by Charles Ross
C. L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth (2 vols, 1923)
TRHS
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
VCH
The Victoria History of the Counties of England
YCR
York Civic Records, 1, ed. A. Raine
Part I
THE ROAD TO THE THRONE
Chapter I
THE HEIR OF YORK
Edward of York was born on 28 April 1442 at Rouen in Normandy, the headquarters of his father, Richard, duke of York, then serving as Henry VI’s lieutenant-general in France. His high birth alone would have been sufficient to secure for Edward a leading place in the politics and society of his age. By 1447, when the king’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, died without heirs, the recently married but still childless Henry VI became the last surviving male in the direct line of the House of Lancaster. This gave Duke Richard a strong claim to the throne of England as long as Henry VI failed to produce an heir. He was not, however, the king’s nearest male relative. This distinction belonged to the youthful and violent Henry Holland, duke of Exeter, a descendant of Elizabeth, daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, from whom the royal house derived, and his close blood-relationship to the king may have led Exeter to believe that he, rather than York, should have been made Protector of England during Henry VI’s illness in 1453–4.1 If male descent were to be preferred to female, then York’s main rival, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, a grandson of John of Gaunt by his mistress (later his third wife), Katherine Swynford, might have been regarded as Henry VI’s heir presumptive but for a royal addition to an act of parliament which had excluded the Beaufort family from succession to the throne. York’s family connections were rather with the Plantagenet than the Lancastrian line. He was directly descended in the male line from John of Gaunt’s next brother, Edmund of Langley, Ist duke of York, fourth surviving son of King Edward III and he was later to adopt the surname ‘Plantagenet’ as if to emphasize the purity of his royal ancestry.2 But if descent in the female line were to be allowed, then Duke Richard’s claim to the throne was better than that of Henry VI himself, for through his mother, Anne Mortimer, he was directly descended from John of Gaunt’s elder brother, Lionel, duke of Clarence. But not until 1460, the year of his death, did Duke Richard, or anyone else on his behalf, raise that particularly dangerous question, and meanwhile he continued, unprovocatively, to bear the arms of Edmund of Langley. Yet York evidently thought well enough of his male descent-or was prompted by fears of Somerset-to encourage his supporter, Thomas Young, the member of parliament for Bristol, to propose in the parliament of 1451 that the duke should be recognized as heir presumptive to the throne, a suggestion so strongly resented that it landed Young in the Tower forthwith.
Richard of York was also the greatest English landowner of his day. In England proper his estates, chiefly inherited from Edmund of Langley, extended into more than twenty shires. In Yorkshire he had wide estates in the West Riding centred around his castle of Sandal near Wakefield. Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire was the focus of substantial estates in the east midlands. Further south another concentration lay in Hertfordshire, Essex and Suffolk, and he had other valuable properties in Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset. But his greatest strength lay in the inheritance of his mother, Anne, heiress of the powerful Mortimer earls of March. A chain of great lordships stretched through eastern Wales and the Marches from Denbigh in the north to Caerleon and Usk in the south, and was flanked by others in the adjoining English border counties, especially Shropshire, where Ludlow Castle formed the administrative headquarters of the whole. As earl of Ulster, York was also a leading Anglo-Irish landowner. These estates together yielded the duke nearly £7,000 a year gross, and perhaps about £5,800 net.1
Edward’s mother, Duchess Cecily, was a far from negligible person in her own right. She was a member of the powerful and numerous Nevill clan which came to play so large a part in English politics in the 1450s, and seems to have inherited the startling fecundity of that family. She herself was the eighteenth child of her father, Ralph Nevill, Ist earl of Westmorland, and his tenth by his second wife, Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt. Before Edward was born, she had already presented Duke Richard with a daughter, Anne (1439), and a son, Henry (1441), who died an infant, leaving Edward himself as his father’s heir. Between 1442 and 1452 she continued to produce children steadily: there were six more sons, of whom three died young, leaving Edward with three young brothers, Edmund, George and Richard, and two more daughters. The family was completed by the birth, on 20 July 1455, of Edward’s youngest sister, Ursula.1
Little is known of Edward’s early years. His father came home from France in the autumn of 1445 and then remained in England until he left to take up his appointment as lieutenant of Ireland in July 1449. Edward and his nearest younger brother, Edmund (born, like himself, at Rouen), were probably established with their own household at Ludlow, which was later to become the home of his son, Edward, prince of Wales, in the 1470s. Their mother spent much time at Fotheringhay, where several of the younger children, including the future Richard III, were born, and Edward may have done so too, for it was certainly later one of his favourite residences. At first the boys were in the care of a Norman nurse, Anne of Caux, who was later to be rewarded with a handsome pension of £20 a year by Edward in 1474.2 As they grew older, the boys were placed in the charge of a governor. He is generally said to be Richard Croft, of Croft in Herefordshire, who lived on to serve Edward himself as king, and then Richard III and Henry VII, and died in 1509, plump with prosperity. But the evidence for this repeated assertion is slender and should be rejected.3
Equally, we have no direct information about the education received by the young Edward and his brothers. That they took their studies seriously is shown by a letter to their father from Edward and Edmund at Ludlow dated 3 June 1454.4
And where ye command us by your said letters to attend especially to our learning in our young age, that should cause us to grow to honour and worship in our old age, please it your Highness to wit that we have attended our learning sith we come hither, and shall hereafter; by the which we trust to God your gracious lordship and good fatherhood shall be pleased.
Their training probably followed the pattern usual amongst the English aristocracy of the day. Something of its character and flavour may perhaps be inferred from the regulations laid down by Edward himself in 1474 for the education of his own son, Edward, prince of Wales. Each day, after hearing matins and mass, and taking his breakfast, the boy was to spend his mornings ‘occupied in such virtuous learning as his age shall now suffice to receive’. His midday meal was accompanied by the reading aloud to him of ‘such noble stories as behoveth a Prince to understand; and know that the communication at all times in his presence be of virtue, honour, cunning, wisdom, and deeds of worship, and of nothing that should move or stir him to vices’. ‘In eschewing of idleness’ after his meal, he was to be further occupied about his learning, and then should be shown ‘such convenient disports and exercises as behoveth his estate to have experience in’. After evensong and supper, he might be allowed ‘such honest disports as may be conveniently devised for his recreation’.1
Despite its obvious emphasis on moral training, this traditional regimen conceals a solid element of book-learning. Recent research has suggested that the upper classes of fifteenth-century England were far from being ignorant or ill-educated.2 The educated layman becomes increasingly prominent in all walks of life. The tone had been set by the Lancastrian kings themselves, all of whom enjoyed a distinctly bookish upbringing. Resident tutors were now common in the households of the wealthy. In the ordinances which Edward approved for his own royal household, provision was made for the education of the young ‘henchmen’-the sons of nobles and gentry-who waited upon the king’s person. Their master was to show them ‘the schools of urbanity and nurture of England’. They were to be taught to
ride, joust and wear armour, and to learn the formalities of court and household, paying special attention to their manners at table. But they were also to learn ‘sundry languages and other learnings virtuous, to harping, to pipe, sing and dance’.3 In the same way, Edward and his brothers received a grounding in Latin, and there is abundant evidence that they could both speak and write in French as well as in English.4 Probably Edward also received some instruction in such practical matters as estate management and the law as it related to land. In his Boke of Noblesse, revised for presentation to Edward IV in 1475, the antiquary William Worcester spoke of the frequency with which men of noble or gentle birth ‘learn the practice of law or custom of land’. It is perhaps no coincidence that the introduction of the methods of private estate management into the government of the royal lands comes so soon after the accession of a king who was himself brought up as heir to a great private estate. His interest in the law is reflected in his sitting in 1462 in the court of King’s Bench, where no king had sat for generations, a rare enough event to be noticed in contemporary London chronicles.1
Edward’s education, therefore, probably provided a sound training for a practical man of affairs. His later career shows that he had no marked intellectual interests. He shared to the full his contemporaries’ taste for ceremony and elaborate display, for hunting, jousting, feasting, and the company of women, but his library shows that his reading habits were conventional, and largely confined to chivalric romances and to history seen as a repertory of’ deeds of virtue’ and useful examples. He read for pleasure in French and English, but not in Latin.2 Unlike one or two of his lay lords, such as John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, or his brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, and several of his leading churchmen, he had no interest in contemporary humanism, nor was he an active patron of the new art of printing. Nor does he seem to have been influenced by the profound piety of his mother, Duchess Cecily. Her deeply religious way of life, and her love of the writings of the great mystics, like St Catherine of Siena and St Bridget of Sweden, left their mark upon her daughter, Margaret, the future duchess of Burgundy, but her eldest son escaped them entirely.3
If Edward was neither scholar nor saint, he possessed many of the assets which go to make a successful king. He was clearly a man of considerable intelligence, equipped with a particularly retentive memory.4 He had considerable personal charm and affability and by temperament was generous, good-natured and even-tempered. Consistently courageous, he had great confidence in himself and the capacity to inspire it in others, and from early in his career showed natural gifts of leadership. All this was united with remarkable physical advantages. Like his great-great-grandfather, Edward III, he inherited to the full the Plantagenet characteristics of great height and good looks. When his coffin was opened in 1789, his skeleton was found to measure 6 feet 3 J inches, and to be broad in proportion.1 His good looks were universally acclaimed by his contemporaries, and it may be doubted whether they would have recognized the bovine and lack-lustre features which peer blearily from the most familiar portrait of him (now in the National Portrait Gallery). Even his sharpest contemporary critic, Philippe de Commynes, who met him twice, repeatedly praises his fine appearance: ‘He was a very handsome prince, and tall…. I do not remember having seen a more handsome prince than he was when my lord of Warwick forced him to flee from England. ‘A handsome upstanding man,’ said a German traveller, Gabriel Tetzel, in 1466. ‘A person of most elegant appearance, and remarkable beyond all others for the attractions of his person,’ said the Croyland Chronicler at the end of the reign. Dominic Mancini, writing a few months after Edward’s death, refers to a streak of vanity which went with charm and good looks:
Edward was of a gentle nature and cheerful aspect: nevertheless should he assume an angry countenance he could appear very terrible to beholders. He was easy of access to his friends and to others, even the least notable. Frequently he called to his side complete strangers, when he thought that they had come with the intention of addressing or beholding him more closely. He was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity … of revealing his fine stature more protractedly and more evidently to onlookers.
‘He was a goodly personage,’ adds Sir Thomas More, ‘and very princely to behold … of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and clean made; howbeit in his latter days, with over-liberal diet, somewhat corpulent and boorly, and natheless not uncomely.’2 As his household accounts reveal, Edward always had a taste for the fine clothes, expensive furs, and rich jewellery which best showed off his superb physique.3 In an age so prone to judge by external display, to look like a king was an immense asset in being a king; and when Edward came to the throne at nineteen in the full flush of his youth, he must have presented his subjects with a startling contrast to the sickly and shabby person of King Henry VI.
As Edward of York grew to manhood, the pattern of his future career was already being shaped by the political ambitions of his father. A brief account of the political conflicts of the 1450s, and Duke Richard’s role therein, is an essential preliminary to understanding the circumstances which brought Edward himself to the throne, and helps to illuminate the problems with which he had to deal as king.1
The 1450s dawned darkly for the government of Henry VI, the best-intentioned and most ineffectual of all English kings. Against a background of renewed but increasingly disastrous war in France, two dangerous movements of protest against the regime came to a head. The first, in the spring of 1450, was the impeachment by the commons in parliament of the king’s chief minister, the duke of Suffolk; the second, the outbreak in May and June of a formidable popular rebellion in Kent and the south-east under the leader known as Jack Cade. Between them the charges brought against Suffolk and the grievances of the rebels provide a damning commentary on the misgovernment of the regime; and their reliability has been very largely substantiated by modern research.2 Both commons and rebels concentrated essentially on three issues. First, it was alleged that Suffolk and his friends had monopolized the king’s ear and had excluded from his presence his natural councillors, the great lords of the realm. Secondly, they were accused of having severely impoverished the Crown and enriched themselves at the king’s expense. Hence the king was heavily in debt, he did not ‘live of his own’, and his subjects suffered from the evils of royal purveyance and heavy taxation. Thirdly, they were charged with having perverted the course of justice for their own ends. The corruption and oppressiveness of local officials, and the difficulties of obtaining impartial justice, were specifically linked with corruption and self-seeking at the centre of government, in court and council.3
The Kentish rebels suggested remedies as well as advancing complaints. As a cure for the insolvency of the Crown they proposed the comparatively new idea (already popular with the commons in parliament) that the king should resume into his own hands the ‘livelihood’-the royal estates and revenues-he had squandered so recklessly and apply the proceeds to the support of his household and royal estate.1 But their chief remedy for the abuses they had outlined so forcefully was traditional enough. The king should dismiss his evil councillors and replace them with the great lords of the realm. Special mention was made of the duke of York. The king was urged2
to take about his noble person his true blood of his royal realm, that is to say, the high and mighty prince the Duke of York, exiled from our sovereign lord’s person by the noising of the false traitor the Duke of Suffolk and his affinity. Also to take about his person the mighty prince the Duke of Exeter, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Norfolk, and his true earls and barons of this land, and he shall be the richest Christian king.
Against this background of widespread popular discontent, York himself made a forceful entry into politics in the autumn of 1450. His sudden emergence as leader of the critics of the government was probably largely inspired by his own genuine personal grievances. As a likely heir to the childless king, and the greatest magna
te of the realm, he could reasonably expect a place in the king’s councils. This had been refused him. Supplanted in his command in France by Suffolk’s ally and political successor, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, he had been shuffled off to a dignified political exile as lieutenant of Ireland, far from the centre of power at the English court. He had experienced enormous difficulty in getting any repayment of the vast sums owed him by the government for his service in France, and saw his rival, Somerset, and Somerset’s friends, given preference at the exchequer; and this happened at a time when, like all great Welsh landowners, he was suffering from sharply declining revenues from his estates.3 Despite Somerset’s disgraceful record in France, he returned to England in 1450 to take a prominent place in the king’s council, and York may even have begun to fear that Somerset might be officially recognized as heir presumptive to the throne.4 In September 1450, York came back to England to begin the first of a series of attempts to oust his rivals at court and to establish himself in their place as the king’s leading councillor. His efforts convulsed English politics throughout the 1450s, and an increasingly hostile reaction by the court to his ambitions ultimately provoked civil war.
Historians in general have shown scant charity to Richard of York. His entry into politics has been seen as largely inspired by a personal vendetta against the duke of Somerset. His demands for reform and retrenchment, and his professed concern for order and justice, have been regarded as no more than cynical attempts to exploit in his own interest popular resentment of the regime.1 Such judgements may well be over-harsh. An upright and honourable man, York seems to have believed sincerely in the need for peace and good government. As protector of England, when he had solid backing from the council, he made notable efforts to come to grips with the problems of growing disorder. He showed himself vigorous and successful in Ireland.