by Thomas Penn
The defection of Somerset, who had more cause than most to hate the house of York and all it stood for, was an instant and shattering blow to the Lancastrian cause. Eager to display his newfound loyalties, he immediately turned against his former comrades-in-arms and joined forces with Warwick to besiege Alnwick, the one remaining castle in Lancastrian hands.
In pitch dark, early on the morning of 6 January 1463, a Scottish army finally reached Alnwick. Rather than risking a pitched battle, Warwick had broken his siege, withdrawing his forces a safe distance. Fearing a trap, the Scots halted. With both sides holding off, each scared of the other – the English ‘had no courage to fight’, the Scots were similarly ‘affeared’ – the besieged Lancastrian garrison saw its chance and ran for it. Having inadvertently lifted the siege, the Scottish army withdrew. Warwick, advancing cautiously, found the doors to a deserted Alnwick wide open. It wasn’t the chivalric endgame that Edward and his nobles had in mind when they set out the previous October. But it was a victory nonetheless.44
At Durham Edward, fully recovered from the measles, eagerly received the formal submission of Somerset, the man who had slaughtered his father and brother at Wakefield and whose own father had been killed by Warwick at St Albans. Edward, though, had made conciliation his watchword. Besides, Somerset’s defection had turned his Northumbrian fiasco into a triumph.
Not only had Lancastrian resistance in the north lost its leader, but Somerset’s pledge of loyalty to Edward was the kind of news that gave potential backers of Lancaster, like Louis XI of France, pause for thought. With questions being asked about what precisely Edward’s expensive northern campaign had achieved – as one disgruntled chronicler demanded rhetorically, despite mobilizing ‘almost all the armed force of England’, what had the king actually done except capture three castles? – it was a coup that Edward was keen to play up.45
In a letter to his London creditors Edward stressed that, contrary to rumours, he had made the Lancastrian duke no guarantees: he would spare Somerset’s life, and nothing else. Besides, had every confidence in both Somerset and Sir Ralph Percy, who had assured him of their allegiance ‘to the uttermost article of their honour’. So bullish was Edward that he returned to Percy’s command two of the recaptured fortresses, Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh, which he had previously held for the Lancastrians. As a chronicler put it, Edward now controlled all England except a castle in North Wales, Harlech, still stuffed full of Lancastrian insurgents.46
Over the following weeks, Edward progressed easily south, Somerset conspicuously by his side. His expansive mood persisted. In a warm letter to Warwick, Edward put on record his ‘tender respect’ for his cousin, who had marshalled Yorkist forces in the northeast that December with such resolve. He recalled the formative winter they had spent together in Calais, besieged by Henry VI’s troops, and the extraordinary risk and expense to which Warwick had gone in sailing to Ireland and back, to rendezvous with Edward’s exiled father – a journey for which Edward now belatedly reimbursed him, ordering repayment of £3,580, in cash, from the revenues of the duchy of Lancaster.47 As he arrived back in London on 24 February, his barge escorted triumphantly down the Thames by a civic flotilla, Edward’s mind was already drifting to his next great campaign: an invasion of Scotland, where Henry VI remained out of reach in exile. He summoned Parliament to vote him a tax for the purpose.
By the time Parliament sat at Westminster two months later, however, Edward’s confidence in his ability to command the Lancastrian allegiances was looking questionable. Away in Northumberland, Sir Ralph Percy’s newfound Yorkist loyalties had already evaporated. When an army of Scots and French made their way across England’s northeastern border that spring, Percy opened the gates of Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh to welcome them and declared again for Henry VI and Lancaster.48
On 29 April, Chancellor George Neville opened Parliament with the customary sermon, a typically well-turned oration on the importance of justice. The mood was one of constructive collaboration. Appreciating the job Edward had on his hands, and the commitment he had already shown in tackling the country’s ills, the Commons were willing to give him both time and money, and they quickly granted a tax for his Scottish campaign. Nonetheless, mindful of kings’ regrettable habit of frittering away taxpayers’ hard-earned cash on everything but the purpose for which it was raised, the Commons also insisted on minuting that it was to be spent in the way taxes were meant to be used: on the defence of the kingdom.49 In return, as was customary, they wanted Edward to do something about their own, mostly economic problems.
While the reasons for England’s economic slump were many, the Commons had a habit of blaming everything – from the moribund cloth trade to the ‘vices and inconveniences of idleness’ that came with mass unemployment – on ‘aliens’, foreigners.50 In the minds of most English merchants, foreigners were parasites. Flemings, or Dutch, were regular targets of opprobrium. So too were the German merchants of the Hanse, the powerful trading league that, to the chagrin of England’s Merchant Adventurers, had all but squeezed them out of the Scandinavian and Baltic markets, and whose fortified trading compound in London, the Steelyard, was a persistent reminder of the trading privileges they nevertheless continued to enjoy in England.51 But there was one community that, more than most, provoked English xenophobia and envy in equal measure – the Italians.
Italian merchant banks dominated the international finance of north-western Europe, which in turn gave them access to the kind of credit of which English businessmen could only dream. In England, Italian brokers bought up wool, cloth and tin, in return importing luxuries like spices, silks and fine textiles into the country – the kinds of goods that Englishmen secretly craved while publicly scorning them as ‘nifles and trifles’. Meanwhile the massive Venetian, Florentine and Genoese galleys, dwarfing northern European vessels, were able to export on a scale that only served to drive home their dominance. Shipping English goods to the Mediterranean and beyond, they manipulated foreign currency exchanges in the process, making huge profits before they had even paid their English suppliers. As one vocal English critic put it, they ‘wipe our nose with our own sleeve’. The fact was that Italians did profit while English merchants suffered – though this didn’t stop English merchants trading with them, borrowing from them, or even going into business with them.52
The solution to these problems, as England’s merchants saw it, was protectionism. Free markets only worked to the advantage of foreigners. Edward had to get tough: to impose tariffs, and preferably bans, on foreign traders and to put the English first. Such a move wouldn’t just benefit the mercantile community but the country as a whole, which would be ‘enriched again’.53
Such demands left Edward with a circle to square. England’s businessmen, both London’s Merchant Adventurers and the powerful syndicate of Calais wool merchants, had bankrolled his regime, and his debts to them were astronomical. On the other hand, foreigners were big business, their trade contributing hugely to royal customs revenues. Italians were a prime source of credit and luxury goods, and Edward was hungry for both; nevertheless, with his creditors watching closely and with Parliament dangling tax money in front of him, he had to do something.
On the face of it, the package of measures that he waved through Parliament was impressively protectionist. Foreign traders were prohibited from buying English wool, and a sweeping ban was imposed on foreign imports into England, from silkware to gloves, tennis balls to playing cards. But Edward retained a loophole: the royal import and export licences that allowed the holder to ship toll-free, which kings granted in reward to creditors and supporters alike. At the same time, he presumably offered quiet reassurance to the horrified Italian merchants, who had convinced themselves that Edward was a king with whom they could work.
Meanwhile, in an eye-catching piece of legislation Edward reinforced the Calais wool monopoly. Now, all foreign buyers of English wool had to pay at least half the cost upfront, in English coin or bullion. T
his was a measure that would benefit the flow of money into a cash-strapped England, but it was bound to damage the economy of Flanders, which bought the bulk of its wool through Calais, and was guaranteed to put the Low Countries’ overlord Philip of Burgundy’s nose firmly out of joint. Not that anybody in England cared. One versifier summed up English exceptionalism with pithy truculence: ‘there is no realm in no manner degree/ But they have need to our English commodity’. Other countries needed England more than England needed them.54
Late that spring, news arrived from Northumberland. At Alnwick Castle the former commander, Sir Ralph Grey, resentful at his demotion for Edward’s favourite Sir John Astley, had locked up the new captain and declared again for Lancaster. With all three Northumbrian strongholds back in Lancastrian control, Edward was back where he had started the previous autumn.
In fact, things were worse. With a full-scale Lancastrian–Scottish offensive surging across the border, resupplied by French ships waiting unopposed off the English coast – Louis XI’s flipflopping support of the Lancastrians was back on again – the forces of the Neville brothers, on whom Edward had leaned heavily since the start of the reign, were entirely inadequate to the situation. Warwick dispatched a rider to London, requesting urgent military support.55 Edward wasted no time. Proroguing Parliament on 17 June, he was in the saddle days later, raising men as he went.
As the royal household again rumbled north, through the Hertfordshire towns of Barnet and St Albans and into the east midlands, people began to notice something odd. In place of Edward’s usual bodyguard, drawn from his household and chamber staff, were the duke of Somerset and two hundred of his men, ‘well harnessed’: armed to the teeth. It was, said one shocked chronicler, as though a lamb had entrusted himself to wolves.56
Although Edward had stressed the strictly limited nature of Somerset’s pardon, the drip-feed of royal favour – conditional upon the duke’s continued loyalty – had since turned into a flood. Edward had restored to him his title and lands, accompanied by a shower of cash gifts. Nor was that all. Edward made ‘full much’ of Somerset, for whom he had ‘great love’. Earlier that summer he had put on a tournament in Westminster, in the duke’s honour. On hunting trips, he allowed Somerset to ride immediately behind him: a signal mark of favour, as was the king’s pointedly lax security. Edward’s eager search for intimacy continued in the royal bed, which Somerset shared ‘many nights’. The king, of course, exulted in his role as healer and unifier, and there was every reason to encourage this great Lancastrian war-hero to luxuriate in the heat of his favour, former loyalties now tempered and welded to the house of York. But the compulsion with which Edward sought Somerset’s friendship was, some felt, too much.
On 18 July, as the king’s household stopped at Northampton, an enraged mob tried to barge its way into the royal lodgings in order to kill ‘that false traitor Somerset’. Edward, turning on the charm, defused the situation with ‘great difficulty’. A tun of wine was tapped in Northampton’s marketplace with a royal order to ‘drink and make merry’, and the mollified townsfolk queued with basins and cauldrons, bowls, pans and dishes to carry away the king’s claret.57
Quite how the fracas had ignited was unclear, though one account put it down to local anger at Somerset being ‘so nigh the king’s presence’ and having been ‘made his guard’. If the townspeople were furious, so too – more quietly – were the men Somerset’s guards had displaced. These were Edward’s knights and squires of the body, their loyalties forged in long service and stress-tested in war; men who doubled as the king’s personal security and as his closest servants, watching out for him even as they dressed him, made his bed, fed his pet dog. Edward’s relationship with Somerset threatened to destabilize the delicate ecosystem of the royal household. Arguably, nobody was more threatened than the king’s closest friend, his chamberlain William Hastings.
Northamptonshire was Hastings’ domain. Since the start of the reign he had accumulated royal grants and offices across the region, including the constableship of Northampton castle, which he shared with his brother Ralph. Another key figure in local law enforcement was Thomas Wake, sheriff of Northamptonshire and an usher in the king’s household, who had close ties to both Hastings and his brother-in-law the earl of Warwick. Given that Hastings and Warwick had much to lose by Somerset’s meteoric rise in the king’s favour, it would hardly have been surprising if those responsible for law and order in the town had stood by while the violence escalated. They might even have given it a nudge. Then, when Edward had got the point, they calmed things down; indeed, the tun of wine that placated the rioters had been supplied by Thomas Wake himself.58
Edward’s close advisers now had the excuse they needed. Somerset was secretly – and, it was explained to him, for his own security – sent to his castle of Chirk, several days’ ride away in the Welsh Marches. His men, their wages fully paid up, were detached from him and dispatched to Newcastle, on the other side of the country, to bolster the garrison there.59 If Edward was disgruntled, he soon perked up. Some days later, a messenger from the Neville brothers rode into Northampton with euphoric news: in the northeast, the vast Lancastrian-led army pouring across England’s borders had been stopped in its tracks.
In the past weeks, Warwick and his brother John Neville had been mobilizing frantically to assemble a force capable of stemming the Lancastrian tide. As the Lancastrian army, confident in its vast numerical superiority, battered the frontier fortress of Norham Castle with an array of ‘great ordnance’, an envoy was sent to Warwick, telling him either to submit to Henry VI or be annihilated in battle. But what the Nevilles lacked in numbers, they made up for in audacity. Three hours later, advancing fast along the River Tweed, they overwhelmed the unprepared Lancastrians who fled, abandoning arms and armour, artillery and ammunition. The Nevilles pursued them deep into Scotland, sacking and burning, a chevauchée in which, reported an awestruck Italian, ‘not a castle, nor a city, nor a town, nor a house’ was left intact. The destruction only stopped when their frenzied soldiers realized they had run out of food and had to retrace their steps.
Margaret of Anjou had staked everything on this latest invasion, and it had failed spectacularly. With further help from a devastated Scotland out of the question, she was running out of options. Retreating to Bamburgh Castle, she took ship once again, along with her nine-year-old son and a coterie of around fifty close advisers and servants, foremost among them the chancellors of her household and that of her son, Sir John Fortescue and John Morton. They were headed, it was rumoured, not for France – where Louis XI, hearing news of the Neville brothers’ devastating raid, had once again dropped the Lancastrian cause like a hot potato – but to the port of Sluis, in Burgundian Flanders. They did so without Henry VI, who was on board another ship that had started taking on water. Turning back, he was evacuated to the safety of the Scottish court in Edinburgh.60
Two hundred miles south, in Northampton, Edward mulled over his grand scheme to march north and destroy Scotland. As he did so, he went out hunting.
4
Two Kings of England
A few miles west of the Great North Road, on a bend in the River Nene, Fotheringhay was the house of York’s spiritual heart. Late in the fourteenth century the first duke of York, Edmund of Langley, gifted the crumbling old castle by his father Edward III, had turned it into an expression of family ambition. Re-planning the site, he spent lavishly on two new gatehouses, a chapel and spacious new domestic apartments, along with orchards and gardens. Even the stone keep was rebuilt in the shape of a fetterlock, articulating Langley’s fetterlock-and-falcon badge. Langley’s foundation of a small religious college was taken up enthusiastically by succeeding dukes and by the early 1440s, under the supervision of Richard of York and Cecily Neville, it was complete. The glorious centrepiece of the cloistered college was a new church, its perpendicular lines visible for miles across the surrounding meadows. An emphatic declaration of dynastic intent, the church would
also become the family mausoleum. For Edward – and his brothers – especially Richard, who had been born there – Fotheringhay had fond associations.
In early August 1463, with Warwick having so spectacularly secured the Scottish border, Edward was no longer in a rush to head north. Instead, making the leisurely thirty-mile journey up the Great North Road from Northampton, he relaxed into Fotheringhay life, hunting, hawking and directing some renovations and improvements to the castle. Unlike Warwick, who earlier that year had reinterred his own father at the Neville family mausoleum at Bisham, Edward hadn’t yet got round to bringing to Fotheringhay the bodies of his father and brother Edmund, which remained where they had been hastily buried at Wakefield three years before. While he naturally continued to commemorate his father’s Obiit, the mass held on the anniversary of his death, a reburial was costly; and Edward had other things to spend his money on.1
From Fotheringhay, Edward set in motion the mobilization of men and materiel for his forthcoming campaign into Scotland. Artillery, bows, ammunition and supplies were stockpiled; away in the Channel ports a fleet was fitted out. The Neville brothers’ lightning raid into Scotland had completely changed the international picture. A month previously, Edward and Warwick’s negotiating team had tried to attend a planned summit brokered by Philip of Burgundy, who was eager to conclude a tripartite peace with England and France, but the French king had been hostile, making it impossible for them even to cross the Channel. Now, Louis XI’s decision to back the Lancastrians was looking more unwise by the day, something Edward’s advisers wasted no time in pointing out. On an August Sunday at Fotheringhay, William, Lord Hastings wrote to one of the summit’s brokers, a Burgundian diplomat called Jean de Lannoy, updating him on events with relish.2