The War of the Roses

by Timothy Venning

  The Woodville marriage: why the secrecy? Could it have been denied later?

  It is quite feasible that Edward would not have married Elizabeth Woodville despite their physical relationship; the secrecy in the nature of the ceremony and delay in announcing it are suspicious. The urgency of the northern campaign in May 1464 could have caused an immediate delay in announcing it, though the Nevilles would hardly have risked allying to the rebel Somerset–a hereditary foe and associate of their Percy rivals–if they were furious at the marriage. Conceivably, Edward was keen to consummate the relationship at once and Elizabeth would not agree without a ceremony so the impatient King did not wait for a more propitious time and a more public ceremony. (One story had it that he tried to ravish Elizabeth and put a dagger to her throat.) Elizabeth wisely refused to accept any sexual relationship without a marriage ceremony; was the delay due to Edward considering denying its occurrence? Elizabeth or her family may have forced his hand by publicizing it. Indeed, in spring 1464 King Henry of Castile was offering Edward the hand of his sister (and eventual successor) Isabella, which Edward turned down. If this offer had been accepted Elizabeth Woodville would have stood no chance–and Isabella would not have been in Spain to succeed Henry and unite Castile with Aragon by marrying Ferdinand of Aragon. Would Spain have stayed disunited?

  The nature and reasons for the allegations made of Edward’s other ‘legal’ contract to marry Eleanor Butler, revealed by Richard III in 1483, make it impossible to say that the King had succeeded in having his way with Eleanor (who possibly had a child) without a full marriage ceremony but Elizabeth was not so naïve and made sure that the marriage was legal and publicized. It is not proven that the ‘contract’ existed and was not drawn up by Richard in June 1483 to justify his coup–and whoever informed Sir Thomas More of the accusations made by Friar Shaa at St Paul’s on 23 June seems to have had an idea that the supposed contract was with Elizabeth Lucy, not Eleanor.72 Was this just confused memories, seeing as Elizabeth had definitely had a son by Edward (Arthur, Lord Lisle)? Or was it a deliberate attempt to confuse More’s contemporaries? The chances of Edward having some legal arrangement with Eleanor are probable, not least as the supposed witness to the contract–Bishop Stillington–was arrested for words prejudicial to the King in 1478 at the time that Clarence was claiming that Edward’s children were illegitimate so he was heir to the throne. At the time of the marriage Stillington was a junior court cleric and Lord Privy Seal, i.e. in charge of the King’s private administrative arrangements; and he received the first available bishopric after the Woodville marriage was announced (plus the Lord Chancellorship in 1467). Edward was capable of shameless illegality when convenient, as when he declared the Countess of Warwick (the widow of the ‘Kingmaker’) legally dead in order to pass on her lands to her sons-in-law, his brothers. In 1481 he did not return the estates and titles of his second son Richard’s defunct child-bride Anne Mowbray, heiress of the Dukes of Norfolk (and niece to Eleanor Butler), to her cousins as was legally required.73 Ironically, the king who righted this illegality was the ‘tyrant’ Richard III in 1483.If Edward had intended to deny marrying Elizabeth Woodville if convenient and then done so, Elizabeth and her family lacked the political power to force his hand; it remains possible that he would have gone on to commit a French or Castilian marital alliance. In that case, his ambitious brothers Clarence and Gloucester could then have used the marriage ceremony with Elizabeth Woodville as evidence to disinherit Edward IV’s children instead of the Butler ‘pre-contract’.

  Different results for the 1469 crisis. What if Edward had won at Edgecote, and what if he had had to flee England?

  Even if the Woodville marriage had gone ahead, Edward need not have faced disaster in 1469 or 1470. As mentioned above, he was dangerously slow to react in July 1469 and stayed inactive at Nottingham for weeks as the Redesdale rebels advanced and Warwick and Clarence evaded a summons to court and fled to Calais to carry out the marriage that the King had banned. Arguably, Edward was waiting for the arrival of Herbert’s Welshmen and Devon’s south-westerners, under commanders more loyal and aggressive than the lords in his own retinue who duly abandoned him at news of the defeat at Edgecote. Edward may have been correct not to trust his backers at Nottingham, or risk their loyalty in an attack on ‘Robin of Redesdale’, but he made no effort to hasten south-west to link up with Herbert or Devon and put himself in the hands of men he could trust. As events turned out, the two nobles quarrelled over lodgings when they met up and lodged their men separately so ‘Robin’ and his pro-Neville force were able to take Herbert’s men alone by surprise on 2 July and rout them. Devon’s men were, at best, late to the battle, and the arrival of a small force of Warwick’s men (rumoured by the royalists to be the Earl himself in force) completed the rout.74

  Had Edward been there to enforce harmony on his commanders, or the two men co-operated better, the royal forces should have outnumbered the rebels (who lacked an experienced and aristocratic general) and won. With the rebels defeated and royal forces more confident, Edward, Herbert, and Devon could have taken on Warwick and Clarence with a better hope of victory. Warwick had the Calais garrison troops but he was not that successful or innovative a general and had lost to the ex-Queen at St Albans in 1461; Edward had won against superior numbers at Mortimer’s Cross and was to do so again at Barnet, and Herbert had defeated Jasper Tudor in Wales in 1468.The chances are that Edward would have won against Warwick in August 1469 as he was to do against him in April 1471, not least as on the latter occasion he lacked the Herbert and Devon armies and Warwick had his brother Montague at his side. The open treason Warwick had committed would have been adequate grounds for forfeiture of his estates, though Edward would probably have forgiven Clarence as he was to do after worse desertion in 1470–1; as Isabel Neville was related to Clarence (via the latter’s mother, Cecily Neville, Warwick’s aunt) their marriage could be legally annulled if Edward wished it.

  Edward would have faced the dilemma of keeping Clarence loyal (he still lacked a son) by allowing him to keep Isabel as his wife and to receive her father’s forfeited estates as a bribe, or to break up the Neville ‘power-bloc’ by giving the Earl’s lands to loyalists. As Warwick’s brother Montague had not yet entered the field against Edward, there would be no reason to strip this so-far-loyal Neville of his power (which currently included the confiscated Percy estates and Northumberland title); it was Edward’s enforced return of the Percy grant to its rightful owner in 1470 that caused Montague to join the next revolt. Warwick would have had to flee into exile, as he did in 1470 when his next revolt failed, and would thus have been likely to link up with Queen Margaret in France under Louis XI’s patronage as in 1470; they could be expected to invade in due course. With the Woodvilles still dominant at court and Elizabeth’s father alive as Lord Treasurer, this could be used as a stimulus to encourage affronted magnates to desert the King at the first opportunity–but if Clarence had been bought off with (part of?) Warwick’s estates he would have been unlikely to desert Edward as he did in 1470.

  Even after Edgecote, with his demoralized men slipping away, Edward could have shown more speed and purpose in his retreat and evaded Archbishop Neville’s pursuers–although his lack of a ready army to fight another battle would have probably meant exile. Warwick would thus have had the choice of making his new son-in-law Clarence king, as he had apparently considered as early as 1467, or of deciding for Henry VI. He had some ex-Lancastrian backing in his 1469 rebellion, but in 1470–when he did restore Henry–he was in a weaker position as an exile who had been forced to ask Louis XI for aid and accept his invitation to link up with Margaret, his family’s arch-enemy. His manifesto in 1469 spoke of coercing not deposing the King, though this may have been subterfuge to maximize his support and reassure Yorkist lords that he aimed at removing the greedy Woodvilles not restoring Henry VI. If he had been successful in overthrowing and exiling Edward in 1469–possibly not his original intention–he would have
been in a different position from that of real-life August 1469, with Edward safe out of his reach. He was more likely to have backed Clarence as king than Henry, not needing French and Lancastrian aid as desperately as he did in real-life 1470. England would thus have been in the position of having two ex-kings, one at large and one in the Tower, the latter’s wife and heir in exile in France, and a weak ‘King George’ as a Neville puppet. The resulting potential for chaos and counter-coup would have been even greater than that of real-life spring 1471.

  Chapter Four

  The Fatal Blow to an Otherwise Stable Yorkist Government: The Early Death of Edward IV?

  What if he had not died aged forty and there had been no division of the dynasty’s adherents in a vicious and controversial fight over the succession?

  The Yorkist regime seemed firmly established from May 1471, with Henry VI and his heir both incontrovertibly dead and the nearest Lancastrian claimant now the exiled Henry Tudor, son of Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor. The 14-year-old suffered both from a lack of connections with the higher nobility (at most he had been to court once, during Henry VI’s ‘re-adeption’1) and from the fact that the Beaufort line had been barred from the throne by Act of Parliament in 1396 as illegitimate. This could be reversed, but all his landed male Beaufort kin (the line of his grandfather John Beaufort’s next brother) had been wiped out between 1455 and 1471 and his mother was safely re-married to the Yorkist stalwart Thomas Stanley. Henry’s only military backer from 1471 was the exiled Earl of Oxford, Warwick’s commander at Barnet in March 1471, who vainly seized St Michael’s Mount on his behalf but was blockaded, captured, and deported to the isolated castle prison of Hammes near Calais. Margaret of Anjou’s cousin and patron Louis XI recognized Edward IV’s restoration, no other English enemy had an interest in overturning the Yorkist order, and the young and vigorous Edward seemed set for a long and successful reign free from the overbearing presence of his cousin Warwick. Had he learnt from his mistakes in 1464–70, or would he repeat them?

  The break-up of Warwick’s concentration of land and power left the only figure able to challenge the King as the latter’s next surviving brother, Clarence, who had inherited half the Warwick estates via his wife Isabel and endeavoured to seize them all. Edward prevented that by acquiescing in the marriage of Isabel’s younger sister and co-heir, Anne, to his other brother Richard, which Clarence vainly resisted (supposedly by having Anne hidden in disguise in a London cook-shop).2 When it came to a confrontation between the King and Clarence after Isabel’s death in 1476, the King had his brother imprisoned in the Tower and tried for treason. Clarence’s recent behaviour had been provocative and foolish in the extreme, given his luck to be pardoned for his past desertion of Edward in 1470, and he had apparently consulted astrologers about the succession and openly challenged Council decisions. The fact that he had one of Isabel’s maids arrested, tried before a private ‘court’ composed of his adherents, and executed for ‘poisoning’ her suggests that he was crazed with grief and/or paranoid. But he had also had hopes of securing Duke Charles’ young heiress Mary of Burgundy as his next wife, which would give him the resources to invade England on Edward’s death if he wanted the throne, and Edward refused to accept this.3 The unstable Clarence might well revolt in retaliation, so securing him in the Tower avoided a repeat of his treachery in 1469 and 1470.

  Clarence was a major threat, given his vast landed estates and ‘affinity’, and Edward’s firm reaction was wiser than his extreme caution in 1469. The trial and condemnation for treason meant that he could seize Clarence’s estates and militarily neutralize him. But executing rather than imprisoning his brother would have been a major embarrassment for the King and some observers do not seem to have thought he would do it. In the end the death-sentence was carried out in February 1478, though Clarence was privately killed (supposedly being drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine) not beheaded.4 It is possible that we can see another instance of Edward’s already twice near-fatal lassitude in his initial lack of reaction to Clarence’s excesses in 1477; the Duke had been making wild allegations and his partisans had been breaking the law openly for months before Edward acted to arrest him. As in Henry VI’s years in power from c. 1440, great men close to the King seemed to be immune from punishment. The fact that the usually indulgent King was prepared to commit fratricide has led to modern speculation that he had to silence Clarence in order to prevent him revealing that the marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was illegal–or that Elizabeth and her family drove him to do it.5 This thorny issue is entangled with the question of whether the ‘Eleanor Butler betrothal’ actually occurred or was invented by Richard III in 1483.

  The years after the crisis of 1477–8 saw a return to domestic calm, though some historians have criticized Edward for his continued over-reliance on a small group of trusted lieutenants who had local power over a wide area concentrated in their hands. He had built up Warwick before 1469 (not that he had much choice, given his military/political debt to his cousin) and faced revolt; he had allowed similar licence to the less reliable and proven traitor Clarence after 1471 and faced open defiance. Now he granted extensive local power to Richard of Gloucester, making him his lieutenant in the north in Warwick’s old role (as was logical due to his marriage to Anne and ownership of Warwick’s principal castles of Middleham and Sheriff Hutton) but also creating a judicially autonomous principality for him on the Borders. The latter was a potential problem to the Crown, though it may have been mainly aimed at equipping and financing the Duke for future expansion into southern Scotland; it was unwise to alienate royal judicial and financial rights to any subject, however loyal.

  This might not have mattered to English politics had Edward continued to lead the government, Richard being as unswervingly loyal as William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (Edward’s other grantee of extensive local power) had been in Wales in the 1460s. But Edward died suddenly on 9 April 1483, just short of his 41st birthday, leaving a boy of 12 as his heir. Another round of domestic strife followed, this time with Richard and Edward’s wife’s family as the main protagonists, and the nature of Richard’s resulting usurpation of the throne was to give Henry Tudor an unexpected reversal of fortune. But what would have happened had Edward IV lived longer?

  The unfortunate timing of Edward IV’s death–and the potential role of Clarence. How the fall of Clarence fundamentally altered events in 1483

  As a result, Edward V would have been able to succeed as an adult or near-adult. Even at the age of 12 he did not need a formal ‘regent’, hence the confusion over what exactly was entailed by his uncle Richard being ‘Protector’ and for how long. By tradition, the closest male relative of the under-age King would serve as head of the regency council, with the most recent precedent having seen the Council refuse the right of Protectorship (in England) to the infant Henry VI’s uncle Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in 1422. (Humphrey was not the closest male relative, but his older brother the Duke of Bedford had been given the governorship of France by the late King’s will.) Ironically, if Edward IV had not killed Clarence in 1478 he would have been head of the Council in April 1483, and the record that the latter had for treason to his brother from 1469 was not reassuring. Given the difficulties of ‘back-dating’ the story of Edward’s alleged ‘pre-contract’ to Eleanor Butler beyond the sudden claims made by Richard in 1483, it is not certain that Clarence did regard himself as having a superior right to the throne to Edward V’s. Why was the supposed ‘witness’ (or backer of any witnesses) Bishop Stillington arrested at the time of Clarence’s fall in 1478 –to shut him up? However, irrespective of the ‘pre-contract’ claim Clarence had defied Edward IV to marry Warwick’s elder daughter and joined the Earl’s revolt in 1470, only returning to his brother’s side after Edward had landed in March 1471 and marched on his base at Coventry. He was politically unreliable and a potential threat to Edward V anyway, and we can see from his public resistance to Richard marrying his wife’s sister Anne Neville in 1471–2
that his ambitions had not been curbed by his near-escape from treason-charges in 1471. Technically Anne, widowed aged only 15 when her first husband Prince Edward of Lancaster was killed at Tewkesbury, was his ‘ward’ and he thus had the right to veto her choice of husband; and keeping her unwed kept her lands in his, not her husband’s, hands. But he would have been wise to submit the decision to the King, not insist on his rights and quarrel openly with her suitor, Richard, as testified to by the Paston Letters.6

  Clarence was an unstable and politically rash character, who Edward did not trust as a potential husband for the heiress of Burgundy in 1477 after his wife Isabel died in childbirth. Sending him to Burgundy with his armed retainers would keep its leaderless lands out of French hands, and keep him out of England for years to come, but the King presumably feared that he would use Burgundian resources to attack him or his heir later. Technically, English intervention by Clarence might also spark a war with the acquisitive Louis XI of France, long kept at bay from annexing Burgundian territories by the militarily superior Duke Charles–and Edward had shied away from fighting Louis during his invasion of France in 1475, signing an unpopular peace treaty. Protecting Burgundy from Louis would lead to the French King cancelling his subsidy to Edward, although the unreliable ‘Spider King’ had already violated his 1462 truce with Edward by backing Warwick and Queen Margaret in 1470 and was clearly capable of betraying Edward whenever convenient. Was Edward prepared to gamble–correctly–in 1477 that Louis’ other rival Maximilian of Habsburg, son of Emperor Frederick III, would save Burgundy from Louis and avoid him having to intervene?