by Jones, Nigel
Warwick had another monarch in mind to place upon the throne that Edward had sullied. The king had two surviving younger brothers. The youngest, Richard, Duke of Gloucester – one day to become England’s most notorious king – had, aged seventeen, shown loyalty amounting to hero worship of his glamorous royal brother. The elder, George, Duke of Clarence, was cut from very different cloth. These two would find prominent places in the Tower’s pantheon. One would become its greatest villain, the other its most bizarre victim. Clarence, born in 1449, was accurately summed up by Shakespeare as ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’. Tall, like his brother, the duke had few other of Edward’s regal characteristics. Treacherous, malicious and impulsive, eaten up by envy and ambition, Clarence had foes aplenty, but he was his own worst enemy.
Once Warwick had abandoned dreams of being the king’s puppet master and turned to plotting his destruction, he chose Clarence as his cat’s paw. As captain of Calais, Warwick strongly favoured a French alliance to drive a wedge between the wily King Louis XI and the Lancastrian exiles planning a comeback from France led by Margaret of Anjou. Edward, dreaming of reigniting the Hundred Years’ War, allied himself with France’s great rival Burgundy, whose ruler, Duke Charles the Bold, had married his sister Margaret. As the 1460s wore on, there were growing signs that the exiled court of Queen Margaret in France had well-placed sympathisers in England. And Warwick carefully stirred and seasoned the bubbling cauldron of discontent.
In June 1468, a cobbler, John Cornelius, was arrested in Kent as he boarded a ship for France. Cornelius was a Lancastrian courier smuggling letters between Margaret’s court and secret Lancastrian cells in England. He was taken to the Tower and in the torture chambers beneath the White Tower the soles of the shoemaker’s feet were seared with flaming torches until, in his agony, he began to gasp out his contacts’ names. They were a surprisingly high-placed circle, including city merchants, squires and knights. All were hauled into the Tower in their turn and tortured. One of those arrested was another Lancastrian agent, John Hawkins, a servant of Lord John Wenlock, a veteran soldier and former Speaker of the House of Commons who was a strong supporter of Warwick.
Hawkins was stretched on the most fearsome instrument in the Tower’s orchestra of pain: the rack. As his agonised screams echoed off the cellar walls with the tautening of the rack’s rollers, dragging his limbs from their sockets, Hawkins too named names, and an ever widening circle of covert Lancastrians came under suspicion. Hawkins and Cornelius, both limping from their tortures, were brought before Chief Justice Sir John Markham. The judge, an unusually humane man for that brutal age, refused to admit the Crown’s evidence against them as it had clearly been coerced by torture.
The queen’s father, Lord Rivers, the new Lord Treasurer, told the king that the uncooperative judge should be fired, to which Edward agreed. Poor Cornelius was then returned to the Tower’s torture chambers and still more vicious methods were applied. Red-hot pincers tore chunks of flesh from his body. These extreme measures killed Cornelius before he named more Lancastrian co-conspirators. Frustrated, the authorities continued the wave of arrests and executions into 1469. The moving force behind this reign of terror, from motives of avarice as much as political expediency, was the Woodville family.
Like the Despensers under Edward II, or the Beauforts behind Henry VI, the Woodvilles had become the inspiring instruments of royal tyranny. Idle Edward too easily let his spouse’s family have their grasping way. When John Hawkins, again under torture in the Tower, let slip the name of Sir Thomas Cook as a Lancastrian sympathiser, the Woodvilles seized their opportunity. Cook, a wealthy London alderman and former lord mayor, had in his house a costly wall tapestry or arras, woven in gold thread, depicting the siege of Jerusalem. This had been coveted by the queen’s mother, Jacquetta, now Duchess of Bedford, who had unsuccessfully offered Cook £800 for it.
When Cook was brought into the Tower for questioning, Jacquetta’s husband, Lord Rivers, ordered his men-at-arms to plunder Cook’s house. They turned his wife and family into the street and seized the Jerusalem arras, along with several other tapestries, also making off with jewels, plus quantities of gilt and silver plate. Although Hawkins withdrew the accusations against Cook that had been wrung from him under torture, the authorities refused to release the alderman. Indeed, the king stripped him of his office, and grasping Queen Elizabeth got in on her parents’ act by demanding – under an obscure old law called ‘Queen’s Gold’ – a cut of £800 in addition to the massive £8,000 fine that Cook had to pay to secure his release from the Tower. He never recovered the goods or the cash that the Woodvilles had stolen, and died in poverty.
One nobleman who never wavered in his loyalty to the fallen House of Lancaster was John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. His fidelity had been cemented in blood in 1462 after his father, the 12th Earl, and elder brother Aubrey, accused of plotting to restore the Lancastrians, were flung into the Tower and, despite their noble status, brutally executed. Father and son were first hanged, before being cut down half choked but still alive, castrated, then forced to watch their genitals burned in the executioners’ brazier. Next they were disembowelled while tied to chairs and had their intestines wound out of their abdomens on to a roller. After this gruesome display they were finally beheaded and their pitch-coated heads were spiked on London Bridge.
King Edward clumsily attempted to buy the loyalty of the new Earl of Oxford. He waived the usual attainder that prevented the relatives of traitors from inheriting their titles and estates; released his aged mother from house arrest and pardoned her; and allowed Oxford to take up his family’s hereditary office of Lord Chamberlain. Finally, he married Oxford to Warwick’s sister, Margaret. The king’s actions show that Edward – whatever his other gifts – was no psychologist. Though outwardly conforming – even presiding as chamberlain over Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation in 1465 – despite or because of the grim fate of his father and brother, Oxford remained an irreconcilable secret Lancastrian, awaiting his opportunity to strike.
As other Lancastrians were tortured in the Tower, they took cold comfort from the fact that the object of their steadfast loyalty – the shadow of the man who had once been Henry VI – was eking out his existence in the same fortress where they suffered. Late in 1468 there was a fresh wave of arrests. Those held included John Poynings and Richard Alford, accused of contacting the new Duke of Somerset – Edmund, a former prisoner in the Tower – and now a leading light at Queen Margaret’s exiled court. Poynings and Alford were tortured before being executed on Tower Hill along with Richard Steeres, a pioneer of tennis in England and former servant of that other great Lancastrian stalwart, the Duke of Exeter. Steeres, like Cornelius, had been caught carrying letters to Queen Margaret. Finally, after the arrests of the heirs of two West Country Lancastrian lords, Sir Thomas Hungerford and Henry Courteney, a bigger fish – the Earl of Oxford himself – landed in the Tower.
After the awful fate dealt to his father and brother there, the young earl must have believed that his last hour had come, and that his next station after his Tower cell would be the scaffold. Instead, miraculously, he was released at Christmas 1468 after just a few weeks. Oxford’s stay in the Tower may have been short, but it was not easy. According to a contemporary report he was ‘kept in irons’ but whether this means that he was merely shackled, or subjected to the excruciating torture of being hanged, by his wrists from iron manacles, we do not know. It seems probable that the pressure was sufficient to open Oxford’s lips, for the same letter records that ‘he has confessed much’ and soon afterwards Hungerford and Courtenay were both hanged, drawn and quartered for treason.
In April 1469, King Edward pardoned Oxford for ‘all the offences committed by him’. But having seen the inside of the Tower, and experienced how murderous the Yorkist regime could be, Oxford was not willing to wait on the king’s fickle favours. In July, less than three months after his pardon, he was off. At Canterbury he attended a rendezvous of
the discontented. There he met Richard, Earl of Warwick; Edward’s unruly brother Clarence; Warwick’s brother George Neville, Archbishop of York; and Warwick’s eldest daughter Isabel, whom the king had banned from marrying Clarence – thereby offending both his brother and Warwick. The high-ranking band of malcontents all had burning grievances against Edward and the Woodvilles. Defying the king, they set sail for Warwick’s citadel of Calais bent on vengeance.
There followed a year of complex plots, revolts and battles during which Warwick defied the king by marrying Isabel to Clarence; incited revolts against Edward; invaded England; deposed his protégé the King; executed the patriarch of the hated Woodvilles, the queen’s father Lord Rivers; and at one stage had two monarchs – Henry VI in the Tower, and Edward IV at Middleham in Yorkshire – in captivity. This earned him the nickname ‘the Kingmaker’. But the Kingmaker still needed a king. Edward turned the tables when a genuine Lancastrian revolt forced Warwick to release him to defeat it. Restored to his kingship, Edward proclaimed Warwick and Clarence rebels and traitors, forcing them to flee to France
Barred from Calais, when Warwick and Clarence finally landed in France they made straight for the court of the scheming Louis XI. The French king, keen to keep England weak and divided, advised Warwick to do the unthinkable: make peace with his arch-enemy, Queen Margaret of Anjou. Warwick saw the sense in combining against the common foe. In August 1470 he met Margaret in Angers Cathedral. The haughty queen kept the proud earl on his knees for a quarter of an hour as he begged forgiveness for his past misdeeds, and talked up the advantages of their unnatural alliance. At last Margaret relented. To seal the deal, it was agreed that Warwick’s younger daughter, Anne, should marry Margaret’s son Prince Edward. As a sop to the now redundant Clarence, it was decided that he should be heir to the throne should Edward and Anne fail to produce children.
Margaret made clear it would be up to Warwick to do the heavy lifting necessary to prise King Edward from his throne, release her husband Henry VI from the Tower, and smooth the way for her son’s belated entry to the city he had not seen since leaving it as an infant seventeen years before. To prepare for his invasion, Warwick repeated the same tactics he had used the previous year. He fomented another Lancastrian revolt in the north to lure Edward from London. Then, in mid-September, with sixty ships fitted out by King Louis, Warwick landed in Devon accompanied by Clarence, Oxford and Jasper Tudor. King Edward had left his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, pregnant with her third royal child, in the palace at the Tower, having had the apartments there expensively refurbished for the birth of what he hoped would be his first son and heir. But the queen had her mind on more than her coming confinement. Well aware of Warwick’s bitter hostility to her and her clan, she had the Tower ‘full victualled and fortified’ against a possible siege; the king having previously taken the precaution of bringing in large cannon from Bristol with extra ammunition to add to the Tower’s armoury.
Edward was in York when he heard of Warwick’s arrival. Always supremely confident of his own ability, Edward trustingly relied on another Warwick sibling, John Neville, Marquess of Montagu, to hold the north while he hurried south to meet and beat Warwick. However, at Doncaster, Edward heard alarming news: Montagu had defected to his brother’s side and was hastening to arrest Edward. With no time to finish his dinner, Edward fled, accompanied by his youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester; his bosom friend William Hastings; and the young Lord Anthony Rivers, now head of the Woodville family. The little group rode hell for leather for the Norfolk coast, finding two Dutch ships about to sail home. Edward had no cash to pay for his passage, and gave the skipper a gown trimmed with the fur of pine martens in lieu of a fee. In this bedraggled manner they were put ashore on Burgundian soil. After a decade’s reign, Edward IV had lost his kingdom.
The news of her husband’s flight reached Queen Elizabeth at the Tower on 1 October. At the same time she heard of the rapid approach of Warwick with some 30,000 men. London was already in a state of high fear after the men of Kent, inspired by Warwick’s agents, had attacked the city, targeting, as in the Peasants’ Revolt, its large Flemish community. The Flemings, subjects of the Duke of Burgundy who had given shelter to the fallen King Edward, were considered fair game. Shaken by the sudden turn of fortune, and eight months’ pregnant, the queen abandoned any idea of defending the Tower. With her mother and two infant daughters she vacated the fortress and – not for the last time in her turbulent life – sought sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.
The next day Warwick’s advance guard entered the city. On 3 October the constable of the Tower – the sadistic John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester – peacefully surrendered the fortress. His gesture did Tiptoft little good. Although Warwick and Clarence had issued a general pardon, Tiptoft, uniquely, was excluded. Guessing what fate awaited him, the constable fled to a forest in the Midlands where he was found hiding in a treetop, and was brought back to the Tower. The cruel constable had incurred particular odium for impaling the bodies of some Warwick supporters on stakes after hanging them, and could have expected no mercy from the earl. The judge was Lord Oxford, whose brother and father Tiptoft had had butchered so gruesomely on Tower Hill. Now Oxford had the sweet revenge of seeing Tiptoft beheaded on the same spot. The constable – a noted classical scholar, despite his brutality – made a bizarre final request to the executioner. He asked that his head should be struck off with three strokes of the axe in honour of the Trinity.
Control of the Tower, and with it, custody of King Henry, had passed to Warwick’s lieutenant, Sir Geoffrey Gate. Fearing that too sudden a transformation would tip the king’s fragile mind into insanity again, Gate selected a cleric as the most suitable person to break the shocking news to the devout but now institutionalised monarch that he was no longer a prisoner and would be required once again to act out the role of a king. Bishop Wainfleet of Winchester was chosen to bear these tidings, and he, accompanied by London’s lord mayor, gently brought Henry out from his gloomy lodgings blinking into the daylight, ‘a man amazed, utterly dulled with troubles and adversities’. Neglected during his long incarceration, the king was unwashed, scruffy, smelly and reluctant to resume his royal functions. Or, as the Cambridge chronicler John Warkworth put it, ‘Not so worshipfully arrayed, and not so cleanly kept as should seem [befit] such a prince.’
Gate made sure that Henry was given a bath and reclothed in garments suiting his renewed regal status, before moving him into the same freshly decorated apartments in the Tower’s palace that Queen Elizabeth had just left. On 5 October, Warwick’s brother, Archbishop Neville, arrived at the Tower to greet Henry, and the following day the Kingmaker himself finally entered the city. Warwick went straight to the Tower where, with much bowing and scraping to Henry, as Warkworth tells us, ‘he did to him great reverence, and brought him to the palace of Westminster, and so he [Henry] was restored to the crown again’. Another chronicler reported that the king, far from rejoicing in the sudden transformation in his status, was ‘as mute as a calf’.
On 13 October Henry was re-crowned in St Paul’s Cathedral, with Warwick carrying the king’s train, and Lord Oxford bearing his sword before him. Henry was then housed in the suitably clerical surroundings of the Bishop of London’s palace, where he did precisely nothing while Warwick ruled his realm.
The Kingmaker was surrounded by enemies – past, present and potential. In addition to the resentful Lancastrians, there were his former Yorkist friends, primarily the exiled Edward. Above all, though, there was Clarence. The treacherous duke had originally allied with Warwick out of ambition, but now, with Henry restored and his son Prince Edward as heir, Clarence’s prospects looked poorer than ever. Even before returning from France with Warwick, messages had reached Clarence from his brother, promising forgiveness if he deserted Warwick and reverted to his family allegiance. To get the awkward duke out of the way, Warwick sent Clarence to Dublin as Lieutenant of Ireland. Here, however, in his father’s old stamping ground,
Yorkist pressure on him increased. His aged mother and his three sisters combined to turn the screw and Clarence succumbed. He agreed to support Edward when the ousted king returned.
Almost as soon as he learned that his wife had given birth to his first son – another Edward – at Westminster, Edward IV made his move. With thirty-six ships, a thousand Yorkists and a small mercenary army provided by his brother-in-law Duke Charles of Burgundy, he left the Dutch port of Flushing. His fleet scattered by storms, Edward landed alone at Ravenspur in Yorkshire – auspiciously the same spot where Henry IV had put ashore seventy-two years before to wrest the throne from Richard II.
Edward made his way south, gathering troops. In the Midlands he linked up with Clarence who had collected ‘a considerable army’ and announced his defection from Warwick. The Kingmaker was in the fortified city of Coventry – a traditional Lancastrian stronghold where he and Oxford had mustered a sizeable army. The earl had left his brother, Archbishop Neville, in charge in London. Fearing that events were again tipping Edward’s way, the cleric tried a desperate measure to boost support. He paraded King Henry around the city on horseback. But the gesture backfired. One glance at the wretched king, dressed in an old blue gown, and staring absently around him, served to diminish rather than rally support. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Archbishop Neville himself put out secret feelers to Edward, offering to surrender the city. But the key to London, as ever, was the Tower. And during the night of 10 April, in a prearranged coup, Yorkist agents seized the fortress. The capital now lay wide open and the next day Edward, accompanied by his brothers Clarence and Richard, entered it at the head of his 7,000-strong army. There was no resistance.
Edward made straight for St Paul’s Cathedral where the Archbishop of Canterbury solemnly declared King Henry deposed again – and gave thanks to God for King Edward’s return. Before being reunited with his wife, daughters and newborn son at Westminster Abbey, Edward’s next port of call was the Bishop of London’s palace. Here George Neville fearfully awaited him with his royal charge. King Henry was characteristically mild-mannered in his greeting. ‘My cousin of York, you are very welcome,’ he declared, adding trustingly, ‘I know that my life will not be in danger in your hands.’ Edward wasted no time in packing Henry back to his old familiar quarters in the Tower. Henry’s feeling on being returned to those secure surroundings – replacing various Yorkist lords who had been held there by Warwick – was probably one of relief.