Even though a fresh alliance with France was now out of the question, Jasper Tudor had refused to give up the fight. Now, heartened by Somerset’s re-defection to the Lancastrians, he began to look for new opportunities to pursue, and new foreign powers to support the cause. This came in the form of Duke Francis II of Brittany. Francis sent an envoy to meet Henry and Somerset, who assured him there was still considerable support across the country for the deposed king, and the restoration of his kingship would still be possible, if only he might be supplied with food, materials and men. Having spent Christmas at the exiled Lancastrian court, the envoy returned at the end of February 1464, with letters from Henry to his wife Margaret, her parents and the Duke of Brittany. Jasper travelled to France soon afterwards, arriving in Brittany in March. He carried with him letters from Louis XI, who did not believe that his truce with Edward prevented him from requesting that Brittany should give aid to Jasper in order to assist his return to Wales. Francis obliged, and on 26 March ordered that Jasper should be provided with the protection of a fleet led by the vice-admiral of Brittany, Alain de la Motte. However, in June, in a characteristically sudden change of mind, Louis XI wrote to the duke criticising him for the support he had given to Jasper, prompting a confused Francis to reply that he thought he had only been carrying out the French king’s wishes.
Meanwhile, in retaliation for Somerset’s double-dealing, Edward announced his intention to lead a force against the Lancastrians in the summer. Since Somerset’s defection, their cause had rallied and having gone on the offensive, several vital outposts had been captured which allowed them to control most of the countryside south of the border, and were threatening the Yorkist stronghold at Newcastle. Edward understood the urgency of the situation, and began to muster a massive royal army. A battle involving 5,000 Lancastrian troops took place at Hedgeley Moor on 25 April, resulting in a Yorkist victory, yet it was victory at the battle of Hexham on 15 May that ensured the virtual extinction of the Lancastrian cause. This time Edward would show no mercy. After the battle, over thirty Lancastrians were dragged out of their hiding places, rounded up and summarily executed, including Somerset who had been captured in pursuit. Bombarded by the king’s ‘great guns’ that caused its walls to crumble into the sea, Bamburgh soon capitulated. Henry VI was forced to flee into hiding, wandering the countryside until he was eventually captured in July 1465 and taken to the Tower.
It seemed that after nearly five years, Edward IV had finally succeeded in pacifying his kingdom, having weeded out the last remnants of Lancastrian opposition. While Margaret of Anjou remained exiled in ‘great poverty’ at her father’s residence in France, only Harlech Castle, described by one contemporary as ‘so strong’ that ‘it was impossible unto any man to get it’, remained in Lancastrian possession.
Jasper Tudor also remained at large, though his exact whereabouts during these dark years are unknown. Surviving hand to mouth, he embarked on raids across North Wales, where his fame in frustrating the Yorkist regime was admired by Welsh poets, who wrote of his ability to command raiding parties from the Dyfi estuary. One ally upon whom Jasper relied for support was Gruffydd Fychan of Corsygedol, whose residence at Barmouth, the fifteenth-century stone house, Ty Gwyn, was celebrated in verse as being the location which Jasper used as his headquarters, planning his next moves. Ultimately, however, Jasper’s fortunes as a renegade and a rebel without much of a cause would change little without the backing of a significant foreign power to provide the money and men necessary to embark upon a major invasion and pose a serious threat to Edward IV.
The tide of diplomacy had been in Edward’s favour ever since his agreement with Louis XI. Yet this was soon to change when, against the best advice of his most powerful supporters, the Earl of Warwick included, Edward set his heart on concluding new alliances with the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany in the spring of 1468. In doing so, he alienated Louis XI who, diplomatically isolated himself by the move, looked to seek revenge by once again taking up his cousin Jasper’s cause. On 1 June 1468, having been courted by Jasper and Margaret of Anjou in turn, he agreed to provide Jasper with three ships and £293 5s 5d to allow the earl to travel to Wales. In reality it was a paltry investment, with no chance of making much impact, yet Louis was not interested in backing a full-scale invasion of England. He merely sought to embarrass Edward for the affront of spurning his diplomatic advances; making his next move across the board, Jasper Tudor was the nearest convenient chess piece.
A convenient pawn he may have been, but Jasper was determined to make the most of his opportunity. Landing in the Dyfi estuary near Harlech on 24 June 1468, he set out across North Wales, marching towards Denbigh, where in the process his forces swelled to 2,000 men. At the same time, Jasper decided to hold assizes and formal court sessions ‘in King Harry’s name’, a gesture clearly designed to show that he considered Henry VI the rightful King of England. Jasper managed to capture Denbigh without difficulty, and in an act of open defiance burned down the new part of the town, leaving it ‘clear defaced with fire’, while Flintshire was so ravaged that it would struggle to pay taxes five years later. So impressive was the force and impact of Jasper’s lightning raid, that news spread across the courts of Europe, with the Milanese ambassador in Paris reporting that in response Margaret of Anjou was also journeying to visit Louis, in an attempt to solicit further assistance.
Evidently rattled by the progress Jasper was making through Wales, Edward IV ordered William, Lord Herbert and his brother-in-law Walter, Lord Ferrers to raise a large army from across Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and the Welsh Marches to crush the insurrection. A force of some 7,000 men was split in two: one wing moved across the North Wales coast and into the Conway valley, where it was ‘wasted with fire and sword’, the other moved north from Pembroke; both were to converge upon Harlech Castle from the east and the south. Hopelessly outnumbered, the fortress surrendered with only slight resistance on 14 August. Jasper managed to escape his enemies and, according to the Welsh chronicler Elis Gruffyd, gave them the slip, managing to commandeer a boat from a gentleman ‘living at Mostyn … at a place called Picton pool’. Mention of Mostyn suggests that the Tudors may have been helped by the Conway family; John Conway was the lessee of the township of Mostyn lordship, though help may have also been given by one of Jasper’s kinsmen, Hywel ab Ieuan Fychan of Pengwern and Mostyn. In order to disguise himself, Jasper had to carry a ‘bundle of pease pods’ on his back, ‘for fear that someone should spot him – for there were plenty to spy on him in those parts’. Boarding the boat, he managed to sail to Brittany ‘more through the craft of the earl than the craft of the boatmen of Picton’.
In spite of the early success of his invasion, Jasper had suffered a devastating setback. The once impregnable fortress at Harlech had fallen, and with it was removed from Lancastrian possession their only toe-hold left in the kingdom. His humiliation was complete when in September 1468 Edward, delighted with the outcome, rewarded Herbert for his crushing of the rebellion and capture of Harlech with Jasper’s own Earldom of Pembroke. Jasper was not the only person dismayed by Edward’s decision to raise Herbert to the earldom, a sign of his rising favour and influence at court. Silently fuming, the Earl of Warwick watched as he saw a man he considered an upstart from relative obscurity take his place alongside him as an earl, his equal. For too long, Warwick believed, he had suffered in silence; action would need to be taken, and he, the kingmaker, would be the one to act.
‘Now take heed,’ wrote one contemporary observer, ‘what love may do.’ It was a lesson that Edward IV learnt to his peril. An attractive and energetic young man standing six foot three inches tall, with ‘a goodly personage and very princely to behold’, Edward IV had an eye for the ladies, particularly those at court, and he ‘pursued with no discrimination the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly’, casting off his conquests to other courtiers ‘as soon as he had satisfied his lust … much against their will’. Nevertheless, for the security o
f the Yorkist dynasty, it was vital that the king should marry. The Earl of Warwick, believing that Edward owed him his kingdom, and that in turn all matters of English policy should come under his influence, had taken a strong interest in arranging a French marriage for Edward, and had entered into negotiations with Louis XI for the hand of the French king’s sister-in-law, Bona of Savoy. The match would have secured a lasting peace between England and France, something which Warwick considered particularly vital given Louis’s previous support for his Lancastrian cousins.
Edward refused to listen to the earl’s reasoning. Early in the morning on 1 May 1464, Edward departed the court in secret. Why he did so, no one would find out until four months later, but the consequences of his actions that May morning would be politically explosive. Edward had married Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Sir John Grey, who had died fighting for the Lancastrians at St Albans in 1459. Her mother was Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the aristocratic princess who had been married to the Duke of Bedford; Jacquetta had then gone on to marry Elizabeth’s father, Richard Woodville, a humble member of the gentry. For a king to marry a commoner was unthinkable, let alone a woman who was four years older than him with two children from her previous marriage; when the king publicly announced that he was already married in September, the council was astounded, protesting that ‘she was not his match, that however good and fair she might be, she was not a wife for so high a prince as he’. Edward would hear none of it. Clearly infatuated with his new bride, chroniclers wrote in amazement how they spent ‘three or four hours’ in bed, with some even claiming that Elizabeth had used witchcraft or sorcery to place a spell upon him. Still, for the old nobility like Warwick, accustomed to the order of rank and dignity, matters were about to get much worse.
The arrival of Elizabeth Woodville at court could scarcely have been greeted with greater controversy. Ambitious and determined to obtain advancement for her family, the new queen set about providing for her twelve brothers and sisters. Within a month of the royal marriage, her sister Margaret had been betrothed to the Earl of Arundel’s heir; this followed with successive marriages for her sisters to the Duke of Buckingham and the heirs to the Duke of Exeter and the Earl of Kent. When her twenty-year-old brother John married the Duchess of Norfolk, in her sixties and on her fourth marriage, the court recoiled at the sheer indignity of the grasping family, prepared to make such ‘diabolical’ unions, all it seemed, for the sake of greed. It did not help matters that the duchess was in fact Warwick’s aunt, but it was the planned marriage of Thomas Grey, Elizabeth Woodville’s son from her first marriage, to Lady Anne Holland, the heiress to the Duke of Exeter, that caused Warwick’s ‘great and secret displeasure’ since Lady Anne had previously been betrothed to the son of Warwick’s brother, Lord Montagu. For the earl, a pattern was beginning to emerge: his family’s influence was beginning to be slowly eroded by the upstart Woodvilles, as Warwick’s uncle Lord Mountjoy was replaced as treasurer by Elizabeth’s father, the newly created Earl Rivers. Warwick’s position as premier nobleman and power-broker was under threat from a group of parvenus.
It was not merely his status at court that concerned Warwick; the earl had earned a significant reputation at the courts of Europe as the most powerful man in England, to whom Edward IV owed his throne: as one foreign chronicler remarked, Warwick ‘might also be called the King’s father as a result of the services and education he had given him’. Louis XI was intrigued by Warwick, and in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the earl, during the course of several embassies during the 1460s, had won him over to the idea of an Anglo-French treaty. When instead Edward, influenced by Earl Rivers, began to favour a treaty with Burgundy, England’s largest trading partners, it was a public humiliation for Warwick, whose influence and control of the king had been exposed as a sham.
Relations between Edward and Warwick worsened when it was suggested as part of an agreement that Edward’s sister Margaret of York should marry Charles, Count of Charolais, the eldest son of Duke Philip of Burgundy, while Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence should marry Philip’s daughter Mary. Warwick was aghast. He had hoped that, without a male heir, and with the Woodville clan claiming most available aristocratic marriages for their own (indeed every English earl who had an available heir to marry had chosen for them a Woodville wife), he would be able to marry his two daughters to Edward’s younger brothers, George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
Warwick had done much to flatter the two young men. Like Warwick, both brothers had been ‘sorely displeased’ at their brother’s marriage, and had to witness the unedifying spectacle of their mother Cecily having to kneel in homage before the new queen at court. Warwick had taken Richard into his household as one of his ‘henchmen’ in 1465, where he was trained in the arts of war at Warwick’s castle at Middleham in north Yorkshire. Yet Richard was still a boy, too young to have much influence at court; to begin with, Warwick’s target was Clarence, the heir presumptive to the throne, in whom the earl would seek to fulfil his ambitions.
One chronicler wrote a circumstantial account of how in the autumn of 1464, shortly after Edward’s announcement of his marriage, Warwick invited George, then aged fifteen, and Richard, aged twelve, to Cambridge where he suggested that Clarence should marry his eldest daughter Isabel, and Richard his younger daughter Anne. When Edward discovered what had happened he summoned both boys to his presence, where they were ferociously reprimanded. For Edward, a marriage between Warwick’s daughter and Clarence was out of the question. Clarence was heir presumptive; Edward and the Woodvilles would hardly allow Warwick’s influence to extend to becoming yet another kingmaker.
For Clarence, the king’s refusal to allow his marriage was an uncomfortable bridle. He had no other reason to be dissatisfied with his own position, having been appointed as the King’s Lieutenant in Ireland in 1462, while in 1464 he had been endowed with the lands of the Earldom of Chester, traditionally reserved for the Prince of Wales, enriching his wealth to around £3,666 13s 4d a year. But it seems that, encouraged by Warwick, ambition had got the better of him.
By 1467 Warwick was once again pursuing the duke, complaining to him how Rivers and the Woodvilles controlled the court; offering to make Clarence King of England or governor of the realm, he told the duke that the entire country would support him. It was clear that some agreement had been reached when, as Jasper Tudor planned his attempted invasion in Wales, rumours circulated that a plot was planned at court. A shoemaker named Cornelius, under torture in the Tower confessed that several Lancastrian sympathisers had been conspiring with Margaret of Anjou, including Lord Wenlock, a close friend of Warwick’s, and John de Vere, the thirteenth Earl of Oxford, Warwick’s brother-in-law. Confessing his innocence, Oxford, whose own father had been executed as a traitor six years previously, was lucky to escape with his life. Others were not so fortunate. Several were charged in May 1468 for having plotted, with Margaret of Anjou, the ‘final death and final destruction’ of Edward IV and, found guilty, executed.
Further insult was heaped upon Warwick when his brother George Neville, the chancellor and Archbishop of York, who had been working hard to gain a papal dispensation for Clarence and Isabel’s marriage, was sacked from his position as chancellor after he refused to meet representatives from Burgundy. Edward was determined to press ahead with his sister’s marriage to Charles, and despite the dowry costing a ruinous 200,000 gold crowns (£41,666 13s 4d), the marriage took place in Flanders in July 1468, ‘much against’ Warwick’s wishes, who now developed a ‘deadly hatred’ of Charles. Warwick understood that the marriage and alliance, which had brought England into partnership with Brittany and Burgundy, were part of a prelude to war against France. Two months before, the king had announced to Parliament that, with the new alliance with Burgundy, he intended to wage war on ‘his old and ancient adversary’, for which he obtained a substantial grant in taxation. In August Edward agreed to send 7,000 archers to assist the Duke of Brittany ag
ainst France, and during the autumn months a fleet was actively being prepared at Portsmouth, ready to sail as part of a planned invasion of France to take place the following year.
In fact, in a calculated gamble, Louis had himself made peace with Brittany and Burgundy in October 1468, making any invasion practically impossible. For fear of humiliation, Edward hid the truth, claiming that Margaret of Anjou was preparing to invade England from Harfleur; he spent £18,000 on ordering the fleet to patrol the Channel instead. It was this kind of waste that confirmed contemporary writers’ opinions that taxpayer’s money was being frittered away, that law and order were breaking down with ‘great riots and oppressions done to our subjects’, with the king’s councillors, especially the Woodvilles, enriching themselves at the expense of the common people. It was in this explosive atmosphere that rebellion broke out in the north in the spring of 1469, led by one ‘Robin of Redesdale’. Robin’s real identity may have been Sir William Conyers, the brother of Sir John Conyers, the constable of Warwick’s castle at Middleham. In a familiar echo of the revolts of the 1450s, manifestos were circulated calling for the deposition of the king’s evil advisers, in particular the Woodville clan. Worryingly, another rumour began to circulate that Edward himself was a bastard and that Clarence should be the rightful King of England.
In spite of initial attempts to crush the rebellion, the ‘mighty insurrection’ began to move south, numbering an estimated 20,000 men. When news of the rising unrest reached Edward, he decided to move north, waiting at Fotheringay Castle for reinforcements to arrive. These were slow in assembling, and when it became clear that none would be ready in time, Edward withdrew to Nottingham Castle to wait for Welsh troops that had been promised by William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. With the situation deteriorating daily, on 9 July, Edward wrote to Warwick and Clarence, both of whom had suspiciously not yet offered any military support, demanding that they show their loyalty. He received no response.
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