by Thomas Penn
Edward had kept by him Somerset’s jousting armour, which he had presented to the duke the previous spring for a tournament held in his honour. Almost as if he couldn’t bear the sight of it, he now gave it to Clarence: a stunningly grown-up gift for his precocious fourteen-year-old sibling.25
But Edward was shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Indeed, having previously convinced himself of Somerset’s loyalties, he had even released Somerset’s younger brother Edmund Beaufort from the Tower, where he had been kept as surety against Somerset’s continued good behaviour. At the turn of 1464, as insurgency flared across England – revolts against Edward’s taxes fuelling latent Lancastrian allegiances – Edward’s confidence in his own personal qualities had been exposed for the hubris it was.26
During the first months of 1464, Edward rode through the southern half of his kingdom with a demented energy. In January, as the scale of the disturbances became clear, he and a number of his lords had rendezvoused with the earl of Warwick at Northampton, in the centre of the country; there, he ordered judicial commissions to be held from the west country to the midlands. Sent to the city of Gloucester, where ongoing troubles were believed to have been infected by Lancastrian sympathies, Warwick’s ‘smooth words’ had had little effect there. Edward, by contrast, had no time for local sensitivities. Arriving with a massive armed force and his two chief justices, he restored order in a slew of hangings and beheadings; then, postponing the latest session of Parliament, he rode across the country into East Anglia to tackle more armed uprisings, mobilizing men as he went.27
From south Wales through to Lancashire and Cheshire, where as many as ten thousand people were rioting, Edward’s lieutenants had their hands full. Deployed far from their homelands the forces of John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, who had spent the previous winter besieging the Northumbrian castles, were now hunkered down behind the walls of Holt Castle in Denbighshire, from where they conducted long and dangerous counter-insurgency operations in the hostile countryside, trying to hunt down the ringleaders who had helped ‘the duke of Somerset’s going’. Among Norfolk’s men was the young esquire John Paston. In a letter home he wrote how, like everybody, he was out of cash: could his father send funds?28
While by mid-March the situation in Wales was under some semblance of control, and Edward’s swift, savage action had restored order in the southwest, Yorkist problems in the northeast had deepened. Lancastrian appeals for international aid, co-ordinated by a French agent, had borne fruit: despite his new-found enthusiasm for the house of York, Louis XI had been typically unable to pass up such a promising opportunity for skulduggery. Breaking out of their stronghold at Bamburgh and boosted by support among disaffected locals, Somerset and his troops had retaken swathes of the surrounding country, from the Scottish border to the Tyne valley, and were preparing to strike further south. Edward, it was clear, was going to have to tackle them himself. He would have to raise yet another army. More to the point, having already run through the previous taxes granted him, he would have to find more funds from his increasingly hostile subjects. Resentful at the best of times about royal demands on their scarce finances, people were becoming sceptical about how Edward was spending their money – and indeed, whether he was capable of bringing peace to England at all.
The unremitting winter cold had subsided, giving way to an unseasonal spring heat. Drought soon took hold; pasture dried up and crops started to fail. In London, the plague was about. To one chronicler in the city, the lack of rain and the pestilence exacerbated the prevailing sense of economic crisis. The price of wheat had slumped, to 4d a bushel – in fact, so had the price of all foodstuffs, while wine could also be had ‘great cheap’. There was a ‘great scarcity of money’. Prices were at rock bottom because there was no cash with which to buy anything.29
The bullion crisis had been brewing for decades. In recent years it had seen mints close across northern Europe and in Calais, and had been behind Edward’s aggressive insistence that foreign exporters of English wool and cloth pay half on the nail, in cash or bullion. In 1464 the crisis came to a head. While gold was used on the international markets and by princes, silver was what ordinary people used to buy goods and to trade. Now, there was barely any silver bullion left in Europe. Brokers reported that Venice’s regular galley convoys to Syria had sailed off with the last of its silver stocks, leaving the great city-state temporarily without liquid currency. Months later, Florence would endure what one appalled politician described as the city’s ‘greatest calamity’ since the famine of 1339: a wave of bankruptcies in which one overexposed bank after another – already under the strain of prolonged economic downturn and with the outbreak of war between Venice and the Ottoman Turks disrupting lucrative trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean – collapsed. With England in the grip of a deflationary spiral, and desperate to avoid antagonizing public opinion further, Edward had to explore more creative solutions to fundraising. As ever, when Edward brought his massive energies to bear on a task, he proved rather good at it. And while he had a habit of ignoring advice when it suited him to do so, he tended to prick up his ears when his financial advisers spoke to him about money-making opportunities.30
On 27 March, proclaiming his latest campaign to suppress Lancastrian resistance in the north, Edward ordered a new income tax with a difference. It was a levy on his supporters, formulated, as Edward was at pains to point out, on the advice of his council. All recipients of royal grants worth 10 marks (£6 13s 4d) or more since Edward had come to power were to hand over a quarter of their annual value, payable in cash by 5 May. Non-payment would result in instant forfeiture. If it was unpopular – the last time such a tax had been levied was back in 1312 – it was also shrewd. By definition, anyone holding such assets had a vested interest in keeping Edward on the throne.31
There were other sources of income to be tapped. With the Yorkists positioning themselves as the champions of big business, London merchants were regularly to be seen in Edward’s chamber, their presence enhancing the commercial atmosphere of the Yorkist court where financial talk was common: tips and business contacts swapped, and likely investments recommended. Leading noblemen and women, among them the earl of Warwick, John Howard, and Edward’s mother Cecily, were heavily involved in international trade on their own account; so too were the likes of Hastings, Montgomery and Hatteclyffe, close royal servants with their own intimate links to London commerce. At the centre of such talk was Edward, his eyes gleaming at the various money-making schemes that councillors, advisers and merchants alike put his way.
Already, Edward was a dominant presence in England’s two main export industries, wool and cloth. He siphoned off the proceeds of his recently voted parliamentary taxes, handing £20,000 to the Calais treasurer, William Blount, to trade in wool on the crown’s behalf. For Edward, this trade was a win–win. English wool, purchased by royal factors, was to be shipped to Calais – John Tiptoft’s fleet, which had failed to carry out a single raid on Scotland, was on hand to escort shipping across the Channel – for onward sale to the Low Countries. The profits would go to meeting the vast debts owed to the Calais garrison; Edward, meanwhile, would get back his original investment.32
Hungrily alert to the possibilities of international trade and the profits to be made, Edward was drawn closer to the one group who, more than any other, understood its complexities. If, in the summer of 1463, London’s community of Italian merchant-bankers had been alarmed at the protectionist legislation passed by England’s Parliament, their worries soon subsided. Not only did Edward facilitate their trade, he went fully into business with them.
Edward’s factors, the men who travelled England, from the Welsh Marches to the Cotswolds to Kent, buying up the best English wool on his behalf and arranging its onward shipment, were Italians. As well as exporting the king’s wool to Calais, they also drew other business ‘aventures’ to Edward’s attention; opportunities of which Edward took full advantage. Holding the precious
royal export licences that allowed them to ship goods toll-free, Italian galleys carried their cargoes of wool and cloth to ‘diverse foreign parts’, mostly through the Straits of Gibraltar to Italian ports – which, in the efficient, experienced hands of his Italian agents, offered decent rates of return. Not only were these deals done in Edward’s name but, as one of his administrators later remarked with a faint air of disgust, he was negotiating them ‘in person’, as though he himself were ‘a man living by merchandise’, through his factors.33
Through such deals, Edward fuelled his counter-insurgency campaign against the Lancastrian rebels. That spring, as he mustered his forces for the march north to confront Somerset, the king and his councillors ordered the stockpiling of eight thousand woolcloths, to be shipped by his factor Giacomo de Sanderico for, as Edward put it, the raising of funds ‘towards our great charges borne and to be borne at this time’.34 And, convinced that they had Edward’s ear, Italian merchants responded with alacrity to the king’s demands for credit.
Early in April, in a timely reminder to both English and foreign merchants of the regime’s pro-business stance, Warwick and his deputy, John, Lord Wenlock, hosted talks with the French ambassador over a maritime Anglo-French truce, to complement the truce by land that had been concluded the previous autumn. Helping to bring peace and security to England’s key trading routes, it was an agreement that would benefit the mercantile communities who had invested so much in the house of York – though, clearly, nobody would benefit more from the rapprochement than their increasingly trade-minded king. The talks, moreover, were proving more wide-ranging.
In the months following Louis XI’s promise to withdraw his backing from the Lancastrians, official contact between England and France had intensified, with envoys shuttling between Calais and the French court. By and large, English agents operating out of the Calais Pale reported directly to its commander, Warwick. They included men like Warwick’s agent Richard Whetehill, lieutenant of Guisnes Castle on the Calais frontier, who in early 1464 played a significant role in the growing Anglo-French détente by forwarding Warwick’s letters to Louis XI, sending French correspondence in the other direction, and meeting regularly with his French counterparts.
None of this was particularly unusual. Leading noblemen were expected to maintain an international profile, and Warwick had long been acknowledged as the house of York’s leading diplomat. From the outset, Edward had given him free rein: after all, just as Warwick was his subject, so Warwick’s servants were the king’s men too. In high-level international negotiations, the pair sent double sets of letters, showing that they were working together and that Warwick knew Edward’s mind. As far as routine diplomacy was concerned – the low-level processes of letter-writing, maintaining and developing contacts with foreign envoys and advisers – Warwick was, more or less, in charge: his perpetual motion and obsession for detail thrown into relief by Edward’s expansive kingship.35 It was a system that worked, so long as Edward and Warwick were on the same page – which, by and large, they appeared to be.
However, from the start of Edward’s reign, many who had dealings with Warwick and his men came away with the impression that the earl was in fact dictating policy. When attending talks with the English, it was crucial for foreign diplomats to be briefed on ‘the will of my lord of Warwick’; his non-appearance at negotiations, meanwhile, left people profoundly disappointed.36 Edward may have tried to create the impression of a monarch resplendent at the centre of his own solar system; but on the international stage, at any rate, he was being eclipsed by the energy and power of his greatest subject. It was an impression that Warwick – perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not – cultivated. In fact, in certain diplomatic circles, it had become something of a joke.
At the end of March 1464, one of Louis XI’s envoys reported back on a recent meeting with Richard Whetehill at which various issues had been discussed, including Edward’s plans to lead an army north against the Lancastrian resistance in the northeast. Knowing what played well with Louis, who had an overdeveloped sense of the ridiculous, the envoy repeated a joke that he had apparently picked up from Warwick’s men. ‘They say that there are two chiefs in England’, he wrote. ‘One of them is the earl of Warwick and’, he sniggered, ‘I have forgotten the name of the other.’37 Louis undoubtedly found it funny. He also took notice.
That April, at the Loire city of Chartres, Louis talked expansively about having received an ‘excellent’ letter from Warwick, informing him of the successful talks between England and France, and opining that a permanent peace would surely follow. The previous autumn there had been tentative noises about a marriage alliance between the two countries. The idea had taken root in Louis’ mind, and Warwick’s letter had clearly encouraged his ambitions. Parading his two sisters-in-law – one of whom was intended for Edward – in front of Warwick’s herald, who made strongly appreciative noises, Louis even promised to pay the dowry.38
As the Yorkist regime gained credibility abroad, so the bids for Edward’s hand in marriage started to come in. Talk of a high-profile European match was ongoing. Earlier in 1464, Castilian envoys had been in London to offer the hand of Isabella, heir to the throne of Castile. Edward, unenthusiastic, had turned down the offer, a rejection about which Isabella remained bitter long after her subsequent marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon. That a king should reject a marriage proposal was hardly news, but people had begun to talk about Edward’s lack of interest in potential brides: ‘men marvelled’, one chronicler noted, that the king was ‘so long without any wife’ – and, he added with delicate understatement, ‘were ever feared that he had not been chaste of his living’.39
For kings and princes, of course, marriage and extra-marital sex were hardly mutually exclusive. Still, there were contemporary medical concerns about promiscuity. As far as physicians were concerned, sex, like most things, was good in moderation: part of a lifestyle that kept the four humours in balance. But ‘immoderate frequency of the work of Venus’, in the words of the distinguished Oxford physician Gilbert Kymer (an associate of Edward’s own doctor William Hatteclyffe), came with a catalogue of health warnings, including corruption of the humours, increased risk of illness, ‘forgetfulness, fatness, neglectfulness and foolishness’. It also, Kymer concluded, ‘shortens the life’.40 And, as his close servants and advisers were all too aware, Edward did nothing in moderation.
As William Hastings had hinted the previous summer, Edward enjoyed the hunt, and rumours of various liaisons followed him around. Unable to control himself, he moved in on whoever caught his eye: ‘the married and unmarried, the noble and lowly’. When staying with Warwick on one occasion, he had abused the earl’s hospitality by seducing one of the women in his household. Warwick, apparently, was furious. Indeed, while on progress around the country, Edward seemed to make a habit of lodging with obliging hostesses whenever he could: as he returned to London to meet the Castilian envoys late in February 1464, he was put up at the Hertfordshire town of Ware by a lady named Alice Farwell.41
That spring, whatever Edward thought of Louis XI’s offer of a marriage treaty, Warwick was enthusiastic. After all, it made sense. Peace with France was the objective towards which Edward and Warwick had been working together over the previous years. What was more, the Yorkist government – or at any rate, Warwick – shared Louis’ concerns about the potentially destabilizing belligerence of the Burgundian heir, Charles of Charolais. In seeking a French marriage for Edward, Warwick was pursuing this direction of travel to its logical conclusion. That, and the fact that he relished his dealings with Louis, a king who was perfectly happy to go out of his way to inflate the earl’s unmistakeable sense of his own importance.
What Edward thought about the idea went unrecorded, but he let Warwick get on with it. Soon, reports were circulating through northern Europe that a fresh round of Anglo-French peace talks were to be held, once again under the benign aegis of Philip of Burgundy. This time, reported an Italian merchant-banke
r writing home from Bruges, talk was that Warwick himself planned to attend. ‘We shall see what happens’, he added.42
In late April, Warwick’s brother John Neville rode with an army through England’s northern borderlands to the frontier, to escort a Scottish delegation south for talks on a lasting peace with the Yorkist government. Neville knew Northumberland like the back of his hand. As warden of the East March, he was responsible for security in this most disaffected of regions, and had fought across it almost constantly in recent times. He knew that the Lancastrian insurgents, for whom Scottish support remained vital, were determined to stop the talks going ahead. North of Morpeth, at Hedgeley Moor, an army blocked his route: five thousand men under Somerset’s command.
In the fighting that followed, Neville’s men killed one of Somerset’s captains, Sir Ralph Percy, who, with Somerset, had sworn loyalty to the house of York the previous winter before defecting again to Lancaster. The last surviving adult male of the Percy family, the Nevilles’ bitter rivals for control of England’s northeast, Sir Ralph had been a focus for local loyalties. The effect of his death on the Lancastrian troops was instantaneous: ‘discomfited’, they broke and fled. Somerset himself managed to get away. Having brought the Scottish embassy unscathed to Newcastle, Neville then packed them off to the safety of York, ninety miles further south. He and his men stayed in Newcastle, watchful.43