by Charles Ross
1 Avrutick, thesis cited above, p. 390, n. 3; Bellamy, ‘Justice’, 147–8.
2 CPR, 1467–77, 128. Six of the magnates were present on the bench when the jury presented their verdict: P.R.O., K.B. 9/320.
3 CPR, 1476–85, 50.
4 CPR, 1467–77, 69–70.
5 Avrutick, ‘Commissions of Oyer and Terminer’, 66; and for the commissions, CPR, 1461–7, 279, 304.
1 Lander, ‘Council, Administration and Councillors’, 166–75; p. 398, n. 4 above.
2 See below, p. 403.
1 PL, III, 284, 313; IV, 16, 19–20.
2 PL, IV, 19, 94–5.
3 CCR, 1468–76, 315.
4 CCR, 1476–85, 221–2.
1 CC, 559; Bellamy, ‘Justice’, 136–8.
2 PL, IV, 30–1.
3 RP, VI, 160.
4 Somervillc, Hist. Duchy Lancaster, I, 252.
1 Bellamy, Law of Treason, 164–5.
2 Baldwin, King’s Council, 430–2.
3 Bellamy, ‘Justice’, 148–9, noting examples of men being ordered to appear before chancery, and the instructions altered for them to appear in council, and vice versa.
1 I. S. Leadam and J. F. Baldwin, Select Cases Before the King’s Council, 1243–1482 (Selden Soc, xxxv, 1915), 116–17; Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 135–6; Chrimes, Henry VII, 147–9.
2 Chrimes, op. cit., 147.
3 8 Edw. IV, c. 2; Statutes, II, 426–9.
4 Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 140, but cf. his ‘Justice’, 146.
5 CPR, 1476–85, 343. For other examples of common-law use of examination, mainly in relation to mercantile offences, see Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, 137–8.
1 E.g., by J. R. Lander, ‘The Administration of the Yorkist Kings’ (unpublished Cambridge M. Litt. thesis, 1949).
2 Bellamy, ‘Justice’, 155.
3 Avrutick, ‘Commissions of Oyer and Terminer’, 170.
1 RP, V, 496.
2 RP, V, 618 (commons in 1467); Annates, 788–9; CPR, 1467–77, 55; CCR, 1468–76, 25–6 (Grey-Vernon and the bodyguard).
3 RP, VI, 8–9, 159–60.
4 RP, VI, 198.
1 Literae Cantuarienses, III, 274–6. See also Edward’s privy seal letter to Salisbury of II February 1472, which dwells on ‘the great wildness and indisposition’ which followed upon civil strife (Benson and Hatcher, Old and New Sarum, 179–80).
2 Above, p. 134; below, pp. 408–9.
1 PL, I, 262–4.
2 RP, VI, 35–9, 51–4, 133–43; A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall, 106–8.
1 CPR, 1467–77, 429; R. A. Griffiths, ‘Royal government in the southern counties of the principality of Wales’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 1962).
2 Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses, 200.
3 Somerville, Hist. Duchy Lancaster, I, 225, 252, for this and other evidence of lawlessness in the north parts of the Duchy; also CPR, 1467–77, 515, for power, 1 May 1475, to Lord Stanley to grant pardon to those who had been stirring up insurrection in the county of Lancashire.
1 For this, and what follows on the feud, CPR, 1467–77, 426–7; CCR, 1468–76, 36, 71 244, 315; Rymer, Foedera, XI, 699; Whitaker, History of Richmondshire, II, 261; Proceedings in Chancery in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Calendars (Record Commission, 1827), It Ixxxvi. I am indebted for information on this matter to my former student, K. R. Dockray. For the Stanley-Gloucester feud, see CCR, 1468–76, 138.
1 Wedgwood, Hist. Parliament, Biographies, 423–6; for his connections with Warwick, Gladys M. Coles, ‘The Lordship of Middleham, Especially in Yorkist and Early Tudor Times’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1961), App. B, 12, and p. 127.
2 W. I. Haward, ‘Gilbert Debenham: a Medieval Rascal in Real Life’, History, xiii (1929), 300–14.
1 A. L. Rowse, ‘The Turbulent Career of Sir Henry de Bodrugan’, History, xxix (1944), 17–26. Rowse, however, failed to notice his condemnation by parliament in 1459 as an already notorious malefactor (RP, V, 367–8).
2 Ibid.; Wedgwood’s assumption that they were Yorkists ignores the fact that several were prominent Lancastrians, e.g. Sir William Tailboys, executed after Hexham, and John Caterall, attainted 1461, RP, V, 477.
3 E.g. Sir Robert Harcourt and John Cockayne, for whom see Storey, End … of Lancaster, 57–8, 156–8: the latter was still alive in 1504. For a detailed and interesting study of another rascal with a thirty-year record of crime – Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, until recently thought to be the author of the Morte d’Arthur – see William Matdiews, The Ill-Framed Knight (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), 13–33.
1 W. H. Dunham, Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 66–71.
2 RP, V, 487–8.
3 Statutes of the Realm, II, 426–9. Dunham, op. cit., 73–7, argued that the statute did not extend to peers, but cf. the comments of Bellamy, ‘Justice’, 152–4, and E. W. Ives, ‘The Common Lawyers in Pre-Reformation England’, TRHS, 5th ser., xviii (1968), 162.
4 Bellamy, ‘Justice’, 152.
1 Williams, English Hist. Documents, 533.
2 Dunham, op. cit., 74–82, and 140 for text of the ‘compact’. It was precisely the frequency of retaining which led Dunham to believe that it could not have been meant to apply to lords. All but five of the sixty-nine indentures of retainer by Lord Hastings post-date the act of 1468, ibid., 73.
3 Chrimes, Henry VII, 191.
Conclusion
THE END OF THE REIGN:
ACHIEVEMENT AND AFTERMATH
King Edward kept his last Christmas at Westminster Palace with particular splendour. Although his health may already have been failing, he was still capable of making a vivid impression of royal majesty on the minds of his admiring subjects. Surrounded by his five daughters, whose beauty caught the attention of those present, the king himself, resplendent in a fashionable new wardrobe, presented ‘a distinguished air to beholders, he being a person of most elegant appearance, and remarkable beyond all others for the attractions of his person’.1 Apart from a brief visit to Windsor, the court stayed on at Westminster during the early months of 1483, until about Eastertide (28–30 March), when the king suddenly fell ill.
Contemporary sources are so imprecise and conflicting that the nature of this final illness cannot be more than a matter for speculation. The Croyland Chronicler, whose explicit testimony would have been of the highest value, chose to be deliberately enigmatic with his remark that the king took to his bed ‘neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady, the cure of which would not have appeared easy in the case of a person of more humble rank’. Polydore Vergil similarly speaks of death from ‘an unknown disease’, but elsewhere hints at poison. The Tudor chronicler, Edward Hall, believed that Edward had contracted an ague or malarial infection in France which suddenly turned from a ‘tercian’ or benign phase to a malignant ‘quartan’ fever, and the end was brought on by a surfeit of food. Malaria was still common in medieval Europe, and the marshes of the Somme valley in the wet summer of 1475 were a likely place to catch it, but it is doubtful whether Edward’s contemporaries would not have recognized and recorded the disease, and no source before Hall mentions ague. Mancini, who was in London at the time of Edward’s death and had contacts with the court, tells us that the king caught cold on a fishing-trip with some of his courtiers.2
Commynes twice asserts that Edward died of apoplexy (‘quaterre’) brought on by excess. This was soon to kill his own master, Louis XI, who like Edward lingered on for several days after a (second) cerebral haemorrhage on 25 August 1483.1 This explanation certainly fits best with what we know of Edward’s gigantic physical appetites. Mancini reported that ‘In food and drink he was most immoderate: it was his habit, so I have learned, to take an emetic for the delight of gorging his stomach once more. For this reason, and for the ease, which was especially dear to him after the recovery of his crown, he had grown fat in the loins.’ There is no evidence that his sexual extravagance had diminished w
ith the years, as Mancini testifies. The Croyland Chronicler likewise refers to his corpulence, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyments.2 All this self-indulgence made Edward vulnerable to some form of stroke. Elsewhere, however, Commynes asserts that the king’s death was caused by melancholy or chagrin at the news of the Treaty of Arras, a blow from which he never recovered. Bishop Russell seems to confirm that this contributed to his decline, for, in an address drawn up three months later, he asked: ‘Was not his pensifous sickness increased by daily remembrance of the dark ways, that his subtle-faith friends had led him in?’3 But it is unlikely that such concern could have overwhelmed a man of Edward’s resilient temperament, and on the whole his death was probably more or less directly the result of continuous excess, which his wealth and station allowed him to indulge in, as the Croyland Chronicler’s cryptic comment seems to suggest.4
The king’s illness was serious enough for his death to be reported prematurely in York on 6 April, and a mass was sung for his soul in the Minster the next day. Yet in fact he lingered on, still clear enough in his mind to add several codicils to his last will, and to attempt to reconcile feuds amongst his courtiers, especially the quarrel between Hastings and Dorset.1 After an illness lasting ten days, he died on Wednesday, 9 April 1483, three weeks short of his forty-first birthday. The Croyland Chronicler tells us that as the end approached he repented sincerely of his sins, desired that all his debts should be fully paid, and was in devout reverence of the sacraments of the church. Such, he added wryly, was ‘the most beseeming end of this worldly prince, a better than which could not be hoped for or conceived, after the manifestation by him of so large a share of the frailties inherent to the lot of mankind’.2
His funeral rites were carried out with all the panoply and sombre splendour which Edward would have wished (and at a cost of no less than £1,496 17s 2d).3 First, his body, naked except for a loincloth, was laid upon a board in Westminster Palace, whilst the lords spiritual and temporal then in London, and the mayor and aldermen, came to gaze upon it. The corpse was then embalmed, wrapped in cerements of waxed linen, clothed, with a cap of estate on the head and the feet shod in red leather, and in this guise it lay in state for eight days in St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, watched over by nobles and royal servants to the sound of requiem masses. On 17 April the body was placed upon a bier, covered with a large, rich cloth of gold, and carried into Westminster Abbey by fifteen knights and esquires of the body. Above it was a canopy of cloth imperial fringed with gold and blue silk, flanked at the corners by four banners of the Trinity, Our Lady, St George and St Edward. Before the bier walked Lord Howard carrying Edward’s own banner. The chancellor, Archbishop Rotherham, nine bishops and two abbots led the procession into the Abbey, and behind the bier came a parade of the temporal lords and knights, among them many of his old friends and servants, like Hastings, Stanley and Ferrers, some of whom had attended his coronation twenty-two years before. A ‘similitude’ or life-sized image of the king had been constructed, and this now stood beside the bier dressed in the royal clothes, crowned, and equipped with orb and sceptre, as bishops, lords, judges, mayor, aldermen and household knights and esquires made their offerings.
The next morning (18 April) the funeral procession set out for Charing Cross and then to Sion Abbey, where it rested overnight. The following morning it moved on through Eton, where the bishops of Lincoln and Ely and members of Eton College censed the corpse, to Windsor and Edward’s fine new chapel of St George. All that night the body was guarded by a great company of nine lords and many household men and the kings and pursuivants of arms. On 20 April the final masses were celebrated in the chapel by Archbishop Rotherham of York and Bishops Russell of Lincoln and Dudley of Durham. Offerings were then made of the accoutrements which were to rest upon the tomb – shield, sword and helmet – by those who had been close to the king by blood or service. After offerings made by ‘the man of arms’, Sir William Parr, controller of the household, clad in full armour, and bearing a battle-axe head downwards, the lords made their offerings of cloths of gold, ‘each after his degree or estate’, and the body was laid in the tomb. Following the usual custom, the great officers of the household cast their staves of office into the grave, and the heralds did likewise with their coats of arms. Given new coats, the heralds then immediately cried out ‘Le Roy est vif! Le Roy est vif!’ and offered prayers for the dead king.
Long ago Edward had left precise directions for the construction of his tomb. In the will he had drawn up in 1475 he had conveyed to trustees very extensive estates, mainly sections of the Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of York lands, for the payment of his debts, to provide an appanage for his younger son and marriage portions of 10,000 marks each for his daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, and a similar sum for the child the queen was then carrying should she prove to be a daughter, and had made arrangements for the payment of the rest of the marriage portion of Cecily, then affianced to the heir of Scotland. He had also adjured his heir to make sure of the continuance of any grants he had made to ‘divers of our Lords as well of our blood as other and also Knights, Squires and divers other our true and loving subjects and servants’ who had ‘faithfully and lovingly assisted us and put them in the extreme jeopardy of their lives, losses of their lands and goods in assisting us as well about the recovery of our Crown and Realm of England as other divers seasons and times of jeopardy’. A great deal of the will, however, consisted of elaborate injunctions for the carrying-through of his new works at Windsor, with his own tomb as its centrepiece. He was to be buried ‘low in the ground, and upon the same a stone to be laid and wrought with the figure of Death with a scutcheon of our Armour and writings convenient about the borders of the same remembering the day and year of our decease’. Over this should be built a vault, and upon the vault a chapel with an altar and tomb, and ‘upon the same tomb an image for our figure, which figure we will be of silver and gilt or at the least copper and gilt’.1
This chapel had been built at the same time as the choir, and was screened from the aisles by a pair of superb iron gates suspended from iron towers, which have been described as ‘without doubt the most remarkable works of their period in that material remaining in the country’. These gates, now in the presbytery, were probably the work of John Tresilian, who had been employed on ironwork in the chapel since 1477. In the financial year 1482–3, thirty-three casks of touchstone, or black marble from the Low Countries, had been delivered for the construction of the tomb. Unfortunately, neither the ‘figure Death’ or cadaver nor the king’s funeral effigy were ever completed, and the tomb remained unmarked until the present slab of touchstone was placed there in 1789, similar to that put above the tomb of Edward’s old enemy and victim, Henry VI, whose remains were transferred to Windsor from Chertsey on the command of Richard III. However, some of the accoutrements placed on the tomb during the funeral rites were to remain there for over two hundred years. The king’s coat of gilt mail, covered in crimson velvet with his arms embroidered on it in pearls, gold and rubies, and his banner of ‘taffety’ with the royal arms painted thereon, were finally removed from the tomb by Parliamentary soldiers in 1642.2
In the five hundred years since he died, Edward IV’s historical reputation has suffered a series of vicissitudes. For early Tudor writers, like Sir Thomas More and Polydore Vergil, whose accounts were based upon the reminiscences of a wide circle of men who had known and served Edward, he was a king of considerable achievement and stature. He was seen as an active, businesslike king, who had done much to make his realm peaceful and prosperous and whose rule had been both firm and popular. This tradition was maintained throughout the sixteenth century by Hall, Holinshed and Stow, who largely reproduced More’s balanced and respectful appraisal, and from whom Shakespeare obtained his material. Not until the eighteenth century, when the French historian, Rapin, published his History of England in 1723, did a different view emerge. Rapin, followed later in the century by David Hume, imported into his
assessment of the king the critical and prejudiced views of Philippe de Commynes. Edward now appeared as debauched, cruel, avaricious and lazy, capable of energy and decision only in times of crisis.1 This characterization was repeated and in some ways exaggerated by almost all the historians of the nineteenth century, and Edward’s reputation reached its nadir in the blend of grudging condescension and moral disapproval expressed by the most influential of Victorian medievalists, Bishop William Stubbs:2
Edward IV was not perhaps quite so bad a man or so bad a king as his enemies have represented; but even those writers who have laboured hardest to rehabilitate him, have failed to discover any conspicuous merits.
Stubbs then credits Edward with personal courage, affability, a ‘fairly good’ education, a definite plan of foreign policy, skill as a merchant, and a readiness to enforce the law where it did not clash with ‘the fortunes of his favourites or his own likes and dislikes’, and he continues:
But that is all: he was as a man vicious far beyond anything that England had seen since the days of John; and more cruel and bloodthirsty than any king she had ever known: he had too a conspicuous talent for extortion. … Edward far outdid [in fierce deeds of bloodshed] all that his forefathers and his enemies together had done. The death of Clarence was but the summing up and crowning act of an unparalleled list of judicial and extra-judicial cruelties which those of the next reign supplement but do not surpass.
Modern historians have moved a long way from this highly prejudiced and ill-informed assessment. Freed from Stubbs’s preconceptions, concerned rather with the realities of political power than with Victorian theories of parliamentary sovereignty, and working from the hitherto unexplored records of the reign instead of chronicle and narrative evidence, they now see him in a far more flattering light. Here was ‘a king of iron will and great fixity of purpose’, ‘an astute and able ruler’, a monarch who possessed ‘the ruthlessness of a Renaissance despot and the strong-willed ability of a statesman’, who had the capacity to rescue England from the horrors of civil strife and replace them with order, wealth and prosperity.3 Moreover, his intelligent responses to the problems of late medieval government provided in all essential respects the foundations on which the early Tudors were to build. This modern estimate has been succinctly phrased by S. B. Ghrimes:1