The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Later, in a letter to Pope Sixtus IV – to whom, months before, he had trumpeted his invasion plans – Edward put the failure of his campaign down to adversa tempestas. The ‘bad weather’ into which Edward’s army had run was real enough. The weather that summer had been appalling and, with the second terrible harvest in as many years, there was little to sustain an army on; corn was scarce and prices high, which, combined with the effects of Edward’s ‘benevolence’, had led to unrest and rioting in the north.46

  Yet there was no denying that it was the king himself, at his erratic worst – the wavering ‘tavern bush’ of scathing ambassadorial report – who had scuppered his own invasion. Not for the first time, Edward’s vaunting military ambitions had been followed by a limp afterthought of a performance. His desire for comfort overriding his impulse for glory, he had found it all but impossible to tear himself away from the luxuries of his Thames valley houses, and his compulsive triangulations with Maximilian and Louis, until it was too late. In his own mind, Edward perhaps felt that the army had served its purpose: his new treaty with Louis was signed and the latest half-yearly instalment of his French pension duly paid.47 The uncomfortable truth, though, was that he had blown at least twice that sum on an invasion which, as a result of his indolence, had run into the sand. Once again, he had raised massive sums from his subjects, and had failed even to try to deliver. Neither did he seem particularly bothered about it.

  None of which, by now, came as a surprise. Edward, after all, was no longer capable of moving anywhere fast. In previous years, commentators had hesitatingly suggested that this once-beautiful king was carrying a little extra timber. Now, as he approached forty, the havoc he had wrought to his body through decades of self-indulgence was horribly evident, his massive frame and fine, delicate features blurred with fat. Englishmen and foreigners alike unhesitatingly reached for the same word: ‘gross’. But while foreign commentators were quick with their digs about Edward’s preference for the bed and the banqueting table over the battlefield and the tent, domestic opinion was growing altogether more scathing. One contemporary chronicler, a councillor of Edward’s, later wrote how people in England of all walks of life marvelled at how a king ‘so addicted to conviviality, vanity, drunkenness, extravagance and passion’ could continue to function. When it came to money, if nothing else, Edward had total recall.48 Even now, to the consternation of his subjects, Edward’s razor of a memory managed to slash through the sybaritic haze that his life had become, instantly recalling the names, details and personal wealth of men scattered through his kingdom ‘as if they were daily within his sight’.

  There had always been an obsessive edge to Edward’s bingeing. In earlier years, the furious energy that fuelled it had also found release elsewhere: during his lean, dry months in the Low Countries, in his drive to regain his kingdom, he had glowed with the superhuman vitality that had floored Philippe de Commynes. Now, that compulsiveness had turned in on itself, evident in Edward’s insatiable hunger for deal-making, for cash and, above all, in what Commynes, tellingly precise with his adjectives, described as a ‘violent’ addiction to pleasure.

  Edward’s court had always had the atmosphere of a hunting ground. But where, over the years, some in the king’s inner circle had tried to curb his appetites, such advisers were now dead – like William Hatteclyffe – or, afraid of the consequences of ‘counselling or answering’ him, had fallen quiet. Now, Edward had nobody to step in with quiet, authoritative advice on his lifestyle, and he gave his impulses free rein. His companions egged him on. The younger Woodvilles – men like the queen’s brother Sir Edward and her two sons by her first marriage, Dorset and Sir Richard Grey – were among the ‘principal promoters and companions of his vices’. Hastings, Edward’s longstanding fixer-in-chief and pimp, was said to have been the chief culprit, ‘secretly familiar with the king in wanton company’, a phrase of Thomas More’s that left everything to the imagination. Edward was in the habit of passing on to his companions the women discarded from his bedchamber once he had tired of them, a practice that caused widespread distress among its victims who, as one chronicler noted grimly, were used ‘much against their will’. Queen Elizabeth, hardly able to visit her wrath on members of her own family, was said to have loathed Hastings, his relationship with her husband a constant, humiliating reminder of the way he had once facilitated her own entrance into Edward’s bedchamber.

  As his councillors had long feared, Edward’s prodigious consumption was finally catching up with him. Doctors such as the Cambridge- and Ferrara-trained physician John Argentine, ‘standing in the presence of the king’s meals’, stood by in silent horror while Edward, crammed with food and awash with drink, left the table to take an emetic then came back for more. His body exhibited the imbalance of humours that resulted from his lack of moderation and self-government; meanwhile, the prolonged spells of listlessness and sadness into which he was regularly plunged in recent years left his physicians shaking their heads in rueful acknowledgement of what they already knew – that excessive sexual activity stripped men of their virility and left them enervated, ‘effeminate’, suffering the effects of ‘women’s conditions’.49 Whatever adversa tempestas had prevented Edward from leading his army into Scotland, it was nothing, it seemed, compared to the increasing personal tumult in the king’s body and mind.

  Edward’s army had not been entirely disbanded. Before winter closed in, Anthony Woodville, Dorset and Lord Stanley rode north on the king’s orders. Joining forces with Richard and Northumberland, they drove the raiding Scots back across the border in an orgy of ‘incontinent great burnings, robbery and destruction’. Meanwhile, Edward’s new treaty with France started to bite. That winter, Louis studiously ignored the Scottish king’s increasingly desperate pleas for aid, James III writing to him ‘diverse times’ and getting ‘no answer’ in return.50

  Woodville and his fellow commanders soon returned south, leaving Richard and Northumberland, watchful, to hold the line. As Edward worked out his next steps, what he needed above all was his brother’s constancy, to keep the border against the Scots until something turned up. It was a hard winter. Amid plummeting temperatures and further Scottish incursions, Richard’s men were unpaid, hungry and restive. Richard himself spent much of his time trying to keep a grip on discipline and, with troops on the West March suffering a ‘daily increasing dearth and scarcity of victuals’, requisitioning scarce food supplies.51 As 1482 came round, he was forced to ship in quantities of wheat, barley, oats and rye from Wales and Ireland to feed his hungry men. The lengthening days finally brought relief in the form of a succession of cash payments from Westminster, including £10,000 in backdated wages for his army. Richard duly fulfilled his brother’s expectations. As he slogged through the dark, dreary months on the border, he perhaps asked himself why Edward had so spectacularly failed to invade Scotland the previous autumn, and whether the king’s increasingly haphazard manoeuvrings had any concrete end in view at all.

  For by this point, the involutions of Edward’s foreign policy seemed finally to have worked themselves to stasis. That January, when Burgundian ambassadors turned up at court demanding that he fulfil his promises to Maximilian and to know what was going on with Louis, Edward shrugged. There was nothing he could do until he had dealt with Scotland. Meanwhile, his advice to Maximilian was simply to sit tight and wait for the ailing Louis to die – ‘which’, he said, ‘wouldn’t be long in coming’.52 Then, suddenly, the diplomatic pressure was unexpectedly released.

  Late that March, Maximilian and his wife were out hunting when her horse tripped and fell, throwing her and breaking her back; days later, she died. Marie of Burgundy had been Maximilian’s key to the great cities or ‘members’ of Flanders, who had put up with his mercurial autocracy largely because of their loyalty to her and her family. Having borne the brunt of his destructive and costly foreign policy, they now refused to acknowledge him as regent, claimed guardianship of Marie’s two children, the three
-year-old Burgundian heir Philip and his little sister Margaret, and forced a reluctant Maximilian to open talks with France. Which was fine as far as Edward, confident in his position as power-broker, was concerned: at least it stopped Maximilian pestering him for military backing. Besides, Edward had other fish to fry. His invasion of Scotland was on again.53

  For well over two years, the Scottish king’s disaffected brother Albany had been kicking his heels in France. In recent months Louis, having abandoned his friendship with James III in favour of his new treaty with Edward, began to look at the duke with renewed interest. If Edward still wanted to invade Scotland – and Louis, who wanted Edward off his back, was exceptionally keen that he should do so – he needed a figurehead for a regime change. With some gentle nudging from the French king, Albany formally petitioned Edward for help. Edward responded with alacrity. A short, victorious war followed by the installation of a compliant puppet king on the Scottish throne seemed the ideal solution to what was becoming an intractable problem.54

  That spring Edward seemed possessed, the lassitude of the previous summer replaced by a manic energy. In April, a ship carrying Albany and twenty attendants nosed into Southampton harbour. Styling the duke ‘king of Scotland’, bringing him to London and installing him in the Erber, the great stone townhouse formerly belonging to the earl of Warwick, Edward again moved on to a war footing.55 Ordering his forces to be ready to mobilize on two weeks’ notice, he bolstered them with two thousand northern European mercenaries fresh from the battlefields of Flanders and Switzerland, including several hundred gunners, all kitted out in new red-and-white battledress. In mid-May, the king went down to Dover to review his fleet, before returning to London to inspect his troops before their march north. During those days the death of his second daughter, the fourteen-year-old Mary, a few miles downriver at Greenwich, seemed to pass almost unnoticed: her coffined body was rowed up the Thames, past the Tower where her father was absorbed in his preparations, to Windsor. On the 29th she was lowered into the ground in the half-finished St George’s Chapel, the king’s eleven-year-old heir Prince Edward a solemn figure by her grave. At that moment the king himself, Albany at his side, was riding north out of London to rendezvous with Richard at the family’s home of Fotheringhay.56

  They had been there a full week before Richard turned up. The day he arrived, as though waiting for his imprimatur, Edward and the duke of Albany signed their deal. In the treaty, which formally acknowledged Albany as the rightful king of Scotland, Edward promised him military aid to regain his crown; in return, Albany – regally signing himself ‘Alexander R’ – would pay Edward homage as his overlord, marry Edward’s daughter Cecily as soon as he could wangle a papal dispensation to free himself from his French wife, and cede Berwick and a large swathe of southwest Scotland to the English crown.57

  Richard, in fact, had just returned from raiding this area, his forces pillaging and burning their way twenty miles into Dumfriesshire. The raid, it turned out, was audition and dress rehearsal rolled into one. Finally accepting that he was not the man to lead an invasion of Scotland, Edward handed his brother leadership of the campaign and with it, Richard’s chance to confirm his status not just as lord of the north, but as the kingdom’s undisputed war-leader. As usual, events in mainland Europe were monopolizing the king’s attention. With Maximilian newly vulnerable and Edward’s eyes turned towards Scotland, Louis had seized his opportunity. French armies were once more on the march towards Flanders, provoking frantic demands from Calais for increased security and a hasty attempt by Maximilian to convene a peace conference.58 The day after the Fotheringhay treaty was signed, Edward promptly headed back south.

  By mid-July Richard’s army was on the move. Most of his twenty thousand men were northerners: Richard’s private forces and those of his right-hand man Northumberland, supplemented by contingents led by Lord Stanley, the queen’s son Dorset and her youngest brother Edward Woodville. In Richard’s lengthy baggage train was a closely guarded war-chest of some £15,000: wages to keep the army together for four weeks. Ample time, so it was felt, to destroy the meagre, divided forces of James III and to place his brother Albany on the throne. Nevertheless, the clock was ticking. Richard had to crack on.

  In late July he was still on the English side of the border when news came that James’s army, mustering at the Scottish border town of Lauder, had disintegrated. The Scottish king’s resentful, fractious nobles, all too aware of the potentially catastrophic military mismatch that awaited them, had taken matters into their own hands. Arresting and summarily hanging a number of the king’s household officials, they seized James and hustled him back to Edinburgh Castle, where he was locked up. Richard’s way to Edinburgh lay open. With the citadel of Berwick holding out, Richard bypassed it and made his way unopposed up the coast at speed, plundering and burning everything in his path. On 2 August, he entered the Scottish capital.59 There, his problems started.

  First, it had become abundantly clear that, with not a single Scot rallying to him on their march north, Albany was not a viable figure as king. With commendable realism, Albany himself sized up the situation and, abandoning his claim to the throne in exchange for his restoration to his ducal titles and lands, instantly swapped sides. His puppet king gone, Richard had an urgent need to get hold of the man who, despite his manifest inadequacies, Scots still viewed as their rightful king. The problem was that James III, locked in Edinburgh Castle, remained the prisoner of his own noblemen – and though Richard had entered Edinburgh easily enough, the castle, crouched on the volcanic cliffs that rose sheer above the surrounding city, was all but impregnable. Neither could Richard get his hands on James’s young sons, sent well away to Stirling with their mother for safekeeping. Regime change was now out of the question. Unequipped for a siege and with his army’s wages running out, Richard led his army back south with secret – and not especially reassuring – promises from Albany that, despite having been received back into the Scottish political fold, he planned to reassert his claim to the crown when the chance arose. Re-crossing the border, Richard besieged Berwick Castle, which capitulated. For the first time since 1461, when Margaret of Anjou had handed it over to the Scots, this key border fortress was in English hands. In terms of what Richard had to show for his vaunted march to Edinburgh and back again, though, Berwick was more or less it.60

  Given the campaign’s time limit, however, Richard had made the best of a bad job. He had acquired the lustre of a national war-leader, at least in some quarters. Away in Calais, Hastings – who got on well with Richard – ordered celebratory processions and bonfires, and the town’s artillery was ‘shot for joy’. This outpouring of public sentiment was led by Edward. ‘Thank God’, he exclaimed in a letter to Pope Sixtus IV, to whom he had used the Scottish campaign as a constant excuse for avoiding contributions to the papal crusade against the Turks, ‘for the support received from our most loving brother.’ Such was Richard’s stature, Edward added, that he could probably beat the entire kingdom of Scotland on his own. Nevertheless, there emanated from the letter a sense that Richard was managing the king’s expectations: the conquest of Scotland, Edward puffed to the pope, would not be long in coming, ‘especially as the duke of Albany so influences their policy’.61

  Those actually involved on the campaign, by contrast, were under no illusions about what it had, or rather hadn’t, achieved. On their way back to York, one contingent of troops grumbled incessantly about how boring it had been, having spent all their time guarding the artillery and baggage train. Neither had the campaign been exactly a picture of unity. On his way into Scotland, Richard had left Lord Stanley and his men behind, handing them the unglamorous and far from simple task of trying to capture Berwick. On his return from Edinburgh, the relationship between the two, saturated with mistrust from years of friction in the north of England, reached a new low, Stanley simmering with resentment at the way he had been left ‘in great danger’ at Berwick. At Salford Bridge, there was a sta
nd-off between armed retainers of the two lords: in the fight that followed, Stanley’s men made off with one of Richard’s banners.62

  For Richard, it was clear that his inability to get hold of the Scottish king had cost him his grip on the Scottish capital, indeed on Scotland itself. As the earl of Warwick had shown during the civil wars of the preceding decades, for anybody ambitious to bring about regime change and wield power, possession of the king was nine-tenths of the law. In Scotland, that rule had been driven emphatically home to Richard. It was a lesson that, over the coming months, he would absorb and reflect on.

  17

  They Have Taken Away the Rose of the World

  In the corridors of Westminster during that summer of 1482, the afterglow of Richard’s Scottish campaign soon subsided. Among the more financially minded of Edward’s councillors there were mutterings about an expensive fiasco. Berwick had been a ‘trifling’ gain; besides which, it could only be a drain on royal resources, its upkeep costing some ten thousand marks a year. Talk had it that £100,000 had been squandered on Richard’s campaign: it was an exaggerated sum, put about by Westminster-centric civil servants with an equally caricatured view of the north – a region from where, as one of them put it dismissively, ‘all evil spreads’. Nevertheless, the whispering got to Edward. Having basked in the news of Berwick’s capture, he was soon obsessing about how much money had been spent on it – especially when it became clear that Richard’s campaign hadn’t actually solved his Scottish problem. He had renewed concerns about matters at the other end of the country too.1