The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  The last straw, for Edward, was news that had just come to his knowledge of a conspiracy against Edward, Elizabeth and their family that was ‘more malicious, more unnatural and loathly’ than any treason yet perpetrated. In preparation for a fresh insurgency, Clarence had mustered large numbers of troops, ready to ‘raise war’ against the king at an hour’s notice, and planned to send his little son out of England and out of danger should his uprising fail. But the erosion of Clarence’s networks was complete: the people he had enlisted to smuggle the boy abroad had betrayed him. Roger Harewell, a member of Clarence’s household; John Tapton, formerly Clarence’s own chancellor; and another man with close links to Clarence, the abbot of Tewkesbury John Strensham – all had been in Clarence’s closest trust. They had gone straight to the king with news of the plot.47 Clarence’s manoeuvrings, Edward concluded, could only be construed as the ‘most extreme purposed malice’.

  Edward had tried the path of mercy, and it had proved fruitless. For the sake of the royal family, for the greater good of England, justice had to be served. In a phrase that resonated with Rotherham’s sermon and with the political trials of recent decades, justice was not only concerned with rewarding the good, but was also about the ‘punishment of evil doers’.

  For all the sorrowful rage of Edward’s indictment, there was something coldly detached about the progress of the trial, every aspect of which had been contrived to steer it towards its inevitable outcome. Various people – probably including those members of Clarence’s household who had already denounced him – were produced to give evidence on the crown’s behalf, though their role in proceedings was ill defined. The onlooking chronicler couldn’t tell whether they were witnesses or accusers – or, as he put it acidly, both ‘at the same time’. Clarence, allowed to defend himself, met each charge with the same automatic reply of ‘not guilty’. With nobody prepared to speak out on his behalf, he called no witnesses. At one point, in desperation, he offered to settle the trial by single combat with his brother the king, an offer that was unsurprisingly rebuffed. It was hard to avoid the impression that, as Clarence put it, Edward was destroying him as inexorably ‘as a candle consumeth in burning’.48

  On 7 February, after going through the motions of considering its verdict, Parliament pronounced Clarence guilty of treason. Sentence was handed down by Buckingham, whom Edward had temporarily appointed to the role of high steward, the great officer of state who customarily delivered such convictions. Even Buckingham, it turned out, occasionally had his uses. The duke duly condemned Clarence to death. Now, all Edward had to do was give the nod.

  Clarence was taken back to the Tower and time passed. Perhaps, his brother’s life in his hands, Edward pondered the enormity of his next, irrevocable command. A week or so later, with Parliament still in session, Speaker Allington and a group of MPs walked over to the house of Lords and, with all decorum, requested that they ask the king to get on with it.

  Insisting that the king order his own brother’s liquidation was hardly something that Allington would have done on his own initiative. The source of the nudge could be guessed at. A key member of the Yorkist establishment, Allington’s effusions about Queen Elizabeth and the little prince of Wales were a matter of parliamentary record; the queen had rewarded him handsomely, appointing him one of the prince’s councillors and making him chancellor of the boy’s administration.49

  The Woodvilles’ fear and loathing of Clarence had never gone away. No amount of reconciliation could make up for the killing of Earl Rivers and Elizabeth’s brother John after Edgecote almost a decade previously, and Clarence’s smearing of the queen’s mother as a witch and Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward as illegitimate, together with their offspring. In the years that followed, the innuendo around Clarence’s ambitions had fed their hate and encouraged their backing of Richard against him. If Edward was anxious that Clarence was out to destroy him and his children, Elizabeth – who had already experienced the raw violence of which Clarence was capable – was infinitely more so. But if, as one later commentator put it, it was Elizabeth who persuaded Edward that unless Clarence were dead, their children would never come to the throne, the queen was hardly alone.

  On 18 February, deep in the Tower and away from public view, Clarence was executed. The manner of his killing was obscure: even those close to events were unsure of its nature. Soon, word leaked out that rather than being beheaded, Clarence – in a nod, perhaps, to his excessive drinking habits – had been drowned in a butt of malvasia, sweet Greek white wine.50 Even at the last, Edward had been unable to resist indulging one of his typical poor jokes. It was a gag of exquisite tastelessness.

  Within hours of his brother’s murder, Edward was trying to mitigate the enormity of what he had done. Pronouncing that he intended to do ‘right worshipfully’ for Clarence’s soul, he gave orders for his brother’s body to be escorted honourably to Tewkesbury Abbey, where he would be buried alongside his wife, Isabel. Edward further smoothed Clarence’s passage into the afterlife by paying off his outstanding debts.51

  If all this constituted simply a formal tying-up of loose ends, later chroniclers didn’t think so. According to Thomas More, who got his account of proceedings from Edward’s close adviser John Morton, Edward ‘commanded’ his brother’s execution then, as soon as he was told it had been done, he ‘piteously bewailed and sorrowfully repented’. More’s contemporary, the Italian historian Polydore Vergil – who based his narrative on first-hand interviews with those who had been around at the time – added a telling detail. From that time onwards, whenever Edward was confronted with somebody petitioning him on behalf of a condemned man, Clarence would come into his mind and he would ‘cry out in a rage: “Oh unfortunate brother, for whose life no man in this world would once make request”.’ In order to avoid the shattering guilt of his brother’s murder, Edward constructed for himself a new, more comforting, reality: that it had been everybody’s fault but his own. Edward, Vergil said, had convinced himself that his brother had been ‘cast away by envy of the nobility’, who had failed to intercede with the king on Clarence’s behalf. Vergil saw straight through this elaborate act of self-exculpation: ‘it is very likely’, he concluded simply, ‘that king Edward right soon repented that deed’.52

  Given the lengths to which Edward had gone to stitch up both council and Parliament, the lack of support for Clarence was hardly surprising. There was one hint of an objection, by the king’s former chancellor Robert Stillington – locked in the Tower shortly after Clarence’s killing, he was pardoned months later for having made unspecified ‘utterances’ prejudicial to the king – but that was it. Even before his death, those who might have had the power to influence the king’s mind were hungrily eyeing Clarence’s vast agglomeration of lands and offices that, now forfeit to the crown, were available for redistribution. First in the queue was Richard.53

  Later, Richard was said to have been overcome with sorrow at his brother’s death. It seemed unlikely. The pair had after all been at odds since childhood, their youthful squabbles eventually metastasizing into a malignant vendetta over the Warwick inheritance. In any case, outward displays of grief were hardly incompatible with business. On 15 February, as Clarence awaited execution, Edward conferred the condemned duke’s title of earl of Salisbury on Richard’s small son and heir, in what was clearly a prearranged deal. Days later Richard was handed the great chamberlainship of England, one of those grants that he had been forced to hand over to Clarence. With typical singlemindedness Richard had recorded the obsolete grant in his cartulary: its return to him was justice done.54

  There were other favours, including the tidying-up of a persistent worry. As Parliament had ruled back in 1475, Richard’s hereditary title to the Warwick patrimony – the estates that now formed the heart of his northern power base – was dependent on the continued survival of the legitimate male Neville heir, Warwick’s nephew George, and his family line. With George now in his late teens, his presence both val
idated Richard’s claim and threatened it. Richard had to ensure that, on reaching adulthood, the boy would be in no position to mount a challenge for his lands. Parliament now passed an act asserting that the boy had insufficient income to maintain his high rank of duke of Bedford – true enough, given that Richard had taken all his lands – and correspondingly demoting him from his dukedom to the rank of earl. Unable to do away with George Neville physically, Richard could at least make him disappear politically.55

  By the time of Clarence’s death, however, Richard had removed himself from the claustrophobic atmosphere of Westminster, riding north to make a quick tour of his Yorkshire estates. Much to his satisfaction he had acquired Richmond Castle, one of those grants over which he and Clarence had fought and which now, finally, he had prised from his brother’s stiffening clutches. The whole of the north Yorkshire fiefdom of Richmond was now his. Whereas for Clarence, it had brought with it persistent problems – back in 1470, the Beaufort family had aggressively sought its return on behalf of the previous claimant Henry Tudor – there was hardly any likelihood of the attainted, exiled Tudor returning to claim his patrimony.56

  Three days after Clarence’s death, more royal paperwork came through for Richard: approval of Richard’s petition to found two chantry colleges, at Barnard Castle in Durham, and at his north Yorkshire home of Middleham, to pray for the ‘good estate’ of the royal family, including Edward and Elizabeth and – delicately eliding Clarence – ‘the king’s brothers and sisters’. It was a judiciously timed request on Richard’s part, given the king’s ongoing preoccupation with his health and his morbid self-chastising over Clarence’s execution.57 Richard, as he always had done, knew how to bend with the king’s increasingly extreme fluctuations of mood. Nonetheless, Richard seemed glad to be back in the north. As he described his arrival in York, with perhaps just a hint of relief, it was a ‘homecoming’.58

  16

  Diamond Cuts Diamond

  With the spring of 1478 came growth. As Edward’s free-trade agreements with France and the Hanse continued to hold, England’s ports flourished, exports surging to double the amount of the recession-hit 1460s. The wealth was unevenly distributed; London, as ever, did best, inexorably sucking the mercantile trade away from other great entrepôts like York and the slow-declining Southampton. In the capital, the mayor Ralph Josselyn embarked on an energetic fundraising campaign for long-needed repairs to the city walls, riding around the Sunday markets with a collecting box. Nobody embodied the sense of financial boom more than Edward. The memory of Clarence’s killing was subsumed in a frenzy of royal spending, Edward reiterating to England and its neighbours – and, perhaps, to himself – the power and magnificence of the house of York.1

  At Windsor, where the perpendicular lines of Edward’s new chapel were now reaching skywards, an army of masons and carpenters was at work; so too at Eltham, where the king’s new hall was taking shape. In the east midlands Nottingham Castle, which dominated the surrounding region from high on its sandstone cliff, was undergoing a major upgrade: new royal lodgings were bolted on to the ancient fortress, in the form of a ‘right sumptuous’ three-storey polygonal tower with ‘marvellous fair’ bay windows.2 Besides these great projects – whose combined budgets alone came to an annual £3,250 – and a proliferation of other architectural works, Edward was busy acquiring. With the cash to feed his appetites, he bought everything from fine wine to clothes, textiles and soft furnishings, jewels and plate. He employed an agent, the Flemish merchant Philip Maisertuell, paying him £240 to source the finest Flemish illuminated manuscripts. He paid £160 for three ‘images’, including an exquisite golden Virgin and Child studded with ‘great numbers’ of precious stones, from the duke of Suffolk; and he bid the staggeringly large – and, incredibly, unsuccessful – sum of £3,000 for a ‘mighty’ diamond and ruby ornament being hawked around the courts of Europe by the Genoese dealer Luigi Grimaldi.3

  As fast as the money flowed out of Edward’s coffers, it was coming in. Along with the rest of his family and inner circle, the king remained alert to new business opportunities proposed to him, as they had been from early in the reign, by a coterie of advisers and leading merchants. With the new openness in trade, such ‘aventures’ were increasingly plentiful, from the king’s Italian factors, who – on the king’s account and their own – bought up all the wool they could lay their hands on (to the inevitable chorus of grumbles from English exporters) to the English merchants with whom Edward went into business, their fleets protected by the navy into which Edward had poured money over the past years. Long interested in his merchants’ ambitions to break into the lucrative Portuguese-dominated north African trade in ivory, gold and slaves, Edward was also intrigued by sailors’ accounts of other possibilities: the rumoured island of Brazil, a country of fabulous wealth that lay some hundreds of miles west of their usual trading routes.4

  A new spirit of expansion was, almost imperceptibly, percolating through England’s mercantile trade. English ships started appearing in Italian ports, exporting on their own account; among them, sometimes, appeared Edward’s own great ships. That summer, the Florentine state galleys that had habitually brought luxury goods to England and exported massive cargoes of wool and cloth, weighed anchor and left Southampton Water for what would be the last time, never to return.5

  At the same time, balancing magnificence and prudence in the prescribed way, Edward issued a new directive designed to tackle wastefulness: slashing the royal household’s wage-roll; reducing allowances of food and fuel; tightening up procedures of service. On his council’s advice, he made strenuous efforts to tidy up the long-standing mess between the Exchequer and his chamber treasury, where real financial power lay, and – flush with his annual French pension and the income from the dead Clarence’s forfeited estates – to tackle the regime’s debts. The man appointed by Edward to spearhead this programme of fiscal reform was the ex-Lancastrian who in recent years had become one of the house of York’s most dedicated servants, John Morton, whose forensic clarity Edward appreciated.6

  Top of the list of the regime’s creditors was the city of London, which had bankrolled Edward since 1461 and had never been properly paid back: now, he granted the city a slew of profitable offices. The initiative, however, came too late for Edward’s greatest creditor. In 1478 the London branch of the Medici bank closed its doors for the final time. Coming during the Medici’s annus horribilis – a year of family assassinations and financial disaster – its failure was the result of embracing a lending policy so reckless that, rather than owning Edward through its loans, as the Medici had hoped, Edward ended up owning, and ultimately ruining, the bank.7

  Running through these reforms was the sense of a tightening royal grip, of a king determined to exploit his resources and rights to the full. To do so, he could hardly have chosen better than Morton, a man whose reputation for ‘hard dealing’ already went before him. Through England’s customs houses, from Dartmouth in the southwest to the Norfolk port of Great Yarmouth, royal agents moved, ‘searching’ the income streams due to the king from the increased movement of goods in and out of the country. In London, as other ports, a new post was created: a royal surveyor of customs, given sweeping powers to look for and investigate customs evasion, and ‘entertainment’ or bribery of royal officials. The city found Edward’s renewed attentions uncomfortable. That summer saw a blizzard of prosecutions, followed up by royal accusations that members of the Merchant Adventurers were trying to ‘embezzle greatly’ the subsidies due him through the Port of London. When a deputation of merchants, anxious to resolve matters, turned up, Edward directed Morton to have a chat with them about the ‘very truth’ of the matter. Some time later they emerged, chastened, acknowledging their guilt and agreeing to pay the king £2,000 in settlement.8

  If a fresh sense of hesitancy pervaded people’s dealings with the king, it was hardly surprising. Even when young, Edward possessed the ability to flip suddenly from his default mode of
expansive bonhomie to boiling rage if he felt he was being mucked around. Now, people tiptoed around him, and with reason: a king who was prepared to kill his own brother would clearly do anything to anybody. When news reached the king of a fight between some of his household men and a gang of Londoners, the city rushed to soothe his fury, then passed a ruling that never again were citizens to provoke members of the royal household. Calm was restored: the sun came out again. Courtiers seemed more than usually alert to the royal cues. When the royal esquire Thomas Norton, summoned to court to explain his malicious accusations of treason against the mayor of Bristol, was shown into the king’s presence, Edward simply slid his eyes away from the kneeling figure, ‘estranging his look’. The assembled courtiers instantly did the same. Norton made his way out, alone, friendless, out of favour.9 As one close observer of Edward’s behaviour put it, the king ‘seemed to be feared by all his subjects, while he himself feared no man’.

  Norton’s opponents had known who to lobby. This was the nexus of family and close servants around the king, his handpicked group of chamber servants, the ever-constant Hastings at their head; and the queen, her ‘blood’, and their advisers who dominated the household and council of Edward’s heir, the prince of Wales. It was this tight group through whom Edward could ‘rule as he pleased’, and who wielded his power with impunity.

  Outside this charmed circle, however, it was noted that people began to ‘desert’ the king, to distance themselves from the regime, perhaps convinced that the game of courtiership just wasn’t worth playing. Some years later, one of Edward’s servants, John Blount, Lord Mountjoy, categorically advised his sons not to ‘desire to be great about princes’, adding with feeling ‘for it is dangerous’. Clarence’s death had shown precisely how dangerous it was.10