The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  When the herald arrived in Brussels on the last day of April, Burgundy was on a war footing. Days before, Philip and Charles had brought their long conflict to a close with a very public display of reconciliation, Philip proclaiming his commitment to his son’s anti-French league and to war with his former protégé, Louis XI. In the midst of the general mobilization, the herald presented Anthony Woodville’s counter-challenge to the Bastard of Burgundy. While the Bastard, needing Philip’s sanction to proceed, promised him a reply ‘in haste’, the herald was left kicking his heels for days, something he tolerated with diplomatic ‘great cheer, as a herald pertained to have’. But while Philip, still seething at Edward’s high-handed economic policies, was determined to make a diplomatic point, ultimately he gave his consent to the tournament: as his son Charles doubtless reminded him, if Burgundy was going to make war on France, it needed England onside. While Anthony Woodville’s challenge to the Bastard was a private agreement between two individuals rather than a treaty between two heads of state, there was no mistaking its significance for future collaboration between Burgundy and the house of York.44

  Weeks later, on 23 May 1465, Chester Herald disembarked at Edward’s Thames-side manor of Greenwich. There, he related the story of his trip to the king and a clutch of attendant lords, among them two boys looking on dutifully: Edward’s youngest brother Richard, now twelve years old and, three years his junior, the latest and most glorious addition to the queen’s family, the duke of Buckingham.

  Chester Herald’s return from Burgundy had been impeccably choreographed. The next day, Elizabeth Woodville was due to set out from Greenwich on the first stage of her journey to Westminster Abbey where, the following Sunday, she would be crowned queen of England. London was ready to give her a royal welcome.

  In the weeks leading up to Elizabeth’s coronation, a subcommittee of London’s corporation had drawn up plans for the reception that it was expected to lay on for significant royal events. Central to this civic street party were the pageants: multi-storeyed tableaux vivants that, constructed at strategic points along the queen’s route through the city, would come to life as her procession approached. In the background, the queen’s representatives – principal among them her parents, with their close connections to London’s Guildhall – vetted the preparations, advising, recommending and insisting.45

  The first two pageants would be staged on London Bridge, the great shop-lined thoroughfare with its twenty stone piers supporting two hundred buildings that hung over the river. A fortnight or so before the reception, three loads of ‘old material’ – stuff left over from previous royal receptions – had been taken out of storage in the Guildhall and carted over the bridge to a rented warehouse at its southern end. There, a team of carpenters and craftsmen worked, constructing the great timber stages and making the linen hangings with which they were covered, ‘stained’ with brilliant and expensively acquired colours: green verdigris, red brazilwood, vermilion, indigo, white and red lead and – for the faces and flesh of images – a gallon of pink-yellow, all mixed with alum to ensure the paint stayed fixed on the fabric. Eight lifelike effigies, figures from the Bible and myth-history, were made: their faces painted masks of leather over carved wood, their hair dyed flaxen. Reams of paper, gold and red, white and black, were cut into decorations; verses, spoken by actors to greet the queen, were written out ornately on boards, for the benefit of the literate. The labour was intense and thirsty. Even on the short, late spring nights, the men worked until the light failed, getting through four pounds of candles in the process and running up a tab of 46s 10d at the adjacent alehouse, The Crown.

  On the afternoon of Friday 24 May, the bridge stood ready: pageant stages constructed, swathed in colour, the way swept and lined with forty-five cartloads of sand. Earlier in the day Elizabeth, dressed in white, and her party – a pack of noblemen, Edward’s household servants and the queen’s gentlewomen – set out from Greenwich to London Bridge, some five miles to the west. At the high point of Shooters’ Hill, its archery butts deserted for the occasion, they were met by a reception committee: London’s mayor and aldermen, and representatives of the city’s companies, handpicked for their charisma, good looks and horsemanship, all dressed in gowns of Yorkist blue and mulberry. Riding up the Old Kent Road, the procession turned into Borough High Street and, at the Church of St George the Martyr, halted to hear a speech of welcome by the church’s clerk, dressed as St Paul (a nod to the city’s saint and to Elizabeth’s Burgundian family, St Pol). Halting at the ‘stulps’, the thick wooden posts marking the approach to London Bridge, Elizabeth’s procession was greeted by a choir singing from the upper window of an adjoining house and, as the first pageant came to life, presented with an illuminated souvenir booklet of the verses she was about to hear.

  In wrestling with the twin problems of Elizabeth’s genealogy and her widowhood, her advisers had decided to own them, to put them front and centre. They had done their work well. Playing up Elizabeth’s maternal heritage – it was, as one chronicler stressed, the ‘duchess of Bedford’s daughter’ that Edward had married – the symbolism of the festivities also smoothed away the issue of her widowhood. At the bridge’s entrance St Mary Cleophas – the Virgin Mary’s twice-married half-sister – stepped forward to address the queen. Elizabeth’s procession then moved forward, passing through the tunnel of houses whose upper storeys met overhead. In the shadow of the Drawbridge Gate, on its tower a thicket of traitors’ heads, an enactment of the Feast of the Visitation saw the Virgin’s cousin, St Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, deliver a monologue. In both pageants, two London actors, Edmund Herte and Salomon Batell, played the Virgin Mary’s relatives. By implication the starring role, that of Mary herself, was filled by the watching queen, who (it was noted) wore ‘the attire of virgins’. Boldly acknowledging the new queen’s complex marital history, the two pageants spun it adroitly into a compliment: remarriage and fertility were next to holiness.

  Then the procession headed into the riot of noise and colour that was feast-day London. In the stands that lined the route were the city’s livery companies; the rest strained for a view, leaning from windows, perched on rooftops. Hours later, Elizabeth and her retinue emerged on the city’s eastern side at the Tower where, as custom demanded, she would spend the night, riding through its sequence of massive, fortified gates, the tumult outside subsiding to a distant roar.

  Edward was already there. That evening, he created a new group of forty knights, leading them through the complex ritual of purification. Accompanied by Lord Hastings and a group of veteran knights, he visited each man in turn as the knight-to-be lay naked in his ceremonial bath. Advising him of the duties of his Order, foremost of which was to ‘love the king thy Sovereign lord … and his right defend unto thy power’, Edward dipped his right hand in the bath and touched the man’s shoulders with his wet fingers. After this royal baptism, clothed and hooded in black, the men gathered in the chapel of St John, where they spent the night in vigil, stained glass and gold glinting in the light of their tapers. The following morning Edward enveloped each new knight in an embrace, then brought his hand down on the man’s neck and, breathing the words ‘Be ye a good knight’, kissed him.46

  Leaving the Tower, the royal procession nudged through the London crowds, Elizabeth a vision of white cloth-of-gold in a horse-drawn litter, blonde hair tumbling around her shoulders, on her head a gold circlet encrusted with precious stones. In front rode the phalanx of new knights, blue gowns billowing out behind them, their loyalties conspicuously bound to their king and his family. Among them the recovering Lancastrian nobleman John de Vere, to whom Edward had recently returned his family title of earl of Oxford, rubbed shoulders with an assortment of freshly knighted Woodvilles: the queen’s brothers; Thomas Grey, her oldest son by her first marriage; her cousin, the musician and composer William Haute. Leading them, as the precedent of his great rank demanded, was the nine-year-old duke of Buckingham.

 
; For one London chronicler, however, it was only worth mentioning five names: members of the corporation whose knighthoods were a ‘great worship’ to the city – this was no overstatement, given that only eleven Londoners in the city’s history had previously received the honour.47 All five had been generous creditors of Edward’s regime. Both the mercer Hugh Wyche and his successor as mayor, Thomas Cook, had negotiated thousands of pounds in corporate loans to the regime, as well as dipping their hands in to their own coffers on repeated occasions. There were two more drapers, along with Cook: Henry Waver, who had lent substantial sums both to Edward and to Elizabeth Woodville’s parents; and the current mayor Ralph Josselyn who, whatever his privately expressed misgivings, had clearly proven supportive – besides which, he was Cook’s brother-in-law. Finally, the influential goldsmith Matthew Philip was a regular supplier of fine plate to the royal household.

  If the knighthoods were a compliment to the city, they were also a royal endorsement of the tight-knit London syndicate whose lavish credit had brought it close to the regime, and which had now bought into Edward’s marriage.48

  On Sunday 26 May Elizabeth, clothed in purple, was escorted into Westminster Abbey by England’s two archbishops: Edward’s uncle Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury and – newly created archbishop of York – George Neville, both barefoot. Preceding the queen and her train of noblewomen, all in red, were the great officers of state, the newly made knights and, at the head of this ‘solemn procession’, Edward’s brother Clarence.

  Now fifteen, Clarence remained the king’s heir, and Edward gave him the ceremonial pre-eminence his status demanded. He stood by while Elizabeth was crowned (her mother Jacquetta standing by her ‘reverently’, supporting the weight of the crown on her daughter’s head) and held a basin of water from which the new queen refreshed herself after the arduous ceremonial. Back in Westminster Hall, Clarence supervised the coronation feast in his capacity as steward of England, directing operations astride a ‘richly trapped’ warhorse, its tack glittering with ‘spangles of gold’. If the ceremonies were a picture of the newly remodelled regime, then Clarence – along with his new brother-in-law Anthony Woodville and the newly restored earl of Oxford – remained at its heart.49

  While there were some notable absences, all were easily explicable. Etiquette demanded that Elizabeth’s mother-in-law Cecily be absent, although she perhaps needed no second invitation.50 Warwick and Hastings, meanwhile, had been sent abroad on a high-level mission to try to break the trade deadlock with Burgundy and reopen talks with France. Their brief for the Burgundian negotiations was to say much and do nothing: to make appropriately bellicose noises against ‘our enemy’ Louis while resisting all attempts to drag Edward into war with France.

  As tens of thousands of Burgundian troops poured across the border into north-eastern France, Warwick’s agents monitored the brewing hostilities. On 16 July at Montlhéry, southwest of Paris, the armies of Louis XI and Charles of Charolais’ league fought each other to a standstill. While Louis had avoided complete disaster – his isolation and defeat of Charles’s Breton allies had been key – he was forced to agree to humiliating reforms and to sign away a series of grants to the rebel lords, including the cession of a string of towns along the River Somme to Burgundy. So, it perhaps came as something of a surprise to Edward when, on the 22nd, Warwick returned bearing a freshly concluded agreement, not with Charles of Charolais – who, irritated by English foot-dragging, had aborted the talks – but with Edward’s ‘enemy’ Louis. For the beleaguered French king, extracting an English commitment not to back Burgundy was essential. For Edward, Louis’ reciprocal promise not to back the exiled Lancastrians had never seemed less urgent. Besides, it wasn’t what Warwick had been sent for. In tying up an agreement with Louis, Warwick hadn’t so much failed to fulfil Edward’s brief as contradict it entirely.51

  Meanwhile, shortly before sunset on Thursday 18 July, a rider had arrived in Canterbury from the north with urgent news for Edward, there with Elizabeth on pilgrimage to the tomb of St Thomas Becket. After over a year on the run, Henry VI had finally been chased to ground. Having narrowly escaped capture as he sat down to dinner at his latest safe house of Waddington Hall in Lancashire – his host’s brother was said to have tipped off local knights loyal to Edward IV – the Lancastrian king had been detained in the nearby woods as he made for Brungerley Hippingstones, a ford across the River Ribble. After offering up thanks to God, Edward ordered the newly returned Warwick to meet Henry as he was brought south in chains.

  On 24 July Warwick headed north out of London, up through the inns of St John Street to the village of Islington, where he took custody of the Lancastrian king. Formally arresting Henry, Warwick had him lashed to a donkey, legs tied to the stirrups, arms roped to his sides, a straw hat perched on his head. Then, in a grotesque inversion of a triumphal entrance, he led the helplessly swaying Henry – held on either side by ropes in case he fell off – back into the city and along the main thoroughfares of Cheapside and Cornhill, through jeering, mocking crowds. Warwick invariably knew what played well with the people. As one onlooker, a Hanseatic merchant from Danzig, put it, anybody who thought of ‘doing honour’ to a crowned king of England as he passed, wisely kept quiet ‘for fear of his life’.

  Following this public humiliation Henry was taken to the Tower and locked up. There, he was kept modestly, in a manner befitting his status: late king of England de facto, in deed, but not de jure, of right. Edward treated him well enough, paying for his attendants’ expenses – one, Henry’s aged and leprous secretary, Thomas Manning, was released and pardoned – providing him with a new wardrobe and occasionally sending him wine. After all, as one chronicler pointed out, people could then come and see for themselves this hapless example of Edward’s benevolence, and listen to him try and justify why he once claimed the crown of England.52

  In the wake of Edward and Elizabeth’s marriage, scribes and illuminators set about updating their royal family trees and lines of descent. One man, an Oxford graduate called Thomas Haselden, had taken a fairly common-or-garden Lancastrian genealogy and, over the years, had made his own pro-Yorkist adjustments: underlining how Henry of Bolingbroke had incarcerated Richard II, ‘true king of England’, in the Tower, before ‘unjustly’ seizing the crown as Henry IV; emphasizing Roger Mortimer’s central place in the line of succession. On a new page, Haselden now added a drawing of Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth kneeling before God, flanked by St George and St Margaret. As St Margaret prayed for a fruitful marriage for Elizabeth, God reiterated his gift of the kingdom of England to Edward. Haselden’s summary was clear enough. The new reality and future of the house of York lay in Edward, Elizabeth and their offspring, whether people liked it or not.53

  6

  They Are Not to be Trusted

  On Sunday, 22 September 1465, Edward IV’s chancellor, George Neville, was enthroned as archbishop of York in a glittering ceremony in the city’s cathedral. Neville had shown scant enthusiasm for his previous bishopric of Exeter, though admittedly in recent years he had had his hands full trying to hold together Edward’s precarious regime. But the archbishopric of York was different. With a rich portfolio of estates and offices, it presented abundant opportunity to entrench and extend Neville rule throughout England’s northeast, giving that authority an added dimension: spiritual, as well as temporal. Still only thirty-three, the rise of this brilliant politician seemed irresistible. His enthronement was a statement of his own and his family’s pre-eminence in the north; so too was the celebration that followed, a meal so excessive that it would come to be known as the feast of the century. Lasting about a week and involving around three thousand diners, it dwarfed the festivities that Thomas Bourchier had put on for his enthronement as archbishop of Canterbury some ten years before. It also outdid Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation feast in Westminster the previous May. Which was, perhaps, the point.

  During the previous weeks, carts and wagons had streamed int
o the archiepiscopal castle at Cawood, south of York, with a staggering supply of provisions. There was a frenzy of butchery. The carcasses disembowelled, plucked, prepared and dressed for the occasion included 1,000 sheep, 500 deer of various varieties, 400 swans, 2,000 each of pigs and chickens, 104 peacocks, 12 ‘porpoises and seals’ and 6 wild bulls. An army of pastry-makers produced nearly ten thousand pastries, pies and tarts, as well as the ‘sugared delicates and wafers’ with which the more privileged of the sated guests would idly toy as they digested the twenty-one pounds of meat that, on average, each was served. All this was washed down with three hundred tuns of ale and a hundred tuns of wine.1

  Many of England’s great and good were there, noted one chronicler, ‘except’, he added, ‘the king and the queen’. Edward’s non-attendance was hardly a surprise. Rather than make the long trip north, he had preferred a convivial progress through Essex, doing favoured household servants like Thomas Montgomery – with whom Edward stayed at his manor of Faulkbourne – the great, and punitively expensive, honour of hosting the royal entourage for days at a stretch.2 In any case, the Neville guest list was an expression of the regime’s unity and inclusivity. On the archbishop’s left hand, in an optimistic piece of seating, were two Neville brothers-in-law: the young earl of Oxford, John de Vere, and the man who had condemned his father and older brother to death, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. Presiding over the ceremonies, together with Warwick and John Neville, was yet another Neville brother-in-law, William Hastings. The king had even graciously provided his own ewerer for the occasion, to wash noble hands, proffer crisp linen, pour water, and lend a discreet ear to the table talk.