The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  This vision of England, with its commerce, fragrant gardens and exceptional singing – the Bohemians had been gently propelled from one entertainment to another in a soundscape of the most ‘pleasant and sweet music’ – had been carefully choreographed for the visitors. It was, though, the richness of Edward’s court that left the deepest impression. This was ‘the most splendid court that could be found in all Christendom’, at its heart a ‘handsome’ king who moved easily amid the ceremonial and his beguiling, exact queen. The dining in isolation, the prolonged silences at table weren’t strange in themselves – they were, as foreigners had noted over the years, peculiarly English customs – but there was something about the sharp edges of the ritual on which Elizabeth insisted that caught the Bohemians’ attention: an insistence, almost, on the fact of her queenship itself. To one member of Rozmital’s party, a bibulous squire named Schasek, this rigid acknowledgement of rank masked something more slippery. The English, he wrote, were great observers of protocol, always ready to genuflect to power and authority. But ‘no matter how they bend the knee’, he concluded, ‘they are not to be trusted.’17

  If the Burgundians were left with the sense that Edward and Elizabeth had money to burn, it was hardly surprising. One of the men now responsible for supplying credit to the king’s coffers was Elizabeth’s father, Lord Rivers, whom, shortly after the queen gave birth, Edward made treasurer of England. As head of the Exchequer, Rivers took control of a government department whose role in the kingdom’s finances was changing. Since the start of the reign, Edward had diverted income of various kinds – rents from land, loans, the proceeds of his recoinage, even the pope’s taxes – into his own coffers. While, in theory, all payments still had to be declared and enrolled in the Exchequer, the government’s account of record, the Exchequer’s active role in collecting revenues and paying them out was diminishing. Its other role, that of borrowing on the crown’s behalf, was fast expanding.18 For decades, Exchequer officials had been selected for their business acumen and their ability to provide the king with funds: both as creditors in their own right and, drawing on their contacts in the mercantile community, as co-ordinators of credit syndicates. In the first years of Edward’s reign, this arrangement had intensified and, in December 1465, the then treasurer of England, William, Lord Mountjoy, had secured the regime’s biggest single loan to date, of £6,200.19 When, three months later, Edward replaced Mountjoy with Rivers, he did so on the understanding that his father-in-law could do even better.

  The treasurership had proved a tough job in the unforgiving economic climate of recent decades. Pestered by the crown’s creditors, treasurers also carried the can for its financial failings: back in 1450, Cade’s rebels had decapitated Henry VI’s hated treasurer Lord Say, stuck his severed head on a pike and paraded it down Cheapside. But there were upsides. The treasurer enjoyed exceptional access to the king, with whom he had a daily audience, had huge political influence and controlled swathes of royal patronage. For all this, as well as preferential treatment at the Exchequer, petitioners and creditors were prepared to grease the treasurer’s palm with ‘rewards’. Besides which, treasurers were well paid – though at times, it wasn’t entirely clear where treasurers’ salaries stopped and peculation began: some clearly found their proximity to sources of ready cash an irresistible temptation. When appointing Rivers, though, Edward had awarded him an unprecedented financial package, including an annual salary of a thousand marks.20 While this had much to do with Rivers now being family, Edward clearly also thought he was worth it. Rivers had the invaluable gift of convincing people to invest in Edward’s regime. Which was just as well.

  Over a year into the Anglo-Burgundian trade war, the effects of Philip of Burgundy’s embargo were biting hard: English cloth exports had fallen by three-quarters. This, combined with Edward’s various rounds of taxation and the crippling seigniorage fees that merchants were forced to shell out under the king’s recoinage programme, meant that willing and reliable creditors were at a premium. London’s corporate loans, on which the regime had relied so heavily in its first uncertain years, had dried up.21 As fundraiser for the crown, Rivers’ approach was much the same as that of his predecessors: targeting rich individuals with the promise of royal favour in return. The difference was that Rivers, as the king’s father-in-law, sat as close to the heart of power and influence as it was possible to get. His promises carried weight – and he was exceptionally persuasive. The results were instant. Four days into his treasurership, working with a small group of colleagues – career officials like the Exchequer under-treasurer John Rogger, the teller Thomas Pound and William Kerver, the keeper of the queen’s wardrobe – Rivers secured for Edward a loan of £11,200, a sum that put even Mountjoy’s hitherto spectacular effort firmly in the shade. The money was delivered, as usual, straight into the king’s chamber.22

  Since the start of the reign, the king’s chamber treasurer – who also went by the title of keeper of the king’s jewels, the custodian of the valuable stones and plate that, when not adorning heads and sideboards on great feast days, acted as security for credit – had been an ageing Lancastrian relic named William Port, who had held the same post under Henry VI. Port’s unobtrusive competence and experience – and, perhaps, his culture: he was a music fellow at New College, Oxford – had seen him transfer smoothly to Edward’s service.23 In June 1465, just after Elizabeth’s coronation, Edward decided Port’s time was up. The man who replaced him as ‘architectour’ or supervisor of the king’s personal finances, his role as chamber treasurer confirmed not simply by the royal word of mouth but – for the first time – by letters patent, was no jobbing administrator but one of Edward’s most valued servants, a man he held close to him: the esquire for the body Thomas Vaughan.

  Since entering Edward’s service back in autumn 1461, Vaughan had become one of an exclusive group of chamber attendants who, when not looking after Edward’s daily needs, were abroad on various high-level diplomatic missions. In his new capacity as chamber treasurer, Vaughan now oversaw a system that, in addition to the annual £14,000 that it now received from the Exchequer, was raking in money from many and various sources, from the king’s trade deals to the sale of royal wards. Answerable solely to the king, Vaughan occupied a crucial node in the network of political influence around Edward, working alongside men like the chamberlain Lord Hastings, the household treasurer John Fogge, and the man with whom, back in 1461, he had fled London only to end up in a French prison, the king’s doctor, William Hatteclyffe. Like Vaughan, Hatteclyffe had spent a fair amount of his time over the past years away on royal diplomatic business; now, in January 1466 he had been made the king’s secretary.24 The control of royal finances, vested in a coterie of servants within Edward’s household, was becoming ever more tight-knit: at the heart of this operation, in his influential new role as fundraiser to the regime, sat Rivers. When he heard about Rivers’ appointment, Warwick, sensing himself further elbowed from the king’s side, was reported to be livid.

  Charles of Charolais had been right. When his ambassador to England had raised the idea of an Anglo-Burgundian marriage, Edward had jumped at it. In the spring of 1466, the king sent a full diplomatic mission across the Channel, again headed by Warwick and Hastings, for talks on a possible marriage between Charles and Edward’s sister Margaret, and the lifting of the damaging trade embargo. In his enthusiasm for a closer union with Burgundy, Edward had sent his ambassadors armed with another proposal: that his brother Clarence should marry Charles’s only child and heir, the eight-year-old Mary.25 What Clarence thought of the idea went unrecorded. For Warwick, who had continued to work assiduously for an agreement with France, the forthcoming discussions were an unpalatable prospect. If he wasn’t keen on a treaty with Burgundy, less still did he want to negotiate away the hand of Clarence, whom he wanted for his own daughter Isabel.

  Late that March, the English negotiators met their Burgundian counterparts in St Omer. The Burgundian delegation in
cluded some of Charles’s closest advisers: the Bastard of Burgundy; Louis of Gruuthuse, an affable, cultured courtier–diplomat from Bruges; and a high-cheekboned, thin-lipped Italian in his late thirties, short black hair brushed severely forward. Tommaso Portinari was one of the most influential financiers in northern Europe, the new manager of the Bruges branch of the continent’s greatest bank, that of the Medici of Florence.26 Through Portinari, the Medici were heavily invested in the Burgundian state. What was more, they had every interest in bringing about a closer union between Burgundy and Edward IV’s England.

  Over almost a quarter of a century in the Medici offices in Bruges, Portinari had woven himself into the fabric of his adoptive country. It was remarked upon by his Medici colleagues, and not in a good way. By 1464 the tension between Portinari and his then manager, a morose accountant called Agnolo Tani, had reached snapping point. Unimpressed by Portinari’s flamboyant lifestyle and his growing intimacy with Charles of Charolais, sources close to Tani informed head office in Florence that Portinari was spending more time swanning about at court than he was on the bank’s affairs. Portinari huffed indignantly that it was just as well that he did because, unlike Tani – who had neither the ability nor the inclination to cultivate the bank’s prestigious customers – he was winning new and lucrative contracts from the Burgundian state.27 Portinari and Tani, chalk and cheese, clearly detested each other. But their spat was fuelled by something that went far beyond petty personal politics.

  For decades the Medici had followed a general rule of thumb: that offering financial services to princes was very risky indeed. Such loans were difficult to secure and to amortize; besides which, banks often found it impossible to extract themselves from such agreements, being forced to extend further loans to their princely debtors in order to stand a chance of recovering the initial credit they had lent. Princes had a habit of squeezing banks until the pips squeaked, before defaulting. The Medici constantly held in mind the most notorious case, late the previous century, of the great Florentine bank of Bardi and Peruzzi: having failed to recover the series of massive loans that it had extended to Edward III of England in order to fund his military adventures in France, the bank had collapsed.28 But there was a flip side. Supplying credit to princes brought with it access and influence. Doors magically swung open to new markets and business opportunities, from the importing of luxury goods to the exporting of wool. At a time of continent-wide recession, such opportunities were more important than ever to the Medici, who, like all banks, dealt in commodities as well as cash. If the Medici wanted growth, Portinari argued to his bosses, it had to take this route.

  On 6 April 1465, worn down by his incessant lobbying, the Medici bosses made Portinari head of the Bruges branch. The results were instant. The following month, Portinari won for the Medici company the lucrative toll at Gravelines on the Calais–Flanders border, through which flowed all wool exports from England to the Low Countries, from under the long nose of his Lucchese competitor Giovanni Arnolfini. In the resulting contract, Portinari had acquired a notable new status: that of councillor to Philip of Burgundy. If the Medici bank now had a handle on Burgundian policy-making, the converse was also true: the bank had become more invested, more entangled, in Burgundian affairs.29 What was more, this new spirit of Medici enterprise was drifting across the English Channel. And Edward’s eyes had lit up at the prospect.

  Gherardo Canigiani had arrived in London on Medici business as a twenty-two-year-old and had never left. Now, almost two decades on, he was a naturalized Londoner, who knew both city and court like the back of his hand and was a member of the Calais Staple to boot. In the first precarious years of Edward’s reign, as the king cast around for sources of credit, Canigiani had obliged. At first the sums he lent were relatively modest – £200 here, 100 marks there – but, combined with the fine fabrics with which he was supplying the Great Wardrobe, they were substantial enough to get him close to Edward. There were pressing reasons why he needed to do so, chief among them the fact that the Medici relied heavily on exports of English wool to fill the convoy of galleys that docked each year at Southampton. To facilitate this operation, Edward’s favour was essential.30 Luckily, Canigiani had Portinari’s knack for getting close to princes. With a moth-like attraction to power, he seemed to find the glow of Edward’s favour irresistible; besides which, his twenty years in England had perhaps left him instinctively inclined to answer the king’s call.

  Edward liked everything about Canigiani: his excellent English, his superb contacts and, most important of all, the way that he never said no. In return, Edward granted him export licences and cut through red tape on his behalf. When one of Canigiani’s ships, stuffed full of illegal imports, was detained at Sandwich by customs officials, Edward ordered the cargo returned to him, throwing in a licence to ‘sell and dispose of it freely to his own profit’. By mid-1464 Edward, appointing Canigiani his factor, had gone into business with him and was employing him on sensitive diplomatic affairs, sending him to Scotland with hundreds of pounds of bribes to the pro-Lancastrian bishop of St Andrews in exchange for ‘diverse secret matters’. When Canigiani decided to upscale his living arrangements in line with his fortunes, Edward wrote to the powerful merchant-financier Sir Thomas Cook, ordering him to rent Canigiani his grand house next to the stocks market in the heart of the city. Cook obeyed with alacrity. All of which fed back to the Medici head office in Florence. In August 1465, aware of Canigiani’s closeness with the regime, Piero de’ Medici appointed him joint manager of the bank’s London branch. By late March 1466, after a bust-up with his colleague, Canigiani was in sole charge.31

  In both Bruges and London, the Medici branches were now run by men who believed that cosying up to their respective regimes was the best way for the bank to do business. With Medici fortunes in northern Europe reliant on smooth trade relations between England and Burgundy, both Canigiani and Portinari were anxious that the ongoing friction between Edward and Philip of Burgundy be resolved and the trade embargo lifted. That March, as Warwick’s diplomats arrived in St Omer, Portinari was among those desperate to achieve progress. He was to be sorely disappointed.

  It didn’t take long for the talks to get bogged down. On 15 April, Warwick and Charles came face to face at Boulogne, in a meeting designed to further the entente cordiale. The pair, it was said, detested each other at first sight, their mutual antagonism fuelled by Warwick’s barely concealed partiality for France. So much so that before the English embassy left, one of Charles’s closest advisers, Guillaume Bische, was deputed to give Warwick a reality check.

  Warwick needed to be aware, Bische buttonholed him, that Louis XI was an exceptionally slippery customer. There was absolutely ‘no surety or firmness’ in anything he promised, and if Warwick thought he could deal with the French king, he would inevitably find himself entangled. Reeling off a string of examples of Louis’ untrustworthiness, Bische was blunt: ‘if you put your faith in him, Monsieur de Warwick, you will find yourself deceived.’32 Warwick ignored him.

  In the back-and-forth over trade concessions, both sides proved equally intransigent, refusing to concede ground until the other had made the first move. England’s Merchant Adventurers pressed for Edward’s embargo to remain in place until Duke Philip lifted his own export ban; Philip refused to budge until Edward relaxed his punitive bullion laws – a subject on which the English king had deliberately avoided giving his diplomats any power to negotiate. Neither was there any progress on the proposed marriage between Edward’s sister Margaret to Charles. The subject of Clarence’s putative betrothal to Charles’s daughter Mary, as disagreeable to the Burgundians as it was to Warwick, was quietly shelved.33

  Next, in Calais, Warwick and his team entertained a delegation from the French king. In contrast to the stilted conversations with the Burgundians, the talks went swimmingly – not least because Louis, panicked by the possibility of an Anglo-Burgundian alliance, remained exceptionally keen for his ambassadors to wrap up
a new agreement with England.

  Early that summer, Warwick returned to England having concluded an Anglo-French truce, to last until 1 March 1468. He found Edward in a state of expectancy. A few weeks before, the king had started to push forward plans to host the great tournament, starring his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville and Anthoine, the Bastard of Burgundy, whose articles had been drawn up the previous year, and which would form a cornerstone of the new Anglo-Burgundian entente. On Edward’s orders, the tournament’s organizer John Tiptoft devised a new system of scoring for a ‘jousts of peace’, drawing on the latest continental fashions. Warwick’s return to England, however, punctured the king’s anticipation. It was the Burgundian track that Edward was keen to progress, not the French. On this front, Warwick had failed to achieve anything at all. And if Warwick and his agents could not be relied upon as far as Burgundy was concerned, neither, Edward was discovering, could his own chancellor, Warwick’s brother George Neville.34

  On 6 June, a week after Tiptoft had presented his new jousting rules to the king, then busy hunting at Windsor, Edward signed a warrant authorizing safe passage to England for the Bastard of Burgundy and his entourage. Reading over the warrant, George Neville raised an eyebrow and, instead of processing it, returned it to the king, highlighting two omissions: the lack of a limit on numbers in Anthoine of Burgundy’s company, and the failure to stipulate that the king’s ‘English rebels’ – exiled Lancastrians like Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who were still hovering around the Burgundian court – should be excluded from it. On the face of it, both seemed reasonable points. Edward thought otherwise.