Edward IV

by Charles Ross

  3 Lander, op. cit., 151–2.

  4 See further below, pp. 324–6.

  5 E. W. Ives, ‘The Common Lawyers in Pre-Reformation England’, TRHS, 5th ser., xviii (1968), 154–5.

  1 Brown, op. cit., 115–17; Lander, ‘Yorkist Council and Administration’, 46.

  2 Below, pp. 365–6.

  3 Most of the evidence for great council meetings is brought together by Scofield, II, 376–8; for 1476, see Lander, ‘Council, Administration and Councillors’, 143. Cf. Myers in English Historical Documents, 356–7.

  1 Scofield, I, 331; and for a detailed survey of conciliar work, Lander, ‘Council, Administration and Councillors’, 138–51; ‘Yorkist Council and Administration’, 35–46.

  2 On the functions of the court, see the stimulating discussion by P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity, 119–26, and also the remarks of B. Wilkinson, Constitutional History of England in the Fifteenth Century, 214–16.

  3 A. R. Myers, The Household of Edward IV, for a full description of household organization and reform during the reign.

  1 Brown, ‘Authorization of Letters under the Great Seal’, 148–9.

  2 James Raine, The Priory of Hexham, I, ciii-iv. The prior did not, however, recover his money.

  1 PL, III, 301–2.

  2 PL, I, 259–61; VI, 28–9; Lander, ‘Council, Administration and Councillors’, 164 and n.

  1 A. L. Brown, op. cit., 149; and for what follows, above, pp. 101–2.

  2 Mancini, 67.

  3 More, Richard III, 72 (part of the duke of Buckingham’s speech attacking Edward’s reputation); RP, VI, 240.

  1 More, 55–6; Nicolas Barker, ‘Jane Shore’, Etoniana, no. 125 (June 1972), 383–91 (‘The Real Jane Shore’).

  2 R. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 132–3. Unlike Philip, Edward did not legitimize his bastards or introduce them to court. Only two of them are known to us by name: Arthur Plantagenet (d. 1542), created Viscount Lisle by Henry VIII in 1523 (CP, VIII, 63–8) and a daughter named Grace, who may have been brought up in the household of the dowager queen Elizabeth Woodville, and was present at her death in 1492 (B.M. Arundel MS 26, ff. 29v-30r). I am indebted to Miss M. M. Condon for this (the only known) reference to her.

  1 More, 10–11; Mancini, 67–9.

  2 Above, pp. 73–4.

  3 For examples of profits made by other courtiers, and for evidence on bribes and inducements, see Lander, ‘Council, Administration and Councillors’, 163–4; and for Howard’s rewards, above, pp. 234, 255.

  1 For some evidence on this, see below, pp. 324–8.

  2 This section is based on the biographical notices of bishops in the three volumes of A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford (1957–9), and his companion volume for Cambridge (1963), which are alphabetically arranged; for membership of the council on the lists in Lander, ‘Council, Administration and Councillors’, 166–75; and for the changes in the character of the episcopate, R. J. Knecht, ‘The Episcopate and the Wars of the Roses’, University of Birmingham Hist. Journal, vi (1958), 108–31, though my own conclusions differ from those of Dr Knecht on certain points.

  3 CSP, Milan, I, 64; Scofield, I, 412–15, 429–33, 442, 455, 463; and above, p. 275.

  1 There were three vacancies at Carlisle, 1462–8, and one each at Bath and Wells, Exeter, Rochester and York, and at Bangor.

  2 F. R. H. Du Boulay, ed., Register of Thomas Bourgchier, 1454–86 (Canterbury and York Soc., 2 vols, 1955–6), i-xxiii; Du Boulay, ‘The Fifteenth Century’, in C. H. Lawrence, ed., The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages, 218–19. Judging by his neglect of his diocesan business, much of his time and energy must have been spent in the service of his sovereign.

  3 See above, pp. 71–2.

  1 Knecht, op. cit., esp. pp. 108–10; A. Hamilton Thompson, The English Clergy and their Organization in the Later Middle Ages, 1–39.

  2 They were John Booth of Exeter, Peter Courtenay of Exeter, James Goldwell of Norwich and Oliver King.

  1 Above, p. 164.

  2 The other was Richard Bell, prior of Durham (1464–8), bishop of Carlisle (1478 1495), and a member of the king’s council from 1471.

  3 Emden, op. cit. (Oxford); Scofield, I, 430, 455, 507; II, 16–17, 30, 47, 51, 63–80, 102, 124–5, 251, 300.

  1 Emden, op. cit. (Cambridge); CPR, I, 89; II, 169, 171, 184, 201, 283, 366, 379, 401.

  2 Emden, op. cit. (Oxford).

  1 Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity’, 4–5, 13, and see also generally Myers, Household of Edward IV.

  1 For the principal officers of the household, see the lists in Myers, op. cit., 286–97, and in Handbook of British Chronology (2nd edn 1961), 72–80.

  1 For Howard, see the article in DNB; CPR, 1461–85, passim; and the large numbers of references supplied by Miss Scofield. On some points I am indebted to the researches of Miss Anne Crawford, notably the fact that he was not treasurer of the household as late as 1474, as is usually stated, and for information on his shipping interests.

  1 Wedgwood, Hist. Pari., Biographies, 750–2.

  2 Ibid., 663–4; a nd the many references in Scofield and the Calendars of Patent Rolls; Morgan, op. cit., 15, 20.

  1 A ‘shift-system’ allowing them to be away from court for half the year seems to be clearly implied in the provisions made by the Black Book of the Household for knights of the household, esquires of the body and esquires of the household (Myers, op. cit., 108, 111, 127). Of the twelve knights, for example, it provides that four should be ‘continually abiding and attending upon the king’s person in court’ and elsewhere makes arrangements for the time when ‘viii. of these knights be departed from court’.

  2 Myers, op. cit., 127.

  3 For the political use of a similar system by the dukes of Burgundy, see G. A. J. Armstrong, ‘Had the Burgundian Government a policy for the nobility?’, in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (1964), II, 9–32. Cf. Morgan, op. cit., 20–1.

  4 For the ordinance, see Myers, op. cit., 199–200, 262–4.

  1 E.g., the commissions to seize the lands of the duke of Clarence into the king’s hands in March and April 1478 (CPR, 1476–85, 108–11), which were staffed almost exclusively by household men.

  2 Above, pp. 221–2; and for other examples, and the importance of Calais as an ‘outward office’ of the chamber, Morgan, op. cit., 16–17.

  3 A. Gooder, The Parliamentary Representation of the County of York 1285–1832 (Yorks Arch. Soc., Record Series, 1935), I, 204–7; and Calendars of Patent Rolls, passim. For the information about the value of his estates, I am indebted to my former student K. R. Dockray.

  4 At least nine were knighted after the battle of Tewkesbury (PL, V, 105; Shaw, Knights of England, II, 14–16.

  1 Apart from Sir John Fogge and Sir Thomas St Leger in Kent (where the rising had strong Woodville connections), they were the real leaders of the Wiltshire-Berkshire sector of the risings of 1483: amongst these, William Norris, William Berkeley, William Stonor, John Gheyne and Giles Daubeney were attainted for their treason in the parliament of 1484 (RP, VI, 245–6).

  2 B.M., Harleian MS 433, fos 310–16.

  3 Ibid., fos 317–21. Cf. the comments of Wolffe, Royal Demesne in English History, 185–6.

  1 J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England, 128; T. B. Pugh, in Fifteenth-Century England, 107–8; A. L. Brown, in ibid., 19–20.

  2 A. L. Brown, in Fifteenth-Century England, 18–19.

  3 T. B. Pugh, in op. cit., 107–8.

  4 Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity’, 24.

  Chapter 15

  THE KING AND THE COMMUNITY:

  NOBLES, COMMONS IN PARLIAMENT,

  AND MERCHANTS

  (i) Relations with the Nobility

  The skill with which a late medieval king managed his great men is the acid test of his ability, and often of his capacity to survive. Together the nobility commanded formidable resources of land, wealth and territorial influence, and the active cooperation of t
his group, or at least some substantial section of it, was essential if the Crown were to preserve the political peace and well-being of the realm. Without a standing army or an effective police force, the king lacked coercive power, and relied heavily on the local influence of magnates and barons to keep law and order and maintain the royal authority in the shires. Their capacity to raise troops was no less vital in times of war, invasion or rebellion. The king’s problem was to win their goodwill and obedience without making excessive concessions to a class whose power had increased steadily during the previous century and a half.

  Previous chapters have shown how closely Edward’s security depended upon his handling of the nobility, but it will be convenient here to discuss his policy towards the peerage as a whole, especially since it has aroused widely differing opinions amongst modern historians. For E. F. Jacob he was a king who remained to the end very dependent upon a powerful faction amongst the nobility: Yorkist rule was a ‘party experiment’. That view was rejected by S. B. Chrimes, who believed that Edward was so successful that ‘by 1480 there was no over-mighty subject left in England’. J. R. Lander, more moderately, found in Edward’s reign the serious beginnings of a policy of curbing baronial power in general, and ‘breaking the teeth of the sinners’.1 In fact, it can reasonably be argued that if Edward did not actually increase aristocratic

  power, he did little to diminish it. In his first reign his attempts to establish his regime on the support of a small group of established baronial families reinforced by a newly-created nobility of his own broke down when dissensions developed amongst them. Although his policies changed after 1471, the result was to produce an alienation between the majority of ‘country peers’ and the ‘court peers’, and Edward’s death in 1483 was the signal for a power-struggle amongst the latter which brought ruin to the House of York within two short years. Certainly Edward never attempted the highly effective if highly unpopular methods whereby Henry VII reduced his nobility to a state of nervous subjection to the royal will, and it is in their treatment of the aristocracy that the contrasts between Edward IV and the first Tudor are most sharply and significantly defined.

  The king had two major assets in his dealings with the peerage. First, he alone had the power to ennoble a man or to promote him from baronial status to one of the higher ranks of nobility. The mere conferment of a title did not in itself greatly increase a man’s power, but it was a distinction much sought after in an age when English society was becoming more stratified at the top, and when a small class of fifty or sixty parliamentary peers were emerging ‘in possession of rank and privileges which marked them off from lesser men’.1 Edward IV made lavish use of his power of ennoblement. His reign began with the immediate creation of seven new barons, the promotion of two of his kinsmen, Henry, Viscount Bourchier, and William Nevill, Lord Fauconberg, to the earldoms of Essex and Kent, and the elevation of his brothers, George and Richard, to the dukedoms of Clarence and Gloucester. It may be argued that these early creations were necessary to fill the gaps in the parliamentary peerage caused by civil war, attainders, and the normally high rate of natural extinction, especially among the higher ranks of the nobility. Sixty-four lay peers had been summoned to the parliament of 1453, among them five dukes and twelve earls; only forty remained to be summoned to Edward’s first parliament, if we exclude his new creations, and amongst the upper ranks there was only one duke and four earls. It was necessary, too, to reward his firm supporters and help establish their dignity as well as their power. Yet the flow of creations and promotions continued steadily up to 1471: one duke, eight earls and six barons received their tides during these years. After 1471 the king’s policy changed. Promotion to the higher ranks of the peerage was almost entirely confined to members of the royal family: Edward’s second son, Richard, became duke of York and Norfolk, Thomas Grey earl of Huntingdon and then marquis of Dorset, and Clarence’s son, Edward, was recognized as earl of Salisbury. Two new viscounts (Berkeley and Lovell) and three new barons complete the list. Yet the total of creations remains substantial: thirty-two new peers, among them four dukes, two marquises, ten earls and two viscounts.1

  The contrast with Henry VII is striking. He showed himself to be extremely reluctant to add to (or even replace losses within) the numbers of the hereditary peerage. He is often credited with nine new creations, but some of these were restorations, and others were based upon a personal summons which was not necessarily intended to create a barony. It has recently been claimed that only one of these nine (Giles, Lord Daubeney) was given a barony by charter, to him and his heirs male.2 He was even more sparing in replenishing the higher ranks of the peerage, creating only one duke, two earls, one marquis and one viscount (and some of these were restorations to titles forfeited under the Yorkists). ‘The English higher nobility numbered 20 families in 1485, but only half these titles survived when Henry V III was crowned.’3 For Henry VII, we are told, election to the Order of the Garter rather than a peerage was the ultimate mark of honour, especially for men who had climbed solely by service to the king.4 Edward IV made similar use of the Order as a means of rewarding his friends and servants, creating only one fewer new knights than Henry, but significantly more were English noblemen.5 But the fact that Edward was so obviously more generous in dispensing new titles of nobility and in promotion to the higher ranks of the peerage is surely indicative of his favourable attitude towards the baronage as a class. On balance it could serve only to strengthen the position of the aristocracy in English society.

  Far more important than the distribution of dignities, however, was the use the king made of his royal patronage and the extent to which he was willing to strengthen the landed power and local influence of the aristocracy by the tangible rewards of grants of land, offices, wardships, marriages and cash pensions and annuities. The king controlled a vast reservoir of patronage which no private subject could match, and of which even the highest in the land were eager to obtain their due – and often undue – share. Here Edward, at the beginning of his reign, enjoyed exceptional advantages. The series of attainders of Lancastrian supporters in 1461, together with the deaths of others not attainted, brought Edward, in the form of forfeited lands and wardships, surely the most magnificent windfall of the entire middle ages. Within a few years it had been almost totally dispersed. We have already seen something of the motives and methods which lay behind this dispersal, and the consequences for the king’s finances are examined below.1 The main point here is that the principal beneficiaries were a comparatively small section of the baronage. He had done nothing to cure the problem of the over-mighty – or even the mighty – subject. He had created several new magnates, and had strengthened the power of certain well-established families, above all the Nevills. He had not won the backing of the baronage in general, few of whom had benefited materially from his rule.

  After 1471 the king’s treatment of the baronage changed significantly only in one respect. In the 1460s an important part of his distribution of patronage had been to create and delimit areas of territorial influence in which his chosen great men should have the rule of the shires – the Nevills in the north, Herbert in Wales and the Marches, Hastings in the midlands, and Humphrey Stafford in the south-west. With this scheme now largely in ruins, he turned instead to a similar territorial re-ordering, but this time aimed at the endowment of members of the royal family, including the queen’s kinsmen. Between 1471 and 1475 Clarence and Gloucester were allowed to divide the Warwick inheritance between them, but for Gloucester this was only the beginning of a steady build-up of power in the north, culminating in the great hereditary franchise in the north-west and hereditary tenure of the West March in 1482.2 Having destroyed one over-mighty subject in the north, Edward now created another. Political needs during the trouble with the Nevills had meanwhile involved the restoration of the Percy family to the earldom of Northumberland, thus reviving the power of the most independent of all the northern magnate families. Room was also found in t
his northern scheme for the new steward of the royal household, Thomas, Lord Stanley, as master of the county palatine of Lancaster, and his brother, William Stanley, with land and office in north-east Wales.3

  In Wales and the Marches Edward built up the nominal authority of his heir Edward, even to the extent of virtually expropriating the second earl of Pembroke. In form this new government might be conciliar, but politically it gave a large regional authority to a group of Woodvilles and their associates, headed by the senior member of the family, Anthony, Earl Rivers. There was no place in this scheme for the greatest of the surviving Marcher lords, the young head of an old magnate family, Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham. He had been allowed to enter on his inheritance, as a minor, in 1473, but soon afterwards was consigned to political limbo.1 He was appointed as steward of England at the trial of Clarence in 1478, and such few favours as he received – the king’s acting as godfather to his newly-born son, Edward, and a grant of the royal manor of Cantref Selig, Co. Brecon – belong to this period.2 But he was mysteriously absent from the royal invasion army of 1475, having contracted to go, and was given none of the employments and responsibilities which a man of his position might have expected: most remarkable of all was his exclusion from the commissions of the peace everywhere except in Stafford.3 It was later alleged that Buckingham resented having been married to a Woodville, and he clearly wanted to recover that share of the inheritance of his Bohun forebears which Henry V had claimed arbitrarily against a poor exchange – a price Richard of Gloucester was willing to pay for his support; but, these considerations apart, he may well have had cause to resent his cold-shouldering by Edward IV.4

  In the midlands Edward was already contemplating a territorial rearrangement even before the death of the hostile Clarence. In 1474 Lord Hastings was given charge of various lordships recovered from the duke under the act of resumption of 1473, especially the Honour of Tutbury in Staffordshire, and in the following year provision was being made for the infant Richard of Shrewsbury, the king’s second son. Lands formerly belonging to the Welles and Willoughby families were settled on him in March 1475, and under his will drawn up before leaving for France Edward seems to have planned for Richard an appanage based on Fotheringhay, Stamford and Grantham and other Duchy of York lands in the north-east midlands, combined with certain Duchy of Lancaster honours in the same area.5 Soon after, the death of Duke John of Norfolk in January 1476 offered Edward the opportunity to add the substantial Mowbray inheritance to Richard of Shrewsbury’s projected endowment, by marrying him to the infant heiress, Anne. The death without issue three years later of the infant bride did not deter Edward from keeping the Mowbray inheritance for his son. A king who had already proved willing to disinherit the countess of Warwick for the benefit of Clarence and Gloucester, and the countess of Oxford on Gloucester’s behalf, saw no problem in vesting the Mowbray lands in Richard and his heirs, an arrangement sanctioned by act of parliament. The principal sufferer was the heir-at-law, his own servant, John, Lord Howard.1