The Demon's Brood

by Desmond Seward

Retrospect – ‘King Henry the Saint’

  Henry VI’s inadequacy was a major cause of the Wars of the Roses, yet no king who lost his throne has ever been so popular. After his murder many of his subjects venerated him as a martyr, and by 1473 prayers were being said before his image on a stone screen in York Minster that portrayed the kings of England. In 1479 Edward had it removed, besides trying vainly to prevent pilgrims from flocking to Henry’s grave at Chertsey.

  Richard III reburied him in St George’s Chapel, where his tomb attracted no fewer pilgrims than Becket’s at Canterbury. He was credited with many miracles, generally of healing – the most spectacular were bringing back to life a plague victim who was being sewn into her shroud, and preventing the rope from hanging a man falsely accused of theft. In churches and cathedrals throughout the land, he was commemorated with images on rood screens, in stained glass windows and paintings, with fervent hymns and prayers composed in his honour. As Stubbs puts it, he ‘left a mark on the hearts of Englishmen that was not soon effaced . . . the king who had perished for the sins of his fathers and of the nation’.34 Before the break with Rome, as heirs of the Lancastrians the Tudors hoped to have him canonized, planning to rebury his remains in their new chapel at Westminster. Even after the rupture, the banner of ‘King Henry the Saint’ was carried at Henry VIII’s funeral.

  Catholics continued to venerate him. In 1713 Alexander Pope referred to the ‘Martyr–King’ in his poem Windsor Forest, while during the 1920s there was an unsuccessful campaign to secure his canonization.35 Later, he became one of Evelyn Waugh’s favourite saints.

  13

  The Self-Made King – Edward IV

  It was in the hour of need that his genius showed itself, cool, rapid, subtle, utterly fearless, moving straight to its aim through clouds of treachery and intrigue, and striking hard when its aim was reached . . . His indolence and gaiety were in fact mere veils thrown over a will of steel

  John Richard Green1

  The conqueror

  The reason why the Yorkists won at Towton was Edward IV’s leadership. Even in a snowstorm, he stood out. A giant in ‘white’ (burnished) armour with a coronet on his helmet, wherever he pushed his way forward his pole-axe felled every enemy who dared to face him.

  For Stubbs, Edward was ‘vicious far beyond any king that England had seen since the days of John, and more cruel and bloodthirsty than any king she had ever known’.2 But Stubbs could not forgive him for destroying a Lancastrian constitution that never existed. There were Victorians who disagreed with Stubbs, such as Green, with whom the king’s contemporaries would certainly have sided. Thomas More, only five when Edward died, but friendly with men who had known him, says he was ‘of heart courageous, politic in counsel, in adversity nothing abashed, in prosperity rather joyful than proud, in peace just and merciful, in war sharp and fierce, in the field bold and hardy’.3

  Edward IV gave England the firm rule she had lacked for decades. The best-looking man of his day, with a magnetic personality, he ended by being worshipped by his subjects who overlooked his massacres as well as murders, that included his predecessor, his brother and his brother-in-law.

  Youth

  Edward was born on 28 April 1442 at Rouen where his father Richard, Duke of York was Lieutenant General of Lancastrian France. His mother Cicely Neville, the Earl of Westmorland’s eighteenth child, was known in the north country as the Rose of Raby from her beauty. (Stories of Edward being the bastard of an archer called Blaybourne when York was away are ridiculous – if the duke was defending Pontoise at the time the boy was conceived, he could have commuted to Rouen quickly enough, on a ballinger along the Seine.) His nurse was a Norman girl, Anne of Caux, to whom he gave a large pension after he became king. He spent most of his childhood in the great castle at Ludlow, York’s favourite residence.

  In 1454 Edward was created Earl of March. The next year, barely thirteen, he accompanied his father to St Albans, and presumably watched the battle. When the duke and his friends fled from Ludford Bridge, instead of going to Ireland with his father, Edward went to Calais with Salisbury and York, returning with them to London in summer 1459. Had he ridden north with York in December, history might have been different – his brother the Earl of Rutland was stabbed to death after the Battle of Wakefield by Lord Clifford, who shouted, ‘By God’s blood, thy father slew mine and so will I and all thy kin!’4

  March had gone to crush Henry’s army in south Wales, 2,000 strong and led by Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, which was marching towards London to join Queen Margaret. On 2 February 1461 it was intercepted by Edward with a slightly larger force, on the banks of the River Lug at Mortimer’s Cross near Leominster. His men were alarmed at seeing three suns in the sky (a ‘sundog’) but he assured them it was a good omen – ‘therefore let us have a good heart and in the name of almighty God, go we against our enemies!’5 In his first battle as a commander, he routed Jasper Tudor’s men, who became bogged down advancing over marshy ground, then launched a ferocious pursuit. When sensing victory Edward always gave the order, ‘Kill the gentles and spare the commons!’,6 sending captured enemy leaders to the block. Among the dozen beheaded this time was Owen Tudor, the former husband of King Henry’s late mother.

  Then he joined forces in the Cotswolds with Warwick, who had just escaped from defeat at St Albans. Fourteen years older, the ‘Kingmaker’, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick had married the heiress of the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick (just as his father married the heiress of the Montague Earls of Salisbury) and become England’s richest magnate, while the deaths of his father and his uncle York turned him into an elder statesman. If a poor soldier, prone to panic and losing the two battles where he commanded, Warwick was a redoubtable fighting seaman who when Captain of Calais rid the Channel of pirates. He was also an exceptionally wily and determined politician, his young cousin relying on his support.

  Shaken by Margaret’s victory at St Albans, the pair knew they were dead men without a king of their own. March therefore claimed the throne as his father’s son and by right of the Accord of 1460, riding into London on 28 February. He was warmly welcomed, if observers noted that apart from Warwick there were few great lords with him – his only other ally of substance, the Duke of Norfolk, was absent, raising East Anglia. At Westminster on 4 March, although not crowned king, ‘Edward IV’ was invested with the Confessor’s regalia.

  On 13 March he rode out from the City to find and destroy Margaret, driving his army of about 16,000 men so hard that regardless of snow and bad roads it covered 180 miles in sixteen days. He then engaged an army of fellow countrymen numbering approximately 20,000 who firmly believed that Henry VI was their rightful sovereign.

  The Lancastrians occupied a strong defensive position on higher ground, but the wind blew the snow into their faces so that the Yorkist archers outshot them. Forced to come down and fight at close quarters, they held their own for six hours. Even after the Duke of Norfolk arrived with Yorkist reinforcements and charged their flank, they fought on into the dusk before breaking. Thousands were killed as they tried to flee over the narrow bridge across the River Cock or drowned in the little river which was in spate. An area of snow-covered ground 6 miles long and 3 miles wide was red with blood – heralds are said to have counted 28,000 bodies, although 16,000 is a more likely figure. Edward had ordered his men to give no quarter, and magnates and gentry taken prisoner were beheaded on the battlefield.7

  Coronation

  When Edward returned to London he was greeted euphorically. Not only had he won a decisive victory, but he was strikingly different from the former sovereign – young, handsome, high spirited, commanding. Everybody expected reform and good government. There was a sense of renewal during his coronation at Westminster Abbey on 29 June 1461, and when Parliament met in November it warmly confirmed his right to the throne, the Speaker even complimenting him on his ‘beauty of personage’. Henry VI was attainted as a usurper, with twelve peers and a hundred knights and sq
uires who, whether dead or alive, became outlaws under sentence of death, losing their lands and property. Two new earls and seven new barons were created, while his brothers were made princes – George, Duke of Clarence and Richard, Duke of Gloucester – and England acquired a new royal family.

  Edward knew the war was not over, as he hinted in an address to parliament when he referred to the ‘horrible murder and cruel death of my lord, my father, my brother Rutland and my cousin of Salisbury, and others’.8 The Milanese Prospero di Camulio commented, ‘Anyone who reflects at all upon the queen’s wretchedness and the ruin of those killed and considers the ferocity of this country, and the victors’ state of mind, should indeed, it seems to me, pray to God for the dead, and not less than the living.’ The canny Milanese added, ‘grievances and recriminations will break out between King Edward and Warwick, King Henry and the queen will be victorious’.9

  The new king could not feel safe, and established a widespread network of spies who regularly sent him reports. In 1462 he gave the constable, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, power to proceed in cases of treason, ‘summarily and plainly, without noise and show of judgment, on simple inspection of fact’,10 which was contrary to Common Law and earned Tiptoft the name Butcher of England. In their ‘simple inspection’, the council used the rack or ‘burning in the feet’.

  Yet Edward also tried conciliation, pardoning the Duke of Somerset who had been Lancastrian commander at Towton, restoring his estates and even sharing a bed with him. But ‘Harry of Somerset’ was the son of the duke killed at St Albans and rejoined Henry VI at Bamburgh. Warwick and his brother Lord Montague then eliminated Henry’s last bastions. They did so with enthusiasm since it involved the final destruction of their arch-enemies in the North, the Percys. Resistance came to an end in 1464 when Montague routed Somerset at Hexham, executing him immediately on Edward’s express orders. In reward, Montague was made Earl of Northumberland.

  Warwick dominated England, to the extent that a Frenchman joked that the country had two rulers, ‘M. de Warwick and someone whose name escapes me’.11 Even the chancellor was his brother, Archbishop George Neville of York. The earl also dictated foreign policy, and from across the Channel Louis XI set out to make friends with him, rightly suspecting that King Edward intended to renew the Hundred Years War.

  But a fortnight before Hexham was fought, Edward had secretly taken a step that nearly cost him his throne.

  The man

  Like Stubbs and Green, modern historians differ in their view of Edward IV, but no one denies he was colourful. With an overwhelming presence that matched his physique, he dominated everyone around him.

  When his tomb was opened at Windsor in 1789, the skeleton was found to be 6 ft 3½ in tall – a fifteenth-century giant. No portrait conveys the yellow-haired, fair-skinned good looks noted by the chronicles, but Philippe de Commynes says he had never seen a more handsome prince when he first saw him in 1470. In an age when a nobleman spent a year’s income on clothes, he dressed with eye-catching opulence, in cloth of gold, velvet brocades, silk damasks, in furs and the finest linen, and was covered in priceless rings, chains and hat badges.

  His manner was unusually informal and friendly, ‘so genial in his greeting that when he saw a newcomer bewildered by his regal appearance and royal pomp, he would give him courage to speak, by laying a kindly hand on his shoulder’, writes the Roman scholar Domenico Mancini. ‘He listened very willingly to plaintiffs or to anyone who complained to him about some injustice – charges against himself he disarmed by an excuse even though he might not put the matter right.’12 Flatteringly, he could remember the name of every landed gentleman in the kingdom, with the name of his estate. He was equally charming to City merchants and their wives, whom he often entertained. When he asked a rich widow for a loan and she said she would give £10 he kissed her, whereupon she gave him £20.13

  Although in no way an intellectual, he collected several hundred illuminated manuscripts, bought in Flanders, mainly histories or historical romances (which were more or less indistinguishable), including the chronicles of Froissart and Waurin. Apart from missals or primers, all were in French. Several English chroniclers dedicated their works to him, such as Capgrave and Harding, but there is no evidence he read them. Nor is there evidence of his patronizing the printer Caxton. He built more lavishly than any king since Edward III, adding to his favourite castles of Fotheringhay and Nottingham, but – except for the hall of Eltham Palace and St George’s Chapel at Windsor, little of it has survived. As for relaxation, hunting ranked high, especially fallow buck or hares in the Thames Valley, while he enjoyed angling. A gentler side is revealed by a ‘garden of delights’ at Windsor – herbs, roses and lilies.

  Apart from gluttony – he purged his belly after a meal to begin all over again – Edward’s main pleasure was womanizing, which eventually ruined his health. When he married, he told his mother that his bride was sure to bear him children since she had plenty already, while ‘by God’s Blessed Lady I am a bachelor and have some too’.14

  Mancini heard how the king behaved badly towards his conquests, whom he seduced by money or promises, passing them on to friends as soon as they bored him. He pursued ladies whether married or unmarried, high born or low, getting Lady Eleanor Butler into bed by promising her marriage, which later caused serious political trouble. Although Mancini says that he never forced them, Vergil tells us he tried to rape one of Warwick’s kinswomen under the earl’s own roof. Nonetheless, he treated Queen Elizabeth with respect and was an indulgent father to his daughters. (At least one, Elizabeth, inherited his looks.)

  Edward was a good friend, especially to William Hastings, a young Warwickshire squire who had fought for him with outstanding bravery at Mortimer’s Cross, doing so again on more than one occasion. William became his boon companion and trusted lieutenant, rewarded by being made a peer and Lord Chamberlain. Thomas More heard that he had been ‘a loving man and passing well-beloved’,15 although the queen hated Lord Hastings for encouraging and sharing in her husband’s womanizing, and as an enemy of her kindred.

  When at Sheen, a favourite residence, Edward liked to hear Mass in the external chapel of the charterhouse next door. He established a friary at Greenwich, also a favourite palace, for the Observant Franciscans, one of the period’s few genuinely fervent orders. A cleric who knew him well comments that despite his self-indulgence he was ‘a most devout Catholic, an unsparing enemy towards all heretics, and a most loving encourager of wise and learned men, and of the clergy’. The same writer adds that the king died a sincerely religious death.16

  Marriage and the Wydevilles

  For all his piety, Edward’s uncontrollable libido brought him a most unsuitable wife. Elizabeth, Lady Grey was the widow of an impecunious Lancastrian knight mortally wounded at Towton and a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Margaret. Her father, Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, was a very minor Lancastrian peer who had married the Duke of Bedford’s widow Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Twenty-six, blonde, beautiful and tough, she resisted the king’s attempts to seduce her, even when he drew a dagger, saying that if she was too humble to be his queen she was too good to be his harlot.

  In despair, he married Elizabeth ‘in most secret manner’ early on the morning of May Day 1464 at Grafton near Stony Stratford, while supposedly hunting. The only other people at the most romantic wedding in royal history were the priest, the bride’s mother, two gentlewomen and a young man to help the priest sing. Not until September did Edward reveal he had a queen – making a fool of Warwick, who had been in Paris negotiating the king’s marriage to Louis XI’s sister-in-law. Some of Edward’s subjects were so shocked that there were rumours of witchcraft. Even so, Elizabeth was crowned at Westminster in May 1465. The Earl of Warwick did not attend the ceremony.

  A grasping courtier on the make whom Warwick described contemptuously as the son of ‘but a squire’,17 old Lord Rivers quickly exploited the situation. By 1466 he was treasurer of England and
an earl, marrying his numerous children to the greatest catches in the country, the immensely rich Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, ‘a slip of a girl of about eighty’, being forced to wed his twenty-year-old son John, in what an anonymous chronicler called ‘a diabolical marriage’. (She was only in her sixties.) Allying with new magnates such as Lord Herbert, the Wydevilles formed what was virtually a court party.

  Warwick defects

  In 1467 it became clear that Edward had turned against Warwick when he dismissed his brother Archbishop Neville from his office as Lord Chancellor. He also repudiated Warwick’s pro-French foreign policy. The earl did not want to revive the Hundred Years War, fearing King Louis might finance a Lancastrian revolt, but in 1468 Edward married his sister Margaret to the new Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, who was Louis’s arch-enemy. Warwick realized he had lost all influence.

  Humiliated at home and abroad, the ‘Kingmaker’ saw the Wydevilles as the Duke of York had seen the Beauforts, convinced they meant to destroy him. He tried to regain power with a series of political manoeuvres that came in three phases. First, he plotted to put Edward under strict control and rule through him, as York had done through Henry VI as Protector; then to replace him on the throne by his younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, who was the Yorkist heir presumptive; and finally to restore Henry.

  The first phase began in July 1469 when, with Warwick’s secret encouragement, thousands of north countrymen led by a mysterious ‘Robin of Redesdale’ rose in Yorkshire. Listing grievances similar to those of Jack Cade, pointing out that Henry VI had lost his throne because of bad government and courtiers such as the Wydevilles, they marched south. At the same time Clarence sailed with Warwick to Calais where the earl was still captain and married his elder daughter Isabel, then returned to England with his father-in-law. On 24 July Robin’s men cut a royal army to pieces at Edgecote Heath near Banbury, Rivers being captured and beheaded. Edward, who had not accompanied the army, surrendered, but after a brief confinement and promising to govern as Warwick and his brother wished, freed himself and returned to London. No more was heard of Robin of Redesdale. This first coup had petered out by Christmas 1469, the king issuing pardons. He did not feel himself strong enough, however, to move against Warwick and Clarence.