The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  The following day, he sent Neville another warrant, one dripping with irritation. The safe-conduct’s expansive terms, he stated, had been discussed at length with many of his councillors. Neville knew all this perfectly well because, as Edward now twice reminded his chancellor, he had been part of the discussions: ‘you being present’. What was more, Edward’s chamberlain Hastings had already received ‘clear’ and honourable verbal assurances that no Lancastrian sympathizers would be included in the Burgundian party.35 But, Edward concluded heavily, he would concede both points to Neville: the Bastard was to bring with him no more than a thousand men, and no English rebels should be numbered among them.

  Neville’s punctilious attitude seemed to spark in Edward something more than the usual spasm of annoyance at having to ask twice for the royal will to be done. In the king’s tone there was, perhaps, a suspicion that Neville was being deliberately obstructive, almost as if he were trying to entangle the king’s great Burgundian project in red tape. Maybe, too, he disliked being corrected by a chancellor who seemed to find it difficult to modulate his intellectual superiority, even when addressing his own monarch.36

  Some weeks later, Edward wrote to the pope regarding the appointment of an English cardinal, an office which, as he well knew, George Neville had publicly hankered after for years. The cleric whose name Edward put forward for papal approval was not Neville, but the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier. As well as being Edward’s uncle, Bourchier was an uncontroversial conciliator whose opinions drifted serenely along in the wake of Edward’s desires and whose family, blood relatives of the king, were becoming closely entwined with that of the queen: several Bourchiers now served in Elizabeth’s household. Thomas Bourchier, Edward felt, was far better suited to represent English interests at Rome. He didn’t tell George Neville.37

  Through the summer, Anglo-Burgundian negotiations, robbed of much of their momentum by Neville foot-dragging, slowly began to pick up. Warwick’s new treaty with France that June had an unintended consequence. Alarmed by the prospect of an Anglo-French alliance, Charles of Charolais’ changeable attitude towards the house of York grew markedly warmer and, on 9 October, the tournament on which Edward and his wife’s family had set their hearts was finally scheduled for the following spring. Passports were dispatched to the Bastard, his knights and a thousand men to visit England.

  There was another reason for this new spirit of co-operation. In the intervening months Edward had decided he could no longer trust Warwick and his agents with the Burgundian talks, so he had quietly sidelined them. Diplomatic activity with Burgundy was now run from within the king’s chamber, by his closest, most trusted staff.38

  On 23 October 1466 Edward put his signature to a new agreement with Charles: a mutual defence pact in which they promised one another their help against any and all threats. But where Edward’s other diplomatic achievements had been trumpeted, this pact was secret. Louis XI was not to get wind of it. Neither, for that matter, should Charles’s ill, ageing father Duke Philip, who remained obstinately opposed to any deal with England. The other player from whom it had to be concealed was Warwick. Barely anybody knew except the few close servants of Edward’s chamber and household who had helped bring it about: Hastings; Sir Thomas Montgomery, who had been in Bruges that summer; the chamber treasurer Thomas Vaughan and William Hatteclyffe, who as secretary kept the signet with which the king sealed his letters.39 Central to the pact, too, were the queen’s family, from the outset a driving force in Edward’s détente with Charles.

  In an attempt to thrash out a resolution to the trade war, and for other ‘secret matters’, the Anglo-Burgundian talks continued. As usual, the English negotiating team was headed by two figures. One was the familiar figure of Lord Hastings. The other, in place of Warwick, was the queen’s father, Rivers. Having led his family’s charge into the marriage market and muscled into the royal finances, Rivers was now establishing himself in Warwick’s former sphere of pre-eminence – diplomacy. Warwick’s thoughts on his exclusion by the king’s father-in-law were unlikely to have been positive.40

  That September, marriages were brokered for two more of the queen’s sisters, bringing to seven the number of Woodville marriages since Elizabeth’s own marriage to the king two years previously. Negotiated by Elizabeth and her parents, always with their eye for the main chance, they were facilitated by an enthusiastic Edward with grants of land and office. Elizabeth’s ten-year-old sister Mary was betrothed to the heir of Edward’s point man in Wales, William, Lord Herbert, who in recent years had extended his fearsome influence over much of the principality, all the while moving ever closer to the king and to the queen’s family. If the marriage itself, celebrated in style at Windsor Castle, was uncontentious, the royal grant that accompanied it was not – at least as far as the earl of Warwick was concerned. Warwick had long had his eye on the Somerset lordship of Dunster, an estate now conferred on Herbert’s son. That Edward was now privileging the claims of Herbert – a man who had once, as sheriff of Glamorgan, been Warwick’s own retainer – only added insult to injury.41

  If the Herbert marriage irritated Warwick, news of another Woodville marriage left him incandescent with rage. Some eighteen months previously, Warwick had arranged for his young nephew George to marry Anne Holland, only child of the exiled Lancastrian nobleman Henry Holland, duke of Exeter. George was one of the greatest prizes currently on the marriage market: as the son of Warwick’s brother John Neville, he stood to inherit the earldom of Northumberland. Then the queen intervened. Following talks with the young girl’s mother, Edward’s oldest sister Anne – a discussion sweetened by a payment from the queen of four thousand marks – Anne abruptly cancelled the contract with Warwick. Instead the girl was married off to one of Elizabeth’s sons by her first marriage, Thomas Grey. Warwick had been gazumped. Behind closed doors, his fury at the Anne Holland stitch-up was reportedly intense.42 Publicly, his expression barely flickered.

  If Warwick was vexed at these dents in his pre-eminence, Clarence appeared a model of decorum, undertaking governmental tasks with maturity and, when required, turning on a sparkling charm. At Salisbury that Easter, entertaining Edward’s Bohemian visitors on their journey west, he proved himself a sophisticated host, treating them to an ‘unbelievably costly’ banquet. He had an immediate incentive. On 30 January 1466 Edward had set in train the formal process for his brother’s coming-of-age. Clarence could now discern that threshold across which, in the adult world beyond, exceptional wealth and power awaited. Desperate for both, he had set out to display all the qualities Edward looked for in him. Edward had been convinced.

  On 10 July that year, paying homage to his king, Clarence took possession of his lands. The customary age of majority was twenty-one; Clarence was still three months short of his seventeenth birthday. That autumn he rode to Tutbury in Staffordshire, where he began to acquaint himself with his landed inheritance in the north midlands, centred on the great estates of the duchy of Lancaster, and to involve himself in the region’s complex web of local politics. There was plenty to keep him busy.43

  Like any great lord, Clarence was quick to assert his authority, at the hub of which was his household, several hundred strong. His ducal influence rippled outward across his vast estates. These were maintained by the local landowners who looked to him for protection and advancement, and from whom he demanded loyalty in return; in times of conflict, the thousands of tenant-farmers who worked his lands would turn out for him, their billhooks becoming weapons of war.

  Such authority, though, didn’t just come with the territory; it had to be earned. And most of the time, conflict was something that a powerful magnate like Clarence was supposed to avoid. His job was to impose order and good rule, to ensure that his servants behaved themselves and, where necessary, to intervene in local spats, to arbitrate between the disputants, both – as he put it – for their ‘quiet and rest’, and for the benefit of the ‘country’ or region as a whole: in other wo
rds, to prevent local trouble escalating into feuds that, in turn, sucked in wider networks of influence and became something more troubling, more uncontrollable. Equally, if his own interests, and those of his associates, were challenged – or, indeed, if opportunities for self-aggrandizement presented themselves – active intervention on behalf of those interests was sometimes a necessity: intervention that carried with it the latent threat of litigation and violence. Clarence, with his neuralgic sensitivity to any perceived slight to his exalted status and rank, was alert to such challenges.44

  For all his diplomatic progress with Burgundy, Edward was having a tricky financial year. With his recoinage nearing completion, the profits had stopped flowing, while the continuing Burgundian embargo had dented the enthusiasm of many of his regular creditors in the mercantile community. In the Exchequer offices at Westminster, Rivers and his officials were staring at a drop of almost two-thirds in annual revenues, which, even though increasing quantities of income were now being diverted directly into the coffers of Edward’s chamber without appearing in the Exchequer accounts, told a grim story.45 But the news wasn’t all bad. Edward’s, and latterly Rivers’, cultivation of the Italian merchant-banking community was paying off. On 27 October, Gherardo Canigiani paid an exceptionally welcome call on the king.

  Canigiani had taken the Medici’s new policy of lending to princes to heart. But apart from the usual quid pro quo – a royal licence to export wool and cloth toll-free until the debt was repaid – there was another pressing reason why Canigiani and his bosses in Florence were so keen to have Edward in their debt: a mineral called alum.

  Astonishingly versatile, potassium alum was coveted for medicine and cosmetics as an astringent, antiseptic and anticoagulant. But it was in the textile industry of northern Europe where it was used on an industrial scale, to cleanse and purify wool and as a mordant, or dye-fixer: properties that made it indispensable to the functioning of the wool and cloth trades of England and the Low Countries. As a result, alum was very big business indeed. It was, in short, a mineral without which Europe’s economy would grind to a halt.

  The best alum, rock alum, was to be found in the mines of Phocaea, near the city of Smyrna on the Anatolian coast. For centuries under Genoese control, Phocaea had in recent years been absorbed into the advancing Ottoman Turkish empire that was now menacing Christendom’s south-eastern borders. While merchants from Christendom could still access the mines, prices had risen. What was more, every purchase of this indispensable commodity was now effectively funding the Ottoman military advance into Europe. So when, in 1460, huge deposits of high-grade rock alum were discovered northeast of Rome at Tolfa, in papal territory, it seemed to the cash-strapped Pope Pius II – still trying vainly to convince Christendom’s princes to fund a crusade – that God had answered his prayers.46

  In order to maximize profits, to control the sale of alum and keep prices high, Pius created a single company, the Societas Aluminum, to which he handed exclusive rights to the mining, shipping and sale of papal alum all over western Christendom, and which would deliver a proportion of its profits into the camera apostolica, the papal treasury. The company’s enterprises were backed up by the full range of spiritual punishments. Christendom’s merchants were forbidden from buying any alum except the papal stuff, on pain of excommunication. The fact that monopolies were forbidden in canon law was, it seemed, neither here nor there. Naturally, it made sense for the Societas Aluminum to be run by an organization with a continent-wide reach and influence, especially in the lucrative, alum-hungry markets of England and the Low Countries. It was hardly a surprise when, after a couple of false starts, the papacy struck a deal on 1 April 1466 with the Medici bank.

  For the Medici, the Societas Aluminum presented an extraordinary opportunity. Even with a glut on the market, importers into England were achieving net profits of some 25 per cent. If the Medici could persuade Edward and Philip of Burgundy to enforce the papal monopoly, ceding them exclusive rights to sell the commodity in their territories, they and their papal clients stood to make a killing. So, it was hardly a surprise that when Edward IV came calling for a loan that autumn, Gherardo Canigiani fell over himself to oblige. Shown into the king’s privy chamber on that late October day, Canigiani personally delivered into Edward’s ‘own hands’ the sum of £5,354 19s 10d, in cash.47

  In February 1467, the French king Louis XI was on pilgrimage in the cathedral city of Bourges. Among his entourage there was the usual flock of foreign diplomats, including a representative from the Burgundian court and the Milanese ambassador to France, Giovanni Pietro Panigarola, a man who missed little.48 Dining within earshot of the French king one day, Panigarola overheard some intriguing table talk. Sitting by the king’s side was his cousin Duke John of Calabria, the bitter, penniless son of René of Anjou. As the conversation turned from falcons and hunting to international politics, Duke John was loudly undiplomatic, insulting the attendant Burgundian ambassador and, as the conversation turned to England, the earl of Warwick. Louis, by contrast, was mildness itself. He liked winding people up and seemed to keep his cousin by him for precisely that purpose. Now, he enjoyed watching Duke John work himself up into a fury about Warwick, the man who had brought down his sister Margaret of Anjou.49

  Warwick, John spat, was completely unreliable. Rather than waste time and energy cultivating the earl’s friendship, Louis should instead help Margaret of Anjou regain the throne of England. The French king disagreed. Warwick, he pointed out, had been a better friend to him than his own family – indeed, he had prevented Edward from making war on France.

  If Louis liked Warwick so much, Duke John snapped back, why didn’t he then try and persuade the earl to change sides, and recover the throne of England for Margaret and the house of Lancaster?

  Without missing a beat, Louis asked, banteringly, what security the house of Anjou would give him for his backing of such a venture? Margaret’s oafish son, perhaps? At which point, Louis added a few sharp words about the Lancastrian heir, now a bellicose thirteen-year-old who talked about little else but ‘cutting off heads or making war’ – almost as though, Louis sneered, the boy were the king of England himself.

  There was something absurdist about Louis. When the Burgundian ambassador protested about his persistent efforts to entice England into a military alliance against Burgundy, the French king, all wide-eyed innocence, denied everything: ‘It was all an invention.’ Equally, while Louis ridiculed John of Calabria’s wild proposal about bringing Warwick and the exiled house of Lancaster together to overthrow Edward he was, as the onlooking Panigarola astutely put it, only ‘half-joking’.

  Even though Warwick had been a ‘good friend’ to him over the years, Louis – suspicious of everyone and everything – didn’t trust him an inch. But the one thing the French king did not doubt was Warwick’s influence with Edward. Over the years the Lancastrians had tried to bring to Louis’ attention the growing coolness between Edward and the man who had once been his mentor. At the French court, however, the idea persisted of Edward as an impressionable young ruler under the thumb of the man who remained the ‘first nobleman of England’ – no doubt with the encouragement of Warwick’s agents who, despite being sidelined from the Burgundian talks, continued to run the French diplomatic track. That things might be otherwise did not seem to cross Louis’ mind. Soon, he would find out.

  7

  Love Together as Brothers in Arms

  In late March 1467, shortly before Easter, the Norfolk knight Sir John Paston wrote home from his Fleet Street lodgings. Now in his mid-twenties, Paston was a long way from the nervous boy who, some six years previously, had been packed off to the royal household by his father to progress the family’s claim to a contested inheritance, and had been too shy to ask for a meal there. In the intervening years, with the claim mired in violent local politics and interminable legal wrangles, Paston’s frustrated father had come to think his son a spendthrift layabout, squandering his income at court;
the pair had barely been reconciled when his father died. Paston, though, had found his feet at court, making friends in high places. He had ingratiated himself with the queen’s family, while no less a figure than Edward’s chancellor George Neville had promised to look after the family’s interests, to be their ‘singular good lord’. Meanwhile Sir John’s embrace of all things chivalric and his reputation as a courtly lover – ‘the best chooser of a gentlewoman’, according to a friend – made him a natural addition to the virile circle around Edward: indeed, he was an almost exact contemporary of his twenty-four-year-old king. Now, as Paston wrote breathlessly to his brother, he had just taken part in an exclusive royal tournament, organized by Edward himself, at the secluded manor of Eltham, deep in the Kentish countryside. ‘I wish you had been there to see it’, he wrote, ‘for it was the goodliest sight that was seen in England this forty years of so few men.’

  Paston’s excitement was understandable. One of only three men on the king’s team, the team ‘within’, his team-mates were the king’s brother-in-law Anthony Woodville and the chamber servant Thomas St Leger, who was having an affair with the king’s married sister Anne. On the away side, the team ‘without’, were two more powerful figures, William, Lord Hastings and Thomas Montgomery, and John Parr, a king’s esquire from Westmorland.1 This was about as good an opportunity as it got to make an impression, both with people who mattered around the king, and with Edward himself.

  The tournament was match practice for something much bigger, the long-awaited chivalric showpiece between Anthony Woodville and the Bastard of Burgundy, which was to take place in London that spring. For Edward it represented a chance to bring together England and Burgundy in an ever-closer union, at the heart of which would be a spectacular marriage alliance. Following Charles of Charolais’s polite enquiry regarding Edward’s sister Margaret the previous year, Edward had clung on to the idea and had not let go.