The problem between the Stonors and the Queen was apparently worked out, since one of the younger males was subsequently knighted. Sir William Stonor also fell in and out of favour with the Queen through the years. In a letter of 19 August 1481, Queen Elizabeth charges her forester of Blakmore to deliver a buck to ‘our trusty and well beloved Sir William Stoner, Knight’, but another letter in August 1482 threatens to sue Sir William for hunting and slaying deer in her forests at Barnwood Chace and Eggshill Common.11 Apparently Sir William took advantage of his favoured position and provoked action from the Queen.
More troubling problems arose from the continuing resentment and envy harboured by long-term Yorkists, who were angry at the power and influence of the formerly Lancastrian Wydevilles, now so central to Edward IV’s life and court. Even though realignments of loyalty were commonplace in this small kingdom – Warwick and Clarence were certainly proof of that – the military expertise, chivalric prominence and cultured intelligence of the Wydevilles caused particular resentment among those who lacked their savoir faire. Still, the extent of hostility to the Queen’s family may be greatly exaggerated. Those critics who claim that Edward IV’s appointment of the Queen’s father as Treasurer of England alienated Sir Walter Blount, the man he replaced, ignore the contemporary evidence that Blount named Earl Rivers and his son Sir John Wydeville in his will as deceased friends for whom Masses were requested.12 No one disputes that Rivers served Edward IV well as Treasurer of England, faithfully carried out the King’s orders and helped the nation achieve the solid financial standing it lacked under Henry VI. Neither does anyone doubt that Rivers paid the highest price for serving the King when he was executed by Warwick in 1469.
Leading the opposition to the Wydeville faction were Edward IV’s brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, supported by Hastings and Buckingham, all long-time Yorkists of the blood royal. The differences between the two factions originated in personal, as well as political, ideals. Anthony Wydeville’s undisputed military and administrative skills were matched by a scholarly and pious propensity that set him apart from others. As soon as English governance began to stabilise, for instance, Anthony determined to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a shrine second only to Jerusalem in attracting devout Christians during the medieval era. Anthony believed such a pilgrimage to be particularly appropriate for an English warrior who had spent the past twelve years in handto-hand killing.
If a letter from Sir John Paston to his mother is accurate, Edward IV responded in anger when he heard Anthony’s request to make the pilgrimage:
The King is not best pleased with him [Anthony] for that he desireth to depart; in so much that the King hath said of him that whenever he hath most to do, then the Lord Scales will soonest ask leave to depart and weeneth that it is most because of cowardice.13
Hardly cowardice. Whatever Anthony’s faults, cowardice was not one of them. At the age of seventeen, this man was captured at Sandwich by Dynham and carted off to Calais where Warwick imprisoned him; in 1461 he fought at Towton only to be captured and imprisoned; in 1463 he helped direct the siege of Alnwick Castle; in 1470 he defeated Warwick and Clarence at Southampton; in 1470 he helped Edward IV escape Warwick’s troops and accompanied him into exile; in 1471 he rode out from the Tower to defeat Falconbridge; in April 1472 he led 1,000 archers to the relief of Brittany which helped repel the latest invasion from France.14 While at sea, his men were decimated by the ‘flux and other epidemics’, and his ships had to return home in November.15 Anthony’s military service was matched only by his chivalric prowess, renowned in the tournament lists of both England and Burgundy.
If Edward IV ever uttered the hasty words reported by John Paston, he soon issued an order of safe conduct in which Anthony, Earl Rivers was termed Carissimus ac Dilectissimus Consanguinius (our most dear and beloved brother). In the preface to his translation of The Dictes and Sayengis of the Philosophers, Anthony states his reason for making the journey:
Where it is so that every human Creature by the sufferance of our Lord God is born and ordained to be subject and thrall unto the storms of fortune and so in diverse and many sundry wises, man is perplexed with worldly adversities of the which I, Antoine Wydeville, Earl Rivers, Lord Scales… have largely and in many different manners have had my parte, and of them relieved by the infinite grace and goodness of our said Lord through the mean of the Mediatrice of Mercy, which… exhorted me to dispose my recovered life to his service in following his lawes and commandments. And in satisfaction and recompense of mine iniquities and faults before done, to seek and execute the works that might be most acceptable to Him. And as far as mine frailness would suffer me, I rested in that wit and purpose during that season I understood the Jubilee and pardon to be at the Holy Apostle Saint James in Spain which was the year of grace 1473.16
This reflective humility symbolises the differences between Anthony and the rapacious rivalries of Edward’s court. Cynics who may question the sincerity of Anthony’s words need only look to his actions for proof. Within months of his pilgrimage, this most accomplished of courtiers departed for the Welsh Marches to spend the rest of his life as governor to the three-year-old Prince Edward, heir to the throne.
None of the Wydevilles, in fact, built personal fortunes or accumulated great power from their closeness to the King – certainly not in the grand tradition established by the Nevilles and pursued by Clarence and Gloucester. Neither did the Wydevilles receive vast grants of land and lucrative offices such as the King conferred on William, Lord Hastings; William, Lord Herbert; Humphrey, Lord Stafford; and a host of other preferred intimates. Nor did any Wydeville ever display the greed of Clarence and Gloucester, who dispossessed the Countess of Warwick of her lawful rights and property, most of which she had inherited from her own father. Beyond the marriages of Elizabeth’s siblings to noble spouses, the Wydevilles profited little by their sister’s marriage to the King.
Whatever the Wydevilles did receive, they earned through meritorious service. The appointment of Elizabeth’s father as Treasurer of England, Constable of England, and member of the King’s Council, for instance, earned him £1,330 per year.17 Beyond his creation as Earl Rivers, Elizabeth’s father gained no extraordinary grants of land or money from Edward IV. So, too, Anthony Wydeville received his principal income from his wife’s inheritance, a marriage made years before Elizabeth became Queen. When the King granted Anthony the lordship of the Isle of Wight and the castle of Carisbrooke in November 1466, and made him Keeper of the Castle of Porchester in Hampshire in 1467, that recompense was hardly extraordinary considering his military service and his diplomatic expertise in negotiating the marriage of Margaret of York to the Duke of Burgundy.
Among the other Wydeville brothers, John and Richard were knighted at the Queen’s coronation in 1464. Richard was Edward IV’s candidate to become Prior to the Knights Hospitaller in 1468, but was thwarted by Warwick’s supporter, John Langstrother, proving that the Queen did not always win her will.18 Although Richard did serve as Justice of the Peace in Bedfordshire from 1473–87, he exists as little more than a hard-to-find footnote in fifteenth-century history. John, married to the Duchess of Norfolk, died with his father at the hands of Warwick in 1469.
Neither did the Queen’s youngest brothers, Edward and Lionel, receive unusual preference during Edward IV’s reign. Edward Wydeville became a naval officer, but his notoriety did not develop until after the death of Edward IV. Lionel graduated from Oxford with a Doctor of Divinity degree and entered the Church. He became Dean of Exeter in November 1478, Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1479, and Bishop of Salisbury in 1482. Lionel was somewhere between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-six when he became Bishop (his birth year is uncertain), as compared to Robert Neville who obtained that post at the age of twentythree, two years before canonical age.19 In short, preferences given to the Wydevilles never exceeded traditional norms for the era.
Only Anthony figured prominently in cour
t politics during the reign of Edward IV. His contributions were enormous. After appointment as governor to Prince Edward in 1473, Anthony spent much of his time at Ludlow supervising the young prince and bringing order to the lawless and unruly Welsh Marches. While there, he also translated moral and philosophical texts already popular on the continent into English. Anthony periodically left Ludlow to serve in diplomatic missions, where his knowledge of continental traditions served England well – most notably, an effort to persuade Charles the Bold to abandon the siege of Neuss and join the English campaign against Louis XI of France – but he soon returned to Ludlow to govern the Marches, supervise the extensive estates inherited from his father-in-law, and translate more texts. There is no question that he was ‘different’ from the typical member of Edward’s court.
That ‘difference’ may be exactly why Edward IV appointed Anthony as governor of Prince Edward, heir to the throne. In his September 1473 ‘Letters of Instructions from King Edward IV. to the Earl of Rivers, and John… Bishop of Rochester, for the education of his son Edward, Prince of Wales’, Edward IV made it absolutely clear that the objective of his son’s education was ‘the virtuous guiding of the person of our dearest first-begotten son, Edward, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, and Earl of Chester, for the politic, sad [serious] and good rule of his household’.20
To that end, the King gave absolute power to Anthony in supervising every detail of the prince’s life:
Ordinances, touching the guiding of our said Son’s person, which we commit to the said Earl Rivers.
First. We will that our said first-begotten son shall arise every morning at a convenient hour, according to his age; and, till he be ready, no man be suffered to come into his chamber, except the right trusty the Earl Rivers, his chaplains, and chamberlains, or such others as shall be thought by the said Earl Rivers convenient for the same season…21
The King specified the nature of the boy’s instruction during meal times, another reason for selecting Earl Rivers as governor:
Item. That no man sit at his board, but such as shall be thought fit by the discretion of the Earl Rivers; and that then be read before him such noble stories as behooveth to a prince to be understand and know; and that the communication at all times in his presence be of virtue, honour, cunning [knowledge], wisdom, and of deeds of worship, and of nothing that should move or stir him to vice.22
A separate ‘Item’, addressing the education of the prince and other children living in his household, similarly emphasises both moral and intellectual instruction:
Item. We will that the sons of noble lords and gentlemen being in the household with our said son, arise at a convenient hour, and hear their mass, and be virtuously brought up and taught in grammar, music, or other training exercises of humanity, according to their births, and after their ages, and in nowise to be suffered in idleness, or in unvirtuous occupation.23
King Edward IV wished his son to be educated in the new humanism that was changing the world from medieval parochialism into the renaissance of learning that was already sweeping the European continent. The King chose the best man in the realm to govern that education: Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers.
Rivers’s appointment was confirmed by patent issued at Westminster on 10 November 1473:
Appointment, during pleasure, of the earl Ryviers, brother of the queen, as governor and ruler of the king’s first-begotten son the prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester, that he may be virtuously, cunningly and knightly brought up.24
The elaborate instructions of the ‘Letters’ leave no doubt that the King had carefully considered what constituted an appropriate education for the next King of England. Above all, he was concerned for the prince’s moral wellbeing. Much of the day was spent worshipping at divine services – Masses, Matins, Evensong – for which the Bishop of Rochester was responsible. Governance of the prince’s daily schedule by Earl Rivers demonstrated not only the King’s enormous respect and trust for the Queen’s brother, but his ideals for his son’s education and character. Unfortunately, Edward IV’s values did not extend to others in his kingdom, who still believed that personal gain was the raison d’être of political power.
To assure that his son lived in a household governed by culture and by moralistic principles, the King surrounded him with his Wydeville relatives. The Queen’s brother Lionel became the prince’s chaplain. Brothers Sir Edward Wydeville and Sir Richard Wydeville were appointed counsellors to the prince. Sir Richard Grey, Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage, was Prince Edward’s comptroller, assisted by Elizabeth’s cousin, Richard Haute.25 The Master of the Horse was Lord Lyle, Elizabeth’s brother-in-law by her first marriage. If the prince’s long-time chamberlain, Sir Thomas Vaughan, was not a relative, he was close friends with the Wydevilles. The overwhelming presence of the Wydevilles infuriated other factions of Edward’s court. They dared not, however, oppose the will of the King.
Thus, at the age of two-and-a-half, Prince Edward and his entourage moved to Ludlow Castle, where his father had grown up. To avoid the personal distress that Edward IV had endured when a child at Ludlow, Queen Elizabeth accompanied the prince, moving to Ludlow with him in March 1473, even before Edward IV issued his formal letter of instructions.26 The journey could not have been easy for the Queen, who was five months pregnant with the King’s sixth child. Perhaps she welcomed the bucolic retreat, away from the pestilences of London and the politics of the court, as she set up her son’s home before preparing to enter the birthing chamber for her eighth child.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Life at Ludlow
Medieval Ludlow was a bustling market town surrounded by the rich farms of Wales, Shropshire, Worcester and Herefordshire. Every Thursday, the streets filled with merchants, shoppers and visitors attending the weekly market. Livestock sold at the Bull Ring spilled over into Corve Street and Old Street where pigs, cattle, horses and sheep jostled with people coming and going about their business. Merchant stalls along High Street sold wine, ale, fish, salt, oats, peas, bread – produce from the surrounding farms and necessities imported from elsewhere.
Wool drove the region’s economy, with sheep raised along the Welsh border producing the finest fibre available in the world. The river Teme provided power to drive fulling mills – two at the end of Mill Street and two at Old Street – turning Ludlow into a cloth-manufacturing centre which exported goods to London and abroad. The wool and cloth industry required a wealth of other tradesman – carpenters and sawyers, masons and stonecutters, tilers and thatchers – to provide the infrastructure for the expanding economy. Taverns and friaries housed and fed scores of people who came long distances to do business in Ludlow.
Three fairs added to the prosperity of the region: the feast of St Philip and St James on 1 May, St Laurence’s Fair on 9, 10 and 11 August, and St Catherine’s Fair on 24, 25 and 26 November. Tolls collected at the seven gates to Ludlow provided income to fund the leper hospital of St Giles and the Hospital of St John the Baptist. Rich burgesses became alderman and councillors as town governance brought order to the growing community.
Religion thrived, with friars preaching and teaching and tending the needs of their parishioners. The Dominicans, or Blackfriars, had arrived in 1254, and the Carmelites, or Whitefriars, in 1350. Members of the Palmers’ Guild, established in the mid-thirteenth century, appear prominently as figures in the stained-glass windows of the parish church of St Laurence. The soaring Perpendicular splendour of St Laurence’s was extensively remodelled between 1433 and 1471, reflecting even today the economic vigour of Ludlow during this era.
To this vibrant community, Queen Elizabeth and her son Edward, Prince of Wales, moved in March 1473. Taking up residence in Ludlow Castle, a particularly appropriate home for the ‘Prince of Wales’, the entourage established a royal presence in the Welsh Marches. Located approximately twenty-five miles south of Shrewsbury, Ludlow Castle dominated a country that Thomas More characterised as ‘far off from
the law and recourse to justice’, where robbers walked at liberty, uncorrected. The first castle at Ludlow, built by Roger de Lacy, son of Walter de Lacy who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, was a Norman stronghold that not only protected England from the unconquered Welsh but launched expeditions into Ireland. De Lacy descendants had married into the Mortimer family, another powerful Norman dynasty, through which Richard, Duke of York inherited Ludlow Castle. When Edward IV became king in 1461, Ludlow became a royal castle, similar to Windsor and Balmoral today.
To bring this region under royal control, Edward IV created the ‘Prince’s Council’ to govern Wales and the border counties through courts that heard criminal, civil and ecclesiastical cases. Prince Edward, though a mere child, represented the King’s authority, which otherwise resided with the Privy Council in far-off London. The King appointed to the Prince’s Council astute politicians and loyal supporters, chief among whom were the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Clarence, Gloucester, Rivers, Hastings, and Sir Thomas Vaughan (the prince’s chamberlain). Other members included the Bishop of Bath and Wells, the Abbot of Westminster, Lord Dacre, Sir John Fogge, Sir John Scotte, John Alcock and Richard Forster.1 On occasion, the council met at Tickenhill in Bewdley (the prince’s summer home), Shrewsbury and Worcester, but Ludlow was the headquarters of the King’s authority.
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