his livelihood and destroy him; to his illegal retaining of men, whose contracts purposefully omitted the customary overriding oaths to the king and his heirs. There was more. Clarence had in his possession a copy of the agreement between himself and Margaret of Anjou – made back in 1470, as the duke and Warwick thrashed out their accord with the house of Lancaster – which, stamped with Henry VI’s great seal, guaranteed Clarence the crown should the main Lancastrian line fail. He had also breathed life into the allegation that he and Warwick had first spread in the late 1460s, following the bloodletting at Edgecote: that Edward himself was illegitimate, a ‘bastard’, and that he and his heirs were consequently ‘not begotten to reign’.