by Thomas Penn
Finally, early in August, the ambassadors, taking with them nine ‘very handsome’ white horses and some English hunting dogs that Sforza had asked them to pick up, departed London and, accompanied by Edward and the royal household, rode back through Kent to the port of Sandwich. As they passed through towns and cities, they were astonished by Edward’s reception: the people, Dallugo wrote, ‘adore him like a God’.
The Milanese ambassadors left with the impression of a monarch whose sprawling insouciance conveyed his ease in his own kingdom, confident in the loyalties of his subjects and only too happy to embrace the Lancastrian opponents who were now flocking to offer him their ‘tender obedience’, and whose total victory was only a matter of time. Their visit, in other words, had gone precisely as Edward would have wanted. There had, though, been something obsessive about the king’s constant attentiveness towards his guests. From the moment he had met them, to his insistence on personally escorting them to the ship that would take them out of England, he barely let them out of his sight.
Edward threw himself into the government of his new realm with the same intensity with which he partied. As he sat, an imposing presence in the council chamber, chewing over with his councillors the challenges faced by his regime; as he processed business, receiving petitioners, authorizing warrants, letters and bills with a regal ‘word of mouth’, a capacious flourish of his sign manual ‘R. E.’, or the wax stamp of his signet, Edward’s dominance was striking.7 If some foreign observers speculated that the king was putty in the hands of his family – one got the impression that Warwick was ‘everything in this kingdom’; his mother Cecily, noted another, could ‘rule the king as she pleases’ – anybody who mistook his affability for inattention was rapidly put straight.8 Over the past decade, with Henry VI’s government impotent in the face of endemic disorder, the king’s laws had gradually become a dead letter. Edward was determined to be obeyed. When, perhaps in the habit of ignoring royal summons, the Norfolk gentleman John Paston failed to respond to two privy seals from the king, his brother wrote from London late one night, reporting how a raging Edward had sworn to kill Paston if he again ‘disobeys our writing’, adding insistently that ‘the king will keep his promise’.9 Paston duly turned up.
Long-standing kinsmen and associates of the house of York settled comfortably into positions of power and influence in the new regime. Now, they were indisputably Edward’s men, bound to him in a slew of ennoblements and knightings after Towton. Among them were his ever-reliable uncle Henry Bourchier, older brother of the archbishop of Canterbury, who was made earl of Essex and treasurer; Sir John Howard, a Norfolk soldier of explosive violence who was as ‘mad as a wild bullock’ when things didn’t go his way, and the uncompromising William Herbert, busy restoring order in Wales. But there was one man who, more than any other, defined Edward’s rise.10
The emergence of William Hastings had been almost as sudden as Edward’s own. A bluff Leicestershire esquire, he had followed his father into Richard duke of York’s service, but rather than fleeing into exile with the Yorkist lords after the fiasco of Ludford Bridge, had kept his head down. He resurfaced as Edward surged to the throne, becoming a key member of his warband; the bloodbath at Towton, in which Hastings fought shoulder-to-shoulder alongside his teenage king, transformed his fortunes. Knighting him amid the battlefield carnage, Edward deluged him with grants and rewards. Then, towards the end of July, he made Hastings, now in his early thirties, chamberlain of his household: an appointment that showed just how close, how quickly, the two men had become.
Tough, of unswerving and proven loyalty, Hastings also seemed to get on with everybody – ‘a loving man, and passing well beloved’, as Thomas More later put it. As chamberlain he headed the king’s ‘chamber’, the sequence of royal apartments that constituted the above-stairs of the king’s household and the team of personal servants that ran them. Here, the king slept, ate, processed business and entertained, displaying his wealth and power to awed petitioners and diplomats alike. In the space of four months, this obscure Leicestershire esquire had become a friend whom Edward not only relied upon to help project his regime’s image, but whom he trusted with his security and his life. Whatever it was that Edward first found in Hastings – his relaxed conviviality, his ‘pliancy’, his constant readiness to anticipate his king’s needs and desires – he had an added attraction for the king: the sense that Hastings was entirely his own creation. With no lineage and little land to speak of, Hastings owed everything he had to his monarch, his fortunes inextricably linked with Edward’s own.11
As Edward’s travelling household rumbled through southern England that summer, Hastings was at his side. Heading unhurriedly towards Wales to link up with Herbert’s counter-insurgency campaign, Edward showed himself to his admiring people: meeting and greeting, hearing complaints and delivering justice, graciously accepting gifts of cash and plate from civic dignitaries and enjoying their lavish hospitality. Welcomed into Bristol by elaborate pageants figuring forth his royal heritage, Edward stayed for a week. He oversaw the provision of seaborne supplies, sent round the coast to Herbert as he besieged Jasper Tudor’s stronghold of Pembroke Castle on the tip of southwest Wales, and presided over the treason trial and execution of the troublemaking Devon knight Sir Baldwin Fulford, who had been stirring up Lancastrian resistance across his native southwest. (Fulford’s head, stuck on a spike in Exeter marketplace to discourage Lancastrian tendencies among the locals, stayed there for some eighteen months until his son, noting that bits of it ‘daily falleth down’, pleadingly petitioned to remove it.12)
At Bristol, Edward changed his plans. With Herbert’s mopping-up operation still proving effective, the king left him to get on with it. Standing down the forces that had been due to muster at Hereford and taking their wages – two thousand marks, sent in eight pairs of saddlebags – he carried on through the Welsh Marches, through the scene of his triumph at Mortimer’s Cross, to his childhood home of Ludlow, before returning to London by equally comfortable stages. Ahead of him, news reached the capital that Herbert had taken Pembroke Castle and, after pursuing Jasper Tudor’s forces up the Welsh coast, had caught up with them and crushed them at Twt Hill outside Caernarfon. Lancastrian resistance in Wales had collapsed, with only a few isolated groups still holding out.13
Although Jasper Tudor himself remained on the run in the mountains of Snowdonia, Herbert could console himself with the capture of his four-year-old nephew Henry, earl of Richmond. The boy’s patrimony had been confiscated, but things could always change; besides which, his mother, the great Lancastrian heiress Lady Margaret Beaufort, had managed to hold on to her inheritance. Henry Tudor had exceptional value in the wardship and marriage market. Herbert paid Edward £1,000 for his custody, bringing him up alongside his own daughters at his great Monmouthshire castle of Raglan. He probably thought he had got a bargain.14
That October, Edward spent a fortnight downstream of London at his manor of Greenwich, on a bend in the Thames as it broadened towards the sea. There, to his delight, two of his father’s former servants reappeared. Earlier in the year, as Margaret of Anjou’s army had approached London, Thomas Vaughan and William Hatteclyffe had left London by ship with the family treasure, hoping to courier it to the safety of the Low Countries. Promptly captured by French privateers, they had spent the intervening months kicking their heels in a French gaol, until Edward paid their ransoms. Both were experienced, highly capable, valuable men and Edward was quick to find them influential posts in his household. As an esquire for the body, Vaughan became one of the most intimate of Edward’s chamber servants. On hand to fulfil the king’s desires, should ‘anything lack for his person or his pleasure’, he was also entrusted with the most confidential information, the keeping of ‘many secrets’. As well as dressing and undressing the king, Vaughan formed part of his first line of security, watching over him ‘day and night’. Hatteclyffe, meanwhile, was appointed king’s physician. Having formerly looked afte
r the abstemious, listless Henry VI, he now had a rather different challenge on his hands.15
Given Edward’s tendency to compulsive self-gratification, it would take all Hatteclyffe’s skill and tact to keep in balance the four bodily humours that, following the Greek medical authority Galen, were held to derive from the consumption of food and drink: to point out, as he stood ‘in the presence of the king’s meals’, that it might be an idea to slow down, or not eat or drink quite so much of this or that; and to have rather more robust private discussions with the king’s chief household officers about trying to rein in his compulsive consumption of ‘meat and drinks’. As he counselled Edward on his lifestyle and attempted to encourage him to follow the regimen they had drawn up together, Hatteclyffe became one of his most intimate advisers, dispensing judicious advice about the state of the kingdom of England, incarnate in the body of its new, young king.16
Late in the month, Edward was rowed upstream in the royal barge through London to Westminster. Before the opening of Parliament, he had some fraternal business to settle. On All Saints’ Day, crowned and in rich purple velvet robes, he processed around a Westminster Abbey filled with nobles and city dignitaries as the feast-day responses were sung: five boys of the chapel royal clustered on the altar steps, one holding a lighted candle, their interweaving voices fragile in the incensed air. The same day, Edward created his youngest brother Richard duke of Gloucester, the great royal dukedom previously held by Henry VI’s uncle Humphrey, whose populist cause had been taken up by the Yorkists. It had taken Edward a while to get round to it, some four months after Clarence had received his title and lands – but then Clarence was heir to the throne. To the nine-year-old Richard, the ceremony must have seemed worth the wait; less so the ragbag of grants with which Edward endowed him. Edward had a lot of people to reward and for now his young brother was well down the pecking order. Besides, Richard was scarcely in a position to object.17
On Thursday 12 November, in Westminster, the new speaker of Parliament Sir James Strangways, a Yorkshireman with close connections to the Neville family, rose to set out for the assembled Lords and Commons Edward’s right and title to the English crown. He launched into an official version of the recent convulsions, enshrining in parliamentary record the accounts that had been evolving in Yorkist verses, prophecies and genealogies: a story of foul, unnatural Lancastrian rule swept away, and true order restored by Edward’s ‘knightly courage’ and ‘mighty power’. Following Strangways’ peroration, Parliament proceeded to turn this narrative into legal reality, passing a comprehensive act of attainder that declared the house of Lancaster and its descendants legally dead and perpetually disinherited. Eliminating them from the political map, the act also formalized the comprehensive land grab that Edward had carried out the previous summer, which had turned the poverty-stricken nobleman of Mortimer’s Cross into one of the greatest royal landowners since William the Conqueror. Now, he possessed a vast portfolio of property stretching across England, his own landed inheritance swelled by the royal duchy of Cornwall, the great private estates of the duchy of Lancaster – which, in a neat legal move, were now made the permanent possessions of the kings of England – and the confiscated lands of great Lancastrian noblemen.18 All of which looked good on paper. The problem was that Edward had already given much of it away. Unsurprisingly, the man who had gained most was the earl of Warwick, who was handed a massive swathe of lands and grants, from the captaincy of Calais and control of the Cinque Ports on the Kent coast to wardenship of the Anglo-Scottish Marches, as well as estates across the north of England and the midlands.
Still, Edward and his advisers were mindful that patronage was a balancing act: kings were meant to retain enough land to provide them with an income that enabled them to live in royal style. Henry VI, who had granted everything away, had got this catastrophically wrong. And having used Henry’s incontinent generosity as a stick to beat him with, the new Yorkist regime had to start as it meant to go on.
At the heart of royal finance was the Exchequer, whose old-fashioned processes ground slowly, subject to its ‘ancient course’, and with maddening inefficiency in terms of providing the king with ready money. But there was another method that Edward knew, having grown up with it as earl of March: the flexible, direct process of land management used by noblemen up and down the country to extract the value of their estates in cash. Months into his new reign, Edward started to impose the same system. Instead of time-serving rent collectors entrenched in the Exchequer offices in Westminster, a group of professional financial officials – appointed by and directly answerable to the king and his closest chamber servants – fanned out across the crown estates, surveying lands, receiving income and noting meticulously everything that ‘might be most for the king’s profit’. Their cash receipts were ‘delivered to the coffers of the lord king’, wherever in the kingdom he happened to be, for his immediate disbursement. The Exchequer was given a copy of the accounting for record; that was all. The real business was going on in the king’s own chamber. Flexible and efficient, it was a system subject to the control of Edward and his close personal servants, one which was actioned with a scrawl of the king’s signature or, as Edward regally put it when directing financial transactions, ‘by our commandment given by our own mouth’.19 In autumn 1461, he launched the new system on a portfolio of crown lands in the Welsh Marches. In time, it would spread to whatever sources of income he could get his hands on.
It was not the whole answer, however. Efficient though this new system might be, it took time to implement. More to the point, the question of whether the crown lands could provide an adequate source of royal revenue, however rigorously they were managed, remained moot. Though Edward also made the habitual claim to customs revenues on all exports and imports flowing through England’s ports, this income stream had been badly dented by the disorder of recent years. And even in stable times, the kingdom’s running costs, from the maintenance of the Calais garrison and the security of the country’s northern borders, from diplomacy to the glittering magnificence of the royal household, were constantly in excess of its revenues.20 These times were not stable. Edward urgently needed other sources of credit.
Apart from tackling the mountain of debt he had accumulated – both inherited from the previous regime, and which he owed to his own supporters and financial backers – Edward had to deal with the ongoing security situation. As autumn turned into winter, the relative calm of recent months began to prove illusory. Yorkist spies, sent across the border into Scotland, reported how the faction-ridden government of its young king James III was now being driven by the pro-Lancastrian bishop of St Andrews, James Kennedy, working closely and busily with Margaret of Anjou and the exiled Lancastrians there. The news from France was worse. Louis XI’s kneejerk reaction against his late father’s administration seemed to have got something out of his system. Calming down, he started to release all the people he had locked up, including the vengeful Somerset. Across England, meanwhile, disorder was renewed and intensified. As Edward tried to crack down on local unrest, his agents, the household men who were also the king’s eyes and ears in the regions – men by whom ‘may be known the disposition of the counties’ – tried to sift these acts of violent criminality, looking for signs of political agitation and ‘suspicious congregations’, picking at networks of affinity to see what and who might, possibly, lead to the house of Lancaster.21
As Parliament adjourned for Christmas, Edward, massive in his robes of state, addressed the Commons, thanking them for their ‘tender and true hearts’ and promising to reward them with ‘my body’, which would ‘always be ready for your defence’. Then his tone hardened. If any of his enemies who had already been pardoned for bearing arms against him should backslide, they would ‘never again’ be accepted into the king’s grace, whatever their rank. Instead, they would be ‘thoroughly punished’. There would be no more chances.22
Throughout the first months of 1462, reports of suspicio
us activity flooded in. An agent of the Norfolk gentleman John Paston wrote to him breathlessly with ‘right secret’ information. An army of 120,000 men, led by Somerset and backed by an international coalition of kingdoms, would make co-ordinated landings on the Kentish, Yorkshire and Welsh coasts; simultaneously, a combined Lancastrian–Scottish army would cross England’s northern border. However wild the rumours, Edward and his advisers took them seriously. Along England’s southern coastline, towns were put on high alert and defences strengthened. Warwick, handed the admiralty of England – a logical move, given how heavily the country’s dilapidated navy relied on his own private fleet – dispatched patrols along the Channel and the vulnerable East Anglian coast.23 Edward’s slender resources were badly stretched. In Norfolk, vendettas, gang violence and shifting allegiances had combined in a toxic brew. ‘For love of God, take good await to your person’, one panicked correspondent advised John Paston, ‘for the world is right wild.’ Much to his irritation, Edward had been forced to send one of his key advisers, Thomas Montgomery, to ‘set a rule’ in the region: there was, he snapped, nobody whose absence from his side ‘might worse have been forborne, at that time’. Newly appointed sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, Montgomery materialized in the area late that December and started sniffing around, armed with some names that the king had given him.24 Whether or not his activities had anything to do with the events of the following weeks, things moved fast.