The Demon's Brood

by Desmond Seward

  The second phase opened in Lincolnshire in February 1470, after Lord Welles and his son Sir Robert attacked a neighbour who was Master of the Horse, and Edward announced his intention of punishing them. Encouraged by messages from Warwick and Clarence, Sir Robert started a full-scale rebellion. Lord Welles lost his nerve, however, and went to court, hoping to defuse the situation. Although he pardoned him, the king sent a message to Sir Robert, saying he would execute his father unless he surrendered. When Robert defiantly marched to attack the royal forces, Edward beheaded Lord Welles, then crushed the rebels at ‘Losecoat Field’ near Stamford – where they threw away their doublets to run faster.

  During the battle they had shouted, ‘A Clarence! A Warwick!’ and on the scaffold Sir Robert confessed he had hoped to make Clarence king. Similar risings had been planned elsewhere, but collapsed after Losecoat Field, despite appeals by Clarence and Warwick, who rode through Derby and Lancashire in the hope of finding supporters. On 2 April Edward denounced his brother and the earl as ‘rebels and traitors’ and they fled to Calais.

  Outwardly, the Yorkist regime still looked safe. The king felt confident enough to restore Henry Percy to the earldom of Northumberland, compensating Warwick’s brother with the title of ‘Marquess Montague’ and lands in the West Country – a package that privately the new marquess spurned as a ‘[mag] pie’s nest’. Looking back from the 1480s, Dr Warkworth comments how everybody had hoped Edward would ‘bring the realm of England in great prosperity and rest’. Instead, there had been ‘one battle after another and much trouble, and great loss of goods among the common people’.18 And the Great Slump went on and on.

  Warwick’s third attempt against Edward started at Angers in July 1470, where he begged Queen Margaret’s pardon for having fought against the House of Lancaster. He acknowledged Henry VI as king and Edward of Lancaster as Prince of Wales; Edward was then betrothed to Warwick’s younger daughter, Lady Anne Neville. Surrendering his place as heir presumptive, Clarence was accepted as the prince’s heir – should the prince not beget sons. Eager to overthrow an ally of Burgundy, Louis XI supplied funds, and a Lancastrian invasion force landed in Devon on 13 September. Having been decoyed up to Richmondshire by a feigned rising, which melted away as soon as he arrived, Edward was too far off to organize a defence in time.

  Overthrow and recovery

  Only just avoiding an attempt by Montague to arrest him at Doncaster, Edward galloped to Lynn. From there, on board a small English merchantman and two ‘hulks of Holland’ together with 800 Yorkists who included his brother Richard, he sailed to Flanders on 28 September, pursued by hostile Hansa ships. When they landed at Flushing he presented the English skipper with a marten fur coat in lieu of payment as he was penniless. The Duke of Burgundy gave Edward a pension but refused to see him, sending envoys to congratulate Henry VI on his restoration. Living at Bruges or The Hague, Edward heard how Warwick took control of England as Lieutenant of the Realm, with Clarence as deputy and George Neville as chancellor, and how parliament confirmed Henry’s Readeption. The Neville brothers felt so confident that they dismissed their troops.

  In reality, Warwick faced alarming difficulties. He was obliged to restore the confiscated estates of Lancastrian grandees, such as the Duke of Exeter and the new Duke of Somerset, upsetting those to whom they had been granted. In any case, it was clear that Exeter and Somerset hated him. Nor did they conceal their dislike of Clarence. The situation was likely to grow even worse for the earl and his son-in-law after Margaret’s return.

  When Louis XI declared war on Burgundy in December 1470, Duke Charles changed his mind, giving Edward £20,000 to equip an invasion force. On 11 March thirty-six little ships sailed out from Flushing with 1,200 troops on board – Yorkist exiles and hired hand-gunners. Anchoring off the Norfolk coast and learning that the Lancastrian Earl of Oxford was waiting for him, Edward sailed north, only for his fleet to be scattered by a gale. Barely escaping shipwreck, accompanied by Gloucester and Lord Hastings, he landed at Ravenspur at the mouth of the Humber (where Bolingbroke had disembarked eighty years before) and assembled about a thousand troops who had also survived the storm.

  Entering York, he ordered his men to shout ‘King Henry! King Henry!’, swearing at the minster’s high altar that he merely intended to claim his duchy of York. However, joined every day by supporters, he proclaimed himself king again at Nottingham. Warwick, always an indecisive soldier, did not try to intercept him, waiting for Clarence to bring reinforcements, but Clarence rejoined his brother at Banbury in a public reconciliation. On 12 April Edward rode into London, to be greeted by his queen, who during his absence had given birth to their first son in the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.

  Yet Warwick could call on troops from his northern and Midland estates, from Wales (of the sort who held out for so long at Harlech), from the West Country and from Kent. Had they combined, Edward would have been doomed. Instead, Warwick advanced on London, while the Earl of Devon went down to the west with the Duke of Somerset to meet Queen Margaret, who was coming over from France with the Prince of Wales.

  On the day after Edward’s arrival in London, Yorkists and Lancastrians confronted each other at Barnet (then a market town called Chipping Barnet) 11 miles north of the City. The king, who had about 9,000 men, commanded his army’s centre, the Duke of Gloucester the right and Lord Hastings the left. The Lancastrian force was bigger, probably 15,000, its centre under Marquess Montague with Warwick behind in reserve, the right under the Earl of Oxford and the left under the Duke of Exeter. Throughout the night Lancastrian gunners bombarded their opponents’ camp, but, miscalculating the range, fired over it.

  Edward attacked at 4.00 am next morning, Easter Sunday, in a thick fog that hid the opposing divisions’ uneven alignment – Oxford on the Lancastrian right outflanked Lord Hastings, while the Yorkist right outflanked the Lancastrian left. As a result, the battle pivoted like a rugby scrum, swinging round at right angles, Exeter’s defeat on the Lancastrian left being counterbalanced by Hastings’s rout on the right.

  Then Montague in the centre mistook the star and streams worn as a badge by Oxford’s troops for Edward’s sun and streams and turned on them, so that Edward was able to launch a decisive charge. Montague fell on the battlefield while Warwick was killed as he lumbered towards the horse-park, trying to find a mount on which to escape. (Later, the two brothers’ bodies were exposed in coffins on the pavement at St Paul’s.) The Duke of Exeter, knocked unconscious, was saved by a faithful servant, Oxford being the only Lancastrian leader to escape unhurt.

  Landing at Weymouth with Edward of Lancaster two days before Barnet, Margaret was met by Somerset and Devon, who had raised an army about 9,000 strong, but with too few men-at-arms. As Edward guessed, they made for Wales, hoping to join forces with the Lancastrians of Wales and Lancashire. Determined to intercept them before they crossed the Severn, despite burning hot weather he drove his own 2,000 men-at-arms and 3,000 foot at a merciless pace, covering over 30 miles a day.

  He caught up with Margaret’s army at Tewkesbury on the evening of 3 May, attacking next morning. Her troops occupied an excellent position on a low ridge south of the town, guarded by hedges and lanes, but the king’s archers and hand-gunners shot volley after volley at them until Somerset, an inexperienced commander, was provoked into charging down on the Yorkist left. Ambushed by a body of mounted men-at-arms, the duke’s troops broke and ran. Regaining the ridge, Somerset accused Lord Wenlock, who led the centre, of treachery and brained him with a pole-axe. When the Yorkists advanced uphill all along the front, what was left of the Lancastrian army bolted, 2,000 being slaughtered in the pursuit, including the seventeen-year-old Edward of Lancaster. Somerset and a dozen other leaders took refuge in Tewkesbury Abbey, to be dragged out and beheaded in Tewkesbury marketplace. Margaret was captured at a nearby nunnery.

  Warwick had been popular in Kent, because of his campaigns against Channel pirates, and his cousin, Thomas Neville, the Bastard
of Fauconberg, helped by the mayor of Canterbury and a small force from the Calais garrison, raised 5,000 Kentishmen. The Bastard attacked London on the day Tewkesbury was fought, bringing cannon to bombard the City. Led by Earl Rivers, the Londoners beat back their attempt to enter across London Bridge, and then used pardons to trick Fauconberg and the mayor into abandoning their men. The pair were hunted down and executed regardless of pardons, their heads being set up on London Bridge.

  ‘From the time of Tewkesbury field’, crowed a Yorkist chronicler – ignoring the Bastard’s onslaught – ‘King Henry’s party . . . was extinct and repressed for ever, without any manner hope of again quickening.’19 With Henry’s murder the direct male line of Lancaster was extinct. So was the male Beaufort line, except for a boy who was only a Beaufort on his mother’s side and a refugee in Brittany – ‘the only imp now left of Henry VI’s brood’.20

  The second reign of Edward IV

  Edward’s entry into London after Tewkesbury resembled a Roman triumph, with Margaret of Anjou dragged along in a cart for the public to jeer, on her way to the Tower. A Yorkist future seemed assured. Not only did the king have siblings, but he had a son and heir. He felt so secure that he forgave many old enemies, thirty attainders being reversed between 1472 and 1475, besides employing former Lancastrians as ministers – such as Dr John Morton, whom he made Master of the Rolls and Bishop of Ely.

  He also pardoned Sir John Fortescue, once Lord Chief Justice, who had gone into exile with Margaret, on condition he drew up a refutation of his arguments in favour of Henry VI. Before his death in 1479 Fortescue (the finest English legal mind of his age) wrote that Edward ‘hath done more for us than ever did King of England, or might have done before him. The harms that hath fallen in getting of his realm be now by him turned into the good and profit of us all.’21

  A last flicker of resistance came during the winter of 1473–4 when, supplied with ships by King Louis, the Earl of Oxford (who had been one of the Lancastrian commanders at Barnet) occupied St Michael’s Mount. In whose name he did so is unclear. It was definitely not that of Henry Tudor, and his action may have been a mere gesture of defiance. He was soon starved into surrender.

  Otherwise, Edward’s only worry was bad blood between Clarence and Gloucester. ‘These three brothers, the king and the two dukes, were possessed of such surpassing qualities that, if they had been able to live without dissension, such a threefold cord could never have been broken’, commented someone who saw a lot of them.22 But George and Richard fell out. Clarence had married Isabel Neville, the older of Warwick’s heiresses, while Gloucester married Anne, the younger, despite Clarence trying to hide her in the City disguised as a kitchen maid. Both men quarrelled furiously over who should inherit the earl’s vast estates.

  Edward took care not to make excessive demands on parliament. In 1472 the first assembly for two years voted new taxes, but when their collection descended into chaos he resorted to ‘benevolences’ – forced gifts from the rich – not merely from London merchants, but from those in all the towns he visited on progress. He made sure that customs duties (which went to the royal Treasury) were collected more efficiently, raised rents on Crown lands, enforced feudal dues and economized on his household. Having long been a ‘merchant king’, who on his own account exported wool, cloth (dyed and undyed), tin and pewterware, he used Italian and Greek agents to engage in the lucrative Levant trade – in commodities such as alum, prized as a dye-fixer by cloth manufacturers.

  The Hundred Years War again?

  One reason why Edward levied benevolences was to restart the Hundred Years War. He had a grudge to settle with the French king, who had financed Warwick in 1470. Originally, he planned to invade Normandy and strike at Paris, flanked by a Burgundian army on his left and a Breton army on his right. When Duke Francis II of Brittany lost his nerve and dropped out, Edward still believed a Burgundian alliance should be enough to defeat Louis XI.

  An English invasion force crossed to Calais at midsummer 1475, 11,000 men with cannon and a wagon train carrying supplies in case of scorched earth tactics. Philippe de Commynes – who saw them ride by – thought they resembled a mob on horseback, not realizing the English dismounted to fight. However, they did not begin the campaign until July and were hampered by heavy rain. Worse still, obsessed with trying to found a kingdom, Duke Charles saw them as merely a means to stop Louis intervening in his war against the Habsburgs. He had no intention of providing Burgundian troops.

  ‘Ah, Holy Mary, even now after I’ve just given you 1,400 crowns, you don’t help me a bit!’, Louis moaned on learning of the invasion.23 Nonetheless, he suspected he might be able to buy off Edward, who was in poor shape for a long campaign. He sent a message in which he apologized for aiding Warwick and offered good terms. He had guessed correctly. English envoys agreed to make peace if the money was right, and Louis made sure it was. On condition Edward left France at once, he would pay him 75,000 crowns down, with an annual pension of 50,000 crowns, while the Dauphin was betrothed to his daughter Elizabeth. Louis also bought Margaret of Anjou for 50,000 crowns – he wanted her to bequeath him her rights in Lorraine and Naples.

  Terrified Edward might change his mind, the French king neutralized the English army with a week’s free eating and drinking at Amiens. There were tables in the streets laden with wine, unlimited credit at the taverns and whores free of charge. An orgy of drunkenness ensued, English troops lying in heaps all over the city – while many caught the pox. The two rulers met on 29 August 1475 to sign the treaty, on a bridge at Picquigny near Amiens. Commynes tells us that the King of England, wearing cloth of gold and a black velvet bonnet with a fleur-de-lys jewel, bowed to within 6 in of the ground, and spoke quite good French. He also noted that although still good looking, he was running to fat.

  By early September, the English army was back in England. (One casualty on the way home across the Channel was the king’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Exeter, who did not fit into a Yorkist world – thrown overboard on Edward’s orders.) Having been told for three years that it was their duty to pay for a war, not everybody at home was pleased. In Burgundy Duke Charles was so angry that he was said to have eaten his Garter. But England could not afford to go on fighting France while, added to the profits from his business ventures, the French pension enabled Edward to rule without parliament. The Great Slump was ending and prosperity returning. Picquigny marked the start of a Yorkist golden age.

  The Yorkist golden age

  Nobody enjoyed ladies, feasting and hunting more than Edward IV. According to Thomas More, he boasted he had three concubines, each with a special gift – ‘one the merriest, another the wisest, the third the holiest harlot in his realm, as one whom no man could get out of the church lightly to any place but it were his bed’. The merriest was Jane Shore, adds More. ‘For many he had but her he loved.’24 The estranged wife of a City merchant, Jane was famous for her kindness as well as promiscuity, intervening with the king to save friends from ruin – there is a tradition that she stopped him from dissolving Eton. Mrs Shore was hated by the queen, on whom Edward nonetheless found time to father at least ten children.

  Not even siblings defied the king with impunity. Angered by Edward stopping him from marrying the heiress to Burgundy, Clarence became impossible. Early in 1477 he hanged one of his late duchess’s ladies for supposedly poisoning her beer, then hanged a servant for poisoning his younger son. He also claimed the king was trying to kill him with witchcraft. In July, after two men were executed for plotting to murder Edward with sorcery, the duke pushed his way into the council when the king was absent, insisting that they were innocent. Infuriated, Edward arrested his brother and in January 1478 had him attainted for treason – among the charges were practising necromancy and spreading rumours that Edward was a bastard. Clarence died at the Tower the next month, drowned in a butt of wine.

  Trouble abroad began in 1482. War broke out with Scotland, while at the end of the year Louis XI and Archduk
e Maximilian, Burgundy’s new ruler, made peace. Throwing over Princess Elizabeth, the Dauphin was betrothed to Maximilian’s daughter, while Louis stopped Edward’s pension. Throughout Christmas, the king thought of nothing but vengeance, summoning parliament in January to vote money for a war. Yet he no longer had the energy for campaigning, self-indulgence having made him ‘fat in the loins’.25

  About Easter 1483 Edward fell ill. Mancini heard that it began by his catching cold during an angling party on the Thames.26 The disease may have been pneumonia, to which his corpulent body could offer little resistance. After ten days, still only forty years old, the king died in the Palace of Westminster on 9 April 1483. Immediately after his death his body was exposed for ten hours, naked from the waist, so that it might be seen by the lords spiritual and temporal, and by the mayor and aldermen of London.

  Retrospect

  Modern historians stress that when Edward IV died there was barely enough money in the treasury to pay for his funeral. Yet he had been far from unsuccessful. Although his foreign policy was wrecked by the alliance between French and Burgundians, he deserves credit for realizing that England could not continue the Hundred Years War against a reunited France.27 He never lost a battle – Towton, Barnet and Tewkesbury were no mean victories – and kept the Crown he usurped until he died in his bed.